Lake felt a chill run down his spine as he sat and stared at the calendar on the wall. Now his navy career was about to end, and he was not sad to see it go. With the pen still in one hand, he reached up and crossed out the smiley face.
“Captain in control!”
The alert helmsman seemed rather proud of himself as Commander David Edwards entered Providence’s control room by the thin door leading from the forward upper level passage. Edwards gave a polite nod to the young sailor, although the obligatory announcement had slowly grown more and more irritating over the last six months. Of course, the teenage helmsman had only done his duty. He was required to announce his captain’s presence to the dozen other sailors in the room, just as it was required on all other U.S. Navy warships — but sometimes Edwards wished he could move about unseen. Sometimes he didn’t want to be disturbed. Especially during the quiet morning hours like these, his favorite time of day at sea.
Edwards had donned a fresh cotton khaki uniform for entering port, and his black hair still felt wet from his morning shower. It had been a long time since he had worn the khaki shirt and pants, but they still fit perfectly, despite the weeks at sea. Edwards made it his regimen to spend at least an hour a day on the ship’s exercise bike or treadmill, and it always paid off. He was resplendent in his uniform and took care to ensure that he always set a good example for his men. The gold dolphins and command star pins near his left breast pocket always sparkled in any light, not to be outdone by the equally polished silver oak leaf pins adorning his collar. He exuded authority and had a natural leadership presence. He was a submarine captain.
As he surveyed the men at the various stations around the room, Edwards thought for a moment about how much he was going to miss the daily routine at sea. The men in the control room went about their morning tasks, preparing the ship for the first surfacing since leaving the Indian Ocean over four weeks ago. The helmsman and planesman nursed their aircraft-like controls on the forward port side of the room. Using only electronic gauges, they gingerly held the ship on course and speed at a depth of one hundred fifty feet, their every move under the watchful eye of the diving officer who sat just behind them. Master Chief Ketterling, the burly African-American chief-of-the-boat and the best diving officer on the ship, spoke in his low deep voice as he directed the two planesmen to keep a wary eye on their depth and angle gauges. To their left, another sailor under Ketterling’s eye operated the ballast control panel and kept a good trim by moving water from one tank to another to counterbalance any change in the ship’s weight distribution.
In the aft portion of the room, beyond the two side-by-side periscope wells, several quartermasters pored over two chart tables, preparing the day’s charts for entering port. Although the ship’s gyroscopic computers kept track of the ship’s exact position with an error of only a few feet, the quartermasters were still required to maintain the written plots, a tried and true back-up to satellite navigation.
On the starboard wall, a single petty officer appeared lonely as he sat at one of the four tactical computer consoles. The other consoles were empty, only manned during battle stations. Leaning on one arm, the petty officer casually dialed in a solution on a distant sonar contact. Though he appeared bored, he had a firm grasp on the tactical picture. At the drop of a hat he could rattle off the course, range, and speed of half-a-dozen active contacts in Providence’s tactical computer registry.
Just forward on the starboard side of the control room, a sliding door led to the sonar room. It was shut as it usually was while at sea, but Edwards could envision his headsetladen sonarmen sitting at their consoles just a few feet beyond. A speaker in the control room’s overhead broadcasted the ocean sounds for all to hear, but there was little to hear this morning. Providence’s own flow noise gurgled loudly from the speakers as the ship glided through the water, and it would have been the loudest sound in the room had it not been for the officer of the deck’s rattle-like typing.
At the podium on the periscope platform the officer of the deck, a slightly balding and pudgy lieutenant commander, whacked something out on his laptop computer keyboard seemingly oblivious to all around him, including his captain. But Edwards knew better.
This was Edwards’ favorite time of the day. He loved the silent routine of a submarine in the morning. Each sailor going about his duty, instinctively speaking softly so as not to disturb those sleeping in the lower level bunkrooms. The smell of bacon and toast wafting up through the ventilation system from the galley one deck below. The fluorescent lights dimmed in every passageway. The gentle roll of the deck as the ship passed through eddies in the ocean. Every item stowed in its proper place, ready to take any angle the ship might experience.
He loved it all, especially the fact that this was his ship, his responsibility.
He, Commander David G. Edwards, commanded a Los Angeles Class fast attack submarine and all of her one hundred and twenty eight officers and men, and though he had been in command for over six months now, he still had a hard time believing it. After all, command at sea was the high point of a naval officer’s career, and few ever achieved it.
Providence was far from being the youngest submarine in the fleet, but Edwards still loved her like she was his own baby. Her three hundred sixty feet of cylindrical nuclear-powered black steel was twenty years old. But periodic refits and modernizations had kept her up to date with the latest submarine technologies from stem to stern. She had state-of-the-art sonar systems and electronic surveillance systems as well as a lethal arsenal of weapons. Her four torpedo tubes amidships could fire torpedoes, cruise missiles, or anti-ship missiles, and the twelve vertical tubes in her bow could fire more cruise missiles. She was virtually self-sufficient at sea, making her own fresh water, oxygen, and power. Her two hundred twenty-five megawatt nuclear reactor could power a small city. Its refueled uranium core could supply enough energy to run Providence’s propulsion and electrical systems for fifteen years. Were it not for the needs of her human crew she would seldom need to touch the land.
She was indeed an impressive ship, and Edwards was proud to be her captain. There were newer submarines out there, like the Virginia and Seawolf Classes, but he had always preferred the Los Angeles Class, mostly because he had spent his entire naval career in them. At times, it felt like he had spent his whole life in attack submarines, and sometimes it was hard to remember what life was like before the navy. He had come a long way from his days as an air force brat growing up on Offutt Air Force Base just outside Omaha. As a child he had watched his dad’s B-52 take off countless times and disappear into the blue skies over the plains. He came to hate airplanes because they reminded him of his dad going away all the time, and of the countless times his mother had threatened divorce. When he was young, he decided he could never be a pilot like his dad. As he watched his mother turn from alcohol to extramarital relationships looking for the comfort and warmth absent in his father, he decided that when he grew up he would never fly off into the sunset and leave his own family. He would never place his own personal ambitions above his duty to his family.
At least, that’s what he set out to do. His father, of course, had other plans for him. His senior year in high school, Colonel Edwards worked hard to secure him an appointment to the
Air Force Academy. Perhaps in his dad’s mind it was his way of making up for all those lost years. His dad pulled a lot of weight with the academy’s superintendent and the general called many times to impress upon the seventeen-year-old Edwards that he was being handed the opportunity of a lifetime.