“Different boat, different service… what the hell. Might as well start something new at my age.” He sniffed the air like a rabbit. “How the hell am I going to maintain discipline when you run around the boat smelling so good? Pretty soon we’re going to have to have flowers in the wardroom.” Snow ran his tongue over his teeth and reached for his toothbrush.
“I’ll leave if you want me to.”
“Ever see a man brush his teeth in the morning?”
She nodded.
“Good. Stay. I haven’t had a woman who cared enough to watch me do it for a long time.” He snorted. Leaving the fishbowl behind brought a great sense of relief. And Imperator had performed perfectly all night, through every conceivable evolution… every one except weapons systems, and that could wait.
She could sense she’d made a mistake, and Snow wasn’t going to let her forget it.
“Can you handle me washing my face and combing my receding hair without stepping outside?” The attitude was unpleasant, the treatment subservient — the direct opposite of hours before.
“Haven’t seen anything that’s bothered me yet, Captain.”
“Good. This beats hell out of having some pimply-faced sailor barking at me to get up, I could get used to it.”
“First thing you know, everyone would want to be captain for a day,” she retorted.
“How about ordering me some scrambled eggs and whatever else they’re dishing out, and I’ll change and be up to the wardroom in about five minutes. Okay?”
“Consider it done, Captain,” she answered grimly, stepping back into the passageway.
“Oh, by the way,” Snow called before she’d taken more than a couple of steps, “did you tell anyone you were coming down here to get me up?”
“Just the messenger on watch.”
“Wonderful. It’s probably all over the ship.”
Snow pulled the curtain across the entrance to his cabin. Long ago, he’d convinced himself not to grade any female over thirty on the scale he’d devised for himself, but Carol Petersen was well above average in looks as far as Snow’s classification system worked. She must be late thirties, he surmised, maybe leaning pretty hard on forty. But she didn’t really look it. She still had a fine figure. He learned she’d never been married soon after she reported to the fishbowl. She managed to make coveralls look neat and seemed to fill them out, even the baggy ones.
Until this morning, he rarely considered her as anything else but a senior engineer, a vital one, but still a critical member of his crew. But being awakened by her — now he was even sure that perhaps it was the smell of the perfume that he’d noticed — set his imagination to running.
The continued success of Imperator’s first day at sea was marred only by a single message: SOVIET SUBMARINES MONITORED VICINITY 48N 146W MOVING IN GENERAL DIRECTION YOUR TRANSIT AREA. ANTICIPATE INTERCEPT. OUR HUK WILL ADVANCE TO BLOCK. PROGRAM THEIR UNITS 24 AND 41, OUR UNITS 19, 39 AND 72.
Snow ordered the sound-library tapes for the numbered Soviet and American submarines inserted into the computer for passive identification and tracking.
The remainder of the day was without incident.
Andy Reed loitered against the shiny chrome railing in the control center, patiently waiting his turn at the periscope. It was the captain’s responsibility to take the first look no matter how clear sonar reported the area. The periscope operated like a television camera, displaying exactly what appeared to the captain on remote screens. Glancing over his shoulder, Reed watched the scene shift on the unit mounted near the entrance to sonar. But it was not in color and Reed longed to see the Pacific as it actually was.
His thoughts drifted back a few short days to the moment they’d gotten underway from Pearl Harbor. It was so beautiful. Mornings like that were easily engraved in his memory forever after too much time behind a desk. Everything had been perfect that day: the water a deep blue to match the Hawaiian sky, wisps of cirrus on the horizon, a light breeze carrying the fresh aroma of flowers and mown grass. Diamond Head majestic to the east. As the picture came back clearly, he also remembered his good but failed intentions of immediately recording it in a letter to Lucy. But that had been forgotten as Houston exited the channel into the Pacific and the crew had made preparations to dive.
Caught up by the sensations of newfound freedom on the water, he had asked the captain’s permission to take the conn as OOD. Once again he was the confident junior officer conning an attack submarine from the top of the sail, ocean water majestically foaming against the black hull. As Houston rolled casually in the soft swells, crewmen secured the ship for that first day at sea. Reed watched with pleasure as the men scurried about the rounded deck attached to lifelines. Preparing for that first dive, sonar always searched for the slightest rattle. All fittings were double-checked, because there were no second chances once they dived. In less than twenty minutes, much too short a period from Reed’s vantage point high above the ocean, sonar pronounced the hull to be as secure from sound as possible.
Houston was ready to dive and Reed found himself the only man on the bridge, as command was shifted to the captain down in control. Reed prepared the sail against his own mental check-off list. The clamshells secured, he dropped down through the hatch and reported last man down. It was an exhilarating feeling to be back, yet momentarily disappointing to give up the sounds and smells of the open ocean. Yes, he had spent too long behind a desk.
He was brought back to the present by the captain. “Admiral, care to take a look for yourself?”
The view through the periscope was so different from the screen he’d been studying moments before, and he could control it. Slowly circling, glued to the eyepiece, he brought the vast beauty of the ocean swimming into perspective. In every direction, the sea was in constant motion, the horizon sharp in some places, setting off water and sky, in other places merged by the meeting of clouds at its edge. It was a singular beauty that he treasured. As soon as he finished, Reed promised himself to sit down and write Lucy — and include his recollections of the morning they’d gotten underway.
“Beautiful,” he whispered silently to himself, stepping back from the periscope. “Thanks for the look, Ross,” Reed remarked to the captain. “About the only time I ever see anything like that is when Lucy and I get away sailing for a day — but even then there’s always land in the distance,” he added wistfully.
Houston’s satellite antenna had been raised for daily message traffic while they peered through the periscope.
Now, like any submariner, her captain was anxious to dive again. “Do you want to send anything to Olympia or Helena before we pull the plug, Admiral?”
“I guess not, thanks. Nothing’s changed in the last twenty-four hours. We know where their submarines are in relation to Imperator and so do Olympia and Helena. I think I’ll just keep her on the same track. She knows pretty much what to do if we lost contact at all. Let’s keep radio silence and dive.”
Ten minutes later Houston leveled off, speeding toward the rendezvous point that would place them between Imperator and the Soviet submarines sent out to destroy her. There had been no doubt of the Russian intent even before Houston departed Pearl Harbor. Their message traffic had been thoroughly analyzed. Other Petropavlovsk-based submarines had been detached, with orders to stop Imperator before she got through the Bering Strait to dive under the ice. That was the main reason Reed was to use Houston as his flagship — just in case the fates won out. His orders were to provide a screen until Hal Snow was ready to fight her. Then Reed was to analyze the competition.