He turned his head a bit to the left until he found an angle that made better use of the undamaged areas of his retinas. Then he spotted them: two shadowy forms a few thousand yards away, nearly invisible against the dark ocean. Ships, both churning up trails of spray in their wakes. They were hauling ass. Way too fast to be freighters or cruise ships. Probably warships.
He wondered how Roxy had picked up on them from this distance. Could she hear the whine of their turbine engines? Maybe some frequency up in the spectrum of dog whistles, too high for human ears to detect? Or was the wind carrying stray whiffs of exhaust gases?
Jon heard nothing but the murmur of water against the hull of his boat and the quiet creak of the rigging. He smelled nothing but salt air and the light musty aroma of a recently-bathed canine crew member. Whatever the dog had cued on, it was too subtle for basic human senses.
Jon shifted his grip on the helm and leaned forward to rap his knuckles against the teakwood coaming of the open companionway. “Cass? Can you come up here for a minute?”
There was no sound from below decks.
Jon gave it thirty seconds and then rapped harder. “Hey, Doc. Get your butt up here. I need you to do some of that Navy shit.”
A minute or so later, Cassy lurched unsteadily through the companionway, rubbing one eye and sagging against the aft bulkhead of the cabin for support. “If you woke me up to make coffee, you’re a dead man.”
“I’ve already got coffee,” Jon said.
Cassy changed hands and began rubbing her other eye. “Right. And who are you again?”
Jon smiled. “I’m your husband. Or at least that’s what Roxy tells me.”
Cassy waved a dismissive hand. “You can’t trust a word Roxy says. She’s a dog. She’ll say anything if you promise her bacon.”
“I don’t have any bacon,” Jon said.
“Then why the hell did you wake me up? I’m not the kind of girl who gets out of bed for strange men with no bacon.”
Jon gestured to the west, the same direction toward which Roxy’s snuffling nose was still pointed. “What are those?”
Cassy stared blearily into the distance, rubbed her eyes some more, and then tried again. Eventually she managed to focus on the objects of Jon’s question. “I’m pretty sure those are ships.”
“I can see that,” Jon said. “What kind of ships are they?”
His wife shrugged. “I don’t know. Fast ships?”
Jon sighed. “I was hoping that the Navy taught you something besides how to hand out Motrin.”
“I’m a part time Hospital Corpsman,” Cassy said. “I can pop an 18 gauge IV needle into a vein or apply a pressure bandage in my sleep. I can name all 206 bones in the human body. I can read medical charts, update medical charts, and occasionally even find medical charts. But identifying ship silhouettes is about four-thousand miles outside of my training pipeline.”
“Sounds about right,” Jon said. “In the Jarheads, every Marine is a rifleman. I just figured that you squids might have something similar. You know… like maybe… every sailor is a sailor?”
Cassy rubbed the bridge of her nose with an extended middle finger: the old fashioned (but still understood) covert method of flipping the bird. “I’m the other kind of sailor.”
“What kind is that?”
“I’m the kind who patches up dumbass grunts who step in front of bullets.”
And beneath Jon and Cassy’s long-standing cross-service banter, that part happened to be true.
They had met at the Multinational Medical Unit in Kandahar. Cassy had been attached to the MMU’s trauma team when Jon came in on a CASEVAC helo with shrapnel in his neck and a 7.62mm round in his left thigh. She had taken over stabilizing the wounded Marine until the triage doctors had worked their way around to him.
It might be an overstatement to say that Cassy had saved the life of the man who later became her husband, but Jon didn’t think so.
He could still remember seeing her face for the first time, being comforted by the evident concern and competence in her expression as she went about the business of keeping his damaged body alive.
Jon’s physical injuries had healed long ago, but Cassy continued working her slow and patient magic on the wounds that didn’t show. The ones that tended to yank him out of sleep, to leave his heart thundering in his ribcage and his muscles trembling with unneeded adrenaline.
So he accepted her little taunt with a nod. “Fair enough, Doc. I’ll take a Motrin pusher over the other kind of sailor any day of the week.”
“And twice on Sunday,” Cassy said.
“And twice on Sunday,” Jon echoed.
The sun was beginning to peek over the horizon now, and visibility was improving by the minute. Jon looked out toward the distant ships, tearing across the waves under the growing light. “I only know amphibs, aircraft carriers, and submarines,” he said. “If we rule out those, what does that leave?”
Cassy looked at the ships again. “Too big to be tugboats, and too fast to be minesweepers. I don’t know… Cruisers? Destroyers? Maybe Littoral Combat Ships?”
Jon nodded. “If the wind stays with us, we can make Key West in about four days. Then maybe we can find out what in the hell is going on down here.”
He didn’t mention the other reason for wanting to get to Key West… Fallout. Thankfully, the nuke had gone off downwind, and Jon had turned the boat into the wind almost immediately after the blast. Theoretically, that should have been enough to keep the Foxy Roxy outside of the bomb’s fallout footprint.
Jon and Cassy had also done two saltwater scrub downs of the boat’s topside surfaces, followed by showers for themselves and the dog, cutting heavily into the freshwater reserve tank. For all of that, Jon wouldn’t stop worrying until he, and Cassy, and Roxy had all been tested for radiation exposure.
He looked south toward the shadow of Cuba’s landmass on the horizon. It wasn’t too late to double back to the U.S. Marine Corps base at Guantanamo Bay. Gitmo was a lot closer than Key West, and the base would have medical facilities and (probably) decontamination equipment.
But Cuba was too close. Too close to the site of the nuclear explosion. Too close to whatever the fuck was coming unraveled down in this part of the world.
Cassy was oblivious to the doubts and questions bouncing around inside of Jon’s head. The specifics, at any rate. She nearly always seemed to know the general line of his thoughts.
If she knew this time, she was keeping it to herself. For the moment, her eyes were glued to the speeding warships. “I don’t know what you guys are doing,” she said softly, “but good luck and keep safe.”
CHAPTER 13
Roughly 420 nautical miles southwest of the Foxy Roxy (and 300 feet down), the Los Angeles class fast attack submarine USS Albany was gliding quietly through the water column.
The submarine was not technically silent. The Seawolf class boats were quieter, and the Virginia class subs were quieter still. There were acoustic emanations; the laws of physics and the limitations of noise-reduction technology saw to that. Even so — under most circumstances — the acoustic source levels of a Los Angeles class sub were low enough to be largely masked by the ambient noises of the ocean environment, or dissipated by the mechanics of absorption and volume spreading.