The mini’s crew went through final mating and lockdown procedures. The big doors of the hangar swung closed. Ambient sea pressure around the mini was relieved. The crew undogged the bottom hatch and opened the top hatch of Challenger’s mating-trunk air lock. Jeffrey quickly climbed down the steep steel ladder. Minisub maintenance technicians were ready with tool bags to climb up.
Jeffrey came out of the air lock into a narrow corridor inside his ship. His executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Jackson Jefferson Bell, was waiting for him.
“Welcome back, Captain,” Bell said.
“Good to see you again, XO.” The two men shook hands firmly and warmly.
“How’s the baby?” Bell’s wife had given birth to their first child, a son, a couple of months before.
“Great, sir.” Bell grinned. To Jeffrey he was a changed man since becoming a father, somehow more mature and mellow, and more involved with life. Jeffrey felt a bit jealous.
“Lieutenant Willey has the deck and conn,” Bell said. Willey was the ship’s engineer.
“The crew has a basic idea of our mission parameters?”
“Yes, sir. I was briefed by Commodore Wilson’s deputy and also had a private talk with commander, Sub Group Two.” He referred to the rear admiral commanding the three New London fast-attack squadrons — Wilson’s boss. “I’ve told the men about the convoy sailing for the Central African pocket, sir, and our role to seek and destroy the Admiral von Scheer.”
“Good. Let’s make the CACC our first stop.” CACC, command and control center, was the modern name for a submarine’s control room.
Jeffrey followed Bell down the corridor. The lieutenant commander was a couple of inches taller than Jeffrey was, fit but not as muscular, and a couple of years younger. Bell’s walk was confident. His posture projected pent-up positive energy. He was clearly pumped from having been in command of the ship in Jeffrey’s absence. Jeffrey smiled to himself. I’m gonna need Bell’s skills and support more than ever, on this mission.
Crewmen Jeffrey went by perked up when they saw their captain. He smiled and gave them quick hellos.
It’s good to be back. Jeffrey took in the familiar sights, sounds, and smells of his command. The flameproof linoleum tiles on the deck. The imitation-wood wainscoting that covered the bulkheads. The bright red fire extinguishers and axes. The gentle breeze of coolness through the ventilator ducts. The triangular Velcro-like pads on the deck that marked valves for the emergency air-breathing masks. The long and narrow pipes along the overheads, with clusters of fittings for those valves — and all the other exposed bundles of pipes and wires and cables flowing like purposeful rivers everywhere.
Bell had put the ship at battle stations for the rendezvous, just in case. Jeffrey squeezed past damage-control parties stationed in the corridors. Again he greeted his crew. Some wore thick and heavy firefighting gear. Most of the men were barely out of their teens.
The control room was rigged for white — normal daytime fluorescent lighting. Jeffrey stood in the aisle. Lieutenant Willey sat at the two-man desk-high command workstation in the center of the compartment. Bell sat down in the other seat, as fire-control coordinator. The overall atmosphere was one of concentration and great care: although Challenger was still in heavily patrolled home waters, an enemy threat could appear at any time — an Axis submarine, a mine, anything. Jeffrey let Willey retain the conn. He told him to go deep and head due south at the ship’s top quiet speed: twenty-six knots.
Jeffrey liked the lanky and straight-talking Willey. He had been an engineer himself, on his own department-head tour, between his stint at the Pentagon and his more recent planning assignment at the Naval War College. Like many nuclear submarine engineers, Willey had an air of intensity and overwork. Besides his turns on watch as officer of the deck and conn in the CACC, he was responsible for a million details of keeping Challenger’s entire propulsion system in good shape. Willey’s turf was the whole back half of the boat, from the reactor compartment to the hot and cramped engine room and turbogenerator spaces to the pump jet behind the stern. He had broken a leg in combat on Challenger’s first war patrol in December, but that hadn’t stopped him — leg in a cast and all — from going right back out with Jeffrey on their next emergency assignment. By now, Willey’s leg was well healed.
Jeffrey went back and forth between checking the status of the ship’s important systems with Bell on Bell’s display screens, and greeting — and sizing up — the other main members of his battle-stations team.
Challenger’s chief of the boat, whom everyone called COB — pronounced “cob” — sat in the left seat of the ship control station at the front of the control room. COB was a salty master chief of Latino background, built like a bulldog, with a leadership style to match. COB came from a clan of Jersey City truckers, but he liked to brag that as the black sheep of the family, he instead had gone to sea. COB was — among many other things — effectively head foreman and shop steward for all of Challenger’s enlisted people. He was in charge of their training, morale, and discipline. The oldest man aboard, in his early forties, COB’s many years of navy service gave him potent credibility. Now, at the ship-control station, he managed the ship’s ballast and trim tanks, compressed air banks, pumps of all types including the powerful bilge pumps, and the hydraulic systems. COB constantly scanned his dials and readings and indicator lights. Flow diagrams and schematics danced on his screens. He worked switches to fine-tune things, as slight differences in temperature and salinity in the surrounding water altered the water’s density, and with it Challenger’s buoyancy — her tendency to rise or sink.
Next to COB sat the battle-stations helmsman, Lieutenant(j.g.) David Meltzer. Meltzer was a tough kid from the Bronx who always walked with his chest puffed out, as if he were asking the world to give him something even more interesting and hard to do. Meltzer spoke with a heavy Bronx accent he made no effort to disguise and wore a class ring as a Naval Academy graduate. Jeffrey thought very highly of him. Meltzer sometimes acted as the pilot of Challenger’s minisub; in the past few months, he had driven Jeffrey, Ilse Reebeck, and a team of Navy SEALs to and from land combat more than once. Meltzer was cool under fire. As helmsman, he controlled Challenger’s depth, course, and speed, based on helm orders from whoever had the conn — the job was not an easy one, when combat called for fast and tight maneuvers of the nine-thousand-ton vessel in close proximity to bottom terrain.
On the control room’s port side was a row of seven sonar consoles, each with two large screens, one above the other, a computer keyboard, track marbles, and sets of special headphones. At the front of the row sat Royal Navy Lieutenant Kathy Milgrom, an exchange officer, and also part of a controversial experiment. Before the war broke out, the Royal Navy began placing women in fast-attack sub crews. This was partly an outgrowth of European Union court rulings about equal rights in all military combat units. It was, to some, a natural extension of the Royal Australian Navy’s success with coed crews on their Collins-class diesel subs, going back more than a decade. And maybe most important, to its proponents, and especially now with this war, using women on the UK’s nuclear submarines doubled the available supply of talented people.
Kathy Milgrom was especially valuable to Challenger because she’d served as HMS Dreadnought’s sonar officer. The ceramic-hulled Dreadnought had been operational months before Challenger completed post-shakedown maintenance and workup training. Milgrom was in the thick of the fighting in the North Atlantic, starting in the summer of the previous year, whereas Captain Wilson took Challenger into battle — with Jeffrey as his XO — for the first time last December. With the brain trust Lieutenant Milgrom represented, from her working directly with Ilse Reebeck on sound propagation and oceanographic nap-of-seafloor tactics in very deep water, she’d be a vital resource to Challenger in their hunt and showdown with the von Scheer. Jeffrey gave silent thanks to the British commodore who’d recommended her temporary transfer, and to the U.S. Navy brass who, with some note of caution, had approved it.