"So we just forget about it, like it never happened."
"Something like that. Yeah. Learn to live with it like I have. I just ride around in my submarine, and when I go ashore I act like every other stupid drunken sailor you ever heard of. That way I don't have to think about all this shit. Wise up, Fogarty. Look at it this way, if the Russians were going to start a war over this they already would've done it."
"Maybe they don't know about it yet."
"Don't bet on it. They know more than you think, and so do we." Sorensen bit his tongue. "Look, kid, I know you feel bad about the Russians. It was just their tough luck."
"It could have been us, Sorensen."
"I know." He thought about telling Fogarty he now had evidence that maybe the Russian sub didn't sink. But he wasn't positive, not yet, and he wanted his point to sink in.
There was a knock on the door. "Comin' through." Willie Joe came in, followed by a pair of electricians carrying coils of cable over their shoulders. One was wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. "You the sonar guys?" he asked.
"No," Sorensen replied. "I'm Captain Nemo."
"Right, chief. You ready to test about five hundred circuits?"
17
After a week in dry dock, the welding of the bow was completed and new sonars and torpedo doors installed. Barracuda was moved to a finger pier where electricians continued to work on the circuitry.
Sorensen and Fogarty were in the control room, pulling hundreds of feet of inch-thick cable up from the torpedo room and arranging it in coils. "This is going to help you qualify in record time," Sorensen said. "You might even make second class."
Panting with exertion, Fogarty said, "Pulling cable? You're nuts. You're just trying to keep me busy, keep my mind off what's happened—"
"C'mon, quit yer bitchin'. Heave."
They grunted and moved four hundred pounds of cable six inches. Fogarty wiped his brow.
"I sure could go for a cold beer."
Sorensen dropped the cable. "That's the most sensible thing I've heard you say since you've been aboard. I could go for a dozen myself."
"You been in Rota before?"
"Once."
"What's it like?"
"It's just another scumbag Navy town, kid. Don't get your hopes up." Sorensen raised his voice. "Willie Joe."
The redhead leaned out of the sonar room.
"Yo."
"You finish the circuit test on the new down-searching array?"
"Not yet."
"Forget it. Come give us a hand."
Willie Joe picked up a coil of cable. For an hour they dragged the coils out of the ship and stacked them on the pier. When the last coil was placed on top of the pile they lounged on the pier and watched the civilians work.
A light warm rain started to fall. They could see running lights on the bay. The Russian trawler moved along its picket line from Cádiz to Rota, then turned around and went back.
"What are they so interested in?" Fogarty asked.
"The Vallejo," Sorensen replied. "What else?"
The USS Mariano G. Vallejo, a missile submarine, was berthed at the next pier. Her sixteen Polaris A-3 missiles and their warheads represented more firepower than all the bullets and bombs in all the wars in history.
One of the missile hatches was open, and a team of technicians was removing the nose cone from a missile. The yardbirds stared inside at the bundles of wires and warheads. One grinned and whooshed his hands in a gesture of explosion.
Willie Joe sat down next to Fogarty, who appeared concentrated on the big missile ship.
"Say, Fogarty," he asked, "where'd you learn that karate?"
"It's not karate, it's tae kwan do."
"Tie what? What's that?"
"Korean martial art."
"I never figured a guy like you would know that stuff."
"Oh, yeah? What kind of guy are you supposed to be to know it."
"I dunno. Mean."
"Maybe you've seen too many movies, Willie Joe."
"Did you go to a school and all like that?"
"Sure."
"Will you teach me some of those moves?" Willie Joe tried to smile, but his teeth were bad and his attempt to hide them twisted his smile into more like a smirk.
"Why do you want to learn?"
"So I can whip your ass. Why do you think?"
Before Fogarty could answer, they heard pipes followed by the quartermaster's voice blaring from the loudspeakers on the pier.
"Now hear this. Liberty call, Liberty call. Liberty for the first division will commence at twenty hundred hours. Cards will be good for twenty-four hours. Be advised that by order of the base CO, all personnel are restricted to the naval station and the town of Rota. The city of Cádiz is off limits. That is all."
"That's us," said Sorensen. "I'll buy you sweethearts a beer."
Pisaro came down the gangway hollering, "Sorensen, what are you jawing about?"
"How much we love the navy, sir!"
"Is that a fact. Listen, Ace, I want you back here tomorrow night at twenty hundred hours. Make sure you're on time."
"Aye aye, sir."
"And sober."
"Yes, sir."
By the time they changed, members of the third division were straggling in. Among them was Corpsman Luther.
"I was hoping you'd show up," Sorensen said. Luther nodded and they slipped quietly into the tiny dispensary where the medical stores were kept.
"What's happening in town, Eddie?"
"The usual. A new guy named Buzz took over the Farolito."
"What's he like?"
"He's an old bubblehead with a red nose."
"That figures."
A moment later Sorensen emerged with enough Desoxyn to keep him going all night.
"Let's go, let's go," he said, hustling up the ladder. He popped a pill into his mouth. "Where's Willie Joe?"
"He caught the bus," Fogarty said. "We have to walk."
He was getting to feel as mean as Willie Jo figured he was.
Nothing looks more like a sailor than a sailor on liberty in civilian clothes. Fogarty had the haircut, the brand-new plaid shirt from the Navy Exchange, the creased Levis, the clumsy black leather shoes, and the all-American smile. Even Sorensen, who took pains to look like anything but a GI, was doomed to failure. The wraparound sunglasses and custom-made cowboy boots helped, as did the faded jeans and Guatemalan shirt, but there was nothing he could do about his swagger or his natural tendency to walk in step with his buddy.
The main gate to the naval station was in the middle of the town. Sorensen and Fogarty flashed IDs at the American and Spanish Marine guards in the sentry box and passed through the barriers. They repeated the process at a second checkpoint manned by the Guardia Civil, policemen with three-cornered leather hats and snub-nosed machine pistols. They crossed railroad tracks and skirted around a traffic rotary that spun off cars and trucks in five directions. Directly opposite the gate, at the foot of the Avenida de Sevilla, an eight-foot painted plaster statue of the Virgin Mary looked down on them from atop a thirty-foot pedestal. A halo of blue light surrounded the head of the idol. Sorensen looked up at the Virgin's merciless eyes and said, "That tells you everything you need to know about Spanish women. You leave them alone."
They stood on the Avenida de Sevilla, rocking on their heels, surveying the scene. A string of seedy bars and cheap hotels tailed away from the gate, their faint lights barely illuminating the dank slum. The rain had stopped, and the cobbled streets glistened. Tiny trucks and motorscooters buzzed past, sending a fine spray into the night. A few sailors in white hats, and many more in civilian clothes, milled from bar to bar, sharing narrow sidewalks with whores, hustlers, priests and old women dressed in black.