"Surf's up."
He turned on the tape recorder and out flowed the mellow tones of Dave Brubeck's "Home at Last."
From a pile of magazines he grabbed the one on top, a dogeared Playboy. Tapping his feet, he flipped through the pages to the centerfold.
After a while the same old tits and ass became monotonous. He dropped Playboy and picked up Newsweek. Bad news. Riot, revolution, war, assassination. A general strike in France. He liked the naked women better.
The chaos of life ashore made him crazy. Millions of half-wits running around in confusion, like an ant colony gone amok. Greed, selfishness, corruption, lives without passion, without purpose.
Underwater, the madness disappeared. Inside Barracuda's pressure hull Sorensen had found a purpose and an identity. On the ship life was orderly, pure, simple, and defined only by the implacable laws of physics. The sub demanded total discipline and absolute dedication. Every man had a job to do and did it with his whole being or not at all.
Few could give that much, but certain men blossomed and thrived in the artificial environment of a submarine. For Sorensen it was liberation. He had joined the navy on his eighteenth birthday and never looked back, never wondered what his life might have been like under open skies. Now, after ten years, he realized that he couldn't stay below forever. For one thing, navy regulations were against it and eventually he would be promoted to chief and stuck in a sonar school where he'd probably drink himself to death…
He dropped the magazine and put on a whale tape. He liked whales and recorded them frequently. On this tape the whales were hooting up a storm. What could interest a bunch of whales so much, he wondered. Lunch? Whale sex?
In the torpedo room Chief Lopez was feeding a fly to his pet, a brown Mexican scorpion named Zapata. The scorpion lived in a glass cage mounted over the firing console and was the subject of many whispered rumors and legends.
Lopez dimmed the lights in the compartment and switched on an ultraviolet bulb in the cage. The scorpion glowed an iridescent blue. Lopez leaned his full face closer to the cage, sweat running into his heavy beard, eyes flaring like an aficionado de toros awaiting the kill. The fly buzzed around, banged into the glass and finally dropped to the sand. The scorpion moved. Lopez imagined he could see a drop of venom leaking from its tail.
The rest of the watch stood around quietly while Lopez acted out the ceremonial feeding. The torpedo-men knew better than to make smart remarks about Lopez and his bug.
In the galley the Filipino cook, Stanley Real, had worked for hours on a sauce demi-glace. Stanley fancied himself a chef de cuisine rather than a navy cook. He was trying to explain the difference to Cakes Colby, the steward.
"This sauce it is cook for three days."
Cakes thought Stanley's fuss over the sauce was ludicrous.
"It looks like gravy to me, Stanley."
The cook waved a slotted spoon in Cakes's face. "Once, they say to me, cook for the President Marcos. On the Andrew Jackson in Subic Bay the President Marcos eat his dinner on the ship. Big missile sub, yes, the Andrew Jackson. The President Marcos he come and he run his hand all up and down the missile, like he love it, then he eat. He like what he eat. He call me from the galley to the officers' mess and he say come cook for me in the palace of the president. No no, I say, I am loyal to the U.S. Navy. I am qualified as a submarine, first class, I say. I am citizen of the U.S.A."
Cakes was making his last cruise. The only member of the crew to have served in World War Two, he had seen a lot of cooks in twenty-five years, but never one like Stanley Real.
"Good God, Stanley. Where do they find guys like you?" Cakes muttered as he locked away the officers' flatwear in a cabinet. "Whatever happened to white beans and ham hocks?"
In the forward crew quarters, in a bunk on the third tier, Fogarty lay sleepless, all in a sweat. In two days his world had changed so completely that he seemed to have forgotten who he was. The discipline of the sub often required him to react without thinking, as if he were a robot, and he lay now in his bunk pretending that his brain had been replaced by a reactor. Someone pulled the control rod a little ways out of his head, and he speeded up. Pull it all the way out and he speeds up so much, he melts. Push it all the way in and he stops, he scrams.
Fogarty understood that on a submarine there was no margin for error. A moment's hesitation could mean disaster. Fogarty knew that in time the discipline would become automatic, but the learning was painful. Two hours out of Norfolk, as the crew raced through their first damage-control drill, he had banged his knee on a bulkhead while scrambling through a hatch, and it still hurt. Yet the bruises to his body were nothing compared to what was being done to his brain. He was being bombarded by information. A whole new world was being revealed to him in the sonar room — the sea and all its multifarious sounds — and he was close to overload. Sitting watches with Sorensen was an exacting experience. In his casual way, Sorensen was a perfectionist who never tolerated mistakes. Off watch, Fogarty frequently found himself running from one end of the ship to the other during endlessly repeated drills. Not a single watch had passed without a drill, and he felt as if he had a terminal case of jet lag. Night and day had been replaced by the rotation of the watches; his circadian rhythm was off. He knew it was five o'clock in the morning — four hundred feet up there was weather, a sunrise, a sky — but on Barracuda there was only machinery, a handful of radioactive metal and one hundred men.
The compartment was dark. His bunk was a tidy cocoon. To his right he could feel the acoustic rubber insulation that lined the pressure hull. To his left a flimsy gray curtain gave him a sense of seclusion. He heard the whir of air conditioners, and the sounds of sleeping men packed together as carefully as the uranium pellets in the reactor.
His mind refused to shut down. Electrical circuits popped like flashcards into his imagination, demanding recognition. When those were exhausted he started going through the signatures of Soviet submarines, retrieving the sounds from memory. The Russian ships were noisy, but he had had no real idea how loud they were until Sorensen played a tape of a Hotel-class fleet ballistic missile submarine. Fogarty thought it was the most frightening thing he had ever heard.
Fogarty could hardly believe that he was lying in a bunk with the sound of Soviet machinery running through his head. All his life he had waited to get on a nuclear-powered sub. When he was eight years old he had been electrified by the news that Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-propelled submarine, had put to sea. When Nautilus went under the polar icecap and surfaced at the North Pole, Fogarty made up his mind that he was going to become a submariner. He read 20,000 Leagues Under the sea and Run Silent, Run Deep so many times his paperback copies fell apart. His father, who had served on a submarine in World War Two, encouraged both his sons to join the navy, but it was young Mike who fell in love with subs. In high school Fogarty had puzzled over the mysteries of nuclear reactors and spent hours in the library buried in Jane's Fighting Ships. He built model submarines, marvelous, handcrafted working miniatures with radio control that struck terror into the hearts of toy sail-boaters on Lake Minnetonka.