Yes, she'd been on that flight, and now she was dead. Kazuko! …
The fact that she'd told him she was leaving him meant nothing now. They would have gotten back together, he was certain of that. They would have worked something out. Hell, Garrett wasn't going to stay in the Navy forever. He had no interest in seeking flag rank, and doubted he would achieve it in any case. He didn't have the political connections. He could have retired in another few years, retired and lived anywhere in the world that suited him. And Kazuko wouldn't have stayed with JAL forever, either. They'd talked, once, about the two of them retiring one day and meeting halfway — literally — in Hawaii.
A long time later, he lay in his quarters, the door locked to keep the bustle and routine of the submarine at bay. The XO had the chair, and here there was time to lie down on his bunk, time and quiet to think.
Not, Garrett thought, that thinking was a particularly good thing to do just now.
A military man lived by plans. Op orders, sailing orders, duty rosters, plan-of-the-day, all were means by which the military life could be organized and channeled, so that individuals — from the 153 men on board the Virginia to the hundreds of thousands of officers and enlisted personnel Navy-wide — all could pull together, working as one.
What Garrett was now acutely aware of was the need for a plan for his own life. Every time he started to get things squared away for himself, it seemed, someone would come along and kick him in the balls. Each time he thought he knew where he was going, it turned out he wasn't going that way at all.
Damn it, life ought to be more than reacting to what other people did. Ever since Claire had left him, he'd struggled with the idea of taking control of his own life.
He was the captain — the man in control — of the most modern attack submarine in all the arsenals of the world. Why couldn't he control his own life?
He recognized that pang of self-pity as the onset of a depressive episode, placed his hands over his face, and groaned.
He'd been dealing with moderate clinical depression for several years. Hell, depression was an occupational hazard for submariners. You had to be borderline crazy in the first place to voluntarily lock yourself away from the sun and stars in a steel sewer pipe deep beneath the surface of the ocean. Too-close quarters, too tightly regimented a life, too few outlets for normal relaxation or play, these things demanded men who could handle a lot of stress. All too often, though, stress turned to anger, and anger was turned inward, suppressed, buried, because there was no way on board a Navy submarine to release that anger when it first flared hot.
And anger suppressed in that fashion swiftly metamorphosed into a cancerous, soul-devouring depression.
The Navy handled the problem in a typically Navy way. Men with severe depression could not hold command, of course, and all command personnel were subject to periodic psych evaluations. Enlisted men were expected to report unhealthy behavior in their shipmates. Classes and awareness seminars were mandated for personnel on shoreside rotation. Garrett had never seen any figures, but he'd heard that the submariner service accounted for more doses of Prozac and other antidepressants than any other department in the Navy.
The antidepressants weren't helping now. At least, he sure didn't feel like they were. He felt as though he could barely move.
He was angry — at himself and at the service. He'd totally blown it with Claire; she'd left him because he was never home, never there when she needed him, and he'd not been able to balance his career in the Navy with the demands of a life at home.
And he'd blown it with Kazuko. He'd hoped to be able to get her to change her mind, to convince her that he could change, that he would change, that this time he would find a way to strike that improbable balance between husband and submarine commander.
But now, Kazuko was dead and he would never have the chance to tell her what he thought, what he wanted, what he'd dreamed for both of them. She'd died thinking he didn't care, thinking that he loved the Navy more than her.
Maybe she'd even died hating him. It was so easy to imagine that.
Damn, I'm an idiot….
There was no way to release the anger he felt at himself. All he could do was hold it, control it… and feel it shifting to a self-loathing depression that pinned him there to his bunk.
He felt, too, as though he were balanced between two paths. Slip one way, and he would drop into an abyss of self-pity, surrendering everything he'd built in his career so far — his command, his reputation, the trust of those both below and above him in the hierarchy of rank. Go the other way, and he would suck it all up, deal with it, suppress it, and continue to function as he always had.
The first choice was so enchantingly easy. Hell, he could call up Jorgensen on the private internal comm channel right this moment and formally relinquish command. Hell, do it now, before Doc Colbert had to do it for him!
He reached for the microphone in its cradle on the bulkhead next to his bunk.
And stopped.
No…
The other choice was a lot harder. But he also knew from experience that the blackness and self-doubt were temporary. He could command an attack submarine.
He could, he would command himself.
The Shuhadaa was racing along on the surface at twenty knots, running parallel to the northwest coast of Borneo, which lay some five hundred kilometers over the horizon to the southeast. Ul Haq was taking advantage of a heavy cloud cover that had rolled in over the area at sunset. Weather reports were calling for a storm over the entire Spratly region, and he wanted to use the cover clouds and rain would provide — protection from the all-seeing eyes of American spy satellites. Already, the wind had freshened and the sea had begun picking up. The wind was blowing out of the northeast now at twenty knots, and the waves were beginning to join one another in long, rolling swells capped by white horses and scatterings of spray.
Ul Haq stood alone on the sail's weather bridge, wrapped in a plastic hooded poncho, feeling the wind blast against the exposed skin of his face. Salt spray stung out of the darkness. Shuhadaa was plowing directly into the teeth of the wind, which made for rough sailing. The narrow hull of the submarine pitched and yawed and rolled with each passing swell, with waves surging across the forward deck and exploding around the narrow, upthrust barrier of the sail.
He'd considered submerging; even with a full gale blowing on the surface, at fifty meters the sea would be as calm as the inside of a fishbowl. But ul Haq had decided to stay on the surface as long as he possibly could. He wanted to give Shuhadaa's batteries a chance to recharge to full, which was only possible when she was running on her diesel engine. The submarine could run her diesel while submerged, drawing in air and venting the poisonous exhaust gases through her snorkel, but running on the snorkel was a compromise that would not help the situation. At snorkel depth, Shuhadaa would still be subject to the pitching embrace of rough seas, her airway would intermittently be blocked by breaking waves, and no snorkel system was 100 percent effective. The stink of diesel fuel and exhaust fumes would fill the boat, compounding the misery of seasickness and sharply reducing the efficiency of the crew.