by Joe Buff
Felix pushed these morbid thoughts from his mind. He knew that the Ohio, as a former strategic-missile sub, was slow by modern standards but was also exceedingly quiet, and her refitted sonars were state-of-the-art. Her officers and men—it was the Blue Crew for this rotation—inspired total confidence.
The ending of his prayer was for the safety and well-being of his family.
Felix got out of bed and stood up straight; because of his seniority, he had the middle rack in a tier of three—the easiest to enter and exit. He was careful to not make noise, since people around him still slept. But the advantage of the Ohio, as an ex-boomer, was her roominess. She carried a powerful complement of SEALs: sixty-six men, including command and planning staff, plus communications and logistics personnel. Each SEAL had his own rack in a dedicated bunk area, with separate climate control from the rest of the ship. The air at the moment was kept warm and humid; Felix was lucky not to have to risk a chest cold or worse coming back from the jungle to the dry and freezing air of a typical fast-attack sub.
He was still very stiff and sore from his physical exertions on the bloody but successful mission, and his whole body ached, as if he’d run a competitive ultramarathon—which, indeed, he had. His chest was black-and-blue from the impact of enemy bullets against his flak vest. Even after almost ten hours of uninterrupted sleep, he felt weary and drained. But he knew from experience that strong hot coffee and a nice big breakfast were just the thing to restore his vigor and spirit.
Felix answered the call of nature, then shaved and showered, in the well-equipped multiple-person head belonging to SEAL country on the Ohio. His shower was very short, to save water, and he had to be careful not to bang his elbows as he scrubbed himself: each stainless-steel shower cubicle was barely the size of an old-fashioned phone booth. He also had to be careful when flossing his teeth, or he’d poke the guys at the sinks next to him in the face; the other SEALs, all early risers, were also awake. The head got crowded and busy fast—the air was filled with drifting steam from the showers, and with profane locker-room humor from SEALs wearing towels. Felix admired his neighbors’ tattoos, and sometimes saw scars from old wounds; he himself wore no tattoos, just a necklace crucifix.
After dressing, Felix made the rounds of his team, to cheer up the wounded who were confined to their racks and speak with the ambulatory wounded, to buck up everyone’s morale. Even on the spacious Ohio, there was no separate sick bay, just a cramped cubicle used by the ship’s corpsman to dispense medicine for routine complaints. The Ohio’s wardroom table, where ship’s officers ate their meals and did briefings and paperwork, doubled as an operating theater; the tables in the enlisted dining compartment became the triage center; seriously hurt personnel, including the SEALs, used their own narrow sleeping racks as the closest thing to a hospital bed available. While clandestinely violating neutral territory, the ship could not afford to betray her presence by evacuating badly wounded men to any surface ship or shore facility—everyone involved knew it and understood. A walled-off part of the ship’s food freezer had been turned into a morgue.
Felix’s men appreciated the visit from their master chief. They were visibly more chipper as he teased and joked with them all. They’d held a brief memorial for their lieutenant the day before—and life simply had to go on. Felix left each man feeling much better, with smiles on their gaunt, pain-drawn faces and their depression dispelled. Mourning was a luxury Felix had scant time for. He knew his men’s biggest problem of the moment would be boredom, with all the tricks it could play on one’s mind. Because of their wounds they couldn’t really exercise to burn off energy, and for now they weren’t on active mission status—so they had no immediate combat tasks to get ready for. Instead, they could watch movies, or play video games or checkers or cards, or talk or sleep or read or listen to music. Felix resolved to make sure his men’s needs were attended to so they wouldn’t go batty. It was hard enough for most SEALs to deal with the claustrophobic confines running submerged in a nuclear sub at the best of times.
Here I go again, Felix the mother hen caring for my brood.
Felix himself enjoyed the coziness and intense companionship aboard a submarine, but other SEALs thought he was strange.
To stretch his legs and get some kinks out of his body, Felix took a quick trip around the multidecked missile compartment. It filled the whole middle portion of the submarine’s hull, and he was impressed by its dimensions.
The modified Ohio was a hybrid warship, and even with her massive size, space was at a premium. Many of her huge missile tubes, which once held sub-launched ballistic missiles tipped with thermonuclear warheads, now carried seven Tactical Tomahawk cruise missiles apiece. Ten of those two dozen tubes were dedicated to Special Warfare operations: two for air locks that SEALs could use to board minisubs or directly enter the sea in diving gear, two for explosives and ammunition storage for their missions, and up to six for other SEAL equipment stowage. The missile compartment also now had decontamination showers, and areas for postmission rig and weapon wash-down and cleaning—and an extremely good physical-training exercise and weight room. Virtual-reality practice aids helped keep the SEALs’ marksmanship and battle reflexes sharp while they traveled impatiently from place to place—squeezed inside a giant sardine can that had no windows.
The Ohio did have four tubes in her torpedo room, with a supply of war-shot fish that was small—only about a dozen—but deadly nevertheless.
Felix made his way forward. The corridors were narrow, functional, and stark. During the morning change of watch, the passageways and ladders were very crowded. Often men had to stand sideways in order to jostle past one another. If two submariners had potbellies, this clearance was awkwardly tight. Including the SEALs, there were two hundred people aboard the Ohio. The watch was changed every six hours, round the clock.
Even before he reached the enlisted dining space, Felix noticed the delicious smells of breakfast. He heard the subdued noise of clattering plastic plates and the enthusiastic babble as crewmen chatted over their meals. He waited in line, cafeteria-style. The mess-management specialists already knew him well—even without the old facial scar, Felix’s compact muscular build and his upbeat personality would cause him to stand out in any crowd. The cooks piled plates high with the foods they knew he liked most, now that he’d been released from the bland pre-packaged jungle warfare odor-control diet regimen.
Felix took his tray and sat at the six-man booth that was unofficially reserved for chiefs. Now, at 0545 ship’s time, oncoming watchstanders had already eaten, and it was the offcoming watchstanders’ turn to dine. The atmosphere was a little more relaxed. Felix talked with a friendly mix of his own SEAL peers and some of the Ohio’s submariners. They traded the standard joshing, each saying he thought the other was utterly crazy for his career choice. Felix’s answer, as usual, was that both SEALs and submariners were undersea warriors, so to the rest of the naval community—and to the outside world at large—both types of men must seem mad. Beyond that, the chiefs avoided shoptalk, as was the custom at meals. They mostly spoke of their families: how their kids were doing in school, wives and cars and pets and housing and overdue bills and such. By long-practiced tacit agreement, they left their worries unvoiced—of death, or escalation, or a spouse who might ask to divorce.
As Felix finished his breakfast, a messenger came and asked him to report to the Special Warfare command and planning center. Felix gulped the last of his coffee, bussed his dirty dishes, and headed aft.
He took a steep steel ladder down one level. The Special Warfare command center was a compartment that once held electronics needed to fix the Ohio’s exact position and then coordinate launching her two dozen Armageddon rockets. The very thought gave Felix the creeps. With all that equipment removed, the SEALs now had different consoles and workstations to support the various missions U.S. Navy frogmen trained for. Many of the consoles in the blue-lighted compartment were manned. Message traffic was monitored t
hrough Ohio’s low-observable floating-wire antenna. Upcoming SEAL sorties from the sub were mapped out and then rehearsed, using simulators and planning software. Felix made a point not to look, in order to maintain mission security.
Running into the master chief of the ten-man SEAL command and communications staff, he was told, “Commander McCollough wants to see you.” The chief pointed to a small meeting room. The door was closed.
Felix knocked and entered. McCollough sat at a worktable, going over status reports and briefing documents; the commander wore neatly starched and precisely creased khakis, with his rank insignia on the collar tabs. When he saw Felix, he stood. As a chief, Felix also wore khakis—the main difference was the anchor on each collar tab, instead of bars or oak leaves.
“Morning, Master Chief,” McCollough said.
“Morning, sir.” In the SEALs, relations between officers and enlisted men were informal—the navy didn’t salute indoors anyway. The room they were in was drab, linoleum floor tiles and painted metal bulkheads—a study in gray on gray.
McCollough shook Felix’s hand. This was the first sign Felix got that they’d have a serious discussion.
“Sit. Please.” The commander pointed to a chair beside his own. The two men were about the same age, but McCollough was a good foot taller. McCollough spoke with a heavy Boston Irish accent that Felix liked. He also enjoyed the commander’s lively sense of humor and his tolerance of the practical jokes of which most SEALs were so fond. As was the way in the SEAL teams, McCollough—as a commissioned officer—had spent much less time on field operations than Felix. The fact was, the SEALs worked their chiefs quite hard, but moved their officers up and away from the day-to-day grit rather quickly.
“Feeling rested?” McCollough asked.
“I wouldn’t mind a month on leave.” Felix meant it, but he smiled. His smile was short-lived. He knew at once McCollough’s question wasn’t small talk. Right now the commander was stone-faced, even dour.
“I need someone to lead another team, on a different sort of op.”
Felix thought fast. “You want my advice on picking the best lieutenant still fit for duty, sir? What sort of op?” The Ohio had seven separate eight-man teams under McCollough’s command. The team that had deployed from Ohio to the Brazilian coast—the one Felix and his men heard fighting off an ambush the night before they themselves were hit—had come back with several wounded, including their LT and their chief. With the death of the lieutenant of Felix’s team, there remained five lieutenants or lieutenants junior grade to choose from.
“What sort of op?” McCollough repeated Felix’s question. “The sort of op I want you to lead.”
“Sir?”
“You did a real good job back there. I need somebody mature and hard, not another kid with daydreams of glory, with his head stuffed full of all the generalist nonsense naval officers are supposed to know to enhance their ‘upward mobility.’”
“I’m not sure I like where this is going, sir.”
McCollough suddenly smiled, a disarmingly puckish grin. Felix knew that look. The commander used it to win people over to something he knew they wouldn’t welcome—something procedural, bureaucratic, dealing with navy regulations and hierarchy.
“Master Chief, I put you in a few weeks ago for what I prefer to view as a well-deserved battlefield promotion. I can think of no better time than now to inform you that the Senate’s rubber stamp came through. You’ve been formally approved as a limited duty officer with the rank of full lieutenant.”
“Thanks but no thanks, Skipper,” Felix said immediately. A limited duty officer was a chief or other enlisted person who’d won a commission through merit. The limited meant that, lacking the generalized training McCollough just mentioned, the officer’s future assignments would be confined to their existing specialty—in this case, SEAL operations.
McCollough sighed. “Look, do me a favor and take it for now. Once we’re through with this deployment, if you haven’t changed your mind…”
Felix shook his head vehemently. “Master chief is what I am, and what I want to be till I retire. It’s the best social club in the world. None of this officer politics crap, none of these jump-through-hoops promotion selection boards and mumbo-jumbo fitness reports. Let me just do what I love to do.”
“You see, my man Felix, that last part is exactly the idea. This next op, I need someone who can command. You’ll be off on your own with a team, exposed, beyond any means of support, and you may go head-to-head with kampfschwimmer in a knock-down-drag-out with no retreating allowed this time.”
Felix thought for a minute. “Sir, does this have something to do with repercussions from my team’s last action? The hard proof of Axis involvement in northern Brazil?”
“The answer is yes, and no, and I don’t know. We sent your report up the ladder, with my full and unconditional endorsement. But questions like yours, the answers don’t filter back down.”
“I understand.”
McCollough cleared his throat pointedly. “So quit evading the issue. To command, by navy regs and age-old custom, you have to be a commissioned officer…. You do geta raise, you know.”
“Effective immediately?” Felix’s wife and kids could always use the extra money.
McCollough nodded.
“But what about your exec?” McCollough’s deputy was a lieutenant commander, seasoned and mature himself.
“One, he doesn’t have the language skills. Two, I need him here. We have too much to do, getting ready for other near-term ops. And three, he just isn’t as good in the field as you are. I don’t think anyone in my complement is as good in the field as you.”
“First you bribe. Now you’re trying to flatter me, sir.”
McCollough smacked the table. His face turned red. “I never flatter anybody and you know it! Take the promotion! I don’t have all day to waste coddling you. And you don’t have any time to waste getting ready for this assignment.”
“Uh, okay, Commander. Okay. But it still stands, if I don’t like it, later, you send in the forms and I go back to master chief forever?”
“If you and I are still alive in a month, that’s a promise. Meantime, get ready to leave the ship. You’re taking men from my third platoon and transferring to Challenger once we rendezvous.”
“Jeffrey Fuller’s boat?”
“That ought to make up somewhat for your inconvenient change in rank.”
“Yeah, if I don’t mind being squashed to the size of a peanut, down at fifteen thousand feet.”
“Challenger’s crush depth is classified. Keep your educated guesses to yourself. You should know better.”
Felix was taken aback. “Sir, what’s really the matter?”
McCollough sighed, and rubbed his bloodshot, overworked eyes. “After we drop you off, we’re heading across the Atlantic. My men are tasked for antimine warfare and sabotage around the extreme north flank of the pocket to help prepare waterspace access for the convoy landings. Plus joint suppression of enemy air defenses in coastal Saharan Africa.” JSEAD. “Clandestine intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting for Ohio’s Tomahawks and other Allied warships and planes.” ISRT. “Sexy-sounding catchphrases from the Pentagon, but it’s going to be a bloodbath…. You ought to be glad you’re getting off now.”
“You know I don’t see it that way, sir. Don’t send me on some sideshow.” Not now, when my friends and teammates are going to be put in harm’s way.
“I’m not—and it won’t be a sideshow. You lead a team that is also preparing the waterspace in a big way. Something new, when you and your men deploy from Challenger. Something real important, a breakthrough if it works. You’re going to be a force multiplier, in a very big way.” A small group whose efforts greatly leverage the power of main-line fleet units. “My exec will give you briefing materials. Study them hard. The operators from third platoon are already trained. You’ll have to use both of Ohio’s minisubs to shuttle your men and the speci
al equipment across to Challenger quickly.”
“Yes, sir.” This is getting interesting.
McCollough reached in a pants pocket. “You’ll need these.” He passed across to Felix a pair of not new collar tabs. Each had the two silver bars of a full lieutenant.
Felix had a sinking feeling. “Where did you get these, sir?”
“From someone who should have listened to you better than he did, and paid the price.” Felix’s dead lieutenant.
“Mother of God.”
“Wear them in his memory.”
Felix hesitated.
“If you think they’re cursed, I think you’re the man to break the curse.” McCollough stood. Again he shook Felix’s hand. “The rendezvous with Challenger is eighteen hundred tomorrow evening. That gives you less than thirty-six hours…. And congratulations, Lieutenant Estabo. I mightnot see you before you go…. Ask my exec for the Orpheus package.”
CHAPTER 12
Thirty-six hours later, in the Caribbean Sea aboard Challenger, Jeffrey sat alone in his cabin rereading his orders for the umpteenth time. The USS Ohio was nearby: Challenger’s minisub, and the pair of minis from the other sub, were busy completing the transfer of SEALs and their gear.
Since reboarding Challenger off Norfolk, Jeffrey had decided to set the proper tone from the start. As much as possible, he intended to delegate. In this, his second deployment as Challenger’s captain, with no acting in front of captain to limit or excuse his role, his hands-on style of leadership needed to change. He simply had to let go of the day-to-day nitty-gritty, as familiar and reassuring as it might be, or he’d be overwhelmed. There was just too much else for him to think about, on a higher level. He had to roll his sleeves back down, button the shirt cuffs nice and tight—and let his officers be the ones to plunge into details.