by Todd Tucker
“What do I need to know?”
“There’s an enemy submarine out there. And somebody onboard really knows what they’re doing.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Commander Carlson carefully dried and scanned every page of the documents they’d plucked from the sea. Almost all of it was readable, although that didn’t mean it was understandable. Much of it she’d read while holding the damp sheets in front of a hand dryer in the crew’s head.
It was medical research, she could tell that much. Something about the flu, which made sense given the history of the island. She knew about the flu, they all did, they’d been getting increasingly serious messages about hygiene and hand washing, and they’d all been required to get flu vaccines during their last port call, vaccines that clearly no one expected to be effective. That was confirmed in the captured documents—the scientists wrote about the futility of the present vaccines, and the virulence of the new strain. There were frightening classified briefs from the Alliance about the spread of the disease, the death rates, the unrest in the cities where it was doing the most harm.
She concluded that the crate of paper she’d grabbed represented some of their earlier work. Some of it contained dates. The earliest date was three years before, the most recent about a year earlier. But she could tell, even without any medical training, that they were getting close to a cure. There was an excitement in the more recent documents, a certainty that an answer was at hand.
She wrote a brief, one-page memo that summarized their findings, the dates that the paperwork spanned, the paragraphs and charts that seemed the most important to her untrained eyes. She consolidated these into about a five-page message, with the relevant scans attached, and sent it to squadron headquarters. It was as large a message as she dared send; she didn’t want to stay at PD any longer than necessary in the zone so close to the island where she chose to linger. They came to PD and sent the message to their satellite in a sixty-second, encrypted burst. They submerged the instant they received confirmation that the message had been received by the satellite.
Then she went to the wardroom, shared a microwave pizza with Banach, and waited for two hours, the amount of time she thought it might take for her bureaucracy to partially digest the information.
At sunset, they rose again, and a message was waiting for her. The OOD held the scope while she went to radio, reading it one line at a time as it came out of the printer.
Jennifer Carlson was a woman who had seen much during the war. But what she read on the message made her jaw drop. She walked back down to the wardroom, where Banach was enjoying a post-pizza cigarette.
“Sorry,” he said, starting to snuff it out on his plate. He knew his commander didn’t like smoking, and he did it only when she wasn’t around.
She waved her hand dismissively. “I have word from our illustrious leaders.”
“Did they congratulate us on shooting down the plane? Or chastise us for deviating from doctrine?”
“They express their congratulations,” she said, reading the message. “And they confirm that it was a high-value kill.”
“Oh?”
“The Alliance is sending out another rescue mission to the island, this time by submarine.”
“Smart.”
“The boat they are sending is the Polaris,” she said. “She’s on her way.”
Banach raised an eyebrow at this. “They know exactly which boat is coming? They know the name? How could they know that?”
“Because,” said Carlson, holding the message in front of her. “We have a man onboard.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
They flew Pete on a commercial plane from Charleston to St. Louis, where he boarded a military transport. The pilots seemed mildly put out to be hosting him, in the way military pilots always did, barely saying a word to him on the flight from St. Louis to Spokane, Washington.
At the Spokane airport, Pete was met on the ground by a military vehicle that was flying a small Alliance flag from the right corner of its hood. The drivers, however—two sergeants—were regular Army, and had numerous battlefield commendations. They weren’t talkative, with Pete or with each other, but they seemed happy to have him, to have duty on the mainland, for which Pete, as their cargo, got part of the credit.
“Seat belt, please, sir,” said the driver as Pete settled into the small backseat. As soon as it clicked, they were off with a roar of the vehicle’s heavy engine, heading west.
Pete realized that he’d been in the Alliance’s bubble for a long time. Outside the walls of the military bases where he’d spent so much of his time in the past few years, it seemed like things were starting to break down. In the hardscrabble towns outside of Spokane, a few people stared at them accusingly from their porches as they passed. Almost every store was closed. A few gas stations were open, but cars were lined up, most of them parked: they looked like they were waiting for gas to arrive. Lines also snaked out the doors of government clinics and pantries. A light mist began to fall, obscuring the view. The people in lines stood still, their faces blank, oblivious to the rain. Not long ago, Pete had associated poverty with obesity, a bad fast-food and junk-food diet accompanied by plentiful television and video games. The poor had transformed, he saw, back to an earlier version of want, where they looked gaunt, like images of dust bowl farmers during the Great Depression. Soon they were in the prairie, and Pete fell fast asleep as the sergeants murmured to each other about battles fought and comrades lost.
* * *
When they crossed the Northern Cascades and neared the coast, the area became increasingly militarized. A vehicle similar to their own sat alongside the road, charred, burned out.
“What happened to them?” asked Pete.
The solider in the passenger seat looked back at Pete without saying anything. He pointed to the sky.
* * *
After three hours of driving, they stopped suddenly on a deserted strip of highway, and the soldiers checked their tablet computer.
“Orders are updating,” said one of them.
“We should be OK,” said the soldier who wasn’t driving. “Looks like we’re meeting your boat in Bangor. Puget Sound is deep enough there for your ride, but pretty far inland. Improves our odds.”
They waited ten minutes until the tablet beeped. The driver read the orders, and then handed it to his partner to verify.
“We’ve got an hour to kill,” he said. “Looks like they want us to do the rest of the drive in the dark.”
“Sounds good,” said Pete. He was about to ask the soldiers if they had any food, but they had both already fallen asleep in their seats, trained, like soldiers everywhere, to sleep whenever an opportunity presented itself.
After fifteen minutes, he let himself out of the vehicle to urinate, and to stretch his legs. He walked a few feet away, not sure if he would be violating some kind of Army etiquette by peeing too close to their vehicle. It was a still, cool night, and Pete noticed for the first time that the soldiers hadn’t even pulled over: they’d stopped in the middle of the highway. It didn’t seem like any kind of martial arrogance; he assumed they must have good reason to believe that no other drivers were coming along. And, come to think of it, Pete hadn’t seen one in a while, in either direction. Not even another military vehicle. The interstate must be closed to civilian traffic, he realized.
Something caught his eye to the north, in the sky. A dark form, flying silently toward them. He felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck, and fought the urge to shout out to his companions until he was certain.
It swooped low, and then curved back into the sky, too high for him to see in the blackness. He kept his eyes up, and saw it again, blocking out its silhouette in the stars.
It was a vulture.
He exhaled loudly with relief. Any other time in his life, the appearance of a lone vulture on an empty highway might fill him with silent dread, a dark omen. But under the circumstances, he almost laughed with relief.
>
The vehicle behind him erupted with alarms. The driver threw his door open.
“Get in!” he screamed.
Pete dived for the door. Before he even had the door shut, they were spinning their tires, speeding down the highway.
The soldier in the passenger seat reached up and silenced the alarm in the overhead console that was blaring. “Drone,” he said. “Directly behind us. Flying west.”
“What the fuck were you doing out there?” said the driver.
“Taking a piss,” said Pete.
“Did you see it? Why the fuck didn’t you say something?”
The driver had switched on a center console that showed the drone as a tiny, bright green blip to the east in the center of a small screen.
“Gaining on us,” said the passenger. “Radar says he’s going about one hundred knots.”
“That means he’s not armed,” said Pete. “That’s too fast for an armed bird.”
The two soldiers looked at each other, assessed Pete’s knowledge without saying anything to each other.
“So you think we should just go back to sleep?” he said. They were roaring down the highway, hitting potholes with jarring force.
“No,” said Pete. “It’s in suicide mode. Unarmed, far from home. He’s going to try to crash into us.”
“I’ve heard about that,” said the soldier in the passenger seat. “Kamikaze mode.”
“Well, fuck me,” said the driver. He was scanning the roadside, looking for some kind of natural cover, but there was nowhere to hide.
“Wait until he’s in his dive!” said Pete. “Once he starts free fall, he doesn’t alter course. Everything shuts down.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“I wrote the program,” said Pete.
“Did you also write the program that’s supposed to keep them from attacking on Alliance territory?”
“Five hundred yards,” said the soldier in the passenger seat, looking at the radar screen. “But he’s climbing.”
“It wants to gain altitude before diving,” said Pete.
“So what should I do?”
“Keep driving straight,” said Pete. “Let it commit to a solution.”
They roared down the highway. The driver suddenly veered to avoid a massive crater in the center of the road. Pete could feel the vehicle coming up on two wheels. They crashed back down.
“That’s a new one,” said the driver. “Not on the chart. Probably where our friend there dropped his bomb.”
“Bombing what?” said the other sergeant.
“Unlucky farmer?” he said. “Who knows. Maybe a mule or a goddamn enemy possum.”
Other alarms began beeping on their overhead console. “One hundred yards and diving,” he said. “Heading right for us.”
“Keep driving,” said Pete. He was counting down in his head, running the numbers, knowing the drone wouldn’t correct its free fall in the last ten seconds of flight. “Slam on the brakes when I say so.…”
They could see on the radar that it was directly behind and above them. They still couldn’t see it. Pete watched the two dots on the radar screen converge, their truck and the enemy drone. The two dots were almost on top of each other.
“Now!” he said.
The driver slammed on the brakes, and the truck skidded to a halt, going completely sideways. They sat for one pregnant moment, and then the drone crashed directly on the stretch of road in front of them, right outside the driver’s side window. There was no explosion, as the drone carried no fuel. Just sparks and the concussion.
They waited a moment, made sure there were no more blips on the screen, and then all three men got out to look at the wreckage.
Debris was scattered everywhere, centered on a small crater the drone had created in the asphalt. None of the pieces had any kind of markings or identification on them. Both sergeants took pictures. It was the closest Pete had been to a drone since leaving Eris Island. After a few minutes of catching their breath and walking around the wreckage, they got back into the truck without a word.
The driver drove slowly around it, into the median, to avoid the destruction.
The soldier in the passenger seat was the first to speak. “Those things are bigger than I thought.”
* * *
“We’re almost there,” said the driver. They’d driven about another hour since the drone attack and were approaching the submarine base. They’d slowed down to an almost leisurely pace to make the rendezvous at the exact right time, which seemed painfully slow after their brief one-hundred-mile-per-hour sprint.
The soldier in the passenger seat turned and shook Pete’s hand. “We’re not going to hang around after we drop you off, I’m afraid, so let’s say goodbye now.”
Pete took his hand.
Suddenly they were at the head of the dock. They exchanged documents with two men in a machine gun nest that was topped by a heavily camouflaged metal shield. He waved them on and then ducked back below his cover after a quick survey of the sky.
“Go,” they said to Pete. “Good luck.”
He jumped out of the vehicle with his seabag, and as soon as he did, his companions sped away inland, as fast as they could drive.
Pete looked around. The soldier in the machine gun nest was deep inside his shelter, invisible.
“Is there a submarine around here somewhere?” Pete yelled toward him.
“That way,” said the soldier. His hand appeared out of the shadows, and pointed down the pier.
Pete didn’t see a submarine, but he started walking in that direction anyway.
* * *
After a few minutes it came into sight, a dark shape emerging from the ocean. When he got to it, the brow and a single set of lines were the only things that connected the vessel to shore. Water still dripped from the dark steel of its hull; Pete got the impression that it had surfaced just moments before his arrival. A man waited for him topside, in a full captain’s uniform.
“Welcome aboard,” he said.
“I’m happy to be here,” said Pete, extending his hand. The captain was wearing regular Navy ribbons; Pete thought he probably wanted him to notice that.
“I’m Captain Finn McCallister,” he said.
“Pete Hamlin,” he answered, taking the captain’s extended hand.
An alarm screeched belowdecks. “Let’s get going,” said the captain. “Sounds like they’re near.”
“Who?”
The captain looked at him like he was making a bad joke. He pointed at the sky, just like the soldier who had driven him there a day before.
“The drones?” asked Pete.
“Of course not,” said McCallister, striding toward the ladder. “The drones are perfectly engineered to defeat the enemy and protect the Alliance. But all the same we should get submerged before they start dropping bombs on our heads.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
At the bottom of the ladder, a young officer was waiting for them, a weary smile on his face and a stack of linens in his hands.
“Lieutenant Ramirez will show you to your bunk,” said the captain. “He’s your new roommate.”
“There’s a uniform here, too,” said Ramirez, patting the top of the stack. “So you can look like a submariner. We even put your name on it.”
“Sorry for all the trouble,” said Pete.
“Don’t apologize,” said Ramirez. “This is the first time I’ve seen the sky in five months. I’ll be forever grateful.” He gave the hatch a longing glance as the captain spun it shut, preparing the big submarine to go to sea again.
“I’m going to control,” said the captain. “I need to get us to the dive point as quickly as possible. As soon as we get in deep water, I’ll bring you to my stateroom so we can have a look at your orders.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“In the meantime, Ramirez will show you around.”
“Come on,” said Ramirez, no longer interested in lingering now that the last sliver of sk
y had been shut off to them. “First stop, our stateroom.”
As it turned out, it was right around the corner.
There were two bunks, one of which had been stripped bare revealing its thin, Navy-issue mattress.
“Here,” said Ramirez, handing him the stack of sheets and pillowcases. For the first time, Pete noticed that a pamphlet was sitting on top: WELCOME ABOARD THE USS POLARIS.
“What’s this?”
“That? A little bit of a joke. A thing we used to hand out to visiting bands of Cub Scouts and Rotarians. A memento of happier times. But there is some info that might be useful to you in there. Ever been on a submarine before?”
“Never,” said Pete. “Spent a lot of time in the simulator in Charleston. But this is my first time on a real boat.”
“You get used to it after about five years,” he said. The fatigue from all the years showed in Ramirez’s face, but his smile was genuine. Pete thought Ramirez was one of those guys who could suffer through anything, probably a job requirement for a career in the submarine force. Or maybe he was just glad to have somebody new to talk to.
“Well,” said Pete. “Hopefully this won’t take that long.”
There was a sharp knock on the stateroom door, and a strikingly beautiful woman appeared, with commander’s insignia on her collar.
“Already hanging out in your stateroom?” she said. “Looks like Ramirez’s bad habits rubbed off on you fast.” She had shoulder-length blond hair and a turned-up nose. Her body was small but powerful, athletic, reminding Pete of a cheerleader. Her eyes were hard, though, and she stared Pete down.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Ramirez, unfazed. “Now that I’ve shown him his rack, I’ll show him where we watch movies and take showers.”
“That will cover a normal day in your life,” she said with a snort. She extended her hand to Pete. “Commander Hana Moody,” she said. “I’m the XO.”
“Pete Hamlin,” he responded.