by Todd Tucker
“I know,” she said. “You must be important.”
“Not at all,” he said. “It’s all about the mission.”
“Which is?”
There was a pause as she waited for Pete to disclose something. Anything.
“Ma’am, I’m not really at liberty to say. I haven’t even reviewed my orders with the captain.”
She tossed her head and exhaled loudly. “Jeez, some manners from you. A guest on my ship, given this prime bunk, and you’re keeping secrets from a superior officer.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Once I tell the captain, it will be up to him to share with anyone on a need-to-know basis.”
“I’m familiar with the requirements,” she snapped. She was looking him up and down now. “Ever been on a submarine?”
“Never,” he said.
“Are you Navy? Alliance?”
Pete shook his head. “I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Jesus, you’re a pain in the ass. I’m told you have officer of the deck training?”
“Correct, ma’am.”
“Then I guess we’ll treat you like an officer. We can use the help.”
“Only got four on the entire crew right now,” said Ramirez. “Captain, XO, me, and Frank.”
“You’re forgetting somebody,” said Moody.
“Oh, the doctor!” Ramirez said in a teasing way, as if he knew it would irritate her.
“He gets a stateroom to himself and no duties on the watch bill,” she said. “But you won’t get off that easy. I’ll need to observe you before putting you on the watch bill, of course.”
“Of course,” he said, and their eyes locked.
“It’ll mean spending a lot of time with me,” she said. “Hours and hours.”
“Looking forward to it,” said Pete.
She laughed loudly. “Sure you are, hotshot. All right—I’m going forward to take the watch from the captain.”
She turned and left without another word.
“She’s pretty hot, right?” said Ramirez.
“Sure,” said Pete.
“Beautiful,” Ramirez said a little wistfully. “But deadly.”
* * *
They spent a few minutes talking about hometowns, and what was going on ashore, as Pete unpacked. Ramirez was eager for news about the epidemic and the Dallas Cowboys. He had a girlfriend who had dumped him recently, and clearly he still pined for her. She hadn’t written to him in months; Ramirez worried about her.
Pete pulled out a Lucite block, one of the only personal items he’d thought to pack.
“What’s that?” said Ramirez.
Pete handed it to him. He turned it over in his hand. “Is that a honeybee?”
“It is,” said Pete. “At every stage of its life cycle. There’s the larva,” he said, pointing. “The pupa, the adult.”
“Very cool,” said Ramirez, staring at it curiously.
“It was a gift,” said Pete, feeling it necessary to explain.
“Let me guess,” said Ramirez. “From a girlfriend.”
Pete shook his head, trying to hide his sadness.
“Wife?” said Ramirez.
Pete shook his head again, and carefully took the Lucite block away.
“Ex-wife?” said Ramirez.
Pete didn’t have it in him to clarify, so he let that stand.
Ramirez shook his head ruefully. “Join the club, my brother. The Submarine Force Lonely Hearts Club.”
Pete placed the honeybee memento above his desk, and continued unpacking.
* * *
After a few minutes, a sound-powered phone on the wall of the stateroom chirped, and he was summoned to the captain’s stateroom. On the way there, he passed a muscular lieutenant with HOLMES on his nametag. He nodded gruffly in Pete’s direction, his only acknowledgment. I guess not everyone here is happy to have a new shipmate, he thought.
“Come in, shut the door,” said the captain when Pete arrived. He scooted over to make room in the small stateroom.
“Aye, sir.”
“Listen,” said the captain, as they both sat down. The cramped quarters made for a kind of instant intimacy. “I suspect you’re a civilian—maybe I’m about to find out. So, if that’s true, why don’t you call me Finn, and I’ll call you Pete. At least when it’s just the two of us.”
“Sure … Finn.”
The captain smiled broadly at that, as if he was pleased and surprised at the effort. “OK, let’s take a look.”
Pete pulled out the small tablet that he’d been holding, and powered it on. He swiped his finger across it, and the patrol order came to light. The first few pages were all boilerplate, long descriptions of responsibilities and secrecy requirements. The captain scanned through it all quickly, swiping ahead with the confidence of a man who had read a great many patrol orders and knew how to get to the good parts. He watched the animated projections of the epidemic, his eyes growing wide. Finally he got to a paragraph that offered a summation of the mission and he read it, and Pete watched him go back to the top and read it again before he offered any kind of reaction.
“Eris Island,” he said. “You can get us in there?”
“I can,” said Pete. “It won’t be easy, but I can.”
“One time we got within about two hundred miles and it was hot as hell. Drones everywhere.”
“We’ll stay submerged as long as possible. Degauss and cross the shoals at PD.”
The captain nodded while making eye contact. “And that’s where we’ll find the wonder drug?”
“Yes, sir,” said Pete. “We hope so.”
The captain tapped the icon on the screen that contained Pete’s personnel file. “I’ll read this in a minute, after we get through the nuts and bolts here, but are you a doctor? A scientist?”
“I’m an engineer,” said Pete. “With extensive experience on Eris Island and with the drones. That’s my expertise.”
“Aha,” said the captain, nodding, thinking it over. “There’s someone I’d like to share this with,” he said.
“You have that authority, sir.”
The captain picked up a microphone over his desk, and turned a switch. His voice boomed across the ship. “Doctor Haggerty, report to the captain’s stateroom.”
He hung up and waited for the doctor to arrive. Pete knew that somewhere close, Commander Moody was fuming at being kept out of the loop. He wondered how she would take it out on him.
* * *
Later that night, Ramirez took Pete to the wardroom. “I’ve shown you where to sleep, now I’ll show you where to eat. That should about cover it.”
It was a somewhat formal-looking room: wood panel cabinets, a glass case with actual silver serving platters on display, and eight chairs arranged around a table with the captain’s chair at the head, the only chair with arms.
“That silver is from the USS George Washington,” said Ramirez, pointing at the cabinet. “The first ballistic missile submarine. The first to carry a Polaris missile.”
Pete stared through the glass at the elaborately etched silver tray, a long, flat-decked submarine carved upon it. “Beautiful,” said Pete.
“Hard to imagine an era when they served food on silver like that onboard a submarine.”
Pete looked around and confirmed what Ramirez was saying. Any formality in the wardroom had long since given way to a kind of grubby practicality. Very old magazines were stacked across the table. A well-worn steel coffeepot had the power of place in the room, right next to the door. Giant, unillustrated bags of Navy-issue snack foods were arranged on a side counter—cheese balls and corn chips. Little boxes of cereal were stacked like bricks against one wall. After years at sea, it seemed, the Polaris had given up on the burden of formal meals.
“Breakfast?” said Ramirez, holding up a tiny box of Apple Jacks. “Or lunch?” he said, poking a bag of the bright orange cheese balls.
“How about just coffee?” Pete responded, sitting down across from him.
/> “We have that,” said Ramirez. He began to make a fresh pot.
“How often do you get resupplied?”
“As often as we can,” said Ramirez. “Which ain’t that often. We meet a tender up north … every year it gets farther north. Every six months if we can pull it off. Each time the food gets worse, the supply parts get harder to come by. Unfortunately, they made this boat so well that it just keeps running.”
“Why so far north?”
Ramirez looked at him as the coffeemaker began its noisy burbling cycle. It was a hard, assessing stare.
“The drones,” he said.
“The drones?”
“If we go far enough north, we’re less likely to get one of our own little bombs dropped on us. Every year we go farther. Two months ago I was on the bridge when we met the tender. We were so far north that with my binoculars I could actually see ice in the water.”
“Jesus.”
He shrugged. “Of course, we’re not supposed to say that. But I can tell you that we haven’t heard a whisper from an enemy ship out here, submarine or otherwise, in over a year. But every time we get near the surface, those drone alarms start screaming.”
The door burst open, Frank Holmes in workout gear carrying a stack of papers. He was followed by a man Pete hadn’t yet met. It had to be Haggerty, the doctor. Ramirez quickly stopped talking.
“What’s going on in here?” said Holmes with a large smile on his face. “A non-qual lounging in the wardroom?” He began feeding classified papers into a shredder that sat at the corner of the room, which groaned as it tried to digest them. Pete fought his engineer’s impulse to tell Frank to slow down, he was feeding too much paper into the machine at once.
Ramirez shot Pete an evil grin that said, watch this. “Hey, Frank … whatcha doing?”
Frank turned around, still feeding his sheaf of paperwork into the shredder. “I’m deleting these old targeting documents,” he said.
Ramirez burst out laughing. “That kills me every time!” he said. He looked at Pete. “He says he’s deleting stuff when he shreds it.”
“Whatever,” said Frank with a shrug. “Same fucking thing.” He clapped his hands as the shredder finished chewing through the last document.
“So,” Frank said to Pete. “Who won the Super Bowl? Was it awesome?”
“Tell us it was,” said Ramirez. “Even if it wasn’t.”
* * *
Pete learned in the wardroom that part of his onboarding required a cursory physical examination from Haggerty. He followed the doctor to sick bay after he finished his coffee.
“Any contagious diseases?” Haggerty asked, reading from a clipboard.
“No,” said Pete.
“No coughing, diarrhea, sore throat?”
Pete shook his head.
“Don’t be offended,” said the doctor. “We have to ask everybody.”
“I’m not offended at all,” Pete answered.
The doctor turned and reached in a drawer for a small plastic cylinder. He wrote a tiny serial number on it and handed it to Pete. “Here, wear this on your belt: your personal dosimeter. It will keep track of how much radiation you receive from the reactor. Don’t worry, it won’t be much. I read them once a month, and all of us have negligible doses, even guys like the captain and Ramirez who have been here for years.” He pointed to a row of binders, one for each crewman, past and present. Ramirez’s was thick with paper, one sheet representing every month onboard.
“Thanks,” said Pete, undoing his belt to attach the device.
“It’s a hell of a thing,” said the doctor.
“What’s that?” said Pete.
“Your mission. Our mission. You really think the cure is out there?”
Pete shrugged. “You’re a doctor, don’t you believe in cures?”
He smiled wryly. “Of course I do. I’m just not sure I still believe in patrol orders.”
* * *
After his physical, Pete met Ramirez back in the stateroom.
“Home sweet home,” said Ramirez as he walked in.
“How long have you been at sea?” he asked, remembering the folder with Ramirez’s exposure tracking.
He squinted his eyes, as if deep in thought. “Five years and two months. Longer than anybody except the captain.”
“And you’ve been engineer the whole time?”
He nodded. “Yep. And Frank is weapons officer, Moody is XO. That’s it—four watchstanders. The ship was designed to operate with no fewer than six, originally, but here we are.”
“What about the doctor?”
“Not a watchstander. Technically, he’s not required to learn a watchstation as the science officer, but it would be, you know, good manners if he did. I hear most doctors on other boats do it.”
“That’s the plan for me?”
Ramirez nodded. “You should be able to complete the qualification in a couple of weeks with all your simulator time. Everything is pretty much automated. But it’ll still be nice to have another name on the watchbill.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
“Just don’t get too good. They’ll never let you leave.”
Pete laughed. “Is that what happened to you?”
Ramirez nodded. “Yeah. For a while I sent messages requesting a transfer—my sea tour was supposed to end two years ago. They stopped even giving me the courtesy of a response. And I stopped asking—don’t want to look disloyal. In the current environment.”
He held Pete’s gaze.
“Meaning?”
He could tell Ramirez was assessing him, not completely sure if he could trust Pete.
“The captain and I—we’re Navy guys. He went to the academy, I was ROTC at Texas A&M. Frank and Hana—they’re Alliance officers. Pure Alliance.”
“True believers?”
“Exactly. They distrust everyone and anyone who isn’t drinking the Kool-Aid. And they don’t mind letting their bosses know about it.”
“And that includes you?”
“Absolutely. And the captain.”
Pete thought about that.
“What about the doctor?”
Ramirez laughed. “Who knows where he comes from. Medical school, I guess.”
“So why did you volunteer for submarines?”
“That’s a question I ask myself a lot these days,” said Ramirez. “My father was a submariner, I guess that had something to do with it: a captain.”
“What boat?”
“The Alaska. An old Trident. Here,” he said, “let me show you something.”
He reached into his desk and cleared some papers and books out of the way, revealing a small safe. He spun the dial and opened it up. Nestled among a dozen bottles of medicine was a small nine-millimeter pistol.
“This was my dad’s,” he said, pulling it out. “At sea, he slept with it.”
“The drugs, too?”
“No,” he said. “I happen to be the controlled medicinals custodian, one of my many collateral duties, that’s why I’ve got a safe.”
“So why did your dad sleep with a gun?”
“He said that the captain of a Trident submarine was the most vulnerable part of the entire strategic weapons triad. So the minute the boat went alert, he put the purple key around his neck, and this pistol under his pillow.”
Pete took it and hefted it. He dropped the clip. “It’s loaded,” he said.
“Well, he couldn’t very well stop a mutiny or a KGB takeover if it was unloaded,” he said.
“Are you allowed to have this?”
He shrugged. “Not technically. No real small arms allowed on the boats anymore—just a few Tasers and billy clubs. The doc is the only other one who has the combination to the safe, we do a monthly inventory of the drugs together. He never says anything.”
“Maybe he thinks it’s a cigarette lighter.”
Ramirez shook his head vigorously. “God no. Cigarettes would really get me in trouble.”
* * *
Pete spent the next days learning the ship’s systems, usually with Ramirez but also standing watch with Moody, Frank, and the captain. Ramirez had been right, the ship was easy to learn, the systems supremely well engineered, and with Pete’s technical acumen he soon learned them all. While he didn’t have the competence they’d all gathered after thousands of hours on the conn, the simulator and the attention of Commander Ase had served him well, and he was soon trusted enough that they signed his qualification book and made him an officer of the deck. They honored the occasion in the wardroom with a real meal, a chicken that had been saved deep in the freezer for a special occasion, and a bottle of wine that the captain brought down from his stateroom. Only Moody wasn’t present, as someone had to stand watch in the control room.
“To our new watchstander,” said the captain, raising a glass. “By my calculation, this should give each of us twenty-five percent more time in the rack, and Hamlin seventy-five percent less.”
They clicked their glasses together and drank.
“What now?” said Ramirez.
“Now—we have a mission to complete.”
“Are we getting close?”
The captain nodded. “We’re getting close.”
Suddenly the phone buzzed at his knees, a direct line to the control room. He picked it up.
“Captain.”
He nodded as he listened, his brow furrowing with concern. “OK. I’m on my way up.”
“Something wrong, Captain?”
He nodded. “We’ve got a submerged contact. Moody thinks she’s following us.”
* * *
The next two weeks were a blur of evasive maneuvers, countermeasures, and stifling tension. But they couldn’t shake the shadow boat. Pete watched a change come over the captain as he tried to evade the enemy boat, but couldn’t. One night prior to taking the midnight watch, he spent some time with the captain to discuss the situation in the wardroom.
“You’re certain it’s the enemy?”
He nodded. “No Alliance boats would get this close to Eris—trust me. It’s crazy to get this close, and if I didn’t have your assurances that you knew some backdoor in, I wouldn’t be trying it either.”
“Why don’t they shoot us?”
“I’ve thought about that,” said the captain. “Maybe they want to see what we’re doing. Maybe they want to shoot us after we pick up our cargo.”