by Todd Tucker
• • •
At 3:15 in the morning, Hein wandered into control.
“Head break?” he asked Jabo.
“Shit yes,” said Jabo. “Thanks.” Head breaks were the most needed on the midwatch, because of the vast amounts of coffee consumed, and the hardest to come by, because everyone who could be sleeping was in the rack. They quickly exchanged the keys and Jabo bolted from the Conn as the quartermaster was recording the relief in the deck log.
“This is Lieutenant Hein, I have the Deck and the Conn.”
As the helm was acknowledged, Jabo darted back up the ladder and grabbed a few of the books that the XO had left for him.
“Just a head break Jabo!” shouted Hein.
“This will just take me a second…”
He bolted down the ladder into the watchstander’s head where he took a fantastically long and satisfying piss. He washed his hands and took the books into the Officers’ Study.
The Navigator was there. He looked up from his chart without smiling or speaking, and then went back to work. Jabo edged around the table to the locker in the corner that contained the books he was looking for.
The shelf held their small library of submarine history, all the classics both modern and ancient, novels and nonfiction: Wake of the Wahoo, Hunt for Red October, Clear the Bridge, and Run Silent, Run Deep. Jabo was looking for anything that might liven up his lecture on the Kilo.
“Brushing up on your submarine history, Jabo?” said the Nav. There was something snide in his tone.
“Doing some training for the XO…”
“If you’re looking for Rig for Dive, I’ve got it.”
“I don’t think I need it—that’s World War II, right?”
The nav chuckled. “Yes. Good guess.”
Jabo felt himself getting pissed off at the Nav’s smirk. “Crush Martin, right? Lost his boat after that?”
The Nav suddenly turned and swept his hand over the row of history books. “They’re all about lost boats. Lost men. All the nonfiction ones, anyway.”
“Not all of them…”
“Let’s see…” The Nav tapped one of the book’s spines. “The Wrasse went down somewhere in the Sea of Japan, nobody knows where: ninety-two men.” He tapped another. “The Tang, sunk by one of her own torpedoes, 74 men lost.” He pulled an ancient paperback half way out to read the cover. “The Wahoo, gunned down by Japanese planes in the La Perouse Straits, 79 men. Fifty-two submarines this country has lost in all. Three thousand men still onboard.” He pulled another book out and threw it on top of his chart: U-Boat Commander, by Gunther Prien.
“Our enemies haven’t fared any better. The hero of Scapa Flow wrote this right before his boat disappeared. “
“Dangerous work,” said Jabo, feeling the need to say something.
“Suicide,” said the Nav. “And submarines are built for suicide missions.”
“Not anymore...”
The Navy laughed hard at that, almost a bark. “Jesus, Jabo. You really believe that? You think anyone has ever believed that a Trident Submarine would ever come back from a war mission? How loud do you think we’d be during a launch of our twenty-four missiles? How far would that sound carry? How vulnerable would any Trident be during a strategic launch? We’d be lucky to get all twenty-four missiles away before the first torpedo found us.”
“I don’t know…”
“Take a look, Jabo,” said the Nav, pointing to the other side of the room, to the books that contained all their war fighting tactics and procedures. “See if you can find a procedure for reloading a Trident submarine. There isn’t one. No one plans on us coming back.”
He sighed deeply and slumped back in his chair.
Jabo returned to the conn.
• • •
At 0545, just as the scent of frying bacon was beginning to drift into the control room, Kincaid arrived. As they were nearing the end of the formal turnover, Jabo brought up the incident in the Officers Study.
“So he said that we’re on a suicide mission?”
“That’s right,” said Jabo.
Hayes thought it over for a moment. “I’ve heard that kind of shit before. It’s something boomer sailors tell themselves to make it sound like what we do out here is tough.”
“I guess,” said Jabo. “I guess you had to be there. This didn’t seem like some kind of posturing. He seemed…”
“Depressed? Pissed off? He’s a department head. He should be depressed and pissed off.”
Just then, the navigator started walking up the ladder to control, a bundle of rolled charts under his arm. He walked right by the two friends without saying a word.
Hayes shrugged. “I’m ready to relieve you.”
“I’m ready to be relieved. Ship is on course two-seven-five, Ahead Full, depth six-five-zero feet.”
“I relieve you.”
“I stand relieved.”
“This is Lieutenant Kincaid, I have the Deck and the Conn.”
The watchstanders acknowledged in succession as Jabo signed the deck log, then walked the short distance into radio. He had a few minor matters he needed to take care of before he could lay down and get a quick nap before the real workday of the ship began. He handed off the previous night’s messages to Gurno which he had finally read and reviewed. “Route these to the navigator, please. He’s in control.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Gurno, fresh from a shower and breakfast. Jabo could barely keep his eyes open.
He reviewed and signed some planned maintenance charts for the division. Leaving radio, he briefly considered breakfast, but decided he needed sleep more than he needed food. So he stumbled down to his stateroom, shut the lights off, and closed his eyes knowing that soon he’d be awoken as the day’s drills began with the general alarm; or the flooding alarm; or, maybe, if the XO was in the mood for something exotic, the rapid, high-pitch beeping of the missile emergency alarm. The ship’s tight schedule would somewhat neuter the drills; they would have to simulate emergency blows, snorkeling, and trips to periscope depth, most of the things that made drills fun and interesting. But there would still be drills, and that still required everyone to be awake, no matter if you’d been up all night on the midwatch.
Jabo didn’t fall asleep right away. He was still troubled by his conversation with the navigator. But like all submarine officers, he’d learned that when given the opportunity to sleep, you must sleep, no matter how disturbed you were from the last watch, no matter how pissed you were at the XO, and no matter how depressed you were that you had to wake up in a few minutes for the next round of bullshit. You had to fall asleep fast because you didn’t know how many hours, or days, might pass before you got another chance. That pressure alone had kept him awake on his first patrol, that feeling of panic that he needed to get to sleep in a hurry, but couldn’t. Since then, he’d mastered the art of falling asleep quickly.
Jabo started breathing deeply, pretending to sleep being the important first step. He had a few vivid, happy memories that he retreated into at times like these. All of them were about Angi.
He recalled the time he’d been driving home from the base early one morning, the refit after his second patrol, exhausted after an all-night watch in the engine room during a marathon round of testing on the primary relief valves. As he drove through a pouring rain, the sour smell of the engine room still clinging to his khaki uniform, he was startled to come upon Angi as she ran down Westgate Road. She was running away from him and didn’t see him. She seemed oblivious to the rain, even though she was drenched, from her sleeveless Nike running shirt to her Saucony running shoes, the one luxury she allowed herself on their meager budget.
He slowed down so he wouldn’t pass her too quickly, not wanting to splash her, but also wanting to watch her a little longer. He was struck, once again, that someone so beautiful could love him. She was athletic, but she didn’t like it when Jabo described her that way. She was southern belle enough to think that adjective was an alte
rnative for beautiful, a backhanded compliment in the same way that her grandfather inevitably described bigger girls as “healthy.” But that’s not how Jabo felt—to him there was no better, no more alluring description of his wife’s physical beauty, the way her body was young, strong, and fast. Her shirt clung to her skin in the rain, and water ran down her toned legs, each step sending up a splash that would find its way, eventually, into Puget Sound.
He fell into something that was deeper than sleep, something like an attempt to heal, or hide.
• • •
He’d been asleep two and a half hours when the first alarm sounded, about two hours longer than he’d been counting on. There’d been a debate in the wardroom among the drill team about whether or not they might allow a brief period of snorkeling. The captain finally decided they could, as long as they grabbed the broadcast at the same time and only ran the diesel for about fifteen minutes. This took time to work into the drill plan, which allowed Jabo to sleep for those extra minutes, and when he heard the fire alarm sound, and jumped out of bed and into his poopie suit, he felt good for the extra sleep, felt like a million bucks, hoped he would be he first officer to the scene so he could take charge, put out the simulated fire with non-simulated enthusiasm. When Kincaid’s voice announced after the alarm that the fire was in the Supply Office, Jabo was already sprinting aft, thinking about what hoses were closest, how pissed the Supply Officer was going to be if they moved a single sheet of paper on his desk, and how much fucking fun his job was.
• • •
The dinner plates were cleared away and Jabo hurriedly set up the projector and the computer. The first image was an interesting one he’d found of a Kilo actually being delivered to the Chinese atop a cargo ship. It was rare to see a sub completely out of the water like that, and seeing how easily it fit atop the cargo ship highlighted how small it was. It took up barely half of the big ship’s top deck.
According to the watchbill, Jabo was supposed to be on the conn; it had been twelve hours since his midwatch ended and it was his turn again. But he’d been assigned to do this training, so the XO had detailed the engineer to relieve Hein for the training period, which pissed the eng off on a number of levels; if a department head needed to be assigned some menial duty on behalf of a junior officer, then philosophically he believed it should never be him, as the head of the most important, most demanding department on the ship. Secondly, the act seemed to imply that the engineer didn’t need to know anything about Kilo submarines; he was the engineer after all, concerned about the reactor compartment and aft, and he was always sensitive to being slighted as a kind of support officer, a non-warrior. But someone had to be on the conn during Jabo’s training, and the XO, for whatever reason, decided to send the sullen engineer to control, perhaps if for no other reason he thought his three-section junior officers needed a break more than him.
“Danny, let’s get started,” said the XO. He flipped off the lights.
“This was the first Kilo submarine purchased from Russia by the People’s Liberation Army, in 1995,” said Jabo. “Now the Chinese own a total of twelve of these boats. Our intel tells us that two are Type 636, the most capable platform, and as the XO mentioned last night, one of the quietest submarines in the world.”
“But they’re diesel boats, right?” asked Ensign Duggan. “They’re only quiet when they’re running on their batteries.” Fresh out of the navy’s nuclear power training, he’d been indoctrinated to believe that nuclear propulsion was the pinnacle of human achievement, and that all other modes of power generation were dirty, noisy, and primitive.
“Don’t underestimate this new generation of diesel boats,” said the XO. “I’m sure that Danny will get into the specifics, but they can run a long time on their batteries.”
“Four hundred miles at three knots,” said Jabo.
“There you go.”
“But they’re on the surface the rest of the time?” said Duggan. “Running the diesel?”
“That’s right,” said the XO. “And you know what that sounds like to us? When they’re running their little diesel?”
Duggan shook his head.
“It sounds like a fucking diesel. Like a fishing boat, or a merchant, or any other fucking thing in this ocean that runs with an engine and a propeller. And then they kill the engine, submerge, and disappear.” Jabo felt bad for Duggan. Like every newly reported ensign, he’d been absolutely living in the engine room, trying to qualify Engineering Officer of the Watch. No one really expected him to know about the capabilities of enemy subs, they wanted him to know how to charge the battery, shift the electric plant, and answer a bell: keep the lights burning and the screw turning.
“The 636 boats were improved over older Kilos in a number of ways,” said Jabo, after he felt like Duggan had had enough time to squirm. “But especially in sound silencing.” He clicked through to a new photo of the Kilo, an aerial shot of a boat on the surface, a puff of white diesel smoke coming from behind the sail. “The main shaft speed has been reduced to lower noise, and the entire hull is covered in sound-absorbing anechoic tiles.”
“But they’re still pretty crude, right?” asked Duggan.
There was a silence…he’d had a chance to shut up, and had declined, in an effort to look smart. Ensigns were told sometimes in training that their leadership would respect them for speaking up, for being an active part of the conversation in the Wardroom. This, of course, was bullshit.
“You think we don’t need to worry about these guys?” said the XO. “Is that what you’re saying, Duggan? Think I’m wasting your time here?”
“No sir…”
The XO’s forehead vein started to bulge. The Captain sat back and smiled, ready to enjoy the show like the rest of them.
“Okay, Duggan, let’s assume for a minute that you’re right and the best analysts at NATO are wrong, and that these improved Kilos are pieces of shit.”
“That’s not…”
“Let’s also assume that they aren’t very capable operators, that they are not disciplined, because God knows, the Chinese are known for being happy go-lucky dipshits, aren’t they Duggan?”
“XO…”
“So, since you’re fresh out of Sub School let me ask you a simple question. Duggan, when you are war gaming, and you put three shitty fighter jets against one really good fighter jet, who wins?”
Duggan, Jabo was happy to see, had finally decided to stop talking and take his beating in silence.
“I’ll answer: the shitty jets usually win. You might get one, maybe two, but three on one is too much. How about…three shitty tanks against one really kick-ass American tank?”
Duggan was looking at his hands.
“That’s right, kids, the shitty tanks win. So, how about…two shitty subs against a one billion dollar US Trident submarine with the best minds in the country aboard? Now, how about two not-so-shitty diesel subs versus one Trident? How about two pretty good diesel boats, perhaps the best, quietest diesel-electric boats in the world, against one Trident submarine manned by junior officers who think because they are nuclear trained college graduates that no fucking Chinese skipper in a diesel boat can ever hurt them?”
Everyone was quiet now. Duggan looked like he wanted to melt away.
“Okay, XO, I think you’ve made your point,” said the captain. “You oncoming guys—go take the watch. I am sure the engineer is breaking out in hives up there.”
Book Two: Ahead Flank
Angi was drifting off, not quite asleep, when the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Angi, its Karen Duggan.”
Angi could hear worry in her voice; it woke her right up. “What’s wrong?”
“Have you heard anything about a fire on the boat?”
A chill went through her. Almost every patrol there were rumors like this, and almost every patrol they proved to be baseless. Well, not baseless, but usually exaggerated somehow, a grain of truth mutated in the Petri dish
of a bunch of wives with too much too worry about and not enough real information. “No I haven’t heard anything, Karen.”
“Please,” she said, “tell me if you know anything. I am really freaking out about this.”
Angi sympathized with Karen, who’d moved out west with Brendan, thousands of miles from her family just weeks after getting married—just like she and Danny had. She remembered that hopeless feeling of not knowing anything, the feeling that everyone else somehow knew more. “Karen, I haven’t heard anything, I swear, but I’ll ask around. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve heard.”
“I was talking to one of the chief’s wives at the exchange, and she said they had a friend at SUBPAC who said that they had to order some equipment for the boat and rush it to the shipyard in Japan, said that something had been damaged in a fire and had to be replaced. She sounded like she knew what she was talking about, but shit, what do I know?”
Angi thought it over. It sounded ominously specific. And those chiefs’ wives always did seem to have access to better information than the wardroom wives…
“Karen, I am going to make some calls, and I’ll get right back to you. But I am sure it’s nothing. If it was bad, the Navy would have told us something by now.”
“Okay, Angi, thanks.” Angi could tell that her last statement had made her feel better. Only someone on their first patrol would believe it.
• • •
She called Denver Kincaid first.
“Denver, have you heard anything about a fire on the boat?”
“Molly Hein just called and asked me the same thing,” she said. “Do you think there’s something to this?”
“Molly might have just heard about it from Karen, too…I don’t know. I think I’m going to call Cindy,” she said.
“Let me know…”
“I will. I’m sure everything is fine.”