Launch Code

by Michael Ridpath

  Justin was at least five years older than Toby, but he seemed a friendly enough ally. He was tall, with thinning red hair cut short, and brown eyes looking out of a round chubby face with an air of preoccupation, as if he was constantly harassed. The soft face contrasted with the taut, hard torso that nestled beneath his shirt, the neatly constructed muscles of an office worker who spends a lot of time in the gym. Toby suspected, and Alice had confirmed, that it wasn’t Brooke who harassed Justin, but his work. He was employed by an old media company in Chicago that was under attack from new media, and Justin gave the impression of not quite being able to handle it. The gym helped, apparently, just not enough.

  But Alice believed he was a good thing for Brooke, who was earning decent money as a dentist, and he treated her well.

  Toby was surprised that no one had mentioned that Justin had known the Guth family from his childhood. On the one hand, why should they? On the other, he knew Alice well enough to know that the omission had been intentional.

  Another Guth secret.

  The women joined them in the living room. During the interminable commercial breaks, Bill reached for a tapestry and began stitching. It was one he had designed himself, a view of Barnholt from the sea, really just swathes of blue and green and grey and the windmill. Toby had been surprised when he had seen Bill working away with needle and yarn on his first trip up to Norfolk.

  Alice had explained that it had started when Bill had finished off some needlepoint that her mother had been working on when she died, with Alice showing him how to do it. He found it had helped, and he worked on another that his wife had already bought. Then he began to design his own – all of Norfolk coastal scenes – which became increasingly less precise and more impressionistic. He never did them in London, only in Norfolk. Toby thought they were rather good.

  Justin asked Toby a question.

  ‘Did Sam say anything about my father this afternoon? Craig Naylor?’

  Toby was sure that there was a reason that Justin had asked him and not Bill. But Bill answered.

  ‘Just briefly,’ he said. ‘I told him what had happened.’

  Justin glanced at Toby, who nodded.

  ‘Did he talk about what my father did when the submarine got the orders to launch? What his reaction was?’ Justin was once again asking Toby. Toby wasn’t clear how much Justin knew about the near-launch, but it was obvious he had known more than Toby. Toby felt a flash of jealousy as he realized Brooke must have told her husband more than Alice had told him. Maybe Brooke trusted Justin more than Alice trusted Toby?

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ said Toby.

  ‘Craig was in a different part of the submarine,’ said Bill. ‘He was weapons officer, which meant he was down in the missile control centre. The discussion about the launch orders took place in the control room.’

  Justin nodded, and the play started again. The Redskins were third down and five at the eleven-yard line.

  The Redskins scored twice, then the Cowboys got a field goal. At half time, Alice announced that she had forgotten some of the food she needed for the following day, and she would pop out to Tesco in Hunstanton to pick it up. Toby offered to come too, as did Brooke, but Alice insisted on going alone, and so he turned his attention back to the half-time analysis.

  Seven

  Alice drove fast to Hunstanton. It wasn’t far, and although it was dark, the roads were empty. The supermarket was just the other side of town and was open twenty-four hours a day.

  Alice parked by the entrance and swiftly filled a basket with staples that they might need more of over the next couple of days: milk, bread, coffee, the kind of yoghurt that Maya liked. She swept her purchases through the self-service checkout, and then drove back to Barnholt.

  She clenched the steering wheel tightly. She thought she had built a good rapport with Sam. He seemed to like her, indeed he seemed to enjoy the company of all the Guth family. She liked him.

  But he was dangerous.

  How dangerous, she didn’t yet know.

  Once she reached Barnholt, she turned off the main road, but rather than going on along the back lane to the house, she parked by the green, just opposite the King William. The lights were on and there were a number of cars in the parking lot: it wasn’t quite closing time.

  Alice took a deep breath, opened the car door, and stepped out into the night.

  It was well after eleven by the time Alice got back to Pear Tree Cottage. She noticed that there were still lights on in the living room, and in her father’s study upstairs.

  She opened the front door and carried her two shopping bags through to the kitchen.

  Toby joined her. ‘The Redskins won,’ he said.

  ‘I bet Dad was pleased.’

  He kissed the back of her neck. She didn’t respond. ‘You took your time,’ he said. ‘That’s not much to show for an hour and a half in the supermarket. I was getting worried.’

  ‘I had to go to King’s Lynn to get everything I needed,’ said Alice brusquely. ‘Has everyone else gone to bed?’

  ‘I think so. Shall I give you a hand?’

  ‘No,’ said Alice sharply. ‘I’ll put it all away; you won’t know where it goes. You go upstairs and I’ll be with you soon.’

  But once she had put the groceries away, she crept upstairs to her father’s study. By the time she slipped into bed next to her husband, he was fast asleep.

  Eight

  August 1983, Groton, Connecticut

  I loved the Navy. I loved serving in submarines.

  I loved the Alexander Hamilton.

  She was a Lafayette-class submarine, built in 1962. For three years she had operated out of Holy Loch on the west coast of Scotland. An alternating series of Blue and Gold crews had flown back and forth from the submarine base at Groton in Connecticut to take her out into the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean and wait for the order to blow up the world.

  You have to be kind of weird to enjoy working on submarines, especially on ballistic missile submarines which are designed, essentially, to do nothing for long periods of time. For ever, really. Ideally, boomers should never do anything at all.

  Patrols last about seventy days. Seventy days of never seeing the sun, never seeing a cloud, never feeling a breath of wind on your face. Seventy days of being crammed in a fat metal tube with a hundred and thirty-nine other men, with no privacy, a bunk that is little more than a coffin, occasional showers that last seconds, food that has been stored for weeks and reheated in minutes. Seventy days where the days of the week and the hours of the day become disjointed and blurred and where the crew toil to keep the sub puttering quietly along at three knots, with its missile hatches firmly shut, slaves to the giant machine.

  So why did I love it?

  The physics fascinated me, still do. The power of nuclear fission has held me in awe since high school. The idea that all that energy could be contained in a reactor core the size of a small car and manoeuvred around the world’s oceans amazed me. I wanted to be one of the guys taming that power, controlling it, manipulating it, directing it, its master not its slave.

  The power of the dozens of nuclear warheads inspired awe in me also, but in an entirely different way. My father had been in the Navy in the Pacific, and had done his bit to make the world safe for democracy. I believed that the Cold War was a real struggle for the future of the world. I couldn’t deny there was a chance that humanity might blow itself up, but I wanted to be one of those people capable of taking the responsibility to ensure nuclear weapons preserved peace, not destroyed everything. My country needed sensible, rational, reliable men to steward its nuclear arsenal, and I was proud to be one of those men.

  The Navy encouraged the sense of an elite that went with serving on ballistic submarines, and I responded well to that. They were the great capital ships of the late-twentieth century, and I was glad to serve on them. I was proud of the insignia pinned to my chest: the golden pair of dolphins, the silver submarine with a gold star for
each deterrence patrol. As befitted an elite service, discipline was a little more relaxed under the sea than above. And the crew were much smarter.

  A submarine was stuffed full of physics and engineering nerds. Sonarmen who could rewire a recording studio, missile techs who were actual rocket scientists, engineers who could design a nuclear reactor. There were probably more men who could solve a differential equation on one submarine than on a fleet of surface ships or, for that matter, in the whole Marine Corps.

  That might not have been strictly true, but I believed it was.

  The crew of a submarine was a family, who worked together, slept together, kidded together, quarrelled together, and kept the world safe. Together.

  My father owned and edited the newspaper in a small town in southern Pennsylvania. I knew he wanted me to take over from him eventually, but it became clear to both of us as I grew up that I was more interested in science than journalism. When I told him I wanted to go to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, he hadn’t argued. The Vietnam War was just coming to an end, joining the military was a far from fashionable thing for an eighteen year old to do, but he understood that I believed I was serving my country against a real enemy. He believed I was too.

  I had graduated from the Academy, majoring in Physics rather than the more common Engineering, spent six months at the nuclear propulsion school in Florida, six months training on the prototype reactor in Idaho and then three months on the Submarine Officers Basic Course at Groton. After all that, I had joined the Alexander Hamilton as an ensign. I got my nuclear qualifications, had been promoted to lieutenant and completed my fourth patrol on the boat.

  I had made friends, good friends. One of these was Lars da Silva, who had graduated in the same class as me from the Academy, and had also joined the Hamilton as an ensign. His olive skin, green eyes and thick blonde moustache testified to his heritage: his mother came from Midwestern Swedish stock and his father was Brazilian. We shared a stateroom with a third junior officer, Matt Curtis: it was known as the ‘JO Jungle’.

  Another was Craig Naylor. Craig was a couple of years older than Lars and me. Broad-chested with a round face and winning smile, he was serving his second tour on patrol, his first having been on a fast-attack submarine in the Pacific. He was one of the four ‘department heads’ on the boat. In his case he was weapons officer, which meant he was in charge of the missile command centre, and of actually launching the submarine’s nuclear weapons.

  Craig was married. Kind of. Two weeks after he had returned to his married quarters in Groton from his last patrol, his wife Maria had announced she was leaving him. She said it wasn’t for anyone else; it was just that to be a submariner’s spouse was to be a wife for only half the year, a half wife. It was no way for a woman to live her life, no way for a couple to coexist, no way to bring up children. She was going to end it before it drove her any crazier than she already was.

  Craig was bewildered. Such separations were a common enough event in the submarine service; Maria did have logic on her side. But she had never mentioned any of this before. There had been no ‘me or the Navy’ ultimatum.

  Then it had all become clear. There was a guy called Tony Opizzi; an insurance salesman based in nearby New London.

  Craig had needed company, fast, and Lars and I were happy to provide it. No one could deny that Craig was an all-round good guy. He was a straightforward, upbeat man who just made you feel good about yourself. He was great to be with on a submarine. He was great to be with in a bar.

  Lars and I were not the only people who felt sorry for Craig. His younger sister, Vicky, who had just started working for a bank on Wall Street, invited Craig and a couple of his friends to stay with her in the city over the Labor Day weekend.

  Would Lars and I like to come?

  You bet we would.

  Nine

  Vicky Naylor took us to a bar on the Upper West Side, four blocks from her apartment, where the three of us were crashing on her floor. There she introduced us to Kathleen and Donna, two friends from college.

  The bar was jumping on a Friday night, even on a Labor Day weekend. I was a small-town guy, as was Lars. I loved the buzz of the city, the feeling of exhilaration on a big night out. Lars and I had travelled down to New York a few times on weekends over the previous couple of years. It was a great place to have a few beers, but we always felt out of place. Relations with civilians had gotten a little better since the seventies and Vietnam. On submarines we wore our hair a little bit longer, while everyone else now wore their hair a little bit shorter. But we were not yuppie bankers or lawyers, blowing our pay cheques on booze and cocaine. We weren’t hip New York graduate students getting by in the big city on little money at the cool hang-outs.

  We were in the military, and New York was not a military kind of town.

  They could tell, the guys at the bar, their girlfriends, they could tell we were not one of them.

  At least Kathleen and Donna knew who we were.

  Vicky wasn’t subtle. She was a large woman, red-haired like her brother, and like her brother good-hearted. She had a plan for Craig, and that plan involved Kathleen. Donna was the back-up.

  I could see why the plan had seemed a good one. Kathleen was cute. Small, blonde, pert, upturned nose, white teeth, winning smile. Smart, although her voice had an irritating high pitch. She was a paralegal at a major commercial law firm, which partly explained why she had no boyfriend. The firm never let her out of the office; she was only able to join us that evening because of the Labor Day holiday. And Craig was good-looking with an easy charm. It should be a good match.

  The plan should have worked, but what Vicky had failed to understand was that Craig had no interest in meeting a new woman. He wanted the one he already loved back, please.

  Of course Lars and I had no such qualms, Lars especially. Kathleen was just his type. And I could see that Vicky had taken a shine to Lars. So the evening started off with a kind of circular balance. Kathleen was trying to impress Craig, whether of her own accord or just following her friend’s instructions wasn’t clear. Craig wanted to talk to his sister about his soon-to-be ex-wife. And Vicky really wanted to get to know Lars better.

  Which left me with the back-up.

  Donna.

  Her honey-blonde hair was unfashionably long, she was wearing tight jeans and a white cotton top that showed off one pale shoulder – that was fashionable that year. A lop-sided smile hovered, never totally disappearing from her face, as if life left her mildly amused.

  ‘I’m guessing you’re not a banker,’ I said.

  ‘I might be,’ said Donna. ‘I work in an office. It has filing cabinets and paperclips and staplers.’

  ‘Staplers? Wow.’

  ‘Do you have staplers on your submarine?’

  ‘Way too dangerous. Staplers flying around a confined space could kill someone.’

  ‘Of course. You have to be highly skilled to use them. I am highly skilled and I have had lots of practice. I could show you some day.’

  ‘That would be great,’ I said. ‘No one has ever offered to do that with me before.’

  Donna frowned slightly.

  ‘I’m sorry. That’s very forward of me,’ I said. ‘We’ve just met, and we’re already talking staples.’

  The edge of Donna’s lips twitched upwards, and her blue eyes crinkled. She took a sip of her beer.

  I offered her a cigarette. She shook her head. ‘I’m trying to quit.’

  ‘Do you mind if I do?’ I asked. She glanced at Lars and Vicky, who were both smoking, and shook her head again. I lit up. ‘Where do you do your stapling?’

  ‘For the United Nations. Their development program. Basically I’m a low-paid filing clerk. An idealistic low-paid filing clerk, making the world better one staple at a time.’

  ‘That’s very noble.’

  ‘So you don’t think I look like a banker, huh?’ The corner of her lip twitched.

  ‘Do I look like a sailor?’

>   ‘I have no idea what a sailor looks like. Do you have tattoos? Do you eat spinach?’

  ‘Seriously? You don’t know anyone in the Navy?’

  Donna shook her head. ‘Apart from Mr Hosier who lives next door to my parents back home. I think he was in the Navy in the Korean War.’

  ‘What about the army?’

  Donna shook her head again.

  ‘No one from college?’

  ‘We all went to Swarthmore. They’re not big on the military at Swarthmore.’ Swarthmore was a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, not too far from where I grew up; it was founded by Quakers, famous for their pacifism. She shrugged. ‘Sorry.’

  The Vietnam War had finished the year before I went to the Academy, and probably three or four years before Donna had gone to college, but it certainly wasn’t forgotten, especially by my generation. A lot of people – an awful lot of women – my age seemed to think that you had to be either a moron or a traitor to join the military. A traitor, not to your country, but to the nobler cause of world peace.

  I realized that Donna was probably one of those women. It was only then that I noticed the yellow and black ‘No Nukes’ button on the denim jacket draped on the back of her chair.

  Donna was definitely one of those women.

  Oh well.

  ‘Hey, Vicky, Bill doesn’t think I look like a banker!’ Donna said.

  ‘Don’t be fooled,’ said Vicky. ‘Donna was always much smarter at economics than I was. And math. You wouldn’t believe how many bankers I work with who couldn’t figure out a square root if you paid them.’

  ‘Really?’ said Craig.

  ‘Oh yeah. You’d run rings round all of them. But they have the gift of the bullshit. They know how to make other people do their square roots for them.’