The submarine continued westward at five knots, at a depth of 460 feet. Occasionally, natural forces tried to alter her depth. For three days, a huge tropical rainstorm raged above her, torrents of fresh rainwater diluting the ocean, making it less salty. A seagoing vessel’s buoyancy is determined by the mass of the water she displaces. Salty water is denser than freshwater, which is why it’s easier for a swimmer to float in the ocean than in a lake, and easier still in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. As the rain diluted the sea, the ocean around her became less dense; the boat started to sink.

When the rain ended, the same cold front that had carried the storm cooled the ocean, and cold water is more dense than hot. The boat displaced a higher mass of water, became more buoyant, and wanted to rise.

In both cases, the ship’s autopilot sensed the acceleration and efficiently adjusted the planes of the ship to maintain her programmed depth. Her destination, too, was programmed into the computer, along with an algorithm that randomly inserted maneuvers to make tracking her harder, even as she maintained her overall course.

She was a very quiet ship, by design. Her keel was laid in 1988 and she was commissioned in 1992, her construction straddling the end of the Cold War. So it was a Soviet enemy she was designed to fight, an enemy with sophisticated sonar and tactics, and the quest for silence influenced the design of every system. It was something the crews of these boats were drilled on constantly, that their machinery would not give them away; they were far more likely to be discovered by noise they created: a toilet seat dropped, a hatch slammed, a wrench dropped carelessly in the bilge. A sound like that was called a ‘transient,’ and could travel for miles underwater. Under the right conditions, when temperature layers in the ocean created sound channels, the sound could travel hundreds of miles. Anyone who was trained to track American submarines learned to listen for these random, careless noises as they were often the only audible sound a submarine made.

But no one walked the passageways of this boat, or maintained her machines, or watched television, so that innate, stubborn tendency of men to make noise didn’t give her away. Especially at such a slow speed, she was nearly silent.

At precisely 6:00AM (Hawaii-Aleutian time zone), in the Chiefs’ Quarters, a digital alarm clock began bleating. It was generally regarded as poor shipboard etiquette to have an alarm clock, because it would wake up everyone around you, and no one had the same schedule onboard a ship that had to run day and night. The beginning of your work day was undoubtedly the middle of the night for the person sleeping next to you. Courtesy dictated that you leave a wake up request with the messenger of the watch who would wake you up at the requested time without waking up those around you. But this alarm clock belonged to the Chief of the Boat, the senior enlisted man on the entire crew, and no one begrudged him his clock. Besides, he was surrounded by other chief petty officers, men who’d been at sea for decades, and who could sleep through anything. The COB had been a machinist for twenty years before becoming a master chief. His hearing had been dulled by years of engine room noise, and he had the alarm’s volume turned to the maximum setting.

With no one to silence it, the alarm bleated, its sound echoing through the passageways of the forward compartment and off the steel bulkheads that separated them from the sea. After thirty minutes, it shut itself off.

Twenty-three hours and thirty minutes later, it did it again.

Master Chief Cote was in his office at Tripler, finishing up his paperwork for the day. Never far from his mind… he was also finishing up his last tour of duty in a thirty-year career. It was time to conclude, he recognized, a journey that had started in Vietnam and culminated, just two years before, on Alabama, a submarine he loved even though at times it seemed determined to kill him. He’d had a longer, more exciting career than any recruiter had ever promised him. His mind went back for the first time in years to the grinning Chief Petty Officer who had recruited him, in an office above the Seymour, Indiana, post office that reeked of Old Spice and pipe tobacco, a garish framed print of the Constitution adorning the wall. His phone rang and the memory disappeared.

“Master Chief Cote.”

“Master Chief, it’s Petty Officer Wills. Can you come down to D-3? We’ve got a sailor here who needs a medical DQ from his next patrol. Ship sent him here late last night.”

It was one of Cote’s primary duties — as the resident submarine corpsman, he needed to sign off whenever a sub sailor missed a deployment for medical reasons. The original reason, he supposed, was to ensure that no one was malingering to get out of sea duty, a determination that the submarine force, with its stubborn pride, wanted made by one of its own. In reality, that was not a large concern; sailors were far more likely, in his experience, to hide a serious ailment to avoid letting down their shipmates than they were to fake an illness. And the ship’s command was certainly not inclined to send sailors home for mild ailments and start day one of a patrol short-handed. When a ship voluntarily sent him one of their own, Cote knew, it was usually dire.

“I’ll be right there.”

He took the elevator down to the third floor. He was at Tripler Army Medical Center, the Army hospital in Honolulu known affectionately to generations of military men as “Crippler.” It was the largest military hospital in the entire Pacific sphere, treating all the horrible things that can happen to a soldier or sailor, or an aging veteran for that matter, responsible for an area that covered roughly 50 % of the earth’s surface. The elevator doors slid open and Cote saw the young petty officer waiting for him with a concerned look on his face.

“Master Chief, thanks for coming quickly.”

“Sick submariner?”

“Very sick,” he said as they walked down the hall, their black oxfords clicking on the tile. “And getting worse by the minute. Ship sent him here late last night, he had a fever and cramps. I’m waiting for his test results.”

“Any ideas?”

He shrugged. “Flu? I don’t know. He seemed stable last night… I guess that’s why they didn’t order any tests.” There was a note of scorn in his voice.

“What did his corpsman think? Did you talk to him yet?”

“Didn’t get a chance,” said Wills. “His boat pulled out this morning.”

Cote furrowed his brow at that, bothered. It smacked of abandonment.

They walked silently to a far corner of the ward surrounded by a curtain. The young petty officer threw it open, revealing to Cote a breathtaking view of Honolulu in the background, while a young man was dying in the fore. His face was gray, contrasted sharply by the blood that was dribbling from his mouth.

“Here’s his chart…” said Wills, but before he could reach it, the sick sailor coughed so hard he almost convulsed. His back arched severely and he groaned in pain.

“Code!” said the master chief as he ran to his bedside. Wills jumped for the wall and pushed a button, setting in motion an emergency process that the master chief knew would be too late.

He stepped up to the young sailor and put his hand on his forehead — it was hot to the touch. White spittle had dried around his lips. His eyes searched without seeing anything. His hospital gown was soaked through with sweat. Cote noticed a stuffed green seabag leaning in the corner.

“Son… it’s okay,” he said.

“No…”

Lacking any better ideas he took the young man’s hand. In contrast to his forehead, it was clammy, cold, lifeless. The skin was rough, and his fingernails were dirty and cracked, the hand of a mechanic. He saw what he thought was a badly bruised fingernail, then realized to his surprise that it had been painted black with nail polish.

“Where are you from, sailor?” He urgently wanted to keep the conversation going, feeling that any loss of consciousness would be the end.

“Boise,” he gasped.

“Is that your hometown? Or your boat?”

The young man’s eyes focused on him for a moment, and after a thirty-year career that began as a medic in a war zone, Cote recognized a man who was ready to die.

“Boat,” he sighed.

It was the last word he ever spoke.

Danny Jabo and his young cousin were walking slowly through the cornfield, crunchy with snow, their shotguns held loosely at their sides. Little Mike wouldn’t shut up. He was from the talkative cohort of the Jabo clan, and Danny thought the boy’s chatter would be a suitable replacement for the noise normally generated by a team of good dogs.

“Over there?” he asked, pointing.

Danny nodded, as they walked toward a fence line that the farmer, yet another distant relative, had indicated was thick with cottontails.

“How close do we need to get?” he asked.

Danny put his finger to his lips, shushing him.

“Closer?”

Danny was finishing up three weeks of leave, his all-too-brief shore tour at the Purdue University ROTC unit complete. He’d spent every minute he could on that shore tour with Angi, his wife, even declining to get an MBA on the Navy’s dime while he was there. His fellow officers thought he was crazy to decline, but to Danny the thought of life in a corporate office building was horrifying even if it was, they all told him, inevitable and financially worth the misery. So instead of finance classes and group PowerPoint projects, he savored twenty-four months of coming home at night and sleeping in the same bed with his wife, home-cooked meals, and especially being present for their daughter’s birth: such was certainly not a guarantee to anyone in the nuclear navy. To him that was the biggest gift of his shore tour, not a degree in business. But with the shore tour drawing to a close, and orders to the USS Louisville in Pearl Harbor in hand, they’d headed back to Tennessee to visit the relatives a last time. Danny felt a familial obligation to teach his young cousin how to hunt, even if the kid did seem incapable of shutting up long enough to aim.

Danny stopped, about thirty feet short of the fence row.

“Did you see one?”

Danny shook his head. “Not yet,” he whispered. “When you see one, don’t aim for the white of the tail, even though you’ll want to — you’ll shoot behind him and miss.”

Little Mike nodded his head, his eyes alive with excitement. “Should we get closer?”

“We’ll take a few more steps and stop again,” said Danny.

“Will they bolt if we get closer?”

“If they’re in there, they already see us.” And hear us he thought. “Sometimes they bolt when you’re moving, but sometimes they move when you stop, because they think they’ve been spotted. It scares’m out of hiding. You ready?”

Little Mike nodded.

They took three steps forward and stopped again. Mike raised his gun as Danny did. They waited, held their breath for two seconds, and then a group of rabbits broke free from the undergrowth, running crazily in all directions.

Danny let Mike shoot the one that ran right toward them. Mike fired, snow flew up, and the lifeless rabbit popped backwards. Danny swung around to follow the rest of them.

“I got him!” said Mike. “Holy shit, I got him!”

“Watch your mouth,” said Danny, as he lowered himself to one knee, the Remington 870 shotgun on his shoulder. The boy’s cursing was a recent problem, and the whole family was working to cure him.

“There’s four of them!” said Mike. “Four!”

Danny shut out the boy’s voice as he focused, he knew he had maybe a second to make a decision, less if he wanted to get off two shots. He quickly pulled the trigger, cleanly hitting one that was speeding by from right to left, dead before it stopped cart-wheeling in a snowy clump. The boy shouted something in excitement but Danny didn’t hear a word. He pumped the gun, the spent yellow shell flying as a fresh one replaced it in the chamber.

There were three left, and their terrified zigzags were not as random as they appeared: all three were moving rapidly away. Danny saw that one was running almost straight away, while another angled away, falling in behind it. The third rabbit was the lucky one, as it departed his view and his mind at a right angle, just like the excited chatter of his cousin.

He waited until the two remaining rabbits pulled into line, one in front of the other, about two feet separating them. He followed them for a millisecond, then pulled the trigger.

They seemed to be struck at the same instant, both of them flying into the air and landing lifelessly next to each other.

“Great shot! You got two in one shot! Jesus Christ!”

Danny stood up and looked down at his beaming cousin. With his left hand he lightly slapped him on the back of his head, knocking his hunting cap off.

“I told you to watch your mouth, boy.”

He picked up his hat, grinning from ear to ear. “Will you show me how to dress them?”

Danny smiled now. “Got a knife?”

The boy proudly pulled a hunting knife from his boot, its blade shining in the winter sun.

They tromped up the stairs to the farmhouse and Little Mike burst through the door, two rabbits in each hand, as Danny made sure both guns were safe and propped them on the porch. Mike was regaling his aunts and uncles with tales of the hunt already by the time he got in, talking so fast and excitedly that Danny wasn’t sure the older folks could follow it all. He was suddenly very glad he’d taken the kid, as he absorbed some of his thrill and the place swelled with the voices of talkative Jabos, while the quiet half of the family just nodded and smiled. The house was toasty warm and filled with the combined smells of a roaring blaze in the fireplace and something sweet in the oven.

“You kill some bunnies?” Angi walked toward him from the kitchen, their baby girl tucked in her arm. She still took his breath away, always the prettiest person in the room, whether they were in a farmhouse or a black tie Navy Ball.

“Yeah, me and the youngster took four.” Danny took the baby from her, looking down at her head. He longed for her hair to be red like her mother’s. It didn’t show signs of redness yet, but Danny had heard that could change in infants, and he hopefully inspected her noggin every day.

“Did he cuss at all?”

“Shit yes he did,” said Danny. Angi slapped him in the back of the head.

“Not in front of the baby. I’d rather that not be her first word.”

“My bad.”

“You should check your phone,” she said. “I heard it ringing a few times while you were out playing.”

Danny walked over to the coat hooks by the door still holding the baby. He fished his phone out of his jacket pocket with his free hand.

Three missed calls and a voice mail. Caller ID: COMSUBPAC.

Danny sighed. They rarely called three times with good news.

Danny stood at the foot of the brow for a minute, looking the Louisville over. Angi had gone back to Indiana to supervise their move while he got on the next flight to Hawaii. He’d spent the flight wondering about his wife and baby, this being the first time the three of them had been apart — he knew it wouldn’t be the last. He’d also speculated about what was going on with his boat, what required him to get out there so quickly. Speculating was all he could do: on the phone they would tell him nothing. He landed in Honolulu, took a cab to the sub base, and now here he was staring at the boat that would be his home for three years. It would be the last time, he knew, that he could look at it with no sense of ownership, no sense of responsibility, no long list or anxiety about what needed to be done. All that, for a few moments more, was a mystery. For now, he could just look at her: SSN 724.

To an untrained observer, it looked very much like all the other submarines that lined the piers around the base: black, mysterious, undeniably deadly. Someone with a passing knowledge of warships would be able to see quickly that she was an attack submarine, as opposed to a missile sub, or boomer, like Alabama where Danny had spent his first sea tour: the lack of a long, flat missile deck easily gave that away. Danny’s previous submarine had been designed to launch long-range nuclear missiles. His new boat was designed around the more traditional submarine mission of shooting torpedoes, both at other submarines and surface ships.

Someone with slightly more experience could discern that she was a 688, or Los Angeles-class submarine, the nation’s largest class of submarines, a workhorse of the Cold War that had proven very useful for the new missions the force had found itself handed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. A close look at the bow, and the barely visible outline of the hatches for twelve vertical-launch cruise missile tubes, marked her as one of the “second flight” 688 subs, with the cruise missile capability that was an enhancement from the original design. The Louisville had, in fact, conducted the first war patrol of any US submarine since World War II, in the first Gulf War in 1991. On January 19 of that year, she fired the first shot of that conflict, a Tomahawk cruise missile that struck the Al Muthanna chemical weapons factory. The fact that the boat still had planes sticking out from her sail meant that she was not the most recent version of the 688, the “688i,” as in “improved.”

But Danny, with his experience and his expertise, saw far beyond the silhouette of the Louisville. He saw that the deck was painted and clean. There were few obstructions on the deck, and the only thing that connected her to shore were the shore power cables, the brow that he would soon walk across, and the two lines forward and aft that held her to the pier. The two young petty officers on the quarterdeck were clean-shaven, fit, and were resisting the urging of the tropical breeze to relax. In fact Danny knew they’d spotted him and were waiting for him to either come aboard or keep moving. Not all the seagull shit had been removed from the black hull of the boat, because that would be impossible, but they had diligently kept up with the relentless birds as best they could. The pier alongside the boat was clean too, the trash barrels were not overflowing and a load of zinc bricks had been neatly stacked. The flying bridge was erected atop the sail, and not a speck of rust was visible anywhere. Danny knew two things as he took a deep breath, stepped onto the brow, and crossed a small sliver of the Pacific onto his new home. With the Louisville, he’d once again found himself aboard a good boat. And: it was going to sea very, very soon.

He saluted the Petty Office on the quarterdeck. His name tag read Warner.

“Lieutenant Danny Jabo requests permission to come aboard.”

“Come aboard, sir,” he said, saluting back. “You must be our new navigator.”

Danny lowered his hand and stepped forward. “That’s what my orders say. Is the captain aboard?”

“Yes sir, I believe he is. Would you like an escort to help you find him?”

Danny detected a slight smirk in that, wondered if it was the attack boat sailor’s scorn for the new officer whose previous tour had been aboard a missile submarine: Boomer fag.

“No I’ll find him myself,” said Danny. “Just tell me where the elevator is.”

Warner hesitated at that, then realized he was being screwed with. He nodded his head and smiled. “Good one, sir.”

“Glad you liked it…”

He dropped his seabag down the hatch, then climbed down after it.

It was the smell that brought it all back more than anything else: a combination of diesel exhaust, amine, a lot of hardworking men in close proximity, and the smell of somebody cooking a large amount of calorically dense food; Danny guessed sloppy joes or beef stew. Despite what his new fast boat shipmates might think, Danny could find his way around the boat just fine. In fact, it was considerably easier since the boat was smaller than Alabama along any dimension: length, width, or, the measure with which maritime people preferred to compare total size, displacement. His old boat, the Alabama, had displaced 18,000 tons, more than some World War II aircraft carriers. His new boat displaced less than half of that: 7,000 tons. Despite the vast difference in size, however, the crew wasn’t all that much smaller: 154 men on the Alabama, 129 on Louisville. He was squeezing by a large number of those men as he made his way aft, and they mutually sized each other up as they rubbed by. They were in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and Danny liked them already, because they were his shipmates now. At the end of the passageway near the engine room watertight door, he found the man he was looking for.

He glared at a stack of orange kapok life preservers that Danny knew automatically had not been stowed to his satisfaction. He still had the same combative expression, the same gleaming bald head, and the muscular arms that he denied being vain about. This was his new commanding officer and his old friend: Commander Joe Michaels.

On Danny’s final patrol aboard the Alabama, they’d been on a high-speed run to Taiwan when their navigator went crazy and decided to sink the ship. Danny had been the communicator, Michaels the XO. It had ended with four dead bodies, including the navigator, and a collision that had nearly killed them all. In the aftermath, the Navy’s institutional wisdom had ended the career of their Captain. But they promoted Danny and Michaels, and made them heroes. When Danny first learned that he would be serving with him again on Louisville, he knew that it would be a tour filled with exhausting hard work, unreasonable demands, and profane insults. He wouldn’t have been happier if he’d been awarded another Navy Cross.

“Captain?”

Michaels turned. “Oh Christ… not you again? I told them to send you back to another boomer where you’d be more comfortable. Told them you liked those big toilet seats.”

“Danny Jabo, reporting for duty sir.” He dropped his seabag to the deck and saluted, and smiled despite himself.

“What are you so happy about?”

“Glad to be back on a boat.”

“Yeah bullshit. I’ll call Angi and tell her you said that.”

“She’s still in Indiana for now…”

“Then I’ll wait ‘til she gets to a place with telephones.” He extended his hand and Danny shook it. “I hope you’ve got your affairs in order, Jabo, because we’re going to sea in a hurry.”

“You know sir, that’s exactly what you said when I reported to the Alabama.”

“Don’t mean it ain’t true,” he said. “Follow me.”

They walked forward to his stateroom, and in what was too quick to be called an introduction, the CO shouted the name, or more often the nickname, of every man as they passed. Some were named, obviously, for how they looked: Bear, Red, and Stump. Some he called with the time-honored name for their positions on the boat: the corpsman was Doc, the supply officer was Chop, and the radioman was Sparks. Other nicknames were more mysterious, like Easy Money, Heavy Weather, and a Lieutenant jg he called “V-12.”

“Shut the door,” said Michaels as they entered his stateroom.

Danny did, and sat down.

“You meet the XO yet?”

“Not yet,” said Danny. “Where’s he from?”

“Did his JO tour on the east coast: I forget which boat. Was engineer on the Bremerton out here, was on the ORSE board before he came here.”

“Heavy nuke,” said Danny, carefully stripping all judgment from his voice.

“Heavy nuke,” said Michaels, nodding. “He’s been here about six months longer than me. Got along famously with the previous Captain.”

“Another heavy nuke?”

“I don’t know what you’re implying Jabo!” He playfully pounded the small fold-out desk. “Are you saying I can’t get along with these engineering types? Think they’re smarter than me?! Anyway, yes, he was a heavy nuke too, did a tour at Naval Reactors, blah blah blah. So I need to beat that shit out of him, teach him how to be a warrior.”

“Like me?” said Jabo.

“Warrior? You don’t get to call yourself this early in your second tour.” But Jabo could see approval in his eyes. “Anyway, that brings us to our mysterious mission…”

“Which is?”

“We’re going to Subpac in about an hour,” he said. “Get our orders. They’ll tell us all the details. Certainly I don’t know much yet, other than the fact that I’ve been told to go to sea in two days. But I’ve heard some weird shit.”

“Weird?”

Michaels rubbed his hand across his smooth bald scalp and sighed, then fixed Danny in his gaze.

“It sounds like we’ve got a submarine missing.”

“Missing? Sunk?”

Michaels shrugged. “Hell if I know. But we’re going to look for a friendly sub, and in about an hour we’ll all know more.”

Danny took a deep breath, suddenly feeling a sense of responsibility that he hadn’t felt in the past twenty-four months. He and his captain looked at each other for a moment, aware of the irony, or the fate, that had brought them together to look for a missing boat after what they’d been through together on their last patrol on Alabama.

“We’ve got an hour,” said Michaels. “Why don’t you go on the pier and call Angi? It might be a while before you get another chance.”

Danny looked at the boat as his phone dialed Angi, watching a Mark 48 torpedo being slowly lowered into the boat. The dark, forest-green color of the weapon struck him, not for the first time, as oddly beautiful. Angi answered.

“You see the XO yet?”

“He’s my CO now,” said Danny. “That’s going to be hard for me to get used to, too.”

“How is he?”

“The same. Called me a motherfucker about five times. The crew loves him of course.”

“Of course.”

She paused, awaiting the bad news. Danny could hear the baby fussing in her arms.

“You’ll need to handle the movers by yourself…” Danny was limited in what he could say on the phone by security rules.

“I know,” she answered. “Jenny called me.” Jenny was the Captain’s wife. Angi’s tone was flat, not angry. But she did sound tired in anticipation of what was in front of her: packing up everything they owned, then a drive cross country, then a six hour flight to Hawaii where, if everything went according to plan, all their stuff would show up and she would get to establish a new home, their third in two years. All with a baby in her arms. Moments like this reminded Danny that while he had knowingly volunteered for both the navy and submarine duty… his beautiful wife hadn’t signed up for this shit.

“You going to be ok?”

“We’ll be fine,” she said. “Call us when you can.”

They walked across the sub base together, the captain, the XO, and Danny. To the captain, everything they passed in Hawaii prompted a story, a tale of a bar that no longer existed, a stand- off between a drunk petty officer and shore patrol, and reminders of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that Michael’s recounted as if he’d been there himself to repel the attackers. The XO was quiet, shuffling a stack of files from one hand to another, occasionally peeking inside to verify he hadn’t forgotten some document.

“Didn’t you serve on a boat out here, XO?” Danny asked, when the captain was between tall tales.

He nodded, pausing in his search through a folder. “Bremerton. I was Engineer.” He stopped there, but seemed to sense that the CO and Danny were both waiting for him to contribute a sea story. “We did a refueling overhaul,” he said.

They turned toward one of those beautiful old art deco buildings that dotted Pearl Harbor, gleaming white in the tropical sun. The building, like the sub base, pre-dated Admiral Rickover and his nuclear navy, so it also pre-dated his Spartan ideal of plain, unadorned buildings in which form strictly followed function. And the function was, always, to slavishly labor toward the old man’s ideal of engineering perfection. The architecture of this part of the sub base was old, grand, and comfortable with the most traditional role of any navy: defending an empire.

“I thought we were going to Subpac?” said Danny, not recognizing their route. He had been to the headquarters building before and knew the way.

“No,” said the captain. “That’s not what I said. We’re not meeting at Subpac, we’re meeting Subpac.”

Danny tried not to look startled. They weren’t going to Subpac the building. They were meeting the two star admiral himself: the commander of every submarine in the Pacific.

“You ever meet him?” Michaels asked the XO. “You were out here the last few years. What’s he like?”

“Never really met him,” said the XO. “Saw him at a change of command once.”

They both waited for more, but the XO seemed to have difficulty taking the reins of a conversation. They marched up the coral steps of a two-story building at the edge of a courtyard.

Inside the foyer their eyes adjusted to the dim light as a yeoman checked their IDs. The walls were lined with black and white photos of the base during World War II. One showed a tender surrounded by dozens of tiny diesel subs, probably more in one frame than made up the entire modern Pacific fleet. They made so many of them, Danny knew, because they were vital to the navy’s Pacific mission, the only thing holding back the relentless Japanese advance. And because large numbers of them tended to disappear.

“Right this way, gentleman,” said the yeoman, and he led them down a narrow hallway that was lined with faded battle flags, many of them adorned with tiny rising suns for every Japanese ship they’d sunk. They stepped through a doorway at the end of the hallway.

“Gentlemen.” Admiral Wells stood in his dress whites to greet them with a grim smile. He was extremely trim, his shoulder boards with their two stars extending slightly past his narrow shoulders. It was easy to picture him running Hawaii’s famed Ironman race, which he had completed three times. He shook each of their hands in descending order of rank, finishing with Danny.

At the admiral’s side was a lieutenant with the gold braid on his shoulder that marked him as the admiral’s aide. On the other was a commander from the Naval Investigative Service whom Danny took just a moment to recognize. They stared at each other a moment.

“Commander Carr!”

“Lieutenant Jabo.” They shook hands enthusiastically. Although they’d met only once, it had been a memorable day.

“You two know each other?” said the admiral.

Carr explained. “I did the preliminary investigation onboard the Alabama. After the collision. Lieutenant Jabo was the first man I spoke to.”

“Of course,” said the admiral, remembering, looking from Michaels to Danny. “You two were both on there. With Captain Sellers. We went to the Academy together.”

They both nodded their heads, silently acknowledging that among the lives that had been sacrificed during that patrol, so had their CO’s career.

“Danny, you lost a finger, didn’t you?” He mildly amused by the idea.

Danny felt the XO, next to him, tense up as the admiral called him by his first name.

“Yes sir, two fingers actually. Lost them and got them back.” He extended his left hand so they could see the scars around the base of his ring finger and middle finger, dark pink lines like rings around the bottom. Everyone except the XO leaned over it so they could get a better look. Danny made a fist as best he could.

“I didn’t get back the complete range of motion,” he said. “But still pretty remarkable considering they spent two days in a zip lock bag of ice.”

“They shut a hatch on it, right?” asked the admiral.

“Yes sir, that’s right.” The surprise was evident in Danny’s voice.

“Don’t be surprised,” said the admiral. “I’ve read that incident report many, many times. Everyone in this building has. That’s the closet we’ve come to losing a boat since the San Francisco ran aground.”

“The corpsman cut them off,” said Michaels. “Lieutenant Jabo went right back to fighting the fire after he bandaged it up. Danny got those cool scars to go with his Navy Cross.”

The admiral shook his head in admiration. “What you did — what you both did — was a credit to the submarine force.”

“Thank you sir,” said the Captain and Danny simultaneously, equally embarrassed by the praise.

There was a pause, and then the admiral sighed heavily. “Well I’ll give you young men credit. You have a knack for landing interesting assignments.” He nodded at Carr, and Carr stood to speak in front of the large chart of the Pacific that hung in front of the room.

“Three days ago, both emergency distress buoys were launched from the USS Boise, SSN 764. They began transmitting here,” said Commander Carr, tapping the chart with a telescoping pointer he’d pulled from his pocket. It was in the middle of the biggest, most remote part of the Pacific, equidistant, it seemed, between Japan and Hawaii.

“You know what that sounds like, right?” said the admiral.

“Yes sir,” said both Danny and the captain, two of very few men alive who’d heard the sound of those beacons launching and lived to tell about it. Danny heard the XO clear his throat, perhaps an unconscious attempt at getting the admiral to direct some of his comments to him, the Louisville’s second-in-command.

“We believe they were launched due to timer reset,” said Carr.

The buoys were designed to announce a dire emergency onboard a nuclear submarine. Three conditions could cause the buoys to fire the explosive bolts that held them to the hull, after which they would float to the surface of the ocean and begin transmitting on a frequency monitored at designated listening posts on three continents. One, a large positive pressure inside the hull, indicating an explosion or fire. Two, excessive depth, well in excess of the ship’s test depth. And finally a timer that had to be reset manually at least once a day in the ship’s control room.

“That means twenty-four hours without action. And ignoring a fairly obnoxious alarm.”

“Accidental?” said Danny. “The ET’s forget to reset them?” It was inconceivable to him, but it had happened.

“We don’t believe so,” said Carr. “The ship had also missed a routine transmission a day earlier. Subpac had just sent a query message across the regular broadcast when the buoys began signaling. We haven’t heard a word from her since.”

The Captain spoke. “What do we think happened? Did she sink? Reactor accident? Are we going on a salvage mission?”

The Admiral and Carr shot a look at each other. “We don’t believe she’s sunk,” said the Admiral.

“We caught a trace of her on this SOSUS array a day later,” said Carr, pointing to a position on the chart. SOSUS arrays were extremely sensitive listening devices fixed to the ocean floor at key points throughout the world. “This was west of the BST buoys. She was still running quiet and deep at that point: they heard good screw turns indicating five knots. But remember — the buoys launched on the timer, not for collapse depth, or high pressure. In addition, if she sunk in ocean that deep, every tank would have imploded and that we should have heard loud and clear on the SOSUS net. We have no reason to think the submarine is not intact.”

“She’s just not responsive,” said Danny.

“And overdue,” said Carr. “As of noon today. So we have a ship that’s not responding, that we believe has not sunk. Based on that, we have three theories. One, some kind of catastrophic accident that has killed the crew, but somehow didn’t damage the equipment.”

“Like what?” said the Captain.

“Maybe some kind of gas leak,” said the admiral. “Johns Hopkins has been working with us on this, and the best they could come up with was a fire in one of the charcoal bed filters: it would burn quickly, and release enough carbon monoxide to kill everyone, but leave the ship more or less intact.”

“And she’s still steaming?”

The admiral spoke. “The geniuses are gaming this out for us as we speak, but we know it’s possible. With the equipment in good working order and the autopilot engaged, she could maintain course and speed for days. Maybe weeks. Especially at slow speed.”

“You’re not buying it?” said the captain.

“Not really. If it is some kind of equipment casualty, obviously it’s something we’ve never thought of. Or we would have fixed it.”

Carr continued. “The second theory is some kind of virus that’s wiped out the crew.”

“Any evidence of that?”

“No evidence,” said Carr. “But there are a couple of precedents. A Trident two years ago was hit so hard by the flu that they had to return to port — half the crew was incapacitated and two men ended up dying.”

“The Nevada,” said Michaels. “I remember that.”

“Thirty years ago, a sturgeon-class boat had meningitis outbreak that killed four men.”

They mulled that over for a moment.

“What’s your third theory?”

“Maybe she’s okay. Maybe she’s just suffered a catastrophic equipment failure, a complete loss of power, and is adrift and on the surface. Crippled but alive.”

“Seems like they would come up with some way to send an SOS,” said the captain. “Christ, they still have a flare gun, right? Battery powered VHS radios?”

“No one has heard anything, no one has reported anything, and we’re combing satellite photos for any sign of her. But it’s a big ocean — maybe she is out there adrift. Let’s hope so. The only thing we know for certain is that she’s in trouble.”

“So what do you want us to do about it, Admiral?” asked the captain.

“Find her and track her. And as far as your crew is concerned — everybody but you three — it’s an exercise. The details are in your orders.”

“And after we find her?”

“Attempt to contact her as described in the special procedure.”

“And if we can’t?”

“We haven’t decided yet.”

The trio of officers from the Louisville walked back across the base.

“Are we ready to go to sea?” the captain asked the XO.

“Yes sir. The reactor is shut down but the plant is warmed up. We could pull out in two hours.”

“Looks like we’ve got until the morning. Let’s rig for dive tonight, brief the wardroom after dinner. Do a reactor start up at five. Danny, you get ready for a nav brief tonight.”

“Aye aye sir,” they both said.

“Any questions?”

The XO said nothing, but after a few steps, Danny said “Yeah, I’ve got about a hundred questions.”

“I’m a busy man, Jabo. Give me your top one.”

Danny thought for a moment. “Why do we need to keep this a secret from the crew?”

The captain mulled it over for a while. “What do you think, XO?”

“Perhaps because they don’t want the crew to think about what’s happened to the Boise.”

“Could be,” said the captain. “Or maybe they don’t want the crew to think about what’s about to happen to the Boise.”

On board, Danny found Stateroom 2, his new home. He threw his sea bag on the bare mattress. His new roommate appeared at the doorway just as he was getting ready to turn around and start preparing for the nav brief.

“Sir! Lieutenant Vijayvergiya!” he extended his hand.

“Say that again?”

“Call me V-12,” he said. “Get it? Starts with ‘V’ and has twelve letters. It’s Indian. I’m your roommate!”

The kid exuded enthusiasm. And youth — Danny couldn’t believe that just one sea tour separated them. “Well, V-12, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m sure we’ll get to know each other soon.”

“You were on Alabama, right sir?”

Danny nodded. He wasn’t used to this. On his shore tour, the highly classified incident on the Alabama was unknown. But apparently, in the two years that he’d been away, it had become part of submarine lore, studied and debated by every man on a boat. “Yeah — I was there.”

“Can I see your fingers?”

“Maybe later.”

V-12 took the hint and stepped backward so Danny could exit. “No problem sir. Looking forward to it.”

Master Chief Cote walked into the windowless conference room on the seventh floor of the hospital where the investigators awaited him. They sat on one side of an enormous conference table. Directly across from them on the table sat two business cards, lined up precisely together. Cote knew they’d been placed there to show him where to sit. If the two civilians thought they were intimidating him, they were wrong. Master Chief Cote didn’t have a business card. But he had four inches of ribbons on his chest, topped with the silver dolphins of a submariner and a Republic of Vietnam Service Medal.

After some perfunctory handshaking, Cote sat down and read the cards. Joshua King of the Naval Investigative Service was the young, earnest man who seemed eager to start. The professorial older man, who appeared to be in charge, was C. David Connelly of the Center for Disease Control.

“Ready?” asked King.

Cote nodded.

With a flourish, King pulled from his jacket pocket a small digital tape recorder. He carefully turned it on, and positioned it on the table so its small blinking green light pointed directly at the master chief.

“Your name?”

“Master Chief Richard Cote.”

“Your billet?”

“Subpac Medical Liaison, Tripler Army Medical Center.”

“And you were with the victim when he died?”

“I was.”

“Did he say where he’d been in the previous twenty-four hours?” asked King.

Cote sighed. He’d been through all this before, many times. With his entire chain of command at the hospital in the first twenty-four hours after the death, even as the crew from the CDC was spiriting away the body of the sailor from the Boise. Afterwards, of course, as rumors swept the hospital, he’d been asked the same questions by his colleagues. He kept telling everybody the same thing: he knew nothing.

“By the time I got down there, the petty officer was already crashing. He told me he was from the Boise, that’s about it.”

“Did you go through his belongings? His sea bag?”

“Of course not,” said the master chief.

“Did you make physical contact with him?”

“I touched him. His forehead. And his hand. I’m assuming that’s why you guys,” he said, pointing to the older man, “took about a quart of my blood for testing. Hopefully the fact that I’m still sitting here means I don’t have what he had.”

The NIS man reviewed his list of questions, ignoring Cote. “Have you had any contact with his friends or relatives since?”

“Friends or relatives? You guys won’t even tell me his name.”

“Could you answer the question, Master Chief?”

“No. No friends or relatives.”

“Who else did you personally see in physical contact with the victim?”

“Petty Officer Wills, that’s it. But he’d been there all night, I’m sure there were others.”

“Have you had a fever since in the incident? Coughing? Sore throat or diarrhea?”

Cote reached forward for the recorder. King flinched.

“Hey…” said the NIS agent. Cote found the tiny on-off switch, and flipped it with his thumbnail, tossed the recorder back on the table.

“Can we talk like men for a few minutes?” he said.

“Master Chief, this investigation…”

The older man finally spoke. “It’s okay,” he said raising his hand.

“Can you tell me what the hell is going on?”

He sighed. “Master chief, I’ll tell you everything I can. And if I can’t answer you, I’ll tell you so, I won’t lie to you.” He turned to King. “Josh, if you’re uncomfortable with this, you can leave the room.”

The NIS agent pouted as he put the recorder back in his pocket, and then slumped in his chair in defeat.

“How about you start with his name?” asked Cote.

“Petty Officer Third Class Bill Dunham,” said Connelly. “He was an A-Ganger from Bakersfield, California. Smart, hardworking, but recently a bit of a screw up. Had been AWOL a few days before, reported back to the boat after being gone three days, a former shipmate thinks it had something to do with a girl. We think the captain was getting ready to take him to mast when he got sick. They brought him here, to Tripler, right before deploying.

“What was wrong with him?”

“We’re really not sure. Something fast, and obviously virulent. We’ve identified similar strains in east Asia but we can’t figure out exactly what he got or where he got it.”

“Had the boat been to Asia?”

“Not in four years, and the entire crew has turned over since then.”

“Contagious?”

“By the time you saw him, it obviously was not. Or you and I would be having this conversation through a wall. We’ll continue to keep an eye on you and your coworkers, but so far no one is symptomatic at all. We haven’t figured out the method of transmittal. We’re not even sure how deadly it is — so far we have only one victim, and for all we know his immune system might have been compromised.”

“One of the reasons you keep talking to me, and the others.”

“Correct.”

“What else?”

“We’re trying to figure out exactly where he caught this and how,” said Connelly. “That’s the most important thing. Obviously this is a deadly illness of some kind and we need to know more. The rate of transmission. The fatality rate. To do that, we need to keep track of everyone who could have come into contact with him during the contagious phase, whatever that was, if there was one. The only thing worse than a mystery illness is a mystery pandemic. So far, we haven’t identified any other victims, but it’s imperative that we find them if they’re out there. That’s why we need to know if you hear from any of Dunham’s friends or family.”

“Why don’t you start with his boat?” said Cote. “Isn’t that a logical place to start? See if his shipmates are sick?”

The NIS agent looked up at that, and he and Connelly made eye contact.

“Master Chief, you’ve finally asked me a question I can’t answer.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

King stood. “Thank you for your time, master chief. You have our cards, please let us know if you remember anything additional. Or if you start to display any symptoms. Especially coughing.”

“Will do.”

Cote stayed in the conference room a few minutes after they left and ruminated. He tried to think of how many men he knew aboard Boise.

Seven floors below, a young woman timidly approached the welcome desk. She wore low-cut jeans and a loose top that exposed a sliver of her taut, tanned stomach. Like every young woman on the island, she felt constant pressure to stay fit, because swimsuit season ran year-round. But while her body was young and beautiful, her eyes were red from crying, and she looked exhausted. The receptionist, a kindly older woman with a natural sympathy that suited her work, looked up from her Sudoku book to greet her.

“Hi, um, I’m looking for a patient,” she said. “I mean, I want to see if he’s here?”

“Are you family, sweetheart?” asked the receptionist.

“Um, no, I’m his… girlfriend.”

“And you’re not sure he’s here?”

“No, I’m not…” she choked on the words a little bit, trying not to cry. “It’s just — his boat pulled out, and he promised he would send me a letter on that last mail call. I haven’t gotten anything yet… so I thought maybe he was sick and I should check here.”

Sympathy welled up in the receptionist — could anyone possibly be this innocent? The poor girl was so in love that she thought the only reason for a missed letter was a hospitalization. She considered carefully what to say next. She decided on the spot that she would not be the one to dump an ice cold bucket of reality all over this poor thing.

“How long ago did he pull out, dear?”

“Four days ago.”

“Well that’s not very long is it? Maybe you just need to give the mail a couple of days!”

The sad girl nodded, and pulled a strand of blonde hair from her face. “Maybe.”

The receptionist briefly considered asking for a name and actually checking to see if he was in the hospital, but decided against it. She knew what the result would be. The boy wasn’t sick: he was just an asshole.

“I’m really not supposed to tell you if he’s here or not, if you’re not family,” she said.

“Ok.”

“But why don’t you wait a couple of days, come back and check again, okay?”

The girl sighed, defeated, but grateful for the older woman’s kindness. “Okay,” she said, walking back to the front door and into the unending tropical sunshine that always seemed cruel to the heartbroken.

The receptionist sighed too and watched her leave. She remembered that feeling so well, despite the years. She’d lived on Oahu her whole life and she, too, had had her heart broken by a sailor on one of these ships, despite the warnings every islander had given her prior to giving herself away. Maybe she’d given the girl two more days to think that the boy was still in love with her, two days of false hope. She was okay with that.

The officers filed into the wardroom at 1900. Dinner had been cleared but the pleasant smell remained, underpinned by a fresh pot of coffee that had been brewed in anticipation of a long night, the hundreds of check lists that had to be complete before the ship could go to sea.

Danny took note of his new shipmates as they arrived. He didn’t know any of the officers other than the captain personally, although in the small world of nuclear submarines, he was sure he would know some of their friends, their former ships, their former shipmates. Learning everyone’s names would be his first priority, but the boats they’d served on would be next.

Of course for the majority of the officers that filed into the wardroom, there were no previous boats — they were junior officers on their first sea tour, just like he’d been on Alabama. Of the 129 men on the boat, 12 were officers, which included the XO, the CO, and three departments heads: Danny, the engineer, and the weapons officer. That meant that of the twelve officers that filed into the wardroom that evening, the leadership of the boat, seven had never served on a boat before Louisville, and were probably in their early twenties. It was a sobering thought.

One of them was V-12, and Danny couldn’t help notice the way the other JOs deferred to him, listened when he talked, and greeted him first when they entered. While a little goofy, Danny thought, he possessed that great intangible that the nuclear navy sought so hard to instill in its young men: leadership.

The captain and the XO arrived together, the Captain sitting at the head of the table and the XO literally at his right hand. The XO, as always, came in carrying a thick stack of documents, which was beginning to seem almost like security blanket.

“Alright, let’s get started,” said the captain. “We have our orders. As many of you know, we are pulling out at dawn tomorrow. After a day of training at the Kauai torpedo range, we will proceed to Papa Hotel, submerge, and then commence a high speed transit to the western Pacific, where we will attempt to locate and track a friendly submarine.”

V-12 spoke up. “Is she wearing a NAU?”

“No NAU,” said the captain. “She’s going to be quiet.” Often friendly subs were given a Noise Augmentation Unit, or NAU, in exercises like this, to simulate the noisier boats of their enemies. And because, in reality, it was nearly impossible to track a modern US submarine unassisted.

The XO spoke up. “Part of the exercise is to see if we can do it. See if we can track one of our own with no help.”

Danny noticed how the captain had carefully avoided lying to them so far. They were going to track and find a friendly submarine — that was true. The XO didn’t seem to have as much trouble. Maybe the deceit was something that he and the CO had discussed, maybe it was even necessary. But it was interesting.

Danny rolled out a small scale chart of the Pacific across the wardroom table. JOs at either end held it down. He’d carefully drawn two neat lines upon it. The first was a blue great circle route that represented their high speed transit to the last known location of Boise: where the SOSUS array had heard her.

On the western edge of the chart was the second line, in red, one that connected the dots from the launch of the BST buoys to the SOSUS hit. The line connecting those two points of data represented the best estimate they had of Boise’s course and speed.

“We should be on station in four days,” said Danny. “That’s an SOA of twenty knots.” Those were the first words he’d spoken to his new shipmates in his capacity as navigator. Every one of the junior officers was staring at his hand where it hit the chart. He traced the blue line of their route with his finger and their eyes followed it intently.

“Alright,” the captain sighed. “Let’s get this over with. Danny, show them your goddamn fingers.”

Danny was startled a moment, and then he complied: flipping over his left hand and so they could see the bright scars. He flexed his fingers so they could see the incomplete range of motion. They all leaned in, fascinated, except for the XO who flipped through one of his binders.

“The last time Danny was on a high speed transit across this ocean, he lost those fingers for a few days,” said the CO. “But I was nicer back then. If any of you shitheads screw this up, I’ll cut your whole hand off.” They all laughed.

“At some point in the next few days,” continued Michaels, “Danny will satisfy your curiosity and give us wardroom training about the legendary USS Alabama. In the meantime, I’d like us to focus on the mission at hand. Got it?”

“Yes sir,” they all said.

“Where’s our operating area?” said V-12, pointing at the chart.

Danny nodded. “We don’t have one. We have this line in the ocean that we know she travelled on.”

V-12 sat back in his chair. “So we’re trying to find a modern, friendly submarine, somewhere in the western Pacific, with no NAU, and no operating area to even limit her?”

“That’s correct,” said Danny.

The junior officer smiled. “Cool.”

The first sonarman to hear it was Petty Officer Third Class Ivan Bradley. He was called by all, inevitably, “Crazy Ivan,” the name given to a radical submarine maneuver that Soviet captains made famous during the glory days of the Cold War. Bradley was twenty years old, brand new on the boat, as is often the case for men making a crucial, subtle discovery via sonar. More jaded sonarmen looked at every trace on their screen as ambient noise, commercial shipping, or their own ship’s noise, and had to prove to themselves that they’d found a submarine. The young men fresh out of the trainers of New London had spent hundreds of hours in a simulated ocean filled with sinister schools of Akulas, Kilos, and Chinese diesels. They looked at every trace in the water as if it was a submerged submarine and sometimes… it was.

They had heard whispers of her twice before in the last twenty-four hours. Just a few seconds the first time, before she disappeared into a cloud of biological noise. Six hours later, they heard her again, held her for about forty-five minutes. They thought they were closing in when she just vanished from their sonar screens, a chimera, the sound of her screw replaced by the cursing of Commander Michaels in the control room. They stood down but kept the tracking party in Control, and every man on the boat remained tense, ready to go, unable to sleep or relax when they knew, and hoped, that at any second they might be called to battle stations again.

Crazy Ivan heard her on the towed array, a long cable containing hundreds of hydrophones that dragged behind the ship. Well behind the Louisville and its own noise, it could peer far into the ocean the same way a telescope in space, above the earth’s streetlights and murky atmosphere, could see all the way back to the beginning of time. He closed his eyes and listened on his headphones just a moment more, hearing again the distinctive whoosh whoosh of a propeller barely audible above the background noise.

“Submerged contact, Sierra One,” he said, digitally marking it on his console.

The sonar supervisor turned a switch and immediately began listening to what Bradley had heard. He nodded his head briskly and grabbed his microphone.

“Conn, sonar, submerged contact Sierra One bearing two-seven-eight.” You could hear the adrenaline in his voice — it was what sonarmen lived for.

“Battle Stations!” called the chief of the watch on the 1MC for the third time in the last day, and they could hear feet pounding all around them as every man on the boat took his position.

“This is Lieutenant Jabo,” they heard on the mike. “I have the conn.” While he was brand new to the boat, the men of sonar nodded at each other upon hearing his voice: they’d unanimously decided earlier in the watch that Jabo’s presence on the conn would give them the best chance of success.

He’d taken the conn from Captain Michaels, who’d beaten him to control by just seconds. The XO stood in a corner of the control room, a stop watch around his neck, the freshly-laminated pages of the special procedure in his hands.

“Right full rudder,” said Danny. “Steady on course zero-three-zero.” He spoke into the microphone above his head that had been switched on. “Sonar, Conn, coming right for TMA.”

“Sonar conn, aye,” they responded. The Louisville needed to turn, so they could see how it affected the relative motion of the submarine in front of them, a necessary step in determining its course and speed: it was an art called Target Motion Analysis. A skilled officer, like Danny, would turn the ship in a way that maximized the information they got out of the move, in the least time, while also putting the ship in a better attack position. Two maneuvers were better than one, and three better still, but Danny had carefully studied the charts after the last two failed approaches. He was going to make one maneuver, turn toward the target, and close rapidly. It evoked the aggressive Soviet tactics of old, a contrast to the scientific, patient approaches of most American captains. The Soviets, it was said, trained their men to need just three things in order to shoot an enemy: a torpedo, a bearing, and a will to shoot.

The ship turned as Danny had ordered, and the towed array behind her became unstable. As they knew it would, the trace of their target disappeared. They only hoped this time, as the towed array stabilized, it would reappear. With a few seconds to wait, Danny looked at the screen in front of him trying to glean what historical information he could. Michaels tapped the screen.

“That her?” he said, pointing to the faintest of white lines.

“That’s it,” said Danny.

The sonar supervisor had made his way to control. “I listened myself before we turned. I definitely heard propeller noises.”

“Very well,” said Danny, peering at the screen. While sonar was sound, outside the sonar room it was most often converted into a visual display, lines whose brightness varied with the intensity of the volume. The trace they were all studying intently was barely visible before they turned, and had now disappeared entirely. Danny was quietly worried that they would lose their target while turning, as they’d done twice before in the last day.

The helmsman spoke. “Sir, ship is steady on zero-three-zero.”

“Very well,” said Danny. They waited for the sonar array behind them to straighten out and stabilize so they could see once again.

After what seemed like an eternity, an amplified voice from sonar: “Sir the towed array is stable.”

“Very well.”

As Danny stared at the screen, the captain stared over his shoulder, so close Danny could smell the coffee on his breath.

“That’s it,” they said at the same time, tapping the screen. The trace had reappeared off their port bow, incrementally louder as they were closer.

At least three people in the control room ran a calculation based on the submerged contact’s change in bearing rate with the Louisville’s new course, to estimate its range and speed. These were consolidated on the Time Range chart at the front of the control room, so the OOD could see an aggregation of all the estimates of range.

“Two thousand yards?” said Michaels.

“Looks like it,” said Danny. He was picturing the sub in front of them.

“Conn, Sonar, we’re starting to pick it up on the sphere.”

Danny turned a switch on the display and they could see. The spherical sonar array was a fixed ball of hydrophones on the very front of the ship, encased with an acoustically permeable fiberglass dome. It couldn’t see as far as the towed array, or see behind the ship at all, but it also didn’t get unstable every time the ship moved, and when it gained contact, it provided more precise data. More importantly, the target’s visibility on the sphere confirmed that they were getting closer to each other.

“Sonar conn, coming left to continue to close range.”

“Conn sonar aye.”

Danny gauged their closing speed in his mind. “Left five degrees rudder, steady course zero-zero-zero.”

“A thousand yards,” said Michaels. “That’s what we are shooting for.”

“A thousand yards, aye sir.”

They watched the estimate of the sub’s distance decrease, and the growing brightness of the signal in front of them.

Danny counted off the range in his head, using the three minute rule. If they were closing at three knots, they would close at 300 yards every three minutes. One hundred yards every minute. That meant on current course it would take roughly… nine minutes to close to nine hundred yards.

It seemed like forever.

They stayed the course, watching as the signal grew stronger and clearer on their screen. Finally Michaels stood up straight and shouted out to the crowded control room.

“Everybody ready?!” He turned to the XO who now held the stopwatch in his hand.

“Go, Danny.”

Danny looked up to microphone above his head. “Fire water slug from tube one!”

The torpedo room acknowledged the order and instantly Danny felt the force of the shot in his feet, and his ears popped with the change in pressure.

The XO clicked his stop watch and waited. “Ten seconds!”

“Fire water slug from tube two,” said Danny. Again the order was instantly acknowledged and carried out.

“Ten seconds!” said the XO again after a brief wait. Danny picked up the microphone for the underwater telephone and read from the laminated sheet in his hand.

“Boise this is Louisville do you read? Boise this is Louisville do you read?”

Several seconds passed before they heard the garbled message return to them, a sound like a drowning man. “Louisville this is range control. All clear, return to station.”

“That’s what we’ve been waiting for!” shouted the captain, and the control room cheered.

The captain looked at Danny. “Good job, Danny.”

“Thank you sir.”

“I guess that completes our training phase.”

The XO had made his way toward them. “Just in time — they only gave us twenty-four hours. We should get our final orders when we get to periscope depth.

“Then away we go,” said the captain. “Let’s the three of us go debrief in the wardroom,”

Danny poured himself a cup of coffee and watched the XO fidget with his stopwatch.

“Well that was fun, wasn’t it?” said the Captain.

“Yes sir.”

“Nice work up there Danny. XO, did we miss anything?”

He nodded. “No sir. I’m sure Subpac will have some critique for us in this transmission. But to me it looks like we acquired the drone and then followed the special procedure perfectly.”

“It just took us three tries,” said the captain with a sigh. “And it’s only going to get harder.”

“How so?” said Danny.

The captain shrugged. “Well for one thing we had a very limited area to search out here on the range. We have no idea where the Boise is, really. And I don’t give a shit what those guys say, a real 688 doesn’t make that much noise. Especially at five knots.”

“We’ll have to track her on transients,” said the XO. “If they don’t know they’re being tracked, maybe they’ll be noisy.”

“Let’s hope they’re really fucking noisy.”

Danny wandered back up to control where the OOD was turning slowly on the periscope, and the ship bobbed almost imperceptibly near the surface of the calm Hawaiian waters. V-12 appeared at his side.

“Nice work, sir!” he said.

“Just following the script.”

“Well the two OODs before you couldn’t seem to get it done.”

“Just lucky,” said Danny. “What are you doing up here?”

“I’m communicator, remember? Waiting for the message from Subpac. It’s coming off-line encrypted, the captain told me to bring it personally to him.”

Danny and V-12 stared at each other for a second, V-12 waiting for him to offer something. “Why do you think that is?”

“Why what is?” said Danny.

“Why offline? Why would they send exercise notes to be personally decrypted by the Captain?”

“Who knows?” said Danny. “That’s why they send it offline. It’s a secret.”

V-12 kept smiling. “And why aren’t we using exercise names on the underwater telephone? Isn’t that weird, to call out our real names, in the middle of the Pacific, in the blind?”

“If you say so,” said Danny, shrugging.

V-12 saw he wasn’t going to get any new information, and ambled off to radio, the quizzical smile still on his face.

Danny sighed. It was a nuclear submarine, filled with smart men. He wondered again how long they would be able to keep their mission secret. He wondered how long they should.

The Louisville’s executive officer was in the ship’s tiny office, using their sole photocopier to duplicate the watch bill he’d just authored. He picked one up as it came off the machine and suppressed a narrow smile as he looked over the page, still warm from its creation.

He was the second-in-command of the boat, charged with many administrative responsibilities, including the approval and publication of the watch bill. Commander Michaels had even less patience than most captains for administrative drudgery, and was happy to delegate it all to his meticulous XO, who was skilled with spreadsheets and PowerPoint in a way he would never be with torpedoes. He read the watchbill again, to make sure Lieutenant Danny Jabo was exactly where he wanted him.

You may have a Navy Cross, he thought to himself. And maybe the admiral knows you by name. But I still control the watch bill. Once it was published, the captain wouldn’t second guess him on this.

The XO had been solidly in the middle of the pack at every early stage of his career: 253^rd in his class at the academy, barely in the top half at nuclear power school, and slightly worse at prototype. But this is why he had made it to XO, clawing ahead of so many peers that had once been deemed more promising. And this is why he would make it to captain: he was good at this. He had the careerist equivalent of good eye-hand coordination, a sense for which way the wind was blowing, a knack for saying what superior officers wanted to hear even before they knew they wanted to hear it. And he knew that if Danny Jabo was the captain’s favorite officer in the wardroom, then he couldn’t be. And he was at a critical stage in his career, just one step to go before taking command of a ship himself, the pinnacle of a naval officer’s career, getting his twenty years in, and retiring with a captain’s pension.

And now the XO’s fate was solely in the hands of the mercurial Commander Michaels, and the fitness report he would issue at the end of this tour. Any praise that was less than completely glowing, any superlative that was remotely qualified, might doom him. The Cold War was over, and with so many boats decommissioned, and so few new ones being built, there weren’t that many commands to go around. Careers were sacrificed every day because of an adverb misplaced or the absence of an adjective in a fitrep. The XO sensed that any praise lavished on Danny, bona fide naval hero, would be taken from him. So Lieutenant Jabo needed to come back down to earth.

He didn’t think it would be hard. Danny seemed uncomplicated in that way, non-political in a manner that probably made him endearing to others, easy to like. But as a result, he’d never see the XO coming. He’d never outmaneuver a guy like the XO when his career was on the line.

As he congratulated himself on his cunning, the copier made a grinding noise, and one of the green lights on the control panel turned red. Agitated, the XO threw open the access plate and saw where the paper had jammed. He grabbed the edge of the offending sheet and pulled, but the machine held onto it tight. With two hands, he pulled again, hard. He heard a snap and the sheet came free, as every light on the machine briefly turned red, and then its internal systems shut everything down to save itself from further damage. He smelled the sweet aroma of melting plastic. The XO jabbed the power button over and over, but nothing happened.

He had killed the copier.

Danny was walking out of his stateroom when he saw a gaggle of junior officers, including V-12, gathered around the bulletin board, peering at the new watch bill. A few glanced at him as he approached and stepped over to make room.

He scanned it until he found his name. It was under V-12’s.

“What the fuck?”

V-12 laughed. “I guess I’m supposed to teach you how to be an EOOW.”

He nodded and considered it. While technically he wasn’t qualified on any of his new ship’s systems, he’d been qualified everything on a previous ship, and wore the gold dolphins of a qualified submariner. On the Alabama, when a new department head had arrived, they’d typically given him a token watch or two in the engine room, followed by a few observed watches on the bridge as OOD, and then they put his name in the watch qualification book. They hurried the process both out of respect for the officer’s previous experience and the dire need for qualified watch officers. So maybe that’s what this was, just a token watch. But as he took note of the XO’s small, neat signature at the bottom of the strangely wrinkled sheet of paper, and absorbed the fact that he would be ostensibly supervised by his lower-ranking roommate, he felt certain that at least part of this was deliberate — an attempt to put him in his place.

“This is crazy,” said V-12.

“Yeah, well.”

“You were the only officer of the deck who could find the drone on the range!” he said. “What do they want you in the engine room for?”

“Do I hear some questions about the watchbill?” The XO had appeared behind them, a tight grin on his face. “If so, you can address them to the Number 4 torpedo tube.”

“No questions, XO,” said Jabo, not taking the bait. The XO continued anyway.

“I know you qualified on an S8-G reactor on that Trident,” he said, emphasizing the word. “Thought you might need time in a fast attack engine room: S6-G.”

“Good idea, sir. Looking forward to it.”

The XO nodded, disappointed that Jabo wasn’t more pissed about it.

V-12 spoke up. “XO, what’s wrong with the watchbill?”

“I put people where they need to be, V-12. Everyone contributes, everyone qualifies, no exceptions.”

“No, not that. I mean — it’s all crumpled up.”

The other JOs chuckled and the XO’s smile disappeared. He did an about face and stormed down the passageway.

“Well,” said V-12, looking at his watch. “I guess we should do our pre-watch tour.”

Danny marveled at how much smaller the engine room of Louisville was, compared to the Alabama’s, where he’d learned the trade of nuclear propulsion. Everything was smaller: the air conditioners, the air compressors, the evaporators that made their freshwater out of the sea that surrounded them. And that equipment was jammed into an engine room that was smaller still, machinery crammed from the deck to the overhead, and every move required ducking and twisting to avoid a piece of gear. The Alabama had been designed around her twenty-four ballistic missiles, a huge suite of weapons that stretched everything out, making the ship longer and wider on every axis. The Louisville seemed very crowded in comparison.

“I’m sure this all looks familiar,” said V-12, as they walked through the engineering spaces prior to taking the watch.

“Some of it does,” said Jabo. “Some of it doesn’t.”

While Danny was learning about the S6-G propulsion plant, he was also learning more about the crew, including V-12. He was efficient and knowledgeable, reviewing the logs thoroughly as they conducted their pre-watch tour and noting anything amiss in the space: a dead light bulb by the evaporator, a damaged piece of lagging near the port main engine. If Danny had a critique of him it was that he was a little chatty as he talked to the watchstanders. Submarining was serious business, and being the EOOW was a grave responsibility. V-12 was here to give these men orders, but sometimes it seemed like he was running for student council.

But hell, thought Danny as he stepped into maneuvering. I’m supposed to be here learning from him.

“Lieutenant Jabo is the Engineering Officer of the Watch,” he announced. “Under Instruction.”

“Throttleman, aye.”

“Reactor Operator, aye.”

“Electrical Operator, aye.”

He recorded it in the logs.

“So sir, what’s a naval hero like yourself doing a UI watch?” It was Brady, the Reactor Operator.

“I just do what I’m told,” said Jabo. “Just like you guys.”

“Seat?” V-12 was courteously offering him the EOOW’s chair.

“Maybe later,” said Jabo.

“What did they have for the EOOW on a Trident?” asked the electrical operator. “A recliner?”

“Hammock,” said Jabo, and they laughed.

He looked at the panels in front of him, which didn’t look all that different from what he’d learned on Alabama. The watchstanders, too, seemed familiar. The nuclear enlisted men of the submarine force fancied themselves, with some justification, as the smartest men on the boat, if not the smartest men in the navy. They were unquestionably the biggest smart asses. They grouped all the other crewmen together, calling them “coners,” as they occupied the front part of the submarine. While all the boat’s officers were also nuclear trained, as well as college graduates, the enlisted men didn’t mind challenging their intellect as well. It made the watch go faster.

The boat was moving at Ahead Flank, 100 % reactor power, transiting to the search area as fast as possible. This meant every man in maneuvering had to be on his toes, but especially the throttleman, who controlled the flow of steam to the main engines. If he screwed up, the reactor could exceed 100 % power, a reportable incident. Jabo watched him work; he was a lean, serious-looking young man, who scanned his panel efficiently while making minute adjustments to the throttle. Jabo noticed half of a tattoo poking out from under his sleeve.

“Is that an Eagle, Globe, and Anchor?” he said, surprised, recognizing the emblem of the United States Marine Corps.

“Yes sir,” said the throttleman, not offering further explanation.

“James was in the Marines before he was in the Navy,” explained V-12.

“No shit.” said Jabo. “How does that happen?”

“I enlisted in the Marines right after high school. Did my two years in an infantry platoon and got out. Got a job slinging packages at Federal Express for a year, decided I wanted back in the military. But something different.”

“And now you’re a nuclear mechanic?”

“Yes sir.”

“Wow,” said Jabo, impressed. He was really evaluating James now, and he did have the short hair and the erect posture, and most of all the earnest demeanor, of someone who’d been through Parris Island. “You went from being a Marine Corps infantryman to a nuke on a submarine. That’s really two ends of the spectrum.”

James shrugged. “Not that different,” he said, scanning his panel, adjusting the throttles slightly. “There are lots of misconceptions on both sides.”

“How so?” asked Jabo.

“Those grunts aren’t as dumb as you think.”

“And?”

“And you guys aren’t complete pussies.”

They all pondered that.

A few minutes later, the 1MJ phone whooped — somebody was calling maneuvering. The 1MJ was one of the boat’s many sound powered circuits — an ingenious, time-honored navy system of communication that required no power source other than the speaker’s voice. Jabo picked it up.

“Maneuvering, Jabo.”

“Lieutenant Jabo, this is the XO. How’s your watch going?”

“Fine sir. Learning a lot.”

“Good, glad to hear it.” There was a pause, but Jabo was comfortable with silence. Finally the XO cleared his throat and continued.

“I believe Chief Beck is your Engineering Watch Supervisor — could you have him contact me in my stateroom?”

“Aye aye sir.”

The XO hung up.

Jabo picked up the 2MC microphone, the amplified circuit for the engine room. Normally underway, amplified circuits were avoided because of the noise. But since they were going Ahead Flank, and their own machinery was operating so loudly, it didn’t matter. “Engineering Watch Supervisor, come to maneuvering.”

Within seconds Chief Beck was there, still tanned from their time in Hawaii. He was standing watch as the Engineering Watch Supervisor, the senior enlisted man in the engine room, but he was also the senior mechanic on the boat. He looked a little surprised to see Jabo in there with young V-12.

“Who’s teaching who in there?”

“I like to think we can all learn from each other,” said Jabo.

“Good point. You called, sir?”

“The XO wants to talk to you.”

“May I?” he said, pointing to the 1MJ.

“Certainly. He’s in his stateroom”

He selected the XO’s stateroom with the dial and turned the crank.

“XO, this is Chief Beck.” He began nodding as the XO spoke on the other end.

“Yes sir. I understand. You know we don’t have anybody qualified to do that… yes sir. My best mechanic. Aye, aye sir. We’ll figure something out.”

He hung up with a quizzical look on his face. “Weird,” he said.

Everyone in maneuvering waited for more.

“The copier is tits up,” he said. “God only knows how long until we’re in port to swap it out. So the XO told me to put my best man on it, get the goddamn thing fixed no matter what. I guess we can’t run a submarine without a steady supply of copies. “

“Can you do it?” asked Jabo.

He shrugged. “Not like any of us have ever fixed a copy machine before. But I’ve got mechanics who can fix anything.” He pointed at James.

“I’m on it,” the throttleman responded, without taking his eyes off his panel.

Master Chief Cote took the long way out of the hospital, leaving through the main reception area, which he almost never did. It was a beautiful day, however, and he thought he would walk outside a little before getting in his car and driving back to the house. He had increasingly less to do at the hospital. The navy was getting comfortable with the idea of living without him. And, increasingly, Cote was getting comfortable with the idea of living without the navy. He knew he would move back to Indiana when he got out, it was a foregone conclusion. So he was already nostalgic for Hawaii and determined to enjoy the days he had left in paradise, every palm tree, every wave, every flawless sunrise.

The reception area was more hectic than normal. Almost every seat was taken with a sick person or their companion. Standing at the main desk, a young pretty girl was crying her eyes out and pleading with the receptionist.

“Please, you’ve got to help me!” she said. “The other lady told me I could come back in a couple of days and check.”

The woman at the desk gave her a fatigued roll of her eyes. “I don’t know anything about that. And I can’t give you that kind of information if you’re not family,” she said. “I can’t even tell you if he’s here.”

“Please!” she said, the word elongated and turning into sobs. Other people in the waiting area began to turn away and mutter in embarrassment. Cote paused just a moment. The girl, in her desperation for help, sensed his gaze.

Her eyes dropped to the silver dolphins on his chest.

She ran to him and grabbed his arms. “Please, you’re a submariner! You’ve got to help me!”

“I’m not sure I can,” he said. “But I’ll try. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“It’s my boyfriend… he told me he’d write me a letter before the boat pulled out… I never got anything! And now I know his boat is overdue… all the wives are talking about it. And I can’t get anyone to tell me shit because we’re not married yet!”

At the mention of “overdue” Cote perked up a little. It wasn’t unheard of, but it was a lot more unusual than it used to be during the height of the Cold War, when captains had to lead their boats into peril and improvise to get them home. He’d been on a Sturgeon class boat once in shallow water near the Kamchatka Peninsula when the Soviets somehow got a whiff of them. For two weeks, the Soviet High Command had a better idea of their location than Subpac, as they dodged sonobuoys and ice floes in the Sea of Okhotsk. Submarine schedules had become much more predictable since the demise of their old foe.

“You didn’t get a letter… so you think your boyfriend must be in the hospital?”

“Yes!” she said, almost shouting. “He loves me! I know it sounds stupid.” She ran her fingers through her hair and Cote saw that one of her fingernails was painted black.

He grabbed her hands and looked into her eyes. “What boat is your boyfriend on?” he asked, his voice lowered.

Her eyes widened, sensing correctly that Cote knew something terrible. “Boise.”

It was midnight before they were all gathered together in a conference room: the admiral and his aide, Carr and King from NIS, and Connelly from the CDC. Master Chief Cote was there too, wondering if he might finally learn what the hell was going on. In the center of the table, in a sealed plastic bag, was a bottle of black nail polish.

“First things first,” said the admiral. “Where’s the girl? How is she?”

“She’s in isolation on the fifth floor, sir,” said Cote. “She appears to be thoroughly freaked out, but not sick at all.”

“Let’s make sure she’s treated well,” said the admiral. “I can’t imagine what she’s going through. I don’t want her to feel like she’s a prisoner here.”

King, the eager young NIS agent, spoke up. “We can keep her here as long as we want,” he said, pointing at Connelly. “We have the authority from the CDC.”

The admiral frowned and leaned over the table toward the young man. “I took an oath to be an officer and a gentleman, if that’s alright with you.”

King withered in his seat.

The admiral turned to Connelly. “What do we know?”

“Looks like the pathogen was transmitted via the nail polish. Something cheap she bought at a flea market at Aloha Stadium. We confiscated a case of it from the vendor, he says he imported it directly from some relative at the factory in Thailand. We’ve got a team in Bangkok right now checking it out, they theorize they made a batch with contaminated river water. There are things in that river science doesn’t even have a name for. Somehow it got into his bloodstream when he painted his nail.”

“It was cracked,” said Cote. “His fingernail. I saw it.”

“Why did he paint his fingernail? Did she say?”

“They painted each others’ nails. Some kind of sign of devotion.”

The admiral sighed heavily at that.

Connelly continued. “So that’s why he was infected and she wasn’t, because it got into his bloodstream and mutated into some kind of infection. We think. Inside the boat, it went airborne somehow. Maybe it took hold in an air filter, or inside one of the scrubbers. We won’t know for sure until we get onboard.”

“You think everybody got it?”

Connelly shrugged. “We don’t know anything for sure, we’re still not even sure what we’re dealing with yet. Maybe something like the Hanta Virus. But based on the circumstances… I fear the worst.”

“So what do we do?” asked the admiral, more to himself than anyone in the room. “Sink it? An out of control nuclear submarine filled with a deadly disease?”

Carr responded. “Obviously this is way above my paygrade…”

“And mine,” said the Admiral. “But tell me what you think.”

“After 9-11, the planners agreed they would from now on shoot down airplanes that were non-responsive, heading toward populated areas.”

“How do they define non-responsive? What if the pilots are just busy? Or distracted?”

“Or asleep? All those things are possible, and, in fact, have happened. More often than you would think. Most recently just two weeks ago, when a Northwest Airlines 737 overflew the Minneapolis airport by 150 miles, and was nonresponsive for about an hour.”

“What happened?”

“The pilot finally answered the call. Said he and his copilot were distracted and lost ‘situational awareness’ as they were arguing about some company policy.”

“And they were really ready to shoot her down?”

Carr slid a file folder over the table toward the admiral. “Two F-16s from the Minnesota Air National Guard were on the runway, ready to intercept. The protocols call for a series of escalating actions, starting with a fly by, waving wings, even dropping flares. We modeled our special procedure on this, with the shooting water slugs and the underwater telephone. The idea is to confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that the plane can’t or won’t respond.”

“And then they shoot her down.”

“If they have to. We’re not going to let big jets fly into buildings anymore.”

“And a nuclear submarine can do a lot more damage than an airplane,” said the admiral. “A lot more. But we don’t even know if everybody is dead onboard Boise. Not yet.”

“If there’s anyone onboard, they’ll answer the call from Louisville,” said Carr. “The special procedure will leave no doubt.”

“But the Louisville has to find her first,” said the admiral. “No matter what, they have to find her.”

Danny woke up early the next day and grabbed a granola bar in the wardroom. The delicious smell of bacon was wafting from the galley, but he fought the temptation. Angi managed to stay in great shape and he didn’t want to come back from sea with a belly, an occupational hazard on submarines, which had the best food in the navy. He crunched on the bar as he walked the short distance to control. It tasted like honey mixed with sawdust.

Lieutenant Bannick was the OOD, and he looked disappointed to see Jabo on the steps. Bannick was on his last deployment, his resignation letter already turned in and his separation orders in hand. Rumor had it that he had a job offer from Kraft Foods, near his hometown in Naperville, Illinois. Certainly he was growing his hair out in preparation for civilian life. Jabo had no problem with that; he had himself written his resignation letter once, and had had every intention of getting out. He had no problem with people leaving the service after fulfilling their obligation. But he did have a problem with people who phoned it in, no matter how short they were. Perhaps because of his last patrol on Alabama, Jabo knew better than most how much a submarine depended on the dedication of every man.

“Aren’t you happy to see me?” said Jabo.

“I was hoping you were my relief,” said Bannick. “I’ve got to piss like a race horse.”

“I’d take the watch if I could.”

“Yeah what the fuck is up with that?” Bannick responded with a chuckle. “You’re qualified to chart our course, but the XO won’t let you take the watch?”

Jabo saw a few enlisted heads turn at that in control, and he chose not to respond. Everyone on the boat had a god-given right to bitch, he knew, including officers. But an officer like Bannick, even one nearing the end of his time in uniform, shouldn’t be airing his doubts about the command where the crew could hear him. For that same reason, Jabo would talk to him about it later: in private. He continued over to the chart.

They were getting close to the area that he’d boxed in with a red pencil line — his best estimate of where the Boise might be. It excited him. Another twelve hours and he would request the captain station the tracking party, and be ready to man battle stations. He carefully checked, and re-checked their position. Then he pulled out a binder of the latest NTMs, or Notice to Mariners, to verify that the chart was completely up to date. Bannick had wandered over to look.

“Nothing out here, right? Nothing but deep water?”

“Supposed to be,” said Jabo. “But sometimes these sea mounts can sneak up on you. And trust me, you don’t want to hit one at this speed.”

“We’re about to slow down to go to PD,” said Bannick: periscope depth. “We’ll get a fix while we’re up there.”

Jabo spent another fifteen minutes reviewing the chart, where they were and where they were going, satisfying himself that they were safe. He made an entry on the deck log, noting the time: 0625.

“Ahead one third,” ordered Bannick.

“Ahead one third, aye sir,” responded the helm as he rang it up. The engine order telegraph dinged as the engine room answered the bell.

Just a few feet away, the sonarmen came alive as the ship slowed and their acoustic environment became visible to them again. At ahead flank, they’d made so much noise that they couldn’t hear a thing, but as the ship slowed it became quiet again, and to sonarmen, it was like removing a blindfold after many hours.

Sounds emerged in every direction. Behind them, a distant cargo ship with battered screws steamed in an efficient great circle route across the Pacific. A lonely whale moaned plaintively far to the north. Below them, the tectonic plates of the ocean floor groaned as they shifted.

Through all that, a junior sonarman heard something exceedingly odd on his headphones: a faint pinging. He jerked upright, put his hands over his earphones, and closed his eyes in concentration.

“What have you got?” asked the supervisor.

“Not sure…” he said. “But think it might be active sonar. Straight ahead of us.”

“Oh fuck,” said the supervisor, making a quick note in his logs. He turned a switch so he could listen to the same thing as his watchstander. “Do we have anything else on that bearing?”

“Nothing.”

The submarine, as part of its mission to remain quiet, relied largely on “passive” sonar, meaning they just listened for noise with an array of exquisitely sensitive listening devices. It also had, but rarely used, “active” sonar. This was the science of emitting a pulse of sound into the water and waiting for it to hit something and bounce back. The nature and the timing of the echo could reveal much about the target, most importantly its bearing and distance.

Because of the preternatural quiet of a vessel like the Louisville, other vessels using passive sonar had little hope of finding her. So active sonar was the platform of choice for everything thing that hunted her: planes, ships, and other submarines. A sonarman on a submarine was trained to react to the pinging of active sonar the same way an infantryman in the bush would react to sound of a ratcheting shotgun.

It was extremely faint, and it took the supervisor a while to hear it, but there it was: a series of regular pings, about one second each and one second apart. Definitely electronic, definitely manmade.

“How does it comp?” he asked.

Another watchstander was furiously keying a computer on the side, comparing the frequency of the pinging signal to their vast electronic library of known active sonars, friend and foe.

“It doesn’t match up to anything,” he said. “But it sure as hell sounds like active sonar.”

“Yes it does,” said the supervisor.

He picked up the microphone, exhaled, and spoke.

“Conn sonar, we have possible active sonar at three-zero-zero, designating Sierra One. Recommend battle stations.”

Jabo jerked his head up at that, and looked at Bannick. He fully expected him to immediately call away battle stations; that’s what he would have done. The Chief of the Watch actually put his hand on the alarm. Bannick hesitated, glanced nervously at Jabo, and then hunched down to look at the CODC, his computerized sonar display. He picked up the mike and spoke into it. “Sonar, conn, I don’t see anything at three-zero-zero.”

The sonar supervisor stepped into control. Jabo sensed some disdain from him toward the young Officer of the Deck. “Sir, I listened to it myself. It’s extremely faint but it’s regular and its electronic. Recommend battle stations.”

“Did you get a match?”

“No!” he said, unable to hide his frustration. “Not yet. But it is without question manmade. We need to call it.”

“I concur,” said Jabo. “Along that bearing, it could be our target.”

Bannick exhaled jaggedly. “Let’s not freak out here,” he said. “Why would our target be using active sonar?”

“You need to tell the captain,” said Jabo. “Now.”

Bannick didn’t say anything, but looked toward the ladder, as if his relief might show up and spare him from having to make any tough decisions. Aggravated, Jabo walked briskly to sonar.

There was a brief look of surprise from the sonarmen as he entered. “Can I listen?” he said, and a watchstander nodded, handing him a set of headphones.

After a few seconds he could hear it — it was impossibly faint, and he gave credit to the man who first heard it. It reminded him of one of those hearing tests the navy made him take once a year. But there it was, a faint, regular electronic beeping. “Shit.”

He took the headphones off and handed them back.

“Where are you going, sir?”

“To tell the captain,” he said.

Just as he reached the door, the watchstander at the middle console stopped him. “Wait…” he said.

Jabo paused.

“It’s gone,” he said.

“Shit!” said Jabo. “Are you sure?”

The sonarman waited, his eyes shut, straining to hear it again.

“It’s gone. Not a trace.”

“Goddamn it!” said Jabo.

He walked back into control where Bannick smirked, having just gotten the word from the supervisor, his under-reaction vindicated. “Now let’s get my relief up here,” he said. “The smell of that bacon is making my stomach growl!”

MM3 James was staring at the copier, trying to pull it apart in his mind, piece by piece, before he did so in real life. He was a gifted mechanic, a skill set he found to be under-appreciated in the real world. People understood that electricians were smart, and that computer guys were smart. But guys who could look at a machine and understand it intuitively… they seemed only to impress each other. At least that was true until he got in the military, where keeping machines running, both in the Marine Corps and in the Navy, tended to keep people alive. So good mechanics were treasured.

The copier was small and complex, and clearly not designed for do-it-yourself maintenance. He pulled off the access panel and stared inside, saw in his mind how the dozens of tiny gears meshed and turned to pull a blank sheet of paper up, feed it through, and spit it out the other end with an image upon it. Picking up a single sheet of paper was a tricky mechanical challenge, and James admired the delicacy of it. He turned those gears by hand, saw that was not the problem.

He pushed the power button, nothing happened. He found an internal breaker that had tripped, reset it, and turned it on again. The machine tried to come to life, but with a horrible ratcheting sound, deep inside its guts, it shut down again. The sound actually made James happy; it confirmed that the problem was indeed mechanical. If it was something to do with the electronics of photocopying, he was screwed, but gears and motors were something he could fix.

Slowly he disassembled it, one component at a time, not putting anything aside until he understood its role in the machine. Finally he pulled out a shiny steel axel from inside the machine that held two white plastic gears on each end, each about an inch in diameter. One of them was missing about half its teeth.

“Bingo,” he said.

He pulled the damaged gear off the axel, and put it in his pocket.

Danny almost ran into James as he looked for the captain. He saw the copier in pieces behind him, a red danger tag hanging from it marking it as OOC, or Out of Commission. If he’d been a junior officer with more time on his hands, he would have cornered James to explain his plan for the machine. Jabo’s dad had been a heating and air condition repairman, a gifted mechanic himself, and he was interested in such things. But he didn’t have time.

The captain and XO were both outside the captain’s stateroom, heading down to the wardroom for breakfast.

“Jabo!” said the captain. “Join us for some fake eggs?”

“I think we just detected the Boise,” said Jabo, trying to keep the anger out of his voice.

Both the captain and XO stared.

“Then why aren’t we at battle stations?”

“You need to ask Bannick that,” he said. “I recommended it.”

“Tell us what happened.”

Jabo sighed, trying to keep cool. “Sonar heard a regular, active signal, along the right bearing. Bannick dicked around, and we lost it before he called anything away.”

“It’s gone?”

“Completely,” said Jabo.

“Shit,” said the captain.

The XO smirked skeptically. “Active sonar? If it’s the Boise, why in the hell would she be using active sonar? I’ll want to listen to those tapes myself.”

“Good idea,” snapped the captain.

“And aren’t we too far?” continued the XO. “We’re still outside the red zone — as you plotted it.”

“Considering what we know and don’t know about her position — no telling. But yes, by my very rough estimates, we’re pretty far. Either we’re closer than we think, or it was a really loud noise. Or both.”

The captain furrowed his brow and thought hard. “Ok, fuck it. Maybe that is her. Jabo, you give the training after lunch. We’ll station the tracking party right after. Everybody agree with that?”

“Yes sir,” they both said.

“Good. Jabo, come down and eat with me. We’ll tell Alabama stories and irritate everybody.”

“Aye, sir.” They all started toward the wardroom, but the captain stopped and turned to the XO.

“I thought you were going to go listen to those tapes.”

The XO turned around and walked to sonar without a word.

In the wardroom, Petty Officer Sheldon was setting out a silver pitcher of orange juice.

“Sheldon!” said the captain. “What’s real and what’s fake? Report.”

The cook smiled. “Morning, captain. Real milk, still,” he said. “For probably another two days. Real bacon. Fake eggs.”

“Orange juice?” He pointed.

“Real.”

“Real concentrate? Or real fresh squeezed?”

“Squeezed it myself.”

“Outstanding — give me real bacon, fake scrambled eggs, and a large real orange juice.”

“Aye aye, sir. Nav?”

“Just coffee for me,” said Jabo.

“What?” said the captain. “In the final days of real orange juice and real milk?”

“Yes sir, I’m good.”

“It’s rude to let your captain eat alone. Don’t they teach you ROTC guys wardroom etiquette?”

In truth, Jabo didn’t need much convincing. Like Bannick, the smell of bacon was making his stomach growl. “Alright, in the spirit of good manners,” he said. “I’ll take the same as the captain.”

“Very good,” said the cook, disappearing into the galley.

“So,” the captain said as they sat down. “What do you think of our little ship? We haven’t had much time to reflect together since you reported.”

“Loving it,” said Danny. “Ship and crew.”

“What are your first impressions? Any weaknesses? I value your opinion.”

“Well, captain, I can give you a good assessment of the engine room.”

The captain smiled at that. “You’re not enjoying your time back there?”

“Honestly — I think I could serve the ship better up here.”

“Maybe so,” said the captain, nodding.

Sheldon came in with their orange juice, and the captain waited until he left to resume. “He’s a good XO,” he said.

Danny nodded. “I didn’t know we were talking about the XO.”

“Bullshit. You’re pissed because he put you in the engine room. And I don’t blame you— a hot shot like you wants to be up front, where the action is.”

“Wouldn’t you, sir?”

“Of course. And trust me, this is a very small world we’re living in. If and when you are needed on the conn, you’ll be on the conn. I can personally guarantee you that.”

“In the meantime?”

“In the meantime, consider this a learning experience.”

“On the S6-G propulsion plant?”

The Captain shrugged. “It wouldn’t kill you. It is different than what you’ve learned before, and you are a lot more likely to run into the S6-G on future boats than another S8-G. And I don’t mind at all having one of my more experienced officers back there watching over that engine room. But that’s not all.”

“Sir?”

“Consider it a learning experience on how to work with difficult officers. Officers who aren’t like you. Officers who perhaps don’t have your talent, officers who are at different places in their careers. Trust me. Much like the S6-G reactor, this won’t be the last time you see one.”

The door burst open and V-12 entered the wardroom, bounding with energy.

“Captain! May I join you for breakfast?”

“Certainly, young man.”

V-12 turned to a cabinet behind them, opened it, and began rooting through a huge pile of single-serving boxes of cereal.

“We’re having bacon and eggs,” said the captain. “You can give Sheldon your order…”

“No thank you, sir,” said V-12, his back still toward them. “There’s Lucky Charms in here somewhere, I saw them yesterday.”

Danny worked on the charts for about two hours, fueled by coffee and the excitement that they were about to begin the hunt. Adequately prepared for the training, and utterly exhausted, he snuck down to his stateroom when the rest of the crew was gathering for lunch, and slept for forty-five minutes, fully clothed in his rack. That forty-five minutes was the only sleep he’d gotten in the last day, and it was interrupted twice: once by the radioman needing him to review messages downloaded at periscope depth, prior to routing to the captain. The second time an engineering laboratory technician from aft needed to remove Jabo’s dosimeter from his belt for routine measuring and chronicling of how much radiation he’d absorbed. He would have been interrupted a third time, by an ET needing a signature on a training plan, but V-12 intercepted him at the door and told him that it could wait, giving his roommate about ten more minutes of sleep before he had to head down to the wardroom and begin training.

Danny spread out the chart on the wardroom table. The last known positions of the Boise were on it in red X’s, the SOSUS hit and the BST buoys. He had also drawn an X for noise they’d heard that morning, and the bearing, at least, did fit along his predicted track.

Their position, too, was drawn over it, a series of slow snake-like motions across the Boise’s faint trail. They had slowed to eight knots, and were angling their way westward, listening keenly at the slower speed. They were hunting.

And he knew they were close.

Two of the three OOD’s arrived early for the training, and studied the chart, which Jabo appreciated: Lieutenants Perez and Burkhardt. The third OOD of the three-section watchbill was Bannick, who apparently didn’t feel he needed the extra time. They also looked over the special procedure, which the captain’s night orders the night before had required them to memorize. It contained the actions that would, theoretically, alert the Boise to their presence when they finally located her and got within range.

The three of them, Bannick, Perez, and Burkhardt, would be on the conn because they had the most time of all the junior officers on the boat — about two years each. They’d qualified everything and wore gold dolphins on their chest. Burkhardt and Perez were friends too, Jabo knew, sharing a stateroom. This was good, it meant they would trust each other and help each other out as things got tough.

“You guys have any questions before we start the official portion of this training?”

“Not yet,” said Perez.

“Yeah, maybe after this training.”

“Burkhardt, I saw your orders come through on the last broadcast.”

He nodded. “I heard — I’m going to the ROTC unit at Creighton.”

“Congrats,” said Jabo. That’s what I did. ROTC at Purdue.”

“Good time?”

Jabo nodded. “Good duty. But it’s cold up there.”

“Did you get your MBA?”

“Nah,” said Jabo. “I’m not smart enough for that.”

“Keep an eye out for my orders, too,” said Perez. “Should be here soon.”

“Where are you going?”

“Trying for the ORSE board,” he said.

“East coast or west coast?”

“East, hopefully,” said Perez.

ORSE stood for Operational Reactors Safeguards Exam. They were the team that evaluated all the nukes in the navy, travelling to every nuclear ship and grading their performance. It was a grueling and vital job. There was one team on each coast, and as with most things in the submarine force, the east coast group held a measure of prestige. The snobbery was a holdover from the Cold War when the subs out of Groton and Norfolk operated on almost a daily basis with their Soviet adversaries. It was the kind of shore tour that could set a junior officer apart from the pack.

“Nice,” said Jabo. “Nice easy shore tour.”

“He’s a diggit,” said Burkhardt, laughing. ‘Diggit’ was a term the crew used to deride any man who was overly enthusiastic about the Navy, as in ‘he digs it.’

“Well thank God they’ve got ROTC units to send guys like me and Burkhardt,” said Jabo.

The wardroom door crashed open and the rest of the officers streamed in for their training. V-12, of course, was at the at the head of the pack. Bannick came in looking like he just awoken minutes before, his hair standing straight up, eyes squinting. The XO and captain arrived last and took their seats

V-12 spoke up. “Is today the day you tell us what really happened onboard the legendary USS Alabama?”

“Not today,” said Jabo.

“When? We were promised all the lurid details when you reported aboard.”

The captain spoke up. “How about we complete our fucking mission first, V-12?”

“Put me on the conn, captain! I’ll find her.”

The captain rolled his eyes at this and everyone laughed. “Just stay in the engine room where you can do the most good. Or the least damage.”

“Aye, aye sir.”

The captain thumped the table. “Commence training, Jabo.”

“We’re now following the tracking standing orders,” said Jabo. “Which you have all reviewed. Upon completion of this training, we’ll station the tracking party. If any of you get a hit…” He glanced at Bannick, who looked away. “Call away battle stations. We have every reason to believe the Boise is within range now.”

“Explain the operating areas,” said the captain.

“Yes sir,” said Jabo, pointing at the chart. “While we don’t have any assigned areas, you’ll see I’ve assigned overlapping boxes, boxes that creep gradually westward at eight knots. Each OOD should consider it his job to search each of these boxes completely during his watch. But stay on track… be ready to turn over the watch where your box overlaps with the next box, so we can continue.”

V-12 stood up to get a better look at the chart, even though he wasn’t an OOD. He would spend the patrol in the engine room, as the Louisville put her most experienced junior officers on the conn, and the newer guys in maneuvering. Jabo wished he had V-12 up front. Bannick stared at the chart blankly, uninterested. Jabo would have gladly traded Bannick’s experience for V-12’s energy and enthusiasm.

“What makes us think she’s moving along this five knot westward track?” he said.

“Exercise briefing,” the XO snapped.

“And the data points I have here…” said Jabo, pointing at the chart. “It’s consistent with a five knot SOA.”

“What about stovepipes?” said V-12. “Hers or ours?”

“No stovepipes,” said the XO.

V-12 looked up at that, as did a few others around the table. When submarines operated together, they were usually assigned “stovepipes” in the ocean, literally columns of water they were assigned from the sea floor to the surface, areas where they knew they could go to periscope depth, or surface, without the risk of colliding with the other boat. It was a staple of submarine exercise protocol. Not having them was akin to announcing a football game with three quarters. Jabo had actually considered creating some fictional stovepipes and putting them on the chart, just for appearances, but he didn’t want to limit any area of the ocean from their searching no matter how small. In addition, he felt like it would be lying.

“How will she get the broadcast?” asked V-12. “Or shoot trash?”

Jabo shrugged. “Like us — she’ll just have to be careful.”

He looked over at the three OODs, Bannick, Perez, and Burkhardt. They were okay with it, he could tell, too focused on the specifics of the procedures they’d been given to be distracted by the doctrinal departures. But V-12 wouldn’t let it go.

“Did they have to get special permission from the CNO for something like this? It’s a complete departure from Navy regs.”

The XO was starting to get agitated at V-12’s questions. “Why don’t you worry less about Navy regs and more about the standing orders you were supposed to memorize last night?”

“But XO…”

“You heard me,” he said. “And since you’re so concerned about the integrity of this exercise, why don’t you recite the standing order for us?”

V-12 sat back, and looked the XO right in the eye.

“The OOD shall maintain an 8 knot SOA while searching along the recommended axis spelled out in Appendix A of the standing order. Standard collision avoidance maneuvers shall be taken upon broadband detection, in parallel with the manning of battle stations. Trash will be gathered and compacted on the evening watch and shot on the morning watch while the ship is at Periscope Depth, acquiring the broadcast. The tracking party will be supervised by the JOOD while the OOD ensures the ship is turned over at the end of watch in the overlap between the old and the new operating zones, as outlined in red upon the main navigational chart.”

He sat back.

“Is that right?” said the captain to Jabo, who’d been following along on a laminated sheet.

“Word for word.”

“Anybody want to hear Appendix A?” said V-12.

Later that afternoon, Jabo saw the XO had posted a new watchbill to account for the tracking party. It was handwritten on a sheet of lined paper due to the death of their copier. It still had Jabo in the engine room, still under the instruction of V-12. And just when he thought it couldn’t get any better, he noticed he’d been given the midwatch that night: midnight to 0600.

Jabo grabbed a few hours of sleep late that evening. He thought of his wife, Angi, running in front of him on a rainy Seattle road as he drifted off. He missed her so bad it pained him, but something about the memory made him fall into a deep dreamless sleep. About two hours was all he needed, and it was all he got.

When he woke up, he thought for a disorienting second that he was back on the Alabama, and that his friend Hayes Fountain would be awake in the stateroom, putting on his Nikes, ready to go on one of his mythic treadmill runs that he logged meticulously in a binder, on graph paper, each patrol. Jabo wondered if that would be how it was for him now, all the memories of all his boats jumbling together until he was an old man and he wouldn’t be able to tell one boat from another when he reminisced. He missed Angi constantly, it was part of the background noise of his life at sea. But he realized with some surprise how much he missed the Alabama, too, and the shipmates he’d had, on this boat where he was in many ways still a stranger.

He showered, and met V-12 at the watertight door to the engine room at 2300 for their prewatch tour.

“You can skip this…” said V-12.

“Not my style,” said Danny.

They walked through the engine room and verified everything was in order. It was, as expected, quiet. The men on the 1800–2400 watch had had the midwatch the night before, and were ready for the luxury of at least six uninterrupted hours of sleep, something that only came along every three days. They checked the logs, talked to the men, and then went forward to grab a quick bite to eat.

The wardroom was darkened, as Burkhardt and Perez finished up a movie before the midnight meal, or “midrats,” were served. Submarines, with the day broken into four six hour watches, served four meals a day.

“What’s the flick?” said Jabo.

“Point Break,” said Burkhardt and Perez together.

“Good one,” said Danny. There were two kinds of scenery you grew to miss at sea, he’d learned, and there were cinematic remedies for both. Some underway favorites contained lots of beautiful women, and others contained lots of beautiful landscapes. Point Break was the latter, and had been a favorite on the Alabama too. “Peace through superior firepower,” he said, quoting the film.

“Fear causes hesitation,” said Burkhardt. “And hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true.”

Perez joined in. “If you want the ultimate, you have to be willing to pay the ultimate price.”

“I can see you guys have watched this a few times.”

“About five so far,” said Perez.

“Maybe we shouldn’t get too much of our personal philosophy from a bad Patrick Swayze movie,” said V-12.

“Fuck you, it’s a classic.”

“Better this than Dirty Dancing,” said Jabo.

There was easy laughter around the table, and Jabo could feel the bond between the junior officers. It was a direct byproduct of the huge responsibility that the submarine forced placed on the shoulders of twenty-five year old young men. It was slightly tighter with Perez and Burkhardt, who’d been on the boat longer — the reason why they were on the conn. But V-12 was there too, well-liked and well on his way to becoming a solid watch officer.

Petty Officer Spencer, the cook, came in and turned on the lights as Patrick Swayze took on that last giant wave, and Johnny Utah threw his badge into the surf. The credits rolled as he placed platters of cold cuts and bread on the table. Jabo took a single piece of wheat bread, cut it in half, and started building himself a sandwich. The half-sandwich looked tiny in his big hands.

“That’s all you’re having?” said V-12.

“That’s it,” said Jabo. “I had a big breakfast.”

“You worried about getting fat?”

“My wife is hot,” he said. “I have to stay in shape.”

“Let’s see some pictures,” said Burkhardt.

“Never,” said Jabo. “None of you will ever see her.”

They were laughing as the Captain came in. “What’s going on in here? Plotting a mutiny?”

“No sir,” said V-12. “Lieutenant Jabo was just telling us how hot his wife is.”

“Nice, Jabo, real classy.” He looked at Jabo’s mini-sandwich. “Is that why you’re eating like a sorority girl?”

“Yes sir,” he said. “And I’m going to make myself puke it up before I take the watch.”

“You’re ongoing?” he said, the smile frozen on his face. “Aft?”

“Yes sir,” said Jabo. He got the distinct feeling that the captain had wanted Jabo up front now, and that the XO had chosen to ignore his wishes.

“Hm,” he said, and a slightly nervous silence descended in the wardroom as the officers processed his obvious displeasure. Just then the XO walked in.

“Midrats!” he exclaimed. “Spencer! Where’s my special mustard?”

His eyes swept the room and he quickly detected the tension that had preceded him. He nervously glanced down at the platters of food on the table.

“Cold cuts!” he said with artificial enthusiasm. “Did you know that cold cuts are one of the most expensive meals you can serve on the boat? The crew always thinks it’s the chop going cheap, but really it’s the opposite.” He was proud of his knowledge.

The captain wiped the corners of his mouth with a napkin. “I had no idea,” he said.

“Well,” said V-12, breaking the silence and standing up. He looked at Danny. “Little hand says it’s time to rock and roll.”

Everyone stared.

“What the hell is that, V-12?” said the captain.

“It’s from the movie!” he said, pointing at the screen. “It’s from Point Break!”

Everyone laughed out loud even as the captain shook his head.

Jabo and V-12 made their way to the engine room, and into maneuvering, where they took the watch. It was the same team they’d had, including James, the Marine Corps veteran, staring dutifully into his panel, as always somewhat aloof from the rest of the watchsection, even in those closed quarters. There was a flurry of activity as they took the watch, signing into the logs, looking at the night orders for the slight bit of activity that would be taking place on their watch: securing the port motor generator. But soon, in the quiet of the midwatch, Jabo started to feel resentment creep back over his exile in the engine room. Not because of pride — but because of his deep certainty that he could serve the ship, and the mission, best in the control room, driving the ship and leading the crew. He tried to think of it as a learning experience, as the captain had suggested, but the lessons eluded him: instead he seemed to be wasting a lot of energy because of some weird personal vendetta belonging to the XO. He sighed heavily.

“Something bothering you?” asked V-12.

“Yeah. I heard we’re almost out of real milk.”

“I guess that never happened on the Trident,” said the reactor operator.

“Never,” said Jabo. “We kept two dairy cows in missile compartment lower level, Bossy and Flossie, gave us fresh milk all patrol. I was Chief Dairy Officer.”

“I heard it was more exciting than that,” said V-12. “On that particular Trident.”

“Hm.”

The watchstanders nodded expectantly.

“Seriously,” said V-12. “Why don’t you tell us what happened? We’ve all got secret clearances.”

As they waited for him to tell the story, it occurred to Jabo that he didn’t talk about his last patrol on the Alabama much, even to Angi. If they ever made him see a Navy shrink, which they’d threatened to, the doctor might diagnose him with some kind of post-traumatic stress. And maybe that was a part of it. More likely, thought Jabo, it was a deeply ingrained inclination to avoid talking about himself. But a long six hours of watch dragged out in front of them, and he didn’t have that many good jokes.

“It was our navigator,” he said. “Mark Taylor. Academy guy, wound really tight. He was crazy, but none of us knew it until he tried to kill us all.”

“Nobody knew he was crazy? Nobody suspected?” asked the electrical operator.

“We had our suspicions,” said Jabo. “Just like I’m sure you’ve had about every officer on this boat at some point.”

“How did he do it?”

“A couple of ways before the collision, but we didn’t know. Started a fire. Actually killed an A-ganger by dumping all our Freon.”

“We trained on that incident,” said the electrical operator. “Turned to Phosgene gas.”

“That’s right,” said Jabo. An image of Petty Officer Howard flashed through his mind, the first victim of Taylor’s madness. It brought back a familiar combination of sadness and anger. “After that, he deliberately ran us into a sea mount at Ahead Flank.”

“That’s fucked up,” said Brady, the reactor operator.

“Yeah,” said Jabo. “It is. He wanted to sink the boat, and he nearly did it.”

A call came up from middle level, requesting to secure the motor generator for maintenance.

“Secure the port motor generator,” said Jabo, giving the order.

“Secure the port motor generator, aye sir,” said the electrical operator, efficiently securing the machine from his panel while ensuring all electrical busses remained energized. The watchstander in the spaces acknowledged. Jabo made a note if it in the logs. A few minutes later the electrician showed up in maneuvering with red safety tags to sign, which he would hang before commencing the work. After Jabo signed them, he hung two of them on the breaker switches for the machine in maneuvering, and then headed back down to the machine to perform his work.

“So then what happened?” asked Brady after the electrician departed.

“We had a collision, which caused flooding, which caused an electrical ground, which caused a fire.”

“And Commander Michaels was there too?”

“Right there with me — fighting the flooding in the torpedo room. Then the fire in Machinery One.”

“What happened to the Nav?”

“Dead. Killed himself right before we ran aground. Hung himself by the diesel. We had to run the fire hoses by his body.”

“And you lost a finger?”

“Part of a finger,” he said, holding it up.

“Lost a finger and gained a Navy Cross,” said V-12.

The men shifted in their seats now, impressed, quiet, a little awed. Even James, he could see. It wasn’t how Jabo liked his nukes, all their smart-ass tendencies neutralized.

“James,” he said, to the throttleman, ready to change the subject.

“Sir?”

“How’s that troubleshooting of the copier going?”

He shrugged. “Pretty good.”

“He’ll do it,” said V-12. “Smart guy.”

“Tell me your plan,” said Jabo. “I’m curious.”

James shrugged again, and then reached into a cubby near his feet. He pulled out a bar of soap with the broken gear pressed into it.

“Here it is. I tore it down, and I think this is the only thing broken.”

“Let me see that,” said Jabo. James handed it over. The gear had been pressed flat into the soap, until the edge of it was just flush. Jabo could see that the side of the soap itself had been carefully planed flat, making a perfectly horizontal surface.

“Half the teeth are stripped.”

“That’s right. I’m going to carve the missing teeth into the soap with an X-acto knife.”

“Then?”

“I’m going to pour epoxy into the mold, let it dry and cure.”

“That’s it?”

“I’m sure I’ll have to file down the new teeth to make everything mesh together. Might have to balance the thing, depending on how fast that gear turns, I’m really not sure.”

“But you think that will do it?”

“Yes sir, I do.”

Jabo handed it back with a smile. “I do too.”

The watch ended and Jabo made his way forward to the control room. In the berthing areas, the men were stirring quietly, hitting the showers, heading for breakfast, the ship’s day beginning even as his watch had just ended. As predicted by his comrades-in-arms at midrats, the half sandwich had not satisfied him and the smell of breakfast cooking was making him hungry.

In control, the tracking party had already been stationed, making the crowded space that much more crowded, with two additional watchstanders, both of them hovering over a chart: an ET plotting the ship’s position, and a Junior Officer of the Deck, or JOOD, supervising. While normally the Officer of the Deck would have both the “deck and the conn,” in these situations the conn was delegated to the JOOD.

It was a significant division of duties. The “conn” meant the JOOD could give orders to the ship’s control party, altering the ship’s course, speed, and depth. The “deck” however, meant the senior watchstander, the OOD, was responsible for the ship as whole, and was the captain’s proxy in the control room. That was a sacred responsibility, and could never be delegated.

The OOD that morning was Bannick. He tensed up when Jabo entered. He opened the night orders and made a show of reviewing them.

“Any sign of her?” asked Jabo.

“Not at all,” Bannick said with a nervous half laugh. Jabo could tell he absolutely did not believe they would acquire their target, nor did he want to. It pissed him off. He headed to the chart.

They had moved into the new red box he had labeled, as required, ready to search a new sector. And, in fact, it looked like a lot of empty ocean, at least on paper. The JOOD was Lieutenant (junior grade) Francis but Jabo had heard everyone in the wardroom call him Van. He had a little less experience than V-12, and while qualified EOOW he did not yet wear gold dolphins.

“Van, right?”

“Yes sir, that’s what they call me.”

“It’s not your name?”

The ET hunched over the chart laughed a little.

“No sir, they call me that because when I reported aboard here, for the first six months I lived in my van while I found a place to live.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. But I’ve got an apartment now.”

“You okay with the nickname?”

“Sure,” he said. “But there used to be an A-Ganger onboard here that everybody said looked like me, except he was about six inches shorter. They all called him ‘minivan,’ and he fucking hated it.”

“Damn. I like that,” said Jabo. He wandered to sonar.

The watchsection was wide awake, and, true to stereotype, the small space smelled like soap and scented shampoo, the fresh watchsection well scrubbed and showered.

“Fuck, is that cologne?” he said.

“Sir who would wear cologne at sea?” said the supervisor. “That would be really gay.”

“I don’t know,” said Jabo. “It smells like lilacs in here or some shit.” The watchsection was alert and in a good mood — they knew they were the tip of the spear in their search, and now that they had slowed, they could peer into the ocean with the full complement of the ship’s tools. Every man in sonar, and every device they controlled, was looking for the Boise. It was what sonarmen trained for constantly and rarely got to do: hunt for a worthy adversary.

Jabo leaned into a broadband display for a better look. “What’s that?” he said, pointing to a slight white trace on the waterfall display.

“That’s a Dick-4,” said the supervisor.

“What’s a Dick-4?” asked Jabo with a completely straight face.

“You’ve heard that one before, haven’t you sir?”

“About a million times,” said Jabo. “You guys need to come up with some new material.”

V-12 appeared at the door. “Good morning sonar!”

“What are you doing here?” said Jabo.

“You’re my UI watch,” he said. “I should be asking you that. The standing orders say you’re never supposed to me more than an arm’s length away from me, so I can prevent you from harming yourself or others.”

“Good one,” said Jabo.

V-12 wedged himself further into the small space. He clearly had a hunger to participate in the search, even if he was delegated to the back of the ship. Jabo sympathized.

V-12 pointed to the same trace that Jabo had noticed. “What’s that? A Dick-4?”

“It’s a merchant,” replied the supervisor. “About fifteen miles out. Loud as shit.”

“I guess so,” said Jabo. He stared at the sonar display, turned a switch to shift it to relative bearings, so he could easily see which way was forward, and visualize their sonic picture not as a map, but as the water around them. That’s where Boise was: somewhere in front of them.

“You guys all listen to the tape?” he asked. “The signal we heard yesterday?”

“Yes sir,” they all replied in unison.

“It never did comp out,” said the supervisor. “Doesn’t match anything we have in the system. But it’s obviously manmade. And it sure as hell sounds like active sonar to me.”

“Ok if I listen?” said V-12. “I haven’t heard it yet. That’s really why I came up here.”

“Sure,” said the supervisor. He took off his headphones and handed them to V-12. As he put them on, the supe started turning switches, recalling the recorded beeping from the day before.

“I think I hear it,” said V-12.

The supervisor looked up from his console with a grin. “What?”

“I hear it,” said V-12. “I think I hear the pinging.”

“I haven’t turned on the tape yet,” he said. “You’re still listening to the sphere.”

V-12’s face became dead serious. “I hear it,” he said. “Listen.”

The supervisor turned the switch so that the whole room could hear it. And there it was: the same faint, regular pinging they’d heard the day before.

“Oh, shit,” said the supervisor.

“Tell the OOD,” said Jabo. “Now.”

The supervisor grabbed the 27-MC microphone, and then hesitated. The pinging faded, then disappeared.

“Fuck,” he said. “She’s gone. Again.”

“Goddamit,” said Jabo. “Keep listening.”

“It just disappeared,” said the supervisor. “If anything, she was louder than yesterday. But then it just evaporated.” He looked at his watch to make a note in the logs, and Jabo instinctively looked at his watch too: exactly 0630.

It occurred to him suddenly that the last time he’d felt this adrenalin surge, he had also smelled bacon in the air.

“Let me see the logs from two days ago,” he said.

The supervisor pulled a binder from a small cabinet. Jabo flipped back to 0630 from two days before, then three days before. Nothing. He couldn’t call it a pattern: just two data points. But it was all he had.

“He waved his hands at V-12. “Move,” he said. “Let me out. I need to go talk to the captain.” V-12 backed out so they could both leave.

The XO and captain were both in the control room, smiling, chatting with the watchstanders, both holding standard navy issue coffee mugs made from indestructible green plastic. Everyone looked up as Jabo stormed into the room with V-12 trailing behind him.

“Captain, I think we heard her again.”

He raised his eyebrow. “No shit? Why aren’t we at battle stations?”

“She disappeared again. But: I think I know when we’ll hear her again.”

“Oh really?” said the XO with a smirk. “You’ve got some intel you’d like to share?”

“Twenty-four hours from now,” said Jabo. “I’m not sure why, but we seem to be picking up active emissions from her between 0600 and 0630. And I’ll bet we will again tomorrow.”

“I like a good bet,” said the XO. “What are you wagering?”

“If I’m wrong — keep me in maneuvering the rest of the patrol.”

“Sounds appropriately humiliating,” said the captain. “What if you win?”

Jabo paused just a moment. “Make me the battle stations OOD,” he said.

“You’re not even in the qualification book…” said the XO. The captain raised his hand to silence him.

“Anything else, Jabo?”

“Yes,” he said. “I want V-12 to be my JOOD.”

Jabo looked at the captain as the control room behind him lapsed into a shocked silence. V-12 stared at his feet to avoid looking at the seething XO. Their second-in-command suddenly turned to leave, but as he did so he ran right into the messenger, who was holding a tray full of steaming coffee mugs for the morning watch section. Coffee spilled everywhere and the XO stomped right through it as he stormed out.

“Congratulations,” said the captain after a pause. “You’re an OOD now. Usually we have a little ceremony.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You can thank me by finding the Boise.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” He tried to think of something intelligent to say. “Who’s taking my slot in the engine room?”

The captain looked around. “Lieutenant Bannick can do the duty.”

At first Jabo thought: great, another officer in the wardroom pissed at me. But when he turned, he saw nothing but gratitude on Bannick’s face.

Not knowing what else to do, Jabo decided to attack the problem. “Let’s take a look at the chart.”

He traced the course of the Boise, his red line, with his finger. “Ok. We have several pieces of data that show her along this track.”

“Several?” asked the captain.

“Two. More if you count the SOSUS hits and the BST buoys. I want to stay on this course, at five knots, stay right behind where we think she is.”

“But not gain on her.”

“Exactly. I don’t think she’s going slower than five knots, and this way we won’t run into her.”

“That would be lovely.”

“Let’s man battle stations at 0530, and wait and see if we hear that pinging again at 0600.”

“You mean wait and see if you’re right?”

“Correct, sir.”

“You’re going to have to eat a lot of shit from the XO if you’re wrong.”

“Captain… I really don’t care.”

Michaels sighed. “I know you don’t, Jabo. We’ve been over this.”

“Captain…”

“Let’s talk about that bullshit later. Trust me, it’s as tiresome to me as it is to you. But I feel I owe you some fatherly advice on that front. There’s more to a naval officer’s career than saluting the flag and giving rudder orders.”

“Aye, aye sir.”

“Anything else I need to put in the night orders?”

“Yes sir, one more thing. I’d also like to go down to 720 feet. For the rest of the day.”

The captain furrowed his brow, calculating. “That’s in the envelope,” he said. “But barely. Awfully deep for that slow speed. Why?”

“Exactly because it is a screwed up depth. I doubt the Boise will be that deep. So if we creep up on her for some reason, we won’t run into her.”

The captain nodded. “Good thinking Jabo. There are more elegant ways to locate a submarine than running into her.”

James was going forward, bar of soap in hand, when he ran into Lieutenant Jabo coming out of the control room.

“Sir.”

“Petty Officer James — how are you?”

“I wanted to see you, actually, sir.”

“I don’t know anything about fixing copiers.”

“None of us do. I wanted to see what our plans were for the next twenty-four hours.” He held out the soap bar so Jabo could see it. The broken gear had been pulled out, and the cavity had been carefully cleaned and smoothed. Tiny new teeth, to replace the broken ones, had been meticulously carved in the soap.

“I need to pour the epoxy in, and it takes twenty-four hours to cure. I want to make sure we won’t be taking any major angles in the meantime, or it’ll spill out. Have we got any drills like that planned? Any emergency blows on the plan of the day? Sir?”

Jabo nodded. “Should be smooth sailing. Plan on going to battle stations about 0530 tomorrow morning, then things should start to get interesting.”

“So we found what we’re looking for?”

“Let’s hope so,” said Jabo. “Both for the sake of our mission and my career prospects.”

“Sounds good sir,” said James. He started aft.

Jabo looked at his watch. “You going to pour the epoxy in that thing now?”

“Yes sir, I need to, if we’re going to start rocking and rolling in twenty four hours.”

“Mind if I watch?”

Back at the machinist’s work bench, deep in the engine room, Jabo looked over James’s shoulder as he worked. He put the bar of soap directly under the strong work light, picked it up, and blew into it to dislodge a speck of soap that had fallen into the mold. From a drawer he pulled out a small tin can of epoxy, and unscrewed the lid. Jabo smelled the paint-like odor.

“Ready?” said James.

“My heart is pounding,” said Jabo, and it actually was, a little bit.

James carefully poured the epoxy into the mold. It was thick and black, like motor oil. He poured it until it just swelled over the edge of the rim of the mold, but not a drop more. The black liquid shimmered, shaking slightly with the vibration of the equipment that was all around them: a fetal gear.

“Now what?”

“Twenty-four hours until it’s completely cured, like I said. It should set up somewhat in two.”

“What are you going to do with it for the next two hours?”

“I’m going to sit here with it, make sure it doesn’t spill and that nobody fucks with it. Sir.”

“If you do this right, the XO will be jacked. There may be a Navy Achievement Medal in it for you.”

“Great, I can’t wait to explain to my grandkids how I won my medal.”

“James, I’m not shitting you: this is really cool. Good job.”

They looked at the shimmering surface of the gear, and then Jabo excused himself and went forward.

The ship filled its day with all the routine activities that had to be done, in anticipation of battle stations the next morning that might last for hours. Thin sheets of steel were rolled into cylinders exactly the same diameter as a can of Navy-issue coffee. Trash was compacted into them and shot to the bottom of the ocean. A watch qualification board was held in the wardroom, an oral exam for a young sailor who had completed the exhaustive requirements for putting on silver dolphins. The ship went to periscope depth and acquired its broadcast, which Jabo reviewed in radio. Among the pages of routine traffic, three messages stood out. Lieutenant Perez received the orders he wanted, to the ORSE board in Norfolk, Virginia. Machinist Mate First Class Steele had been promoted to chief. And Petty Officer Third Class Wise’s wife had given birth at Tripler: mother and baby girl were doing fine. It was an unusual amount of good news in one broadcast, and Jabo was glad that during the brief, one-day break, they all might get a chance to enjoy it.

As he left radio, he ran directly into the XO.

“Morning, XO.”

“Jabo.” A long pause. “Broadcast?”

“Yes sir,” he said, handing over a clipboard to the XO for review. A separate copy had already been routed to the captain. The XO flipped through each page, scanning it briefly, and initialing it with his green pen. When he finished, he handed Danny back the clipboard without a word.

Danny considered briefly that it might be a good opportunity for him to kiss some ass, or at least make some kind of conciliatory conversational gesture to the XO. There were plenty of pleasant things in the broadcast to talk about. But in the end, he came up empty, and didn’t feel like speaking to him that much anyway. He supposed this was one of the things the captain had counseled him on: he needed to get better at faking it.

Three enlisted men sat around a table in Crew’s Mess, a deck of cards between them: Brady, the reactor operator, Cartwright and Deacon from sonar. They were going to play Hearts, coners versus nukes. They’d been given the day off, or as close to a day off as you can get on a nuclear submarine underway: no drills, no maintenance, no training. Word had come down that the captain wanted them rested and sharp for battle stations in the morning. The crew happily complied.

“Where the fuck is James?” said Deacon.

“On his way,” said Brady. “He’s doing something in the engine room, said he couldn’t leave the workbench for a couple of hours.”

Cartwright sipped his coffee. There was so much milk and sugar in it that it looked almost white. “He’s missing out. They gave us the day off and he’s back there working on something.”

“Yeah, what’s up? I hear we’re going to battle stations tomorrow morning?”

“That’s what the chief said,” replied Deacon. “It’s not on the plan of the day or anything, but he says Lieutenant Jabo figured something out, and we’re going to battle stations at 0530. We’re supposed to chill until then.”

“What did he figure out?”

“Whatever we’re looking for — he thinks he found it.”

“It’s the Boise,” said Cartwright. “The ship we’re exercising against.”

“And what do we do when we find her?” said Brady. Despite his pervasive nuke snobbery, he was fascinated by all things tactical, sonar and torpedoes, approaching and evading. Like many nukes, he harbored a secret fear that aft of the watertight engine room door, they were missing out on all the real fun. “Are we going to shoot her?”

“Not quite,” said Cartwright. “Just shoot some water slugs, talk to her on the UT, get her attention. “

“I guess Lieutenant Jabo can explain it to us in maneuvering.”

Deacon shook his head. “Nope, not anymore. They moved him forward, finally. He’s the battle stations OOD for this.”

“About time,” said Cartwright. “He’s a bad ass.”

“I heard he chopped off his own finger to keep fighting a casualty on the Alabama,” said Deacon.

“I heard he killed his navigator,” said Brady.

They all laughed.

“Well whatever he’s doing, it got us the day off.” He raised his coffee mug in a toast.

James rolled in, got himself a cup of coffee — black — and scooted in across from Brady.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said.

“What the fuck are you doing back there?”

“Mission critical work. Fixing the copier. You guys talking about this sub we’re hunting?”

Cartwright nodded as he shuffled. “Lieutenant Jabo figured out that she was pinging every morning at the same time. That’s why we’re going to battle stations tomorrow at 0530.”

“She’s active?” said James. “Isn’t she supposed to be hiding?”

“It’s an NAU,” said Cartwright. “I’m almost positive.”

“NAU?”

“Noise augmentation unit. A noisemaker. Somebody decided to turn it on for a few minutes a day to give us a sporting chance.”

“Why?” said Brady.

“Because,” said Cartwright as he began to deal. “Without some kind of artificial noise we would never, and I mean never, hear a Los Angeles-class submarine operating at five knots.”

The ship’s propulsion machinery continued smoothly pushing the ship forward along its programmed route. Nuclear fission turned mass into energy, which turned water into steam, which turned the ship’s main engines and propelled her across the Pacific. The air conditioners had failed, however, and the ambient temperature in the engine room would have soon killed any watchstander, had any stayed alive. It was 140 degrees in engine room upper level.

Other systems throughout the ship had also been affected without caretakers. Fluorescent lights flickered and went out without watchstanders to replace them. A bilge overflowed, sloshing dirty water over the lower level decks, with no one to manually operate the bilge pumps. The ship’s atmosphere was oxygen rich, as the oxygen bleed continued to provide O₂ to a ship that had no humans to breathe it. While not as hellish as the engine room, the entire ship was hot, one hundred and ten degrees in the control room.

With no cooling water, the operating fire control computer in the control room heated up until it began to destroy itself. The acrid smell of burning electronics soon permeated the forward compartment, as did a thin layer of greasy smoke that hung near the overhead. The image on the computer’s monitor began to distort and display nonsense, as its brain overheated, and then it finally went dark. Still, the computer inside refused to die as electricity poured into it and no heat could leave.

Finally temperatures inside the machine reached the point where wire insulation began to melt. With no plastic around them, bare wires in the dying machine touched each other and sparked. In the oxygen-rich atmosphere of the Boise, the sparks flared into electric flames that burst from the machine. Some landed on Lieutenant Dwyer’s beloved book of procedures, which quickly ignited. It was a thick book, and with nowhere to go, the white smoke quickly filled the forward compartment as the book burned and burned, the vinyl tile on the deck beneath it melting.

The ship’s autopilot efficiently maintained course, speed, and depth as the control room was filled with smoke, darkness, and the sound of tripping circuit breakers. All over the boat lights shut off as the ship’s electrical system tried to save itself.

Jabo rolled out of the rack at 0300, too excited to sleep. V-12 was snoring lightly in the rack below, and Jabo decided for the moment to let him keep sleeping. He’d be awake soon enough.

He walked into control where there was a tense silence. Word had raced through the boat about Jabo’s theory, and everyone had an opinion. Some thought it was a set up, that the game had been rigged in their favor by an NAU. Others thought the opposite, that it was too easy, that they were falling for some kind of ploy and would fail in their pursuit because of it. They’d had all day to talk about it, and every man had an opinion. Either way, everybody knew something interesting was going to happen at 0600: either they were going to find their target, or Lieutenant Jabo was going to get humiliated. There was an air of nervous expectation in the control room, the planesmen and the dive all focused intently on their indicators, with none of the usual midwatch malaise.

Van was on his feet, Jabo was happy to see, alertly watching his team.

“Morning,” said Jabo. “So you’re the OOD?”

“Yes, sir,” said Van. “This is like… my third watch ever. And my first midwatch.”

“I hope it was all you expected it to be.”

“Yes sir,” he said laughing.

“Van… you don’t need to call me sir.”

“Nav?”

“Better. Although I’m not exactly used to that yet either.”

“Are you relieving me?”

“I will soon enough,” said Danny. “Give you a few minutes to eat, if you want, or shower. But probably not both. I’m calling away battle stations at 0530.”

Jabo glanced quickly at the bearing repeater indicator and saw that all was in order. They were going five knots, along the course that matched his best guess for Boise. And they were at that odd depth he’d ordered: 720 feet. Even though it made absolutely no tangible difference inside the boat, seeing that big number had an effect: combined with the quiet of the midwatch, and the anticipation of the crew, it felt like they were deep.

“You think we’ll hear her?” said Van, almost whispering.

“We keep hearing that pinging, whatever it is. It’s happened the last two mornings about the same time. So that’s what I’m hoping. If I’m wrong, I guess I’m going to be spending a lot of time in the engine room this patrol.”

“Anything but that,” said Van, laughing anxiously.

Jabo could see that Van was nervous around him, he had clearly tagged him as adult supervision. He felt a little bad about it. If for no other reason, he was worried that the young officer might not be completely forthcoming, for fear of fucking up. Fear of fucking up could lead to paralysis, even though it was a behavior that permeated some parts of the officer corps.

“You hear anything?” said Jabo. “Sonar got anything out in front of us?”

Van nodded vigorously. “No — nothing at all.”

“You excited?”

Van looked at him, smiling, afraid it was a trick question. “Yeah, of course.”

“You should be. This is going to be fun.”

“Can I ask a question?” said Van, nervousness in his voice.

“Of course.”

“Can I get a head break? My bladder is about to explode.”

“Of course,” said Jabo. “It’s about time I did something useful up here.”

He and Van exchanged course, heading, and depth, and then Jabo said, “I relieve you.”

“I stand relieved.”

Jabo turned to the watchsection and announced, “This is Lieutenant Jabo. I have the Deck and the Conn.”

It was the first time he’d said those words in three years, and it felt really good.

Jabo stayed in the control room when Van came back, gave him the watch back for a couple of hours, and then took it back again for good. V-12 came up about 0500, also too excited to sleep.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, glad you could make it.”

“Wouldn’t miss it. Ready to give up the conn?”

“In a few minutes, let’s go to battle stations first.”

“Aye,” said V-12. He wandered over to study the chart.

At 0525 the captain came to control, his eyes alive with excitement. “You find her yet?”

“Not yet sir.”

“I knew this plan was bullshit.”

“Wait until 0600,” said Jabo. “That’s the pattern.”

The captain looked at his watch. “You ready for battle stations?” Jabo waited for the few seconds to tick by until it was exactly 0530. Then he picked up the 1MC microphone and announced to the crew, “Battle Stations!”

“Chief of the watch, sound the general alarm.”

“Sound the general alarm, aye sir,” he responded, and then sounded the clanging alarm. Outside control he heard feet on the deck, running in every direction.

“Christ, the alarm sounds loud,” he said.

“Good,” said the captain. “In this case, we want her to hear us coming.”

The Damage Control Assistant, or DCA, showed up and started taking reports and checking off boxes on his dry erase board. Within minutes he announced, “Sir all stations have reported. We’re at battle stations and fully rigged.”

“That’s got to be a record,” said the captain. “I think some people were cheating and not actually sleeping.”

It was 0535.

Jabo fought the temptation to look at his watch. He regretted calling away battle stations so early, because in that state, there was none of the routine business to distract him from the slow passage of the next thirty minutes. No tags to approve, no drills to run, no maneuvers to order. Just the undetectable motion of their ship through the ocean, and the Boise somewhere in front of them. V-12 fidgeted by the chart. Jabo finally looked at his watch.

Five minutes had gone by.

In maneuvering, Lieutenant Bannick looked over his panels one last time, and then signed himself into the EOOW’s log.

“Lieutenant Bannick is the engineering office of the watch.”

Each of the three enlisted watchstanders acknowledged in turn.

“Welcome back to the engine room, sir,” said Brady, the reactor operator directly in front of him.

“It’s good to be back,” said Bannick, and he wasn’t lying.

Like all officers on the boat, with the exception of the supply officer, he’d been to nuclear power school, spent his first year at sea in the engine room, and had in large part been selected for the nuclear power program to begin with because of his engineering prowess. He was comfortable in the engine room, and more confident, less terrified of fucking up than he was on the conn. Not that he didn’t have massive responsibilities back there: a nuclear reactor, about twenty feet in front of him, was his responsibility. But as Officer of the Deck, he had responsibility for the entire ship, for the mission. During his first couple of years, back here, they used to consider Bannick good at his job, before he moved forward and the cracks in his abilities started to show. He would never be a great officer like Jabo, he knew. And Jabo certainly knew it, the first time he laid eyes on him. He didn’t crave that responsibility, and wasn’t good at it. He didn’t feel any humiliation at being moved back to the engine room. What he felt was profound relief. As he sat down behind the EOOW’s small desk, he thought even the chair felt more comfortable.

“So this is it for you, right sir?” said Brady. “Getting out?”

“Already got my separation orders.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Brand Management at Kraft Foods.”

All three watchstanders chuckled at that, which stung Bannick more than he thought it would. Kraft was a great company, he was proud to be going there.

“What are you going to do there? Sell cheese?”

“Kraft is an eighteen billion dollar company,” he said. “They do a hell of a lot more than cheese.”

“Like what?”

“They make Jell-O, Maxwell House Coffee, Ritz Crackers, A-1 Steak Sauce. All kinds of stuff. “

The watchstanders still seemed amused.

“And they don’t mind throwing money around,” said Bannick. “They’re paying me twice what I make in the Navy.”

That got their attention, and it was completely true. They were all under the impression that officers were obscenely overpaid.

“So, what exactly will you do?” asked Brady. “Design a better Ritz cracker?”

“No, being a brand manager takes years — it’s like being a captain of a ship. I’ll be working toward that.”

“Is this what you wanted to do?” asked Brady. There was genuine curiosity in his voice, all the teasing had gone. “When you decided you wanted to get out of the Navy, is this the kind of job you were looking for?”

Bannick thought it over for a minute. “Here was my main requirement. For the rest of my life, I want a job where if I fuck up, it doesn’t kill anybody.”

“Well that rules out crossing guard,” said Brady.

Five more minutes went by. Jabo began to worry.

The XO was in control now, avoiding eye contact, seething with resentment. He stood directly in front of the conn, his back to them, close enough that Jabo could smell his Old Spice. He had the stopwatch around his neck, ready to manage the details of the special procedure, although he radiated doubt about the plan that Jabo had foisted upon them. They were all on top of each other, crowded in control, the captain, the XO, V-12, and him. This is probably something that doesn’t happen in corporate America, thought Jabo, a bunch of executives get pissed at each other and then lock themselves together in a small room for a few hours. Or weeks.

He had convinced the captain to act on that daily pinging because it was all they had, but what if it wasn’t Boise?

The XO’s doubt was contagious. What if it was some far away ship, some weird active sonar from a fishing boat, some electronic glitch in their own computers? What if whatever was making the noise on the Boise had stopped? It gnawed at him that it didn’t match up with any active sonars, or in fact any sounds emitted by any submarines, friend or foe. Exactly what did he have to base his theory on, other than hope? The situation had called for bold action — that daily pinging might be the only thing they get. But it wouldn’t make it any easier to stomach if nothing happened.

Jabo knew what would happen then — he’d seen it before. The XO would tear him down, it’s what guys like him were good at. The story of the morning pinging would be a seed to build on, a narrative that Jabo was reckless, or stupid, or worse. If they never found the Boise, he would blame this moment, saying Jabo’s crazy theory had taken them off track, diverted them from the objective, screwed the mission. He’d probably even work on the legend from the Alabama, saying Jabo’s role had been overstated or worse. He’d tear Jabo down, was just looking for an opening to do it.

“Be careful with that thing,” said V-12. He was pointing at Jabo’s hands, where he’d been unconsciously rolling and unrolling his copy of the special procedure.

“What? Why?”

“We can’t make a copy of it.”

The XO’s shoulders tensed in front of them and the back of his neck turned red.

“Sir, it’s 0600,” said the Chief of the Watch. Jabo had asked him earlier to announce it, although that felt pointless now, everyone on the boat was staring at his watch, waiting to see if Jabo was right or wrong.

“Aye,” said Jabo. He looked expectantly toward sonar, waiting for them announce the pinging.

Another five minutes went by.

Jabo exhaled loudly. “Maybe it’s our depth.”

“How’s that?” snapped the captain.

“We always heard her at a much shallower depth,” said Jabo. “Maybe we’re in a sound channel down here, away from the signal.”

“Is there a channel?” said the XO. “Did you shoot an XBT?” An XBT was essentially a tiny torpedo with a thermometer on it, attached to the ship by thousands of feet of copper wire as thin as a human hair. It was shot out of the signal launcher and the temperature of the ocean at every depth was recorded as it fell to the bottom of the ocean.

Jabo’s face was turning red; he hadn’t even thought to look at the acoustic profile when he ordered that odd depth of 720 feet. He was about to confess when V-12 appeared at his side with a long scroll of paper.

“This is from six hours ago,” he said. “Van shot it. Almost completely flat. No sound channel.”

The captain looked at the paper while Jabo silently thanked V-12 with a relieved nod.

“Alright,” said the captain. “Let’s stay here for now.”

Five more minutes went by without a word in the control room.

In sonar, they all stared at their consoles, focused on the noise coming in their headsets. It was a whirring they were all familiar with, the sound of an empty ocean, a rushing noise like wind. They’d been trained to pick noises out of that sonic haystack, and they were all good at it: that’s why they were the battle stations team. While their brains were focused on their ears, their eyes were focused on their consoles, which had a digital clock in the lower corner: 0610, and the minutes continued to tick by.

Then, from the cold, unknowing noise of the ocean in front of them came a high, watery ping, each pulse lasting one second with a second between. It faded, then disappeared for a beat, but then it was back, as distinct and regular as a metronome.

Jabo heard the sonar supervisor key his microphone before he said a word.

“Sonar conn, we have an active submerged contact at three-four-zero relative, designate Sierra One.”

Thank God, Jabo said to himself. He looked at his watch: 0615. They had fifteen minutes to prosecute the target.

The supervisor was in control. “It’s faint!” he said. “May not be due to range, may be due to our depth. But we’ve got her. Recommend we come shallow.”

“No time,” said Jabo. “I’m going to do one TMA maneuver. That’s all we’ll get. I want to confirm range, then we’re doing the procedure.”

“Aye, aye sir,” said the supervisor, trotting back to sonar.

“Do it,” said Jabo to V-12. “Like we discussed.”

“Left ten degrees rudder!” said V-12. “Steady on course two-four-zero.”

The helm acknowledged the order and the ship swung left. On the console in front of them, bearings were starting to stack up, each ping from the Boise, one green dot for every ping that sonar heard. The fire control operator adjusted the solution he had in the system to keep the dots in a straight line. The straighter the line, especially after the maneuver tested their solution, the more accurate their estimate of the Boise’s course, speed, and range.

“What have you got?”

“Looks like she is on two-five-zero, five knots, about a thousand yards in front of us,” he said.

Jabo looked at his watch, they had ten minutes left. He waited one full minute, to verify that their solution still stacked up.

“Captain, we’ve got her. Inside a thousand yards. Recommend the special procedure.”

“Concur,” said the captain.

Jabo picked up the 27MC microphone, a link to sonar and the torpedo room. “Fire water slug from tube one!” he said.

Instantly, he felt the whoosh beneath his feet and his ears popped as the torpedomen ejected a tube full of water toward Boise. Had there been a torpedo in that tube, instead of just water, it would have sped toward the target on an intercept course determined by fire control.

“Ten seconds!” said the XO, stopwatch in hand.

“Fire water slug from tube two!”

Again, he felt the rumble in his feet and felt the pressure change in his ears. He’d been on the receiving end of these, in previous exercises, and he knew how loud the sound would be to the Boise, less than a half mile away.

“Ten seconds,” said the XO.

Jabo picked up the microphone for the UT, or underwater telephone, a transponder that broadcast voice directly into the water.

“Boise, this is Louisville, do you read? Boise, this is Louisville, do you read?”

They waited, but there was no response. Jabo’s heart was pounding, he felt excitement that they’d located their target, but was deeply certain that her lack of response was bad news. He looked down at the captain who was continuing to watch her dots stack up in a straight line.

“Sir? The special procedure is complete.”

The captain continued staring at the dots. “No reaction at all,” he said with a sigh. “Stay on course until it stops.”

They stayed behind her for another ten minutes until the pinging stopped, at precisely 0630, and the reliable, straight stack of green dots abruptly stopped growing.

“Ok,” said the captain. “Let’s go active. One ping.”

It was an option Danny hadn’t had on the Alabama, where their active sonar had been crude and almost useless. The BQQ-5 sonar on the Louisville, designed to use against a very quiet foe, was both sophisticated and powerful.

On the captain’s order, the same sphere they used for listening emitted a burst of sound so powerful that it actually boiled some of the seawater in contact with it. The sound travelled to the Boise, bounced against its hull, and returned to them.

“Conn, sonar, Sierra One detected on active.”

Danny and the captain huddled around the CODC screen to see the display. The signal was a smear that vaguely correlated with the solution they’d been building.

“Again,” said the captain. Sonar complied, sending out another active pulse. Again, the return stacked up, but the precision was bad, not nearly as solid as the sound the Boise had emitted on her own.

“It’s fuzzy,” said Danny.

“The tiles,” said the captain. “I’ve operated against a coated boat before, and it looked just like this.” The captain was referring to the anechoic tiles that covered the Boise. (The Louisville, not an “improved” 688, was not covered by the tiles.) The soft, rubbery surface was specifically designed to absorb and degrade an active sonar signal.

“Again?” asked Danny.

“No,” said the captain. “That’s enough. It won’t get any better. Break contact. Let’s go to periscope depth and tell them we’ve found her.”

“Do it,” said Jabo, turning to V-12.

“Dive make your depth one-five-zero feet.”

“Make my depth one-five-zero, aye sir.”

At the shallow depth they cleared baffles, turning to starboard to make sure no one was behind them, in their acoustic blind spot. With that accomplished, they were ready to go all the way up.

V-12 puts his hands on the ring for the number two periscope, and turned it. The cylinder smoothly rose until he could flip down the handles and put his eye to the eyepiece. He turned around completely once before giving the order.

“Dive, make your depth seven-five feet.”

“Make my depth seven-five feet, aye sir.” The control room went silent as the ship started coming shallow. V-12 slowly spun with the scope, ensuring their path to the surface was clear with his own eyes.

“Scope is breaking….scope is clear,” he said, continuing to spin around deliberately, searching the seas.

“No close contacts,” he said. The control room began talking again, giving orders, receiving reports. V-12 kept his eye on the scope. Jabo leaned over to him and whispered in his ear as he spun.

“So you didn’t see her on the way up?”

“No,” V-12 whispered back. “And I was looking.”

“Raise the mast,” said the captain.

The Chief of the Watch flipped a toggle switch that raised one of their multi-function antennas. They started receiving traffic immediately, routine messages that had been waiting for them.

“Are we ready with our outgoing message?” asked the captain.

“We’ve got the draft prepared,” said V-12, his eye still on the scope. “Just need to fill in our course and speed for the Boise, her exact position, and her response to the special procedure.”

The leading petty officer for radio had appeared, clipboard in hand, with the draft message. Jabo looked over the shoulder of the fire control operator and wrote down their best estimate of the Boise’s speed, course, and range, in ballpoint pen on the palm of his hand. He then took the clipboard and transferred that information to the blanks on the message template.

“It’s ready, captain.”

The captain took it, read it over carefully, and then handed it over the XO for review.

“I think we can all agree she didn’t respond, correct?” he said. His voice was uncharacteristically serious.

“Yes sir,” they all said in turn.

The captain initialed it and handed it back to the radioman. “Transmit,” he said. “They’ll be waiting for this.”

“Transmit, aye sir,” he said.

Jabo gave a quick look at the depth indicator to make sure they were staying on depth; this would not be a good time for the mast to dip below the surface and screw up the transmission. He tapped V-12 on the shoulder. “Take a break,” he said. “Let me take a look.”

“Sure.”

Jabo leaned over and put his eye to the scope, adjusted to the daylight in front of him. The sea was calm, but not glassy, about a sea state one. Pillowy clouds piled up on the horizon. He completed a complete rotation in slow, and then turned to what he knew was the bearing of the Boise, just a half mile in front of them, but below the surface. There was no sign of her, of course, just an endless plane of water.

“See anything?” said V-12.

“Lots of water,” said Danny.

He started turning, automatically completing the standard search of the horizon. A ninety degree arc in high power, 270 degrees in low power, repeat. It was relaxing in a way, the slow revolving, the luxury of staring a long distance ahead. Normally underway your eyes never had to focus on anything more than a few feet away.

As the adrenalin subsided it gave way briefly to pride, happiness with himself for finding the Boise. But that was quickly replaced by a feeling of doom as he wondered what it all meant to the Boise, and what it would mean to them.

“Take it back,” said Jabo, and V-12 quickly replaced him at the scope. He made eye contact with the captain. The XO diligently kept his back to them.

On the mike from radio: “Conn, radio, receiving traffic from Subpac.”

“Very well,” said the captain.

“We’ve got it,” said the voice of the radioman. “It’s off-line encrypted. Request the captain come to radio.”

Without a word, the captain headed in that direction.

Jabo stepped over to the chart, to take a look at their position. The red marks he had down for the Boise were still there. He looked at the numbers on his hand, and put down, in red, a track for the course and speed of the Boise. He took a long, clear ruler and extended the line all the way to the left edge of the chart.

“Is that where we’re going?” said the Nav ET who had appeared at his side.

“No,” said Jabo. “It’s her.”

He pulled another chart from a drawer beneath the table, verified the position, and extended the track, in a light red pencil line, continuing it westward until it hit land.

The red line went all the way to Hong Kong. One of the busiest ports in the world. Manila, in the Philippines, to the south, was also a possibility. Or Taiwan, to the north, if they were slightly off. But Danny was confident in the solution.

He took a pair of dividers, and marked off days, at five knots, across the red line he’d drawn on the first chart. He adjusted the span of the dividers for the scale of the second chart and did it again.

Three and a half days until landfall.

The Boise was suddenly awash in noise. The report of the Louisville’s two waterslugs bounced across her hull, at ten seconds apart. This was followed by the watery sound of Danny Jabo’s voice as he hailed them by name. Finally the two pulses of sonic energy from the Louisville’s active sonar slammed into her. All the while, the COB’s alarm clock bleated dumbly from the Chief’s quarters.

In the control room, the fire control computer continued to consume itself, as fire and heat combined to destroy it. The breaker to the machine opened, but not before the short circuits inside it caused a giant surge of electricity.

Electrical breakers upstream of the computer also sensed the over current, and efficiently began tripping open, to protect the ship’s overall electric system from whatever was wrong, to isolate whatever problem in front of them. A breaker just outside the control room, controlling power to an array of low voltage circuits, tripped open with a loud kachunk, and power to the computer was cut off. With no electricity, the fire quickly subsided, as it burned what it could inside the machine and quickly died out.

Electricity for a number of systems went through the same breaker, including power to the chief’s quarters. All the lights went off.

The red digital numbers on the COB’s alarm clock went dark.

The captain stayed in radio for what seemed like a long time, and Jabo kept the ship at periscope depth, in case they needed to send a message again quickly. The off-line encryption process was cumbersome, and required the captain to check each character in a message against a book that only he possessed, to translate the message one character at a time. Undoubtedly he would double check his work since he would have no radioman to assist him. After about thirty minutes, the captain came back into control, his face grim, a message hardcopy in his hand.

“Get a relief,” he said to Jabo. “I need you and the XO in the wardroom.”

“Aye sir.”

“And tell your relief to get us back on station, following the Boise.”

“Aye sir.”

A few minutes later the three of them were in the wardroom.

“We have our orders,” said the captain. He looked down at the paper in his hands, seemingly searching for the words. “They want us to sink her.”

“Jesus,” said Jabo.

The XO nodded without saying anything.

“That’s what it says,” said the captain. “My God. I’m going to sink a US submarine.”

“When?” said the XO.

“As soon as we can,” said the captain. “I’m thinking another twenty-four hours, when we hear the mystery pinging again and we can confirm her position.”

“I looked at the chart,” said Jabo, numbly. “She’s heading right for Hong Kong. She’ll be there in three days. I’m sure there’s no alternative.”

“And we’re the lucky bastards who get to do it.”

For a minute they all contemplated the magnitude of what they were being asked to do, but then Jabo started thinking about the specifics they needed to complete the mission: he couldn’t help himself. “We’ll need to load warshots in the tubes,” he said.

“All four,” said the captain. “And plan on shooting two. God help us if we can’t hit her with two.”

“What do we tell the crew?” said Jabo. “They know it’s the Boise out there. And they’ll know we’re shooting real torpedoes.”

“We can tell them it’s part of the exercise,” said the XO, the first words he spoken. “Tell them the Boise has been replaced overnight by a drone.”

“No,” said the captain. “I’m telling the crew the truth. I’ve already decided.”

“Does it say that in our orders?” asked the XO.

“It doesn’t say not to,” said the captain. “And I’ll be damned if I ask these men to destroy a US submarine without even telling them what the hell they’re doing.”

“But their clearance level…” said the XO.

“XO, this is it for me. This is the thing my career has led to, the thing I’ll be remembered for in the submarine force, if I’m remembered for anything. And in addition to following orders, I have to be concerned about the judgment of history. About right and wrong.”

“Ok,” said the XO quietly. “When do you want to tell them?”

The captain thought it over for a minute. “Let’s have officer training after dinner, right here. I’ll tell the wardroom in person. After that I’ll get on the 1MC and tell the whole crew.”

The mood of the crew was festive, as everyone knew they had done the impossible: they’d tracked a Los Angeles class submarine. The cooks, in response, cooked steak and giant crab legs that extended past the edge of every man’s plate. For dessert, the supply officer had held back a few five gallon buckets of real ice cream for a special occasion, and he brought them all out, three in crew’s mess and one in the wardroom.

The mood in the wardroom, too, was festive, the officers’ spirits soaring with the success of the exercise and the quality of their food. The cooks had even laid out a white linen table cloth to enhance the atmosphere.

But Danny couldn’t enjoy the food, he knew what they were going to do in the morning. The XO, too, seemed to share his somber mood, although few seemed to notice because he was always so dour. But Danny was surprised by the captain. While not exactly light-hearted, he did seem to be in a good mood. He seemed happy but not ebullient, jovial in a reflective kind of way. He always liked telling sea stories, but his stories that night were less bawdy than normal, more reminiscences of a long, successful career. To Danny, it felt vaguely like a retirement ceremony.

“You guys ever hear of Captain Wreford-Brown?” he asked when the conversation paused. “I met him once.”

Everyone nodded their heads.

“No? Never heard of him? Shame on you, submariners. He should be a hero of yours. How about the HMS Conqueror?”

Again, no one knew the reference.

“Okay, I’ve got an easy one. How about the General Belgrano? Just you JO’s — everybody know it?”

Every junior officer nodded his head.

“Go ahead, tell us Bannick.”

He laughed nervously and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Sir, I believe the General Belgrano was an Argentinian warship sunk by a British submarine during the Falklands War.”

“Very good Bannick. And you know the significance of that to us?”

“It’s the only ship ever sunk by a nuclear submarine at war.”

“Absolutely correct,” said the Captain. “And she was sunk by the HMS Conqueror, commanded by Chris Wreford-Brown.”

“You met him, sir?”

“I did,” said the captain. “He spoke at the Pentagon when I was there on my shore tour. He’s retired now — manages a zoo in Devon, England.”

There was laughter around the table, and the captain joined in. “Hey, that’s part of our charter here — create good citizens that can contribute to society when they get off these boats. That’s something to keep in mind, apply what you’ve learned here on the outside.”

The captain cleared his throat. The wardroom grew quiet waiting to hear what was next.

“A lot of us submariners know the name of the Conqueror, and the ship she sunk,” he said. “But what a lot of people don’t realize is that the General Belgrano began her life as a United State Ship: the USS Phoenix. She was a Brooklyn-class light cruiser, commissioned in 1938. She was stationed in Pearl Harbor, was present during the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941. After that, she was in combat almost continuously, supporting General MacArthur and his island hopping campaign, as we took back the Pacific, one tiny scrap of land at a time. Bataan, Corregidor, Leyte Gulf: she was there for all of them, dodging torpedoes and kamikazes. Nine battle stars in all. By any measure, she was a tested combat vessel, and served our country well.”

Danny wondered where the captain was going with his story. Like many Naval officers, the captain was a history buff, and Danny wondered if he was lost in this story, or delaying the revelation about the Boise.

“We decommissioned her, along with hundreds of other good ships, at the end of the war. In 1951 we gave her to our friend Juan Peron in Argentina, and he named her Diecisiete de Octubre, the date of “Peoples’ Loyalty Day,” a holiday he created to honor himself. When a coup threw his ass out of office in 1955, they changed her name to General Belgrano, to honor one of their founding fathers.”

He paused for a moment, and looked over the room. “So most of us had heard of the General Belgrano, right?” They all nodded their heads. “But no one knew that was a US ship, right?”

They all nodded again. “That’s because she wasn’t a US ship anymore. When men and officers like all of us, from the cities and towns of the United States, left her and stopped caring for her, she stopped being a United States Ship.”

He ran his hand across his smooth scalp. “Gentleman, I guess all of us in the military at one point hope that we’re going to make history. Or at least participate in history. Tomorrow morning, we’re going to do that, although not in a way any of us thought we ever would. Tomorrow morning at 0600, we’re going to sink the USS Boise.”

A murmur went through the room. Jabo made eye contact with V-12, who didn’t seem surprised. The captain continued.

“The Boise left port shortly before we did. Soon after, she dropped out of contact, but, as we have seen, she has continued her journey, presumably on autopilot. The exercise we just participated in was designed to prove that no one is onboard, that she is a ghost ship, with no one alive. And she is continuing to steam westward, toward both friendly and not-so-friendly nations in Asia, and we have to stop her. Just like some of our comrades in arms might have to someday shoot down a passenger plane that is heading toward a populated target, out of control, we have to stop the Boise.”

“What’s wrong with her, captain?” It was Perez.

“We don’t know for sure. Or at least we didn’t when they briefed us in Pearl. Could have been a massive atmospheric problem, a radiation casualty, who knows. But the powers that be have decided that she has to be stopped, and we’re the ones to do it. I’ll be telling the crew as soon as I’m done here.”

The faces around the table were stunned and quiet. “We expect to go to battle stations tomorrow, just like we did this morning, and this time, instead of shooting waterslugs, we’ll shoot Mark 48 torpedoes.”

Jabo knew what they were going to do, and even so hearing the words, and seeing their effect on the wardroom gave him pause. Especially since he would be the OOD — he would be the one with his finger on the trigger.

But not really, he thought. Shooting a torpedo was not like firing a missile from a fighter jet, or throwing a hand grenade — it was a group effort. A complete team effort, with every man on the boat doing his part. Sonar would acquire the target, Jabo would give the order, a team of men in the torpedo room would align the valves that actually shot the weapon. If necessary, a fire control tech in the control room would steer the weapon toward the target. A dozen men, easily, would be able to rightfully tell their grandkids that they sunk the Boise. And that, thought Jabo, was why the captain was right for telling them all. They did have a right to know.

The wardroom had fallen quiet. Jabo wanted to break the silence and keep them focused on the task at hand. “What’s our attack plan, captain?” said Jabo.

The captain looked up, a little startled.

“You tell me,” he said. “You’re our battle stations OOD.”

Jabo thought hard for a minute. “I don’t think a standard two shot salvo is the way to go. That pattern is designed to account for evasion tactics, and to make it harder to detect us, the shooter. We don’t have to worry about either one of those.”

“So you want to go with a single shot? Be economical with the people’s million dollar torpedoes?”

“No sir. I think we should fire two shots, but closer together than the normal spread. Maybe offset just twenty degrees. Hopefully we’ll have thirty minutes or so to acquire her and get her solution entered with a high degree of accuracy.”

“What about active?” asked the XO. “Will we use that again?”

“If we have to,” said the captain. “But as we saw today, we can’t rely on it.”

“What about range?” said Burkhardt. “We were close when we found her this morning, right? Inside a thousand yards? Do we want to be firing warshots at that range?

“And how many do we want to load?” said Perez. “Should we put warshots in all four tubes? Just in case we need to shoot again?”

Soon the wardroom was engaged in a lively, productive debate about how to best acquire, prosecute, and sink a submerged target.

James had to drill the hole out slightly to get the gear he’d created onto the smooth axle. He wanted it tight, had purposely undersized the hole, wanting the plastic to grip the steel so that it wouldn’t slip around. But he was worried about cracking the new gear if he pressed to hard. He rubbed a little soap from his mold on the axle to lubricate it, and slowly pushed the wheel down to the small scratch that he’d made on the steel rod, marking its correct placement.

With the gear in place, he slowly reassembled the machine. He’d filed every individual tooth down until it looked perfect, but there was no way he would be able to tell how the thing worked until it was all assembled, until the gears meshed and turned with purpose. He’d gained an appreciation for the precision of the copier as he’d worked on it. And while he understood it well, there were a number of mysteries inside it, gears that appeared to have no purpose, limit switches that had no discernible function. But he knew that the engineers at Xerox wouldn’t waste any space, or parts, in the machine. It was fascinating to him, the philosophical differences evident in machinery. The machines he’d worked on in the military had been designed for reliability and ruggedness. Elegance was never an issue. And to hell with cost, too, especially on a submarine: the thing needed to work when flooded and shot. And if for some reason it broke, it had to be fixed by men at sea or Marines in the field. The Xerox machine had clearly been designed at every stage with cost in mind. Every wire was cut as short as possible, with no slack. When one gear could serve two purposes, it did. When metal could be replaced by plastic, it was. When they got back in port he would find somebody who could explain to him everything about the copier that he couldn’t figure out on his own.

Soon everything but the access panel was back in place. He went to control to get the danger tag cleared from the machine so he could turn it on and test it.

He was surprised to see the engineer on the conn.

“Hello, eng. What are you doing up here?”

He looked irked. “Captain called all the other officers into the wardroom.”

James understood; the engineer felt slighted. They were talking about something tactical and the captain felt he could be briefed later. “Well here’s our chance at some forward compartment glory,” he said, reaching for the tag out log.

The engineer raised an eyebrow, his spirits lifting. “You fixed it?”

“I’ll let you know in a minute,” he said. “Request permission to clear tags.”

The engineer took the sheet from him and signed it. “Clear tags. That’s awesome, James.”

“We’ll see, sir,” he said, already striding away.

Back in front of the copier, he took the red tag off the power switch and paused. He pushed it and nothing happened.

He remembered the small internal breaker, pushed it up, and pushed the power button again. The machine hummed to life.

He closed his eyes and listened as it clicked, and waited for the control panel to say READY. Everything sounded okay, but he knew his little gear wasn’t turning yet.

The READY light turned green. James looked around the office for something to copy. He found a sheet of paper turned over on the table, a flyer for the Hickam Half Marathon that had taken place a week before. He put it face down on the glass of the copier, closed the lid, and pressed the COPY button.

He heard a jarring click that almost bothered him, but the machine hummed and chuckled to life. He saw the warm incandescence of the copier’s light moving below the cover. Then, a pause, and a perfectly formed copy came out the other end.

James took it out and admired it.

The 1MC speaker next to his head clicked to life. “This is your captain,” it said. “I’m going to tell you men what we’re doing tomorrow morning.”

Jabo and V-12 rolled out of their racks together; Jabo let the young man in the lower rack exit first. They had both decided to take showers, interestingly, even though it certainly wasn’t required and they could have used the extra sleep. They were doing something important, thought Jabo, and maybe it would be better if they didn’t stink.

They toured the boat together. Every man was alert and ready. In the torpedo room, they were loading warshots into the tubes; they stopped and watched. Both because it was of critical importance for what they were about to do, and because it was a strangely beautiful operation to watch.

The Mark 48 torpedoes were nineteen feet long, taking up almost all the room available in the torpedo room. They weighed 3,500 pounds each, 650 pounds of which were the high explosives in the warhead. They could be steered via miles of thin copper wire that connected the weapon to the ship, and each weapon contained both active and passive sonar of its own. Danny had once been at a security seminar while on shore duty, and someone had asked the admiral on the podium if we would ever have drone submarines, the way the Air Force had embraced drone aircraft. He responded that the Navy had had drone submarines for a century: they were called torpedoes.

The torpedoemen moved the weapons up and down in their racks almost silently as they eased them toward the tube. At the breech door, they verified again that everything was lined up, and then the weapon was smoothly, almost silently inserted inside, the twenty-one inch diameter of the weapon filling the tube exactly. It occurred to Danny that there was a kind of close precision that was distinctive to loading weapons, whether it was a Trident missile being lowered into its tube, a Mark 48 torpedo being loaded, or a shotgun shell being pushed into his Remington 870 at home.

Timmons, the leading torpedoman, shut the breech door when the weapon was fully inside, and wrote on its status board in grease pencil: WARSHOT LOADED. All the tubes said the same thing now.

“You think we’ll shoot all four?” asked Timmons.

“If we do, it means I’ve screwed something up,” said Jabo. “If all goes according to plan, we’ll only need one, but we’ll shoot two just to be sure.”

“Normal approach?”

Jabo nodded. “As deliberate as possible. We’ll get a gnat’s ass solution, take time to validate it, and shoot two weapons.”

“We’re ready down here.” He pointed at the tube in front of them. “Tube One is your snapshot tube.” Snapshot was a quick reaction shot, usually a defensive move, the submarine equivalent of shooting from the hip. Tube One was their bullet in the chamber.

“We’re not expecting evasion, obviously. Or counterfire. But good to know.”

“You ever shoot a warshot?” asked V-12, to both of them.

“Never,” said Jabo.

“I did, once,” said Timmons. “At the range.” He patted the side of one of the dark green Mark 48 torpedoes that was still on the rails, patting it like you would a horse in the stable. “But nothing like this. Obviously.”

Jabo had always liked the torpedo room, and torpedomen. They vied with the A-gangers for the title for the most “real” of submariners. In their ongoing rivalry, they often said that “A-gangers pump shit, we do shit.” It was damp down there, in the lowest part of the ship, and loaded to the gills with deadly weaponry. It seemed a vestige of an earlier age, when submarines were the most feared, and hated, weapons in the fleet. When submarines were invented there were old fashioned officers who, in their dress whites and gold braid, thought that submarines were ungentlemanly, attacking their victims from the unseen depths: a dirty business. Danny could see how a visit to the torpedo room might confirm that belief.

“Were you ever on a Trident?” Jabo asked Timmons. “You seem familiar.”

“Yeah, I was.” said Timmons. “I was on the Florida — gold crew.”

“That’s it,” said Jabo. “That’s where I did my observed watch to get my dolphins. Captain Sullivan.”

Timmons laughed. “I actually think I remember that. Did you fire a water slug?”

“That’s one of the things Captain Sullivan made me do. I was lost. Your LPO was whispering in my ear the whole time, telling me exactly what to do.”

“Spence. Yeah, you got lucky there, he took mercy on you.”

“For sure. I stand here before you today only because of the collective mercy of about a hundred petty officers who have kept me off the shoals. What’s Spence doing now?”

“Retired, I heard. Made chief and got out.”

“Good for him,” said Jabo.

“He was famous for an incident on the Baton Rouge. They had a hot run in the north Pacific, had to flood the tube and everything. We still train on it.”

“Well,” said Jabo. “Keep focused this morning. Because you’re about to be a lot more famous than that.”

They reached control at the same time as the captain. He grabbed Danny’s elbow as they were about to step inside.

“You okay with this?” He looked Danny right in the eye.

“Sir?”

“You’re about to sink an American submarine. Filled with the bodies of men like you and me. I want to make sure your head is on straight.”

“We’ve got our orders,” said Danny. “And I’m the man to carry them out.”

“No qualms?”

Danny shook his head, a little mystified. “No sir. I’m sure this has been looked over by every admiral in the navy. And that’s good enough for me. Isn’t it for you?”

The captain looked him over for a long second. “I guess I’ve just known more admirals than you have.”

Everyone took their positions in control in an exact repeat of the day before. The only difference was that everyone, from the captain down to the newest cook in the crew’s mess, knew what they were about to do. But if anyone was gripped by doubt, they would have the benefit of that inertia, the reassurance of repetition. It was something they knew well on Tridents, Danny recalled, where every man knew at an abstract level that someday he might be called on to launch the nuclear missiles that could end the world. To defeat the normal human trepidation about that, they drilled constantly on the launch sequence, both to become proficient, and to make it seem routine.

“Are we ready?” asked the captain, already on the conn.

“Ready, captain.”

“Torpedoes loaded?”

“Loaded sir. V-12 and I watched them do the last one.”

“Very well,” said the captain. “When the time comes, shoot tubes one and two.”

“Shoot tubes one and two, aye, sir.”

Danny took a look at Van’s paperwork, then went over to focus on the chart.

The bright red line indicating Boise’s track was right in front of them. They were trailing behind her, waiting for their 0600 signal, the pinging that had guided them in. Danny checked his watch: 0530. He also looked at their depth: 280 feet. A more normal depth that would hopefully prevent that would prevent anything like yesterday where the Boise’s sound had drifted away from them, perhaps because of Danny’s brilliant idea to stay deep. Now they just needed to wait for the pinging.

V-12 appeared at his side with an XBT print out. “Completely flat,” he said.

“Good,” said Jabo. “We should be able to hear her.”

“At 0600?” said V-12, checking his watch.

“Let’s hope so,” said Danny. Since his apparent victory yesterday, the whole crew had adopted as gospel that the Boise would helpfully broadcast a loud noise every day starting at 0600. Danny wasn’t so sure. “I’d feel a lot more confident about that if I knew exactly what that sound was.”

“Who cares?” said V-12. “As long as she keeps doing it.”

“Right,” said Danny.

He stepped over to Van on the conn.

“Ready?”

Van exhaled. “I think so…”

“The proper answer to that question is, ‘I’m ready to be relieved.’”

“Oh, shit… sorry Nav…”

“I’m just screwing with you,” said Danny, putting his hand on his elbow. “Relax. But I am here to relieve you. You’ve got about ten minutes to grab something to eat before battle stations if you want.”

“Ok… cool,” he said. “Ship is on course two-seven-zero, 280 feet, and five knots.”

“Very well,” said Danny. “I relieve you.”

“I stand relieved.”

“This is Lieutenant Jabo,” he said. “I have the deck and the conn.”

The control room watchstanders acknowledged in turn. Danny caught the captain’s eye briefly. They nodded at each other.

“You going to call away Battle Stations?” he said.

“I’m going to wait,” said Danny. “Give the off going section ten minutes to eat and use the head.”

“Good thinking,” said the captain.

In truth, Danny remembered how slowly the time had gone the day before, and he didn’t feel like staring at his watch, watching the seconds tick by for a full thirty minutes before anything happened.

At 0550 Danny gave the order. The COW picked up his microphone and announced “Battle Stations!”

There was less running around than normal, fewer heavy footsteps on the deck plates, because everyone was in position already. Within minutes, the COW announced that all stations had reported, and that they were ready. Danny thought that’s how it must be during war. Battle stations wasn’t an event, it was a state of mind, everybody ready to fight all the time.

“Very well,” said Danny. He picked up the 27MC microphone that connected him to sonar and the torpedo room. “Flood tubes one and two.”

The captain looked at his watch as the torpedo room acknowledged the order. “It’s 0600.”

“Aye sir,” said Danny. He was hoping that the pinging would start again immediately.

The inside of the Boise was almost completely dark now, including the Chiefs’ Quarters. One by one, the lighting busses had tripped off as a result of the small fires and the resultant circuit breaker trips. Most of the light that remained came from the indicator lights on the systems that remained working, lights that were yellow, green, and red.

Those colored lights barely penetrated the dark, or the thick haze of smoke that now permeated the ship. The air was unbreathable, filled with fumes and vapor from the fires and the slow destruction of the ship. None of the ship’s atmospheric control equipment was working, and most of the fans had tripped off, so the smoke was pooling in thick clouds in the darkness.

But the ship’s propulsion machinery continued on, designed to be the most secure, the most survivable, the last thing to die on the boat. The screw continued to turn and the ship moved forward, but these were like the shallow breaths of a man in a coma, signs of life that weren’t really alive, the core reflexes of a man whose soul had long since departed.

At 0615, Danny looked at his watch, and avoided eye contact with the captain. His eyes scanned the bearing repeater, checking their depth, course and speed. Boise had taken a few minutes to show up before, he reminded himself, as he fought off his anxiety that they’d lost her.

He wondered about her, out in front of them, what might have gone wrong. How long could a ship steam on without a crew? Maybe she’d gone off course, or taken a dive. Maybe she’d driven herself to the bottom of the ocean before they could shoot her.

It bothered him that the notion disappointed him.

“It’s 0625,” said the captain.

Jabo shook his head. On cue, the sonar supervisor came into control.

“No sign of her?”

“No sir. Recommend we go active.”

Danny looked at the captain, who nodded. “Three pings,” he said.

Sonar sent three pulses into the water in front of them, each about five seconds apart. The returns came back scattered across their display, two of them vaguely aligning with their solution, one completely off.

“Wonderful,” said Jabo.

“How confident are you in this solution?” said the captain.

“About fifty percent. But I’m one hundred percent sure that this is all we’ve got.”

The captain shook his head. “Well shit.”

They watched the clock tick by until 0630 passed without a sign. Silence descended on the control room.

At 0640, V-12 broke the silence. “I still think that solution is solid,” he said.

“That’s incredibly comforting,” said Jabo. “I do too. But I can’t shoot a million dollar torpedo where I hope she is. We need to hear something.”

“But we won’t hear her,” said V-12. “We’re going five knots, she’s going five knots. Same class of submarine. We’re making the same amount of noise. We’re probably making more, what with… everybody alive on here. Without that 0600 pinging we’ll never hear her.”

V-12 was trying to help, but he was getting on Jabo’s nerves. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he remembered that afternoon of rabbit hunting in a snow-frosted field in Tennessee. He remembered shutting out his nephew’s jabbering as he focused on his shot. He remembered the advice he gave the kid, how sometimes you needed to stop moving in order to flush out the rabbits.

“All Stop!” He had an idea, but there was no time to explain it. That’s why he had the conn, he thought, to make decisions like this.

The helm paused momentarily, but his hand reached toward the Engine Order telegraph automatically. He rang it up.

“Maneuvering answers all stop,” he said.

Jabo picked up the 27MC microphone, to explain to the captain and sonar at the same time. “Sonar conn, coming to all stop, let’s see if we can pick her up on broadband as we slow down.”

“Conn sonar aye!”

The ship slowed as the screw stopped — and it grew quieter. Danny noticed the ship’s depth and course starting to creep. The ship was like an airplane; it required forward motion, water flowing over its rudder and planes, to maintain control. As they slowed to a stop they would lose control of their motion. But he hoped this wouldn’t take long as their ship became almost completely silent.

“Four knots,” said V-12. Another two minutes went by. “Three knots.”

“Flood Aux four,” said the Diving Officer. “Officer of the Deck, we are losing depth control.”

“Very well,” said Danny.

At 0650, Danny heard the 27MC crackle. “Conn, Sonar, submerged contact at three-five-zero relative, designate Sierra One. We’re hearing steam ring.”

“She’s close!” said the captain.

“Snapshot, Tube One!” said Danny, as the fire control operator punched in the bearing.

A “snapshot” was a procedure designed to launch a torpedo very quickly, with a bare amount of information. It was generally designed as a defensive move; a shot at an enemy submarine that suddenly appears out of the acoustic haze. Danny had hoped to take a carefully aimed sniper’s shot, but instead it was a shot from the hip, into a dark room. But unlike a sniper, Danny’s bullet had ears and a brain.

The battle stations torpedo team executed the snapshot procedure quickly, without question, and with competence honed over hundreds of hours of practice. Within fifteen seconds they had thrown the switch that forced compressed air into tube one, and ejected the torpedo into the sea.

The Mark 48 torpedo came to life once it left the ship. Its fuel, a monopropellant that contained its own oxidizer, ignited immediately and turned its motor. The torpedo was swift: it was designed to exceed the fastest speed of the fastest Soviet submarine. It also began transmitting active sonar from its nose immediately, and sending that data back to the ship via the thin copper wire that connected her.

The sound she transmitted bounced off the hull of the Boise and returned. Like a shark sniffing blood, the torpedo turned and accelerated toward her target.

“Torpedo is away!” came the word into control.

“Very well,” said Danny.

“It’s homing!” said the fire control operator. Through its wire, the torpedo was now sending them telemetry data.

Danny looked at the fire control screen. She was 800 yards almost directly in front of them.

The torpedo counted down its distance to the Boise and broadcasted the range back to them. They watched the numbers on the screen countdown… and then disappear.

A dull thump sounded in front of them.

The torpedo was designed not to kill directly with its explosion. Ideally, it wasn’t even supposed to contact the target vessel. Against a surface ship, it was designed to explode well beneath the target. A steam bubble would then raise up against the hull, lifting it, and break the ship’s back.

It worked slightly differently against the Boise, which was not vulnerable to being lifted up in the air like a surface ship. The fuse of the torpedo sensed when it was close to the Boise and detonated the Mark-48’s 650 pounds of high explosive, plus the large amount of fuel that remained inside the weapon. A huge, superheated steam bubble was created instantly, its walls moving outward in all directions faster than the speed of sound. When the bubble reached the hull of the Boise it attached itself to the side of the ship. The steam bubble collapsed in the water, then expanded again, oscillating. It was a massive, twisting, murderous amount of force.

In sonar, the supervisor tore the headphones off his head. What was a dull thump to the rest of the crew was a blast of noise to him. After hours of straining to hear the slightest trace of Boise, it was like a flashbulb going off in a darkened room. He put the earphones back on as soon as the blast noise waned.

Immediately after the boom came the groaning, wrenching sound of the Boise’s hull being torn apart. It was a sound he’d never heard before, but it was instantly recognizable. He could see in his mind the keel bending and the steel bulkheads giving way and admitting the sea. It reminded him of the sad cries the whales made.

Next came a loud, high-pitched hissing.

“What’s that?” said one of his men.

“Air banks,” he answered. The sound grew louder, as the tanks tore apart releasing thousands upon thousands of pounds of compressed air into the ocean, the emergency air banks that were supposed to save the Boise but never would. Soon he heard a similar hiss, but oscillating, falling away. He realized it was small gas cylinders sinking, punctured or with their valves torn off, spinning as they fell, the escaping gas spinning them like pinwheels.

Next came loud, staccato popping. It was a sound that they recognized from improperly conducted trash disposal: the sound of glass bottles popping as they passed through their own collapse depth. It’s why they kept a metal rod in the TDU room, to smash glass bottles before ejecting them. But there was no one left on the Boise to worry about it. Bottles of salad dressing and mayonnaise, every glass jar on the ship, fell to the bottom, until it could stand the pressure no more and imploded in an instant with a sound like a gunshot that travelled for hundreds of miles. As the hissing subsided, those random pops grew in frequency, like a string of fire crackers. As it reached its crescendo, the supervisor pictured a school of bottles floating downward together, tumbling, until they were obliterated by sea pressure a mile below the surface.

The pops slowed and disappeared.

The ocean was silent again.

Master Chief Cote was cleaning out his desk; after more than three decades it was his last day in the Navy. He’d declined to have a retirement ceremony, even though he was certainly entitled. He always found them a little embarrassing, and uncomfortably reminiscent of funerals.

It was a day at some level he thought would never come; he couldn’t picture himself out of uniform. He saw those other retirees puttering around, they tended to hover around the military towns they were comfortable with, to be close to VA medical facilities and people who understood their sea stories. They were easy to spot, the men with white hair kept short, and “casual’ clothes that were pressed a little too well, khaki shorts with razor creases and golf shirts tucked in tautly, RVs that were cleaned as if ready for inspection.

His office had accumulated a lot of crap during his shore tour, and he had to sort it into three piles: His personal possessions which would follow him home. Items that were classified because of medical privacy, patient records and the like. And items that were classified because of military secrecy, anything with the record of a specific ship’s movement or details about its mission. He’d briefed his replacement about all the navy material he was leaving behind, and the personal stack was small; he could fit it all in a box on his way out.

He reached a bookshelf near his door which was piled high with medial reference books and paper. It was the last major shit heap in his office, and was one he’d been avoiding cleaning up because it was so daunting. Laying on top of it was an unmarked manila envelope. He picked it up and looked inside.

The first thing he pulled out was a military ID card for Petty Officer William Dunham.

Cote took the envelope to his desk and dumped it out.

He had, he could soon see, the personal effects of Will Dunham, the items that were with him when he arrived at Tripler. Somehow they had ended up in his office. He knew he’d never seen them before, he had too much of an interest in Dunham, had thought about him too often, to forget that he had this trove of information about the young man. Someone, probably on that first day, had probably heard that Cote was involved in the case and had dropped off the envelope in his office. Maybe they’d meant to remind him later and forgot, who knows.

His name tag was in there, with the crest of the USS Boise to the right of the word DUNHAM. Two standard issue black navy ballpoint pens, the type that hadn’t changed in Cote’s entire career. Another unchanging artifact of a naval career: one of the small green notebooks designed to fit in a back pocket, to record everything that needed to be done: his first chief had called his a “paper brain.” Dunham’s was filled with neat script, observations from his watch, notes from training, several phone numbers in back with Honolulu area codes. The heaviest object in the envelope was a “leatherman” in its leather sheath, a foldable tool that every mechanic carried on his belt, containing a knife, screwdriver, and, handiest of all, needle nose pliers. Cote would have to submit it all to a heartless bureaucracy where it would, at some point and after a thorough and pointless examination and inventory, end up in the mailbox of a grieving parent, just in time to reopen the wounds of their loss.

Cote was almost ready to put it away when he found a small envelope at the bottom, addressed and stamped. It was addressed to a girl.

The envelope was unsealed. He opened it and pulled out a single piece of stationery.

Cote stopped reading there, suddenly feeling guilty for violating the dead sailor’s privacy. He hesitated for a minute. He sealed up the large manila envelope of Dunham’s things and put it on his stack, things to be dealt with by his successor. But he sealed the love letter and stuck it in his shirt pocket.

A few hours later, Cote left Tripler for the last time. The Hawaiian sunshine was blinding, and he paused for a few moments of the steps. No one was waiting for him, thank God, no one was there with a bundle of Mylar balloons to mark his retirement.

He looked both ways, and jogged across the street to a blue mailbox. He took the letter from his pocket, and in his last act in uniform, he dropped Dunham’s love letter in the mail.

Danny was on the bridge when land came in sight, the tiny speck that was Oahu. Soon, he knew, as they got closer, it would grow and take shape, Diamond Head looming on the right. He’d read once that by some definitions the Hawaiian Islands were the most remote islands on earth, and it certainly always looked that way by sea.

It had been a flurry of activity since they sunk the Boise. They reported the success of their approach and kill, and within hours they’d received orders to return back home. The mood of the crew had been good, if not ebullient, every man there aware that while successful, they’d sunk a submarine of the United States, a billion dollars and over a hundred men. They’d learned that the official report would state that the boat was lost at sea, and that the Louisville had been part of a search and rescue team — the unnamed “US submarine” in the official media reports. Like the XO’s stories, it was just close enough to the truth to be a convincing lie. Everything else was left very vague — the Navy didn’t want any ambitious foreign power to try to locate and raise the Boise, as the US had in fact done with the sunken Soviet boat the K-129 during the Cold War. Captain Michaels had done what captains have always done to keep men from thinking too much, running drills and making them clean, keeping every hand busy so as to not grow too contemplative.

Certainly there would be rumors. And since their entire crew knew the truth, and even though they were sworn to secrecy, some of those rumors would be the exact truth. No matter. The Navy had lost two nuclear submarines before in its history, the Thresher in 1963 and the Scorpion in 1968. The rumors, legends, official reports, and scholarly studies still competed with each other to describe exactly what happened: was it a malfunctioning torpedo or a Cold War intrigue? A bad weld, a frozen valve, or a curse? The Boise would become like the Thresher and the Scorpion before her, like all submarines, really, even those still steaming: a mystery.

They were on the surface, V-12 paired with Jabo once again. They were running man overboard drills, executing graceful Williamson turns to the left and the right, coming right back up their track while the wake was still visible. They weren’t even sounding the alarm or involving the rest of the crew, just making the maneuver, using the theoretical challenge of doing a U-Turn and coming back to the same spot in the ocean as a time-honored way to master the motion of the ship on the surface.

“How was that one?” said V-12, looking for praise.

“It was alright,” said Danny.

“Just alright?”

“Well you’ve done about twenty of them. It should be perfect.”

“You know if you fall in the water you’ll want me up here.”

“If you’re up here I’ll probably jump in the water.”

The lookout behind them acknowledged a report from control. “Captain to the bridge,” he said. Danny and V-12 both stood a little straighter as the captain’s feet rang on the ladder steps.

“How are we this morning?” said the captain. “Both of you learning how to drive my ship?”

“Yes sir,” they both said.

“Turns a little tighter than the Alabama, doesn’t it?” he said to Danny.

“Yes sir,” he said. “I like my chances as a man overboard on this boat a lot better.”

He nodded. “And we don’t have that big flat missile deck to stand on, so that’s a good thing. Probably a lot more likely to have a man overboard here.”

Danny looked at his watch. “Sir, I recommend we start heading toward Pearl.”

The captain looked at his watch too. “Make it happen,” he said.

V-12 began giving orders and getting the ship on track to bring them home. “Here,” said the captain, handing Danny his cell phone. “Give Angi a call. Looks like we’re close enough.”

“You sure?” said Danny.

“Yeah, go ahead. I’m sure she’s dying to talk to you.”

Danny took the phone and dialed Angi’s phone from memory. She answered on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

She paused for a minute, exhaled nervously. “Wow! I thought you might call.”

“God it’s good to hear your voice,” he said. He forgot that the captain and V-12 were both standing there, just disappeared into hearing the voice of the woman he loved.

“Yours too!” she said. “Danny, there’s a submarine in the news — the Boise.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s missing! It’s front page news here, the families on television are crying every night — it’s awful. Do we know anybody on the Boise?”

“I’m not sure,” said Danny.

“They’re saying it’s lost! Do you know any more about it?”

“Well.”

“Oh,” she said. “I get it. You can’t talk about it.”

In his state room, the XO was sorting through the flood of incoming message traffic, sorting out what had to be acted on right away, all the while looking for the messages he was expecting.

Danny had showed him up — and good. He’d been doing this long enough to know that. But he was second-in-command so whatever success Danny had brought them would be reflected on him as well. And he took some consolation in the fact that Danny would carry this around with him: he was the man who sunk a US submarine. He’d done his job masterfully, and completed his mission, but that fact remained. Danny had killed a boat. In the small world of the submarine force, that would be a cloud looming over him. It was more than superstition, although that would be a factor. But even completely rational men would recognize that Jabo wasn’t a guy you wanted to be around if you wanted a nice quiet career. And the submarine force was small. He and Jabo would cross paths again someday, and the XO would be able to get to him somehow, either by direct attacks or by laying obstacles in his path. Torpedoes or mines.

In the meantime, the XO would do what he could to seize the high ground. In a burst of inspiration he’d dashed off a message to Xerox, explaining to them how’d they’d fixed their machine at sea, an example of can-do spirit that reflected on the best tradition of the sea services. He fantasized that those Xerox executives might seize this, the story of how vital their machines were and how clever these submariners were. The XO’s fantasy even went further, he imagined a time after he got out of the navy when he might go to work for Xerox, the story of the repair at sea propelling him to lofty heights in the company.

A few hours later, outside of Pearl, a tug appeared at their side, and with it an orange, waterproof bag of US Mail. This included a certified letter from Xerox, which the XO was handed in the control room. He eagerly tore it open.

It was a single sheet of paper, signed by a VP of Customer Service. It explained that in allowing a non-certified technician to repair the copier, the Louisville had voided its warranty.