WW III

or two, sometimes they had more shore leave than expected if he decided a new coat of anechoic, or “sponge,” paint, as the crews called it, was needed. The red paint absorbed active sonar pulses sent out by sub chasers and so denied them any return echo or at least diluted the echo so much that it was too weak to be of any use to the enemy. Painting the bottom of the 360-foot-long, 42-foot-wide sub that served both as an attack submarine and a Trident II balistic missile carrier was a job that took two weeks in the dry dock, affording the crews, alternating shifts, at least a week’s liberty, even longer if the sub’s barnacle-encrusted exterior had to be scraped down and new primer applied. However, with Roosevelt on second-stage alert, Executive Officer Zeldman had a hunch none of them would be seeing Holy Loch for a while.

He put the question to Brentwood, who said, “We’ll see.”

“Skipper’s not exactly bursting with information, is he?” said the third officer.

“He’s got his reasons,” answered Zeldman, not permitting himself to be drawn into taking sides. But the lieutenant did have a point.

Zeldman couldn’t quite figure Brentwood out either. He was one of those men, Zeldman thought, who seemed to be born old. It wasn’t that he looked old, despite slightly graying hair, but rather that he had an unflappable manner and deep-set brown eyes with a penetrating quality about them that constantly made you feel he knew what you were going to say before you said it. Luckily, however, unlike some people, who thought they knew everything, Robert Brentwood wasn’t the least bit arrogant or impatient with others, the kind of man, Zeldman concluded, a boy would be lucky to have as a father. But Zeldman doubted if the skipper would ever be one. He wasn’t married, unlike most of the crew, or even engaged.

Zeldman had put it down to Brentwood’s obsession with his work. He was first and foremost a submariner — everything else took second place, so much so that Zeldman had become convinced that though Robert Brentwood came across as a strong, silent type, he must be driven deep down by a burning ambition to surpass his father’s achievement as admiral. Zeldman was quite wrong about this — Robert Brentwood had no intention of trying to surpass his father’s reputation. He merely loved submarines. Always had. Years before, when Lana and David had asked him how he could possibly sign on for “coffin duty” in what was essentially nine titanium-alloy spheres welded together and covered in a superstructure that at times looked stronger than it really was, Robert Brentwood had no good answer. All he could tell them was that he did not share their fear of death by sudden implosion. Death was inevitable; the way you went, he told them, was beside the point. And what Zeldman had at first taken to be his quiet, all-knowing air was nothing more than shyness.

Brentwood was conscious that his reticence was often misinterpreted by the men on the Tennessee as aloofness, a kind of carefully constructed emotional shield between captain and crew so that orders were less likely to be questioned in times of crisis. With women it was different, for he discovered that most of them intuitively understood that his shyness was not a deliberately erected barrier or a lack of feeling but rather the quietude of a man confident in himself and his work, a man most of them liked, but one whose most passionate affair was with the sea. A pretty young Englishwoman in her late twenties, during one of the welcome-ashore parties arranged by the British Admiralty at Holy Loch, had once unabashedly told Robert Brentwood over her half pint of Guiness, “I’d like to go to bed with you.”

“Thank you,” he’d replied.

“It’s so, then?”

“No. Sorry.”

The woman had appeared stunned. “Why ever not?”

“Not before marriage.”

The girl, “a smashing blond bit,” as his English host had described her to Brentwood before her arrival, had spat out half her Guiness in astonished gaiety at the American’s joke. When she saw he was serious, surprise quickly gave way to anger. “You’re not a sailor.” It was delivered with all the finesse of a depth charge, meant to shake the very bulwark of his masculinity.

“I can assure you I am, ma’am.”

“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me! Are you queer?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Jesus — you’re worse than Bing Crosby,” she said, pushing a napkin at him to wipe off the chocolatey stain of Guiness.

Brentwood had taken the train to London a few days later for a bit of sight-seeing and had ordered a biography of Bing Crosby at Marriage’s bookstore.

“Back list, sir,” the manager informed him without bothering to consult Books in Print. “We could have it in five days.”

Brentwood told him he wouldn’t be able to pick it up for about three months but offered payment.

“That’s not necessary, sir,” the manager informed him. Brentwood ordered the book anyway, mad at himself for having mentioned how long he’d be away, the length of his next patrol, a breech of security for which Brentwood roundly chastised himself.

A few days later, when he returned to the ship, then in the floating dry dock, he asked Zeldman one morning, “You know anything about Bing Crosby?”

The executive officer had shrugged. “Big shot in the forties and fifties, I think. A crooner.”

“What’s that?”

“A singer.”

“What kind of singer?”

“Not sure. My Grandpa used to talk about him. Love songs, far as I can recall. Pretty slow.”

“Was he ever married?”

“Think so,” said Zeldman, who’d been pouring the coffee in the galley at the time, his voice rising above the hammering echoing through the Roosevelt as yard “birds” replaced one of the hatches on the six multiwarhead missile bays aft of the sail which the sub carried along with the eight attack torpedo tubes forward.

Standing in the sail as they’d slid slowly out of Holy Loch for another NATO Atlantic patrol, the second officer had asked Zeldman, “Ex, you ever heard of a Bing Crosby?”

“For crying out loud,” said Zeldman, “what’s with this Bing Crosby? Skipper was on about that yesterday.”

“Yeah?” said the second officer. “He was asking me this morning.”

From that point on, Captain Robert Brentwood became known as “Bing” among his crew, and the boat’s unofficial theme song was “Moon River,” crew members occasionally providing impromptu renditions during off- hours. Zeldman figured that if the skipper heard some of the associated jokes, his hair would turn completely gray overnight.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Lin Kuang stood alone in the forest darkness high above Taiwan’s Taroko Gorge, the sound of the rushing river far below melding with the swishing sound of the wind in the pines, and here he pledged to Matsu, goddess of the sea, by all that was holy to him that he was ready for battle. The waiting was over, the invasion fleet ready, as it had been since his grandfather’s day, since that terrible day in 1949 when the Communists had driven the Kuomintang to the sea, when, thanks to the mercy of Matsu, the fleet of the two million Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek had arrived safely on Taiwan and made it their own.

Lin Kuang had never been “home” to the mainland, but one night, as a junior officer years before, he had been the captain of one of the Nationalist navy’s motor torpedo boats that had landed a raiding party during the intermittent fighting over Quemoy Island just off the mainland. The purpose of the raid was ostensibly to gather and update intelligence reports on the Communist ports’ defenses. But the real purpose was to keep every soldier in the KMT practiced and ready, to prevent them from ever sinking into the passive acceptance, shown by the rest of Taiwan’s eighteen million, of believing that Formosa, as Taiwan used to be called, was home. The KMT ruled Taiwan and built up enormous financial reserves to the point that it was now, after Japan, the richest Asian nation. But, with the legendary Chinese patience, the KMT had never lost the belief that the Communists in Beijing were