proceedings.
As he closed the prayer book, Brentwood nodded to the torpedoman’s mate. The mate palmed the clearing control for tubes seven and eight. There was a dull thud, a gush of water like a toilet flushing, then a hiss of compressed air as the shrouds were shot out, the mate immediately venting the tubes, readying them to receive Mark-48 torpedoes. There were tears in Brentwood’s eyes. He turned away and cleared his throat, then turned to the small clump of men before he left for the eighty-two-yard walk back to control. “Thank you for being here.”
There was an awkward murmured response, one of the men, a yeoman, watching intently as Brentwood stepped over the sill of the watertight door, past the reactor room, heading into “Sherwood Forest,” where the six Trident C missiles stood, their silos dwarfing their human controllers.
“Thanks for being here?” said the yeoman. “Where the hell else would we be? On Coney Island?” He glanced across at a young quartermaster to get his reaction. The quartermaster gave a noncommittal shrug. He was enjoying the show.
“He meant thanks for coming, you asshole,” chimed in an off-duty planesman.
“I fucking know that,” said the yeoman.
“Then what are you bitching about?”
The yeoman didn’t know specifically, only that Brentwood’s tears disturbed him. Perhaps Brentwood reminded him too much of his old man, a typewriter salesman, who’d always cut an imposing figure most of the time. A no-nonsense, strong type — a heap of quiet self-confidence— before computers. Too old to change, and sometimes he’d start thanking you for doing the simplest thing when it was your job. Got all weepy and scared the hell out of you — whole world seemed it would come apart and just swallow you up. It meant he was against the ropes about something — couldn’t handle it himself anymore.
“Little things are important,” the yeoman answered the planesman obliquely. With his old man, it hadn’t been anything spectacular at first — nothing you’d really notice. Just a few drinks to begin with. Then a few pills to “calm my nerves.” Then he couldn’t get up mornings. Pretty soon he was incapable of making any important decision. “See your mom” became the cry. The yeoman told the planesman the scuttlebutt from the hospital corpsman was that Captain “Bing” had been white as a toilet, hand shaking, as he’d given Evans the shot. What the yeoman didn’t tell the planesman was that his rather had been scared shitless of needles too. And so was he. That’s what was wrong — pretty soon his old man had started freaking him out too. The planesman dismissed the scuttlebutt. “Aw, shit — corpsmen always like to make things bigger than they are. Makes ‘em feel important. Hell, I know plenty of guys who don’t like getting shots. Go weak at the knees. So what? What do you want? Joe Montana?”
“Fucking right,” said the yeoman.
“Then, buddy,” put in a torpedoman, “you’re on the wrong friggin’ boat.”
“That’s what I’m thinkin’.”
“Well — what are you planning to do about it?” the planesman said. “Swim?”
“Nothing you can do, is there?” replied the yeoman.
“For Christ’s sake, you’re making a big thing out of squat all.”
“Listen, man. It’s the little things that count. Right? Isn’t that how they weed everyone out at the school? Guy panics for a second in the dive tank and he’s out.”
“Balls!” said the torpedoman. “Don’t know anyone who liked being in the tank.”
“Yeah — but you didn’t show it, right?” pressed the yeoman.
“Hey,” said the torpedoman. “I’d rather the guy running this boat show a little compassion than have some hard-ass Quigg.”
“Who’s Quigg?” asked the yeoman.
The torpedoman looked across at the planesman disbelievingly. “He doesn’t know who Quigg was.”
“So?” said the yeoman. “You gonna tell me?”
“You don’t have to worry,” cut in the planesman. “Bing’ll get us out of this. He’ll get us home.”
“Yeah,” added the torpedoman. “We’ll be in Faslane before you know it.” Faslane was the village for Holy Loch.
“At five knots,” said the yeoman, “it’ll take a fucking year.”
“Not to worry, yeo, we’ve got enough food to—”
“Fuck! You told us that before. We’re crawlin’ along like some fucking turtle and you’re worried about goddamned chow. You can’t eat yourself out of a HUK pack. Their goddamned Alfas are faster than we are.”
The planesman slapped on his submariner’s cap and, without another word, left the torpedo room, making his way forward, the torpedoman following.
“Time he had furlough,” said the planesman, half-jokingly. “He’s more goddamned worried than the old man.”
“Not surprised,” said a voice behind them. The planesman saw it was a two-striper, the young quartermaster, who’d been draped against the torpedo, his neat dark beard matching the dark, short-sleeved uniform that distinguished him from the rest of the
“What do you mean?” the torpedoman asked.
“He had a girl in Glasgow,” explained the quartermaster. “Killed in one of the rocket attacks.”
“Better keep an eye on him then,” said the planesman.
“Who?” said the quartermaster. “Me?”
“You seem to know all about him.”
“Hell, I hardly know him.”
It was one of the problems on the big pigboats — on any large vessel. Even though the seventy-day assignments meant they were together on the sub for forty days straight, with twenty-five days tied up alongside Holy Loch, some of the ship’s company, working eight hours on, twelve off, never met. Often all there was to know about a man apart from his technical qualification was whatever the scuttlebutt happened to pass on, and that was notoriously unreliable. “Hell,” said the quartermaster, “I don’t even know myself.” The other two laughed. They thought it was a joke.
“Come on,” said the torpedoman. “I’ve got to report to the chief up in the machine room. Bing’s got him working on some special rig.”
“What kind of rig?” inquired the planesman.
“I don’t know. All I do know is the old man wants it ready before the next TACAMO rendezvous.”
“There’ll be no rendezvous,” said the planesman. “Any of our E-6As come this way, the Russians’ll blow ‘em out of the sky.”
“I think maybe the old man knows that,” said the quartermaster.
“Then how we going to confirm our position?” argued the planesman. “Either way, we’ll have to go up with an aerial.”
“If the TACAMO comes, we can use the floater,” proffered the quartermaster. He meant the floating low- frequency wire.
“Still have to go up a ways,” said the planesman. “Takes too friggin’ long for data transmission. Russkies’ll be waiting for that. We need a burst message — a lot of data — quickly. Tell us where the fuck we are and what’s going on up there. For my money, that means sticking our UHF out of the water.”
“That’s no friggin’ good,” said the torpedoman. “They could spot that on SATCON. Our warm wave’d be too close to the surface anyway. They’d pick us up on the satellite’s infrared.”
“Satellite can’t cover the whole ocean,” said the quartermaster.
“They don’t have to with us doin’ three and a half knots,” put in the planesman.
“Shit!” said the quartermaster. “I thought that yeo was a rain face.”
“Ah—” said the torpedoman, “what the hell? We’re probably worrying about nothin’—right?”
No one answered.
Walking into his cabin, Robert Brentwood drew the green curtains shut, tossed his cap onto its hook, and stood for a minute studying the map of the North Atlantic taped to the bulkhead above the safe. Three things worried him. First, the navigation computer was malfunctioning as a result of the last depth charge, so that unless he had a clear sky for a star fix, it was imperative the TACAMO aircraft make its rendezvous to give them their exact position. Even as the sub rose via slow and quiet release of ballast, feeling its way toward the surface to wait
