Tidal Rip

The Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington, D.C.

Commander Jeffrey Fuller let the hubbub of the cocktail reception swirl around him in the huge grand ballroom of the posh and historic hotel. The crowd moved to its own indecipherable Washington rhythms. The strong conversational currents and nasty undercurrents of glittering socialites and power brokers seemed to be running way above his head, his feet hurt from standing for hours, and he was hoarse from too much talking. The weight of the bronze medallion of his brand-new Medal of Honor felt heavier and heavier on its ribbon around his neck. He tried to remind himself that the whole reception was in his honor, but Jeffrey could see by now that almost everyone had really shown up for selfish reasons. If anything, he told himself ruefully, the nation’s capital during this grimmest of wartimes was more unforgivingly competitive, and more politically manic, than ever before.

Still, part of Jeffrey felt very fulfilled. He was surrounded by so much sheer energy from all these people, and this moment was the ultimate achievement of his naval career. He was also grateful that, at least for the moment, he was being ignored, lost in the crowd of civilians and of men and women in uniform. He tried to rest his eyes, which hurt from the glare of so many TV camera lights. The reporters must have gotten the footage they wanted of him, because the different clumps of extra glare from those lights were far away in the gigantic room. Jeffrey welcomed his temporary sense of solitude within the mob — this came easily to a submariner, who lived in a cramped and crowded world and needed to make his own privacy, internally, wherever he was.

One of Jeffrey’s former shipmates, stationed now at the Pentagon, came by. “Hey, Captain. Way to go!” The two of them talked for a couple of minutes, then the other man moved on.

Again, Jeffrey savored a fleeting sense of joy, a tingling in his chest, and a lightness in his gut. The Medal of Honor… He tried not to remember that winning a medal in battle usually meant that other good people hadn’t made it back.

All around Jeffrey wineglasses and cocktail glasses and soft-drink glasses clinked. Tuxedoed waiters circulated smoothly through the hundreds of guests, offering tidbits of snacks on silver trays. The offerings were meager, compared to all the events the hotel had hosted over the years, because of wartime austerity. It wasn’t lost on Jeffrey that all the wines were inexpensive labels, and every one of them was American made.

Jeffrey had had little appetite at lunch. Now his stomach rumbled, not that anyone else would notice in this din. As a waiter passed, he grabbed a bite to eat — a cracker with cheese spread.

Jeffrey realized that none of the hors d’oeuvres he’d seen all afternoon included seafood. This wasn’t surprising, considering the amount of nuclear waste and fallout built up by now in the Atlantic. Some scientists said the ecological damage wasn’t really that severe, that the ocean was very vast and so the toxins were hugely diluted. The relatively small tactical atomic warheads now — used by both sides hundreds of miles from land — weren’t much compared to the many megatons the U.S. and USSR and other nuclear powers had tested in the atmosphere or in the oceans in the early Cold War. But it was very different, at least psychologically, in an actual shooting war. No one was taking chances, which was too bad. Jeffrey loved seafood.

He quickly went from feeling fulfilled to feeling glum. Some of the atomic weapons detonated in the oceans had been set off by his ship, on his orders. Jeffrey wondered for the umpteenth time how many whales and dolphins he’d killed, collateral damage to the environment as he went after high-value enemy targets. He rationalized that the Germans and Boers had started it all, this limited tactical nuclear war at sea. Allied forces needed to use nukes in self-defense. High-explosive weapons just weren’t effective enough when the enemy was firing at you with fission bombs. And precision-guided high-explosive weapons weren’t the cure-all some pundits had thought they’d be before the war. The Axis had figured out how to distort the Global Positioning Satellite signals, and how to detect and jam or kill a ground or airborne laser-target-homing designator. Some defense analysts had warned about such things, before the war. Maybe they hadn’t been able to get the right people to listen.

Jeffrey was self-aware enough to witness his own mood swings. So here I am, in glamorous wartime Washington, D.C., wearing my country’s highest medal for valor, and I feel like crap. He grabbed for another hors d’oeuvre as a pretty young waitress went by. I need to raise my blood sugar. That should help. The waitress paused politely and Jeffrey took a dumpling filled with some sort of meat. Then he watched what he already called “the process” start again.

The waitress saw his star-shaped bronze medallion out of the corner of her eye. She turned to look at his face, to make sure it was really him. Of course it was him: Commander Jeffrey Fuller, United States Navy, captain of USS Challenger. War hero. The man of the hour. On national TV, and on the cover of every newsmagazine — the Internet was so plagued by Axis hackers and misguided hoaxes that most people used hard-copy newspapers to follow the war and the troubled economy.

“Um, sir, I…” the young lady stammered.

Jeffrey met her eyes and waited. Submariners were very good at waiting.

She smiled, and hesitated. Then she positively beamed, and leaned a few inches too close. “Congratulations, Captain.” There was a hunger, a wanting, in her eyes. A Medal of Honor groupie? Was there such a thing?

“Thanks,” Jeffrey said, friendly enough but distant and noncommittal. He had his mask of command to maintain, his professional demeanor — and he’d never felt comfortable flirting, whatever the context.

She controlled herself and switched to more of a daughter-father mode. “Thank you, Captain. For everything you’ve done, to help protect us.”

The woman hurried away, blushing. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to talk to the guests. Maybe she’d just felt nervous, suddenly talking to a battle-hardened nuclear submarine captain in his full dress blues. Flirting was natural when people felt nervous.

Jeffrey doubted if that young lady, if most of the civilians here, really knew what the medals on his jacket even meant, which one was which. He knew very few of them had any idea what a person had to suffer through to earn these medals. Today, on the theory that less was more, Jeffrey used only his major decorations: the Navy Cross, with gold star in lieu of a second award, for his first two combat missions in the recent conflict. The Presidential Unit Citation, awarded to Challenger’s whole crew by the Department of Defense, for what they did under Jeffrey’s leadership on their latest mission, their third, the mission for which he’d just received the Medal… And his Silver Star and Purple Heart, won years ago, in the mid-nineties. He’d been a freshly minted junior officer in the Navy SEALs in those days, on a black operation in Iraq, and the SEALs’ extraction went bad. Eventually recovered, but unfit for further commando duty, Jeffrey had chosen to transfer to submarines; wanting a career in the navy ever since he was a kid, he’d done Navy ROTC at Purdue, with a major in electrical engineering — good background for his move to the Silent Service.

I was about that waitress’s age when I got wounded, Jeffrey reflected. The thought made him feel very old. He was thirty-seven, and this coming summer would turn thirty-eight, if he survived the war that long. He wondered what the navy would order him to do next. He wondered if he really would survive the war.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jeffrey caught a glimpse of Ilse Reebeck. She was a Boer freedom fighter and had served as combat oceanographer on Jeffrey’s submarine during all of USS Challenger’s war patrols. Originally a civilian consultant, Ilse was now a lieutenant in the Free South African Navy. Jeffrey saw her talking to several African dignitaries, diplomats and generals who’d been invited to the party. Jeffrey was heartened to see that an ethnic Boer could talk with a group of black Africans without them all coming to blows. This boded well for the future. Jeffrey knew there were plenty of “good” Boers. Ilse’s family had all been good, and paid the ultimate price for resisting the reactionary takeover last year: They’d been hanged with so many others, on national TV, in Johannesburg, South Africa’s capital.

Jeffrey, standing in a corner of the ballroom now — to get breathing space from the increasing press of the crowd — looked steadily at Ilse, trying to make eye contact. He could tell that she could see him. But she ignored him and continued to talk to her fellow Africans. Some of them wore traditional tribal robes, and Jeffrey thought these men looked very powerful. Finally Ilse blinked and subtly shook her head, and still didn’t look at Jeffrey. He gave up and looked away.

Ilse was like that. He and she had been intimate, off and on. Ilse was very emotionally complex. Sometimes Jeffrey felt he was being used, since it was always Ilse who decided when it was time to be close or time to be detached. Today, she’d been altogether standoffish. She wore a new medal herself, the Free South African Legion of Merit, a gaudy embroidered sunburst over her heart, on a wide red sash. Jeffrey thought the whole thing looked overdone. But he’d hoped he and Ilse could share in the sense of celebration today. That wasn’t happening, and