Straits of Power

through brutal experience. The cruise home should be a milk run.

But there were no new medals awaiting Jeffrey at Pearl Harbor for the latest tremendous things he’d accomplished, despite an earlier message implying there would be. No admirals came to shake his hand, no squadron commodore gave him a pat on the back. And Jeffrey was sure he knew why.

He’d broken too many unwritten rules — too many even for him — on that fateful mission spanning half the globe. He’d stepped on too many toes, made too many new and wellplaced political enemies in Washington, while exercising initiative that had seemed to make sense at the time: He’d won a vehement shouting match quashing a civilian expert whose advice he was supposed to respect. On his own accord he’d clandestinely violated a crucial ally’s sovereignty, leaving the seeds for what could still become a disastrous diplomatic incident. Worst, while obeying orders he knew he could have chosen to ignore, he and everyone else on Challenger had had to listen, horrified, doing nothing but flee while dozens of good men — friends and colleagues — died under Axis attack in the Med.

The real price of that ambivalent inaction under fire only began to show on the transit across the vast Pacific from Australia to Hawaii. Challenger should have steered in the opposite direction, toward Boer-controlled South Africa, to engage and eliminate front-line Axis naval units there; eager to clear their names via further mortal combat against a hated foe, the crew grew restive at being banished toward a safe rear area.

It was then that some of Jeffrey’s men began to have nightmares so bad that they’d wake up screaming, reliving the deafening battle from which Jeffrey ran. Tragic, yes, but unacceptable on a warship that needed to maintain ultraquiet. There was little that Challenger’s medical corpsman, a rotund and normally jolly chief, could do for them. Six of Jeffrey’s people were offloaded, also by minisub, at Pearl as psychiatric cases. Not one new crewman transferred on, odd in itself since rotation of U.S. Navy personnel was a common procedure — and in this situation another bad sign.

Jeffrey was working more short-handed even than that. One of his star performers, Lieutenant Kathy Milgrom of the UK’s Royal Navy, who’d served as Challenger’s sonar officer on the ship’s most vital missions, had been summarily detached. Jumped two ranks to Commander, she was now an influential advisor on the Aussie naval staff in Sydney. This was terrific for Milgrom, and Jeffrey was very glad for her, but he’d been miffed that he found out about it only when she got the orders directly and then told him; the way it was handled violated correct protocol. Now, that incident seemed like the first harbinger of Jeffrey’s abruptly downgraded status in the eyes of his superiors.

Also during his Australian leave, Jeffrey found out from his father — who’d rocketed from dull bureaucrat to a very senior position in wartime homeland resource conservation at the Department of Energy — that Jeffrey’s ex- girlfriend, edgy and self-reliant Boer freedom fighter Ilse Reebeck, was under arrest for treason, an alleged double agent for the Axis. Before deploying to the Med, Jeffrey was grilled about their relationship by the Director of the FBI in front of the President of the United States, with the director slinging rhetoric that made Jeffrey look pretty bad. The president had taken a shining to Jeffrey at the Medal of Honor presentation, followed by a private chat, earlier in the year. He had no idea where he stood with his commander in chief these days. The rumors of Ilse being held in solitary confinement, leaked to him by his dad but neither confirmed nor denied through normal channels, were another contributor to Jeffrey’s mounting sense of trouble. His tentative moves intervening on Ilse’s behalf had been curtly rebuffed, with sharp instructions for him to stay within his proper sphere — undersea warfare, not domestic counterespionage.

So Challenger was back to having an all-male crew, which should have simplified his leadership problems, but the effect on morale wasn’t positive when word got around. The men admired Milgrom’s talent, and Ilse’s as a combat oceanographer, and they believed — with the strength of sailors’ superstition — that Ilse’s being on board in the past had brought the ship good luck.

Privacy was scarce-to-nonexistent on a sub; scuttlebutt and gossip — and wild speculation, too — traveled fast. His crew, each a hand-picked volunteer who’d passed the toughest imaginable screening, were seeing the same tea leaves that Jeffrey was trying to read. They could sense what he was feeling, no matter how hard he bottled it up to do his duty as their captain and carry on as if all were routine. When he offered quick words of greeting or encouragement, as he moved around his ship that bustled like a snug beehive — with everyone as familiar to him as if they were part of his family — the words rang hollow.

Jeffrey was easy to read; deceit in face-to-face interactions simply wasn’t in him. He’d found out the expensive way, early in his Navy career, that he was awful at poker. In stark contrast, the personal anonymity from the opaqueness of the ocean — combined with getting inside an enemy sub captain’s mind through a sixth sense that Jeffrey possessed in uncanny abundance — posed the sort of contest, the winnertake-all blood sport, that he excelled at and most craved. The higher the stakes the better, at this type of game, and Jeffrey never felt so alive as when nuclear torpedo engines screamed and their warheads erupted, while he snapped helm orders to maneuver Challenger like a fighter jet under the sea.

On his latest missions the stakes had been as high as they could come, possibly shaping the outcome of the whole war. But this last time, it appeared, Jeffrey had gone too far in some ways, and not far enough in others. He suspected there were whispers in the corridors of the Pentagon that he was an uncontrollable cowboy, a loose cannon who second-guessed others too much — and when it mattered most, his jealous rivals would be saying, he’d shown a streak of cowardice. Jeffrey knew he’d done the right thing at every stage of that mind-twisting mission, but what he knew inside didn’t count. He was on his way into professional obscurity, dead-ended at the rank of commander, bound for some desk job far from the action. His own worst nightmare was coming true: He was being beached, before the war had even been won.

He listened to the steady rushing sound that came from the air-circulation vents in the overhead of his cabin. The air inside the forward parts of Challenger was always cool, to keep the electronics from overheating. Jeffrey was very used to it, but this evening for some strange reason he felt chilled into his marrow. Then he understood.

The cycle of death-defying adrenaline rushes, followed by high-level awards and attention, had for him become addictive. Jeffrey was experiencing the symptoms of withdrawal, leaving him utterly empty inside.

He looked up for a moment at the bluish glare of the fluorescent fixtures, like plant grow-lights to keep submariners healthy while deprived of any sun for weeks on end. He glanced at the grayish flame-proof linoleum squares that covered his stateroom deck, then gazed around at the fakewood wainscot veneer, and bright stainless steel, lining the four bulkheads of his tiny world. He pulled a standard-issue brown sweater out of a clothing drawer, one made of wool with vertical ribbing, putting it on over the khaki uniform blouse and slacks he always liked to wear while under way. He was still cold.

Outside his shut door, in the narrow passage, he heard crewmen hurrying about now and then, on their way to different stations to perform the myriad tasks that helped the ship run smoothly every second of every minute of every single day. There was no margin for error on a nuclear submarine. Jeffrey dearly loved this endless pressure, much as he’d grown accustomed to the constant, potentially killing squeeze of the ocean surrounding Challenger.

He sighed. Too soon another man would sit at this little fold-down desk, sleep in this austere rack, put up photos of wife and children, and assert his own personality and habits onto the crew. Challenger would have a different captain, because Jeffrey’s run of luck as captain had finally run out.

Someone knocked.

“Come in!” Jeffrey welcomed any distraction.

His executive officer entered, Lieutenant Commander Jackson Jefferson Bell. A few inches taller than Jeffrey, but less naturally muscular, Bell was happily married and had a six-month-old son to look forward to seeing again, once they arrived in the States. Cautious in his tactical thinking when Jeffrey was super-aggressive, Bell complemented Jeffrey perfectly in the control room during combat. Often he’d played devil’s advocate in engagements where split seconds mattered, when the waters thundered outside the hull and Challenger shook from stem to stern as if tossed by an angry sea monster — and Jeffrey’s crew looked to him to somehow, some way, keep them alive, while an Axis skipper did his damnedest to smash their ship to pieces and slaughter every person aboard.

Right now Bell seemed uncomfortable, as if he could tell that their prior working relationship would end soon. Comings and goings, joinings and separations, were a normal enough part of life in the Navy. This time, though, it