U.S.S. Seawolf

shores.

Judd was a rock-steady naval commander: experienced, cool under pressure, and self-trained in the art of avoiding panic in any of its forms. He was popular with his crew of 100-plus because his reputation and record demanded respect, and because his presence, a mixture of imperturbable confidence, professional approach, and great experience, all leavened with a quiet sense of humor, inspired total trust.

He knew as much as any of his expert crew, and often more. But he still took care to show that he valued their work and opinions. He would mildly set them straight only when strictly necessary — often with an apparently simple and innocuous question that would cause his adviser to think again, and work it out for himself. He was anyone’s idea of the perfect commanding officer.

Judd had high qualifications in hydrodynamics, electronics, propulsion, and nuclear physics. His appointment to command Seawolf had come directly from the top, from Admiral Joe Mulligan, the Chief of Naval Operations, in person, himself a former nuclear submarine commander.

The reasons behind Linus Clarke’s recent appointment as Captain Crocker’s executive officer were less apparent. The lieutenant commander was only 34, and he was known to have served for several months with the CIA at Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. No one ever asked anyone precisely what he had been doing there. But serving naval officers with Intelligence backgrounds were rarely appointed second-in-command on big nuclear attack submarines.

Linus wore his mild celebrity with relish. He was a tall, slim Oklahoman with dead-straight floppy reddish hair. And he wore it rather longer than is customary among the disciplined officer corps of the U.S. Navy. But his rise had apparently been consistent, and he had graduated from Annapolis in the top quarter of his class. But no one was interested then, and he managed to disappear very successfully for a few years before emerging from the portals of the CIA with a rather mysterious reputation.

There was a total of 14 officers in the wardroom of USS Seawolf, and while it was obvious that each of them knew something about Lt. Commander Clarke, no one quite knew everything. Except for Captain Crocker. And, like the rest of them, he avoided the subject. Among the enlisted men there was a certain amount of chatter, principally emanating from a seaman in the ship’s laundry who claimed that the name on the XO’s dog tags was not Linus Clarke. But he could not remember what the name was, and he was thus only half- believed. Nonetheless, there was chatter.

Linus himself was naturally rather secretive, and he added to this by adopting a measure of irony to his conversation, a thin, knowing smile decorating his wide, freckled face. He also adopted the slightly self-serving attitude of one who is a bit too daring and adventurous to spend a long time in the company of the hard, realistic men who handle the frontline muscle of the U.S. Navy. He undoubtedly saw himself as Hornblower, as opposed to Rickover.

A typical Clarke entrance to the wardroom would be, “Okay men, has there been any truly serious screwup you need me to sort out?” He always grinned when he said it, but most people thought he meant it anyway.

One week after his appointment to Seawolf, still moored in San Diego, there had been a small cocktail party ashore. After three quite strenuous glasses of bourbon on the rocks, Lt. Commander Clarke had ventured up to his new captain and confided, “Sir, do you actually know why I have been detailed to your ship?”

“No, can’t say I do,” replied Judd.

“Well, sir, we’re going on a highly classified mission, and as you know, I’ve been on similar missions before. Basically, I’m here to make sure you don’t screw it up. You know, for lack of experience.”

Captain Judd Crocker gazed at him steadily, concealing his total disbelief that any jumped-up two-and-a-half, even this one, would dare to speak to him in such a way. But he rose above it, smiled sardonically, and declined to say what he really thought—Oh, really? Well, I’m deeply comforted to have such a rare presence on board.

At that moment, Linus Clarke made a mental note to be extra careful in all of his dealings with the commanding officer in the future. To himself, he thought, This is one cool dude…I thought my little speech might throw him a little…but it sure didn’t.

He was correct there. Judd Crocker had been around ranking admirals all of his life, men of enormous intelligence. He had sailed the East Coast with the heavyweight financiers of the New York Yacht Club, crewing on the annual summer cruise up the New England coast, and sometimes navigating all the way up to the glorious archipelago of the Maine islands. Since he was a boy, and even when he was a midshipman, he’d sat in some of the most expensive staterooms in some of the biggest oceangoing yachts in the United States, and listened to conversations of great moment. It would take rather more than an insolent, smartass remark by a slightly drunk lieutenant commander to unnerve him. But he assumed, too, that young Clarke had also had his share of company with the great and the mighty.

Nonetheless, they did not form what the Navy traditionally hopes will become a natural trusting partnership in command of a ship that had cost something close to the national debt.

Beyond the Silent Service, Judd Crocker was married to the former Nicole Vanderwolk, 10 years his junior and the daughter of the redoubtable Harrison Vanderwolk, a big-hitting Florida-based financier with major holdings in three states. Like the Crockers, the Vanderwolks had a waterfront summer house on toney Sea View Avenue in Osterville, a couple of doors down from the former residence of the U.S. Army’s youngest-ever general, “Jumping” Jim Gavin of the 82nd Airborne, legend of the Normandy landings.

The Vanderwolks, the Gavins, and the Crockers were lifelong friends, and when Judd married Nicole it was cause for a mass celebration in a yellow-and-white-striped tent, the size of the Pentagon on the sunlit shores of Nantucket Sound.

Unhappily, they were unable to have children, and in 1997, shortly after Judd was appointed to Seawolf, they adopted two little Vietnamese girls, ages three and four, renaming them Jane and Kate. By the turn of the century they were all ensconced in another waterfront property out on Point Loma in San Diego, both sets of parents having clubbed together to buy the $2 million home as an investment while Judd was stationed on the West Coast under the command of the Submarine Force U.S. Pacific Fleet (SUBPAC). The deal was simple: When it was time to sell, the admiral and Harrison would receive $1.1 million each. Judd and Nicole would keep the change. The way things were going in the California real estate market, Judd and Nicole were winning, hands down.

The private life of Linus Clarke was rather more obscure. He was unmarried, but there were rumors of a serious girlfriend back at his family home in Oklahoma, a place to which Linus retreated at every available opportunity. He made the journey by commercial jet to Amarillo, Texas, and then used the small Beechcraft single- engine private plane owned by his father for the last northerly leg of the journey.

And once on the family cattle ranch, deep in the Oklahoma panhandle, Linus, as usual, disappeared. Given his family connections, it was not much short of a miracle that no word ever appeared about him, even in local newspapers. But perhaps even more unlikely was that he had always avoided the media during his tenure in Washington and at the Navy base in Norfolk, Virginia.

Judd Crocker thought it a major achievement by the young lieutenant commander, but of course, on a far grander scale the English royal family had been doing it for most of the century, effectively “hiding” sons Prince Charles and Prince Andrew for years while they served in the Royal Navy. It had been the same with King George V, of course, and Prince Philip. Indeed, Prince Andrew hardly had his photograph taken when he flew his helicopter off the deck of HMS Invincible during the Falklands War. It was the same with Linus Clarke. And he seemed determined to keep it that way.

And so the aura of mystique clung to him. On the lower decks the men knew who he was, and that he had CIA connections. But the subject was not aired publicly. In the wardroom he was watched carefully. It was an unspoken fact that no one wanted him to make a mistake.

“I guess,” remarked Lt. Commander Cy Rothstein, the combat systems officer, “we always have to remember just who he is.”

“That’s probably the one thing we ought to forget,” replied the captain. “And we better hope he can, too. Clarke has a major job on this ship, whoever the hell he is.”

Right now, as Seawolf cruised through the pitch-black depths of the Pacific, still making 20 knots, Judd Crocker was preparing to go deeper, down to almost 1,000 feet, for the torpedo tube trials, another searching examination of the submarine’s fitness for frontline duty.