their enlisted people than they’d ever expect from themselves, hardly working while the enlisted people slaved away on brutal hours and insufficient food?
They must be, Ishi concluded. There was something about flying jets that simply inculcated that air of superiority into any man. Perhaps it was a natural consequence of leaving the earth, soaring in realms that man had never been designed to challenge. Flying created brutal monsters, as far as Ishi was concerned, and he had done his best thus far to stay out of the pilots’ paths.
“Yes, sir. All is ready,” Ishi answered, aware that any other answer would be followed by more questions. He didn’t know the status of Chan’s aircraft, but he was willing to bet that his fellow sailors were too terrified to let anything go untouched on it. “All is ready.”
Chan studied him for a moment, and Ishi felt a flash of fear. Surely the man could read through his subterfuge and knew that Ishi was faking it.
“Very well,” Chan said finally. “I shall hold you responsible if it is not.” Chan studied him for a long moment, as though committing his features to memory, and Ishi felt true terror. If all was not in readiness, Chan would indeed hunt him down on the ship and make him pay for the discrepancies.
Sonar Technician Second Class Renny Jacobs glanced up at the digital clock for the fourth time in as many minutes. Enticing odors were wafting around the ship from the galley, and with each fresh spurt of air from the ventilation system, his stomach complained anew. It was surf ’n turf night, and one deck down and fifty feet aft, the cooks were forking over tender fillets and fishing fresh lobster tails out of the steaming caldrons. Once it looked like everyone was fed, they’d start handing out seconds. And if his relief didn’t show up pretty damned soon, Renny was going to be shit out of luck for those as well.
And just where the hell was Otter Pencehavan? And why the hell couldn’t he ever be on time for watch relief?
It wasn’t like Renny expected Otter to skip chow — hell, no one did that. No, the routine was well established. Otter was supposed to go to early chow, show up in line the moment the chow line opened. Get his food, eat at a reasonable pace, then get his ass up to the Control Room to relieve so that the rest of them could go eat. It wasn’t like they could leave Sonar unmanned simply so all the sonarmen could go to chow at the same time.
Sure, they were just off the coast of Hawaii, and they’d just finished REFTRA, the refresher training that was the final evolution before their next deployment. It’d been four long days of drills, emergencies, simulated targets and evasions, the entire crew worn down to a thin nub by the continual clamor of the general quarters alarm. REFTRA was always more intense than an actual deployment ever was.
The skipper hadn’t said yet, but Renny knew they’d passed. Passed, and passed with flying colors. It was just something you could tell after a while, watching the inspectors. They’d been impressed, you could see it in their eyes. Sure, they’d find some little shit to gripe about — they had to, didn’t they? But it didn’t mean much. In the areas that matters, the sub’s crew had well and truly nailed the inspectors’ collective asses to the bulkhead.
Not that that mattered all that much when you were on the verge of starving to death.
He heard footsteps padding quietly down the passageway, and turned to look up at the hatch. Otter’s cheerful, beaming face appeared, followed quickly by the rest of his lanky body. A small smear of melted butter graced one corner of his mouth.
“Good chow,” Otter said cheerfully. He slid into the chair bolted to the deck next to Renny. “Primo lobster tails.”
“I wouldn’t know, asshole.” Renny started to embark on another tirade about Otter’s timeliness, then thought better of it. It’d just eat up time, and right now there was only one thing Renny wanted to eat up. “I had it, you got it,” he continued, in the traditional sailor’s shorthand turnover brief.
Otter nodded and slipped on the headphones. “Anything going on?”
Renny pointed out a couple of commercial contacts tracking their ways across his passive acoustics screen, then updated Otter on their latest positions. “Nothing out of the usual,” Renny concluded, then slipped his own headphones off in preparation for leaving. “Except one thing.”
“What?”
Renny paused for a moment, trying to sort out his thoughts. “Weird noise, like torpedo tubes opening or something. Compressed air, I guess. A mass of bubbles — you could hear them breaking up — then nothing.”
Otter shrugged. “Surface pukes venting something, probably.”
Renny nodded. “That’s what I called it. But I was expecting it to come back. You know how the commercial ships are — they get on a cycle. And it seems to correlate with that main propulsion system.” Renny traced out the acoustic signature with one finger. “Turbine, not a diesel. I couldn’t correlate it to any of the known merchant traffic.”
“Which means exactly zip,” Otter concluded. “Big boy’s off schedule, that’s all.”
“Yeah.” Renny could hear the lobster and steak calling to him. “That’s probably all it is. Some asshole navigator’s whose got no better time sense than you do.”
Lieutenant Commander James “Bam-Bam” Flint leaned back in his chair and sighed. The TAO, or tactical action officer, was a big corn-fed blond from Iowa who often found the long hours of sitting in a chair and staring at the screen, waiting for something to go wrong, almost intolerably tame. He’d spent many hours wishing for a longer cord for his headset, or a speaker, or any way that he could pass the watch standing up, pacing, some form of movement that would relieve the kinks and knots that settled into his muscles whenever he held still too long.
Today had been no exception, a relatively quiet day despite the intensive refresher training schedule. The S- 3B Viking squadron has just finished a mock torpedo run against an adversary sub played by the USS
Bam-Bam mentally ran through the remainder of the training schedule for the rest of his watch. Nothing major, nothing even very interesting. The only wild card in the deck was the SEAL team ashore in the mountains of Hawaii, conducting joint training with other service special forces. The carrier was supposed to be standing by to provide support services for the team, but from what he’d seen so far, the SEALs preferred to stay down and dirty on the ground with their own gear.
As the last of the S-3B Vikings pounded down the flight deck, Admiral Everette “Batman” Wayne leaned back in his chair and sighed. Bam-Bam, a Hornet pilot, turned around with a questioning look on his face. “Sir?”
Batman waved one hand idly in the air. “Nothing. Just thinking.” He levered himself up from the chair and stretched. “They’ve done a good job so far. I’ll be in the Flag Mess. Call me if anything interesting happens.”
“Will do, Admiral.” Bam-Bam turned back to the screen. The last S-3B was now showing up as a friendly air symbol on the large blue screen that dominated the port bulkhead.
“What does he mean by interesting?” the watch officer sitting to Bam-Bam’s right asked.
“It depends on who the admiral is,” the pilot answered. “For some of them, they mean anything that hasn’t been choreographed down to the last second of flight cycle time. Micromanagers, you know.”
“Like on the
“Exactly. But with Admiral Wayne, it’s a little different. He figures if you’ve passed your TAO test and oral board, you ought to have enough sense to figure it out. It depends on where you are, what’s going on in the world, whether we’re in the middle of a potentially explosive situation or whether we’re cruising off the coast of Hawaii during REFTRA.”
“So how do you know when to call him?” the watch officer asked. “Some of it’s an easy call, I guess. You lose an aircraft, have a collision at sea, someone starts shooting at you — that I’d be able to figure out. But how do you decide about the rest of it?”
Movement on the screen caught Bam-Bam’s attention, and he leaned forward in his chair, suddenly not particularly interested in carrying on a theoretical watchstanding discussion with the junior officer. Adrenaline trickled through his muscles, sweeping away some of the discomfort.
