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Colonel Nguyen ordered everything useful taken off the still-attached mini-submersible, then set it to dive to the bottom and stay there on bare maintenance power. They marked its position for possible recovery. Now the hijacked Nebraska was clean and silent once again.
Two days later they surfaced eighty miles off of Fiji, in a place where wind and current would carry the lifeboats to the island. The sullen crew loaded the rubber rafts with plenty of food and water, then got in.
Major Muzik addressed them in a cheerful booming voice from the bridge at the top of the sail. “Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure hijacking your boat. Remember that you are all now Eden Plague carriers; I suggest you seek asylum when you make landfall if you don’t want to wait for your Unionist masters to send you to one of those concentration camps they claim don’t exist.” Followed by a few salty epithets, he gave a friendly wave, then climbed down the ladder and dogged the hatch shut before descending to the control room.
A day later he found Bitzer sleeping in the helmsman’s seat. Colored screens with readouts comprehensible only to a submariner covered the bulkhead in front of him. Muzik hoped there was an autopilot. “What’s our status, Chief?” he asked, loud enough to wake Bitzer up.
Bitzer didn’t open his eyes. “On course and doin’ fifteen knots quiet. This boat’s a beauty.”
“How do you know if you aren’t looking at the gauges?”
“Completely by feel, sor. It’s in me blood.”
Muzik sighed as he backed up toward the door. “Why do I even ask? And what the hell am I doing on a submarine anyway?” he muttered to himself.
“Keeping me awake, sor,” answered Bitzer, still without opening his eyes.
“Maa-aa-aa,” Muzik bleated, sheep-like.
Bitzer finally opened one eye and raised half a smile. “Glad to see you’re a fan, sor. Now would you mind, I’m meditating on the mandalas tattooed in me eyelids.”
“Sometimes I miss the good old days.”
“You mean the days of snap and pop and knuckle-me-head for officers?”
“No. Flogging.”
Bonnagh put his feet up on the console and laced his fingers behind his head, laughing. “Ah, yes, one of the three great traditions of the Royal Navy.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. Which are?”
“Rum, sodomy and the lash, me good major. Rum, sodomy and the lash.”
Muzik choked off a laugh and moved on to the mess, the team’s gathering place. The others there glanced at him as he kept chuckling to himself.
Everyone had breathed a sigh of relief after the crew was offloaded. Harres was up and around and running the power plant just fine now, though his shaved skull looked lumpy from the back. Kelley’s voice was a bit slurred from the loss of several upper teeth but otherwise he healed well; everything would grow back eventually. The boat ran smoothly for the next two days, a quiet routine of regular meals and careful work on cracking the Trident missiles and their codes.
On the fifth day after taking the Nebraska, Alkina glided coldly into the mess, squaring off with Colonel Nguyen and Major Muzik. Gunnery Sergeant Repeth was away standing watch with Bonnagh in the control room; the three enlisted technicians were working on the warheads. In a flat voice, almost conversational, she said, “Colonel, I demand to know what’s going on. This boat is off course.”
Disdaining her putative rank, Nguyen replied, “Miss Alkina, this boat is going exactly where I want it to go.”
“It is supposed to be heading for a rendezvous with the Free Australian Navy, who will escort it into our sub base at Garden Island.”
Colonel Nguyen sat back in his chair, crossing his arms. “If we were, we’d all be dead by now. Half the Pacific Fleet is between us and Australia looking for us.”
Alkina’s upper lip twitched below her dead black eyes. “Colonel, I am getting tired of being cut out of the loop. Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on?”
Nguyen stood up, placing his hands flat on the table in front of him, leaning toward her. “What’s going on is as follows. There are leaks in the FC council. This operation was approved by the council. Several people outside the council also know about it, some of them in the Australian Government. Also, the UG Navy isn’t stupid. They just lost one of their ballistic missile subs, and they are going hell-for-leather looking for it here in the Pacific. They can track the movements of your navy on their overhead assets. So anywhere your navy seems to be going, anywhere they look like they are trying to escort us in, they will be a target and we will be highlighted. Don’t think they won’t use a nuke on us and anyone near us, just to make a statement.”
Spooky leaned back, beginning to pace. “You should have known this could start a hot war. I imagine everyone is weapons-free up there and people might be dying in naval combat. And we have three, count them, three men aboard who know anything about running a submarine, in a vessel that normally takes one hundred and fifty. We can’t fight this boat. Our only chance is to get lost. To go somewhere where we won’t be found. And when it comes time to launch, we have to expect an immediate nuclear strike on our position, so every minute, every second we have will be precious.”
Alkina’s clasped hands tightened behind her back, the only telltale of her emotion. “Launch. Launch what, to where? I thought the main point of taking this boat was to get missile and weapons technology, to help the anti-satellite program. To put our own satellites up. To gain a nuclear deterrent, if we could somehow make it credible by getting around the virtue effect.”
“You’re trying to tell me Australia couldn’t have assembled nuclear weapons by now? And in any case you Aussies have already gotten around the virtue effect, haven’t you?”
Allkina’s eyes glittered, and her face went still. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“How else do you explain Samoa?”
“That was an accident. Somehow our fleet automated integrated missile system was activated and took action on its own.”
“That’s the party line. It sure looked like a well-executed ambush to me. The UG lost almost an entire carrier strike group. Twenty thousand sailors and nineteen ships. You lost two. Whatever it was, it convinced them that the Australian navy was a dangerous opponent.”
“It also convinced them to obliterate several Australian military bases.”
“Yes, but that’s what prompted the Neutral States to extend their nuclear deterrent umbrella to the Free Communities. That was an enormous political victory for the Chairman and the FC.”
“Colonel, I don’t want to depend on the good graces of others to protect me and my country, or the rest of the FC. Or on getting lucky.”
“I’m counting on that. That’s why we are fleeing south, as far as we can get, into the Ross Sea just off Antarctica. That’s why our technicians are working on those missiles. And that’s why you are going to help me launch them.”
