1

2000 GMT
SEAWOLF
MID-PACIFIC

The movie tonight was Contact, with Jodie Foster.

Dillon unusually took the second hour of the first watch of every other cycle for his turn on the stationary bike in the torpedo room. Captain’s privilege. A TV monitor was bracketed to a niche in the bulkhead and the nightly movie started at this hour. Contact was one of his favorite films, in part because Jodie Foster could have been Jill’s twin sister.

She was sitting on the hood of her car, earphones over her head, her eyes closed as she listened to sounds from space.

The lack of sunlight and exercise were the twin enemies of submariners. Especially since the advent of nuclear power, which made extended underwater cruises possible. They could make freshwater and oxygen from seawater, but for sunlight they had to rely on UV lamps and vitamin D. Since there was nothing else to do aboard a sub except work, sleep, and eat, weight was always a problem. Stashed here and there in the odd corner throughout the boat were exercise machines: the bike in the torpedo room, a treadmill (which Dillon hated) just aft of the baffle behind the sonar dome, and several chin-up bars in engineering, in the crew’s mess and in the doorway to the goat locker, which was chiefs’ territory.

Dillon did an hour on the bike every other watch, and on the off watches did one thousand sit-ups in his stateroom.

A low-pitched rhythmic noise suddenly started. One pulse. Then two. Then three. Jodie Foster opened her eyes and sat up. She was trying to believe that she was actually hearing the signal she’d been working all of her career as a radio astronomer to hear.

A signal from an intelligent race on another planet.

Dillon loved this part. That precise moment of discovery that took your breath away; when anything and everything was possible. In school he’d been faced with two paths in nuclear physics: pure science or engineering. He’d made his choice, one that he’d never regretted. But he still looked at scientists with a kind of reverence. It was like being a lapsed Catholic who still nodded and mumbled “Hello, Father,” when a priest walked by.

Someone rapped on the side of a CO₂ tank with his knuckles. Dillon looked over his shoulder. It was Master Chief Petty Officer Arthur “Mr. T” Young.

Young was the senior enlisted man aboard the Seawolf, and therefore was often called upon to be a buffer between the crew and the officers. He was almost always chief of boat starting out on patrol and coming back in. He was also COB whenever they found themselves in a tough situation.

If anyone could be said to uphold navy tradition, it was him. Except that he and the chief engineer Lt. Mario Battaglia were best of friends ashore. The navy usually frowned on fraternization between enlisted men and officers, but no one ever dreamed of breaking up this pair. Without them Seawolf would stop functioning as a tightly-run warship. Dillon and his XO gave the direction, but it was duos like Battaglia and Young who provided the glue that held everything together.

“Have you got a minute, Cap’n?” Young asked. He should have been nicknamed Popeye, because he looked like the cartoon character. Short, bowlegged, with thick ham hocks for arms. He and Battaglia, who was a stocky Italian from the Bronx, could have been brothers. But Mr. T. stuck because no one except for the captain knew what the middle initial stood for, and Dillon had promised never to tell a soul.

“Sure thing, Master Chief,” Dillon said. He reached over and turned the TV monitor’s sound down as Jodie Foster drove at breakneck speed along the desert track beneath the mammoth radio telescopes.

Young came the rest of the way into the cramped corner of the torpedo room and rested a shoulder on a cable-covered bulkhead. He looked worried, which was a switch because he was usually an easygoing man. It was the crew who came to him with their troubles.

“I’ve got a bit of a problem, skipper. I surely don’t know what to do about it, or if there’s anything I can do.”

“Somebody find out your real name?”

“No, sir, it’s not that. It’s back ashore.”

Dillon frowned. Personal problems were his problems because of the effects they could have on the operation of his boat. “Okay, what’s the deal?”

Young looked down at his shoes for an uncharacteristic moment or two. When he looked up he seemed sheepish yet determined. “You know my wife, Suze.”

“Of course.” A couple of times each year Dillon’s wife Jill hosted a tea for the ladies of the Seawolf. And after each patrol Dillon and his officers and their wives staged a blowout picnic for the entire crew and their wives and sweethearts and kids. Suzanne Young was as well liked among the other enlisted men’s wives as Young was with his boys.

“We’ve been married for twenty-four years, Cap’n. There isn’t a thing I wouldn’t do for her; climb mountains, walk through fire. Hell, I’d give my life if I thought it would make her happy. But it’s not enough.”

“I’m all ears, Art, but you’re not making sense,” Dillon prompted.

“There’s another woman,” Master Chief Young blurted, and before Dillon could react, he shook his head. “But it’s not what you’re thinking. She’s not some bar girl I picked up somewhere. You know, a one-night stand.” He looked away again for a moment. “Her name is Beth Anne Hoding. She’s from Newport, originally, but she’s living in Honolulu now. She moves to whatever base I’m assigned to. And it’s been like that for eighteen years.”

Dillon stopped pedaling. For a moment he was struck dumb. He’d intervened in a domestic squabble from time to time, or dealt with a Dear John letter—once even a Dear John letter so cleverly disguised in a familygram that whoever vetted it in Pearl had missed the significance. But he’d never had to deal with anything like this.

“Have you told Mario about this?”

Young shook his head. “No one on earth knows about it except for you, Cap’n.”

“Well, you say that it’s been going on for eighteen years. What’s the problem all of a sudden?” Dillon asked. His question sounded callous to his own ears, but, damnit, what Young had been doing to his wife and to himself and therefore to the boat was wrong.

“Beth Anne has cancer. She’s dying. And she has nobody except me.”

Jodie Foster was racing through the corridors, and pushing through doors in the main control building, all the while giving frantic instructions via her cell phone.

Dillon shook his head. “I’m sorry, Art. Why didn’t you request emergency leave?”

“I wouldn’t have gotten it if I’d had the guts to ask, sir. Beth isn’t a relative. And I didn’t know that she was sick until a couple of hours ago. She stuck a letter in my seabag, and I just got to it.” Young’s wide, dark eyes were moist. “She told me not to worry.” He laughed. “Now that’s a crock. I didn’t know what to do, skipper. You’re the only person I could turn to.”

“Is she seeing a doctor?”

“At Pearl General’s oncology center.”

It was the same place that the navy doctors had sent Jill. Cancer sometimes made strange bedfellows. It was even possible that they’d seen each other, spoken.

“We can’t turn the boat around, Art.”

“I wouldn’t want that, sir. I just wanted to share this with somebody. With you, because your wife is sick too. Beth Anne wrote that she saw her at the hospital.”

No one else on the crew knew that Jill was sick, not even Charlie Bateman. COs were supposed to be invulnerable; somehow above the problems the rest of the crew might have. The chief’s problem was doubly his now.

“I suggest that you figure out how you want to handle this, chief,” Dillon said. “When you get that worked out, then come to me and we’ll figure out how to get it done when we get home.”

Young nodded his appreciation. “Will do, Cap’n,” he said. “And thanks.”

“Think the whole thing out, Master Chief,” Dillon cautioned sternly, “That includes what you’re going to tell your wife.”

“Skipper, conn.” It was Bateman.

Young nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said, and he left.

Dillon answered the call. “This is the captain.”

“When you get a chance, skipper, Marc and Ski would like to run something by you.”

Dillon glanced at the television monitor. Jodie Foster was just realizing that the alien signal consisted of prime numbers.

“I’ll be right there.”

 

Dillon splashed some cold water on his face in his stateroom, got a cup of coffee from the officers’ wardroom and went up to the control room.

His XO was hunched over one of the chart tables with Lt. Jablonski and Chief Sonarman Zimenski. They had a very small-scale western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean chart spread out. Superimposed was a clear plastic overlay, which showed the ocean bottom details: the sea mounts, ridges, abyssal plains, canyons, and littoral regions around the land masses.

Jablonski and Zimenski had worked out a series of plots on the overlay with a thin-line grease pencil, parallel rules, and dividers. All of the work could have been done on computer-generated charts, but tradition dies hard in the U.S. navy. Most sailors preferred using paper charts at least in the initial chalk-talk phase of a proposed operation.

“What’s up?” Dillon asked, joining them. He’d decided to grab the Contact DVD later tonight and replay it in his stateroom. Captain’s privilege.

Bateman looked up. “Marc and Ski came up with an idea for our mission station approach that looks good to me. Could give us a big advantage going in, especially if they suspect we’re on our way.”

Dillon put his coffee aside. “Okay, what do you have?”

“I got to thinking about what happens when we show up in the Indian Ocean, Cap’n,” Zimenski said. “If it’s a Kilo we’re looking for, she’s bound to be real quiet. Especially if they know we’re coming for them like Mr. Bateman says. And especially if they have an idea when we’re going to get there. So I took a look at the new thermocline predictions we loaded at Pearl just before we sailed.”

Zimenski replaced the very small-scale chart with a slightly larger one, that showed only the Indian Ocean east to the Malaysian peninsula and south to the Andaman Islands. He placed a matching overlay showing the bottom features, and a second clear overlay showing ocean currents and thermoclines.

“Once we cross the Andaman Basin and get into the Bay of Bengal we’ll have a straight shot to where we think the Kilo should be waiting. About five hundred miles with nothing blocking our sound lines.”

Dillon knew exactly what his chief sonarman had come up with, but he just nodded.

“If they’re waiting for us it’ll be beneath the thermocline where they think they’re all but invisible to sonar. Pearl predicts the line will be between eleven hundred seventy feet and twelve-fifty. If we make our initial approach beneath this level, and then stick our bow just into the duct boundary, we should be able to hear them as far as six hundred miles out.”

Zimenski looked up. “It’s a deep sound channel. The Kilo would be in it, looking toward the east. But there’s a secondary thermocline about one hundred feet beneath the main line. That’s where we’ll come in. Minimum sound resistance. Like a megaphone.”

“They wouldn’t suspect us to be within range so soon,” Bateman said. “They might not be so careful with their noise management.”

“It would give us the chance to load and roughly preset a pair of torpedoes without anyone being aware of it,” Jablonski suggested.

Dillon tried to find fault with their plan, but he could not. He looked up and grinned. “Okay, gentlemen, good plan. Let’s do it.”

Jablonski was happy, but Zimenski was flying high. He’d just pulled another Jonesy.

“Might just give us the advantage,” Dillon said. “Payback time for the crew of the Eagle Flyer.”

“All right,” Bateman said, grinning.