The younger man looked west and north across San Francisco Bay to where the outline of the Bay Bridge was emerging out of the mist, which roiled, slowly thinning across the icy water. He could never remember a time when standing on the casing of a submarine in these waters had not been anything other than a bone-chillingly frigid experience. He strained to focus on the distant misty San Francisco waterfront but his eyes failed him, for the moment too unused to long focus after the weeks at sea.
The older man suddenly spied something that displeased the eye of the senior non-commissioned officer on the boat.
“With you permission, sir,” he growled. “I have some ‘Chiefing’ to do!”
“Carry on, Boats.” The USS Theodore Roosevelt’s Torpedo Officer grudged a guarded smirk as the other man stalked off to the gangway across the two SSBNs and yelled at the two Marines guarding the companionway up to the deck of the USS Hunley. He had no idea what either of the Marines had done to upset Master Chief Petty Officer Erickson; but any notion that they did not fully deserve the noisy dressing down they were presently receiving never troubled his conscious mind. With a sigh he realised he had wool-gathered too long. The only reason he was topside was to pay a courtesy call to the torpedo workshop on the USS Hunley. Two of his Mark 37 torpedoes would fall due for a two year workshop maintenance overhaul before the Gold crew got back to Alameda. Ideally, he wanted them both rotated out of service and replaced with ‘unexpired fish’ before he handed over to his Gold crew doppelganger.
Walter Brenckmann wondered if the ‘peace dividend’ cuts had bitten any deeper while the boat had been on patrol. Considered in the round the Submarine Service had got off relatively lightly while most of the surface fleet was steaming into mothballs under the Draconian cutbacks. However, the Submarine Service had not escaped the axe completely. New construction was on hold, completed boats were being towed to Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facilities, recruitment and training was being slashed, and sooner or later the Gold and Blue alternative crewing system would be substantially modified or abolished to reduce manpower requirements.
The SSBN fleet was the victim of its own success. Who exactly was it deterring these days? If the politicians were to be believed the October War had ended in a crushing total victory over the Soviets. If so, what was the point of the USS Theodore Roosevelt and her sisters prowling the oceans awaiting a call that was never likely to come again in his or anybody else’s lifetimes?
Walter Brenckmann’s Gold crew opposite number was two or three years his senior, a married man with a prematurely receding hairline. He was already in the Hunley’s cavernous torpedo shop when he arrived.
The men saluted casually and shook hands, swapping wan smiles.
“Good trip?” Inquired Lieutenant Thomas Lovell Clark II with an amiable southern drawl.
“A quiet trip, Tom,” Walter replied. “How have things been back on land?”
The other man shook his head and sighed.
“The President wants to put an American on the Moon by the end of the decade!” He chuckled glumly.
“Why?” Walter asked, frowning his bewilderment. He half-suspected Tom Clark was pulling his leg.
“Beats me, Walt,” confessed the other officer. “I take it you’re here about the two Mark 37s on the maintenance list?”
“I was going to request replacements ahead of the handover.”
“I’ve checked the maintenance logs on both fish,” Tom Clark shrugged. “Unless you’ve logged something new in the last eleven weeks we’ll probably keep them onboard. I’ve already flagged the issue with the Skipper. The Skipper wants a quick clean handover.”
Walter Brenckmann was not about to tell his colleague his job; even if he personally would have been uncomfortable with the idea of sailing without a full inventory of operational fish with unexpired service and certified component tags. But if Tom Clark was happy sailing with two potentially unreliable fish that was his headache. Given that no US Navy SSBN had ever fired a fish in anger it was somewhat academic; a simple matter of professional pride more than anything else.
“Things were so quiet I took time out to work on my sonar badges,” he remarked, apparently idly. He had made a lot less small talk before the war; his moderate tendency towards a less reserved loquacity was one of the small changes in him in recent months. He liked to think he was still the wholly self-contained, dead-eyed professional he had been before the war but in his heart of hearts he knew he was not. While he was in no way ashamed of his part in the cataclysm, after all, he had only been doing his duty that night in late October last year, no sane man could remain untouched, unchanged after that night and he was no longer the island that he had once believed himself to be. He liked to think he was a better man than he had been before; a man more in contact with his fellows for if he was not, who then could understand what it had been like for the Torpedo Officer and Assistant Missile Officer of a Polaris submarine flushing its birds on…
Actually, he had no idea whatsoever where the Theodore Roosevelt’s birds had flown that night, nor in all truth, did he ever want to know.
“It’s very quiet out there now,” he said thoughtfully. “Real quiet. It’s kind of eerie. There’s hardly any commercial traffic. I heard real whale song for the first time. That was really weird. We had a pod of whales following the boat for nearly forty-eight hours one time. The boat was ringing with their songs. It was the damnedest thing, Tom.”
The two men eyed one another.
The Polaris boats avoided normal shipping routes, searched out secret, hidden places in the emptiest parts of the oceans and yet until the October War there had been nowhere truly quiet, the distant rumble and roar of engines had always drowned out many of the natural ancient sounds of the seas.
“I think I’d like to hear that,” Tom Clark smiled. “Whale song, I mean.”
Chapter 5
Major General Colin Powell Dempsey, the commanding officer of the Washington Combined Army and Air Force National Guard, and the State’s Emergency Disaster Management and Civil Defence Commissioner, answerable only to the Governor of Washington State tried not to groan out aloud.
I am definitely getting too old for this shit!
Every now and then a speculative or random rifle bullet pinged off the armour of the M48 Patton main battle tank parked just inside the tree line offering shelter — along with the other three forty-five ton armoured sentinels of the 3037th Heavy Cavalry Troop — for the 303rd Cavalry’s forward command post and Company Mobile Field Army Surgical Clearing Station.
The old soldier held up the handset attached by a dangling cable to the field radio pack on the communications trooper’s back so that the man on the other end of the connection could hear what was going on for himself. He was confident that the distant, regular crackling thunder of the 90-millimetre guns of 3035th and the 3039th Heavy Cavalry Troops would convey the gravity of the current tactical situation to the Governor of Washington, Albert Dean Rosellini more eloquently than words alone.
He clamped the handset back to his head.
“It sounds like you’ve got a full scale war going on up there, Colin!”
The sixty-one year old twice retired career soldier allowed himself a wan smile. He liked and respected the Tacoma born younger man who, like him, had had the misfortune to be in a position of high authority in the American North West when the World went mad thirteen months ago. Since then both men had done their best to mitigate the worst exigencies of the catastrophe, and until now they had hoped against hope that they could somehow maintain at least the veneer of civilization by defending the rule of law across most of the State without resorting to outright war.