“Are we finally going to find out what the hell is going on this patrol?”
Kincaid shrugged. “I already told you the plan. We’re going to go to sea, we’re going to screw around for three, four, five or six months, and then were going to come back. In a year, we’ll do it again.”
Jabo laughed. “Maybe you’re right.” Kincaid worked hard to always be the least impressed person about any event of shipboard life, whether it was a fire in the engine room or the new ice cream maker in the Crew’s Mess.
“Let me ask you something, Hayes. Was life on submarines really that much more exciting twelve years ago? Is it that much more boring now?”
“Let me tell you a secret,” he said leaning in and whispering. “Life on submarines has always been boring.”
“Fuck you, I don’t believe it,” said Jabo, laughing. “I’ve heard the stories. Plus, why would you stay in all this time?”
“I like the food.”
They stepped out of their stateroom and walked down the short ladder that took them to the wardroom.
The Captain was at his traditional spot, at the head of the table, while the XO sat literally at his right hand. The navigator, small and exhausted looking as always, was standing up in front with a tripod that held a chart, a chart hidden by a standard issue navy bed sheet. That was unusual — everyone in the wardroom had at least a top secret clearance, and Jabo felt again that maybe Kincaid was wrong about their patrol being boring. Jabo also sensed some tension in the silent room.
They were all three in their khakis, and Jabo felt a little underdressed in his poopie. Soon the other junior officers in poopie suits piled in, though, all of them just as eager as he had been to get comfortable. The noise level rose. They waited for Hein to arrive, who was being relieved on the conn by the engineer himself, at the XO’s insistence…whatever was going on they wanted Hein to hear firsthand. Hein finally arrived, looking slightly befuddled, and sat next to Jabo without saying a word.
The XO convened the meeting. “Everybody shut the fuck up.” They all quickly complied. The XO’s muscular arms bulged inside his khaki sleeves, and his bald head gleamed in the fluorescent lights. MS1 Straub, the head cook, stuck his head in from the galley door, doing his job and seeing if anything was needed. The XO nodded at him, and he got the message, retreating. The XO locked the door behind him when it shut — another unusual precaution.
“Before we get started,” said the Captain. “I’m tempted to ask what the craziest rumor each of you has heard. About our patrol orders, not about girl babies.” There was nervous laughter around the table. “Whatever you’ve heard,” said the captain, “I can assure you it’s complete bullshit. The XO and I were briefed the morning of our departure by the Admiral, and the navigator found out shortly after.” Jabo looked at the nav, whose face was impassive, haunted, exhausted.
“So here’s what we’re really going to do,” said the captain. “We’re taking this ship to Taiwan.”
There was some muttering around the table, and Jabo watched for just a moment as even Kincaid was unable to hide his surprise, before he slipped back into his mask of practiced nonchalance. But it was truly remarkable news. Because of the nature of their normal mission, they almost never went anywhere exciting. Unlike their brothers on attack submarines who deployed all over the globe with battle groups, Trident Submarines generally followed a fairly predictable schedule of leaving Bangor, Washington, going to sea for a few hundred days, and returning. If they were lucky, every other patrol or so, they might pull into Pearl Harbor. Once, on Jabo’s first patrol, they had to surface off of Kodiak Island, Alaska, to medevac a shipmate who’d suffered a heart attack. But foreign ports were just never part of the deal — their deployment schedule didn’t allow for it and most foreign nations were hesitant to allow twenty-four nuclear missiles into one of their harbors, with all the protests and controversy it would inevitably cause.
“The United States has a fundamental commitment to the nation of Taiwan,” said the Captain. “The nature of which, frankly, is too complicated to explain here. But, in short, we will surface two weeks from now one hundred nautical miles east of the island, we will pull into the Taiwanese navy base at Suao, and then we are going to remove sixteen warheads from one of our missiles, and give the government of Taiwan temporary custody of them. It’s all top secret, beyond top secret, until we pull into the harbor, and then the news media of the world will be invited to take pictures. You’ll probably all end up on the Nightly News.”
“Isn’t that a violation of the non-proliferation treaty?” said Hein. Hein had gone to MIT and was one of the smartest guys that Jabo had ever met. It didn’t surprise him that he would throw out a question like that.
“That’s a good question Jay. I asked the same thing of the admiral. The official line is that we’re not proliferating because we’re not giving them the warheads — we’re allowing them to store them on our behalf. Or something like that. But your intuition is sound — I have no doubt that this will stir up a shitload of controversy, at home and abroad, and will antagonize the Chinese beyond belief. But I believe, as everyone at this table should, that our national leadership has thought this through completely and that they’ve decided the benefits are worth the risks.”
“What do we tell the crew?” asked Kincaid.
“Nothing,” snapped the XO. “No one knows where we are going or why. We’ll tell them the day before we pull in that we are going to Taiwan, but not why. This is all ‘need to know,’ and you guys need to know, since you’re going to be looking at the chart every night and making sure we’re headed in the right direction. You, you, and you,” he said, pointing in turn at Kincaid, Jabo, and Jay Hein, “will be straight up three-section OOD starting with the next hour. Get to know and love those charts. Outside this room, only quartermasters and a handful of Nav ETs will know. And I guess we’ll have to tell the engineer sooner or later.” Everyone chuckled.
“You, you, and you,” said the XO, pointing to Morgan, Morrissey, and Retzner, “are our three-section EOOWs.” They all happened to be sitting next to each other on one side of the table, all friends and roommates on their second patrol. They nodded in unison. “And you,” he said, pointing to Duggan, “Your job is to qualify EOOW, get on the watchbill, and make life a little easier for your six shipmates here.”
“Aye, aye sir,” said Duggan. Jabo heard the urgent sincerity in his voice. It was a shitty feeling to be the only one in the room without a real role to play.
The XO continued. “All of you can regard any information about our mission just like targeting information— no one else needs to know.”
“The rumor mill is already running like crazy…” said Hein.
“Then let it run. I frankly don’t give a shit,” said the XO. “This is a vitally important, vitally secret mission, one that will have historic consequences. I am honored that they’ve chosen us to carry this out, and woe to the sailor or officer who fucks it up. Understood?”
Everyone nodded. The XO had made it clear that the question and answer period was over.
“Ok,” he said, waving a hand toward the nav. “Let’s get on with it. The navigator, as we mentioned, just found all this out. After spending the better part of the last week getting our charts in order for a patrol of the northern pacific, he’s got to revise everything. But show them what you’ve got.”
The Navigator pulled down the sheet to reveal a small-scale chart of the entire Pacific Ocean. On it, he’d penciled in a great-circle route all the way to Taiwan. While it looked curved on the flat chart, the course was actually a straight-line across the curved surface of the earth. A large red dot, on the far right hand side of the chart was labeled PA: Papa Alpha. The track connected it to a point on the other side of the Pacific: PZ, Papa Zulu. Point A to Point Z. “This is all I’ve got so far,” he said meekly.