“Ah, come on, Chief. It’s nearly two in the morning,” Forster whined.
“It ain’t. It’s fifteen minutes until two and in the time you’ve spent here whining to me about doing what I’ve told you, you could be halfway there.”
“Ah, Chief, we just finished an hour in that car. There’s no air-conditioning,” Forster objected.
“Well, next time, you’ll learn to get all the information.”
“Can we have guns this time?” Meeks asked. “Guns always make me feel safe.”
“No, you can’t have a gu — a piece. It’s called a goddamn piece, Meeks, and I wouldn’t trust you with a gun. Goddamn Arkansas razorback! You’d shoot someone just to see if it’s true that guns kill.”
“Oh, they kill all right, Chief. I just don’t want someone else finding out on me.”
“Come on, Meeks,” Forster said. “Let’s go.” He grabbed his Dixie-cup hat and jammed it on his head.
Meeks opened the refrigerator again and grabbed a second soda. “You want one?”
“Yeah, but I want a Sprite soda.”
“That’s seventy-five cents!”
“You’ll get your money, Turnipseed. Christ,” Meeks said, looking at Forster. “You’d think Mama Turnipseed owned the damn thing.”
“He does,” Forster said as they shut the door behind them.
“Chief, Meeks owes me seventy-five cents.”
“That’s your problem.”
Bellis walked to the desk, picked up the telephone, and dialed the Subic Operations Center. A moment later he was talking to the command duty officer, a Lieutenant Wagner with a deep Bostonian accent. Bellis quickly brought the lieutenant up-to-date on the security light emanating from the telephone switching building near the warehouses. Wagner said he was going to send a couple of marines out that way. The chief asked that they not shoot Forster and Meeks, as much pleasure as it would bring.
“What’d he say?” Turnipseed asked, reaching up and tapping the light again, as if the act would cause it to go away.
“He said he didn’t trust a bunch of us enlisted to resolve a security light so he’s sending the marines out to check on it.”
Turnipseed shook his head. “That’s Lieutenant Wagner for you. He don’t trust nobody. Sending marines to check on a faulty security light is like sending… like sending… well, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” Bellis said quietly, glancing at the door. He had a bad feeling about this. Marines and sailors were known to have misunderstandings. Olongapo was a great place for having them.
TEN
The knocking woke him. MacDonald raised himself onto his elbows and turned on the table lamp. The bulkhead clock showed five minutes to two. “Come in!” he shouted.
Joe Tucker and Lieutenant Burnham entered, stopping just inside the stateroom door.
“What’s wrong, XO?” MacDonald spun around in the bed, planting his bare feet on the small throw rug Brenda had given him after seeing the sparse compartment he would call home for three years.
“Just got this in from Naval Intelligence, sir. Top secret,” Joe Tucker said, as if that explained everything.
MacDonald reached for the message board. Burnham stayed near the door, as if positioning himself for a quick exit. Draftees such as him should not be allowed to avoid it by joining the navy.
“About our Echo submarines?” If it was, it was something that could have waited until morning.
Joe Tucker shook his head. “Best you read it.”
“Mr. Burnham, turn on the overhead light, please.”
Burnham flipped the switch. The overhead white light filled the small stateroom.
The two khaki-clad officers waited while MacDonald sat on the edge of his rack in his T-shirt and Skivvies reading the page-and-a-half message. He glanced at Joe Tucker once while reading. The world gone crazy. A minute later, he closed the metal covering over the message.
“What do you think?”
Joe Tucker cleared his throat. “It might explain why we had a tattletale and two cruise missile submarines doing an anticarrier exercise against us last Thursday.”
MacDonald looked at Burnham. “Your thoughts, Wood-row?”
“Sir, I agree with the XO.”
“Not much we can do about this,” MacDonald said, tapping the message board. “It’s half a world away.”
“There is an operations plan being prepared for the chief of naval operations to release. It would divert the Kitty Hawk battle group to the Middle East.”
“Says here that Naval Intelligence expect the Israelis to launch a preemptive strike sometime in the next few hours. Once that happens, we have only two ways to the conflict. One is to overfly Saudi Arabia, which isn’t a belligerent at this time; the other is to enter the Red Sea, which the navy won’t allow an aircraft carrier to do. It bottles us up. Kind of like sending one into the Persian Gulf.”
“Means we go around the tip of South America.”
“By the time we got there, the fighting would be over.” MacDonald bit his lip. He handed the message board to Joe Tucker. “The Israelis aren’t going to wait for us. What’s the status of our steam plant? We still have steam?”
“I authorized them to secure engine room number one earlier today, Skipper. There were some steam pipe repairs that needed to be done.”
“We can’t get under way?”
Joe Tucker shook his head. “We are scheduled to be here another two days. Stillman and I discussed the idea of securing one today; they’d do the repair work and scheduled maintenance through the night. Then tomorrow we’d do the other steam room. So if we had to get under way, we could, on the other engine room, and bring the other one up within a day.”
MacDonald nodded. Stillman was the mustang chief engineer of the Dale. Mustangs were a rough lot. They were enlisted men who had somehow managed to receive a commission based on their technical knowledge. “Keep engine room number two up and ready for emergent departure, in the event this Naval Intelligence notice is accurate.”
“If it’s not, then it will be the Arabs who will attack,” Burnham said, drawing the attention of both senior officers.
“Why do you say that?” MacDonald asked.
Burnham crossed his arms and leaned against the bulkhead. “They’ve been moving—”
“They?”
“Skipper, the ‘they’ is Egypt and Syria,” Burnham answered, then continued as if he were in a classroom. “Jordan has increased its presence along its border, but has been silent on the war drums that Egypt and Syria are beating.” He shook his head. “No, sir — they’re going to war, so either Israel will do the preemptive thing or Egypt and Syria will blitzkrieg across the border and do what they have been promising.”
“What promise?” Joe Tucker asked.
“Push them into the sea, eradicate Israel, kill every Jew — man, woman, and child — in the country.”
MacDonald nodded. “Thanks, Lieutenant, but I cannot see the world standing by and watching something like that happen.”
Burnham uncrossed his arms. “The world has stood aside in our lifetime, and if not at this time or in this place, we will see it do it again.”
“Out of our area of operations right now,” MacDonald said. “Anything else?” he asked, looking at Joe Tucker.
The sound of footsteps came from the passageway outside. Lieutenant Burkeet stuck his head inside the stateroom.
“Looks as if I’m hosting a wardroom party up here,” MacDonald said, drawing the navy-issued gray blanket over his knees and Skivvies.
“Skipper, XO, OPSO,” Burkeet said. “I hate to bother you, but Oliver insists he has the Echo submarine on passive sonar.”