“Well!” said Banach. “That is good news for us!”
She took her eye off the scope and smiled at him. “Yes, it is, Lieutenant. Very good news.”
Her submarine, like their entire fleet, had been designed with coastal warfare in mind, where mines might be concentrated at strategic chokepoints. And while her government might not be able to make a decent microwave oven, they did control 90 percent of the world’s titanium supply. And if they couldn’t make a decent microprocessor or a clever movie or a decent rock-and-roll record, they could, better than any government on earth, marshal the huge labor forces necessary to mine titanium ore from its inevitably difficult locations, smelt it, and refine the metal. Titanium was a complete pain in the ass to work with. Every weld on her big boat had to be conducted in an inert atmosphere, a blanket of argon or helium to prevent the introduction of oxygen. But that was exactly the kind of laborious process at which her people excelled, and her boat was entirely crafted out of that difficult, rare metal. The Polaris, made out of strong American steel, had to subject itself to an ancient and clever degaussing range to make itself magnetically invisible. But her titanium boat had been born that way.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The ship had limited exercise equipment, but Frank Holmes diligently used it all. He bench-pressed every free weight they had, 220 pounds total, and now he could do twenty-five reps at that weight. He would then curl 100 pounds at a time, five sets of ten, and finish by squatting the full 220 pounds. He felt he was capable of squatting maybe twice as much, but those were all the weights they had, so that was that.
On off days he did bodyweight exercises: push-ups, pull-ups, dips, and hundreds of crunches. He’d run on the ship’s lone treadmill to chisel off the tiny amount of fat left on his body, and punch the heavy bag that he had diligently repaired over time until now it was virtually constructed of duct tape. Most guys got soft on submarines, he knew, but he’d put on fifteen pounds of pure muscle since deploying on the Polaris two years earlier. Two inches on his chest, an inch on his arms. He would be even bigger, he thought, if the ship had any decent food, but the animal protein his body craved was hard to come by. He’d hoarded some beef jerky, but the last of the real chicken and eggs had long since been consumed, and the next trip to the tender could be months away. As often as he once dreamed about sex with the soft, sweet girls he’d grown up with in Katy, Texas, he now dreamed about protein. He was a proficient masturbator after two years at sea, but there was no equivalent way to satisfy his primal need for meat. Visions of ribs, cheeseburgers, and T-bone steaks filled his dreams. Still, he was enormously strong.
So moving Ramirez’s dead body was easy once he got past a small, initial burst of squeamishness that came with the sight of all the blood.
The torpedo room was directly below the staterooms, the lower-most, forward-most compartment on the ship. Frank dragged the corpse to the ladder and briefly tried to think of a more dignified option before simply dropping him down the hatch. The body landed with a thud on the steel deck below. Frank climbed down after it, then dragged Ramirez to the front of the torpedo room, past the racks of indexed Mark 50 torpedoes, and caught his breath before proceeding.
The torpedo room had always been one of his favorite places on the boat. Filled with forest green torpedoes, it seemed more military than any other place on Polaris, full of manly, menacing firepower. There were four firing tubes in all, two port and two starboard, with the control panel between them. It smelled dank, both because of its low position on the ship and because the torpedo tubes were often filled, drained, and filled again with the sea that surrounded them. When he had volunteered for submarine duty, Frank had a picture in his mind of what a submarine would be like. The torpedo room was one of the few places on the boat that somewhat looked like that picture.
He had fond memories of the torpedo room as welclass="underline" during his walk-through for his qualifications, the torpedo room was where Captain McCallister had brought him his final task: to line up the system and shoot a water slug — basically a tube full of water, although the actions would be nearly the same if firing an actual torpedo. Captain McCallister had been patient as he plodded through the procedure, and had given him a few key hints along the way when he was stuck. But he had succeeded, finally pushing that red button and ejecting a thousand pounds of seawater back into the sea with a satisfying whoosh. He still recalled the subsequent ratcheting and hissing of valves that returned to a firing position, the popping of the ears as the pressure changed with the expulsion of the compressed firing air. Later that night, after dinner, Captain McCallister had pinned gold dolphins on his chest, Frank’s proudest moment aboard. So he fancied himself as something of an expert.
The memory gave him a brief stab of guilt about the captain. The man had always been good to him, and he obviously knew the submarine better than any man aboard. Hell, he had designed the thing. But Moody said that he was a traitor, and he’d seen it himself. Somebody was giving them away, and with an enemy boat behind them, this wasn’t a time to screw around. He was taking his orders from Moody now, and he was comfortable with that.
He reached for the bound yellow book of torpedo room procedures, thumbed through it until he found the correct one, and reviewed it carefully, a thick index finger pointing to each step as he slowly read it. He remembered the way Moody had raised an eyebrow at him in the wardroom, the doubt in her voice: he was determined not to screw this up.
Three of the four tubes had small signs hanging from their breech doors: WARSHOT LOADED. The lower port tube was empty; that would be the one he would use. Everything on the submarine, Frank knew, was controlled by switches and valves. Therefore switches and valves were everywhere, and, amazingly to Frank, every one of them had a specific purpose, a reason for being. He went through the initial lineup in the procedure, verifying the positions of valves and pushing buttons until he thought he was ready. But when he tried to open the big breech door of the lower, port tube, it wouldn’t move. He knew from his practice down there that when things were properly aligned, everything moved with a liquid, well-engineered ease. But when something was amiss, the strongest guy in the world couldn’t make it budge. He studied the panel, trying to figure out what was blocking his progress. An interlock prevented it, he saw, because the muzzle door was open; the ship’s designers logically made it impossible to open both the muzzle and the breech simultaneously. Somehow he’d skipped that step in the procedure, so he backtracked, pushed a button to close the muzzle door, and tried again. Still the breech wouldn’t open.
He sat down and reread the procedure again, starting to get nervous. He was stuck in the middle of it, and if he had screwed something up, he didn’t know how to recover, how to back out, how to start over. He remembered Captain McCallister talking to him two years earlier as he nervously attempted the procedure. “You can’t sink the ship from here, Holmes,” he said. “Don’t worry. Torpedo tubes have been around for over a hundred years, and they’ve pretty much idiot-proofed them.”
But Frank wasn’t worried about the quality of the ship’s idiot-proofing. Rather, he was worried about the ship proving that he was an idiot. He imagined telling Moody that Ramirez’s body was still cooling away on the torpedo room deck. Or stuck in the breech door. Or jammed in a tube. No, he couldn’t face her with that kind of news.
Reading the procedure for the third time, he noticed a warning on the bottom of a page that cautioned not to open the breech door until the tube was fully drained. In fact, yet another interlock prevented it, so that a thousand gallons of seawater wouldn’t gush from the tube onto the deck of the torpedo room. He eagerly found the drain valve for the port tubes and opened it. At first he was alarmed to hear so much water draining from the tube. Submariners were conditioned to worry at the sound of gushing water. But the noise soon diminished as the tube emptied, a yellow warning light went off on the console, and he approached the breech door once again.