ERIS.
Pete touched the map, and the image of the island expanded.
It was a navigation chart that looked deeply familiar to Pete, in the same way the control room felt familiar, something borne of thousands of hours of studying. A TOP SECRET label adorned it on top and bottom.
He tapped a button on the screen, changing it from a map view to a satellite image. The island was roughly kidney shaped. At the north end of the island, right up against the shore, was a tower. At the far other end of the island were two small buildings, also facing the sea. The roofs were darker in color, worn, conveying a greater age, and seemed disconnected from the work on the other side of the island. The center of Eris was taken up almost entirely by an airfield, with a few scattered maintenance buildings in between.
Pete used two fingers to change the scale of the chart, zooming out, and changing it back from a satellite photo to a nautical chart. Two concentric rings circled the island, both colored in red to convey danger. The innermost ring was a perfect circle with the tower at its exact center, a five-mile radius. It was labeled EXCLUSION ZONE. Pete noticed hash marks on the outside of the circle… it seemed to indicate that safety lay inside.
Farther out was a more irregular dashed red line, about seven miles from the island. This line was jagged and imperfect, unlike the inner circle, and seemed to be a product of nature. Pete could see the italicized soundings indicating the depth of water around it: it was shoal water. Serious shoal water, as shallow as ten feet in some spots, a superb natural barrier to the island. And it had been there eons, Pete could tell. All around the perimeter were the dotted-line profiles of wrecked ships, the chart symbol for the vessels that had wrecked themselves upon the shoals over hundreds of years. There were a few shallow breaks around the shoals where a careful surface ship might approach, but no submerged submarine ever could. And that meant a two-mile stretch between the two circles, some kind of no-man’s-land… Pete traced the circle with his fingers until he found one tiny spot in the shoal line where the water was 120 feet deep. If the tower was the center of a clock, the break in the shoal water was at about seven o’clock.
“There,” he said, tapping the break. “We could get through right there at periscope depth.”
Moody suddenly pulled him to his feet, turned him around, and kissed him hard upon the lips.
He jerked backward, almost falling over his chair, and dropped the tablet with his orders to the deck.
“What?” said Moody, clearly annoyed. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s… my head,” he said. “It still hurts.”
She looked him up and down. “You haven’t been the same since the mutiny,” she said.
“Tell me about it.”
“Go get some rest,” she said. “That’s an order. But the next time I see you, be ready to work.”
“Aye, aye,” he said, grabbing the tablet and backing out of her stateroom.
WELCOME ABOARD THE USS POLARIS
The Polaris-class submarine is the latest advancement in submarine technology. It is well equipped to accomplish its assigned mission, providing significant advances over previous classes of submarines. Specifically:
• Each Polaris-class submarine carries 50 percent more missiles than its predecessors (36 compared to 24).
• Ease of maintenance has been designed into the class, minimizing maintenance requirements and extending the period between lengthy shipyard overhauls. Polaris-class submarines are able to stay on patrols for longer periods with shorter time between patrols.
• The increased range of the C-6 missiles enables the Polaris to operate in ten times more ocean area than previous submarines.
• The central command and control system of the Polaris allows significant automation and reduction of crew size. For example, Trident submarines, the workhorse missile submarine of the Cold War, carried a crew of over 150 men. The Polaris will go to sea with just 18, and can operate with as few as 6.
• The total system was designed to ensure that the United States and her strategic allies have a modern, survivable deterrent system in the 2020s and beyond.
• The Polaris is vital to the Alliance submarine force. Her mission is to maintain world peace.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Instead of heading to his rack, Pete turned toward the escape trunk where Finn McCallister was being held prisoner.
He saw the bottoms of McCallister’s feet against the grate, motionless. It looked like he was sleeping, his head hanging, his mouth open. His face was somewhat hidden in the shadows inside the trunk, but Pete could see that he looked haggard, exhausted. His uniform had been ripped, like Pete’s. The captain awoke with a start.
“Pete!” he said, overjoyed to see him. He jumped down on his hands and knees so his face was against the grate. “Are you alone?”
“I am,” he said.
“I knew you’d be back,” he said. “You’ve got to get me out of here.”
“I’m trying… to figure out what’s going on.”
“Do that,” he said. “Keep your head up. You can’t trust anyone right now.”
“Can I trust you?”
Finn looked stricken. “Of course,” he said.
“How much do you know about my orders?”
The captain looked confused. “Everything that I could read,” he said. “And what you told me after I read them, when you came on board. You said the Alliance had identified this epidemic as a massive threat, not just to the war effort, but to humanity. I also saw in your service jacket that you’re an engineer, not a doctor; that’s why I brought Haggerty in the loop. We’re the only ones aboard who know the full patrol order.”
“How much do you know about the epidemic?”
He shook his head. “Not much. We’ve been at sea so long… but I know everything has changed up there since we left. You showed me the projections, though, showed me what it was doing to the civilian population. And…” He hesitated.
“What else?”
“Your wife,” he said. “You told me your wife was killed by the disease.”
Pete was rocked by a real sadness, a profound sense of loss. A memory of her flashed in his mind, blond hair, blue eyes. The death of his wife, he knew, was what had put him on the boat somehow, the event that set him on a path that ended onboard a nuclear submarine. And while it made him tremendously sad, he was grateful to Finn for sharing this information with him, to give him a real memory that he could build upon. He decided at that moment to trust McCallister.
“There’s a lot I don’t remember,” said Pete.
“About?”
“The mutiny.”
McCallister shook his head, still angry with the memory.
“Moody has gone completely crazy,” he said. “It all really started when that shadow boat showed up. With your orders, and that boat tailing us, she just started getting increasingly paranoid. Frank — that idiot — convinced her that someone had been giving our position away somehow. We had a huge fight in the control room; none of us had slept for days. She wanted to shoot the shadow boat, I ordered her to stand down, and then Ramirez ran out of the room. Alarms started going off, fires broke out — it looked like someone was trying to sabotage us.”