"Working three shifts. What do you think of that?"
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA
Toland examined himself in the full-sized mirror in the Norfolk BOQ complex. He'd made the drive down the evening before. The uniform still fit, he noted, maybe a little tight at the waist, but that was nature at work, wasn't it? His "salad bar" of decorations was a bleak row and a half, but he had his surface warfare officer's badge, his "water wings" he hadn't always been a glorified radio operator. His sleeves bore the two and a half stripes of a lieutenant commander. A final swipe of a cloth across his shoes and he was out the door, ready on this bright Monday morning for his annual two weeks of duty with the fleet.
Five minutes later, he was driving down Mitcher Avenue toward headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet-CINCLANTFLT -a flat, thoroughly undistinguished building that had once been a hospital. An habitual early riser, Toland found the Ingersoll Street parking lot half empty, but he was still careful to take an unmarked space lest he incur the wrath of a senior officer.
"Bob? Bob Toland!" a voice called.
"Ed Morris!"
It was now Commander Edward Morris, USN, Toland noted, and a shiny gold star on his uniform jacket designated him as the commander of some ship or other. Toland saluted his friend before shaking hands.
"Still playing bridge, Bob?" Toland, Morris, and two other officers had once established the most regular bridge foursome at the Pearl Harbor officers club.
"Some. Marty isn't much of a card player, but we got a bunch at work that meets once a week."
"Good as we used to be?" Morris asked as they headed off in the same direction.
"Are you kidding? You know where I work now?"
"I heard you ended up at Fort Meade after you hung it up."
"Yeah, and there's bridge players at NSA who're wired into the damn computers-I'm talking assassins!"
"So how's the family?"
"Just great. How's yours?"
"Growing up too damned fast-makes you feel old."
"That's the truth," Morris chuckled. He jabbed a finger at his friend's star. "Now you can tell me about your new kid."
"Look at my car."
Toland turned around. Morris's Ford had a personalized license plate: FF-1094. To the uninitiated it was an ordinary license number, but to a sailor it advertised his command: antisubmarine frigate number one thousand ninety-four, USS PHARRIS.
"You always were nice and modest," Toland noted with a grin. "That's all right, Ed. How long you had her?"
"Two years. She's big, she's pretty, and she's mine! You should have stayed in, Bob. The day I took command-hell, it was like the day Jimmy was born."
"I hear you. The difference, Ed, is that I always knew you'd have your ship, and I always knew I wouldn't." In Toland's personnel jacket was a letter of admonishment for grounding a destroyer while he had the deck. It had been no more than bad luck. An ambiguity on the chart and adverse tidal conditions had caused the error, but it didn't take much to ruin a Navy career.
"So, doing your two weeks?"
"That's right."
"Celia is off visiting her parents, and I'm baching it. What're you doing for dinner tonight?"
"McDonald's?" Toland laughed.
"Like hell. Danny McCafferty's in town, too. He's got the Chicago, tied up at Pier 22. You know, if we can scare up a fourth, maybe we can play a little bridge, just like the old days." Morris poked his friend in the chest "I gotta head along. Meet me in the O-Club lobby at 1710, Bob. Danny invited me over to his boat for dinner at 1830, and we'll have an hour's worth of Attitude Adjustment before we drive over. We'll have dinner in the wardroom and a few hours of cards, just like old times."
"Aye, aye, Commander."
"Anyway, there I was on Will Rogers, " McCafferty said. "Fifty days out on patrol and I got the watch, right? Sonar says they have a goofy signal, bearing zero-five-two. We're at periscope depth, so I put the search scope up, train it out to zero-five-two, and sure enough, there's this Gulfstream36 sailboat, moving along at four or five knots with the autosteering set. What the hell, it's a dull day, so I flip the scope to hi-power, and guess what? The captain and the mate-there's one gal who'll never drown!-are on top the deckhouse, horizontal and superimposed. The boat was maybe a thousand yards away-just like being there. So we turn on the scope TV camera and get the tape machine running. Had to maneuver for a better view, of course. Lasted fifteen minutes. The crew ran the tape for the next week. Great for morale to know just what you're fighting for." All three officers laughed.
"Like I always told you, Bob," Morris noted. "These sub-drivers are a nasty, sneaky bunch. Not to mention perverts."
"So how long you had the Chicago, Danny" Toland asked over his second cup of after-dinner coffee. The three had the submarine's wardroom to themselves. The only officers aboard were either standing watch or asleep.
"Three busy months, not counting yard time," McCafferty said, finishing off his milk. He was the first skipper for the new attack sub, the best of all possible worlds, a captain and a "plankowner." Toland noted that Dan had not joined him and Morris for "attitude adjustment" at the base officers' club, during which they'd tossed down three stiff drinks apiece. It wasn't like the McCafferty of old. Perhaps he was unwilling to leave his sub, lest the dream of his career somehow end while he was away from her.
"Can't you tell from the pale, pasty look common to cave-dwellers and submariners?" Morris joked. "Not to mention the faint glow associated with nuclear reactor types" McCafferty grinned, and they waited for their fourth to arrive, He was a junior engineer, just about to come off reactor watch, Chicago's reactor wasn't operating. She was drawing electrical power from the dock, but regulations demanded a full reactor watch whether the teakettle was working or not.
"I tell you guys, I was a little pale four weeks ago." McCafferty turned serious-or about as serious as he ever got,
"How so?" Bob Toland asked.
"Well, you know the kinda shit we do with these boats, right"
"If you mean inshore intelligence gathering, Dan, you ought to know that that electronic intelligence stuff you collect comes to my office. Hell, I probably know the people who originate a lot of the data requests that generate your op-orders. How's that for a revolting thought!" Bob laughed. He fought the urge to look around too obviously. He'd never been aboard a nuclear submarine before. It was cold-nuclear subs have nuclear-powered air conditioning-and the air was heavy with the smell of machine oil. Everything he could see sparkled both from being almost new, and from the fact that McCafferty had undoubtedly made sure that his crew had gotten things looking especially good for his friends. So, this was the billion-dollar machine that gathered all that ELINT data...
"Yeah, well, we were up in the Barents Sea, you know, northeast of the Kola Fjord, trailing a Russian sub-an Oscar-about, oh, ten miles back of her-and all of a sudden we find ourselves in the middle of a friggin' live-fire exercise! Missiles were flying all over the damned place. They wasted three old hulks, and blasted hell out of a half-dozen target barges. "
"Just the Oscar" Morris asked.
"Turned out there was a Papa and a Mike out there, too. That's one problem with us being so quiet in these babies. If they don't know we're there, we can find ourselves in the middle of some really unpleasant shit! Anyway, sonar starts screaming 'Transients! Transients!' from all the missile tubes being flooded. No way we could be sure they weren't getting ready to put some real torpedoes in the water, but we stuck up the ESM and picked up their periscope radars, then I saw some of the things whipping over our heads. Damn, guys, for about three minutes there it was just a little hairy, y'know?" McCafferty shook his head. "Anyway, two hours after that, all three boats crack on twenty knots and head back to the barn. Your basic out-and-in live-fire. How's that for a lively first deployment?"