The peanut butter sandwiches were slightly soggy and tasted of salt, but the coffee in the Thermos was almost hot. He sat in the U-shaped dinette booth to eat his breakfast.
Looking through the tinted windows on the other side of the cabin, he could see stratocumulus clouds building up in the southwest. He might run into some weather — light squalls — in the late afternoon. Right now, the seas were calm, with one-foot swells running, and the SeaGhost took them smoothly.
McCory thought the boat would also take to heavy weather gleefully. With her smooth topsides, wind and water would sluice right off her. She might even cut right through the tops of tall waves, playing submarine. He would have to calculate her weight and displacement. As far as he had determined, all of the flat surfaces — well, curved surfaces — were comprised of a fiberglass impregnated with a carbon compound for strength. There was almost no flex in the major panels. If the engineers had followed Devlin’s drawings, the keel, structural beams, and ribs would also be cast in carbon-filled plastic, with lots of angles and cutouts to foil radar returns.
He thought she would be light for a boat her size. There was no armor plating of any kind. A direct hit by hostile fire in the twenty millimeter or larger calibers would be all it would take. But then, hostile fire would have to find her first. Computer-controlled guns, using radar data, would be useless against her.
The interior fittings, in the cabin at least, were also of fiberglass and plastic, from cabinets to instrument panels. Two ceramic burners on the galley range. Even the sonar, radar, and CRT screens were plastic.
The interior was navy spartan. The deck was covered in a light gray industrial carpeting — sound-insulating against sonar-seeking footfalls, and the bulkheads were painted a slightly darker gray. The chair and dinette cushions were upholstered in a heavy gray Naugahyde.
It was comfortable though. Outside the tinted windows, a fierce sun was building up heat, reflecting hot off the water in the far distance, but inside, the air conditioning was doing its job.
McCory slid out of the booth and walked forward to lean against the instrument panel bulkhead. Through the windscreen, the sea appeared to be a bright blue this morning, but the coloring of the foredeck blended right into it. He scanned the ocean but saw nothing. He was completely alone, a condition that never bothered him. In fact, it was a situation that he often sought for himself.
The left CRT in the helmsman’s panel, set to rearview, also showed emptiness.
If anything bothered him, it was being so fully enclosed. McCory had been on boats from the age of six months onward, but he was accustomed to sun and wind in his face. His face demonstrated the history — deep sea-tanned and weathered, with squint lines at his eyes and deepening crevices at the outside edges of his nose. His eyes were Devlin’s, sharp and clear and a radiant blue, but his mother had played a part in his coloring. Her darkness was in his skin tone and his hair — it was a dark auburn and cut short. He didn’t like maintaining elaborate styling.
He went back to the stations behind the helmsman’s chair. Against the rear bulkhead on the starboard side was the communications console. It was complex and, as far as he could tell, state of the art. Running his finger down the stacks, he noted UHF, VHF, HF, FM, AM, low-power, marine, and ship-to-shore telephone sets. Scanners. A printer recessed in the left side of the desk surface suggested telex and cable capability. On the right side of the desktop, a panel slid back to reveal a computerlike keyboard. There were two scrambler interfaces and what looked to be an encryption device. If for nothing else, the Navy would be very excited about the loss of those top secret black boxes.
McCory turned on the AM component and searched for a shore-based radio station transmitting news. When he found one out of Atlanta, he turned the volume down and left it broadcasting on an overhead speaker. He could select from a variety of speakers sited within bulkheads of the cabin, and there were a bunch of cushioned headsets lying around.
Maybe he’d make the news.
Next to the communications console, facing outboard below the window, was the commander’s station, primarily a chart table. There were drawers in a stack to the left, but they were locked. A shallow center drawer held some drawing instruments, pens, pencils, and now, two fragmentation grenades. On the right, under the table, were tubes for chart storage, and the only navigation chart aboard was for the Eastern Seaboard. There were also two shelves full of manuals. McCory pulled the manual for the radar and, as he did, found the boat’s log.
He opened it, found a pen, and dutifully entered the beginning of this morning’s voyage. He signed off as “K. McCory, Captain.” He had only made lieutenant in the Navy, but he had captained a lot of boats.
Then he scanned the radar manual. It was an operator’s manual, rather than a maintenance manual, and he was surprised by what he found. Carrying the book forward, he sat in the radar operator’s chair and experimented with the set.
One of the drawbacks to radar in a battle or war setting was that, when it was actively seeking, it emitted radiation that could be detected by hostile forces. If a boat commander used his radar, he knew what was out there, but what was out there also knew where he was.
This radar set had its own computer, and after a few tries with the keyboard mounted to the right of the screen, McCory had it programmed as explained in Chapter Eight of the manual. The range was set for thirty miles and at randomly selected intervals of time to avoid setting up a routine. Between twelve and seventeen minutes, the set would go active, make one 360-degree sweep, utilizing fore and aft antennae that were electronically synchronized, then return itself to an inactive state. If that single sweep picked up a blip, a low-toned alarm would buzz.
Pleased with his discovery and his new-found computer programming ability, McCory checked on the autopilot, then dialed in a new heading of 190 degrees. He would begin to slowly close with the coast. He was going to enter his safe harbor way after night had fallen once again.
He reset the air conditioning thermostat to a lower setting, entered the port-side bunk cabin, and sprawled out on the lower bunk. As always, he was asleep within a minute.
The eleven o’clock news caught Justin Malgard by surprise. He and Trish were in bed, but Trish was already in a near-coma. She believed beds were for sleeping or making love, not watching the late news.
Malgard grabbed the remote control on the bedside stand and turned up the volume. When the piece was over, he turned the volume down and slipped out of bed.
He slept in the nude, so he grabbed his robe from the chair beside the dresser and donned it as he went out into the hall. Jason’s bedroom was quiet as he went by it, but Patty, who was fifteen, had her stereo going, playing something that would have shattered eardrums if she had not been trying to sneak it past the ordained shut-off time. Malgard stopped, opened her door, and started to reinforce the house rule verbally. Patty, however, was already asleep, on her back with her mouth open and her blonde hair spread carefully over the pillow.
Malgard went in and shut off the stereo, then closed the door and took the stairs down to his den.
It was a nice den. Trish was not much of a decorator, and he had paid outrageous fees for a professional to design every room in the fifteen-room house. Patty and Jason did not understand the cost, of course, and it was a constant struggle to get them to maintain their rooms and the recreation room located in the basement.
The den was his refuge. The deep-pile, rust carpet absorbed sound. The furnishings were finished in dark oak and brown leather. There was a full wall of bookcases housing leather-bound books ranging from classical literature to hard science. It always felt very academic, very intellectual, and very professional to Malgard. When he retired, Malgard intended to read every one of those English, French, and American authors.