Fortune had smiled in another way, too. He'd been assigned to the Foreign Technologies Department at Atsugi, where the DIA and ONI kept a close watch on such developments as quieter Russian submarines out of the Komsomolsk shipyards, or the acquisition of Kilo sub exports by Beijing. Since he'd actually encountered one of those Kilos, Garrett had arrived at Atsugi as a minor celebrity and was assigned to an office processing all incoming data on Chinese Kilos.
He'd become the Navy's Far East expert on Kilos; in fact, he'd been summoned to the meeting this morning in order to brief the assembled admirals and captains on the Kilo and its current capabilities. He'd done so after Frank Gordon had finished his presentation, and managed to get through the material despite the spinning clutter of thoughts in his skull.
He found himself wondering if Gordon had had a hand in putting him at Atsugi in the first place. Damn the man, it wouldn't be beyond his powers. Garrett didn't know whether to be happy about that or furious at the meddling in his career. His career might be going nowhere right now, thanks to the Operation Buster incident, but damn it all, it was his career, and he wanted to make it or go belly up on his merits, talents, and sweat, not his friendship with a senior submariner.
He reached the dockside and found a parking place for his car. He had to stroll a few hundred yards to reach a good vantage point. The air was cool and quite wet; a storm was moving in from the Pacific, and clouds were gathering above the base, promising rain. Shafts of bright sunlight, however, were slashing down out of the cloud-mountains, sparkling on the dark water and illuminating the ranks of submarines moored to the piers.
There she is…
A security perimeter had been established to keep the curious well away from her moorings, but it was possible to get a good view from where he stood. She was long, low, and dark gray, a beautiful, elegant lady. White, magnetic numerals reading 21 clung to the side of her sail. They would be removed when the vessel put out to sea, but for now they identified her as SSN 21, the first attack submarine of the twenty-first century, arguably the most modern attack boat in the world. Forget what the experts thought about the Akula; Sea-wolf was the Queen of Deep Water.
She looked huge. Her sail appeared small compared to the bulk of her hull, and the wedge at the forward foot of the sail, which gave it a sweeping, smoothly curved look instead of the usual right angle between deck and conning tower, made the boat look a bit alien to Garrett's eye. At just over 106 meters in length overall, she was actually three meters shorter than the lean and slender Pittsburgh, but her lines were heavier, bulkier, and her submerged displacement was almost a third again greater than a Los Angeles boat. Despite that, she could manage thirty-five-plus knots underwater and had been built to travel at twenty knots in almost complete silence. Everything about her had been designed with quiet in mind. She was to the dark and quiet world of submarines what the F-117 Stealth Fighter was to the skies. In fact, it was said of the Sea-wolf that she was quieter moving at tactical speed than a Los Angeles-class boat was tied up to the pier.
Unlike Pittsburgh and the earlier L.A. boats — but like all of the newer L.A. boats numbered 751 and later — she had her planes mounted on her bow rather than on her sail. The public explanation was that this allowed her to surface through the ice with fewer problems during operations beneath the Pole. In fact, sail-mounted planes had been discovered to be a serious source of unwanted sound at higher submerged speeds, and moving them to the bow was yet another effort to achieve perfect undersea silence.
Her complement would be something like 115 men and twelve officers, about the same as on board an L.A.-class. But there were only two Seawolf-class submarines afloat now, with one more, the Jimmy Carter, due to launch in another year. Quite a noisy battle had been fought in the corridors of the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill as to whether there would ever be any more, and eventually the Seawolf program had been killed in favor of the smaller, cheaper Virginia-class New Attack Submarines. Competition for a berth on board Seawolf, or on her sister boat Connecticut, was fierce and unrelenting, especially among officers who saw the prestigious assignment as a big leap up the career ladder.
And now he was going to be the Seawolf's executive officer.
"She's a real beauty, isn't she?"
Garrett didn't need to turn around to see the speaker. He knew the voice well. "Yes, sir," he said. "And I'm standing here wondering just how much you had to do with getting me this billet." He turned then and saluted Captain Gordon, stiff and rigidly precise. He needed to keep a tight-fisted control on his emotions just now.
Dream come true? Or nightmare?
Gordon returned the salute with a perfunctory snap of his arm. "You can't think I'm responsible for Commander Joslin's heart condition."
"Hm. I guess not. But every time my career goes anywhere, up or down, you seem to be somewhere in the wings."
"At this point, Tom, I'm more worried about my career than yours. This Chinese Kilo thing caught us all napping… and that Akula up at Canton makes it much, much worse. Intelligence is going to take it in the neck if Taiwan falls to the PLA."
"That's the usual way of it, isn't it?" Garrett said with a rare grin. "Shoot the messengers."
"Especially if the messengers didn't bring the message in time. Or if the message was… unpalatable. Right now there's a lynch mob forming up at the Pentagon. ONI isn't in real good odor at the moment."
Garrett chuckled. As usual, Gordon had a way of disarming him with easy wit and a comfortable change of topic.
"So… can Seawolf bail out the ONI?"
"If it's possible, she can," Gordon replied. "We need intel, and we need it badly. Seawolf is the best platform in the world for this kind of work."
"That's what they say. Last I heard, the Seawolf was still a boat in search of a mission."
Work on Seawolf had begun in 1989, with a design intended to counter the newer, quieter Soviet boats like Akula and the Sierra, but when the Soviet empire had died, Seawolf lost her major projected opponents.
So Seawolf had gone to sea in the mid-1990s with a broad range of capabilities, with mission and growth potential that far exceeded the L.A.-class boats. She was designed to carry out a variety of crucial operations anywhere from under the Arctic ice to littoral regions anywhere in the world, with missions including surveillance, intelligence collection, special warfare, covert cruise-missile strike ops, mine warfare, and both conventional antisubmarine and antisurface ship operations. The question was whether this extremely expensive submarine was even necessary anymore in a world where the Soviet Union no longer existed.
The Navy had pushed hard to keep the Seawolf program in place despite the cost-cutting efforts of the post-Cold War Congress. They'd managed to save a fragment of the original program, but unfortunately, cost overruns had kicked the price tag for Seawolf up to over a billion dollars per boat — ten billion for the first five, and thirty billion more for the next twenty-five— and the original planned complement of thirty Seawolf-class submarines had long ago been scaled back to three.
"She has a mission, Tom," Gordon said after a long moment. "Operation Red Dragon. Surveillance, intelligence-gathering… and ASW support for the Stennis CBG."