"Good to meet all of you," Garrett said. They looked like a good group… but wary. All submariners, in Garrett's experience, were a bit reserved with newcomers and outsiders. It had to do with the job, where silence was more than golden, where secrecy was the rule, and where you depended on the other members of the crew to work together to make sure you returned to the sunlight alive after each time the boat dived.
It had been a while since Garrett had been aboard a submarine, or even associated closely with submariners. Was it their natural Silent Service reticence he sensed? Or something more?
He would have to get to know them better to decide.
"So, anyone get a load of the new XO when he came aboard?" Torpedoman's Mate First Class Jordan Larimer asked the others. Midday dinner was over and the mess tables wiped down. Larimer and four other Seawolf sailors had gathered there for a break and some scuttlebutt with cups of coffee or juice before getting back to the routine of preparing the sub for departure.
"I saw him," Engineman Second Class Bennett said. He shrugged. "Didn't look like much. Another ring-knocker."
"Annapolis, huh?" Sonar Tech Chief Eric Toynbee said. "Takes more'n that to turn out a good submariner. Right, Queenie?"
He slapped the youngster on the bench next to him hard enough so the kid almost spilled his bug juice. Ken Queensly was Seawolf's newest sonar tech, a skinny, gangly looking kid with Coke-bottle glasses and the awkward air of a computer geek.
"Right, Chief," Queensly said. "I heard he was a full commander, though. What are we going to do with two commanders on board?"
"Stay out of trouble," Larimer said, and the others laughed.
"On a ship," Toynbee explained, "and in the boats, the guy running the show is always 'Captain,' no matter what his rank. And if he's captain of a boat, he's God Almighty Hisself. There is no question who is in charge."
"But, I mean, do we call him 'Commander' or 'Mister Whatsisname'?" Queensly asked.
It was a fair question. In Navy rank protocol, a lieutenant commander was generally called "Mister" and addressed by name, while full commanders and up were addressed by their rank and name… unless, of course, they were captain of a ship, in which case they were always called "Captain."
"Well," Toynbee said, stroking his chin, "sir will do until he makes his wishes known."
"How the hell'd we manage to get an O-5 as XO?" Bennett wanted to know.
"The way I heard it," Radioman First Class Wayne Shaeffer said, "this guy had a boat of his own, the Greeneville. He collided with a Jap fishing boat off Hawaii and—"
"You're full of shit," Toynbee said, laughing. "That guy was booted clear out of the Navy. Excuse me… he took early retirement as an option. This ain't the same guy."
"Naw, I'm telling you it is," Shaeffer said. He leaned forward and let his voice drop to a conspiratorial murmur. "I got a buddy at Pearl, stationed at the comm center. He said there was orders for this guy to take Mr. Joslin's place, only he'd been a sub driver before and got busted for colliding with a Jap ship a few years ago."
"Then your buddy's full of shit," Toynbee insisted.
"You gentlemen are talking about the Ehime Mara," a new voice said. They turned in their seats as a man in officer's khakis with the three gold bars on his shoulder boards of a full commander stepped through the watertight door and onto the mess deck. The COB was close behind him.
"Attention on deck!" Toynbee barked, but before any of them could rise, the newcomer waved them back.
"As you were," he said. "Don't mind me. I just happened to catch your conversation coming down the passageway. The boat you're talking about was the USS Greeneville, a Los Angeles-class submarine, SSN 772. She surfaced under a Japanese fishing boat nine miles south of Diamond Head, Oahu, in February of 2001. The Ehime Maru was a Japanese research-fishing vessel carrying a number of students on board. She was torn open when the Greeneville performed an emergency surface exercise under her, and she sank in two thousand feet of water. Nine Japanese nationals were killed, creating a serious international incident and ruining several promising Navy careers.
"Greeneville's skipper was Commander Scott Waddle. I didn't know him personally, but by all accounts he was a good man and an excellent sub driver. According to the testimony at his Board of Inquiry, he did not receive key sonar information on the Japanese vessel's location in time before surfacing… and his routine periscope sweep before the exercise indicated the area was clear. The chief, here, is right, though. Commander Waddle retired from the service shortly after the incident. A damned shame. It was a sad end to a promising naval career."
An awkward silence followed. Chief Toynbee finally said, "Uh, thank you, sir,"
"Don't mention it. Always glad to be of help."
"As I was saying, sir," Dougherty said, "this here's the enlisted mess. And since it's the largest common area on the boat, it doubles as our rec center, movie theater, and all-round hangout joint. These goldbricking gentlemen are Chief Toynbee, our head sonar tech…
TM1 Larimer… RM1 Shaeffer… EM2 Bennett… and ST3 Queensly." He looked at the men around the mess table. "This, people, is Commander Garrett, our new XO."
"Gentlemen," Garrett said, smiling pleasantly. "Good to meet all of you."
"Welcome aboard, sir," Toynbee said.
"Thanks, Chief. I like what I see so far."
"If you'll come this way, sir… " the COB said, ushering Garrett toward the aft passageway.
They waited in silence for several moments, until the new officer was out of earshot. "Whew!" Bennett said. "What do you make of that?"
"Seemed like an okay guy," Toynbee said. "Not stuck-up, like some ring-knockers I've known."
"I dunno," Larimer said. "He was laying it on pretty thick with that lecture. Like he was tryin' to make a point or something."
" 'Course he was," Toynbee said. "He was telling us that he'd heard us talking about him!"
"Man!" Queensly said, adjusting his glasses on his nose and staring at the door through which the two had exited the mess deck. "His ears must be as good as mine!"
Ken Queensly had been assigned to the Seawolf straight out of sonar tech school, with one of the highest grade averages ever recorded. Though he would be spending the next several months rotating through all of the Seawolf's departments before winning the coveted submariner's dolphins, it was clear that his true talent lay with the gang in the sonar shack. He was one of those rare and gifted individuals who could pull the slenderest threads of information out of garbled noise, working at a level beyond the capabilities even of most computer-assisted electronics, a level that seemed to be nothing less than psychic to others. His hearing was incredibly acute, and his assessment of Garrett's hearing high praise indeed.
"Bullshit, Queenie," Toynbee said. "He heard us, all right… but you didn't hear him coming!"
The others laughed, and after a moment Queensly joined in. "This is going to be an interesting deployment," he said. "We're going to have to watch every word we say!"
Garrett stood on the Seawolf's weather bridge, looking past the lines of Navy ships moored to the Yokosuka piers at the dark waters of Tokyo Bay beyond. The sun had just set in red-orange glory behind a stretch of clear sky to the west; the rest of the sky was overcast, with the promise, borne of a fresh, wet, northeasterly breeze, of more rain to come.