The USS Nebraska, an Ohio-class Trident ballistic missile submarine, was the second ship in the Navy’s history to bear that name. Its current skipper, Bret “Mush” Morton was a third-generation Navy man whose submariner grandfather had distinguished himself in major battle actions in these very waters during a stretch from 1942 to 1944. Two years when, on a regular basis, ten boats would leave Pearl Harbor and only four would return. Those odds made that twenty-four-month span in World War II equal to a century of patrol in submarine years.
In this “second century” of sub operations, the big boats like Mush Morton’s were relegated to deterrence by guaranteeing the nuclear annihilation of any would-be aggressor. To insure that mission, they needed to survive. In subs, that meant remaining undetected. Not so easy when prowling the ocean in something almost as long as a fifty-six-story skyscraper is tall, and forty-two feet wide, containing the men, equipment, nuclear weapons and power plants to move the whole eighteen thousand metric tons of the thing at a classified speed exceeding thirty knots. They ran extremely silent and they ran very deep. For that reason, Mush wasn’t used to getting flash traffic in the middle of his ‘hide and seek’ peacetime patrols, and the order he now held in his hands was as sketchy as they come. Simply stated and without the usual naval syntax, he was tasked to steam at flank speed to grid I-7 on the map and look for anything unusual. That was it. No inkling of what he would or should be looking for. As far as he could remember, this would be the first time an SSBN was looking for something instead of trying not to be killed by something looking for it.
Back at fleet, the rear admiral who was Commander Submarine Force Pacific was not sure either. All they had was a directive from the White House and some mission runner asking for assistance. But ComSubPac was also part of the National Command Authority and this D.C. controller, code-named “Halfback,” was invoking the highest level of priority.
Brooke was alternately dipping herself over the side for heat relief and rolling on to the craft to ward off the chill from the Pacific. She had lost feeling in her toes; rubbing them helped get the circulation going somewhat. Dehydration was her big enemy now. She hadn’t had anything to drink for twenty hours and had been baking in the sun for half that time. Her mouth was dry, and the occasional salt spray stung her cracked lips. As she had learned in the rugged survival course when she was qualifying to be an FBI agent, her last hope was to capture her urine and filter it through cloth, such as her shirt. She had started unbuckling her pants when she heard a sound. A swoosh of air, about five hundred yards off; something, maybe a whale, had breached the surface. Over the wave caps, she glimpsed a huge grey hulk in the water. Her eyes were salt-burned and she squinted and rolled them wide open in an attempt to squeegee off the stinging salt, but she still couldn’t focus. Then she saw a glint; something metallic had reflected the sun’s light. A ship! Brooke started yelling, but to her surprise, only a squeak came out of her parched throat. She grabbed the rifle strap from around the shaft and lifted the weapon out of the water, where it wouldn’t corrode as fast. She shook out the water in the barrel then pointed it in the air and let out three, three-shot bursts. Although deafening to her, from her low angle, the sound quickly dispersed across the wave crests, each robbing the sound of a bit of the acoustic power the gun had generated. The scores of waves between her and the boat had each reduced the sound level to a point that, when it reached the conning tower of the Nebraska, was little more than a burble masked by the wave splash against the hull.
With no change in the direction or activity, the hulk continued to pull away from her. She decided to try one last-ditch effort. She switched to full-automatic and tried something she hoped would increase the effective range of the ubiquitous Russian weapon she had studied at Quantico. She emptied the entire magazine as she shot upward, arcing the gun toward the hulk. The rifle couldn’t hit the boat with a straight shot, but she hoped that by whipping the rifle and arcing the shots into the air, they would gain distance, like an artillery shell. The mag emptied in fewer than four seconds and along with it her ability to defend herself or signal any other passing ship.
And then there was silence.
Now she was truly alone.
Mush and his exec officer were manning the bridge when five distinct plinks turned the men around. Using the binoculars, they focused on the aft deck of the sub. Three dimples in the hull were highlighted as a bullet rolled around in one of them. “Sir, I think somebody just shot at us.”
“Hank, I believe you’re right.” He leaned into the voice-powered interphone. “Helm, come around one-eighty, I want a fix on a point five hundred yards off our stern and I want to be there two minutes ago.”
“Aye, aye. Coming about, sir.”
“Stand by for battle surface. Weps, I want the two fifty calibers manned, now. We might have pirates out here.”
“Deck guns on the way, sir.” The weapons officer said.
“Now who’s got the balls to fire on a U.S. Navy warship?” Mush said over the sounding klaxon horn as he scanned the stern, pivoting to keep his sights on a particular patch of water that was rapidly coming around to his prow.
Brooke could see the boat turning now and she made out the conning tower jutting out of the water and its lookouts on the main mast. She tried to fight it, but a small cry welled up inside her. As the relief flowed from her chest in heaves, and tears washed the salt from her eyes, she thanked God. In a minute, she was checking herself; she reached around her back, arching her torso as she attempted to smooth out the crumpled back of her blouse.
“Is that what I think it is?” Mush said, adjusting the focus of his binoculars.
“It’s been a long time, but not that long, skipper. That… is a woman! A well-built woman…”
Mush commanded into the interphone, “I want a recovery team on the deck now with blankets, and alert sick bay we got a survivor coming aboard.”
From the front hatch on the foredeck of the Nebraska four men emerged with grappling poles, heaving lines and stretchers. Each man clipped his lifeline to the receded buckles on the edge of the decking, lest they be inadvertently in need of rescue themselves due to a rogue wave or flailing subject.
Chief Boatswain Murray couldn’t believe what he was seeing: a woman in a wet white blouse, hanging on to an overturned Zodiac in the middle of the Pacific. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
The captain had made his way down to the bow where Mr. Murray was hanging off the edge as he reached down to the woman. The other men stood gaping. She was a stunner, and she was coming onboard in a transparent manner. Mush quickly stepped forward, covered her with a blanket, and got her down onto the stretcher. She coughed out a “thank you.” The other men quickly snapped out of it and all helped carry the stretcher below and into sickbay.
Mush looked up at the bridge and shrugged his shoulders to his exec, who returned the shrug, both thinking the same thing — How do we put this one in the logbook? Then he ordered, “Weps below, clear the deck, I don’t like being exposed like this. Pull the cork, Hank!”
Executive Officer Evans hit the dive alarm and barked over the wailing horn, “Lookouts below! Clear the bridge.” He waited for Mush to get below and watched the forward hatch wheel turn, indicating it was watertight sealed; then he lowered himself into the bridge hatch yelling, “Dive. Dive. Dive.”