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•   •   •

The first days at sea were always hectic, exhausting, but there was something of a relief to it as well: both the ship and the crew were meant to be underway.
Alabama’s
numerous and complicated systems were designed to operate ideally while in motion, relying on seawater to cool the steam flowing through condensers, shield radiation, and to insulate them from the world of commodores and admirals. The crew was also designed to operate optimally inside a ship at motion, with each division manned to operate a three-section watchbill of six hours on watch, twelve hours off, with plenty of maintenance and training for all hands to do in those off hours, into which also had to be squeezed showering, shitting, shaving, eating, and occasionally sleeping. So while bitching about sea time was an ancient and valued tradition of any maritime force, there was something pleasing about throwing off all lines and getting underway. For almost thirty six-hours, the ship steamed on the surface, each hour rougher then the last, until the ship had finally reached Point Juliet, marking water deep for them to submerge.

Lieutenant Hein, like many men, had rebounded from his seasickness after the initial episode of vomiting. He was standing watch in the control room as the officer of the deck, and he carefully verified their position on a familiar chart of Puget Sound. He then verified that the ship was rigged for dive, and looked to the captain who was standing at his side on the conn. He awaited his order.

Captain Shields nodded his head. “Submerge the ship.”

“Submerge the ship, aye sir. Chief of the watch—submerge the ship.”

The chief of the watch picked up the 1MC microphone and announced to the crew: “Dive! Dive!” He sounded the klaxon alarm,
Ahh-OOO-Gah
, twice. Modern submarines had, tragically, replaced the traditional klaxon alarm with a poor electronic facsimile, but
Alabama
, like many boats, had taken an old iron klaxon from a decommissioned boat in the shipyard. The large, gray cast iron alarm was bolted to the deck at the chief of the watch’s feet in a completely unauthorized modification to the ship’s plans.

After sounding the klaxon again, the chief of the watch threw the switches that opened the vents to the six main ballast tanks, the giant tanks of air at each end of the submarine that kept her afloat. Salty spray shot fifty feet into the air through the open vents, as seawater flooded into the tanks through grates in the bottom. Lieutenant Hein watched the controlled sinking of the ship through the periscope and gave a running update to the men in control.

“Forward tanks venting…” He turned the periscope one hundred and eighty degrees. “Aft tanks venting….decks awash…” It was always a strange sight to see the dry deck become covered in swirling green water, where just minutes before crewmen had scurried to make the ship ready for sea. Then the scope was at sea level, water splashing over the optics, then it was under. “Scope is submerged. Lowering number two scope.” He backed away from the scope and turned the orange ring that brought the scope down. Every part of the ship was under water. Their patrol as a submarine had begun.

•   •   •

The navigator excused himself from the control room without a word, and quickly locked himself into the watchstander’s head at the bottom of the control room ladder. He grabbed each side of the small steel sink, and looked straight down at the drain to avoid looking at himself in the mirror. He throat constricted as he thought of the sea surrounding them, just inches away on the other side of the bulkhead, endless, dark, and merciless.

•   •   •

In his stateroom, Jabo felt the rolls ease, without completely stopping, as the ship paused at an intermediate depth to get its initial 1/3 trim. The chief of the watch and the dive were working together, moving water from tank to tank, making fine adjustments, until the ship was at a perfect, level angle, and a slow speed, with all the control surfaces at a zero angle. It took time and skill to get it exactly right. Then the ship increased speed, which he could not feel. But it went deeper, which made the rolls completely melt away, and Jabo almost sighed at the sheer pleasure of the moment. Jabo didn’t quite feel any kind of supernatural, physical connection to his ship. Maybe that came after a lifetime of sea tours, maybe the XO and captain felt that way. But Jabo was profoundly in tune with the machinery that surrounded him, and it was a special kind of relief he felt as the ship went deep. It was like driving a truck on rutted dirt roads for two days, then finally pulling onto the smooth asphalt of a new highway.

“So you turned in your letter?” asked Hayes Kincaid, his roommate in Stateroom 3. Their third roommate, Hein, was on the conn. At the moment the diving alarm sounded, the earliest moment allowed, they both changed from their khaki uniforms into their blue coveralls, or “poopie suits,” and tennis shoes. The poopie suit was one of the great perks of submarine life, and Jabo had trouble imagining how his comrades-in-arms in the surface navy managed to strap themselves into khakis, blues, and shined leather shoes every day.

Kincaid was not only his roommate, he was his best friend on the boat. He was the only black officer onboard, and the only one who’d been enlisted prior to receiving his commission. Kincaid had done a full sea-tour on a submarine as a nuclear electronics technician before being awarded an ROTC scholarship and attending Hampton College in Virginia, where he got a mechanical engineering degree and an Ensign’s shoulder boards. Then he went right back to nuclear power school, then right back to sea.

“Well sort of. Not really. The captain refused to accept it.”

Kincaid laughed loudly. “Can he do that? Didn’t you need to get that in this last mail call?”

Jabo shrugged. “He was a little mysterious about it. Said we’d have another mail call in a couple of weeks, and that the reason we were having the mail call would convince me I want to stay in the navy.”

Kincaid laughed again. “
Fuck
…
that
. You want to come back to one of these? Be a
department head?”

“That’s what I said—I mentioned the navigator —said he doesn’t look like he enjoys life all that much.”

“What did the captain say to that?”

“Said the nav was a bad example.”

“Fuck that! He’s a perfect example. That department head tour is when they
get
you. JO tours, XO tours, what are they, three years? Because JOs, like you, they’re trying to trick you into staying in. And XOs, they only need one per boat. And the CO tour is down to what, eighteen months? But the departments heads, the Navy knows they’ve got those guys, they’ve already decided to stay in—so they keep them out here like five years, wring every last drop of sweat out of them. And then what do they do? Promote half of them to XO and tell the rest to fuck off. No pension, no nothing to show for their trouble.”

“What the fuck, Hayes, aren’t you a lifer?”

“I’ve got twelve years in, my friend, ‘cause of my enlisted time, and all my time in college counted too. I’ll do my shore tour after this, then my department head tour, and then I’ll have my twenty. The Navy can do whatever it wants to me after that. I don’t give a shit if I don’t screen for XO.” But Jabo knew Kincaid would—he was an outstanding officer and, despite everything he ever said aloud: he loved the navy.

The rough voice of their Executive Officer on the 1MC:
All officers report to the wardroom.

“Are we finally going to find out what the hell is going on this patrol?”

Kincaid shrugged. “I already told you the plan. We’re going to go to sea, we’re going to screw around for three, four, five or six months, and then were going to come back. In a year, we’ll do it again.”

Jabo laughed. “Maybe you’re right.” Kincaid worked hard to always be the least impressed person about any event of shipboard life, whether it was a fire in the engine room or the new ice cream maker in the Crew’s Mess.

“Let me ask you something, Hayes. Was life on submarines really that much more exciting twelve years ago? Is it that much more boring now?”

“Let me tell you a secret,” he said leaning in and whispering. “Life on submarines has always been boring.”

“Fuck you, I don’t believe it,” said Jabo, laughing. “I’ve heard the stories. Plus, why would you stay in all this time?”

“I like the food.”

They stepped out of their stateroom and walked down the short ladder that took them to the wardroom.

•   •   •

The Captain was at his traditional spot, at the head of the table, while the XO sat literally at his right hand. The navigator, small and exhausted looking as always, was standing up in front with a tripod that held a chart, a chart hidden by a standard issue navy bed sheet. That was unusual—everyone in the wardroom had at least a top secret clearance, and Jabo felt again that maybe Kincaid was wrong about their patrol being boring. Jabo also sensed some tension in the silent room.

They were all three in their khakis, and Jabo felt a little underdressed in his poopie. Soon the other junior officers in poopie suits piled in, though, all of them just as eager as he had been to get comfortable. The noise level rose. They waited for Hein to arrive, who was being relieved on the conn by the engineer himself, at the XO’s insistence…whatever was going on they wanted Hein to hear firsthand. Hein finally arrived, looking slightly befuddled, and sat next to Jabo without saying a word.

The XO convened the meeting. “Everybody shut the fuck up.” They all quickly complied. The XO’s muscular arms bulged inside his khaki sleeves, and his bald head gleamed in the fluorescent lights. MS1 Straub, the head cook, stuck his head in from the galley door, doing his job and seeing if anything was needed. The XO nodded at him, and he got the message, retreating. The XO locked the door behind him when it shut—another unusual precaution.

“Before we get started,” said the Captain. “I’m tempted to ask what the craziest rumor each of you has heard. About our patrol orders, not about girl babies.” There was nervous laughter around the table. “Whatever you’ve heard,” said the captain, “I can assure you it’s complete bullshit. The XO and I were briefed the morning of our departure by the Admiral, and the navigator found out shortly after.” Jabo looked at the nav, whose face was impassive, haunted, exhausted.

“So here’s what we’re really going to do,” said the captain. “We’re taking this ship to Taiwan.”

There was some muttering around the table, and Jabo watched for just a moment as even Kincaid was unable to hide his surprise, before he slipped back into his mask of practiced nonchalance. But it was truly remarkable news. Because of the nature of their normal mission, they almost never went anywhere exciting. Unlike their brothers on attack submarines who deployed all over the globe with battle groups, Trident Submarines generally followed a fairly predictable schedule of leaving Bangor, Washington, going to sea for a few hundred days, and returning. If they were lucky, every other patrol or so, they might pull into Pearl Harbor. Once, on Jabo’s first patrol, they had to surface off of Kodiak Island, Alaska, to medevac a shipmate who’d suffered a heart attack. But foreign ports were just never part of the deal—their deployment schedule didn’t allow for it and most foreign nations were hesitant to allow twenty-four nuclear missiles into one of their harbors, with all the protests and controversy it would inevitably cause.

“The United States has a fundamental commitment to the nation of Taiwan,” said the Captain. “The nature of which, frankly, is too complicated to explain here. But, in short, we will surface two weeks from now one hundred nautical miles east of the island, we will pull into the Taiwanese navy base at Suao, and then we are going to remove sixteen warheads from one of our missiles, and give the government of Taiwan temporary custody of them. It’s all top secret, beyond top secret, until we pull into the harbor, and then the news media of the world will be invited to take pictures. You’ll probably all end up on the Nightly News.”

“Isn’t that a violation of the non-proliferation treaty?” said Hein. Hein had gone to MIT and was one of the smartest guys that Jabo had ever met. It didn’t surprise him that he would throw out a question like that.

“That’s a good question Jay. I asked the same thing of the admiral. The official line is that we’re not proliferating because we’re not giving them the warheads—we’re allowing them to store them on our behalf. Or something like that. But your intuition is sound—I have no doubt that this will stir up a shitload of controversy, at home and abroad, and will antagonize the Chinese beyond belief. But I believe, as everyone at this table should, that our national leadership has thought this through completely and that they’ve decided the benefits are worth the risks.”

“What do we tell the crew?” asked Kincaid.

“Nothing,” snapped the XO. “No one knows where we are going or why. We’ll tell them the day before we pull in that we are going to Taiwan, but not why. This is all ‘need to know,’ and you guys need to know, since you’re going to be looking at the chart every night and making sure we’re headed in the right direction. You, you, and you,” he said, pointing in turn at Kincaid, Jabo, and Jay Hein, “will be straight up three-section OOD starting with the next hour. Get to know and love those charts. Outside this room, only quartermasters and a handful of Nav ETs will know. And I guess we’ll have to tell the engineer sooner or later.” Everyone chuckled.

“You, you, and you,” said the XO, pointing to Morgan, Morrissey, and Retzner, “are our three-section EOOWs.” They all happened to be sitting next to each other on one side of the table, all friends and roommates on their second patrol. They nodded in unison. “And you,” he said, pointing to Duggan, “Your job is to qualify EOOW, get on the watchbill, and make life a little easier for your six shipmates here.”

“Aye, aye sir,” said Duggan. Jabo heard the urgent sincerity in his voice. It was a shitty feeling to be the only one in the room without a real role to play.

The XO continued. “All of you can regard any information about our mission just like targeting information— no one else needs to know.”