Undetected (2 page)

“XO, I have the deck and the conn,” he informed his second-in-command.

“The captain has the deck and the conn,” Lieutenant Commander Kingman confirmed, passing authority back to Bishop.

“Helm, come to heading 040.”

“Come to heading 040, aye, Captain.”

Let the
Seawolf
do the hunting. Bishop's job was to stay silent and never be seen. He'd follow the whales for a while. They were heading the direction he wanted to end up, and they were traveling with their young. The enormous mammals would stay well clear of any submarine they heard ahead of them. Trailing miles behind the whales and watching their movements would tell him a lot of useful information. He wished to hide. The whales would help him do so.

The world seemed like a quiet place when submerged on patrol, but Bishop was aware it was more illusion than fact. Strategic Command sent out a daily naval update, highlighting ships that might be in their area, passing on general news about military deployments around the world, often mentioning diplomatic missions and trade tensions and political concerns from all points of the globe. The military sat at the crossroads of so many dynamics going on between nations. Some nations were rising in stature, in wealth and influence, while others were declining, whose leaders strained to stay in power by any means necessary rather than fall.

It had been a quiet patrol, but sometimes the quiet wasn't the whole story. Bishop wondered if North Korea had come
close to blowing something up, if Russia was arguing about natural gas shipments to Europe again, if Japan and China had more fishing boat skirmishes along the chain of islands whose ownership they disputed in the East China Sea. The daily briefings were useful, yet they were never quite enough to satisfy his curiosity about the dynamics of what had
almos
t happened.

From the military history he had studied and the classified briefings he had for this job, Bishop was more aware than most of how close the world often was to war. A boomer didn't patrol the ocean at hard-alert status because the world had turned peaceful. It remained a deterrent against the fact the world was inherently the opposite—unstable and prone to warfare.

And if he had to pick a subject to lose sleep over at night, he would choose North Korea. When nuclear weapons were considered the reason the nation continued to exist, when warheads were stockpiled in dangerous numbers, North Korea remained an immediate threat to South Korea and a serious threat to Japan. Bishop would prefer rational actors when it came to military matters, and he wasn't convinced the new North Korean leader had a rational view of the world around the isolated country. Bishop knew some of the classified captain's-eyes-only tasking orders were launch package codes for North Korean targets.

The world might be quiet tonight, but he didn't make the assumption it was calm. Following the whales for a while sounded like a smart way to stay undetected.

She needed to get out of Boulder, Colorado. Gina Gray peeled an orange and studied the night sky through the win
dow above the kitchen sink. The conviction had been growing over the course of the last few weeks. She needed to make a major change.

Breaking up with a guy was always difficult, but this hadn't been her choice, and she hadn't seen it coming. It put her in an uncertain mood. And continuing to cross paths with Kevin Taggert at work was too high a price to pay for her peace of mind. It was time to leave.

She'd put off the decision for weeks, for she enjoyed working at NOAA's Marine Geology and Geophysics Division. But her task of mapping the seabed of the world's oceans using satellite data was essentially finished. She'd solved the last technical problem, incorporating the earth's gravity map with the radar data. The algorithms were finished, and now it was just processing time. A set of detailed seabed maps for the Pacific were complete, and they were beautiful in their exquisite detail. They were already in use by the Navy. The rest of the world's five oceans would follow as computer-processing time was available, and her colleague Ashley had that task well in hand.

The maps were a major step forward in knowledge about the oceans. The satellite data significantly improved both accuracy and coverage, so much so that in two years of work she'd managed to render obsolete the accumulated knowledge of decades of previous maps of the ocean floors created by surface ships using side-scan sonar. Her maps were practically works of art. But not many would get to appreciate the full impact of what she'd accomplished. The military was exercising its right to classify the resolution of her maps and would only release a version to the public with a lower level of detail.

She understood the reason the data would be classified. Telling an enemy—or for that matter, even a curious ally—the depths and locations of the underwater trenches and seamount formations along the Pacific Northwest would give them the ability to hide their own submarines more easily, to watch who entered and exited the Strait of Juan de Fuca, headed for the Naval Base Kitsap at Bremerton or the Naval Submarine Base Bangor. Other naval bases around the world would similarly become more vulnerable. Keeping the higher resolution maps classified would give the U.S. an advantage at sea that was worth protecting.

Gina accepted the military decision, even though it complicated matters for her personally. Her résumé wouldn't be able to show the true extent of her work, but those who appreciated what she could do with large data sets would see the notation on the page and know the actual work product was classified. At least this project wasn't being classified at a level where she couldn't even reference the work in her résumé—something that had happened with her sonar work.

But she hadn't taken this project on for the scientific credit it would give her. She'd taken on the seafloor mapping project to keep submariners—Jeff Gray, her brother, chief among them—safer. An accident like the USS
San Francisco
, which had hit an underwater formation, killing a crewman and nearly sinking it, wouldn't happen again. Seamounts everywhere in the world's five oceans would now be clearly marked on the new navigational charts incorporating her seabed data.

Her brother was out on the USS
Seawolf
somewhere in the Pacific tonight and wasn't due back in Bangor for a few weeks. She couldn't use him as an excuse to head to the West Coast,
though that was where she most wished she could be—at Jeff's place, tucked in safe with the last member of her family.

Her dream of being married by the time she was 30 looked further away than ever before. Her options were fading. As painful as it was to absorb the breakup with Kevin, she couldn't afford to pull back from dating again if she was going to keep her dream alive. She'd have to shake it off, patch together her self-confidence, and move on. Kevin hadn't meant to cause her so much turmoil. He'd broken things off as gently as he could, done it with kindness by saying it wasn't her; it was simply that it wasn't going to work out for the long term and it would be better to conclude that now and keep their relationship a friendship.

It
was
her. This was the third serious relationship to end in essentially the same way. And she was at a loss for the reasons and what to do about it. She didn't understand what had gone wrong, so she didn't know what to fix. She was adaptable, willing to change, willing to make adjustments. She just needed a guy to like her enough to stick with her while they figured out how to make a relationship work for the long term.

She wanted to get married. She was 29, reasonably pretty, she had a good smile, her weight was under control, she could converse on most subjects with some knowledge, she went to church, she was nice to people, and the fact she wasn't married when she wanted to be just didn't make sense. It was the kind of failure that fit into the bucket of things she simply couldn't understand.

“Just one guy, God. Surely somewhere there is one guy for me,” she mentioned quietly as she gathered up the orange peels and dropped them into the trash. She even kept a fairly
neat house. She wasn't the best cook in the world, but she was decent enough with a cookbook.

Her speech could lock up on rare occasions, but it had happened only twice in the last two years with Kevin, and it was more an embarrassment for her than a concern. The doctors compared the phenomena she experienced to a stutterer who had difficulty getting the words out. She couldn't believe that was the problem. The speech freeze would clear itself on its own in a minute or two. She mentally pushed away the concern. If she wanted to find reasons for Kevin's decision, she could talk herself in circles. He hadn't given her one.

Jeff would help her out. It's what big brothers did. She could ask him to introduce her to Navy guys he liked. Surely on a base where more than ten thousand people worked, there would be a few eligible, nice, single guys whom Jeff thought might like her. She wouldn't mind being a military wife.

She had worked on sonar projects in the past—her idea for cross-sonar now kept Jeff materially safer than he had been before. If she married a military man, there would always be ocean work she could do for the Navy, regardless of where they were based. If she got lucky enough to marry a submariner, she already knew she liked the Bangor area, in the northwest part of Washington State. The other home port for submarines stateside was at Kings Bay, Georgia. While she hadn't visited it, Jeff had thought it a nice enough place for the year he had been stationed there.

Gina finished the orange.

She had a couple of new sonar ideas worth exploring. A phone call would put in motion the security clearances necessary to let her pursue them. She could be on the West Coast tomorrow, tucked into a lab at Bangor, have some time to
herself to work. She could stay at Jeff's place. It would give her physical distance from Kevin. It would keep her occupied until Jeff got back from his sea patrol.

If she retreated to Chicago, her other option, she ran the risk of giving up on her dream of marriage. She had held on to the family house there as her home base. She loved the science projects she could tap into at the university she had attended for so many years, and she felt at home at the church she had attended since her teens. But the five years working in Chicago were marked by two relationships that had not worked out, and she didn't know who else in her circle of acquaintances there would think to ask her out on a date if they hadn't done so in prior years. With the move to Boulder she'd had two years dating Kevin and a chance for what she dreamed of to come true. She'd just have to try again.

Go west, she decided. Work on her sonar ideas. Ask for Jeff's help. It was at least a plan. Better than staying in Boulder and trying to find polite things to say when those encounters with Kevin brought back the sadness of a dream that was dying.

Have Jeff introduce her to Navy guys he liked, keep an open mind. She would make a concerted effort not to dismiss any guy who showed an interest, regardless of how unlikely she thought he might be from their initial introduction. She wasn't dreaming about a perfect match anymore. A good guy would be fine. Someone willing to commit to building a good marriage. She just had to figure out where he was, put herself in his path, say hello, and hope for the best.

Bishop thanked the petty officer who brought him more coffee, put his fork through a stack of pancakes, and reviewed
the drill plan for the next watch. Fresh eggs, milk, and fruit ran out three weeks into a patrol, and the sub didn't resurface for more supplies unless there was a major equipment failure aboard and provisions could be picked up as an incidental extra. Bishop chose to stick with pancakes and bacon, occasionally cinnamon rolls, rather than adapt to powdered milk and an egg substitute.

He wanted two more fire drills focused on the command-and-control center before this patrol was finished. They were complex drills, and he didn't want to run them too close to reaching the continental shelf or when they were sailing under a shipping channel. He penciled in the drills for 6 and 18 hours out, added a note for the drill coordinator that he wanted to also have the sonar room face an equipment failure during the first of the fire drills.