“You kill some bunnies?” Angi walked toward him from the kitchen, their baby girl tucked in her arm. She still took his breath away, always the prettiest person in the room, whether they were in a farmhouse or a black tie Navy Ball.
“Yeah, me and the youngster took four.” Danny took the baby from her, looking down at her head. He longed for her hair to be red like her mother’s. It didn’t show signs of redness yet, but Danny had heard that could change in infants, and he hopefully inspected her noggin every day.
“Did he cuss at all?”
“Shit yes he did,” said Danny. Angi slapped him in the back of the head.
“Not in front of the baby. I’d rather that not be her first word.”
“My bad.”
“You should check your phone,” she said. “I heard it ringing a few times while you were out playing.”
Danny walked over to the coat hooks by the door still holding the baby. He fished his phone out of his jacket pocket with his free hand.
Three missed calls and a voice mail. Caller ID: COMSUBPAC.
Danny sighed. They rarely called three times with good news.
<p>Pearl Harbor, Hawaii</p>Danny stood at the foot of the brow for a minute, looking the Louisville over. Angi had gone back to Indiana to supervise their move while he got on the next flight to Hawaii. He’d spent the flight wondering about his wife and baby, this being the first time the three of them had been apart — he knew it wouldn’t be the last. He’d also speculated about what was going on with his boat, what required him to get out there so quickly. Speculating was all he could do: on the phone they would tell him nothing. He landed in Honolulu, took a cab to the sub base, and now here he was staring at the boat that would be his home for three years. It would be the last time, he knew, that he could look at it with no sense of ownership, no sense of responsibility, no long list or anxiety about what needed to be done. All that, for a few moments more, was a mystery. For now, he could just look at her: SSN 724.
To an untrained observer, it looked very much like all the other submarines that lined the piers around the base: black, mysterious, undeniably deadly. Someone with a passing knowledge of warships would be able to see quickly that she was an attack submarine, as opposed to a missile sub, or boomer, like Alabama where Danny had spent his first sea tour: the lack of a long, flat missile deck easily gave that away. Danny’s previous submarine had been designed to launch long-range nuclear missiles. His new boat was designed around the more traditional submarine mission of shooting torpedoes, both at other submarines and surface ships.
Someone with slightly more experience could discern that she was a 688, or Los Angeles-class submarine, the nation’s largest class of submarines, a workhorse of the Cold War that had proven very useful for the new missions the force had found itself handed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. A close look at the bow, and the barely visible outline of the hatches for twelve vertical-launch cruise missile tubes, marked her as one of the “second flight” 688 subs, with the cruise missile capability that was an enhancement from the original design. The Louisville had, in fact, conducted the first war patrol of any US submarine since World War II, in the first Gulf War in 1991. On January 19 of that year, she fired the first shot of that conflict, a Tomahawk cruise missile that struck the Al Muthanna chemical weapons factory. The fact that the boat still had planes sticking out from her sail meant that she was not the most recent version of the 688, the “688i,” as in “improved.”
But Danny, with his experience and his expertise, saw far beyond the silhouette of the Louisville. He saw that the deck was painted and clean. There were few obstructions on the deck, and the only thing that connected her to shore were the shore power cables, the brow that he would soon walk across, and the two lines forward and aft that held her to the pier. The two young petty officers on the quarterdeck were clean-shaven, fit, and were resisting the urging of the tropical breeze to relax. In fact Danny knew they’d spotted him and were waiting for him to either come aboard or keep moving. Not all the seagull shit had been removed from the black hull of the boat, because that would be impossible, but they had diligently kept up with the relentless birds as best they could. The pier alongside the boat was clean too, the trash barrels were not overflowing and a load of zinc bricks had been neatly stacked. The flying bridge was erected atop the sail, and not a speck of rust was visible anywhere. Danny knew two things as he took a deep breath, stepped onto the brow, and crossed a small sliver of the Pacific onto his new home. With the Louisville, he’d once again found himself aboard a good boat. And: it was going to sea very, very soon.
He saluted the Petty Office on the quarterdeck. His name tag read Warner.
