Polaris (7 page)

“I don't think so,” she said. “They seem to have other things on their mind.”

“Can our friend onboard tell us anything?”

She shook her head, frustrated. “Haven't heard from him lately. That would make this entirely too easy.”

She walked over to the cramped corner of the control room where Banach stood, where the chart was spread out. In the lower corner of the chart was Eris Island. They'd followed the
Polaris
up here, to the opposite corner, to a spot that was strangely featureless on the chart, devoid of geological marks or even soundings.

“Stay at this depth, and slow,” she said. “Let's see what they are up to.”

They drifted closer, staying about a mile away, waiting to see what happened. She tried to visualize what they were doing as they slowed almost to a standstill, drifting forward at a speed of just a few knots. She thought about their man onboard, wondered if he was still alive. Maybe he'd been discovered in the ruckus that they'd overheard, exposed, perhaps even executed. No, she thought again, the Alliance prized themselves on their civility too much for that.

Suddenly, a noise spiked on their sonar. She could hear it right through the hull: a dull
ka-chunk.

Before she could say anything, a delicate alarm sounded next to the chart, a rarely heard alarm that took her a moment to recognize.

“Captain,” Banach said, “the inertial navigation system is failing.…”

She looked up at the central panel in front of the dive chair, where a number of other alarms had sounded. Some of the smaller circuit breakers on the ship had opened, and the electrical system was busily resetting itself into a safe mode.

Meanwhile the
Polaris
continued drifting slowly forward.

“Is it some kind of weapon?” asked Banach. “An electric pulse? Are we under attack?”

“No,” said Carlson. “I don't think so. But we are at the edge of some kind of electrical field … a powerful one.”

They waited a few more minutes and then the
ka-chunk
sound repeated, and the alarm for their navigation system cleared. Breakers continued to reset around them, and she realized that the sound was similar to the one that had come to them on the bearing of the
Polaris
.

Once again the
Polaris
sped up and changed depth, ascending to periscope depth.

“Let's follow them up this time,” she said, heading for the scope. Banach climbed into the dive chair and efficiently brought the ship shallow.

She raised the scope as they came up. Soon they were at periscope depth, and Carlson squinted at the bright equatorial light through the scope. The
Polaris
was a mile or so away, too far for them to see the scope.

But she could see the drones everywhere, attracted by their earlier trip to the surface. They were swooping overhead, many of them directly above where she thought the
Polaris
was sticking up her nose. They were no longer in the tight pattern of attack that she'd seen earlier. The drones were swooping and searching.

“Captain?”

“They've made themselves invisible to the drones,” she said, the solution suddenly dawning on her. “At least at periscope depth.”

“How?”

“Degaussing,” she said. “They must have passed an underwater degaussing range.” It made sense, in a way, this close to Eris Island, probably the outcome of another, earlier research product. She grudgingly respected the Alliance and its technology; it always seemed to work when they needed it. Her leaders, on the other hand, couldn't provide her ship a microwave oven that would work without bursting into flames.

“So the drones use MAD?”

“Apparently,” she said, watching the drones fly obliviously over the
Polaris
. “At least for shallow boats.”

“Well!” said Banach. “That is good news for us!”

She took her eye off the scope and smiled at him. “Yes, it is, Lieutenant. Very good news.”

Her submarine, like their entire fleet, had been designed with coastal warfare in mind, where mines might be concentrated at strategic chokepoints. And while her government might not be able to make a decent microwave oven, they did control 90 percent of the world's titanium supply. And if they couldn't make a decent microprocessor or a clever movie or a decent rock-and-roll record, they could, better than any government on earth, marshal the huge labor forces necessary to mine titanium ore from its inevitably difficult locations, smelt it, and refine the metal. Titanium was a complete pain in the ass to work with. Every weld on her big boat had to be conducted in an inert atmosphere, a blanket of argon or helium to prevent the introduction of oxygen. But that was exactly the kind of laborious process at which her people excelled, and her boat was entirely crafted out of that difficult, rare metal. The
Polaris,
made out of strong American steel, had to subject itself to an ancient and clever degaussing range to make itself magnetically invisible. But her titanium boat had been born that way.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

The ship had limited exercise equipment, but Frank Holmes diligently used it all. He bench-pressed every free weight they had, 220 pounds total, and now he could do twenty-five reps at that weight. He would then curl 100 pounds at a time, five sets of ten, and finish by squatting the full 220 pounds. He felt he was capable of squatting maybe twice as much, but those were all the weights they had, so that was that.

On off days he did bodyweight exercises: push-ups, pull-ups, dips, and hundreds of crunches. He'd run on the ship's lone treadmill to chisel off the tiny amount of fat left on his body, and punch the heavy bag that he had diligently repaired over time until now it was virtually constructed of duct tape. Most guys got soft on submarines, he knew, but he'd put on fifteen pounds of pure muscle since deploying on the
Polaris
two years earlier. Two inches on his chest, an inch on his arms. He would be even bigger, he thought, if the ship had any decent food, but the animal protein his body craved was hard to come by. He'd hoarded some beef jerky, but the last of the real chicken and eggs had long since been consumed, and the next trip to the tender could be months away. As often as he once dreamed about sex with the soft, sweet girls he'd grown up with in Katy, Texas, he now dreamed about protein. He was a proficient masturbator after two years at sea, but there was no equivalent way to satisfy his primal need for meat. Visions of ribs, cheeseburgers, and T-bone steaks filled his dreams. Still, he was enormously strong.

So moving Ramirez's dead body was easy once he got past a small, initial burst of squeamishness that came with the sight of all the blood.

The torpedo room was directly below the staterooms, the lower-most, forward-most compartment on the ship. Frank dragged the corpse to the ladder and briefly tried to think of a more dignified option before simply dropping him down the hatch. The body landed with a thud on the steel deck below. Frank climbed down after it, then dragged Ramirez to the front of the torpedo room, past the racks of indexed Mark 50 torpedoes, and caught his breath before proceeding.

The torpedo room had always been one of his favorite places on the boat. Filled with forest green torpedoes, it seemed more military than any other place on
Polaris,
full of manly, menacing firepower. There were four firing tubes in all, two port and two starboard, with the control panel between them. It smelled dank, both because of its low position on the ship and because the torpedo tubes were often filled, drained, and filled again with the sea that surrounded them. When he had volunteered for submarine duty, Frank had a picture in his mind of what a submarine would be like. The torpedo room was one of the few places on the boat that somewhat looked like that picture.

He had fond memories of the torpedo room as well: during his walk-through for his qualifications, the torpedo room was where Captain McCallister had brought him his final task: to line up the system and shoot a water slug—basically a tube full of water, although the actions would be nearly the same if firing an actual torpedo. Captain McCallister had been patient as he plodded through the procedure, and had given him a few key hints along the way when he was stuck. But he had succeeded, finally pushing that red button and ejecting a thousand pounds of seawater back into the sea with a satisfying
whoosh
. He still recalled the subsequent ratcheting and hissing of valves that returned to a firing position, the popping of the ears as the pressure changed with the expulsion of the compressed firing air. Later that night, after dinner, Captain McCallister had pinned gold dolphins on his chest, Frank's proudest moment aboard. So he fancied himself as something of an expert.

The memory gave him a brief stab of guilt about the captain. The man had always been good to him, and he obviously knew the submarine better than any man aboard. Hell, he had designed the thing. But Moody said that he was a traitor, and he'd seen it himself. Somebody was giving them away, and with an enemy boat behind them, this wasn't a time to screw around. He was taking his orders from Moody now, and he was comfortable with that.

He reached for the bound yellow book of torpedo room procedures, thumbed through it until he found the correct one, and reviewed it carefully, a thick index finger pointing to each step as he slowly read it. He remembered the way Moody had raised an eyebrow at him in the wardroom, the doubt in her voice: he was determined not to screw this up.

Three of the four tubes had small signs hanging from their breech doors:
WARSHOT LOADED
. The lower port tube was empty; that would be the one he would use. Everything on the submarine, Frank knew, was controlled by switches and valves. Therefore switches and valves were everywhere, and, amazingly to Frank, every one of them had a specific purpose, a reason for being. He went through the initial lineup in the procedure, verifying the positions of valves and pushing buttons until he thought he was ready. But when he tried to open the big breech door of the lower, port tube, it wouldn't move. He knew from his practice down there that when things were properly aligned, everything moved with a liquid, well-engineered ease. But when something was amiss, the strongest guy in the world couldn't make it budge. He studied the panel, trying to figure out what was blocking his progress. An interlock prevented it, he saw, because the muzzle door was open; the ship's designers logically made it impossible to open both the muzzle and the breech simultaneously. Somehow he'd skipped that step in the procedure, so he backtracked, pushed a button to close the muzzle door, and tried again. Still the breech wouldn't open.

He sat down and reread the procedure again, starting to get nervous. He was stuck in the middle of it, and if he had screwed something up, he didn't know how to recover, how to back out, how to start over. He remembered Captain McCallister talking to him two years earlier as he nervously attempted the procedure. “You can't sink the ship from here, Holmes,” he said. “Don't worry. Torpedo tubes have been around for over a hundred years, and they've pretty much idiot-proofed them.”

But Frank wasn't worried about the quality of the ship's idiot-proofing. Rather, he was worried about the ship proving that he was an idiot. He imagined telling Moody that Ramirez's body was still cooling away on the torpedo room deck. Or stuck in the breech door. Or jammed in a tube. No, he couldn't face her with that kind of news.

Reading the procedure for the third time, he noticed a warning on the bottom of a page that cautioned not to open the breech door until the tube was fully drained. In fact, yet another interlock prevented it, so that a thousand gallons of seawater wouldn't gush from the tube onto the deck of the torpedo room. He eagerly found the drain valve for the port tubes and opened it. At first he was alarmed to hear so much water draining from the tube. Submariners were conditioned to worry at the sound of gushing water. But the noise soon diminished as the tube emptied, a yellow warning light went off on the console, and he approached the breech door once again.

As if he had spoken a magic spell, the locking ring turned smoothly, and the door swung open with barely a tug. He bent down and looked inside, peering into the tube with the small flashlight he kept on his belt. It was polished smooth, still damp, and smelled of the sea. He rejoiced for a moment, the battle seeming half won. Now he just needed to get Ramirez inside.

The tube was, he remembered randomly from his qualifications, twenty-one inches in diameter. Seemed like a lot, and Ramirez wasn't a big guy, but as Frank lifted him up and tried to shove him inside, he saw that it would be difficult. He decided put him in headfirst, because it seemed like the right thing to do. He grabbed him from behind, around his waist, and tried to flop him inside. Frank winced as he heard Ramirez's teeth crack on the edge of the tube. One of them broke off and fell to the deck. He continued pushing, got Ramirez in up to his hips, where he became stuck.
Of course
, thought Frank,
he probably has a thirty-two-inch waist, and this is a twenty-one-inch tube. But wait—that would be the diameter, whereas the thirty-two-inch waist was a circumference.
… He was certain there was a formula he could use to convert one to the other, but even if he remembered it, he wouldn't be able to do the math in his head. Rather, he just kept shoving, with all his considerable strength, until he could move Ramirez no more. His lower legs stuck out of the tube, the thick soles of his heavily worked engineer's boots dangling in the air.

So close, thought Frank. He saw the tooth he'd knocked out of Ramirez's head, kicked it across the deck and into the bilge in frustration. He'd be all the way in the tube if he were just five pounds skinnier. Or one inch.

And then he realized what he needed to do: he would have to undress him.