Charles Taylor - Boomer

Old Stonewall’ s air did have a different smell to it — it was coming back now — not so much a smell as a lack of one. It was constantly being scrubbed clean, monitored by a computer, sanitized to death so that it had no personality. That was the air’s most distinguishing feature — no taste, no smell, no nothing. All the aromas of food from the galley, the smell of machinery, the leather shoes, soap, after-shave lotion, even the farts, were duly sucked into the scrubbers and cleansed. Only when they surfaced to enter port at the end of a long cruise did the contamination alarms go off — to warn they were about to breathe the unclean air that everyone ashore regularly enjoyed without a moment’s hesitation.

There was another memory from his command of Stonewall Jackson that Mark Bennett was aware of every morning when he slipped on his uniform blouse — a medal that few peacetime officers displayed, the one that legitimately belonged to Ben Steel, who now had his own command — Manchester. But junior officers weren’t awarded such honors for that type of action. They went to the commanding officer responsible for making submariners out of their young officers.

In that particular instant, old Stonewall had been on her way back to Holy Loch when she picked up a Russian submarine, a new nuclear boat that must have been on trials to prove how elusive her new design would be. Ben Steel was sonar officer, and one of his sonarmen had detected a strange sound when they were south of Greenland. There was nothing like it in the computer memory, but there was every indication this was a foreign submarine, one quite different than anything the Pentagon was aware of. Bennett maneuvered to get a track on it. Same course, about the same speed. A pure intelligence coup there for the picking. Could he … should he? An SSBN was on duty until she entered port. But this contact appeared to be on a heading for Holy Loch. His initial responsibility lay in the missile tubes aft, but if he could also track this one without losing that tenuous contact with NMCS….

Every sound during every minute of the following sixty hours had been recorded as they silently closed and then followed that submarine. Steel had been awake the entire time, directing his sonar team, analyzing the Soviet’s abilities by her sound and tactics, and assisting Mark Bennett in one of the great naval-intelligence coups of the period.

Mark Bennett received a medal. Ben Steel received a letter of commendation for his service record. That’s the way it had to be. But every senior officer in the Navy knew the story and agreed with Stonewall Jackson’ s captain that some day Ben Steel would be the senior submariner in the Pentagon. It was just a matter of time.

Now he thought of Ben Steel on Manchester and where he had been ordered. He squeezed his eyes shut until they hurt. Somehow … somehow the best kept having to prove it.…

A hungry gull made one final, curious pass by the stranger wandering the beach in the gathering darkness. But there was nothing — no garbage to be carelessly discarded by this human. As it soared off, the bird broke the stillness with a scream of frustration, acknowledging there was no more chance of satisfying its hunger until morning.

Mark Bennett repressed the urge to scream back at the gull — or was it a desire to sustain that mournful cry because he, too, failed to understand why there were no answers to his questions? What was that elusive something lurking in the back of his mind? A controlling factor of some kind had been added to the puzzle of Alaska and Nevada, something that would clarify their disappearance. But a barrier existed to hide what he was so sure was the obvious.

Squeezing his hands into fists, he wished desperately that Judy were beside him. Her arm would be around his waist and she would match her stride to his and her presence would have comforted him until the answers came. And if, God forbid, Florida disappeared also, she would know how to explain it to Cindy Nelson, and she would rush to help all the families.…

Bennett stopped abruptly and hung his head, his eyes closed against the phosphorescent sparkle in the sand. Then he felt lone tears squeeze out the corner of each eye and run down his cheek. The families of Alaska and Nevada … when would they be told? How long could Ray Larsen — no, it was all of them, not just Ray, don’t blame Ray — how could they justify keeping it from those wives … parents?

He had no idea whether this hideous gamble of silence was saving any other lives.…

There was no physical sensation of movement aboard Manchester. It was much like riding a commercial airliner as on a clear, calm day, although there was no takeoff or landing, no turbulence to experience. Even at flank speed, vibration seemed nonexistent once the human body became attuned to the submarine. Each functioning piece of machinery was designed to float on its mountings to avoid “sound shorts” which were caused by a piece of metal transmitting sound through her hull into the ocean.

As he sat at the desk in his tiny captain’s stateroom, Ben Steel toyed with this oddity. He knew as well as the next man that complete lack of sound and motion were still humanly impossible. His body was moving with Manchester and he would be thrown forward into the bulkhead if she came to a sudden stop, no different than a car hitting a tree. He had also become inured to the everyday hum of her moving parts. Man had yet to achieve absolute silence with submarines, but he was damn close. Still, certain sounds did filter out into the water, and sophisticated listening gear did hear them over unimagined distances.

Man’s knowledge of electronics was more advanced than his ability to silence tons of machinery. Steel had heard those telltale sounds so many times before in sonar. He remembered his tour on Stonewall Jackson when he’d put on the big, soft earphones each day and been patiently taught to discern manmade sounds from those of sea life. He’d even seen what those sounds looked like when displayed on a screen, beautiful —”the visual display of sound cascades down the screen like a waterfall.” Where had he read that? It sounded like poetry. But he’d never gotten to the point where he could identify a sound visually. He understood sound, and he’d learned how adept he could be at using his natural abilities when they’d followed that Russian sub off Greenland. But the technical aspects, the fine points, those were beyond him. They were left to that rare breed called sonarmen.

But there really was no physical sensation of movement, no vibration in the seat of his pants to indicate that Manchester was moving through the ocean faster than most automobiles ever traveled through a city’s streets. She was heading for a rendezvous with the unknown, a mysterious something none of them would ever see, and something Steel certainly hoped she would hear — before being heard.

Undersea battles were an everyday occurrence in the trainers ashore. And whenever you made the mistake of being sunk, the instructors started the game over again, working with the attack team to increase their proficiency. There was always a critique at the end of each day to evaluate why you had been sunk, or what you did to sink the enemy. Then you went out for a couple of beers. That element of schooling was called tactics. You lived or died by tactics in a dogfight — that’s what the instructors hammered home again and again.

And, of course, the commanding officers and executive officers attended their own schools, where they were exposed to a great deal more than simple tactics. They learned how to build and nourish an attack team that might save everyone’s lives in a melee hundreds of feet below the surface. Then, there was strategy, that grand study of the entire ocean battlefield where each submarine and surface ship was simply a number expected to contribute to the common good.