Charles Taylor - Boomer

“Negative, Captain. They’re heat seeking.”

“Then there’s no warning signal to the aircraft once they’re launched?”

“They have to know our radar’s on them and they’re being tracked, but they can’t tell exactly when we launch. Of course, they could pick them up on radar. But that’s highly unlikely in this mess.”

“I want you to fire all four missiles in the launcher. I don’t want them to have an opportunity to report any attack.”

Peter Simonds, Manchester’ s executive officer, had never in his life — not once, not even in his single days when he partied every night with the other bachelors — considered becoming a SEAL. As an ensign there had been early signs of the stomach that now hid his belt buckle. He was a fancier or fine women and food and drink and had grown accustomed to that belly to the point that it was a comfortable friend. While it created an annual problem at the time of his Navy physical, his talents outweighed the spirit of the regulations. Peter’s good intentions expanded each year, enough to escape each doctor after a halfhearted warning. The result was that he continued to avoid anything vigorous that would take time from his favorite habits ashore.

There was a time when Peter considered settling down. It was the one memorable point of his single tour on a missile boat, Lewis and Clark, and at the same time the lowest point in his life before he’d grown to understand his good fortune. The incident occurred far enough in the past that he had finally been successful in moving it to the rear of his mental filing system.

He met her the first time they pulled into Holy Loch for a refit period with the tender Simon Lake. Any of the older officers in the wardroom could have warned him against falling in love with a girl he met in a bar, but it was something everyone had to learn. As unfortunate as it was to learn the hard way, Peter would no more have interfered today with one of his junior officers than his XO did with him at the time—”the school of hard knocks,” his captain said later on in a consoling voice, and “better than knocked up.”

Her name was Mary, simply Mary, none of those lilting Scottish names for her. She was pretty and talked with a pleasant, rich accent and she drank much too much of the local whiskey. But for a young, single officer in a foreign country for the first time, that was exciting. The fact that she didn’t take him to her flat until the second night convinced Peter that she’d decided he was special. When she told him she loved him, he sincerely believed his dashing charm had simply bowled her over. Not once did it occur to him that he was a ticket out of the life she had succumbed to in the past years. Not an officer in Holy Loch, whether stationed there or just passing through, had the heart to tell him who and what she really was.

When Lewis and Clark got under way for the next patrol, Mary possessed his undying love and the ring that had been given to him by his grandmother.

When Lewis and Clark returned to Holy Loch, he went directly to her flat, racing up the stairs and through the door like the lovesick puppy that he was. The man in bed with Mary claimed that he’d paid for the entire night but had no interest in a fight. He had no objection if Peter wanted his ring back, so he calmly pulled on his skivvies and headed down the hall for a hot tub.

Each year that passed dimmed memories of pretty, sweet Mary and her lovely accent, until there were months that he never thought about her. Nor did he ever interfere with the painful love lives of his junior officers. His grandmother’s ring remained buried deeply in his jewelry box. Peter remained a contented bachelor.

Yet there was also a contrariness surrounding the XO. At sea he was considered an exceptional submariner, an action-oriented officer who would relish contact with an enemy boat. He especially enjoyed the SEALs who came aboard his submarines, although their stays were short. They were rarely aboard longer than it took to transport them to their lockout point near an unfriendly coast, but he found them more interesting to him personally. Their attitudes were the same as his.

Too many of the younger officers were inordinately intense, no matter whether they were qualifying for their dolphins or competing to become a department head before their peers. It was always a race for them — yet it shouldn’t have been a race, not from Simonds’s view. Regardless of their abilities on paper, too many of this new breed never seemed to become an integral, functioning unit of the submarine, no matter how hard they worked. Peter Simonds wore a submarine like a second skin. He was a natural. And he also took the time to learn from people beyond the submarine navy — like the SEALs.

Simonds found Lieutenant Commander Burch, the SEAL they plucked from the ocean, where he expected he would — in the torpedo room. It was the last space the XO was checking for extraneous noise. He already knew it was secure and there would be no noise until the time came to reload tubes. And at that point such sounds would no longer matter. The torpedo room was also where Simonds knew he’d run into Burch because SEALs found any unfamiliar weapon a challenge.

“I suppose if there was an easy entrance to that missile launcher tucked way up in the bow, I’d have to crawl up there to find you.” There was almost always a happy lilt to Simonds’s hoarse voice. “Can you imagine someone my size crawling through that access trunk just to shoot the shit with you?” He laughed.

There was a single, small hatch leading from the torpedo room into the missile space located all the way forward on the lower level. There were twelve vertical tubes, each one containing a Tomahawk cruise missile, set between the pressure bull and the sonar sphere separating the torpedo room from the bow.

Burch had recognized the other “natural,” in addition to Manchester’ s captain, within an hour after he’d come aboard. He understood intuitively why Ben Steel was so confident in leaving the control room to Simonds during the search phase. “I haven’t been shown the missiles, but I’ll take your word for it.” The chief torpedoman was nearby, arms draped comfortably over one of his weapons. “The chief’s been teaching me how to ride one of these devils.”

The torpedo room was the entire width of the submarine, and the area up to the tubes and the instrument panel was mostly for torpedo storage. The torpedoes, close to two feet in diameter and twenty feet long, were cradled on hydraulically operated racks that could be adjusted to shift the weapons from their original storage place to a position where they could be loaded into the tubes. The four tubes, two on each side, canted outward at an angle, surrounded by a mass of gauges, valves, and piping. Between the tubes were the torpedomen’s control stations. The actual firing was done from the control room, although it could be done by hand from the torpedo room in an emergency.

“Are you getting aboard one of those fish before or after it leaves the tubes?” Simonds wandered over and leaned casually against the same torpedo as the SEAL.

Burch was a stocky individual, all shoulders and chest and muscles. “You flatter me. The chief explained what it was like inside one of those tubes. A bit of a tight fit. Looks like I’d have to catch it on the way by.”

The XO pushed his glasses back on his nose. “It’s comfortable in here, isn’t it? Smells good, too. Other than preparing for a firing sequence, I’d prefer to be in here myself.” He took a deep breath and inhaled the intoxicating aroma of grease and metal. “You ought to be here when they’re reloading. Less than seven minutes from the time we fire until we’re ready again. Not quite as fast as being in a gun mount but a hell of a lot more exciting.”