Charles Taylor - Boomer

So many of the other men — she’d heard the stories from other wives too many times — came back and had trouble if their homes didn’t run like the submarines they’d just left. Everything needed a place, a purpose, a reason, and an explanation if there wasn’t. It was so much easier for them if their homes were organized just like their submarines, so they didn’t have to shift personalities when they came ashore. Wayne Newell was like that; Myra had reaffirmed that yesterday.

But Ben Steel came home to get away from the Navy, He couldn’t get out of his uniform and into his old, rumpled shorts any faster each afternoon. Homework with the girls was a high point of his evening during the week. Dinner was a time for all of them to plan the day trips around the island, especially to Makaha. Alycia and Greta always waited for him to complain about their bikinis, and they’d bring it up if he forgot. Yet he never once criticized them — they’d never done anything on those trips that required a lecture. He used to tease Connie afterward, when they were home in bed on a Sunday night, that the girls acted just like the ones in the old “beach party” movies, all show and no action. They never gave him reason to believe otherwise.

The other thing he liked was their solitary walks, just the two of them. Sometimes it was on a deserted beach while the girls went “trolling for boys,” as Ben called it. Other times, it was just a stroll down the hill from their home at night. He said it was good for the mind and the body, but that his aging body was more demanding recently.

The nights on their hill were perfect, especially if there had been showers that afternoon. The dampness heightened the aroma of the flowers, especially the exotic ones, creating billowy, deep perfumes that filled the darkness with images of their daytime colors. The discordant evening sounds became special also.

The longer they lived on the hill, the more both of them learned about the insects and animals that lived there with them. Connie remembered how amazed she was by Ben’s knowledge of the night creatures. He could explain which ones survived by eating the undergrowth and which ones lived off each other—”the food chain is alive and well” was how he put it. Those walks just by themselves, as if the rest of the world were a million miles away, created wonderful memories. Sometimes, when they got back to the house and the girls were asleep, they made love in the front yard with the night sounds and aromas enveloping them. There must have been magic in that old house!

Privacy was something that Ben decided he’d probably always treasured, but he’d failed to realize it until they were married. In high school, in the Academy, even the first few years in submarines, he was always part of a group that did everything as a unit and succeeded because of that fact. It was Connie who taught him that the smallest unit, and the most meaningful one by far, could be made up of two people. Children became a part of that unit, but both of them understood that eventually those children would leave to develop a family of their own. Then, it would be just Ben and Connie Steel again — and that was the most vital relationship either of them would ever experience. They both vowed, silently more often than verbally, that they each would do everything possible to make their life together special for each other.

When Ben was ashore, he socialized with Navy people only as a necessity of the job. He consistently made a special effort to coordinate everything else around the two of them in their early years of marriage, dreaming of the day they would have their own home. As they transferred from one assignment to the next, it became an obsession.

That house on the hill provided the final element of their relationship — privacy. Because a career in submarines meant living close to the people you worked with on a twenty-four-hour basis, you got to know every possible thing about them. For Ben Steel there was nothing like escaping to that house to unwind from the tremendous responsibilities he carried as Manchester’ s commanding officer. Most of all, it was where Connie waited for him.

He never talked submarines when he was home, and he avoided it when they were with other people, unless he was dragged into a conversation. Ben Steel could separate business and pleasure like no man she’d ever met.

Connie squinted at the late-afternoon sun, lit another cigarette, look a hesitant puff, coughed, and tossed it in the grass. Then she wiped away a tear that had begun to course down her cheek after a long struggle to hold it back. It was hard to think such thoughts when she was alone like this.

God, how she missed that man! The house was so empty without him.

Ben Steel remembered very few times in his career when he had found himself in such a quandary. He stood silently on the starboard side of the control room. While his eyes seemed fixed on one of the fire-control displays, he saw nothing. His arms were folded across his chest, his mind oblivious to the sounds around him.

Peter Simonds had left him alone, determining intuitively that it was better to kibitz with the OOD. Eventually the captain would come to some type of decision on their next move. That was a given, he knew, after working so long with Steel.

There was nothing hidden or implied in the orders Lieutenant Commander Burch had delivered when Manchester fished him out of the Pacific. COMSUBPAC had made their mission as clear as possible. Two Tridents were missing. To send a warning to all boomers could tip off the Russians if they were involved, possibly even cause other subs to be sunk before a solution could be found. Florida was considered the next likely target by the admirals in Pearl Harbor. But she was in peril from an unknown source and would know no more than they did. Steel had been ordered to her sector to screen the boomer from harm and engage any enemy submarine that appeared to be challenging her.

He had yet to establish sonar contact with Florida. That was troubling in itself. It might even mean they were too late. But they now had passive contact with another submarine. It was a natural assumption that such a contact would be enemy because certainly no American submarine was expected to be anywhere near that sector. Manchester was the only U.S. submarine ordered into that area. Yet that contact had finally been designated as a 688-class. And soon after, David Hall thought it could be Pasadena, a sister ship, Wayne Newell’s ship. It didn’t make sense — such a coincidence couldn’t occur in a situation like this!

Wayne Newell … Wayne Newell. Was it a coincidence? They had ended up at nuclear power school together, then forgotten each other until they bunked together on Stonewall Jackson. Their wives had become such good friends in those days, and it was only the letters between the women that had kept them in contact until they both arrived in Pearl to take command of sister ships at the same time. It seemed that every time he turned around at a critical time, there was Wayne. Coincidence?

And now, were they in contact once again in a sector in the Pacific neither of them would ever have any reason to have been, except for … coincidence? Steel considered the quiet, introspective Newell, equally as talented as any other C.O. in the boats, maybe more than most, but never outgoing or competitive, as others would expect. Of course, the element of competition was there, but it never came to the surface with Newell. He always appeared bland, neutral even, yet there was never any doubt that he meant to be better than anyone else. He just was going about it in his own way. That could be frustrating to aggressive officers who assumed the way to succeed was to face the competition at the line of scrimmage and then charge into the fray like a fullback. Weren’t those the rules of the game?