George Wallace - Hunter Killer [Movie Tie-In]

The radioman handed Glass an aluminum clipboard with the words TOP SECRET painted in two-inch high letters on its cover. Glass flipped it open, signed a disclosure sheet saying he had seen the message, and began to read:

TOP SECRET, SPECIAL HANDLING REQUIRED

TO: COMMANDING OFFICER USS TOLEDO , SSN 769

FROM: COMSUBLANT

BT

1. IMMEDIATELY PROCEED AT BEST SPEED TO RN SUBMARINE BASE FASLANE. MOOR PIER NOVEMBER TWO.

2. LOAD DSRV MYSTIC AND OTHER EQUIPMENT.

3. UNDER WAY IMMEDIATELY UPON COMPLETION ON-LOAD.

4. FOLLOW-UP ORDERS AND AMPLIFYING INFORMATION TO BE DELIVERED BY SPECIAL COURIER UPON ARRIVAL.

BT

Glass read the words again, trying to search for any meaning hidden between the lines of the terse message. Something was up, and whatever it was, it was important. There hadn’t been any mention of a submarine disaster in the message traffic. That would be the most probable need for the rescue vehicle. Glass closed the cover.

Well, he decided, there was no good to be served by trying to guess the situation. Not until COMSUBLANT decided to tell him more.

He hurried back to the control room. He almost bumped into Edwards as he stepped through the door. He handed the message board to the XO. Edwards read it once, then read it again. He whistled as he looked up at his skipper. “Wow! Wonder what’s going down.”

“No idea, but you better go grab the nav. Tell him to put that second dessert aside and get his butt up here. There’s work to do.”

Edwards chuckled as he slid down the ladder to the middle level. It appeared Perez’s fondness for sweets had not escaped the skipper’s attention.

Glass stepped up to the navigation chart that was spread out on the port-side plotting table. Dennis Oshley, the leading quartermaster, was stooped over the table, plotting Toledo ’s latest position fresh from the GPS receiver above his head. He looked up when he realized Glass was standing there.

“Help you, Skipper?”

Oshley was always serious, rarely joining in the usual onboard camaraderie. Like everyone else on Toledo , he did his job well. Exceptionally well. Glass vowed once again to have a chat with him one day, see what made him tick. Maybe he could find out why the young man was so solemn all the time.

“Just seeing how long it would take us to get to Faslane,” Glass said.

Oshley grabbed a pair of dividers and walked them across the chart from the position he had just plotted all the way to the Royal Navy Submarine Base on the west coast of Scotland. “I get a hundred and fifty-five miles, Skipper.” He picked up a circular slide rule, a relic from an earlier time but sometimes still the fastest way to solve certain problems. “Let’s see, at twelve knots, it would take thirteen hours.”

“You hankering for a pint or two of stout, Skipper?” the quartermaster asked.

“That would taste good, but I don’t think we’ll have time to imbibe. Oshley, you better start plotting the most direct transit in. We can’t wait around for the Brits to give us a submerged transit lane, so plan on a surface run all the way.”

Oshley looked up at Glass. When he got no further amplification on the strange order, he shrugged and began maneuvering the parallel motion protractor to start drawing a course.

Glass had already stepped up to the periscope stand. Durand was still looking through the scope, tracing a circle, watching for anything that might be approaching the sub. He leaned back from the scope for a second and rubbed his eye. “What now, Skipper? Go deep?”

“No, Mr. Durand. Surface the ship. We’re heading for port.”

Durand looked hard at Glass. “Did you say surface, sir?”

“That’s what I said, Mr. Durand. Now get a move on it. We don’t have time to lollygag around out here.”

Ten minutes later the sub was surfaced, ready for the long, cold run on top of the ocean all the way into Faslane.

O’Malley stepped into the control room. He looked like a bright orange version of the Pillsbury Doughboy. The exposure suit he had donned was bulky and not very fashionable, but it was warm, waterproof, and floated should the wearer fall overboard, so no one complained.

“Request permission to open the upper hatch,” he called across the room to Durand.

“Open the upper hatch, one inch pressure in the boat,” Durand sang in response.

O’Malley bounded up the ladder. In a few seconds there was the unmistakable sound of air whistling past the partially opened hatch. Glass felt his ears pop from the pressure change just as he saw the HATCH SHUT light on the ballast control panel flash out. The wind rushed out of the boat as the air pressure inside equalized with that outside. In a few moments the whistling stopped. O’Malley swung the heavy hatch fully open and climbed up into the dripping-wet bridge cockpit.

Glass donned his own exposure suit and made the long climb to the bridge. The wan sun hung low on the horizon like a dim afterthought, a pale orange ball in the otherwise gray winter sky. This far north and this time of the year, it appeared above the horizon for a few hours each day, bringing scant warmth to a cold, dreary place. A bitter wind whipped the sea into whitecaps with the occasional gust sending bullets of spray against the Plexiglas windshield.

“Where to, Skipper?” O’Malley yelled over the wind as Glass emerged from the hatch to stand next to him in the cockpit.

“Steer zero-nine-zero until you get to the North Channel. We’ll come to one-three-zero then until we’re clear of the Mull of Kintyre. By then Nav will have charts plotted so you can see what’s going on. Now kick her up to a full bell. We need to get moving.”

Toledo picked up speed until the sea washed back across her bow, deep and clear until it crashed high up on the sail, then falling in frothing white chaos. A broad white churning wake stretched far behind as the sub plowed ahead through the winter sea.

Toledo slid on, steaming down the North Channel between Strathclyde, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, then turning east to enter the Firth of Clyde as they passed the lonely, barren rock of Ailsa Craig. Then they turned northeast to run between the Ayrshire coast and the Isle of Arran. The channel here was wide and deep with plenty of room for the ships traveling to and from the busy port of Glasgow at the head of the firth.

The firth narrowed to a couple of miles across as they passed between Garroch Head on the Isle of Butte to port and the Cumbrae Islands to starboard. Mercifully, the mountainous terrain shielded them from the cold wind blowing in off the North Atlantic. O’Malley and Glass were busy keeping track of all the shipping in these confined waters, making sure none of them got too close to Toledo . Boats of all types scurried about the busy waterway. Huge freighters, small coasters, and fishermen all steamed up and down the firth. Ferries made their scheduled runs back and forth across the stretch of water as well.

“Watch for those guys,” Glass warned O’Malley as a large ferry weighted with cars and trucks and a railing lined with waving passengers steamed across Toledo ’s bow. “They don’t give way for anybody.”

“So I see!”

As they made the long sweeping turn around Gourock, Glass pointed over to the opening of a loch on the port side.

“That’s Holy Loch over there. Our FBM subs used to patrol out of there before the Tridents hit the water. I was there once as an ensign. The winds coming down the loch can hit a hundred knots. Real nasty.” He chuckled as he reminisced. “So bad sometimes that the liberty boats couldn’t make it out to the tender. There’s a bar on Hunter’s Quay that serves a selection of Scotch whiskeys you wouldn’t believe.”