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“The rumor mill is already running like crazy…” said Hein.

“Then let it run. I frankly don’t give a shit,” said the XO. “This is a vitally important, vitally secret mission, one that will have historic consequences. I am honored that they’ve chosen us to carry this out, and woe to the sailor or officer who fucks it up. Understood?”

Everyone nodded. The XO had made it clear that the question and answer period was over.

“Ok,” he said, waving a hand toward the nav. “Let’s get on with it. The navigator, as we mentioned, just found all this out. After spending the better part of the last week getting our charts in order for a patrol of the northern pacific, he’s got to revise everything. But show them what you’ve got.”

The Navigator pulled down the sheet to reveal a small-scale chart of the entire Pacific Ocean. On it, he’d penciled in a great-circle route all the way to Taiwan. While it looked curved on the flat chart, the course was actually a straight-line across the curved surface of the earth. A large red dot, on the far right hand side of the chart was labeled PA: Papa Alpha. The track connected it to a point on the other side of the Pacific: PZ, Papa Zulu. Point A to Point Z. “This is all I’ve got so far,” he said meekly.

Jabo noticed for the first time behind the nav a small pyramid of tightly rolled up charts that looked freshly-delivered from Group Nine. They must have come over in the last mail bag off the tug. Every one would need to be reviewed by the nav, updated, and approved. And every chart he’d already done this for in their normal patrol areas, working day and night for weeks, was now useless. The captain had delivered on his promise in one way, Jabo thought, in revealing to him orders that were spectacularly different from anything they’d done before, an exciting unforeseen mission for them and their boat. But he’d also confirmed that the navigator’s life was pretty fucking miserable.

“We’re going to have to really burn it up,” said the Navigator. “To make it there in time, across the operating areas they’ve given us, we’re going to have to have a speed of advance of twenty knots the entire time, day and night.”

“This is going to preclude a lot,” said the XO. “Our sonar will be degraded, we’ll be limited in the drills we can run. And we’re going to have to keep our heads up. That means you, OODs. You’re going to be covering a lot more ground each watch than you’re used to—keep an eye on the chart, on the fathometer, all that good shit. Make sure we are where we are supposed to be. You hear me?”

“Yes sir,” they all said in unison.

“What’s after Taiwan, sir?” asked Jabo.

The XO looked at the captain, who nodded. “After we complete this mission, we’ll make another two-week transit, assume a target package, and begin a normal strategic deterrence patrol.”

No one said what everybody was thinking: they were going to be at sea for a very, very long time.

“Ok, everybody get the fuck out of here and get some rest,” said the XO. “You’re going to need it.”

•   •   •

The three roommates crowded into the stateroom: Kincaid, Jabo, and Hein. Hein was dogging it a bit, giving the engineer a few minutes more on the conn. They all wanted to talk it over.

“Ever been to Taiwan?” Jabo asked Kincaid.

“Never. Never heard of a boat that has.”

“Of course not,” said Hein. “It is going to cause a complete shit storm. This is huge!”

Jabo nodded grimly.

“What, aren’t you pumped about this? God knows what kind of attention we’re going to get…this could be great for our careers.”

Kincaid laughed. “You’re the only one here all that worried about that, my friend.” He nodded at Jabo.

It took Hein a second to process. “Really? You turned your letter in?”

“Not exactly,” said Jabo. “Captain’s going to endorse it when we get to Taiwan.”

“If we make it!” said Hein, grinning. “We’ll have to evade the entire Chinese Navy.”

Jabo nodded, lost in thought. He was excited, like Hein, like the captain had promised. They were doing something extraordinary. But he was also going to be at sea months longer than he’d expected. With the changes to their orders, he’d originally thought that an early departure might mean an early return; in time for his child’s birth.

But the opposite was true. They were going to be at sea longer than normal, and he would almost certainly miss everything. He wondered when and how Angi would learn the news.

•   •   •

The Navigator sat alone in the Officer’s Study at 2:00 am, a huge, unblemished chart of the Pacific Ocean in front of him. There was a repeater in the study and the navigator registered subconsciously that they were on course and on track, 280, twenty-two knots, 650 feet. At that depth, they were well-insulated from the upheaval on the ocean surface. They were so seemingly motionless that the five sharpened pencils he had laying on the table only moved when he picked them up. He liked being busy. It seemed to quiet the nervous buzz in his head. If he focused intensely and worked himself into exhaustion, he hoped, he could stop thinking about all the things that worried him.

Counting his years at the Naval Academy, Mark Taylor had been in the Navy thirteen years. For that entire time, he’d been nervous, fearful that he would somehow fuck things up. At times his anxiety was nearly debilitating. During his Plebe year at the Academy, he once dreamed that he was being strangled, and awoke swinging his arms, fending off his attacker. But Plebe Year was
designed
to drive people crazy, as the upperclassmen, with their ritualized hazing, attempted to ferret out any weakness among the newest members of the Battalion. While Mark worried about his sanity, he took comfort in the fact that he seemed to be holding up better than many of his classmates. During Hell Week, another fourth class Mid from his company stood on his desk in his second floor room in Bancroft Hall and jumped, intentionally landing on his knees, shattering them, sending himself away from Annapolis with a debilitating injury. He recuperated for a month and then enrolled at Ohio State University on crutches. It was a measure of how miserable Plebe year was that most of the other mids spoke of his experience with envy. Mark worked hard to cope, and hoped that after his Plebe Year things would get better.

And...they did. For a while. He realized that frenzied hard work seemed to keep his bad thoughts at bay, so he pushed himself ruthlessly in the library and classroom, and chose to study electrical engineering, by consensus the hardest degree at the Academy. His stellar grades soon attracted the interest of the nuclear power program’s recruiters who were always looking for motivated young engineers with a high tolerance for abuse. His senior year, he sat for interviews with a couple of psychologists who screened all candidates for the nuclear submarine program. One shrink handed him a piece of paper and a pencil and asked him to draw a picture of himself. Mark drew a stick figure that he hoped looked normal and happy, then worried that the smile looked maniacally toothy and large.

The second psychologist presented him with two columns of activities; in each case he was supposed to circle the one activity of the pair he would rather do. One instance asked if he would rather “peel potatoes,” or “kill people.” Although his final years at the Academy had been relatively happy, he approached the tests with the attitude that he did have something to hide, and to him, the tests seemed superficial and easy to fool. Some aspiring nukes got called back for a third psychological interview, but Mark didn’t even have to do that: the shrinks gave him a clean bill of health, which Mark, with his great faith in the Navy’s institutional wisdom, took as vindication. When he left Annapolis with an Ensign’s stripes and orders for nuclear power school, Mark began to feel confident that his fears and insecurities had been outgrown, part of the residue of Plebe Year that he’d left behind on the banks of the Severn.

Nuclear Power School and prototype training brought with them a new kind of pressure, and with it, a few worrisome episodes. Once, while at nuclear power school in Orlando, he’d slept an entire weekend. Went to bed on Friday night, and didn’t wake up until Sunday afternoon. He awoke to a bed that he’d soaked through with urine. He had to drag his mattress and sheets to the apartment complex’s dumpster without his roommate seeing, and slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of his room for the rest of the term.

The second episode was worse. It happened at the S1-C prototype in Connecticut, an operating nuclear reactor that was the capstone of their engineering training. The plant was built to operate exactly like a submarine plant, and even turned a shaft. Since there was no ocean, however, to absorb the energy, the screw turned a generator which dissipated the plant’s energy into electrical resistors, which turned it into heat, which dissipated over the Connecticut countryside. When the plant was running, the resistors were hot—it was their job to be hot. They were surrounded by a high fence designed mainly to keep out the raccoons who were attracted to the warmth, but who would sometimes get trapped between resistors and cook, making a god awful mess.

One frigid February night, Mark wandered outside the plant trying to clear his head after a marathon studying session. The next morning he was to be observed as Engineering Officer of the Watch conducting casualty drills. If he performed well, his nuclear power training would be successfully completed. If he failed, his nuclear aspirations would be ended. He hadn’t left the site in twenty-four hours, and planned on studying through the night, right up until the moment he took the watch in maneuvering. He was stressed, exhausted, and fairly certain that some of the mumbling he heard inside the large, common study area was audible only to him.

He paused at the high fence that surrounded the resistor bank. He could see where the insulated cables came out of the fake hull, channeling electricity into the resistors. I=V/R, Ohm’s Law, flashed into his head, the cornerstone of electrical theory. Like all the other ensigns at the site, he could rapidly and accurately calculate in his head what current would flow through the resistors at a given power level, how many shaft horsepower that translated to, and how much heat would be generated by the resistors as it absorbed that power. Because it was so cold, he could actually feel the heat coming off of the resistors; it felt good on his face as his back turned cold in the chilly night; it even smelled pleasantly warm, like a campfire, something Mark had never noticed before during midnight walks around the installation.

That’s when Mark noticed that a long, thin oak branch had fallen from the surrounding trees and landed atop the resistors; what he smelled was the unmistakable aroma of wood being heated to its burning point. There were no trees directly over the resistor bank, but the branch was covered in dried, curly leaves. It must have snapped off in the cold and glided over from the surrounding woods like a paper airplane, landing exactly where it would do the most harm. Mark couldn’t do anything himself because of the fence; the branch was unreachable. He immediately turned, intending to run to the nearest phone and alert the Engineering Officer of the Watch. .

But…he stopped.

He watched the branch in a kind of trance, thinking that it was not unlike an experiment Naval Reactors might conjure up, to see what the consequences of a branch falling on the resistor bank might be. He pictured a chart in a Reactor Plant Manual charting the temperature of a wooden branch versus time on a logarithmic graph, a bold horizontal line indicating the auto-ignition temperature of dried leaves. For a few minutes, he thought maybe nothing would happen. But then white smoke began to curl away from some of the leaves, and he smiled as the nostalgic, pungent aroma wafted over him. Then a few of them burst into flame, then, almost simultaneously, all of them were on fire.

The branch burned quickly, and settled into the resistor bank as it fell apart and turned to ash; the crevices between resistors and wires showed vividly in the orange flames. Soon Mark began to smell the sour, acrid smell of an electrical fire, and a few pops came from the resistors as wiring melted and shorted out. Resin inside the resistors melted and dribbled down the side, like gore from a wounded animal. A minute more, and he heard the
KA CHUNK
of large circuit breakers tripping, one right by his feet, that made him jump, and one just inside the hull. A bleating alarm sounded inside the hull, and he heard a muted, concerned announcement of the casualty from inside. He wandered away from the resistor bank, and took the long way back to the classroom where he’d been studying.

The next morning, crews were cutting down every tree within five feet of the outer fence line, and the plant was shut down while they all had training on the incident, and discussed the seriousness of what had happened: a reactor that is creating energy and then suddenly has no place for that energy to go. It could lead, they all reviewed, to soaring temperatures, protective actions, damaged fuel. They all worked through equations to calculate the rate and the extent of the potential damage.

Mark had to wait two days for repairs to the resistor bank to have his observed watch; he combated simulated flooding and recovered from an actual scram. He passed with solid marks. He didn’t let the branch incident bother him for more than a few days. After all, it wasn’t like he’d thrown the branch onto the resistors, there would have been a fire even if he’d never gotten near it: his presence there was a coincidence. And all the reactor’s protective mechanisms had worked properly, protecting it from any damage. He graduated third in his class and received orders to the USS
City of Corpus Christi
. On his way to the west coast, he stopped in his hometown of Lansing, Michigan to marry Muriel, his high school sweetheart.

Mark loved Muriel, but he told her nothing about the fears he had for his own sanity. It was easy to keep from her at first. When they’d dated in high school and during trips home from the Academy, he’d been fine. Muriel was a tough woman, a realist, and Mark knew if he told her, she would immediately seek help, help that would result inevitably in the end of his career. And, in a way, keeping Muriel in the dark made him feel better, just as fooling the Navy shrinks had. Muriel was smart, and perceptive. If she couldn’t tell that Mark was crazy…well then, he must not be that crazy. Of course, when she finally realized everything, he had to leave her. A wife telling the Navy that her husband was crazy was one thing. But a spurned wife telling the Navy that her ex-husband was a nut...the Navy would have to shut down if it listened to every allegation hurled by an ex-wife.