unused memories. “Oh . .. yeah.”
It was busy at the headquarters of Commander-in-Chief Pacific. CINCPAC
was a Navy command, a tradition that dated back to Admiral Chester Ni-
mitz. At the moment people were scurrying about. They were almost all in
uniform. The civilian employees were rarely in on weekends, and with a few
exceptions it was too late for them anyway. Mancuso saw the collective
mood as he came through security, people looking down with harried
frowns, moving quickly the better to avoid the heavy atmosphere of an of-
fice in considerable turmoil. Nobody wanted to be caught in the storm.
“Where’s Admiral Seaton?” ComSubPac asked the nearest yeoman. The
petty officer just pointed to the office suite. Mancuso led the other two in
that direction.
“Where the hell have you been?” CINCPAC demanded as they came
into his inner office.
“SOSUS, sir. Admiral, you know Captain Chambers, my operations offi-
cer. This is Dr. Ron Jones-”
“The sonarman you used to brag on?” Admiral David Seaton allowed
himself a pleasant moment. It was brief enough.
“That’s right, sir. We were just over at SOSUS checking the data on-”
“No survivors, Bart. Sorry, but the 8-3 crew says-”
“Sir, they were killed,” Jones interrupted, tired of the preliminaries. His
statement stopped everything cold.
“What do you mean, Dr. Jones?” CINCPAC asked after perhaps as much
as a second.
“I mean Asheville and Charlotte were torpedoed and sunk by Japanese
submarines, sir.”
“Now wait a minute, son. You mean Charlotte, too?” Seaton’s head
turned. “Bart, what is this?” SubPac didn’t get a chance to answer.
“I can prove it, sir.” Jones held up the sheaf of papers under his arm. “I
need a table with a light over it.”
Mancuso’s face was pretty grim. “Sir, Jonesy appears to be right. These
were not accidents.”
“Gentlemen, I have fifteen Japanese officers in the operations room right
now trying to explain how the fire control on their ‘cans works and-”
“You have Marines, don’t you?” Jones asked coldly. “They carry guns,
don’t they?”
“Show me what you have.” Dave Seaton gestured at his desk.
Jones walked CINCPAC through the printouts, and if Seaton wasn’t ex-
actly a perfect audience, he surely was a quiet one. On further examination,
the SOSUS traces even showed the surface ships and the Mark 50 antisub
torpedoes that had crippled half of PacFlt’s carriers. The new array off Kure
was really something, Jones thought.
‘ ‘Look at the time, sir. All of this happened over a period of what? Twenty
minutes or so. You have two hundred fifty dead sailors mil (here, .uul il
wasn’t any accident.”
Seaton shook his head like ahorse shedding troublesome msecls. “W;ui a
minute, I haven’t had any word-I mean, the threat board is blank. There
aren’t any indications at all that-”
“There are now, sir.” Jones wasn’t letting up at all.
“But-”
“Goddamn it, Admiral!” Jones swore. “Here it is, black and while,
okay? There are other copies of this back at the SOSUS building, there’s a
tape record, and I can show it to you on a fucking TV screen. You want your
own experts to go over there, well, shit, they’re right here, ain’t they?” The
contractor pointed to Mancuso and Chambers. “We have been attacked,
sir.”
“What are the chances that this is some sort of mistake?” Seaton asked.
His face was as ghostly pale as the cloth of his undress-white uniform shirt.
“Just about zero. I suppose you could wait for them to take an ad out in
The New York Times if you want additional confirmation.” Diplomacy had
never been Jones’s strongest suit, and he was too angry to consider it any-
way.
“Listen, mister-” Seaton began, but then he bit off his words, and in-
stead looked up at his type commander. “Bart?”
‘ ‘I can’t argue with the data, sir. If there were a way to dispute it, Wally or
I would have found it. The people at SOSUS concur. It’s hard for me to
believe, too,” Mancuso conceded. ‘ ‘Charlotte has failed to check in and-”
“Why didn’t her beacon go off?” CINCPAC asked.
“The gadget is located on the sail, aft corner. Some of my skippers weld
them down. The fast-attack guys resisted putting them aboard last year, re-
member? Anyway, the fish could have destroyed the BST or for some reason
it didn’t deploy properly. We have that noise indicator at Charlotte’?, ap-
proximate location, and she has failed to respond to an emergency order to
communicate with us. There is no reason, sir, to assume that she’s still
alive.” And now that Mancuso had said it, it was official. There was one
more thing that needed to be said.
“You’re telling me we’re at war.” The statement was delivered in an ee-
rily quiet voice. ComSubPac nodded.
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“I didn’t have any warning at all,” Seaton objected.
“Yeah, you have to admire their sense of tradition, don’t you?” Jones
observed, forgetting that the last time there had been ample warning, all of it
unheeded.
Pete Burroughs didn’t finish his fifth beer of the day. The night had not
brought peace. Though the sky was clear and full of stars, brighter lights
continued to approach Saipan from the east, taking advantage of the trade
winds to ease their approach into the island’s two American-built runways.
Each jumbo jet had to be carrying at least two hundred soldiers, probably
closer to three. They could see the two airfields. Oreza’s binoculars were
more than adequate to pick out the aircraft and the fuel trucks that scurried
about to fill up the arriving jets so that they could rapidly go home to make
another shuttle run. It didn’t occur to anyone to keep a count until it was a
few hours too late.
“Car coming in,” Burroughs warned, alerted by the glow of turning
lights. Oreza and he retreated to the side of the house, hoping to be invisible
in the shadows. The car was another Toyota Land Cruiser, which drove
down the lane, reversed direction at the end of the cul-de-sac, and headed
back out after having done not very much of anything but look around and
perhaps count the cars in the various driveways-more likely to see if people
were gathered in an inopportune way. “You have any idea what to do?” he
asked Oreza when it was gone.
“Hey, I was Coast Guard, remember? This is Navy shit. No, more like
Marine shit.”
“It sure is deep shit, man. You suppose anybody knows?”
“They gotta. Somebody’s gotta,” Portagee said, lowering the glasses and
heading back into the house. “We can watch from inside our bedroom. We
always leave the windows open anyway.” The cool evenings here, always
fresh and comfortable from the ocean breezes, were yet another reason for
his decision to move to Saipan. “What exactly do you do, Pete?”
“Computer industry, several things really. I have a masters in EE. My real
specialty area is communications, how computers talk to each other. I’ve
done a little government work. My company does plenty, but mostly on an-
other side of the house.” Burroughs looked around the kitchen. Mrs. Oreza
had prepared a light dinner, a good one, it appeared, though it was growing
cold.
“You were worried about having people track in on your phone.”
“Maybe just being paranoid, but my company makes the chips for scan-
ners that the Army uses for just that purpose.”
Oreza sat down and started shoveling some of the stir-fry onto his plate.
“I don’t think anything’s paranoid anymore, man.”
“I hear ya, Skipper.” Burroughs decided to do the same, and looked at
the food with approval. “Y’all trying to lose weight?”
Oreza grunted. “We both need to, Izzy and me. She’s been taking classes
in low-fat stuff.”
Burroughs looked around. Though the home had a dining room, like most
retired couples (that’s how he thought of them, even though they clearly
were not), they ate at a small table in their kitchen. The sink and counter
were neatly laid out, and the engineer saw the steel mixing and serving
bowls. The stainless steel gleamed. Isabel ()rc/.a, too, ran a tight •’tup. and it
was plain enough who was the skipper at home.
“Do 1 go to work tomorrow?” she asked, her mind drilling, Hying lo
come to terms with the change in local affairs.
“I don’t know, honey,” her husband replied, his own thoughts slopped
cold by the question. What would he do? Go fishing again as though nothing
at all had happened?
“Wait a minute,” Pete said, still looking at the mixing bowls. He stood,
took the two steps needed to reach the kitchen counter, and lifted the largest
bowl. It was sixteen inches in diameter and a good five or six inches deep.
The bottom was flat, perhaps a three-inch circle, but the rest of it was spheri-
cal, almost parabolic in shape. He pulled his sat-phone out of his shirt