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"You look a little pale," Hesseltine remarked. "We'll get some chow into you, that'll perk you up. There's always great chow on a sub. It's a _navy tradition." He stood up.
"Where's the head?"
Baptiste gave him directions. He watched Hesseltine go, admiringly. "More tea, Mrs. Webster?"
"Yes-thank-you ..."
"I don't think you recognize the genuine quality of Mr,
Hesseltine," Baptiste chided, pouring. "Pollard, Reilly, Sorge
... he could match with history's finest! A natural operative!
A romantic figure, orally-born out of his own true time....
Someday your grandchildren will talk about that man."
Laura's brain went into automatic pilot. She slipped into babbling 'surrealism. "This is quite a ship you have here.
Boat, I mean."
"Yes. It's a nuclear-powered American Trident, which cost over five hundred million of your country's dollars."
She nodded stupidly: right, yes, uh-huh. "So, this is an old
Cold War sub?"
"A ballistic missile sub, exactly."
"What's that mean?"
"It's a launch platform."
"What? I don't understand."
He smiled at her. "I think 'nuclear deterrent' is the concept you're searching for, Mrs. Webster."
" `Deterrent.' Deterring what?"
"Vie
Laura sipped her tea. Five hundred million dollars. Nuclear powered. Ballistic missiles. It was as if he'd told her that they were reanimating corpses on board. It was far too horrible, way off the scale of reason and credibility.
There was no proof. He hadn't shown her anything. They were bullshitting her. Magic tricks. They were liars. She didn't believe it:
"You don't seem disturbed," Baptiste said approvingly.
"You're not superstitious about wicked nuclear power?"
She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak aloud.
"Once there were dozens of nuclear submarines," said
Baptiste. "France had them. Britain, U.S., Russia. Training, techniques, traditions, all well established. You're in no danger-these men are thoroughly trained from the original coursework rework and documents. Plus, many modem improvements!"
"No danger."
"No."
"Then what are you going to do with me?"
He shook his head, ruefully. Bells rang. It was time to eat.
Baptiste found Hesseltine and took them both to the officers'
mess. It was a nasty little place, next to the clattering, hissing racket of the galley. They sat at a solidly anchored square table on metal chairs covered in green-and-yellow vinyl. Three officers were already there, being served by a cook in an apron and crisp paper hat.
Baptiste introduced the officers as the captain-lieutenant, captain second rank, and the senior executive officer, who was actually the junior of the bunch. He gave no names and they didn't seem to miss them. Two were Europeans, Ger- mans maybe, and the third looked Russian. They all spoke
Net English.
It was clear from the begi
They dug into their meals: foil-covered microwave trays marked
"Aero Cubana: Clase Primera." Laura picked at her tray.
Aero Cubana. She'd flown on Aero Cubana, with David at her side and the baby in her lap. David and Loretta. Oh, God ...
The officers were edgy at first, disturbed and excited by strangers. Hesseltine oozed charm, giving them a thrilling eyewitness account of their attack on the Ali Khamenei. His vocabulary was bizarre: it was all "strikes" and "impacts"
and "targeting," no mention at all of burned and lacerated human beings. Finally, his enthusiasm broke the ice, and the officers began talking more freely, in a leaden jargon consist- ing almost entirely of acronyms.
It had been an exhilarating day for these officers of the Red
Crew. After weeks, possibly months of what could only have been inhuman suffocating tedium, they had successfully stalked . and destroyed a "terrie hard target." They were going to get some kind of reward for it, apparently-it had something to do with "Hollywood baths," whatever that meant. The Yel- low Crew, now on duty, would now spend their own six-hour shift in a boring escape run across the bottom of the Indian
Ocean. As for the Blue Crew, they had missed their chance at action and were bitterly sulking.
She wondered what they were trying to escape from. The missiles-"Exocets," they called them-had flown for miles before hitting. They could have been launched from almost any large surface ship in the straits, or even from Sumatra.
No one had seen the sub.
And how would anyone suspect' its existence? A submarine was a monster from a lost era. It was useless, designed only for killing-there was no such thing as a "cargo sub" or a
"Coast Guard sub" or a "search-and-rescue sub."
Sure, there were little deep-sea research vessels, bathy- scaphes or whatever the word was- just like there were still a few ma
It reminded her of something she'd heard when she was eleven or so. One of those horror folk tales that kids told each other. About the boy who accidentally swallowed a needle... . Only to have it show up, years or decades later, rusty but still whole, in his ankle or kneecap or elbow ... si-, lent steel entity sliding unknown and unknowable through his, living breathing body ... while he grew up and married and held down some unremarkable service job... till he goes to the doctor one day and says: Doc, I'm getting old, may be rheumatism but I have this strange stabbing pain in my leg... . Well, says kindly Doc, put 'er here under the sca
I'd picked up every last one... .
"You okay?" Hesseltine said.
"Excuse me?" Laura said.
"We're talking about you, Laura. About whether to put you straight in a tank, or let. you hang out a while."
"I don't understand," she said numbly. "You have tanks?
I thought you were navy people."
The officers laughed, false yo-ho-ho club-room laughter.
The Russian-looking one said something about how the world's women hadn't gotten any smarter. Hesseltine smiled at her as if it were the first thing she'd done right.
"Hell," he said, "we'll show 'em to you. That all right, Baptiste?"
"Why not?"
Hesseltine shook hands all around and made a studied exit.
He and Baptiste and Laura emerged into a dining hall where thirty neatly groomed Red Crewmen were eating, jammed elbow to elbow around collapsible tables. As Hesseltine en- tered, they set down their forks with a clatter and applauded politely.
Hesseltine offered her his elbow. Frightened by their flat, fishlike eyes,, she took his arm. He paraded her down the narrow aisle between rows of tables. The men were all close enough to grab at her, to wink or grin or hoot, but none of them did, or even looked like they wanted to. It smelled of them: their soap and shampoo, their beef stroganoff and green beans. In the corner a wide-screen TV was showing an illegal kick-boxing match, two wiry Thais silently beating each other bloody.