Gina relaxed on the bunk and let her mind drift. The temperature stayed cool, and she was glad for the layers Bishop had suggested she wear. Sleep was getting easier to come by. She was exhausted with the flow of people, along with the volume of information she was trying to absorb. This experience was intense. The nervousness about being underwater was still a constant edge, but if she stayed busy, she could push it aside. Bishop had been right to insist she come. She could do this for five days of a sea trial. But she didn’t understand how men could face doing a 90-day patrol.
Life aboard the boat had an interesting tempo. There was not an extra man aboard the submarine—they each had a full job to do, with each depending on the other, and they worked hard. She had absorbed that fact early on. It was a privilege to watch them efficiently and competently go about their work.
The meals were good, better than most restaurants. She was getting used to Bishop’s questions when they shared a meal. He had her talking about Chicago, high school, Jeff, movies she liked, people she had worked with, things she wanted to do in her lifetime—anything but the sea trial they were here to conduct. It felt like he was deliberately avoiding any conversation that had a work tone to it. She appreciated that.
So far she was handling the stress of it all reasonably well. Her speech had frozen twice with Bishop. Once when she was trying to answer a question he posed about her mom, and once when he surprised her with a question about Jeff and Tiffany. She appreciated that Bishop handled it by simply settling back in his chair, his hands linked loosely across his knee as he waited, relaxed, for her to get past the freeze. He never asked about the speech problem. Bishop was simply good company. And he was doing his best to encourage things between her and Daniel.
Whenever Daniel came off watch, Bishop would within a few minutes excuse himself so Daniel could have her undivided attention. Gina was grateful and somewhat surprised by the effort Bishop was making to further the relationship. Bishop had concurred with Jeff that Daniel was a good man and was now going out of his way to be helpful in seeing that things had a chance to develop.
Knowing Jeff and Bishop both expected it to work out with Daniel felt like a bit of unexpected pressure—that if it didn’t, it would surprise and disappoint them. She hadn’t expected that when she asked for Jeff’s help, but realized now that she should have. Of course, Jeff would expect it to work out. He’d chosen a good guy for her to meet, so why wouldn’t it work out? The situation made her a bit uneasy, and she felt an odd burden that it needed to be a success or Jeff would be seen to have made the wrong choice for her.
“Quit borrowing trouble,” she whispered to herself. She liked Daniel Field. He made her laugh. He was good company. The sea trial was giving her some extended time in his company to talk about anything that interested her, to watch him work. Getting to know him was not hard. What to do with what she was learning about him was the question, and how was she supposed to sort out all those impressions in such a short period of time?
The events of the last couple of weeks felt like a compressed dating relationship. Since the dinner introduction, she had been to a concert with Daniel, boating with him, met several of his friends, and enjoyed two evenings of music. After one dinner, he’d picked up the guitar to play part of a set with the group onstage. She’d even joined him for some batting practice. Added to that, she had now spent a large chunk of the last three days talking with him. What she was learning about Daniel was gradually making a full picture.
Was he the one? When she’d met him initially, she’d hoped he might be. Was there anything she had seen so far that told her something different? She hoped never to have another breakup with a guy, and she’d rather not get so heart-bruised if this one was also not going to work out. Was there anything that suggested they were not going to be a good match? She was pondering that all-important question when sleep finally overtook her.
One of the things Gina liked most about Daniel was watching him work. He loved his job. He brought the same focus to it as he did to the music he was passionate about. She was learning a lot about sonar just by observing what he would glance at and set aside as not a concern and what he would spot on the screen and focus in on, revealing something interesting in the waters around them.
Gina watched him now as he leaned forward in his seat, one hand pressed against the headphones he was wearing to bring the sound that much closer to his ear as he dialed in the focus. He smiled.
“Got it.” Daniel held out the headphones. “Gina, listen.”
She pressed them against her ears. Her eyes shot to his, and she grinned. Whales were singing. “This is wonderful.”
“One of the side benefits of patrolling around the oceans. These whales are far away, but it’s a large group.”
“I listen to the tapes of these encounters in the lab, but it’s not the same as hearing it firsthand.”
“It’s beautiful. Hold on, let me give you another sound.” He moved the cursor.
She grimaced. “It sounds like fingernails across a blackboard. What is that?”
Daniel laughed. “A fishing vessel with a poorly maintained engine.”
“I see why you can tell ships apart without seeing them.”
“They sound very different from each other.” He moved the cursor to another spot on the screen.
“That’s more like a deep bass, humming.”
“Very good. It’s a freighter out of Hong Kong.”
“Give me another one.”
Daniel chose another line in the waterfall display.
“It sounds like a rockslide.”
“It is. An underwater one, about five miles from here. There have been repeated rockslides over the last half hour.”
“I can see why you like this job, Daniel. It’s like a puzzle that you play by hearing rather than sight.”
“The more time listening, the better my memory for the subtle differences. I could teach you some of this if you like—you’ve got a good ear.”
They had been at sea five days now, the last of the sea trial tests were finished, and the sub was heading back toward Bangor. “Could you help me distinguish the Ohio from the Connecticut?”
Daniel nodded and shifted the display to a wider view. “You have to find them in the first place. Watch the middle screen. We’re looking for an interruption in the waterfall that looks a bit like a fishhook.”
Gina was enjoying herself, Mark thought, listening to her laughter as he moved through the control center to join her in the sonar room. If she had requested to stay onshore, they would have been okay on the sea trial, but she would have missed the rich experience of the last five days. The last of the planned maneuvers were complete, and they were now nearing home, the sea trial finished.
Bishop tapped on the sonar room door, and she turned from her conversation with Daniel, smiled at him. Bishop loved her smile. “We’re getting ready to surface, Gina.”
“Oh, that’s good news!”
He laughed at her relief. “Want to come to the control center and watch it?”
“I’m fine here. Thanks for asking. I’m learning how they tell ship traffic apart.”
Bishop nodded, shared a smile with Daniel, and headed back to join the Nebraska’s captain.
Bishop tapped on the sonar room door again a few hours later. Gina slipped off the headphones.
“Come topside and see the ocean at night,” he invited.
She hesitated.
“Trust me, Gina. I won’t steer you wrong.”
She set down the headphones and came to join him. “I’m not particularly brave, Mark,” she said softly.
“You won’t need to be brave, just careful. Borrow from my experience and simply do what I do. It’s well worth the risk to see what it’s like topside right now.”
She nodded and came with him into the command-and-control center.
He held out an insulated jacket. “You’ll find it helpful to wear this.”
She slid it on.
/> “Start up and I’ll come up behind you. The XO is topside and expecting you. He’ll help you step off the ladder when you enter the sail.”
She took a deep breath and started climbing the ladder. Bishop followed and stepped out beside her in the sail. It was like a balcony with a high, solid wall of the Nebraska hull on all sides of them, the lookout posts up yet another ladder to an even higher perch. The breeze was calm, the sky filled with stars, the water bright with reflections of the moon on gently rolling waves. She tucked her hands deep into the jacket pockets.
“That’s Washington State ahead of us, and that’s Canada on your left,” Bishop said, pointing. A night view didn’t get more exquisite than this as land rose up ahead, forests of trees, communities built down to the shoreline along inlets, the streetlights forming ribbons through the trees.
“It’s truly beautiful, Mark.”
“We don’t often return home at night, but with three subs to transit, we’ll use the dawn to our advantage. You can already see it beginning to brighten on the horizon.”
She glanced around, seemed to be fascinated looking from the sail at the size of the Nebraska’s trailing curved hull. In the moonlight the huge circle hatches of the 24 missile tubes were only an impression in the otherwise smooth deck. She started to say something, and her words froze.
He felt her frustration, saw it in the way she grimaced and her hands tightened. “Hey, relax.” He rested his arm across her shoulders, turned her slightly into his body away from the lookouts and the XO, and waited for the words to return.
“It never happens this frequently,” she finally whispered. “I don’t know what’s changed.”
“Don’t worry about it. What were you going to say?”
“It’s odd to know something this heavy floats.”
Bishop chuckled. “It defies common sense, doesn’t it?”
He tapped the solid surface of the sail. “A boomer is one solid mass of metal.”
She leaned her arms against the surface near the windshield and watched the water and the glistening moonlight and the approaching land for half an hour.
“I’d like to go below now, get some sleep,” she eventually said. “When we reach the pier in about 14 hours, I want to be ready to hit the lab and find out what the Ohio was hearing while we were actively pinging.”
At first, Bishop was surprised by her plan to immediately go to work, but then decided he wasn’t surprised at all. Sleep wouldn’t come while she wondered at the answer, so she might as well see what the data from the Ohio looked like. “Sounds like a good plan,” he replied.
He turned on the red-light flashlight—the color helped protect night vision—to illuminate the hatch, and he lifted the grate for her. “The ladder treads will be a bit slick, so take your time. I’ll go first and stay just below you.”
He stepped down, waited for her to begin her descent, and carefully confirmed she had her footing on each rung. She stepped off the ladder inside the command-and-control center, where he helped her off with the jacket. “Like an escort to the stateroom?”
“I’m good. Thanks for showing me that, Mark.”
“You’re welcome. Sleep well, Gina.”
“Good night.”
Bishop watched her leave and then headed back topside. He nodded to the XO guiding the Nebraska home and took a spot at the back of the sail. The stars in the night sky were still bright even as the coming sunrise began to lighten the horizon. He let himself consider a thought he’d been holding at bay for the last week.
He’d made a mistake, he finally let himself acknowledge, telling Jeff no regarding dinner with Gina. She was young, but he thought now he could have looked past that. She was interesting. He enjoyed her smile and her laughter. And if he’d spent the last few weeks dating her instead of ceding that ground to Daniel, he might have been able to move beyond the surface questions by now to begin learning about her dreams and hopes, the core of who Gina was.
Bishop sighed, accepting reality. He might believe now he had made a mistake, but he couldn’t undo how facts had changed. Gina seemed genuinely happy in Daniel’s company. Jeff had chosen a good man, and Bishop agreed with the choice. Daniel had been telling her stories from prior patrols, making her laugh, talking about his family and hers, sharing history—everything a guy hoping to court her would be doing. Jeff had been right to introduce the two of them. They would make a good couple.
Bishop had planned to call Jessica, but he hadn’t followed through. Jeff’s description had simply been too accurate. Jessica was the kind of lady who would take dinner to someone who was sick, bake a cake for a friend, run errands to help a neighbor out. She would be a wonderful wife and mother one day, and life would be peaceful. But there weren’t layers to her.
Bishop had thought a woman like Jessica was what he wanted, someone who would give him a peaceful life and a happy marriage. He found himself now wondering if what he really wanted, what he had really been waiting for, was something more complex. Gina defined that characteristic in every way he could measure it. Her age, her smarts, those thoughts which tangled her in knots, the relationship failures of her past, that tendency to get easily hurt. Setting out to have something with her would have been a careful adventure, and he’d let her slip through his fingers. Even encouraged it to happen, for Jeff to introduce her to Daniel, and done what he could to make sure she had the time during this trip to get that relationship on a solid footing.
Jesus, do you have any idea how I’m supposed to get myself out of this jam I’ve put myself into? he prayed, wondering if God would take pity on him. He’d finally met someone interesting, someone who had his attention, and he’d mishandled it before the possibility even got any traction.
10
Mark waited for the high-tech security pad to place the digits one through nine in a random order on the keypad, then searched for the digits he needed to enter the building security code. The door clicked, and he pulled it open. The entire Naval Undersea Warfare Center’s new acoustical research lab was an SCIF building, protected against electronic eavesdropping from outside. He headed up the stairs, provided a palm print, and was granted access to the second-floor labs and offices.
Mark paused before he tapped on the open corner-office door. There was something very pleasant about watching a woman absorbed in her work. Gina had been here for the majority of the last seven days, and he didn’t think it had registered with her yet that it was Saturday. Toombs had found her a permanent office, and the desk surfaces were cluttered with open books, printouts, Post-it notes. At the moment she was studying data flowing across the screen and watching the picture on the second screen shift—wave forms of the audio, he realized, the visual form of the data he was accustomed to seeing on a waterfall screen. Her algorithms were turning parts of the data stream orange and red and deep blue, and she hit the pause button to study the screen.
Her concentration broke as she realized someone was watching her, and she turned, her surprise followed by a welcoming smile. “Mark.”
“How’s it going?”
“This is the first configuration, the Ohio recordings,” she said, and pointed to the screen and the flow of color in the sonar data. “It shows the ocean filled with geological noise. He’s hearing the ping; he just thinks it’s ocean noise.”
She shifted the cursor and zoomed in on a section of the audio wave form. “Here’s the ping. But the sonar algorithm isn’t picking up anything unusual to classify this as something to analyze further. When I force the audio stream through the deeper analysis, the software says it’s a rock falling—which it actually is, as that was the sound I used as my cross-sonar ping.” She frowned slightly at the screen. “I’m not sure I could even write an algorithm that would identify this as something for further study or that could see it as something deeper than just a rockslide. It’s possible I’ve created something I can’t even deconstruct.”
Bishop smiled. “It’s good then, the data.”
&nbs
p; “Better than I expected by far.” She changed the data stream and the colors shifted. “Here’s the coastal water ping. A cross-sonar ping has limitations where you would expect, in the noisy environment near the coast. The range it works drops down significantly. In the open ocean you can get an additional 60 miles on average. As you get into the coastline and the noise picks up, the added range falls to just over 15 miles.”
“That’s still very significant for coastline work.”
Gina nodded. “I think the Undersea Warfare Group will decide to deploy this capability in relatively quick fashion. The risks to cross-sonar are minimal compared to the visibility this offers. I think the returns are well worth the additional risks.”
He leaned against the corner of her desk. “How long do you need to complete the review?”
“At the pace this is going, I’ll be finished by Monday.”
“I’ll let Rear Admiral Hardman know.”
Bishop wasn’t at all sure how to handle matters now with Gina. Given his own recently acknowledged interest in her, he was trying to find that elusive line between their genuine friendship and wanting to bring it to another level. He deliberately brought up the question he was curious about. “Are you going boating with Daniel this weekend?” He was aware Gina and Daniel had been out together several evenings in the last week.
Gina nodded. “Lunch on his boat tomorrow, followed by an afternoon on the water. We’re fitting in what we can before he heads to Groton for five weeks at sub school.”