America Read Free Page B

pulling the sub away from the pier seemed to be pulling effortlessly, with little white water from her screw.
    With the band still playing, Captain Sterrett ordered everyone except the watch team on the bridge to go below. Time to say good-bye to earth and sky and families and get about the serious business of taking a brand-new, state-of-the-art attack submarine on patrol for the very first time.
    Leonard Sterrett had been eagerly anticipating this day from the moment he had been told, three years ago, that he was to be America ’s first commanding officer. He had been working to earn a submarine command since that summer day twenty-three years ago when he walked through the gate at the Naval Academy in Annapolis to begin his plebe summer. Now he had it. The responsibility for a capital ship worth two billion dollars manned by 134 men was all his.
    He turned in the cramped open bridge and waved one last time at the people on the dock, especially his wife and parents, who had shared his dream all these years. He could see them and his teenage daughter waving back.
    Then he turned to face the sea.
    The officer of the deck, Lieutenant Ellis Johnson, seemed to read the CO’s mood. “Congratulations, sir,” he murmured, just loud enough to be heard.
    â€œThank you,” the skipper said and smiled at the sea and sky.
    *   *   *
    A mile or so away, barely making steerageway, USS John Paul Jones, a guided-missile destroyer, kept a watchful eye on the covey of boats that had gathered to watch America get under way from the New London submarine base. For the last hour a small Coast Guard cutter had done most of the work of keeping the spectator boats corralled, mainly through use of a bullhorn. Overhead a helicopter belonging to a television station circled slowly, shooting footage for the evening news. One of the boats contained a delegation of antinuclear activists who had tried their best to raise a rumpus and be noticed by the camera folks in the news chopper. The Coast Guard skipper had threatened them with arrest and confiscation of their borrowed boat, so they were behaving themselves just now.
    Aboard Jones, Captain Harvey Warfield focused his binoculars on America. The sail on the sub was located far forward on the hull, almost as if the attack boat were a boomer full of ballistic missiles. Well behind the sail was the squarish shape of a miniature submarine, a fifty-five-ton delivery vehicle for special-warfare commandos, SEALs. Although it was hard to judge from the portion of the submarine visible above water, to Warfield’s practiced eye America looked slightly longer and sleeker than the navy’s Seawolf boats. Perhaps the fact that he knew its dimensions exactly, 377 feet long and 34 feet in diameter, colored his perception.
    Certainly not the fastest or the deepest-diving U.S. submarine, America was the quietest, without a doubt the ultimate stealth ship. Designed for shallow-water combat, the most difficult environment submarines could fight in, America packed more computer power inside her hull than all the other submarines of the United States Navy combined. Originally the submarine had been laid down as USS Virginia; the name had been changed to get a few more votes in Congress, which was the way things worked in Washington in this age of Pax Americana. These things Warfield knew from press releases and briefings—he wasn’t cleared for the really juicy classified stuff, the secrets the submariners put in the I-could-tell-you-but-then-I’d-have-to-kill-you category.
    Which was just as well, Warfield thought. Submarines had never interested him much—months submerged, the crew packed into the tiny ship like sardines in a can, the ever-present threat of drowning or being crushed when the hull imploded.… Just thinking about it was enough to make Warfield’s skin tingle. Submarining was tough duty, obviously, and somebody had to do it. Those who did