Polaris (27 page)

“Why didn't they shoot you with a torpedo again? You were sitting ducks.”

He shrugged. “Maybe they wanted to conserve their torpedoes. I think they didn't want to give away their position again; we would have shot right back. Who knows? Maybe they just wanted to see if the lifeboat attack would work.”

“And it did?”

He nodded. “The raft kept drifting nearer, and by the time the drones spotted it, it was right next to us. We couldn't dive, the engine room was still flooded. The down angle alone would have fucked us, about eleven tons of seawater rolling forward. Propulsion was screwed up because of the flooding, with the emergency propulsion motor we could barely make three knots against the current. The first bombs landed on the raft, blowing it to hell. But everything on that raft was made to float—the drones just kept hitting it, shredding it. Finally, one of them hit the scope.”

“While you were on it?”

He nodded. “That's how I got this,” he said, tapping his eye patch. Pete winced at the click of his mangled fingertip on the leather. “Blew the optics right though the scope, shot the glass into my eye.”

“Jesus.”

“A second bomb fell a few feet underwater, hit the conning tower and exploded, breached the bridge trunk. Started a fire in external hydraulics. That's about five hundred pounds of pressure, caught fire immediately. We lowered everything, submerged, even though that made the flooding start again in the engine room. Took local control in shaft alley, guys standing waist deep in water, controlling the planes with wrenches while the control room burned. Killed half my crew,” he said.

“My god,” said Pete. He'd never heard any of this.

Ase shrugged again. Pete realized he'd told the story many times, both in the brightly lit halls of power where he had to explain the disaster to his admirals, and in the dimly lit bars of Groton and Norfolk, where submariners told their real stories.

“We managed to get the fire out. Limped back to Pearl, at periscope depth the whole way. Saved the boat, somehow. Not that it mattered. It was too much to repair. As soon as they finished their investigation, they dragged her out to sea and scuttled her.”

Pete took it all in. It was the most Commander Ase had ever spoken to him.

“You know why I'm telling you all this?” he asked.

“So I know to lower the scope during a drone attack?”

“Yeah, I do recommend that. Highly. But in general—fuck the drones. The drones are like the weather, or…” he said with that weird smile curling onto his broken face, “the current. It's something out there you all have to be concerned about, something you should use to your advantage, just like the Typhon boat did. But that's not the reason I told you that story. That's not what you need to know.”

“What do I need to know?”

“There's an enemy submarine out there. And somebody onboard really knows what they're doing.”

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Commander Carlson carefully dried and scanned every page of the documents they'd plucked from the sea. Almost all of it was readable, although that didn't mean it was understandable. Much of it she'd read while holding the damp sheets in front of a hand dryer in the crew's head.

It was medical research, she could tell that much. Something about the flu, which made sense given the history of the island. She knew about the flu, they all did, they'd been getting increasingly serious messages about hygiene and hand washing, and they'd all been required to get flu vaccines during their last port call, vaccines that clearly no one expected to be effective. That was confirmed in the captured documents—the scientists wrote about the futility of the present vaccines, and the virulence of the new strain. There were frightening classified briefs from the Alliance about the spread of the disease, the death rates, the unrest in the cities where it was doing the most harm.

She concluded that the crate of paper she'd grabbed represented some of their earlier work. Some of it contained dates. The earliest date was three years before, the most recent about a year earlier. But she could tell, even without any medical training, that they were getting close to a cure. There was an excitement in the more recent documents, a certainty that an answer was at hand.

She wrote a brief, one-page memo that summarized their findings, the dates that the paperwork spanned, the paragraphs and charts that seemed the most important to her untrained eyes. She consolidated these into about a five-page message, with the relevant scans attached, and sent it to squadron headquarters. It was as large a message as she dared send; she didn't want to stay at PD any longer than necessary in the zone so close to the island where she chose to linger. They came to PD and sent the message to their satellite in a sixty-second, encrypted burst. They submerged the instant they received confirmation that the message had been received by the satellite.

Then she went to the wardroom, shared a microwave pizza with Banach, and waited for two hours, the amount of time she thought it might take for her bureaucracy to partially digest the information.

At sunset, they rose again, and a message was waiting for her. The OOD held the scope while she went to radio, reading it one line at a time as it came out of the printer.

Jennifer Carlson was a woman who had seen much during the war. But what she read on the message made her jaw drop. She walked back down to the wardroom, where Banach was enjoying a post-pizza cigarette.

“Sorry,” he said, starting to snuff it out on his plate. He knew his commander didn't like smoking, and he did it only when she wasn't around.

She waved her hand dismissively. “I have word from our illustrious leaders.”

“Did they congratulate us on shooting down the plane? Or chastise us for deviating from doctrine?”

“They express their congratulations,” she said, reading the message. “And they confirm that it was a high-value kill.”

“Oh?”

“The Alliance is sending out another rescue mission to the island, this time by submarine.”

“Smart.”

“The boat they are sending is the
Polaris,
” she said. “She's on her way.”

Banach raised an eyebrow at this. “They know exactly which boat is coming? They know the name? How could they know that?”

“Because,” said Carlson, holding the message in front of her. “We have a man onboard.”

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

They flew Pete on a commercial plane from Charleston to St. Louis, where he boarded a military transport. The pilots seemed mildly put out to be hosting him, in the way military pilots always did, barely saying a word to him on the flight from St. Louis to Spokane, Washington.

At the Spokane airport, Pete was met on the ground by a military vehicle that was flying a small Alliance flag from the right corner of its hood. The drivers, however—two sergeants—were regular Army, and had numerous battlefield commendations. They weren't talkative, with Pete or with each other, but they seemed happy to have him, to have duty on the mainland, for which Pete, as their cargo, got part of the credit.

“Seat belt, please, sir,” said the driver as Pete settled into the small backseat. As soon as it clicked, they were off with a roar of the vehicle's heavy engine, heading west.

Pete realized that he'd been in the Alliance's bubble for a long time. Outside the walls of the military bases where he'd spent so much of his time in the past few years, it seemed like things were starting to break down. In the hardscrabble towns outside of Spokane, a few people stared at them accusingly from their porches as they passed. Almost every store was closed. A few gas stations were open, but cars were lined up, most of them parked: they looked like they were waiting for gas to arrive. Lines also snaked out the doors of government clinics and pantries. A light mist began to fall, obscuring the view. The people in lines stood still, their faces blank, oblivious to the rain. Not long ago, Pete had associated poverty with obesity, a bad fast-food and junk-food diet accompanied by plentiful television and video games. The poor had transformed, he saw, back to an earlier version of want, where they looked gaunt, like images of dust bowl farmers during the Great Depression. Soon they were in the prairie, and Pete fell fast asleep as the sergeants murmured to each other about battles fought and comrades lost.

*   *   *

When they crossed the Northern Cascades and neared the coast, the area became increasingly militarized. A vehicle similar to their own sat alongside the road, charred, burned out.

“What happened to them?” asked Pete.

The solider in the passenger seat looked back at Pete without saying anything. He pointed to the sky.

*   *   *

After three hours of driving, they stopped suddenly on a deserted strip of highway, and the soldiers checked their tablet computer.

“Orders are updating,” said one of them.

“We should be OK,” said the soldier who wasn't driving. “Looks like we're meeting your boat in Bangor. Puget Sound is deep enough there for your ride, but pretty far inland. Improves our odds.”

They waited ten minutes until the tablet beeped. The driver read the orders, and then handed it to his partner to verify.

“We've got an hour to kill,” he said. “Looks like they want us to do the rest of the drive in the dark.”

“Sounds good,” said Pete. He was about to ask the soldiers if they had any food, but they had both already fallen asleep in their seats, trained, like soldiers everywhere, to sleep whenever an opportunity presented itself.

After fifteen minutes, he let himself out of the vehicle to urinate, and to stretch his legs. He walked a few feet away, not sure if he would be violating some kind of Army etiquette by peeing too close to their vehicle. It was a still, cool night, and Pete noticed for the first time that the soldiers hadn't even pulled over: they'd stopped in the middle of the highway. It didn't seem like any kind of martial arrogance; he assumed they must have good reason to believe that no other drivers were coming along. And, come to think of it, Pete hadn't seen one in a while, in either direction. Not even another military vehicle. The interstate must be closed to civilian traffic, he realized.

Something caught his eye to the north, in the sky. A dark form, flying silently toward them. He felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck, and fought the urge to shout out to his companions until he was certain.

It swooped low, and then curved back into the sky, too high for him to see in the blackness. He kept his eyes up, and saw it again, blocking out its silhouette in the stars.

It was a vulture.

He exhaled loudly with relief. Any other time in his life, the appearance of a lone vulture on an empty highway might fill him with silent dread, a dark omen. But under the circumstances, he almost laughed with relief.

The vehicle behind him erupted with alarms. The driver threw his door open.

“Get in!”
he screamed.

Pete dived for the door. Before he even had the door shut, they were spinning their tires, speeding down the highway.

The soldier in the passenger seat reached up and silenced the alarm in the overhead console that was blaring. “Drone,” he said. “Directly behind us. Flying west.”

“What the fuck were you doing out there?” said the driver.

“Taking a piss,” said Pete.

“Did you see it? Why the fuck didn't you say something?”

The driver had switched on a center console that showed the drone as a tiny, bright green blip to the east in the center of a small screen.

“Gaining on us,” said the passenger. “Radar says he's going about one hundred knots.”

“That means he's not armed,” said Pete. “That's too fast for an armed bird.”

The two soldiers looked at each other, assessed Pete's knowledge without saying anything to each other.

“So you think we should just go back to sleep?” he said. They were roaring down the highway, hitting potholes with jarring force.

“No,” said Pete. “It's in suicide mode. Unarmed, far from home. He's going to try to crash into us.”

“I've heard about that,” said the soldier in the passenger seat. “Kamikaze mode.”

“Well, fuck me,” said the driver. He was scanning the roadside, looking for some kind of natural cover, but there was nowhere to hide.

“Wait until he's in his dive!” said Pete. “Once he starts free fall, he doesn't alter course. Everything shuts down.”

“You're sure about that?”

“I wrote the program,” said Pete.

“Did you also write the program that's supposed to keep them from attacking on Alliance territory?”

“Five hundred yards,” said the soldier in the passenger seat, looking at the radar screen. “But he's climbing.”

“It wants to gain altitude before diving,” said Pete.

“So what should I do?”

“Keep driving straight,” said Pete. “Let it commit to a solution.”

They roared down the highway. The driver suddenly veered to avoid a massive crater in the center of the road. Pete could feel the vehicle coming up on two wheels. They crashed back down.

“That's a new one,” said the driver. “Not on the chart. Probably where our friend there dropped his bomb.”

“Bombing what?” said the other sergeant.

“Unlucky farmer?” he said. “Who knows. Maybe a mule or a goddamn enemy possum.”

Other alarms began beeping on their overhead console. “One hundred yards and diving,” he said. “Heading right for us.”

“Keep driving,” said Pete. He was counting down in his head, running the numbers, knowing the drone wouldn't correct its free fall in the last ten seconds of flight. “Slam on the brakes when I say so.…”

They could see on the radar that it was directly behind and above them. They still couldn't see it. Pete watched the two dots on the radar screen converge, their truck and the enemy drone. The two dots were almost on top of each other.