Free The Trident Deception by Rick Campbell Page B

attended the Naval Academy, graduating at the top of his class, eventually reporting to the USS Kentucky, BLUE Crew.
    Trident submarines had two crews, BLUE and GOLD, to maximize the time the submarine, with its nuclear-tipped missiles, spent at sea. While one crew was out on patrol, the other received replacements for the personnel who transferred or left the Navy, then began the training cycle that melded the new crew into a team. The Off-Crew spent its time in various trainers, including weeklong navigation, tactics, and strategic launch sessions, and were formally recertified just before the other crew returned to port.
    Tom would return to port soon, but not soon enough. The patrols were long, the time away from his family difficult to reconcile with his obligations as a husband and especially a father. Tom and Nancy had married a week after he graduated from Annapolis, in one of the June weddings that followed the graduation ceremony each year. Nancy took an immediate dislike to Navy life, from the long hours Tom spent studying at Nuclear Power School to the shift work at the Moored Training Ship that followed. But her distaste for Navy life intensified once the long patrols began, and her attitude had soured even more during the last patrol. Nancy had given birth to twin girls while Tom was underway, and she hadn’t yet forgiven him for not being there during her difficult pregnancy. Nancy had made her position clear: It was either her and their two children or the Navy. Both were not an option.
    The revelation Tom was getting out of the Navy would stun and devastate his father, and the last thing Tom wanted was to disappoint him. But given the alternatives, there was only one choice. He didn’t relish the conversation he would have with his father upon his return to port, but there would be time enough to find the right words.
    Tom wiped the sweat from his face as he rounded the aft end of Missile Compartment Upper Level again, passing the twelve missile tubes on the starboard side of the submarine before returning past the other twelve tubes on the port side.
    Fifty laps to go.
    *   *   *
    While Tom paced the decks in Missile Compartment Upper Level, the ship’s Captain sat with the XO in the Wardroom discussing Malone’s retirement plans over a friendly game of cribbage. This was Malone’s sixth and last patrol aboard the Kentucky . He had his twenty years in and would retire after his change of command upon return to port, going home to Iowa to take over his father’s farm. His parents were getting on in years, and Malone’s two sisters had no interest in continuing the family farming heritage. Working the earth and growing crops were a far cry from Malone’s last twenty years, yet he and his wife, Karen, also from the Midwest, looked forward to leaving the metropolitan area with its fast-paced life and returning to the countryside, where people had time to chat. He would miss the Navy, and especially the dedicated men he worked with. At the same time, he looked forward to the next phase of his life.
    Malone picked up his next set of cribbage cards, pausing for a moment to savor the unmistakable omen of good luck. He had just been dealt a twenty-nine-point hand, his first ever in twenty years of play. The odds of being dealt a twenty-eight-point hand were fifteen thousand to one, and the even rarer twenty-nine-point hand, considered a good luck omen among submariners, one in a quarter million. As Malone looked down on his twenty-nine points, he could not but reflect on the hot summer day in Mare Island Naval Shipyard years earlier, his submarine one of the last to complete overhaul before the historic shipyard closed down, the victim of a shrinking submarine fleet and associated industrial infrastructure.
    He had watched his Captain escort an elderly woman off the boat following lunch, returning moments later to the Wardroom, where Malone waited. As the Captain eagerly unwrapped a thin package left on