Free Nimitz Class by Patrick Robinson Page B

three times in the past two hours, asking questions.”
072300JUL02. 20N, 64E.
Course 340. Speed 3.
    Back and forth on a four-mile patrol line. “We just wait here, Georgy, and stay silent. No need to go anywhere near the sonobuoys they dropped. I think the big ship will come back to us in the next day or two.
    “Right now we have time to get a good charge in. We’re just about in the middle and I doubt they’ll be looking for us here. Then we’ll be okay for two or three days, smack in the rightplace at roughly the right time. Crew happy? What did you tell them?”
    “Just what we agreed, Ben. They still think we are on special exercise, making covert test of new nuclear weapon. I tell them Indians get the blame for breaking test ban treaty. Once it gone, maybe trouble from crew. But too late then, and they not know what happen. Even Andre, he not know, but I tell officers quick, right after. They control crew. Maybe worry for first minutes, but okay I think. No choice for them anyway.”
081758JUL02. 21N, 62E. Course 220. Speed 10.
The Thomas Jefferson .
    Weather foul. Very strong monsoon gusts. On the Admiral’s Bridge, Zack Carson and Jack Baldridge were peering through the teeming bridge windows, and all they could observe was a couple of miles of murky, rainswept sea. All fixed-wing flying had been canceled for the night.
    “Strange weather, Admiral. You’d kinda expect a chill when it’s so gray and wet. When it looks like this in Kansas, it’s usually as cold as a well-digger’s ass.”
    “This is the southwest monsoon, Jack. It’s a warm wind blowing right across the equator, and it brings with it all the goddamned rain India is gonna get this year, from now till about next spring. Mustn’t that be a bitch if you happen to be a farmer?”
    They stood in silence for a while, and the carrier was curiously quiet, with the flight deck almost deserted. Only the occasional squall slashing against the island of the carrier disturbed the peace, as the giant ship pitched heavily through the long swells, 130 feet below the two officers. They were heading back upwind, across the carrier’s 120,000-square-mile patrol zone.
    If he squinted his eyes, Zack could just make-believe he was looking at a great field of Greeley County wheat in the gray half-light of a rainy summer evening. He’d hardly ever been in hilly country in all of his life. His landscapes were strictly flat, the High Plains and the High Seas. He thought about his dad, old Jethro Carson, stillgoing strong at eighty years of age, ten years widowed now, but still the master of those hundreds and hundreds of acres. And Zack resolved to take the entire family out to visit in the fall, when the warm, sweeping grasslands of his youth were, to him, so unbearably beautiful.
    “You don’t think there really is anything out there snooping on us, do ya, Jack?”
    “No, Admiral, I really don’t. But when you get a contact, you gotta run the checks. It’s not my job to take anything at all for granted. Especially with those sneaky pricks. But I do believe if some goddamned foreigner was sniffing around our zone, we’da got him by now.”
    “I guess so, Jack. But those Russian diesels were just about silent under five knots.”
    “Yeah, but they weren’t that good. And even in this weather we’d be sure to hear them snorkeling.”
081800JUL02. 20N, 64E.
Course 155. Speed 3.
    “She’s out there, Georgy, off our port bow, coming back from the northeast.”
    “I guess three to four hours. You sure about this, Ben?”
    “I am sure, my nation is sure, and my God is sure. I expect your bank manager would also be sure.”
    “I want distance five thousand meters—not closer. This thing very stupid, very big. Work on time only. Run four minutes. We might get a more accurate distance visually. But we might not.”
    “Check all systems, Georgy. For the last time. We’ve come a long way for this. I just wish we could have done it four days ago. More poetic