by Jan Coffey
Smith doesn’t like me much.
She gave a small nod and turned her attention back to the room.
“Graduated with distinction, earning a Masters of Science in Physics with a military professional subspecialty in Nuclear and Directed Energy Weapons. He was presented the Naval Sea Systems Command Award and the Superintendent’s Most Outstanding Thesis Award for his work on Nuclear Propulsion.”
“That’s impressive,” someone murmured. There were a number of other comments.
“After completing Submarine Officer Advanced Course, subject reported as Engineering Officer on USS Rhode Island, completing two deployments, including numerous surfacing in the packed ice and open water polynyas of the Arctic.”
Sarah remembered those blocks of time very well. That was when they’d first become romantically involved.
“Immediately following second deployment, served as assistant force nuclear power officer reporting to the Commander Submarine Force, U.S Atlantic Fleet.”
There was another tap on her arm. She looked over at Commander Dunn again. He had another note for her. Seth McDermott. Good guy. He’ll be working on our team.
She nodded and turned her attention back to Seth.
“During this assignment, instrumental in developing advanced submarine firefighting tactics, damage control equipment, and active ventilation procedures. Additionally, subject earned his Professional Engineering license in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
This time, there was no tap, but the legal pad slowly slid in front of her. Sarah looked down.
Let me take the first swing.
Surprised, she read it again before turning to Commander Dunn. He was all attention, focused completely on the speaker. She didn’t know what he meant or how to take his comment.
“In his next deployment, he served as executive officer on a five-month deployment around South America on USS Omaha, during which time he conducted top-secret weaponry testing. Following that tour, he was assigned his first command, USS Hartford.”
Seth McDermott finished reading and looked up. To Sarah’s relief, for a couple of moments, absolute silence ruled the room. Now she understood that it was actually advantageous for McCann to have his impressive record read by these people.
“All the makings of a fine early career,” Rear Admiral Smith said curtly, flipping through his pages. “Now let’s get back to basics. Commander McCann. What was his first name?”
“Darius, sir.”
“Darius. What is Commander McCann’s ancestry?”
Sarah had to fist her hand in her lap and bite her tongue so she wouldn’t stand and object to the question. She couldn’t believe what Smith was implying. The innuendo was hardly subtle. McCann’s flawless record spoke for itself.
Lieutenant McDermott looked across the room at Admiral Meisner. Sarah saw her superior hunch over the table, his elbows planted on the dark mahogany. She knew that was a sure sign that Meisner wasn’t any too pleased with the question, either.
“What is it that you want to know, Admiral?” Meisner asked.
“I’m interested in his ancestry.”
“How many generations would you like to go back, Admiral?”
“One will do.”
Sarah knew her superior was well aware of this information, so she was pleased when Meisner took his time and thumbed through a manila folder on the conference table first before answering.
“Father, fourth generation Irish. Cork City, I believe. Commander McCann’s mother was born in Iran.”
Smith looked positively smug as he turned to Admiral Gerry, Commander of the Atlantic Fleet. “Has Commander McCann ever expressed anything that might demonstrate disagreement with our Middle East policy?”
“Of course not,” Gerry said.
“Does he have any family members that still reside in Iran?”
“Admiral Meisner?” Gerry said, fending off the question.
“He does, sir.”
Sarah saw the Head of the Joint Chiefs scribble a note that he handed off to an aide. The man left the room immediately.
“Is this his first patrol in the Persian Gulf region?” Smith asked the Atlantic Fleet commander
“Yes, sir,” Gerry answered, obviously showing deference to the president’s advisor.
“Did he have any objection to this assignment?”
“No, sir.”
“My apologies for interrupting, Admiral Smith,” Dunn said before Smith could fire the next question. “But we’re wasting valuable time discussing information of very little relevance.
“Very little relevance, Commander Dunn?” Smith asked critically.
“Yes, sir. My understanding was that this briefing was being held for the purpose of understanding the credentials of the ranking officer so that strategies can be developed to counter the potential actions of the unidentified hijackers. It serves no purpose to assume that Commander McCann has betrayed his trust.”
“Do you think it is irrelevant that McCann has family connections with a rogue nation that is a sworn enemy of the United States?”
“Yes, sir. It is entirely irrelevant to the purpose of this briefing,” Dunn responded sharply. “Unless, of course, we had all been told beforehand that you wanted to conduct a genealogy club meeting, then I could have brought pictures of my Russian great-grandmother who, as you know, was a diehard communist. Perhaps you have something to share about your own great-grandfather, who I believe stole horses for the South during the Civil—”
“That’s enough, Commander,” the Head of the Joint Chiefs snapped. “But I have to agree that we are digressing from our purpose, Admiral.”
Sarah didn’t miss the daggers that Dunn and Smith sent each other. He wasn’t kidding when he said they didn’t like each other.
Admiral Pottinger, commander of the Atlantic Fleet Sub Force, spoke for the first time. “We need to discuss a plan for taking back control of this vessel. We cannot afford to leave that submarine in the hands of hostile forces for even a minute longer than we have to.”
“Whatever is decided upon must be quick and decisive,” someone else replied from across the table. “We cannot allow any half-assed cowboy stunts like the one the Coast Guard pulled this morning.”
Others began to weigh in with their opinions, but Sarah knew she’d have no involvement in any of those decisions. Admiral Meisner was on the same wavelength, for she saw him stack up the files in front of him and turn around and hand them to her.
“McDermott will stay and bring you anything pertinent from this meeting,” Meisner said. “You’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Sarah nodded and grabbed her stuff. Commander Dunn was on his feet, and the two of them left the room.
Outside, she turned to him. “You’re lucky you’re not being escorted to the brig, talking like that to Admiral Smith.”
“He’s retired,” Bruce said coolly. “He just doesn’t know yet that he doesn’t run every show.”
Sarah looked at him as they walked down the corridor. “So what’s the real bone of contention between the two of you?”
“If you really have to know,” he replied, smiling as he pulled open a door for her, “I’m his former son-in-law.”
~~~~
Chapter 13
USS Hartford
8:01 a.m.
Amy glanced over at the hole in the wall where McCann had disappeared before reaching up to make the first cut into the wires overhead. Without the schematics, she was no better than a bull in a china shop. But it really didn’t matter. Any kind of damage was a positive step.
She felt partially responsible for this whole mess. She’d ignored the immediate warning flag that had gone up in her head the moment she’d started testing the navigation system in the control room. The rejection report completely disagreed with the actual sequence. From the first readouts, it was clear there was nothing wrong with the system. The local network malfunction could have only been caused by someone intentionally disconnecting a wire o
r loosening a connection. She had a good idea that it must have been something right there in the control room, too.
From the moment she’d been given the job, she’d operated on the defensive, looking for screw-ups that would have occurred during production. She’d searched for catastrophic system failures and had totally disregarded the possibility of operator sabotage.
She knew now why it happened, too. Someone had wanted to bring Hartford back in for this, the hijacking, and Amy had missed the opportunity to send up a flare. She’d never even voiced her concern to the sub’s commander.
Idiot.
She snipped away with her cutters, determined to do some real damage to the navigation system that she guessed was probably working perfectly now.
~~~~
Chapter 14
Key West, Florida
8:10 a.m.
Mina Azizi was born and raised in Iran.
Iran was a different place then. It was a different time, long before the Islamic revolution had shattered the bond between East and West, before the revolution that set women back decades in their freedoms and in their perceived value in a society that was suddenly so foreign to Mina.
Mina came from a large family where having an opinion was as vital as having bread and water; it was the sustenance of their very existence. Voicing that opinion was as natural as the water that ran over the stones in a river at the base of the garden. When she was growing up, every Friday, without fail, her parents’ house was filled with people. Young and old, cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends who happened to be passing by descended on their house, since her father was the eldest in his generation. No matter how many came, there always seemed to be enough food. The conversations were lively, the arguments loud.
She remembered sleeping on pallets on a second story porch with her cousins on warm summer nights. The smell of the flowers from the gardens still came back to her sometimes on warm evenings. She recalled the arguments she and her cousins had until her grandmother would come out and tell them to go to sleep. They were good days.
Mina came to the United States in 1961 at the age of eighteen to attend George Washington University. That same year, she met and fell in love with a hazel-eyed, sweet-talking senior who proposed marriage to her at the end of their first date.
Mina and Harry McCann married a year later, and Mina’s life took a different path than she’d ever imagined just a few years before, lying on her pallet on that summer porch, the scent of her family’s flowers in the air.
Now, nearly fifty years later, she was happy to think that path had been a good one.
There had been many sacrifices. From the very beginning, she’d missed her parents, her brother and sister. Early in their marriage, she and Harry made a point of visiting Iran every summer. But as their four children came along, each two or three years apart, the trips had become more difficult to make, less practical, and therefore less frequent.
And then the revolution changed everything. Travel between Iran and the U.S. stopped completely. When her mother died, Mina couldn’t return for her funeral. She couldn’t visit her father after his stroke. She’d missed his funeral, as well.
She still had a brother and sister who lived in Iran. She talked to them on the phone. But that was the extent of her connection with people who were everything to her in the early years of her life. She sometimes felt it was as if she’d lived two separate lives.
Harry filled many gaps in Mina’s life, and she loved him for it. He wore many shoes. As the years passed, they had created their own kind of Iranian-American family. Mina had no immediate kin nearby to stop by and fill her house on weekends, so they had created a new extended family that included their three sons and their daughter and an endless array of friends who had each carved their own permanent place in her heart and at their table. And now her family included five grandchildren that she and Harry were extremely proud of.
Mina hadn’t been too keen on moving to Key West after Harry’s retirement. But with the way their children’s lives and jobs had developed, there hadn’t been that one place where they could live and be close to all of them. She finally gave in to Harry and, two years later, she had to admit that he’d been right. Her family loved to come to the Keys for visits. The grandchildren were more attached than ever to Mina and Harry. And the times when there were no impending visits, the two of them were flying to California, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, or Connecticut to see them.
In fact, this morning Mina was already planning to start packing for their Thanksgiving trip to Massachusetts to visit their daughter and her family, even though they weren’t leaving for another two weeks.
Following her everyday routine, Mina slipped out of bed around 7:30, started a pot of coffee for her husband, and made herself a cup of tea. She stepped out the kitchen door onto the brick path already warm with the sun. The hibiscus in the back was blooming beautifully, and she marveled at their colors before walking around the side of their little house.
On both borders of the walk, she and Harry had planted a rose garden, and the scents of the roses filled the morning air. Some of the prettiest had no scent, and Mina could never really understand why a botanist could breed a hybrid for beauty at the expense of smell. Still, she mixed the different varieties and was happy with the end result.
It was Mina’s habit to take her time on this walk. It was her ‘moment of Zen’, as Harry joked. As she ambled along, she liked to search out every new bud and tend to every fading bloom. Along the brick walk, two or three feet apart, she’d placed clay pots of fragrant flowering jasmine. As she passed them, she collected pocketfuls of star shaped flowers, knowing how much Harry enjoyed the fragrance at the breakfast table. Reaching the gate by the driveway, she opened it, picked up the morning paper, and paused before starting back along the brick path.
Most mornings, she also stopped to talk to their neighbor Nora Smith. A retired school teacher, the ninety-two-year-old was an early riser, but Mina knew that the older woman timed her own walk to get the newspaper to have a chance to visit with Mina. They exchanged news of everything from their children and grandchildren to politics to flowers to tourists to gas prices to whatever Nora had seen on CNN that morning. Unlike Harry and Mina, who never turned on the TV unless they were watching a movie or a ball game, Nora’s never went off.
This morning, Mina saw that Nora’s paper was still lying on her driveway. Looking up at her neighbor’s house, she saw the shades still closed. There was no sign of her elderly friend on the wraparound porch, either.
Concerned, she started across the small border garden to knock on her door, just to make sure everything was okay. Nora never slept in.
“Mina...”
She turned around, surprised to see her husband. Hastily dressed in jeans and a tee shirt, Harry was coming out their front door. They both were creatures of habit. But it wasn’t the fact that he hadn’t showered and shaved before stepping out that worried her—it was the look in his eyes. She always believed Harry’s eyes were a window to his soul. He didn’t have to say a word for her to know something horrible had happened.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Who called? Who’s sick? Was there an accident?” She stumbled as she came back through the strip of garden, and the handful of jasmine flowers she was carrying spilled onto the driveway. She recovered her footing and ran toward him.
He didn’t say anything but only gathered her in his arms.
“Please tell me. How bad is it? Who called you?” She couldn’t stop the questions any more than she could prevent the tears welling in her eyes.
“Nora called. She said we should turn on the TV.”
Perplexed, Mina looked up into his face and saw pain there. Something made her think of the September 11th attack. It had happened first thing in the morning. She thought of the afternoon of the Challenger explosion. She still remembered where she was and what she’d been doing.
“What’s on TV, Harry? Who’s destroying our world, this tim
e?”
“I don’t know the details yet.” He took a deep breath. “There’s something going on with Darius’s submarine.”
The world tilted. Her vision blurred. Darius was the only one in their family who’d wanted to join the military. She’d been furious with him when he told them. She’d used so many arguments against it. Her parentage. The possible questioning of his loyalty. The rejection of the belief she and Harry had tried to instill in all of their children about the peaceful resolution of problems. They’d tried to raise peace-loving, responsible adults. Not soldiers.
All her tears had been for nothing, and Darius had done what he felt he was meant to do. In the end he’d managed to succeed in his career, and he had made his parent proud of him. They were proud of him and everything he’d accomplished.
Now, she could only think the worst. Hartford had sunk. There had been a nuclear accident. Where was her son? It was his birthday today. Forty years old. It felt only like yesterday that he was just an infant. A little boy...
“What are they saying?” she asked, feeling her body go numb joint by joint. But not her grieving heart.
He shook his head. “They suspect hijacking. But nothing is for certain. We’ve had no calls from the navy. We don’t even know if he was on board. They were docked at Electric Boat for some reason. This could all be nothing. I want to think it’s all nothing.”
“Did you try to call him?”
“I called his house. No answer.”
“Then we have to call someone else,” she said passionately. “His superior. That Admiral…what was his name…the one we met at that dinner in D.C. last year. I’ll call the secretary of the navy. I’ll call the President directly. I’ll demand to know what he’s done to my son.”
Mina’s emotions swung from one end of the spectrum to the other. Grief turned to anger. Numbness was replaced by uproar.
“We’re his parents,” she cried. “We have the right to know what’s happening to him.”
