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water run over her for a good ten minutes. It helped to clear her head, as she tried to remember the events of the evening. She didn’t even recall making it back to the boat and wondered how they’d gotten her aboard. The possibility she’d been carried aboard like a sack of potatoes over Hoover’s shoulder was too depressing to think about. The entire crew would know about it by now, and she cursed herself for being a fool. She dried off, stepped out of the shower, and began dressing. But, as she pulled on her underwear, she noticed something odd reflecting in the mirror.
    “Oh, shit!” she swore and clicked on the white light frantically. “No, guys. Please!” she pleaded. She turned her left shoulder to the mirror and saw, in the middle of her shoulder blade, a trident tattoo. “Oh, come on!” Kristen said in disbelief. “Please tell me that’s not real ink.”
    Kristen, now feeling worse than before she’d taken the shower, dressed and then made her way to the deck for morning muster. She hardly noticed the unusual quietness permeating the submarine, more concerned about the very real possibility of throwing up in front of her division than why it was so quiet on board.
    She came up on deck, expecting to see the crew lined up for muster, but the aft deck was empty. Other than a handful of men on watch, the crew was nowhere to be seen. She glanced at her watch, seeing that she’d arrived a couple of minutes early, but by now the deck should be awash with men.
    “Good morning, Lieutenant,” she heard COB’s deep voice from the sail. She looked up and saw him leaning against a railing.
    “Good morning, COB,” she managed, feeling the need to vomit again.
    “You’re up a bit earlier aren’t you, Miss?”
    Kristen squinted her eyes and shielded them with her hand against the bright sun. “What do you mean?”
    “Well,” he replied with a knowing smile, “it is Sunday after all.”
    Kristen closed her eyes tight and cursed her stupidity. On Sunday there were no muster formations, and the crew was normally on liberty. “I must have forgotten.”
    “Maybe you should go back to bed, Lieutenant,” he suggested.
    Kristen replied with a slight wave of her hand and went back below.
     
    COB watched her disappear with an amused smile and then sat back down beside Brodie on the sail. COB had been awake when the SEALs brought Kristen back just after two in the morning. She’d clearly been intoxicated as she staggered aboard between Hamilton and Hoover, singing, and carrying her shoes. But at least, she’d been able to blow off some steam, which was what COB and Graves had hoped would happen. He took a sip of coffee and looked out at an aircraft carrier just visible on the horizon.
    “Who’s coming in?” he asked Brodie.
    “The George Washington and her battle group,” Brodie replied. “They’re due in today.”
    COB raised a questioning eyebrow. “I thought they were in the Med?”
    “They were,” Brodie answered. “Her entire battle group left the Med several weeks ago when all this nonsense in Korea seemed to be blowing up.”
    “They must have burned out every bearing in their engineering plants getting here so fast.” COB had never been on a surface ship in his life but was aware, from his experiences on submarines, that every ship and piece of machinery had its limits. The Seawolf could sprint, potentially, for years at thirty-five knots off the power provided by her uranium pile, but this was only in theory. In reality, the turbines, the reduction gears, shaft seals, shaft bearings, and other equipment couldn’t handle such speeds for more than a short time before failures would occur. During their brief forty-knot-plus sprint to escape the torpedo a week earlier, the precision machinery in the engineering space had taken a beating, and the crew had spent every day since then replacing parts showing signs of either damage or—more often—metal fatigue from the stress placed on