[Bill Nichols]

Here’s a taste, just a nibble, of the plot:

Peter Vornado and Burke Dillinger are lifelong best friends. Both have risen to command nuclear submarines, and they are friendly but fierce competitors on the Squadron 8 piers for the best-in-squadron award. Vornado commands the Virginia-class submarine Texas. Dillinger commands the Los Angeles class submarine Hampton. Their shared history includes a thousand exploits at the Naval Academy, their first sea tour on the same ship, and a recent deadly combat operation in the Barents Sea north of Russia that is so highly classified that they themselves don’t even mention it. This operation resulted in the loss of Dillinger’s former submarine, the Tucson, leaving him with a lifelong wound. During the Barents operation, Vornado experienced something he can never speak about – a woman he became involved with. During the operation, Dillinger fell in love with his female executive officer, Natalie D’Assault. There was a nuclear explosion that ended the Barents operation, but Dillinger, D’Assault and Vornado all survived, although they all took nearly lethal doses of radiation.

Dillinger and Natalie, who is now retired, are married. She is pregnant with their child. Dillinger is concerned with her health, because Natalie hasn’t gained much weight. The idea of having a child makes him feel awed and almost unworthy. He will be relieved when September comes and the baby is born.

Hurricane Helen is headed for the North Carolina and Virginia coastline. The U.S. Navy’s Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet, orders all vessels to scramble to sea. Dillinger and Vornado are pulled out of their houses on a rainy Sunday and ordered to get their ships to sea. Dillinger is bothered because he doesn’t want to leave his wife, whose health he is worried about. Vornado is in the middle of a serious marriage-ending fight with his wife over something he said in his sleep. Vornado tells Dillinger he may have said something about the other woman.

On the way to the naval base, Vornado tells Dillinger about his sleep-talking episode. He also talks about something going on with the recent exercises with his ship, the USS Texas. Apparently the Navy is worried about the ballistic missile submarine force, and has been practicing submarine-versus-submarine exercises between fast attack subs and ballistic missile submarines in an attempt to teach the fast attack crews how to rapidly detect and destroy a ballistic missile “boomer” submarine. It is not the Russians the Navy is worried about, but the French. Three French sub officers and a French intelligence officer have been observing Vornado’s exercises at sea.

Dillinger is told by the squadron commodore before departing to evacuate the hurricane that he may be out at sea longer than just a week – there is something going on in the eastern Atlantic and that the Hampton has been ordered on the operation. Dillinger protests being given a mission, since Natalie is about to give birth, but the commodore sends him out anyway.

From USSDevilfish.com ( http://www.ussdevilfish.com/news.htm)