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The three roommates crowded into the stateroom: Kincaid, Jabo, and Hein. Hein was dogging it a bit, giving the engineer a few minutes more on the conn. They all wanted to talk it over.

“Ever been to Taiwan?” Jabo asked Kincaid.

“Never. Never heard of a boat that has.”

“Of course not,” said Hein. “It is going to cause a complete shit storm. This is huge!”

Jabo nodded grimly.

“What, aren’t you pumped about this? God knows what kind of attention we’re going to get…this could be great for our careers.”

Kincaid laughed. “You’re the only one here all that worried about that, my friend.” He nodded at Jabo.

It took Hein a second to process. “Really? You turned your letter in?”

“Not exactly,” said Jabo. “Captain’s going to endorse it when we get to Taiwan.”

“If we make it!” said Hein, grinning. “We’ll have to evade the entire Chinese Navy.”

Jabo nodded, lost in thought. He was excited, like Hein, like the captain had promised. They were doing something extraordinary. But he was also going to be at sea months longer than he’d expected. With the changes to their orders, he’d originally thought that an early departure might mean an early return; in time for his child’s birth.

But the opposite was true. They were going to be at sea longer than normal, and he would almost certainly miss everything. He wondered when and how Angi would learn the news.

• • •

The Navigator sat alone in the Officer’s Study at 2:00 am, a huge, unblemished chart of the Pacific Ocean in front of him. There was a repeater in the study and the navigator registered subconsciously that they were on course and on track, 280, twenty-two knots, 650 feet. At that depth, they were well-insulated from the upheaval on the ocean surface. They were so seemingly motionless that the five sharpened pencils he had laying on the table only moved when he picked them up. He liked being busy. It seemed to quiet the nervous buzz in his head. If he focused intensely and worked himself into exhaustion, he hoped, he could stop thinking about all the things that worried him.

Counting his years at the Naval Academy, Mark Taylor had been in the Navy thirteen years. For that entire time, he’d been nervous, fearful that he would somehow fuck things up. At times his anxiety was nearly debilitating. During his Plebe year at the Academy, he once dreamed that he was being strangled, and awoke swinging his arms, fending off his attacker. But Plebe Year was designed to drive people crazy, as the upperclassmen, with their ritualized hazing, attempted to ferret out any weakness among the newest members of the Battalion. While Mark worried about his sanity, he took comfort in the fact that he seemed to be holding up better than many of his classmates. During Hell Week, another fourth class Mid from his company stood on his desk in his second floor room in Bancroft Hall and jumped, intentionally landing on his knees, shattering them, sending himself away from Annapolis with a debilitating injury. He recuperated for a month and then enrolled at Ohio State University on crutches. It was a measure of how miserable Plebe year was that most of the other mids spoke of his experience with envy. Mark worked hard to cope, and hoped that after his Plebe Year things would get better.

And…they did. For a while. He realized that frenzied hard work seemed to keep his bad thoughts at bay, so he pushed himself ruthlessly in the library and classroom, and chose to study electrical engineering, by consensus the hardest degree at the Academy. His stellar grades soon attracted the interest of the nuclear power program’s recruiters who were always looking for motivated young engineers with a high tolerance for abuse. His senior year, he sat for interviews with a couple of psychologists who screened all candidates for the nuclear submarine program. One shrink handed him a piece of paper and a pencil and asked him to draw a picture of himself. Mark drew a stick figure that he hoped looked normal and happy, then worried that the smile looked maniacally toothy and large.

The second psychologist presented him with two columns of activities; in each case he was supposed to circle the one activity of the pair he would rather do. One instance asked if he would rather “peel potatoes,” or “kill people.” Although his final years at the Academy had been relatively happy, he approached the tests with the attitude that he did have something to hide, and to him, the tests seemed superficial and easy to fool. Some aspiring nukes got called back for a third psychological interview, but Mark didn’t even have to do that: the shrinks gave him a clean bill of health, which Mark, with his great faith in the Navy’s institutional wisdom, took as vindication. When he left Annapolis with an Ensign’s stripes and orders for nuclear power school, Mark began to feel confident that his fears and insecurities had been outgrown, part of the residue of Plebe Year that he’d left behind on the banks of the Severn.