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“Well,” said the commander. “I’m just here to do the preliminaries. There’s never been a case like this — sabotage on a nuclear submarine. So the final report will be signed by someone several pay grades above me.”

“But what do you think?” said Jabo. He found himself wanting answers.

“I think…based on my initial investigation…that you’re navigator was fucking nuts.”

“And that’s it?”

“Lieutenant, you’ve been in the Navy long enough to know what’s coming next. Something this major…there will have to be consequences. Maybe someone could have seen this coming. Maybe there were enough signs…” He jabbed his finger into his leg with a stabbing motion.

There was a rap at the door…the yeoman. Danny wondered how long he’d been standing there. He had a courtier’s aptitude for eavesdropping.

“Any outgoing mail, lieutenant?”

Danny shook his head.

“Are you sure? The bag is getting ready to go across and the captain specifically told me to ask you.”

Danny thought for a moment, wondering what that could mean. He’d already written a short note to Angi and put it in the bag, but that’s nothing the Captain would take an interest in. Then he remembered, the letter that had passed between them on their first day at sea.

“No,” he said. “No letter from me.”

The yeoman nodded and walked back to his office to seal the outgoing mail bag.

“Lieutenant, let’s go take a look at the body,” said Carr. “And then maybe you can help me find a cup of coffee.”

“Aye sir,” said Jabo, backing out of the stateroom.

• • •

Angi flew to Hawaii with a group of the other wives to meet the boat. During their layover in Los Angeles, she bought a newspaper where for the first time, she saw a story about the events onboard the USS Alabama: the vaguest possible description of an incident at sea, the Navy’s vaguest possible confirmation of fatalities, and a boilerplate description of a ballistic missile submarine. Captain Shields was mentioned by name, his official photograph positioned over a stock photo of a submarine, a Los Angeles class submarine that Angi could tell was misidentified as a Trident. The dead men were not named, but their families had been notified, and Angi thought it probably wouldn’t be long before the world knew. While waiting to board in LA, a first: a grandmotherly passenger recognized that she was pregnant, and put her hand on Angi’s belly.

During the long flight, Angi read through the rest of the paper, including an article on page four about the cooling off of tensions between Taiwan and China. The prime minister of Taiwan had made some conciliatory remarks toward the mainland leadership, and shortly after the Chinese had made a remarkable apology and agreed to pay damages to the shipping companies and the families of the dead crewmen of Ever Able. That article finished with a series of numbers about the staggering importance of China in the world economy.

The Alabama was scheduled to go into the floating drydock in the shipyard but would pull in first to the pier at Ford Island, a tiny dot of land in the middle of Pearl Harbor. By the time they got there, the tropical sun was low. The weather was, of course, beautiful. Just off the pier was the twisted, rusty wreckage of the USS Utah, sunk on December 7, 1941. Angi was surprised to learn that in addition to the famous Arizona memorial, just on the other side of Ford Island, there were uncelebrated reminders of the Japanese sneak attack everywhere in Pearl Harbor. Ford Island, in particular, isolated from the rest of Oahu, seemed frozen in time, as if they might at any moment hear the buzz of descending Japanese Zeros. The place was so fundamentally beautiful, Angi could see how a sneak attack had succeeded. It would be easy to be lulled by a place like this, deceived into a sense that nothing could ever go wrong.

She stood waiting at the small Utah memorial with a group of four other wives, including the captain’s wife and Cindy Soldato, and read and re-read the plaque a dozen times while they waited:

NEAR THIS SPOT, AT BERTH FOX 11

ON THE MORNING OF 7 DECEMBER 1941,

THE USS UTAH WAS STRUCK ON THE PORTSIDE

WITH WHAT IS BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN

THREE AERIAL TORPEDOES AND WAS SUNK.

SHE WAS SUBSEQUENTLY ROLLED OVER

TO CLEAR THE CHANNEL BUT WAS

LEFT ON THE BOTTOM.

At first they were the only people there. As a group, they tried to fight off the fear that the ship’s plans had been changed, perhaps they were pulling into a different berth, or directly into the drydock. None of them expected the Navy to tell them anything if such a change were ordered.