Chapter One
"Mark your head!" shouted Officer-of-the-Deck Stephen Wheatley to his helmsman in the pilothouse. It was the midnight to 4 a.m. watch and Wheatley was on the starboard wing of the bridge as salt spray from the menacing water walls seventy feet away lashed the slim, young officer’s well-tanned cheeks. Nothing he had ever experienced in sailing across the Pacific compared with these monsters of destruction slamming into his ship.
USS Latner (DD-952) was steaming toward a rendezvous with a tug towing a target to be fired upon to “school the ship,” as captains called these exercises. Her sleek haze-gray bow pounded into the relentlessness of the waves and Wheatley was soaked through his green foul weather gear. Maybe it’s a hurricane, he thought.
Operating under the Captain’s Night Orders, he was in charge of the ship and her safety during these midnight watches when the Old Man was down in his cabin asleep.
"Mark! Course 310, sir!" the helmsman, seaman Cutter, replied. He was dry but unsteady on his feet.
"Very well," Wheatley muttered as he bent into the winds battering the pilothouse entrance and angrily pulled the drawstring of his slicker more tightly about his neck and head. As his ship slammed its prow toward point X-Ray, he felt the non-skid deck plates shudder the soles of his waterproof boots.
What a godforsaken night!
They were steaming into the onrushing California current that swept south from the Aleutians. Latner was forcing herself against Nature, against the clockwise motion of one of earth's most pronounced currents, one that had known the triumphs and tragedies of the whole war in the Pacific, from Pearl Harbor to Iwo Jima. The current knew the dead, the dearly departed of so many American families because it had received them at their violent deaths--torpedoed, kamikazied or blown right out of their turrets—received them quietly and laid them to rest in the deepest, coldest graveyards on earth, passed over their cold bodies time and time again until they were consumed by the sea itself.
“We ought to be back in port sitting this fucker out,” he told Cutter.
Wheatley had little patience these days for shooting the guns or searching for submarines. He knew the brass would say they were “maintaining maximum training levels during revolutionary period in the long history of the Cold War.” It was June, 1990 and the Berlin Wall had crumbled last year with men and women hacking away at that hideous gray cement construction between freedom and oppression. Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of “glasnost” and “perestroika” were rapidly spinning the once monolithic Soviet Union out of control and into a disarray of various republics each one struggling for its own revolutionary 1776.
The US Navy was maintaining fighting strength, preparing for any eventuality that might befall the country, requiring war ships stationed on the high seas in international waters.
“Someone still has all those nukes,” Captain Nelson had told his officers only days before, during a ward room briefing on foreign policy ordered annually by the Defense Department. “And somebody’s going to use them one day,” he predicted with his stern gaze directed at his officers. The statement startled Stephen —somebody else using nukes against the US? Seemed like mere speculation, or, at worst, an attempt to maintain high readiness through fear of more nuclear terrorism.
“Some wild-assed rebels sneaking around?” Wheatley said to himself.
There were no headlights to beam through the steep, black, raging waves and illuminate destroyer Latner's pathway toward her rendezvous northwest of Santa Rosa, a small island just off the coast of southern California. The coastline, always clearly delineated in the mind of any navigator with precise markings like Monterey Bay or La Jolla, was well out of Latner’s range now. Green blips and streaks appeared on the surface search radar reflecting the height of the waves that tore into this veteran of so many voyages. She sailed alone as she did so often these days. Latner was an aging Forrest Sherman class destroyer whose crew struggled to prevent visiting Admirals from observing the rust that lay just beneath a fresh coat of haze gray paint on her open deck spaces. Long gone were her task group operations across the western Pacific during the Vietnam War and in the dimmer past was her service during the Korean conflict.
