The new tailshaft was finally in place after what seemed to the skipper the longest and most tedious mechanical repair job he'd ever experienced. Inside the ship's hull, bearings were reseated and seals reinstalled throughout the shaft alley. A hundred men and women were working on that detail. The engineering crew had been working on twenty-hour days, scarcely longer than the shifts that had been demanded and gotten from the civilian yard workers who manned the heavy equipment around the enormous concrete box. The last task would soon be under way. Already the immense traveling gantry started to move a shiny new screw back toward the far end of the shaft. Thirty feet across and precisely balanced, in another two hours it would be fully attached to what would soon be the world's most expensive twin-screw ship.

The CNN report coincided with the local dawn. The shot, Ryan saw, was from across the harbor, with the female reporter holding up her microphone, and a "Live" caption in the lower-right corner of the screen. There was nothing new to report in Pearl Harbor, she said.

"As you can see behind me, USS Enterprise and John Stennis remain in dry dock. Two of the most expensive warships ever made now depend on an army of workers to make them whole again, an effort that will require…"

"Months," Ryan said, completing the statement. "Keep telling them that."

The other network news shows would soon give out the same information, but it was CNN that he was depending on. The source of record for the whole world.

Tennessee was just diving, having passed the sea buoy a few minutes earlier. Two ASW helicopters had followed her out, and a Spruance-class destroyer was also in view, conducting hurried workups and requesting by blinker light that the submarine pass her close aboard for a quick tracking exercise.

Five U.S. Army personnel had come aboard just before sailing. They were assigned space according to rank. The officer, a first lieutenant, got a berth that would have belonged to a missile officer, had the boomer carried any of those. The senior NCO, being an E-7, was titularly a chief petty officer and was given a space in the goat locker. The rest were berthed with the enlisted crewmen. The first order of business was to give them all new shoes with rubber soles along with a briefing on the importance of being quiet.

"Why? What's the big deal?" the senior NCO asked, looking at his bunk in the chiefs' spaces and wondering if a coffin would be any more comfortable if he lived long enough for one.

Ba-Wah!

"That's why," a chief electrician's mate replied. He didn't quite shiver, but added, "I never have gotten used to that sound."

"Jesus! What the hell was that?"

"That's an SQS-53 sonar on a tin can. And if you hear it that loud, it means that they know we're here. The Japs have 'em, too, Sarge."