Glass dropped down through the forward escape trunk, squeezing past the mass of sailors who were standing there, passing boxes down. He nimbly stepped over the accumulated pile of stores that was building up on the mess decks. They would be walking on cans for a week, at least.

He scurried up the ladder to the control room. Perez and Oshley were bent over a pile of charts, planning their eventual track out of the confines of the base and back to open water. He squeezed past them and headed for his stateroom.

The deck of the passageway forward of the control room was missing, as was the deck for the middle-level passageway below. A long ramp angled up from the after end of the middle-level deck to the topside of the open weapons shipping hatch. The strange yellow box Glass had seen topside now dangled from the ramp and traveled down its length. It looked even stranger up close. The clear glass lens of an underwater video camera seemed like the eye of an intelligent alien being staring curiously at him. Was it malevolent or disinterested? He wasn’t sure.

Glass stepped around the corner of the ramp and jumped into his stateroom. He could see all the way down to the torpedo room in the lowest level of the boat from here and he felt cold air spilling down from the open hatch above.

He plopped down in his chair and grabbed the outside phone. “Joe Glass here, Commodore.”

“Well, Joe, it’s good to hear your voice. How is it going out there?”

“Real good. This is a good boat and a good crew. They learn real fast. I gotta tell you one thing, though. When I climbed up on the bridge for that first under way out of Norfolk and the officer of the deck turned around and asked for permission to get under way, I looked behind me to see where you were standing. It took me a few seconds to realize he was talking to me.”

Glass could hear Ward chuckling on the other end of the line.

“Joe, that happens to every new skipper on his first time out. I remember feeling the same thing myself the first time we got Spadefish under way.” Ward paused for a moment for an obvious change of subject. “Joe, I’ve been looking at your exercise messages. It looks like you got your butt kicked on the first run.”

Glass grimaced. He might have expected it. It was like a high school teacher inspecting a former student’s first college grades.

“Yeah, Turbulent is real good and a lot quieter than we thought. We got in too close and she shot us before we were ready. We all learned a valuable lesson there.”