CHAPTER 21 THE SUMMER DRIFT
Alex sat still, his hands resting flat on the desk, forcing his breathing into shallow, rhythmic increments. He slid his right hand off the wood, letting his fingers drop into the narrow space between the two beds.
His fingertips pressed against the cold linoleum where Patrick’s shadow usually fell. The three feet of separation between their racks had stretched into thousands of miles of open water, an administrative amputation he could not calculate his way out of.
Patrick McClellan stood at the observation rail, his fingers hooked into the steel chain-link to hold his balance against the pitch of the hull.
The pristine whites of the Academy had been replaced by utility coveralls stained with hydraulic fluid and bilge grease.
His hands were mapped with raw blisters and deep wire-brush scrapes from sixteen consecutive hours of stripping corrosion from the lower pump rooms.
The shift from the classroom to this industrial isolation was total. Here, there were no academic shields. There was only the unrecoverable drift of a small auxiliary ship rolling through the swells of the Philippine Sea, thousands of miles from the Atlantic corridor.
Patrick stepped inside the dim, red-lit chart room behind the bridge. The Junior Officer of the Deck remained focused on the radar repeater, leaving Patrick alone behind the plotting console.
Slowly, his thumb slipped into the pocket of his coveralls, his skin catching on the latch of the heavy brass maritime compass. He flipped it open. Under the crimson glare of the overhead lamp, the engraving inside the lid was clear:
My husband, my partner, my life.
Patrick traced the stamped letters with a thumb blackened by engine grease, his chest rising and falling heavily under his damp undershirt. To his father, this deployment was a calculated move to starve out a liability.
To the legal officers, this compass was evidence of a career-ending deviation. But as the ship took a heavy plunge into a ten-foot swell, the metal biting hard into Patrick’s palm, he focused entirely on the words.
He looked through the salt-crusted window of the bridge at the black water. He could no longer hear the steady hum of the Bancroft radiators or Alex's dry, quiet voice. But he knew the lines on the chart were holding.
"I've got the heading, Alex," Patrick said into the roar of the ventilation intake, his voice a low grate against the steel bulkhead.
"I'm coming home."