Chapter 16
ON THE FERRY TO LA Maddalena, Tom told us we should get out of the car and go check out the view from the upper deck. We didn’t need to be told twice.
“Jesus, Paul,” I said as I stumbled up a narrow flight of stairs and into the sunshine, “this can’t be real.” The island, which had seemed hazy when we were eating lunch in Palau, was coming into sharper focus, and we crossed the deck and leaned against the railing, trying to take it all in.
The port town—also called La Maddalena—was nestled in a small cove at the southernmost end of the island. Creamy stuccoed buildings with terra-cotta roofs sloped toward a little wharf where fishing boats bobbed like corks, and above the town, the hillside was nothing but undergrowth and granite.
Have you ever looked at something so stunning it leaves you feeling woozy? That’s how it was for me that afternoon on the ferry. “Can you believe we get to live here?” I asked as La Maddalena loomed ever larger, and Paul shook his head, seemingly as shell-shocked as I was.
Behind us, Palau and the mainland of Sardinia had faded into the distance, and the island of Santo Stefano was slipping past the ferry’s starboard side.
Paul suggested we cross to the other side of the deck to see if we could catch a glimpse of the Gilmore, but even from this new vantage point, we couldn’t see it.
Around us, people congregated in twos and threes, and I studied all of them, trying to get some sense of the people we would be living among.
There was a quiet, older couple overdressed for the weather, which had turned out to be quite balmy, and there were a few young men who spoke rapid Italian and were wearing uniforms I didn’t recognize. “That’s not us, right?” I whispered.
Paul shook his head. “Must be the Italian navy.”
Just a few feet away from us was a woman with a bowl haircut and flared jeans, chasing a toddler, and I knew without having to ask that she was American. I was tempted to try to get her attention, but just then Paul pointed at a tugboat in the distance. “You see that?”
“The tugboat?” I asked, staring hard at the horizon.
“Yeah, but it’s not just a tugboat. You see the sub?”
“Huh?”
“Behind the tug.” He continued to point but moved closer to me so that I could follow his line of sight. “That dark mound. You see that?”
I thought I did, but I wasn’t sure until the tug changed course and I could see the sub’s sail, sticking up out of the water like a giant shark’s fin. “Oh, wow. Yeah, I see it.”
“Must be on its way to the tender.”
“That’s how they do it? On the surface like that? With a tug?”
He laughed. “You thought they’d be underwater?”
I didn’t know what I’d thought. “I guess?”
Paul launched into this long explanation about rudders and turning radiuses, and I realized this was the most animated I’d ever seen him. “You really love these things, don’t you?”
He didn’t take his eyes off the sub, which was disappearing behind the other side of Santo Stefano. “I do.”
I didn’t know much about what Paul had done on the U.S.S.
Sand Lance, but I suspected that he would miss aspects of life aboard a submarine.
He spoke fondly of the men on his “boat,” but I also got the feeling that he liked the work itself.
Being a good submariner required a combination of intellect and intuition, daring and restraint.
Not just anyone could do the job, and only the very best people could do the job well.
I was starting to understand that Paul was a guy who did everything well. Well, almost everything.
“Are you going to be bored on the tender?” I asked, and as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew the answer was yes.
He had agreed to head up the Gilmore’s RADCON division because he was due a shore tour, and the alternatives—serving as an instructor at submarine school or as a watch officer on a major submarine staff—would have meant pushing paper around for a couple of years while he impatiently waited to go back out to sea.
“The ends justify the means,” he said.
“And what are the ends?” I asked, genuinely curious now that his ends and my ends were apparently one and the same.
“Submarine Officer Advanced Course in New London. Then department head of a fast-attack sub. I want to qualify for command by the time I’m thirty.”
“Qualify for command?”
“Command of a sub.”
“Oh, you mean like you want to be in charge?”
He bumped my shoulder with his. “Who wouldn’t, right?”
“Right,” I said. But it occurred to me that I wouldn’t.
I had never been in charge of anything in my entire life, and the very idea that I might one day throw my hand in the air and suggest to anyone—let alone the secretary of the navy—that I was not only qualified to command something but the best woman for the job felt as foreign to me as the island we were fast approaching.