Dark Transit

Epilogue

The limo turned left off of Admiralteyskiy Prospekt onto Admiralteyskiy Proyezd, a single lane road fronting the Admiralty Building, where a formally dressed soldier at the guard post checked him into the complex. The limo glided to a halt at the arched entrance to the yellow brick structure. Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev climbed out of the car and looked at the statues on either side of the entrance, each one featuring three women holding the globe on their shoulders. For a moment, he was reminded of his three female department heads and his female first officer, but he had to correct himself. Two department heads. Navigator Maksimov and Weapons Officer Sobol had survived, but his engineer, Captain Third Rank Alesya Matveev, had died in the reactor explosion, undoubtedly roasting from the steam leak in the fourth compartment or dying instantly from the flash of neutron and gamma radiation that was ten thousand times an individual’s lifetime dose. At least, Alexeyev hoped she’d died instantly. Dying aboard a submarine could be anything but merciful, he thought, and it was important to him today that she hadn’t suffered.

Under the archway there was another guard post for him to check in with biometrics, and an aide, a senior lieutenant, led him into the gargantuan labyrinth of the complex. It was deceptive from the outside, just three stories tall, but nearly a kilometer long. The aide took him inside one of the inner buildings across a courtyard from the arch and into an elevator. The elevator descended to a floor deep under the building. Probably constructed during the First Cold War, Alexeyev thought, hardened against a direct nuclear hit.

The elevator door opened to a simple and functional corridor. After a walk that seemed endless and two changes in direction, the aide admitted Alexeyev to a large conference room. The first thing he noticed were the large charts on the wall. The Gulf of Oman. The Arabian Sea. The South Atlantic at the Cape of Good Hope. The charts were marked up with bold red arrows, circles, and blue arrows. At the conference table were his senior officers, Lebedev, Maksimov and Sobol. Across the table from them were unfamiliar officers, with nametags reading ORLOV, VLASENKO, DOBRYVNIK and TRUSOV. Orlov, Alexeyev thought, could that be Natalia’s first husband? He looked at the man, dismayed that he seemed handsome, making Alexeyev wonder what Natalia had seen in Alexeyev.

Alexeyev moved to take a seat next to Lebedev, but as he touched his seatback, a parade of admirals came into the room, led by Chief Commander of the Navy Anatoly Stanislav, then the Chief of Staff and First Deputy Commander of the Navy Pavel Zhabin, then the Pacific Fleet Commander Aleksandr Andreyushkin and Northern Fleet Commander Gennady Zhigunov. An unfamiliar man in a suit came in after Zhigunov. The last in the procession, a large, solid female admiral, shut the door and waved them all to seats.

Just as Alexeyev’s backside hit his seat, a side door opened and servers in formal dress brought in trays of exotic crackers and caviar with bottles of vodka and glasses. The servers arrayed plates and napkins and poured generous portions of vodka for everyone.

“So,” Stanislav said. “Let us hear the story. Tell us everything. Start from the beginning. Captain Orlov, perhaps you will start?”

Alexeyev traded wary glances with Lebedev, then cautiously picked up the vodka glass and took a sip, certain that it must be poison.

Orlov told the story of the Novosibirsk taking the nuclear strike, how all their systems seemed to conspire against them, and a massive fire broke out from machinery two, then about their struggle to save the ship and the crew, then the story of the rescue by the Panther, and how the Americans had repatriated them without even interrogating them.

Stanislav nodded. “I don’t know if any of you have heard, but the Voronezh crew died before the nuclear strike. The second captain AI system sent us a message detailing the event. Apparently a design flaw in auxiliary machinery room two took out both oxygen generators and the oxygen storage system, and the ventilation system pumped toxic smoke throughout the boat. That was not long before it took a nuclear depth charge close enough to scatter it to atoms. So, Captain Alexeyev, tell us your story.”

Alexeyev did his best to tell the tale, at one point putting his hand to his bandaged eye. The hospitals had been unable to save it. In a few weeks, after the surgery to remove the infected eye healed, they would fit him for a glass eye. Until then, he’d have to have the dressings changed every few hours. When he finished, Stanislav nodded in approval.

“So, you all see how Captain Alexeyev and his crew learned from the incident on the Voronezh and before engaging the enemy, shut down atmospheric control to harden the ship. But the Shkval detonation in the third compartment caused a severe reactor casualty. So Engineer Voronin, you see that you have major design flaws in your Yasen-M, yes?”

“Admiral, yes,” the slight civilian engineer in the business suit said to Stanislav. “We will redesign the entire atmospheric control layout and systems. And the ventilation systems. And the reactor core must be hardened from shock. The rod drop that Captain Orlov suffered on the way to the Gulf of Oman was also a flaw on the Kazan, making it more volatile from the shock of a torpedo hit. We’ve already started on a new design that rectifies these flaws while keeping the supreme acoustic advantage of the Yasen-M. We will call it the Yasen III.”

“For the sake of good luck, Anatoly,” Stanislav said to Director Voronin, “name it something new, yes?” He looked at Orlov, then at Alexeyev. “Gentlemen, you and your crews represented the Russian Republic with courage and a fighting spirit. And believe me when I say, no Russian attack submarine will ever again sail without nuclear-tipped Kalibr antisubmarine cruise missiles. That mistake is all mine and it shall not recur. Now, please, everyone, drink up while we await the main course. Aleksandr,” Stanislav said to the Pacific fleet commander, “perhaps you would care to give the evening’s first toast.”

Alexeyev turned to Ania Lebedev. “I guess we’re not in trouble after all.”

She looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Do you get the funny feeling this whole battle was some kind of test? A drill?”

He nodded. “I’m not sure why I feel that way, but the bosses are going awfully easy on us for losing a submarine. And a battle.”

A few minutes after the meeting at the Admiralty ended, the limo took Alexeyev to the airport, where he wearily climbed into the first-class seat on the flight to Murmansk, sleeping most of the way, getting up only once to go to the bathroom to change the dressing over his eye. The jet landed and taxied to the concourse. Feeling like he weighed eight hundred kilograms, Alexeyev walked down the jetway into the concourse.

Lebedev caught up to him. “Where do we report for duty, sir?”

“Pass the word to the crew, Ania. We all have three weeks of stand-down while the bosses try to figure out what to do with us. Take some time off. See your family. Relax.”

“I’ll put out the word, Captain, but call me if we have orders.” She touched his shoulder, then turned to walk to the baggage claim room. Alexeyev stared after her. She’d changed, he thought. Or maybe he had. The other officers and crew filed past him, all of them hollow-eyed and exhausted, all on their way to get their bags, mostly full of the uniforms the Admiralty had given them to replace all their belongings lost on the Kazan.

Alexeyev walked through the door where the inner security ended and people gathered to meet family or friends after arrival. As he walked, he stared dejectedly at the floor when something made him look up.

Natalia Orlov stood there in a simple white dress, her platinum blonde hair flowing around her shoulders, her romantic blue eyes done with light makeup, her impossibly long lashes that made her so beautiful one of her best features. She was crying as she ran toward him and threw her arms around him and started kissing his neck.

“Georgy, Georgy, Georgy, I am so sorry! I love you so much, I thought you might have died, I hurt you so deeply, oh please forgive me!” She would have gone on and on, but Alexeyev put one finger on her lip, her tears running down the back of his hand. He always had been a sucker for a woman’s tears, he thought. He hugged her back, and the two of them walked down the concourse.

“My eye,” he said. “It was an infection. They say it was herpes.”

She looked at him. “As soon as I heard I had myself tested. I got it, all right. From that bastard Boris Novikov. If he hadn’t died, I would have killed him myself.”

“What about that guy you wanted to have in my bedroom? In our bedroom?”

“None of that was true, Georgy. I was angry at your disappearance and your silence. I had no idea you were going off to war and couldn’t transmit. I’m sorry I thought the worst. It was a last resort. I wanted to get you to talk to me.” She went on again about how sorry she was, and again he had to silence her, but this time he did it with his own lips.

They walked on down the concourse and he smiled at her, and lovely Natalia Orlov smiled back and put her head on his shoulder.

Now, he thought, part of his life had healed. But what of submarine command? Command at sea was an experience like no other, he thought. Ah well, eventually he would have had to give it up. Maybe the time had just come a little sooner than expected.

Vice Admiral Robert Catardi stood at the podium, resplendent in a starched service dress white uniform with full medals, swordbelt and ceremonial sword.

“Now that I’ve given out the Presidential Unit Citations to the crew of the USS Vermont and given the silver star awards to the Panther boarding party, I have one very special award I’d like to make. Could I have Lieutenant Anthony Pacino approach the lectern?”

Pacino looked at Catardi and broke ranks to walk to the podium, the formal choker whites distinctly uncomfortable in the summer sunshine on the pier overlooking the USS Vermont. The starched whites were one of those uniforms one would want to tear off after twenty minutes in it. It was so stiffly starched that it looked great for half an hour, then resembled an unmade bed after that. Pacino had no idea what Catardi could be bringing him up to receive. He’d already gotten the P.U.C. and the silver star. What could be better than that? He stepped up the three steps to the raised platform at Catardi’s podium and came to attention.

Catardi’s aide, Lieutenant Commander Wanda Styxx, handed Catardi a velvet box. “For innovative and meritorious service in the United States Submarine Force, Lieutenant Anthony Pacino is hereby awarded the highest honor a submariner can possess. Gold dolphins, indicating Lieutenant Pacino is qualified in submarines.”

Pacino stared in surprise and shock at the velvet box holding the gold dolphin emblem, the award coming nine months before he rated it. In the eyes of Navy Regulations, he was still a non-qual air-breathing puke, but Catardi and Seagraves had waived all that and decided to make him a qualified submariner.

Pacino couldn’t help it. His eyes got moist as the admiral unpinned his airborne wings, re-pinned them under his medals, then pinned the gold dolphins in their place above the medals. “If I stick you, Patch, it’s purely intentional,” Catardi grinned, stepping back to examine his handiwork. The shining gold dolphins were centered and level above Pacino’s ribbons. Catardi came to attention and saluted Pacino, and Pacino returned the salute, his hand and posture rigid, a tear threatening to run down his cheek. Wanda Styxx smiled sweetly at him and winked.

Pacino looked out into the crowd on the pier and could barely believe his eyes. It was his father in a black business suit, clapping with the crowd. And it wasn’t his imagination, the old man was wiping a tear from his own eye. Pacino waved a salute at him and his father saluted back.

The rest of the afternoon and evening were a blur. A few moments with the elder Pacino, who had to rush to Washington with Catardi and Styxx, then to Quinnivan’s for a post-operation ship’s party. A few times, Pacino gazed down to sneak looks at his dolphins, still not believing it was all real. He looked up and saw Commander Ebenezer Tiny Tim Fishman saluting him. Pacino returned the salute, grinning at his friend.

He called for a ride to his apartment, wondering whether his Corvette would start after being away for over two months. He pulled off the starched service dress whites, dumped them in a corner, showered and got dressed in jeans. He bit his lip as he hit the starter for the engine, but it coughed and came to life.

Pacino wheeled the car to Quinnivan’s, parking it in the driveway next to the red Ferrari, being careful not to ding the door of Elvis Lewinsky’s pride and joy. As he stood to walk into the house, he saw Elvis Lewinsky standing there.

“Hello, non-qual.” Lewinsky was grinning at him.

“Hey, Fucking Engineer, I’ll have you know I’m the proud owner of a pair of gold dolphins. Solid gold dolphins. Presented by the commander of the submarine force himself.”

“Yeah, well, when you’ve been aboard long enough to remember where the wardroom is, let me know, non-qual.” Lewinsky laughed. “Come on. Word has it Bullfrog Quinnivan has a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Macallan waiting for you. Can’t keep the boss waiting.”

Pacino nodded. As he and Lewinsky entered the lower level of the XO’s house, the crowd erupted in shouting and jeering, most of them teasing that he was too green to possess dolphins and that as far as they were all concerned, he was still a non-qual air-breathing puke. Expecting this situation, he’d brought the dolphin emblem Catardi had pinned on him. He pulled it out of his pocket with a dramatic flourish and pinned it to his Polo shirt above the left pocket amid the laughter and taunts. Quinnivan came up to him with a glass of the Macallan scotch.

“Mr. Lipstick, wearin’ your new dolphins, I see. And you’re cryin’ inside because the crowd is still calling you a non-qual, yeah?”

Pacino smiled and shook his head. “On a submarine, XO, never let the crew know what bothers you.”

“Attention all you scoundrels, ne’er-do-wells, misfits and pirates!” Quinnivan yelled at the crowd. “I’ve heard about enough out of all you assholes laying into poor Lipstick here that his dolphins were a fookin’ gift. So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to take the backing off the pins of these dolphins, exposing the pointy needles of the thing, and each one of you is going to get a chance to punch Mr. Pacino in the dolphins, as hard as you want. And I don’t care if you put him in the emergency room, but after you each take your shot, that’s it. No more of this ‘non-qual air-breathing puke’ nonsense. When we’re done, Mr. Pacino here is as qualified as any of us. Everybody got that?”

The crowd booed and hissed, but they were all smiling. Quinnivan organized a queue and the officers lined up to punch Pacino in the dolphins. The hardest shot came from the captain himself, who grinned as he fired a punch into Pacino’s dolphin emblem, Pacino biting his lip and refusing to wince, the pins of the emblem puncturing his chest. He could feel blood running down his chest and into the fabric of his shirt. Then Quinnivan, whose punch was more gentle, until it came time for Rachel Romanov’s turn, who came up, dramatically balled up her fist, frowned and wound up to hit him. Pacino clamped his eyes shut in anticipation, but then she pulled her punch and just caressed his chest where the dolphins were, winking at him.

“I’m going to miss calling you a non-qual,” she whispered into his ear. “But I’ll find something else to tease you about.” Pacino stared at her. Since their arrival in Norfolk, she’d been positively nice to him. None of her previous annoyance was visible. It was as if she’d never been mad at him.

By the time of the last officer’s punch, Pacino’s chest was throbbing and blood had seeped through his shirt, making a large wet red stain, but he didn’t care. He was a non-qual no more.

It was then a large man entered the room, wearing leathers and carrying a motorcycle helmet, who raised his fist and bellowed, “It never happened!” The crowd immediately responded with their reply in loud unison, “We were never there!” He finished, yelling, “USS Vermont!”

“I’ll be damned,” Quinnivan said. “Man Mountain Squirt Gun Vevera. Aren’t you dead yet?”

Vevera laughed, accepting a glass of scotch from Quinnivan. “Catch up, XO. Stem cell therapy. Duke University Cancer Center. I’m in remission. Fuck, XO, I’m healed. I’ll be back aboard as soon as you sissies get back from your little stand-down vacation.”

Captain Seagraves joined the crowd around Vevera. “XO,” Seagraves said. “Do we have a job for Mr. Vevera?”

Quinnivan smirked. “I’m sure we’ll find something for him to do, sir.”

“Welcome back, Duke,” Seagraves said to Vevera, clapping him on the shoulder.

“Do I get to take a punch at the former non-qual?” Vevera asked.

“Just take it easy on him, Squirt Gun,” Romanov said, smiling. “He has delicate feelings.”

Man Mountain Vevera’s punch was even lighter than Romanov’s. “Welcome to the major league, Patch.”

Rachel Romanov came over and took Pacino’s hand, leading him upstairs, where she asked Shawna Quinnivan for a spare shirt and a first aid kit. She sat Pacino down on the master bathroom’s toilet lid and peeled off his bloody shirt and tenderly cleaned his wounds from the pins of the dolphins and bandaged him up, then helped him into the XO’s shirt. She pulled the bloody dolphins off his shirt, washed them in the sink, reunited them with the backing pins and handed the emblem to Pacino. She sat opposite him on the lip of the tub and looked up at him. He noticed her eyes seemed puffy and red. “Thanks,” he said. “You okay, Nav?”

She blinked as if trying to hold back tears. “Bruno and I broke up,” she said, sighing. “It was a long time coming.”

“I’m sorry to hear,” Pacino said. “You two seemed good together.”

“We’ve been limping along for some time,” she said, blinking back tears, her jaw hardening as if she were trying to get control of herself. “But the mission didn’t help. Imagine what total radio silence for two months does to a marriage. Meanwhile, his dalliance with his chubby missile officer — I don’t even want to talk about it. I decided I’d had enough.” She swallowed hard and shook her beautiful chestnut hair, then looked at him. “But never mind about all that. What about you? Are you going to see that Wanda Styxx chick?” Was it Pacino’s imagination, or was there a trace of jealousy in her voice?

“She asked me out after the awards ceremony,” Pacino said, a slow smile spreading on his face. “But I gave her an excuse. You know. Dentist appointment on Saturday night.”

Romanov laughed. “I don’t suppose I could get you to cancel your dentist appointment, could I?”

Pacino drank her in with his eyes, feeling a sudden desire that was entirely inappropriate to feel for a senior officer. “I think my teeth are in pretty good shape, actually,” he said. “Got anything in mind?”

“Maybe a ride in that hotrod of yours?” she asked.

“That might be arranged, Nav,” he smiled.

“Call me Rachel,” she said. “Anthony.” She stood from the tub’s edge, took a step toward him and straddled him, then touched his face with one hand and ran her fingers through his hair with the other. Her eyes brightened as she looked at him.

Later, when he looked back on this moment, he realized how natural and inevitable it felt when her lips met his. And at that moment, as Rachel Romanov’s warm silky tongue explored his mouth, he thought about Ebenezer Fishman’s theory that this was all a simulation. And deep in his heart, Anthony Pacino fervently hoped it wasn’t, and that beautiful Rachel kissing him was the true reality.

Jeremiah Seamus Quinnivan pulled Dieter Dankleff over to the bar and said quietly in his ear, “who’s that fookin’ bloke?”

Dankleff grinned. “That, XO, is Captain Resa Ahmadi of the Iranian submarine Panther. Guy saved our lives at least three times, maybe four.” He waved and shouted at the Iranian. “Resa! Over here!”

The Iranian naval officer self-consciously stepped over to the bar. “Hello, U-Boat,” he said.

Dankleff introduced him to the XO, then asked him, “So Captain, what happens for you now?”

“Back to Bandar Abbas,” he said. “I’m being repatriated after all.”

“No hard feelings from the bosses?”

Ahmadi smiled. “In my debrief, I told the tale of how, when you first captured the ship, I sabotaged it and caused it to sink, exceeding test depth by at least fifty meters, but after you recovered with that emergency surfacing, you kept me tied up in the torpedo room. There’s no one to tell the Revolutionary Guards otherwise, what with Abakumov staying here. So, gentlemen, back in Iran, I’m a brave hero. But now that I’ve lied, all of you have to swear to it.”

Dankleff laughed. “Where’s Lipstick? He wanted to buy you that drink. Hey XO, what concoction from your almighty bar do we have for the good Panther captain, bearing in mind that when it comes to alcohol, he’s a bit of a non-qual?”

Quinnivan found a craft vodka, made in Austin, Texas, and poured two fingers in a crystal rocks glass. “Try this, Cap’n, yeah? It’s good for what ails ye.”

“A toast to the immortal spirit of the submarine Panther,” Dankleff said, raising his glass. “May she ever sail safe.”

“And to your Vermont,” Ahmadi said, taking a sip, then a second one, then looked at the glass. “You know, Commander, I can see now why my religion prohibits such a substance. It is frankly wonderful.”

Lieutenant Commander Mario Elvis Lewinsky left the party early, feeling exhausted. He hadn’t even had a drink at the gathering. There was just something about the end of this operation that left him feeling empty. The drama was over. Now it was back to working on meaningless reports to the squadron engineer and NavSea 08, division training and equipment preventive maintenance. There was no doubt — after being a submariner in combat, in mortal peril, the return to the mundane life of a nuclear submarine engineer was far beyond difficult. For a moment he looked up at the crescent moon, remembering how it had looked out the periscope in the Arabian Sea. His eyes came to rest on his prized possession, the Ferrari Testarossa, Italian for redhead, and for a moment, all he could feel was a crushing sadness that Redhead had left him.

And almost as if his thinking about her conjured her into being, the car door of a nondescript small blue SUV opened across the street, and Redhead climbed out of it. She walked over to him, wearing a tight black pencil dress with tall pumps, her luxurious red hair arrayed down past her nipples, the fabric of the dress tight around her slender waist and curving hips and struggling mightily able to contain her huge breasts. She confidently walked up to him, looked into his eyes and put her soft hand on his face. He suddenly became aware that his face was three days unshaved, stubble everywhere. He noticed her big brown eyes were almost liquid, moist with tears as she looked up at him.

“Hello Mario,” was all she said, her voice trembling.

He looked at her. “I’ve missed you so much, Redhead,” was all he could say, and he felt the moisture flood his eyes.

She took his face in both her hands and her soft red lips met his for a long, blissful kiss. He felt her warm, soft body as his arms brought her close. Finally, she pulled back and looked at him, her eyes drifting from looking at his left eye, then his right.

“How’d you know I’d be here?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Bruno Romanov told me there was a ship’s party here tonight. I was worried I’d have to walk in there with all those catcalling dogs you call your fellow officers.”

“Well, I’m glad you came, but why did you?”

“I came to say I’m sorry. And to pay for the damage to the car.”

He waved his hand in the air. “It’s okay. Fixed up better than new. Insurance paid for it all.”

She smiled. “At the cost of huge premium increases, I’m sure.”

“Well, that is true,” he said.

She drilled her soft eyes into his. “Perhaps I can do something that will make up for all that, Mario.”

Mario Elvis Lewinsky smiled at her. “I look forward to whatever that might be.”

“Give a girl a ride? There’s an amazing restaurant on the beach we just have to try.”

Lewinsky opened the passenger door of the Ferrari, careful not to dent the door of Lipstick Pacino’s classic black Corvette, and watched as Redhead slid into the passenger seat, her mile-long legs the things of boyhood fantasies.

He walked around and got into the driver’s seat and looked over at Redhead.

“I’m glad you came back,” he said as he started the V-12 engine, which shook the car with raw power.

“I couldn’t live without you, Mario,” she said, her expression serious.

“Redhead,” he said, “I know exactly how you feel.”

Lewinsky touched Redhead’s hand, then found reverse and backed the Ferrari out of the driveway, turned west, shifted into first, punched the gas and popped the clutch, his shrieking tires leaving black marks on the road in front of the Quinnivan residence.

In the situation room, National Security Director Michael Pacino took his habitual seat, waving Admirals Rob Catardi and Grayson Rand to seats on his side of the table. CIA Director Margo Allende and Deputy Director of Operations Angel Menendez took seats on the opposite side.

“Anyone know what this is about?” Pacino asked.

“President Carlucci wanted to see us in person,” Allende explained. “Said he wanted to see the whites of our eyes when he told us what he’s going to tell us.”

“Am I stepping in on cue?” President Vito “Paul” Carlucci said, walking in with a phalanx of staffers. Pacino, the admirals and the CIA spooks jumped to their feet. Carlucci flashed his winning smile and waved everyone to seats at the table. He took his seat at the end of the table and looked up at the gathered officials.

“Well,” he began, “I had a very interesting conversation with the Russian President.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I’ll just summarize the high points for you. First, we had a discussion about who had the better attack submarine. Vostov claimed victory on that, because his submarine Kazan had such an extreme acoustic advantage over the Virginia-class Vermont that Vermont could only hear the Yasen-M by using active sonar. Kazan was able to sneak up on the Vermont and fire off a stealth torpedo. But I told Vostov that number one, his three Yasen-M’s were on the bottom, two of them thanks to Vermont’s SubRocs, and that Vermont heard that stealth torpedo and countered everything Kazan had in her torpedo room with countermeasure torpedoes, and if she’d had just one more Tomahawk SubRoc, his prized Kazan would be on the bottom. Oh wait, I forgot, his prized Kazan is on the bottom.”

Carlucci paused to take a sip of the carbonated Italian water he favored. Pacino waited patiently.

“I then pointed out that his submarines are fragile. Hell, one of them spontaneously burst into flames and killed the entire crew for no apparent reason. We didn’t touch it. The nuclear strike vaporized that Yasen-M, but her crew were already dead. It was piloted by the onboard AI, which was pretty stupid from what I’ve gathered. And the second sub that sank from the nuclear depth charge should have survived, but it was so susceptible to fire that it sank when one of our subs would have lived on.

“Needless to say, Dmitri Vostov was not taking this lying down. He said all he had were minor design problems, and that the battles of June 7 and July 3 went our way only because we cheated. Cheated, I said. Yes, he replied, you cheated. First, he alleged, the Vermont fired not at the two Yasen-M submarines detected from her own onboard sensors but rather at a probability ellipse where the computers suspected they would be as a result of us cheating by placing transponders on their periscopes. And Vermont used nukes before detecting them. So it was a shot in the dark, but a lucky one. I asked him about the third Yasen-M, which we sank. And he said we cheated on that too, because Vermont was out of weapons, and the only thing that sank the third Yasen-M was a supercavitating torpedo invented by the Russians, fired from a submarine designed and built by Russians. So in Vostov’s mind, the victory wasn’t ours at all. It was at best a stalemate.”

Pacino thought about the Russian president’s allegations of them cheating, reminded of his first submarine command’s motto, you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.

Carlucci paused. “The good news is that Vostov won’t retaliate for our nuclear strike or for our stealing the Panther. Or sinking the third Yasen-M. Or even the grizzly bear worm. He listed his reasons — that we rescued the two crews, we were humane to the Russian submariners we rescued, we repatriated them without humiliating them or interrogating them, and when we took Panther, we released her crew without killing them. And we shut down the worm with no lasting effects on their military.”

Carlucci paused again to sip some more water and look at the gathered officials and staffers, clearly enjoying having this audience.

“So that brings us to the next point,” the president said. “The Panther. We’re giving it back.”

“Wait, Mr. President, no,” Pacino said without thinking. “All the blood, sweat and tears it took to steal that submarine—”

Margo Allende spoke. “Sir, Admiral Pacino could have lost his son on that mission. How can we give it back? We had the plans to the reactor, but they’re useless without having the real thing, and now we have it.”

Carlucci smirked. “We don’t need the Panther. We have Alexie Abakumov, the reactor’s designer. We have him and all his calculations. The Iranian crew is in flight right now and should be landing in the Bahamas in two hours. They’ll take back the Panther and sail it back to Bandar Abbas. Fueled up with low-smoke diesel and loaded out with food courtesy of the United States Navy. Lots of great American food. Pizza. Cheeseburgers. Chili. Steak and lobster.” Carlucci laughed. “And beer and wine. And some vodka and bourbon.”

Allende sighed. “Okay, Mr. President. We’ll do this your way.”

“Another point, folks,” Carlucci said, looking at the admirals. “Allow me a critique of our submarine program — while we showed the Russian submarines catch fire or experience reactor casualties in battle, how do we know our own ships can take that kind of shock and not experience massive fires and toxic gases all through the boat, or a reactor explosion like the Yasen-M had? You need to consider a shock-testing program, gentlemen, and pronto. And all these countermeasure torpedoes, folks, sure, they’re fine if the other guy’s out of fish, but otherwise, you spend all damn day just neutralizing each other’s weapons. You need to carry more of them so when the bad guy is out of bullets, you’re still loaded up. Someone once told me: guns are great, but the battle goes to the guy who’s got more ammo. And for God’s sake, get supercavitating torpedoes like that Shkval. What happened to your solid rocket-propelled Vortex underwater missile program? I thought all the bugs were out of that.”

Catardi answered as Pacino was about to comment. “The defense contractor who made them went out of business. We weren’t shooting them unless we were in combat, so we weren’t restocking inventory. Testing them was too dangerous to the firing ship. It was her own Vortex missile that caused the loss of the Seawolf.”

Pacino was glad Catardi had answered. He didn’t want to be reminded of the sinking of the Seawolf. He’d been the captain that day when the Vortex missile blew up in the torpedo tube and detonated every weapon in the torpedo room.

“I’m confident you’ll find a way to create a newer, safer, but just as lethal program. So Admirals, one last thing. The most important thing. The Russians have built a better submarine than the Virginia-class. Sure, the Yasen-M has problems like bursting into flames, but now that the Russians know about these weaknesses, they can harden up the soft spots. The important thing is that they can hear us miles before we can hear them. Have you gotten that into your heads, gentlemen, that our submarines are inferior?”

Vice Admiral Robert Catardi looked at Rand, then at Pacino, then back to the president.

“Well, sir,” Catardi said, “We’ll just have to build a better submarine.”

Carlucci smiled his politician’s smile. “We don’t have to build a better submarine, Rob. We just have to steal one.”

Michael Pacino pulled out a chair for Margo Allende in a secluded booth table at Kelly’s Irish Times, a dark, brick-and-wood Irish Pub walking distance from the Capitol building. He looked down at the green and white checkered tablecloth.

“I suppose every day is St. Patrick’s Day here,” he smirked.

Allende’s auburn hair shone in the soft lighting of the bar, and she looked gorgeous to Pacino. A waitress came, took their drink orders and disappeared, returning momentarily with a Balvenie scotch for Pacino, a Manhattan for Allende.

“This may look like any Irish pub anywhere,” Allende said, “but there are more deals done here than anywhere else in D.C. And it’s also an Agency hangout for when we’re visiting in town.”

“Any food recommendations?”

“You can never go wrong with the shepherd’s pie,” she smiled shyly.

He looked up at her. “Margo, I’m thinking of quitting,” Pacino said.

“What? Why? You’ve got the best job in town.”

“I didn’t appreciate the way the boss treated our people. This was all a little too much of a dangerous game of chess between him and Vostov, and the crew of our boat — and my son — were just pawns on the board. It was a hell of a gamble. The probabilities were stacked against us from the start. We got very lucky. I worry our luck will run out.”

“I know you feel protective of Anthony,” Allende said, taking a sip of her drink. “But maybe you can better protect him as the boss’ advisor than as a private citizen. Plus, there’s another compelling reason you should stay on.”

“Oh really?” Pacino said, raising an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

She leaned in close, a slight smile on her face. “I have it on good authority that you work with a very pretty Agency girl who has a huge crush on you. If you play your cards right, you might get lucky with her.” She winked seductively.

Pacino smiled and scratched his head. “I wonder who that girl could be?”

“I know who she is,” Allende said, “but I’m CIA. I know everything worth knowing.”

“I bet you do,” Pacino said. “But I imagine that gets disappointing at Christmas, on your birthday and before anniversaries. Because you’d always know what your presents would be.”

“Anniversaries,” she said. “I like the sound of that. Can this be the day of our anniversary?”

Pacino sipped his scotch and looked over the rim of his glass. “A first date, if you get right down to it, is a ‘zeroth anniversary,’ so I suppose you’d be telling the truth if you told the waitress today is our anniversary.”

“So this is a date? A rendezvous intended to commence a romantic relationship between you and me?”

“You’re asking? I thought you knew everything worth knowing,” he smiled.

Jeremiah Seamus Quinnivan sat down at the kitchen table, enjoying being fussed over by his wife after their long reunion the night before, the plate of sausage and eggs arriving in front of him with a cup of steaming hot coffee.

“Seamus,” Shawna said, holding out her tablet computer, the display selected to the news files of the Satellite News Network’s world news page. “Did you see this?”

Quinnivan found his new reading glasses, hating them with their admission that he was getting older, but damned if he could read regular-sized print without them. He looked at her tablet’s display and read aloud.

“Let’s see—‘Elias Sotheby, billionaire software mogul and philanthropist, buys office building in Paris for new software company’s headquarters; Sotheby names company Harmaakarhu, Finnish for grizzly bear.’”

“Dammit, Seamus, not that article, the one above it.”

Quinnivan read the headline to himself.

Quinnivan read the article, most of it getting the details wrong, and completely leaving out the nuclear attack on the two Russian subs and the torpedo battle with the third, but that was the American press, he thought. That, or the story had been leaked by the Russians, who would prefer to minimize any revelation of their losses. He looked up at Shawna Quinnivan. “What about it?”

“Seamus,” she said, sitting down next to him, a worried look on her face. “Was this you? Did you and Vermont do this?”

And Jeremiah Seamus Quinnivan, Commander, Royal Navy, executive officer of the project submarine USS Vermont, took off his reading glasses, looked his wife in the eye and said seriously, “It never happened. We were never there.”