Dark Transit

1

Lieutenant junior grade Anthony Pacino cut the engine of the old Corvette, the self-doubt and fear infecting him despite the colors of the ribbon of the Navy Cross shining over his left breast pocket.

He looked down at the ribbon for a moment. It sat there, next to the national service ribbon and below his airborne wings, the ribbon a simple blue field with a small stripe of white in the center. He’d shown up at his last command without wearing the ribbon, still feeling unworthy of the medal, the full citation itself so classified that his service jacket would only say the bare bones of the reason for the medal: “Awarded for classified action in the service of the U.S. Submarine Force during a mission in which Midshipman First Class A. M. Pacino — at great risk to his own life and without regard for his personal safety — performed a heroic sacrifice that saved the lives of three crewmembers.” Pacino had insisted once to his father that an award like that should be given for more than just saving a few people.

But when he’d reported for Submarine School without wearing the ribbon, he’d gotten the reprimand of his life from visiting Vice Admiral Rob Catardi, the former captain of Piranha and one of the three whom Pacino had saved, who had nominated Pacino for the award and told him quietly and intensely that not wearing his Navy Cross dishonored the day Pacino had done what he did. What he’d had to do. So Pacino had worn the ribbon on his uniform ever since, not so much for himself or Navy regulations, but for Rob Catardi.

It occurred to Pacino then that his storied father had earned the medal himself twice, both times with citations too classified to tell anyone about and both times from incidents in which his submarines sank with most of their crews lost. Perhaps, Pacino thought, that was the thread that bound him and his father together — not their mutual suffering or their struggles in the submarine force, but that something in their karma seemed to demand that they survive catastrophes while the people around them died, with the twisted result that they would be honored by a Navy that couldn’t see the reality of their losses and only rewarded courage rather than victory.

Not that it mattered. Today was Friday, the sixth of May. His orders required him to report to the Naval Security Group U.S. Submarine Force—“NavSecGru SubFor”—at 1300 and get a security indoctrination, and when that was complete, report aboard the submarine USS Vermont at or around 1500. That was odd, he thought, in a Navy where seemingly everything important started well before dawn and new orders required reporting aboard on a Monday. He found the nondescript building marked only with the number “112” and handed his identification to a guard stationed behind heavy glass with only a slot for the ID card. He scanned his fingerprints and put his eyes up to the retinal scanner. The guard handed back his military ID and the entrance door clicked open. Pacino pushed through it, the steel door heavier than it looked.

A scowling first class petty officer waited for him. He wore the NWU Navy working uniform with its odd-looking multi-color digital camouflage print pattern and multiple pockets with combat boots and a cloth cover, the uniform new since Pacino had graduated from the academy. The petty officer didn’t salute but just escorted Pacino to a cramped, sparsely furnished cinderblock-walled room with only a metal table, metal chairs and a camera in the corner watching him, the dingy space looking like something from a Detroit police station’s interrogation room. The sailor left and shut the door, leaving Pacino to wait. He stared at the wall and for the first time all day, allowed himself to think about her. About Carrie Alameda. Today, like so many days, he was still sleepwalking in shock, almost a year after that night in Boston.

Lieutenant Commander and Engineer Carolyn Alameda had been his mentor on his long first class midshipman cruise on the Seawolf-class submarine USS Piranha, at first a hostile and harsh taskmaster, but softening later as he demonstrated capability in his diving officer qualifications and the studies of the submarine. They’d had to share a stateroom, and soon they both became aware of their mutual attraction, which they had both tried to keep locked down, but it had been a compelling force of nature. He would never forget the first time she had let her guard down enough to give him a smoldering look, igniting a desire in him he’d never experienced. Getting orders to evacuate the Piranha had been both a disappointment and a relief to Pacino — disappointment because he wanted to be with the submarine when she sailed into harm’s way, into genuine combat, but a relief that leaving Alameda behind would avoid them both getting disciplined by “Big Navy” for fraternization, a Naval Academy conduct offense for him but a full-blown court martial for her.

Carolyn Alameda had been unconscious and half-drowned when he had found her after his foolish re-entry into the doomed hull. The miracle of their rescue at the hands of the Royal Navy at first seemed like the universe smiling down upon both of them. Despite the prohibition of U.S. Navy Regulations, Pacino had secretly started to see her on weekends at grad school in Boston, when she would come up from DC, avoiding having him visit her in the town where seemingly everyone was military, where their relationship would raise eyebrows.

For a long moment in Pacino’s life, everything seemed so perfect. Carrie Alameda’s career was going into high gear and Pacino was celebrating completing his master’s thesis, only waiting for his advisor’s nod before graduating and going on to the Navy’s nuclear training program.

And then this brief ray of sunshine turned into black darkness. Carrie had been visiting him at the humble walk-up apartment he shared with two other grad students on Newbury Street in Back Bay Boston. They’d finished dinner, enjoying having the apartment to themselves with Pacino’s roommates out of town for the long Memorial Day weekend. Pacino had carried off the dishes and poured a Merlot for Carrie and three fingers of Balvenie scotch for himself and joined her on the sofa.

“Anthony,” she’d said, looking into his eyes, “I never asked you this. I didn’t want to upset you. But somehow now seems the right time.”

He looked at her, raising an eyebrow.

She went on. “When we were in the deep submergence vehicle and being rescued, you were clinically dead for a while. While you were, you know, out of it, did you see anything?”

Pacino nodded solemnly. “The more time that goes by,” he said haltingly, “the dimmer the memory gets and the more unreal it seems. By now, I only remember a few fragments, and what I do remember seems more like a fever dream than an experience.”

“What did you see,” she asked, her hand moving up to caress his face. “What happened?”

“I was watching myself from a distance for the whole rescue. I saw the DSV’s emergency ascent. I saw the inside of the rescue submersible. I could feel the Royal Navy commander’s thoughts and emotions. I saw the DSV surface. I saw the guys coming in the hatch to take us out. I saw the operating room. They were trying to resuscitate me, without any luck. Then a big black tunnel appeared, sucked me into it. I lost track of time, but I felt like I was inside for a few hours. Something happened while I was in there, and as much as I try, I can’t remember what it was, and it seems important, but it’s like trying to grab a cloud. And then I guess the tunnel sort of spit me back out into the rescue ship. From behind, I saw Colleen leaning over to look at my body and in an instant, I was back in my body again. I opened my eyes and I’m staring right at Colleen, blinking away the visions, trying to understand what the hell had happened.”

Carrie’s lovely smile shone on him for just a moment, then faded. Her face froze, then went blank, and her eyes rolled up into her head. She slumped over and fell to the floor, the wine glass breaking, the red wine spilling in a pool around her unmoving body.

Pacino rushed to kneel over her, trying to find her pulse, which was weak but present. He frantically pulled her into a fireman’s carry, grabbed his wallet, phone and keys and raced down four flights of stairs with her on his shoulder, hardly noticing how he was panting from the exertion. He unlocked his car and poured her into the passenger seat, slapped the seatbelt on her and roared off toward Mass General Back Bay, the emergency room entrance he had driven past a hundred times. He dialed 911 as he drove, barking at the operator to have a team standing by at the ER. He rounded a corner at a red light, the old Corvette’s tires slipping on the streets wetted by an evening drizzle. Finally, he skidded to a halt at the emergency entrance, set the parking brake and left the car running while he ran to the passenger side, pulled her out and carried her into the ER, where the crash team waited with a gurney. He was following when an administrator pulled him away to move his car. He opened his mouth to argue but realized he was blocking an ambulance. He ran to the car, threw it into gear, found what passed for parking in the absurdly crowded lot, then dashed back into the emergency room entrance.

He was forced to wait in misery and shock for what seemed hours, the nurses and administrators refusing to let him back to where Carolyn Alameda lay unconscious in surgery. When the sweat-soaked surgeon walked out, Pacino could see by his expression the news. “I’m sorry, Mr. Pacino, she had a brain aneurism and it was catastrophic. We couldn’t save her. There’s no telling whether the trauma from that submarine incident had caused this or if it were completely unrelated. It could have been waiting to happen for five years, or it could have started developing five weeks ago.”

It seemed so unreal. One moment, the most solid, real, dear person in his universe was speaking warmly to him, and the next she was gone, as if she’d never existed.

He couldn’t remember the day of the wake and the funeral the same way he remembered most things. Unlike the mental video of a normal memory, Carrie’s funeral was just a flash of a hundred intense images—

Her open coffin with her in her uniform with her rows of medals and her gold submarine dolphins, her cap tucked under her arm. Her face resting, as if she were sleeping, that constellation of beautiful freckles sprinkled around her nose, one of the first things Pacino had noticed about her.

A large framed photograph propped up on an easel behind her showing her in dress whites, smiling and standing next to then-Commander Robert Catardi with the gigantic hull of the USS Piranha behind her. Other framed photos of Alameda as a youngster, running track in high school, graduating as a midshipman from Annapolis, all of them showing her brilliant smile, her straight white teeth and singular beauty of her soul shining out in all of them.

The enormous crowd of officers present in the church, both senior and junior, and the enlisted men and women of her former submarine Toledo. Her brothers, one a Marine lieutenant, the other an Air Force colonel. Her grief-stricken father, struggling on a walker with an oxygen bottle attached to it, the Tygon tubing extending from the bottle over his ears to his nose.

The size of the cathedral where the service was conducted, candles lit everywhere. Pacino’s father sitting next to him, the old man’s suit seeming somehow odd when Pacino had always seen him in his officer’s uniform. His mother on the other side of him, holding his hand. Missing, for some reason, was his father’s wife Colleen, who had not been herself since the Explorer II rescue.

The graveside service was held in a dreary cold June rain. The time came to leave in his father’s black town car. His mind drifted during the ride to his father’s house in Annapolis. He heard the clink of a highball glass as it hit the copper surface of the bar in front of the Annapolis house’s stone fireplace, then the sound of the scotch pouring into the glass. From miles away, he sensed the smoky taste of the whisky as it cascaded down his throat. Then more and more until finally his father half-carried him to the guest bedroom.

He woke up the next morning, not knowing where he was. His father stood in the kitchen, tall and gaunt, pouring him a steaming cup of hot black coffee. His father stole a glance at him to see if he were okay, and the answer coming that he most assuredly was not.

The phone call came in from the detailer putting him into a later nuclear power school class and instructing him to take two months off, somehow knowing how hard this had hit him despite the secrecy of the affair, perhaps Pacino’s father having intervened. The days passed, one blurring into the next, Pacino running on the cobblestone streets of the bayside village before sunrise, numbly sitting on the eastern deck staring out at the sailboats on the Chesapeake in the afternoon, quietly drinking scotch with his father in the evening and watching the sun set from the western deck.

Sometimes, when Pacino remembered their last conversation, he wondered at the timing of it. Did Carrie instinctively know she had only minutes left? Did she see the opening of that tunnel behind him as he spoke to her?

His last night at the Annapolis house, he packed his seabag and got ready to leave. It was time to return to his life. He’d reported to Navy Nuclear Power School and buried himself inside the studies and the twelve-hour days. After half a year of that, six months of nuclear prototype, where he studied, qualified on and operated a live submarine nuclear reactor plant. Then three months of submarine school, where he realized that his time on Piranha had taught him most of what they were trying to teach, with the exception of the tactics of how to sneak up on an enemy submerged contact and kill it before it realized it was being stalked. He took a week of leave and spent it at his father’s house, then loaded his scratched and dented ancient Corvette with the modern engine and rolled it south to his newly leased apartment in Virginia Beach, commutable to Norfolk Naval Station, where his orders instructed him to report aboard his new permanent duty station, the new Block IV Virginia-class submarine Vermont.

This morning, a sun-drenched day in May, he donned his starched tropical white uniform with the shoulderboards of a junior grade lieutenant and the damned Navy Cross — but notably and sadly missing gold submarine dolphins that he had yet to earn and which could take over a year to be granted. And not having those dolphins while onboard a submarine would make him a second-class citizen, as berated and dismissed as he had been when he’d reported aboard Piranha as a lowly midshipman a million years ago. And now he’d experience the same strangeness of starting a new life chapter on Vermont. He took a deep breath and consciously brought himself back to the moment. With an effort, he tried to fold up and put away all thoughts of Carrie Alameda, to compartmentalize his feelings, and to some extent over the last month he’d been able to do that, but doing so seemed to drain his energy and leave him with a heavy depressed feeling. He remembered when his father’s wife Eileen had suddenly died in an interstate accident, the old man had been the same way, almost in a walking dead, power-saver mode. It had taken a war that the old man was losing to knock him out of that funk.

The door to the interview room clicked, then opened, revealing a short, corpulent man in his sixties. He shuffled in, wearing over-stuffed pants and vest from a suit, the vest open, an out-of-fashion tie at half mast, the tie bearing a dime-sized stain on it, the man smelling of stale cigarette smoke. Pacino stood to shake his hand, but the gruff man waved him to a seat. He rubbed his hand over his bald scalp and opened a briefcase to withdraw a folder full of papers and a tablet computer.

“I’m Barsky, head of submarine security at SubFor. This meeting is to indoctrinate you into a program. The program’s name itself is top secret. So first, sign here.” The first paper slid across the desk. Pacino scanned it. The paper itself was marked as Top Secret — Fractal Chaos, whatever that meant. It was legalese but amounted to one long threat of life imprisonment or execution if even a minor breach of security could be tied to him. In the event of a major security breach, he’d be treated as an enemy combatant, stripped of his citizenship and Constitutional rights and either tossed into a black program cell or summarily executed. Pacino looked up at Barsky and lifted an eyebrow. “Sign it,” the harsh man said, “or your submarine career ends right now.” Pacino shrugged and signed the nondisclosure agreement in quadruplicate. “That just entitles you to be read into the program, which is named — and the name is special compartmented information, SCI, top secret codeword material—Fractal Chaos—and that codeword is three levels above the classification top secret. You’re aware that SCI material includes the nation’s most closely guarded secrets? Some of them so secret that only a few people know about them?”

Pacino nodded gravely, and the next hour was simply more of the same. He signed more forms, each more graphically threatening than the last, a few of the final agreements not committed to physical paper, but only on Barsky’s tablet computer. The last forms required him to submit knowingly and willingly to any kind of electronic surveillance on himself at any time and to surrender his Fourth Amendment rights, agreeing to any kind of physical search of himself, his home or his possessions at any time. Pacino signed it, beginning to understand why his father had been so closed-mouthed about the operations of his submarines.

Finally, Barsky stood and waved him to the door. A different petty officer, as dour as the first one, waited and escorted him down the corridors to the entrance door, which slammed behind him. He climbed back in the Corvette and drove it to the officer parking lot for Pier 22, home of Squadron Eight and Submarine Development Group Twelve. This late in the day, the open parking spaces were a long way from the pier. He walked to the pier security building that displayed a large emblem of an angry shark pushing a billiards eight-ball, the logo of Squadron Eight, a separate emblem for SubDevGru 12, an image of King Neptune, his chest armor bearing the numeral 12. Pacino produced his identification, rescanned his fingerprints and submitted to the retinal scan. He put the contents of his pockets in a dog bowl that was scanned by the equipment. He walked through the millimeter wave body scanner, then collected his personal items. The guard pointed to his phone. “Your ship will be collecting that from you when you get to it, so any calls, texts or emails, you should send out now.”

“I’m good,” Pacino said, taking the phone and walking out into the early May sunshine to the long and wide concrete runway of the pier. He could see the ship in the distance. The pier was empty except for her. Perhaps an operational tempo surge or exercises were going on, but Vermont was the only submarine at the pier, her sister ships from the squadron at sea. He paused a few shiplengths away to look at her. As usual with nuclear attack submarines, there wasn’t much to see. Just a simple cigar-shaped black cylinder with a vertical conning tower — the sail — presiding over the bow, a number of masts pointing to the sky emerging out of the sail. The sloping hull aft angled into the brackish water of the slip, the rudder sticking straight up farther aft. Doubled up heavy lines bound the sub to the pier, coiling from the bollards on the concrete jetty to the cleats on the top of the ship’s hull. The hull itself was covered in a black, spongy, rubbery coating to avoid bouncing back sonar pings. A gangway, the brow, extended from the pier to the hull, and a banner was tied to the brow’s structure, reading USS VERMONT, SSN-792.

The ship’s seal was affixed to the banner. It showed an attack sub on the surface, a fragment of a Betsy Ross American flag, an image fragment of a square-rigged sailing vessel on the left, and on the right, the 1907 Connecticut-class battleship USS Vermont, BB-20, in the background, then below the sub image, gold and silver submarine dolphins, the seal’s written motto reading, “Vermont — Freedom & Unity.”

Pacino paused, remembering what little he knew about her, the information passed on by his father at one of their cocktail hours. Vermont was what the Navy called a “project boat.” By that, it meant that her missions were “special projects” or operations so secret that they couldn’t be spoken of aloud. She didn’t report like the other boats to the squadron commander or even to the normal command structure of the force, but directly to the National Security Council and to POTUS, the President of the United States.

He walked up to the topside watch sentry, a second-class petty officer in crackerjack dress blues with gleaming silver dolphins and a splash of ribbons above his pocket, the name badge reading WATSON. His emblem showed the symbol of a ship’s propeller, so he was one of the mechanical personnel onboard. Petty Officer Watson came to attention and saluted, and Pacino rigidly returned the salute.

Before he could announce himself, Watson said in a deep South accent, squinting, “You’re Lieutenant Pacino, reportin’ aboard, right?”

Pacino nodded. “How’d you know?”

Watson smirked. “Ain’t ever’ day the son of the Chief of Naval Operations himself walks aboard your ship, and a nub non-qual airbreathin’ puke at that.”

Pacino smiled despite the friendly insult. “Dad’s long retired,” he said. “And I’m just another non-qual junior officer.”

Watson seemed to appreciate Pacino’s humility. He half-smiled. “I’ll need to see your orders, Mr. Pacino, and your identification.”

Pacino took his phone from his back pocket and pulled up his digital orders, the terse text only directing him to report to the NavSecGru and then Vermont, SSN-792. Watson looked it over and compared it to what was displayed on his pad computer. Pacino handed over his identification. Watson put the identification card into a scanner while he held up a portable retinal scanner. After a few seconds, he seemed satisfied at the readout.

“I’ll need your phone,” Watson said. Pacino handed it over. Watson opened a washing machine-sized cabinet and put the phone into a drawer inside. “Faraday cage,” he said. “No signals going out or coming in. You can pick it up when you leave the ship for the day. The yeoman will have a pad computer waiting for you onboard — but remember, it never leaves the ship.”

Watson pulled a VHF radio from his belt. “Duty Officer, Topside.” The radio hissed with static. It took a moment for the duty officer to answer. While he waited, Pacino looked up at Vermont’s sail and saw the other topside watchstander, whose combat-helmeted head protruded from a cubbyhole on top of the tall fin, the man’s high-powered rifle visible. A sniper, Pacino thought. Defense from an invasion, assuming a commando force could penetrate the pier security. Odds were, though, he thought, any commandos would come from the sea, not the shore. Out in the slip between the piers on the starboard side, a heavily armed Coast Guard small boat patrolled slowly, a second one on the other side of the jetty toward the cruiser piers.

Watson’s radio finally clicked with the deep voice of an authoritative young man. “Duty Officer.”

“Sir, Mr. Pacino is here.”

“Roger, copy, on my way.”

A stocky officer in working khakis appeared from the canvas tent over the aft hatch, making Pacino feel out of uniform since he himself wore tropical whites, his shirt and pants white, his hat — his cover — white, and even his belt and shoes white. Tropical whites were the more formal summer uniform, for reporting aboard. The officer approaching had the double silver bars of a full lieutenant on his collars, gold submarine dolphins above his pocket, a key on an elaborate chain around his neck, his name badge reading, DANKLEFF. He was half a head shorter than Pacino, dark-complected, with pockmarked skin showing a distinct five o-clock shadow and wore thick-lensed glasses with thick black rims. Pacino came to attention and saluted, and the duty officer waved a sloppy salute back. He reached out and shook Pacino’s hand, smiling with what seemed genuine joy to meet him.

“I’m Dieter Dankleff,” he said. “I’ll be your sea daddy for the next few weeks.”

“Anthony Pacino,” Pacino said. “Glad to meet you.”

“‘Patch,’ right?” Dankleff asked.

Pacino nodded. “Patch,” his father’s nickname, had seemed to stick to him as well.

“Put this on your belt,” Dankleff ordered, handing Pacino a small black plastic cylinder the size of a cigarette lighter. “Thermoluminescent dosimeter, to be worn at all times on your belt to record your cumulative radiation dose. Even if you’re aboard in civilian clothes, the dosimeter goes on your belt.” Pacino strapped the dosimeter to his belt. “Now, come with me. The captain and exec are waiting for you below.”

Dankleff walked across the gangway, turning to salute the American flag flying aft. Pacino did the same, then stepped off the gangway onto the spongy hull of the submarine, the foam coating glued to the high tensile steel for sound quieting and minimization of returned sonar pings. Aft of the sail, the conning tower, there were two hatches. The forward one had a scaffold-and-canvas “dog house” over it with the emblem of the Navy SEALs — sea/air/land commandos — and was surrounded by a locked chain. Farther aft, a larger dog house had the emblem of the ship on it. Dankleff walked to the aft doghouse, opened the curtain and stepped inside. Pacino followed him into the relative gloom. Inside the doghouse was a huge hatch, twice the size of the hatchway on the Piranha. As if Dankleff knew what he was thinking, he said, “Plug trunk. Bigger hatch to load bigger things without making hull cuts, like widescreen flat panels. Usually, our access is through the lockout hatch forward, but the SEALs have that tied up, what with getting all their shit loaded in.”

“Down ladder,” Dankleff called, then lowered himself into the trunk. Pacino followed, the bright light of the outside world vanishing, traded for the florescent lighting inside the 15-foot-wide cylinder. Inside, it resembled the escape trunk he’d used to leave the Piranha. And to come back inside it, he thought. Dankleff waved him through a large vertical hatch that opened into the aft part of forward compartment upper level. Pacino noticed the smell was exactly the same as Piranha or his father’s boats — an oily mix of cooking grease, amine atmospheric control chemicals, and ozone from the electrical equipment. It made his head spin for just a moment, the scent bringing back both the Piranha and Carrie Alameda so strongly it was if she stood right next to him.

Just like onboard the forward spaces of the Piranha, bulkheads forming the tight passageway were covered with a wood trim laminated coating in the few places where there were no panels, junction boxes, cable runs, piping or valves. Unlike the Piranha, on top of the deck of the passageways were twelve-inch diameter tin cans of food, jammed tight and overlaid with sheets of half-inch plywood, making the overhead a foot closer. Pacino had to slouch down to get through the passageway. He followed as Dankleff continued into a narrow passageway forward and ducked down a stairway to the middle level of the forward compartment. Pacino followed him, stepping off into the crew’s mess, which was oddly deserted. The deck was visible here — no plywood or tin cans. Tables and benches were gathered, café style, with a long food service line. Behind it the packed galley was likewise empty. Dankleff walked forward into the forward passageway, where the cans-and-plywood resumed, past a second set of steep stairs, where there was a door marked “XOSR,” for the executive officer’s stateroom.

“Listen, Patch, the XO is Lieutenant Commander Quinnivan, on exchange from the Royal Navy’s fast attack sub force. Good guy, but tougher than grandma’s leftover steak. In command is Commander Seagraves, who makes Quinnivan seem warm and fuzzy by comparison. So good luck in there,” he said, “and welcome aboard. I just hope you’re braced for a wild ride.”

Before Pacino could ask what he meant, Dankleff reached up and knocked on the executive officer’s door.

2

The executive officer’s stateroom was the biggest aboard the Vermont except for the captain’s, with a double rack against the far bulkhead, one wall with closets and cubbyholes, the other with two fold-down desks, a small pull-out sink in the corner.

Executive Officer Lieutenant Commander Jeremiah Seamus Quinnivan, Royal Navy, wasn’t English, but rather an Irishman from County Cork, having enlisted in the Royal Navy in his youth as a choice, since it was either that or being tossed into jail. It hadn’t taken long for the service to realize he had talent and after getting an engineering degree, he’d eventually found his way into a series of assignments on Astute-class fast attack submarines and from there to the U.S. Navy / Royal Navy joint exchange program. Quinnivan wore dark blue pants and shirt, with an emblem of his rank in the center of his chest, the emblem a dark blue background with three horizontal gold stripes, the middle stripe narrower than the others, the top stripe making a loop-the-loop in the center. On his fold-down desk was a black beret with a gold crown surrounded by laurel leaves as the center emblem. Over Quinnivan’s pocket were embroidered gold submarine dolphins, their design starkly different than the American version, but still recognizable. On one shoulder was sewn a patch with the flag of the United Kingdom. On the other was an embroidered patch with the Vermont logo.

Quinnivan was short and slight, his close-cropped hair salt-and-pepper, the gray invading his Van Dyke beard and mustache, both of which lent him a somewhat sinister look when he frowned, but when he smiled, his spirit seemed barely contained by his body as his eyes crinkled at the corners, revealing teeth that had been capped — some thought from a fight when he was young that had knocked them all out.

Quinnivan leaned back in his swivel chair and looked up at the captain, who stood in the doorway to their shared bathroom, the CO / XO head. Captain Timothy Talisker Seagraves was tall for submarine duty, his head threatening to bang into numerous valves tucked into the overhead, and solid as well. He had slightly longer-than-regulation black hair that swooped over his head with streaks of gray over his ears — gray arriving early for the 39-year-old — with heavy black eyebrows, dark brown eyes, a straight nose, stark cheekbones, thin lips and a square jaw, with a dimple centered in his chin. Quinnivan once joked with Seagraves that the captain looked like he could be a senator, a judge, a news anchor or a daytime soap opera star. Quinnivan considered that he and Seagraves must have looked an odd couple, with his humble looks and Seagraves’ physical near perfection. Seagraves stood with an attitude of unquestioned confidence and authority as he leaned casually against the door jamb. On the collars of his working khakis, he wore silver oak leaves. Over his left pocket he wore gleaming gold submariner’s dolphins, and below them, a gold capital ship command pin.

Quinnivan picked up his pad computer, which was displaying the classified service jacket of the newly reporting officer, Anthony Pacino. “Skipper, ya had a chance to look at this wee laddie’s personnel file?” Quinnivan’s Irish brogue was comically thick unless he was briefing senior officers, when his accent would calm down somewhat.

“I looked it over,” Seagraves said in a commanding baritone voice with just a hint of a Southern accent, Atlanta or Savannah, perhaps. “I got a call from Admiral Catardi, who recommended Pacino in glowing terms. You know we had to cash in favors to get NavPersCom to assign Pacino to us, right? Are there issues or concerns, XO?” Seagraves never called Quinnivan “Jeremiah” or “Seamus,” as he’d prefer to be addressed, only using his official title of the executive officer, “XO,” but not from stuffy formality but the feeling that he might lapse into calling the Irishman by the crew’s nickname of “Bullfrog,” from some forgotten rock ’n roll lyric about his first name.

Quinnivan stroked his short black-and-gray beard, his gesture when he was carefully choosing his next words.

“Ya know, Skipper, this kid Pacino, back home we’d call him a ‘chancer.’ He’s got a propensity to take risks, yeah? Smart lad, good grades at the Academy and his graduate school, but almost got kicked out of Annapolis for conduct offenses. Going over the wall at three in the mornin’, ya know, yeah? and then getting caught drinking in Baltimore as an underclassman. Then the kid parks his fookin’ hotrod Corvette in the parking space of the Commandant of Midshipmen. That was almost the last straw, since the commandant was late for a meeting with the admiral. Sure, Pacino’s brave, yeah? but reckless. I’m not sure how well I’ll sleep with him standing officer-of-the-deck watch on the conn.”

“You didn’t read the classified citation from Rob Catardi on the Piranha incident, did you?”

Quinnivan shook his head. “It isn’t in the file, Skipper. Just the unclassified note of the award for, well, obviously, bravery.”

Seagraves pulled Quinnivan’s heavy weather gear off the room’s second chair, tossed it onto the upper rack, spun the chair backwards and plopped down into it, resting his forearms on the chair back.

“XO, lend an ear and let me tell you the top-secret tale that Admiral Catardi told me about the Piranha rescue.”

As the captain spoke, Quinnivan’s face changed from doubt to disbelief and then to pure awe.

A knock came at the door. The DCA, the Damage Control Assistant, Lieutenant Dieter Dankleff, cracked the door open. “Excuse me, XO, Captain, I have Lieutenant junior grade Pacino here to report aboard.”

“Send him in,” Quinnivan said, smiling. “And Duty Officer, rig ship for class alpha air gap.”

“Rig ship for class alpha air gap, aye sir.” Dankleff withdrew and Pacino stiffened his posture into rigid attention, his white officer’s cover tucked under his arm. Pacino shook the captain’s hand, then the exec’s, looking directly into each man’s eyes.

“Pacino, reporting aboard as ordered, Captain, XO.” The lieutenant’s voice wasn’t as deep as Seagraves, more of a low-pitched tenor, but a smooth tenor, with no discernable regional accent. The lad had confidence in his voice, but also a sort of weariness, Quinnivan thought.

Quinnivan, with a practiced eye coming from years of commanding officers and enlisted men, took in Pacino with a long glance. The lad was slender and tall, his uniform pressed, starched and spotless. He carried his cover, his hat, under his arm, cradled into his ribs. He wore several ribbons, most of them the usual awards for officers with his experience, but the lone ribbon on the top row, center, was the Navy Cross, which Quinnivan had never seen before. Above the ribbons were paratrooper wings. Quinnivan wondered how the hell a junior grade lieutenant had had paratrooper training.

This kid Pacino had odd looks to him, Quinnivan thought. He seemed rugged and tough overall, yet his individual features were refined — his lips had a full, puffy look to them and his almond-shaped eyes were large and emerald green with long lashes. His nose was straight, his cheekbones sculpted, his hair looking a little longer than it should, a shade of chestnut that reflected the overhead lights. Quinnivan thought it must be a hell-ride going to a nightclub with this kid — he had to be popular with the womenfolk, but he also had this look about him that showed he had no idea about his good looks, in contrast to Seagraves, Quinnivan thought, who knew he had a striking appearance and used it whenever he could.

There was something more here, though, Quinnivan thought. There was something about the young man standing in the room entrance. He seemed engulfed in a dense cloud of something. If Quinnivan were pressed, he would have described Pacino’s aura as one of exhaustion. He seemed as if he were carrying a thousand-pound backpack. He’d have to get to the bottom of that, and soon, he thought.

Seagraves spoke first after glancing quickly at Pacino’s ribbons. “Welcome aboard, Lieutenant. What have you heard about the Vermont?”

“Actually, nothing, sir. There’s not much in the open sources about her.”

“That’s good,” Seagraves said, seriously. “We’re a project boat. The things we do — well, let’s just say we never did them and leave it at that. There are a few unforgiveable sins in the submarine force and particularly on this boat, Mr. Pacino, and one of them is talking about our operations. To anyone. That includes family. Decorated war hero fathers. Girlfriends, wives, mistresses—”

Quinnivan interrupted. “Especially those fookin’ mistresses. And hookers too, yeah?”

Seagraves smiled, smirking at the XO: “Yes, XO, hookers too. Drinking buddies. Mothers. Family dog. Even submariners from other boats. Especially submariners from other boats. Even former bosses like Admiral Catardi. Anyone.”

Pacino looked at Seagraves, the point being made that he couldn’t talk to his father about anything that would happen aboard.

“Understood, sir.”

“Pacino, what’s the mission statement of the USS Vermont?”

Pacino frowned. “I don’t know it, sir.” Was Quinnivan talking about what was written on the Vermont logo on the banner strapped to the gangway, ‘Freedom and Unity’?

“It never happened,” Quinnivan began, looking at Seagraves.

Captain Seagraves finished with the companion statement: “We were never there.”

“Memorize that, young Pacino,” Quinnivan said.

Just then the ship-wide announcing 1MC circuit clicked. Pacino froze, knowing that in the submarine force, that click meant shut up and listen.

“Rig ship,” the overhead speakers rasped with Dankleff’s voice, “for class alpha air gap.”

Seagraves looked at Quinnivan. “Well, I’ll leave you to your work, XO. I’m going to shove off.” He nodded seriously at Pacino. “Good to have you aboard, Mr. Pacino. Oh, XO, cigars tonight?” Quinnivan nodded and smiled at that, and Seagraves ducked into the door to the shared head and from there into his stateroom.

Quinnivan waved Pacino to the empty seat. “Shut the door and relax, willya, laddie, while I tell you about the top-secret lore of the USS Vermont.”

Pacino shut the door and sank into the hard steel chair at the far bulkhead of the XO’s stateroom, keeping his posture rigid. Quinnivan reached over to this walkie-talkie and pulled the battery out of it and tossed it and the battery onto his bed, which was crowded with papers and books. Quinnivan’s desk phone buzzed. He picked up the handset. “XO. You’re rigged for class-A airgap? Okay, Duty Officer, good, good.” Quinnivan hung up and looked at Pacino.

“Well, okay, then, Mr. Pacino, I’m not going to tell you about all our operations in the last two years. That would take too long. But just to give you an idea what you’re signing onto here, I thought I’d give you the top-secret Fractal Chaos briefing on our last operation, which is typical of what we do at sea. Now, there’s a documentary video of this last operation, yeah? But it’s too long and boring to watch. So, I grabbed a few screenshots of the optronics mast videos for you.”

Quinnivan operated the software of his pad computer for a moment, authenticated himself with a retinal scan, then displayed a photograph of what looked like an aerial photo of a huge super-yacht. A second photo showed the same luxury yacht from the water level with crosshairs superimposed on it — a periscope photo.

“You’ve heard of Elias Sotheby, world famous billionaire industrialist, made his fortune in computer software and electric vehicles, went on to become a global philanthropist and activist, all into financing the medical health of the third world and saving the earth from dying of climate change, yeah?”

Pacino nodded. “It was all over the news. He disappeared off the face of the earth, what, a month ago? Two?”

Quinnivan shot a look at Pacino. “Yeah, forty-one days ago he disappeared, because we on the Vermont disappeared him.” Quinnivan clicked to a high-definition photo showing Sotheby held up by two men in black wetsuits. The background was black, as if the photo were shot at night. A bullet hole showed clearly in Sotheby’s left temple, with a gaping exit wound on the right side of his skull big enough to put a baseball in, but unmistakably Elias Sotheby. Quinnivan glanced over at Pacino, whose mouth hung open in disbelief.

“Why?” Pacino asked.

Quinnivan shrugged. “No idea, lad. We don’t have the need to know. We involve ourselves more in the ‘how’ than the ‘why.’ Valid, authenticated orders came in from the president, and we went to work.”

The 1MC clicked again, and Quinnivan paused. “Vermont, departing!” Another click.

“Captain’s left the ship,” Quinnivan noted, then continued. “And in this case, the ‘how’ involved finding this yacht, stalking her, popping up to periscope depth and locking out some very rough blokes, your Navy calls them SEALs, who got aboard the yacht in the middle of the night.”

Quinnivan picked up his desk phone, dialed a number. “Yeah, George, XO here. Send up a pot of coffee, service for two, willya?” He hung up and continued. “You ever met any of those SEALs?”

Pacino nodded. “I went to airborne school at Fort Benning between plebe and youngster year and met half a dozen of them. Pretty closed-off group of guys, never talked to anyone outside their unit. Capable people, did phenomenally well at the physical stuff, you know, the six mile runs in combat boots, twenty chin-ups, fifty push-ups. I can tell you, I wouldn’t want to meet any one of them in a dark alley.”

Quinnivan laughed as a knock sounded on his door. He quickly flipped his pad computer on its face and called, “come in.” A mess cook entered with a tray with a coffee carafe and two cups with milk and sugar service on the side. “Thanks, George,” Quinnivan said as the messman took his leave. Quinnivan poured for them both, dumping milk and three sugars in his and looking up at Pacino while waving the milk container. Pacino shook his head, taking his coffee black.

“Damn,” Quinnivan said, sipping loudly, “American coffee. I never thought I’d like it until I’d stood about three command duty watches with no sleep in between, and Mr. Dankleff introduced me to the stuff. My eyes were opened. I had no idea how I’d survived before coffee. And just like a hotdog is better at a ballpark, yeah? Coffee is fantastic on a submarine, at sea and at depth. Just magical.” He sipped the coffee. “Where were we?”

“SEALs,” Pacino prompted.

“Right. So the SEALs sneak aboard, find Sotheby in his stateroom, immobilize him with zip ties, find and pack up all the computer hard drives, cell phones, pad computers and documents for transport, scour the yacht for anyone aboard, but he was alone, these computer techies relying on their AI to drive their yachts, plus Sotheby was a notorious loner. They set the yacht on fire, bring Sotheby back to the boat, we observe through the periscope until the yacht founders and then sinks, and meanwhile we interrogate Sotheby in the wardroom — well, the SEALs interrogate him. We didn’t have the need to know. But I imagine most of the questions went to the passwords for his electronics, account numbers of offshore accounts, what he was really up to, who was controlling him and whom he was controlling. You know, the usual.”

Pacino put down his cup. “And afterward, they just shot him? In the wardroom?”

Quinnivan laughed. “No, son, that would have made a mess. We broach the sail, just enough that they can get Sotheby’s body out of the ship. SEALs do the deed, take the kill photo, weigh him down and toss him over. The sounding read nineteen hundred fathoms under the keel — well over eleven thousand feet. I guarantee no one will hear from Mr. Sotheby again, unless they get a double of him made up with plastic surgery to be a ‘new’ Elias Sotheby, a puppet to say what they want him to say and do what they want him to do.”

Pacino looked at his cup sadly. The brew had gone cold.

Quinnivan nodded in understanding as if he knew what was going through the junior officer’s mind. “Yeah, young Mr. Pacino, this is what being on a project boat means. Doin’ secret but nasty stuff like this, yeah?”

Pacino opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it. Quinnivan shut down the pad computer, put it into his safe, then turned to look at Pacino.

“So, young lad, this ship is a three-hundred-and-seventy-seven-foot-long blunt instrument of presidential policy. We are assassins. We put the killer in hunter-killer. We do as we’re told, and what we’re told is sometimes very ugly. But I suppose the bright side is, by doing so we can change world politics, perhaps even the course of history.” Quinnivan wasn’t smiling now, Pacino noted. Quinnivan picked up his phone and dialed it. “Duty Officer, secure the rig for class alpha air gap and come pick up Mr. Pacino.”

Click, from the 1MC system. “The class alpha air gap is secured. Rig ship communications for in-port.” Click.

Quinnivan absently found his VHF walkie-talkie, put the battery in it and turned it back on. “I’ll see you later at the party at my house, lad, yeah? The DCA — Mr. Dankleff — will give you the address and time.”

The wardroom, a combination of conference room and mess table for the officers, was empty.

“Where is everyone?” Pacino asked Dankleff. Since Pacino had been with Dankleff, the man hadn’t stopped smiling. In fact, he seemed to be having such a good time that Pacino was tempted to ask him what drugs he was on.

Dankleff smiled even wider. “Pre-lubricating for the ship’s party at the XO’s house. Hail-and-farewell ceremony. You’re one guest of honor, the hail part. The farewell is for the officer you’re replacing, Duke ‘Man-Mountain Squirt Gun’ Vevera, who’s leaving the ship early due to medical issues. Let me show you to the three-man stateroom where you’re assigned. It’s half of a sixpack in the upper level. In a way you’re lucky. It’s the only junior officer stateroom not shared with a department head.”

Dankleff led the way down the narrow passageway, turned at the steep athwartships stairway to the upper level, emerging into a passageway with more plywood laid on top of the twelve-inch diameter cans, the wood-and-can loading stretching all through the ship’s upper level deck surfaces.

“I see we’re loaded out for deployment,” Pacino said, hunching over to walk down the passageway.

“Oh, yeah, part of being on alert status,” Dankleff said. “Can’t have a sudden emergent mission fucked up by the boat running out of food. Anyway, bunking in with the engineer, navigator or weapons boss is no holiday, let me tell you. But this three-man bunkroom is half the size, so when there’s an emergency and all three of you have to vault out of bed and get dressed in fifteen seconds in a space half the size of Mommy’s powder room back home, it’s a total cluster-fuck. Normally, as your sea-daddy, I’d give you a full tour of the boat, but the party is coming up in a couple hours, so I’ll do it Monday.” Dankleff handed Pacino a card with handwriting on it. “Here’s the Irishman’s address. Party starts at nineteen hundred sharp. Do not be fashionably late. XO takes roll and latecomers, well, they suffer. XO explicitly told me to tell you to have your ass there at nineteen hundred. On the fuckin’ dot. You know what they say, Patch—‘If you’re early, you’re on time; if you’re on time, you’re late; if you’re late, you’re off the team.’ So I’ll see you there.”

Dankleff clapped Pacino on his shoulderboard, turned and headed back to the ladderway to the middle level. Pacino rubbed his eyes a moment, his head still spinning from some of the things Quinnivan had told him. He had thought Piranha’s combat mission was eye-opening. But Vermont had done things Pacino could barely believe.

Pacino put on his cover and walked on the plywood and cans, hunched over, to the ladderway to the plug hatch. It was almost 1630. He’d need to hurry to make it across town to his apartment and change before going to the XO’s. He climbed out of the hull and looked down at the vessel, knowing that in the last month, she and her crew had assassinated Elias Sotheby. Farther down the pier, he turned to glance back at Vermont, which lay quietly at her mooring, acting innocent, but hiding deep and violent secrets.

3

Jeremiah Seamus Quinnivan’s Virginia Beach house looked like ten thousand others in the suburbs of Norfolk, Virginia. When Pacino cut the engine on the old Corvette, it was 1850, ten minutes before the appointed time. He’d be damned if he’d be late for the first thing he was ordered to do, especially when cautioned by Dankleff to be spot on-time.

For the last two hours, his mind had been so filled with what Quinnivan had told him about the attack on Elias Sotheby’s yacht that he realized for those hours he hadn’t thought about Carrie Alameda. And with that thought, the grief came crashing back to him, as hard as it had been before, but now made worse by the guilt of forgetting her. For just the slightest moment he could swear he could feel her presence in the car sitting next to him. Hoping he could somehow connect to her, he spoke aloud to the passenger seat.

“Carrie. I miss you. I miss you terribly. I think about you all the time. I hope you’re okay, wherever you are.” His voice trembled and then broke on the last phrase.

He waited, wondering if he’d sense something. A scent of her, or the feeling of a caress on his face. There was nothing physical, but maybe the slightest feeling of something peaceful came into his mind, almost a soothing feeling. For some moments he shut his eyes and tried to explore the sensation to see if it were real, but then his watch beeped that it was two minutes to the hour of 1900.

He took a deep breath and told himself he was back on duty and to swallow his overwrought emotions. He dried his eyes and got out of the car, which he’d parked across the street from the house, and suddenly noticed how odd it was that a ship’s party this big didn’t result in a street packed with parked cars. Maybe all the officers had taken car services over, he thought, which would have been a good idea if the amount of drinking he predicted actually happened.

Feeling uncertain and nervous, but trying to make his face seem composed and cool, he rang the doorbell. He hoped he had dressed properly for the occasion. Quinnivan had said it would be a casual thing, saying even shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops would be allowable. Pacino had dressed in jeans, the kind with no holes or rips in them, a dark blue button-down Oxford shirt and his brown, scuffed harness boots. Though it was May, the weather hadn’t awakened to spring yet and it was on the cool side, so Pacino had debated tossing on a leather jacket, but decided it would be silly just for the walk from the car to the front door.

The door opened and Pacino found himself looking slightly up at a stunning, slender tall brunette woman, perhaps thirty-five, with beautiful, bright sky-blue eyes, pouty lips and the features of a model or a newscaster, dressed in tall dark heels, a tight charcoal pencil dress that looked like cashmere, a diamond pendant around her throat, revealing a curvaceous figure that could stop traffic. Pacino chided himself, thinking staring at the XO’s wife’s chest would certainly violate protocol. And judging by her outfit, he was right to think he’d underdressed. Perhaps he should have worn a suit and tie. When she spoke, it was with a cultured London accent. “Hello, young man, come in, please, welcome, welcome, I’m Shawna, Seamus’ wife, come along.”

For a moment, Pacino was lost. Who the hell was Seamus, pronounced “shame-us,” he wondered. “Seamus?” he asked, hesitantly, as he stepped into the foyer that opened into the living room, a room tidy with what seemed fifty candles burning softly. Mellow jazz music emanated from the room’s sound system.

“Seamus Quinnivan,” she said. “You did meet him on the ship today, right? And you’re Patch Pacino, correct? Newly reporting aboard that wretched stinking vessel Vermont?” She crinkled her beautiful nose as she mentioned the name of the submarine. He nodded at her. She found a door in the kitchen, opened it and clicked a button on what looked like a wall-mounted intercom. “Seamus,” she called into the squawk box, “our first guest is here, Mr. Pacino.”

He could hear the XO’s jolly brogue shout up from the room below. “Pacino, get your ass down here to engineroom lower level!”

He looked at Shawna Quinnivan. She smiled warmly and said in her silky English voice, “Normally I’d offer you a drink at the bar here, but Seamus is all equipped down in his man-cave.”

Pacino swallowed. “If I can ask, ma’am—”

“Shawna,” she corrected him, touching his shoulder.

“Shawna.” He swallowed. “Where is everyone?”

She smiled. “Ship’s parties never start on time and this one isn’t set to kick into gear until eight pm. We won’t have a quorum until nine at the earliest. Some won’t even arrive until midnight. You military types, always hustling and bustling and being on-time or early for things. When you relax, you don’t want to be timing things by a clock.”

“Oh,” he said. “I thought the DCA, Dieter Dankleff, said it would begin at nineteen hundred sharp. Seven pm.”

“Dieter? Oh, you mean ‘U-Boat Dankleff.’ Yes, darling, that was just for you, dear,” she said, smiling brightly.

“Pacino!” Quinnivan bellowed from below. “Getcher arse down here!”

Pacino gave Shawna a grateful expression and went below to the lower level.

Quinnivan stood behind the bar fussing with the bottles and glasses. When he stepped around it, Pacino could see he wore old jeans with holes and rips, an open flannel plaid-patterned lumberjack shirt, a T-shirt with a faded image of a bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whisky and old scuffed and torn steel-toed boots. Pacino thought how out of a place a suit and tie would seem now. Quinnivan hurried over and shook Pacino’s hand warmly. “Welcome to engineroom lower level,” he said with pride, expansively waving at the room. “Come on, we have some twenty-five-year-old single-malt rare-cask whisky waitin’ for us. The two thousand dollar a bottle kind. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion. I held off on having the first drink until you could get here. You’re fookin’ late, by the way. If you’re early, you’re on-time. If you’re on-time, you’re late. And if you’re late, you’re off the team, yeah?”

Pacino found himself pulled over to the bar, where seemingly every alcoholic concoction known to mankind crowded the bar’s surface. Quinnivan produced two crystal rocks glasses and poured two fingers of the Macallan 25 scotch for each of them, handed one to Pacino, then raised his own glass and clinked it into Pacino’s. Pacino took a pull of the scotch, and it was smooth, smoky and mellow. Quinnivan downed his in one go and poured more for himself.

“Ah, a good scotch tastes like the dirt from the grave of an honest Scotsman,” he said. “But good fookin’ luck findin’ tha’.” He shook his head. “So, young man, what do ya think of the engineroom here?”

Pacino hadn’t even noticed the room, his vision tunneled to the Irishman and his firehose stream of words so heavily accented that he had to concentrate hard to translate it all into English. The room was large, in an L-shape, one part of it devoted to two pool tables lit by dim and mellow Tiffany hanging lamps. The walls were a thick mahogany paneling in places, interrupted by areas where old bricks formed the walls. The ceiling was a grid of heavy mahogany beams with an ancient tin pattern painted an off-white in between the beams. The copper-sheathed bar presided over the corner of the room, and the area toward the stairs featured a large brown leather couch and four overstuffed leather club chairs arranged around a heavy antique mahogany coffee table. The couch faced a fireplace big enough to roast a pig in whole and it was burning a few logs, giving the room a pleasant wood smoke aroma. The wall where the stairs entered the room had one of the new gigantic flat panels mounted on it, a Samsung “Wall,” a television so big that it needed a special truck to bring it to the house. Despite the stark modernity of the flat panel, the effect of Quinnivan’s decorating was that it almost seemed like an old-fashioned English gentleman’s club.

“It’s amazing,” Pacino said.

“Shawna recreated her father’s old English study and retreat, but I canceled the plans for the desk and work tables over there and decided on pool tables instead, yeah? The fook do I need an office for? It’s not like I can bring any of the ship’s work home, what with it all being classified, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“You, um, wanted me here early, sir?” Pacino asked, wondering if prompting Quinnivan might be a misstep.

Quinnivan guided Pacino to one of the club chairs. “Indeed I did, lad, and my apologies for flim-flammin’ ye to get ya here early.”

Pacino sank into the leather chair and put his glass down on a marble coaster on the table in front of him. Quinnivan stepped back to the bar, retrieved the Macallan bottle, refilled their glasses and put the bottle on the table, sat down and leaned forward in his chair, as if he were a coiled spring.

Away from the formality of the submarine’s XO’s stateroom, Pacino looked again at Quinnivan. As imposing a personality as the Irishman was, he was not tall, perhaps lacking six feet by four inches, and wiry, all of maybe 150 pounds. He was going bald, his hairline climbing up the crown of his skull, but the effect balanced by his closely-cropped black and gray-streaked beard that gave him a sinister look unless he were smiling. Quinnivan had narrow green eyes that often lit up in amusement, crinkling the crow’s feet at his temples. Pacino hadn’t seen him in any moods other than expansively cheerful or soberly somber — such as when he was telling Pacino about Vermont’s last operation, but Pacino imagined the Irishman’s expression could be frightening when he was angry.

“Listen, lad, the submarine functions as a ‘SCIF,’ a special compartmented information facility. When it’s rigged for an air gap, no radio waves or internet signals can leave the sub’s hull, avoiding a spy eavesdropping on our afternoon’s conversation, yeah? Nor can sound waves from in-hull be detected. We’re completely isolated from the physical universe. That was one reason the boat was a ghost town, yeah? Nobody can work very effectively when we unplug. That and this party. Anyway, places like this house are most assuredly not a SCIF. Anything you say here, you may as well have published in the Satellite News Network news files. So bear that in mind, yeah? Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, about what we do at sea or are getting ready for justifies talking about business when we’re outside the hull or the tender ship or at command HQ. And absolutely never email, text or talk on the phone about it. And that goes especially for what I told you today.”

“Understood, sir. I’m used to that. My father never talked about his boats. The only time I got any indication what it was like for him was when I visited his ships when he was in port.”

“Well, okay then,” Quinnivan said, relaxing slightly and leaning back in his seat. “Anyway, I wanted to let you in on something before this party starts. It’s a hail-and-farewell, so the crowd will be greeting and meeting you, but we’re also bidding farewell to communications officer Duke Vevera. Duke had a recent physical due to some abdominal pain, and turns out the fooker’s got stage four pancreatic cancer that’s spread almost everywhere. Probably has only a month or two left. If Monday happens the way I think it will, we’ll probably never see him again, and his funeral will happen when we’re a thousand feet under.”

“Holy shit,” Pacino gasped. “That’s terrible.”

“Aye, it is, but the youngster’s sensitive about it. He doesn’t like folks talking about his illness or making it seem like he’s a goner. So we’ve all agreed to act like it’s no big deal, yeah? We’re all just going to pretend like the diagnosis never happened. Just play along, right? It’ll be okay.”

“Aye aye, sir, will do.”

“Another thing, there, Patch. You’re going to hear people talk about ‘Monday’ and that ‘Monday’ is coming. Let me let you in on that concept. Back in the old days, bomber crews used to hang out when they were on duty, playin’ cards and makin’ jokes, takin’ naps, in a building a few feet from their airplanes, yeah? so that if the balloon went up, they could sprint to the cockpit and roar off. They called it ‘being on alert.’ Well, starting Monday at zero eight hundred, Vermont is on alert status. When we’re on alert, the lines are singled up, the reactor is critical and self-sustaining, steaming the engineroom, shorepower is disconnected and a manned crane awaits to remove the gangway. The battlecontrol system, weapons control and sonar are up and online. We’re fully loaded out for a forty-day run, with canned goods loaded on every deck surface forward with plywood on top, like you saw today. We’re rotating and radiating on the radar. We’re basically two minutes from tossing over our lines and getting our nuclear-powered asses out into the channel, yeah? There’s no cell phone communications with the wife or girlfriend. There’s no pizza delivery. We’re essentially at sea but with the hatches open. We get the word to go, we man the maneuvering watch and we fookin’ go.”

Pacino looked at Quinnivan. “So, how often have you had to leave port when you were previously on alert status?”

“Never. We don’t get into the duty rotation for alert status often, but the boats that do rarely leave. They’re just on stand-by just in case, yeah? Vermont being a project boat, we’re usually off doing our own thing with a special operation and don’t have to be on the alert status duty roster. But not this time. You noticed we’re the only boat at the piers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, this alert status starting Monday seems different. It wouldn’t surprise me if we’re ordered out before sunset. So be ready to disappear Monday. Have someone looking after your car, your mail, your apartment, your bill payments. Make sure you don’t have any plans that will disappoint someone. Sister’s birthday, cousin’s baby shower, whatever. Cancel everything.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

A knock sounded from the entrance to the room. Captain Seagraves, dressed in chinos, brown shoes and a sweater appeared. “Gentlemen,” he greeted them in his deep baritone.

“Skipper,” Quinnivan called, grinning, bolting to his feet. “What’re ye drinkin’ tonight, boss? The usual? That rotgut corn-squeezin’ moonshine from Kentucky?” He headed to the bar to make the commander a drink.

Pacino stood and shook Seagraves’ hand. “Evening, sir,” he said. Seagraves seemed distracted, looking around the room.

“You started early, I see,” he said to Quinnivan as the exec handed him a glass with two fingers of bourbon. Seagraves sank into a club chair opposite Pacino. “Did you give Mr. Pacino the rundown on the scoundrels, misfits and pirates who form the officer cadre of our good ship?”

Quinnivan joined them, pouring another scotch for Pacino and himself. “Cheers, lads,” he said, toasting the captain. “I was just getting to that, Skipper. Our menagerie of zoo animals we generously call ‘officers.’”

But before Quinnivan could hold court, a call came from the intercom, Shawna’s English accented voice, saying, “Seamus, Elvis is here with his Ferrari. He wants to park it in the garage.”

“Come on, lads, let’s go see Elvis’s crazy-ass sports car,” Quinnivan called. He looked at Pacino. “Elvis is our engineer,” he explained as they climbed the stairs. “Academy grad like you. Bloke’s a little wobbly after his redheaded sexpot girlfriend left him, yeah? Anyway, he’s an amateur investor from some seed money from his deceased da’, and put together enough of a fortune to play with antique sports cars, but despite being the nuclear chief engineer and owning a barn full of rolling stock, the fooker can barely turn a wrench himself.”

Through a doorway from the kitchen, the pristine garage waited as the fire engine red 1985 Ferrari Testarossa slowly rolled into the garage, its V-12 roaring and purring as the driver brought it in and parked it. The room crashed into silence as the driver cut the engine. The door opened and a blonde-haired, crew-cut, blue-eyed, tall skinny man unfolded himself up to his full height.

“Elvis!” Quinnivan yelled at the engineer. The engineer immediately screamed back at the XO—“Bullfrog!”

The exec pulled the engineer into a bear hug and smiled at him. “Lad, you’re much too fookin’ sober. Come on down to the lower level engineroom and grab a drink, yeah?” Quinnivan looked over at Pacino. “Eng, this young one here, Mr. Anthony Pacino, is newly reportin’ aboard. He’s the replacement for Mr. Vevera. And Patch, this here is Mario ‘Elvis’ Lewinsky, chief fookin’ engineer.” He’d pronounced the name Mary-oh. Quinnivan put his hand to his mouth as if he were disclosing a deep secret to Pacino. “Elvis is Lieutenant Commander Lewinsky’s middle name, and he hates it, which is why we call him that.” Pacino nodded, remembering from Piranha that one thing about the submarine force was that anything that annoyed a sub sailor would be relentlessly thrown in that sailor’s face, as part of the force’s mysterious traditions.

The engineer shook Pacino’s hand while showing his teeth to the laughing executive officer. “Dammit, Bullfrog, you know damned well it’s Mar-rhymes-with-far-ee-oh. Pacino, glad to have you aboard, non-qual,” he said, in a deep authoritative but friendly voice, smiling. A reminder to Pacino that he remained a second-class citizen until he could get qualified in submarines and earn his dolphins.

“Thank you, sir,” Pacino said.

“Don’t ever call me sir,” the engineer said. “Even if I’m chewing your ass. I’m Elvis or Feng.”

“I thought you hated your middle name,” Pacino said, thinking the ‘Feng’ moniker seemed to embrace that he wasn’t just the engineer, he was the fucking engineer.

The engineer rolled his eyes. “Listen, non-qual, one thing you’ll quickly learn aboard a submarine is that anything that bothers you will be picked up by the crew and thrown at you a hundred times over. Why? To make sure you can don’t break under pressure. Scared of spiders? For fuck’s sake, don’t tell anyone, or there will be a hundred spiders in your rack. So the whole ‘Elvis’ thing? Whatever, I no longer give a shit.”

“Anyway,” Pacino said, “Beautiful car.”

“Testarossa,” the engineer said. “Italian for ‘redhead.’ With all that goes with the spirit of a beautiful, sexy redhead.” He sounded sad as he said that, Pacino noticed, imagining that the engineer must be missing his redheaded ex-girlfriend. Idly, Pacino wondered what had happened to the two of them. Probably the unpredictable and long absences from the schedule of the submarine.

Pacino asked to see its engine. The V-12 sparkled in the overhead lights of the garage.

Quinnivan grabbed Elvis’ shoulder. “Ya know, lad, Mr. Pacino here has a classic ’69 Corvette, yeah? and he changed out its engine and tranny himself with a first decade LS V-8. You should check it out.” It almost seemed to Pacino like the XO was trying to cheer the engineer up.

Lewinsky looked at Pacino, blinking. “Seriously?” Pacino waved him over to the Corvette across the street. He walked to the front and hit the latch and raised the hood. Lewinsky stared at the big and modern LS engine crammed into the tiny engine compartment for several long moments before he whistled. “Wow. You swapped this out yourself? Computer control and all? And a manual six speed? And a supercharger?”

Pacino nodded.

“Jesus, this thing must have five hundred horsepower.”

“Six hundred and forty, but who’s counting,” Pacino smiled.

“It’d be interesting to see which car is faster on the track, yours or mine. But listen. I could use a good mechanic,” Lewinsky said. “Not on this, but I have a restoration project I could use help with. We’ll talk about it after Monday.”

There it was again, Pacino thought, the reference to ‘Monday’ as if it were a scheduled event rather than just waiting at the pier for orders that may or may not come.

Lewinsky straightened up when he saw the gray limo bus round the corner and roll to a stop in front of Quinnivan’s house. A dozen or more people with duffel bags climbed out and headed into Quinnivan’s house through the garage.

“Let’s go meet the guys,” Elvis said.

4

Pacino followed the engineer into the house and down the stairs, where in just the few minutes since the limo bus arrived, the previously whisper quiet lower-level room was crowded with people, making noise and shouting at each other. He found his rocks glass on the coffee table and turned toward the bar. U-Boat Dankleff walked up, smiling as usual. He was wearing black jeans and a black hoodie and his usual black-framed glasses.

“Wow, I hear Bullfrog gave you some of the two-grand-a-bottle scotch. You’re definitely a VIP, he’s been saving that for months.”

Pacino grimaced. “I don’t think a non-qual can be a VIP,” he said. “I have a question for you, U-Boat.”

“Sure. Shoot.”

“How did you get the name ‘U-Boat’? Because you’re the damage control assistant and own the diesel generator?”

“Nope,” Dankleff said, smiling mysteriously. “I’m the great-grandson of Oberleutnant Zur See Walter Dankleff, the captain of the German U-Boat U-767, which went down in the English Channel on June 18, 1944, but not before he took down a buttload of Allied shipping.”

“Whoa, talk about a pedigree.”

“Not really. We could have a long debate about how much talent is hereditary. You’re in good shape if it is, what with your admiral father and sub captain grandfather.”

“U-Boat, let’s hope it is hereditary.”

“So,” U-Boat said, “have you met the navigator? ‘Dominatrix Navigatrix’?” Pacino shook his head. Dankleff waved over a tall, slender woman wearing tight jeans and tall boots with a red sweater. Her dirty blonde hair was long, obviously attended to before the party, sweeping gracefully below her shoulders, some of it curled. She walked up and smiled with a mouthful of white, even teeth. She was compellingly beautiful, Pacino thought, reminding himself that she was a senior officer.

“So you’re the new nub,” she asked, extending her hand. “I’m Rachel Romanov, ship’s navigator and TAO.”

“TAO?” Pacino asked.

“Tactical action officer. In days gone by the position would be called the operations officer, or the ops boss, the person who’s in charge of setting up the ship’s mission, but now the term tactical action officer is used. I suppose it sounds more specific. So reporting to me in the operations department, I have the navigation electronics technicians, the radiomen and the crypto-spies. And the communications officer, Mr. Eisenhart, reports to me. I run the department, but tactical action operational planning is also my thing. That and, as navigator, obviously, knowing where the fuck we are.”

It sounded strange to Pacino’s ears to hear an elegant, attractive woman like her curse. Suddenly she yelled over his head. “Bruno! Get Mr. Pacino another Macallan! And another Merlot for me!” Then back to him, she said, “Sorry to scream like a fishwife, but it’s so loud in here. Bruno’s my husband. Get over here, Bruno, goddammit!”

A man a half-head taller than Romanov carefully ducked through the crowd to join them. His round head was shaved, giving him a tough look, but the skin at his eyes wrinkled into laugh lines as he handed Pacino the whisky. “Must be a hundred dollars’ worth of scotch in that glass,” he said in a deep commanding voice with an odd accent, almost German or east European.

“Bruno, this is Patch Pacino, our new non-qual. Mr. Pacino, meet Commander Bruno Romanov, in command of the missile cruiser Javelin,” Rachel explained. “We were assigned to a destroyer together a million years ago, back before I left the Navy.”

Pacino shook Bruno’s hand, nodded and said, “Good to meet you, sir.” Then to Rachel, “You left? You were a skimmer?” Surface navy sailors were called, somewhat dismissively, “skimmers,” although Pacino dropped the second half of the epithet, avoiding saying “skimmer puke” in deference to Bruno.

“I had a dream of being a contented housewife and having children, but it turns out that medically, it’s just not meant to be. I got bored and applied for reinstatement. Submarine force recruited me. Turns out I have mad skills at navigation and tactics.”

“It’s true,” Bruno said, just before Quinnivan heaved to, placing his arms around Bruno and Rachel.

“Ah, just the two I’m lookin’ for,” Quinnivan said. “Bruno, Rachel, I see you’ve met Lieutenant junior grade Anthony “Patch” Pacino, the replacement for Squirt Gun Vevera. Pacino here qualified dive and pilot on the ill-fated Piranha, ya know, just before the disaster, but he seems all healed up now, yeah?”

Healed up except for missing Carrie Alameda, Pacino thought.

“Anyway, Patch,” Quinnivan said, grinning, “be careful around the navigator for two very good reasons. The first is how mean she is.”

“Bullfrog!” Rachel said, exasperated. “I am not mean!” Apparently this exchange had been going on for some time, as it seemed a running joke between the two of them.

“You’ve heard of ‘velvet glove, iron fist,’ yeah?” Quinnivan addressed Pacino directly, grinning. “Well, the navigator here is ‘silk glove, titanium fist.’ We’ve taken to calling her ‘Silky’ for short.”

Rachel rolled her eyes and whispered into Bruno’s ear, who took her wine glass and headed back to the bar to get her a refill.

“The other reason?” Pacino asked.

Quinnivan put his hand up to make it look like he was disclosing something confidential, but his stage whisper was loud enough to be heard all the way at the bar. “She’s been known to get just a wee bit slutty when we’re in liberty ports, yeah? You’ll want to watch yourself, or Silky might try to throw a fook into ya.”

Rachel tilted her head back and laughed loudly, coughing and choking. “I am not slutty in foreign ports!” she squealed, laughing, but even more exasperated. Quinnivan laughed uproariously, enjoying the look on the navigator’s face.

She caught her breath and looked at Pacino. “It was a case of mistaken identity,” she explained, just as Bruno showed up with her refilled wine glass. “Bruno and I were in this cozy bar in La Spezia when he unaccountably disappeared downstairs—”

“I told you I had to hit the head—”

“And he was gone so long I think I’d had two rounds waiting for him—”

“Let’s just say there was a loud argument in the men’s room—”

“And so his bar stool is unoccupied for so long and then he shows back up—”

“You mean some stranger shows up,” Bruno added.

“He looked just like you,” Rachel said.

“He had long hair,” Bruno reminded her.

“You did too, back then, and anyway, I was feeling romantic and started kissing him—”

Bruno leaned in to interject to Pacino. “I had to peel her off the poor man.”

“Poor man? He seemed to enjoy it,” she laughed.

“I ended up having to buy him a few rounds just to get him to agree to leave her alone after that.”

“So you see, Mr. Pacino, it was not a case of being slutty in-port.”

Quinnivan laughed. “You didn’t tell him about the other incident, though, did ye?”

“Oh my God, Bullfrog, shut the fuck up!”

Quinnivan, Bruno and Rachel laughed together at what must be another inside joke. Eventually Quinnivan and Bruno went back to the bar. Rachel took a last sip of her second wine.

“Anyway, it’s good to have you aboard. You go by ‘Anthony’?”

“Patch,” Pacino said. “My inevitable nickname.”

She nodded. “Anyway, Patch, Monday’s coming, so get in early, pack a bag for a month — that means both pair of underwear — and be ready to go.”

“You think we’ll leave?”

She shook her head. “Not here. We’ll talk more Monday.” She saw someone in the crowd and a sour expression came to her face. “See you later, non-qual,” she said, and walked to the bar. Pacino did his best not to watch her walk away, but he couldn’t help but admire her perfect body. He looked up to see Dankleff, who was joined by a slightly older man. “Patch, I suppose it’s time for you to meet your new boss, Sprocket Spichovich.” He pronounced it Spick-ah-vick.

A dark-haired, youthful and underweight man shook Pacino’s hand. He had a mop of too-long hair over his eyebrows, a round open face, a dark mustache and large ears. He was better dressed than most in the room, with a starched button-down white shirt, dark wool trousers and a brown herring-bone sport jacket with patches on the elbows. “You’re Pacino,” he said in a smooth tenor voice with a slight New England accent, not quite Boston, not quite Maine. “I’m Al Spichovich. Weapons officer.”

“Sprocket,” U-Boat Dankleff said. “Not drinking tonight?”

Spichovich made an unhappy face. “Duty after midnight when I relieve Doctor No.” Spichovich looked at Pacino. “On the nights of a ship’s party, we split the duty officer duties so everyone can enjoy, except the early half attendee has to remain sober. Which kind of flies in the face of the whole mission of a ship’s party.”

“You mean you want to let the others get drunk, then lure them into a poker game and walk off with all their earthly possessions?” Dankleff looked at Pacino. “This guy’s a card shark. Do not ever get talked into playing a couple of hands with him.”

Pacino noticed the weapons officer looking over at Romanov with an angry expression.

“Something wrong?” Pacino asked. Spichovich seemed to snap out of it.

“No, everything’s fine,” he said, and wandered absently off.

“Anyway,” Dankleff said, “Lieutenant Commander Spichovich — Sprocket — is the weapons officer. So the torpedomen and missile techs report to him, and firecontrol, sonar and the IT guys. And of course, the torpedo division officer, Doctor No. You’re relieving Easy Eisenhart as sonar officer so he can take over communications from Man Mountain Vevera. Have you met Easy Eisy?”

Pacino shook his head. “Easy!” Dankleff yelled toward the pool table area. A younger man walked up who could be Spichovich’s younger brother, just as gaunt, with the same haircut and rounded face, but with a sharper nose and normal-sized ears. He wore jeans and an ancient Grateful Dead T-shirt.

“You rang?” he asked Dankleff.

Dankleff pointed to Pacino and said, “Meet Anthony Pacino. He’s taking over your sonar slot while you take over comms from Vevera.”

Eisenhart shook Pacino’s hand, his face breaking into a friendly smile. “Don Eisenhart. Don’t get any ideas about my nickname. Someone said I give checkouts too easily and sign people’s qual cards without harsh examinations. Totally not true. I’m the toughest officer on the boat to get a qual signature from. Bear that in mind.”

“Right,” Dankleff said, rolling his eyes for the half-dozenth time that night. “Your easy ways with a pen hovering over a nub’s qual card earned you the name ‘Easy.’” He looked at Pacino. “A while back he was awarded a water-cooled pen by the XO and his little feelings have been hurt ever since.”

“None of that’s true,” Eisenhart said to Pacino, his expression a frown that was trying to conceal a grin. “I was ‘Easy Eisy’ back at the Academy. Probably because I never sweated anything. Exams, PT tests, midshipman cruises, whatever. It’s all easy when you’re ‘Easy Eisy.’”

“He just now made that up,” U-Boat said, smiling brightly.

“Goddammit, U-Boat,” Eisenhart growled.

“You were the class ahead of me, right?” Pacino asked Eisenhart.

“Yeah, and Feng was one of my firsties,” Eisenhart added, referring to first class midshipmen, who acted as drill instructors for the incoming class of fourth class midshipmen, or plebes. Eisenhart drained his beer mug and added, “so he’s been flaming on me for more than half a decade now. You, the Feng, I and the captain are the only Academy grads here now that Squirt Gun is leaving. Everyone else, including Silky, is an ROTC puke. Those morons barely know how to wear their uniforms.”

Easy Eisy looked over at the stairwell entrance door and shouted out, “Lobabes!”

A tall blonde man appeared with a fresh bottle of scotch, this one a sixteen-year-old Balvenie. “Dump that Guinness piss water, Easy, and get a whisky glass.” Without a greeting and without asking, the newcomer uncorked the bottle and poured the scotch into Pacino’s glass. “You look a little dry there, non-qual,” he said, smiling. “I’m Lomax. Kyle Lomax. Mechanical officer. Main Propulsion Assistant, MPA, to the fucking engineer.”

He shook Pacino’s hand, then poured two fingers for himself and downed the scotch like it was water. Lomax was tall, muscular, with a full head of blonde hair, blue eyes and a full mustache. He looked like someone from a recruiting poster, but recruiting for the 1939 German Wehrmacht.

“Good to meet you,” Pacino said. “I’m Anthony Pacino.”

“Boozy!” Lomax shouted over Pacino’s head. “Get over here and meet our new nub!”

A slender medium-height young man with black hair, dark eyes and a smile joined them. “What?” he said to Lomax. “I didn’t even know we were due for a new non-qual.” He looked Indian or Middle Eastern, but his accent was from New York. Brooklyn, perhaps.

Lomax pointed to Pacino. “We were due. Meet the new non-qual,” Lomax explained. “Boozy, meet Pacino. Pacino, this is Boozy. Boozy, what is it you do on this ship, exactly, other than catch loads of bunky?”

Pacino extended his hand and the shorter officer shook it. “I’m Muhammad Varney,” he said to Pacino, ignoring Lomax’s implied insult. “Crew calls me ‘Boozy Moozy’ or just ‘Boozy’ for short. And as Lobabes Lomax here well knows, I’m the electrical officer. Everything from four hundred Hertz to DC. I power your lights, your coffee-maker, your glorified stereo you call a Q-fucking-ten-vee-four, your AN/BYG-1 battlecontrol system and your thirty megawatt propulsion pump-jet. And your oxygen generator. And if Elvis’ S9G reactor shits the bed, my batteries keep your asses alive until you can start U-Boat’s diesel. So you want power? You want electricity? You want to breathe? Just give me a call.”

Pacino couldn’t help his curiosity. “Why Boozy?” he asked.

Varney smiled. “Because I drink despite being a Muslim,” he said. “In moderation, of course. But these infidels act like I’m an alcoholic.”

“Boozy!” Silky Romanov shouted from the bar. “Have a whisky!” She wandered back with two glasses of scotch and handed one to Varney.

Varney smirked. “Listen,” he said to Pacino. “You need an electrical check-out? Don’t go to Easy Eisenhart. He doesn’t know shit about the electrical systems.” Easy sputtered beer in Varney’s direction, but the electrical officer sidestepped. “I’m your man. Knock on my stateroom door and I’ll get you squared away.” He looked at the drunk navigator. “And you, Silky, leave us menfolk alone to run the world — go play with Bruno, will you?”

“I’m gonna find better company,” the navigator said, taking no offense and going off to talk to Seagraves.

Lomax suddenly punched Varney in the shoulder. “He may not look the part,” Lomax said to Pacino, “but Boozy here played first string football for MIT.”

“Running back,” Varney said. “But playing first string for MIT wouldn’t even get you past screening practice at UCLA.”

“True,” Lomax said. “And Navy’s 150-pound squad could beat your asses.”

“We beat Harvard my senior year,” Varney said. “And Yale.”

“But not NJIT.”

“Nobody beats those thugs from New Jersey,” Boozy said, shaking his head.

Pacino looked at the other officers. “So Boozy, you went to MIT, and Lobabes, you’re from UCLA?” It felt odd to call people he’d met seconds before by their nicknames.

U-Boat Dankleff joined the circle, grabbing the neck of the Balvenie bottle in Lomax’s hands and pouring for himself. “Lobabes was a cheerleader,” he confided loudly to Pacino. “For the UCLA football team. A fucking cheerleader. Can you picture Lobabes in a little skirt with pom-poms?”

“And those cute little white sneakers,” Rachel shouted from across the room.

Again, Lomax controlled his facial expression, trying to act like he thought it was funny. “Don’t knock it, U-Boat. You have any idea how many gorgeous female cheerleaders are yours for the taking if you’re a male cheerleader?”

Suddenly the XO was in their crowd. “Zero!” he said, laughing. “They’re too busy scoping out the football players. I hear Lobabes had a dry four years there!”

“Keep it up, Bullfrog,” Lomax said, gritting his teeth.

“But at least his schooling was easy at UCLA, studying,” Quinnivan cleared his throat and said the next words in a sarcastic imitation of a sophisticated English elite, “English literature. I’m still trying to figure out how you got into the American Navy’s nuclear program,” he said to Lomax. “Or how you got qualified in submarines so fast.”

“Easy Eisy graped off his signatures,” Rachel said, shouting again from the bar.

“I did not!” Eisenhart said, his face flushing. He looked up. “Pork Chop,” he called out.

A youth who was medium height, thin, as dark as Varney joined them, and said in a Southern accent that seemed from Atlanta, “Gentlemen. Silky. Howdy do.”

“Mr. Ganghadharan, sir,” Quinnivan said, grinning, “allow me to introduce to you Lieutenant Junior Grade Anthony Pacino, soon to be our sonar officer, reported aboard today. He was pilot-qualed on the Piranha. Patch, this here’s Anik Ganghadharan — just try pronouncing that when you’re drunk, yeah? His name’s a virtual sobriety test. Which is why we just call him Gangbanger. He’s our supply officer. Or ‘suppo.’ Or Pork Chop. But I roll with Gangbanger. Fitting, if you ask me. The man has the lying soul of a criminal with the heart of a thief,” Quinnivan slapped the supply officer’s shoulder. “Gangbanger here has been known to pull raids to steal parts from heavily guarded Navy warehouses by dark of night to get us underway. Fooker is by the very definition of the word, a goddamned felon. Check out his stateroom cubbyholes — you’ll find his balaclava hood, a black bag and a gun.”

“All part of my profession,” the supply officer said calmly. He looked at Pacino. “So, Pacino. I’m a proud graduate of Penn State. What about you? You one of those stuck-up Naval Academy morons like the Feng? Or Easy?”

“Or the captain?” Seagraves suddenly interjected, having surreptitiously joined their group from behind Gangadharan. The supply officer visibly shrank a few inches, gulping.

“Sorry, Captain, I didn’t see you there,” Gangadharan stuttered.

Seagraves laughed. “Perfectly fine to have an opinion, Supply Officer. Just be prepared to back it up with facts.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” the supply officer said, obviously intimidated by the captain. Seagraves laughed again, stole the Balvenie bottle from Lomax and poured Gangadharan and himself two fingers of the scotch. “Since Mr. Pacino here drank all the twenty-five-year-old Macallan, we’ll have to make do with sixteen year old Balvenie.”

Lomax grinned. “Aren’t you a bourbon man, Skipper?”

Seagraves shook his head in mock sadness. “A certain Irishman and Royal Navy officer we all know and love ran out. And believe me, gentlemen and ladies, he will be reading about that in his next fitness report.”

Pacino noticed that despite the light mood and the joking around, the officers had a definite fear of their commanding officer. For a moment he wondered if his father’s officers had feared him, thinking about Rob Catardi fondly remembering Pacino’s father teaching him everything he knew about being a combat submariner. The captain remained for another minute of conversation, then vanished to the bar to find Quinnivan.

“So, Pacino,” Gangadharan said, as if trying to restart the dialog from before the captain’s appearance, “Naval Academy?

Pacino nodded.

“How is it you’re a junior grade lieutenant instead of an ensign?”

“I spent a year at grad school in Boston.”

“Boston University? Tufts? Northeastern? For fuck’s sake, not Harvard?”

“No,” Pacino said, “MIT.”

Varney started laughing. “You went to The Institute?” he asked incredulously.

Pacino looked him in the eye and spelled out seriously, “I H T F P.”

“The fuck does that mean?” Lomax asked.

Boozy Varney choked on his whisky. “It’s the motto of ‘The Institute,” or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as it is officially called. The motto stands for, ‘I hate the fucking place.’ What was your major?”

“Mechanical engineering, heat transfer. I know. Really exciting, right?”

“Don’t tell the engineer that,” Lomax said. “He’ll have you taking my job and I’d just as soon keep it.” Lomax, as the main propulsion assistant to the engineer, the MPA, was head of the nuclear mechanics.

“So, my new friend and the ship’s newest non-qual nub,” Varney said seriously. “How long you gonna take to get qualified as submerged OOD? We need another warm body on the officer-of-the-deck watchsection.”

Just then the noise of the crowd in the room went quiet as a young man showed up at the entrance to the room, holding a black motorcycle helmet in his hand. He was of medium height but was solid, bulky, perhaps outweighing Eisenhart by fifty pounds. He had a motorcycle leather jacket on, with leather pants and black engineer’s boots. He was blonde with a ruddy face, his eyes hidden behind wrap-around dark sunglasses. He came to attention and pulled the glasses off with a flourish. He raised his fist in the air and shouted suddenly, “It never happened!”

The room burst out the response, twenty throats shouting in unison, “We were never there!”

“USS Vermont!” the newcomer responded, then dropped his fist.

“Squirt Gun,” Quinnivan shouted. “Get over here, ye fat dead man!”

Quinnivan pulled the young man into a bear hug and behind his back counted down from three with his fingers, and as he got to zero, the crowd roared in unison, “Aren’t you dead yet?”

Lieutenant Duke ‘Man-Mountain Squirt Gun’ Vevera made a face at the room. “Fuck you all,” he said. “It’s a tiny golf-ball sized tumor. A few months of chemo and I’ll be back. For fuck’s sake.” He walked into the room, put down his helmet and pulled off his leather jacket. Pacino stared at Quinnivan, remembering him say that Vevera was terminal and that he was sensitive about his medical condition and not to mention it. And then the officers all joked about it to his face.

Pacino found the night starting to become blurry from all the whisky he’d been putting down. And he remembered everyone showing up in a limo bus with luggage — were they all staying overnight? And then Quinnivan quieted down the room and sat Vevera down in a folding chair in front of the fireplace facing the officers while Quinnivan orchestrated the gift-giving.

“Usually, farewell gifts are given one at a time,” the XO announced, “but on this solemn occasion, it’s incumbent upon us all to give them simultaneously.” Again, Quinnivan counted down from three, and at “one,” the officers all reached into brown paper sacks and withdrew squirt guns, in various shades and sizes, some looking like black pistols, others huge colorful pump-action blasters with tanks of water, and all of them were aimed squarely at Vevera. By the time the action was over, he was soaked.

He wiped the water out of his eyes and said, “I suppose there’s a reason why you had me sit on the tile by the fireplace instead of on the carpeting.”

Pacino leaned over to Dankleff. “Why squirt guns?” he asked quietly.

Dankleff answered, “Vevera’s nickname, Squirt Gun? See, he had a girlfriend. Nice lady. But one night in the wardroom, while eating midnight rations — mid-rats — he unwisely confessed to the XO that she was a ‘squirter.’ Ever since then, he was Squirt Gun Vevera. Although Man-Mountain still stayed stuck, I suppose.”

Commander Timothy Seagraves joined Lieutenant Commander Jeremiah Quinnivan on the back deck leading out from the kitchen overlooking the wide backyard, the grass green in the light of the spotlights.

“Well, XO, what do you think of our new non-qual?”

Quinnivan pulled a leather container from his pocket and pulled the lid off, revealing two cigars. He offered one to the captain and took one himself, then clipped Seagraves’ cigar tip and his own with a large cutter. He produced a torch lighter with the emblem of the Vermont on it and lit Seagraves’ cigar, then puffed his own in a mellow cloud of smoke.

“Well, sir, he’s an awful quiet lad. Not a swashbucklin’ pirate like us.”

Seagraves snorted. “I wouldn’t call myself a swashbuckling pirate. You, definitely. Me, not so much.”

“That’s because your nuclear navy overlords grind into ye so much reactor safety, you’ve lost your tactical warrior footing. Lucky for you, Skipper, ya have me aboard.”

Seagraves laughed. “That I am, XO.” He puffed the stogie for a moment. “How did the young man react to your classified briefing?”

“The expected, yeah? Disbelief at first. Nothing in the news about it, yeah? Once he saw it was real, well, he was not thrilled. But he didn’t show disgust either. Didn’t shy away.”

“So he’s not bloodthirsty and he’s not morally opposed to submarine warfare. That’s about as balanced a reaction as you could hope to get.”

Quinnivan thought about it for a moment, then leaned on the deck rail and turned to face the captain. “I suppose, as you Americans would say, he was raised right, yeah?”

Seagraves nodded somberly. “So, do you think Vevera is coming back like he says?”

Quinnivan looked at the captain and shook his head. “Not a chance,” he said somberly. “That lad’s standin’ on a trap door.” He checked his antique Rolex. “I guess we should return to our party before the boys get into any more trouble, yeah?”

Seagraves checked his phone. “It’s nearly midnight. I’m going to leave you guys to it.”

“You have a car service?”

“Already on its way,” the captain said. “Good night, XO.”

“Night, sir. See you Monday.”

Pacino opened his eyes to bright morning sunlight. He was in a guest bedroom, tucked into the bedclothes, still wearing his jeans and shirt. The walls were a pastel blue shade, and for a moment he thought he was in Carrie Alameda’s condo in Alexandria. He thrashed in the covers, vaulting out of the bed to try to find her, and then his headache punched him like a giant fist. As he stood there stupidly, he realized this wasn’t Carrie’s house and that she was long dead. And with that thought he seemed to deflate, and he collapsed to the floor in a heap. Then he asked himself, if he weren’t at Carrie’s, where the hell was he?

When he opened his eyes, he saw that his boots were placed by a high-boy and the contents of his pockets were on the nightstand. He sat up to check his phone, his head pounding. Quinnivan’s, he thought. He’d had too much to drink. It was almost nine in the morning. Someone had carried him into bed. He tried to think. The last thing he could remember was Duke Vevera getting blasted by water cannons.

Pacino put on his boots, got his phone and wallet and went into the hallway to go down the stairs. In the kitchen, Shawna cooked breakfast, now wearing jeans and a simple top with sneakers, her long hair in a ponytail.

“Well, good morning, Patch,” she said. “I see you survived your first ship’s party.”

“Am I the only one still here from the party?” Pacino’s voice was a croak.

She laughed. “Oh no, that party went on to six in the morning. I think you were out before one o’clock AM. Everyone’s crashed down below, but you seemed to have passed out first, so the boys carried you upstairs and continued on. Coffee?”

“Yes, please,” he said. “And water.” His head still pounded. A big man walked into the kitchen and plopped down next to Pacino. He had a completely bald head except for short tufts of white hair over his ears, a full face, blue eyes and wire-rimmed glasses with small lenses. He had to outweigh Pacino by fifty or sixty pounds, probably from submarine cuisine. He wore jeans, a plaid shirt and cowboy boots.

Pacino went to stand to greet the stranger, but the man waved him back down. “Sit, please, sir. I’m Joe Quartane, chief of the boat. COB for short.”

Pacino shook his hand. “I’m Pacino. Newly reported. Taking over as sonar officer.”

Quartane nodded. “Morning, ma’am,” he said to Shawna. She handed him and Pacino steaming cups of coffee. “Ensign?” the COB asked Pacino.

“Lieutenant junior grade.”

“That’s odd.”

“Had a year of grad school before nuclear power school.”

Quartane nodded. “Graduate school. Art history? Ancient cultures? Gender studies?”

“Mechanical engineering,” Pacino said, smiling. “Thermodynamics and heat transfer.”

“That your hotrod out front?”

“Not the Ferrari, if that’s what you mean. The Corvette.”

“Feng still running that hot red Ferrari, eh?”

Pacino looked at him. “So, your rating — mechanic?”

“Yep,” Quartane replied. “A-gang.”

Auxiliary gang was a group of tough-guy non-nuclear mechanics who tended to ships’ systems and had a crazy esprit de corps despite what the other divisions said to deride them, that they were mere plumbers.

“Senior chief?” Pacino guessed.

“Master chief,” Quartane replied.

“Whoa,” Pacino said. He’d only met one in his life, and he was now at the bottom of the eastern Atlantic.

From the entrance behind Quartane, Duke Vevera walked in, wearing only boxer shorts and a black T-shirt with a snarling skull and gothic script spelling It Never Happened. We Were Never There. USS Vermont. He plopped down opposite Pacino, next to the chief of the boat.

Shawna brought him coffee and smiled at him. “Man Mountain, dear, aren’t you a bit underdressed?”

“Two things,” Vevera smiled. “The Quinnivan residence rules prohibit wearing leather pants at the breakfast table. And also, I can’t seem to find them. After I rested my eyes, some scumbag seems to have run off with them.”

Pacino tried not to smile or laugh. Vevera seemed genuinely hurt by the prank. As Shawna put down plates of eggs, sausages and bacon, Mario Lewinsky came in, white as a ghost, smelled the food and waved it off, disappearing for the bathroom.

“Tough night,” Pacino said, waving his thumb to where the engineer went.

“You seemed to have had fun,” Vevera said, smirking. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone dance with the Dominatrix Navigatrix quite the way you did.”

“Oh hell,” Pacino groaned.

“Don’t worry about it, kid, I doubt she’ll even remember. But every cell phone in the house will, so, perhaps you’d better stand by for the blackmail photos later. Oh, and if I were you, I’d watch out for the wrath of Bruno. Damned good thing you’ll be working for the weapons officer and not the navigator.”

Pacino finished his food. “I should go,” he said. Suddenly all he wanted was a shower and a nap. He said good-bye to Vevera and Quartane, thanked Shawna, who kissed him on the cheek. He walked out to his Corvette. At least, he thought, he had the keys. Vevera was missing everything that he’d had on him, phone, keys, wallet. Motorcycle helmet. A large black Indian Chieftain classic motorcycle was parked in front of Pacino’s car — it must be Vevera’s, he thought, which would explain all the leather. Perhaps the leather was also meant for shielding against the deluge of squirt gun water that he may have anticipated. Odd that Vevera still rode the motorcycle, as allegedly seriously sick as he was.

Pacino rolled to his apartment and dragged himself inside.

5

After crashing all day Saturday, horribly hungover, Pacino woke early on Sunday. He’d intended to unpack his apartment, but when he looked around at how stark and dark and dingy it was, he decided to save doing all that for later. It made more sense to go the base and spend Sunday night on the boat. That way, he’d be ready for whatever Monday threw at him.

He opened several boxes and found toiletries, clothes, and uniforms and packed them into a duffel bag, grabbed his electronics and packed his backpack. After showering and changing into working khakis, he clicked his phone’s app for a car service and waited the eight minutes it took for the driver to arrive.

The driver dropped him at pier security. As before, they took the contents of his pockets for scanning and put him into the millimeter wave scanner. He rolled his baggage onto a conveyor leading to a large machine, presumably X-raying the bags. The security petty officer opened Pacino’s duffel, rifled through the contents, did the same to the backpack, then zipped them back up, nodding at Pacino and buzzing open the heavy bulletproof glass door.

Pacino hurried down the pier to the Vermont. To the right, the looming gigantic hull of the tender ship Olympus took up half the length of the pier, the support vessel a cruise ship painted gray, but with the bowling alleys and shops replaced with weapons storage bays and machine shops, with offices for the squadron staff and the commodore in command.

It was a little after eleven in the morning when he arrived at the brow to the ship. A different petty officer awaited him. He returned the man’s salute, the youth a third class petty officer in a formal white crackerjack uniform, his rating emblem showing an arrow and a headset. A sonarman.

“Petty Officer Sanders,” Pacino said, reading the man’s nametag. “I’m Pacino, taking over sonar from Mr. Eisenhart.”

“I know, sir,” Sanders said. “Welcome aboard. Your identification?”

Pacino handed his military ID to Sanders, who scanned it into a device by the phone Faraday cage. It beeped green lights and Sanders handed it back. Pacino handed over his phone, then headed over the gangway to the aft hatch. He stopped, faced the flag, saluted it, then turned to the “doghouse” over the plug hatch, shouted “down ladder!” and dropped his duffel to the deck below. He looked around him at the sunny May Sunday morning, took a deep breath of real air, then climbed down the ladder into the chamber. As always, the overpowering smell of the submarine invaded his senses, as if to command him to leave the surface world behind and concentrate on the submerged universe. Pacino grabbed his duffel and backpack and muscled it all through the hatch, then followed the passageway around forward on the port side to the three-man bunkroom.

The ship was quiet, the only sound the bass hum of the air handlers blowing air in the diffusers in the overhead of the passageway and the bunkroom. Pacino looked around. Inside the door of the three-man room, the deck was two feet wide and four feet long, with three cubbyholes on the forward bulkhead, three racks opposite the door from the passageway. The wall to the right of the door had hooks with hanging uniforms. The upper and middle bunk were strewn with books and folders and clothes. He’d barely unpacked his duffel into the lowest cubbyhole and the space under the bottom bunk when a knock came at the doorjamb. Pacino straightened up and turned to see a tall thin white-haired man with wire-rimmed glasses in working khakis, his anchor-and-star collar emblems showing him to be a senior chief petty officer, his name tag reading “R. NYGARD, TMSC(SS).” The chief torpedoman, Pacino thought. Above his pocket were pewter-colored submarine dolphins.

“You’re Pacino?” the chief asked in an unfriendly, no-nonsense tenor.

“Yes, Senior Chief,” Pacino said. Nygard didn’t extend his hand, so Pacino didn’t offer to shake hands. “Duty Officer wants to see you in the wardroom,” Nygard said.

“Who’s the Duty Officer?” Pacino asked to Nygard’s back as he was withdrawing down the passageway.

“Doctor No,” Nygard called over his shoulder. Pacino hadn’t met a person named “No,” or was it “Noe”?

Pacino took the aft ladder to the lower level, through the crew’s mess to the wardroom, where spread out on the table were three tablet computers, multiple printouts, binders and a slight, short officer, like Pacino, a junior grade lieutenant, obviously of Chinese descent. He had a round, full, almost chubby face, wearing a half-smirk as if he’d break into a grin in a second. His expression was open and friendly. He glanced up at Pacino over his half-frame reading glasses, stood up and reached across the table to shake Pacino’s hand.

“I’m Lieutenant No, first name Li,” he said. “Torpedo Officer. I work for Sprocket like you do.” His accent reminded Pacino of a midshipman in his company at the Academy who’d been from Chicago.

“I didn’t see you at the ship’s party,” Pacino said.

“I was there, got there half past midnight. On party nights, we split the duty. Weapons Officer had the duty after midnight, which was why he wasn’t drinking. By the time I got there, you’d already shlunked.”

“‘Shlunked’?” Pacino asked, wondering if that were some Mandarin or Cantonese word.

“Shlunk. Irish slang for someone who disappears from a party without saying good-night, whether by sneaking out or passing out. I take it, your case was the latter. Be careful, the XO will give you that as a nickname. Shlunk Pacino. Too bad you don’t remember, though. I hear you had a wonderful time dirty dancing with the Dominatrix Navigatrix.”

Pacino rubbed the hair on the back of his head, not knowing what to say. He’d better toughen up his alcohol tolerance, he thought. Hard liquor on the deck with his dad hadn’t prepared him for this fiasco.

“Anyway, I wish I’d known earlier you were coming in today. I’d have had more time for you.” No stood up, removed a key around his neck and handed it to Pacino. “As of right now, you’re the duty officer under-instruction. First task? Get the reactor started.”

Pacino looked at No, nodded, and reached for a phone. He looked up the code for maneuvering and punched in the three buttons and heard the phone buzz. “Engineering Duty Officer,” Dankleff’s voice called.

“It’s Pacino,” he replied. “I’m duty officer under instruction.”

“Ah, Mr. Pacino,” Dankleff said, sounding pleased. “Just the man I want to speak to. I need permission to start the reactor. You’ll need to call the engineer. Tell him we have no class alpha discrepancies. Tell him we did the estimated critical position and it’s in the expected range. Tell him we’re on shorepower running in natural circulation on both loops. And tell him we’re manned aft for reactor startup.”

Pacino grabbed a pen and a blank pad of legal paper belonging to Li No and scribbled notes.

He took the landline phone and dialed the engineer’s cell phone.

“Lewinsky,” the engineer’s deep voice barked.

“Engineer, this is Pacino, Duty Officer Under Instruction.”

“Go ahead,” Lewinsky said, his voice clipped and almost angry.

“Engineer, the reactor is natural circulation on both loops, ship is on shorepower,” Pacino said formally. “Estimated critical position is calculated and is within spec. Watches are manned aft for the startup. The out-of-commission log shows no class alpha discrepancies. Request permission to start the reactor, sir.”

“Don’t call me ‘sir,’” Lewinsky said. “You have my permission to start the reactor and my recommendation to the captain is we start the reactor now. Get back to me after you call the skipper.”

“Understood, Engineer,” Pacino said, unconsciously standing at attention. Lewinsky hung up. He looked at Li No. “Engineer concurs.”

No shrugged. “Call the captain.”

Pacino dialed the commanding officer’s cell phone number. Immediately Seagraves’ baritone came over the phone line. There was noise in the background, as if he were in a restaurant. Pacino identified himself and that he was the under-instruction duty officer, then repeated the status to the captain and added that the engineer recommended reactor startup now.

Seagraves said, seriously, “Duty Officer Under Instruction, you have permission to start the reactor.”

Pacino acknowledged and the captain hung up on him. Pacino was already seeing some of what he’d seen on Piranha, the casual first-name-basis joking around among the officers off duty, the iron-hard formality on duty.

“Mr. No,” Pacino said, “We have permission to start the reactor.”

No nodded. “Call the Feng back and tell him the skipper okayed the reactor startup.”

Pacino got up to grab the land line, called Lewinsky and made the report to him.

“Call aft,” Li No ordered.

Pacino buzzed maneuvering again and relayed the order to Dankleff. He sat down at the table. Li No looked up.

“Paratrooper pin?” No pointed to Pacino’s chest, where his silver airborne wings were pinned above his pocket, the eagle’s wings surrounding a parachute canopy.

Pacino nodded. “I went to jump school at Fort Benning before third class year, spent a month training with the Army, some SEALs and a bunch of zoomie cadets.” Zoomies were Air Force Academy cadets, in the dismissive lexicon of Annapolis midshipmen. “Did PT in full combat gear. Thirteen-mile group runs. Twenty-mile forced marches. Jumped out of half a dozen jets. Managed to avoid breaking my legs.” That was the year before the Princess Dragon terrorist attack that almost killed his father and took him out of his chief of naval operations position, Pacino thought glumly. How easy and simple life had been before the Princess Dragon and Piranha disasters.

Li No nodded. “Nice. Oh, where is it?” He moved the piles on the table, finding a slender box with a pad computer inside. “Eisenhart said to give you this,” No said. He motioned Pacino to sign for it on No’s tablet. “It’s got the secret, top secret and codeword-classified data file apps, plus information on all ship’s systems. It has everything in there you need to know to qualify in submarines. Put in your military identification number and answer the security questions. The software will guide you in from there. If you lose it, you may as well kiss your career good-bye, so my recommendation to you is, don’t lose it. It’s got a sensor in it that knows if it’s leaving the ship’s hull. If you were to bring it topside, it would self-destruct. Lomax was standing duty a year or so ago and liked to tuck his computer inside his belt in back. Fucker forgot it was there, climbed out the plug hatch, computer destructed and literally set his pants on fire and burned his ass. You can imagine the jokes he faced after that.”

“Got it,” Pacino said. He opened up the tablet and started entering security information, and finally it opened up to a page full of app icons. He found the classified news files and opened them up, scanning through the headlines, none of which in any way resembled the open-source news articles. He decided to enter a search for Elias Sotheby.

A warning notification flashed up, stating he wasn’t approved to read the information at his clearance level. He’d have to petition to Eisenhart to get the right clearance, he thought. He canceled the search and looked up at No.

“Can I ask you a serious question?”

Li No answered absently, his concentration remaining on his work. “Ask away.”

“Before I do, can you rig the ship for an airgap?”

No looked up and stared at Pacino for a moment. He picked up his VHF radio. “Duty Chief, Duty Officer,” he called.

The wardroom door opened and Nygard stepped in. “You rang?” he said.

“Rig ship for a class alpha air gap,” No ordered, putting his radio down.

“Sir, we’re all in the middle of pre-underway checks and a thousand other things, not the least of which is emails to and from squadron.”

“We’ll rig communications back to in-port in five minutes.”

Nygard sighed wearily. “Aye aye, sir, rig ship for class alpha air gap.” He set down his radio and pulled the battery out of it. Li No did the same. Nygard left and No grabbed a microphone with a black coiled wire out of a cubbyhole by the captain’s seat. His accent rang throughout the ship, “Rig ship for class alpha air gap.” He waited a few minutes, and then Nygard came back in.

“Ship’s rigged for class alpha air gap by me, checked by Petty Officer Miller.”

“Very well,” No said. Nygard stepped out. No got up and locked both doors of the wardroom.

“What do you want to know?”

“XO said that Vermont sank the yacht belonging to Elias Sotheby. That our SEALs killed Sotheby. Is all that true?”

Li No blinked, then frowned. “Yeah. So what?”

Pacino blinked. “So during peacetime, you just sank a yacht and killed its owner?”

No acted as if he didn’t care. “Yeah. What of it?”

Pacino stared at No. “You just killed him in cold blood?”

No slapped shut his tablet cover, tossed it roughly aside and looked up at Pacino, frowning. “That’s what we do. We’re a project boat. Didn’t XO clue you in to that?”

“He did,” Pacino said. “It’s just kind of hard to believe.”

No shrugged. “There had to be a good reason for it. We don’t do things randomly, we just follow our very specific orders. We just aren’t privy to the entire context of the op. The story of why we did that is compartmented six ways at least. There are all of maybe five people on earth who know the complete story.”

“That’s amazing,” Pacino said.

“Hell,” Li No said. “That’s nothing. Wait till you see what we do next.”

“What is next?” Pacino asked.

“Nothing. Forget I said that. Any other questions?” When Pacino shook his head, No reached for the phone and dialed three numbers. “Yeah, send the Duty Chief to the wardroom.”

Nygard reappeared. Li No looked up at him. “Secure the rig for class alpha air gap and rig ship for in-port communications.”

Nygard repeated back the order. No announced on the 1MC, “Secure the rig for class alpha air gap, rig ship for in-port comms.” He and Nygard resuscitated their VHF radios and Nygard left.

The 1MC clicked again. Dankleff’s voice. “The reactor,” he announced dramatically, “is critical.”

“About time,” No said. “Oh, by the way, Pacino, you’re on the maneuvering watch’s watch bill as junior officer of the deck. If and when we get ordered out, you’re driving us out of port.”

“Okay,” Pacino said. He’d done that on Piranha without incident. If he could drive a submarine as a midshipman, he thought, he sure as hell could as an officer.

No pointed to Pacino’s computer. “Get in there and study the charts and the tides. Memorize it so you know this port inside and out.”

Nygard put his head in. “Duty Officer and Duty Officer U-I, the ship’s communications are rigged for in-port by me and checked by Petty Officer Miller, and the SEALs have arrived topside. They want one of you up there.”

“Get topside and get the SEALs signed in.” No ordered. “I’ll meet you in lower level aft of the torpedo room. Starboard side, there’s commando berthing. And just some advice from me to you. Don’t try to mess around with them. Those guys are scary.”

Pacino climbed the ladder of the plug trunk to the topside doghouse and emerged through the tent flap to the outside world, noticing that the morning’s clouds had cleared and bright sunshine illuminated the pier. He took a deep breath, the air smelling odd after being inside the submarine. He saluted the ensign flag aft and Petty Officer Miller, the topside watch, and stepped over the gangway to the pier.

On the pier was a flat black two-ton truck with staked sides loaded with equipment containers. In front of it stood a tough-looking black man, maybe forty years old, wearing scuffed black boots with skulls on them, ragged black jeans, a Harley T-shirt showing a burning skull and a leather vest with biker outlaw patches on it. Under his biker vest was the butt of a large caliber handgun peeking out from a shoulder holster. On his other side, a fourteen-inch K-Bar combat knife was secured in a black leather sheath. He had a thin face, prominent cheekbones, hollow cheeks, a few days of beard growth over pockmarked skin and a scar on his forehead disappearing into his hairline. He was about Pacino’s height but outweighed him by forty pounds at least, most of it muscle. He looked at Pacino, his hard face easing into an intent, kind look. Pacino’s eyes narrowed, thinking a facial expression of kindness was out of character to the SEAL’s costume, or uniform, or whatever they called this grubby outlaw look.

“I’m Pacino, duty officer under instruction,” Pacino said, looking at the biker. The biker stepped close and held out his hand, his crushing grip dry and sandpapery rough, a slight smile coming to the big man’s lips.

“Commander Fishman,” he said in a deep, sonorous baritone. “Eb Fishman. I’m in charge of SEAL Task Group Eight Zero, the crew detailed to your boat.”

Fishman produced his pad computer from an internal vest pocket on his right side, opposite the holster’s side. “Our orders.”

Pacino read the official message, from the commander of the special warfare command to SEAL TEAM TASK GROUP EIGHT ZERO with a copy to SSN-792 USS VERMONT. Pacino was no expert, but it seemed in order, and the group was expected aboard. Pacino gestured to Petty Officer Miller, the second class machinist’s mate from Auxiliary Gang who was standing topside watch duty.

“Let’s get you signed in.”

As with Pacino on Friday, Miller took Fishman’s identification and biometrics, which had been sent over from SubCom prior to the arrival of the commandos. Miller nodded at Pacino as Fishman’s identification checked.

A tall man dressed in black jeans, a long black ranch coat, and pointy-toed black cowboy boots emerged from behind the truck, dusting off his hands from unloading the equipment crates. He wore a large pistol, a chrome-plated semi-automatic, holstered on one hip, the end of the holster strapped around his thigh above his knee. He looked corn-fed, solid, perhaps an inch taller than Pacino and Fishman, and much younger, perhaps in his mid-twenties. He had trimmed black hair and a salt-and-pepper beard, round and friendly green eyes, pronounced facial features and a face that seemed to relax into a smile. His smile deepened into a grin as he approached Pacino and offered his hand.

“I’m Lieutenant junior grade Elias Aquatong,” he said in a southern Midwest accent, perhaps Kentucky or Tennessee. “My friends call me ‘Autoloader.’ The other SEALs on this team call me ‘Grip,’ the assholes. You drop one lousy crate of grenades and boom, your damned call-sign changes to ‘Grip.’” He leaned over and pointed to Fishman, confidentially stating in a stage whisper, “you can call Fishman ‘Tiny Tim.’ His first name is Ebenezer, but the handle ‘Scrooge’ didn’t fit him. He’s way too sweet and nice to be a Scrooge.”

Fishman tipped his head without smiling, the banter obviously having become banal to him. He withdrew a Camel unfiltered from his inside vest pocket and produced a scratched-up lighter with the emblem of the USS Barracuda. He lit it and blew the smoke in a perfect ring that rolled toward the submarine. The entire time, he cupped his hand around the lit end, as if shielding it from someone watching. He looked at Aquatong with an amused expression, almost like a grizzled uncle at an apprentice nephew. “You know, Grip, I did you a huge favor. Because, you know, ‘Aquatong,’” he paused, “is a stupid and distracting name.” Aquatong just laughed and shook his head.

Pacino looked up as an unmarked black SUV drove up behind the cargo truck. Two men climbed out, one medium height and thin, looking Japanese, wearing a black windbreaker, red baseball cap, black T-shirt and black jeans. None of the clothing had any markings or for that matter, wrinkles, looking like the pants, shirt, jacket and hat just came off a rack at a department store. The other man was a lanky black man of medium height, wearing blue jeans and a starched white button-down shirt under a sport jacket. The Japanese SEAL looked thirty, though he could be older. The thin black SEAL was definitely older, but his exact age was indistinct.

Aquatong pointed to the older man. “That’s Senior Chief Tucker-Santos. He’s a commando and a corpsman. Call him ‘Scooter.’ So named because he dumped an expensive bike on an easy ride.”

Tucker-Santos came over and shook Pacino’s hand, snarling at Aquatong. “It was a hard ride up a New Hampshire mountain through four inches of blowing snow, actually,” he said. “And it was an emergency.” He looked at Pacino. “Story for another day, Lieutenant. Glad to be riding your fine submarine.” As the senior chief leaned over, Pacino could see his holstered pistol beneath his sport jacket. The piece was huge, at least a forty-five. He gestured at the Japanese man. “This is Petty Officer First Class Hoshi Oneida. Just call him ‘Swan Creek.’”

“Not ‘Swan Creek,’” the slender first class petty officer said in a gentle voice, approaching Pacino and shaking his hand. “Just ‘Swan.’” He smiled. “Good to be aboard again with you fine gentlemen of the Silent Service. This should be a good op.”

There it was again, Pacino thought. First the XO’s vague thought that the ship would depart Monday, then Li No’s hints, and now the SEAL operator calling this an ‘op,’ short for operation—Navy slang for a secret mission.

Pacino shepherded the men to the lower level aft of the torpedo room where the SEALs’ berthing room was located. Li No was there with Senior Chief Nygard. Both men met the four commandos and showed them their bunks. Nygard went to help with their equipment load, some of which would go into the lockout trunk, some into the lower-level torpedo room. Pacino and No returned to the wardroom. Pacino brewed a pot of coffee. When it was done, the two SEAL officers came in and plopped down into chairs next to Pacino, facing Li No. Pacino offered coffee and both accepted cups.

“Hot water for me, Mr. Pacino,” No said. Pacino heated a cup and set it in front of Li No, who pulled a teabag from his briefcase. The two commando officers both poured seemingly toxic levels of sugar into their coffees, then sipped from their cups.

“Submarine coffee is the best,” Fishman said. Aquatong nodded. “I don’t know if you know this, Mr. Pacino,” Fishman said. “The Navy has its own coffee plantations in Columbia. Rumor has it we had to make a covenant with the cartels to be able to operate down there.”

It seemed surreal, sitting in the wardroom and drinking coffee with the commando officers in their odd civilian clothes. Fishman still wore his biker vest and shoulder-holstered weapon. Aquatong had lost the long coat, revealing a cowboy-style black shirt with snaps instead of buttons. He still wore the belt with the pistol holstered to his thigh.

“Have you been aboard Vermont before?” Pacino asked the SEALs.

“We just rode, what, Grip, only a month ago?” Fishman asked Aquatong.

“Yeah, Tiny Tim, about then.”

“That one was wild,” Fishman said.

Pacino was tempted to ask if that run had been the superyacht operation, but decided to keep his mouth shut. His mind went to the thought of an upcoming operation, but knew it would require re-rigging the submarine’s communications for an air gap, and it was possible even the commandos didn’t know, or if they did, they might not tell him. After all, he didn’t have the need-to-know. The phone near the captain’s chair buzzed. Li No motioned Pacino to pick it up.

“Duty Officer U-I,” he said.

“Engineering Officer of the Watch here,” Lieutenant Dieter “U-Boat” Dankleff said formally. He’d stopped being ‘engineering duty officer’ and started being ‘engineering officer of the watch’ when the reactor was started. “Reactor is self-sustaining and shorepower breaker is open. Request to divorce from shorepower and remove the shorepower cables.”

“I’ll call you back,” Pacino said, replacing the handset. He looked at Lieutenant No. “The EOOW,” he said, pronouncing it ee-ow, “wants to remove shorepower cables.”

“So, Mr. Pacino, whose permission do you need to do that?”

Pacino considered. “I think it was part of the captain’s permission to start the reactor.”

“You sure, or are you guessing?”

Pacino looked at Li No. He wasn’t sure, but this was a submarine. Indecision was penalized harshly here. Better to miscalculate and beg forgiveness than to seem uncertain.

“I’m sure.”

No nodded and waved a hand in the air. “Well, then, divorce from shorepower.”

Pacino dialed maneuvering. Dankleff picked up.

“Engineering Officer of the Watch, divorce from shorepower,” Pacino ordered Dankleff.

Dankleff’s voice was jovial. “Divorce from shorepower, EOOW aye.”

Pacino sat back down and took a pull from his coffee. While he’d been up at the phone, the SEALs had pulled out their weapons and put them on the table in front of Li No, who for the first time showed an interest in something other than his WritePad tablet. Fishman looked over at No.

“Mark nineteen Desert Eagle,” he said. “Fifty cal. The actual most powerful handgun in the world. And it actually will blow your head clean off.”

“That sissy piece of shit only holds seven rounds and weighs a ton,” Aquatong sneered. “Now this is a real man’s weapon. Sig Sauer chrome-plated model 1911 shooting a magazine of twenty-one rounds of forty-five caliber freedom nuggets. Stars on the grip, the number 1776 engraved on the barrel.”

“Grip actually wanted a pink one with a Powerpuff girl riding a unicorn on one side and Hello Kitty on the other, but the stars and the 1776 inscription were all he could get.”

“Shit, Tiny Tim, all I have to do to win a gunfight with you is wait till you’ve got off seven rounds, then unload three times that number into you.”

The SEALs took back their weapons and put them back into their holsters.

Grip Aquatong looked over at Lieutenant No. “U-Boat Dankleff still around?”

Li pointed his thumb aft, still staring at his tablet computer. “He’s back aft, starting the reactor.”

“He still getting divorced from Eurobitch?”

Li No nodded. “They couldn’t work it out.”

Pacino lifted an eyebrow. “U-Boat’s getting divorced?”

“It’s been coming for years,” No said. “Eurobitch was introduced that way to the crew when U-Boat reported aboard as a non-qual nub two years ago. That tells you something right there. Now U-Boat’s the Bull L-T and she’s worse than ever.”

“Bull L-T?”

“Bull lieutenant,” No explained. “Senior man amongst the junior officers aboard.”

“So, what’s U-Boat doing about a place to live?” Pacino asked. If he’d known U-Boat were becoming single, he might have been able to get an apartment with him and saved on rent.

“Probably move onboard the boat,” No said. “It’s been done.”

“Damned shame,” Pacino said.

“Hello, gentlemen,” Navigator Rachel Romanov said from the forward wardroom door.

“Navigator,” Li No said, looking up. “What are you doing here?”

Romanov walked past the SEALs and Pacino to the pod coffee maker. “Bruno got underway Saturday. Nothing to do at home but drink vodka and take care of the cats, so I got a cat-sitter and came in. No sense being hungover and late for Monday. Especially not for this Monday.” She looked at the SEALs. “You,” she said to Fishman. “Commander Fishman, commanding officer, right? Tiny Tim?”

Fishman stood and offered his hand and the navigator shook it. “You remembered. You’re Romanov? Silky Romanov?”

“That’s me. And you? I remember you but I forgot your name.”

Aquatong stood and offered his hand. “Grip Aquatong, executive officer of our little task group.”

“Rachel Romanov, navigator of this humble boat.” She got her coffee and took her normal chair, the one forward of the executive officer’s, tipping it back on its back two legs, her face becoming serious. “So what’s going on with U-Boat?” Romanov asked the table.

Li No shrugged. “Trouble with Eurobitch. He’s moving out.”

“It’s a shame,” she said. “But then a lot of folks saw that one coming.”

“Divorce ain’t for wimps,” Aquatong said. “I’m going through one myself.”

“Yeah,” Fishman added. “He has to sell his loud-ass Harley for money to pay the ex her half of the — quote — marital estate — unquote.”

“Don’t remind me,” Aquatong said, his perpetual smile fading away.

“What kind of Harley?” Romanov asked, sipping her hot brew, her chair back on all four legs.

Aquatong pulled out his tablet computer and showed the navigator the photos of the bike. “2014 Heritage Softail Classic, leather bags, windshield, double pipes, tuned for high torque, loudest motorcycle in a three-state area. If Elvis Presley ever rode a motorcycle, this would be the bike he’d ride.”

“Oh yeah?” she said, taking Aquatong’s handheld so she could see the photos close up.

“Oh yeah,” Fishman confirmed. “Remember that bike rally last summer?”

“That was awesome,” Aquatong said, his smile returning.

“So there we are at this bike rally,” Fishman said, leaning far back in his chair and settling into telling the story while Romanov scanned intensely through the photos. “We’re all there. I’m on my Dyna Wide Glide. Scooter’s there with his Fat Bob. And Swan Creek is there with that rice burner of his, what is that thing—”

“Suzuki Hayabusa,” Aquatong said.

“Right. Hayabusa. A horrible thing painted baby blue, looks like a teenaged girl’s dream of a motorcycle. Second fastest production motorcycle in the world, as Swan Creek keeps telling us.”

“Not that he got to prove it,” Aquatong added. “He got pulled over for going a hundred and thirteen in a fifty-five. He was trying to see if he could get to the advertised 195 mile per hour advertised top speed.”

“I had to bail him out that time,” Fishman said. “Anyway, so we’re there waiting for the bikes to get lined up and finally we’re ready. In fact, that guy from your boat was there too, what’s his name?”

“Vevera,” Aquatong said. “You introduced me to him, Tiny Tim. Vermont’s communications guy. Squirt Gun Vevera.”

“Yeah, that fat fucker,” Fishman continued. “He’s on that shiny, fancy Indian bike. Chieftain or something. Only a yuppie like you, Grip, would own a sissy bike like that.”

“Hey. Them’s fightin’ words, Tiny Tim.”

“Anyway, finally the rally leader gives the signal to start engines. So about a thousand motorcycle engines all start at once. Swan’s bike’s two hundred horsepower engine just does this little whispering sizzle, sounds like a sewing machine. Can’t even hear it even if it’s pin-drop quiet. Anyway, all those bikes cranking at once? You’d think that would be the loudest sound you’d ever hear, right? Oh no. Grip here, he waits about six seconds and only then hits the starter on that Heritage of his, and suddenly the eardrums of a hundred people shattered as his engine cranked up.”

“It was epic,” Aquatong said, grinning. “Suddenly three hundred people spin their heads around to stare at me.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t even get a single biker girl’s phone number out of it, you pathetic loser.”

“Hey, fuck off, at least I’m single now, not like a certain boss of mine who has to ask permission to go to a strip club.”

“So this bike,” Romanov said seriously. “How many miles and how much you want for it?”

“Whoa,” Fishman said, “hold on there, little lady. You couldn’t handle a bike like this.”

“I used to own a Fat Bob back in the day,” Romanov said. “I burned so much rubber on that bike I had to replace tires every season.”

“Wait, you’re a, you’re a…biker chick?” The commandos stared at Romanov. Li No didn’t even glance up.

Romanov shrugged. “I used to be. Back when I was a surface ship Navy officer.”

“Man,” Fishman said, getting up to get a refill. “A skimmer, a bubblehead, and a biker chick. You got any sisters at home, kid?”

Romanov laughed. “You’d hate my sister. She has four kids and gained a hundred pounds.”

“Hey, Tiny Tim,” Aquatong said, “you’re getting in the way of negotiations, here. Navigator, she’s got eight thousand on the clock. A mere ten grand gets you the keys to this fine scooter.”

Romanov handed back Aquatong’s tablet. “Nine grand and you’ve got a deal.”

“Nine thousand five hundred.”

She looked at him, frowned, and said, “Nine-five and you buy me a helmet and leather jacket. And boots.”

“Nine-five, helmet, jacket, and you buy your own fuckin’ boots.”

“Deal,” she said, bursting into a smile as she shook his hand. “Is it on base, officer parking?”

“That it is, Madam Navigatrix.”

“Let’s go see it,” she said, getting up and leaving the wardroom with Aquatong.

Pacino decided to go aft and visit the engineering spaces and say hello to U-Boat Dankleff.

6

Pacino had been in the wardroom since 0600, staking out a seat near the supply officer’s end of the table, with his back to the bulkhead, drinking coffee, reading the classified intelligence digest and reviewing ship’s information, starting with the layout.

So far his caution about being early for things had paid off. The room began to fill with frowning officers who seemed sleepy or grumpy. The merriness of Saturday night had inevitably yielded to the tense edginess of Monday morning. The chair to the right hand of the captain’s end seat, the aft end of the wardroom, would be reserved for the XO, Pacino knew, the chair to the left, the engineer. Next to the XO’s seat would be the navigator’s, and next to the engineer, the weapons officer. At the far end, opposite the captain, was the supply officer’s seat. The other chairs were up for grabs for the junior officers. Generally, if they did things on Vermont the way they did on Piranha, the engineers’ officers — the main propulsion assistant, damage control assistant, and electrical officer — would sit on the XO’s side so they could face the engineer. The engineer’s side would then fill up with the torpedo officer, the sonar officer, and the communications officer. That left two open seats, one on each side, then the supply officer’s seat at the end.

The coffee maker was doing triple duty, with the pod coffee maker gurgling loudly and the espresso machine making angry steaming noises. Navigator Silky Romanov flipped her long hair into a ponytail while she waited for coffee, then grabbed her cup and sat down next to the XO’s seat. Romanov opened her tablet computer and paged through it. Damage Control Assistant U-Boat Dankleff and Main Propulsion Assistant Lobabes Lomax entered the room, grabbed coffee and took their seats to the navigator’s right, their attention also taken up with their tablet computers. There was no sign of Boozy Varney, the electrical officer. Pacino guessed he had relieved U-Boat aft to run the nuclear plant since U-Boat was seated next to Silky. Engineer Elvis Feng Lewinsky came in then and made himself a double espresso, his booming baritone voice addressing U-Boat.

“So DCA, your report?”

U-Boat straightened his posture in his chair and answered formally. “Engineer, estimated critical position coincided with the calculation to within one half of one percent. Plant is in a normal full-power lineup running natural circulation in both loops, propulsion is on the main motor, motor tested ahead and astern, test sat. All tanks are full or higher than nine zero percent with the exception of San One and San Two, which are at ten percent. Out-of-commission log has ten discrepancies, all minor. Engineering is ready for alert status.”

Elvis nodded. “Very well.”

The supply officer arrived, made his coffee from the pod machine, a hideous smelly witch’s brew of hazelnut and vanilla, then plopped down near Pacino as Li No came in, sitting one seat over from the weapons officer’s seat. Eisenhart, the outgoing sonar officer and incoming communications officer, came in from the captain’s end door and squeezed past the engineer, the weapons officer’s seat and Li No’s seat and settled to Pacino’s right. He leaned over to say something to Pacino.

“You catching up with the intel digest?” he asked.

“I’m locked out of half of it,” Pacino said quietly. “Clearance level isn’t high enough, according to the software.”

“Okay, I’ll fix that after officers’ call,” Eisenhart said. “If the XO asks, though, tell him you’re running hot, straight, and normal.”

“Got it.”

When Quinnivan entered the room holding a coffee cup, everyone in the room seemed to stiffen up, sitting at attention in their chairs. The executive officer frowned and took his seat, annoyance in his voice when he said, “Where’s the weapons officer?”

As if on cue, Spichovich came into the room on the supply officer’s side door and made his way aft to the seat by the engineer. “Good morning, XO. Morning, everyone,” he said gravely. Quinnivan seemed satisfied, looking around the room as he took a mental roll call of the officers present.

Quinnivan looked at his old watch. “Let’s start, people. Officers’ call. We are on alert status in exactly fifty-nine minutes and thirty seconds. Readiness for alert — Engineer?”

“Engineering’s ready,” Elvis said, his face serious. “Ship is divorced from shorepower with propulsion on the main motor. Ready to answer all bells.”

“Good work, Eng. Weapons?”

“Weapons department is ready,” Sprocket said. “Battlecontrol is online and nominal, self-checks complete.”

“Very good, Weps. Navigation and operations?”

“Operations department is ready,” Romanov reported. “Charts are updated and uploaded to the tactical apps. All lines are singled up. The crane is ready and manned and prepared to remove the gangway. Ship is rotating and radiating. The harbormaster’s pilot is in the mess decks, standing by. Both tugs are in the slip with engines at idle, on stand-by. Radios to the tugs tested, tested sat.”

“Very well, Nav. Supply?”

“Supply department is ready,” Gangbanger said, quietly. “Load-out complete for forty days, spares inventory complete and sat, no major items on the out-of-commission log and no major discrepancies.”

“Whatever happened to the fookin’ washin’ machine?” the XO asked, his tone aggressive. On Friday, the day Pacino reported aboard, the ship’s washing machine had burst into flames. Pacino had heard it from Gangbanger at the party and the long story of what he had to do to get it fixed. The part couldn’t be borrowed—“cannibalized”—from other ships of the same class, since they were all at sea.

“Sir, we just needed the rotary switch for a replacement, but there were none in the fleet, so we ordered and found an entirely new washing machine, ripped the rotary switch out of it, brought it to A-gang and abandoned the rest of the new unit on the pier.”

“Gangbanger’s brute force method comes through again. Well, okay then,” the executive officer said. He looked up at the gathered officers. “We won’t be going over admin today, people, but take any time while we’re on alert to catch up on your deliverables. Also, the captain and I will be walking the spaces to inspect stowage for sea, so get with your divisions and take a strain to ensure seaworthiness, and for God’s sake, clean the hell up. Everything better be goddamned sparkling and shiny. Eng, you have anything?”

“No, sir,” Elvis said.

“Nav?”

“Yes, sir,” Romanov said, her pretty face clenching into a hard frown. “The watch officers on the way out — Mr. Lomax and Mr. Pacino — need to study the tides and charts, and be aware of the tide situation as the day goes on. If the alert turns into an order to get underway, take a few minutes to review the tides for that time of day before you get to the bridge. Once the maneuvering watch is stationed, you won’t have time to look at the tides and chart, so make sure you’re doing it now and throughout the day. Clear?”

Pacino and Lomax nodded. “Yes, Nav,” Lomax said obediently.

“Weps?”

“Nothing for me,” Spichovich replied.

Quinnivan slapped the table. “Very well. Officers’ call is complete and sat. Let’s go make some money.” Without another word he grabbed his cup and his tablet and vanished through the captain’s end door.

Pacino showed Easy Eisy the warning notification that flashed when he put in his search for ‘Sotheby superyacht.’ If Eisenhart were disturbed at Pacino’s search, he didn’t show it. He went into his own tablet and adjusted settings for what seemed like fifteen minutes while Pacino studied the charts of Norfolk, Hampton Roads and Virginia Beach, checking the nominal depths of the channel, the outbound traffic separation scheme east of Virginia Beach, the buoy numbering, then the tides, starting with the tide situation as of 0800. Finally Eisenhart said, “Try it now.”

Pacino entered the intel files and searched for information on Elias Sotheby’s disappearance. A long article came up, marked TOP SECRET—FRACTAL CHAOS, with video clips available and photographs. The photos XO had shown him were embedded in the article. Suddenly, finally, it seemed all too real.

Pacino checked the brass bulkhead chronometer. Just as the minute hand clicked to the twelve of the hour of 0800, the overhead speakers of the 1MC announcing circuit clicked with XO Quinnivan’s voice.

“Communications emergency, communications emergency. Navigator, Communicator and Radio Chief, report to radio.”

“And here we go,” Lomax said, standing.

“What’s happening?” Pacino asked.

“Suit up and look at the chart and the tides one final time,” Lomax said. “This communication emergency will be a message to us to go, the go-code. We’re outta here.”

The 1MC clicked again, then Quinnivan’s voice came over. “Station…the maneuvering watch!”

Pacino made his way through the mad crowd of crewmen hurrying to their maneuvering watchstations, up the ladder to the upper level and across to the narrow passageway to his half-a-six-pack berthing room. He ditched his working khaki uniform and put it on one of the hooks on the wall, grabbed his digital camo working uniform from the lower locker along with his binoculars, jumped into the uniform, put the binoculars around his neck and grabbed a USS VERMONT baseball hat with the ship’s name embroidered above gold dolphins and below, the embroidery spelling SSN-792. The uniforms they’d given him already had his name embroidered over the pocket, with an American flag patch on the left shoulder and the Vermont emblem patch on the right. All that was missing were gold submarine dolphins, he noted with dismay.

Pacino debated whether to take his jacket with him, then decided that despite it being May, the winds topside from their passage would make it cold. He pulled it on, thinking if it were too hot topside, he could toss it somewhere in the bridge cockpit. He grabbed his handheld computer and clicked again to the chart and the tides, seeing that high tide would be in ninety minutes. He clicked to a real-time satellite image of Port Norfolk and noted the traffic, which was light for a Monday morning. He put the handheld in a pocket in his jacket, the pocket sized for the tablet, then opened the door and hurried into the passageway.

He stepped down to control to check in with the officer of the deck, Lieutenant Lomax, and the navigator, Lieutenant Commander Romanov. Pacino looked around the room, which seemed large when unoccupied with the ship shut down in port, but which was now cramped and bursting with people, all shoulder-to-shoulder, every console seat filled, the crew all donning wireless headsets with boom microphones. Lomax stood behind the ship control station, checking the status displays for tank levels and the main ballast tank vent indicator lights. He seemed far away, absorbed while he handed Pacino a full body harness and a lanyard. Pacino stepped into the harness. He looked over at the navigation console, the large electronic table displaying the harbor chart.

The navigator stood at the electronic chart table, holding her hand to her earphone as if straining to hear someone. She looked up at Pacino as if she sensed his glance and nodded once at him, deeply serious. Lieutenant Commander Lewinsky, the engineer, stood at the command console, standing contact coordinator watch, his job to monitor the radar display and periscope to keep an eye on shipping traffic and report the contacts to the bridge. Lewinsky’s best engineering officer of the watch, Lieutenant junior grade Li No, would be aft running the engineering watchsection in maneuvering. The ship control pilot for the run would be the DCA, Lieutenant Dankleff, with the chief of the boat — the COB — Master Chief Quartane, as copilot.

The exec, Lieutenant Commander Quinnivan, stood next to the navigator at the chart table, frowning at the track laid down by one of Romanov’s navigation electronics technicians. As Lomax had told him before the watch, the XO would be supervising all the action from control, being wary for any mistake by a watchstander. When it came time to leave, the captain, Commander Seagraves, would be on the bridge with them, standing on top of the sail surrounded by the temporary handrails that made up the “flying bridge.”

The navigator’s almost hostile voice was grating as she nagged him one final time, her voice projecting at him though she kept her eyes on her chart. “Mr. Pacino, you checked the chart and the tides?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Lomax spoke quietly to the engineer at the conn command console, with its large ultra-high-definition periscope display, the periscope view trained aft to look into the channel. When they finished, Lomax had a few words with Quinnivan, the two officers looking over at Pacino for an instant. Pacino felt his stomach quiver with nerves as the harbormaster’s civilian pilot walked into the room. An old, grizzled sailor well into his sixties clamped his harness on, spoke quietly to the navigator, then vanished out of control.

Executive Officer Quinnivan motioned Pacino over.

“Yes, sir,” Pacino said, standing at attention.

“Listen, young Pacino, Vermont is a combat submarine. You fookin’ drive it like you stole it, understand? The navigator and captain will step in if you’re standing into danger. But the biggest mistake a conning officer can make is being tentative. You be aggressive up there. Remember, Patch, when that last line comes off? The USS Vermont is at war.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And listen up for anything the captain has to say to you, laddie. I read about your underway on the Piranha. You can do this.” Quinnivan clapped Pacino on the shoulder and drilled his gaze into Pacino’s eyes, as if searching for weakness. Pacino swallowed hard.

“Aye aye, sir. Understood.”

“Good luck, lad,” Quinnivan said, his eyes crinkling as he smiled.

“Mr. Pacino, let’s go,” Lomax interrupted seriously.

Pacino looked around control one last time. There was none of the levity of the ship’s party from Friday night, nor even the calm professionalism of officer’s call an hour before. The atmosphere was as tense as anything Pacino had witnessed, even more than those frightening “comearounds” to the upperclassmen during Plebe Summer at the academy.

His heart beginning to hammer in his chest, Pacino followed Lomax to the upper level and the ladder under the bridge access tunnel. “Officer of the Deck to the bridge,” Lomax shouted up the tunnel, then vanished up the ladder. Pacino waited for him to get all the way up, then shouted, “Junior Officer of the Deck to the bridge!” He checked that his lanyard was tucked in, then took the ladder rungs until the submarine’s upper level disappeared and he was in the darkness of the vertical tunnel, only a few hooded lights illuminating the empty cylinder of steel. Above him, he could see the circle of bright light shining down from the outside world, and a momentary flash of memory tugged at him as he remembered something dimly from the Piranha sinking, but he put it aside and climbed close to the upper hatch.

“Junior Officer of the Deck, permission to come up?”

“Permission granted, come on up,” Lomax called, and Pacino climbed up through the upper hatch and stood aside as Lomax put down the grating allowing them to stand on top of the opening to the tunnel. Pacino looked around him. He stood in a crow’s nest of steel, the coaming of the bridge coming to chest level. Pacino slipped past Lomax and went to the port side and leaned over, looking down on the linehandlers on the pier and on the topside deck, all of them looking up at him expectantly. Ahead of him, a large Plexiglass windshield was bolted to the sail, and below it was the bridge communication box, with a microphone on a coiled spring, a large speaker and two rotary switches to select communication circuits and adjust volume. Lomax handed Pacino the microphone.

“Test your comms with all stations,” he ordered.

Pacino looked at the box and checked that it was selected to “7MC,” the maneuvering and ship control circuit.

“Pilot, Bridge, comm check,” he said into the mike, hoping his voice didn’t tremble.

“Bridge, Pilot,” Dankleff’s voice boomed out of the speaker. “Comm check sat.”

“Bridge, aye,” Pacino said. “Navigator, Bridge, comm check.”

“Bridge, Navigator, aye,” Romanov’s harsh voice called back. “Check sat.”

Lomax laughed. “Goddamn, that woman’s voice penetrates to the marrow of your bones. I feel sorry for Bruno.” Pacino smirked.

“Bridge aye, Contact Coordinator, Bridge, comm check.”

“Bridge, Contact, check sat,” Lewinsky’s deep booming voice reported.

“Maneuvering, Bridge,” Pacino called, “comm check.”

“Bridge, Maneuvering,” No replied in his harsh Chicago accent, “communications check satisfactory.”

Pacino looked at Lomax. “Officer of the Deck,” he reported formally, “communication circuits tested, tested sat.”

Lomax nodded. “Very well, JOOD.”

Behind Pacino’s left shoulder, the radar rotated, atop its tall mast, the radar array rotating once every two seconds. To Pacino’s right rear was a small commercial DynaCorp radar unit mounted on a temporary mast tied into the flying bridge handrails. As Pacino had learned on Piranha, sometimes the boat would sneak out of port using only the commercial unit so a waiting spy ship wouldn’t see their unique military spec’s radar signal, but today, apparently, it was acceptable to be identifiable as a Navy submarine. Pacino checked over the port side again, where the lines holding them to the pier were singled-up, linehandlers impatiently standing by. Forward, through the windshield, Pacino could see the nose of the ship sloping downward into the brackish water of the slip. To starboard, on his side, the two tugs could be seen, idling in the channel. At the end of the slip he could see the pier’s security building with its tall guard tower, almost looking like a mid-size airport’s control tower. Pacino frowned, wondering why they’d moored with the bow pointed landward. This would be so easy if they were parked nose-out, but then, bow-in like this had been how Piranha had been moored when he drove her out, back what seemed a hundred years ago.

Pacino pulled out his handheld and mounted it on a support to the left of the bridge box. Lomax’s was already mounted on the right, his display showing the chart. Likewise, Pacino brought up the chart, showing their position flashing on the pier leading into the Elizabeth River’s Norfolk Harbor Reach.

“So, JOOD,” Lomax said, his voice dead serious, “listen up. The captain and XO heard about your ‘back full, ahead flank’ underway when you drove out your midshipman cruise submarine. So the CO wants to see how you’d do that now. You think you can do it again?”

“Yes, OOD,” Pacino said, turning around to see the waters astern of them. He could see the rudder pointing straight aft and the open water of the river far astern. He could feel his heart beating harder and faster than before. Being pulled out by two tugboats would have been so easy. But a back-full, ahead-flank underway? That risked the ship, not to mention his reputation.

“Don’t fuck it up like Man Mountain Vevera did,” Lomax said.

“Why? What happened?”

Lomax laughed, breaking the tension of the morning. “Fucker put on a weak back one-third bell instead of back full. The river current overcame his rudder. Instead of the propulsor pulling the stern south in the river so the bow would point north — the way out of Norfolk — the current pushed the stern north, so that the ship was exactly backwards. Normally the captain would have taken the conn and gotten it all figured out, or at the very least, given Vevera rudder orders so he could recover and get the bow pointed north. But the captain was gagged. It was this oddball exercise simulating a nuclear first strike, with SubCom staff onboard simulating that half the crew were injured or dead, with no comms to command HQ, and one of the simulated injured was the captain. We had to get underway with a random officer, so they picked Vevera since he happened to be the one in the wardroom slamming down sausages when the staff rats walked in.

“So Man Mountain Squirt Gun Vevera, what does he do? Does he bring the ship to all stop and use the thruster to rotate the hull 180 degrees to face north? No. That fucker decided to just keep going backwards. He shifted the rudder so the stern kept coming around from north to east to south again. Eventually he was pointing north in the river, after having executed a full two-seventy-degree turn going backwards. In a goddamned river channel. Goddamn, he got lucky, it was high tide and there were no sandbars, but any other time he would have hit something or run aground. The crew was screaming and howling in hilarity, and the goddamned navigator almost passed out. And the entire time? I think the captain had turned purple in the face, the ComSub staff guy was furiously taking notes, and Vevera? He was as cool as if he had no problem with it at all. As the bow came around to the north, he ordered the ship from back one third to ahead two thirds, then looked up at the staff rat and said, and I quote, ‘I planned that very carefully.’ I’m telling you, it was fucking legend!”

Lomax paused, his face going from exhilarated hilarity of the memory to a sad, hopeless expression. “Fucking Squirt Gun Vevera,” he said. “Now that fucker’s gonna die.”

“We don’t know that,” Pacino said. “Maybe he’ll beat this thing.”

“No chance. My uncle’s an oncologist. I forced Squirt Gun to get a second opinion from Uncle Joe. Joe can’t tell me what his professional opinion is due to doctor-patient confidentiality, but Joe’s face spoke for him. For Vevera, it’s just a matter of time, and not much time at that.” Lomax hoisted his binoculars to his face and scanned the channel. “Let’s get our heads into the operation, Mr. Pacino. Just don’t do what Vevera did. When you back into the channel, do it with a back full bell with right full rudder, and train the outboard to zero nine zero, start it, and don’t stop it until we’re pointed fucking north, you got that?”

Pacino nodded. “I’ve got it. Don’t worry. I did it before. The current was faster in the Thames River than here.”

Just then a voice came up from below. “Captain to the bridge!”

Pacino replied, “Come up, sir.” He bent and pulled up the grating so the commanding officer could climb up into the cockpit.

“Hello, Mr. Pacino,” Seagraves said in his deep baritone, emerging fully into the bridge cockpit. “Mr. Lomax.” Seagraves kept going, climbing up to the top of the sail behind them, to the handrail-enclosed flying bridge, latching his safety lanyard to one of the flying bridge’s horizontal rails.

“Morning, Captain,” Lomax and Pacino replied, almost in perfect unison.

“Mr. Lomax,” Seagraves called, “did you brief your JOOD on the procedure to get underway?”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Lomax said, facing the captain.

“Very well.” Seagraves checked his watch. “Brief the navigator on your intentions, Mr. Pacino.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Pacino said. He picked up the bridge box microphone, still selected to the 7MC ship-control circuit. “Navigator, Bridge,” he called.

“Bridge, Navigator,” Romanov’s voice crackled.

“Navigator, Bridge, intentions are to back into the channel without tugs or pilot and proceed to Thimble Shoal Channel unassisted.”

There was a pause. Obviously Romanov was not comfortable with the announcement, but she knew Pacino was on the bridge with the captain and that the departure method, however unconventional, was approved.

“Bridge…” There was a long second as Romanov showed her displeasure. “Navigator, aye.”

The captain looked down at Pacino. “Mr. Pacino, let’s go.”

Pacino noticed that the harbormaster’s civilian pilot was not on the sail, but walking across the gangway to the pier. Pacino pulled up his bullhorn. “On the pier, pier crew remove the gangway!”

The diesel engine of the pier cherry-picker roared as its boom hoisted the gangway off the hull and put it back down on the pier.

Pacino checked his chart and tides one last time. The damned current from the south was pushing the hull against the pier to the north. He’d need to push off the pier with the thruster, the “outboard,” which was mounted on a pedestal far aft and withdrawn into the hull. A hydraulic mechanism could push it down out of the hull by five feet to be in the clear water away from the hull.

He pulled the microphone to his mouth. “Pilot, Bridge, lower the outboard and train the outboard to zero nine zero.”

Dankleff’s voice boomed out of the bridge box. “Lower the outboard aye, and the outboard is rigged out. Train the outboard to zero nine zero, aye, and the outboard is trained to zero nine zero.”

“Pilot, Bridge, aye.”

“Shift your pumps, JOOD,” Lomax ordered.

“Right,” Pacino said. “Maneuvering, Bridge, shift main coolant pumps to fast speed.”

“Bridge, Maneuvering,” Li No said, “Shift main coolant pumps to fast speed, aye.” There was a short pause. “Bridge, Maneuvering, main coolant pumps are running in fast speed. Ready to answer all bells.”

“Maneuvering, Bridge aye,” Pacino acknowledged. He peered down onto the pier and hull and lifted the bullhorn. “On deck,” he ordered, “Take in lines six, four, five, three and two!”

The deck crew chief acknowledged and the pier crew hurriedly took the lines off the pier bollards and tossed them to the crew on the submarine’s deck. Finally the deck chief, the auxiliary division chief, Dysart, yelled up in a gravelly voice, “two, three, four, five and six are in, sir!”

Only line one at the bow held them to the pier. That and the goddamned current, Pacino thought.

As he gave his next order, he felt his armpits melt into sweat. He could feel the beads of sweat on his forehead. His blood was pumping so hard it made a rushing noise in his head. “Pilot, Bridge, start the outboard!” he ordered.

“Start the outboard, Bridge, Pilot aye, and the outboard is started.”

“Pilot, Bridge, right full rudder.”

“Bridge, Pilot, right full rudder, aye, and my rudder is right full.”

“Very well, Pilot,” Pacino called. He looked aft, making sure the rudder was put over to the right, or left as he peered backwards toward the river. Pacino glanced at Lomax. “OOD, be ready to sound the ship’s whistle.” Lomax nodded seriously.

“On the flying bridge,” Pacino called up to the captain and the lookout standing next to him, “Be prepared to shift colors.”

The lookout of the watch acknowledged, his hands on the flag’s lanyard.

Pacino’s heart felt like it would beat clear out of his chest any minute. What if this went wrong like it did with Vevera? Would he himself have Vevera’s cool panache? He seriously doubted it. Pacino bit his lip, his nerves jangling. This was it, he thought. The eyes of the entire crew were on him, the new nub non-qual officer, seeing if he could pull this off. He shut his eyes for just a half second, reminding himself that his father had done this every time he’d gone to sea, and that he himself had done this once before, as a mere midshipman.

“Pilot, Bridge,” he called on the 7 MC microphone, “all back full.”

“Bridge, Pilot, back full, Pilot aye, and Maneuvering answers, all back full!”

Pacino looked aft at the foam bubbling up astern of the rudder. He picked up his bullhorn.

“On deck! Hold line one!”

Pacino looked at the pier, seeing how it was moving away from the stern. The bow was still tied tight to the bollards on the pier. Pacino watched as the force of the outboard thruster battled the current, the outboard trying to pull the stern up-river, the current trying to push it back against the pier. The wake was boiling up around the rudder.

It was time to go.

“On deck,” Pacino shouted into his bullhorn, “take in line one!”

The moment the line was pulled off the bollard and tossed over to the deck, the USS Vermont was officially underway.

“Shift colors!” Pacino shouted aft. “Sound one long blast on the ship’s whistle,” he ordered Lomax. Lomax reached under the cockpit lip forward and found the handle to the air horn and pulled it toward him. An earsplitting baritone shriek roared across the water of the bay, lasting what seemed two dozen heartbeats. Pacino spun to look to the stern, to make sure there was no traffic in the channel and to see if the stern would break south as he intended. On the flying bridge, the lookout hoisted the American flag and the Jolly Roger flag of SubCom, the black field with the white skull-and-crossbones.

“OOD,” Pacino said to Lomax, “Three short blasts on the ship’s whistle.”

Lomax pulled on the freakishly loud air horn and the blasting roar came again for a long second, quieted, then again and finally a third time. All this deafening noise, Pacino thought, made it so no one could hear his orders. But it was a safety signal to anyone sailing behind them in the channel to let them know they were backing into the river.

The submarine started moving slowly, an inch at first, then gradually accelerating, first at a leisurely stroll, then walking speed, then jogging speed, the ship’s smooth motion making it seem like it was stationary and it was the pier that was moving backwards. Soon the pier was fading backward at what seemed twenty miles an hour. The end of the pier came even with the sail. Pacino looked aft, and the rudder, propulsor and outboard thruster were losing their struggle with the current. Despite the back full revolutions and the outboard’s thrust, the current was pushing the stern northward, the stern now headed almost due west. Vevera’s nightmare was happening to Pacino.

“Kick it up to back emergency,” Captain Seagraves commanded sternly, his jaw clenching.

“Aye, Captain. Pilot, Bridge, all back emergency!” Pacino yelled into his 7MC mike, only after giving the order realizing he’d shouted, his hand shaking. He leaned far over the aft part of the bridge coaming, praying that the stern broke south. He could feel a sudden violent trembling of the deck under his feet, the ride no longer smooth, the power of the propulsor at maximum revolutions in reverse boiling up foam so furiously it frothed higher than the rudder.

“Come on, rudder, you motherless whore,” Pacino muttered, or at least he thought he’d said it under his breath, but the captain himself nodded and said, “Exactly, Mr. Pacino, that rudder is definitely a motherless whore.”

And just then, the stern broke south, the force of the propulsor at one hundred percent reactor power, the outboard thruster, and the full rudder angle only now overcoming the current of the Elizabeth River, the stern going south, the bow rotating to come north. Pacino let the ship turn for just a few seconds, then hoisted his 7MC mike.

“Pilot, Bridge, all stop, rudder amidships, train the outboard to zero-zero-zero and retract the outboard!”

“Bridge, Pilot, rudder amidships, aye, all stop, aye, and Maneuvering answers, all stop. The outboard is trained to triple zero, rigging in the outboard … and the outboard is rigged in!”

“Very well, Pilot. All ahead flank!”

“All ahead flank, aye, and Maneuvering answers, all ahead flank!”

For an agonizing ten seconds, the hull’s backward motion continued, but then slowed until the ship froze in the channel, the steel of it shaking with the power of the reactor as forty thousand shaft horsepower went from full reverse to full ahead, and finally the ship started to move forward, picking up speed, the bullet nose starting to burrow into the water and forming a small bow wave.

“Ease it back down, Mr. Pacino,” Captain Seagraves advised, “or your bow wave will drown the deck crew.”

“Aye, Captain,” Pacino said, clicking the 7MC mike. “Pilot, Bridge, all ahead two thirds, steady as she goes.”

“Bridge, Pilot, all ahead two thirds, steady as she goes, steering course north, and Maneuvering answers, all ahead two thirds.”

“Bridge, Navigator,” Romanov’s voice intoned, smoother this time, less harsh. “Hold the ship ten yards west of track, recommend course zero-zero-two to regain track.”

“Pilot, Bridge,” Pacino said, “Steer course zero-zero-two.”

“Bridge, Pilot, steering zero-zero-two.”

“Mr. Pacino,” the captain called down. “That was an adequate job. But don’t get cocky. Watch yourself in the channel.”

“Yes, sir,” Pacino said, realizing he’d soaked through his uniform with nervous sweat. The first thing he’d do when he got off watch was take a long hot hotel shower. He looked down at the deck. The deck crew was furiously stowing the heavy lines into the line lockers and rotating the deck cleats into the hull. Soon the hull was clean and rigged for sea. Aft, he could see the deck crew descending into the plug hatch, then the hatch coming shut.

“Bridge, Pilot,” Dankleff called, “Deck is rigged for dive, last man down, plug hatch rigged for dive.”

“Pilot, Bridge, aye,” Pacino acknowledged. “All ahead standard,” he ordered.

“Bridge, Pilot, all ahead standard, aye, and Maneuvering answers, all ahead standard.”

Finally Pacino felt like he could breathe again. He traded places with Lomax, moving to the starboard side of the cockpit. To the right, the Norfolk Naval Base surface fleet piers appeared and moved aft. First the destroyer piers, then the cruiser piers, then the gigantic piers for the aircraft carriers, where the colossal USS Gerald R. Ford was moored. The sheer size of the aircraft carrier was staggering, the deck towering over Vermont’s sail.

“Bridge, Navigator,” Romanov’s voice blasted from the 7MC speaker. “Distance to turn one hundred yards. New course will be zero-three-four.”

“Navigator, Bridge, aye,” Pacino called, checking his chart display. At the end of the naval base, the channel turned northeast and headed toward the Interstate-64 bridge-tunnel.

“Bridge, Navigator, mark the turn to course zero-three-four.”

“Pilot, Bridge,” Pacino called into his mike, “Right fifteen degrees rudder, steady course zero-three-four.”

Dankleff acknowledged. Pacino glanced aft to see that he’d turned the rudder correctly, then picked up his binoculars and scanned down the channel. There was no traffic. The sun from the east was intense. Pacino took out his sunglasses and put them on.

“Let’s increase speed to full, Mr. Pacino,” Seagraves called.

“Aye, Captain. Pilot, Bridge, all ahead full.”

“Bridge, Pilot, all ahead full aye, and Maneuvering answers, all ahead full.”

As the ship accelerated, below, forward, on deck, the bow wave climbed up the hull and broke on either side of the sail, the spray kicked up into the cockpit. The thrumming of the propulsor could be felt below, the wake boiling up to a furious frothy white behind them. The wind of their passage became loud, and the flags aft flapped in the wind of it. The sound of the radar spinning once every two seconds, combined with the wind and the blasting noise of the bow wave, seemed hypnotic. Pacino realized there was a certain magic in the sights and sounds of the ship getting underway. He had a half-second thought about his father, but put it away and concentrated on the channel navigation as the interstate’s tunnel came closer.

He looked to starboard at the bridge and its ramp into the tunnel, the trucks and cars vanishing below the water to proceed beneath them. Soon they were past the tunnel and the buoys of Thimble Shoal Channel beckoned, seeming to stretch into the distance to the left and right, like a runway formed in the harbor. Navigator Romanov guided them through two turns until the ship was lined up into the long channel pointing toward the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. At the exit of that tunnel, they’d be almost clear of the harbor.

“JOOD,” Seagraves said, his voice loud to overcome the wind of their motion, “Increase speed to flank.”

“Aye sir,” Pacino said. “Pilot, Bridge, all ahead flank.”

“Bridge, Pilot, all ahead flank, aye, and Maneuvering answers, all ahead flank.”

The deck beneath Pacino’s boots began to tremble harder until finally the hull was shaking violently. The flags aft flapped even harder, the noise from them competing with the blast of the hurricane wind and the earsplitting roar of the bow wave, which had now flowed over the forward half of the hull, the only part of the deck not underwater far aft, the sea spray becoming constant, wetting Pacino’s sunglasses and making them opaque. He took them off and pocketed them.

“Bridge, Navigator, JOOD 1JV.” The navigator wanted to speak to him privately on the 1JV phone. Pacino hoisted the phone to his ears, plugging the other ear against the noise.

“Junior Officer of the Deck.”

“JOOD, Navigator,” Romanov said. “Speed limit in the channel is fifteen knots. You’re going twenty-one.”

Pacino glanced up at the captain. “Navigator,” he said slowly, “We’re in a hurry.”

“Navigator, aye,” she snapped and hung up.

In what seemed no time, the Bay Bridge Tunnel was behind them and the submarine was in open water. Romanov had them turn south after Fort Story, paralleling the Virginia Beach coast, until the resort hotels had faded astern, then turned them due east into the traffic separation scheme. Twenty minutes later, they were officially out of Norfolk Harbor and into the Atlantic Ocean.

“Secure the maneuvering watch,” Quinnivan’s voice boomed on the 1MC shipwide announcing circuit. “Station underway watch section one.”

Captain Seagraves climbed down from the flying bridge. “Disassemble the flying bridge, gentlemen,” he said, addressing both Pacino and Lomax. “I’ll be in my stateroom.” With that, he vanished into the vertical tunnel to the upper level.

“Control, Bridge,” Pacino called, “Captain has left the bridge.”

Pacino took a deep breath, looked aft at the fading beachfront of Virginia Beach, and scanned the horizon with his binoculars. The ocean was empty except for them. The sun rose higher in the sky as the radar rotated, the flags flapped, the wind blew and the bow wave roared, and for a long moment, Anthony Pacino realized something — that here, in this moment, he was actually happy. The sea had seemed to have infected him. All the heavy weight of losing Carrie Alameda and the Piranha seemed much lighter now. He smiled as he scanned the horizon again.

7

Pacino found a seat at the wardroom table, the same one he’d used at officers’ call, for the mid-day meal. It was starting to feel like an assigned seat. Watch relief had gone down at noon, but the “turnover” from Pacino and Lomax to Lieutenant Eisenhart had taken a quarter hour, so that by the time they were relieved, it was almost 1220 hours, almost an hour after the meal started for the oncoming watch section.

Pacino had walked into the wardroom and found the captain finished with his plate, as were the engineer and XO, all of them lingering with coffee after the meal. On behalf of himself and Lomax, as off-going junior officer of the deck, it fell to him to give the watch relief briefing to the captain. Pacino had taken a deep breath and said, “Captain, off-going JOOD, sir, Mr. Lomax and I have been properly relieved by Lieutenant Eisenhart of the deck and the conn, sir, steaming on the surface as before, course zero-nine-five, all ahead flank. Last fix on our watch was noon by GPS satellite and concurs with SINS inertial nav to within ten yards. Sounding is three zero fathoms and correlates to charted depth. Time to the Point Delta dive point at the hundred fathom curve is seven hours. Electric plant is in a normal full-power lineup, main coolant pumps one, two, five and six running in fast speed. Forecast calls for us hitting a squall line in the next hour. From what we could tell, sir, it looks like we’re going to be in for it — it’s going to be wet and rough out there.”

Captain Seagraves had nodded up at Pacino. “Very well, Mr. Pacino. I just wanted to say, you and Mr. Lomax did a somewhat adequate job today.”

Lomax smiled in pleasure. Apparently, doling out weak praise was a running joke for the captain. “Why, thank you, sir,” Lomax said, taking his seat.

The captain, XO and engineer finished and left the room. There was no sign of the weapons officer or navigator, and after a moment the room was empty but for Li No, Lomax and Pacino.

Soon Pacino’s plate was taken up by sliders — hamburgers so greasy they virtually sailed down one’s throat — and fries. As he washed it down with a searingly sugary bright red colored “bug juice,” he considered how good this would have tasted with a beer. But no doubt, he’d have to watch his intake, because inhaling chow like this four times a day would make anyone pack on pounds.

After the meal, Pacino grabbed coffee in a USS Vermont mug and opened his handheld and scanned the news files. As the ship steamed through the rising sea state, the room and deck started to sway and roll in the waves, his coffee threatening to spill out of his cup. He concentrated on his display screen. There were multiple alerts sent to him by the XO, the navigator and the weapons officer, things that were required reading. They were odd, seemingly unconnected articles.

The first was an article about China’s Peoples’ Liberation Army Navy, or “PLAN,” which was commissioning their fifth gigantic supercarrier. A second, an editorial about how nations hostile to America were planning to send their naval forces to conduct operations in the Western Hemisphere — Iran and North Korea and China, all seeking blue water naval status by sailing in Atlantic waters, a traditional lake of the western powers of the USA, the UK and the European Union. That one gave Pacino pause — imagine a Chinese carrier battle group in the damned Atlantic, steaming off Norfolk.

There was a third secret-classified article about the Iranian and North Korean submarine programs, with the North Koreans concentrating on putting a sub-launched ballistic missile into a quiet diesel-electric submarine while the Iranians had aspirations to put a nuclear reactor into a retrofitted old Kilo Russian-built diesel-electric attack sub.

A fourth article about the Taiwanese building submarines intent on deterring China from invading them. A fifth about experimental new tactics of nuclear attack submarines versus diesel boats, since operating on batteries alone, diesel boats could be between three and nine decibels quieter on broadband sonar than a nuclear boat. It boiled down to some complicated acoustic physics of narrowband tuning to seek out low frequency bell tones — tonals — put out by large electrical motors. And a sixth about the new amphibious Chinese PLAN helicopter carriers.

The seventh was about drug smuggling by the Medellin cartel, and how they were building and using narco-subs to ferry cocaine from Medellin, Colombia, their submarines becoming progressively more sophisticated, and that their competitors, the Barranquilla cartel, had secretly succeeded in putting in service a much larger submarine, rumors persisting that the operational Barranquilla narco-sub was a replica of an old World War I American design, sailing out of Santa Marta, Colombia, but no one in the open sources or the top secret intelligence community had yet seen it. It was elusive. It was a ghost.

The eighth article covered what was known about the capabilities of China’s new antisubmarine warfare maritime patrol aircraft and the heavy antisubmarine weapons they carried, including a hypersonic nuclear-tipped weapon that dropped a hundred kiloton bomb in a depth charge.

The ninth and final article was classified top secret, higher than the others, and laid out the schematic plans of the Russian Status-6 Poseidon / Kanyon nuclear powered, hundred megaton torpedo, meant to loiter off the coastal cities of an enemy — the EU or America — or even lay dormant on the bottom for months, and when triggered, detonate a cobalt-laced dirty bomb powerful enough to kill tens of millions and make an area inside of fifty miles uninhabitable for three hundred years. And the last paragraph was the most chilling, that to date, there was no effective countermeasure to this nuclear-powered death machine.

To judge by the selected articles, the future looked far less than peaceful for a submarine like Vermont.

After Pacino finished the required reading, he turned to studying for his qualifications for his dolphins, concentrating first on the diving officer / pilot section. The trim system, the drain system, the high-pressure air system, the steering and diving hydraulics and what to do when each system failed. He shut his eyes for a moment and remembered his qualification watch held for him by Alameda and Catardi on Piranha, when he’d stood diving officer of the watch and had every casualty known to man thrown at him, and when he’d managed to pull through it, every man in the control room exchanged twenty-dollar bills, most betting against Pacino’s ability to prevail, but both Alameda and Catardi betting he would succeed and beat the scenario.

He’d been put on the watchbill for the next week as copilot at the ship control station, he saw from a notice on his handheld. He’d be standing watch beside Chief Dysart, the auxiliarymen chief — A-Gang — who would be manning the pilot station. Dysart had to be the most intimidating presence Pacino had run into in the submarine force, taciturn and wearing a perpetually angry face. The officer of the deck on their watch section would be the navigator, Lieutenant Commander Romanov, and Pacino didn’t relish that idea, not after whatever foolishness had happened at the ship’s party. The sonarman of the watch would be his soon-to-be-chief, Chief Albanese, a wiry redhead who had so much energy he had to be freebasing coffee grounds. Torpedo Officer Li No, the engineering officer of the watch for that watch section, had hinted Pacino would stand copilot watch for a few days, then rotate into the pilot seat, and after a qualification checkout, would start standing submerged officer of the deck under instruction. That, he looked forward to, that and eventually getting his dolphins when he qualified, perhaps eight, nine or ten months in the future, assuming Captain Seagraves waived the one-year requirement. But he couldn’t pick a better qual boat than Vermont, he thought. The coming months promised to be busy with operations, where qualification in submarines went fast. The minute they made port, quals would effectively stop, whether in a liberty port where everyone would be partying or at home port, where the crew would be frantically working to repair the ship and get it ready for the next op.

Hours seemed to pass in a moment, Pacino thought, because already the mess cooks were setting up for evening meal. Pacino looked up from his handheld, coming out of the trance of studying and thinking about qualifications. The deck was rocking hard and trembling violently from the power of the propulsor as the ship rocketed through the waves at flank speed. The motion of the boat that made some people seasick only made Pacino drowsy. At one point the deck was doing slow corkscrew motions, both rolling and pitching in what must be waves a third the length of the ship and as tall as the sail. It felt like being rocked to sleep, he thought. Just then, Lomax walked in wearing foul weather gear, holding a safety rail at the wardroom credenza to keep his footing. “We’ve got the evening watch for the dive, Mr. Pacino. It’s raining hard topside and the sea state keeps climbing, so you might want to think about whether you want to skip dinner.”

“I’m okay,” Pacino said. Lomax called in the mess cook, who set down plates for the two officers earlier than the normal start for the oncoming watch section. “Cold cuts,” Lomax said, packing turkey, ham, cheese and onions into a bun dripping with mustard. “Sea state is too high to cook.” Pacino joined him, making a sandwich and wolfing it down with chips. After what could only be five minutes, Lomax stood and gestured to Pacino. “Go get appropriately dressed and meet me in control. And leave your handheld in your safe. They may be water resistant, but it’s insane out there.”

Pacino got into a full-body rain slicker and pulled a safety harness over it, clamping the blue Vermont ball cap onto his head. He debated leaving his binoculars in his cubby, since it was raining so hard, he’d probably see nothing through them, but decided to hang them around his neck anyway. He traded out his at-sea sneakers for combat boots and headed down to the middle level.

In the control room, Lomax held on to a hand-hold bar at the command console, looking at the periscope display, where Lieutenant Varney had the contact coordinator watch, his headset covering one ear, with a boom microphone extending down his jawline. As contact coordinator, Varney was responsible for tracking surface contacts, using the periscope, the radar set and data from sonar, analyzing their relative motion and making sure there was no risk of collision.

“Anything out there?” Lomax asked.

The unmistakable sound of someone vomiting came from forward, the ship control station. Pacino looked over as the copilot finished puking into a black plastic bag and wiped his face.

“You okay, Copilot?” Lomax asked. “You need to be relieved?”

Torpedoman Senior Chief Nygard, the copilot at the right-side console in the cocoon of flat panel displays, joysticks and interface variable function keys shook his head. “I’m fine, sir,” he said, just before hurling up again. Lomax gave Pacino an amused look. “So, Contact Coordinator, contacts?” Lomax prompted Varney.

Varney shook his head. “Sea state is too high to see much and we’ve got wind-driven rain falling horizontally. We’re not going to get much with optronics on visible light spectrum. We’ve been running infrared for the last hour. Nothing but a few brave seagulls.” Varney checked the bulkhead chronometer, then his watch. “Sunset’s in five minutes, but it looks more like midnight out there. Nothing on sonar to report, but with these waves, everything is drowned out or attenuated. Radar’s as clean as it could get with these waves. So, as best we can tell, we seem to be alone out here. Looks like everyone else had the good sense to stay home.”

“Keep a sharp eye out anyway,” Lomax advised. “We are on or close to a major shipping lane. Merchant traffic is out there somewhere. I don’t want to look up and see the bow of an incoming supertanker fifty yards dead ahead of me.”

“Absolutely,” Varney said, his voice iron hard.

“Sounding?” Lomax asked.

“Only five eight fathoms,” Varney said, turning around to point at the chart. “The continental shelf goes all the way out to here,” he said, pointing to Point Delta, “then the ocean depth falls off a steep cliff. Sixty fathoms here on this side of Delta, almost eight hundred here on the other side.”

Lomax turned to the navigation console, staring down at the chart. Their location, “own-ship’s position,” was marked with a slowly pulsing bright red dot, their path from Norfolk — their “track”—marked with a thin but bright red line. Their intended course extended with a dotted blue line from own-ship’s position ahead in the sea to a second point, this one a bright “X” drawn in blue, marked “Point Delta.” Point Delta was the dive point, where their intended course intersected the hundred fathom curve, where it would be safe to dive the boat. The run out almost due east to the continental shelf was an eleven-hour transit. It must be nice, Pacino thought, to be assigned out of Pearl Harbor, where you could submerge half a mile from the pier. He looked forward to being submerged, because being under meant no rain and no waves — and hot food.

“Mark the distance to the dive point, Mr. Pacino,” Lomax ordered. Pacino manipulated a cursor to own-ship’s position, then extended a line to Point Delta.

“Twenty-eight point five nautical miles,” Pacino reported. At their present speed on the surface of 19 knots, losing a few knots from laboring through these waves, they’d be there in a little over ninety minutes. Of course, just five minutes in this weather would leave them as soaked as if they had fallen overboard.

“Pilot, Copilot,” Lomax announced to the two chief petty officers at the wrap-around console displays of the ship control station, “Mr. Lomax and Mr. Pacino to the bridge to relieve the officer of the deck.”

“Aye, sir, wait one,” Chief Goreliki, the pilot, replied. She spoke into her boom microphone to the bridge. The navigator’s piercing soprano voice came in reply, “Send them up.”

Lomax led the way to the upper level to the bridge access trunk step-off pad, which had a grating under it to catch any water coming in from above, but even so, that section of the passageway was flooded with the rainwater and spray from the bridge. “Watch your footing,” Lomax said. He looked up into the dimly lit vertical tunnel, only two hooded red lamps illuminating the ladder extending upward. “Lieutenant Lomax to the bridge!” he called.

“Come up!” Lieutenant Commander Romanov shouted down.

“Up ladder!” He climbed up. Pacino waited for him to get to the top, knowing that in a sea state like this, if Lomax fell on top of Pacino, there’d be two injured officers rather than just one.

“Pacino to the bridge,” Pacino called, imitating Lomax.

“Come on up!” Navigator Romanov ordered.

Pacino climbed the ladder, the rungs wet and salty from the spray above. He reached the bridge grating, which Lomax held open for him, and climbed up. Immediately he was hit with the showering spray from the boat hitting a tall wave, the water like a cold firehose stream. This would be a long hour, he thought, as he fastened his safety harness’ lanyard onto the safety rail.

He faced Romanov, the off-going officer of the deck. “I’m ready to relieve you, ma’am,” he shouted over the roaring noise of the bow wave and the rain. It was startling how dark it was when it should have been a bright May twilight. He couldn’t help glancing to starboard as the boat rolled right, a towering wave seemingly far over his head, illuminated by the green starboard running light. One thing he hated, Pacino thought, was looking up at water. The boat rolled slowly, sickeningly back to port, the huge swells now over his head on that side, these colored red from the port running light.

“I’m ready to be relieved,” the soaked-to-the-skin navigator yelled. “We’re on course zero-nine-five, steaming at flank even in this sea state. Captain is anxious to get to the hundred fathom curve and get under this weather. Dive point is approximately twenty-three miles ahead. In an hour, I’ll be back in the control room to take the watch while you two rig the bridge for dive. Once you come on down, I’ll keep the watch long enough for you guys to shower and change, then relieve me again when you’re ready.”

“Got it,” Pacino shouted over the gale.

“There’s no surface contacts but you and the lookout back there, Petty Officer Williams, keep your eyes out. If someone is there, we won’t see him until he’s right on us.” She leaned in to put her face close to Pacino’s, the rainwater running off the brim of her ball cap and into his face. “You got it, Mr. Pacino?”

He stood straighter, as much as he could, given the bucking of the deck. “I have it, ma’am. I relieve you, ma’am.”

Romanov nodded. “I stand relieved.” Lomax held up the grating and the tall, slender navigator disappeared down the access trunk.

Pacino looked out at the miserable seascape, amazed at the anger of nature. It would definitely be good to get submerged and under this, he thought.

The 7MC speaker clicked, then rasped Romanov’s voice. “Bridge, Navigator, I’m ready to relieve the JOOD of the deck and the conn.”

“Navigator, Bridge, pick up the 1JV,” Pacino said into the microphone as a spray of saltwater smashed into his face. The bridge cockpit’s windshield was useless in this.

“Navigator,” Romanov said into the phone.

“I’m ready to be relieved,” Pacino shouted. “Ship is on course zero-nine-five, all ahead flank, no contacts, steaming toward Delta.”

“I relieve you, sir,” Romanov said crisply.

“I stand relieved,” Pacino replied, hanging up the phone.

“Let’s hurry,” Lomax said, reaching for the clamps holding the bridge communication box to the steel of the cockpit.

Petty Officer Watson, the A-ganger who Pacino had first met topside, arrived at the bridge grating over the access trunk. Over the next fifteen minutes, Lomax and Pacino disassembled the bridge cockpit equipment and passed it down to Watson, who lowered it down to a second man in the access trunk. There must have been a hundred pounds of stuff up here, Pacino thought, as he took a wrench to the bolts holding the windshield in place, passing the tool, the bolts and the windshield down to Watson.

Lomax scanned the cockpit with his flashlight, finding a stray coffee cup, but otherwise it was clear. He looked at Pacino.

“Take a last breath of real air, Mr. Pacino.”

Pacino complied, knowing this to be a tradition in the submarine force. He lowered himself into the bridge access trunk, looking upward as Lomax pushed shut the panels that would streamline the sail, making the bridge cockpit disappear. Finally his boots appeared in the upper opening. Pacino lowered himself out of the way. Lomax shut the upper hatch and rotated the dogs so it clamped itself locked shut.

“Check the hatch rigged for dive,” he ordered Pacino, who climbed even with Lomax and checked the hatch.

“Shut and locked,” Pacino said, lowering himself all the way back into the submarine. Lomax emerged down the ladder and pulled the lower hatch shut and spun the wheel to dog it shut.

“Check it,” Lomax said. Lomax reached for the drain valve from the access trunk and shut it. “Check that, too.”

“Hatched checked locked. Drain valve checked shut.”

“Follow me,” Lomax said. They hurried down the ladder and into the control room.

“Officer of the Deck,” Pacino said to Romanov, “Sail and bridge access trunk rigged for dive by Mr. Lomax, checked by Mr. Pacino.”

“Very well, gentlemen,” Romanov said. “You have exactly eight minutes to shower, change and get back here.”

Nothing could feel as good as the hot freshwater of the shower as Pacino rinsed off the seawater. He dried, ran to his stateroom and climbed into his blue at-sea coveralls, rigged with the American flag and Vermont patch. He hurried to the control room, arriving a few seconds before Lomax.

He and Lomax reassumed the watch, and Romanov went back to her chart table. Pacino checked the chart. They were almost on top of the Point Delta dive point.

“Well, Mr. Pacino?” the captain’s voice sounded behind Pacino. “Your report?”

“Yessir, ship’s ready to dive. Rig for dive made by Chief Dysart and checked by Lieutenant Junior Grade Ganghadharan with the exception of the bridge and bridge access trunk and bridge upper and lower hatch, which was rigged for dive by Mr. Lomax and checked by me—”

“JOOD, Navigator,” Romanov interrupted. “Mark the dive point!”

“Sounding!” Pacino called to the navigation electronics technician of the watch.

“One five four fathoms, sir!” the petty officer called from aft.

“Captain,” Pacino continued. “Ship is at the dive point, sounding is one hundred fifty-four fathoms. Request permission to dive, sir.”

Seagraves nodded. “Junior Officer of the Deck, submerge the ship.”

“Submerge the ship, JOOD, aye, sir,” Pacino repeated back formally. “Pilot, submerge the ship to one five zero feet!”

“Submerge the ship to one five zero feet, Pilot aye,” Chief Goreliki repeated. “Ordering all ahead two thirds,” she reported, “and Maneuvering answers all ahead two thirds.” Over the 1MC shipwide announcing circuit, her voice boomed throughout the ship.

“Dive, dive!”

She reached into the overhead and hit an alarm lever, and a loud screeching “OOOOOO-GAAAAAAAH” blasted out of the speakers. She spoke on the 1MC again.

“Dive, dive!”

“Copilot, open forward main ballast tank vents,” she ordered. The copilot, the torpedoman chief, Nygard, repeated the order and selected the “open” selector and the confirmation button on his touch screen for the forward ballast tank vents.

Pacino stood behind the command console, his eyes on the periscope screen. He trained the view to the bow, the venting coming out of the forward ballast tank vents barely perceptible above the rolling swells.

“Venting forward,” he called.

“Going to ten degree down bubble,” the pilot announced. The deck, with all its rocking and rolling, started to tilt forward.

“Copilot, open aft main ballast tank vents,” Goreliki ordered, and Nygard operated the touch screen buttons.

“Aft MBT vents open,” he called.

Pacino trained the periscope view to dead astern. In the waves and wind, he could see vertical spray coming out of the aft vents.

“Venting aft,” he said.

The deck plunged into a steeper tilt. Pacino was still holding on to the command console’s safety hand-hold bar.

“Six five feet,” Goreliki called.

The waves and spray had grown closer to the view.

“Sail’s under,” Pacino said.

“Seven zero feet, seven two.”

“Scope’s awash,” Pacino said. “Scope’s awash.”

“Seven five feet.”

“Scope’s under,” Pacino said, reaching for the selector on the console that would lower the periscope.