Dark Transit

8

In the flank sprint to the Caribbean, there had only been one excursion to periscope depth, at the Tropic of Cancer southeast of Nassau, Bahamas, to collapse the “fix error circle” of the ship’s inertial navigation system, what Romanov called an “overgrown fucking gyro.” Once Romanov knew exactly where they were, she could be confident in her navigation past the island approach to the entrance to the Windward Passage between the eastern tip of Cuba and the northwestern point of Haiti. The ship slowed down to standard speed, 15 knots, to navigate from the windward islands through the Cuba-Haiti shipping lanes and past Jamaica at “Point Whiskey,” where the ship sped back up to flank speed and headed south.

From Pacino’s glances at the navigation chart console before his copilot watches, and a few days later, pilot watches, they had diverged from a course toward the Panama Canal, so they were headed elsewhere. Obviously, they wouldn’t go through the canal and they wouldn’t be waiting to ambush someone exiting the canal, so what possible mission was this? Pacino asked at least once a watch, but still Romanov would divulge nothing about their destination. She’d stand next to Pacino and make sure there was one navigation point and only one entered beyond their immediate sailing point.

“Nav,” Pacino said, glancing at his watch before assuming the pilot console seat, “where are we going? What are we doing? What’s the mission?”

It had almost become their inside joke. He’d ask and Silky Romanov would give him a mysterious, teasing smile, her eyes bright, and say in a false Southern accent, “ain’t sayin.’” But today she looked at him seriously and said, “after evening meal, Mr. Pacino, at nineteen hundred, there will be an op brief for the officers and SEALs. And I promise, all your eager non-qual questions shall be answered in full.”

Pacino had nodded and taken a briefing from the off-going pilot of the watch, Chief Cruz, the jocular and friendly storekeeper chief.

The watch dragged on, the ship ramming through the Caribbean Sea at flank speed at five hundred feet below the waves, with nothing happening. After watch relief, Pacino went to the wardroom and studied for his qualifications, but couldn’t concentrate, so he opened up the assigned NewsFiles his boss, the weapons officer, had assigned him to read, both open-source and classified, although none were higher than secret level. Pacino searched for context. There had to be a reason Spichovich would send these, but like the first batch from the XO, these seemed unrelated and random. Another update on the Russian Republic’s Status-6 Poseidon / Kanyon nuclear powered, nuclear-tipped autonomous torpedo. An update on North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and desire to build the sixth modification of their SLBM submarine-launched ballistic missile and test it from a modified diesel-electric submarine. Great, Pacino thought, the hostile North Korean regime arguably run by a madwoman builds a nuclear-powered ballistic missile sub, a “boomer,” with unlimited range and duration. She’d be tempted to shower down doom on the U.S. west coast.

A second Iranian update about them attempting to design a nuclear reactor for a submarine, with apparent failure on that score up to the present, but there were ominous signs that the Russians were equipping an old Iranian Kilo-class diesel-electric submarine with a radical, new design of a liquid metal reactor, using the Iranians to test it. Apparently, according to the intel, it was too dangerous for the Russians to test in their vast boondocks, and they had gotten the Iranians to agree to take it to the Indian Ocean for a test run. If it worked, it would be the Iranians to own, but odds were, the unit would explode with the yield of half of Hiroshima’s energy release. But the Iranians didn’t seem to care, so intense were their desires to enter the nuclear submarine club.

With all that going on in the world, Pacino thought, why would a “project boat” like Vermont be ordered on this oddball flank run toward the South American coastline? With a task force of SEAL commandos on board?

Eventually the table was set for dinner, which would be Chinese food with sesame chicken or spicy beef, brown rice, eggrolls and the supply officer’s favorite, fortune cookies with custom-made fortunes he had written especially for the crew. Gangbanger’s strange sense of humor was evident in some of the outrageous fortunes. Chinese night was tremendously popular with the crew, but Pacino would have been happier with a steak and potatoes. The officers at dinner were subdued and quiet, none of the usual banter going on, all of them waiting impatiently for the op brief.

Finally, after the cutlery was removed and the table cleared, the officers produced their handhelds on the table’s leather-covered surface. The captain, XO and navigator got up and followed the captain forward through the door by the supply officer. Engineer Elvis Lewinsky passed a large carafe of coffee to Weapons Officer Sprocket Spichovich, who filled up and passed it to Torpedo Officer Li No, who shook his head, his cup already filled with his eclectic tea brew, the pot then passing to Communicator Easy Eisenhart, who freshened his half-full cup and passed the pot to Pacino. Pacino filled his cup and handed the pot to the SEAL XO, Grip Aquatong. Aquatong was already drinking from a large energy drink can and passed the pot to Supply Officer Gangbanger Ganghadharan, who set it on the center of the table.

The middle level of the forward compartment started at frame 87, the bulkhead between the massive reactor compartment amidships and the forward compartment’s crew’s mess, which was the largest open space aboard, spanning the width of the boat, with café seating style tables that could seat a group of forty, more if they crowded three to a bench seat. The messroom ended forward with a door to storage on the port side, a steep centerline staircase — called a “ladder”—going up to the upper level, and the galley on the starboard side with its long cafeteria-style tray-slider for food service to the crew. Opposite the galley along the centerline passageway was the wardroom, a combined officer’s messroom, conference room and office, where the officers and SEALs officers were waiting for the operation brief.

Forward of the wardroom, there was a small room for the chief yeoman’s office, adjoining the executive officer’s stateroom, with a pass-through opening that the XO could open so he could talk to the yeoman — his administrative aide — without getting up and leaving his stateroom. Farther forward was the head between the XO’s stateroom and the roomier captain’s cabin. To starboard along the central passageway was officers’ country, the three main staterooms of the department heads and the junior officers who reported to them, with their own narrow passageway leading to their staterooms and the two-hole unisex toilet and shower. Forward of officers’ country and the captain’s sea cabin was the control room. The layout considered that a sudden call to battlestations could empty all the officers into control in seconds without them having to dash up or down the steep staircases.

The captain held court in his stateroom with the XO seated at the aft seat of the pull-out table and navigator on the outboard seat by the door, the captain’s high-backed leather command chair rolled up to the table at the forward end so he could see them both at the same time.

“So, Nav,” Seagraves said, looking down at his coffee cup, then refilling it from a carafe on the table. “What are you going to tell Spichovich when he asks about the written op order? You know you don’t have much of a poker face.”

Romanov frowned, a slight color coming to her cheeks. “I’ll tell him the truth. He’s not cleared for it.”

“How’s that make any sense?” Quinnivan snorted. “He’s cleared high enough to execute the order. How can he not be cleared to read it? You do know his other nickname, right? ‘4-Wall’? Fooker doesn’t just roll around on his little girly bicycle. He plays handball at an almost semi-pro level. He earned the name from beating people using all four walls — and the ceiling and floor too. I’m thinking he won’t buy your bullshit.”

“I’ll tell him it’s a multi-mission operation order and he’s only got the need to know for the first mission.”

Seagraves nodded at Quinnivan. “Sounds credible, XO. Still, there is no written op order. And we only have this one mission assigned.”

“But there is an op order, Captain,” Romanov said quickly. “It’s just not aboard this ship. Or with any of us. For reasons I gather have to do with the very slight chance of us getting caught being naughty and a hostile power going through our paper and electronic business.”

Seagraves nodded approvingly again at Quinnivan, obviously liking what he was hearing.

“And we were briefed by ComSubCom himself.”

Vice Admiral Catardi had personally brought them into his SCIF adjoining his headquarters office inside the Commander Submarine Command complex, their briefing held with him and the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations himself and three of his direct reports.

“So, just like there’s no written contract for a wedding or a marriage, it’s a verbal thing witnessed by, well, witnesses.”

“She makes another good point, XO,” Seagraves said, but Quinnivan still shook his head.

“I don’t know, Captain, I’m not sure I’ve ever sailed into anything remotely like this without orders. The last mission, we had a detailed op order. And the one before that.”

“We have orders. You heard the admiral.”

Seagraves nodded and downed the rest of his coffee and stood. “Well, Nav, it’s showtime. Let’s do this,” he said. He led the way aft down the passageway, the exec following.

The officers stood when the captain entered. He waved them to seats and he and the XO sat down. Navigator Romanov hurried into the room and grabbed a remote control from the table, standing at the large flat panel screen over the supply officer’s head. She clicked the remote and a large screen became filled with a chart of the Caribbean Sea.

Quinnivan spoke up. “Navigator, everyone in here cleared for this briefing?”

“Yes, XO,” she said.

“Go ahead, Nav,” Seagraves said, leaning back in his chair.

Romanov’s pointer hovered over a spot in the sea labeled Colombian Basin. “Good afternoon, officers,” she began. “We’re here,” she said, operating the screen, a red dot flashing at their position, “One hundred and seventy nautical miles north of our arrival at our destination, Point X-Ray, which we should reach early in the mid-watch, zero one hundred local time, Thursday the twelfth.” The dot labeled “X” was north-northeast of a small city on the Colombian coast labeled Santa Marta. “Once at X-Ray, we’ll be commencing a slow speed bow-tie barrier search pattern here, from Point X-Ray due west to Point Yankee, here.” Yankee was north-northwest of Santa Marta. “The width of the bow tie pattern is twenty nautical miles. When the ship reaches Yankee, we’ll turn back east and proceed at bare steerageway back to Point X-Ray.”

“And what are we searching for, exactly?” Spichovich asked, his chair turned so he was directly facing the navigator, his arms crossed, a frown wrinkling his forehead. Pacino glanced at his boss, the weapons officer, whose voice had taken on an unfamiliar edge. In Pacino’s short dealings with his boss, Lieutenant Commander Spichovich had been a complete gentleman, a friendly and sensitive superior, asking Pacino what he could do to speed along Pacino’s qualifications, sitting with Pacino, Eisenhart and the sonar chief, Albanese, as they “turned over” command of the sonar division from Eisenhart to Pacino, the turnover completing last night as Eisenhart, Pacino and Spichovich had visited the captain and XO in the captain’s stateroom to report the turnover. As of last night, Pacino was officially the sonar officer and Eisenhart was officially the communications officer, or “communicator.”

Romanov turned from the screen to address the room. “Gentlemen, welcome to Operation Bigfoot. That’s what we’re searching for. ‘Bigfoot’ because like the monster of myth, everyone has heard about it, but no one has ever actually seen it. Until now.” She clicked the remote and the next slide came up. The wardroom’s officers immediately began talking and pointing.

“Quiet down, everyone. The photograph you’re looking at is from 1916. This is the submarine L-4, a diesel-electric submarine designed by our good friends at Electric Boat, about 90 years before they were acquired by DynaCorp, and built by their shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts.” Romanov clicked the remote, the next slide showing the L-class submarine in profile and in plan, the drawing showing the interior compartments. Below the schematic diagram, a blur of statistics were displayed.

“Let’s review some things about this submarine — a miraculous ocean-going American submarine — built well over a century ago. 457 tons surfaced, 557 tons submerged. 167 feet length overall. Seventeen-and-a-half feet in beam. Two NELSECO diesels, 1300 horsepower total. Two Electro Dynamic main motors, 800 horsepower total. Two bays of 60-cell batteries. Speed, 14 knots surfaced, ten-and-a-half submerged. Range, 4300 nautical miles surfaced at seven knots, 150 nautical miles submerged at five knots, which, officers, is a submerged endurance of thirty hours. From a boat designed in the year of our Lord nineteen fourteen.”

Spichovich spoke again, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “So, Nav, we’re going back in time to fight Diesel Boat Eddie in his 1914 L-class diesel submarine? A World War I diesel sub named,” he coughed sarcastically, “‘Bigfoot’?”

“Not exactly,” Romanov said, her cheeks reddening slightly. “This is a narcotics smuggling submarine. The narco-subs have progressed tremendously, but they’ve mostly just been speed boats with the topside flattened out. Ten years ago, the Medellin cartel built a small diesel-electric submarine with a snorkel mast and a diesel that could smuggle ten tons of cocaine, but it had trouble in the open seas, balance trouble, and it had problems trying to submerge, even more trying to surface. It sank a few times, each time killing the four-man crew. They kept resurrecting it, but eventually it sank in deep water, killing the crew, and three hundred million dollars’ worth of product was lost. Designing a submarine is not for the inexperienced. We think the Colombian Barranquilla cartel tried their hand and started off with a blank sheet of paper and started designing a special purpose submarine, but like their competitors, their prototypes were ridiculously underpowered, or heavy, or unbalanced. Or they simply sank. The cartel finally realized that reinventing the wheel made no sense. So they took a look at past designs, designs they could get their hands on from open sources. Their shipbuilders found the detailed plans for the L-4 and visited the actual submarine, rusting away in a Massachusetts coast museum. They had just enough unclassified data from dusty old Navy archives and DynaCorp file rooms to be able to build a new one.

“For secrecy, they assembled it in the hold of a cargo freighter lying-to in Port Saint Marta. They’ve fitted it out with modern Edison battery Giga-Packs, with battery power density four times what the 1914 versions had, with half the weight and less than half the volume, and modern diesel engines, with twice the fuel efficiency, so they could maintain the same range with half the volume of fuel. Which makes for even more space available for cocaine. With a ten-ton load of coke, the most anyone’s been able to smuggle in a narco-sub, you make upwards of three hundred million dollars. This ship can transport over fifty tons, perhaps even sixty. That’s over one point six billion dollars. And no depth control or instability problems with this boat — it was a success over a hundred years ago, and they have the detailed specs. They just copied it. We’ve been looking for it ever since our good friends in the intelligence services got wind of it. But no one has ever even gotten close to this thing. We think this ship has made at least half a dozen successful smuggling runs already, and with that load of coke, the cartel will corner the market.”

“Wait, we’re doing drug interdiction,” Spichovich asked, incredulously. “You sent us down here at flank speed to, what, intercept and sink a fucking narco-sub?”

“No,” Romanov said dryly. “We were sent down here at flank speed to steal it.”

The wardroom burst into loud crosstalk. Pacino looked over at Tiny Tim Fishman and Grip Aquatong, who were smiling in pleasure. Grip reached out and fist-bumped Fishman.

“Quiet, people,” Quinnivan said from the aft end of the room.

“This makes no sense,” Spichovich said, acid in his voice, “why would they replicate a World War I sub where there are a thousand more advanced subs they could copy? A late-flight World War II German U-boat, for one.”

“The L-class is perfect for them,” Romanov said, staying calm, only her slight blush a sign that Spichovich’s harassing questions were bothering her. “The World War II subs could be twice this size or even triple the size. Too cumbersome, too difficult to hide, too long to build and too expensive. This one could well be called ‘Goldilocks’ instead of ‘Bigfoot.’ It’s not too big, not too small, but just right. Small enough to be assembled in the hold of the cargo mother ship, which was modified to have under-hull opening doors and a crane mechanism to lower the sub into the water unnoticed. So for now, gentlemen, this is the state of the art narcotics smuggling submarine. It has a test depth of 200 feet, deep enough to avoid any Coast Guard activity. And you guys will enjoy this. The boat has fully functional torpedo tubes — not to attack with weapons, but to offload the drugs. They have neutrally buoyant torpedo shaped cargo containers holding the coke, and when they get to the Florida coast, they rendezvous with the coastal boats and shoot the cargo out the tubes, which the receiving boats catch in nets. The L-class stays submerged the entire time, then sneaks back to Santa Marta, Colombia, for another load. We think that her maiden voyage paid for the submarine’s construction ten times over. Multiple trips? That, gentlemen, is a business plan. Questions?”

“So,” Quinnivan said, “tell us more about stealing this sub. How do we do it? I’m assuming this is the reason the SEALs are embarked.”

Seagraves broke in. “Let’s ask our newest non-qual junior officer, who will be the approach officer for this op so that he can fulfill the requirements of his qual card. Mr. Pacino, knowing what you know now, and seeing that we have our SEAL friends here, how do we hijack a diesel-electric sub?”

Pacino shook his head, feeling warmth come to his cheeks. “I’d have to say, force it to the surface. Sneak up under it, blow ballast, bang into her undersides and bring her up to the surface. Then the SEALs open a hatch, toss down a nerve gas grenade and make off with the sub.”

Fishman laughed and smiled. “That’s actually not half bad, Captain. Not very subtle, but not bad.”

The other officers were rolling their eyes, shaking their heads or making dismissive noises.

“No, Mr. Pacino,” Seagraves said. “Do you want to try again?”

Pacino shrugged. “I’ve got nothing, Cap’n.”

“What about you, Weapons Officer?” Seagraves looked over at Spichovich. “You have a better plan?”

Spichovich nodded. “Gentlemen and Navigator, back during the Cold War, one of our attack submarines was trailing a Soviet Akula nuclear attack sub that had arrived on a top-secret patrol in the western Atlantic, right off our shores, coming to see if he could himself shadow a missile sub leaving Kings Bay or one of our attack subs leaving Norfolk or Groton. The incident is still highly classified, but the basics are that our boat managed to get too close to the Russian at an odd angle and got his towed array sonar completely wrapped around the Russian’s screw. With his screw fouled, the Rooskie came to a stop, then surfaced to see what happened. There he is, on a super-secret hush-hush covert mission off American shores, and he surfaces in broad daylight, and a dozen members of his crew — probably a bunch of smelly A-Gangers,” he said, shooting a smirk at Dankleff, the head of the auxiliary mechanics, “come out of the hatch and stare dumbly aft trying to see what happened. Eventually divers got equipped and went over the side.”

The towed array was a thick cable a shiplength long towed by a steel wire rope that could be a mile long, intended to process high frequency narrowband sonar signals, the cable length intended to get the array far away from the noise generated by the sub streaming the array. The cable of it wrapping around a ship’s screw would completely immobilize it, as would the thick diameter array itself.

“So without propulsion,” Spichovich continued, “a submarine would have to have perfect trim and a fantastic hovering system to avoid sinking or popping to the surface. There is no standard operating procedure for a fouled screw, just common sense to use the engines at maximum revs to try to break whatever is fouling the screw, and if that doesn’t work, come to the surface and send over divers to get rid of the fisherman’s net or whatever it was that got wrapped around the screw.”

“Nicely done, Weps,” Seagraves said. “So, Mr. Pacino, what do you think now?”

“Sir,” Pacino began, “I’d come up beside the L-class when she’s steaming submerged, lock out the commandos, and get them to wrap a net of some type around the L-class’ screw.”

“Hopefully without getting ourselves wrapped around the screw,” Fishman said.

Pacino continued. “That’s going to be tough at five knots, though.”

Aquatong put his hands behind his head and grinned. “That’s what we do for a living, Patch. That’s why we get the big bucks.”

“So then what?” Seagraves asked Romanov.

“Well,” Romanov said. “The sub surfaces. A hatch pops open and one or more crewmen come out. The SEALs use non-lethal weapons to take out the crewmen and take over the submarine, or in the worst case, use lethal force. We augment them with a crew of two of our qualified officers so they can operate the boat and steam it to Andros Island, Bahamas, at the Navy/DynaCorp AUTEC test range, where the CIA will be waiting to study the boat.”

Pacino raised his hand self-consciously, wondering if he’d be ridiculed for acting like he was a second-grader trying to get the teacher’s attention.

Romanov smiled warmly at him. “Yes, you in the back, Mr. Pacino, you have a question?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Pacino said. “This target is diesel-electric. We’ll hear him when he’s on his diesels — assuming he can snorkel — but when he’s submerged on his batteries, he’s going to disappear into the ocean background noise.”

“Spoken like the sonar officer he is,” Spichovich said harshly, his annoyance again directed at the navigator. Pacino glanced at the weapons officer. Obviously, there was some beef between the two department heads.

“He’ll come out of port in the belly of this freighter,” Romanov said, clicking to the next slide, showing a photograph of a fairly large container ship, the slide after that showing the ship in a schematic drawing in profile view. The hold below the waterline had a submarine stowed in it, dotted lines marking underwater panels of the ship’s hull that could be removed to allow the submarine to submerge under the freighter. “This design partially replicates the CIA-commissioned Howard Hughes’ ship Glomar Explorer, which was built in the 1970s to recover a Soviet submarine off the seafloor and pull its hull into the hold of the ship, but in this case, the submarine is assembled and constructed inside the freighter, and when it is ready to launch, leaves the freighter’s hold and disappears for the Florida coast. When this happens, there will be a thousand transients as divers open up the under-hold panels to allow the sub to leave—”

“Divers?” Spichovich asked. “Divers in this crystal-clear Caribbean seawater? Do you understand that if we’re close enough, they’ll see us visually? What happens to this mission then?”

Romanov inclined her head, her jaw clamped. “We’ll stay a clear distance from the freighter when he’s preparing to launch the L-class, for that exact reason. Once the L-class clears the freighter and makes his way north, we believe he will be submerged and snorkeling to charge his batteries. Once the operation has progressed to the point that the L-class is under the control of the SEALs, we’ll lock out the two officers who will take the boat back to AUTEC. Narco-sub submerges and heads north. We submerge and clear datum. The entire incident? It never happened. We were never there. Any other questions?”

Spichovich waved his hand. “Can we see the op order?” The navigator opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, Spichovich put his palm out and said, “You know what — I don’t even want to know. But tell me this — why wouldn’t the L-class leave the freighter’s hull with a full battery charge, then just steam silently away?”

“Intelligence on the L-class says it can get shorepower when its mother ship is tied up at the pier but not once the freighter puts to sea. It’s a short sail to the hundred-fathom curve, but still, unrigging the bracing inside the hold takes time, there could be problems or issues getting the hold doors open, and that entire time, the sub is on internal power on her batteries, and she isn’t rigged to snorkel inside the hold. That would be like warming up your car in the garage with the garage door closed. I know,” she said, as Spichovich raised his hand, “that would be easy to fix with a ventilation system or an exhaust plenum to get the diesel exhaust out of the hold, or a shorepower connection inside the freighter, but things are not yet that sophisticated. There’s obviously plenty of money to make ship alterations, but maybe the profits from the previous trips are paying for production expansions. Plus, if it works — if it ain’t broke — don’t fix it.”

The engineer spoke up then. “What about the crew of the Bigfoot? What do we do with them?”

“Commander Fishman?” Romanov asked.

The SEAL commander shrugged. “Hostages create trouble. There’s the risk of them escaping their restraints and thwarting the mission and killing us or sinking the boat. And hostages consume manhours. Someone has to keep an eye on them, allow them to use the bathroom, give them food, water. You need one person on our team for every three hostages to be safe. That’s a 24-hour thing, so three men standing one eight-hour watch a day or two four-hour watches a day. We don’t have six extra people for this mission. So we either kill them or leave them.”

“Leave them?” Lewinsky asked.

“Put them in a raft with some rations and water and leave them to be rescued. Or apprehended and arrested.”

“Any other questions?”

Every officer in the room had a question, it seemed, until they reached the limits of what was known about the L-class. Seagraves stood, thanked the navigator, and he and the XO left the room. Romanov gathered up her tablet and shot a glare at Spichovich, shook her ponytail off her shoulder and stormed out of the room. Pacino looked at Spichovich, who shrugged as if there were no explanation for his issues with the navigator.

“My advice, Mr. Pacino? We’ll be on a barrier search. This could go on for days. When we eventually detect this guy, we could be at battlestations rigged for ultra-quiet for hours, even days, with no sleep and the only food a plate of peanut butter sandwiches with coffee cups of bug juice to wash it down. So, while we search and wait, I suggest you get as much sleep as you can.”

Pacino nodded and left, taking the steep stairs to the upper level and around two passageway corners to his stateroom. He hung up his coveralls and climbed into the bunk and tried to sleep, but his mind wouldn’t stop spinning about the operation and his part in it. Approach officer. Every eye in the control room would be on him, from the captain on down.

After an hour of anxiety, he finally sank into sleep and a dream about carrying a hunter’s rifle into thick woods, searching for something that never appeared.

9

Pacino had drifted into a deep sleep, coming out of it abruptly as the messenger of the watch violently pulled his bunk curtain aside, stuck his head in, shook Pacino’s shoulder and whispered intensely, “Man battlestations!”

“What time is it?” Pacino asked groggily.

“Zero five hundred, sir. Come on, out of the bunk.”

Pacino got hastily out of the bunk and found his coveralls and sneakers, yawning, the grogginess making him wish he hadn’t taken Spichovich’s advice and stayed awake. He’d kill for a steaming cup of coffee, he thought, taking the ladder down to the middle level and making his way to the crowded control room. He felt his nerves vibrating the way they had just before he’d driven the ship out. But that had just been shiphandling. This was a real operation. A combat operation, even if the opponent were unarmed. Or armed with only shotguns, rifles and pistols, not missiles or torpedoes.

He walked into the control room and walked up to the midwatch officer of the deck, Lieutenant Varney, at the command console. The messenger of the watch, the same petty officer who’d awakened Pacino, arrived with a large tray of coffee cups. Pacino took one gratefully, the brew hot enough to burn his tongue. For the next five minutes, Varney walked Pacino through the initial contact with Master Two, the cargo ship. The main target, the L-class submarine, would be designated “Master One” when it emerged out of the belly of the cargo ship. The cargo ship was making loud transients, and it was considered likely this was the beginning of the operation to launch the narco-submarine, but the cargo ship was still steaming slowly northward out of Port Santa Marta and hadn’t slowed yet, and they all believed it would need to stop to be able to launch the submarine.

Romanov asked a few quiet questions. She would be battlestations officer of the deck while Pacino would be the junior officer of the deck and the “approach officer.” During battlestations, the XO would take up a roving position behind the battlecontrol and weapon control consoles, his job to get the magical, mystical holy grail of information called “the solution,” which was the distance to their main target and his heading and speed. If one knew the solution, one could easily put a salvo of torpedoes right on top of where he’d be in the near future — assuming the target didn’t suddenly change course or speed — a very bad event known as a “zig.” The XO’s position was called the “firecontrol coordinator” or simply “coordinator.”

The “approach officer” was usually the captain, who rode herd over the firecontrol coordinator, the weapons officer and the officer of the deck. That holy trinity always spoke up just before a weapon launch, the coordinator responsible for the solution, the weapons officer for the health and settings of the weapons to be employed and the officer of the deck for the behavior of the ship in the moments prior to launch. For Pacino to be acting as approach officer seemed insane, but this was how this was done in the force, he knew. Thrust the maximum amount of responsibility and demands on the non-qual and harden him to be qualified and “heavy,” the submariner’s term for knowledgeable. He consoled himself that the captain would be right behind him, as would the navigator, in the event he made a critical mistake.

Pacino nodded at Varney. “I relieve you, sir,” he said.

Varney faced Captain Seagraves. “Captain, I’ve been properly relieved of the officer of the deck watch by Lieutenant Commander Romanov and Lieutenant junior grade Pacino.”

“Very well,” Seagraves said quietly.

Varney hurried to the starboard side attack center console nearest Quinnivan, “pos one,” where the officer most adept at tracking contacts sat and, dancing with the computer and the sonar data, originated his best guess at the solution to the target. Lieutenant Lomax at pos two would compete with Varney, coming up with his own suggestion of the solution. Lieutenant Eisenhart joined them at pos three, his console usually selected to the geographic plot, which showed the contrasting solutions of pos one and pos two so the captain and XO could see which made more sense. Absent an active sonar pulse, using passive listen-only sonar required some intuitive guessing about what the contact was doing, but emitting active sonar gave away their position and intent, and was not stealthy. It contradicted Vermont’s battle cry of It never happened, we were never there.

Pacino took up his position at the command console, its large flat panel screen tuned to the navigation chart display, since the periscope was retracted and switched off. He reached down with two fingers and blew up the scale of their position shown in blue, north of Santa Marta, with the exiting freighter’s position blinking in blood red.

“Your headset, Approach Officer,” Romanov said from over his shoulder. He gave her a look of gratitude and strapped on the headset, only one ear covered to monitor the phone circuits, the other open to the sounds of the room around him. “Better darken the room so we can see the displays.”

“Pilot,” Pacino called to Lieutenant Dankleff at the ship control console, “rig control for black!”

The lights went out in the control room, the room lit only by the sonar display consoles on the port side, the firecontrol and weapon control consoles to starboard, the command and navigation console displays and the large screen periscope monitors forward port and starboard.

The navigation electronics technician suddenly piped up from the aft port corner of control. “Approach Officer, mark sunrise!”

“Very well, Nav ET,” Pacino said. With the seascape brightening, it meant a greater chance any divers helping the cargo ship launch the narco-sub might see them.

“Approach Officer,” Romanov said, “make sure battlestations are fully manned.”

“Coordinator,” Pacino barked at the XO. “Are we manned?”

Quinnivan spun to face him, coming to attention as if Pacino were the captain himself, and said formally, “Approach Officer, battlestations are manned.”

“Very well, Coordinator,” Pacino said, trying to force his voice to be deep, loud and commanding, hopefully not wavering from his intense nervousness, a hint of absurdity occurring to him that his boss’ boss was treating him like a superior officer.

“Ready for your speech?” Romanov asked. He nodded, trying to remember all the tactics drilled into him by the navigator, hoping he looked cooler than he felt. He cleared his throat self-consciously.

“Attention in the firecontrol party,” Pacino announced to the crowd in the room and the phone circuits, “my intention is to parallel the slow course of the freighter, designated Master Two, who is on course north, speed four knots, range, one thousand yards, maintaining our present depth at one two zero feet. We will hold station with Master Two as he slows, stops and prepares to open his hold and lower and release the target diesel submarine, Master One. We are at risk at that moment of being seen by divers in this clear water from any floodlights inside the cargo ship and the early morning sunlight, if the divers exit the freighter’s hold, so we’ll hang back, more deeply submerged so we won’t be counterdetected, but hovering close to Master Two, with both scopes raised. I will be controlling number one scope while the Coordinator and pos one will control the number two scope. Number one will display on the forward starboard display, number two on the forward port.

“Once the noise of the hold doors opening fades, we will come shallow and trail Master One until he’s clear of the freighter. We don’t want the freighter to see the Bigfoot surfacing and having trouble, or else it would heave-to and render aid. We’ll need to commence the operation to force the sub to the surface as soon as the freighter is over the horizon.

“Before Master One secures snorkeling on his diesels and goes deep, we’ll match his speed and take station slightly ahead of him at periscope depth so we can fine-tune our position. Being ahead of him gives the SEALs the advantage of the current moving them toward the Bigfoot hull. At my call the SEAL force will lock out with their propulsor units and drive to the hull of Master One. We will continue steaming beside the target but fading slightly astern of him in case there’s a failure and one or more SEALs need to return to own-ship. The SEALs will deploy the net to stop Master One’s screw. Expectations are that Master One will go dead in the water and surface. SEALs will conduct tactical steps to overcome the crew and take command of Master One on the surface. We will enter phase two of the op at that time. Are there any questions?”

“I have a question,” the weapons officer, Spichovich said, from his position at the weapons control console, the aft end of the consoles of the AN/BYG-1 battlecontrol system. “What if Master One doesn’t use his diesels? What if we’re wrong about him needing to charge batteries and he leaves the freighter on batteries and his main motor and goes quieter than a hole in the ocean?”

Pacino looked at Romanov. As the brand-new sonar officer, Pacino had spoken briefly to Chief Albanese, who was not optimistic he could track a diesel sub on batteries. All the exercises we did with NATO diesel boats, he’d explained, maybe one time in three we could track them, but most of the time they vanish like ghosts. A diesel boat on batteries? All you have are transient noises and maybe a slight thrum from his main propulsion motor. Otherwise, those bastards are invisible.

Romanov spoke up. “He’ll be going slow enough on batteries that we can keep up with him with periscopes raised,” she said. “If sonar has trouble tracking him, we’ll be able to see his snorkel mast. Odds are he will be below five knots, perhaps only going three to conserve battery power. His max submerged speed is just over seven knots and we can sail with a periscope deployed up to ten knots before it risks getting snapped off in the slipstream. Anyone else?”

The control room was pin-drop silent.

“Be watching for The Glitch,” Romanov said quietly in his free ear. She’d explained that The Glitch was that first thing that went wrong on an operation, something that would take it off the battle plan. And once off-plan, they would all be improvising. The most likely glitch was that the Bigfoot wouldn’t snorkel on his diesels but would slip away from the launching freighter quietly on batteries, and in the worst case, vanished into the noise of the ocean and got away from them. Which would lead to mission failure.

“Coordinator, Sonar,” Albanese’s voice came over the headset. “Master Two zig, turn count going down. Master Two is stopping.”

“Very well,” Pacino said. “Pilot, all stop and prepare to hover.”

“All stop, Pilot aye,” Dankleff replied, “and Maneuvering answers, all stop, preparing to hover, sir.”

“Pilot, mark speed one knot.”

“Mark speed one knot, Pilot, aye, speed two knots.” A second later, Dankleff announced, “Speed one knot, sir.”

“Pilot,” Pacino ordered, “engage the hovering system and hover at present depth.”

“Hover at present depth, Pilot, aye, and commencing hovering, depth one two zero feet, sir.”

This was it, Pacino thought. He looked down at his right hand. It was trembling. Pacino gripped the command console safety handrail, hoping no one noticed.

In the lockout trunk, Lieutenant junior grade Grip Aquatong tightened the strap of his full-face helmet and adjusted the tactical camera on top of the helmet. His integrated helmet included the air from his rebreather and communications interface, with a small heads-up display on the upper portion of his visor screen. He looked over at similarly clad Commander Tiny Tim Fishman, who nodded and gave him a thumbs-up sign.

To the port side, Senior Chief Scooter Tucker-Santos was readying the four Mark 17 Mod 2 propulsion units, small devices resembling a scuba tank but that had a powerful battery, a shrouded propulsor and motorcycle handlebars protruding aft of the propulsor. On the starboard side, Petty Officer First Class Swan Oneida was breaking out their weapons, multiple Mark 6 Mod 1 electrical shock directional weapons, each one able to fire enough current and voltage at a person to kill him if dialed up high enough, the unit functioning something like a civilian Taser, but far more powerful with a much longer range, but which also worked underwater.

Oneida had assembled four M4A1 carbines, fully automatic 5.56 mm rifles, each encased in a waterproof casing that with one click on one of several quick-release buttons would disconnect the casing and drop it to the deck. Oneida passed out the Mark 6 tactical directional shock units and the encapsulated M4A1s while Tucker-Santos equipped each man with a Mark 17 propulsion unit.

“Nothing to do now but wait for the word to flood down and open the upper hatch,” Fishman said to the men. “Go over your assignments to yourselves. What’s the rule, Grip?”

Aquatong answered up, belting out, “Fucking up is not an option, boss!”

“That’s right, gentlemen.”

This was always the worst part of any mission, Fishman thought, the interminable wait for the action to start. There was no doubt, if one hoped to succeed in the military, he’d be well advised to get good at the art of waiting.

Perfect, Pacino thought, as he looked at the display of the optronics of periscope number one. The high-definition image was a blurry blue of the Caribbean Sea, but visible at a high angle overhead was the underside of the freighter.

“Coordinator, Sonar,” Chief Albanese said, “loud transients from Master Two.”

The freighter would be opening his hull doors any minute.

“You’re too close,” Romanov coached quietly. “Take us down.”

“Pilot, make your depth two hundred feet.”

“Two hundred feet, Pilot, aye, and descending to two hundred feet, sir.”

The image in the screen lost focus but was still visible in the sea, the light having faded some with the depth.

“Two hundred feet, sir,” Dankleff announced.

“Very well, Pilot.”

“Coordinator, Sonar, very loud transients from Master Two.”

He was either opening his hold doors or getting ready to, Pacino thought. Pacino strained to look at the periscope image.

“Coordinator, Sonar, transients continue.”

They all waited for what seemed an eternity, until Albanese announced, “Master Two has gone quiet.”

“Listen for a turn count,” Quinnivan ordered Albanese.

Seagraves shot a look at Romanov and gestured with his thumb — unmistakably ordering, get us up.

“Let’s get closer,” Romanov said. “To hell with the freighter’s divers, we can’t lose this target.”

“Pilot, make your depth one hundred feet,” Pacino called. Dankleff acknowledged, but for Pacino, the only thing that existed in the world was the image on his periscope display screen. He zoomed the view closer until he could see it in the blue haze of the ocean. Discernable in the distance was the underside of a ship with cargo bay doors dropped open, bright lights from floodlights inside the hull shining on a large metal claw device coming slowly deeper in the water, the claw holding a shape. The claw exactly resembled the claw named “Clementine” used in Glomar Explorer’s Project Azorian / Project Jennifer to pull that sunken Soviet “Golf” submarine, K-129, off the sea bottom decades before. This, Pacino thought, had to be the disadvantage of declassifying military secrets. God alone knew how bad actors would use information developed by the military and intelligence community. The black blur in the claw had to be the L-class narco-sub. Bigfoot. In the flesh.

“Coordinator, Sonar, slight transients again. Mechanical in nature. Scraping noises.”

“Listen up for a main motor startup,” Quinnivan advised over Albanese’s shoulder.

Pacino waited, hearing his heart beating thunderously in his chest, his pulse throbbing in his neck.

“Transients stop and we’ve got something, something rotating very slowly, believe it’s a turn count,” Albanese announced, one hand over his right ear as if that would help him hear better. “Oh, out-fucking-standing,” Albanese said, half to himself, his voice sounding oddly happy.

“What is it?” Seagraves demanded.

“I’ve got a turn count,” Albanese said, “bearing to Master One at zero-four-zero, making three zero RPM and he’s got a sound problem, Captain, a bearing rub or a ding on his screw, we’re hearing it every revolution.” Albanese spun around from his triple-screened master sonar console. “We’ll be able to track him when he’s on his batteries with this, sir.”

Quinnivan, Seagraves and Romanov crowded the command console, surrounding Pacino and the periscope display.

“He won’t be able to fix that underway,” Quinnivan said, one hand over his boom mike, a crooked grin on his face.

“It’s like a lottery win, Skipper,” Romanov said, smiling. For an instant Pacino stared at her, her usually frowning, dour face erupting into a shining beauty when she smiled.

“Let’s get ready to trail him,” Seagraves commanded.

“Coordinator, Sonar, Master One is making transients.”

“What is it, Sonar,” Quinnivan barked, turning from the command console.

“Could be, wait … wait, yes, we have a diesel engine startup at zero-four-one, bearing to Master One.”

“Take it up to PD, Approach Officer,” Seagraves said, leaning close to the periscope display.

“Periscope depth, aye, Captain. Pilot, vertical rise to six eight feet!”

“Better make it six four,” Romanov said. “We’re not sweating periscope exposure. We don’t even know if Master One has a periscope himself — yet. And the freighter isn’t a threat any longer. It’s not like he’s going to radio his coast guard people to report his illicit drug boat’s being followed.”

“Pilot, make your depth six four feet!”

“Six four, Pilot, aye, depth eight zero. Seven five. Seven zero.”

The periscope display showed the undersides of the waves approaching. This view seemed bizarre to Pacino. The underside of the water surface was an oddly shimmering silver, like looking through the reverse side of a mirror. A wrinkly mirror. Some waves admitted slight glimpses of blue sky and white clouds above. At the pilot’s call of seventy feet, a wave trough approached and for just a split second the periscope view became foamy and blurry.

“Scope’s breaking,” Pacino called.

“Seven zero feet, sir, coming up.”

“You’re sluggish, Pilot, get us up,” Pacino said, more out of instinct or perhaps unconscious imitation of the officers on Piranha than his own intention.

“Six nine feet, sir.”

The periscope view went through two cycles of foam splashing over the view, then cleared, the view blurry from the unit being wet, but it dried rapidly and the view became crystal clear.

“Scope’s clear,” Pacino said.

“Six seven, six six, six five feet, sir, and six four feet.”

“Very well, Pilot.”

“Pos One, do a surface safety sweep,” Quinnivan ordered Lieutenant Varney at the pos one master console of the BYG-1 battlecontrol system. The periscope view of unit two rotated quickly on the display mounted in the port forward corner of the room, the intention to identify any close contacts missed by sonar that posed a danger of collision. The blur of motion showed only the freighter, Master Two. After the sweep, the view zeroed in on the freighter. On its rusty stern, the Panamanian flag flew over block white letters spelling MV SARGASSO CAUSEWAY.

“Approach Officer, we have a name for Master Two,” Quinnivan said. “The motor vessel Sargasso Causeway bears one-six-five, range, three divisions in low power, angle-on-the-bow port sixty.”

“Get a laser range,” Romanov ordered Pacino. “Odds are the freighter won’t know what it is even if he sees it.”

“Coordinator, get a laser range on Master Two,” Pacino said to Quinnivan, who acknowledged quickly and repeated it to Varney on pos one.

“Range twelve thousand five hundred yards,” Lieutenant Varney, the pos one operator, reported. The freighter was six nautical miles away. At this range, the Vermont’s periscopes would be as good as invisible.

“Coordinator, Sonar, Transients, Master Two,” Albanese said. “He may be rigging in the hull doors.”

Pacino looked up at the number one scope’s display. Interesting, he thought. Sargasso Causeway. It was as if the owners of the freighter were consciously or unconsciously revealing their intention to smuggle. He returned his concentration to his periscope display, trained to the bearing of the target, Master One, the L-class, the Bigfoot. For a moment he wondered what the owners called it. A number? The name of a wife or sweetheart?

There, he thought, a slight wake boiling up from a pole extending vertically several feet over the wave crests — no, two poles. He must have a periscope in addition to his snorkel mast.

“I have Master One on visual,” Pacino said. “Showing extensions of two masts.” He zoomed as far in as the unit could magnify. In 96x, the view bounced slightly despite gyro-stabilization and post image computer processing, and it was blurry, but still, that higher mast unmistakably resembled the old-fashioned attack periscopes of the diesel submarines of fifty years before. The other mast had a wider cylinder on top of it, which must have been the head valve for the snorkel, which should shut if the mast suffered a wave rolling on top of it, preventing the induction piping to the diesel suction from pulling in water and damaging the diesel — and flooding the submarine. No doubt, this submarine was as sophisticated as Navigator Romanov had promised. Pacino watched his display. He could see smoke boiling out of the ocean slightly behind the Bigfoot’s masts. Exhaust fumes. Evidently, they didn’t use low-smoke diesel fuel.

Pacino took the magnification down to 8x to see if he could still detect the masts, and he could make them out, the rooster tail of the motion and smoke trail making it easier.

“Coordinator, Sonar, turn count, Master One, four zero RPM on one four-bladed screw. He’s headed out of town.”

“Get in trail,” Romanov ordered.

“Pilot, all ahead one third, turns for three knots, steer course three five zero.”

“All ahead one third, turns for three, steer three five zero, Pilot aye, and Maneuvering answers, one third, turns for three knots.”

For the next ten minutes Pacino concentrated on falling in behind the L-class target, close enough he could make out the periscope and snorkel mast at 8x magnification but far enough away that Master One probably wouldn’t see his own periscopes. Pacino wondered what Bigfoot would do if he did see the scopes. Probably secure snorkeling and go deep on batteries and try to evade — at least that’s what Pacino would do if it were his call. He added RPM a few turns at a time to close in the range, then dropped revolutions off as he seemed too close, all the while coached by Romanov. For those ten minutes, Pacino felt a triumph, that this mission was going well. Soon the freighter would be distant and over the horizon behind them and the mission of the SEALs could begin. And then the bad news came in.

“Coordinator, Sonar, loud transients have stopped from Master Two, but I now have a turn count on Master Two and he’s making one two zero RPM on two three-bladed screws. Master Two is speeding up and turning, bearing one-six-eight. Coordinator, Master Two is getting louder. I believe Master Two is steaming toward us.”

Quinnivan grabbed Varney’s shoulder. “Pos One, turn the scope to Master Two to the south!”

There in the port forward control room overhead, the number two periscope view showed Master Two, the Sargasso Causeway, with a large bow wave forming. “Observation, Master Two, number one scope, bearing mark,” Quinnivan said, leaning over Varney’s Pos One console. “Range, mark, four divisions in high power, angle on the bow port five. Take a laser range.”

“Now two four zero RPM,” Albanese reported.

The freighter was approaching at full throttle.

“Bearing one six five,” Varney reported from Pos One. “Range thirteen thousand two hundred yards.”

Quinnivan looked over at Pacino, Seagraves and Romanov. “He’s either seen us and is coming to investigate, or perhaps worse, he’s going to steam beside the submarine and escort it out of the area, maybe all the way to Miami. Which would put a damper on our plans with our good friends, the SEALs. If they tried to force Master One to surface in sight of the freighter, the freighter would render aid. And for all we know, start a shoot-out with the SEALs.”

“The freighter has never done this on prior voyages,” Romanov said dejectedly. “He’s always turned around and gone back to port, leaving the narco-sub alone. Why is this different?”

There it was, Pacino thought. The Glitch. Maybe the freighter had seen Vermont’s twin periscopes and grown alarmed, and was either coming to investigate or their procedures had changed, and now the revised base plan had them escorting the narco-sub.

Without conscious thought, Pacino looked at the senior officers and said breathlessly, “Let’s toss a Tomahawk Mod EMP Kakivak cruise missile at the freighter. That’ll shut him down dead in the water without hurting the submarine.”

A Mod EMP Kakivak was a “NNEMP,” a non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapon that would fry the electronics and major electrical components of anyone or anything in its blast radius. Pacino had encountered its detailed specifications in the course of this qualification studies. Vermont was loaded out with two of them, despite no one expecting to use them.

For a long moment, Lieutenant Commander Romanov stared at Pacino, then found her voice. “Are you insane? You can’t just launch a warshot cruise missile at a civilian freighter!”

Pacino took in the room. Every eye was on him. Quinnivan looked like he’d just been slapped, his face turning red. Varney, the pos one battlecontrol console operator, looked at Lomax on pos two, then at Eisenhart on pos three. Ganghadharan, at the navigation console, shared a look with both of them. Pacino thought for a moment he heard Lomax murmur to Eisenhart, Jesus, check out the big brass balls of non-qual Pacino.

It was Weapons Officer Spichovich at the weapon control console, the WCC pos one, who broke the moment of silence.

“Captain,” he said, addressing Seagraves, who had put his hand to his chin and stared at the deck, deep in thought, “I have Mod EMP Kakivaks in the number two VPT in tubes eleven and twelve. Recommend spinning up both, sir.”

Quinnivan turned from the periscope display at Varney’s pos one. “Master Two is making way, fast, maybe twelve to fifteen knots, and his angle-on-the-bow is narrowing. We’re on the same bearing from him as Master One, and he’s coming straight toward the both of us. If he aims to escort the Bigfoot out of the area, he’s sighting in her periscope and snorkel mast. Which means he might also be seeing ours. Recommend dipping scopes.”

Romanov hissed at Pacino. “Down scopes!”

Pacino hit the hydraulic control levers to lower both periscopes. “Scopes one and two coming down,” he said to the room.

Seagraves glanced at Romanov and Quinnivan. “Mr. Pacino has a point,” he said, his baritone voice quiet and confident. “An EMP would shut down the freighter. And he’s not going to complain about it to the authorities. And we buy time. None of his radios will work to call for a tow. He’s near enough to shipping lanes he’d eventually be spotted and rescued. Worst thing that can happen is we fry the electronics of an innocent passer-by. Sonar, report all contacts.”

“Captain, the only contacts held by sonar,” Albanese said crisply, “Are Master Two, bearing one-six-zero, distant, and Master One, bearing three five zero, close range.”

“Captain,” Romanov said, her voice uncertain, “that EMP could knock out the Bigfoot. And us.”

“After we launch, we’ll take her deep,” Seagraves said. “If it paralyzes Master One, we’ll deal with that at the time.”

Pacino spoke up. “We could place the detonation a few thousand yards on the other side of Master Two, opening the range to us and Master One, but still close enough to the freighter to shut him down.”

Seagraves spoke to Pacino. “No. At an airburst height of four hundred feet, the damage radius is two thousand yards, more or less, Mr. Pacino. I don’t want to risk launching an EMP, having it go off but being ineffective. When we launch, that warhead is going off directly over his bridge. Straight down his throat. And we’ll be well outside the damage zone. And so will Master One.” Seagraves winked at Romanov. “I can’t bring myself to call him Bigfoot, Officer of the Deck.” He looked back at Pacino. “Approach Officer, drive off west, five knots. You have permission to open the number two VPT door and launch one EMP Kakivak at Master Two, the Sargasso Causeway, with the aim point directly overhead at a detonation altitude of four hundred feet. Immediately after launch, take her deeper in the layer, two hundred feet.”

Pacino acknowledged the captain, then turned toward the command console, the display selected to the same output as the navigation chart plot aft of him, showing the God’s eye view of the sea around him. He looked hard at it, memorizing the image.

“Pilot,” he ordered Dankleff, “Left fifteen degrees rudder, steady course west, all ahead one third, maintain depth six four feet. Weapons Officer, open the number two VPT outer door and make the Mod EMP Kakivak in vertical launch tube twelve ready in all respects for a tactical launch at Master Two, aim point directly overhead Master Two, detonation altitude four hundred feet.”

The flurry of acknowledgements floated in the air of the control room in slow motion. Time seemed to slow down until he realized Quinnivan, Romanov, Seagraves and Spichovich were all staring expectantly at him.

“Firing point procedures,” Pacino said, hoping the litany of commands he’d memorized were correct. “Tube twelve, Mod EMP Kakivak, Master Two.”

“Ship ready,” Romanov reported formally to him.

“Weapon ready!” Spichovich barked.

“Solution ready,” Quinnivan said, a look of uncertainty wrinkling his forehead.

“Shoot on generated solution,” Pacino ordered.

“Set,” Varney said from pos one, sending his final data on the target to Spichovich’s panel, the electronic instructions traveling at the speed of light down to the torpedo room’s master weapons consoles and from there to the aft Virginia Payload Tube’s interface, then to the missile loaded in vertical launch tube twelve.

“Stand-by,” Spichovich said, pulling his panel’s master trigger lever up to the “stand-by” position.

“Shoot!” Pacino ordered.

“Fire!” Spichovich announced, pushing his trigger down to the “fire” position.

Tube 12, the twelfth tube in the aft-most Virginia Payload Tube module forward of the sail, detonated a steam charge under the cruise missile and blew it out of the tube toward the sky, its rocket motor firing as it cleared the sea, the rocket lifting it up to almost half a mile, a slight smoke trail extending backward to the launch point.

“Pilot, all ahead full, make your depth two hundred feet, steep angle!” Pacino ordered.

“All ahead full, Pilot, aye, make my depth two hundred feet, steep angle, and Maneuvering answers, all ahead full, fifteen-degree down angle on the ship,” Dankleff spat.

In a matter of seconds Dankleff pulled the ship out of the dive. “Two hundred feet, sir!”

“All ahead two thirds,” Pacino said from the navigation console. He had to get them back toward the target submarine. “Right fifteen degrees rudder, steady course three-one-zero. Sonar, mark the bearing to Master Two.”

“Master Two bears one-five-eight.”

“Sonar, how is Master Two’s signal?” Seagraves asked.

“SNR to Master Two is fading but still hold him on broadband on the Q-ten wide aperture bow array and spherical array,” Albanese reported.

“Narrowband?”

Albanese shook his head. “Narrowband’s only showing random noise, Captain.”

“Acoustic daylight?”

“Noise as well, sir.”

High above and behind them, the Kakivak missile’s rocket motor ran out of fuel. Twenty-four explosive bolts fired and detached the booster stage and it tumbled toward the sea. The missile’s jet engine, spooled up by the air ramming into its drop-down intake during the rocket boost phase, lit off, the thrust increasing as the missile arched over and dived toward the sea, now five miles from the target, or thirty seconds at the missile’s just-under-supersonic speed. The missile sailed closer to the hull of the target, the huge ship growing large in the seeker window flashing as the Kakivak executed a pop-up maneuver, its winglets rotating to guide the jet powered weapon skyward again. A hundred yards short of the aim point, directly overhead of the freighter, the missile dived back down and sped downward vertically toward the ship. The fuel valves shut and the engine shut down. Another two dozen explosive bolts fired and ejected the warhead payload. The winglets of the now-empty missile body guided it away from the target and the warhead, and four hundred yards south, a self-destruction charge blew it to fragments that fell to the ocean below.

Aboard the warhead, an explosive charge blew a stabilizing streamer out of the top, followed by a small parachute. At an altitude of four hundred feet, the warhead’s trigger detonated and the NNEMP unit’s high explosive charge flashed into incandescent life, the force of it blowing an iron core through the tunnel of a high voltage electrified armature, the sudden and immediate speed of the core relative to the armature generating an intense and focused electromagnetic pulse traveling at the speed of light. There was little to see or hear but a gray puff of smoke and the thump of the explosion, but the electromagnetic pulse traveled straight down, focused on the target until it fried every electronic circuit aboard the freighter Sargasso Causeway. The force of the trigger charge acted as its own self-destruct mechanism, the remains of the EMP unit littering the sea around the freighter.

The freighter’s navigation lights winked out. She slowed in the water, half a dozen crewmen emerging from her bridge structure to the bridge wing to find out what happened.

“Detonation bearing one-five-one,” Albanese called.

“That would be the EMP,” Romanov commented, seemingly to herself.

“Turn count, Master Two?”

Albanese listened intently, one finger raised in the air, then said, “Target zig, Master Two. Turn count Master Two is decreasing. I no longer hold diesel engines from her bearing on broadband. Master Two is slowing down.”

A quick cheer erupted in the room. Seagraves frowned. “Quiet in control!” he barked.

“We got her, Captain,” Romanov said, smiling that beautiful smile and clapping Pacino on the shoulder. “Thanks to our young non-qual here.”

Seagraves gave Pacino a brief look of approval, just the slightest crinkling of his eyes and a nod. “A somewhat adequate job, Mr. Pacino.” Then, as before, the warning: “Don’t get cocky, though. Now close up on Master One and prepare to commence the operation.”

In the blur of the minutes that followed, Pacino ordered the ship turned to the bearing of the Bigfoot and sped up to twenty knots for the few minutes it would take to close the distance to the target. After the five minutes he’d calculated it would take to get within half a mile of Master One, he ordered Vermont slowed to nine knots and raised both periscopes uncaring of the twin rooster-tail wakes rising from behind their periscopes.

In his periscope view, the snorkel mast and periscope of Master One steadily grew. At Romanov’s direction, he hit the target’s snorkel mast with a laser rangefinder burst and reported the range now closed to five hundred yards. The target hadn’t sped up, gone deep or changed his behavior. They were still undetected.

“Pilot,” Pacino ordered, “Left one degree rudder, rudder amidships, steady as she goes.”

“Steady as she goes, course three-five-eight, sir.”

Pacino watched the periscope display, keeping the unit trained to the scope and snorkel of Master One, the crosshairs of the display showing the bearing changing as Vermont drew up even with the Bigfoot and surged ahead.

“Pilot, steer course north, all stop, mark speed five knots,” Pacino called. Dankleff acknowledged and the ship slowed, now just ahead of and on the port side of the L-class narco-sub.

“Speed five, sir,” Dankleff said. “Steady course north.”

“All ahead one third, turns for five knots,” Pacino ordered, all his concentration focused on the snorkel and scope of the target, now just abreast of Vermont’s propulsor shroud aft.

“It’s time, Patch,” Romanov reminded him. “Let’s go.”

“Captain,” Pacino stood erect as he addressed Commander Seagraves, who stood to the port side of the command console. “Request to open the lockout trunk hatch.”

Seagraves nodded. “Permission granted to open the lockout trunk hatch.”

“Lockout Trunk, Control,” Pacino said, keying his boom microphone into the 7MC ship-control circuit. “Flood the lockout trunk and open the upper hatch.”

The repeat-back rasped over Pacino’s headset, Grip Aquatong making the report. “Flood down the trunk and open the upper hatch, Lockout Trunk, aye.”

“Officer of the Deck,” Dankleff called a moment later, “Lockout trunk upper hatch indicates open.”

“Very well,” Pacino said. “Captain, request to lock out SEALs.”

Seagraves nodded. “Approach Officer, lock out the SEALs.”

“Lockout trunk, Control,” Pacino said over the 7MC. “Lock out and commence the operation.” Fishman in the lockout trunk’s dry station acknowledged.

It was all in the hands of the SEALs now.

10

“Approach Officer, lockout trunk hatch indicates shut,” Dankleff reported from the ship control console.

“Very well, Pilot,” Pacino acknowledged.

“Take us slowly deeper to one hundred feet,” Seagraves ordered. “Underhull maneuver, but maintain station relative to Master One. When you clear seventy feet, raise both scopes.”

“One hundred, scopes at seventy, maintain station, aye, sir,” Pacino said, then barked to Dankleff, “Pilot, make your depth one hundred feet, shallow angle, report depths.”

“One hundred feet, aye, and passing six five feet, down two degree bubble, sir.”

“V’well, Pilot.”

“Seven zero feet, sir.”

“Raising scopes,” Pacino said to Quinnivan. He pulled up both yellow-and-black striped hydraulic control levers for the number one and two periscope. The chart view on his command console blacked out, then displayed the view out the periscope, which was automatically trained toward the bow when he’d retracted it before. He pushed the “train” lever on the periscope controller, a unit that startlingly resembled a computer game console controller, to the right to change the bearing to the target, beside them on the starboard side and slightly behind.

“Eight zero feet, sir.”

The waves were getting farther away up above. Pacino trained the view downward from the waves to try to see the hull of the target submarine. Blurry in the blue haze, he could barely make out a black shape. It was bigger than he expected. He could see the bow and the conning tower, but the sub extended into the haze farther aft.

“Nine zero feet, sir.”

“Very well.” Pacino could see other shapes. The commandos who’d locked out and left the Vermont were visible, two of them forward of Bigfoot’s conning tower, no sign of the other two.

“One hundred feet, sir.”

“Approach officer, energize the sail’s under-ice lights,” Seagraves ordered, staring at the display for the number one scope.

“Pilot, turn on the sail’s under-ice lights,” Pacino called.

“Sail’s under-ice lights coming on,” Dankleff said. “Under-ice lamps are lit, sir.”

“Very well.”

The view out the periscope sharpened slightly as the sail’s lights came on, the units designed to allow approach to the underside of the polar ice if they were in the arctic maneuvering under a pressure ridge or preparing to vertical surface.

“Let’s fade back, Approach Officer,” Seagraves ordered. “See if we can get a better look at the screw-fouling effort, and be positioned if one of the SEALs falls off the target’s hull.”

“Pilot, drop two turns,” Pacino ordered.

“Drop two turns, aye, and Maneuvering answers, dropping two turns, present RPM two eight turns.”

“Very well.”

The target slowly rolled past them, now crystal clear in the periscope view in low power. Pacino could make out the detail of the conning tower, saw the two SEALs forward, then the black hull passed slowly by until Pacino could see two SEALs near the aft rudder, with a package — no, two packages — that slowly started expanding. Unfurling. Almost like an underwater parachute, a blooming surface, silk or canvas or some modern polymer with nano-fibers, expanded, flapped slowly in the water flow, then spiraled downward aft of the rudder, the motion of the target submarine and the vortex of the screw pulling the packages downward and inward, until the strange objects were no longer visible. No doubt, they were wrapped hard around the Bigfoot’s screw.

“Master One’s screw is fouled,” Pacino said to Seagraves.

“Get ready to slow and stop,” Romanov said. “You may need momentary reverse turns, but stay close to him.”

“Coordinator, Sonar,” Albanese said, his voice unmistakably happy, “Master One turn count dropping, and Master One’s screw is stopped, turn count zero.”

“Pilot, all stop, prepare to hover,” Pacino ordered.

“All stop, prepare to hover, Pilot, aye, and Maneuvering answers, all stop.”

Quinnivan turned and grinned over at Pacino, Romanov and Seagraves. “We got the fooker,” he said quietly.

The target was slowing too fast. Vermont was starting to pass him, still too fast.

“Pilot, all back one third.” Pacino took a breath. “Mark speed one knot.”

“All back one third, Maneuvering answers, mark speed one knot.”

Pacino waited tensely as the target came back toward them. Being submerged with a backing bell ordered was not a comfortable situation, he knew.

“Speed, one knot,” Dankleff called.

“Pilot, all stop. Commence hovering at present depth.”

“All stop, aye, sir, Maneuvering answers all stop, commencing hovering, depth one hundred feet.”

“Coordinator, Sonar, transients from Master One. Sounds like blowing noises. Believe he’s surfacing.”

“Take us up to PD,” Seagraves ordered Pacino, “and adjust position to be abreast of Master One.”

“Pilot, make your depth six four feet,” Pacino called.

“Rising to six four feet, Pilot aye, depth nine zero. Eight five.”

“Belay reports,” Pacino said, staring at the periscope display. The view was getting too distant.

“Pilot, all ahead one third, turns for two.”

“Ahead one third, turns for two knots, aye, and Maneuvering answers, all ahead one third, turns for two. Depth seven five.”

Pacino waited until the hull of the target was drawing nearer. If he called it right, he could slow Vermont to coast to a halt right beside the Bigfoot. “All stop,” he said, guessing this would be enough thrust to get them beside the target. “Hover at present depth.”

The periscope view grew foamy and blurry as the optics penetrated the waves, then slowly cleared, the bright blue sky above, the deep blue of the ocean below, the waves rolling by slowly, the crests perhaps a foot or a foot-and-a-half tall.

“Six five feet. Six four. Hovering at six four feet, sir,” Dankleff reported.

Pacino trained the scope slightly aft. The target submarine, its hull a dark, glossy black, had stopped, its conning tower moving slightly as the ship rolled in the slight swells. He could make out two figures, hugging tight to the conning tower. The tower was smooth, with no handholds or ladder rungs or openings. The SEALs had wrapped cable around the conning tower to use to be able to hold on to the submarine. Pacino could see two of their thruster units hanging suspended from the cable, and one small equipment bag. The SEALs waited, crouched down low.

Pacino trained his view upward to the top of the conning tower, wondering if the sub’s access hatch was at the top. The snorkel mast and periscope were still extended. Pacino zoomed in to look at the target’s periscope mast. As he’d expected, the sloping glass of the optic opening was pointed right at him.

“He can see us,” Pacino said to Seagraves and Romanov. “There’s nothing happening.”

For two long minutes, the control room crew froze, all of them except the pilot and copilot staring at the periscope displays, waiting for a hatch to open on the sub’s deck or conning tower, waiting for a crewman or multiple crewmen to emerge to troubleshoot the fouled screw, but nothing happened.

“That’s odd,” Quinnivan said.

“Glitch number two,” Romanov said, staring at the command console’s display.

“We have a contingency for this?” Pacino asked Romanov.

She shrugged. “SEALs do. They’ll try to break in. Either an external hatch-opening mechanism or a salvage connection. If that doesn’t look possible, we’ll have to pass over a diamond-plasma cutting rig so they can torch their way in.”

Seagraves frowned. “I have a bad feeling about this,” he said. “They may have a plan in case of being caught or detained.”

Romanov shot the captain a look. “Like the North Korean sub a few years ago,” she said slowly.

“Exactly. Approach Officer, surface the ship.”

“Surface, aye, sir. Pilot, vertical surface!”

“Vertical surface, Pilot, aye.” A blasting alarm boomed through control, the OOOO-GAAAH of the diving alarm. The 1MC shipwide announcing circuit blasted out Dankleff’s voice. “Surface! Surface! Surface!” The diving alarm sounded again, but by that time Dankleff had blown forward and aft main ballast and the periscope view rose higher. Pacino looked downward as their own hull emerged from the waves.

“Prepare to place the low-pressure blower on all main ballast tanks,” Dankleff’s voice crackled again on the 1MC. “Approach Officer, raising the snorkel mast.”

“Very well, Pilot.”

Another 1MC announcement, Dankleff saying, “Placing the low-pressure blower on all main ballast tanks!”

A dim roaring sound vibrated the deck from below and aft. The LP blower was a positive displacement unit, much like the supercharger on Pacino’s hotrod, moving air into the ballast tanks. Slowly the hull came fully out of the water.

“Securing the LP blow,” Dankleff said, and the blower’s noise quieted and stopped.

On the hull of the target, the SEALs continued to wait in their crouch, hugging the conning tower. Pacino glanced at the chronometer. It had been a full twelve minutes since he’d surfaced, and still no sign of anyone emerging topside.

“Sonar,” Seagraves called to Albanese. “Any transients from Master One?”

Albanese turned from his console, his hand pressing his right headphone to his ear, as if that would help him detect transients better. He shook his head. “Master One is dead quiet, Skipper.”

Suddenly a speaker crackled in the overhead above the command console. “Victor Three Papa, this is Sierra Four Alpha, over.” Fishman’s voice.

Romanov grabbed a microphone from an overhead cradle, the coiled cord of it extending into a small red unit the size of a shoebox, the VHF Nestor secure voice circuit. She glanced at Seagraves. “Request to answer, Captain?”

Seagraves put out his hand and Romanov handed him the mike.

“Sierra Four Alpha, Victor Three Papa, go ahead.” Seagraves voice echoed back in a strange bubbly burbling tone as his voice was encrypted for transmission.

“Stand by to recover the team.”

The SEALs wanted to come back in, Pacino thought. Something must be very wrong.

“Prepare to return, Victor Three Papa, out,” Seagraves said, handing the mike back to Romanov. “XO, get to the lockout trunk and find out what the hell is going on,” Seagraves ordered. Quinnivan handed his headset to Varney and half-ran out the room.

Romanov nudged Pacino. “Get the upper lockout trunk door open, now.”

“Captain, request to open the lockout trunk hatch?”

“Open the lockout trunk hatch,” Seagraves said, his face a scowl.

“Pilot, open the lockout trunk hatch and drain the lockout trunk.”

Dankleff acknowledged.

Below, on the deck, one of the SEALs had climbed up on the hull, then a second. They’d taken off their gear but for weapons and left the equipment on the target’s deck. Soon all four had vanished down the hatch and the hatch started shutting behind them.

“Lockout trunk hatch indicates shut,” Dankleff said.

It seemed to take another ten minutes before Fishman and Aquatong came into the control room, Quinnivan behind them, the commandos holding white towels around their necks, their wetsuits glistening wet, dripping slightly.

Fishman addressed Seagraves. “We think there may be a self-destruct protocol going on. There could be a big bang coming from that thing.” Fishman crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the deck. Lieutenant junior grade Elias Aquatong stood beside Fishman, running his fingers through his soaked hair.

Pacino kept his eyes on the periscope display, wondering if the target submarine would scuttle itself, or worse, explode with a self-destruct charge. It came to him that they might be too close to his hull.

“What do you want to do?” Seagraves asked Fishman.

“We’re going to break in, Captain, but before we do, you’d better get Vermont to a safe distance. And submerge it. At this point, anything is possible.”

Fifteen minutes later, the SEALs had locked out again and climbed up on the deck of the Bigfoot with several tool bags. Pacino watched them on the periscope display of the command console, having submerged Vermont and driven her out a thousand yards, now hovering half a mile from the narco-sub, his view trained on the conning tower of the target. Two of the commandos were on the foredeck and two were atop the conning tower, attaching the equipment bags to lines tossed down by the crew up high, who lifted them up and stowed them in the conning tower’s cockpit.

The Nestor satellite secure voice radio circuit crackled with static and blooped with the distorted, decrypted voice of Fishman. “Victor Three Papa, odd situation up here. There’s no hatch opening mechanism on the upper hatch and no ISO salvage connection, just smooth steel. As I stepped close to it to try it with a crowbar, the hatch came open by itself. The hatch is fully open now.”

Captain Seagraves took the red microphone from the overhead. “Sierra Four Alpha, were there lights on inside the submarine when the hatch opened?”

What was he getting at, Pacino wondered.

“It’s bright out here, so it would look dark even if it were lit by floodlights in there, but I’m fairly sure it was dark and some lights flashed on when the hatch came fully open.”

“This day just keeps getting better and better,” Romanov muttered.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Pacino replied, still staring at his display.

“You can say that again,” Romanov said to him.

“You mentioned a North Korean submarine to the captain,” Pacino said. Romanov looked at him blankly. “Well. What did you mean?”

“I forget the specifics,” she said. “It was a while ago. A North Korean submarine got snarled in a trawler net inside the territorial waters of South Korea and the sub surfaced. The fishermen alerted the South Korean Navy. A South Korean destroyer grabbed the sub and started towing it to a South Korean naval base, but it sank on the way. So the South Koreans salvage it, and inside? Entire crew was dead, some with a bullet in the forehead, a few with throats slit. There were four cases of suspected suicide, the senior officers in command. The rest of the crew were executed by the senior guys. The conclusion being, none of the officers wanted it known they were captured submerged by their blood enemies, and you know, death before dishonor. They were also probably terrified of what an interrogation would be like. In any case, suicide made more tactical sense to them than surrender.”

“You think that could be happening here?”

Romanov shrugged. “Maybe, but it’s hard to imagine smugglers turning to murder and suicide when caught. Every other narco-sub detained, they took the crews for questioning. At first, they had to let them go, because there were no laws on the books prohibiting sailing a submarine full of coke on the no-man’s land of the high seas. So a year later, there were brand new international laws making smuggling coke in the open ocean a felony, and the crews apprehended after that, well, they won’t be seeing the outside of a high security prison for a long time. They were all hired guns, though, making ten or twenty grand to move the product. A pittance, really, considering the street value of the cargo. And the risks of the trip.”

“Victor, this is Sierra,” the Nestor radio speaker blared with Fishman’s voice. “My XO and I are going inside the hull. I’m leaving a relay unit on top of the conning tower to relay my helmet cam to your displays. Testing it now.”

“Select the tactical freq for your console display,” Romanov said.

“I don’t know how to do that,” Pacino admitted. Romanov moved him over with her hip and showed him how to manipulate the software to change the display readout to receive and display the SEAL commander’s helmet camera. For just a tenth of a second he became aware of the feeling of the touch of the attractive older woman, and he had to blink back his hardwired male response.

The display winked out, then showed the view of Fishman’s head-mounted tactical camera as he looked down at the open hatch. “Am I patched into the Nestor circuit?” he asked someone out of the camera view, his voice coming out of the Nestor speaker in the overhead.

“You’re coming through five by five,” Seagraves said into the red mike.

“Grip and I are going in now. I’ll go first.”

The view out the helmet camera showed Fishman’s view as he looked down in the maw of the hatchway. He stepped down to the first ladder rung inside, climbed down several rungs, then his hands reached out for the ladder. The rungs of the ladder moved by the view until Fishman’s boots landed on the deck, some twenty feet down from the conning tower cockpit.

He did a slow turn through a full circle to show the inside of the boat.

There was almost nothing there.

He looked up at the ladder and ordered Aquatong to wait on the conning tower. “I’m inside the sub,” he said, “and there’s only room for one person in here. I’m standing in a rectangular space barely a meter square and two-and-a-half meters high. The forward wall is a server rack, nothing but computers. In the forward starboard corner there is a video display that seems to be showing the view out of a camera mounted on the forward server rack. To starboard there’s a bulkhead completely taken up with cables and piping. Aft is another server rack. And the port side is like the starboard side, all cables, wires, junction boxes and piping, with a few valves. That’s it.”

Seagraves grabbed his microphone, ready to say something or ask a question, when Fishman’s voice came back, louder this time.

“Oh, that’s not good,” he said. The video screen mounted in the forward starboard corner suddenly came to life, its display showing Fishman’s face, then rewinding slowly to view his face when the camera had seen him best. The screen froze with his face in the video, but with straight lines superimposed on his face, tracing the shape of his face, measuring his cheekbones, nose and eye spacing. “That’s facial recognition for sure,” he said as he vaulted back to the ladder and took the rungs as fast as he could.

“Fuck, hatch is coming shut!” The camera view showed the world spinning as Fishman threw himself out of the upper hatchway onto the deck of the cockpit. He turned his head and the video view showed the hatch almost half shut. Pacino watched as the hatch slowly and smoothly shut all the way.

“Evacuate!” Fishman ordered. “Victor, stay where you are. We’re getting out of here. Sierra, out.”

The helmet cam view winked out. Pacino tried to return the display to the periscope, managing to get it to work on the second try. The SEALs were tossing down equipment bags and rappelling down the conning tower to the sub’s deck. One of the SEALs on the foredeck had inflated a Zodiac rubber boat and outfitted it with a small motor. Within seconds, the equipment and SEALs were embarked and the boat was plowing through the small waves toward Vermont. Pacino kept his view trained to the submarine, noticing in 8x magnification he could see the sub’s periscope optical opening pointed straight at him. Was it possible the submarine had defensive weapons?

“Broach the sail, Mr. Pacino,” Seagraves ordered. “We’ll bring them in through the bridge hatch. XO, go up and meet them.” Quinnivan left the room in a haste.

“Aye, Captain. Pilot, make your depth five zero feet.”

“Five zero feet, Pilot aye. Depth six zero, five five, five zero feet, sir.”

“Very well.” The SEAL boat reached their sail, then became too close to see in the periscope view.

“Approach Officer, bridge trunk upper hatch indicates open.”

“Very well, Pilot,” Pacino said, his periscope view locked onto the narco-sub, which was floating motionless.

“Approach Officer, Sonar,” Albanese called. “I have transients from Master One. Sounds like thumping noises.”

Pacino watched the submarine. Was it getting lower in the water?

“Scuttling charges,” Romanov said. To Pacino, she whispered, “Get a sounding.”

“Nav-ET,” Pacino called, “Mark sounding.”

“Approach Officer,” a young voice said from the aft port corner of control, “Sounding one thousand seventy fathoms.”

“Six thousand feet plus,” Romanov said, her tablet out as she noted the exact latitude and longitude of the target submarine. “A bit too deep to salvage without military equipment.”

On Pacino’s console display, the decks of the sub vanished beneath the waves, only the conning tower still visible, until soon that too vanished.

“Approach Officer, upper bridge access hatch indicates shut.”

Seagraves tapped his gold Annapolis ring on the command console, impatient for word from the SEAL commander. As if on cue, Fishman stepped into the room, wrapped in towels. He looked over at Seagraves.

“Well?”

“You saw what I saw, Captain. Sub was run by some kind of artificial intelligence. With over a billion dollars in cargo, the AI was reluctant to self-destruct until it looked at my face and realized I wasn’t on its list of friendly faces. Then it decided to sink. I’m just lucky it gave me enough time to get out. I wonder if they programmed that as a safety feature in case one of their own guys didn’t get his face recognized properly. So, now, that sub is on its way to Davey Jones’ locker, never to be seen again.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Seagraves said. “I imagine we’ll salvage it to see what was up with its artificial intelligence setup. And to destroy those drugs, of course.”

Fishman shrugged. “In any case, Captain, the mission’s over. I’m going to take a shower.”

“You and your XO please join us in the wardroom once you’re squared away,” Seagraves said.

“Roger,” Fishman said, spinning on his wet heel and heading for his quarters.

Seagraves turned to Pacino. “Mr. Pacino, secure battlestations and station the normal watch section. Take us to patrol depth, course north, ten knots while you wait for the navigator to lay in a course for Andros Island, Bahamas. Once you’re relieved, convene a patrol report party.”

“Aye, Captain,” Pacino said. He picked up the 1MC microphone and clicked it, his voice blasting through the ship. “Secure battlestations, station underway watch section two.” He projected his voice toward the ship control station. “Pilot, make your depth five four six feet, all ahead two thirds, turns for ten knots, steer course north.”

Pacino looked at Romanov, who was leaning over the chart display and plotting a turning point on the approach to the Windward Passage. “What’s a patrol report party?” Pacino asked Romanov.

“We get the control room watchstanders together and get our story straight for the quick reaction situation report and then the top-secret patrol report to the National Security Council and ComSubCom. You’re the junior officer, so lucky you, you get to write the report for all of us to critique.”

Pacino smiled at her. “I am lucky,” he said. “Who else gets to be approach officer on a tactical mission at the tender age of twenty-three?”

Romanov winked at him and clapped his shoulder. “You did well, non-qual. But like the captain said, don’t get cocky.”

Romanov grabbed the 1MC microphone. “Convene the patrol report party in the wardroom,” she said.

What a difference a week made, Pacino thought. A week ago he was a bundle of anxiety and had zero confidence. Today, he was a veteran, swashbuckling pirate. Quite a week, indeed.

11

Lieutenant Commander Romanov was surfaced officer of the deck with Pacino as junior officer of the deck on the short surface run to the AUTEC complex on Andros Island, Bahamas. The sea was a sparkling deep blue, so transparent that the hull of the submarine could be seen below her massive bow wave as she steamed at flank northeast toward the AUTEC piers. A pair of dolphins suddenly burst out of the flow of the sea and arced gracefully over and dived beneath the bow, then jumped out again, the pair playing in the bow wave. For almost two solid minutes, the dolphins swam and jumped joyfully beside them, sometimes on the starboard side, sometimes to port, sometimes one on each side. Romanov looked at Pacino.

“Dolphins are always good luck, non-qual,” she said, her voice loud to overcome the gale force wind of their passage.

Pacino lifted his binoculars and scanned the horizon, but they were alone in the sea. The speed of the ship on the surface made the howling wind feel like a hurricane, but it was warm despite the salty sea spray. The sun shone on them brightly, glinting off the waves. Pacino could feel the skin of his face starting to burn despite the sunscreen he’d applied when they’d surfaced. He looked over at Romanov. Her long chestnut hair, gleaming in the sunshine, was pulled back in a smooth ponytail, the ponytail going through the back of her Vermont ballcap, her eyes obscured by her dark Ray{MISSING SYMBOL}Ban sunglasses, her tall, slender form revealed by the working khaki uniform. Pacino scolded himself for being aware of her as a woman and not as his superior officer. Sometimes he wished he could just disconnect his central nervous system, or the part of it that reacted to the opposite sex. Dammit, he thought, this was work. He wondered how long this mission would last.

“So Navigator,” he asked Romanov, “What happens when we get to AUTEC?”

Romanov shrugged. “The captain will disembark and go talk to whomever he talks to after an op like this. Probably an ultra-secure videolink to some mid-level staffer at the National Security Council.”

“Cool,” Pacino said, taking another scan of the sea with his binoculars. The howling wind, the bow wave’s sound and fury, the furious flapping of the flags aft, the sun, the sea, the sky and the ruler straight horizon, all of them seemed to warm his cold soul. He could steam on the surface like this all day, he thought.

The admiral-in-command of the combined U.S. Navy submarine force, Vice Admiral Robert Catardi, emerged from the relative gloom of the Navy Gulfstream SS-12 supersonic eight-passenger jet into the bright sunshine of the strip on Andros Island, Bahamas. His aide, Lieutenant Commander Wanda Styxx, carried his overnight bag and briefcase as well as her own luggage. A waiting staff car had its trunk open. A female lieutenant saluted him and he returned the salute and climbed into the back of the car with Styxx. As the car rolled off the airfield, Catardi took a look around at the volcanic rocks of the island. Andros wasn’t like Nassau — there was no natural beauty here. This place could have been used as a training ground for moon landings, he thought. The unbroken stretches of volcanic rock extended to the horizon in every direction, which accounted for the large island being completely deserted.

Deserted, that is, except for the DynaCorp / Navy AUTEC installation on the east end, the nearest point to TOTO. AUTEC stood for Atlantic Undersea Testing and Evaluation Center, and TOTO was “Tongue of the Ocean,” a vast deep hole in the sea surrounded by shallow shoals, keeping the area a place unable to be spied on by an underwater adversary, since the only entrance to it was a channel that any submarine would have to surface to transit. TOTO was a bathtub used by the Navy as a submarine testing ground, big enough for submarine vs. submarine exercises and exercise weapon shots. The tub was fully instrumented with 3D sonar, where the submarine doing training could see a projection of their battle after the action ended, in a large theater with a giant projection screen.

But this visit had nothing to do with testing or evaluation, Catardi thought. He turned his tablet machine back on and went over the situation report from the Vermont. He studied it for the tenth time, then reread the text of the patrol report. He’d review the video files again when they reached the guest office at AUTEC. He switched to the summary of the decision theory geek, Gustuvson, and his computer simulations of the attack on the Bigfoot.

The car arrived at the AUTEC complex and Catardi and Styxx got out of the car to get scanned into the security post. Long legged and slender Styxx got out on her side, all hundred and five pounds of her, the brunette younger woman thin and lithe, a veritable ballet dancer, making the two of them an odd couple. Catardi was of medium height, solid, perhaps twenty pounds shy of “stocky,” but still an imposing presence. His formerly coal black hair now had pronounced streaks of gray in it, one streak extending from the center of his forehead all the way back to the nape of his neck, looking ridiculously like a skunk stripe, he thought. Every morning in the mirror, he contemplated dying his hair, and every morning he decided against it. Catardi had a rugged, chiseled face with dark circles under his eyes, not from lack of rest but inherited from his Sicilian father. He could have been credibly cast in a cigarette ad or a movie about a Wyoming sheriff — although his thick south Boston accent would make the latter impossible — but in fact he had once been dragged in to get a screen test for a pharmaceutical ad by his then-girlfriend, Monica Eddlestein, the local Channel Eleven news anchor. He’d failed the screen test, he thought ruefully, which he believed had contributed to the eventual breakup.

Since Monica, there had been no one. He had a bitter, standard Navy-issue ex-wife, or as she described herself, a widow of his extended sea time, and a daughter heading into middle school in another year. Those were the women in his life, for now, he thought. There were females he could attract, he knew, including his dark beauty of an aide, one Wanda “River” Styxx, despite some of his fire-and-brimstone ass-chewings directed her way, but life was full and busy with his trying to run the combined Atlantic and Pacific fleet submarine forces.

Life must have been simpler back when there had been one admiral-in-command of the Atlantic and a second in command of the Pacific fleet, but in the reorganization of the military ten years ago, the forces had been combined into one post. He had purview over both fleets and administratively reported to his boss, Commander-in-Chief U.S. Naval Forces Atlantic/Pacific, or CINCUSNAVLANTPAC, Admiral Greyson Rand, who was a brilliant but demanding boss, always just as close to an explosive lava-filled rant as Catardi himself was. And God knew, talk about difficult bosses — the National Security Council’s leader, former Illinois senator and current National Security Advisor Dana Brady-Hawlings, who couldn’t be meaner if she’d had twelve snarling snakes growing out of her damned head, was whom he reported to for the Fractal Chaos projects. Projects executed by his project boat, the USS Vermont.

After being cleared by security, the car dropped them at the AUTEC administration building. Styxx gave the driver orders to take their bags to the bachelor officers’ quarters, the BOQ, then followed the admiral into the admin building, where a petty officer escorted them to a large guest office. Styxx got them coffee from an adjoining galley while Catardi settled down at the desk to go over the sitrep, patrol report and decision theory results again. He sipped the boiling hot coffee and turned to the situation report first.

“Jesus,” Catardi muttered. A goddamned ultra-secret warshot Kakivak EMP missile, tossed at a civilian freighter by a covert submarine, which after that was no longer covert and could have left American fingerprints on the botched operation. What if it had been a dud? Then the bad guys would have a copy of their most secret weapon system. Catardi manipulated the tablet to take him to the Vermont’s patrol report. It was a fleshed-out version of the situation report, but with charts and images of the chart output and the periscope display. There was a video, a long one.

Catardi linked his tablet to the wide-screen television on the side of the office away from the windows, shut the blinds, and played the video, finding one of the leather club chairs facing the television, deep in concentration as he watched the control room video. When Lieutenant junior grade Pacino suggested launching the Kakivak missile, Catardi froze the frame, thinking about his history with the young man. There was no doubt, that kid was even more crazily ballsy than his old man. Catardi watched the faces of Seagraves, Quinnivan and Romanov as they reacted to the non-qual junior officer’s suggestion. They’d weighed the risks, he thought, and had done what they thought was right. He would have to convince the National Security Advisor of that, he thought. He pressed “play” and watched the video stream from the SEAL commander’s tactical helmet cam.

After the video ended, Catardi went back to his desk and opened his tablet again to the scenarios described by his artificial intelligence decision theory experts. After an hour, Styxx reminded him it was time to meet the officers of the Vermont.

When they arrived at the pier and stationed the in-port duty section, a message came in marked “personal for commanding officer.” Romanov was summoned to the captain’s stateroom, where Executive Officer Quinnivan was already seated at the captain’s small table.

“Have a seat, Nav, and read this message.”

She read aloud the terse message displayed on Seagraves’ tablet. “USS Vermont CO, XO, TAO/NAV ordered to report to AUTEC’s special compartmented information facility 13 May at 1300 for a debrief with ComSubCom Vice Admiral R. Catardi.” She looked up at Seagraves, the tension evident in the lines of his face. She glanced at Quinnivan, who had looked back with a dour expression of disappointment, perhaps even sadness.

“Catardi’s never had us do a debrief before,” she said uncertainly.

“We’ve never had mission failure before,” Quinnivan said, shaking his head slowly.

The words hung heavily in the air. Romanov realized the term mission failure had never been connected with the previously unblemished record of the USS Vermont.

“I know what this is,” Seagraves said. “It’s a ‘comearound.’”

Quinnivan raised an eyebrow. “Pray tell, Captain, what’s a comearound?”

“Listen up, you poor uninitiated personnel. Plebe year at the Naval Academy,” Seagraves began. He crossed his arms and leaned back in his command chair and continued, “plebes being the newly reporting freshmen, found themselves in a harsh prisoner-of-war environment characterized by being forced to memorize huge amounts of information — famous naval sayings, every coach of every Navy sport, the scores of each bowl game played by the Navy football team in all of recorded history, the quarter-by-quarter story of the last three Army-Navy football games, the hometown and birthday of every man-Jack in the company, every officer in the tactical and academic departments, on and on, with more added every miserable day — and reciting said data without hesitation when demanded by the ruthless firsties—first classmen, the seniors acting as drill instructors — at a meeting of the twelve man platoon in the passageway of The Hall—the corridor of the dorm — while standing braced up — a rigid posture of attention with your chin pulled so hard into your neck that you make at least a dozen wrinkles, while keeping your head up, eyes locked in front of you, staring into the far distance, while the firstie would scream at you from an inch in front of your nose at the slightest mistake or hesitation. It was called a comearound.

“Perhaps the most unpleasant half hour you’ll ever spend in your life, and it happened four or five times a day. And it was a verb as well. ‘Come around,’ Mr. Seagraves, a pissed-off firstie would bark, which meant your meeting with the firstie would be one-on-one, for that extra special attention. Now, keep that up for over two months including weekend days, and there you have your introduction to the hallowed traditions of the United States Naval Academy.”

“Jaysus,” Quinnivan said. “Sounds like an abusive little boarding school for wayward boys.”

“Explains why you ‘boat school’ guys are such hard-asses,” Romanov said. “No offense, Captain.”

“None taken,” Seagraves said, almost smiling, but the smile turning back to his dark expression from before. If this meeting were a comearound, it meant the boss was displeased with their mission result. Or as Quinnivan had put it, mission failure.

Commander Seagraves, Lieutenant Commander Quinnivan and Lieutenant Commander Romanov were escorted by a scowling petty officer in blue-gray digital camouflage NWUs, the shapeless Navy working uniform, to a SCIF secure conference room on the ground floor. They entered the conference room’s airlock’s outer heavy wooden door, then a steel door, then finally a heavy composite door with sound-isolation padding on the inside. The petty officer shut the door behind him. The silence in the room after the door closed seemed eerie.

Romanov took in the room. On a solid oak conference table, there was a pitcher of water with glasses and coasters and a coffee service set up in the center. Seagraves waved Quinnivan and Romanov to seats on either side of the seat he chose at the center of the table, the XO on his right, the navigator on his left. He passed out coffee mugs and filled Romanov’s cup, then raised an eyebrow at Quinnivan.

“I’ll definitely have coffee, Captain.” He poured cream and dumped sugar into the brew and stirred it up.

Romanov glanced nervously at the door. Several minutes after the appointed hour of 1300, the door of the conference room came open and Vice Admiral Robert Catardi rushed in, dressed in sharp tropical whites, with his aide, a slender worried-looking female lieutenant commander with a nameplate reading STYXX, following behind him.

“Attention on deck,” Seagraves commanded, and the Vermont’s officers bolted to their feet and came to attention, Romanov thinking about Seagraves’ definition of a comearound.

“Stand easy,” Catardi said, frowning as he reached out and shook Seagraves’ hand, then Quinnivan’s and Romanov’s. His grip was strong but momentary, without warmth. The admiral was in a foul mood, Romanov realized. He walked around the table and pulled out a seat opposite Seagraves and tossed his hat on the table. Putting a hat on a table was strictly prohibited by Navy protocol with the one exception — if an officer or sailor had been to the North Pole, it was obligatory to put his hat on the table. Few but submariners could boast of visiting the pole. He waved Styxx to a seat on his right and took his tablet computer when she handed it to him. He paged through a few displays, then looked up at Seagraves.

“Let’s get right to it,” Catardi said grimly. “What the hell did you think you were doing, tossing a warshot Kakivak at a civilian merchant ship?”

Seagraves seemed ready for the harsh question. “The cargo ship buttoned up his hold and then ran up to full speed at a vector directly aimed at the narco-sub, and our own periscopes were in his same line-of-sight. He was either going to position himself to escort the submarine part way or all the way to his destination or he was investigating why another submarine’s periscopes were following his narco-sub. Either way, the cargo’s ship’s unanticipated interference spelled the certainty of mission failure.”

Catardi frowned, leaning back in his seat and looking into Seagraves eyes, then over at Quinnivan and finally at Romanov.

“Yesterday, while you were on your flank run on the way here, I called in the AI decision theory geeks. I had them program two different and competing artificial intelligence systems. One of them was given all the data from your sitrep and patrol report. The other only knew what you did when you began the mission. Then we ran scenarios with various levels of bias of the Vermont programmed into the simulation. For our purposes today, the term ‘bias’ means aggressiveness.”

Romanov stared at Catardi, thinking that if his simulations showed a viable way of mission success, this would not go well for the three of them. She went back to the moment that Pacino recommended the Kakivak launch and wondered what else they could have done.

“Scenario one. Low level of bias programmed. Twenty percent aggressiveness. Artificial Vermont dipped periscopes, drove off the line-of-sight to the cargo ship, steamed east and monitored the position of the cargo ship to see if it were escorting the narco-sub or trying to intercept Vermont. With a probability in the high ninety percent level, the cargo ship fell in alongside the narco-sub to escort it out of the Caribbean Sea. The alternative to go after Vermont was low probability after Vermont dipped her periscopes. After the scope dip, Vermont was undetectable from the cargo ship. From that point, there was a fifty percent probability that Vermont lost contact with the narco-sub and could only trail the cargo ship. Mission failure. Then a fifty percent probability that Vermont tracked the narco-sub but couldn’t stop and board it because of the company of the cargo ship escort. Either way? Mission failure with the worst possible outcome — the narco-sub completed its mission and delivered its cargo.”

Catardi paused to pour himself coffee, dumping in three artificial sweeteners handed him by Styxx. The room was pin-drop silent, waiting for Catardi to continue.

“Scenario two. A higher level of bias of the Vermont, at about forty percent aggression. Cargo ship starts up and heads for the narco-sub. Vermont dips scopes, drives off east, verifies that the cargo ship is headed for the narco-sub and not Vermont herself, then commences trailing the cargo ship and the narco-sub, following them all the way to the Windward Passage, Paso de los Vientos, between Cuba and Haiti’s northwest tip. At the entrance to the Atlantic, the Sargasso Sea, Vermont waited to see whether the cargo ship would turn back to Colombia or continue the escort operation all the way up Cuba’s northeast coastline to Miami.

Catardi downed his coffee and Styxx refilled his cup and put the sweetener in. Romanov studied Styxx’s face, wondering if there were anything going on between the admiral and his aide. Styxx seemed clingy, but the admiral was cold as steel.

“We divided the scenario at that point. Scenario two alpha — the cargo ship continued escort operations northward and all Vermont could do at this level of bias was radio ahead to the U.S. Coast Guard, which boarded the cargo ship but lost the narco-sub. Mission failure again, with failure to interdict the cargo. Or steal the target sub. Scenario two bravo — the cargo ship turned back and Vermont deployed the SEALs. At a high percentage, the commandos captured the narco-sub, broke in, and the sub sank, but in much shallower water. Mission failure, but a situation far worse than your actual reality, with the narco-sub lost in shallow water, which means she could be salvaged by the bad guys and the drugs recovered.”

Catardi finished this coffee and swiveled in his chair to put the cup back on the credenza behind him. Romanov looked for a sign from him. So far, the low level of aggression of the simulated Vermont had resulted in worse situations than the actual mission result. But Catardi’s mood still seemed dark. Maybe one of the simulations triumphed.

“Scenario three. Bias dialed up to eighty percent, the AI’s estimate of the equivalent of its evaluation of your real-life aggression level.”

Seagraves’ face revealed his tell, just the hint of his lips drawing back, as if he were about to smirk, Romanov thought. That the computers evaluated their aggression level at eighty percent seemed to please him. His face returned to his normal attentive poker face.

“Cargo ship follows the narco-sub into the Atlantic, staying close to Cuban shores. Vermont says ‘fuck it’ and deploys the SEALs anyway. Narco-sub surfaces. SEALs board the sub. Sailors on board the cargo ship open fire on the SEALs with automatic weapons. Two of the commandos are killed. The other two took cover behind the conning tower and returned fire. Cargo ship sailors fired two RPGs at the SEALs.”

Rocket-propelled grenades, Romanov thought, which she knew were in the weapons inventory of the cartel.

“Then five more. Conning tower blown apart, remaining two SEALs dead. Cargo ship heaves to and takes the narco-sub in tow, back to Columbia. The mission result — the loss of four Navy SEALs and the cartel’s recovery of the drugs and the sub, able to try again later. Mission failure, but again, much worse than your actual mission’s outcome.

“So, scenario four. Bias dialed up to a full one hundred percent. At the point the cargo ship starts driving in to establish its escort operation, Vermont fires a salvo of four Mod nine ADCAP torpedoes at the cargo ship. Cargo ship spectacularly explodes and sinks, killing some four dozen cartel sailors, so none of them could be captured and interrogated. SEALs board the narco-sub and it sinks, but this time two SEALs were trapped aboard when it went down. Loss of two commandos, the cargo ship’s exploding on the front pages of the news files, loss of the narco-sub and cargo, but in deep water. So a similar mission result with respect to the target sub and the drugs, but with fifty souls lost, including two of our own, and a reputational problem if the cargo ship’s exploding and sinking is linked to the U.S. Navy. It would be a scandal.”

“So, Admiral, we seem to have found the sweet spot,” Seagraves said, that tell happening again, Romanov thought. The captain was secretly pleased.

The first glimpse of light seemed come into Catardi’s mood. He pursed his lips, then smiled just slightly, just for a fragment of a moment.

“That’s what I’m going to tell the National Security Advisor, Dana Brady-Hawlings.” Catardi said her name contemptuously as if cursing and spitting. “And now this whole Kakivak fiasco becomes my goddamned idea.” Catardi took his tablet from the table, made a few corrections to a document, clicked the screen and looked up at Seagraves. “Check it, Commander.”

Seagraves looked over at Romanov’s tablet while Quinnivan clicked into his own machine. It was an order, an operation order, an op-order. Dated from five days ago, May 8, the time stamp just before midnight. It ordered Vermont to make haste to Santa Marta and take charge of the narco-sub, and if there were the slightest interference from the cargo ship, to immobilize it with a Kakivak EMP cruise missile. Seagraves looked up at Catardi.

“Thank you, sir.”

Romanov breathed a deep sigh of relief. They were off the hook after all. That bitch of a mission may have failed, but none of the AI could do any better. And now Admiral Catardi had given his imprimatur to their tactics with a backdated order to do exactly what they’d improvised.

“Which brings me to the real purpose of this meeting,” Catardi said, while Styxx lowered a screen at the far end of the narrow room. She clicked her tablet to pair it to the projector, and a view of the earth from overhead Andros Island and the Atlantic Ocean appeared, the deep blue of the sea and emerald green of the land masses making the view seem inviting.

“Just a side comment before we go on,” Catardi said. “Did you note that the difference between eighty percent aggression and a hundred percent aggression is pure undistilled stupidity?”

Romanov nodded. She’d been thinking the same thing.

“Anyway, here we are, Andros Island, Bahamas. I’m ordering you to take a great circle route to the southern tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Agulhas and up northward into the Indian Ocean.”

An animated bright dotted line appeared, drawing a curve on the globe from Andros Island and extending south toward the south Atlantic and around South Africa and turning north-northeast up the eastern African coastline toward Saudi Arabia.

“You’ll enter the Gulf of Oman here, off Cape al-Hadd, Oman, and head toward the Strait of Hormuz and loiter off the Iranian Navy base at Bandar Abbas, which has access to the Persian Gulf to the west and the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea to the east. And yes, Madame Navigator,” Catardi said to Romanov, “it would, in fact, be much faster to route you through Gibraltar, the Med, the Suez Canal and around the Saudi peninsula, but surfacing Vermont to transit the Suez Canal in front of a thousand spies would only happen if we wanted the bad guys to know we were coming. For this mission, stealth is important. Vital, in fact. Your run to South Africa and up the Indian Ocean will be a dark transit done at flank speed, with only one excursion to periscope depth per day for a navigation fix. By ‘dark transit,’ I mean no communications in or out. Complete radio silence until the mission is complete. That means no emails, in or out. After you leave the pier here, the next thing I expect to hear from you is your situation report. Your sitrep reporting complete mission success.”

Catardi looked at Romanov again. “This means you’ll be going over seven thousand nautical miles full-out at flank speed, with only daily excursions to periscope depth to grab a NavSat fix. However, once you round the cape and enter the Indian Ocean, no more periscope depth excursions. You’ll be navigating solely using bottom contour and gravity contour the whole way to keep SINS behaving. Bottom contour nav loses accuracy at high speed without you slowing down to explore an area to cross reference the bottom contours, but we’re going to have to live with your fix error circle growing to the size of Connecticut until you approach the Saudi peninsula. Then you’ll downshift main coolant pumps, go to natural circulation, rig for ultra-quiet and sneak into the Gulf of Oman at no more than eight knots, only popping the scope up long enough for a navigation fix.”

Catardi expanded the map, zooming into an area drawn around Bandar Abbas Naval Base.

“You’re authorized entry within the territorial sea of the Republic of Iran as directed by the president. There will be no written directive to penetrate nor will there be a written op-order for this mission. Your radio suite and crypto equipment will be rigged for programmed self-destruct if the unlock codes aren’t input every hour.”

“What is the mission, Admiral?” Seagraves asked, looking at the blown-up chart of the Strait of Hormuz.

Catardi clicked the next slide, showing a submarine inside a huge assembly building, with massive steel bridge cranes overhead, scaffolding surrounding the vessel, which was placed on top of blocks on the factory floor. The submarine looked weathered. It had seen sea duty.

Romanov looked at the photograph closely. “Is that a Kilo-class?” she said.

“Indeed it is,” Catardi said. “Iran has three older Russian-built Kilo-class diesel-electric attack submarines. Enough of a threat to sink shipping in the gulf. But the Iranians and their nuclear ambitions have progressed to the point of initiating ‘Project Panther.’”

Catardi clicked to the next slide. In this photograph, the Kilo diesel submarine had been torched into a forward portion and an after half. The halves had been moved apart by thirty feet.

“Guess what’s going in there?”

“A missile compartment for ballistic missiles?” Romanov asked. “Nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles?”

“Nope,” Catardi said, turning to the next slide. In this photo, a cylindrical can had appeared between the submarine’s halves. In the photo’s center, the inside of the new module could be seen with bright work lights shining on the interior’s equipment.

“That’s a — that’s a reactor,” Quinnivan breathed.

“Exactly,” Catardi said. “The Russians are lending Iran an experimental lead-bismuth liquid metal cooled nuclear fast reactor, the UBK-500 model, the grandson of the reactors that powered the storied Lira Project 705 class, the submarine class we and NATO called ‘Alfa.’ This unit puts out eighty megawatts thermal from a reactor vessel smaller than your water heater at home. The remainder of the module is the steam generator, ship’s service steam turbine and propulsion steam turbine. The propulsion turbine’s output goes to the Kilo-class’ main motor, which can now run on electricity generated by the nuke in addition to the diesel propulsion generator or the batteries.”

Catardi clicked to the next slide, a profile drawing of the Kilo with the new fast reactor and generator module plugged in. It made the Kilo longer, but the Kilo was a stubby submarine in its original configuration. With the reactor module installed, the submarine looked like it had been meant to have a nuclear reactor.

“The reactor is of key interest to us. The Russians seem to have vaulted ahead in technology with this unit. As you may know, liquid metal reactors have one big problem. At a temperature below 123 degrees Celsius, the metal coolant freezes. It ‘rocks up’ and can’t be melted again without damaging the nuclear fuel modules and making the thing hellishly radioactive, and ruining it permanently. The Russians added something to the mix that makes the coolant stay in liquid form at ambient temperature. That’s ambient temperature in freezing Murmansk, people. And whatever it is that the Russians added to the coolant, it doesn’t become radioactive at a level any higher than the lead-bismuth itself.”

Romanov spoke up. “If this unit is new and secret, why are they giving it to the Iranians to test? Why wouldn’t they test it on one of their own prototype submarines after trying it out in a controlled lab setting?”

“Question of the hour, Madame Navigator. We only have theories. There’s no intelligence about this reactor being tested on land or sea. There are those who think that this thing being a fast reactor — that is, critical on fast neutrons — could go supercritical and become uncontrollable. A reactor runaway on this unit could even go prompt critical and experience a rapid disassembly.”

“Prompt critical rapid disassembly,” Romanov said slowly.

“Explosion, you mean,” Quinnivan said. “You mean just blowing itself apart and scattering radioactivity all over God’s green earth? Or a nuclear explosion?”

Catardi shrugged. “Odds are, just the dirty, radioactive blowing-apart scenario, but there is the possibility it could have a small nuclear yield in the five to ten kiloton level. About half of a Hiroshima bomb.”

Quinnivan whistled.

“So,” Seagraves said, that slight smirk appearing on his face. “Let me guess.”

Catardi began to smile. “Don’t steal my thunder, Commander. That’s right, officers of the project submarine USS Vermont, the United States Navy wants you to steal this submarine. You’ll be keeping the SEALs you had embarked for the narco-sub operation for this op. And you’ll take the Panther the same way you took the narco-sub.”

“So that whole narco-sub mission, that was just a dry run for this?” Romanov asked.

“Goddamn, you’re smart,” Catardi said, his brilliant smile finally appearing. “You got any sisters at home?”

Romanov blushed. At least Catardi’s sarcasm hadn’t been too biting.

“The only difference is you’ll be breaking into a submarine that’s definitely manned, not computer controlled. Which means, to sail it out of the gulf and the thirteen thousand miles back here, you’ll need to man the Panther with some of your officers and sail home short-handed. Commander Seagraves, I leave it to you to decide how to man the stolen Panther to sneak it submerged out of the Gulf of Oman and sail it back to AUTEC on the same route you took to get there. Once here at Andros, we’ll bring in a crew and run it through the Tongue of the Ocean test range, then it’ll go to a facility we’re hastily putting together here for us to rip it apart. Normally, we’d take it to a naval shipyard to peek at this unit’s guts, but given the dangers of this particular nuclear reactor, we’re going to analyze it right here on uninhabited Andros Island. If it does blow up like a nuke, it’ll only damage the DynaCorp complex. And officers, as before, there will be no written op-order. This is the operation order, our discussion in this room.”

Seagraves took a glass from the center of the table and filled it with an inch of water. He looked at it. “You know Admiral, hearing all this, I could really use something stronger than water in this glass.”

“You read my thoughts exactly,” Catardi said, standing, smiling at the Vermont’s officers. “I want you to convene your wardroom at the AUTEC officers’ club at eighteen hundred. Drinks and dinner are on me tonight. Bring the SEAL officers with you. And I want to see young Pacino again before I fly back.”

“Absolutely, Admiral, and thank you.”

Catardi stood and reached for his hat. “I’m going to grab a room at the Q,” Catardi said, referring the bachelor officers’ quarters, BOQ, or just, ‘the Q.’ “Uniform for the O-club tonight is ultra-casual. As for me, I’ll be in jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt.”

Ten minutes later on the walk back to the pier, Romanov looked at Seagraves. “Do you think there will be any more information coming our way about this Panther submarine?”

Seagraves shook his head. “For now, we sail with only the tactical files we have, but it wouldn’t surprise me if our systems get an update when we reach the Gulf of Oman.”

Romanov nodded and grimaced. For fuck’s sake, she thought. Stealing an improvised drug sub was one thing. Stealing an Iranian nuclear submarine, now that was quite another.

12

The knock came to Robert Catardi’s BOQ room door as he was changing out of the Grateful Dead T-shirt into the Harley shirt displaying a skeleton in flames zooming in a crazy speed demon’s motorcycle, the bike trailing flames as well. Somehow it just seemed more appropriate to his mood, he thought.

He pulled on the shirt and opened the door. It was Wanda Styxx, done up in tight jeans and full combat makeup, with tall black boots and a tight red top that dipped low into her décolletage, but she needn’t have bothered. Catardi knew his aide liked him, but that was not to be. Navy Regulations aside, she wasn’t his type. Styxx had that athletic dancer’s body, Catardi thought. He liked voluptuous women with lots of curves. The kind of woman who, when she entered a room, conversation stopped. Like his ex-wife. Damned shame they’d broken up, he thought. Before she had turned into a rage-filled bitter lunatic, she’d been perfect for him.

“Admiral,” Styxx said breathlessly, shaking her long hair off one shoulder. “You’ve got to see this.” She held out her tablet, opened to a Satellite News Network article and pointed to it with a manicured fingernail.

“Wow,” Catardi said, handing her the tablet after scanning the text of the article, but Styxx forced it back into his hands.

“You’ve got to read the last paragraph, Admiral.”

He paged the article down to the last sentence.

“Holy shit,” Catardi breathed. It was too good to be true, he thought. Pacino had been Catardi’s first submarine captain, a million years ago aboard Pacino’s first command, the USS Devilfish, the Piranha-class ship, not the SSNX submarine of fifteen years later. Catardi had been a young non-qual, reporting aboard Pacino’s Devilfish just after the change-of-command ceremony. Two years of serving with then-Commander Pacino, Catardi had grown from being a shy, uncertain non-qual newcomer to a swashbuckling, cocky, dolphin-wearing senior lieutenant. Catardi had rotated off for a three-month temporary assignment to study for his chief nuclear engineer’s exam, and as chance had it, that was just before the secret orders came in that resulted in Devilfish sinking under the polar ice cap, with the loss of all souls aboard except for Pacino himself. He’d never seen the senior officer again, and other than serving under his command of the Unified Submarine Command years ago, and later when Pacino was CNO, Catardi hadn’t thought about him until his son, Midshipman First Class Anthony Pacino, reported aboard Catardi’s submarine command, the USS Piranha, for his midshipman cruise.

This would certainly change things. Instead of the ass-chewing he’d expected from Brady-Hawlings over the Kakivak attack, he could explain it to an understanding fellow submariner. He wondered if young Anthony Pacino had heard the news.

Catardi handed back the tablet to Styxx. “Come on. We’ll be late for the Vermont officers and SEALs.”

Lieutenant junior grade Anthony Pacino stood up from the wardroom table when the outside line’s phone rang. He shot a look at Lieutenant Li No, who was the duty officer, who nodded toward the phone, as if to say, you answer it, non-qual.

Pacino picked up the handset. “USS Vermont wardroom, this is a non-secure line, duty officer under-instruction Pacino speaking, may I help you, sir or ma’am?” It was a mouthful to bark out instead of simply saying “hello,” but it was required.

“Hello Anthony,” his father’s baritone voice crackled on the connection, his tone warm.

“Dad! How are you? Where are you? How did you know you could reach me here?”

His father’s laugh came over the phone. “I got asked to take a job in D.C.,” he said. “Turns out I now have the clearance and the need-to-know to be briefed on what you’re up to, so I thought I’d reach out and tell you I’m thinking about you.”

“I miss you, Dad. I wish we could talk about, you know, stuff.” There were so many things Pacino wanted to tell his father about. The narco-sub operation, his suggestion to lob an EMP weapon at the cargo ship, the crew of the Vermont, but no matter what his father’s new clearance was, all that was off the table.

“Listen, I have it on good authority you’ll be going out to dinner with my old buddy Robbie Catardi tonight. Make sure to tell him I send my warmest regards.”

“I would, Dad, but, well, I’m kind of inport duty officer under-instruction. No liberty at the O-club for me.”

The older Pacino laughed again. “I doubt that, Son. But anyway, I’d better bounce, the boss is standing in my doorway.”

“It was good to talk to you, Dad,” Pacino said.

“You too, Son. Good luck and good hunting.”

The line clicked off. Pacino hung up the phone. Good hunting—a submariner’s term for “get out there, find ’em and sink ’em.” What the hell did his father know about the next mission?

Li No looked over. “Must be nice to have a high-powered father. That’s a hell of a connection.”

“Not really,” Pacino said. “Dad’s been retired for years.”

“I don’t think so,” Lieutenant No said, sliding his pad computer across the wardroom table to Pacino. Pacino leaned over and read the article about Brady-Hawlings, eventually getting to the sentence that ended the article.

“You know what that means, right?” Li No said. “Your boss is Captain Seagraves. Seagraves’ boss is Admiral Catardi. And Catardi’s boss is none other than Admiral Pacino, daddy dearest. A complete circle. Talk about nepotism.”

Pacino shook his head. Somehow his world was coming together again after the horror-filled years after the Piranha sinking. At the moment the captain had accepted his recommendation to launch the Kakivak missile, Pacino finally felt like himself again, not the walking ghost of a month ago.

The supply officer’s side door to the wardroom opened. Executive Officer Lieutenant Commander Jeremiah Quinnivan leaned in. He was dressed as he had been for the ship’s party, an old T-shirt over jeans, falling-apart boots, with a lumberjack open shirt worn over the ensemble.

“Pacino! Let’s go, dammit. You’re late and you’re fookin’ out of uniform!”

“I’m sorry sir, I’m duty officer under-instruction.”

“No you’re not. Now get your fookin’ ass into casual clothes and join us on the pier. You’ve got two minutes and thirty seconds.”

“Yessir,” Pacino said, rushing to the ladder to the upper level. He changed and climbed out the plug hatch and emerged into the brilliant Caribbean sunlight of the late afternoon.

President Vito “Paul” Carlucci opened the door to the crowded room, flashed his dazzling smile at the personnel who all rose to their feet at attention. Carlucci was slender, well over six feet tall, in his late fifties, with a distinguished look owing to the gray streaks of hair that swooped over his ears. Normally never seen out of an expensive suit, on this Saturday, he was dressed in golf clothes — chinos, a short-sleeved Polo shirt, multicolored patterned socks and sneakers. The rest of the room’s inhabitants looked like they’d dressed for Monday morning. Generals and admirals in dress uniforms, cabinet secretaries in suits, their aides sitting along the wall likewise formally dressed.

“Let’s make this fast, people,” Carlucci said, seating himself in his leather swivel chair at the end of the polished table and opening a briefing book.

“Mr. President,” Secretary of War Bret Coppin Hogshead began formally, “the Vice President is remote in Austin, Texas and is present by secure videolink. Also present by video is CIA Director Allende, who is at Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, Israel. Presenting today will be CIA’s Director of Operations, Angel Menendez. Co-presenting will be General Zvi Amit of the U.S. Cyber Command, under the Department of War. Also present today are the chief officers of the Joint Cyber Warfare Task Force, a joint development group of the War Department’s NSA and CIA’s international cyberwarfare team. The briefing book in front of you has a hardcopy of Angel’s presentation.”

Carlucci yawned into his fist. Famously bored by technology and especially computers, he had wanted to delegate these meetings to his VP, Karen Chushi, but after the Stuxnet flap, all cyberattacks had to be personally approved by the president himself. Like authorizing a nuclear strike, it required presidential authority.

“Fine. Let’s start,” Carlucci said. “But give me the Cliffs Notes’ version.”

“Yes, sir,” Menendez said. Solid and shorter than medium height, Menendez sported a goatee and spoke with a slight Cuban accent. His great grandfather had fought in the Cuban Bay of Pigs conflict, and he came from four generations of CIA officers. “The name of the operation and the name of the worm itself—”

“Worm?” Carlucci asked.

“Sorry, Mr. President,” Menendez said. “By ‘worm’ we mean an algorithm. A computer program. A virus. A piece of software code that gets inserted into an adversary’s computer systems with the intent of causing various forms of damage, like the Stuxnet virus did to Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility some time ago.”

“Right,” Carlucci said. “Please ignore my ignorance and proceed.”

“The name of the operation and the name of the worm — the algorithm — are the same, and that name is Harmaakarhu, which in Finnish means ‘grizzly bear.’”

“Wait, why Finnish?”

“Well, sir, of all the languages’ translations of the word ‘grizzly bear,’ the Finnish version is the coolest.”

Carlucci laughed.

“Actually, sir, it was a random word generator run by CIA, but I like my version better,” Menendez smiled.

“Go on then, Mr. Menendez.”

“Yes, sir. Anyway, the effect of the worm will be to invade Iranian Navy computer systems and cause them to stop communicating with each other. Most of them will just brick — go black, sir, and stop functioning. The worm is intended to paralyze Iranian logistics networks and operational control assets of the Iranian Air Force, Naval Air Force and Iranian Navy’s surface action forces. Pretty much everything in the Iranian Navy with the exception of their submarines.”

Carlucci frowned. “Why not their submarines?”

“Sir, that ties into a separate operation that we will be briefing you on next week.”

Carlucci waved. “No problem. So, why are we doing this, exactly?”

“Well, sir, technically, it’s not we who are doing it. The Mossad will be executing the cyberattack. We’ll hand the worm code over to Mossad after you sign off with your permission, and then they will get it inserted into a normal system software patching and update version, so it will be accepted into the Iranian networks and then go to sleep for five days, then it will become active.”

“Okay, understood, but that’s tactics, Mr. Menendez. What is the grand strategy here?”

“Functionally, Mr. President, we’re fundamentally attacking Russian systems from a vector they trust — the Iranians. We infect the Iranian systems, and within days, the multiple interfaces between Iranian systems and Russian systems put the worm deep into the Russian networks. All their analysts will see is a threat vector from Iran. Sir, they will chase their tails for three weeks over this, minimum. At the point you deem appropriate, you can order the kill code. Boom, worm dies. All Iranian and Russian systems return to nominal. And the attack on Russian systems, well, it flanges into your directive regarding an operation we can’t talk about here, at this time.” Because, Menendez thought, the Israelis weren’t read into the Fractal Chaos program.

“Okay. I understand the front end. I understand the objective. Now tell me about the downside. First, can we or Israel be blamed for this attack?”

“Sir, we can’t promise the answer is negative, but we have done everything technically possible to scrub the code of any agency fingerprints. We’ve actually hired amateur coders — hackers, if you will, Mr. President — to give the line-by-line code the look and feel of it being originated by civilians, not state actors. We’ve run it through the AI that guards our own networks to see if it could detect it. It was not able to detect it. So confidence is high, sir.”

“Mr. Menendez, if our guardian AI missed detecting this virus, isn’t that cause for concern? If you and your band of scruffy hackers can defeat it, what’s to stop some angry Venezuelans from penetrating our systems?”

“We have a briefing for you on that on Wednesday, sir.”

“Oh my God, this never ends, does it?” Carlucci remarked in frustration.

“Sorry sir,” Menendez said in sympathy.

“And what, Mr. Menendez, are the unintended consequences of us releasing this bug? Sorry, this worm?”

“Nothing that can be foreseen, sir, but let me reassure you that everything that can be anticipated that could blow back on us has been considered.”

“This will affect Iran and Russia only? No chance of it breaking out of those two cages and getting into Germany’s defense systems? I don’t need Iron Ida Schwarzzen to be pissing in my ear that all her naval systems are down.” Ida Schwarzzen was the renown prime minister of the new German government, a scrapper who had no affection for America or Americans.

“Not a chance, sir. It will definitely stay in its lane.”

“Well, okay then,” Carlucci said, sounding almost sleepy. “You have permission to proceed.” Menendez handed Carlucci a leather folder with a document inside it. Carlucci scanned it and signed it with a fountain pen enclosed in the folder. He stood up. “Well, have a good weekend, all.” With another politician’s smile flashed at the crowd, he disappeared out of the room, the crowd of military officers and cabinet officials leaving after him.

Angel Menendez looked up at the video screen and saw his boss, Margo Allende, turn to talk to a man partially off-screen. For a moment, he leaned in to point at something on Allende’s tablet computer, and when he did, Menendez recognized the famous billionaire and software mogul, Elias Sotheby, one of the architects of the Harmaakarhu worm. Allende smiled at him and nodded, and he left. She turned back to the screen. Menendez gave a crooked smile to Allende. “Well, Madam Director, get that worm going and get back here. You know what they say about when the cat’s away.”

Allende smiled. “I have it on good authority that you love when your boss is out of town.”

“Total lies,” Menendez laughed. “Whoever says that is totally lying.”

“See you soon, Angel.”

With that, Allende clicked off.

Pacino blinked in the bright sunshine of the pier, his eyes used to the relative dimness of the submarine’s interior. The air smelled funny, then he realized it was because it was fresh sea air that didn’t stink of atmospheric control amines, diesel fumes, ozone and cooking grease. He half ran over to the waiting white bus with the DynaCorp logo painted on the side. He stepped in the bus door and took the two steps up to the aisle between the seats, and immediately the Vermont’s officers started jeering at him.

“Look at this guy,” Quinnivan teased. “Khakis and a damned Polo shirt. And fancy little topsiders.”

Pacino surveyed the crowd, who all seemed to sport cargo shorts, flip-flops and T-shirts as if they were headed to the beach rather than dinner with the admiral in command of the submarine force.

“Well, Bullfrog, he is sort of royalty,” Romanov said, smiling that beautiful smile of hers at Pacino, her eyes sparkling. “He has to dress the part.” Pacino looked at Romanov, who looked stunning, wearing shorts that revealed her long, tanned legs, with a tight, revealing tube top and sandals that had three-inch heels. Her hair shone, cascading in loose curls down to her shoulders. Her eyes were made up, the eyeliner making her eyes even more gorgeous. Lip gloss graced her full lips. For a moment he stared at her, unable to deny an animal attraction to the woman, and when she noticed, she winked at him and said, “sit down, you non-qual air-breathing puke.”

Pacino blushed, hoping no one noticed him ogling the navigator, and plopped into a seat for the short ride to the officers’ club. The club was a humble, rusted Quonset hut with a neon domestic beer sign in the front window. Inside there were what seemed dozens of cheap tables and chairs, with the bar and grill in the back of the long narrow structure. The club was deserted except for them, Pacino imagining that the DynaCorp personnel had flown back to the mainland for the weekend. At the back, near the bar, half a dozen tables had been pushed together. Standing at the end of the table was Vice Admiral Catardi with his attractive aide. Catardi wore jeans, sandals and a motorcycle T-shirt. His aide wore tight jeans, boots and silk blouse, made up with warpaint and looking like she’d be going to an upscale nightclub later in the evening. Catardi broke into a warm grin when he saw the Vermont’s officers walking in. Pacino walked over and waited for the admiral to greet the captain, XO, navigator, engineer and weapons officer, then shook Catardi’s hand.

“Patch Pacino, how are you doing with this scurvy crowd of rough pirates, son?” he asked, pumping Pacino’s hand, his other hand clapping his shoulder.

“Good, sir, fine. Best officers in the fleet.” Pacino smiled back. “Oh, I heard from my father — he called the wardroom, sir, and said to give you his warmest regards.”

Catardi smiled even wider. “That man taught me everything I know about being a combat submariner. And now we have the privilege of teaching you.”

Catardi found Seagraves and asked him where the SEALs were.

“They decided on a ten mile run before coming out drinking,” Seagraves said, a slight smirk on his lips.

“Speaking of which, Wanda! Get that bartender over here! Let’s get some beers and whisky out.”

A few moments later, when they were all holding a drink, Pacino sipping from a frosted mug with a beer that tasted fantastic, Catardi called the group to silence.

“Before we go too much further, officers, I have two promotions to make.” He looked at Styxx. “This is the best part of the job. Can I have Lieutenant Commander Quinnivan step up? Front and center, Executive Officer.”

Styxx produced an envelope. Catardi took out the insignia badge and held it up for the crowd to see, the three gold stripes with one of them making a loop.

“Jeremiah Seamus Quinnivan,” Catardi said officiously, “you are hereby promoted to the rank of commander, Royal Navy, by order of the Admiralty on this date, thirteen May.” Catardi accepted a safety pin from Styxx and pinned the badge to the center of Quinnivan’s T-shirt.

Pacino clapped with the rest of the crowd, noticing that Quinnivan was choked up. The tough-as-nails senior officer was actually tearing up.

“Thank you, Admiral,” Quinnivan said, his voice trembling. “I honestly never thought I’d see this day.” He looked up and smirked at the crowd. “It’s not April Fool’s Day, is it?”

Catardi shook his hand as Lomax took a picture, then a second picture with Seagraves shaking his hand.

“Now, I’d like our young non-qual to step up,” Catardi said. “Mr. Pacino, get up here.”

What was all this, Pacino wondered, taking the half dozen steps to join the admiral, the XO and captain at the head of the table. Styxx handed Catardi another open envelope.

“Mr. Pacino,” Catardi said, “you are hereby promoted to the rank of lieutenant, United States Navy, by order of U.S. Naval Personnel Command on this date, the thirteenth of May.”

The officers clapped enthusiastically. Pacino stared at Catardi with his mouth half open. Full lieutenant. Senior lieutenant. The same rank as all the other veteran junior officers in the wardroom. He hadn’t expected to be a full lieutenant for another year. He wondered if Seagraves and Catardi had made this happen inside the bureaucracy of the Navy.

Catardi withdrew the new insignia, double silver bars, from the envelope and pinned one on Pacino’s left collar, the other on his right. Pacino supposed if he’d worn a T-shirt, Catardi would simply have pinned it to the fabric near his throat.

Catardi pumped his hand while Lomax took another photograph, then one shaking Seagraves hand, the captain grinning for the camera. Pacino realized until now he’d never seen the captain smile, which was odd, because Seagraves had teeth so perfect he could have been in a toothpaste ad.

“And now, as is tradition when in port,” Catardi said, “with a promotion like this, you’ll have to drink your bars.” He looked at Quinnivan. “Your weird Royal Navy insignia, being cloth and all, won’t go well inside a glass of whisky, but you’re drinking anyway.”

Quinnivan laughed, mumbling he’d be fine dunking the commander’s insignia.

Styxx handed Pacino a tall tumbler half full of brown liquid in it.

“That’s the best scotch available in Andros,” Catardi said. “It’s some cheap off brand, but we can reasonably expect it’ll work as well as the good stuff. So go ahead. Wanda, put Mr. Pacino’s new bars in the glass.”

Styxx unfastened the new insignia from Pacino’s collars and dropped them into the scotch. Pacino realized everyone in the group was staring at him, the SEALs included, who had just shown up.

“You’re still a non-qual puke,” Romanov said to him, her smile shining on him, her long-fingered hand on his shoulder, her touch warm. “But now a full lieutenant non-qual puke,” she added. “Next, we’re going to get some fucking dolphins on that uniform of yours. Now drink up and don’t stop till you’ve got your silver bars in your mouth.”

Pacino woke before daylight, unsure of where he was. He opened one eye in the dim light of a clock-radio on a nightstand, and realized that there was an arm on top of his chest. He touched the hand. It was warm, soft and small. He traced his way up the arm, slowly turning in the bed to face where the arm met the torso. It was a slender naked woman with brown hair, her skin warm against the skin of his chest. He stealthily moved her hair away from her face to reveal who she was.

Wanda Styxx.

Wanda “River” Styxx.

Lieutenant fucking Commander Wanda “River” Styxx.

Oh my God, he thought. Seriously? He drank his lieutenant’s bars and woke to this?

Styxx stirred and opened her eyes, smiling slowly at Pacino.

“Good morning, Tiger,” she said, a look of happy satisfaction on her face.

Pacino’s mind raced, trying to remember the evening before. He remembered Styxx pulling him to the dance floor. Then fragments of a conversation.

Oh, for fuck’s sake, this wasn’t happening. Pacino vaulted out of Styxx’s bed and lunged for his khaki pants and Polo shirt, searching the room for his wallet and the lieutenant’s bars. Styxx looked up at him.

“Leaving so soon?” she pouted.

“I have to go, I’m starting the reactor and then driving us out today.” God, his head hurt. Note to self, he thought. No more slamming down cheap scotch the night before an underway. “I can’t find my silver bars. Where are they?”

“Probably on top of my clothes,” Styxx said sleepily.

Pacino found the collar devices, leaned over Styxx, kissed her briefly on the lips and half ran out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs, luckily finding the island’s van idling in front of the hall.

“Can you take me to the pier?”

“Absolutely, sir,” the Jamaican driver smiled. “Your captain had me posted here waiting for you.”

Dammit, Pacino thought. The captain himself knew about this indiscretion.

At the pier, Pacino rushed out, crossed the gangway, hurriedly saluted the American flag, dived down the plug trunk, hustled to his room and dumped the casual clothes on his rack, then climbed into his khaki uniform, pinning the new lieutenant’s bars onto his uniform shirt, then rushing to the wardroom to grab coffee before officers’ call, after which he’d assume the watch in maneuvering to start the reactor.

It was five in the morning, but there must have been eight officers there already, all of them in uniform and all of them sober as judges. The moment he entered the room, all of them broke out in howls of laughter. Pacino looked at Spichovich, who looked like he would burst at the seams from laughing. Li No spurted tea on his tablet computer. And Gangbanger, the supply officer, stood up, pointed and guffawed. Quinnivan looked like he was going to suffer a hernia, bent over and laughing so hard he started coughing.

“What? What is it?”

A scowling Rachel Romanov pulled him roughly down the narrow passageway of officers’ country to the unisex head and shoved him against the sink so he could see himself in the mirror.

Pacino’s face had lipstick smeared all around his lips, from his chin all the way to the bottom of his nose, and twice as wide as his mouth. He looked like he was wearing the makeup of a clown.

“Admiral’s aide, huh?” Romanov said in blistering hostility. “Get the stink of that skank off you and join us in the wardroom for zero five thirty officers’ call. What the hell were you thinking? Fucking gross.”

Pacino washed his face, watching in the mirror as Romanov stormed angrily down the passageway. What was her problem? Could this be — no, not jealousy. Certainly, he and Romanov had the beginnings of a connection, but it was a professional friendship, right? And she was a married woman, right? A happily married woman. Right?

Once the lipstick was scrubbed off, Pacino walked back to the wardroom, thinking he could sneak into his seat without further ado, but Quinnivan pointed his finger at Pacino and said, “your new callsign, Lieutenant, is ‘Lipstick.’ Officers, I present to you Lieutenant Lipstick Pacino!”

Pacino frowned, not pleased at their roaring laughter at his expense. Dieter Dankleff clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about them, they’re just jealous you were the one to get that Styxx chick. She shot down a half dozen of us before she pulled you onto the dance floor. You’re a regular ladies’ man, Lipstick.”

“Oh fuck you, U-Boat,” Pacino said. It was all he could think of as a comeback.