Dark Transit

13

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino walked into the wardroom shortly after 0800 and made straight for the coffee machine. He’d missed breakfast so he could find an open treadmill and weight machine in the torpedo room, the breakfast period one of few slack times for the equipment. After a fast shower, he needed caffeine before beginning the grind of a new day of submarine qualification studies and checkouts.

A checkout was a submarine ritual, in which a non-qual studied and memorized a particular system, digging into the tech manuals and SOP procedures, interviewed the men who operated the system and physically touched the major components of it. That could even mean crawling into the oily bilge under the deckplates of aft compartment lower level to touch the drain pump, the massive unit the size of a compact car, able to keep the ship alive during flooding by forcing floodwater overboard through the huge drain piping system. When the non-qual felt he was ready, he would go to a qualified officer and undergo a verbal exam on the system. It usually entailed going over the basics, moving on to making the non-qual draw the piping system or block functional diagram or even the circuit diagram.

Non-quals rarely passed a checkout on the first try. The questions escalated in difficulty and esoteric nature until the non-qual became clueless, and at that point, from one to four “lookups” were handed down from the dolphin-wearer to the non-qual. Tradition had it that reporting with the answers to lookups required bringing the qualified person his favorite drink or snack, spitting out the lookup answers, then getting his “qual card” signed. There were hundreds of checkouts required for an officer to acquire dolphins, and the process could take over a year, depending on the operational tempo of the boat. The most difficult requirement was for the non-qual officer to make two approaches as approach officer, but Pacino had the first one signed off. One to go, and only a few dozen more checkouts, and all that was left was the minimum six-month requirement. By early November, the gods of the seas willing, Pacino should be wearing gold dolphins.

He tossed his pad computer to the table, took his habitual seat and looked over at his boss, Weapons Officer Al Sprocket Spichovich, who was reading his tablet across from the engineer, Lieutenant Commander Elvis Lewinsky. The wardroom was pin-drop silent, and the three of them were the only ones in the room.

“Morning, Patch,” Spichovich said, hoisting a coffee cup and draining the thick black liquid. Lately, Spichovich was the only officer in the wardroom other than the captain who stilled called Pacino Patch. His new nickname, Lipstick, seemed to have stuck much harder. And unlike the other officers, Pacino was rarely referred to by his job title, like DCA Dankleff or MPA Lomax or Communicator Eisenhart. It didn’t sound right to address a person, even if the person were the sonar officer, as Sonar. “Are you looking for another weapons checkout? You know, my sleaziest checkouts are when you play poker with me and the other junior officers while you submit to my interrogation. A zero eight hundred checkout, absent cards, poker chips and cigars? I don’t think even the Feng here could pass that.”

Engineer Lewinsky grinned at Spichovich over his coffee. “Bullshit, Weps,” he said. “I know more about your shit than you know about my shit.”

Spichovich laughed and made a dismissive motion with his hand. “All your shit does is push us through the water. My shit finds the bad guys, then puts warheads on foreheads, the very purpose of us being here. The fucking mission.”

“Yeah, your warheads would still be at the pier if not for me and my boys. Plus, we make the hot water for your shower and laundry and the potable water for your coffee. Where would you be without coffee?”

“Fine,” Spichovich conceded, smirking. “Maybe so, maybe so.” He looked at Pacino. “So, Patch? A checkout?”

Pacino considered the question, glancing at his cup. The coffee in the cup made ripples and waves when Pacino set the cup on the table from the vibration of the deck with the submarine speeding southeast at flank speed in its headlong rush, its dark transit, toward the southern tip of Africa.

“I don’t think so, Weps. Last time I played poker with you, well, I went back to my bunky with my wallet empty.”

Spichovich was a card shark, and loved playing Vermont Hold ’Em, which was just Texas Hold ’Em with aces as low cards instead of high. So far, Pacino had had five easy checkouts during five poker games with no lookups from Spichovich — one on the Mod 9 ADCAP torpedo, another on the conventional Tomahawk land attack and ship attack cruise missile, the third on the new Mod 80 Tomahawk SACM-N, which stood for ship attack cruise missile, twenty kiloton nuclear warhead-equipped, a fourth on the Kakivak Mod EMP and a fifth on the Tomahawk SubRoc antisubmarine cruise missile with a nuclear depth charge, also with a twenty kiloton nuke. Each time Pacino had lost over a hundred dollars in chips, and Spichovich was the bank for the chips, demanding or making payment to cash in or out.

Cash-poor on this run, Pacino had decided to attempt a checkout with Spichovich when they weren’t playing poker, a checkout on the horrendously complex AN/BYG-1 combat control system, and Spichovich had tortured Pacino for over two hours, making Pacino draw a dozen block diagrams of the interconnected systems and subsystems, and leaving him with eleven challenging lookups. Any sane non-qual would only get checkouts from the weapons boss while playing poker with him, where the questions were easy and the lookups few, but the potential for financial loss was tremendous. By Pacino’s calculations, he could be three thousand dollars in the hole getting qualified that way.

“No, Weps, no poker for me and no checkouts, not on Wog Eve. Just advice. From you and the engineer. You know, while I’ve got you both in the same room.”

Lewinsky smiled, leaning back in his chair. “You know, Lipstick, I’m an expert on two things — sports cars and women. I’ll bet you want advice on one of the two.”

“Yeah, Feng,” Spichovich laughed. “You don’t know which end of a wrench to hold for that Italian rig of yours, what’s its name again, Ferrari Testarossa—doesn’t that mean redhead in Italian? Oh, wait, wasn’t Redhead that last girlfriend of yours, that sexpot with the big chest, you know the one, the nymphomaniac? Wasn’t she, you know, a redhead? And left you for what, an attorney? So yeah, the two things you’re an expert on? Lord have mercy that you’re better at running a nuclear reactor than you are at the two things you’re a supposed expert on.”

Pacino looked at Lewinsky, who was laughing so hard he was choking back tears. Insults between friends on a submarine were routine, but the weapons officer’s striking for Lewinsky’s deep cuts — in another environment — would have caused fists to fly. But on a submarine? That was called “Thursday.” Pacino waited for the engineer, no, the fucking engineer, to make his comeback.

“Oh, look at me being lectured by a guy who hasn’t kissed a girl in, what, five years?”

“Hey,” Spichovich said without a moment to think about it, “I had a spectacular girlfriend before this damned boat got between us, and I’d remind you that’s only two years ago, not five, and she was blonde and beautiful and virtuous, unlike your Ms. Redhead, and my mother liked her and my sister told me to marry her, and she was herself an attorney, so no need to leave me to find one.”

“Hell, Weps, if you’d married Legally Blonde Attorney Girl when your sister told you to, you’d be divorced by now.”

“Tell me about it,” Spichovich said, returning to being serious. He looked back at Pacino. “So, Patch, advice from the two heaviest department heads on board the project boat USS Vermont, on Wog Eve, no less. Must be some kind of luck thing. Hey, Feng, is it a full moon too?”

Wog Eve, Pacino thought. At zero one forty hours on the upcoming mid-watch, the Vermont would cross the equator and pass from the North Atlantic to the South Atlantic. The crossing ceremony would begin at midnight in the crew’s mess, and would feature half a dozen hazing rituals of the uninitiated Polliwogs—those who’d never crossed — by the Trusty Shellbacks—the crewmen who’d crossed the equator before. Even in the modern Navy, the hazing would include absurd rituals, some passed down from antiquity, others made up by “King Neptune,” the senior Trusted Shellback of the crew, which in this case was Executive Officer Quinnivan. Even Captain Seagraves was a Polliwog and would have to undergo the hazing during the crossing.

“So, advice?” Spichovich said, prompting Pacino while pushing his overgrown black bangs out of his eyes. The weapons boss was well known for refusing to cut his hair or shave his beard during the duration of any operation, preferring a Virginia Beach salon where rumor had it he had a huge crush on the woman who owned the joint. Unrequited love, Pacino thought, was an awful thing.

“Yessir,” Pacino said. “It’s a delicate situation.”

Spichovich looked at Pacino with rapt interest, then shot a glance at Lewinsky. “Pray tell, oh non-qual Sonar Officer. What’s up?”

Pacino took a deep breath. “It’s the navigator. Ever since AUTEC, Romanov’s been hostile. Total silent treatment. How can I learn anything as junior officer of the deck under her if she won’t talk to me? She won’t even look me in the eye. And why the hell is she doing that? Because of my night with Catardi’s aide? What’s going on? What should I do?”

Spichovich took a long pull of his coffee and tried to refill his cup, but the carafe was empty. He stood and walked around the captain’s end of the table to brew a fresh pot, looking at the coffee pot as it brewed, then looked into Pacino’s eyes.

“It’s a mild form of PTSD,” he said. “You remember her husband Bruno? You met him at the party.”

“Yeah, he was great. Hilarious, friendly. Good guy.”

“Not that good. He’s apparently a ladies’ man and may have stepped out on young Silky Romanov a few times when he was on deployment and his missile cruiser would pull into port. Broke her heart a few times over, I understand. So, when she sees you getting lucky a few hours after we tossed over our lines, well, I think it just put her mind right back to where it was when she found out about Bruno cheating on her. She’s just giving you what she would have given Bruno. The smoldering silent treatment. I wouldn’t take it personally.”

Pacino stared at Spichovich for a moment, speechless, then looked at Lewinsky, who nodded solemnly. “Keep it to yourself, Lipstick,” the engineer cautioned. “The navigator’s been known to flame on people who bring up her burden of pain.”

“Meanwhile I’ll talk to the XO about getting you on my watchsection,” Spichovich said. “I’ll school you, but good, in the ways of driving a combat submarine.”

“Wow. Thanks, Weps, Eng. Glad I came to you guys. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see Chief Albanese. I have a sonar lookup.” Pacino picked up his pad computer from the table, put his cup away in the small pantry sink and walked forward to the supply officer’s end of the table and out into the passageway, walking as if a weight had been lifted from his back.

Lewinsky looked at Spichovich after the younger officer had shut the door behind him. “That was complete horseshit, Sprocket. But goddamn, you sure sold it. And he bought it.”

“Thanks to you, Elvis. We make a good team. I lie, you swear to it. I’d hate for the lad to learn the truth. Goddamned Romanov and her open marriage with Bruno.”

A realization dawned on Lewinsky suddenly. “Hey, didn’t your thing with the blonde attorney end suddenly after you reported aboard? And didn’t you get along great with Romanov until about six months in? And now you guys hate each other. You, Sprocket? And Dominatrix Navigatrix?”

“Let’s make it our secret, Elvis. I admit it,” Spichovich said. “I was one of her many victims. I just didn’t want her claiming another one. I need my sonar officer functional, not broken-hearted after being another toy of the nymphomaniac navigator.”

Lewinsky let out a low whistle. “I saw you whisper something to Wanda Styxx at the AUTEC party. Wasn’t long after that she dragged Lipstick onto the dance floor. So that was you?”

Spichovich nodded. “She and I go way back. She owed me a favor.”

“You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you, Weapons Officer?”

“Maybe I am, Chief Engineer.”

“You’d better hope Lipstick doesn’t guess the truth,” Lewinsky said, looking at the wardroom door.

“When I talk to the XO when he wakes up in an hour,” Spichovich said. “I’ll tell him I need Pacino on my watch section to supervise his quals and watchstanding. He’ll take Patch off her afternoon watch and put the boy on my evening watch.”

“You think he’ll figure out the real reason?”

“Eng, the XO misses nothing. I assure you, he already knows.”

“Polliwog Lipstick, King Neptune commands you to rise to your feet and stand here next to the Polliwog captain of this fine ship!” Quinnivan’s Irish brogue was comically thick and dripping with obscene pleasure.

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino was kneeling on the vibrating, trembling deck of the crews’ mess, the ship shaking from the power of the propulsor pushing against the thrust bearing deep inside the aft compartment, propelling the submarine through the deep sea at thirty-two knots, the speed she made at one hundred percent reactor power at all-ahead flank, full-out. The deck was cold on his bare knees. The tables had been unbolted and stowed, creating a large open space in the ship. Pacino’s wrists were taped together in front of him with five turns of duct tape. He wore a blindfold and his underwear and nothing else. He was smeared with a mushy mix of jello, pasta sauce, soggy spaghetti and the remains of a fish dinner. Louisiana hot sauce ran down his soaked hair into his eyes. In his mouth was a sock that had been soaked in an awful tasting liquid they’d named “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” He was trying hard not to retch.

Pacino did as instructed, the trip from the deck to standing complicated by his tied hands and blindfold, but he was shoved next to Captain Seagraves, who was in the same situation, minus the dirty sock. Next Quinnivan called Navigator Romanov to her feet and she was shoved next to Pacino, the barest impression reaching him that Rachel Romanov stood next to him in nothing but bra and panties, her warm, soft skin a hairsbreadth from his own. U-Boat Dankleff, Easy Eisenhart and Gangbanger Ganghadharan were summoned to their feet and shoved roughly next to the navigator. King Neptune then called upon the Polliwog chiefs to rise to their feet. Chief Firecontrolman Kim, Senior Chief Mechanic Krevin, Radioman Chief Goreliki and Chief Sonarman Albanese were all pushed into the group of officers. Then the first class petty officers, the second class and finally the third class, until all sixty-some Polliwogs stood in front of the King.

“Attention to orders, you scurvy, lower-than-whaleshit Polliwogs!” Quinnivan read from a long text of arcane nautical prose, something handed down centuries ago from the traditions of square-rigged sailing ships, finishing just before the 1MC shipwide announcing system clicked and the deep booming voice of the chief engineer, Elvis Lewinsky, blasted from the mess deck loudspeaker.

“Attention all hands, this is the Officer of the Deck. In ten seconds, the good ship Vermont will cross the equator at longitude west twenty-four degrees, fifteen minutes and twelve seconds. All you Polliwog scum, prepare to become Trusted Shellbacks. Three seconds, two, one, equator crossing! Welcome to the South Atlantic, Shellbacks. That is all.”

“Polliwogs,” Quinnivan shouted. “Remove your blindfolds!”

Pacino did as ordered, blushing as he looked at the other underwear-clad officers, chiefs and petty officers. He couldn’t help noticing Romanov kept her eyes straight ahead, not looking at Pacino. “King Neptune” Quinnivan was costumed in a flowing green cape, purple coveralls, tall rubber Wellington boots and a large gold crown, holding a long scepter with a three-pointed trident at the end.

“Any of you with socks in your mouths, remove the socks and stomp them into the deck!”

Feeling like an idiot, Pacino complied, smashing his bare foot onto the damp sock.

“Now, all of you, give me the USS Vermont battle cry!”

“It never happened!” they all shouted in unison, Pacino screaming with the rest. “We were never there!”

“What? I can’t hear you,” Quinnivan said, cupping his hand to his ear. Three more times he made the crowd repeat the battle cry until finally he looked at them with deep satisfaction. “By the power vested in me by the Universe, the United States Navy and Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, I hereby pronounce you, all of you, Trusted Shellbacks. Congratulations, Shellbacks!”

The veteran Shellback members of the crew clapped and cheered, laughing at them.

“Now get the fook out of here and clean your ragged asses up,” Quinnivan barked.

Pacino waited for Navigator Romanov to finish in the head, then a few minutes more for the more senior junior officers to shower, then jumped in and shampooed the hot sauce out of his hair.

“This is nothing,” Eisenhart said, toweling his hair. “Wait till we cross the Arctic Circle. Now there’s a crossing ceremony.”

“I can wait,” Pacino said.

“Pacino!” Commander Quinnivan bellowed, leaning into the supply officer’s door to the wardroom. “My stateroom! Now!”

U-Boat Dankleff and Lobabes Lomax glanced up at Pacino from the remains of their breakfast dishes. Pacino had skipped working out this morning. The “Grand Convening of the Polliwog Scum” had started at midnight UTC — Zulu time — and had gone on until the crossing at 0140. After all that, Pacino hadn’t seen his bunk until two in the morning and had barely slept but for a short, disturbed dream that the navigator was glaring at him.

“Great way to start the day,” U-Boat smirked, grabbing the coffee carafe.

“Could be worse,” Lomax said. “DCA, what are the nine most frightening words in the English language?”

Dankleff laughed. “‘The captain wants to see you in his stateroom.’”

“Exactly.”

Pacino grabbed his tablet, pushed his chair in and stepped forward to the supply officer’s door, then down the narrow passageway until he reached the XO’s stateroom door. He knocked twice.

“Come in!” Quinnivan shouted.

Pacino entered and shut the door quickly but quietly behind him and stood at attention. “Yes, sir,” he said, staring at the bulkhead straight ahead, reminded of a Naval Academy comearound.

“Relax, Patch, and take a seat. Tea? Coffee?”

What was this all about, Pacino wondered as he sat in the chair next to the XO. Being summoned to the senior officer’s stateroom had made his stomach melt in anxiety, and now Quinnivan offered coffee? Pacino considered saying no to the offer, but thought it would make the atmosphere colder.

“A black-and-bitter would be great, sir, thank you.”

Quinnivan smiled and dialed the galley and asked them to have the messenger of the watch send up coffee. Almost within seconds, a knock came at the door and the messenger — obviously anticipating the executive officer’s habits — brought in a carafe and two cups. Quinnivan frowned at the messenger. “What took ya so long, lad?”

The messenger hastily withdrew, and Quinnivan poured for himself and Pacino. Pacino waited for the exec to say something and reveal why he’d ordered the meeting, but the XO just took a deep pull of the brew and looked at the cup.

“You know why this cup — this simple conveyance of a hot beverage — has two blue lines on it drawn parallel to the rim?” The Pyrex white cup was inelegant, a simple cup adorned only with two blue lines.

“I guess I’ve never thought about it, XO,” Pacino said, trying not to stare at the senior officer to figure out what was going on.

“Well, then, pay attention. The top line is the fill line for inport — or submerged. The lower-level line is the fill point for high seas, when we’re rocking and rolling. Makes sense, yeah?” Quinnivan smiled warmly at Pacino.

“I suppose so, sir.” The executive officer’s charm was taking this somewhere, Pacino thought.

“So, lad, do you know why I called you here?” Quinnivan stared seriously into Pacino’s eyes.

What had Weapons Officer Spichovich said the first night out of AUTEC on this run, when Pacino tried and failed at the last few hands of poker with him, Dankleff and Lomax? Patch, you have no poker face. You couldn’t bluff your way out of a wet paper bag. You’d better work on that, boy. Someday you’ll be in command and on the business end of a bad guy’s torpedo, and the entire crew will be looking at your expression to see if they’ll live or die. If your face shows fear and resignation, all is lost, the battlestations crew will go limp, or worse. If your jaw tightens and you glower with a determination to fight the ship against the odds and win? Well, hell, maybe you will. And if not, you’ll go down with a crew to whom you gave courage in their final moments. Not so bad a way to die, eh?

But lying to the XO, whether through words, omission or his facial expression, that seemed more than wrong. Pacino took a deep breath.

“Well, XO, I suppose this has something to do with Weps asking to take me off Nav’s watchsection and put me on his.”

“Bingo, yeah? And pray tell, young non-qual, why would he do that?”

Pacino considered telling the XO that it was about having more face time with his boss, to keep Spichovich up to date on the goings-on of the sonar division, and to get qualification checkouts during prime time, when Pacino could actually sit at the sonar stack or the firecontrol console, and in truth that was part of the answer. But the real answer was that Navigator Romanov was freezing him out and it was straining his nerves.

“Well, sir, I came to him and the engineer for advice.”

“About?”

“I’m not getting along very well with the navigator, sir.”

Quinnivan unexpectedly laughed, his head tilting back in mirth. He picked up the phone and dialed a number, then said into the phone, “Weps? I win. That’ll be a hundred bucks, as soon as Mr. Pacino shoves off.” He replaced the phone and looked at Pacino. “Sorry for the interruption. I had a bet with the weapons officer about your answer. He insisted you’ve been working on your poker face and your bluffing skills.”

Pacino could feel the color rise to his cheeks. Quinnivan opened a bound diary and made a notation in it, then shut it and looked seriously at Pacino. “Mr. Pacino, report for duty with Mr. Spichovich on this evening’s eighteen-to-twenty-four watchsection. He may have you on copilot watch for a while to get a sense of your knowledge level, then pilot watch, then he may put you on the sonar stack, and finally junior officer of the deck. I expect that before we get to Point Echo for the run northeast, you’ll have all your weapons department qualification signatures and you’ll be operating smooth as the junior officer of the deck.”

“Yes, sir,” Pacino said, wondering if he should stand.

“That’s all, lad. If you would, send the weapons officer to my stateroom.”

Pacino grabbed his tablet computer and vaulted to his feet, opened the door and almost ran into Spichovich, who smiled at him and clapped him on the shoulder before shutting the XO’s door behind him. Pacino walked back aft to the wardroom, wondering it there would be blowback from the navigator for his complaining about her. Not that his relationship with her could get any worse, he thought.

Lieutenant Commander Spichovich shut the XO’s stateroom door behind him and took a seat in the chair just vacated by Pacino.

“Well, XO?”

Quinnivan just smiled his crooked smile and pointed to his open palm. “Well, my Irish ass. I need one-hundred-dollar bills, fresh from the ass crack of a Fort Lauderdale stripper, in my hands, right fookin’ now.”

Spichovich withdrew a huge wad of cash from his coveralls and snapped off five crisp, newly-minted twenties and handed them to Quinnivan. “I should probably get a receipt,” he said. “You’ll forget tomorrow I paid up today.”

Quinnivan put the money in his safe, smiling to himself.

“So XO, your secret evil plan to put a wedge between Silky and Patch-slash-Lipstick all went to plan,” Spichovich said, smiling.

“I have to admit, I had my doubts Wanda Styxx would just go ahead and do as you asked, when the ask was that big. What did it cost you?”

“A favor to be named later, XO.”

“So — expensive.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Well, we’re back on an even keel now. Good order and discipline, Weapons Officer. Good order and discipline.”

Spichovich grinned. “And what about the Nav?”

“Ah,” Quinnivan said, waving his hand in the air. “She’ll get over it. Just like with you.” Quinnivan drilled his eyes into Spichovich’s. “Except that with you, she moved on, but you’re the one who’s still hostile. If you’d just lighten up on her, just a little, it’ll all be cool.”

Spichovich stared sadly at the deck. “Yeah. I guess I’d better work on that, XO.”

“You do that, Weps.”

“Good order and discipline, right, XO?”

“Yes, Weps, my thoughts exactly.” Quinnivan was smiling again. Spichovich stood.

“You need to see anyone else, boss?”

“Nah, I think I’ll grab a little bunky before the evening watch. Those fookers on the eighteen-to-twenty-four watch are morons.” The 1800–2400 watch belonged to Spichovich.

“Fuck you, Bullfrog.”

“And your mother too, Sprocket,” Quinnivan said, grinning.

“Have a good nap, sir.”

14

At 1220 Zulu time, the Vermont reached Point “Delta,” the bottom of the great circle route from the Bahamas to South Africa, and the turning point to due east toward the Indian Ocean. In another seventeen hours, the ship would reach Point “Echo,” marking the start of the northeastern run up the coast of Africa toward Saudi Arabia and the Gulf of Oman. The ship was due at Point “G,” the entrance to the gulf, five days after that, on the afternoon watch of Monday, May 30.

Reaching Point “Delta” also marked a change in the ship’s routine. Up to now, the submarine’s flank run south had been uneventful, steaming full-out during the day, rising one time per 24-hour period sometime during the mid-watch to periscope depth, the PD period busy with obtaining a navigation fix to correct the inertial navigation unit, executing trash disposal and steam generator blowdowns, and receiving a passive intelligence update from the CommStar, which would automatically update all their intelligence news files and archives. Then back down below the thermal layer and speeding up to get back to “chasing PIM,” in which “PIM” was their point of intended motion, or “where the brass wants our ass,” as the navigator would say. The officers worked quietly on division business, worrying over equipment that might break down or had already fallen out of repair, writing endless personnel evaluations, generating the hundreds of status reports on the health of the submarine for the maintenance facilities and the squadron engineer. The SEALs onboard had been passing the time in poker games in their berthing room on the lower level adjacent to the torpedo room or working out. The chiefs stood their watches, worked on their division chores during the day, crashed in their space, the “goat locker,” a sort of combination conference room, movie screening area, berthing area and head, segregated from the rest of the crew. The enlisted sailors stood their watches, occasionally rousted for “field day” to clean up the ship or participating in the many “school of the boat” sessions to learn the ship’s systems and procedures in the course of their own qualifications, attempting to earn silver dolphins just as Pacino was striving to earn gold ones.

Now that they were getting closer to their destination, the senior officers had decided to conduct the operation brief, the brief going down last night, Monday evening after dinner. The department heads and junior officers were, to a man, still reeling from the disclosures made at the brief.

An Iranian diesel boat, cut in half and a liquid metal-cooled nuclear reactor shoehorned in, a fast reactor that could become unstable and blow itself apart in a superheated radioactive cloud or worse, detonate in a small nuclear explosion, if the word “small” could ever be applied to a fission bomb explosion. A reactor so potentially dangerous that the Russian designers wouldn’t even test it in their vast wilderness or their backyard Arctic Ocean, but had convinced the Iranians to take it to sea and test it for them, dangling in front of the Iranians having a nuclear-powered attack submarine. There was no information on whether Russian technicians would be aboard the Kilo, a boat they’d renamed Panther to coincide with the name of the liquid metal reactor’s design program, “Project Panther.” They would sneak the Panther out of its base at Bandar Abbas eastward through the Gulf of Oman, presumably submerged on batteries or snorkeling on its diesel southward en route the deep Indian Ocean, “the IO,” a thousand miles away from land, where intelligence estimates asserted it would then go to initial criticality on the fast reactor.

And sometime during Panther’s run south through the Arabian Sea on the way to the Indian Ocean, Vermont would sneak up on her and steal her, the same way they’d briefly hijacked the Bigfoot narco-sub. A group of six officers and chiefs would be chosen to lock out of the Vermont after the SEALs had secured the Kilo and rounded up the crew, to run the stolen submarine from the Arabian Sea back the way they’d come, down south into the Indian Ocean, around South Africa and into the South Atlantic, then speed all the way northeast to AUTEC in the Bahamas.

There was tremendous debate in the wardroom about who would be chosen to operate the hijacked submarine. All but Lieutenant Li No wanted to be chosen to conn the Panther back to AUTEC, Pacino first among them. It seemed low probability, he was told, because he didn’t even have his dolphins yet, so why would the captain trust a non-qual to operate a stolen foreign submarine and bring it to the Bahamas?

At midrats, the meal served from 2330 to 0130, usually consisting of something simple but gut-busting, like beanie-weenies over rice, or chili with crackers, the engineer looked over at Spichovich and said, “You know, Weps, only the least useful officers to Vermont will be chosen to go, so the bosses might decide to pick you to go on the Panther. I mean, really, what do you do for a living anyway? Wait for us to shoot one of your missiles? Take inventory of torpedoes daily to make sure no one shoplifted one?”

“No way, Feng,” Spichovich said without looking up from his tablet computer. “Your theory is just your way of coping with the fact that you’ll be left behind on Vermont because, let’s face it, tactically, you suck. I mean, that’s why, at battlestations, you’re just the engineering officer of the watch, splitting atoms and making the screw go roundy-roundy while we adults find the bad guys and put them on the bottom. So no heroics or medals for you. Just keep playing with your reactor. Oh, and as to usefulness, all you and your boys do is stare at gauge needles that don’t move for the entire watch.”

“Yeah, until something breaks, and then you’ll be damned glad I’m useful enough to restore propulsion and get you air to breathe.”

“When it was your incompetence that got it broken in the first place?”

The engineer stood and cocked his fist, but he was grinning.

“Knock it off, you two bastards,” XO Quinnivan said, suppressing a smile.

“So XO, who’s going on the Panther?” Dankleff asked, shoveling a spoonful of rancid-looking chili into his mouth.

“My fookin lips are sealed,” Quinnivan said, pushing his plate away and standing.

“Can’t you at least say what the selection criteria are?”

“I suppose I can say this. It comes down to our opinions of you scurvy junior officers, with maybe some metrics thrown in.

“Metrics, XO?” Dankleff stopped chewing.

“The war game simulation results. Once the Nav gets the simulations staged and ready, we’re going to see how the officers do individually and as a team. Once we see how it goes, we’ll know which round peg to put in which square hole.”

“So, basically you’re just going to draw straws?” Lewinsky grinned.

“Exactly,” Quinnivan said, leaving the wardroom by the forward supply officer’s door.

Reaching Point “Delta” began the simulation phase of the transit. As Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov had said during the op brief, “Our mission failure with the narco-sub began with a failure of imagination. No one thought that the cargo ship would escort the Bigfoot out of the Caribbean Sea, and we didn’t have a contingency plan for that. Which forced us to improvise. And no one imagined Bigfoot would be conned by artificial intelligence. So, on this mission, long before we get to the op-area, we’re going to war game this operation. We’ll split into multiple teams, three blue and three red. Each blue team will play Vermont and give the simulation app their actions and reactions. The red teams will steal the Kilo, the Panther, and upload their actions and reactions to the app. A third group will be the God group, consisting of the captain, XO and me. The God group are observers from high over the earth watching as things happen, with perfect knowledge of what the tactical situation is. The God group will introduce scenarios and glitches to the simulation to see what the red and blue teams will do. The God group will also play the part of any interception force — Iranian or Russian — and upload their actions and reactions to the app. We’re going to churn the assignments and make you switch from red to blue and back, with the roster changed each time, so we can evaluate which team make-up is the most effective. Gentlemen, we will be doing this for five solid days, after which the captain, XO and I will be reviewing the results. From what we see, we’ll reevaluate the op plan and form contingency plans.”

Pacino had volunteered to be on a red team, but Romanov put him on a blue team with Supply Officer Ganghadharan and Electrical Officer Varney. The opposing red team for the first round of simulations included Li “Doctor” No, U-Boat Dankleff and Lobabes Lomax. The first simulation went down promptly at 0800 and concluded just before noon. The second started at 1300 and continued for several hours. Pacino reported for his 1800 to 2400 watch with Spichovich, standing pilot watch for six hours. When the watch was over, he was exhausted, and slept a dreamless sleep until his alarm woke him to go aft and work out.

Navigator and Tactical Action Officer Rachel Romanov shut the captain’s stateroom door behind her and took her seat at the captain’s table next to Quinnivan.

“What do you think, Nav?” the XO asked.

Romanov sighed.

“You’re going to think I’m crazy for recommending this,” she started hesitantly. “But of all the officers, Lieutenant Pacino had the highest success rate in the simulations. He’s also the most original and takes the highest risks.”

“I told you he was a ‘chancer,’ Skipper,” Quinnivan said.

“Yeah,” Seagraves said, his chin in his hand, his gesture when he was deep in thought or wrestling with a difficult decision. “It was Pacino who lobbed that nuclear weapon into the sea between the Kilo and the attacking Russian submarine force farther south in the Indian Ocean.”

“It made a handy blue-out across half the horizon from the Russian submarines,” Romanov said. “Those zillion bubbles in the sea that blocked the Russian passive and active sonar allowed the Panther to clear datum, and it also got Vermont off Scot-free.”

“Leave it to that Lipstick to reach for a nuke straight out of the chute,” Quinnivan said.

“Pacino’s blue team won against the scenario at a much higher percentage than the other blues. When we switched him into a red team, he didn’t lose the Panther one time. Meanwhile, the other red teams got boarded or torpedoed by various interception forces,” Romanov said.

“Or their reactors blew up when you were on God group watch,” Quinnivan said, his eyes crinkling into a smile as looked at Romanov.

“Are you saying I put my thumb on the scale to favor Pacino?” Romanov said, a sharpness in her tone, her eyes narrowed at the XO.

Quinnivan put his palms out as if in surrender. “No, no, no, I’m not saying that,” he said, trying to calm the navigator down.

“So,” Seagraves said, “you’re recommending we put Pacino onboard the Panther even though he isn’t even qualified on an American sub.”

“More than that, Captain,” Romanov said. “I’m recommending he be put in as OIC.” OIC meant officer in charge.

“Captain Pacino,” Quinnivan mused. “I like the sound of that.”

“Who would go with him, then, Nav? Pacino’s the most inexperienced of the officers aboard. It would be awkward to put Dankleff or Varney or Lomax onboard with him if Pacino’s in command.”

“More than awkward, Skipper,” Quinnivan said. “It would violate your U.S. Navy Regulations.”

“I’m thinking we send in Supply Officer Gangbanger with him. Ganghadharan is a junior grade lieutenant. Pacino outranks him.”

“Who else, then?” Seagraves asked.

“We send in Chief Radioman Goreliki — she’s a wizard at anything that communicates and she can modify the Iranian radio gear to accept our crypto and transceivers. We send in Chief Firecontrolman Kim — she can figure out the Panther’s firecontrol system if anyone can. And then Chief Sonarman Albanese, to decode the Panther’s sonar system. Then we send in the crypto tech we picked up in AUTEC, Indian guy, what’s his name, Saurabh, who’s fluent in Farsi, because we’ll need translations to operate their systems.”

“You’ve thought this through, haven’t you, Nav?” Seagraves said.

“It’s my best recommendation, Captain, XO,” Romanov said, looking first at Seagraves, then Quinnivan.

“Let us think about it, Nav,” Seagraves said. “Sending those chiefs onto the Panther takes our first-string operators away.”

“You’ll need them more on the Kilo than here. If the mission goes to plan, this is relatively uneventful for Vermont. The action will all be for the Panther.”

“I hear you, Nav. It’s late. Why don’t you get some rest?”

“By your leave, sir,” Romanov said, standing.

“Goodnight, Nav,” Seagraves said.

When the door shut behind her, Seagraves looked at Quinnivan, who pulled a leather cigar carrier from his pocket, a cutter and a lighter. Seagraves opened his desk and withdrew a crystal ash tray and placed it on the table between them. Soon both officers were puffing smoke into the overhead.

“Nothing like watching cigar smoke rise to help you think, eh, Captain?”

“You know what I’m thinking, XO? It’s just interesting that Romanov puts Pacino into the stolen Panther at the same time she’s furious with him. Makes you wonder what’s going on in her subconscious.”

“Jaysus, Skipper,” Quinnivan said, cigar smoke emerging from his nostrils. “Are you saying she’s trying to get him killed?”

“You know what the simulations said in the aggregate, right, XO? This mission has a nineteen percent chance of success. Nineteen. Sixty-one percent chance the Panther is lost at sea, from an opposing force or from its own hellish reactor exploding.”

“What’s the other twenty percent?”

“That we’ll never know what happened. Panther simply vanishes. Either the Russians or the Iranians grab it or torpedo it. Or it sinks out of sensor range of the Vermont or an opposition force.”

“Nineteen percent chance of success,” Quinnivan said. “Do you think the Nav knows that little statistic?”

“How could she not, XO?”

“Still. There is something to be said about that young lad Pacino. He may be a chancer, but he has something I’ve never seen before. It’s like, hell, I’ll sound foolish saying this out loud to you, Skipper, but it’s like that kid carries destiny itself with him. That thing on the Piranha, what do you think the chances were of surviving that?”

“About zero point zero,” Seagraves said.

“Exactly,” Quinnivan said, taking a puff and blowing a smoke ring. “That kid has a special kind of luck, Captain. He brings it with him. With him on the Vermont, we can’t fail and we can’t die. If we put him on the Panther, well, he just won’t be on the Vermont. And I’m not afraid to admit, that scares me.”

Seagraves thought for a moment, tapping a long ash off the Churchill cigar into his ash tray.

“XO, if your metaphysical argument is correct, that this kid quote, carries destiny with him, unquote, we’d be derelict in our duty to not put him on the Panther mission.”

“You make a damned good point, Skipper. But now, let’s look at this from Admiral Catardi’s point of view. You just put his boss’ son on a mission that has a nineteen percent chance of success. And not just any boss’ son. The son that personally risked his life to rescue Catardi himself from certain death in the Piranha sinking. How career enhancing will it be to send Catardi a situation report stating that Panther sank with all hands, including one Lieutenant Anthony Pacino?”

Seagraves tamped his cigar out in the ash tray. “XO, knowing what we know? Catardi would do the same thing. And if we have to give an officer special treatment, what good is he to us? And don’t forget, Pacino volunteered for this mission in the strongest possible terms. And a final point? It was Catardi who sent us on this damned mission in the first place. So we’re all in this together. So it’s settled. Pacino goes.”

Quinnivan seemed satisfied with Seagraves’ answer. “So, are you going to make him OIC?”

“XO, I just can’t put a non-qual officer in command of the Panther. Maybe I could be convinced to make him assistant officer in charge, the AOIC, but that brings up the question, who should be OIC? Who does Pacino work best with? If Pacino is second-in-command, who can complement his tactical instincts?”

“Maybe we ask Pacino himself.”

“Not a bad plan, XO. You might even call it…adequate.”

Quinnivan smiled and put out his cigar.

“Pilot, all stop,” Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov ordered.

“All stop, Pilot aye, and Maneuvering answers, all stop,” Lieutenant junior grade Ganghadharan reported.

“Mark speed four knots,” Romanov said.

Almost immediately, the deck stopped its mad shaking and trembling, the sudden smoothness of the ride seeming strange after being constantly at flank speed for fifteen days.

“Mark four knots, aye.”

The USS Vermont glided slowly to a halt at Point “Golf” at the entrance to the Gulf of Oman.

“Officer of the Deck, speed four knots,” Gangbanger reported.

“Very well, all ahead one third, turns for four.”

The pilot acknowledged. Romanov pulled the 7MC microphone from the crowded overhead. “Maneuvering, Conn, downshift and de-energize main coolant pumps and engage natural circulation.”

The 7MC speaker overhead rasped with Li No’s voice. “Downshift and de-energize reactor coolant pumps and rig for natural circulation, Conn, Maneuvering aye.” A pause. “Conn, Maneuvering, the reactor is in nat-circ.”

“Maneuvering, Conn, aye,” Romanov said into the mike. “Pilot, left fifteen degrees rudder, steady course three-one-five.” She picked the phone at the command console and buzzed the captain.

“Captain,” Seagraves’ baritone came over the phone.

“We’re at Point ‘Golf,’ sir, turning northwest into the Gulf of Oman. You wanted to make a 1MC announcement.”

“Be right there.”

Seagraves appeared in the control room seconds later. “Captain’s in control,” Romanov announced. She handed Seagraves the 1MC microphone. It clicked just before the captain’s voice boomed through the spaces.

“Attention all hands, this is the captain. We’ve completed the flank run to the entrance of the Gulf of Oman and we’re slowing and turning to the northwest for the slow approach to the Strait of Hormuz. We will be setting up a chokepoint barrier search at Point ‘Hotel’ at the exit of the strait in order to detect and trail our target, a modified Iranian Kilo diesel-electric submarine called the Panther. As always, I will rely on the discretion of every member of this crew to keep our secrets. After all, what is the battle cry of the USS Vermont?”

Throughout the ship, the shouting of It never happened — we were never there! rang out.

“That’s right, crew. This, all of this, never happened, and we were never here. We will be rigging the ship for ultra-quiet. The galley will accordingly be shut down — sorry about that — but we will have an abundance of cold cut sandwiches and peanut butter and jelly with cheese and crackers. Wash that down with bug juice, and you’ve got yourself a battlestations feast. Immediately, upon detection of the Panther, we will station battlestations and fall in trail. This may be a long mission, crew, so between now and reaching Point ‘Hotel,’ I urge you all to get whatever sleep you can. There may not be much of that after acquisition. If any of you have questions about the mission, get them to your division chiefs and division officers and, to the extent we’re able to, we’ll put your mind at ease. Let’s all have a safe and successful mission. That is all.” The 1MC clicked off and Seagraves returned the microphone to its cradle.

“Pilot, rig ship for ultra-quiet,” Romanov ordered.

“Ultra-quiet, Pilot, aye.” The 1MC announcing circuit clicked and rasped with the last announcement until ultra-quiet would be secured. “Rig ship…for ultra-quiet.”

“I’ll be in my stateroom with the XO,” Seagraves said to Romanov. “Send Mr. Pacino to see us, please.”

“Right away, sir,” Romanov said.

Pacino walked down the passageway, lit with red lights as a reminder that the ship was rigged for ultra-quiet, then knocked carefully on the door of the captain’s stateroom, bearing in mind what Lomax had said before, that the nine most frightening words in the English language were, The captain wants to see you in his stateroom.

“Come in,” Seagraves called through the door.

Pacino opened it and came to attention. The overhead lights were off, the room lit by three sepia-shaded lamps, making it seem like it was evening, even though it was just after 1500 in the afternoon.

“Have a seat at the table, Mr. Pacino,” Seagraves said, waving to the seat at the door side of the small café style table and seats.

“Yessir.” Pacino put his tablet computer on the table.

“So, lad,” Quinnivan said. “Any idea why we’ve called you here?”

“I suppose it’s about my volunteering to be on the crew of the Panther when we hijack it and take it to AUTEC.”

“‘Hijack’ is such a nasty word,” Quinnivan smirked. “It sounds so unfriendly, like you’re putting a gun to someone’s head.”

Seagraves smiled. “The XO makes a good point. We’re just going to borrow the Panther for a while.”

“A long while, and then we’re going to take her apart all the way down to her fookin nuts and bolts,” Quinnivan added. “But you’re correct, laddie, we wanted to talk to you about this mission.”

Pacino waited, but neither man said anything. Seagraves was manipulating a document on this pad computer and Quinnivan was just looking at him. Finally, Pacino broke the silence.

“So, do I get to board the Panther?”

“Mr. Pacino,” Seagraves said grimly. “You are aware, aren’t you, that according to our war game simulations, this mission has one chance in five of success. Eighty percent chance says we face mission failure. Which is a nice way to say that the Panther goes down.”

Pacino made a dismissive face and waved his hand. “What do those simulations know, Captain? That’s all bull dreamed up by theorists who live their lives in cubicles. Look at the real situation. If we can board this Kilo with an element of surprise, we’ll vanish into the noise of the ocean. We’ll have Onur Saurabh with us, the crypto tech Farsi translator, so we can figure out their systems. And I’ve been thinking, sir, we could find one of the Kilo’s officers who’s willing to cooperate with us and give us some help.”

Seagraves looked at Quinnivan, then nodded. “Mr. Pacino,” he said slowly, “the XO and I have decided to place you aboard the Panther as assistant officer in charge. You’ll be second-in-command.”

Pacino wasn’t prepared for that. He figured the best he would be able to do would be to be the junior officer of those selected. “May I ask, sir, who you’re putting in command? Who will be OIC?”

Seagraves and Quinnivan glanced at each other.

“Laddie, who would you nominate?” Quinnivan asked.

“No question, Lieutenant Dankleff. He’s great with diesel engines and generators, he’s a great leader and he’s a tactical innovator. And he’s good under pressure.”

“He’s also pretty much your best friend aboard,” Seagraves observed. “And your sea daddy when you first reported.”

“That’ll help the mission, Captain, not detract from it. Who else is on the Panther crew?” Pacino asked.

“Lieutenant Varney will come along as your operations officer and third-in-command. He’s an electrical expert and knows reactor controls. You’ll be accompanied by Chief Goreliki on radio, Chief Albanese on sonar and Chief Kim on artificial intelligence battlecontrol systems. And the cryptotech translator. And, of course, the SEALs.”

“But as to who is OIC, that’s still under discussion,” Seagraves said. “Mr. Pacino, send up the navigator, will you?”

“Aye, sir. By your leave, sir.”

“Granted, Mr. Pacino.”

When the door shut behind him, Quinnivan looked at Seagraves. “Interesting. We’d zeroed in on Lomax as OIC, but Pacino went immediately to Dankleff.”

“Let’s see what Romanov thinks about that combination. But at least we have Pacino’s role figured out.”

A knock came at the door. Rachel Romanov came in and sat down at the captain’s table.

Fifteen minutes later, aft in the wardroom, Pacino was reading news files on his pad computer when U-Boat Dankleff walked into the room — or more precisely, danced into the room. He grinned, offered his fist to Pacino and said, “Guess who just got named officer in charge of the Panther?”

Pacino grinned back and bumped U-Boat’s fist. “Captain U-Boat,” Pacino said.

“And I hear you’re my XO.”

“Yes, sir, Captain, sir,” Pacino said, mockingly stiffening at attention in his chair.

He could already tell it would be a good mission.

The crew’s mess was cordoned off at the forward and aft ends. With the galley shut down and dark, the only food was served out of a refrigerated cart placed outside the room. A petty officer was stationed at the forward door to make sure anyone wanting to enter was cleared for the goings-on inside. The aft hatch to the engineering spaces was shut and dogged, a second petty officer seated near the door to escort personnel through if they entered from aft.

Lieutenant Commander Ebenezer Fishman and Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov stood at the forward bulkhead at a large dual-purpose whiteboard, which could be paired to a tablet computer or used the old-fashioned way, with dry-erase markers.

“Okay, people, listen up,” Romanov said sternly. “Glitch matrix review. The following glitch possibilities have been identified for this mission. Commander Fishman will present the glitch and I’ll call one person to state the contingency plan corresponding to defeat the glitch. If that person blows it, I will call on someone else until we arrive at a satisfactory answer. You people got that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” several of them said in unison.

“Fine. Commander, if you’ll start with the easy ones?”

“My pleasure, Navigator, but shouldn’t we reveal the perfect scenario first?”

“Good point. Mr. OIC, Mr. Dankleff, recite for us, please, the textbook mission plan.”

U-Boat Dankleff stood. “Yes, ma’am. Okay, pay attention, pirates. Here’s the nominal mission profile. The Panther—which, until we take her over, is “Master One”—out-chops the Strait of Hormuz right into our barrier search trap. We follow it in complete stealth southeast out of the Gulf of Oman and continue in trail until Master One slows and rises to periscope depth for whatever reason, the most likely reason to snorkel and charge her batteries. It’s possible she sends a situation report back to her base saying all is well. The SEAL force is ready in the lockout chamber. Own ship is positioned to match the speed of Master One, but slightly forward on her port bow, at her ten o’clock, and we’re deeper so we can use the scopes to see what’s going on, without our scopes penetrating the surface and alerting Master One.

“SEALs lock out and foul the screw of Master One. Master One surfaces and a hatch comes open and a crewman or several pop out to say ‘what the fucking fuck happened to our screw?’ and they are overcome by the SEALs, preferably by non-lethal means but lethal if need be. SEALs invade the ship and take out the crew, again, Plan A being the use of non-lethal shock, but Plan B being lethal means. In a perfect world, no bullets will hit equipment. The Panther crew is locked out and placed on or near a provisioned raft with an emergency locator beacon that will fail to work for 48 hours, and only then go off automatically to call for rescue. By that time, we’ll be long gone.

“At this point, the boarding party locks out of Vermont and locks in to the Panther and the submarine is ours. The base plan is to drive off the track of a great circle route around Africa to the southeast, parallel to the west coast of India, then due south to the a point midway between South Africa and Antarctica, then westward into the Atlantic — the idea being that this course keeps us off shipping lanes and isn’t a predictable route from the point of the successful hijacking. We continue westward, again, off the great circle route to the Bahamas, only turning when we can go north-northwest, finally turning due west slightly north of the Tropic of Cancer to head in to the Bahamas and AUTEC.

“All this time, we are submerged deep on batteries by day, at a moderate speed that allows battery endurance until dark, which we’ll need to figure out once we’re aboard. Our intelligence on the watt-hours of the Kilo’s battery is all over the map. During the night, a few hours before dawn, we go to periscope depth, make sure we’re alone in the sea, and snorkel to charge the batteries. By the time the sun rises, we’re deep again, running silent until the next excursion to PD.

“How was that, Nav?” Dankleff sat back down.

“You forgot that Vermont will be in trail of you to make sure no one sneaks up you to try to take you out, whether Iranian or Russian, and to keep track of you,” Romanov said, frowning, her eyes briefly locking on Pacino’s, her frown growing more angry. “It would be nice to be able to know what’s going on with you guys, in case anyone in authority asks.”

“Right, Nav,” Dankleff said, unruffled by the navigator’s frostiness.

“So, can we go to glitch number one, Commander?” Romanov said, addressing Fishman.

“Glitch numero uno, people. Master One comes barreling out of the Gulf of Oman submerged, deep, at high speed, on her batteries,” Fishman said.

“Mr. Dankleff?” Romanov pointed at U-Boat.

“Vermont chases Master One, keeping in trail, SEAL force ready to suit up so that when Master One does eventually go to PD, we can take her. Easy day.”

“Okay, next, Commander Fishman.”

“Glitch two starts out as glitch one. Master One blasts out of the Gulf of Oman deep and fast. We chase her and remain in trail. But somewhere during Master One’s underway, she starts her reactor and is independent of the surface. Master One continues hauling ass to wherever she’s going, without going up to periscope depth.”

“Let’s hear from the AOIC, Mr. Pacino, for this one,” Romanov said, looking at Pacino.

Pacino stood up and addressed the room. “Same as glitch number one, Nav. Vermont chases Master One. He may be independent of the surface, but he can’t stay submerged forever. His navigation will eventually go to shit and he’ll need a navigation fix. The Kilo’s atmospheric control equipment is okay, but any malfunction means he’d need to ventilate. At some point, his mission ends and he has to bring the boat back to base. He’ll want to come to periscope depth to refine his navigation fix before entering restricted waters, like the Gulf of Oman. Chances are high we could get him before he in-chops the gulf.”

“What if he remains submerged deep well into the Gulf of Oman, only popping up before the Strait of Hormuz?”

“Mission failure,” Pacino said, looking Romanov in the eye. “But that scenario would never happen. Hell, even with our inertial nav, the Goddess of the Fix Error Circle eventually has her way with you. Any sub doing what you described would run aground or hit an underwater seamount if it tried to do that for the thousands of miles we’re talking about traveling.”

“You can only hope, Mr. Pacino,” Romanov said coldly. “Commander, glitch three?”

“Master One comes to periscope depth when the SEALs foul its screw, and like the narco-sub, it turns out it’s operated by an AI computer system.”

“Ops Officer, Mr. Varney, go,” Romanov said.

“Let’s say the SEALs can get in,” Varney began, rising to his feet. “They’ll have to react to whatever the AI system is doing. If the ship is stable with the invasion force onboard, they’ll have time to bring aboard the boarding party, and Chief Kim will disable the AI and shift to manual control. Then the mission continues as before. If the AI looks like it is taking hostile action, such as a ship self-destruct, Commander Fishman pulls the pin on the Mark 14 NNEMP pod and the electromagnetic pulse takes out any electronics not directly shielded from the blast.”

“Won’t that destroy the nuclear reactor electronics?” Romanov asked.

“We think the heavy steel bulkhead between the forward compartment and the new reactor compartment would prevent reactor electronics from being affected. There’s a large shield tank with a lead lining between the compartments, for shielding from neutron and gamma radiation from the reactor, but it will work the opposite direction, shielding the reactor electronics from the EMP.”

“What about ship control systems?”

“If the EMP makes ship control impossible, we may have bigger problems,” Varney admitted.

“Let’s say you start to sink. What do you do?”

“Look for a ballast tank blow system or the levers to an emergency ballast tank blow system. This Kilo isn’t designed ground-up to be run by AI, so any AI in command is superimposed on top of the original manually controlled systems. Somewhere in the control room is the ability to blow ballast. We’d use it to surface. Vermont would have to call for a surface task force to tow the Kilo out of there.”

“And what if you’re going down?” Romanov persisted.

“We evacuate the Kilo, lock out of it, attach a sonar locator beacon to the upper hatch so we can find her on the bottom, climb on to a raft and await rescue from the Vermont. And Vermont will chart the position of the sinking with precision so we can come back and salvage or explore the wreck at a later date.”

“So, not exactly a good day at sea, eh, Mr. Varney?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Okay, Commander, glitch four.”

“At the point the SEALs enter the hull, the crew of the Panther resist heavily with small arms fire, maybe automatic rifle fire. Maybe they start to act to initiate a manual self-destruct or scuttle the sub.”

“Chief Goreliki, what happens then?” Romanov said, addressing the radio chief.

Radioman Chief Bernadette “Gory” Goreliki stood up. She was petite, barely five feet tall, with sleek, straight black hair, dark skin and a Cuban accent. It was a shipwide mystery why she had a Polish surname, but she would only smile and change the subject when asked.

“The first SEAL in pulls the pin on an H2S grenade — and hopefully his scuba rig has a good airtight seal.”

“So, hydrogen sulfide gas, Chief. What will it do to the Panther crew?”

“At a thousand parts per million, Nav, it will cause immediate death. One grenade in a room will give us about ten times that. Two or three are the base plan. We can be confident it would kill anyone in the control room and give the SEALs time to search the other compartments, but even in lower concentrations elsewhere in the ship, the H2S will immobilize other crewmen from the ventilation system spreading the gas. The gas is flammable and corrosive, so at the earliest opportunity, we’ll want to ventilate the submarine.”

“Chief, why lethal H2S?” Romanov asked. “Why not use non-lethal halothane and fentanyl, like the Russians did to retake that theater from Chechen terrorists back in the day? That drops people in their boots but doesn’t kill them.”

“That combination is effective but unpredictable,” Goreliki said. “To this day, we’re still not exactly sure what the chemical combination or formula was for the gas the Russians used. And while some survived, it did kill others. Meanwhile, H2S is a no-nonsense, more certain response to a counterattack by ship’s force. It’s lethal, but that’s life in the big city.”

“It could also hurt our people, though, right?” Romanov said.

“Our procedure is that no one takes off their scuba rig until we’ve tested the atmosphere in the Panther.”

“Very well, Chief, thank you. Commander?”

“Glitch five. We take the Panther successfully, but we miss a hidden member of the Iranian crew or the Russian test technicians, and when we least expect it, the person either sabotages the ship or comes out with weapons to kill us.”

“This one’s for you, Chief Albanese,” Romanov said, pointing to the sonar chief.

Albanese stood, his voice nervous, obviously uncomfortable speaking to an audience. “Prevention is the key to this one, Nav. We do a thorough search of the ship visually and with infrared sensors. We tested these in the torpedo room bilges and the aft compartment lower level. If a warm body is hiding, we’ll find him. We’re vulnerable to attack from a hidden crewman until we conduct the search, so by procedure, we’ll all be armed with weapons drawn until we can verify we’re clear. Kind of like when cops kick down a door, unsure of whether there are hidden bad guys.”

“Nicely done, Chief,” Romanov said, smiling at the sonarman. “Commander, glitch six?”

“This is my favorite,” Fishman said. “On the way out of the Gulf of Oman and continuing into the Arabian Sea and perhaps even into the Indian Ocean, Master One is escorted by and guarded by an Iranian gunship or gunships, perhaps even a frigate or destroyer.”

“Chief Kim, this one’s for you,” Romanov said, smiling at the chief.

Firecontrol Chief Nancy “K-Squared” Kim rose to her feet. Like Albanese, she wasn’t used to public speaking. A daughter of a South Korean immigrant and business mogul, Kim was technically brilliant and confident of that fact, never stumped by the myriad problems presented by Vermont’s AN/BYG-1 combat control system, but then, she’d been in on the birth of the unit in the DynaCorp AI labs that brought the complex system to fruition.

“Well, let me see,” she said in a thick Korean accent, speaking just a notch too loud, which Pacino had always found somewhat odd. “I think Mr. Pacino solved that riddle once before, Commander. We launch a Kakivak cruise missile at the surface force and the EMP blast knocks them dead. Then we proceed to take the Panther as before.”

“Do our rules of engagement allow us to do that?” Romanov asked.

“Yes ma’am. The ROE allows non-lethal weapon employment.”

“What if the escorting surface force is Russian? And what if there are several of them? A task force?”

“It doesn’t matter whose flag the ships fly. We launch an NNEMP Kakivak at them and they’ll all shut down.”

“Well done, Chief. Next, Commander?”

“Glitch seven, people. Panther will need refueling four, five or six times en route AUTEC. What if she gets attacked on the surface while refueling or re-provisioning?”

“Back to Mr. Varney,” Romanov said.

“We’ve all got these laminated cards with latitude and longitude of your disguised refueling ships. It’s preferred that we re-provision on the surface, but if the area’s considered hot, there’s a procedure for refueling us while we’re submerged and hovering. It sounds like a recipe for an oil spill to me, or seawater contamination of the oil bunkers, but whatever.”

“What if you lose the cards or run out of fuel far from one of these refueling ships?”

“We lock out a diver with the sat-phone in a waterproof pouch. Speed dial one gets us a dispatcher. The phone provides our location automatically, fueling ship comes to us. But if we have to loiter in one place waiting for a refuel, it could be hazardous to our health. And use of the phone could get us detected if surveillance direction-finder equipment is listening.”

“Not much we can do about that, Mr. Varney,” Romanov said sternly. “Next, Commander.”

“The escort force is a Russian attack submarine. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, it’s a Russian Akula III class.”

“Let’s go back to the OIC. Mr. Dankleff, what then?”

“We’ve talked about this among ourselves,” Dankleff said, standing. “Let’s assume the Akula can trail the Kilo-class but can’t counterdetect Vermont. In that case, we’re looking at mission failure, because presumably if the Panther surfaced, the Akula would heave-to and render aid, and if at that point it did discover Vermont, Vermont might end up shooting at us trying to defend the Panther. And if the Akula can somehow detect us, it could shoot at us preemptively. Of course, we’d shoot back, but we’d have a messy international incident on our hands, and it’s predictable that it could get worse. Of course, any shoot-out between two opposing submarines, well, it could go either way. Naturally, we’re confident we could prevail over an Akula, but what if a Yasen-class decides to show up? We might be evenly matched, or God help us, outmatched. Any hesitation on our part to shoot him could prove fatal, and our present rules of engagement prevent us from shooting first. If we have to wait to fire on a submarine escort, not only are we talking about mission failure, we could be risking the Vermont’s survival. And in addition to attacking us, the Akula or the Yasen might decide to sink the Panther just to protect Russian secrets. This glitch — to use technical terms — is a total clusterfuck.”

“Thank you for that color commentary, Mr. Dankleff. So what do you recommend?”

“I know this is a dark transit, but we need to transmit a request to revise our ROE.”

“You’d change our rules of engagement to what, DCA?”

“We need authorization to employ weapons against an opposing submarine escort force.”

Romanov stared at Dankleff, finally dropping her eyes for a moment, then looked at Fishman. “Let’s skip to the final glitch, Commander.”

“Okay, glitch nine. The Panther is armed with torpedoes and decides to shoot at us while we’re trying to hijack him.”

“Mr. AOIC?” Romanov asked, looking at Pacino.

Pacino stood. “Let’s assume we have at least three tube-loaded ADCAP Mod 9s in CMT mode.” CMT mean countermeasure anti-torpedo mode. “I’d launch a salvo of them at the likely inbound bearings to the Panther’s torpedoes, clear datum deep at flank, and at the right point, slow and hover to eliminate any doppler sonar returns.”

“You know, CMT mode is expected to be a dismal failure in a real encounter, right?” Romanov snarled.

“I know.”

“So, twice your scenarios face mission failure, right, Mr. Pacino?”

“There’s still something we could do,” Pacino said. “I could detonate a SubRoc depth charge in the path of incoming torpedoes. That would do the trick, and probably prevent the Panther from firing again.”

“Mr. Pacino, the rules of engagement prohibit first use of weapons against a Russian submarine counterforce, and they absolutely prohibit your use of nukes.”

Pacino could feel the anger rising in him, knowing his face was flushing.

“But you have to admit, it would work, Nav.”

“I think we’ve run through quite enough,” Captain Seagraves’ hard baritone voice said from the forward entrance to the room. Pacino looked over, wondering how long he’d been listening. “I want to see the boarding party in the wardroom along with you, Navigator.”

Romanov swallowed hard. She shot an angry look at Pacino, then gathered her pad computer and walked past him toward the wardroom.

15

Pacino found his usual seat in the wardroom. Captain Seagraves took his seat at the aft end of the table, XO Quinnivan to his right, Navigator Romanov to his left. Opposite Pacino was U-Boat Dankleff and Boozy Varney, then Chiefs Albanese and Kim next to Varney, with Chief Goreliki seated to Pacino’s left on his side of the table. Dankleff passed around a carafe of coffee and Pacino filled up and passed it to Chief Goreliki.

“So, Nav, I notice we have problems with our rules of engagement,” Seagraves began, opening the meeting.

“Captain, any escorting forces with teeth cause mission failure,” Romanov said evenly. “We need to know how badly the bosses want the Panther. Enough to let us turn some ADCAP torpedoes loose on an escorting Russian attack sub or pop a nuke in the ocean to confuse things? We need authorization to use lethal force pre-emptively at the discretion of Vermont’s commanding officer. We need to send a message requesting revised rules of engagement.”

“We’re in a radio-silenced dark transit,” Quinnivan said to Romanov. “Do I really have to remind you?”

“We could pop a SLOT coded for a delayed transmission,” Pacino offered. “Wait twenty-four hours, come up to PD in the gulf and raise the HDR and see what the brass say.” A SLOT was a submarine-launched one-way transmitter buoy, the unit the size of a baseball bat and fired while submerged from one of two signal ejectors, each a miniature torpedo tube pointed skyward. The SLOT would be loaded with an encrypted coded preformatted message, and when it broached the surface, it would transmit in a brief burst communication to the CommStar communications satellite constellation in low earth orbit, then self-destruct and sink. The reply would take some time, presumably requiring permission from the president himself, but when it arrived it would come back down from the satellite to their HDR high data rate radio antenna, which was more sensitive and faster than the receiver on the periscope.

Seagraves considered for a moment. “You have a problem with that XO, Navigator?”

Quinnivan and Romanov glanced at each other. Romanov found her voice. “It violates the op-order, sir,” she said, “but I think we could be forgiven for coloring outside the lines this one time.”

“I say we do it, Captain,” Quinnivan said, his hand making a fist on the table.

“Navigator, bring the coded draft of the message to my stateroom and have the communicator standing by with a SLOT buoy. Then notify the OOD.”

“Yes, sir,” Romanov said, standing, shooting a piercing glare at Pacino for a moment before she left, the captain and XO following behind her, the chief petty officers rising and clearing out, their clan famous for not liking being in the wardroom any longer than they had to be.

Dankleff stared into the distance. Pacino snapped his fingers in front of U-Boat’s eyes.

“Hey, OIC, where are you?”

Dankleff blinked and returned to the present. “This mission just started to feel real,” he said. “It’s not just a war game simulation or a scenario anymore. And I’m just wondering what the chances are of the Russians not guarding their nuclear reactor test platform. I feel like, fuck, Patch, I feel like I can hear Russian subs out there.”

“Can you hear the sounds of their hulls imploding as they go down from our ADCAP torpedoes?”

“Whoa, there, Mister Aggressive. Just because Dominatrix Navigatrix isn’t your sweetheart anymore doesn’t mean you should go all firing-point-procedures on our Russian friends.”

“Hey,” Pacino said, smirking. “I’m a pirate and a warrior.”

National Security Advisor Michael Pacino put President Carlucci’s torch lighter to the tip of the Cuban Cohiba and puffed it to life, peering through the smoke at the president as he passed the lighter back, the torch lighter showing the worn emblem of VFA-41 with its ace of trumps emblem, the logo of the F-18 squadron that had once been attached to the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan.

“Two fingers?” Carlucci asked, a crystal carafe of Balvenie 30 scotch poised over Pacino’s empty crystal rocks glass.

“Perfect,” Pacino said.

Vito Nunzio Carlucci, who went by the first name “Paul” in an effort to defuse a name that the local Ohio media had once characterized as sounding like it belonged to a New Jersey mob enforcer, was a tall, slender, distinguished fifty-year old with a full head of gray hair that swept over his ears, his features seeming more aristocratically British than Italian. He had once been in the Navy as a young junior officer, leaving the fleet to run for mayor of his native city of Cleveland. The lore of his Navy career had boosted him in the lion’s den of Ohio politics since Carlucci had flown one of the fighter jets off the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan in the Bo Hai Bay rescue mission of the captured submarine Tampa and the Seawolf, which was how he and Pacino eventually met, when Pacino paid him a visit to thank him for saving his Seawolf from the relentless depth charging of the Red Chinese surface action force. Carlucci’s F-18’s missiles had blown apart three Chinese destroyers and sank a fast frigate, allowing the Seawolf to survive and live to fight another day. By the day of their meeting, Carlucci was running for the American Party’s U.S senate seat from Ohio, and the two men became fast friends.

Carlucci avoided the Oval Office, much preferring the remodeled presidential study a few doors down, the room done in dark mahogany paneling with a large tigerwood desk and overstuffed leather chairs facing a ridiculously huge fireplace, where Carlucci kept a fire going even in sweltering Washington summers, the new air conditioning unit able to keep the room feeling freezing despite the logs crackling in the hearth. The windowless room was outfitted as a SCIF, a special compartmented information facility, with air-gapped electronics, no wifi, no ethernet connections, and best of all — according to Carlucci — no phone. A fan of Cuban cigars and scotch, Carlucci particularly enjoyed brainstorming with Pacino, since they could fill the room with smoke and get creative under the mild influence of Scotland’s finest.

Former Admiral Michael Pacino had turned sixty last fall, but was still as gaunt as he’d been as a midshipman. Well over six feet tall, Pacino’s stark cheekbones and penetrating emerald-green eyes shone under a canopy of snow-white hair, the legend that his once coal-black hair had gone to white after the Arctic Ocean mission’s sinking of the first USS Devilfish. Other than the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and the weathered skin of his face, Pacino looked like a youngish fifty-year old, as if he could be in a commercial for one of those Florida retirement golf-course neighborhoods.

“You know, Patch, the media scolded me for appointing you.” Carlucci put down his glass and made a sweeping motion with his arms and hands, as if framing a large headline. “‘Carlucci appoints warmonger admiral as top advisor in nod to military-industrial complex.’ Can you believe that?”

“Well, sir, the War of the East China Sea was somewhat bloody,” Pacino admitted. “Are you sure you still want me on the payroll?”

“Hell, yes, Patch. Those wonks can suck wind. You’re the one I want doing my thinking. Seriously, this office, this position? There’s way too much going on to think clearly, cohesively, about the one thing that truly matters — national security. No doubt about it, you’re the man.”

“Glad to help, sir,” Pacino said, peering through a cloud of smoke at the president.

“So, Patch, this just came in. The duty officer rushed in here right before you arrived. Gave me this.”

Carlucci handed over a clipboard with a simple printout on it. Pacino scanned it, then read it slowly from the beginning, then read it a second time. The USS Vermont had broken radio silence to request a change in the rules of engagement to capture the Iranian nuclear submarine test platform, the enhanced ROE to include approval to attack and sink foreign submarines, surface ships and employ nuclear weapons — presumably in an effort to confuse the opposition force, but also with the possibility that they’d be used on the opposition forces themselves. Finally Pacino looked up at President Carlucci.

“So, Mr. President, how vital is capturing and keeping this Iranian submarine? Is it worth slaughtering Russians over? Is it worth the public relations disaster of tossing a nuclear weapon in anger?”

“Assuming you know what I know, what do you think the answer to that question is?”

“Shouldn’t we be convening the joint chiefs at the Pentagon, and the Secretary of War, SecNav, SecAirForce and SecArmy?”

“You’d think that would be logical, Patch,” Carlucci said, pouring himself another two fingers. “But none of them are cleared for Top Secret Fractal Chaos. They have this annoying tendency to leak juicy things to the SNN NewsFiles. So, for the moment, it’s just you, me, Admiral Catardi and two top officials at CIA.”

“You didn’t answer the question, sir.”

“What question?”

“How important is it to grab this nuclear-powered Iranian sub? The context of this mission suggests that if Russian or Iranian forces oppose the Vermont crew, that Vermont should clear datum, get out of there undetected and let the Kilo test platform go. It’s a test of a revolutionary new reactor and the placing of a nuclear-powered sub in the hands of the Iranians — neither of which are good news for us, but not something to risk a shooting war with the Russians over.”

Carlucci considered for a long moment, then looked up a Pacino. “You remember, just now, I said to assume you know everything I know? Well, no surprise, you don’t. There’s another program I’m reading you into now. It’s classified Release-12. A program run by the Director Combined Intelligence, Margo Allende, and Admiral Rand, the CINC of the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. Its codename is Operation Blue Hardhat.” Carlucci opened his desk and withdrew a folder, broke the top-secret seal and handed it to Pacino. Pacino scanned it, then stood to put pen to the twelve places he had to sign to acknowledge the secrecy of the program. He handed the folder back and sat back down, raising an eyebrow at Carlucci.

“Blue Hardhat is a human intelligence operation,” Carlucci began, “infiltrating Russian shipyards with our own engineers, technicians and scientists. There’s an encyclopedia of information that’s come out of it, but it boils down to one disappointing fact. The Russian submarine program has leapfrogged over our own. Their improved ‘Yasen-M’ class, built on the old Severodvinsk submarine platform, is suspected to have an acoustic advantage over our Virginia class. They’re now believed to be quieter and stealthier, at least by the Blue Hardhat guys.”

Pacino frowned. “That’s not good.”

“Vostov is starting to brag about his weapons systems. He talks about Russian resurgence as a superpower. He’s rattling his saber louder and louder every time we talk.”

“Is he bluffing?”

“I have no idea. But something comes to mind, a chat I had with Vostov a year ago, and God help me, I hope this isn’t part of his thinking now.”

“What do you mean, Mr. President?”

“Let’s assume for a moment that at that time, Dmitri Vostov and I had a close and trusting friendship in spite of all the craziness of our military-industrial complexes and our differing views of the roles of our nations in the world. I told Vostov there was a huge gap in both of our knowledge of the other — that is, who had the most capable attack submarine. With programs that both our nations are investing tens of billions into? So I was thinking, shouldn’t we know, not guess, whose submarines are superior? I told Dmitri that I had this crazy idea that we should each send one submarine into an open sea and let them take each other on. One submarine only. And no surface ships and no antisubmarine warfare aircraft. Just submarine vs. submarine. And each one would have unlimited weapons release. Who would win? Of course, Vostov laughed and said his Yasen-M would put my Virginia-class on the bottom without breaking a sweat. As for me, I told him I remained confident and convinced that our submarine would prevail. Don’t you feel the same way, Patch?”

Pacino considered for a long time. “Sir, beyond the ships’ acoustic advantage or disadvantage, it comes down to the crews of both ships, the rules of engagement and the scenario. Hell, it could come down to which crew is more rested and who had the better breakfast. But on a good day, yes, I think a Virginia could put down a sole Yasen-M. But against two or three? That’s a different story. And no realistic scenario in the open seas would result in a hot battle happening between two lone attack submarines. There would always be a surface warship force involved, destroyers with antisubmarine helicopters. And MPA marine patrol aircraft dropping sonobuoys all over the place and using the magnetic anomaly detectors and hydrogen stream detectors. The slightest sniff of an unfriendly submarine and that submarine would be on the bottom, perhaps even hundreds of miles from the other submarine. So, it would never, ever come down to our sub vs. their sub.” Pacino’s words about ‘open seas’ were significant, he thought, because a million years ago, his USS Devilfish was sent into just that situation, one American submarine taking on a Russian, but that had been under the polar icecap where no aircraft could detect a submarine and no surface ships could intrude.

Carlucci nodded. “Anyway, enough about that fantasy of one submarine going up against the other. Back to the present. This mission came up, and now it’s clear we need to take that Iranian submarine. And now there’s the worry that it may be escorted by a Yasen-M sub. And Patch, despite the possibility of an escort Russian force, we have to grab that Iranian. There’s no question about it. And as to rules of engagement, we were going to wait until Vermont arrived in-theater, and then send them a directive authorizing any and all force to be used at the discretion of the USS Vermont commanding officer against any opposition force. That the mission is of the highest importance to the national security of the United States. That this is a must-win situation. That anything standing between Vermont and mission success should be, well, blown to bits.”

Pacino looked at his cigar, which had gone cold. He put it in Carlucci’s ash tray.

“I know what you’re thinking, Patch. Your boy is on the Vermont. And here I am sending his sub on this mission.”

Pacino consciously tried to harden his expression. “My son will be fine, Mr. President.” Could Carlucci detect that Pacino’s voice had quivered, just slightly, from the emotions rushing through him?

“He’s quite a kid, isn’t he, Patch? That story from the Piranha sinking, just amazing.”

“He is, sir. Listen, Mr. President, I looked into the crew of the Vermont. They’re our best officers, chiefs and enlisted, driving our newest Virginia-class, which is loaded with every weapon that would ever be needed. A Yasen-M trying anything — with our new rules of engagement — might be defeated, sir, assuming the action happens fast. But if this develops over an extended period of time, the Russians could send in destroyers and frigates with helicopters and blanket the sea with sonobuoys dropped by antisubmarine aircraft, all of which are loaded with torpedoes. A concerted and coordinated Russian antisubmarine effort from submarines, surface ships and aircraft would simply doom our Virginia-class. And the mission would fail.”

“I see your point, Patch. Let’s hope it won’t come to that. With luck, we’ll get in, get out and sneak out of there, and no one gets hurt, and the Yasen-M’s never even hear us. Don’t worry, Patch. The Vermont and your boy will be fine.”

But as Pacino drove back to the Annapolis house, long after dark, all he could do was worry. Anthony, Pacino’s flesh and blood, was at sea on a project submarine with orders to arm its weapons and use any and all force against Russian opposition, on a mission that was dangerous on a good day.

There was no doubt. If Anthony’s mother ever heard about this, National Security Advisor Michael Pacino was a dead man.

“Depth two hundred feet, ma’am,” Pilot Ganghadharan reported to Officer of the Deck Romanov.

The phone at the conn’s command console buzzed. “Officer of the Deck,” Romanov said.

“Radio,” Chief Goreliki’s voice came over the circuit. “Flash message in the buffer, marked ‘personal for commanding officer.’ Also, there’s an immediate priority intelligence file update.”

“Send the message to the captain’s stateroom,” Romanov said.

She clicked into her pad computer to look at the intelligence file update. There was a recent set of aerial photographs taken by a Predator drone, looking down on the Iranian Navy’s Bandar Abbas base, the photos showing a submarine steaming out of the interior basins of the base and past the breakwater to the Strait of Hormuz. She zoomed far in, and it was definitely a Kilo-class, a stretched hull Kilo-class. No doubt, that was the Panther.

Dammit, she thought, Vermont wouldn’t be at the Point “Hotel” barrier search point near Bandar Abbas until Thursday after midnight. They should have been at the barrier search outside the straight when the Kilo was towed out of the base and into the deep waters of the gulf. The previous intelligence had the test run starting with the Kilo leaving port next Monday, June 6. This was almost a week early. Now they would have to intercept the Kilo on his run eastward out of the gulf, toward the Arabian Sea and beyond to the Indian Ocean. And if he submerged and went silent on his batteries, there was risk he’d get by them, with the result a mission failure. Another mission failure, she thought.

The conn phone buzzed again. “Officer of the Deck.”

“Captain,” Seagraves’ baritone came over the circuit. “I’m sending the flash message to your pad computer. Get the engineer to relieve you on the conn and come to the wardroom. Emergent op brief.”

“Yessir,” Romanov said. She hung up the phone and turned to see Lieutenant Commander Lewinsky standing behind her. “What took you so long, Feng?” she said, smirking. She gave him a brief on the tactical picture.

“I’ve got it. I relieve you, ma’am,” the engineer said.

“I stand relieved,” Romanov replied. “Pilot, Nav-ET, Lieutenant Commander Lewinsky has the deck and the conn.” She was already out of the room as they acknowledged her. She hurried aft in the passageway to the wardroom while scanning the incoming flash message. As she reached the middle of the message, she stopped and read the remainder. “Holy shit,” she gasped.

The wardroom was crowded. Seagraves and Quinnivan were already seated. She made her way to her seat, since she wouldn’t be presenting.

“Okay, quiet, everybody,” Quinnivan said, frowning at his computer. He projected his tablet’s display onto the large flatpanel screen, showing the text of the incoming message.

“As all of you can see,” Seagraves began, “we have a change to the rules of engagement. We are not only authorized but ordered to use all quote, necessary force, unquote, to accomplish this mission, including the tactical use of nuclear weapons, all at the complete discretion of the commanding officer.”

There was a shocked silence in the room for a moment. Romanov spoke up. “Captain, if that’s the case, we need to get back to the simulation war games. At the time we did them, we considered Russian or Iranian opposition forces to be unlikely or something that would cancel the operation. Any simulated battles we did with those forces were somewhat whimsical.” And ended with mission failure or worse, the sinking of the Kilo or Vermont herself, Romanov thought. “With this ROE change, we need to practice in earnest against attacks and counterattacks from a Russian attack boat or an Iranian destroyer.”

Seagraves checked his watch. “You have less than forty hours before we reach barrier search Point Hotel,” he said. “I suggest you all get busy. XO, my stateroom, if you please.”

Quinnivan shut the door and sank into his usual seat at the captain’s table.

“What do you think, XO?” Seagraves’ arms were crossed across his chest.

“I think there’s more to this mission than stealing an Iranian modified Kilo submarine. Maybe there’s something on that sub that the brass aren’t telling us.”

“I don’t think so. This order,” Seagraves slapped the display of his pad computer, “almost makes it seem like the NSC and the president want us to pick a fight with an opposition force. And sink it. As if this is some type of demonstration of capability. Or a message to Tehran or Moscow. Or both.”

Quinnivan thought a moment. “That’s one thing if it’s a submarine we’re up against. Sinking a sub doesn’t leave much of an immediate forensic trace. Submarines are lost at sea every year. Too many bad things can happen deep underwater, yeah? But a surface ASW force? Sinking an antisubmarine warfare destroyer is going to make for a juicy headline. Satellite News Network will be blasting that all over the globe within minutes. Every swingin’ dick out there owns a satellite-synched cell phone with video capability now. There’s a good chance a destroyer sailor could film the whole thing, or even live-stream it, while it’s attacked from an apparently empty ocean. Worse if we use a Tomahawk cruise missile. A flame trail would lead right down to the launch point. And to us.”

“That last doesn’t worry me,” Seagraves said. “If I have to attack by daylight, I’ll use the delay function on the cruise missile capsule. It’ll just float there until the timer goes off, then launch, and by then we’ll be a mile away. What does worry me is if a Russian Akula III or, God help us, a Yasen-M-class attack sub shows up. No one’s very certain back in the hallowed halls of Submarine Force HQ whether, on an even playing field, we could take them down.”

“Bah,” Quinnivan said dismissively. “The fookin Severodvinsk was dreamed up in the late 1980s. They laid the keel in, what, 1993? Then it rusted till they found the money to complete it in the teens. Sub didn’t get operational till 2013. And I’d remind you, for the last ten years, it’s been at the bottom of the Atlantic, in a million pieces, put there by an American torpedo. The Yasen-class are an old, obsolete, hunk of junk design, Skipper. We’d take a Yasen to the bottom before it even had a sniff of us on its sonar.”

“Severodvinsk was a Yasen class,” Seagraves said, paging his computer to an intelligence file. “The only one. The Yasens after that are ‘Yasen-M,’ for modernized. An understatement. Everything is new. You can hardly compare the Yasen-M to the old rustbucket Severodvinsk. The Yasen-M should probably have been given a new class name, but the Russians were doing something funny with their budget office, wanted to make it seem like they were just cost-effectively building the next unit of the model, but the M-class is new from the propulsor to the sonar dome. All new electronics, with a high level of automation. From a tonnage standpoint, the M is twice our size, almost fourteen thousand tons to our eight thousand. Her reactor is a two-hundred-megawatt monster to our mere ninety. Her crew is all of sixty officers and enlisted, less than half our hundred and thirty, a sure indicator of automation and the incorporation of AI systems. The M can do thirty-five knots to our thirty-two, and in silent mode with natural circulation, it’ll do twenty-eight to our twenty-five. XO, our test depth is twelve hundred feet. Yasen-M can take it down to over two thousand, and do I need to remind you, that depth is knocking on the door of the crush depth of the Mod 9 ADCAP torpedo? If we ever got into a hot war with the Russians, hell, they’d just take her to test depth plus a little more and wait till our torpedoes implode, then shoot us out of the water. We’re still guessing how many weapons she carries, but I’d lay you odds she’s got the jump on us in sheer number of torpedoes. And don’t get me started on the hellish weapons she has. And acoustically? Should I remind you that we’ve never yet been able to trail a Yasen-M submarine? Our Virginias have lurked outside the Zapadnaya Litsa Northern Fleet submarine base for the M-class and fell in trail for all of half a mile before the target would vanish. For all we know, they can hear us before we can hear them. Our so-called acoustic advantage may have flipped in favor of the M-class. Let’s just admit it, XO, we wouldn’t want to run into a Yasen-M-class in a dark alley.”

Quinnivan whistled as he paged his own tablet through the intelligence. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he said after a moment. “Maybe there won’t be an opposition force. Maybe the Panther will go out alone to do his reactor test. It’s dangerous, so going out there alone without an escort is a damned good probability.”

“Yeah,” Seagraves said. “I’m sure you’re right.”

Captain First Rank Yuri Orlov stood on the pier looking at the seemingly combat-ready Yasen-M-class attack submarine K-573 Novosibirsk of the proud Russian Federation Pacific fleet.

“Another one, Captain?” his first officer, Captain Second Rank Ivan Vlasenko asked. When Orlov nodded, Vlasenko shook out another cigarette, the highly coveted American brand, Camel, almost impossible to get on the Russian Pacific coast. They tasted so much smoother than the Russian brands, Orlov thought, which tasted like toilet paper and left an aftertaste like cleaning chemicals.

“Where did you get these?” Orlov puffed the cigarette to life, inhaling the smoke deeply, then looking at the glowing tip of the cigarette. There was no doubt about it, a man could think with a cigarette between his fingers.

“My wife’s sister travels for business. Somehow she got them through customs. I suspect she has a thing going on with a customs agent.”

“If your wife’s sister is anywhere as good-looking as your wife, I’d say that is totally possible.”

“You know, Captain, having a gorgeous wife is a blessing and a curse. Long sea voyages? With all those hound dogs at the base? It keeps a loving husband up at night.”

“Try being divorced, Ivan. I guarantee you, it is a scenario much worse than having a beautiful, sexy wife whose faithfulness you have to worry about.”

“Damned shame, Captain,” Vlasenko said, blowing out smoke from his nostrils.

“Definitely, Mr. First. Anyway, we should turn our attention to the mission.”

Vlasenko glanced for a moment at Novosibirsk’s commanding officer. Yuri Orlov was tall for submarine duty, with dirty-blonde hair, blue eyes, a sculpted face, though his face was pockmarked from his adolescent acne, but the roughness of his facial skin made him look tough. He was thin, almost too thin, Vlasenko thought. Perhaps that was the fault of the Novosibirsk’s mess cooks. As for his own appearance, Vlasenko didn’t have that problem. His wife was a self-proclaimed master chef, and had fattened him up much more than he had been when they had said their vows, yet another reason Vlasenko worried about his wife finding another suitor more to her liking than chubby Vlasenko.

“Agreed, Captain. If the gods are with us, we should be putting to sea tomorrow.”

Five days ago, a reactor casualty had forced an end to their maximum speed run to the Gulf of Oman, originating from the Pacific Submarine Fleet’s Rybachiy Nuclear Submarine Base in Kamchatka. The reactor controls had alarmed and the unit had tripped, and it had taken the ship out of the deep to periscope depth, barely making way while snorkeling on the emergency diesel. The engineer, Captain Third Rank Kiril “Chernobyl” Chernobrovin had taken an hour to thread through the distributed control system’s history module to diagnose the problem, and when he did, the problem was serious — a dropped control rod from a burned out control rod drive motor. Dropping a rod while critical meant the neighboring fuel modules would pick up the load and it was possible they could reach melting temperature, and melted fuel meant a bad day at sea — radiation levels within the hull rising to near fatal for the crew, and to complicate the miserable situation, a failed rod drive was not repairable at sea. No one carried a spare for that, and to Orlov’s knowledge, no one had ever dropped a rod in real life. It had always been a dreamt-up drill run for training, but here it was, cursing this mission.

The dropped control rod in the reactor that happened the day they arrived in the Arabian Sea had forced Novosibirsk to turn sharply west to pull into the port of Aden, Yemen, to await repair crews to arrive from Vladivostok with the exotic parts and tools needed to repair a control rod drive. And every minute it had taken that crew to arrive and fix the reactor was another minute that that asshole Boris Novikov had to get his submarine in-theater. Orlov frowned. “Mr. First, if that asshole Novikov beats us to the Gulf of Oman, I’m going to be seriously annoyed.”

“Your history with Novikov is the stuff of legend, Captain.”

Orlov nodded somberly. “That scum. I’d torpedo him myself if I could get away with it. But that aside, Mr. First, where do we stand with the repair?”

“Let me call Chernobyl, Captain.” Vlasenko pulled a VHF radio from his belt. “Topside Duty Officer, First Officer.”

The radio clicked as the topside watchstander, who stood aft of the graceful conning tower, waved and held his radio to his lips. “Topside, sir.”

“Get the engineer up here. Tell him we want an up-to-the-minute report.”

“Right away, sir,” the duty officer said, the radio clicking back to silence.

“You know, Captain, this will be our last night ashore for five, maybe six weeks. T.K. Sukolov reported he found a bar called ‘The Tent’ in the Sheraton hotel. We could get a cab, maybe grab some dinner, put away some vodka. You know, for good luck.”

“Fat chance of that, Ivan. You’re standing on the soil of a country that has outlawed alcohol.”

“The Western restaurants allow you to bring in two bottles per party as long as you drink behind closed doors.”

“Really?”

“Sukolov was very hungover this morning, Captain. And very happy. Seems he met a flight crew and they invited him and Dobryvnik to their private dining room. So vodka and a little female company.”

“Sukolov’s a dog,” Orlov said, suppressing a smile. The young communications officer, Captain Lieutenant Mikhail “T.K.” Sukolov, was perpetually looking for excitement ashore, and not the sort that an upstanding citizen would seek. “But let me ask you, Mr. First, do we even have any vodka onboard?”

“Officially, sir? Nyet.”

“And unofficially?”

“Unofficially, Trusov could fill a bathtub.”

The weapons officer, Captain Lieutenant Irina Trusov, was a teetotaler. Everything about that woman was prudish, cold, severe and wrapped up entirely too tight, in Orlov’s opinion, but he wouldn’t say that aloud to Vlasenko. Trusov was Vlasenko’s protégé, his creation, recruiting her personally from a distant branch of his family. They were third cousins, if Orlov remembered right.

“Good plan, having a non-drinker guard the vodka. But tell me, will she give it up if you ask?”

“I’ll probably have to resort to stealing it like Sukolov did.”

Orlov made a hissing sound. “Sukolov probably tried to sweet talk her first.”

“I have it on good authority he hit a brick wall with Iron Irina Trusov.”

“Grab the navigator to come with us, and Irina as well — she can make sure we don’t get into too much trouble. I’m assuming the engineer will have to stay with the technicians to supervise the repair.”

Vlasenko snickered. “And as punishment that it’s his equipment that interrupted our mission.”

Captain Third Rank Chernobrovin stepped quickly down the gangway from the boat to the pier, snapped to attention and saluted Orlov and Vlasenko.

“Engineer, reporting as ordered, sir.”

Orlov casually waved a salute back as he took in Chernobrovin, who wore sweat- and grease-stained blue coveralls with horizontal high-visibility reflective stripes across the top and bottoms of his sleeves. The youth looked underfed and hungry, with a perpetual five o’clock shadow on his face even if he had just shaved, his usual at-sea beard gnarly and atrocious, but he was newly married, and apparently the wife didn’t approve of facial hair. That in itself seemed odd, since a woman who liked baby-faced men would never ordinarily connect with a swarthy lad like Chernobrovin, but who could predict feminine attraction? And there was one perpetual constant in the universe, Orlov thought, the undeniable female urge to change her man from what he was to what she wanted him to be.

“So what’s the status, Mr. Chief Engineer?”

“Sir, the new control rod drive is installed and is mechanically complete. We’re loop checking it now. It’s responding. But we need to test it at operating temperature and pressure, and the only way to do that is to start the reactor and warm it up. The shipyard will ask to start it up and heat it up, then perform a normal shutdown, then restart it, then trip it manually to make sure it responds to a manual trip, then restart it again and send it a trip signal from the reactor control panel to make sure it responds to a programmed trip. Since there are five programmed trips, we’ll have to do that test five times. Only then will they clear us for sea.”

Orlov looked at Vlasenko, frowning. “How long is all that going to take?”

Chernobrovin checked his watch. “About twenty hours from now, Captain, if you give me permission to test the reactor and start up and shut down as the testing dictates.”

Orlov looked at the sky, then at Vlasenko. “We could test it while we maneuver out on the diesel. Assuming the weather cooperated.”

“Shipyard techs want to document a thousand data points from the testing, Captain. And if the unit fails to respond to a trip signal, it’s not safe. And it could even run away from us in a control rod withdrawal accident if the power connections got their polarity reversed or if a connection shorts out. And they want us tied up to the pier in case they have to call for more replacement parts.”

“Twenty hours, then,” Orlov said, shaking his head in frustration. Goddamned Sevmash Shipyard. They’d humped the pooch yet again. “You have permission to start up and shut down the reactor as necessary to accomplish the tests. When you’re done, remain steaming and critical. We’re heading out to sea the moment the ink on the closeout paperwork dries.”

“Yes, sir.” Chernobrovin saluted and turned and walked back down the gangway. Orlov watched him, then looked at the hull of the Novosibirsk. The ship was black and sleek, her hull covered with anechoic foam tiling to absorb sonar pings and to suppress noise from the inside. She was 130 meters long and 13 meters wide at her beam. Her graceful conning tower was tall and long, rising at a slight angle at the forward edge, continuing straight aft, then sloping down gently to the after deck. The vertical rudder aft rose almost as high as the conning tower, the cigar-shaped hull continuing as a simple cylinder forward to where the bullet nose vanished into the brackish water of Port Aden. She was, in a word, beautiful. Not like the drab, boring, functional cylinders of the American submarines. Their naval architects had no souls. Give him a Russian ship designer any day, Orlov thought, but it would be nice if they could manufacture their gorgeous designs with some goddamned workmanship. And throw in some reliability. Maybe Russia could get the Germans or Swiss to build submarines for them some day in the far future. Or even the Italians.

An hour later, as the sun was beginning to set, Orlov, Vlasenko, Sukolov, Trusov and the navigator, Captain Third Rank Misha Dobryvnik, were led to red leather seats at a cherrywood table in a room paneled in the dark mahogany. The waiter brought out glasses and a large bottle of Coca Cola with a bucket of ice, handed them menus and left.

“Madam Weapons Officer, would you do the honors?” Orlov asked Trusov.

Captain Lieutenant Irina Trusov smiled with straight white teeth at the captain, tossing a lock of white-blonde hair out of her blue eyes with a shake of her head, her expression worried at the prospect of getting caught committing a crime in a foreign country.

“Happy to, sir.” She pulled a large bottle of vodka from a dufflebag and filled up four rocks glasses. “Ice, sir?”

“Only amateurs put ice in vodka,” Orlov said, winking at Dobryvnik as the navigator dropped three ice cubes into his drink.

“Only cretins drink it straight,” Dobryvnik said, smiling at Orlov.

“A toast,” Vlasenko said. “To a successful mission for us—”

“—and a failed one for that asshole Novikov and his stinking boat, the Voronezh,” Orlov finished. They all held up their glasses, Trusov having put ice and cola in her glass, then drank the contents. Trusov, without being prompted, immediately refilled their glasses.

“Captain,” Dobryvnik said, “tell us the story of you and ‘that asshole’ Novikov. I’m the only one who hasn’t heard it.”

Dobryvnik was a big man with black hair, dark skin, narrow eyes, a flattened wide nose and a round face. In a wardroom composed of mostly blue-eyed Slavic blondes, he stood out. As a junior officer on the Akula III-class submarine K-419 Kuzbass, he had excelled at under-ice navigation, earning his navigation billet on the Novosibirsk. He was the newest officer to report aboard, but Orlov already had a good feeling about the younger officer. He was sharp-witted, sarcastic and funny. The crew had a taken a liking to him from the first day.

Orlov shook his head sadly. “The others only know the first half of the story. The second half is much worse.”

“Pray tell, Captain,” Vlasenko said, passing around the bottle for the third round, “what could possibly be worse than you two loading a torpedo onto the Severodvinsk and having its engine start, blast out of the torpedo tube and zip across the harbor and blow up a tugboat?”

“What?” Dobryvnik almost spilled his drink.

The waiter came in then to take their orders. Orlov and Vlasenko put in their orders, the others hurrying to scan the menu, their minds previously far from thinking about their dinner orders. When the waiter had collected their menus and shut the room’s door behind him, Orlov continued.

“Totally not my fault,” Orlov said, smirking, the worn expression he used when telling the story an inside joke between him and Vlasenko. “The board of inquiry blamed it all on that asshole Novikov, since he was on the loading platform and had direct control of the weapon, but some of his stink rubbed off on me, since I was on the wharf supervising.”

“Did it really blow up and sink the tug?” Dobryvnik stared at Orlov, his eyes wide.

“Not with the full force of the warhead.” Orlov put out his glass for a refill. Vlasenko poured for the captain and himself. “Only maybe ten percent of the high explosive went off, but the impact and that small detonation put a hole in the tugboat big enough that it took on water, and fast. We got lucky. It was right under a six-hundred-ton rail-mounted crane, and a quick-thinking crew and operator put the hook to a cable wrapped around the tugboat’s deck cleats and lifted it up so it wouldn’t sink and held it long enough that they could rig a drain pump and pontoons and patch the hole. But it occupied the crane for a week, and that delayed some important depot-level maintenance.”

“It’s a better story when you have the tug blow up and sink, though, Captain,” Vlasenko laughed.

“A few more vodkas in, and that tugboat in the story gets blown to holy hell,” Orlov smiled. “That asshole Novikov got knocked down a rank and I got one of those letters in my service jacket, the kind that’s not entertaining reading.”

“So what’s the second half of the story, Captain?” Dobryvnik asked.

“Let’s just say that that asshole Novikov was as furious at me as I was at him.”

“Why, what did you do to him?”

“He thinks I could have argued he was blameless before the board of inquiry, that the weapon was defective. Stupid idea, they recovered what was left of the torpedo and they would have seen we were both lying. I told the board Novikov took the safety bolts off to make the weapon easier to load. It was a common practice, but frowned on, and I personally told Novikov that would be unacceptable, but I didn’t check personally that the bolts were installed. Weapon got cockeyed in the tube and the arming circuit went off, had an internal short, started the engine, and the force of the screw on the metal of the tube walked it outward from the hull despite Novikov and his midshipman trying to stop it. Finally, they had to run out of the way and the torpedo started its journey. He blames me for his reduction in rank.”

“Didn’t hurt his career any, not that I saw, Captain,” Vlasenko said. “He may be only a captain second rank, but he’s in command of the Yasen-M boat Voronezh.”

“You know why, right? That asshole Novikov is the adopted son of Admiral Gennady Zhigunov, and Zhigunov is married to the daughter of the Minister of Defense. So. Connections.”

“You said there was more?” Vlasenko prompted.

“That asshole Novikov is pretty much the reason I’m divorced.”

Irina Trusov stared at him. “Really, sir?”

Orlov poured another vodka. “After the board of inquiry, he apparently decided to strike for me where it hurt. While I was on an under-ice run in the Arctic Ocean, that asshole Novikov was busy chatting up and seducing my wife.”

The room went silent, almost as if someone had let all the air out of the room. Orlov looked up from his glass and shook his head. “Yeah, and the story doesn’t have a happy ending, not for either of us.”

“What do you mean, Captain?” Trusov put her hand briefly on Orlov’s sleeve, a gesture of empathy.

“She left me for him,” Orlov said. “And that asshole Novikov was stupid enough to fall for her, just like I did. And would you believe it? She did the same thing to him that she did to me, not even a full year later. His next Barents Sea exercise, she ended up in the bed of the captain of the Kazan.”

“Mother of God,” Vlasenko said. “That woman certainly has a thing for submarine commanders.”

Orlov pulled out his phone and selected a photo of his former wife and passed it to Vlasenko, who handed it to Sukolov — who whistled — who handed it to Dobryvnik, then to Trusov.

“She could be a movie star,” Trusov said, impressed.

The woman in the photo was a platinum bombshell blonde with deep blue eyes, puffy red lips, a small upturned nose; she was slender but with an enormous chest and mile-long legs. She looked like she stepped right off one of those graphics that graced the noses of the bombers of the Great Patriotic War.

“She stopped traffic everywhere she went. It was stupid of me to marry her. Stupider still for that asshole Novikov to fall in love with her.”

“Damn,” Vlasenko said. “Now I feel sorry for both of you.”

“I didn’t mean to turn the evening into a downer,” Orlov said, standing. “I’ll close out the tab. You guys finish without me. I’ll find a cab back to the boat.”

On the cab ride back to the port facility, Orlov leaned his head against the window, berating himself for spilling his sad life story to his officers. For the thousandth time, he cursed the day he met Natalia.

And for the ten thousandth time, he cursed that asshole Novikov. Orlov wondered where that asshole Novikov was at that moment. Probably speeding at full ahead, reactor circulating pumps at fast speed, leaving the Arabian Sea and entering the Gulf of Oman, making his 8300 nautical mile passage from the Northern Fleet Kola base at Zapadnaya Litsa through the Suez Canal look like a breeze compared to Orlov’s 8100 mile run from Rybachiy in the Kamchatka peninsula. The thought of that asshole Novikov entering the Gulf of Oman ahead of them made Orlov sick. As the cab arrived at the pier, Captain First Rank Yuri Orlov, Navy of the Russian Republic and captain of the frontline nuclear fast attack submarine Novosibirsk, opened the door and vomited what seemed like gallons.

16

Captain Second Rank Boris Novikov climbed the four steps from the conning tower interior to the bridge of the Yasen-M-class submarine Voronezh. The ship was anchored in the southbound convoy waiting area a few miles north of Port Said, the northern mouth of the Suez Canal. The route plan had Voronezh passing surfaced through the canal over a week ago, but all traffic had been suddenly held up for reasons unknown. Instead of 97 ships a day going through, half of them southbound, those vessels had all piled up, filling the southbound convoy waiting area until the new arrivals were forced to steam in slow circles, burning their fuel and annoying their crews.

Novikov lifted the satellite phone from his belt and stared at it for a moment, knowing it was prohibited for personal use, but unable to help himself. He dialed the number, her number, a number he’d had memorized since the day she’d given it to him, what seemed half a lifetime ago.

The voice that came over the connection was beautiful, Novikov thought, sweet and soprano, her tongue caressing the consonants, her throat wrapping around the vowels, more musical than an opera singer, but unfortunately, the voice was a recording.

“You have reached Natalia Orlov, and I am so very sorry I am unable to connect with you live, but if you’ll leave me your message, I promise I will call you back at my very earliest opportunity, and until then, may God and all his angels be with you.”

He’d gotten that stupid recording for the last eight days, ever since the Suez Canal shut down. That recording constantly promising she’d call back, a false promise for certain. And she’d kept that foul name Orlov, as if to toss it in his face. Novikov knew she hadn’t gone back to that pud-thumper Orlov. And he doubted she was still seeing Alexeyev, the captain of the Kazan. And if not, where was she? What was she doing? She’d made noises about leaving Murmansk and going back to Moscow, but even so, her phone should have worked.

Novikov decided to leave yet another message. “Natalia, it’s me, Boris. If this number is unfamiliar, that’s because it’s a secure satellite phone. I’m halfway through a voyage and delayed, so I thought I would call you and tell you again how I feel about you. Natalia, I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I miss you so much—”

The first officer just had to pick that very moment to intrude on his space in the upper conning tower.

Novikov clicked off the connection, hoping Captain Second Rank Anastasia Isakova hadn’t heard much of his message. It was unmistakably not an official call, and his whispering romance into a goddamned Navy satphone would not sit well with the crew. Or with the bosses. With an effort to control his expression, he turned to face the first officer.

“Madam First,” he said.

Isakova stepped up to the upper conning tower platform, binoculars hanging from a strap around her neck. The slender brunette was wearing her blue at-sea coveralls with the high-vis stripes, the belt of the one-piece garment tied snugly around her small waist, making her breasts seem bigger. Her hips were narrow, her legs thin, leaving her seeming top-heavy. Her hair was cut ultra-short, giving her a pixie look. Some men liked that, Novikov thought, but she seemed less feminine than he liked. Not like the nightclub singer body of Natalia. Dammit, he thought, could he have one thought to himself without Natalia invading his mind?

“Captain. I came up to talk to you and take a look around. Do you mind?”

“Be my guest. What did you want to talk about?”

“It’s strange, sir,” she said. I’ve been scouring the news from all sources. Egyptian, Israeli, Russian, English, American, French.”

“We all know your amazing talents in languages, Madam First. What did you find out?”

“Exactly nothing, Captain. This situation could go on. The 2021 blockage was a week, but the canal was closed for seven years when the Egyptians and Israelis had a scrape sixty years ago. I suppose the mission could wait a week, but there’s no telling how long this could take. It’s shrouded in secrecy. Something is up. I thought maybe you could call the admiral and ask if he knows anything.”

“I send daily status reports to Northern Fleet HQ. The admiral knows we’re stuck here.”

Anastasia Isakova put her binoculars up to her eyes, but stole a long glance at the captain. Boris Novikov was tall and lanky, with a mop of black hair and dark eyes, a straight nose over strong cheekbones, with a narrow, tough-looking face and a sculpted chin. His teeth, when he smiled, were straight, perhaps unnaturally white — could that be from the vanity of a dental treatment? He reminded her of how the movies depicted Moscow mafia solders or bosses — mean and criminal, with a dark energy seeking release, a large pistol inevitably holstered under a sharkskin sport jacket. That his girlfriend or wife or whatever she was to him, Natalia, had left him seemed incredibly stupid. Isakova had been denying her feelings for the captain for the last year, and had finally started thinking about asking for reassignment.

What had Novikov said at the wardroom table a few months ago? “That pud-thumper Orlov used to always say, ‘put a reasonably attractive female in a room with a reasonable looking male and make them work together for a year, and they’re either going to fuck each other or murder each other.’” And the engineer, Yevgeny Montorov, who had zero tact, had smiled and said, “sometimes both, eh, Captain?” as if he were unaware that saying that would bring Novikov face-to-face with his life crisis, Natalia moving on. And the navigator, Leonid “Luke” Lukashenko, had tried to break the tension by adding, “hopefully in that order, because the reverse would be, well, socially unacceptable.” Novikov had smiled at Lukashenko gratefully for just a split second.

“Maybe a secure video conference is in order,” Isakova said. “Tell him you’re thinking of leaving the Med and going around Africa. With the canal closed, it’s the only way to get in-theater.”

“Draft a message for me to see before you send it, requesting a video link for this afternoon. Maybe we’ll either find something out or get a blessing to go around the horn. Just sitting here cooling our heels won’t do.”

Michael Pacino leaned over and opened the passenger-side door while he pushed the button to open the rear hatch.

Vice Admiral Robert Catardi, clad in jeans, harness boots and a golf shirt with a black sport jacket over it, half jogged up, a briefcase in one hand and an overnight bag in the other. He tossed his bags in the back and the hatch began to close slowly by itself. He stood back a moment, staring at the car. “What. The fuck. Is this?”

“Good to see you too, Rob,” Pacino grinned, holding out his hand. Catardi ducked to fold himself into the sleek black sports car and shook the National Security Advisor’s hand.

“You too, sir,” Catardi said.

“No ‘sirs’ around me, Robby, just ‘Patch’. How long has it been?”

Pacino took the shift lever to first gear and the engine roared as he swung away from the Andrews Military Aviation arrival and departure lounge, the engine screaming as Pacino shifted to second, the car already going insanely fast before he hit third.

“It’s been since the days of the old Devilfish,” Catardi said, reluctant to mention the name of the submarine Pacino had commanded that had so disastrously gone down under the ice, but he hadn’t been in the same room with the older man since then. “And we used to call your son ‘Patch.’”

Pacino looked over as he drove down the winding backroad, taking the scenic route out of Washington.

“I talked to him after you tipped me that he’d be at the — well, where you said he’d be. He sounded like his old self, before the whole, well, you know.”

Before the Piranha sinking, Catardi thought sadly. Their history with sunken submarines was not something either wanted to think about. Catardi decided to change the subject. Plenty of time to talk about the mission of the USS Vermont once they reached Camp David and got into a secure SCIF conference room.

Catardi glanced at Pacino for a moment, seeing what time had done to the man since they’d last met. Back then, Pacino had had a head full of thick hair black as a coal mine, shallow cheeks below strong cheekbones, a straight nose and emerald-green eyes, and stood at a height that should have been too tall for submarine duty. Today, he was still as gaunt and thin as he’d been then and he still had all of his hair, but the hair had all turned pure white. It made for an odd look, since his eyebrows were still black. His eyes were still that weird color of green, but duller somehow. The smile lines at the corners of his eyes had gotten deeper, and he looked tanned. Like Catardi, he was wearing jeans, a golf shirt and a sport coat.

Catardi decided to break the silence and ask about Pacino’s sports car.

“What is this car?” At the moment he asked, they were taking a turn at what had to be over half a G, the car’s engine roaring, then purring, the screaming again as Pacino raked it smoothly through the manual transmission’s gears.

“Aston Martin DB11 AMR. V-12 engine with six hundred and thirty horsepower. She’ll do two oh eight on a flat course, zero to sixty in three point seven.”

“Jesus, Patch. How fast have you driven her?”

“One of my pilot friends took me to an abandoned airfield with an eight-thousand-foot runway. I got to about two hundred and two miles per before I decided I was either going to melt the brakes or go off the end of the runway.”

“This thing must cost a fortune. A lot more than my damned house if I’m guessing right.”

Pacino shrugged. “I sold the sailboat. After that scrape with the drone sub, the sea holds no relaxation for me. I got a good price, from one of my Annapolis neighbors who’d been lusting over it for years. So then I saw this car at a distressed estate sale. Owner found himself in the kind of trouble that needed a million-dollar legal defense, so instead of taking six months to auction it off to some Saudi prince and the hassle of shipping it overseas, he let it go for pennies on the pound. So, really, I paid less than you would for one of those fancy mid-engined Corvettes.”

The truth of it was, Pacino thought, that he’d desperately needed something to cheer him up after Colleen moved out, over a year into her giving him the silent treatment, furious at Pacino that Anthony had chosen to go submarines for his service selection. Seeing him clinically dead and then return had changed her, he thought, and not for the better. He glanced at his left ring finger. This morning he’d decided to take it off and put it in the polished wood box he kept his Rolex in at night. The tan-line on the finger seemed a rebuke.

“Even that price is eye-popping. I hope you’re enjoying it.”

“You know what, Rob? It’s okay.”

Catardi laughed. “Okay, right. Are you getting any time to drive it?”

“Not after Scorch hired me. I guess you can say I’m his consiglieri on military affairs.”

“Scorch?”

“President Carlucci’s handle back when he was pushing a fighter jet off an aircraft carrier for a living. Apparently his afterburners caused some minor damage to a car parked too close to an Air Force Base taxiway.”

“Minor damage?”

“Well, the way Carlucci tells it, the car went up in flames and the gas tank exploded and he didn’t even know it, he was all the way down the runway and going vertical by that time. Turns out the car belonged to the Air Force base commander. Not very career-enhancing for poor Lieutenant Commander Vito Carlucci.”

“I can imagine.”

“He stuck out his tour, then punched out shortly after the Bohai Bay conflict, decided to try politics.”

“‘Scorch’—he’s probably the last guy I could see having a name like that.”

“I know what you mean,” Pacino said. “He’s pretty cautious for an ex-fighter jockey.”

“Cautious? More like weak. You’re aware the political cartoons all depict him holding a purse, right?”

“That’s why he brought me in. But from what I’ve seen so far, he’s pretty tough behind the scenes. Far tougher than I would have ever thought.”

“Press flamed on him pretty hard for appointing you, Patch, you warmonger.”

Pacino smiled, his eyes on the road as he downshifted to third for a tight curve, then down again to second, the engine squealing as he throttled up out of the curve.

“You sink one little Chinese fleet and they call you a warmonger. So unfair.”

Catardi grinned. “So, Camp David. What’s it like?”

“It’s nice. Forested, secluded, rustic. It’s quiet there. The cabins are a bit basic and haven’t been updated or remodeled since Gerald Ford hung out here, but I guess that’s part of its charm. I’m told Carlucci doesn’t use it like other presidents did. It’s an absolute no-media zone, a total comms lockdown. No photographers, videographers, news reporters, nobody. No presidential family members. Cabinet and top-level staff only. And as few of those as possible, and none of their lackeys are invited. That’s why I had to tell you to leave your aide behind, what’s her name? River something.”

“Wanda. Wanda Styxx. Apparently she’s your son’s type. They danced one dance at the AUTEC O-Club and then disappeared together.”

Pacino stared over at Catardi for a split second. “Wow, really?”

“Didn’t see her again until late the next morning, just before your son’s boat shoved off.” Catardi decided to be discreet and not mention that Wanda Styxx was in an uncharacteristically excellent mood for the morning after an O-Club drink-fest.

“I guess he’s starting to get over Carrie,” Pacino said. Catardi lifted an eyebrow.

“Your former engineer, Robby, Carolyn Alameda.”

Catardi whistled, shaking his head. “I couldn’t make her funeral in time. Admiral Rand had me at a comearound at Pac Fleet HQ in Pearl Harbor. She died so suddenly. But you said Patch Junior was quote, getting over her, unquote. They were—?”

“Yeah, they were seeing each other. I thought I’d have to talk him out of getting married, it was that serious.”

“Holy shit. I never knew.”

“Going through what you guys suffered, I guess they stayed in touch after that. And you know the story. Tale as old as time. Boy meets girl. Girl calls boy a non-qual. Boy falls for girl. Boy rescues girl from certain death. Girl falls for boy.”

Catardi felt a moment of guilt that he’d tried to bury the Piranha incident in his mind and hadn’t kept in contact with Alameda, Schultz or the younger Pacino, probably unconsciously thinking that seeing them would bring him right back to that horrible deep submergence vehicle where he’d almost died.

“You were telling me about Carlucci and Camp David,” Catardi prompted.

“Yeah,” Pacino said. “Carlucci doesn’t like the usual presidential accommodations at Aspen Lodge with all its facilities for meetings and communications. He holes up in the super-humble Birch Cabin. He’s got us bunking in the old Holly Lodge, which was the presidential house before they built Aspen Lodge. It has enough gigantic bedrooms to host half a dozen heads of state at a time. The Secretary of State and the Director of Combined Intelligence will be there with us along with the VP. When Carlucci calls, we walk over to Birch’s back deck if the weather’s nice, or indoors in the small den with the fireplace going if it’s raining or snowing or just cold. And that fire’s always going.”

“Sounds cozy. I guess. But the outside deck at the Birch Cabin can’t be secure enough for what I think we’ll be talking about. I suppose I can’t really ask why I got called here.”

Pacino shook his head. “This car’s a lot of things, Robby, but it ain’t a SCIF. But the den at Birch Cabin is.”

An hour later, they parked and took their bags to the security building to check in and get their belongings scanned. After clearing security, a golf cart waited for them, a young, pretty staff aide ready to drive them over the narrow road to Holly Lodge.

“It’s pretty humble for presidential digs,” Catardi said, following Pacino into the house.

“Hey,” Pacino said, “we’re camping, remember?”

The officers’ wardroom doors were both shut, with leather covers affixed to their small circular windows and warning signs posted outside reading SECURE VIDEO CONFERENCE IN PROGRESS.

Captain First Rank Boris Novikov sat in a chair in the middle of the long edge of the table on the inboard side. To his left sat the navigator and chief of tactical operations, Captain Third Rank Leonid Lukashenko. To his right sat First Officer Anastasia Isakova. On the other side of the room, against the outboard bulkhead, a large flatscreen display showed the surface of a table, an ornate green tablecloth on it with elaborate gold stitching, the wall behind the table a dark wood paneling with a framed oil painting of a Project 671 Shchuka-class submarine on the surface, plowing through a high sea state.

As the officers of the Voronezh waited, they each took out their tablet phones and scanned the news again, as they had for the last week, but there was still nothing but a single sentence about the Suez Canal closing.

Finally a large older man appeared in the screen, taking his seat and putting his officer’s cap on the table surface. Someone off-screen handed him an ash tray and a silver cigarette case. The officer opened the case and took out a cigarette, accepted a lighter from the person off-screen, lit up and let out a cloud of smoke. He was in late fifties or early sixties, with all his hair, albeit mostly gray, with a face that was probably once handsome but had given up to the infirmities of age. His face was stern as he got settled and lifted a remote to turn on his screen.

“Good afternoon, Admiral,” Novikov said. “This is First Officer Isakova and Navigator Lukashenko, sir. Officers, allow me to present Admiral Zhigunov, commander of the Northern Fleet Submarine Force.”

The mean expression on Zhigunov’s face melted into a warm smile. “Hello Boris Alexandrovich. And hello also to your officers. I hope you are all well, yes? My chief of staff said you had an urgent matter. What is it that is so urgent that you can’t put it in a radio dispatch?”

The truth was that Novikov wanted to see the expression on his adopted father’s face when the matter of the closed canal came up. Novikov outlined the situation.

“I’d heard,” Zhigunov said, letting smoke out of his nostrils and taking another puff.

“It’s just that we’re stuck here and there’s no contingency plan for this. If this goes on too much longer, I would lag behind where I would have been if I’d immediately backed out of the Med and gone around Africa. It’s fifteen thousand kilometers farther. We could have done that in fourteen days at a speed-of-advance of twenty-five knots, sir. And maybe we still should.”

“I’ve spent a week talking with the secretary general of the Rossiyskoy Federatsii, the SVR.”

The SVR, the federal state security agency, was the successor to the KGB, Novikov thought, but from what he heard, things were no different at the secret spy shop since the hammer-and-sickle flag was struck in favor of the colors of the Russian Republic.

“Yes, Admiral?” Would Novikov have to drag the information out of the teeth of Gennady Zhigunov?

“I hate to tell you this, Boris, but let’s attribute this to secrecy and ‘the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing’ department, because while we, the right hand, were putting you into the Gulf of Oman via the Suez Canal, the left hand, the SVR, were busy with a client organization, the Algerian FLN, who they’ve been financing for years. Turns out the FLN had plans to detonate a very large bomb in the Suez Canal at the Al Salam bridge. Large for a bomb but small for an atomic bomb, I suppose you could say. A suitcase nuclear demolition explosive, as my source said. The secretary general knew nothing of your mission until I told him. The unintended consequences, he told me, were unknown. After we talked, the SVR gave an anonymous tip to an Israeli Mossad agent and that’s why they shut down the canal, so they could find this bomb and the freedom fighters responsible for placing it. So his operation is ending, to allow our operation to continue.”

Novikov stared at the screen. “So, Admiral, what does that mean for us? Should we continue waiting or head west to Gibraltar?”

“I told the SVR secretary general to set up an ambush for the FLN with a second friendly tip to their counterparts at Mossad. Because once Mossad interrogates the people captured, they’ll find the demolition charge, defuse it and reopen the canal.”

“That could take weeks.”

Admiral Gennady Zhigunov looked at his expensive, antique watch given him by Novikov several years before. “No, Boris, they captured the bombers this morning, and an hour ago found the suitcase nuclear weapon. They should be reopening the canal any—”

Just then the forward wardroom door came half open and the head and shoulders of the communications officer appeared. Captain Lieutenant Maksimilian Kovalyov whispered intensely, “Apologies, Captain, but the canal just reopened!” As swiftly as he’d appeared, the radio officer vanished, the door shutting behind him.

Zhigunov smiled, apparently hearing the off-screen voice. “You see? All is taken care of, Boris Alexandrovich. I expect the southbound convoys will start very soon.”

“Thank you, sir,” Novikov said, feeling relief.

“I have another matter for you, Boris.”

“Yes, Admiral?”

Zhigunov held up a clear plastic-wrapped package. Visible inside were the gold uniform epaulets of a captain first rank.

“I hope your ship’s store has these uniform devices, Boris. You’re officially promoted to the rank of captain first rank as of this morning. Message to follow from Northern Fleet Personnel Command. Congratulations, Boris Alexandrovich.”

Novikov smiled. “I ordered the collar insignia and epaulets before we sailed, Admiral. I just had a feeling.”

Zhigunov smiled. “Good luck on your mission, son.” Zhigunov ended the video link and the screen went dark.

Novikov stood up. “What is this damned mission anyway?” he said half to himself. Isakova looked at him, startled. Lukashenko, the navigator and operations officer, froze as he reached for his tablet phone.

“Why, to get to the Gulf of Oman as fast as possible,” Isakova said.

“Yes, but why? What are we doing there?”

“I assume they’ll tell us when we arrive on-station,” she said. Novikov looked at her.

“You’re right. I guess I’m just frustrated by this wait. Navigator, have the engineer see me in my stateroom. Madam First, prepare to get underway. I want us to weigh anchor the second they call on our convoy.”

In his stateroom, as he waited for the engineer, Novikov lifted up his tablet phone as it beeped, then read the message traffic. Great, he thought. The canal authority, Port Said Operations, was prioritizing for the southbound convoys the ships that hadn’t been able to anchor and had had to steam in circles waiting for the canal to reopen, so those ships low on fuel could dock at the refueling facility at Bitter Lake. The second priority would be anchored ships with livestock or perishable goods. The wait for their convoy to get clearance to sail would not come for at least one, maybe two more days. Dammit, he thought, this was insane. It was almost at the point that if he’d turned back immediately when the canal had shut down, he’d have arrived on-station sooner than he would with this new wrinkle.

The engineer came in after knocking. Captain Second Rank Yevgeny Montorov was sweating and dirty. He was shorter than average, but muscularly built, with bulging biceps under his blue at-sea coveralls, the weight-lifting perhaps an attempt to compensate for his lack of height, whether conscious or unconscious. His hair had been going prematurely bald, so he always cut it so close to his head it was a mere shadow. He was a brilliant and a dedicated engineer, having a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and bachelor’s in electrical and a third degree in instrumentation and controls. Unmarried, he always seemed on the prowl for a wife, but so far, he’d been rejected by what seemed all of the available women in the greater Murmansk metro area. Perhaps the females sensed he was too hungry, Novikov thought, or they all detected some character flaw in the youngster in that odd second sight all women seemed to have.

“Looking after the diesel, I see, yes, Yevgeny?” Novikov almost never used an officer or enlisted person’s first name, but Montorov was an exception, reminding Novikov of himself when he was that age, full of energy and wild-eyed patriotism and unfortunately more than a little recklessness. Novikov had made it his personal mission to mentor the youth and save him from the heartache that Novikov himself had suffered. He couldn’t just say, “follow torpedo loading procedures to the letter and avoid overly sexual large-breasted women,” but he could pay attention to the officer’s life and offer sage advice when called for. Perhaps intervening. Perhaps even interfering, when necessary.

“Yes, Captain. The emergency diesel will be very happy to go back to sleep once we start the reactor. I assume you called me here to give me permission to start the reactor.”

“Originally I did, Yevgeny, but it looks like this wait will continue.”

“Really? How long, Captain?”

“Another day, maybe two. They’re forming up convoys of fifty ships and only two southbound convoys will go per day. According to the latest from Port Said Operations, we’re in convoy four. So that’s a day-and-a-half minimum. I’ll have you start the reactor tomorrow, Yevgeny. Until then, make that diesel happy.”

“Yes, sir, understood.”

“What’s the status of the battery?”

“Fully charged, Captain, on a trickle discharge as of an hour ago.”

“Very well. That’ll be all, Yevgeny. Oh, and try to get some sleep before we roll out.”

“Sleep will be no trouble at all, Captain,” Montorov grinned. He shut the door behind him.

For some reason, when he left, Novikov was left with a sense of loneliness. For once, that loneliness wasn’t for Natalia. He picked up the phone handset and dialed the first officer’s stateroom.

“First Officer,” Anastasia Isakova’s crisp voice said.

“Madam First, when convenient, can you come to my stateroom?”

“Right away, Captain.”

Novikov put the phone down, thinking about that pud-thumper Orlov’s statement about men and women working together. Consider the source, he counseled himself. Orlov was an idiot. Still, Isakova was looking more attractive lately.

Captain Yuri Orlov zipped up his at-sea coveralls, laced up his boots and left his sea cabin to go to the wardroom. First Officer Ivan Vlasenko was there, as were Navigator Misha Dobryvnik and Weapons Officer Irina Trusov.

He took his seat at the end of the room that abutted the galley and nodded at the other officers. There was tea service on the table. He poured a cup and dropped in two sugarcubes.

“Status, Mr. First?”

Vlasenko said from the seat to Orlov’s right, “Chernobyl’s still starting the reactor. The repair techs are still here. They want to do a reliability check.”

“Now what, for God’s sake?” Orlov asked glancing at the overhead.

“They want to run it against the load bank at various power levels and let it settle out. Then they’ll increase power. Eventually the engineer will request to run fast speed pumps and they’ll take it up to a hundred percent for an hour.”

Orlov sighed. “You know, Ivan, there comes a time in every repair work-order when it’s time to shoot the repair technicians.”

Vlasenko laughed and Iron Irina Trusov smiled. Orlov thought for a moment — could he remember her ever smiling? He hadn’t noticed, but when the woman smiled, she was really quite beautiful. That head of white-blonde hair, pouting red lips, big blue eyes. But, he thought, for him to be noticing Irina Ice Queen Trusov, his mind must be giving him a notification that he needed to search for female companionship. Maybe it was time, after Hurricane Natalia had done her damage and he’d healed for almost two years. For a moment he was distracted and didn’t hear Vlasenko’s question.

“What was that, Ivan?”

“Sir, I could go back aft and tell them to stop the test and get the hell off our ship. We do have a mission to perform.”

“Yeah, a mission no one’s bothered to tell us about other than to get our boat to the Gulf of Oman.”

“It’s supposedly urgent, Captain.”

“Go back aft and tell those idiots, whatever amount of time they’re spending at each power level, to cut it in half.”

“Yes, sir,” Vlasenko said, leaving and shutting the door behind him.

“I’d better check the charts and current, Captain,” Misha Dobryvnik said, standing and putting his cup away in the bin. Orlov waved, taking a pull from his tea. He figured Irina Trusov would leave the wardroom as well. It would give him time to review the news files and see what was going on in the Gulf of Oman. Perhaps there was some context to this oddball mission.

But Trusov remained behind, refilling her cup, blowing on the hot tea and looking over the rim at Orlov, smiling at him with her eyes.

“Did you see the dispatch on the hack, Captain?” she asked.

“No,” he said, embarrassed that there was something he’d missed. “Was it addressed to us?”

“No, Captain, just a general update message. But it’s serious. The Northern and Pacific Fleet’s air and surface warfare systems all got some kind of worm that shuts down their computers. They can’t fly and the surface ships can’t even start their engines. It’s severe.”

“When did this happen? Do we know where it came from?” Orlov should have known about something this major. It might be a reason why their operational orders were delayed getting to them.

Trusov shook her head in disgust. “Who could it be, Captain. The damned Americans, of course.”

“Did the update say it was a state actor that originated this worm, like Stuxnet?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“It might not have been the Americans. The Chinese are making things difficult now. After they pulled out of the joint space mission, things have been pretty chilly with them.”

Trusov pursed her lips. “It’s the Americans, Captain. It’s always the Americans. You know my uncle went down on the Kursk, right?”

“Vlasenko told me,” Orlov said, hearing his own voice become gentler. “I’m sorry.”

“You know the intelligence agencies think the Americans sank her.”

“If they did,” Orlov said, “it was the perfect crime. There’s no evidence. It’s a conspiracy theory, Irina.” Suddenly it felt strange to address her as ‘Weapons Officer’ or ‘Miss Trusov.’

“Maybe so, sir, but it does fit a lot of facts about the Americans.”

“Do you ever wonder sometimes,” Orlov asked, “about the American submarine force? Their sailors, their officers, their ships?”

Captain Lieutenant Irina Trusov looked over the rim of her cup at Orlov again. “Only in passing, I suppose, the way I think about the Americans in general.”

“And how’s that, Irina?”

“They’re villains, Captain. They remain the glavny protivnik, the main adversary. They never go a year without starting a war, sometimes two, or continuing a war that never should have happened. Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan. Every day their bombs rip apart the bodies of women and children, destroying schools, bridges, bus terminals, causing starvation, disease and death everywhere they go. They pretend to be proponents of peace while their intelligence agencies assassinate anyone who is in their political way. Captain, Mother Russia is the only force that stands between the Americans and total world domination.”

Orlov looked at her indulgently. “I know about one point four billion Chinamen who would disagree with that last point.”

“It’s the hypocrisy, Captain,” Trusov continued, ignoring his comment. “The Americans pretend to be a moral force for good, yet the sheer extent of racism in their culture is baked in. They eliminated slavery, but the descendants of their slaves live in ghettos. Meanwhile, their ultra-elites light cigars with hundred dollar bills while their media and entertainment industries crank out the vilest, most immoral and shocking content. It’s enough to make a red-blooded Russian girl sick. I’m friends with the first officer of the Voronezh, Anastasia Isakova. She was a mentor to me, recruited me into the force, back when she was in the Pacific Fleet. She told me her father lived in Star City and worked at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. He told her a hundred stories of how the Americans won the space race by cheating.”

“Cheating? In the space race?”

“Sabotage. They blew up more than a dozen of our rockets, one of the explosions killing the first chief designer. They even shot down our cosmonauts. The Americans are a wretched culture of killing and death and evil, Captain. The world would be a better place if they just stopped existing between breakfast and lunch.”

Orlov smiled. “Remind me to keep my nuclear release codes locked up tight, Madam Weapons Officer. Still,” he said, looking into the distance. “Consider if you will one of their submarines—”

A knock came at the door and Engineer Kiril Chernobrovin stuck his head in. “Captain, we are in the final hour of testing. We should be ready to answer all bells in fifty-five minutes, sir.”

“Very well, Engineer.” Orlov checked his watch. It was 0530 hours local time. The tea was helping clear his head, but losing a night’s sleep wasn’t as easy as it had been when he’d been in his twenties. He picked up his phone and dialed the central command post.

“Watch Officer,” the navigator’s voice said.

“Navigator, the repair work will be complete in less than an hour. Are you ready?”

“We’ll set maneuvering stations watch in thirty minutes, sir, then get underway as soon as the repair crew walks to the pier.”

“Very well,” Orlov said, putting up the phone. Finally, this ridiculous wait was coming to an end.

Trusov refilled his cup and spooned two teaspoons of sugar in it for him. “You were saying about the American submarines, sir?” she prompted.

“Yes, Madam Weapons Officer. Consider for a moment, if you will, one of their new Virginia-class submarines. Half our tonnage, twice our crew. That points to less automation. Manual control. Sailors back in the engineroom sweating through long propulsion plant watches. Other sailors in their central command post manually driving the ship. And their weapon control is probably primitive compared to ours. There’s no centralized AI system, no second captain, just a bunch of wobbly, off-the-shelf computers. I think of their crew, bottled up in their submarine, fighting against the sea just like us, scanning their sonar screens, straining to hear one of our subs, going days without daylight, without relaxation, without even a single shot of vodka, with bad canned food, and, well, I feel sorry for them. In a way, they are just like us. We would have more in common with the crew of an American nuclear submarine than with any collection of people off the street of Murmansk. Or Moscow, for that matter. I think, often, perhaps too often, that if we went out drinking together, just we and our American submarine counterparts, we might reach a deep understanding. Perhaps, we could even be friends.” Orlov paused, reluctant to look at Trusov, who certainly wouldn’t understand, and who probably thought he’d suddenly gone soft.

“I wonder,” he continued. “If our souls could move through the ocean, through the waves, through the air and past the clouds, in the direction of the closest Virginia-class submarine to us that’s steaming at sea, and just fly unseen into their central command post, what would we see? What are the sailors of that Virginia-class submarine doing right now?”

17

The control room mid-watch was quiet, the lights set to red in accordance with the rig for ultra-quiet, to remind watchstanders of the need to maintain absolute sound silence. In the old days, when periscopes of submarines featured actual optics, control rooms were lit with red lights to keep the eyes of the officer of the deck night-adapted, so at periscope depth he’d be able to see in the dark. Conning officers in decades past had worn red goggles or even a pirate’s eye patch over their periscope eye, to maintain that night vision capability. Today, with the periscopes constructed of non-hull-penetrating optronics, able to see in normal optical frequencies and also infrared, with laser range-finders, their output piped to high definition flatscreen displays, there was no longer a need for lighting the control room with red lights, and yet the tradition lived on. Somehow, red lights — the human perceiving red as an indicator of danger, from the sight of blood — kept the crew mindful of how close to real danger they all were.

Officer of the Deck Lieutenant Mohammed “Boozy” Varney paced the deck in the crowded space aft of the command console, the display selected to the athwartships beam of the sonar narrowband display of the TB-33 thin line towed array sonar, which showed exactly nothing but multifrequency noise, the array searching for a tonal frequency from man-made rotating machinery, hoping to catch the thrum of the electrical generators or the main motor of the modified-Kilo submarine Panther. But so far, it was all noise.

Varney paged his display software to show the output of the BQQ-10 large aperture bow array, which was scanning for broadband noise, and was full of contacts. All 37 of them — merchant ships all, steaming through the gulf with their three or four-bladed screws, tankers laden with oil coming outbound, or tankers empty and riding high, lumbering inbound to get loaded. He squinted his eyes shut and touched his stomach. He checked the bulkhead chronometer—0110 hours Zulu time, or 5:10 am local time. It was barely over an hour into the midwatch, and already his guts were churning.

“Goddamn chili for mid-rats,” he said to no one.

“Someone feeling Chubby Cruz’s famous hot and spicy Tex-Mex chili?” Radioman Chief Bernadette Goreliki said, snickering, from the pilot station. “Just don’t be polluting the control room air, sir. That’s an atmospheric contaminant for sure.” Chief Antonio “Chubby” Cruz, a bony and gaunt Californian with blonde hair and sparse facial hair that only dimly aspired to be a beard, worked for the supply officer and was the boss of the SK division, which kept the boat stocked with spare parts and food, and as such, he ran the messcooks. Cruz was the one who approved the menus, taking only input from the captain and executive officer, and he delighted in serving gut-busting and spicy mid-rats food.

“Shut up, Gory,” Varney said, smiling. “And mind your panel, Pilot.”

“Yeah,” Torpedoman Senior Chief Roderick “Blackie” Nygard said, piling on, from his station as copilot. “Mind your panel, Pilot.”

“Mind my panel, aye, Officer of the Deck, sir. And Copilot, go fuck yourself.”

Nygard smiled. “Go fuck myself, Copilot, aye.”

Varney paged the software on the command console to display the amidships wide aperture hull array’s acoustic daylight output, thinking that there was a remote chance a submerged contact would appear out of the distant noises of the biologics — the fish — that so filled the gulf with noise, that and the damned crowded shipping lanes. He stepped to the port side forward sonar stack position, a console with three large flat panel displays. In the seat was the sonar division’s leading petty officer and the midwatch’s sonarman-of-the-watch, Sonarman First Class Jay “Snowman” Mercer, who was a youthful, short and slender sonar tech who, like Chief Albanese, had been aboard the SSNX that was lost in the revenge attack on the hacked and hijacked drone submarine. They said it was the horror of that operation that had turned his beard stark white and filled his head with gray, but in truth he’d been going gray since he turned twenty. He kept the beard trimmed to a goatee, and looked almost academic with half-frame reading glasses perched on the end of his nose.

“Got anything?” Varney said, leaning over the sonar stack.

Mercer picked up a grease pencil and, on a small white plastic area of the lower console, wrote a hash mark. The hash marks added up to 11. He looked up at Varney and said in a south central Tennessee accent, “That’s the eleventh time this watch you’ve asked that. And we’re all of an hour in. You’re going to beat yesterday’s record.”

“Fuck,” Varney muttered, wandering back to the chart table, calculating the time on this leg until they’d reach the southwestern point of the bow-tie-shaped barrier search pattern, Point Lima, which was hours away at the slow crawl they were doing, four knots, to absolutely minimize own-ship’s noise, the minimum speed that would keep the towed array from dropping toward the sea floor.

“Actually,” Mercer said over his shoulder.

Varney skidded to a halt at Mercer’s console chair a second later. “What?”

“I was just going to say that this is interesting.” Mercer’s grease pencil circled a graph that was the data from the athwartships towed array beam. There was a slender peak forming at 50.2 Hertz.

“Yeah, big deal, fifty cycles,” Varney said dismissively. “Half the ships out here are running fifty Hertz electrics.”

“And if the Panther is on batteries, that’s all we’re going to hear from him. That and maybe a LOFAR detect on his low freq main motor.”

“You got a low freq hit?” Varney asked, leaning far over Mercer’s console.

“No.”

“Fuck,” Varney said, turning away again to go back to the command console.

“But I do have an acoustic daylight detect on something submerged on the same bearing the athwartships beam is looking.”

Varney bounced back again. He leaned in to stare at the top console’s display. To the uninitiated, it would be like staring at the white noise of a broken television, but Varney had qualified under the tutelage of Sonarman Chief Tom “Whale” Albanese, Vermont’s revered top sonar operator, reportedly the best in the Atlantic Fleet, and The Whale had taught Varney the mysteries of the acoustic daylight array. It was mostly noise, but a repeating series of black vertical bars kept recurring off to the side. Mercer rolled his cursor ball over to the there-one-second-gone-the-next black spots, the bearing 310. Then he selected the time-frequency graph in the middle display and rolled his cursor to the bearing spread of the beam, which was from bearings 300 to 325. Then he rolled his cursor to bearing 310 on the broadband waterfall display, which showed a slight trace at 312, which was not unusual, because that was the direction to the shipping lanes.

“You’re sure the acoustic daylight array’s not picking up a surface ship?”

“It’s screening out everything above the thermal layer. I’m only looking deep with it. If the Panther is sailing the way I think he is, he’s at keel depth one hundred meters, and the thermal layer is at fifty.”

“So Petty Officer Mercer, you’re saying—”

Mercer straightened up in his seat and turned to face Varney. “I’m calling it, sir. We’ve snapped him up.” In a louder voice, he announced formally to the entire room, “Officer of the Deck, new sonar contact, designate Sierra Fifty-Seven, bearing three one zero, held on narrowband, broadband and acoustic daylight imaging, possible submerged warship.”

“Hot diggity fuckin’ dawg, and about time,” Varney said, lunging for the phone at the command console. “Good job, Petty Officer Mercer. Don’t fucking lose him. Designate Sierra Five Seven as Master One.” Varney dialed the XO’s stateroom.

“Command Duty Officer,” Quinnivan’s voice came over the circuit. During the midnight watch, Quinnivan relieved Captain Seagraves of most of his command responsibilities so the captain could get some uninterrupted sleep. While stationed, the command duty officer had the same authority as the captain.

“Officer of the Deck, sir,” Varney said breathlessly, his heart pounding. “We fucking got him! I’m calling silent battlestations, sir.”

“I’ll wake the captain,” Quinnivan said, a jolly tone in his voice.

The gathered officers waited silently in the wardroom, counting off the last minutes before stationing the watch to get underway.

“Still no word of what the mission is, Captain?” the navigator and operations officer, Misha Dobryvnik, asked.

Orlov shook his head. “Nothing, just the original orders to make all haste to the terminus point at the entrance to the Gulf of Oman. Safe to assume that once we report that we’re on-station, we’ll get a new op-order.”

The aft wardroom door opened and a sweaty Chernobrovin came in. “Repair crew signed off the work package, Captain,” he said, pouring a cup of water for himself from the credenza. “The electric plant has all ship’s loads and we’re divorced from shorepower, removing cables now. Propulsion turbines are warm and loaded by the load bank, and the main motor is ready.”

“Very good, Mr. Engineer,” Orlov said, standing. “Mr. First, set the maneuvering stations watch.” It would be damned good to get back to sea, he thought.

The announcing circuit clicked and Vlasenko’s hard-as-steel voice came over. “Attention all hands. Set the maneuvering stations watch for getting underway.”

Orlov returned to his stateroom and grabbed his binoculars and his VHF radio. In the central command post, people rushed to their stations and donned headsets. He walked to the forward door of the room, to the ladder and tunnel leading vertically to the conning tower interior. He waited for one of the lookouts to get all the way up, then took the ladder upward, the dim fluorescent lights of the ship giving way to the bright sunshine of the morning. He took the four steps up to the conning station on top of the conning tower, the area featuring two leather seats for the conning officer and assistant conning officer, the seats positioned behind an open space where the officers could stand behind the windscreen. As he stepped into the conning station, the communications officer, Captain Lieutenant Mikhail TK Sukolov was connecting and testing the conning tower’s communication box, a device the size of a toaster oven that bolted to a post aft of the windscreen and was connected electrically by a large cable with multiple connectors. He stood, saluted and smiled at Orlov.

“Conning station communications tested, Captain. All is in order.”

“Very well, Mr. Communicator,” Orlov said formally, returning the salute. Sukolov had been inport duty officer last night, so evidently no hangover for him this morning.

“Excuse me sir,” he said, and passed by Orlov on his way to the control room. He passed Vlasenko and saluted the first officer as he was on his way up from the tower interior to the conning station.

“Lines are singled up, Captain. Pier crew is ready to lift the gangway.”

“Lose the gangway, Mr. First. Did you decide to drive us out yourself?”

“Yes, Captain. I can use the sea air and maybe a little sunshine.”

Orlov nodded, smiling at Vlasenko. “We could all use some sea air and sunshine. Probably our last for a long time.”

The pier crane rumbled as it pulled off the gangway. Vlasenko stood on the port side of the conning station, leaning over the coaming to look down at the pier. He reached for a megaphone and projected his voice down to the linehandlers below. “Pier crew, stand ready to toss over all lines!”

He looked over at Orlov. “Permission to take in lines and get underway, sir?”

“By all means, Mr. First, take in all lines and get underway.” It was high time they got the hell out of here.

Ten minutes later, the Pacific Fleet’s submarine K-573 Novosibirsk plowed through the small waves at maximum surfaced speed, headed northeast for water deep enough to dive.

The command console of the USS Vermont was crowded as Captain Seagraves leaned over the periscope display from the inboard side. Lieutenant Anthony Pacino stood aft of the display and held the controller to the scope in his hands. To his left he could feel the fabric of the navigator’s coveralls against the bare skin of his forearm, having rolled up his sleeves in the warm control room. To Navigator Romanov’s right, the executive officer — the battlestations firecontrol coordinator — stood, alternating his gaze between the large flatscreen periscope display repeaters on the forward bulkhead, one showing Pacino’s, the other showing Lieutenant Varney’s Pos One’s scope, and the firecontrol “dot stack,” representing the best solution to the target, Master One. The Panther. This close to the target, the data source had been shifted from narrowband to broadband, and the dot stack had become sloppy, the phenomenon called “near-field effect.” With a half shiplength between the two submarines, there was wide range of bearings to the target. The approach had been shifted to visual, first on periscope infrared, and now to normal optics.

“Add turns,” Romanov said to Pacino, who was acting as approach officer under the watchful eye of Captain Seagraves.

“Pilot, add two turns,” Pacino commanded.

Lieutenant Dankleff, at the ship control console, acknowledged. “Add two turns, Pilot aye, and Maneuvering answers, now making five six turns and seven point zero knots.”

“Very well, Pilot.”

The target was ahead of them and slightly shallower, at a depth of 328 feet. He was cruising at seven knots, steady at this depth since they’d acquired him. It seemed an odd depth at first, but it was well below the thermal layer and correlated to the target’s depth gauges reading exactly one hundred meters. The speed of seven knots would seem to optimize his range on his batteries.

It was only a matter of time before he came to periscope depth and the operation to take him over could begin.

The voice of the navigation electronics tech came from aft and port. “Approach Officer, Navigator, mark sunrise.”

Captain First Rank Boris Novikov poured tea into the first officer’s cup. Isakova declined the offer of cream and sugar. They were seated at the table of his stateroom, trying to kill time before Port Said Operations called their convoy to form up and proceed south into the Suez Canal.

Kovalyov stuck his head in. “Captain, our convoy commences forming up in one hour.”

“Very well, Communicator.” Novikov checked his watch. It was 0530 hours local time. He picked up his phone and dialed the central command post.

“Watch Officer,” the navigator’s voice said.

“Navigator, the convoy will start forming in an hour. Are you ready?”

“We’ll set maneuvering stations watch in twenty minutes, sir, then weigh anchor and position ourselves in preparation.”

“Very well,” Novikov said, putting up the phone. Finally, this ridiculous wait was coming to an end.

National Security Advisor Michael Pacino gratefully accepted the steaming coffee from Vice Admiral Robert Catardi. They were the first to arrive at Birch Cabin’s special compartmented information facility, a SCIF that had preserved the rustic look and feel of the cabin’s former den, complete with wood-burning fireplace, the out-of-date tables and upholstered couches and chairs that looked like they came straight out of Great Aunt Maude’s front parlor from the year of our Lord 1943.

“Did you get in a nap?” Pacino asked Catardi. The call to assemble in Birch Cabin’s SCIF had come at 2030 after Pacino had been unable to fall asleep for a nap, knowing that once they got Carlucci’s call, they might be up for two days straight. He’d finally slipped into an uneasy rest, the images of a nightmare vaporizing with the jangling of the 1950s bedside table phone, but the residue of unease had lingered behind.

“You kidding? You get the word to fly to Joint Base Andrews for a comearound with the President of the United States, cool your heels over hamburgers and sausages on the Holly Lodge back deck grill with the muckety-mucks, sip a little Kentucky whiskey, but you know that any moment you’ll be standing tall, braced up, in front of the president? For maybe days at a time without being able to go to bed? Who sleeps with that going on?”

Pacino smiled and nodded his chin toward the newcomer coming through the door, Jehoshaphat Taylor. “I bet he did.” Taylor was a vice admiral in the Navy’s Special Warfare Command, or SpecWar, as they liked to say. He was built like a refrigerator, weighing in at something like 270 pounds, all of it bone and muscle. He was swarthy, with black hair, bushy eyebrows and an overgrown beard extending to the collar button of his starched black Harley-Davidson button-down shirt, worn under a leather jacket and above black jeans and black steel-toed boots. He had a look of half-mad violence about him, as if one wrong word and he’d break someone in half. But he saw Pacino and broke into a grin that lit up his caveman face.

“Patch Pacino. Admiral. Sir,” Taylor said, coming up to Pacino and pumping his hand in a hairy paw that dwarfed Pacino’s. “It’s great to meet you in the flesh. The stories about you — my mentors were on the Seawolf with you in the Bo Hai Bay. The stuff of legend, sir.”

Pacino smiled. “No ‘sirs’ around me, Admiral. It’s just ‘Patch’ now.”

Taylor continued pumping Pacino’s hand. “It’ll always be ‘sir’ to me, sir.”

Pacino laughed. “Have you met Rob Catardi, boss of the submarine force?”

Taylor smiled at Catardi. “You mean the boss of the bus drivers who take my commandos into action?”

“Bus drivers?” Catardi said, almost getting irritated.

“I’m just kidding, Rob,” Taylor offered. “Jehoshaphat Taylor. You can just call me ‘Jumpin Joe.’ God knows, I’ve answered to worse.”

“Coffee, Joe?” Pacino asked Taylor.

“I’d rather it were something stronger, it being after happy hour and all,” Taylor said, “but I’ll settle for a blonde-and-sweet.”

The fourth arrival into the SCIF was Admiral Grayson Rand, the commander of the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets. He walked up and shook their hands, smiling. “Gentlemen,” he said, “and I use the term very loosely.” Rand stood barely five foot six, wiry and energetic, his hair going bald but trimmed to a crew cut, making his appearance seem tough. He had a Bayonne, north Jersey accent that accentuated his projected toughness. Dressed in a herringbone sport coat over jeans and brown Bruno Magli loafers, he looked ready to accept an umbrella-decorated cocktail at a megayacht’s party. “So what, pray tell, is going on here?”

“I imagine the president will tell us when he’s good and ready,” Pacino said, refilling his coffee cup.

The door opened again and a chunky man of average height came in, appearing in his forties. He wore a black fedora cap, a Hawaiian shirt and chinos. He seemed dark, with a black goatee and mustache, wide eyes so dark brown they seemed black. He was nowhere near as imposing as Taylor, but certainly formidable. He walked to the coffee pot without a word and poured a cup for himself, acting as if the gathered admirals weren’t even there. Theatrically, he took a deep pull on the coffee, then comically seemed to wake up and realize there were other human beings nearby. He smiled and offered his hand to Pacino.

“Angel Menendez, CIA deputy director of operations.” His accent seemed familiar to Pacino. Cuban, perhaps.

“I’m Patch Pacino, the new national security advisor,” Pacino said, then introduced the other admirals. Menendez shook their hands while sucking down his first cup of coffee.

“Anyone know what this mysterious meeting is about?” Menendez asked. Obviously, he was not used to being in the dark.

The door opened and a confident attractive woman in her late forties walked in carrying a laptop computer.

“Uh, oh,” Menendez said in a stage whisper. “Stand by for action. The dragon lady is here.”

The woman walked up to the coffee area, smiling slightly at the gathering, and poured herself a cup, tilting the sugar container into it.

“Some coffee with that sugar, boss?” Menendez asked, smiling.

The woman greeted them all with a smile that lit up her face. She needed no introduction. Her Senate confirmation hearings had been plastered over all the news files. Margo Allende, former CIA deputy director of operations and master of clandestine services, had been accused by the senators of the National Party of torturing enemy combatants. She had been confirmed by a one-vote margin after answering that she would never allow such an action under her leadership of the Combined Intelligence Agency.

“Good to meet you, Ms. Allende,” Pacino said, shaking her hand. He was surprised. He’d expected her to look older, but the woman was youthful, perhaps in her mid-forties, tall, slender, her straight auburn hair pulled back into a bun, revealing her perfect jawline and long throat. She had a small upturned nose, strong cheekbones, and behind her thick-rimmed glasses she had wide, deep blue eyes, with long auburn lashes under thin arcing eyebrows. She held his gaze, her eyes smiling at him along with her mouth.

“Please. Call me Margo. ‘Ms. Allende’ is my mother. God help us all if she shows up to this meeting.” Allende’s south-of-Atlanta accent was thick as warm honey. Pacino noticed she was still holding his hand in hers, her hand soft and warm.

Pacino introduced her to the admirals and the six of them got to their third cups of coffee, until Director Allende looked at her watch. “Not sure what’s holding up the silver spoons,” she said, “but why don’t we get comfortable in the seating area while we wait?”

“Silver spoons?” Pacino asked.

Allende bit her lip, as if weighing her words. “The VP, Secretary of State and Secretary of War, all go way back together. They tend to disapprove of Carlucci’s, well, let’s just say sensitive initiatives that he tries to get accomplished. So I’ll be nice and just say that when it comes to clandestine activities and projects, those three all need lots of convincing.” She took a club chair by the side of the fireplace facing the door.

When the door opened, the vice president strolled in with three cabinet members, and like the admirals and spymasters before them, found their way to the coffee machine. Pacino stood, as did the others. As the three newcomer men shook the hands of the others, Vice President Karen Chushi came up to Pacino. She stood a head shorter than he did, slim in a tight dress that complimented her figure. She stood too close to Pacino, close enough he could sense an alluring perfume, and she looked up at him with wide light green eyes. He felt her soft hand reach for his.

“Admiral Michael Pacino,” she said in a nasal and irritating south Texas-accented voice, even as she spoke in, what to her, must have been a tone of intimacy. “I’ve waited a long time to meet you. I’m Karen Chushi.”

“Madam Vice President,” Pacino said respectfully. Her nickname of “The Voice” seemed apt, Pacino thought.

“Maybe we would have met sooner if the president had read me into your little ‘Fractal Chaos’ security program.” Her tone took on a resentfulness.

The Secretary of State arrived, his great bulk seeming to dwarf the petite vice president. He held out his hand to Pacino. “Seymour Klugendorf, State Department,” he said in a sonorous voice, smiling in what seemed genuine pleasure. Pacino tried to keep a neutral facial expression, but the man’s tremendous size was freakish. Where, Pacino wondered, did he buy pants that big? The secretary had to be well over four hundred pounds. Before Pacino could say a word, the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy strolled up, sipping from their mugs with the presidential seal.

A tall, slender, man with a marathon runner’s physique, in his late forties, bespectacled with steel-framed glasses, nodded at Pacino. The Secretary of War, Bret Coppin Hogshead, was one of those cool, logical figures, known to get through hostile wartime press conferences with calm, low-voiced sound bites that made him a favorite of the Washington think tank crowd, but unpopular with the rank and file of the military. He looked more like an actuary or an accountant than a major member of the president’s cabinet. Hogshead came from old money, his ancestors arriving on the Mayflower four hundred years ago.

Beside Hogshead stood Secretary of the Navy Jeremy Shingles. He and Pacino had become acquainted in the aftermath of the drone submarine incident, where Pacino found himself having to brief Shingles, then an undersecretary of cyberwarfare in the War Department, about the drone incident and the loss of the Piranha. Shingles was a former civilian test pilot, and later Space Shuttle astronaut, who had taken over the helm of his father’s corporation, McDermott Aerospace, a major defense contractor, second only to DynaCorp. Once, over drinks, Shingles had told the tale of his childhood being raised by Caspar Shingles, the “barnstorming billionaire” who had founded McDermott Aerospace with former Air Force General Billy McDermott. Two years into the company’s history, the elder Shingles had fired McDermott, but decided to keep the name of the company despite McDermott’s lawsuits and claims on the company’s profits. Decades later, McDermott Aerospace supplied the military with most of their fighter jets. A political cartoon had once derisively depicted the front of the Pentagon with a sign reading “Property of McDermott Aerospace.” President Carlucci had known Shingles from years before, and Shingles was one of Carlucci’s few allies in the contentious politics of the administration’s cabinet.

People thought, Shingles once explained, that the president’s cabinet functioned like the direct reports of a corporate chief executive officer, but it most certainly did not. Cabinet level appointments had to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, which meant that in the partisan political realm, each cabinet member had to somehow appeal to both sides of the aisle. They also had to have connections to the Washington, D.C. power networks, and be scandal-free. In the swamp of D.C., having a clean record was not something that came easily. After having five of his proposed cabinet members rejected by the Senate on a partisan vote, Carlucci threw up his hands and appointed people who could be Senate approved, and the eventual result was a cabinet that was anything but a rubber stamp.

It was one of the reasons, Carlucci had explained to Pacino, that he hadn’t read the three cabinet members and the vice president into the “Fractal Chaos” program. Pacino knew it wasn’t that their offices tended to leak secrets, though there was more than a little truth in that, but that Carlucci knew that these particular members of his administration would have opposed their operation to steal the Iranian modified Kilo submarine, and Carlucci was in no mood to be scolded by his own cabinet or have his orders questioned. But since the operation was about to happen, he had decided to read them into the program and invite them here, perhaps so that if it failed, they too would be accountable for the mission. It had seemed a dangerous decision to Pacino, but Carlucci had proceeded anyway.

Finally the interior door to the room opened, three Secret Service agents appeared, two moving toward the outside entrance, the other staying at the interior door, and in walked President Vito “Paul” Carlucci, dressed in a track suit and sneakers. He smiled and walked through the room, greeting everyone personally. When he came to Pacino, he leaned in and whispered, “Careful with these cutthroats, Patch.” He went on to greet Catardi before Pacino could respond.

“Okay, everyone,” Carlucci said above the noise of the conversations. “If I could have your attention, let’s get seated and discuss a few things.”

The large room’s chairs and couches were arranged in a long oval, but all offered a view of a wall-sized flat panel display. Carlucci took a seat to the right of the display, Karen Chushi to his left in a club chair, then Klugendorf, who occupied a small sofa, barely fitting into it. A sofa had been claimed by Hogshead and Shingles, then another chair occupied by Jehoshaphat Taylor, then a couch with Pacino, Allende and Menendez. A second couch seated Rob Catardi and Grayson Rand.

“I’ve asked you here to brief you on an operation that is about to commence, and to watch the progress of it in real time if you’d like, although we may have some time to wait before the real action happens. You’re all cleared for ‘Fractal Chaos’ now, and I don’t have to remind you of how secret this all is. Admiral Catardi, could you present your portion of the operation for us? I took the liberty of having some slides made up in anticipation of what you’d be talking about. You haven’t seen the presentation, but you can ad-lib based on what the slide shows.”

Catardi stood and the display screen came to life. The first slide that Carlucci selected was a standard security statement of the extreme level of classification of the slide deck. Then a photograph of earth from high earth orbit zoomed slowly down over the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea until the screen was filled with the Gulf of Oman, the Strait of Hormuz, with the northward-pointing triangle of Dubai on the south side of the strait and the Iranian Navy’s Bandar Abbas base on the north side.

“Well,” Catardi began, “What you’re seeing is the Bandar Abbas base of the Iranian Navy.”

Carlucci’s view zoomed far in to show the protected basins of the base, the larger warships on one side, the smaller patrol boats on the other, drydocks and building ways on the northeast side, with a floating drydock shown, an oblong black shape in it. The view then zoomed closer so the floating drydock occupied the entire screen.

“This is an Iranian Kilo-class diesel-electric submarine, built by the Russians for export sale.”

Carlucci’s slide changed to show a profile view of the Kilo-class submarine, the outside skin of the submarine graphically melting away to show a drawing of the interior.

“The Kilo has been considered one of Russia’s greatest submarine construction achievements. It’s quiet, fast, capable, reliable, has extended battery endurance and can carry 22 torpedoes or Kalibr cruise missiles.”

The drawing in the slide suddenly split into two pieces, a forward section with the torpedo compartment and the second compartment with the control room beneath the conning tower, and the aft section that contained the diesel ship’s service generator and the larger diesel propulsion generator, the latter electrically connected to the large main motor that drove the shaft and the single propeller. The gap of empty space between the compartments flashed red for a moment.

“We think the Iranians, with Russian help, have split the Kilo hull as shown here, with the combat spaces forward and the propulsion plant aft. They intend to fill that space with a new module.”

A cylinder appeared between the hull sections. A darker red piece of equipment appeared in the front section of the cylinder.

“This is a new Russian-designed liquid-metal cooled nuclear reactor, fueled by bomb-grade plutonium. It’s what physicists call a ‘fast reactor,’ in that it needs no ‘moderator’ to slow down the neutrons produced from the fission of the heavy elements of plutonium, and those neutrons go directly on to create the next generation of fissions. The heat produced by the fissions goes to heat a liquid metal piping system, which then heats water in the steam generators — the boilers — to make steam.”

Two new vertical cylinders appeared near the reactor, with piping connecting them. “What you see next to the reactor are steam generators — boilers — where the hot liquid metal heats water that then boils.”

The animation then showed piping emerging from the steam generators and running aft to a large piece of equipment, bigger by far than the reactor itself. “This is the steam propulsion turbine and generator that will now put power — nuclear power — to the ship’s main motor for propulsion. A second, smaller steam turbine, will supply electricity to the ship’s service generator. So now, the main motor can either be driven by the diesel propulsion generator or the new steam turbine generator or the batteries, and the ship’s electricity can either come from the batteries, the diesel generators or the new ship’s service steam turbine generator.”

In the animation, all three hull sections rejoined themselves together, and the skin reappeared, turning the profile view into a longer, more slender submarine.

“The Iranians have renamed this submarine Panther, which was also the name of the entire program. Integrated together, the modified Kilo is now a nuclear submarine.”

The view changed again to show the Bandar Abbas base, the view zooming back out to show the Gulf of Oman. A red dotted line extended from Bandar Abbas southeast into the gulf. “The submarine will be tested far south of here, either in the southern Arabian Sea or in the Indian Ocean.” The view zoomed farther out, until the Saudi Peninsula shrank in size and the Indian Ocean was screen center between the east coast of Africa and the west coast of India. The dotted line ended in an “X” slightly north of the equator.

The slide returned to showing the new module to be inserted into the Kilo submarine. Carlucci spoke up for the first time.

“Rob, tell the crowd here why this nuclear fast reactor is of such interest to us.”

“Yes, Mr. President.” Catardi turned from the display toward the cabinet members and the VP. “This reactor is revolutionary, a giant leap forward in technology. In fact, we don’t understand how it can function without, well, exploding. If the Russians have managed to make this work, reliably and safely, it revolutionizes everything. This reactor is smaller than a refrigerator in the average home, yet produces enough power to pull a mile-long train at eighty miles per over the Rocky Mountains. The applications are endless. They could use it in space for their moon base. They could power up the Arctic remote areas. And their future submarines will be world-beaters. Compared to their current pressurized water reactors, this has five times the power with an sixth of the weight and a third of the volume. We want to know what makes this reactor tick.”

VP Karen “The Voice” Chushi looked at Margo Allende and frowned. “So, couldn’t Margo’s spies just, I don’t know, bring us the plans? We could study them and figure out what’s going on.”

“Not so easy,” the CIA director said. “But we already did it.” Menendez nodded, as if there were a story there he was remembering.

“The plans gave us more questions than answers,” Catardi said.

“Wait a minute,” Klugendorf said, holding his fat hand up like a child in school. Pacino looked at him, thinking that academic circles were where the Secretary of State had spent his career, eventually making his way to becoming dean of faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School. “If this is a Russian creation and it’s to be tested, why aren’t the Russians testing it? Siberia somewhere, or Novaya Zemlya where they dropped that hundred megaton monster hydrogen bomb? Why would they entrust it to the Iranians?”

“Mr. Secretary,” Catardi said, “From studying the plans, this reactor could be unstable. It could blow itself apart in a dirty radioactive cloud. Or it could go so ‘prompt critical’ that it could blow up in a nuclear explosion — not a big one, maybe ten to twenty kilotons, but that’s on the order of the bombs dropped on Japan. Big enough to vaporize the submarine and all the technicians testing it. But it’s more than that. It’s national prestige. The Russians don’t want a nuclear failure or to be accused of intentionally making another Chernobyl. They’re hiding in the skirts of the Iranians, who are all too happy to test the reactor for them. If it’s a success, Iran gets itself a nuclear-powered attack submarine. Imagine the mischief they could get into with that. If it fails, well, it was just another hare-brained Iranian nuclear project.”

“Okay, then,” Klugendorf said, apparently satisfied.

Pacino glanced at Shingles and Hogshead, who were both studiously and calmly looking at the screen. VP Chushi was frowning, a dark expression on her face. Perhaps she sensed where this was leading.

Carlucci changed the slide again. A green line appeared, extending northeastward along the east coast of Africa to the Arabian Sea and into the Gulf of Oman.

“This is the track of our asset,” Catardi said, “the Block IV Virginia-class project submarine USS Vermont.”

The screen changed to show a picture of a Virginia-class submarine on the surface, the bow wave breaking at her sail as she plowed through the waves, an American flag flapping on a pole on the conning tower.

The screen changed again to a view of the Gulf of Oman, where the green line moved toward the Strait of Hormuz and touched the red line that showed the outbound Panther’s movement.

“This is where the operation will start,” Catardi said.

“What is the operation?” Chushi asked, a tone of suspicion in her voice.

Catardi paused for a moment, glanced at the president, then looked at the vice president. “We intend to steal the Panther.”

Through the sudden din of the loud response of the cabinet members to Catardi’s statement, Pacino could hear the shrill voice of Karen Chushi saying, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

18

“Quiet, please, everyone,” President Carlucci said. The side of the room toward the exterior door with the VP and cabinet members had broken into loud chaos a moment before. The other side, by the fireplace, with Pacino, the CIA officers and the admirals, had remained quiet, all of them still in their seats. “Let me switch on a short video of how this will work.”

A video clip rolled on the large flatscreen, the operation of the USS Vermont in its attempt to steal the narco-sub in the Caribbean Sea. Pacino had never seen it before, and was startled to see his own son acting as the approach officer, guided and coached by a stunningly beautiful female lieutenant commander. He watched as the control room battlestations crew made the decision to launch the EMP cruise missile, and stole a glance at Chushi, Klugendorf and Hogshead, who were all frowning. They all watched attentively as the SEALs locked out and got to the deck of the submerged target submarine, immobilized it, then tried to take it over. The clip ended with the SEAL commander hurriedly evacuating the sub at the conning tower hatch and the periscope view of the narco-sub as it scuttled itself and sank.

Carlucci nodded at Vice Admiral Catardi. “Thank you, Admiral. I wonder if Admiral Taylor could say a few words about why this upcoming operation will succeed when the narco-sub operation didn’t.”

Jehoshaphat Taylor stood. “Thank you, Mister President. The only real difference between the operation to hijack the Panther and the narco-sub is that the Panther will be operated by a human crew.”

“You’re sure?” the VP asked.

“We had almost no intel on the cartel operating the narco-sub,” Margo Allende said in her smooth Georgia accent. “Our intelligence money is better spent watching the Iranians, North Koreans, Russians and Chinese. And we’ve done our due diligence on this Panther. The crew will be human, I promise you.”

“So what happens after you get this sub to come to the surface? Are you going to kill the crew?” Klugendorf asked.

“That’s not the plan,” Taylor answered. “We prefer non-lethal tools. Shotgun shells and bullets, according to Admiral Catardi here, are considered bad for submarine equipment. We’ll leave the crew in a life raft, give them rations and a distress beacon.”

“Okay then,” Klugendorf said, satisfied.

Odds were, Pacino thought, non-lethal means wouldn’t be enough, but maybe Taylor’s men would prevail without shooting. Catardi’s concern was legitimate. A bullet in the ship control console could ruin the whole plan. Pacino noted that Taylor left out the fact that the emergency beacon would be designed to be inert for 48 hours, and only then broadcast the distress signal, allowing the hijacked Panther to clear datum and exit the area.

“After that,” Catardi said, standing as Taylor sat back down, “a small crew from the Vermont will cross over to man the Panther. They’ll drive it to our Bahamas Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center, AUTEC. Sort of the Navy’s version of Area 51, if you will.” The display screen zoomed out from the Indian Ocean, the globe turned and the view zoomed back in to the Bahamas to an overhead shot of the DynaCorp / Navy test facility at the barren Bahaman island labeled Andros Island. “We’ll take the reactor apart here and study it.”

“Are you planning on testing this reactor when the Panther is at sea? On the way to this test facility?” Bret Hogshead asked.

“Not on the run from the Indian Ocean, Mr. Secretary,” Catardi said, addressing the Secretary of War. “We’ll keep the reactor shut down and inert and use the batteries and snorkel on the diesel to get the ship back to AUTEC, so it will be a long, slow — but safe — voyage. After we examine it, we will get a test crew and take it out into the deep central Atlantic and test it there. I’m sure we’ll have the same worries as the Russians. We don’t want this thing exploding in the Bahamas. That would impact the tourist industry for a season or two. We’re still trying to figure out how to select the test crew, since the risk is so high.”

“So that brings us to the present moment,” Carlucci said, standing. “Thank you again, Admiral,” he nodded to Carlucci. The screen darkened, then lit up with a view of the eastern Gulf of Oman. “This is a live view from a Predator drone looking down on the approximate area of where this operation will commence. But we’re not exactly certain of when or exactly where the operation will happen, so this drone will be orbiting at a high altitude and looking for signs of a surfacing submarine. You’re free to take a break or go back to your cabin and grab a nap. We’ll call your room when we detect action, or you can stay here and wait for this to happen in real time.”

“Mr. President,” Karen Chushi said, standing and smoothing out her dress, “I and Secretary Klugendorf, Secretary Hogshead and Secretary Shingles would like a private word with you.” She turned to the admirals, Pacino and the CIA officers. “Could we have the room, please?”

Pacino left and walked slowly back toward Holly Lodge. Rob Catardi fell in step beside him. Once they got there, Pacino motioned Catardi into Holly Lodge’s special compartmented information facility, a more conventional conference room that resembled a rustic version of the White House Situation Room. “We didn’t even get to the issue of a hostile opposition force,” Pacino said, turning on the screen and selecting the Predator drone view, which still just showed empty, unremarkable ocean. “Wait till Chushi gets word that Carlucci already gave Vermont permission to release weapons as deemed necessary to succeed.”

“And nuclear weapons at that,” Catardi said.

“She and Klugendorf are going to melt down over that.”

“Yeah, definitely.”

“Rob, something I meant to ask in the briefing. What’s the range of the Panther? Won’t she need to refuel? And won’t she run out of food?”

Catardi nodded, reaching for the pod coffeemaker. He raised an eyebrow at Pacino, who nodded. Catardi brought two cups to the table and both men sat facing the video screen. “Panther’s range is limited on diesel fuel, advertised at six thousand nautical miles, but we think it may be as low as four thousand. The trip is around fifteen thousand miles, depending on how far Panther will deviate from the great circle route. So she’ll need to stop four or five times before she reaches AUTEC and take on fuel. We’ll re-provision her then.”

“When she surfaces to load diesel, she’ll be vulnerable, Rob. That could be when an opposition submarine could torpedo her and destroy her. And to track the Panther, all the Russians will need to do is keep track of every Navy oiler in the hemisphere.”

“Your buddy Margo and company came up with a work-around. Tramp steamers, rust-bucket tankers, lying-to on shorelines, anchored out, biding their time. The latitude and longitude of all these rusting derelicts given to the Panther boarding party ahead of time. Each one of them can refuel the Panther, and if we absolutely, positively have to, it can be done while the Panther hovers submerged.”

“What about food? How would you load food while submerged?”

“Those rusting hulks that refuel Panther? They’ll be dumping trash overboard, but it won’t be trash. It’ll be food. Submerged Panther divers snatch it up and lock it in. Boom, extended range. Patch, I assure you, we’ve thought of everything.”

“What about this nuclear weapon release issue? What happens when the VP and the silver spoons find out about that?”

“Maybe Carlucci keeps them in the dark about it. Maybe he thinks it’s just a deep contingency plan. What do you think, Patch? Do you think it’s a low probability contingency?”

Pacino stopped, thinking about what Carlucci had said to him in confidence about the Virginia-class and the Yasen-M, and Carlucci’s intentions to demonstrate to the Russian president that American submarines remained superior to Russian subs. And Carlucci was essentially cheating by giving Vermont advanced permission to fire warshots at any Russian submarines trespassing into the operation. Even allowing her to hammer the Russians with nuclear depth charges. Pacino stood up from the table and walked to the display screen, touched the screen absently, then slipped his hands into his pockets and turned to look at Catardi. “Rob, if we were the Russians, do you think there’s a chance in hell we’d let the Iranians test our reactor without a submarine escort out there?”

Perhaps unconsciously imitating Pacino, Catardi stood up to look closer at the screen and put his hands into his pockets. “No way.”

“So the only question is, do they send a front-line boat or a clunker out there?”

Catardi considered. “Clunker. Definitely. An Akula II maybe. Or a Sierra-class. Maybe even an improved Kilo-class. Something they’re not afraid to sacrifice in case the Panther reactor blows up and takes the escort boat with it.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“I know your worry, but no way in hell Moscow would risk sending a Yasen-M-class out there.”

“I hope not. From the intel I’ve read, I don’t know that we could beat one, even with the new Virginia-class.”

“We still have the edge,” Catardi said. “Weapon release rules of engagement. Russians would probably have to ask fleet HQ for permission to shoot at us, whereas we have warshots loaded in all tubes, powered up and ready to fire. And a note from home giving Mommy’s permission.”

“Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that,” Pacino said, a dark worried expression crossing his face. “But we haven’t mentioned the elephant in the room, Rob.”

“What’s that, Patch?”

“Aircraft. Think about it. Four or five of our P-8 antisubmarine jets could find the Panther between breakfast and lunch. Find her and take her out with torpedoes carried aboard. The Russian version? The older Il-38 or the newer Il-114 are more than capable maritime patrol aircraft. They might not snap up Vermont, but they could easily nail down Panther. And it’s easy to mobilize half a dozen of them, even from the Pacific Fleet HQ or the Northern Fleet’s airfields. It’s a long flight, but Panther will be doing an exfiltration for six, seven or eight weeks, Rob.”

“Don’t forget, Patch, Vermont is equipped with Mod Charlie SLAAM-80 missiles. One of those would ruin an Il-114’s entire day.” SLAAM stood for submarine launched anti-air missile, and had gotten submarines out of several scrapes since its introduction.

“You can run out of missiles, be out of range, or late to detect an aircraft, Rob. It’s small comfort.”

Margo Allende walked in then, her eyes drifting toward the screen and back to Pacino, then nodding at him and Catardi. “Hello, boys,” she said, a half-smile on her face. She reached behind her head and removed a pin holding her hair in a bun, and her flowing hair fell down on her shoulders, long and straight and sleek. She shook her head to arrange her hair and looked seriously at Pacino.

“You’re worried about your boy?”

Pacino nodded glumly. “If the Russians blanket the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean with antisubmarine aircraft, they could find Panther and Vermont and torpedo them, or relay the information to any in-theater attack submarines. Or to Iranian destroyers and frigates. Weapon release permission aside, there are a hundred scenarios where this just isn’t survivable. For either boat.”

“You don’t have to worry about any Iranian or Russian surface ships or antisubmarine aircraft,” Allende said, staring into Pacino’s eyes. “If you’re up against an opposition force, I guarantee it will only be from submarines.”

“Why do you say that?” Catardi asked. “How do you know that?”

“Ain’t sayin’,” Allende smiled mysteriously. “You’re not read into the program. Well, I’ll leave you boys alone. Come on out to the bar if you want a drink.”

Pacino nodded, then looked at Catardi.

“I wonder what she’s got up her sleeve to keep airplanes and destroyers out of the mix,” Pacino said, his mood suddenly lighter.

Catardi shook his head. “No telling. But if that’s true, mission success just became much more probable.” He was quiet for a moment, then looked at Pacino. “You know, this whole nuclear release thing must be just a deep contingency plan, Patch.”

“Yeah. You’re probably right.”

“Your son looked good in that video clip,” Catardi offered.

“I hope like hell this goes as planned,” Pacino said, frowning. “You don’t think my boy will be on that crew that takes over the Panther, do you?”

“Hell, no, Patch,” Catardi said. “He’s good tactically, but he’s still a non-qual. No way Seagraves puts him on the Panther crew.”

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino, clad in a form-fitting wetsuit, stood at the forward hatch of the SEAL lockout chamber, his scuba bottles, regulator, mask, fins and weight belt placed in a neat pile by a passageway corner by the canisters of things they’d take aboard the stolen Kilo sub, including SatNav receivers, radio equipment, clothes and food, and the large container that would inflate into the raft they’d pour the Iranian crew into.

The AI division under Chief Nancy “K-Squared” Kim had set up two large flatscreens on the bulkhead opposite the lockout chamber hatch. One was patched into the number one periscope of the command console, the second a view of the control room taken from aft overhead in the room and looking down on the attack center consoles, the firecontrol coordinator and the command console. Sound was piped in, the conversations in the control room audible from the screen.

Chief Kim looked up at Pacino from her seated position on the deck. “Might as well get comfortable, Mr. Patch. It might be a long time before we need to prep.”

Pacino sank down to the deck at a spot where he could see the control room monitor. “Can you turn that up?” he said to Kim. She increased the volume. He shut his eyes and listened to the hum of conversation. The Panther was still deep, 328 feet, going at a battery-endurance speed of seven knots. The control room crew was on a trip-wire alert, waiting for the target to make a move that would indicate he was coming above the thermal layer up to periscope depth. Perhaps a maneuver like turning in a 180 degree turn to hear shipping behind him in his “baffles,” the area directly astern where his sonar in the bow couldn’t hear, the baffle-clear an attempt to avoid colliding with surface shipping.

Coming to periscope depth was always hazardous for any submarine, with some of the loaded supertankers drawing up to 120 feet to the bottoms of their hulls. A sub coming out of the cold thermal layer into the warmer water stirred by the sun would be in an entirely new sonar environment — sounds up there would reflect off the interface between warm and cold and not penetrate deep. Almost the ocean version of a mirage in the desert. The only way to come to PD safely was to come up slowly and maneuver the ship to hear all sounds from all points of the compass, and only then allow the top of the conning tower to rise above 120 feet.

So there would be plenty of signs that Panther was on his way up, Pacino thought, and told himself to relax. Last night had been sleepless. Watchstanders were rotated in and out to sleep for a few hours, then returning to their battlestations watch, the captain and XO deciding who was fading out and directing team members in and out, almost like a professional coach pulling a player off the field and sending in a fresh replacement. Seagraves had taken over the approach officer duty four hours ago and directed Pacino to his bunk, but all Pacino could do was stare into the dark. A combat operation like this, he thought — anything and everything could go wrong.

He thought about the simulations they’d run before snapping up the Panther. This tranche of simulations began by assuming the boarding party had successfully taken over the Kilo submarine, but then the Kilo and the Vermont ran into opposition forces — Iranian destroyers, Russian destroyers, Russian Kilo-class submarines, even Russian nuclear submarines. Even two Russian nuclear submarines operating together. Seagraves had kept the Russian nuclear submarine attackers at older submarine classes to see how they fared, and against the older Akula II-class and older vessels, they’d prevailed, sometimes easily, sometimes with a bit of a struggle. But in all of them, Vermont heard the bad guys long before said bad guys heard Vermont, and assuming the Russian opposition force was there to stop the Vermont’s mission and recover the Kilo, Vermont had immediately fired upon and destroyed the older attack submarines. In those simulation runs, the main issue was positioning Vermont out ahead of the Panther, so there would be little chance of a Vermont-launched torpedo homing in on the Panther instead of the Russian attacker. And that was a challenge because Panther couldn’t hear Vermont, even if she were right alongside. It had been up to Vermont to maintain battlespace awareness and keep herself ahead of Panther. That, of course, made the pair vulnerable to torpedo attack from the rear. Panther wouldn’t hear it and the incoming torpedo would sink Panther before Vermont could even react. A torpedo dropped from astern from an MPA, a maritime patrol aircraft? Mission failure. Every time.

Eventually, after enough simulations had been run that both Vermont and Panther crews were reaching the same results over and over, Captain Seagraves upped the ante and tossed in a modern Russian Yasen-M-class attack submarine, approaching from the south.

Those simulations had all ended in disasters. The Yasen-M submarine, commanded by Romanov in the simulations, every single time, heard Vermont before Vermont heard the Yasen-M, and it had come down to what the Russian’s rules of engagement were. If the Russians had permission to attack on detection, both Vermont and Panther went down. Mission failure. And all the good guys died. If the Russians had to go to periscope depth to ask for permission to shoot warshots from fleet HQ or Moscow, Vermont had enough time to detect the Yasen-M, mostly from the transient sounds the Russian boat made as it ascended to periscope depth, or increasing noise from “clearing baffles,” exposing all sides of himself to Vermont’s sonar arrays, with one angle being the “bingo angle-on-the-bow” where his emitted noise was louder than other angles. But even in those scenarios, it was not an automatic victory for Vermont.

When both Vermont and the Yasen-M were aware of each other and shooting, the scenario would degrade into what was called a “PCO waltz”—so called since prospective commanding officer school featured prospective captains acting as approach officers in submarine vs. submarine exercises, and whenever two attack subs could hear each other and were shooting at each other, the world dissolved into a crazy, mixed-up melee where anything could happen, the fog of war intruded and no one knew what was happening. Likely as not, an attacking submarine could go down from his own torpedo fired into the cloud of confusion. The massive uncertainty of a PCO waltz was to be avoided at all costs, Seagraves had cautioned. “If you’re in a PCO waltz, withdraw and clear datum, and try to sneak up on the bastard again when he least expects it.”

Something about that last advice had rubbed Pacino the wrong way. Retreating in the face of the enemy? That wasn’t the American way, or what he imagined the American way to be. Romanov had chided him harshly for being naïve. “Sticking around for certain death isn’t dagger-in-the-teeth courage, non-qual. It’s dagger-in-the-teeth stupidity. Above all, in submarine operations, stupidity is punished harshly, either by the sea itself or the enemy. So if you’re fighting an attack submarine that knows you’re there and is shooting at you, get the hell out. Clear datum, come back later and sneak up on him.” Pacino had put his head down and yes-ma’amed her, but he doubted he could ever do that. Perhaps, he thought, that was his fatal flaw. Perhaps that was a terrible thing in a harsh future, lying in wait to kill him.

He tried to banish all negative thoughts like that from his mind. The SEAL commander, Fishman, kept saying freakish things like we create our own reality and the universe you live in is built and furnished by you and only you — you live what you create. That was a little too New Age for Pacino’s taste. At his core, he thought, he was a pragmatist, and all too often, pragmatists were mistaken for pessimists. Reality was what it was, he thought. Reality was as solid as a cold brick wall.

In the lockout chamber of the attack submarine USS Vermont, Lieutenant junior grade Elias “Grip” Aquatong reclined against the bulkhead, clad in a wetsuit, weight belt, scuba tanks, fins, his mask strapped on but up high on his head. His thighs were heavily laden with the non-lethal Mark 6 modified Taser, and the M4A1 carbine with attached grenade launcher, with his Sig Sauer 1911 .45 ACP pistol in a watertight container. His shins were strapped with two long K-Bar knives and the one his sister had bought him, a slender ten inch stiletto knife that would stop a man the size of a grizzly bear in his tracks. His weight belt was crowded with watertight containers of .45 ammo, grenades and the 5.56 mm ammo for the carbine. Guns are great, Commander Fishman had preached, but they’re useless without ammo. And in combat, ammo goes fast, and the battle goes to the party who brings more bullets to the fight. Aquatong put his hand on his belt and felt for that ammo, trying to reassure himself.

Commander Ebenezer “Tiny Tim” Fishman came up to him. “How you doin’, Grip?” he asked quietly, looking into Aquatong’s eyes.

Aquatong smiled. “I’m good this time, Skipper,” he said. “Not like last time. No need for your ‘simulation theory’ speech.” Fishman didn’t smile. “I’ll tell you what, though. I think the AOIC, Pacino, could benefit from it.”

Fishman thought for a moment, stroking his chin. “I’ll be back in ten,” he said.

On the passageway deck outside the lockout chamber, the entire Panther boarding party, with the exception of Lieutenant Anthony Pacino, slept. Chief Bernadette “Gory” Goreliki snored quietly next to Pacino. Pacino looked up to see the SEAL commander, Fishman, leaning over him.

“How you doin’, AOIC?” he asked.

Pacino squinted up at him, at first intending to give him the story Pacino was trying to make himself believe, that he was perfectly calm and unafraid, but that was so far from the truth that there was no way he could pull off that lie. Despite Spichovich’s warning about needing to learn to have a poker face and learn how to bluff credibly, Pacino thought this was a bad time to practice telling a bald-faced lie just to see if he could get away with it. What a world, he thought, where his homework assignment from his boss was to learn how to lie.

“The truth, Commander? I’m nervous as fuck.” His voice had trembled, just slightly. Pacino picked up his canteen and tried to unscrew the top, but his hands were shaking too hard. Fishman reached for the canteen.

“Totally understandable,” Fishman said, his voice low, gentle and reassuring as he unscrewed the canteen cap and handed it to Pacino, who took a drink, some of it spilling out of his mouth and running down the front of his black wetsuit. Fishman dropped to one knee and looked left and right at the sleeping Panther invasion crew, who all remained asleep. “I want to share something with you that might make this easier for you. Maybe it will lighten the load you’re carrying.”

Pacino looked at Fishman. “Anything you could do to make this easier for me, Commander, by all means, proceed.”

“Have you ever heard of the simulation theory?” Fishman asked.

“Sure,” Pacino said. “Ever since Elias Sotheby made it mainstream. We’re all living in a video game. This is all a simulation. A computer-generated quasi-reality. None of this is real. The one true god is a software engineer, watching what happens in this simulation. Of course I’ve heard of it. And it’s all bullshit.”

“But is it? Consider this,” Fishman said. “I believe the one thing in the universe that matters is a decision. Have you heard of the branch of analysis called ‘decision theory’?”

Pacino made a dismissive gesture. “I haven’t, but it sounds like a business school buzzword like ‘paradigm shift’ or ‘the new normal.’”

“Far from it, Mr. Pacino. Let me ask you a personal question. What was your last major decision? Your last life-changing decision?”

Pacino bared his teeth in what he thought was a tough expression. “To go back into the airlock of the Piranha after it got torpedoed. But that felt more like instinct than a conscious decision.”

“Exactly the point I’m about to make,” Fishman said. “Do you ever wonder what would have happened if you’d pushed yourself to the surface and saved your own life and just let the submarine sink without you?”

“Sure,” Pacino said. “A thousand times.”

“That,” Fishman said, “is exactly what I’m talking about. Alternate endings.”

“Alternate endings? I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Imagine, if you will, you’re a person who has lived a nice, safe life that ends when you’re ninety-five years old. Call that the ‘Base Life.’ And after you die, you go to the afterlife, and in that afterlife, you wonder about what would have happened if you had made different major decisions. Example, that bully on the school bus in third grade? What would your life be like if you’d punched him so hard he hit the deck, and all your classmates witnessed you being a badass and gave you a standing ovation?”

“Okay,” Pacino said uncertainly. “I guess I’m following you.”

“So, Mr. Pacino, imagine reality — for your life or any life — being a tree. Every time you make a major decision, you create two new branches of that tree. One branch is the decision you made and the reality you live as a result. The other decision leads to a different branch and its reality is completely different. If you look at this, with all the major decisions you make in life, that tree has thousands of branches. Yes?”

“I’m with you so far, Commander.” Pacino wondered where this was all going.

“So what you’re living right now, this is an alternate reality, played out to demonstrate to your soul, which is right now residing in the afterlife, what your life would have been like if you’d made a different decision. So, basically, the reality actually happened for your base life. But this?” Fishman gestured to the passageway and the sleeping Panther invasion force. “All of this? This is a digital simulation. A computer simulation. A video game. All constructed to demonstrate to your base life’s soul what would have happened if you made a different decision than what your base life had actually decided.”

“Whoa,” Pacino said. “So, this, none of this, is real?”

“It’s totally real,” Fishman said. “For us, in this version of reality, this is completely real. But for every reality we sense, there are ten thousand other realities going on at the same time, each one of those created out of a different decision.”

“So you’re saying that in my ‘base life,’ I took the safe way out. I swam to the surface and let Piranha go down without me.”

“No. I think that in that long and safe base life, you didn’t even go to the Naval Academy — too much risk of eventually having to do something dangerous. You probably went to Purdue and studied mechanical engineering and lived your working life out in a cubicle, with a nice safe wife waiting for you in a nice safe home. And this? All this? This is you wondering what life could have been like if only you’d taken more risk.”

“And so there are a thousand variations. There’s lives where I did swim to the surface, right?”

“There’s lives where on that midshipman cruise, you decided to go on a nice, safe aircraft carrier, not down to the scary depths of the submarine force.”

“So what’s the point of all this?” Pacino asked.

“The point is, in the afterlife, after watching all the thousands of lives that resulted from different decisions, your soul will eventually have no regrets. Your soul will see every decision’s result, every outcome. And in that review of every life that emerges from a decision, your soul will learn and evolve and find peace. You’ll become a more powerful you. And then, who knows, maybe you decide to do it again, and you come back. A new you, without the conscious memories of your past lives, but the unique individuality of your soul is always with you.”

“You know, Commander, that sounds completely whacko,” Pacino said, but finding himself smiling.

Fishman smiled back. “I presented that theory in my doctorate board in philosophy at Old Dominion U.”

“And?”

“They failed me, sent me back to do another thesis, but by that time I was done with philosophy. But at least I learned that the world isn’t ready for the real truth.”

“Sorry to hear, Commander. Maybe it is a bit odd, but something to think about, I suppose. At least it’s making me feel better about going out that hatch.”

Fishman clapped Pacino on the shoulder. “Good man. So when we invade this target submarine, remember, it’s just a video game.”

Pacino smiled. “I will, Commander.”

Against the aft bulkhead of the lockout trunk, Senior Chief Ronald “Scooter” Tucker-Santos strapped on his Mark 6 non-lethal attack weapon, his Mark 17 propulsion unit and a waterproof, portable emergency medical kit, then looked over at Petty Officer First Class Hoshi “Swan Creek” Oneida.

“Skipper giving that newbie officer that speech about ‘this is all a video game’?” Tucker-Santos asked.

Oneida looked at Tucker-Santos. “Yup. Works every time. Something about someone making you doubt the reality of walking into combat makes it bearable. ‘It’s only a movie.’ It helped me in Tokyo, Doctor Scooter.”

“Yeah? Do you still believe in Fishman’s theory?”

“I wonder.” Oneida said. “The Skipper is crazy. But something happened and I’ve been meaning to ask Skip about it. If every decision creates a unique branch and a new reality, do those branches ever touch each other? And if they touch, is it possible that you’d be moving along one branch and suddenly find yourself in another?”

“Something happened? What?”

“Back in Japan, my cousin was very close to our grandmother, and in her last days, he sat with her by her hospital bed, only leaving her side for bio-breaks and the occasional shower, having food brought up from the cafeteria for him to eat in her room.”

“Okay, Swan,” Tucker-Santos said.

“So my grandmother died on a Tuesday in May. My cousin left the hospital and went home, completely overwhelmed with grief. He can’t sleep, but finally naps at maybe five in the morning, Wednesday morning, mind you, and at eleven the hospital is calling him. It’s grandmother’s favorite nurse on the line, asking when he’ll be at the hospital, because his grandmother was awake and asking for him. The day after she died, she’s there, asking for him.”

“What?”

“Yeah. So he goes to the hospital, gets there at noon Wednesday, and grandmother is sitting up and having a few bites of lunch. She lasted ten more days before she died again.”

Tucker-Santos looked over at Hoshi Oneida.

“Yeah,” Oneida said. “Two complete parallel realities.”

“Did your cousin ask Grannie if she remembered dying?”

“He told her the whole story. She told him he was crazy. She told him he dreamed it all from exhaustion that Tuesday. But my cousin? He still had the pamphlet the favorite nurse gave him when grandmother died, labeled, ‘When Your Loved One Passes Away’ with a hand-written recommendation of which undertaker to call. And that pamphlet? Favorite Nurse Girl had no memory of giving it to him or of writing anything on it.”

The two SEALs were silent for some time. Grip Aquatong, having heard the exchange, came over and leaned on the aft bulkhead by Scooter and Swan. “You know what I wonder?” he asked the others.

“What’s that, Grip?”

“In a video game, does taking a bullet still hurt?”

“If we fuck up,” Oneida said, deciding to check his ammo one more time, “we’ll find out.”

Pacino realized he was truly exhausted, thinking about Fishman’s alternate endings theory. He shut his eyes and concentrated on making his muscles relax in his toes, then his feet, then his shins, then his thighs, working his way up to his neck, until he was completely relaxed. He imagined himself in a dark movie theater, where he was alone in a row a few from the front in the center, and the screen was blank, with a word dimly appearing on the screen, the word spelling SLEEP.

Five minutes later, Lieutenant Anthony M. Pacino, U.S. Navy, lay in a deep sleep on the deck of the submarine USS Vermont, headed into a combat mission.