Dark Transit

19

“This is finally it, gentlemen,” Commander Fishman said. “What’s not an option?”

“Fucking up,” Lieutenant junior grade Aquatong replied, pulling his mask down over his face.

“Control, Lockout Trunk, request permission to flood down the trunk,” Fishman said into the 7MC communication box nestled in the overhead of the trunk, in a protected space separated from the rest of the trunk by a vertical wall. When the trunk flooded, this space would maintain an air bubble and stay dry.

“Lockout Trunk, Control, flood the trunk,” the pilot said over the comm box’s speaker, the COB, Master Chief Quartane, at the pilot station, having taken the battlestations watch over from Dankleff, since Dankleff was on the Panther boarding party.

“Flood the trunk, Lockout Trunk, aye.” Fishman looked at Tucker-Santos. “Doctor Scooter, check shut the side hatch.”

“Side hatch shut and locked, Skipper,” Tucker-Santos reported.

“Check shut the trunk drain valve.”

“Aye, Skip, and trunk drain valve is shut.”

“Let’s get some ocean in here, people,” Fishman said, pulling down a lever that opened a hydraulically controlled ball valve that flooded the space. In just a few seconds’ time, the warm gulf water came into the trunk, the water level rising fast, over two feet per second. As the water rose, the air in the space compressed, coming close to the pressure of the water outside the skin of the ship at periscope depth. The pressure gauge read 18 psi. Fishman’s ears popped as the air pressure rose. The air above the water began to form a thick, impenetrable fog. The four SEAL commandos were gathered close together in the air bubble space, waiting for the trunk to flood all the way. Other than the air bubble space, in another minute, the trunk was fully flooded with seawater.

“Control, Lockout Trunk, trunk is flooded. Request to open the outer door.”

“Lockout Trunk, Control, open the outer door.”

“Open the outer door, aye, and outer door coming open.”

Fishman moved a second hydraulic lever, and the upper lockout trunk hatch came open. The lockout trunk was now open to the ocean above. He pulled his mask down over his face and gestured to the others with his thumb. Let’s go.

Fishman ducked down from the air bubble into the trunk’s water, then looked up at the circle of light from the world above. He pulled himself up by the ladder rungs until he and his scuba bottles rose through the open hatchway.

The water of the gulf was warm and startlingly clear, almost as clear as the waters of the Mediterranean, he thought. Aft of the ship, slightly above them, he could see the entire hull of the Panther as it moved at periscope depth, using its diesels to charge its batteries. The target submarine looked long and slender and graceful, he thought.

He pulled himself farther out of the hatchway, holding on to the hatch operating mechanism, and watched as the other three SEALs emerged. Once they were all out of the hull, he motioned to the target submarine, letting go of the hatch.

The current formed by the movement of the ship floated him backwards to the target submarine, requiring only slight thrust of the Mark 17 propulsion unit to lift him up the proper depth to the target’s deck. Fishman swam to the target’s conning tower, noticing the side of the conning tower had a large graphic of a prowling, snarling panther. He smirked, admiring it in spite of himself. As they’d practiced a dozen times, he unpacked a cable from a small container, unfurling it along both sides of the conning tower, the flow of the current pulling each end of the cable aft. Scooter Tucker-Santos held the cable at the forward end of the conning tower while Fishman floated aft along the Panther’s port side. At the trailing edge of the conning tower, he found the other half of the cable on the starboard side and fastened the two lengths of cable together with a special grip mechanism, then cinched the grip forward to the trailing edge of the conning tower. That left two cables trailing aft toward the screw. Fishman hand-over-handed himself aft with Scooter right behind him, Scooter latching on to Fishman with a safety cable, attaching them both to the conning tower cable.

Fishman was dimly aware of the massive black shape of the Vermont slowing down and fading back astern of the Panther, there in case one of the SEALs fell off the Panther hull. As the Kilo submarine’s hull angled downward toward its rudder, X-type stabilizers and screw, Fishman followed the cable aft, concentrating hard not to lose the package. The package was a special carbon fiber net that he would deploy and wrap around the Panther’s screw, fouling it so hard that no amount of horsepower or torque of the screw’s driveshaft would overcome the net.

He pulled the package out of its container and let go of the container and let the current carry it away. He found the carbon dioxide pressurized canister attached to the net, designed to blow the net up into a cloud, and pulled its pin. The net, a mere brick-sized solid, immediately blew up into a large fuzzy mass in front of him. Fishman guided it down toward the screw and watched as the screw’s flow vortex sucked the net into it. After several revolutions, the net was fully wrapped around the screw, and two seconds later, the screw stopped. The submarine was coasting to a stop. Any moment, Fishman thought, the sub would surface to see what had happened to their screw. He looked over at Scooter and gestured forward. The two commandos hand-over-handed themselves forward against the rapidly dying current of the submarine’s motion, the work getting easier by the second as the target sub slowed.

Up forward, Grip Aquatong and Swan Oneida were waiting by the forward hatch. Behind him, Scooter Tucker-Santos was grabbing the handholds to pull himself up to the top of the conning tower in case that was the hatch that opened first. As the ship glided to a halt in the warm gulf water, the commandos unsheathed their non-lethal weapons, waiting.

But something was wrong. The Panther wasn’t surfacing. Fishman looked at his diver’s watch. The screw had been immobilized for at least four minutes, maybe longer. He looked up at the surface, then at the conning tower, with the periscope extended and penetrating the surface, a second mast behind it, which must be the snorkel mast, bringing fresh air into the submarine for the diesel generator to breathe to charge the battery bank. Finally the current generated by the ship’s motion completely died. They were stationary in the sea.

He looked over at Grip and Swan, who were gesturing with “what the fuck” signs. He shrugged. Who knew what was going on inside the control room of the goddamned Panther.

In the central command post of the Iranian Navy’s submarine Panther, commanding officer Commander Resa Ahmadi looked over at his second-in-command, Lieutenant Commander Hossein Kharrazi. The two men had an uneasy relationship, since Kharrazi was older and more experienced, having come up through the Iranian Navy’s enlisted ranks, and obviously thought that command of the Panther should have gone to him, not the inexperienced, Harvard-educated upstart who had family connections in both the Revolutionary Guards and the General Staff of the Armed Forces. How many times had Kharrazi muttered under his breath things like, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

“What in the name of Allah is going on?” Ahmadi said from the periscope.

“Let me look,” Kharrazi said. Ahmadi stepped back from the number two periscope and Kharrazi grabbed the grips and put his eye to the periscope optics. On the surface, there was nothing obviously wrong. But the ship had unceremoniously come to a stop in the ocean. Yet there were no fishing trawlers in the surroundings that could account for the screw becoming fouled.

“We can’t surface,” Kharrazi said, his voice muffled by the periscope. “Our orders prohibit surfacing, no matter what.”

“I know,” Ahmadi said. “But we can hover and send out divers to see what’s wrong with the screw.”

“Excellent idea, Captain,” Kharrazi said. Ahmadi could never tell when the man was being sarcastic or genuine when he said things like that. “I’ll see to it.”

“Who are you sending to the escape trunk?”

“The engineer and chief of the boat are both diver qualified. I’ll send them out.”

“Very well,” Ahmadi said, taking the periscope from Kharrazi. “Boatswain,” Ahmadi called, “Commence hovering at present depth.”

“Hover at present depth, Boatswain aye,” the watchstander at the starboard command console acknowledged.

“What’s happening?” the heavily accented voice of Alexie Abakumov asked. Abakumov was the lead test engineer for the upcoming test of the UBK-500 fast reactor, which lay silently sleeping in the reactor compartment far aft. And as usual, Abakumov had been drinking, his stash of vodka taking up more room than the rest of his personal belongings. Ahmadi disapproved, but the Russian was a VIP rider and was owed a certain professional deference.

“We’re troubleshooting a problem,” Ahmadi said, trying to make his voice sound calm and controlled.

“What problem?”

Ahmadi pushed the periscope away from his face and glared at the Russian reactor physics engineer. “There’s a problem with the screw. We are sending divers out to investigate.”

Ten minutes later, Lieutenant Commander Ahmad Kazemi, the chief engineer, and Chief Petty Officer Mehdi Bakeri gathered at the forward escape trunk’s lower hatch in the torpedo room, both clad in wetsuits, weight belts, scuba tanks, regulators and masks, their fins in their hands ready for the climb up the ladder. First Officer Hossein Kharrazi could barely tell them apart. They both looked like frightening phantoms.

Kharrazi picked up the microphone to the inter-ship communications circuit. “Central Command, First Compartment, request permission to enter the forward escape trunk, flood the trunk and open the outer hatch for diver operations.”

The word came through the circuit from the captain’s voice. “Enter the forward escape trunk, flood the trunk and open the outer hatch for diver ops.”

When the upper hatch came open, chief engineer Lieutenant Commander Ahmad Kazemi pulled himself through the hatchway into the clear blue warm water of the Gulf of Oman and immediately felt himself stung by what seemed a huge wasp, but it wasn’t a wasp, it was another diver. His body went completely limp and he could barely breathe. He felt himself floating. A second diver grabbed his inert body and lashed it to a cable at the conning tower leading edge. Kazemi, though he could no longer move, could definitely still feel emotions, and the emotion of the moment was stark panic and fear for his life. He should have been thrashing in the water or fighting these other divers, but nothing worked but his lungs. He felt a moment of gratitude that whatever they’d hit him with hadn’t paralyzed his diaphragm and his chest muscles, at least not yet, but that and his eye muscles were the only parts of him that were still functional.

Kazemi watched as the second Panther diver, Chief Bakeri, emerged from the hatch, and whatever these alien divers had stung him with, they used on Bakeri, who went immediately limp. They moved him back to the conning tower and secured him to it.

One of the divers came over to him and lashed his wrists together behind his back with cable ties, then his ankles, then did the same to Chief Bakeri. Kazemi watched as the divers unlatched him and Bakeri from the conning tower and pulled them to the forward escape trunk hatch. He and Bakeri were maneuvered into the airlock. The divers shut the upper hatch. If only there were a way to alert central command, he thought, but whatever they’d injected him with seemed to be getting stronger rather than weaker, and within another minute, Kazemi found himself fighting to stay awake, and it was a losing battle. He shut his eyes and the world faded away.

The four SEALs crowded into the forward escape trunk of the Iranian Navy’s submarine Panther along with the two paralyzed divers. It was unknown how long it would take the SEALs to secure the Kilo submarine, and if it took too long, the Iranian divers would drown. Fishman had no problem with the Panther crew meeting their ends, but only if it were necessary. Letting a diver drown when his air bottles ran out was not a death Fishman would wish on anyone. He wondered if this were one of those major decisions that would bifurcate his reality and send him down the branch of the universe where he let the divers live, and what that other universe would be like.

Consciously trying to be more present in the moment, Fishman reached up, pulled the upper hatch down and shut it, spinning the hatch wheel that dogged the hatch shut. He searched for a drain valve and a vent valve, found two valves nestled side-by-side in the overhead, and made the assumption that they were the drain and vent valves. He opened the valve in the smaller pipe first, probably the vent valve, then the one in the larger pipe, which had to be the drain valve, and immediately the water level in the chamber fell down from over their heads to their chests, then lower to their knees, until all the water drained from the trunk. Fishman leaned down to the wheel of the lower hatch and spun it, watching as the hatch dogs came off the seating surface. He pulled the hatch open and found himself face to face with someone looking up at him expectantly. The person at the bottom of the ladder apparently thought he was one of the ship’s divers, not a commando invading the ship. The man said something in Farsi.

In response, Fishman hit him with a blast from the Mark 6, and the Iranian went down hard, collapsing to the deck. Fishman reached for cable ties and tied the man’s hands behind his back, then tied his ankles together. He looked up as a second Iranian sailor approached, and hit him with a shot from the Mark 6. The other SEALs handed down the Iranian divers, took the regulators out of their mouths, and piled them by the other two paralyzed members of the Panther crew while Fishman tightened the zip ties on the interior Iranians’ wrists and ankles.

A communication circuit in the crowded overhead rasped with an Iranian voice, undoubtedly inquiring about what was happening. Aquatong pulled the Iranian divers and the two men who’d been at the bottom of the trunk ladder farther into the torpedo room, checking their zip ties, then reached up and shut the lower escape trunk hatch, nodding seriously at Fishman.

The band of commandos made their way aft to the control room, their weapons leveled for the next Iranians they’d encounter.

Dankleff shook Pacino awake.

“Wake up, wake up, wake up! Let’s go, AOIC. Time to get to work.”

Pacino yawned, not sure how long he’d dozed. His entire body ached from lying against the hard deck and bulkhead of the lockout trunk. Pacino stood and strapped on his gear, preparing to lock out of the trunk once the Panther surfaced. The trunk was still flooded with the outer door open, in case one or all of the SEALs needed to return. When Panther surfaced, the plan was shut the upper hatch, drain down the trunk, then the Vermont crew would enter the trunk and lock out for the short swim to the surface, where the SEALs would help them climb onto the hull of the Panther. The hardest part of the operation would be moving all the cargo they needed — the raft that would house the survivors of the crew, the radio and navigation equipment, canisters of clothes and food. The only thing they were relying on the Panther for was oxygen and water. And, he supposed, watertight integrity.

For the tenth time today Pacino wondered about whether the Panther were loaded with weapons, and if so, what were they? And would Chief Kim be able to figure out the firecontrol systems to allow Pacino and Dankleff to shoot at submerged targets, assuming Chief Albanese could find them on what had to be a primitive sonar system?

“So far, glitch-free,” Grip Aquatong said to Tiny Tim Fishman.

“Don’t jinx it, Grip,” Fishman ordered. They stood in the cramped control room of the modified Kilo-class submarine Panther. There were two older men in the room with three younger ones. The older men had to be the officers, the younger ones enlisted watchstanders or perhaps junior officers, all of them immobilized. “Figure out a way to surface this tub.”

Aquatong looked at the ship control area, which had a steering wheel and two control joysticks. “Damn if I know how this works.”

“Maybe on that panel behind you on the starboard side.”

Grip turned and leaned over the horizontal portion of what looked like a control panel. “It’s all in Farsi. I can’t figure any of this shit out.”

“They said to look for big levers, with big operators on them, like the Vermont’s emergency ballast tank blow levers.”

Grip shook his head in frustration. “Nothing.”

“Dammit.”

Scooter and Swan showed up, their Mark 6s ready to fire.

“Status?”

“All ship’s company immobilized. We used half the zip ties we brought. Smaller crew than we imagined,” Scooter reported.

“You check all the nooks and crannies? All the possible hidey-holes?”

“We went over it all once. We’ll need a second and third tour once we get the Vermont crew in here.”

“And don’t forget that translator, what’s his name?”

The short and slight kid with buck teeth and thick glasses, Cryptotechnician First Class Saurabh Onur, had a thick Indian accent, and hadn’t really been adopted by the Vermont sailors, at least, not yet. He was fluent in Russian and Farsi, and he was an expert at encryption and decryption technology. He’d definitely be useful here, but Fishman worried that there was only one of him. There should have been a second CT in case something happened to Onur, he thought.

“Grip, go get the OIC and AOIC in here and bring that CT guy with you. Pacino and Dankleff can figure out the operation of this sub once the CT guy translates all this gibberish. Meanwhile, Swan and Scooter, make another sweep of the sub for anyone we haven’t found and immobilized.”

The three commandos left Fishman alone in the submarine’s control room. He leaned over the older officers, if that’s what they were, wondering if he should put them on the raft with the other crewmen or keep them as hostages to help run this submarine. Obviously, this was harder than they’d imagined.

Dammit, he thought. Another major decision. Another two realities coming his way. But which one led to mission success?

“What the hell?” Dankleff said to Pacino. “Upper hatch is coming shut. But the Panther is still submerged.”

“Must be glitch number one,” Pacino said. “Panther crew must not have wanted to surface — probably in her op-order to remain submerged no matter what. The SEALs must not have been able to figure out how to surface her.”

“Shit. Trunk is draining down.” Dankleff picked up the 1JV phone. “Control, the lockout trunk upper hatch is shut and trunk is draining down. One or more SEALs is coming back in.”

Finally the forward side-door of the lockout trunk opened and Grip Aquatong pulled off his mask.

“You’re next on-stage,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Why isn’t Panther on the surface?”

“Goddamned if we could figure out how to surface her. We didn’t want to just try stuff. Not sure we can trust any of the Iranian crew. We need that cryptotech, Onur.”

“Petty Officer Onur, get in here,” Dankleff barked.

The cryptotech climbed into the lockout trunk, looking like a fourteen-year-old boy. The kid was tiny, Pacino thought, surprised the SEALs hadn’t given him a call sign like ‘Heavy’ or ‘Fatty’ or ‘Massive.’

“What do they call you?” Pacino asked the petite cytotechnician.

“Saurabh, sir. My first name.”

“From now on,” Dankleff said, “you answer to ‘Crypto Geek,’ or just ‘Geek.’”

Onur stared at the OIC as if he’d spoken another language.

“Come on, Geek, get your mask on.”

“First trip, I’ll take OIC and AOIC and the Geek,” Aquatong said.

“I’ll inform control,” Pacino said, reaching for a phone on the bulkhead of the crowded passageway. At first he picked up the 1JV official circuit, but realized half the tactical team would be listening in. He put the phone back, found the inter-station phone and dialed the conn. Officer of the Deck Rachel Romanov answered, her voice seeming perplexed that she’d been called on the unofficial phone circuit. For a moment, Pacino felt something dark blow through his soul.

“OOD, Lockout Trunk,” Pacino said. “SEALs couldn’t figure out how to surface Panther. So OIC, AOIC, cryptotech and Aquatong are going to lock out and get over to Panther and try to surface it.”

“Very well,” Romanov’s cold voice replied.

“And Nav,” Pacino said, hesitating.

“Yes?”

Pacino could hear her breathing.

“I just wanted to say,” he said, “I’m sorry for what I did. I hope someday you’ll forgive me. I treasured our friendship. I was hoping we could be friends again. I wanted to tell you now because, well, I feel like I may be running out of time. My life may be out of days. So. You know. I just wanted to leave you with that.”

There was silence for a moment. Dankleff was waving at him from the hatch, as if to say, let’s go. Finally Romanov answered him.

“Don’t think that way, non-qual,” she said softly, almost gently. “You are going to win this thing. We will prevail. We will all survive this. Because, goddammit, you owe me a fucking drink when we get to AUTEC.”

“I could throw in a steak and some more drinks to go with it, Nav,” he smiled into the phone.

“Good plan. Good luck out there, non-qual. Anthony.”

She hung up the phone. He stared at the handset for a moment, then looked up. Dankleff was staring at him.

“Okay,” Pacino said. “Control has the word. Let’s go.”

Pacino, Onur and Dankleff climbed into the side hatch. Pacino dogged the hatch, shut the drain valve and vent valve and hit the hydraulic lever to open the trunk-flood hull and backup valves.

“Control, Lockout Trunk, flooding down.” Dankleff said over the 7MC communication circuit.

“Trunk, Control, aye,” the box rasped.

The water began to rise in the lockout trunk, and for a moment Pacino felt a visceral panic grip his chest and it became hard to breathe. He consciously tried to take a breath, screaming at himself that this was not the Piranha. But the water had risen above his chest and as it approached his chin, he found himself hyperventilating, and as the panic blew into his mind, the edges of his vision began to darken.

Aquatong slapped his mask, hard. “Lipstick. Lipstick! Patch! Patch! You with us?”

Pacino violently shook his head, trying to clear his mind.

“Shut the flood valve!” Aquatong yelled.

The noise of the flooding stopped. The water was up to Pacino’s shoulders. Aquatong took off Pacino’s mask and regulator, pulling his own mask to his forehead and dropping his regulator.

“You okay, Patch? You gonna make it?”

Pacino saw Dankleff and Onur staring at him. He inhaled. “Just some, you know, anxiety from what I went through on Piranha,” he choked out. “I’ll be okay,” he said, more to himself than the others. “I’ll be okay.” He took a deep breath, put his mask back on and put his regulator into his mouth, clamping his teeth down on the rubber.

Through the mask he saw Dankleff looking at him, knowing that since Dankleff was in command, he was making a decision — whether to leave Pacino behind or soldier on.

“I’m okay, U-Boat,” Pacino said around his regulator.

“Come into the air space with me,” Dankleff ordered, pulling Pacino with him into the space that remained dry while the rest of the trunk flooded, where the valve operating mechanisms and comms box were housed.

“Let’s get going,” Aquatong said.

Dankleff hit the flood valve handle again the sound of water flowing in restarted. Outside the air space, through a round porthole, Pacino could see the water level started rising again until it had risen all the way to the upper hatch. Dankleff shut the flood hull and backup valves, then looked at Pacino, his mask on the top of his head.

“You don’t have to do this, Patch.”

Pacino lifted his mask and dropped his regulator. “It was a momentary thing, boss. I swear I’m okay.” He drilled his eyes into Dankleff’s, hoping he sounded believable.

Dankleff exhaled and put in his regulator and nodded. Pacino pulled his mask down and clamped his teeth into the regulator and took a few breaths. Dankleff turned to hit the hydraulic lever for the upper hatch, then pulled Pacino under the water’s surface with him, the two of them emerging into the flooded lockout trunk.

Inside the trunk, Aquatong was already out the upper hatch, pulling Petty Officer Onur after him, then Dankleff, finally Pacino. As Pacino emerged into the clear water, he could see the entire hull of the black Vermont extending into the distance. He noticed a faint trace of green algae at the waterline, showing how the boat rested in the water when surfaced. Farther back and above them, the hull of the Kilo submarine was also visible, the sub stationary nearer the surface.

Aquatong had strapped a safety lanyard to Pacino’s belt, the lanyard attached to Dankleff and the crypto tech. Aquatong maneuvered his Mark 17 propulsion unit and started off for the Panther hull. Pacino stared at the hull of the Vermont, thinking, there, right there, that’s where the first torpedo hit the Piranha. He clamped his eyes shut and shook his head, forcing himself to be in the present. He saw Dankleff looking at him, giving him a “thumbs-up” sign, but it wasn’t a statement, it was a question. Are you okay? Pacino nodded and shot a thumbs-up back at him, and by that time Aquatong had maneuvered them over the forward hatch of the Panther.

The Panther was bigger than in Pacino’s imagination, but then, he thought, reality always is, and that thought made him think about Fishman’s ideas about the nature of reality. Could this, all this, really be just a simulation? “It’s only a movie,” he thought to himself as his fins went down into the hatch of Panther’s forward escape trunk.

20

Grip Aquatong pulled the upper hatch of the Panther’s escape trunk shut and spun the hatch-wheel to dog the hatch, then opened the vent and drain valves. The water in the tight space drained, and as the level sank below Pacino’s chest, he dropped his regulator, put his mask on the top of his head and pulled off his flippers. Dankleff was staring at him. Pacino grinned.

“I’m okay, Skipper,” he said.

“Better to be dry, eh, AOIC?”

Pacino nodded. Aquatong opened the lower hatch, the last drops of water falling down to the space below. He climbed into the hull, then Onur, Dankleff, then Pacino. Pacino emerged into a space crowded with weapon racks and torpedoes, lit by weak overhead fluorescent lamps. Valves and piping and panels choked the walls of the space, interspersed with a thousand runs of cable. At least one question he had was answered — they did have torpedoes, but what kind?

“Jesus, look at this,” Dankleff said, looking around. “It’s like 1950 in here.”

“Come on,” Aquatong said, “Hurry up.”

The four of them took off their diving equipment and put them into four separate piles — who knew if they’d have to use them again, so no sense mixing them up into a chaotic stack.

“Follow me,” Aquatong said, and walked quickly aft, where a circular hatch was set into the thick steel of the watertight bulkhead. They emerged into a narrow passageway, the walls of it done in a light birch paneling. The passageway extended far aft, but Aquatong only went thirty feet down it before arriving at an alcove where a steep stairway extended up in one direction and down in the other. Aquatong vaulted up a steep staircase to an upper level. Pacino followed Dankleff and pulled himself up by the stair’s stainless steel railing into a narrow area, boxed in in three directions, each wall of it filled with junction boxes, cables and piping, with an open space amidships of the stairway, the opposite area filled with what looked thousands of valves in piping, most with large, red, circular handles, a few of the larger ones high up in the overhead with bar-type handles, these valve handles engraved with large letters in Farsi.

Pacino stared at the valve manifold wall. “You weren’t kidding about it being 1950 in here. Maybe 1940. Look — there’s got to be a million valves in that rats’ nest of piping — it’s ‘The Million Valve Manifold.’”

“More like a World War I sub with that jumble of valves. No way we’re going to figure out how to operate this with just a translator.”

“With any luck, the Iranians are still alive,” Pacino said.

Aquatong kept going forward through a narrow space past the Million Valve Manifold into what had to be the control room, but it was barely twenty feet square. Unlike the U.S. Navy’s submarines with their drab gray paint, the predominant color of the room was a bright corn-on-the-cob yellow. Jammed into the center of the brightly lit room were two periscopes, the forward one slender and retracted, the smooth stainless steel of its pole extending downward into its well. The aft periscope was larger, possibly the navigation unit, and it was extended, the grips still horizontal, the eyepiece glowing with light from the surface.

To the port side of the scopes was a command seat shoehorned in by a bulkhead of more valves, junction boxes and cabling. Forward of the command seat was a panel in the port forward corner, with what looked like a radar repeater or sonar repeater, or maybe both, the console jammed with a hundred switches and annunciator lights. To the right, at about the centerline, was a console built to be stood behind, with a display at eye height, possibly an upward-looking sonar, reminding Pacino of an underice sonar, but what use would that be to a non-nuclear submarine? To starboard of that, in the forward starboard corner, was a small ship control console, with a horseshoe-shaped panel, a steering yoke in the center, joysticks on either side of it, one seat centered behind the yoke, the second jammed against the starboard bulkhead.

Immediately aft were three consoles built to be stations where watchstanders sat facing outboard to starboard, with fairly expansive table-like horizontal sections with keyboards and function keys set into them, communication circuit microphones, vertical sections jammed with rotary switches, gauges, more annunciator lights, toggle switches and buttons. Aft of the three sit-down consoles was the Million Valve Manifold bulkhead. Pacino looked around in wonder. He could fit this entire tiny control room into his father’s kitchen, he thought.

“Figure out how to surface this bitch before it sinks,” Aquatong urged.

“Geek, get over here, Petty Officer Onur,” Dankleff commanded.

“You hear that?” Pacino asked Dankleff.

“What?”

“Diesel engine,” Pacino said. “We’re snorkeling, and apparently hovering while we snorkel.”

“Well, we ain’t goin’ anywhere till the SEALs free up the screw. So let’s hope whatever hovering system they’ve got keeps us level here. We sink a few feet and the induction mast goes under, if they don’t have a head valve or the head valve controller fails, that diesel engine could suck all the air out of the boat and kill us, like in that Chinese diesel-electric sub a few years ago. God knows if they have a vacuum switch interlock.”

“Or even if they have one, does it work?”

“Geek, can you read this panel?” Dankleff said, focusing the crypto tech on the middle console. “This ‘pos two,’ if you can call it that, seems to be a combined ballast control panel and electric plant control panel. We need the BCP part of it. Onur, there should be a switch or lever somewhere that says ‘main ballast tank blow,’ or two of them, with one of them for the forward group and the other for the aft group.”

Petty Officer Onur looked at the panel and shook his head. “OIC, it’s all abbreviations and knobology. There’s nothing a landlubber can figure out from this. I know technical terms in Farsi, but these abbreviations are all what you guys call ‘inside baseball.’”

“I was afraid of this,” Dankleff said. He looked around. “Nothing resembling emergency blow levers. Fucking designers built all the functions into this BCP slash EPCP.”

“Look for a SOP manual,” Pacino said.

“Yeah, Geek, look for a book, an instruction manual, procedure manual, something labeled ‘Standard Operating Procedures.’”

Petty Officer Onur pulled out an orange one-inch-thick plastic binder. “Says ‘Operating Procedures.’”

“Try to find something that says ‘surfacing.’ Or ‘emergency surfacing.’”

Petty Officer Onur studied the manual, frowning.

“This is taking too long,” Pacino said. “We need one of the Iranian crew.”

“The officers are all in the wardroom, or at least we thought they were officers,” Aquatong said. “But they’re all kind of tied up at the moment.”

“Not funny,” Pacino said. “Take me to them. U-Boat, you and Onur keep trying to figure out how to surface this bitch.”

“Hey, who’s in command here?” Dankleff said, but he was smiling.

Down the birch-paneled passageway, a side door opened into the wardroom. Pacino took it in at a glance. Fairly large for a wardroom, almost as big as Vermont’s, which was an odd contrast to the cramped design of the tiny control room. There were bookshelves along two walls, a seating area at the far end, and the long ends of the table each had four seats, with a larger one at the door end — for the captain — and a normal chair at the other end, with a door that opened into the galley, a pass-through in the wall for bringing in food.

There were teacups and plates on the table and a tea service that had gone cold, a serving tray of pastries and small sandwiches in the table’s center. Seated at the end seating area were three tied-up Iranian officers. The end chair and the six seats at the table were taken up with more immobilized Iranians. All of them were zip-tied to their chairs and had duct tape over their mouths. Pacino pulled Onur over.

“Which one is the captain?”

Onur read the name badges over the left breast pocket of their at-sea coveralls.

“There’s just names, sir, not rank or station.”

“For God’s sake, Geek, ask them.”

One of the Iranians started moving violently in the seat he was cable-tied to. Pacino walked up to him. He was maybe forty years old, with a well-groomed haircut, a full handlebar mustache, clean-shaven otherwise, slender, medium height. He looked a little too young for central casting to send in as the commanding officer, though. Pacino carefully pulled the duct tape off the man’s mouth.

He took a gasping breath. “I’m the captain,” he said in perfect, almost British, English, the stress of the moment making his voice a half-octave higher than Pacino imagined it normally was. “Commander Resa Ahmadi, commanding officer of Panther. And who in the name of Allah are you?”

“Anthony Pacino, Lieutenant, United States Navy,” Pacino said, his face close to the Iranian’s, looking into his eyes to try to read if the Iranian were truly the captain, and if he’d try to sabotage the mission, perhaps even sink them all intentionally. “Why do you speak English so well?”

“I went to high school in London. For college and grad school, I went to Harvard in America,” he said. “Double major — quantum physics and international relations.”

“Funny combination of studies for a submarine officer,” Pacino said, weighing the Iranian’s words, and noticing that the officer next to him, an older, thickly bearded and heavier man, was glaring at Ahmadi as if he wanted to kill him. “If you went to Harvard,” Pacino asked, “tell me this — there’s a restaurant just east of the Harvard Book Store, across the street from Lamont Library. What is it?”

Without hesitation, Ahmadi answered. “It’s the Grafton Street Pub and Grill when I was there, but there was talk about closing it down.”

“Really?” Pacino asked. It had been a favorite haunt of his and Carolyn Alameda’s when he’d been a grad student in Boston. “So what does it look like inside?”

“Lots of brick, old wood floor, dark wood tables, dim lighting. Atmosphere. And a rowdy crowd, Mr. Pacino.” Ahmadi looked up at him imploringly.

Pacino unholstered the Glock .45 ACP from its waterproof container at his belt that he’d been issued for this mission. He had no intention of using it, because God alone knew what a stray bullet would do to a submarine designed like this one, but it did a good job of intimidation. He pointed it at Ahmadi’s right eyeball.

“Okay, I believe you, Captain Ahmadi. Now, I need to trust you. I need you to come with me to the control room and surface the boat.”

“Control room? You mean the central command post?”

“Yeah, the goddamned central command post. You think you can do that without me having to put a hole in you big enough to toss an apple through?”

“Lieutenant, I don’t want to die any more than you do.”

“Geek, take my knife and cut Ahmadi’s zip ties.”

Petty Officer Onur took Pacino’s K-Bar knife from his shin sheath and cut the cable ties holding Ahmadi to the chair.

Just then the deck tilted downward and the air pressure in the room sank. Pacino’s ears popped with a BANG, and a second later the sound of the diesel engine cut off, the ensuing quiet boding ill, because if the snorkel mast had gone under, with the deck tilting and the diesel shutting down, it meant one thing.

They were sinking.

Sonarman First Class Mercer put his hand to his ear and raised the other hand to signal attention.

“Approach Officer, Sonar, Master One’s diesel has shut down.”

“Very well, Sonar,” Seagraves said calmly. “Officer of the Deck, what do you think that means?”

“Captain, I was hoping it meant the SEALs and Dankleff and Pacino were preparing to surface, but look!” Romanov gestured to the periscope display. The Panther was taking on a down angle, the angle increasing, and drifting vertically downward. “Dammit, sir, she’s sinking!”

“Mark the depth here, NavET,” Seagraves called to the navigation technician.

“One thousand six hundred seventy fathoms, Captain. Ten thousand feet.”

Seagraves shot a look at Romanov, and Quinnivan stepped over from the firecontrol’s attack center. “What’s crush depth for a Kilo, OOD?” Quinnivan asked.

“We think it’s three-fifty meters, sir. Eleven hundred fifty feet. Give or take.”

“Vertical dive the ship and keep up with it, OOD,” Seagraves ordered, “so we can check its depth.”

“Aye sir. Pilot, insert negative depth rate, ten feet per second. Shifting scope to IR,” she said, shifting the periscope optics to infrared.

“Negative depth rate ten, Pilot, aye, and negative rate increasing, three, five, seven, nine and ten feet per second, OOD, depth three one zero feet.”

“Very well, Pilot, call out depth every fifty feet.”

Romanov concentrated on the periscope display. The Panther was deeper than Vermont. And from its bowplanes and horizontal stabilizers, it had started to glide forward, the range opening.

“Pilot, secure hovering, all ahead one third, turns for three knots. Take the bubble to a twenty degree down angle.”

The deck in the room dramatically tilted downward. Everyone standing had grabbed a hand-hold, including Romanov. She stared at the IR periscope display. The Panther kept sinking deeper, its down-angle steeper.

“Pilot, take the bubble to thirty degrees.”

“Down angle to three zero degrees, Pilot, aye. Present depth five five zero feet.”

“Dammit, Captain, Panther’s angle is steep, she’s going down at thirty degrees now, maybe more.”

Seagraves shot a look at Quinnivan. This mission might be over five minutes from now.

Ending in mission failure.

Ending in the death of their subordinates and friends, Lieutenants Dankleff and Pacino. And the SEAL commandos.

Seagraves clamped his jaw shut, fighting hard to keep the emotions from showing on his face.

“Depth seven hundred.”

“Master One’s angle’s increased to thirty-five, maybe forty degrees.”

“Depth seven five zero. Depth eight hundred feet. Eight fifty. OOD, you got a depth order for me?”

“Pilot, pull out at twelve hundred feet.”

“Nine fifty feet. One thousand feet. Eleven hundred. Eleven hundred fifty, feet, Officer of the Deck, and pulling out. Depth twelve hundred feet. Test depth, ma’am.”

Romanov looked up at Seagraves. “Fuck, Captain.”

“I know,” he said quietly.

Pacino’s last words suddenly filled Romanov’s mind. I treasured our friendship. I was hoping we could be friends again. I wanted to tell you now because, well, I feel like I may be running out of time. My life may be out of days. So. You know. I just wanted to leave you with that.

Oh my God, she thought, and a hot tear leaked out of her right eye and ran down her cheek.

“Hurry up!” Pacino screamed. He pushed Captain Ahmadi up the steep stairs to the upper level. With the steep down angle the ship had taken on, the stairway had become more horizontal, the rungs at odds with gravity. They both slipped twice on the ascent. “You’ve got to blow ballast. Emergency blow!”

“We have to shut the vent valves first,” Ahmadi said. “Or the air in the ballast tanks will just float away.”

“Why the fuck,” Pacino said, gasping for breath as he reached the top of the ladder, “would you sail around with the goddamned ballast tank vents open?”

“Otherwise, they rust shut and you could never submerge,” Ahmadi said, as if it were obvious. Dankleff was holding onto the middle console they’d named “pos two.”

“Well, dammit, shut the damned vents!” Pacino shouted, thinking the Russian designers hadn’t yet gotten a grip on the metallurgy that could keep main ballast tank vents shut without rusting shut. Their design ignorance was about to get him, Dankleff and the SEALs killed.

The down angle was getting worse. Pacino shot a glance at an inclinometer, a simple bubble level device he’d seen on the port bulkhead above the command chair, and it read 30 degrees down. He scanned for depth and found a gauge that said 400. Was that meters? And what was test depth? For that matter, what was crush depth?

Ahmadi lunged to the overhead forward portion of the Million Valve Manifold and rotated a bar handle on a hydraulic valve, the handle marked with bold Farsi lettering, then rotated a second handle farther aft of the first valve. He skidded to the middle console, pos two, and looked at eight annunciators, which changed from red to green.

“Vent valves are shut,” he gasped. He pulled himself back to the manifold and found two more bar handles on massive ball valves set into six-inch piping and rotated the first ninety degrees.

Immediately a blasting noise slammed Pacino’s eardrums and the room filled up with condensation, a fog so thick he could barely make out Dankleff at pos two.

“That’s the forward group emergency blow.” Ahmadi operated the second valve handle. The noise in the room got even louder and the fog from the piping in the manifold grew even thicker. “Aft group.”

“U-Boat, mark our depth. Pressure gauge is at that ship control station.”

“There’s one at pos two,” Dankleff called. “It reads four hundred twenty-five.” He looked at Ahmadi, whose face had turned white, but perhaps that was just the effect of the fog. “Is that meters?”

“Dear Allah,” Ahmadi breathed. “Three hundred and fifty meters is crush depth.”

Pacino vaulted back to the port side so he could see the inclinometer. The deck had stopped inclining madly downward. He had to put his face a foot away from it to read the bubble indication, the fog in the room from the blow system still thick. “Angle has eased to ten degrees dive,” he shouted above the roar of the high-pressure air flow.

The flow noise in the room gradually died down, the fog began to clear and the angle came off. The inclinometer read five degrees rise. Ahmadi reached up and shut the handles of the two large ball valves.

“What’s depth?” Pacino barked at Dankleff.

“Three hundred meters and rising!”

“Thank the Sevmash design engineers,” Pacino said. “They may be stupid about ballast tank vent valves and placement of emergency blow valve actuators, but at least their hull took us to design crush depth and beyond.”

“Two fifty,” Dankleff said, a note of hope creeping into his voice. “Two hundred meters.”

The deck angle climbed. The inclinometer read ten degrees, then fifteen, then twenty. Pacino grabbed a handhold at pos three to steady himself and looked at Ahmadi. “Thanks. I didn’t want to spend eternity at the bottom of two miles of ocean.”

“You and me, both,” Ahmadi said.

“When this is all over, I’m buying you a stiff drink at the Grafton Street Pub and Grill, Captain,” Pacino said.

“And despite my faith’s prohibition of alcohol consumption, Lieutenant, I shall drink it. What is ‘all this,’ anyway? What are you doing here? What’s your mission?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Pacino asked. “We’re stealing your submarine.”

“Why?”

Pacino shrugged. “The nuclear reactor, well, it interests us.”

“Are you going to kill me and my crew?”

“Hell no,” Pacino said, the deck suddenly leveling off and starting to rock from port to starboard in the surface waves.

“We’ve surfaced,” Dankleff said.

The SEAL commander ran into the room and looked around. “Nice recovery, boys,” Fishman said. “We’re going back to Vermont to get our stuff.”

Pacino wiped sweat from his forehead, realizing it would be nice to get out of the hot wetsuit and get a shower.

“So,” Ahmadi said, “you’re not killing us?”

“We brought a big-ass raft to put you guys in,” Dankleff said. “You can even take your personal effects, framed pictures of your kids or wifey or whatever. We’ll set you adrift with rations and an emergency beacon. You’ll be home in no time.”

“Except for you, Captain Ahmadi,” Pacino said. “You and whatever Russian reactor technicians are aboard are coming with us. When we reach our destination, you’ll be repatriated. It’ll be a first-class ticket, I promise. After that drink at the Grafton.”

“There’s no going home for me if I come with you, Lieutenant. I’d be shot for a traitor, or imprisoned for my mission’s disaster. I’ll be forced to request asylum in the United States.”

Pacino looked at Ahmadi. “For you to be educated in London and Boston, you must have some pretty heavy connections to, you know, the guys who run things.”

“I do. I mean, I did. But after this, they’ll disown me, swear they never knew me, or knew all along I’d disappoint them.”

“Yeah. I get that. Damned shame.”

Ahmadi looked at the deck. “There was a woman I wanted to marry. I’d be leaving her behind.”

“Hey,” Pacino said. “Maybe we can get her out to join you.”

Ahmadi shook his head. “She’s a fundamentalist and has never left Iran and only speaks Farsi. She’d drown if she were to leave.”

“People change,” Pacino offered lamely. What else could he say? “Why don’t you help me get the Russian technicians in a room so I can talk to them? I’m going to need them, too.”

“There’s only one, that drunken infidel Alexie Abakumov.”

“Let’s go meet him.”

21

Every time he tightened up the laces on his running shoes, Michael Pacino missed his old black lab, Jackson. The enthusiasm that puppy had would overcome any thought of skipping an early morning workout. Pacino remembered when he came back from the sinking of the SSNX after the drone sub incident, Jackson seemed suddenly older, gray hair at his muzzle, still wagging his tail, but too tired to get up from his bed for a run. Pacino had taken him in to the vet a week later when the dog could no longer eat or drink, just lying in his bed, trembling. That last night, Pacino had put his pillow and blanket on the floor next to the dog and kept him company, the lab occasionally crying in what little sleep he did get. Finally, at sunrise, Pacino had packed him up into the Lincoln SUV and driven him to the Sandbridge Pet Hospital, that last walk through the door reminding him of all the times he’d taken the dog there in the past. Unlike most dogs, Jackson had enjoyed the vet’s office, making friends with the other animals and pet-owners in the waiting room, and smiling up at the nurse or the doctor. As the dog had shut his eyes for the last time, Pacino wept, and as if prepared for that, the vet had a box of tissues handy. The walk back to the truck had been a long one.

The wait for action in the SCIF had continued for hours until Pacino had decided to get some sleep, leaving Catardi to watch the display. But sleep had been impossible, what with worrying about Anthony. At 4 am, Pacino had made coffee and checked the screen, but still nothing. He figured he could squeeze in five or six miles running the circuit of trails around the facility before checking back in to see what was happening with the operation. As he shut the door of Holly Lodge behind him, Vice Admiral Catardi called out to him from a golf cart parked in front.

“Patch. I was just dialing your cell. There’s signs of action. Come on.”

“I’m not exactly dressed to see the President of the United States,” Pacino said, self-conscious in running shorts and a black T-shirt with a leering skull and crossbones on it, gothic script reading, “U.S. Submarine Force.”

“You look great. Come on.”

Catardi rushed them to Birch Cabin, parked the cart and hurried inside, Pacino behind him, half jogging to catch up.

“Oh, Patch, Rob, just in time,” President Carlucci said, smiling.

Gathered in front of the flatscreen were Vice President Karen Chushi and Vice Admiral Jehoshaphat Taylor. Both glanced at him, Taylor nodding respectfully, Chushi smiling slightly, then both returned their attention to the screen.

The television was in a split-screen mode, the right side an overhead view of the ocean with a timestamp and the notation, “Video age: 10 minutes 17 seconds.” On the left side, the modified Kilo submarine Panther was stationary on the surface, a large raft being inflated on the forward deck.

“Take a look at the clip from eleven minutes ago,” Carlucci said. Pacino stood in front of the display, watching the calm square of ocean.

A moment into the video, the nose of a submarine suddenly and dramatically burst forth from the water, the waves and splashing foam rising violently on either side of the hull as the black cigar shape came almost halfway out of the ocean, slowed to a stop and in what looked like slow motion, crashed back into the surface, almost disappearing underwater for a moment before resurfacing and rocking in the gentle waves.

“Now that’s style,” Carlucci said.

“They emergency blew to the surface,” Pacino said.

“Something else you’ll want to see, Patch,” Carlucci said, operating the remote and spinning the history video forward as divers on the port side of the Kilo submarine surfaced and were helped aboard by the SEAL commandos. Carlucci zoomed the screen of the history video so faces could be made out.

“The magnification of this drone is incredible,” Pacino said.

“Our facial recognition is online,” Taylor said. As each diver climbed aboard the sub, a name and rank appeared in a text box with an arrow leading to the person. Pacino saw Lieutenant M. Varney, a dolphin-qualified officer from Vermont, look at the sky, then a petite woman took off her mask, and her label read Chief B. Goreliki, RMC(SS) — a radio chief — and Chief T. Albanese, a sonarman, then FTC(SS) N. Kim, a firecontrol and weapons system tech and AI specialist.

“See, Patch,” Catardi said. “Your son’s not in the boarding party.”

“What about a translator?” Pacino asked. “And that’s a pretty slender crew to be manning a submarine for a long voyage, having to stand watches around the clock.”

“They’ve got my guys,” Taylor said.

“Yes, they have the SEALs,” Catardi said. “See, Patch? You son is safe and warm inside Vermont, probably sipping a black-and-bitter in the control room watching the success of this operation on the periscope display.” Catardi clapped Pacino’s shoulder, smiling.

The boarding party entered the ship, then two SEALs emerged from the hatch, both in full diving gear, and walked aft to the stern, diving into the water.

“Clearing the screw from their net,” Catardi said.

Once the SEALs had climbed back aboard the sub, the history video shrank to a dot, the entire screen now devoted to a real-time view. The large, black, oblong raft was fully inflated, and two of the SEALs were pulling Iranians out of the hull and loading them on to the raft.

“How big is the crew?” Pacino asked.

“We think forty, maybe fifty,” Catardi said.

After the SEALs loaded the last Iranian and lifted large containers into the raft — rations, water, the emergency locator beacon — they withdrew into the boat and shut the hatch after themselves.

“Any of these Iranians identified in our facial recognition database?” Pacino looked closely at the video screen.

“No,” Taylor said.

“I don’t see any Russians.”

“You can tell a Russian from an Iranian from thirty thousand feet?” Taylor was smiling to remove any offense from his comment.

“I guess not. I just imagined a Russian reactor technician would be wearing a different color set of coveralls.”

“Or a lab jacket,” Taylor said.

“What’s the count?”

“Thirty-five,” Catardi said.

“Still seems light,” Pacino said.

“Russians are big into automation, Patch,” Catardi said. “They run with half the number of officers and enlisted we sail with.”

“Maybe so,” Pacino said, but he had his doubts. The intel files he’d seen on the original Kilo class showed minimal automation. The improved Kilo, by contrast, had a modern AI system, a “second captain,” as the Russians called it, the system considered a glorified autopilot, but rumor had it that their front-line AI systems could actually operate the ship in combat, and in some case “fight the ship” better than their human counterparts. After all, AI didn’t get nervous or tired. It didn’t have to recover from a fight with the spouse. It didn’t get hungover. It didn’t hesitate or take into account the morality of sinking another ship filled with human beings. It just fought the enemy. But this hull was the older, original Kilo, built from the technology of World War II German U-boats. The Russians had operated a sub the West called the Foxtrot well into the 1970s, and the Foxtrot was just a Nazi Type XXI U-boat. No automation, just valves jammed everywhere with rudimentary sonar and firecontrol. Pacino imagined that’s why the Russians put their effort into smart torpedoes, which could be fired by even a dumb U-boat, since they were truly fire-and-forget weapons that didn’t need much programming by the launching ship other than the bearing to the target.

Suddenly a large geyser of water and foam sprayed out of the bow of the submarine, then a similar gusher of foam from the rear.

“Ballast tank vents opening,” Pacino said to himself.

The submarine began to settle into the water, and as the foredeck sank low enough that it became awash with the surrounding waves, the raft floated free, the submarine sinking under it. Soon only the conning tower was visible, and then it too got lower in the water until only its top surface was visible, waves breaking over it, until it too sank into the ocean, only the periscope visible extending from the conning tower, and eventually that too vanished, and there was only the raft and the Iranians — and maybe Russians.

A vertical dive, Pacino thought. Submerging vertically took skill. Ideally, it took automation to keep the boat level. Vertical diving an ancient Kilo like this? With a boarding party unfamiliar with the boat? They had to have help from the original Kilo’s crew, Pacino thought. Maybe the captain or some cooperative junior officers or chiefs. Someone who knew what he was doing.

That was both good and bad, Pacino considered. Good because someone from the original Iranian crew could help them operate the stolen submarine, avoiding the thousands of disasters that could befall an uneducated crew from the hazards of the ruthless ocean itself. But bad because having original crewmembers risked retaliation. Sabotage. The Panther, now that she was submerged, could simply vanish into the deep from a crewmember intent on her destruction from within. And if the SEALs were busy standing watches around the clock to drive the ship, they wouldn’t be paying enough attention to whomever Lieutenant Varney had recruited to help them.

In any case, there was nothing to do now but wait for status reports from the USS Vermont, which was ordered to communicate with coded, preformatted SLOT buoys.

“Did Vermont send a status report?” Pacino asked Catardi.

“She popped a SLOT a few minutes after you got here. A simple ‘code one’ with a latitude and longitude. Means success in hijacking the Panther at that position. I doubt we’ll hear much more from her unless there’s trouble.”

“This is going to be a long trip, right?” Pacino asked.

“Mr. President, can you show the intended track of Panther and Vermont back to AUTEC?”

Carlucci operated the screen remote, pulling up a view of earth from high above the Indian Ocean. Twin tracks, one in blue, the other red, extended from the point of capture of the Panther in the mouth of the Gulf of Oman, heading south-southeast, hugging the west coast of India, then proceeding due south to Antarctica and hugging its coast until the point due south of the Atlantic between Africa and South America, then north to a point west of Western Sahara and Morocco — the approximate latitude of their destination — then west to the Bahamas.

“A trip like this, at battery optimization cruising speed, six to ten knots, that could take six weeks, maybe more.”

“Seventeen thousand miles,” Catardi said, “With an average point-of-intended motion speed of seven knots, well, that’s a hundred days. Panther won’t arrive at AUTEC until mid-September. We’ve programmed in refueling operations and re-provisioning four, maybe five times, along the voyage.”

That seemed a weak point of the operation, Pacino thought. Surfacing to load food and fuel would leave them vulnerable to an opposition force. Satellites would photograph them. Enemy submarines could lie in wait knowing their location at a certain time. Even if the harebrained scheme to load them up while submerged and hovering worked, there was still vulnerability if they’d been trailed there by an opposition submarine.

“Did they load on rations?”

“They loaded a lot of stuff, Patch,” Catardi said. “Some of it was equipment. Radio, SatNav. Some clothes. But the rest of the load-out was food. Enough to get to the first refueling point. They’ll be okay. The Vermont will be with her the entire way, making sure she’s safe.”

“Goddamned long wait for this mission to be over,” Pacino said.

“Well, I guess we can enjoy the rest of the weekend here,” Carlucci said. “Nothing more to see. Patch, if you and the admirals need to go, no problem. Go spend the weekend at home. I’ll catch up with you Monday afternoon.”

“Thank you, sir,” Pacino said.

Outside Birch Cabin, at Catardi’s golf cart, Catardi asked Pacino if he were headed back to Annapolis.

“You need a ride, Robby?”

“I’m a little afraid of that thing you call a car, Patch.”

“I’ll drive gently. Interstates, even.”

“I’ll call Styxx. She can get a Gulfstream for me at Andrews. It’s on your way, right?”

“That it is, Robby.”

Admiral Gennady Zhigunov sat down in the sparsely furnished secure conference room at Northern Fleet Headquarters. The room was empty except for him, the metal table, four chairs, a large flatscreen and the camera mounted on top of the screen. He poured half a glass of water from a pitcher on the table, opened a notebook and switched on his pad computer while he waited for the secure link to come up with the Admiralty building in St. Petersburg. This meeting would be the kind that took half a liter of vodka to get over, he knew, because the Kindly Old Gentleman, as they sarcastically called the volatile Admiral Anatoly Stanislav behind his back, had called for the video conference with him from the Northern Fleet and his counterpart and bitter rival from the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Aleksander Andreyushkin. Stanislav was the Chief Commander of the Navy, and Zhigunov had only met him once, and the diminutive, older, gray-haired man had shouted so loud he’d rattled the windows of his office about that regrettable nuclear incident at the Polyarny base. That had to be four or five years ago, but Zhigunov had never forgotten.

Today’s meeting would feature not only the explosive Stanislav but his Chief of Staff and First Deputy Commander of the Navy, Vice Admiral Pavel Zhabin, who despite being a rank below Zhigunov himself, used the rank of his boss as a weapon, having sent Zhigunov dozens of blisteringly furious emails when things hadn’t gone to plan.

Zhigunov took a deep breath as the screen lit up, but the expected view of the Admiralty’s ornate secure conference room didn’t appear, but rather a room much like the one Zhigunov occupied, this one with the emblem of the Pacific Fleet on the wall behind the man in the room. It was Admiral Andreyushkin, the commander of the Pacific Fleet. Stanislav and Zhabin were slightly delayed. Soon the right side of the screen lit up with the Admiralty conference room, Stanislav and Zhabin seated together in the room, the screen’s left half devoted to the figure of Andreyushkin.

Before he could even greet the senior admiral and his chief of staff, Stanislav began, his voice so furious it wavered.

“Are either of you aware what happened an hour ago?” he demanded. Zhigunov glanced briefly at his pad computer. He had cleared out all his messages just before walking into the room so he wouldn’t be blindsided by the admiral.

“No, Admiral,” Zhigunov said.

“What about you, Andreyushkin?”

“I have no information, Admiral,” Andreyushkin said, his voice low.

“Well, gentlemen,” Stanislav spit, as the word ‘gentlemen’ were an epithet, “allow me to display for your edification this video clip, taken from our newest Comsomolets satellite I spent fuel to retask to monitor the Gulf of Oman, since your submarines were both late to get in-theater.” Stanislav’s pronunciation of ‘submarines’ dripped with contempt. He’d come up through the surface navy and had always been annoyed at submariners, Zhigunov thought.

The screen changed to an overhead view of the calm, deep waters of the Gulf of Oman. Suddenly the ocean burst into foam and spray as a Kilo-class submarine blasted out of the water after performing an emergency blow. The Kilo was elongated — the modified Iranian submarine that his command’s submarine Voronezh had been tasked with escorting into the Indian Ocean.

Zhigunov watched in horror as the video showed four commandos emerging from the sea and invading the submarine, being helped onto the deck by multiple men in wetsuits, the bags of equipment being loaded onto the Kilo submarine, a huge raft being inflated on her foredeck, then the commandos pulling the crewmembers onto the raft, finally re-entering the hull and shutting the hatch behind them. Zhigunov had clamped his hand over his mouth as the Kilo submerged beneath the raft, until the square of ocean in the video only showed the raft and the crewmen on it. Finally the video winked out and the snarling face of Stanislav returned to the screen, the frowning first deputy commander likewise glaring at the camera with a dark expression.

“So, you first Admiral Andreyushkin. Your submarine Novosibirsk was due in the Gulf of Oman four days ago. I’m told it’s still two days away, off the coast of the Saudi peninsula, south of Oman. Why is your submarine late to its position to rendezvous with and escort the Panther?”

Zhigunov watched as Andreyushkin swallowed hard. “Sir, the Iranians took the Kilo to sea nearly a week early. What happened?”

Normally Stanislav couldn’t be taken off his relentless interrogations, but this time he sat back heavily and glared at Zhabin. “Something disastrous. The Americans successfully cyber-attacked the Iranian computer systems. The worm they uploaded caused the crashing of all systems related to their surface ships and their air force and navy aircraft. Their aircraft are grounded and their surface warships are welded to the pier. The Iranians were worried that the Kilo might be attacked by the same worm, so they thought it was safest to get it into the Indian Ocean immediately before any submarine systems became affected, so they jumped off early.

“But there’s more. Somehow the worm injected into the Iranian systems found its way into ours. And now our naval air assets are grounded. Our surface ships are bricked. And there’s no telling when we will recover, when we’ll be able to fly. Gentlemen, the reason I’m so fixated on the performance of your submarines are that you are all we have. There will be no overflights by Il-114s or helicopters. There will be no destroyers or frigates or even patrol torpedo boats. We are relying completely and totally on you. So, now, tell me, Admiral Andreyushkin, what is going on with your submarine?”

Andreyushkin sighed. “The Novosibirsk suffered a material failure in the reactor system, Admiral, that required shutting down and flying in replacement parts and technicians to fix it before the boat could get underway again.”

“A material failure? The only failure I see here is you, Andreyushkin, you and your miserable maintenance facilities. I wouldn’t trust those lazy alcoholics with fixing my lawnmower. And their incompetence is your incompetence. You failed. You failed the Navy and you failed the motherland.”

There was no doubt, Stanislav could make a grown man cry in a hundred words or less. At least his own reprimand would be demonstrably not his fault, Zhigunov thought. At least he hoped.

“And you, Admiral Zhigunov. Your command’s submarine Voronezh was likewise scheduled to be at the rendezvous point at Bandar Abbas four days ago. Where in bloody hell was it? Why was it late?”

“Sir, Admiral, I routed it through the Suez Canal and the canal closed for almost a week, for what turned out to be an operation by our own—”

“I don’t care why the canal was closed,” Stanislav said, cutting him off, and pointing at him, his hand trembling, either from his anger or his age, or perhaps both. “It’s just another damned excuse. You should have routed your ship around Africa and sent her on her way the week prior. The intelligence bulletins were practically shouting about trouble in the Suez. Did you listen to them? No. You let that idiot son of yours linger for another week in port and then sent him the shortcut to the Gulf of Oman by a route you should have known would be problematic.”

There had been absolutely nothing in the intelligence bulletins about the Suez Canal, Zhigunov knew. He’d learned long ago to read them carefully enough that he could pass a comprehensive test on them from memory alone. Which meant Stanislav was blowing off steam — who in his right mind would sail eight thousand kilometers farther around a continent if he could go the direct route through a canal? Had he done that, right now he’d be getting flamed on by Stanislav for having taken the long, slow route to the rendezvous point.

Stanislav must have gotten his ears boxed by the president, Zhigunov thought, and was taking his ire out on Andreyushkin and Zhigunov.

Stanislav took a drink from his water glass, his tirade apparently leaving him with a dry mouth. He pointed at the screen again, his face furious.

“I expect both of you to make this horrible situation right. Your orders are no longer to escort the nuclear-powered Kilo submarine to the safe test area. Your new orders are to find the Panther and destroy it. Sink it before the Americans or whatever rabid dogs stole our submarine can take it apart and study it. Am I making myself clear? Zhigunov, what will be your orders to Voronezh?”

“To find the Panther and sink it.”

Stanislav looked at the screen. “Do you think that will be easy?”

“Yes, Admiral. Voronezh is a front-line Yasen-M-class. The best in the world. The boat will hear the Panther long before the Panther is even aware we are shooting at it.”

“Oh my God,” Stanislav said to Zhabin. “Can you believe the stupidity?” He turned back to Zhigunov. “Zhigunov, where do you think those commandos came from? Deep space? The sky? You didn’t see parachutes did you?”

“No, sir.”

“So, where did they come from?”

“Perhaps another submarine, Admiral.”

“Look at this brilliant mind at work, Zhabin,” Stanislav said the first deputy, who shook his head in contempt. Zhigunov could feel his face flushing with anger.

“That’s right. Another submarine. So Andreyushkin, why don’t you try your luck at this? Where do you think the commandos came from?”

“An American submarine, sir.”

“And do you think the Americans sent their second string, their bottom shelf submarine, to execute their savage mission violating international law, their piracy on the high seas?”

“No, Admiral,” Andreyushkin said quietly. “I think they sent their best submarine.”

“And what would that be?”

“A Virginia-class, sir.”

“Well, we’re banging on all eight cylinders today, aren’t we, Andreyushkin? So, if they sent a Virginia-class, does that worry you?”

“No sir, My boat Novosibirsk will find it and sink it. All they need is the order, sir, to fire upon first detection.”

“If you think this will be easy, Admiral Andreyushkin, you are sadly mistaken. And you too, Zhigunov. All this drivel you read about in the newspapers, about the Yasen-M-class being the best in the world — that’s not for your eyes, it’s for the eyes of the rest of the world, so they’ll fear us. But now we come down to it, gentlemen. Are your two submarines, with all their weapons and sensors, equal to a fight with one Virginia-class?”

“Absolutely, sir,” Zhigunov said. “Do I understand you that we have permission to release weapons upon initial detection, sir? No radioing fleet headquarters for permission?”

“Listen to me and listen damned good, Zhigunov, and you too, Andreyushkin. You are ordered to fire on first detection. Put the Panther and the Virginia-class on the bottom. And there’s more.”

More, Zhigunov thought. What more could there be?

“You have nuclear weapon release authority, both of you. It will be coming to you in a coded, authenticated directive issued by the office of the president within the hour.”

Zhigunov stared at the screen. Nuclear weapons?

“And one more thing. None of this goes in writing to your submarine commanders. You bring them up into secure video conferences. I want you to look into their eyes and make damned sure they understand the orders. Is that clear?”

Both Zhigunov and Andreyushkin answered in the affirmative at the same time.

“That’s all. I expect a call from you on a secure line, any time, day or night, the second you get word that the Panther and the Virginia are destroyed. You got that?”

“Yes, sir,” the junior admirals both answered.

The moment the screen went blank, Northern Fleet Commander Admiral Gennady Zhigunov stood up so fast his brushed steel chair fell back to the floor and bounced on the wall. He picked up his paper notebook and threw it at the screen, hard, just as it flashed back to life and the red face of the Pacific fleet commander came up.

Embarrassed, Zhigunov righted the chair and sat back down. Admiral Andreyushkin was far from a friend, but after their reprimand from Stanislav, they were almost compatriots. Comrades, even.

“Aleksandr,” Zhigunov said.

“Gennady,” Andreyushkin said. “I think we should get our orders out to our boats immediately, before they get in-theater, so our recalling them to periscope depth won’t endanger them. We need to tell them not only about the search-and-destroy mission, but that they are steaming into a hot combat zone, because if we have shoot-on-detection orders, surely the Americans do as well.”

Four submarines out there, Zhigunov thought. Perhaps only one would sail home.

“I’m listening,” Zhigunov said, looking at his watch.

“We need to coordinate together, Gennady. We can’t afford to face Stanislav with a broken mission. What if one of our boats shoots the other?”

“Friendly fire,” Zhigunov said. “I doubt either of us would survive that eventuality.”

“Precisely. We need to direct Novosibirsk and Voronezh to work together. It’s the only way.”

“You have a plan?”

“Allow me to show our present situation.”

Admiral Andreyushkin vanished from the screen, replaced with an overhead view of the Arabian peninsula and the Arabian Sea. A black line extended southeast from the Bandar Abbas Iranian Naval base into the Gulf of Oman. The line, once it entered the Arabian Sea, turned due south toward the Indian Ocean.

“This is the track that the Panther intended to take on its way to the test area,” Andreyushkin said.

A red circle bloomed over the black line at the point the black line left the Gulf of Oman and entered the Arabian Sea.

“This red circle is the point where Panther was taken.”

Two blue flashing dots appeared, one off the east coast of Oman, perhaps 300 kilometers southwest of the red circle of the hijacking. The second blue dot was farther southwest, off the coast of Yemen, another 250 kilometers southwest of the first dot.

“The northern blue dot is Novosibirsk. The southern one is Voronezh.”

Suddenly Zhigunov realized the hopelessness of the situation. The search area was huge, a triangle almost 2500 kilometers wide at its base and 900 kilometers tall. East to west, it would take one of their submarines 48 hours to traverse the area at maximum speed and 16 hours from north to south. In that time, anything could happen.

“This is a huge ocean, Aleksandr.”

“Not so much, Gennady. First, what speed do you imagine the Panther and its escort sub to be making in their escape?”

“Well, they will keep the reactor shutdown and inert,” Zhigunov said, thinking aloud. “They don’t know how to start it up, and if they did, they’d accomplish our mission for us by exploding. So they would proceed at a speed that would maximize their battery endurance. Six knots, maybe seven.”

“Exactly, and then they’d come up shallow to snorkel on the diesel to charge batteries, and that speed might even be slower so as to minimize a rooster-tail wake from the periscope and snorkel mast, but let us imagine that speed to be six knots as well. So from the point that Panther was taken, here is a time-based expansion circle.”

The red circle from the hijacking point expanded slowly, the time stamp on the map rolling hour by hour, each hour the circle barely moving, going so slowly.

“Here is the circle at time-zero plus twenty-four hours,” Andreyushkin explained. “As you can see, the possible places Panther can be has only moved less than two hundred seventy-five kilometers from the hijacking point. At maximum speed, that’s a distance we could cover in five hours. At time-zero plus forty-eight hours, the circle is another two hundred seventy-five kilometers from the hijacking point. At seventy-two hours, the circle looks like this, perhaps seven hundred kilometers wide. If we approach this without panicking, Gennady, we could search this effectively.

“I propose the northern boat, my Novosibirsk proceed northeast into the northern part of this expanding circle of probability while your Voronezh turns due east to capture the southern part. From there, Novosibirsk will seek the targets from the north, while Voronezh approaches from the south.” Andreyushkin sat back in his seat, looking satisfied.

Zhigunov thought. “The area is still too big. And if our units are facing each other, there is risk that a weapon from one homes in on and blows up the other friendly unit. No, Aleksandr, your plan won’t work. All we will do is sink each other, at best. Our ships must face the incoming vector of the Panther and her escort together. Then our weapons will leave from our torpedo tubes and go the same general direction, with no friendly submarine in the seeker cones of our torpedoes.”

“You make a good point,” Andreyushkin said.

“Let us look at this from another point of view,” Zhigunov said. “First, are we in agreement that it was the Americans who took the Panther?”

Andreyushkin nodded.

“Who else?” Zhigunov asked.

“The British, perhaps. The Chinese.”

“What possible motive would they have, Aleksandr?” Zhigunov asked.

“I can’t see one. But what is the motive for the Americans to steal the Panther?”

“They want the reactor technology,” Zhigunov said, “and they want to keep it out of the hands of the Iranians. This ongoing conflict between the Iranians and Americans makes it obvious. It had to be the Americans.”

“Very well,” Andreyushkin said. “But what difference does that make?”

“It determines their destination, Aleksandr. If the Americans took this submarine, they aim to bring it back to the Atlantic, and they would avoid the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal. That means a transit through the Indian Ocean and going around Africa into the Atlantic.”

“I’m with you, Gennady.”

“Allow me to control the display,” Zhigunov said. He zoomed the display outward until the entire globe was visible, the eastern Africa coast on the west, the Arabian peninsula on the north, India to the east. He drew a bold yellow line extending from the mouth of the Gulf of Oman along the east coast of Africa and extending west at the southern tip of Africa. “This is the great circle route from the point of their taking the Panther.” Zhigunov drew a second line, this one green, extending due south from the Gulf of Oman into the Arabian Sea, then into the Indian Ocean, then a third line in red, from the hijacking point southeast, hugging the west coast of India. “Now, Aleksandr, if we had taken Panther and aimed to get it to America without being intercepted, which route would we take?”

“The shortest one,” Andreyushkin said. “The great circle route along the east coast of Africa.”

Zhigunov made the bold yellow line fade into a dull, weak yellow. “I don’t think so, Aleksandr. You are correct that it is the shortest route, but we are hunting down a burglar, and a burglar won’t take an obvious escape route. All we would have to do would be to set up in the narrows between Mozambique and Madagascar, in the Mozambique Channel, using it as a choke point, and the Panther would steam right through it at six knots. We’d find it and sink it easily.”

“You’re saying that’s too obvious, and that the Americans are going to try something sneakier?”

“Of course,” Zhigunov said. “They were sneaky enough to steal the submarine in the first place. And they won’t just go due south, since that was the way to the test area, and they would suppose we would have support ships in that direction to monitor the reactor test. We didn’t, by the way, but they don’t know that, and they would want to avoid being detected by one of our destroyers or our patrol aircraft — and we should assume they don’t know about the worm that has paralyzed our air assets and surface ships. That leaves the red route, extending southeast, close to the shores of India. This is perfect, it takes them far away from the great circle route to their destination and from the test route. Plus, the western coast of India is absolutely rotten with shipping. There’s more sonar noise in that part of the world than anywhere other than the approaches to the Suez Canal, Panama Canal or Cape of Good Hope. And a submarine can hide in that ambient noise. That, Aleksandr, is the escape route.”

Andreyushkin nodded. “I see your point, Gennady. I agree. So how should we deploy our forces?”

“This gets easy. The red route extends here. It will take us, let’s see.” Zhigunov manipulated his pad computer. “Thirty hours for Novosibirsk at maximum speed, forty for Voronezh, to reach this point here, approximately halfway down the Indian coastline, west of this town of Marmagao. If we start promptly, Novosibirsk arrives on-station June 4 at 2000 Moscow time and Voronezh June 5 at 0600 hours. Our submarines rendezvous there, in contact with other using underwater encrypted Bolshoi-Feniks sonar, and they will proceed northward together until Panther and the American escort sub drive into them. They should probably have twenty or thirty or even forty kilometers between them, but search slowly north-northwestward at best search speed of six knots after their rendezvous. At the six-knot transit speed of Panther, it will take her days to drive into the search sector of our sonars. With her southward speed of six knots and our northward speed of six knots, we’ll intercept her about five days after the rendezvous. That would put detection on or about June 10, Friday, plus or minus a day.”

“Heavens, Gennady, that’s a week from now. A long time to wait to tell Stanislav the good news we’ve found and put down the Panther and the American submarine.”

“Like we both know, Aleksandr, it is a gigantic ocean out there.”

“We could shorten this up. Have our boats rendezvous much farther north along the Indian coastline.”

“No, Aleksandr, we risk arriving at a point that the Panther has already passed by. We have to make sure we intercept them. We will scour the route from the coast of India all the way north to the shores of Pakistan. We’ll find her, if we are smart and patient.”

Andreyushkin thought for a moment. “We double our chances of detecting her if one boat goes to the northernmost point of the Pakistan-India coastline and the other begins from Point Marmagao, Gennady. They would converge on the targets. With an ocean this big, only one of our units will have the enemy in detection range at one time. The chances of going down from friendly fire are not that great.”

“Are you willing to risk that, Aleksandr? Risk your men’s lives, risk one of the most expensive weapons systems Russia has ever built? And risk that you’ll find yourself explaining to Admiral Stanislav that you lost a submarine to American torpedoes, or worse, from your own force’s torpedoes?”

Andreyushkin sighed. “I suppose you’re right, Gennady. Still, it seems overly conservative. And, what if the Americans actually do decide to take the great circle route?”

“Why would they do that?”

“They might think we’d reject that as a tactic, since, as you said, it is too obvious. They’d expect us to head to the other escape route, the Indian coastline. So, by hugging the coast of Africa, they’ve fooled us. They get away with their operation.”

Zhigunov thought for a long time. “There is no way that Americans think like that, Aleksandr. They are sneaky thieves. They are cowards. They will skulk along the Indian coastline. If we go with my proposal, yes, it will take longer. The longer the Americans go from having stolen the Panther, the more overconfident they will be, and the greater the chance of them making a mistake. We know the sound signature of the Kilo-class, Aleksandr. We will find them. We will sink them. We will report to Stanislav a successful mission.”

Andreyushkin thought a moment, then manipulated his pad computer. “We show arrival in-theater very early. We could hedge our bet, and instead of proceeding to Point Marmagao at maximum silent speed, thirty-one knots, we could do a sprint-and-drift tactic. Twenty-five minutes at max silent speed, then ten minutes at a best sonar search speed of eight knots, then another twenty-five at thirty-one knots. That makes a speed-of-advance of, let’s see, twenty-seven knots. A very slight degradation in speed over ground, but with the benefit that if the Americans get even sneakier than we think they are, we’d definitely detect them in the middle of the Arabian Sea. And if we stagger the drift time, with Novosibirsk drifting at the top of the hour and Voronezh at the bottom, we almost double our chances of picking up the trace of the Panther if it did diverge from the west coast of India.”

Zhigunov smiled at Andreyushkin. “You know, Aleksandr, I don’t care what people say about you. You’re actually quite bright.”

The Pacific Fleet admiral made a face at his Northern Fleet counterpart, as if they were two brothers antagonizing each other in the back of their parents’ car.

“Let us call our submarines to communication depth and present these orders to them now,” Andreyushkin said.

Captain First Rank Yuri Orlov took his tea to the wardroom table and sat at the center of the long end, facing the video screen. Captain Second Rank Ivan Vlasenko took the seat to Orlov’s right, with navigator and operations officer, Captain Third Rank Misha Dobryvnik, and Weapons Officer Captain Lieutenant Irina Trusov to his left.

The screen came up, splitting into three screens. On the left were his opposite numbers from the attack submarine Voronezh, Captain First Rank — apparently promoted since Orlov last saw him — Boris Novikov, his first officer, Isakova to his right and his navigator, Lukashenko, on his left. The other screens each showed a senior officer, the center screen showing Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Aleksandr Andreyushkin, the right screen showing Northern Fleet Commander Admiral Gennady Zhigunov.

After the admirals briefed the officers of the Novosibirsk and Voronezh on the taking of the Panther submarine, and their orders to proceed together up the Indian coastline to intercept her and the assumed American submarine escort, Novikov objected.

“Putting two submarines together defeats the purpose of having two submarines. We need to spread out and cover more ocean.”

“No, Captain Novikov,” Zhigunov said calmly, “we believe the American hijackers and their escort sub will avoid a direct path back to the Atlantic, and they’ll believe a southward route will run them into the Russian support ships waiting at the test site. They’ll sneak away along the Indian coastline.”

“Fine, sir,” Novikov persisted. “Send Novosibirsk up the Indian coastline. Let me and my Voronezh prowl the center of the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.”

“No, Captain. The area is too big to search without reliable intelligence.”

“Well, sir, then send out MPA antisubmarine aircraft and drop sonobuoys. Hell, drop so many a man could walk from India to Africa on them.”

“There’s a slight problem with that,” Andreyushkin admitted. “There is an ongoing cyber-attack that has paralyzed all of our aircraft and surface ships. Those of the Iranians as well. There will be no MPA aircraft or destroyers to help you two. All the Navy’s hopes rest on your two submarines.”

There was silence for a moment while the submarine crews absorbed this horrible news.

“There’s another problem with this,” Novikov said. “If we’re operating together, we’ll have to coordinate together using the sound communication system of the MGK-600. The Bolshoi-Feniks.”

The MGK-600 sonar had a spherical bow array, flank arrays and a towed array, all linked into the Mark VII Second Captain system. The unit’s bow array had a submarine-to-submarine communication and identification-friend-or-foe mode, called Bolshoi-Feniks, which emitted a series of high frequency tones sent in pulses, like Morse code, but with a much faster rate, almost like broadcasting a barcode. The code was encrypted with a daily-changing code, and was able to transmit to another friendly submarine within ten kilometers. Communication at a long distance required shifting the MGK-600’s spherical array’s hydrophones to low frequency, but the data rate was much slower.

“It’s like transmitting active sonar,” Novikov continued. “We could be counterdetected by the American.”

“American sonars are not that good,” Andreyushkin said. “And a transmission is short with the high frequency data rate. It’ll probably be mistaken for a school of shrimp, if the Americans hear it at all.”

“So,” Orlov said, “When we detect the target submarines, what are our rules of engagement?”

“Sink them,” Andreyushkin said. “You are authorized nuclear weapon release. You will each receive an order from the president and the Minister of Defense authorizing use of nuclear weapons. Once both submarines are on the bottom, send an urgent after-action message to both fleet headquarters and the Admiralty with the results of the battle and your own ship’s material condition.”

“Understood, sir,” Orlov said.

“Aye aye, Admiral,” Novikov said.

“Well, gentlemen, you have your orders,” Zhigunov said. “Good luck. Good hunting.”

The screen went black. Orlov reached for the phone and buzzed the central command post.

“Watch Officer,” Captain Lieutenant TK Sukolov’s voice answered.

“Take us back deep and fast, course east, Watch Officer, while the navigator lays in a track for the rendezvous at Point Marmagao.”

“Deep and fast, course east, Watch Officer, aye.”

Orlov drank the dregs of his tea and stared into the distance.

“You worried, Captain?” Vlasenko asked.

“I don’t like these orders,” he said. “Our side has two attack submarines, but we may as well only have one, with these search tactics. And I don’t like using the Bolshoi-Feniks to coordinate. It risks us losing stealth.”

“We’ll minimize its use, Captain,” Vlasenko reassured Orlov.

Orlov grimaced. “And if the president and the Kremlin have authorized us to use nuclear weapons, it means the bosses are worried. I wonder, what is it that is scaring them? Do they think that American sub can sink us before we find him? Please. We’re much superior. We’ll hear him long before he hears us. We’ll put him and the Panther down like the dogs they are.”

“Your lips to God’s ear, Captain. Let us hope so.”

22

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino leaned against the chart table in the navigation chart room, a five-foot-by-ten-foot closet jammed in aft of the central command post. After dealing with the electronics of Vermont’s chart table, going back to a paper chart and a pencil seemed strange, as if he’d wandered back in time.

“So everyone agreed,” Pacino said, tapping his pencil on the line on the chart, “the best route out of here is to hug the India coastline. We proceed southeast, and from there, as we depart the Arabian Sea and in-chop the Indian Ocean, turn due south to Antarctica. We stay as far away from the great circle route back to AUTEC as possible. That way we avoid any opposition force lying in wait for us, such as here, in the Mozambique Channel. Or the south shores of Africa. And off the coast of India, the shipping traffic is heavy. It’ll hide us.”

Lieutenant Dieter Dankleff, officer in charge, leaned far over the chart. “I still say we’ll be going hundreds of miles farther than the great circle route. We’ll burn fuel and go through our food. How long is the total transit time by doing this?”

“A hundred days, give or take,” Pacino said. “But I have an idea that can get it done in three weeks.”

“No,” Lieutenant Muhammad Varney, the Panther’s operations officer, said. “I know what you’re thinking. There’s no way we’re doing that.”

“What?” Dankleff asked.

“Lipstick here wants to start the goddamned fast reactor, then take us up to flank speed. He thinks we can squeeze thirty knots out of this pig. That’s assuming we don’t melt the reactor down, break open the hull or, you know, explode.”

“Explode?” Dankleff said, smirking. “Exploding would be somewhat non-optimal.”

“I spent some time with Captain Ahmadi,” Pacino said. “He’s no fan of the Russian technician, Abakumov, but even Ahmadi thinks the Russian can start the UBK-500 safely and bring it into the power range.”

“UBK-500? You know the model number of the fast reactor?”

“Ahmadi told me all about it. He was translating the Iranian version of the tech manual. First chapter of the operating instructions, anyway. ‘Normal startup.’”

“Okay,” Dankleff said, his voice taking on a commanding tone. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to keep going at six knots to optimize battery endurance, snorkeling at night to charge batteries. And right after Gory Goreliki whips us up some dinner, we’re going to talk more about this fast reactor.”

“I’ll get with Abakumov about this so he can prepare,” Pacino said.

Dankleff smiled. “I’m beginning to like the idea of getting home in a couple weeks instead of three months.”

Varney shook his head. “I’m beginning to fear the idea of hitting the ocean bottom in a day when that reactor blows.”

“Don’t be a pessimist, Boozy,” Pacino said.

“Now, boys, be nice,” Dankleff said. Pacino watched him and Varney leave the navigation space. Dankleff had a spring in his step while Varney slouched out of the room.

He hoped like hell he was right about all this.

After the pasta and meat sauce meal that Gory Goreliki served, Pacino spread out a large-area chart of the Arabian Sea on the wardroom table. Pacino had drawn their course in pencil. He took dividers and walked them down the track, scribbling in a notebook he’d found, then sat back and frowned at the chart.

After an hour, Ahmadi and Dankleff joined him. Varney was in the central command post, manning the evening watch. Standing in the far corner of the room was Grip Aquatong, strapped with a Mark 6, his Sig Sauer 1911 .45 pistol and two K-Bar combat knives, one strapped to each thigh, and a long stiletto knife strapped to his forearm, his gaze fixed on Ahmadi. Ahmadi and the Russian reactor engineer were monitored at all times by one of the SEALs.

Pacino had his head in his hands.

“What’s the matter, Lipstick?” Dankleff asked.

“Something’s bothering me, U-Boat,” Pacino said. “The Indian coast idea seemed like a good idea when we first thought of it, but now it seems too obvious. An opposition force would be looking for us to escape either by the great circle route on the African east coast or to hug the Indian or Saudi peninsula coastline.”

“Say that’s true. What do you propose?”

Pacino took a pencil and marked a south-southwest track starting from their present position.

“A big zig-zag. We head this way to the equator, then turn southwest toward Madagascar, running south of the island, then actually southeastward, here, southeast to our original course that circled Antarctica. It’s random enough that we can hide in the Indian Ocean. No one looking at the possible escape routes from the Arabian Sea is going to nail it.”

Dankleff picked up a phone and dialed the central command post.

“Varney.”

“New plan. Change course to one nine zero.”

“That’ll take us away from the Indian coastline.”

“I know,” Dankleff said. “Someone walked on Lipstick’s watery grave. Just do it.”

“Aye aye, OIC,” Varney said and hung up.

“Happy now?”

“No,” Pacino said. “Our number two problem. Fuel. Captain Ahmadi, were you loaded out full with diesel oil on departure?”

“Yes, Mr. Patch. One hundred percent. Twenty thousand gallons.”

“Your range on full tanks?”

“About four thousand nautical miles. Give or take. Sprinting above battery optimization speed makes the diesel go faster.”

Pacino looked up at Dankleff. “So for the sake of argument, let’s say we don’t use the reactor. We’ll run out of gas about here.” He pointed to the chart. “Southern tip of Madagascar. Unless we fill it up, we’ll be adrift with no fuel. To add in some margin of safety, I’d get to the northeast coast of Madagascar. With our tank range, we’ll need four refills to make it to AUTEC. This hairbrained plan for us to rendezvous with rustbucket tramp steamers with bunkers full of diesel is a loser, U-Boat. There’s no way this scheme to refuel submerged can work, and even if it did, we are totally vulnerable for hours while that goes down. And refueling surfaced is even worse. And we do survive this, we’ll have to do it four more times, U-Boat. Eventually, they’ll catch us. Eventually, we’re going down.”

Dankleff went to the credenza and made a boiling hot cup of Arabian coffee. “I’ll say one thing for you Iranians,” he said to Ahmadi. “Your coffee is goddamned rocket fuel.” He sat at the table by Pacino, looking at the chart. “We’re not used to thinking like this,” he said. “Being nuclear-powered means never having to say you’re out of gas.”

“But we are nuclear-powered, U-Boat,” Pacino said.

“Your first reason to start that beast, to get home sooner, was a good one. But this reason is much more compelling.”

“Look, the longer we’re out here, the longer an opposition force has to find us. And, U-Boat, they probably have shoot-on-detection orders. If we get snapped up, we’re dead men.”

Dankleff nodded. “If I were the Russians, that’s what I’d do.”

“We need to crank up the fast reactor first. Then The Whale needs to figure out the sonar system, and K-Squared has to make the firecontrol system work. And Gory has to configure our secure VHF, UHF and EHF to talk to the CommStar. And we need to figure out the torpedoes and launching mechanisms.”

“I can help with all that,” Ahmadi said. “I’d just as soon not get shot down by a Russian Yasen-M-class.”

Something dark blew into Pacino’s soul. “Why did you mention a Yasen-M?”

A voice from the door said in Russian-accented English, “We were sending two of them.”

Pacino looked up to see the Russian reactor engineer, Alexie Abakumov, standing in blue ship-issued coveralls with a white lab jacket over it, as if the lab coat made him appear more scientific. He was a big man, not fat but solid, almost six feet tall, his full head of dirty blonde hair touching the door sill. He had a straight nose, blue eyes, thin lips, and shallow cheeks that looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week, maybe more. He moved into the room and took a seat opposite Pacino. Commander Fishman shadowed him into the wardroom, his Mark 6 unholstered.

The Russian pulled over a coffee cup, withdrew a flask from his jacket pocket, and half-filled the cup, then took a pull from it.

“Care to share?” Dankleff said, putting a cup beside Abakumov’s. The Russian looked up at him and shrugged, then poured for Dankleff, who sipped the contents and made a sour face.

“What the hell is this?”

“The only vodka I could get, smuggled into Bandar Abbas Naval Base. I know. It’s not exactly Jewel of Russia or Nemiroff, but it takes the edge off.”

“I’d say you could use this stuff to degrease the engineroom if you had enough of it,” Dankleff said.

“The Russians were sending two Yasen-M-class submarines?” Pacino asked.

“That was original plan. Iranians got scared. There was a cyber-worm. Invaded Iranian systems. Made all their aircraft inoperative. Made their surface ship control systems go black. Iranians worried that the worm would infect Panther. So they sent it to sea early. Original plan was to be escorted out by the Yasen-M subs from the moment we left Bandar Abbas.”

“So they’re out there, trying to find us,” Pacino said.

“I thought I heard you talking about starting the UBK-500,” Abakumov said.

“You’re damned right we’re going to start it. If we don’t,” Pacino said, glancing at Dankleff, “we risk running out of fuel in the middle of the ocean, and going too slow for too long, or refueling with some poorly imagined plan, risking getting detected by one of these Russian attack subs.”

“Are you able to start it and put it online?” Dankleff asked the Russian.

The Russian ran his hand over his hair, down to the nape of this neck. “It will be easy.” Abakumov and Fishman stood to go back aft to the reactor controls room aft of the new reactor module. Pacino stood up to go with them, then stopped at the door.

“Goreliki needs to get that radio functional. We’ll have to transmit, to warn Vermont that two Yasen-M submarines are coming for us.”

Dankleff nodded solemnly. “What about the risk of being detected from transmitting?”

“The risk of a Yasen-M surprising the Vermont far outweighs that. And two Yasen-Ms? Fuck, U-Boat. We’re toast.”

“Not if you get that fast reactor started. We could kick this tub into full thrust and get the fuck out of here.”

“Now that thought is worth a shot of that rotgut vodka.”

The watchbill had been completely scrambled by the loss of Varney, Dankleff and even non-qual Pacino. It also put a big hole in the 18–24 watch, where Chief Albanese had stood the watch on the number one Q-10 sonar stack. Lieutenant Commander Mario “Elvis” Lewinsky, the engineer, leaned over the command console, debating calling for the swivel command chair that could be inserted into a hole in the deck directly behind the console. He decided that would be a temptation to sleep, and stood up straighter.

Instead of the engineer’s preference, to stand his daily watch aft as engineering officer of the watch from 0600 to noon — where he could keep an eye on his engineering spaces, the health of the machinery, and the alertness of the watchstanders, and even go through some of the paperwork of his engineering divisions — he found himself on the conn, standing officer of the deck watch. Worse, the watch was on the goddamned midwatch, when Quinnivan and Seagraves wanted someone senior and sharp watching over Panther and keeping a weather eye for any incursion of an opposing attack force.

But Lewinsky felt anything but sharp tonight. In fact, his sleep had been thrashed by this change in schedule. That and worry over the mission. Too many damned things could go wrong. He tried to avoid counting them in his mind when he did have time to lie down in his bunk, but they presented themselves for counting almost like an insomniac’s sheep crowding the fence. So, for the number one malfunction, they could lose sonar contact on the Panther. It was loud when snorkeling — that wasn’t a problem — but it only snorkeled at dark, then maintained slow speed on the batteries. And on batteries, it had a low frequency emission from the main motor and a fifty-cycle whine from the ship’s service generator. And if Panther got out ahead of them too far, it’s signal-to-noise ratio would plummet and it could easily vanish into the noise of the warm Arabian Sea, which was teeming with fish and underwater mammals, all of them calling to each other at once, filling the broadband sonar stack with static. And if they lost sonar contact with the Panther, they would be well on the way to mission failure, because the next submarine to pick up her trail might be Russian.

Which led the way to glitch number two — a Russian attack submarine sent to stop this messy submarine theft. Odds were, an incoming Russian SSN had strict orders to shoot the Panther the second it was detected, to keep that super-secret fast reactor from falling into American hands. And it was up in the air — a fifty-fifty chance — that the attacker could have orders to sink the American escort sub in retaliation for stealing the Panther in the first place. Or out of a defensive analysis, that the best defense is a good offense.

Glitch three? Panther would eventually run out of fuel, and the refueling rendezvous with a disguised merchant oiler could go wrong or an attacking force could find her on the surface when refueling. Or a storm came up while refueling, strong enough to sink her.

The list of worries and glitches went on and on.

Lewinsky knew he shouldn’t worry, that worrying did nothing but erode combat effectiveness, but that was his personality. What had been his personality, anyway, until he’d gotten help. At Annapolis plebe year, his nickname was “Wart,” shortened from “Worry Wart,” because he had sweated everything. Would he fail the next physical strength test? Would the firsties scream at him at the next comearound? Would he fail plebe chemistry? Would his term paper on World War I differences from previous conflicts get an F? Would the company officer barge into his room and find it unsat and give him a class A conduct offense? And if he got a class A, would it snowball into conduct grades so severe that he’d get kicked out of the Academy? Eventually, his worries got so severe he’d had to see a counselor about it, during Christmas break, the sessions kept completely secret in case seeing a psychologist would get him kicked out of the Navy — and that formed yet another worry.

In working with the shrink, a pretty woman named Deb who was perhaps 35, he’d slowly managed to overcome his constant anxiety. Doctor Deb had offered to refer him to psychiatrist to get him anti-anxiety meds, but he’d refused. He couldn’t add to the worry list that some mind-altering medication showed up in a random drug test.

It had taken years with Doc Deb, with her making him learn a technique of visualizing alternate futures, one in which his worry came to nothing, and one where it happened. Then, she taught him, if the worry came true, he would deal with it. He’d have the strength to deal with it.

The shrink’s other effort came in forcing him to have interests outside the military. As with almost all men his age, his most intense interest was in women, but Lewinsky had anxiety levels too high to approach a female, and the only woman he’d seen socially at the Academy was at the plebe “tea dance,” also known as “the pig push,” where random chance matched up plebes with visitors of the opposite sex. The girl that had been forced on him was pretty but quiet and she’d liked him. They’d danced for a few hours before she’d had to leave. But he hadn’t kissed her, worrying that doing that might endanger their connection. And he hadn’t called her later either, because he worried she’d reject him.

So he decided upon an alternate hobby. Cars. There was a mechanic’s facility across the Severn River where midshipmen could rent a space with a lift and borrow tools, so they could work on their cars. With a thousand dollars Lewinsky had managed to save, he’d bought an old Mustang. A 1970 Boss, with the original, now faded, radical orange paint job with black stripes. The car was somewhat sound, having spent decades in a barn, but nothing mechanical or electrical worked, and it would all have to be replaced. The entire power train had to go. He’d scrapped the 351 Cleveland V8 and saved for a big block V8 crate engine with a manual five speed performance transmission, spending his weekends putting the engine into the car and solving the thousands of problems of an engine transplant in a car that old.

He’d worked on the car for his entire time at Annapolis, his father even deciding to pay the rent on the space and pay for the new parts, apparently pleased at the results of this auto-restoration-therapy. By the time Lewinsky was a first class midshipman, a senior, he was a double major in mathematics and physics, a nominee for a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, and the proud owner of a newly painted orange muscle car that was the envy of his entire company. And the funny thing about that car was that it made people talk to him, without him having to do anything. He’d drive it around Annapolis that summer before first class year, the exhaust roaring, the engine purring, the wheels a gleaming polished chrome, the tires wide and black and shiny, the slick orange paint job so outrageous that seemingly everyone at the Academy knew it belonged to him. People came up to him when he’d fill it with gas or when he parked, talking about their own project cars or simply admiring this blast from the past. People of every sort flocked to the car, old duffers who remembered when that was a car they’d lusted over in high school, young teenagers asking how he’d restored it and was it difficult, and then the groupie girls, the women who loved cars, and so it happened that he met Anne, who had fallen in love with the Mustang first, Lewinsky second.

And from that point on, all the worries and anxieties seemed to fade into the past. Lewinsky went on to Oxford, did more work in physics, found it almost unbearably difficult, but managed to squeak by and get a master’s degree. Then on to the nuclear power training pipeline, nuclear prototype, submarine school, and his first submarine, the Norfolk-based USS Montpelier, SSN-765. Three years there, qualifying in submarines, then shore duty teaching physics at Annapolis for two years, then on to the Vermont.

All those years, he’d restored cars, selling the Mustang for a wrecked 1963 split-window Corvette, which had been in such bad shape it had to be lifted from its collapsing garage with a crane. Two years later, it looked as new as when it had rolled off the factory floor. Lewinsky had used the amazing profits from the Mustang to restore the Corvette’s original parts rather than replacing everything as he had with the Mustang. Corvette enthusiasts talked about “the numbers matching” as if putting a new crate engine into a Corvette were some kind of mortal sin.

When he’d sold the Corvette, it had fetched an eye-popping six-figure amount. It left him enough to buy the Ferrari Testarossa, Italian for “redhead.”

So there were cars in his life, but no women. That girl Anne at Annapolis had been kind to him, and they’d dated until he’d had to leave for Oxford, and as people told him to expect, the distance eventually strangled the relationship. She’d found someone else and had gotten married and by now was working on having her second child. As for Lewinsky, while he’d conquered much of his anxiety, he was just too shy to ask a woman out or approach someone at a bar. He began to imagine he would die alone.

He’d steamed on alone until he’d reported back to Norfolk when his instructor duty at Annapolis concluded, and it was time to take on the hardest job in the Navy, engineer of a nuclear submarine. He smiled to himself — his old worrywart self could never have done this job. He’d driven the Testarossa to a beachside café in Virginia Beach one sunny Saturday, thinking he’d have a beer and a sandwich outside on the beachfront deck, enjoy the sunshine, maybe go for a run later in the afternoon when it would get cooler. He’d just bitten into a club sandwich when a stunning redheaded woman walked up to him wearing a short skirt, tube top and running sneakers. She was slender, with curvaceous hips, tiny waist, and what had to be double-D-cup breasts that pointed outward like the front bumper of a ’57 Cadillac. She was practically falling out of her shirt. Her skin was smooth and tanned, her body was toned, and she had a long graceful neck, a lovely face with pouty red lips, strong cheekbones, an upturned nose, wide brown romantic eyes with long lashes, her face framed by long, straight, shining naturally red hair that came down to her nipples, and it had so much sleek body that she could have been in a shampoo commercial.

Without a word, she pulled back the seat opposite Lewinski’s and sat down, smiling at him slightly. She motioned the waitress over. “Old fashioned, neat, please,” she said in a slight Southern accent, her voice silky and feminine, “and ask if they could use Angel’s Envy bourbon. And then I’ll have what he’s having.”

He stared at her, his mouth half open, then he remembered to chew his food and swallow, and it had almost gone down the wrong way.

“Um,” he said. “Hello.” His voice had been an adolescent squeak. He coughed, cleared his throat, and tried to make his voice deep again. And make it sound like every day of the week a gorgeous, hot model sat down at his table, uninvited. “I’m Mario. Mario Lewinsky. Who are you?”

“Hello, Mario. I’m Redhead.”

He found himself smiling at her, despite the strangeness of the situation. Was she a hooker, sent by the officers of the Vermont to tease him and make fun of his reaction? He’d only just met them at the hail-and-farewell party at the executive officer’s house, and they were definitely a rowdy crew of pranksters. It would be just like Man Mountain Squirt Gun Vevera to arrange to have a hooker approach him at a Saturday lunch.

“No, what’s your real name?” Using ‘Redhead’ as her name was a stripper thing, he thought, the way all strippers seemed to be ‘Amber’ or ‘Tiffany’ or ‘Crystal.’

She smiled with a row of absolutely perfect white teeth. Which meant there was no way this was legit, he thought.

“I quit using it. You’ll laugh.” The tiniest micro-expression of sadness crossed that gorgeous face.

He smiled back at her. “Listen, try going through life with a name like Mario Elvis Lewinsky. It can’t be worse than that.”

She looked down at the table for a second, then whispered something he couldn’t hear. He cupped his hand to his ear. “Eh?” he said, imitating a hearing-impaired octogenarian.

“Please don’t laugh. It’s Bamanda. Like Amanda, but with a big BAM at the start. My father’s idea of a cool name, with him going through life bragging about how he invented my name. I would have used my middle name, but he put his fingerprints on that too. I don’t tell anyone what that name is. Since middle school, I just told people my name was ‘Redhead,’ and they started going along with it. I make sure the color stays the way it looked when I was young. These days, decades down the road, I have help from a flamboyant stylist name Jorge. So yes, it’s my natural color, but yes, I dye the fuck out of it. And does the carpet match the drapes? There is no carpet. Hardwood floors, you might say.”

It sounded strange to Lewinsky to hear her curse with that beautiful voice with just a trace of the South. Alabama? Georgia? Memphis? His Indiana-raised ears weren’t trained enough to figure it out. What was even stranger that she had just plopped down and started talking to him as if they were friends. Or more.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but can I ask you, Redhead, why are you sitting here with me? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, it’s just, well, it’s not every day a guy like me,” he ran his hands thought his flat-top haircut and adjusted his black-framed glasses on his nose, “gets visited by a woman who looks like the real-life version of Jessica Rabbit. Shouldn’t you be crooning in a dark smoke-filled nightclub somewhere, wearing six-inch heels and a silk gown with a slit up the side?”

Redhead tilted her head back and laughed, her laugh as musical as her voice. “I noticed the Ferrari,” she said. “I did a photo shoot next to one once, and I thought it was hot, but I mean, you never see one, even here in snooty Virginia Beach. Then a week ago I saw yours and I saw you get out of it. So I checked you out. You’re a Navy lieutenant commander. Engineer on the Vermont. Newly reported aboard. Extremely handsome. Extremely sexy. Extremely smart. And extremely shy. So — no girlfriend. Well, at least until today. As of today, you do have a girlfriend.” She winked at him.

“First, Ms. Redhead, how did you find out all that about me?”

“Hey, Mario. A girl’s got to have some mystery, doesn’t she?”

“Come on.”

“Okay, fine. I used to date Bruno Romanov. He was my first naval officer. I guess you could say I got hooked. I’m sort of a naval officer groupie now. I was out for drinks with Bruno and that bitch Rachel and they mentioned the Ferrari. They said it belonged to you, that you were hot and single and ripe for the taking. So. That brings you to now.” She smiled brightly as if it were a done deal.

“Want to go for a ride?” Lewinsky said, smiling at her. Even if this were a trick by Vevera, Lewinsky decided to roll with it, maybe even have some fun with it. What was the harm? Then he heard his own question, and realized it sounded like a sexual proposition.

Redhead tossed back her whiskey, put down four crisp twenties on the table, using her whiskey glass as a paperweight, and took Lewinsky by the hand out to his car. He opened the passenger door and watched her as she folded those long legs to get in.

Four hours later they were naked in bed and sweating after the most amazing sex he’d ever had in his life. He had never believed in love at first sight, but Redhead was it for him.

It had taken two years for the relationship to fall apart, and when it did, it came apart as suddenly and strangely as it started. If Redhead had a fatal flaw, it was jealousy, and somehow she’d gotten it into her head that Lewinsky had something going on with Rachel Romanov — which he most certainly did not — but his working closely with the ship’s navigator had made Redhead stew in boiling anger, particularly when Vermont would disappear on an op for weeks on end. Redhead finally revealed that Rachel had a crush on Lewinsky, and had put Redhead up to sleeping with him as an odd way of, as Redhead put it, “Rachel fucking you by proxy,” saying, “she used me, she made me into a sex torpedo that she fired at you.” Redhead was convinced that the Vermont navigator had sent Redhead his way in order to obtain juicy details about what sex with him was like, because Romanov lusted for him. The reality of this crazy situation was that Redhead couldn’t live in a world where she thought another woman wanted her man, or one where she thought her man wanted another woman.

Redhead eventually left him, slamming the door after her. She’d taken an ice pick to the Testarossa and in white epoxy paint had written the word ASSHOLE on every surface. It had taken a twenty-thousand-dollar repair and a new paint job to fix that, but there would be no fixing Mario Lewinsky’s heart. He was still deeply, profoundly in love with Redhead, and he imagined he always would be, their terrible ending notwithstanding.

It was then that his reverie was interrupted by Sonarman First Class Jay “Snowman” Mercer, the midwatch sonarman of the watch. “Officer of the Deck, we’ve got some strange transients coming from the Panther.”

“Transients? Like what?” Transients could be bad news. A mechanical malfunction? Something rupturing and breaking? A fire breaking out with the crew making noise trying to battle the flames?

“I’ve got a pump startup. Not just any pump. A big pump.”

“A pump? Why would a diesel-electric submarine be starting a pump?”

“Maybe because it’s about to become a nuclear submarine.”

“Oh, holy hell, no.”

“I’ve got flow noise, Eng. There’s definitely steam flowing in pipes, a fuck-ton of it.”

“Exactly how much is the quantity ‘fuck-ton,’ Petty Officer Mercer?”

“A buttload, in technical terms, Eng. Now I’ve got a turbine starting up. No, two turbines, a small one and a big one. Definitely a big-ass turbine. Do you want that quantified also?”

“Is this for real?”

“I’ve got transient clicks or booms, Eng. Could be breakers shutting. The turbine noise is getting louder. Wait, what the hell?”

“What?”

“Possible zig, Panther, sir. She’s speeding up. Jesus, she’s speeding up. Can you get a TMA leg? With speed across the line-of-sight of at least fifteen knots?”

“Pilot! Left full rudder, all ahead standard! Steady course east.”

“Left full rudder, steady course east, Pilot aye, and all ahead standard,” Torpedoman Senior Chief Nygard said. “Maneuvering answers, all ahead standard. Present course one six zero, seventy degrees from ordered course.”

“FT of the Watch, once we steady on course east, get a curve.”

“Get a curve, aye.”

Lewinsky was already dialing the XO’s stateroom.

“Command Duty Officer.”

“Sir, we have a zig on Panther. Looks like they lit off that fast reactor and they’re speeding up like a bat outta hell, sir. I’m getting a perpendicular leg to get a fix on his speed.”

“I’ll be right there,” Quinnivan said.

Ten minutes later, after Vermont had taken data on the first leg, then turned to the reciprocal course, west, and gathered data on the other perpendicular leg, the answer was in. Panther was doing thirty-one knots.

“Thirty-one goddamned knots, XO,” Lewinsky said.

“That reactor seems to be working quite nicely,” Quinnivan said. “And good news. It didn’t explode.”

“Yet,” Lewinsky said, old worries from the past deciding to visit.

“Your optimism is noted, Eng,” Quinnivan said. “I’ll inform the captain.”