Panic Switch

PROLOGUE

The panicked communication that a fire had broken out in the middle level of the forward compartment came over his headphones, since the boat was rigged-for-ultraquiet with the 1MC general announcing speakers disabled.

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino felt the hard shot of adrenalin hit his system as he selected the ship-wide circuit and barked into his boom microphone. “Fire in forward compartment middle level, fire in forward compartment middle level, casualty assistance team muster in the torpedo room! All hands, don EABs!” He could feel his thinking becoming intensely focused, one track of his mind responding automatically to repeated training for this emergency, another wondering what started the fire and how bad it was, a third thinking ahead to what this meant to the mission. The submarine force’s directive rang in his mind—save the mission, save the ship, save the reactor, then save the crew, in that order. If the fire were severe, there would be no saving this mission, he thought, glancing at the chart display for an escape route.

Pacino hurriedly pulled on his emergency air breathing mask with the fireproof hood, took an experimental breath of the dry, hot air and frowned through the mask’s faceplate at the navigator. The control room they stood in was on the widest deck of the boat, straddling the centerline of the cylindrical hull of the submarine. In the forward compartment. In the forward compartment’s middle level. The very same level as the fire.

“Navigator,” Pacino ordered, “get the fuck to the scene and see what the hell is going on.”

The rigged-for-ultraquiet submarine Vermont hovered a hundred yards north of the twin islands of the deep channel of the Zapadnaya Litsa Fjord, less than 1500 yards from the Russian Federation’s Zapadnaya Litsa Submarine Base.

U.S. Navy Lieutenant Anthony Pacino stood from where he’d been leaning over the navigation chart display along with the navigator, the Nav stationed due to the restricted waters the ship had entered, supplementing the section tracking party. The chart showed their present position, just northeast of the turn an emerging submarine would take to get to the fjord’s channel. The expected outbound transit of the colossal, modified Omega II-class Russian submarine Belgorod was expected to start any minute.

Pacino walked to the port forward large flat panel display, which showed a real-time image taken from an orbiting Apex drone high overhead, the drone’s data beamed down to their floating wire antenna, the picture showing the eight piers of the submarine base. Pacino shook his head — that the Russians had chosen this godforsaken ground for a sub base showed how differently they thought than westerners. The base was in one of the harshest climates on the planet, 175 nautical miles north of the Arctic Circle, with scant vegetation growing on the rocky mountains that rose suddenly from the deep cracks in the earth’s crust that formed the fjord. It was August, and even so, the control room felt cold, the fjord’s water temperature barely climbing above freezing. He imagined that in winter, it would take constant patrols from icebreaking ships to keep the fjord open, and the piers would be piled high with snow and ice. The satellite image showed the same status as an hour ago, when they’d arrived on station, five miles deep into the length of the fjord.

Pacino called to the navigator, “Zoom in closer to the Omega’s pier.” The navigator sidestepped to the command console and manipulated the panel and the image slowly zoomed in until the length of the pier took up half of the large widescreen display.

Tied to the pier was a huge black submarine. It wasn’t apparent from the view how enormous and wide the sub was, but the small figures of four long-haul trucks on the pier lent a clue. Two tugboats were tied up on the outboard side of the sub, and if Pacino’s guess were correct, each tug would be at least 80 feet long. That made the Russian’s sub’s length over 700 feet, 55 feet in beam, matching the secret-level intelligence estimate that claimed she displaced a whopping 35,000 tons. That was bigger than the largest World War II aircraft carriers. By comparison, their own submarine, the Block IV Virginia-class USS Vermont, was tiny, only 8000 tons submerged, 377 feet long and 34 feet in beam. And if its size were not impressive enough, the Omega II could act as a mother ship to a smaller nuclear powered deep submergence submarine, the Omega built to host a deep-diver called Losharik. The op-brief insisted Losharik could dive to a mile deep or even deeper.

“You’re right,” Pacino said, smirking at the navigator. “They should have named it the ‘BUFF.’”

The navigator nodded back without smiling, glancing between the overhead drone intel display and the chart table. “Big ugly fat fucker, it definitely is.”

“You know, Nav, I still think it’s odd that Belgorod is tied up at Zapadnaya Litsa instead of Olenya Guba outside of Polyarny. Olenya Guba’s their usual base, where they pick up the Losharik.”

“Who knows what the crazy-ass Russians are thinking at any given moment,” the navigator said, frowning down at the chart display, laying in a red dotted line for the expected track of the Belgorod when it departed the fjord for the open seas of the Barents. “They must be leaving without the deep-diver being docked to the underside of the hull.”

The navigator, Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov, looked up from the chart at Lieutenant Anthony “Patch” Pacino, fifty thoughts about him flashing through her mind. The youth had walked back to the command console and leaned over it, wearing his black coveralls with the gold embroidered submariner’s dolphins over his name patch on his left pocket, the U.S. flag patch on his left shoulder, the emblem of the USS Vermont on his right. He was tall, just over six feet, and trim without being bulky, as if he were a swimmer or a runner. He had straight, thick, longer-than-regulation chestnut hair that reflected the red of the overhead lamps, all of them turned red under the rig-for-ultraquiet as a reminder for absolute noise quieting. His face at first gave the impression of being rugged, as if it would seem natural to see him in a sheepskin coat on horseback, but on closer examination, his individual features were smoothly refined, almost feminine, his face narrow with strong cheekbones, a sculpted nose over puffy lips that a vain woman would pay a plastic surgeon a fortune for, but the feature that stood out the most were his almond-shaped eyes colored a deep emerald green. There was no doubt that on looks alone, if he desired, he could stop a woman’s heart. Romanov had noticed him on his first day and constantly had to remind herself not to stare at him, hoping he didn’t notice how attracted to him she was. Yet it was clear from his demeanor that Pacino had no idea of his good looks. There was a deep humility to the kid, she thought.

Which was another oddity about Pacino. Only twenty-three-years-old, the sonar officer of the Vermont had a chest of ribbons that twenty-year veterans would envy, one of them the Navy Cross itself. When Romanov had first heard about the medal, she’d dismissed it. It was a fluke from his senior year midshipman cruise disaster, when acting on instinct alone, he’d managed to save three crewmen of the ill-fated submarine Piranha, one of them a VIP admiral who had put Pacino up for the medal, in addition to Pacino being the son of the former Chief of Naval Operations, the admiral in command of the entire Navy, so a green junior officer wearing the Navy Cross could be explained away from a freak occurrence combined with nepotism and office politics. But then the lad had done it again, displaying the same dagger-in-the-teeth courage on the last operation, hijacking an Iranian submarine equipped with a Russian fast nuclear reactor and sailing it halfway around the world, evading the Russian submarines hunting it with search-and-destroy orders, even facing down a front-line Russian attack submarine. The result of the operation was Pacino winning the Silver Star and being granted his submarine dolphin emblem early, the dolphins indicating that he was “qualified in submarines,” only months after being assigned to the Vermont, most of that time spent on the Iranian submarine. The officer cadre of Vermont had at first teased Pacino relentlessly that he hadn’t truly earned his dolphins, but in the month after Operation Panther, Pacino had proved himself an able and competent officer, and the teasing died out.

And that led to today’s operation, in which Lieutenant Pacino had the captain’s confidence to trail and conduct an underhull of the Russian super-sub Belgorod as leader of the section tracking party, which was just a few watchstanders short of full battlestations.

Romanov felt her mind fill with other thoughts about Pacino. Operation Panther had led to the final confrontation with her soon-to-be ex-husband Bruno Romanov, the commanding officer of the missile cruiser Javelin. In early May, Vermont had suddenly been ordered to sea with all communications locked down, and for two months the crew had no contact with the outside world. The Navy had called it a dark transit. Romanov called it a marriage-killer. In the brutal aftermath of the breakup of her marriage, she’d leaned hard on Anthony Pacino, their friendship the only thing that seemed to keep her sane. She’d moved out of the two-story colonial house in Virginia Beach she’d shared with Bruno and had crashed at Pacino’s dark, dreary, nearly windowless apartment. They’d taken turns sleeping on the couch, joking with each other that the crew could tell who’d had the queen bed and who’d had the couch the night before, as that couch was distinctly uncomfortable and useless for allowing a good night’s sleep.

At Romanov’s insistence, Pacino had terminated his lease and gone in with Romanov and three other of Vermont’s officers on a four-bedroom house near the beach, their roommates Dieter Dankleff, Mohammed Varney, and Duke Vevera. Romanov had claimed the master bedroom by virtue of being the senior officer, Pacino taking the room next door that shared the common master bathroom, Vevera and Dankleff down the hall, with Varney taking the makeshift bedroom in the basement. Vevera had christened the house “The Snake Ranch,” the time-honored term for a Navy bachelor pad, presumably due to lonely “snakes” inhabiting boxer shorts. Romanov had objected, what with a female as one of the roommates, but the name had stuck so hard that even the captain and executive officer — the XO — had taken to referring to the house as the Snake Ranch.

There had undoubtedly been speculation as to the relationship between Pacino and Romanov, but they remained platonic friends. At least she told herself that. There had been a drunken ship’s party after Operation Panther wrapped, and the two had shared a momentary embrace that led to a short but intense affair, but Romanov had recovered, realizing that she was on the rebound from Bruno and her jangling nerves only now calming from the Panther run. She’d already lost her marriage, and she’d be damned if she’d also lose her career for having a romantic relationship with a fellow officer on her submarine, a more junior officer at that. Besides, she was eight years older than Pacino, and any fling they would have would eventually, inevitably end. She’d go on to the next assignment, hopefully as an executive officer of a submarine, Anthony would go on to be a department head, and there was no guarantee they’d even be on the same coast on those future assignments. The certainty was that if a relationship ever started, its ending would be embedded within it, and that was no way for either of them to live, she thought.

It occurred to her that since she was his roommate, she might have to suffer seeing him meet and date another woman, and she knew that would bother her. She reminded herself that there were even bigger issues. Even in the oddball fantasy that they started a relationship, and for the sake of argument, it became serious to the point that she’d quit the Navy to be a wife, she couldn’t become a mother. Her sterility had stressed her marriage with Bruno, who had desperately wanted a son, and had wanted her to stay home to take care of the baby. Old-fashioned, she knew. She’d actually agreed with Bruno, but nature had had different plans. Two years of fertility treatment had gone nowhere. So it was hard to believe young Pacino would want to end up with a barren woman who couldn’t give him children.

Pacino’s voice startled her out of her thoughts.

“Training run, maybe,” Pacino said.

“Say again?” Romanov said, bringing herself back to the mission.

“Maybe Belgorod is just going out for training without the deep-diver sub. Maybe he’ll shoot some exercise torpedoes or conduct maneuvers with the surface fleet.”

“Maybe he’s headed out to rendezvous with Losharik to see if they can dock submerged, undetected. The op-brief mentioned that they haven’t tried that yet.”

“Could be,” Pacino said.

Pacino stole a glance at the navigator. Lieutenant Commander Rachel “Dominatrix Navigatrix” Romanov was tall and slender, only a few inches shorter than he was. She was compellingly beautiful, with nearly perfect features. She had wide brown eyes that could peer all the way into someone’s soul, he thought. Her shining long dirty-blonde hair came down past the middle of her chest, although today she’d put it in a ponytail. He’d met her at a ship’s party the day he’d reported aboard Vermont, and in that moment he’d been so stunned by her that he could barely speak. People always talked about the lightning bolt striking when meeting a soulmate and he’d always maintained that was ridiculous. There were no lightning bolts and there was no such thing as a soulmate. But after laying eyes on Rachel Romanov, Pacino began to understand.

During his first days on the submarine, he had had trouble reminding himself that she was a senior officer. A happily married senior officer. He had caught himself staring at her and would bite the inside of his lip to stop himself. Romanov, thankfully, was unaware of how he felt about her until just before he locked out of the submarine in scuba gear to invade the Panther, when he’d become so convinced that it was a suicide mission that he’d decided hiding his feelings no longer mattered. But despite their short liaison after the Operation Panther victory party, and despite her separating from Bruno Romanov and filing for divorce, Rachel had insisted they keep their relationship platonic and official because anything between them would probably end badly, and that would impact their careers. Reluctantly, Pacino had agreed, and they had gone on as close friends, but nothing more. There were times at the Snake Ranch, when he’d lie awake at three in the morning staring at the ceiling, or standing officer of the deck watch during the midwatch, when he couldn’t help but imagine him and Rachel being together, and in those moments, he was positive he would be much happier than he was just being her friend.

“Officer of the Deck, look,” Romanov said to Pacino.

Something was happening on the pier. There were no longer lines connecting her stern to the jetty, and the gangway had been pulled off by a crane.

“Here we go.” Pacino stepped over to the port side, where the number one sonar stack was glowing in green stripes and graphs. “Senior, you ready?” Senior Chief Tom Whale Albanese manned the main sonar display stack with its triple screens, the upper one selected to broadband waterfall noise, the middle to time-frequency graphs of tonals, the bottom screen showing transient noise detection.

“Sonar is ready, Officer of the Deck,” Albanese said over his shoulder. Pacino walked to the starboard side, where Vevera stood watch at the BYG-1 attack center of the battlecontrol console as the firecontrol officer of the watch.

“You all set up, Firecontrol?” Pacino asked Vevera, clapping his shoulder. Vevera wore his leather motorcycle jacket over his coveralls, the one with gold embroidery of the Indian Motorcycle Company logo on the back. Vevera insisted on wearing wrap-around sunglasses while on watch at the console. “And can you even see your displays with those shades?”

“I hold that BUFF in the palm of my hand, Officer of the Deck,” Vevera said. “And these glasses help me see the displays better. Plus, it has the distinct advantage of making me look cool.”

Pacino laughed and returned to the forward port corner to peer at the drone image. The aft tugboat had pulled the massive hull slowly away from the pier, an angle forming in the dark water of the slip between piers.

“Forward lines are cast off,” Romanov said. “The BUFF is underway.”

Pacino returned to the command console and picked up a phone and buzzed the captain’s stateroom, the earpiece of the phone put to his ear opposite his one-eared comms headset.

“Captain,” the baritone voice of Commander Tim Seagraves came calmly over the phone.

“Officer of the Deck, sir,” Pacino said, “Belgorod has shoved off. She’ll be in the channel momentarily. We’re ready to trail and perform the underhull.”

“Very well, Officer of the Deck,” Seagraves said, sounding almost bored.

“Do you want to station battlestations for the underhull, sir?” Pacino asked.

“No, Mr. Pacino. I’m sure you and your section tracking party can handle it. But call me if something unexpected happens.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Pacino acknowledged, but the captain had already hung up.

“Tugs are maneuvering his hull into the twin island channel,” Romanov called. On the drone display, the tug on the Omega’s starboard side was tied up, pulling the submarine backward into the wide channel. Once he cleared the pier, the second tug cast off from the starboard side and repositioned himself to take station on the sub’s port side, the two tugs carefully moving the ship slowly and steadily westward into the fjord’s basin, clearing the islands and spinning the hull counter-clockwise so that it would point northeast along the fjord’s deep channel.

“Quite a contrast to your ‘back-emergency-ahead-flank-without-tugs’ underway you pulled off from Norfolk,” Vevera said to Pacino.

“Hey,” Pacino said, smiling to himself, “not everyone can be a natural born ship handler.”

“Ouch,” Vevera said. Vevera had famously tried the same maneuver himself and had ended up putting the Vermont into a complete 270 degree out-of-control spin in the Elizabeth River Harbor Reach.

“Let’s not forget what Admiral King said about ship handling,” Romanov said absently. “The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling.”

“That’s probably what the captain of the BUFF is thinking right now,” Pacino said. “Sonar, do you hold narrowband contact on the BUFF on the wide aperture hull arrays?”

“No, not yet, Officer of the Deck, and broadband is a complete acoustic shitshow with the tug engines and screws.”

“An acoustic shitshow—I like that. We’ll put that in the patrol report,” Pacino said, grinning.

“Once the tugs bug out,” Albanese said, “and he’s under his own power, I’ll have his broadband trace called out as ‘Sierra One.’ When the underhull is complete, as long as he’s doing more than five knots, we can stream the towed array and I’ll get a wealth of tonals.”

“We can’t wait for the tugs to shove off before the underhull,” Pacino said. “Let’s hope he heads down the channel nice and slow so we can get this underhull done and back off.”

“We’re going to have to underhull him here in the fjord,” Romanov said. “Fortunately it’s deep enough that the BUFF could have just vertical dived right by the pier if he’d wanted to. I suspect that once he reaches the mouth of the fjord and the Barents Sea, he’ll dive and start hauling ass to wherever he’s headed.”

“That’ll be the easy part of the mission,” Pacino said quietly to Romanov, his hand covering his boom microphone. “Trailing him when he’s making flank turns will be cake. This underhull maneuver will be a bitch.”

Romanov nodded at him in understanding. “He’s in the center of channel now,” Romanov said, “and he’s casting off the tug lines. Looks like the tugs are escorting him out.”

“Attention in the section tracking party,” Pacino called to the room. “The BUFF is headed right for us. We’ll let him pass overhead, then put on turns to match his speed and add revolutions until we close the distance with the number two periscope up and get close to his screws to get a good video shot and a sound pressure level trace. Then we’ll maneuver farther under his hull and check out his cold water injection scoops and then forward until we can see his ventral docking bay and docking hatch. The op-brief wants a glance at his bow to look at the size and configuration of his torpedo tube doors, but by then he may already be ready to dive, and doing that would put us very close to his spherical sonar array in his nosecone, and getting counterdetected by the Omega would be bad for business. So we’ll see what happens. As you were.”

“Officer of the Deck,” Albanese called, “I have reliable broadband contact on the BUFF, bearing two one zero, designate contact Sierra One.”

“Sonar, designate Sierra One, the BUFF, as Master One. Firecontrol,” Pacino called to Vevera, “can you infer a range based on own-ship’s position and Master One’s position on the drone image?”

“OOD, it’s rough, but I show Master One’s range at one thousand yards.”

“Speed?”

“Also rough,” Vevera reported, “but it looks like he’s doing about eight knots. He’ll be on top of us in about four minutes.”

“Pilot, mark your depth,” Pacino called to Lieutenant U-Boat Dankleff who stood watch at the pilot’s station on the forward port side of the room.

“OOD, depth one hundred feet.”

“Pilot, take us down to one one five feet.”

“Make my depth one one five feet, Pilot, aye,” Dankleff acknowledged.

“Look-around number two scope,” Pacino called, awaiting Dankleff’s speed and depth report.

“Depth one one two feet, speed zero,” Dankleff reported.

“Up scope,” Pacino said, opening a switch cover and selecting the number two periscope’s switch to raise the optronic unit out of the sail. The ultrahigh definition widescreen display on the command console came alive, the view looking a dark blue. With the scope controller, a unit that looked like it had been stolen from a kid’s gaming setup, Pacino raised the optics to look almost straight up at the waves high above. From this depth, with the keel 115 feet beneath the surface, the periscope optics were forty feet deep. The surface above looked silvery, a wrinkled mirror, rays of sunlight streaming down here and there.

“Sonar, report bearing to Master One,” Pacino called.

“OOD, Master One bears two zero eight.”

Pacino trained the view to bearing 208, then rotated the view downward so he was looking up at a forty-five degree angle to the vertical, the deeper water darkening the view, the surface no longer visible at this angle.

It was then he heard the noises. The sound of the Omega’s screws could be heard faintly through the hull, the whooshing noise becoming louder every second. And then it came slowly out of the blue haze into view, the enormous bow of the Belgorod coming toward them. The bottom of the hull was coming straight toward the optic’s view. The BUFF’s draft was deeper than estimated by five feet. Pacino lunged for the periscope hydraulics switch and dropped the scope to keep it from being snapped off by the Omega’s deep draft hull.

“Down scope! Pilot, make your depth one two five feet smartly,” Pacino ordered, his voice louder than normal. The noise of the Omega’s screws was louder now, almost the volume of conversation.

“One two five feet, aye, sir, and my depth is one two five feet.”

Pacino glanced at Navigator Romanov, giving her a half head shake, as if to say, that was a close one. She returned his gaze, responding with a half nod.

“Raising number two scope,” Pacino called, muttering under his breath, “let’s try this again.”

The scope came out of the well and the display lit up a second time. Pacino trained the unit to look straight up and saw the massive hull of the Omega submarine passing slowly overhead. It kept steaming by, the noise of the screws getting louder now. He’d have to yell to be heard over the din of it.

“Master One is passing overhead,” Pacino said, although it was more for entering the news into the record of the “conn open mike,” a sort of blackbox video and audio recording system set up in the control room to preserve the actions of the crew for later examination. “Nav, what course do you recommend to maintain center of channel?”

Romanov looked at her chart display. “Course zero two eight, sir.”

“Pilot, make your depth one two zero feet, all ahead one third, turns for eight knots, steer course zero two eight,” Pacino ordered.

Dankleff acknowledged. They were putting on turns to match the Omega’s speed, but it would take time to accelerate up to eight knots, and by then Master One’s twin screws would pass overhead of the scope optics, at least they would if Pacino timed this right. Pacino trained his view flatter to look aft along the Omega’s hull. The Russian submarine’s hull began to narrow, the bottom of it becoming shallower. As it tapered at the rudder, the wide-diameter double screws could be seen, both of them churning up bubbles and foam from the power of their revolutions.

“Pilot, mark speed.”

“OOD, speed seven knots.”

“Pilot, make turns for nine.” Pacino would need to speed up or the Omega would vanish down the channel. He must be going faster than their calculated eight knots, or he’d sped up.

The churning screws got closer but were still a bit too distant. Vermont’s speed seemed matched to that of the Russian.

“Pilot, add five turns,” Pacino ordered. “Come up to one one five feet.”

The view of the screws grew closer. Pacino stared hard at them, trying to see if he could tell the number of blades. At least the first data the op-brief had wanted was in — the Omega was not using ducted pump-jet propulsors, but conventional brass screws, the blades in a scimitar shape, but counting blades was tough at their present speed.

“Sonar, you have a turn count and a blade count?”

“OOD, Master One is making six zero RPM on two seven-bladed screws.”

“Very well.” Pacino would leave the visual blade-counting to the people who later would examine the high-def video frame-by-frame. It was time to move the view forward. “Pilot, add two turns, make your depth one two zero feet.”

The view slowly moved along the hull until two structures came into the optics, both on the starboard side, a similar set on the port side. They looked like jet engines, but angled downward by forty-five degrees. “I have the cold water injection scoops,” Pacino reported. “Dear God, those are huge. You could drive a car into those scoops and not touch the sides.”

The view moved farther forward. Pacino turned his view aft as Vermont sped forward relative to the hull of the Belgorod, trying to get a view down the throats of the scoops, then trained the view forward again. Forward of the quadruple scoops would be the flat hull until the mechanism for docking the deep-diving submarine appeared. The view was moving forward until Pacino could just barely see a dark opening in the hull. It looked rectangular, its long axis along the centerline of the hull. Inside the opening it was too dark to make out anything. Pacino was just starting to think about activating the sail’s underice lights to illuminate the Omega hull opening when a breathless voice suddenly crackled over the shipwide phone circuit.

“Fire, fire, fire! Fire in forward compartment middle level! We’ve got a bad fire—” The transmission continued, but became unintelligible, then went ominously quiet.

Without conscious thought, Pacino clicked into the shipwide phone circuit and shouted into it, reminding himself to speak slowly and clearly despite the adrenalin slamming into his system.

“Fire in forward compartment middle level, fire in forward compartment middle level, casualty assistance team muster in the torpedo room! All hands, don EABs!”

He pulled on his emergency breathing air mask, tugging at the fireproof hood and tightening the straps behind his head. The air was hot and dry, but seemed otherwise normal. The ventilation system suddenly stopped blowing air into the room as the rig for fire was executed, and the room immediately soared in temperature. Pacino could feel himself start to sweat all over, perhaps from the heat in the room or the fear. He shot a hard look at Romanov. With no more information coming over the phones, he’d need an officer to take charge at the scene and report what was happening to the control room.

“Navigator,” Pacino ordered, “get the fuck to the scene and see what the hell is going on.” She waved at him as she unplugged her air hose and dashed forward to the door leading to the combat equipment room and the ladderway to the lower level torpedo room. She’d have to make her way aft through the lower level, link up with the casualty assistance team and help fight the fire. Odds were, the fire was happening in the galley. If they were lucky, it was just a grease fire and would be out in a few minutes, but if it were more serious, fighting the fire could make tremendous noise and alert the Russians.

He glanced at the chart, realizing he’d have to break contact with the Omega and escape the fjord undetected, all the while having to fight a goddamned fire.

“Pilot, all stop! Make your depth one five zero feet and hover!”

As Dankleff acknowledged, Pacino lowered the periscope and stepped to the chart table. As the Vermont slowed to a stop, the noise of the huge screws of the Omega came closer, thrashing the water directly over them now. The channel turned northward here, so that the outbound course would change to 015. If Pacino hovered while they put out the fire, the Omega would sail on away from them, but it would still be a disaster if they had to put up the snorkel mast and ventilate the smoke out of the ship. They were far inside the twelve-mile territorial limit of Russian waters, which was a violation of international law, and if detected, the Russians would be justified in taking them all prisoner or even firing upon them. This miserable situation could come down to the agonizing decision between being captured or suffocating. Or even worse, being burned alive.

Romanov’s voice came over his headset, her voice iron hard, but he knew her well enough to know when she was afraid.

“Conn, Torpedo Room, Navigator, the fire is in the wardroom and is extremely severe and spreading forward to officers country.”

“Nav, did you say the wardroom?” Pacino asked, not believing his ears. Why would a fire break out in the officers’ mess and conference room?

“Conn, it’s an oxygen fire. There is an O2 line running into the wardroom for when it doubles as a surgical suite and it — it must be a double-ended shear and oxygen is blowing into the room and the room is engulfed in flames. We can’t get anywhere close to it!”

“Can you isolate it upstream? Cut off the O2 flow?”

“We’re working on it now but the fire has spread to the crews’ mess where the forward isolation valve is. I’ve got Chief Nygard getting into a steam suit now. He’s going to attempt to get to the valve.”

It was then that the casualty grew far worse. The air feeding Pacino’s mask suddenly cut off, and as he tried to inhale, he just drew a vacuum on the mask. He pulled it off, thinking something must have happened to the EAB manifold. He looked up to find the other control room watchstanders dumping their masks. The air of the control room smelled awful, like burning insulation. And now black smoke was pouring into the room from the aft door, the foul-smelling smoke in mere seconds filling the room.

“Navigator, Control, we’ve lost emergency breathing air up here. What’s your status?”

“Conn, Navigator, Chief Nygard is in the middle level crews’ mess trying to get to the O2 valve now, but we’ve lost emergency breathing air throughout the compartment. We’ve got a few OBAs and a few air-packs, but not enough to go around. OOD, you know what this means.”

The smoke continued filling the room, making it even hotter, while visibility was shrinking. Pacino could barely make out the sonar console from the command console. He stepped aft and shut the aft control room door, but the smoke was still getting worse, pouring in from the aft bulkhead despite the shut door. Vevera stood up from his panel as it went dark. “Loss of battlecontrol,” he said to Pacino.

The sonar consoles on the port side blacked out. “Loss of sonar,” Albanese said.

The smoke had completely filled the room. Visibility was near zero. Pacino coughed desperately, sinking down to his knees, hoping that the air would be breathable near the deck, but it seemed no improvement. He could feel dizziness start to overtake him as the overhead red lights clicked off, leaving the room in the darkness of a coal mine.

And now the decision he’d feared was here. There were only two options — surfacing the boat and abandoning ship, or scuttling the vessel in the deep water of the fjord to avoid capture by the Russians. In the first case, they’d be taken captive, held as criminals, interrogated, and tortured, and certainly used as a propaganda win for the Russians, with the top-secret project submarine Vermont in their hands. In the second, every crewman aboard would die and the USS Vermont would sink below crush depth in the deep fjord and scatter wreckage on the sea bottom, all to be harvested by the Russian deep-diving machinery. If the boat still had propulsion, and it were clear that all was truly lost, Pacino could order full speed and a steep angle to crush depth and get all this over with fast, and maybe that way the hull breakup would be violent enough that it would spoil any Russian salvage attempts.

“Maneuvering, Conn, report your status,” Pacino ordered over the tactical circuit.

But there was no reply. The circuit was silent.

“Navigator, Control, report.” No reply. “Navigator, Officer of the Deck, report!” But there was nothing.

By then, the room was so filled with smoke that there seemed no way to breathe. Without remembering how he got there, he found himself lying prone on the deck, coughing so hard it felt like he’d toss up a lung, and it was then that the strangeness began.

He saw a beam of light attempting to shine through dark smoke, rotating around to shine on the other crewmembers.

A second light beam came into view and then a third, a fourth, and more. One of the lamps shone in his face, blinding him, and when it moved from his face, he could see the dim outline of a masked figure oddly wearing a fireman’s helmet.

Everything went black then, but while he couldn’t see or hear anything, he felt a sense of time.

Then he could see and hear again, but only for a brief moment, and while he could see, he couldn’t move. He saw a circle of bright light, half obscured by smoke, and if he didn’t know better, he could swear it was an open hatch, and he felt himself incline from lying flat to being vertical, but he wasn’t standing, he was just… floating.

The world went black again, and again he had that strange sense of time passing.

And like a cosmic strobe light, the world returned once more, this time the light around him so bright he became convinced he’d passed on to the other side like he had in his near death experience aboard the Piranha, but then he saw a flash of something. His head was turned to the side and he could see the outside of the hull of the Vermont, but she wasn’t in a Russian fjord, she was lying in a drydock, drenched with the afternoon Virginia sunshine. A short trailer or container box was placed on the top of her deck aft of the plug trunk hatch, block letters on the trailer reading TRACON, with the emblem of Submarine Development Group 12 next to the letters.

Pacino couldn’t move his head, or anything else, with the exception of his eyes. He looked up and saw a hovering helicopter overhead, its blades rotating in slow motion. He scanned the chopper to see if it had markings of the Russian Navy, but it was painted red with a large white cross painted on it. He could make out the word MEDEVAC on its side just before the blackness came again.

This time the blackness seemed to last longer, and when it ended, the white room around him came into focus. He could see machinery around him, medical machines, and someone in a white outfit starting to rush into the room, but then the universe went black again.

Still that odd sense of time passing. He waited for the world to light up again, but other than waiting, he was unable to think or process what he’d experienced and seen.

When the curtain lifted again, Pacino looked up to see his father, former Admiral Michael Pacino, who was now the National Security Advisor to the president. The elder Pacino leaned over him. Pacino noticed his father’s dark tailored suit and red patterned tie. He blinked and saw his father try to say words, but no sound emerged. Then the blackness came back for him, but this time, there was no sense of time.

It was just a black nothingness.