Panic Switch

8

Pacino, Vevera and Dankleff took seats in the middle of the table on one side, with a view of the main entrance so they could beckon over the new arrivals. Two of the other three “Vermont-ers,” “Easy” Eisenhart and “Gangbanger” Ganghadharan, arrived together, bringing in two strangers with them.

“Easy! Gangbang!” Vevera called.

“Gang’s almost all here,” Lieutenant (junior grade) Anik Gangbanger Ganghadharan said. “No pun intended.” Ganghadharan had been Vermont’s supply officer and presumably would retain the position onboard New Jersey. He was a shorter youth, dark-skinned, of northern Indian descent.

“And who are these guys, Gang?” Dankleff pointed to the strangers. One was short and stout, but built of all muscle, his blonde hair cut short, a pugnacious look about him. He looked like a boxer, Pacino thought, although he didn’t have the height to pull it off. The other newcomer was tall and thin, his legs and arms long, as would well suit a basketball player, with dark hair, also cut short, with a young, innocent-looking face. A bit doe-eyed to be a combat submariner, Pacino thought. And at a half-head taller than Pacino, he looked too tall to be allowed to serve in submarines.

“Gentlemen,” Gangbanger said, “Allow me to introduce our new nubs. By some strange twist of fate, the detailers sent two officers to New Jersey with the same fuckin’ last name. They are both named Cooper. Apparently, to distinguish between the two, that tall one over there they call ‘Long Hull’ and of course, the shorter one who looks like he’d knock you out with one punch? That’s ‘Short Hull.’” The sub force had been known to take submarines and extend their length by adding compartments, leading to some being called long-hulls, as they were currently doing with the Block V Virginia-class, adding an entire compartment aft of the forward compartment just to hold cruise missile tubes. The Block IV sailors looked with disdain upon the Block Vs, considering them just big missile-carriers rather than true attack submarines.

Pacino shook Long Hull’s hand, then Short Hull’s. “Nice callsigns,” he said. “I’m Patch Pacino, sonar officer. Some idiots have been known to call me ‘Lipstick,’ but don’t you two dare ever call me that, or I won’t sign your qual cards.”

Long Hull Cooper made a sour face. “‘Long Hull,’ for fuck’s sake. I guess it beats ‘Wingspan,’ which is what they called me at the Academy. But my first name is Ben.”

“Oh, an Academy grad,” Ganghadharan said. “So are these three morons.” He nodded to Pacino, Vevera and Eisenhart.

“What about you, Short Hull?” Dankleff asked. “And call me U-Boat.”

“My first name is Eli, believe it or not, but I was always just called ‘Coop.’ And no Naval Academy for me. My dad flunked out a decade before I was born, so I suppose they thought I’d screw up too. I ended up at Penn State. Electrical engineering.”

“Ah yes, the great Penn State, my very own alma mater,” Gangbanger said, looking pleased.

“Why ‘U-Boat’?” Short Hull asked Dankleff. Dankleff pulled him close and spoke into his ear for a moment.

“Either of you guys married?” Vevera asked. The newcomers both shook their heads. “You know, we’d be an all-bachelor crew but for Gangbanger over here. That idiot got pulled into an arranged marriage. Can you believe that? In these modern times?”

Ganghadharan smirked. “Allow me to show you what you get in an arranged marriage, people.” He pulled out his phone and drew up a photo of his wife. “Sonia, in all her glory.”

“Holy shit,” Pacino said, whistling. “I’ve never seen her picture or met her. She’s gorgeous. You’re kind of punching over your weight class with her, aren’t you, Gangbanger?”

“Sonia may invite us all to dinner after this op,” Ganghadharan said. “But not you, Lipstick. Arsonists are most certainly not invited. Pacino here burned the Vermont down to the drydock blocks,” Ganghadharan explained to the new officers.

“Oh hell,” Pacino muttered.

“We all heard the story,” Short Hull said. “I managed to get to watch the video. I was pretty impressed, Mr. Pacino.”

“Call me ‘Patch,’ Coop,” Pacino said. “What jobs did you guys have on the PCU unit?”

Short Hull spoke first. “I was torpedo division officer. Not sure if they’ll scramble up our jobs now with you Vermont guys cross-decking over.”

“And you, Long Hull?”

“Reactor controls division,” Ben Cooper said.

“Have you guys spoken to Easy Eisenhart over here? Easy, you’re being awfully quiet tonight. What’s up?” Pacino looked at Eisenhart, who seemed close to tears. Out of character for him, Pacino thought. He’d never seen Easy in any mood but jocular.

Lieutenant Don Eisenhart, Vermont’s communications officer, or “communicator,” lifted his eyes from the floor. “Remember the girl I was seeing in Virginia Beach? She just decided she’s had enough of dating a fast-attack sailor. Turns out, SSN does not stand for submersible ship nuclear. SSN stands for Saturdays, Sundays and Nights. Being at sea all the damned time doesn’t make for much intimacy.”

Dankleff clapped Eisenhart on the shoulder. “Hey, chin up, Easy, there’s always another girl to romance, marry, divorce, and give half your stuff to.”

“U-Boat here got divorced from Eurobitch,” Vevera explained to the new officers. “His little feelings are still hurt from it. Hey, look, it’s Boozy Varney. Boozy!” Vevera waved over a short, slender, black-haired, olive-skinned man to the table.

“Listen up, Hulls,” Dankleff said to the younger officers. “This is Muhammad ‘Boozy’ Varney, our esteemed electrical officer.”

“Boozy?” Short Hull asked, confused.

Varney shook the new officers’ hands. “These alcoholics call me ‘Boozy’ because I drink — in moderation, unlike them — despite being a Muslim. The way I figure it, the USS New Jersey is damned lucky to have us aboard. Except you, Lipstick. Try not to burn up the New Jersey, will ya?”

“Dammit,” Pacino said.

“Hey, as of now, we have all the J.O.s, right?” Vevera said.

“You’re MPA, I’m DCA,” Dankleff said, referring to Vevera’s job as main propulsion assistant and his own job as damage control assistant. “Easy’s commo, Lipstick’s sonar, Boozy’s E-div, Gang’s supply. Short Hull Cooper is torpedo division officer and Long Hull is reactor controls officer. So yeah, we’re all present.”

“So now I guess we just wait for the department heads and the XO and skipper,” Vevera replied. “Let’s get a couple rounds of drinks here before they come.”

“Kind of strange,” Pacino said to Dankleff while Vevera went off to grab a server. “An all-male wardroom.”

“Who knows? We haven’t met the navigator, weapons officer, XO or captain. One or all could be female.”

“A female captain. Hasn’t been one since Devilfish went down,” Pacino said.

“I’ll be the next one,” a female voice said, but a booming female voice that was an octave deeper than Pacino’s. Pacino looked over to see a petite woman in tight jeans tucked into ugly sheepskin boots, with a black sweater that clung to her well-proportioned figure under a black sport jacket. She had full and shining black hair that was combed straight and reached below her shoulders. She had conventionally pretty features, but there was something about her eyes. Her dark brown eyes looked normal one second and eerily wide the next, and when they went wide, she looked frantic or even crazy.

Believing her to be one of the department heads, Pacino reached out and shook her hand. “Ma’am, you’ve arrived at the table for the USS New Jersey wardroom. I’m Patch Pacino, oncoming sonar officer.”

She smiled at him. Her warm hand seemed strangely rough in his.

“I’m Lieutenant Commander Alyssa Kelly. Oncoming chief engineer of the New Jersey.”

“You’re the eng?” Vevera asked. “I’m Duke Vevera, MPA. This is Dieter Dankleff, DCA. Muhammad Varney, electrical officer. Over there is Don Eisenhart, communicator. These guys are the nubs, both named Cooper. That one’s Long Hull and he’s Short Hull. Short Hull is the PCU torpedo division officer and Long Hull is reactor controls officer.”

Kelly greeted the officers with a smile, shaking their hands and learning their street names, and all the while, her eyes kept up that normal-then-wide-eyed thing, as if she were flashing messages with her eyes. After a moment, Vevera became brave enough to ask her what her callsign was.

“I’ve had a few,” Kelly said. “Hated them all. Machinegun Kelly. Moose—that’s the one that’s seemed to stick the hardest, because of my stupid baritone voice. And my least favorite, Crazy Eyes. Any of you J.O.s ever call me Crazy Eyes, I swear I will write you up to the XO.”

“Eng,” Pacino said, feeling strange calling her ‘Eng,’ the usual name for the chief engineer of a submarine, since the Eng for him had been Elvis Feng Lewinsky back on the Vermont. He’d always think about Elvis every time someone said ‘Eng.’ “Do you know who is going to be the XO?”

“No idea,” Kelly replied. “I guess I’ll find out when you guys do. But I do know who the weapons officer is. River! We’re over here!”

Kelly motioned over a tall, slender brunette woman who wore a gray cashmere form-fitting dress that came just above her knees with tall black high heels. As she walked over, Pacino felt his stomach descend several floors. The woman was Wanda “River” Styxx. Before the Panther run, there had been a party for the Vermont officers at AUTEC — the Bahamas Atlantic Undersea Testing and Evaluation Center, the Navy’s version of Area 51—when Pacino had been awarded his full lieutenant bars by Vice Admiral Catardi, the commander of the submarine force, and been ordered to “drink his bars” by downing a large glass filled with rotgut scotch with his new rank emblems at the bottom. The scotch had gotten to him and he’d gone into a full memory blackout. When he woke up the next morning, he found himself naked in the bed of a beautiful and similarly naked woman. And that woman had been the aide to Admiral Catardi, Wanda River Styxx. When Pacino had arrived back at the submarine, the crew had doubled over in laughter. His face was covered with Styxx’s lipstick, from his nose to his chin and from ear-to-ear, earning him the ignominious nickname “Lipstick.” And now here she was.

She walked up to Pacino first, acting as if he were a mere acquaintance. “Hello, Patch,” she said. “I’m oncoming weapons officer, so you’ll be working for me.” She smiled brightly at Pacino and shook his hand, her hand warm and soft in his. He couldn’t help thinking that this was the hand that had been draped over his chest when he woke up that awful morning.

Pacino blinked and swallowed hard, becoming aware of the bug-eyed expressions of the other Vermont-ers who knew his history. “Good to see you again, Commander.”

“Please,” she said, “Call me River. Or, of course, Weps.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She laughed. “And definitely no ma’ams.” She greeted the other officers, remembering them from meeting them during the party at AUTEC.

Fortunately, the next officer joined them at the table then, taking all the attention away from Pacino’s embarrassment with Styxx.

“What the hell?” Dankleff said, breaking into a grin and pulling the newcomer into a bear hug. “What are you doing here?”

Lieutenant Commander Elvis Lewinsky had sneaked up on the gathering, a grin on his features. He shook the hands of the Vermont-ers and introduced himself to the nub officers.

“Elvis, for fuck’s sake,” Dankleff said to his old boss. “Really, what are you doing here?”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Lewinsky said, “you are looking at the USS New Jersey’s new navigator. Which reminds me, where the hell are we?”

“Great,” Vevera said. “Lame navigation jokes already. Elvis, if you’re navigator here, who’s taking care of the repairs to the Vermont?”

“Turns out it was a pretty easy decision for Naval Personnel Command. After we turnover with the PCU crew, the PCU guys — except for the Hulls here — are taking on the Vermont repairs.”

“It’s going to take me a while to learn to not call you ‘Feng,’ Elvis,” Dankleff said. “Man, a split tour as engineer and navigator. You’re going to be heavy as hell for your upcoming XO tour.” The term ”heavy” in submarine lexicon meant knowledgeable.

“I’d half hoped you were showing up to be the XO,” Eisenhart said. “You’re heavy enough now.”

“Oh no, that honor is reserved for a man I understand is a real bastard,” Lewinsky said. “You J.O.s better stand the fuck by. The new XO is a killer. He reportedly eats junior officers for breakfast.” Lewinsky looked at Styxx and Kelly. “And department heads for lunch.”

“Great,” Pacino muttered. “Elvis, do you know who he or the captain is?”

“I know,” Lewinsky grinned, “but I ain’t sayin’. But worry not, crew, because here comes the XO now.”

The officers all turned their heads to see who was approaching the table, and the Vermont-ers’ jaws all dropped when a man in falling-apart steel toed boots, ripped and stained jeans, a Grateful Dead T-shirt and an unbuttoned lumberjack fleece shirt over it walked up, smiling mischievously.

“Oh my God,” Dankleff said. “Bullfrog? You? You’re XO?”

Commander Jeremiah Seamus Quinnivan, Royal Navy, shook hands all around, looking quite pleased with himself.

“Well, of course, lads and lassies, I’m XO. Who did you think would be capable of running you scurvy, misbehaved and out-of-control misfits and pirates on a spec-op?”

“This is almost too good to be true,” Pacino breathed to Dankleff. “Now we just need to know who the captain will be.”

“If Quinnivan is XO, I can guess who the skipper is,” Dankleff said.

As if on cue, Commander Timothy “Scotch” Seagraves, up to then Vermont’s commanding officer, arrived at the table, nodding seriously at the crowd.

“Captain!” Vevera said, shaking Seagraves hand. “Just like old times.”

Seagraves, a serious officer, and never much for partying, spoke up, his baritone voice commanding. “Let’s grab seats, people, and get this dinner underway. We’ve all got an early day tomorrow. We’ll be taking turnover from the New Jersey PCU crew. Change-of-command ceremony is at fifteen hundred. I hope you all brought your choker whites. By sunset, the Jersey is all ours.”

“Sir, if you’re able to answer, you know, in public,” Vevera said as he stood next to the captain. “When do we shove off?”

Seagraves regarded Vevera seriously. “You’ll be missing the change-of-command ceremony, Mr. Vevera, because you’ll be starting the reactor.”

Vevera grinned. “Outstanding, sir.”

“And there she is,” Pacino said, arriving at Pier 1 North.

Vevera, Pacino and Dankleff had decided to walk to the boat’s pier from China Express, the passage into the builder’s yard security gate quick compared to that of Squadron Six in Norfolk. Back at the parking lot across the street from the restaurant, a DynaCorp flatbed half-ton truck had loaded up their seabags and suitcases to transport them to the ship and bring them into the wardroom, where the officers would later relocate their stuff into their staterooms. So far, the XO hadn’t assigned staterooms. Typically each of the three officer staterooms would be assigned to a department head, and his or her direct reports would bunk there. Which was somewhat miserable, Pacino thought, since there would be no getting away from the boss. Doubly awful, considering his boss was River Styxx.

They had walked by the massive submarine assembly building, which was currently assembling the 802 Oklahoma, then a jog south, then west to the jetty leading to the North Pier, eventually walking past a material storage yard and maintenance building to the end of Pier 1 North.

“Yes, thar she blows,” Vevera said.

The three officers stopped and gazed at the USS New Jersey. The boat was mostly identical in appearance to the Vermont. A long, black cylinder, lying deep in the water so that the deck’s curvature allowed walking on the top surface. The plug trunk hatch was open, as was the forward hatch. There were no dog-houses erected over the hatches since they would have gotten in the way of the wooden platform placed on the hull aft of the sail — the conning tower, which was a vertical fin rising out of the hull near the bow. The platform was painted white and had railing draped with red, white, and blue bunting. A lectern was located in the center of the platform. At the top of the sail, the periscopes and masts were all retracted. Unlike Vermont, her anechoic tile coating was fully intact and looked brand new, the hull shiny and black. The boat was tied up port-side-to, her stern facing north, her sonar dome facing south, down-river. Pacino looked northward, at the drydock and roll-out table.

“Well, there won’t be a back-full-ahead-flank underway from here, not the way the Jersey is tied up,” Pacino said. “Put on a backing bell and run right into the drydock.”

“Damned shame,” Vevera said. “I would have liked to see you do that back-full-ahead-flank thing.”

“He made it look easy,” Dankleff said, clapping Pacino on the shoulder. “Although it turned out to be a back-emergency-ahead-flank underway. Still, Lipstick here drove it like he stole it and we slipped right out of Norfolk. Not like the time you fucked it up, Squirt Gun.”

“Hey, I showed him how not to do it. After that? Success was an easy day.”

“You’ll have to learn how to deal with tugboats and a harbor pilot this time, Lipstick,” Dankleff said, grinning. “Assuming you’re the one driving us out.”

“Check out the other side of the assembly roll-out table,” Pacino said. “Floating drydock.” The dock was lined up with their pier. Inside was the bow of a submarine, the sonar dome removed, the internals covered with canvas draped over scaffolding, with more scaffolding in the dock, arranged so densely around the boat it could barely be made out to be a submarine. “I bet that’s the north end of the 798 Massachusetts there. The future Vermont.”

“All these names of states,” Dankleff said in disgust. “At least Big Navy finally woke up and named the last four Barb, Tang, Wahoo and Silversides. So named for World War II combat submarines, decorated all.”

“Much cooler,” Vevera said. “Still, New Jersey is a tough state, and who can forget the fighting battleship New Jersey? Well, let’s get aboard and get our stuff sorted.”

Pacino and the others greeted the topside watchstander, a short and petite female sonarman third class, who wore a nametag ironically reading LONGFELLOW. Pacino wondered how much teasing she’d suffered on the boat from that name. She read their orders, since this was their first time reporting aboard, and scanned their retinae with her handheld biometric device, then returned their salutes as they formally requested permission to come aboard.

“Permission granted, gentlemen.”

“That always sounds strange to my ears,” Pacino remarked as they crossed the gangway to the plug trunk hatch. “Somehow, ‘gentlemen’ is something a more senior man would say to a group of junior guys.”

“It’s the plural of ‘sir,’ Lipstick,” Vevera said. “She can’t say ‘permission granted, sirs.’”

“I suppose,” Pacino said. He leaned over the gaping maw of the plug trunk hatch. “Down ladder!” he called, then stepped down the ladder into the cavernous plug trunk. The smell of the submarine invaded his nostrils then, identical to his father’s old boats, as well as his own — the Piranha and the Vermont—a blend of atmo-control amines, ozone from the electrical equipment, cooking grease, lubrication oil, diesel fuel, diesel exhaust, seasoned with a slight tang of sewage. But there was something else — something cooking in the galley, something greasy.

He stepped through the side hatch and then to the steep stairway — called a ladder — to the middle level central passageway, ducking left into the wardroom, the conference room for officers, also used for their meal service, and in an emergency, a surgical suite. On the outboard bulkhead, a gigantic framed aerial photograph of the old battleship New Jersey was bolted, the massive warship firing her guns, huge plumes of flames emerging from the guns. The room was crowded with a pile of luggage at the forward end. At the aft end, the XO was muttering something to the supply chief, who vanished aft into the galley. Quinnivan looked up and saw the three junior officers. They were the first aboard.

“Hey! You scurvy lieutenants! Pick up your trash and stow it in your fookin’ staterooms! This is the wardroom, not a luggage carousel.”

“But XO,” Dankleff said, “you haven’t assigned us staterooms yet.”

Quinnivan paused. “Okay, then, stateroom one, farthest forward, goes to the navigator, Elvis Lewinsky, with the communicator and supply officer bunking in with him. Stateroom two is for the engineer, Madam Moose Kelly. So you, Vevera, and you, Dankleff, will bunk in with her. Draw straws for bottom or top bunks, I don’t care. Middle rack is the engineer’s.”

“Aye, sir,” Dankleff said, finding a seabag he thought was his, but tossing it back on the mountainous pile.

“And as for you, Mr. Lipstick, you’ll find yourself in stateroom three with the weapons officer, Ms. River Styxx, with electrical officer Varney bunked in. Even though Short Hull Cooper is in Ms. Styxx’s department, he’s a fookin’ nub, so he’s going in the upper level forward half-sixpack along with Long Hull.” The upper level forward half-sixpack room had belonged to Pacino on Vermont. It would feel odd to be in one of the three numbered staterooms, odder still to bunk in with River Styxx, who he had slept with before, although he had no memory of it other than waking up with her. At least she’d seemed happy and satisfied when the sun had risen. God help him now, he thought, if he’d disappointed her that night.

The three J.O.s found their bags and lugged them to their staterooms. Pacino was almost fully unpacked when Quinnivan poked his head in.

“No officers’ call today, Mr. Lipstick. But find your opposite number from PCU New Jersey and get turned over. Change of command ceremony is at fifteen hundred. You got your choker whites?”

“Yes, XO.” Pacino had packed them, but the ultra-starched service dress whites were probably as wrinkled as an unmade bed from being tossed into his seabag.

“Good. Pass that word on to your scurvy buddies, yeah?”

“Aye, sir.”

“As soon as the command change is over, you’re driving us out. Or I should say, Short Hull Cooper is driving as your under-instruction. See to it he doesn’t fuck up, or it’s your head.”

“Understood, sir.”

“And laddy, you’ll be using tugs and a harbor pilot for this run. Think you can handle it?”

“It won’t be a problem, XO.”

“Good, lad. I’ll see you topside at fourteen-forty-five, yeah?” With that, the Irishman vanished.

Pacino had stowed his things into one of the cubbyholes and the rest into the bed pan under the upper rack, then taken the ladder steps to the upper level to the sonar equipment space, or SES. Inside, he found two chief petty officers deep in conversation. They turned to look at him, and to Pacino’s delight, one of them was Senior Chief Tom “Whale” Albanese, who had been his leading chief of sonar on Vermont and had gone with Pacino on the Panther run.

“Whale!” Pacino said, grinning and pulling the senior chief into a bear hug, the wiry redhead smiling back, his uniform smelling of the cigarettes that he chain-smoked when he could get away with it in the non-smoking universe of the submarine force.

“Mr. Patch!” Albanese exclaimed.

“I wasn’t sure if the goat locker would embark on New Jersey,” Pacino said.

“We were given a choice, but XO put pressure on me and a few others, but he needn’t have bothered. I’m happy to be here.”

“Aren’t you married, Whale?”

Albanese made a sour face. “Newly separated. Yet another reason to get out of there.”

“Kids?”

“Fortunately, no. Diane had a miscarriage, and we fought so much after that… well, it just didn’t make sense to stay together.”

“I’m sorry to hear, Senior Chief. Really. I haven’t been through anything like that, but I feel for you.”

“Thanks, Mr. Patch. Anyway, I was going through the turnover with Chief Carlyle-Smith here.”

Pacino shook the PCU sonar chief’s hand. “How is the turnover going? And where is the PCU sonar officer?”

“We’re in great shape,” Albanese said. “And the PCU sonar officer is in the hospital.”

“What happened?”

The PCU sonar chief looked at Pacino. “Domestic dispute. His husband punched him hard enough to break his jaw.”

“What?” Pacino said. “His husband?”

Albanese half-nodded at Pacino. “It’s a brave new world, sir.”

“It don’t matter none,” Chief Carlyle-Smith said. “Sonar is a hunnert percent. I ain’t never seen a sonar suite this tuned up and perfect. Especially coming out of new-con.”

“Hey, don’t jinx it,” Albanese said.

“Sprinkle some holy water on it, Whale,” Carlyle-Smith said. “Anyway, it’s all yours. I’m out of here.”

The PCU sonar chief stepped out. “Is it as good as he claims?” Pacino asked.

Albanese nodded. “For once, the shipyard didn’t hump the pooch.”

Pacino nodded. “Well, okay then. I guess I’ll jump into my choker whites for the change of command. I’ll see you topside, Whale.”

Commander Timothy Talisker “Scotch” Seagraves was almost finished unpacking his gear into the captain’s stateroom. He decided on a last-minute shave before he’d don the starched tunic of his dress whites. He glanced at his face in the mirror, somewhat encouraged that despite turning thirty-nine, his face hadn’t really changed in fifteen years. He was fortunate that despite rich submarine food, he had retained his thin build, although he had gained perhaps ten pounds since Annapolis graduation, but it helped that he was over six feet tall, he thought. He could carry the weight easily. Seagraves’ ex-wife — back before she’d decided she hated him — used to go off about how movie-star handsome he was, but he’d never seen it himself. His face seemed bony to his own eyes, with stark cheekbones, a pronounced brow, shallow cheeks, a cleft chin, ruler-straight jawline, and too-full lips. He shook off the internal debate, lathered up, shaved and was just toweling off when the 1MC general announcing circuit clicked, then boomed with the topside watchstander’s soprano voice.

“ComSubDevRon Twelve, arriving!”

That would be the boss of the local squadron, Seagraves thought, Captain Liam “Twister” Flanagan. Which was odd, since word had come down from ComSubFor that New Jersey was to be a Norfolk-based Squadron Six boat, not a Groton-based Development Squadron Twelve unit, which was Flanagan’s fiefdom. Seagraves had known Flanagan years in the past when Flanagan had been the navigator of the USS Newport News and Seagraves had been her MPA. They’d sailed Newport News for a year together before Flanagan rotated off to be the XO of the Topeka. Soon, a knock came to the door and Seagraves opened it.

Captain Flanagan was short and slight, with a bushy head of brown hair and a well-trimmed goatee. He was dressed in starched dress whites, obviously for the change of command ceremony upcoming in the next hour. Seagraves had put on the pants and shoes, but he was still just wearing his white T-shirt tucked into his white pants, the starched high-collar whites with full medals on a hanger by the door to the stateroom. Seagraves shook Flanagan’s hand and waved him to a seat at the small conference table. He sat in his high-backed command chair and looked over at Flanagan.

“Can I get us coffee, Commodore?”

“Coffee would be excellent, Captain.”

Seagraves made a call to the wardroom, then made small talk with the commodore about his family and life on the base, and how well he knew the base commander, a Naval Academy firstie when Seagraves was a lowly plebe. Once the coffee service arrived and Seagraves had poured for them both, Flanagan got down to business, withdrawing a folded manila envelope he’d had in his back pocket under his choker white tunic.

“Your sealed orders,” Flanagan said, smirking. “Top secret and very hush-hush.”

Seagraves opened the envelope and spread the two pages on the table. He scanned the order, then reread it more carefully. He looked up at Flanagan.

“His Majesty’s Naval Base, Clyde, Faslane, Scotland. U.K. submarine base. Way the hell up north.”

Flanagan nodded.

“The orders seem to stop there,” Seagraves noted. “Make all haste to UK SubBase Faslane, where New Jersey will load out weapons, gear and supplies for a hundred-and-forty day run. Then it stops.” He frowned. “A hundred-and-forty days, Commodore? What the hell is going on?”

“Unknown, Scotch. But obviously, if you’re going for your load-out at latitude fifty-six north, you’re spec-op will be farther north to see our good friends from the Russian Republic.”

“This loadout looks unusual,” Seagraves noted.

“Arctic supplies,” Flanagan said. “A dry-deck shelter. And a team of SEALs will be joining you. Same blokes you deployed to the Gulf of Oman with this summer.”

Seagraves nodded. “Always good to operate with old friends.”

Flanagan nodded. “The same reason you folks from the Vermont all cross-decked together over to the New Jersey.” Flanagan stood. “I suppose I should get topside for your change of command.”

“Thanks for coming over and delivering the orders personally, Commodore.”

“It was good to see you again, Scotch.” At the door leading to the passageway, Flanagan turned to Seagraves. “Oh, and Scotch, try not to burn New Jersey to smithereens, will ya?”

“Fuck you, Twister,” Seagraves said, a crooked smile on his face.

He pulled on the starched choker whites and buttoned them up, then picked up the orders and reread them. Oddly, there was no code-name for whatever this operation would be. The orders were classified top secret but not code-word, which meant the real secrecy would begin in Faslane. Seagraves put the orders in his safe, locked it, then grabbed his white officer’s cap with the scrambled egg embroidery on the brim, and left his stateroom to head to the plug trunk hatch.

9

Captain Seagraves stood at rigid attention, saluted the PCU commander of New Jersey, and said, “I relieve you, sir.”

The PCU commander returned the salute and said, “I stand relieved.”

Light applause broke out on the platform and on the pier. Lieutenant Anthony Pacino watched Seagraves shaking hands with the DevRon Twelve commodore. Ditching the after-ceremony conversations, Pacino stepped to the plug trunk hatch. The sooner he could dump these dress whites, the better. He hurried to stateroom three, hoping he would beat River Styxx to the room. Changing into his working uniform for the underway operation would be embarrassing if she charged into the room while he was in his boxers. He finished changing uniforms, grabbed his pad computer, his binoculars and his brand-new USS New Jersey ball cap and opened the door just as Styxx was reaching for the doorknob.

“Ma’am,” Pacino said instinctively, coming to rigid attention. “Weps.”

“There’s no ma’ams onboard, Mr. Pacino,” she said, smiling slightly. “Just Weps or River. Although, I propose if we’re undressed in the same space at the same time, we’re strictly on a first name basis.”

Pacino smiled at her, relieved that she was being friendly.

“Any news about your navigator?” she asked. “Romanov?”

Pacino’s smile vanished, his face drooping to sadness. “Last I heard, she was in bad shape. She may have lost brain function.” It was easier to say that than the words brain dead.

Styxx put her hand on Pacino’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Patch. Maybe we’ll hear an update when we’re on the way to, well, wherever we’re going.”

“Any news on that? Where are we headed?”

“Your buddy Lewinsky plotted navigation points on the chart, but they only go to the dive point due east of Nantucket and then fifty miles beyond. After that, it’s apparently top secret. Maybe he’ll tell you.”

“Did you ask him?”

She nodded. “Predictably, he told me to go fuck myself.” She grinned. “You know, in a totally professional way.”

“Oh, of course,” Pacino laughed. “Anyway. I’d better do a pre-watch tour.”

“Have fun up there, Patch. I’ll be your contact coordinator.”

“Watch out for all that dangerous surface traffic.”

“Yeah, sailboats and the occasional family fishing outing on a motorboat.”

“And the inevitable Russian trawler.”

Pacino turned and hurried aft to go to maneuvering to see Vevera and how the reactor plant was behaving.

Pacino climbed through the deck grating’s hatch up to the cockpit of the sail, joining Ensign Short Hull Cooper on the bridge. The bridge was a recessed standing area cut into the top of the sail, the top surface of the conning tower retracted using segmented flaps called clamshells. The deck of the space was grating set over the bridge tunnel, the vertical accessway to the bridge from the upper level of the forward compartment. With the boat facing south, the way out of the river, the conning officer would start out on the port side to supervise their disconnection from the pier, and since Short Hull would be driving, Pacino put his pad computer on the receptacle on the starboard side. In the river basin, a large tugboat slowly approached them. Short Hull’s VHF radio crackled to life.

“U.S. Navy Submarine Captain, this is Navy tug Massapequa II, requesting permission to tie up on your starboard side, over.”

Short Hull looked over at Pacino. “What do I do, sir?”

Pacino shook his head. “The only ‘sirs’ onboard are the XO and the captain, Short Hull. Call down to the captain’s stateroom and ask permission to bring aboard the tug. Hand me the VHF.”

Short Hull picked up the 7MC, selected the captain’s stateroom and clicked the microphone button. “Captain, Junior Officer of the Deck, sir.”

Pacino clicked the VHF radio’s transmit button. “Navy tug Massapequa II, this is U.S. Navy submarine, please stand by, over.”

“Navy submarine Captain, roger, standing by,” the VHF rasped. In the channel, the tug’s engines grew quiet as she idled, only keeping up with the current in the Thames.

“How come you didn’t answer up as the USS New Jersey?” Short Hull asked.

“We never self-identify,” Pacino explained. “In case our good Russian or Chinese friends are loitering out in the Sound. We keep the enemy guessing.”

“Captain,” the 7MC crackled.

“Captain, Junior Officer of the Deck, sir,” Short Hull said, sounding amazingly steady. Pacino wondered if he himself had sounded anywhere near that solid when he’d first conned out Vermont on the Panther run. “Request permission to bring aboard the tug on the starboard side, sir.”

“JOOD, you have permission to bring aboard the tug to tie up on our starboard side,” Captain Seagraves’ voice rasped.

Short Hull acknowledged the captain. Pacino handed him the VHF radio.

“Navy tug Massapequa II, this is U.S. Navy submarine, permission granted to come alongside and tie up on our starboard side, over.”

“Roger U.S. Navy submarine Captain, Massapequa II, out.”

On the deck, the line handlers accepted the heavy manila ropes tossed over by the tugboat’s crew. Soon the tug was made fast to New Jersey’s starboard side, lashed tight at the tug’s bow and stern.

Pacino checked his diver’s watch. 1559. The captain had wanted the ship in the channel by 1600. Dammit, they were going to be late.

“Bridge, Pilot,” the 7MC blasted. “Captain to the bridge!”

“Pilot, Bridge, aye,” Short Hull said into the 7MC mike. Pacino stood aside and lifted up the bridge deck grating. The captain climbed up from the bridge access tunnel.

“Afternoon, sir,” Pacino said.

“Afternoon, Captain,” Short Hull seconded.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Seagraves said. He lowered the grating and climbed the four steps up to the top of the sail, where a temporary set of handrails had been erected, the “flying bridge.”

“Mr. Cooper, are we ready to get underway?” Seagraves said, latching his safety lanyard to a D-ring set into the flying bridge’s handrails.

“Except for radar, Captain. Navigator requests we raise the radar mast and rotate and radiate.”

“No,” Seagraves said. “No sense giving listening electronic ears out there our radar pulse rate signature as a newly constructed boat. Let them guess. Tell the navigator to get by with the DynaCorp yacht radar.”

“Aye, sir. We’re ready to get underway, then, Captain.”

“What about the harbor pilot?”

Cooper looked at Pacino, obviously lost.

Pacino reached for the 1JV phone handset and the 7MC mike at the same time, barking into the 7MC, “Pilot, 1JV.”

Dankleff’s voice answered on the 1JV phone circuit. “Pilot.”

“Pilot,” Pacino said, “what’s the status of the harbor pilot?”

“Officer of the Deck, the harbor pilot is here in control looking at the chart with the Nav. Wait, he is on the way to the upper level and the bridge now.”

“Very well,” Pacino said and hung up. “Captain, harbor pilot is on the way up.”

“Request to lay to the bridge!” an older voice croaked from below.

“Permission to come up,” Pacino said. Cooper pulled up the deck grating and a seventy-year-old grizzled sailor climbed up, wearing a high-viz yellow jacket.

“Afternoon, guys,” the harbor pilot said. He climbed up the steps to the top of the sail and stood next to the captain, the two talking quietly.

“Check the chart and the tides one last time, Short Hull,” Pacino said to Cooper.

“Aye, sir. I mean, yes, Patch.”

“Junior Officer of the Deck!” Seagraves barked. “Are we ready to get underway now?”

“Captain, yes, sir, New Jersey is ready to get underway.”

“Well, then, Mr. Cooper, get underway.”

“Get underway, aye aye, sir.” Cooper glanced at Pacino.

“Take off the brow,” Pacino said, referring to the aluminum gangway between the pier and the upper surface of the submarine. He handed Cooper a megaphone he pulled from under the bridge communication box.

“On the pier!” Cooper said into the bullhorn. “Remove the gangway!”

The diesel cherry-picker crane on the pier rumbled to life, its boom pulling the gangway off the hull and rotating to set it back down on the pier. Cooper looked again at Pacino.

“Just order the pier crew to take in all lines,” Pacino said. “I’ll operate the ship’s whistle. And order the pilot to stand by to answer all bells.” Cooper nodded. “And be ready to order the lookout to shift colors.”

“Pilot,” Short Hull said into the 7MC mike, “stand by to answer all bells.”

“Stand by to answer all bells, Bridge, Pilot, aye,” Dankleff’s voice barked.

“On the pier!” Cooper shouted in the bullhorn, “Take in all lines!”

Pacino watched from behind the shorter man, and as the last line was tossed over from the pier, he reached under the bridge cockpit ledge forward and found the ship’s air horn lever and pulled it aft. A blasting roar came from the horn, the earsplitting noise sounding like the Queen Mary was leaving the pier. Pacino held it for a full eight seconds, the horn notifying all in the river basin that the submarine was getting underway.

“Lookout, shift colors!” Cooper yelled up to the flying bridge. The lookout quickly pulled on the lanyard, and the American flag came up on the mast behind the captain, the flag underneath it the banner of the force, a snarling Jolly Roger skull-and-crossbones on a black field, gothic script stating, “U.S. Submarine Force.”

Pacino lifted the VHF to his lips and hit the transmit button. “Navy tug Massapequa II, take us to center of channel.” The engines of the tug roared as the tug put on ahead turns and maneuvered them to the center of the river. Pacino took a quick look up-river, but the Thames was empty, and there were no vessels down-river either. He looked at Cooper. “Put on ahead one third with a right rudder.”

“Pilot, Bridge,” Cooper said into the 7MC, “all ahead one third, right full rudder.”

“All ahead one third, Bridge, Pilot, aye, right full rudder, and my rudder is right full and Maneuvering answers, all ahead one third.”

“Bridge, Navigator,” Lewinsky’s baritone voice boomed from the 7MC, hold us fifty yards left of center of channel, recommend course one seven five.”

“Pilot, Bridge,” Cooper said, “come to course one seven five.”

“Bridge, Pilot, come to one seven five, aye. Steering course one seven five.”

“Pilot, Bridge, aye,” Cooper acknowledged. He looked at Pacino. “All good?”

“You’re doing a hell of a job,” Pacino said, putting the binoculars to his eyes again and scanning down river. The seaway was still empty.

“Bridge, Navigator,” Lewinsky said over the bridge box speaker, “turn point at Point Alpha is in one thousand yards, new course one three five.”

The submarine and the tug moved slowly down the river, the scenery of the lush Connecticut coastline sliding by, opulent houses lining the river on either side of the nearly mile-wide channel. Eventually the New London Ledge Lighthouse grew large ahead of them and the shorelines to port and starboard were behind them. They’d emerged into the Sound.

“Bridge, Navigator, mark the turn at Point Alpha, new course one three five.”

“Pilot, Bridge,” Cooper called into the 7MC mike, “left full rudder, steady course one three five.”

Dankleff acknowledged. Pacino elbowed Cooper. “Look down channel as we go into and come out of the turn,” he ordered. Cooper looked with his naked eyes, then lifted his binoculars.

“Channel is clear,” he said.

The harbor pilot shook Seagraves hand, climbed down into the cockpit, excused himself, and vanished down into the vertical trunk to the upper level. Pacino leaned over the starboard side of the sail and saw the harbor pilot walk forward toward the tug. Two of the tug’s sailors helped him get back aboard the tug.

Pacino nodded to Cooper.

“Captain, request to shove off the tug,” Cooper called up to Seagraves.

“Shove off the tug,” Seagraves ordered, his face covered by binoculars as he scanned down the channel.

“Tug Massapequa II, when able, shove off,” Cooper said into the radio.

“Roger, Navy Submarine. Fair winds, following seas,” the VHF speaker squawked.

The deck crew tossed over the tug’s lines and the tug’s engines roared as she veered off to the right, circling behind them to return to Groton.

“Tell the navigator,” Pacino ordered.

“Navigator, Bridge, the tug has shoved off.”

“Bridge, Navigator, aye.”

“Once the deck is rigged for dive,” Pacino said to Cooper. “Increase speed to full.”

“Bridge, Pilot,” Dankleff called. “Deck is rigged for dive by Chief McGuire, checked by Ensign Cooper.”

“Pilot, Bridge, all ahead full.”

As the ship sped up, the water climbed up over the nosecone at the bow and splashed up to the leading edge of the sail, breaking on either side and foaming back up over the aft part of the deck. The flags snapped in the wind aft. Pacino smiled to himself. The sounds and sensations of getting a submarine underway always gave him an odd sense of happiness.

“Mr. Cooper, secure the maneuvering watch and station the normal surfaced watch,” Seagraves ordered as he climbed down from the flying bridge. “When you can, disassemble the flying bridge.” He vanished into the bridge access trunk.

Lewinsky guided the ship through two more turns as Fishers Island faded astern, the new course 090 until Block Island was behind them. At Point Charlie, the navigator had them turn to east-southeast to skirt Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

“Bridge, Contact Coordinator,” River Styxx’s voice came smoothly over the 7MC. “New visual contact, Victor One, bearing one one two, range two thousand yards by radar. Contact bearing rate is right. Sonar reports contact is shut down and drifting.”

Pacino trained his binoculars to the bearing. “There he is,” he said.

“What is it?” Cooper asked.

“Russian trawler. Or more accurately, a Russian spy ship disguised as a trawler. Lurking just outside our territorial waters.”

Cooper scanned it with his binoculars.

“Report it to the captain,” Pacino ordered.

Cooper picked up the 7MC and made the report to Seagraves, who simply said, “Captain, aye.”

“I see now why the captain decided to keep our radar off.”

“We’ll rotate and radiate once we turn to the northeast,” Pacino said. “The Russian will be well astern by then, and we’ll be seeing heavy traffic inbound to Boston Harbor.”

As Nantucket grew close, at the hour of 1800, their watch reliefs climbed up to the bridge — Varney and Short Hull — and Pacino and Cooper turned over the watch and climbed back into the submarine.

They hurried down the ladder to the middle level and found the captain seated at the end of the table, digging into the traditional meal he’d called for when the sub got underway, New York strip steak with mashed potatoes.

“Go ahead, Coop,” Pacino said to Short Hull.

“Captain, Mr. Pacino and I have been properly relieved of the deck and the conn by Mr. Varney and Mr. Cooper. Ship is steaming at full on course zero nine eight in the channel to the south of Nantucket headed to Point Foxtrot where we will turn northeast. Reactor is natural circulation and the electric plant is in a normal full-power lineup.”

Seagraves frowned up at Cooper for a moment, then said, “You did an adequate job up there, Mr. Cooper. Have a seat and get some chow.”

Cooper looked disappointed as he pulled up a chair next to Pacino. Pacino smirked at Cooper and said quietly, “The word ‘adequate’ means ‘perfect’ in the captain’s usage.”

“Why?” Cooper asked.

Pacino shrugged. “He worries we’ll get cocky and then something would go wrong. It’s his sailor’s superstition.”

“You Vermont-ers are fucking weird. No offense, Patch.”

Pacino laughed. “None taken.”

Vostov knocked on Anya’s door and opened it slowly. He found her in Nanny Roksana’s lap, being read a story. Her eyes were red and swollen, and when she looked up at him, tears formed and rolled down her cheeks. She jumped to her feet and ran to him and hugged him, her tears wetting his jeans. He sank to a crouch and hugged her tight, glancing up to the nanny and waving her out with his head. Two SBP security troops in tactical gear stood in the room’s corners away from the door, both trying to look inconspicuous and both failing.

“Let’s sit down together, okay?” he said gently to her and she nodded, sniffling. He guided her to the overstuffed chair where she liked to have stories read to her before bed. The room was almost identical to her room in the Kremlin complex apartment, which had taken some doing, since the north dacha was much different than the ornate apartment.

The north dacha was a three-story log cabin set in deep woods, with a yard big enough to land a military helicopter, but beyond that, the trees were too thick to see anything beyond the edge of the helipad. Vostov liked this house much better than his gigantic and official presidential retreat fifty kilometers south of Moscow, which was even more ornate than the Kremlin compound, all white marble and soaring halls, as if it had been built by a seventeenth century Tsar. This log lodge had been designed by Vostov personally — perhaps “design” was an exaggeration. He’d sketched on cocktail napkins and a team of architects had given birth to drawings and models, and he’d changed it over and over until it met his approval. Of course, Larisa had always hated it, and usually found an excuse to avoid coming here, but that was fine with Vostov, since it gave him more time to be with Anya by himself.

“I can see that you are very sad about Mommy,” Vostov opened.

“Daddy, did they shoot her?” She shot a glance at the SBP guards.

“No, Anya. Mommy was in a store and some very bad men came in and took over the store. They tried to get some of their bad men friends sprung out of prison. They threatened to hurt Mommy. But guards like those nice men over there,” he nodded his head at one of the SBP men, “went into the store to rescue Mommy, and they did. They shot all the bad men. But the gas they used to put the bad men to sleep, well, that’s what hurt Mommy. Mommy had a very weak heart and nobody knew that. They didn’t find that out until Mommy was in the hospital. They tried to save her, but her heart was too weak, baby, and — I’m so sorry — but Mommy died.”

For the next few minutes Anya just cried and wailed in his lap. What can be said to a six-year-old in the face of death, he wondered. He held her tight and waited for her to calm down.

“Now, in a few minutes, we’re going to get dressed in our best clothes and we’re going to travel to Mommy’s funeral. Do you know what a funeral is?”

“I think so, Daddy. They will put Mommy in a wood box, dig a hole, and put her in the hole, and then they’ll put dirt back into the hole. And then there’s a stone that goes there.”

Vostov nodded. “We’ll take Mommy to a big church first, where they will say some things about Mommy’s life, and there will be lots of people there, people who loved Mommy and lots of them who love you too, and we’ll all be together, we’ll all be sad together. And we’ll take Mommy in her coffin to a cemetery, which is a very pretty place where we put the people we love after they die. But you have to know that Mommy is not really in that box, sweetheart. Mommy is still alive, she’s just alive in Heaven. In the afterlife. Did Mommy ever tell you about Heaven?”

Anya nodded seriously. “She said it was a beautiful place where people go after they die, like my bunny rabbit. Do you think Mommy is there with Bunny?”

Vostov nodded, reaching to the side table for a tissue. He wiped the tears from his cheeks and blew his nose. This was much more difficult than he’d imagined it. But through it all, he noticed, he didn’t feel the slightest amount of guilt. Which was strange. He must still be in shock, he thought.

The rest of the morning was something out of a blurred fever dream. Nanny Roksana knocked and brought in a selection of dresses for Anya. One was white, another black, a third a pattern of primary colors. Vostov sank to one knee and asked Anya which one she wanted to wear, but told her, before she chose, that everyone at the funeral would be wearing black, because that was a sad color and a way to show sadness. Anya looked up him, her eyes filled with tears, and said, “Daddy, Mommy would want me to wear bright happy colors, because Mommy always hated it whenever I was sad.” Vostov nodded at Roksana, feeling a stabbing pain in his chest.

The next thing he knew, he was in the gleaming black presidential Aurus stretch limo, with Anya, Roksana, and Tonya Pasternak. He avoided eye contact with them and simply stared at the floor, only looking up when Tonya reached into the minibar and poured him a double vodka. He downed it in one gulp. Tonya lifted an eyebrow to see if he wanted a refill, but he shook his head.

The limo stopped in front of the newly built Cathedral of Christ the Savior. New, he supposed, in the timeline of cathedrals, the final touches put on the gold-plated domes in 2000, the year Putin had come to power. He walked in, Anya’s small warm hand in his. They walked by what seemed a hundred rows of grieving well-wishers and dignitaries from around the world. He tried mightily to keep his eyes dry, but when he’d hear Anya sniff, it seemed the wetness came anew.

The front pew was reserved for him, Anya, and Nanny Roksana. He waved Pasternak to join them. She’d pinned her hair back in a prim bun and wore an especially frumpy black dress and flat shoes, making her seem forty years older, which was a good thing. He didn’t need anyone thinking his beautiful aide was an affair partner. Not that she ever would be, he thought. With his troubles with potency in the last decade, it would be something of a relief not to be expected to perform sexually. He’d heard about pharmaceuticals that could help with the problem, but that seemed absurd, to take a pill in order to make love to a woman.

When he realized his mind had drifted inappropriately to sex, he bit his lip and forced himself to look up at the massive white and gold coffin made for Larisa, surrounded by flowers piled high around it, a huge portrait of her hanging in the background, the photo one of the few Larisa’s extreme vanity would allow to be published. In life, she usually thought that nineteen out of twenty photos of her made her look ugly or fat, which was insane, since she’d always been gorgeous.

His mind wandered during the eulogies and prayers. He’d be meeting with a parade of foreign dignitaries after the burial service, all having flown in to offer condolences, which he could do without, but it was all part of the pageantry of being head of state — but it was the part he hated.

He wondered who would be in the American delegation. Carlucci would never come. Vostov’s relationship with the American president had had ups and downs, and was currently at a low point after the Panther incident. At best, he would send his vice president. What was her name? He went blank for a long moment, then remembered he’d met her at a Kremlin reception last year. Chushi, he thought. Karen Chushi, a pretty, middle-aged slender woman, friendly enough. He wondered what he should say to her, or what she would say to him.

The funeral procession to Novodevichy Cemetery seemed to take hours, then the tiresome graveside service, but finally they were back in the limo for the ride to the Kremlin. The SPB chief had assured him it was now safe to return to the Moscow apartment, but Vostov already knew that. He’d return Anya with Nanny Roksana to the apartment, then go to his palatial Kremlin office suite to meet with the foreign dignitaries. He glanced at his watch, calculating how many hours it would be until his routine could return to normal.

A knock at the door, and Pasternak jumped up to answer. An aide handed in a fresh black suit in plastic. Pasternak took it and handed it to Vostov, who quickly took off his shoes and pants, dumped his jacket on the floor with them, and pulled the freshly pressed identical suit on. The one he’d worn to the funeral was stained with Anya’s tears and mucus. He was all for theater on the political stage, but wearing that suit would have gone too far.

As Vostov suited back up, he told Tonya to hold off the first visitor until he had time to talk to her. She took a seat in front of his desk, but he stood and waved her to the more informal setting of the four club chairs clustered around the fireplace. He sat and she put her pad computer on the coffee table and sat stiffly, as if she were at attention. She’d changed out of the loose frock she’d worn to the funeral and now had on a flattering black business suit, a beige blouse under her jacket.

“A few thoughts from our Murmansk trip,” he said. She nodded and reached for her pad computer to take notes. “The question the captain of the Belgorod had, about the dangers of sailing under the ice with a submarine that big.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Have Mikhail make sure they will outfit the submarine with arctic supplies, just in case things go to hell under there. Shelters, generator, heater, parkas, emergency food — hell, snowmobiles. That boat’s big, it can store all that stuff inside.”

“Got it, sir.”

“Also, I want an answer from the Navy about getting one or two nuclear-tipped torpedoes loaded onto her.”

“I’ll check, sir, but I don’t think the Navy has that in their inventory. Let me check.” She stroked through the classified search application, arriving finally at an answer. “We haven’t manufactured one for twenty years, sir. There was a hundred-centimeter torpedo with a one megaton warhead. We called it the Gigantskiy. Apparently NATO named it Magnum. It needed a special torpedo tube, it was so big.”

“Get the data on it to that Sevmash chief engineer. What was his name?”

“Director Voronin, sir.”

“Voronin, right. See if he can either find one or make one. And get it on that sub in the next week.”

Tonya scribbled madly for a moment, then looked up at him expectantly. When he stroked his chin and looked at the fireplace, she said to him, “Mr. President, I have to ask. With the time it will take to load all this gear and food and fabricate a new torpedo, plus all the time this journey will take, according to Captain Alexeyev, why don’t you just send the sub into the North Atlantic on a direct route to the targets? What is your thinking?”

He nodded, having expected the question, but from Mikhail, not Pasternak.

“What I told Alexeyev, none of that is what I really think. This whole Poseidon or Status-6 project. Have you seen the budget overruns on this program? And the time they’ve taken? And how much we spent refurbishing an ancient Omega submarine to carry it? And outfitting that deep-diver, Losharik, with the capability to place these things? If you haven’t, I can tell you, it’s billions of rubles. And effort. And time. For a ridiculous weapon that we wouldn’t even control. We can’t even push a button from here to wake it up and make it explode. We’d have to send a plane with a sonar buoy to ping the sound that makes the thing detonate. Or an underwater commando. What the hell good is that?”

“Mr. Putin seemed to think it would be good for deterrence,” Pasternak said. “Plus, you heard the last daily brief’s report of the possibility of nuclear munitions placed by the Americans in our ports. If that is true, it would prove that they started all this, and our placing the Poseidons will be a good way to force the Americans to remove their bombs.”

“Look, Tonya, I’m convinced that these boogeyman bombs in our ports are disinformation — probably planted by the opposition, or the CIA. I’m not taking any action on anything related to these alleged port bombs unless and until FSB or the Navy can find one and show it to me. And as for this ridiculous Poseidon program, I can’t just cancel it. That would be a huge admission of failure. Plus, the way the previous administration trumpeted this so-called superweapon, if we canceled it, we might lose support. The Russkiy Svoboda Party would call us weak, and they’d pile that on to the evidence from the whole Panther mess. Hell, we could lose the election. So the whole program, I can’t just let it sit there with even more funding demands rolling in every day. The only real thing I can do is put it on ice. Quite literally. If the sub and torpedoes are out there, supposedly on the way to American targets, we can use that to show that we’re strong — hell, we could even leak the plan to NATO. The damned Svoboda assholes can’t say we’re lying down for NATO and the Americans then. Plus, that submarine and those weapons will take months to get in place, if they even make it through the polar icecap at all. This will delay the entire issue until well after the election. How many days?”

“Fifty-six, sir. And by the way, your support jumped three points after Larisa died. But I see what you’re doing. It seems to make sense. But why the nuclear torpedo if you really just want to stall the program?”

“I read the file on the loss of the Kaliningrad. Once the Americans knew she was going under ice, they sent an attack sub up there after her. Kaliningrad had a Gigantskiy torpedo. It might have saved her crew — it busted through thick ice and allowed the escape capsule to surface. I figure, number one, that nuclear torpedo might come in handy in the event there’s an emergency and Belgorod has to surface and the ice is thick. And number two, if there is an American sub shadowing it, the torpedo may come in handy neutralizing it. After all, the way I see it, we get two free shots.”

“Free shots?”

“The Americans sank two of our submarines not two months ago and we let it slide for some good reasons, but it still goes without saying that Carlucci owes me two free shots. He can’t very well retaliate if he loses a sub under the icecap after sinking two of ours. And the Americans would have trouble blaming us for the loss of their sub under the ice anyway — too many disasters can befall a submarine under the ice. In any case, politically, I can’t afford to lose another submarine. If that got out, we’d definitely be moving our personal effects out of the Kremlin.”

A knock came at the door. Pasternak hurried over, spoke to the administrative aide, said something quietly and turned to Vostov.

“The American vice president is here, sir. Are you ready to receive her?”

Tonya Pasternak opened the door and greeted Vice President Karen Chushi. Vostov stood and smiled at her, shaking her hand. Chushi looked shorter than he remembered her, and her face was newly lined and her complexion seemed almost gray. She didn’t look well at all, he thought. God, he hoped she hadn’t gotten some kind of food poisoning while visiting Moscow — that’s all he needed, accusations that his SVR had attempted to assassinate an American vice president. He made a mental note to take a meeting with SVR’s chairwoman, Lana Lilya, to make sure the foreign intelligence service wasn’t doing any covert operations he hadn’t authorized.

Vostov waved Chushi to a chair at the fireplace. “Madam Vice President,” he said, nodding at her, careful to make sure his expression remained somber.

“Please, Mr. President, call me Karen.”

“And you should call me Dimmi,” he said. “At least when we’re behind closed doors, yes?”

“Dimmi it is,” she said.

“Do you mind if I have Miss Pasternak translate for us today, Karen? My English, it is a bit weak.” And Chushi’s harsh, nasal west Texas accent was much too thick for him, Vostov thought.

“That would be fine, sir,” she said.

He said something in Russian to Pasternak, who replied with a raised eyebrow, and he nodded at her.

“Madam Vice President,” Pasternak said, “President Vostov is asking if you are feeling quite yourself. You look, what is the expression, under the weather?”

Chushi nodded gravely but bit her lip. When she answered, she said, “You’re right, but I’m just getting over a stomach flu. I should be fine soon.”

After Chushi gave her condolences and the two talked, somewhat awkwardly through Pasternak’s translation, of some inconsequential matters, Chushi stood and excused herself, saying she knew Vostov had many other members of the visiting officials to meet.

When she left, Vostov frowned at Pasternak.

“She’s seriously ill, isn’t she?”

Pasternak nodded. “She looks like my aunt just before she died. Stomach cancer. Metastasized all through her body. Cancer ate her internal organs.”

“I wonder, if that’s the case, how long she has. Did we have any of the FSB’s doctors at the funeral today or the dinner last night?”

“I can check, sir.”

“See if any of our physicians agree with your theory. Not that it matters, though. I understand that in American politics, the vice president is just a figurehead. Ceremonial.”

Pasternak nodded. “Just waiting around for the death of the president, so she can step in.”

“That lady isn’t stepping into anything but a chemo chair, if your guess is correct.”

“For her sake, I hope we’re wrong. She seemed like a nice person.”

Vostov smirked. “She’s a politician. We all seem nice when you meet us. It’s in offices like this, alone with our chiefs of staff, that we’re evil sons of bitches.”

Pasternak smiled briefly, then went to bring in the British prime minister.

As she did, Vostov made a mental note to have the office swept for bugs when the last of the foreign delegations left. He wouldn’t put it beyond any of them to try to plant a listening device in his inner sanctum.

10

He ran south on the smooth packed sand of the beach, almost to the halfway point, his father’s black lab Jackson bounding enthusiastically beside him, looking up at him and smiling that euphoric canine smile as if giving thanks for being taken on the run. It didn’t seem strange that Jackson, four years before, had made his final trip to the vet to be put to sleep. Today, Jackson was as young and energetic as he’d been as a puppy.

They were almost at the halfway point, three miles from his father’s Sandbridge house, where today’s workout plan called for him to turn around and run back. But a quarter mile farther on, he saw the figure of a beautiful woman in a bikini strolling in the surf, and there was something about her, something achingly familiar. He decided to continue the run south, knowing Jackson wouldn’t mind. As he got closer to the woman, she turned her face up from the waves to look at him and it was her. Carrie Alameda, his first love. Dead now, going on two years. He slowed his jog to a walk and approached her slowly.

Her hair blew in the wind and she beamed at him, her lips curving around that gorgeous smile. He could see the constellation of freckles arrayed around her nose and those deep brown almost liquid eyes. He came close enough to touch her, but as he started to reach out to her, he noticed another figure coming from the west, and when he turned, he saw it was Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov, clad in starched dress whites with her ceremonial sword, wearing full ribbons, her gold submariner’s emblem shining in the bright sun, her long gleaming dirty blonde hair combed down past her shoulders. He looked over at her, then at Carrie, and he realized both women were gazing at him, soft smiles on their faces.

He tried to find his voice. “Why are you here?” he heard himself ask.

“To wake you up, like you said you wanted,” River Styxx’s harsh voice said. He heard the awful sound of his bunk curtain being yanked back suddenly. He blinked in the dim light of stateroom three and saw Styxx’s face. She was wearing her at-sea black coveralls, a form-fitting one-piece uniform with the American flag on the left arm, the New Jersey patch on the right, embroidered gold dolphins on her left pocket.

“What time is it?”

“Midrats will be out in fifteen. If you hurry, you can get a shower in before you partake in tonight’s delicacies of beanie-weenies and cornbread.”

Pacino put his legs outside the rack and spun so his back was to Styxx and lowered himself to the deck. Getting out of a top bunk in the crowded stateroom without knocking over Styxx’s laptop or smacking her in the face with his foot took acrobatics. He pulled his hand through his tousled hair and rubbed his eyes. He’d gone down after watch relief and dinner, hitting the rack at 1900. If midrats were fifteen minutes away, it was 2315.

The deck was trembling violently, the vibrations coursing through the ship from the power of the propulsor. Evidently the watch section had kicked their speed up to flank, full out with fast speed main coolant pumps, the reactor power meter needle steady at exactly one hundred point zero percent. The deck inclined upward, then dived downward while heeling to port, then starboard, the boat doing slow corkscrews through the water. The sea state must have risen. The swells must be at least five feet high, he thought.

“Didn’t you have the afternoon watch for the surface run?” Styxx asked, having taken her seat at her pull-down desk. “You shouldn’t be the on-coming officer of the deck until zero six hundred.”

“Yeah,” he said, grabbing his towel. “XO wants me to take Short Hull under my guidance for the dive. So we both jumped watchsections.”

“I take it XO thinks Short Hull has more potential than Long Hull.”

Pacino shrugged. “Who can say who will end up being a slug and who will be a hot-runner?”

He looked down, remembering he was only wearing a T-shirt and boxers. Bunking in with Styxx seemed like XO was playing a joke on both of them. He hurried to the officers’ head, turned on the water and got wet, then shut off the water, soaped up, shampooed, then turned the water on briefly and rinsed, then took a squeegee and wiped down the stainless steel shower enclosure, finishing the shower in less than ninety seconds. “Submarine showers” like this made a sailor long for home and a “hotel shower” long enough for the hot water to run out. He smirked — they’d been underway less than nine hours, and here he was, already longing for the comforts of home.

He carried his dirty clothes and walked back to stateroom three wearing only his towel, and fortunately Styxx had evacuated the room, presumably for the midnight meal. He dressed quickly in his black coveralls, but he’d brought the ones from Norfolk. They still had the emblem of the USS Vermont on the right sleeve. Somehow, he doubted the XO would object.

Aft, in the wardroom, the XO was holding court over the officers seated for midnight rations, sitting in the captain’s chair, his habit when the command duty officer watch was stationed. The CDO watch had the executive officer assuming all the functions of the captain so the commanding officer could get some rest, but that seemed odd with them approaching the Point Delta dive point. Pacino had assumed Seagraves would want to be in control for the dive.

Both Engineer Kelly and Weapons Officer Styxx were seated in their usual seats on the outboard side of the table near the captain’s end. On the inboard side of the table, the XO’s seat was empty with him having commandeered the captain’s chair. The navigator’s seat next to the XO was empty, probably with Lewinsky in control, supervising the chart for the surface run to the dive point, but Vevera was at his usual inboard seat facing the engineer, with Dankleff on his right. The supply officer’s seat was vacant. Varney’s chair and Long Hull’s were also empty. Pacino crossed behind Quinnivan to take his usual seat next to Communications Officer Eisenhart. Short Hull Cooper hurried into the room and plopped down to Pacino’s left. The mess steward came in with a serving tray and served the XO first, then Kelly, then Styxx, going down the table, slopping the thick goo of the beanie-weenies into Pacino’s bowl, then serving the other side of the table, serving Vevera, finishing with Dankleff. Pacino grabbed the large bowl of cornbread and passed it to Styxx, who offered it to Kelly and Quinnivan, then gave it back to Pacino, who loaded up on two portions and handed it down to Short Hull.

Quinnivan looked happily down at his plate as if it were Thanksgiving dinner.

“Ah, lads and lassies,” Quinnivan noted, “there’s nothing quite like the first midrats of a voyage, yeah? And you may not know this, Mr. Short Hull Cooper, but the rules of Quinnivan’s midrats are that we can discuss anything openly. This, people, is one of the joys of serving in the submarine force. In this room, during midnight rations, no subject is off limits, and we all leave our ranks behind. At my table, during midrats only, we are all equals. And I would like this team to come together for this operation, yeah? So I thought we would talk about some things that could get us better acquainted. Certainly, the old guard of Vermont-ers all know the drill. But you, Madam Engineer, and you, Madam Weapons Officer, are new to us, and we’re all new to the Hulls. So let’s talk, okay?”

There was an awkward silence in the room for a moment. Pacino saw Vevera and Dankleff smirking at him and looking at Short Hull Cooper, as if to say, this should be good. Finally, Eisenhart spoke up.

“XO, with your permission, I think it would do me good to talk about relationships. You know, love and sex and what this submarine force does to relationships.”

“Excellent topic, Mr. Easy,” Quinnivan said, the laugh lines at his eyes crinkling. “You see, people, the secret to a good Navy relationship is picking out the right person.”

“We can’t all find people like Shawna Quinnivan,” Eisenhart said. “The perfect wife.”

Pacino had met Shawna several times, before and after Operation Panther. She was a stunning brunette from upper-crust London, and it had been a running joke in the wardroom that she was slumming, having married a rough Irish scrapper like Quinnivan.

“That she is,” Quinnivan said. “So you, Mr. Cooper, are you married, engaged, dating?”

Cooper blushed and put down his spoon. “No, sir. I had a girlfriend senior year, but no one since.”

“Back to you, Mr. Easy. Word on the street is you’ve had some trouble along these lines.”

“Girlfriend dumped him,” Kelly said in a stage whisper to Styxx. “He claims it was because of our long operations, but I think she just woke up to the fact that Easy Eisenhart is a slug.” Perhaps the three worst things a submarine sailor could be called were non-qual, nub or slug.

“Fuck you, Eng,” Eisenhart said, but he was smiling.

“Well, then, lass, what about you?” Quinnivan asked Kelly.

“Me? I gave up on the idea of a committed relationship years ago, XO,” she said.

“Feel free to call me ‘Bullfrog’ during midrats,” Quinnivan said. “Pass the butter, please.”

“Anyway, Bullfrog,” Kelly continued, “the fact is, men are at best a mixed bag. I mean, look at you submariners. All pasty white. Not one of you has a tan. You look like you’ve been hiding in caves. And as men age, pot bellies, male pattern baldness, loss of muscle tone? And that all starts happening at thirty-five. God help you if you stick around another twenty years. And sometime along the road, the main reason for dating a guy pretty much dies unless dosed up on a sex drug. Men smell bad. They’re all hairy. And you kiss a guy? You just get enough bristles on your mouth to give you a rash. And we all know, you men are dogs. Acting like they deserve a woman who looks like a centerfold while they’re at best a three. And men cheat as often as they breathe. So, what the hell, I crossed the street and started dating women.”

Vevera looked at her. “Really, Eng? You? You’re gay?”

Kelly shook her head. “Not really. I suppose I’m sort of half-and-half. I mean, the right guy might actually get my blood pumping, but that would be one chance in a thousand. And he’d have to be one hell of a guy. But mostly, sexually, I think women do it for me. But as for romance? It’s a myth.”

Dankleff swallowed a bit of cornbread and motioned his head for the coffee carafe and poured a cup for himself, looking at Pacino, who nodded and took the carafe and filled his up. The beanie-weenies were not to his liking, but the cornbread and creamy butter had hit the spot.

“So, Eng,” Eisenhart asked, “you’ve never been in love? Had your heart broken?”

Kelly shook her head. “Nope. And I’d just as soon things remain as they are. I’ve seen the things that people who fall in love do. Very stupid things.”

“Hard-hearted Hanna over there,” Vevera said. “Hey, maybe we should call you ‘Hanna.’”

“So, let me ask you this, Ms. Moose,” Quinnivan said, amusement crinkling his features as he poured coffee for himself.

“I fucking hate that callsign,” Kelly said.

“Ms. Engineer, then. Say that AI progressed to the point that you could get — let’s say — for free, a sex robot. Would it be male or female?”

Kelly pushed her plate away and poured herself coffee. “I’d have to say I’d want one with a selector switch. It could be male on Friday and female on Saturday.”

Dankleff chuckled quietly. Pacino looked at Vevera, who seemed more interested in his seconds on beanie-weenies. Perhaps he was hoping the discussion wouldn’t turn to him.

“Well, at least we know that you, Ms. River, are definitely into guys.” Quinnivan glanced at Pacino. Pacino felt the blood rush to his cheeks.

“That I am, Bullfrog,” Styxx said between bites. “And from what I’ve heard, our esteemed navigator is dating a femme fatale.”

“Ah yes, Elvis Lewinsky and The Immortal Redhead,” Quinnivan said.

“That Redhead,” Dankleff said. “The temperature in the room goes up twenty degrees when she walks in.”

“Really?” Kelly asked. Vevera reached for his handheld and punched up a photo taken at a wardroom party. He’d managed to get a full-length shot of Redhead alone, her face model-gorgeous, her shining red hair coming below the nipples of her expansive breasts, which were barely restrained in a flowing red gown that had a slit in it up to her upper thigh, revealing a tanned, toned, long leg clad in a black thigh-high stocking, her small feet in tall stiletto pumps. “Holy cow, this chick looks like she was dreamed up by an adolescent male fantasy.”

“Here’s another one, from her modeling portfolio.”

Vevera’s pad computer showed Redhead wearing only short-shorts and a revealing halter top, draped across the hood of a fire engine red Ferrari Testarossa.

“Whoa,” Eisenhart said. “Squirt Gun Vevera here is stalking the Redhead. You’d better hope Lewinsky doesn’t get a whiff of your interest in her. He’d flatten you.”

Vevera scoffed. “Any human who has a Y chromosome is interested in that chick.” He glanced at Kelly. “And some humans who don’t have one.”

Kelly looked at the photo for a long time, finally whistling. “Wow, she’s all woman, that one.”

Eisenhart laughed. “Wait till you meet her.”

“Nice car, too,” Kelly said, attempting to deflect the junior officers’ attention.

“That’s not Elvis’ Ferrari, but he has one exactly like it,” Vevera said. “That’s how they met. She saw him climb out of his hot-ass car in Virginia Beach one Saturday afternoon and she swooped in on him like a shark after a tuna,” Vevera paused. “I guess sharks eat tuna, don’t they?”

“Wait, Lewinsky has a Ferrari like that?”

“Catch up, Ms. Moose,” Quinnivan chuckled. “Our young navigator Elvis has a barn full of hot cars. Some he restored himself from rusting wrecks in junkyards, others he bought when his Da’ left him some investments, yeah?”

“Let me see that picture again,” Kelly asked, her cheeks blushing red. Vevera handed her back the WritePad. “There is simply no way she is faithful to him on our long operations, not a woman like that.”

“You kidding?” Pacino said. “Redhead is obsessed with Elvis. She’d kill for him. Squirt Gun, show Moose the shot of what she did to his Ferrari.”

Vevera took back the handheld and found another photo and showed it to Kelly. In white block letters, the word ASSHOLE was scrawled all over the car. Last time Pacino saw that picture, he counted the epithet at least six times.

“Oh dear God, why did she do this?” Kelly gasped.

Quinnivan took the question. “She somehow got the idea that Elvis had developed a thing for the lovely Vermont navigator, Dominatrix Navigatrix. You see, Engineer, jealous obsessed women like Redhead most assuredly do not cheat.”

Pacino, on Quinnivan’s mention of Rachel Romanov, tried to steer the conversation back to Lewinsky. “Elvis said it had taken a twenty-thousand-dollar repair to fix his Ferrari.”

“And they’re still together after all that?” Engineer Moose Kelly looked shocked.

Pacino smirked. “The thunderbolt hit them both, Eng. Disproving your assertion that romantic love is a myth.” God knew, it was real, he thought, thinking of how stunned he was the first time he’d met Rachel Romanov at Quinnivan’s party before the Panther run. He couldn’t even speak.

“What about you, Squirt Gun?” Quinnivan looked over at Vevera. “Did you ever find a replacement for that young lass you were seeing? The, uh, squirty one?” Vevera had been unwise enough to mention during a midrats session with Quinnivan that his girlfriend was a squirter, which had changed his callsign from Man Mountain to Squirt Gun.

Vevera shook his head sadly. “She evaporated when I got the cancer diagnosis. I never heard from her again. I’m pretty much resigned to having a relationship with my goddamned motorcycle.”

“Sorry to hear,” Quinnivan said, genuinely sympathetic. “I guess you and Easy Eisenhart should get your asses to the bar at our, shall I say, intermediate destination.”

Hoping Quinnivan wouldn’t focus his attention on Pacino’s ill-fated love life, Pacino asked, “XO, what is our destination? And what is this operation?”

“Ah, so can I assume this discussion has wandered away from love and sex and back to tactics, yeah? Well, tomorrow, once we’re submerged and headed for Point Foxtrot, we’ll have an op brief. For as much as we can, since our orders are pretty vague right now.”

“Can’t you tell us where we’re headed?” Pacino asked.

“I wouldn’t want to steal the navigator’s thunder, Mr. Lipstick.”

“And that’s something I wanted to talk to you about, XO,” Styxx said, frowning. “Mr. Pacino’s nickname, Lipstick? I most strenuously object. I find it offensive. Seeing how the lipstick on his face was mine.”

There was silence in the room for a moment. Quinnivan became suddenly serious.

“You make a good point, ma’am,” he said, addressing Styxx. “Listen up, all you scurvy junior officers. From henceforth, Mr. Pacino will go by the name ‘Patch.’ No more ‘Lipstick.’ And tell the others when you see them at watch relief.”

Pacino checked his diver’s watch. “That reminds me, Short Hull and I need to make a pre-watch tour, XO. By your leave, if we can be excused?”

“Absolutely, Patch. Have a good watch.”

Pacino stood. “Thanks, XO.”

“And try not to burn the boat down, yeah?”

“Goddammit,” Pacino muttered, but Quinnivan was grinning as Pacino and Short Hull Cooper hurried out of the room.

Quinnivan poured coffee for himself while Kelly asked the question, “What about Lip — I mean, Patch? Is there a story about his romantic life?”

Quinnivan leaned back in his chair. “His first girlfriend was Alameda, the engineer from the ill-fated Piranha. I assume you’ve all heard that story. She died suddenly, what, two years ago? Eighteen months ago? From a brain aneurism. Doctors never could figure out whether it was from the stress of the Piranha sinking or had just cropped up afterwards. Then, later, young Pacino fell hard for Rachel Romanov, our previous navigator. Turns out, our young Lip — er, Patch, has a thing for older female submarine officers, but I’d warn you off, Moose — the women Patch dates tend to end up dead or in a coma.”

“Any word on Romanov, XO?” Dankleff asked.

Quinnivan shook his head solemnly. “So far, the news isn’t good. But maybe she’ll pull through, yeah?”

Pacino pulled his safety harness on over his foul-weather gear. He must have gotten his sea legs, he thought, since he barely noticed the rocking and rolling of the ship through the waves. He stood at the navigation chart next to Elvis Lewinsky.

“How far to the dive point, Nav?” Pacino asked, reluctant to touch the display or alter the scale when Lewinsky was using it.

“Twenty miles to the hundred fathom curve, another mile to Point Delta,” Lewinsky said in his booming baritone voice. Pacino wondered if news of the midrats conversation about him and Redhead had reached his ears.

“Then on to Point Echo on course zero seven zero? Another fifty miles out. What happens then?”

“Then we switch to the top-secret chart.”

Short Hull Cooper arrived then, struggling with his safety harness.

“And where are we going, Nav?” Pacino asked. “XO mentioned an intermediate destination. AUTEC, maybe?”

“What’s AUTEC?” Short Hull asked.

“AUTEC is the Navy’s secret submarine test range,” Pacino explained. “Off Andros Island, Bahamas.”

“Andros is the wrong direction from our course,” Lewinsky said. “Anyway, XO wants to keep things hushed up until we can have an op brief tomorrow. Until then, I’m just going to plot one navigation waypoint ahead of PIM.”

Cooper looked at the chart. “What’s ‘PIM?’” he asked.

“Point of intended motion,” Pacino said. “It’s a moving point in the sea where the bosses want us. It’s set up that way so if a friendly gets a detect on a submarine, they can be made aware that it’s us, not a bad guy.”

“Yeah, unless a bad guy is trailing us,” Lewinsky said.

“So, Short Hull, let’s go check out the contact situation.” He motioned Cooper to the command console, where Supply Officer Gangbanger Ganghadharan stood behind a large flatpanel display, studying it and training its aim with a hand-held device that resembled a video game controller. “Gangbanger here is contact coordinator. He’ll look out for any surface ships that might present trouble. A collision at sea can ruin your entire day. What’s it look like, Gang?”

“Three surface ships, gents,” Ganghadharan said. “This one here is Visual Twenty.” He trained the scope to a view of distant lights, one red, two others white. “Bearing zero four one, angle-on-the-bow port ninety-five, range, let’s see,” he said as he turned to put his face into the radar scope. Evidently they’d abandoned the yacht radar and energized the ship’s BPS-16 radar set. “Range, eight thousand yards, beyond closest point of approach and opening.” He trained the scope view to the south. There was a white light and a green light visible. “Visual Seventeen, range seventeen thousand yards, also opening. And over here,” again he trained the scope view to look behind them. “Visual Sixteen, a sailboat, meandering toward Nantucket. Other than that, we’re clear.”

“Did you check infrared?” Pacino asked.

“Yes, but all we have are the three contacts. Visual, radar and infrared all agree. We’re pretty much alone out here, off the shipping lanes to Boston, Portsmouth and Halifax.”

“Good. Any questions, Mr. Cooper?” Pacino asked Short Hull.

“Can I look?” Gang handed the scope controller to Cooper, who rotated the scope through a slow circle around them. He gave back the device and put his face to the radar scope. Satisfied, he nodded at Pacino.

“Okay, let’s lay to the bridge,” Pacino said, pulling Cooper over to the pilot’s station. “Pilot, to the bridge, relieving watch to the bridge.”

The pilot was the chief of the boat, or COB, Master Chief Machinist Mate “Q-Ball” Quartane, the senior enlisted man aboard.

“Wait one,” Quartane said. He spoke into his boom microphone. “Bridge, Pilot, oncoming watch relief requests to lay to the bridge.”

“Pilot, Bridge,” Boozy Varney’s voice rasped in the overhead of the pilot’s station. “Send them up.”

“Let’s go,” Pacino said, leading Cooper to the ladder to the upper level and to the bridge access tunnel. He climbed the ladder, his safety harness’ lanyard over his shoulder. At the top, the officer of the deck had pulled up the grating. “Request to lay to the bridge,” Pacino said formally.

“Come up,” Varney said.

Pacino climbed up through the grating, stepping aside so Cooper could join them. It was crowded in the cockpit with the four of them there, with Varney standing beside his under-instruction, Long Hull Cooper. Once in the bridge cockpit, the noise from the howling wind and the sea breaking on either side of the sail was deafening. Despite the windshield, Pacino was immediately wet from spray. Up this high, the rocking of the boat seemed severe, the hull rolling far to starboard, hanging up there, then finally rolling to port and pausing there, all the while pitching slowly forward, then pitching back up in the long swells. The deck grating seemed to amplify the vibrations from the propulsor at full power, blasting them through the sea state. The seas were dimly red on the port side and green on the starboard, the ship’s running lights trying to shine out through the spray. Ahead of the cockpit windscreen, the radar antenna rotated slowly high over their heads, making a revolution every two seconds.

“JOOD,” Varney shouted to Long Hull over the roar of the wind and the bow wave, “Give Mr. Pacino and Mr. Cooper a watch turnover.”

“Um,” Long Hull said haltingly. “Ship is at all ahead flank on the surface, heading zero seven zero. Three surface contacts.” He repeated the information they’d already gotten from Gangbanger. “Approximately eighteen nautical miles to the dive point.”

“What’s the sounding?” Short Hull asked. Long Hull gulped and grabbed the 7MC mike.

“Pilot, Bridge, report sounding,” Long Hull ordered on the microphone.

“Bridge, Pilot, aye… sounding is … six five fathoms.”

“Anything else?” Pacino asked.

“Captain has secured the command duty officer watch. He should be in his stateroom,” Varney said.

“Got it,” Pacino said. He looked at Short Hull. “Coop? You ready to relieve?”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Cooper, I relieve you as junior officer of the deck.”

Pacino addressed Varney. “Mr. Varney, I relieve you as officer of the deck.”

“We’ll snarf down midrats and relieve you from control in half an hour,” Varney shouted.

“Very well,” Pacino said formally. “Don’t let XO engage you in any bullshit entertaining discussions. Don’t be late.”

Varney and Long Hull Cooper pulled up the grating and lowered themselves down the bridge access trunk.

“Report our relief to the captain,” Pacino ordered Cooper.

Cooper picked up the 7MC and selected the captain’s stateroom. “Captain, Junior Officer of the Deck, sir.”

“Captain,” Seagraves voice responded immediately.

Cooper reported their having assumed the watch. Seagraves sounded bored as he acknowledged.

“Check out the visual contacts with your binoculars,” Pacino shouted to Cooper, his voice loud to overcome the hurricane wind of their passage. “Verify where they are and look for any new contacts that the contact coordinator may not have detected. You should have a mental model of the seaway like the radar screen, updating it from time to time from the contact coordinator’s reports, verified with your own observation. Radar and sonar both are shit in this sea state, and there might be a trawler ahead that has lights that are out of commission. At this speed, we’d run him over almost before we could react.”

“Bridge, Contact,” the bridge communication box boomed with Vevera’s voice. “Contact coordinator watch relief is complete. Lieutenant Vevera is contact coordinator.”

“Contact, Bridge, aye,” Cooper answered. “Report all contacts.”

Vevera went through the same litany as before, with no new ships out there.

“You’re actually pretty good at this,” Pacino commented, scanning the horizon for lights as a swell knocked him back against the port bridge coaming. “Captain might even call you ‘adequate.’”

“I was JOOD during sea trials,” Cooper said from behind his own binoculars.

“What did you think of midrats?” Pacino asked. “And I don’t mean the quality of the food.”

“It was mind-blowing, sir, I mean, Patch. Shooting the breeze with the executive officer? That would never have happened with our PCU XO. Or the PCU department heads.”

“Yeah. Quinnivan’s a trip,” Pacino said.

“Your old nickname, ‘Lipstick.’ What happened, if I can ask.”

“I heard that Quinnivan saw that I and Navigator Romanov were starting to develop feelings for each other and he wanted to put a stop to it, you know — good order and discipline — so when we pulled into AUTEC, he had our old weapons officer call in a favor from River Styxx. Back then, Styxx was admiral’s aide to Catardi, who was commander of the submarine force. So Styxx pulled me onto the dance floor. We were drinking pretty heavily that night. Next thing I know, I’m waking up in her bed in the Q. When I got to the boat, everyone saw my face was smeared with her lipstick from ear-to-ear, nose-to-chin. XO himself christened me ‘Lipstick.’”

“Wow, really? You don’t remember anything?”

“Nothing. But let me tell you, XO’s secret evil plan worked. Romanov was so pissed at me she was spitting nails for most of the Panther run after that. Wouldn’t even speak to me. It actually turned into a problem.”

“Did you two ever get together?”

“Yes and no,” Pacino said. “Just before we, the boarding party, departed for the Panther takeover, I called her up and told her I was sorry and that I had feelings for her. She eventually forgave me.”

“And?”

“Solved one problem, created another one. She was still married at the time. Her divorce was just coming through when the Vermont burned. Just before that, she decided it would be more professional for the both of us to remain friends.”

“Damn. The cursed ‘friend zone.’”

“And now she’s in a coma.” Pacino pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose, trying to hide his emotions.

“I’m sorry, Patch.”

“Hopefully she recovers and everything’s cool. Assuming this mission goes okay.”

“What? Why wouldn’t it?”

Pacino dropped his binoculars and looked at Cooper. “New Jersey is now a top secret codeword project boat. We do things that are more dangerous than the rest of the fleet. We report to the president himself. We do shit that other sailors wouldn’t believe, and the operations are so secret that we can’t even talk about them among ourselves outside of a SCIF, a special compartmented information facility, and only for a good reason. The battle cry of Vermont was, ‘it never happened — we were never there.’ For all we know, this could be one of those ops where, well, where we don’t come back.” Like the Panther run, Pacino thought.

Pacino could feel Cooper’s stare but ignored it as he scanned the horizon in the starlit night.

“Bridge, Control, off-going OOD and JOOD are ready to relieve you in control.”

“Let’s turn over the watch to Varney and Long Hull, then rig the bridge for dive.”

For the next half hour after Varney and Long Hull Cooper took over the watch from control, Pacino and Short Hull rigged the cockpit for dive. The bridge communication box went down first, handed to the waiting messenger of the watch, then the windshield, the hand-held computers, a coffee carafe and two flashlights. Pacino had Cooper search for anything they’d missed, then had him hand down the third flashlight. They took the grating apart and passed it down below, being careful not to fall into the gaping maw of the hatchway. Pacino rigged in the port running light, then turned to supervise Cooper rigging in the starboard light.

“Take a last breath of fresh air, Mr. Cooper. It may be the last real air you breathe for a long time.”

Pacino inhaled the sea air deeply, mentally bidding farewell to the surface. He motioned Cooper down the hatch, then reached over and pulled up the port clamshell, then the starboard, then the centerline, the cockpit disappearing, the sail now streamlined for the submerged transit. He lowered himself into the dimly lit access trunk, only two red lights illuminating the space, and pulled the hatch shut and rotated the wheel to engage the dogs.

“Check it,” he said to Cooper, who checked the hatch shut. The two climbed all the way down the ladder and emerged into the upper level. Pacino rotated the switch for the tunnel’s lights to the off position, then reached up and pulled down the lower access trunk hatch and dogged it, with Cooper checking it, then shut the vent and drain valves, again having Cooper check them. They hurried down to the middle level control room.

“Pilot,” Cooper called, “Bridge and access trunk rigged for dive by Mr. Pacino and checked by me.”

“Pilot aye,” Dankleff said from the pilot’s station.

“We’ll be right back,” Pacino said to Varney. “Coop, go to your stateroom and dump your heavy weather gear, get some dry coveralls and hurry back here.” Pacino did the same.

They took the watch back over from Varney and Long Hull. Pacino examined the chart, standing next to Lewinsky, then checked the chronometer. It was one minute before the captain’s orders to be ready to submerge.

“Looks like we’ve arrived, Nav,” Pacino said to Lewinsky. The “bug,” a lit blue dot on the chart that marked their position, had moved until it was directly over an “X” that marked Point Delta.

“Mark the dive point!” Lewinsky called to the room.

“Sounding!” Pacino called.

Lewinsky’s navigation electronics technician replied from aft of the chart table, “One two one fathoms!”

Seagraves baritone voice calmly intoned behind Cooper, “Well, JOOD, your report?”

Cooper swallowed and faced the captain. “Sir, ship is rigged for dive and at the dive point at Point Delta. Sounding is one two one fathoms. We’re ready to submerge, sir. Request permission to submerge the ship.”

Seagraves glanced at the chart. “I suggest you secure the radar first, JOOD.”

Cooper shouted to Dankleff at the pilot station, “Pilot, secure rotating and radiating and lower the radar.”

“Rotating and radiating secured, radar mast coming down,” Dankleff reported. “Radar mast indicates down.”

“We’re ready, Captain,” Cooper said.

“Very well,” Seagraves said. “JOOD, submerge the ship.”

“Submerge the ship, aye, sir,” Cooper said. “Pilot, submerge the ship to one five zero feet!” Cooper stepped back to the command console’s display of the periscope and took the scope controller from Varney, who was automatically secured from his watch at the point of diving.

It was Dankleff’s show now, Pacino thought. “Submerge the ship, Pilot, aye!” Dankleff announced, his voice jolly at the prospect of flying the ship into the depths. He selected the 1MC ship-wide announcing circuit and his voice projected throughout the submarine, “Dive! Dive!” He hit a function button on his touch screen and a blaring alarm blasted through the space, OOOOOOOOO-GAH! “Dive, dive!” he repeated on the 1MC. “All ahead two thirds, and Maneuvering answers, all ahead two thirds. Rigging out the bow planes, and bow planes indicate deployed. Checking bow planes, and bow plane function checked, checked sat. Opening forward main ballast tank vents. Forward vents indicate open. Opening aft main ballast tank vents, and aft vents indicate open.”

“Check the periscope view,” Pacino said. “Make sure we’re venting.”

Cooper had the view trained to directly ahead and rotated the view downward to look at the forward vents. In the view, four geysers of water blasted upward.

“Venting forward,” Cooper announced.

“Now aft,” Pacino said.

The view aft showed multiple firehose streams of water blasting upward on the aft deck.

“Venting aft.”

“Do a surface search,” Pacino directed. “Make sure in all this excitement we haven’t missed a close surface contact.”

“Proceeding to a ten degree down bubble. Depth four zero,” Dankleff reported. “Four five.”

The deck slowly inclined, still rolling and pitching, until the deck got steep in a forward tilt. The mad vibrations of the deck from their flank speed vanished, the deck now smooth.

“Five zero feet. Five five feet.”

“Call ‘sail’s under,’” Pacino said to Cooper.

“Sail’s under.”

“Six zero feet. Six five.”

The waves grew closer to the periscope view.

“Six nine. Seven zero feet.”

Foam blasted up over the periscope display, obscuring the view.

“Scope’s awash,” Cooper said.

A million bubbles were visible on the display as the view plunged into the waves, until the troughs and crests were above them. The bubbles cleared and the waves overhead could be dimly seen in the view until the view became suddenly black and there was nothing to see.

“Scope’s under,” Cooper said. “Lowering number one scope.” He hit a function lever in the command console until an indicator light flashed on the console. “Scope is retracted.”

“Eight five feet. Nine zero. One hundred feet,” Dankleff said.

The deck had gotten steeper. Pacino reached for the safety handhold bar at the command console.

“One three zero feet.”

The rolling and pitching of the deck seemed to get gentler.

“One five zero feet,” Dankleff said. “And steady on depth. Shutting forward vents. Shutting aft vents. And forward and aft main ballast tank vents indicate shut. JOOD, request to obtain a one third trim.”

Cooper raised an eyebrow at Pacino, who nodded.

“Pilot, obtain a one third trim.”

“One third trim, Pilot aye, and all ahead one third, and Maneuvering answers, all ahead one third.”

For fifteen minutes Dankleff operated his console, aided by his copilot, Quartane, flooding some variable ballast tanks with water, pumping some overboard and balancing the boat by transferring water from aft to forward. He had to increase speed back to two thirds at one point, then after more adjustments, slowed back to one third.

“Junior Officer of the Deck,” Dankleff said proudly, “the boat has a satisfactory one third trim.”

“Very well,” Cooper said, then to Pacino, “now what?”

“Take her deep. Five hundred forty-six feet. And chase PIM,” Pacino said. “The entire time you were at four knots, the PIM dot kept going northeast at twenty-eight knots.”

“Pilot,” Cooper barked, “make your depth five four six feet.”

“Five four six feet, aye, and going to a down bubble of fifteen degrees.”

The deck tilted downward again, the rolling and pitching from the surface gone now. The tilted deck was as steady as the floor of an office building.

“Pilot, all ahead flank,” Cooper ordered.

“All ahead flank, Pilot aye, and Maneuvering answers, all ahead flank. Passing two hundred feet.”

The frantic vibrations of the deck returned as the speed indicator rose from four knots to thirty-two, their speed submerged eleven knots faster than they could make on the surface. Pacino walked to the chart table and bit his lip. The PIM dot was far ahead of them now, but traveling slower than they were, at the average transit speed of 28 knots.

“Mr. Navigator,” Pacino said to Lewinsky, “time to catch up to PIM?”

Lewinsky smiled a crooked smile. “Why don’t you get your under-instruction to calculate that?”

“Good idea,” Pacino said. “JOOD, get over here.”

11

“The news is good, the news is bad,” CIA Director Margo Allende said, pouring a black coffee for National Security Advisor Michael Pacino. “In two areas.” She glanced at Deputy Director of Operations Angel Menendez. The briefing room adjacent to the White House Situation Room was smaller, the same length as the Situation Room but narrower, most of it taken up with a long table. Both rooms were fully secure SCIFs, allowing Allende to speak freely.

“What do we have?” Pacino asked, sipping the coffee, the brew hot enough to burn his tongue.

“Good news first. The vice president was able to plant our bug in Vostov’s office during her visit with him after his wife’s funeral.”

“Excellent,” Pacino said.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Allende said. “We expected her to sit in a chair at Vostov’s desk, which is how he likes to receive official visitors. It always sounded like a power play to me, like a senior person addressing a subordinate sitting in the seat in front of his big desk. But instead, he took the meeting in a set of club chairs by his massive fireplace. A much more intimate setting, but we think we’ll only harvest a fraction of the intelligence we wanted.”

“Wouldn’t a bug sweep locate that in a day?” Pacino asked.

“New tech,” Menendez said. The deputy director favored colorful Hawaiian shirts under a dark blazer with his habitual dark fedora hat, which he’d placed on the table, which irritated Pacino. U.S. Navy unwritten rules, dating back to the 1700s, strictly prohibited hats on tables — unless the owner of the hat had been to the north pole. On that basis, Pacino had always casually tossed his officers’ cover onto whatever table he’d sat at, since he’d been to the pole twice. But he sincerely doubted Menendez had. The rule had been crafted with the thought in mind that no one in the Navy had been or would ever go to the north pole, and then submariners who’d returned from “ICE-EXs” started tossing caps on tables.

“The Russians might find it in a month,” Allende said. “By then they won’t know who placed it. They could blame the British or French.”

“They always blame us,” Pacino mused. “So the intel will be less, but who knows, maybe Vostov conducts his most sensitive conversations in those club chairs.”

“I guess we’ll see,” Allende said.

“You said there were two areas,” Pacino said.

“Yes. The modified special purpose sub, the Omega II, the Belgorod. We still think it’s headed up north under the icecap. And it’s delayed by at least a week, maybe two.”

“Well, that’s definitely good news,” Pacino said. “That gives us time to get our project submarine up there.” He tried to keep his expression neutral, but he was apprehensive about Anthony being assigned to New Jersey, which would be ordered to get into position to trail the Belgorod and find out what the hell it would be doing. At least this wouldn’t be as dangerous as the Panther mission, he consoled himself.

“Oh, there’s more, Patch,” Menendez said, smiling, seeming pleased with himself. “Belgorod is taking aboard four comfort women. Must be a long mission they’re anticipating.”

“That sounds odd,” Pacino said. “I know the Russians. When they’re forward deployed, they often arrange to bring comfort women in their R&R ships or even on their sub tenders, but comfort women on the boat itself?” Comfort women were essentially prostitutes employed by the Russian Navy, their job to keep male morale from collapsing.

“Oh, that’s not the good news,” Allende said. “The good news is that one of them is ours.”

Pacino sat back and stared at Allende. “You’ve got an asset onboard the Belgorod?”

Menendez beamed. “We do indeed.”

“That is good news. What’s the bad news?”

“We haven’t figured out a way for her to communicate with us. We might not be able to get any data from her until Belgorod comes back to base.”

“Oh,” Pacino said. “Perhaps a hack into the radio antenna, like the Blue Hardhat operation you did to the Yasen-M boats?”

Allende shook her head. “We were forced to leak that to the Russians, and now they’re absolutely paranoid about their submarine masts and antennae. We don’t think we could get away with that now, which is why we’re using one of their comfort women. Human intelligence almost always trumps electronic intel, but not if there’s no way to pass us a message.”

“Well, keep working on it,” Pacino said. “The president has taken a personal interest in this operation, like he did with Panther.” As National Security Advisor, Pacino’s rank in the administration was near that of a cabinet officer and Carlucci treated him as if he were Allende’s boss. He wondered if the president knew about Pacino’s personal relationship with the CIA director. Probably did, Pacino thought. Spying on the spies was big business in Washington.

“I’ve got to get back to Langley. Good to see you again, Admiral,” Menendez said, collecting his hat, standing, and shaking Pacino’s hand. After he left the room, Allende poured them more coffee.

“Margo, you said there was something else?” Pacino checked his old, scratched Rolex. “I’ve got to brief the president in half an hour.”

“I don’t know how you’re going to feel about this one, Patch,” Allende said. “The vice president is seriously sick. Late-stage rectal cancer. It’s metastasized throughout her abdomen. Looks like all her major organs are affected.”

“Oh, no,” Pacino said. “She looked terrible at that Status-6 briefing.”

“She’s been taking some stem cell therapy, but it’s terminal and she’s only been given a few months. Maybe even less.”

“She knows the prognosis?”

“She’s the one who told me.”

Pacino shook his head. Karen Chushi was not a typical vice president. She was strong-willed, independent, and sometimes even a critic of the president’s decisions. Carlucci had brought her onto his ticket as a political move to appease the South, since Chushi was from Texas, and to appease the National Party, since she was friends with the other side of the aisle, so much so that some in the press had called for her to leave the American Party and defect to the National Party. But she’d stubbornly remained on. President Carlucci had tried to keep her contained, only bringing her into the circle when he absolutely had to.

“She’s planning on resigning by the week’s end,” Allende said.

“Any word on her replacement?”

“Carlucci doesn’t want new faces in the inner circle. I’m predicting he shuffles the cabinet and elevates a trusted person from within.”

“Maybe Hogshead or Klugendorf,” Pacino said.

Margo Allende just looked at him with that half-amused look she had when she was keeping a secret.

On behalf of Northern Fleet Commander Admiral Gennady Zhigunov, Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev had paid to close the Lamb’s Valhalla pub for tonight’s meeting, Zhigunov’s directive made in defiance of the orders of Admiral Olga Vova, who had placed the establishment off-limits. Zhigunov’s armed guards stood watch outside, keeping the regulars at bay. The servers and cooks had been dismissed for the night, more of the admiral’s staff sent in to serve their table and bring food.

Alexeyev sat opposite Sergei Kovalov, the Losharik captain seeming ill at ease, as he had all week. They’d just come from a long session with Zhigunov at his Northern Fleet headquarters, and the highlights of that meeting had been disappointing.

Kovalov waved over one of the enlisted men to bring a bottle of scotch to the table. The man seemed confused, so Kovalov walked him to the bar and picked out a new bottle of Oban and brought it back himself with two glasses. He poured for the two of them, then looked over at Alexeyev.

“To fallen comrades,” Kovalov said, raising his glass.

“Fallen comrades.” Alexeyev tossed down a gulp of the scotch, trying to distract his mind from his dead former engineer Matveev. And her ghost.

“This mission just keeps getting better,” Kovalov said, pulling over the large ashtray and lighting a cigarette.

“I wonder what the Status-6 delay is all about,” Alexeyev said, adjusting his eye patch. The false eye under it sometimes itched, but he was assured it was just allergies, not a return of the herpes that had infected him during the South Atlantic mission, leading to the loss of the eye.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if those Status-6 torpedoes don’t even work,” Kovalov said. “Seriously, a nuclear reactor in an autonomous torpedo, with a ten-megaton warhead? Manufactured by Sevmash? God help us. At best, those things will just be inert. There’s a thousand things that can go wrong with an unattended nuclear reactor. The damn things could have a runaway, or worse, they could self-destruct.”

“Hopefully, any self-destruct will just be their conventional explosives going off, not a nuclear explosion,” Alexeyev said, putting out his hand, and immediately Kovalov shook out a cigarette, handed it and his lighter to Alexeyev, who lit up and blew a cloud at the ceiling.

“That would scatter plutonium over the entire bay where it’s placed,” Kovalov observed. “And seriously, strategically? Tactically? What the hell good is a weapon that is out of communication with the Kremlin and Defense Ministry? If Vostov decided to push the nuclear button, those torpedoes won’t hear him.”

Alexeyev shrugged fatalistically. “Supposedly a stealthy team of underwater commandos — hydronauts, yes? — will be dispatched who will locate the weapons with a sonar homing device, then ping a particular sonar signal to program them with detonation directions.”

Kovalov scoffed. “Sounds unsophisticated to me. Honestly, what is Vostov’s motivation for doing this? Wasn’t it just six weeks ago he was playing nice with the Americans? Even after we lost Kazan, Novosibirsk and Voronezh?”

Alexeyev shrugged. Politics were impenetrable. At least their mission and equipment they could understand. Perhaps even control. “Have you seen the schematics and tech manual of the Status-6 units, Sergei?”

Kovalov shook his head and drained his glass. “Still too highly classified. We may not even have them when we sail.”

“How the hell—?“

“We’ll have an operation manual, Georgy. It’ll have knobology. But the inner workings and hidden mechanisms? Probably not in the book.” Kovalov pulled the cork on the scotch bottle and poured both of them more scotch. He shook his head. “This is madness. Laying ten megaton bombs in American ports. And carrying them there through the polar icecap?”

“Our ballistic missile subs go up at least once a year per ship,” Alexeyev said, trying to sound comforting, but he himself doubted they’d have an easy time of it.

“We’re thousands of tons bigger than the Borei-class. And our effective draft with Losharik docked to Belgorod? Almost thirty-five meters. Talk about a camel through the eye of the needle. One pressure ridge could stop us cold. No pun intended.”

“We may have to undock your Losharik to get through some narrow or shallow passages at the pressure ridges.”

“Great, undocking and re-docking under ice? Losharik has no under-ice capability, Georgy. If we get separated, God help us, we’ll die down there.”

“Well, let’s leave that problem for later, Sergei. Besides, the two Gigantskiy torpedoes can be used to break up a closed passage.”

“Are you insane, Georgy? Detonating a nuclear torpedo under ice? That would be suicide.”

“It’s only a one megaton warhead.”

“Oh, dear God, only?”

“I see your point, Sergei.”

“Leave it to the Navy to rehabilitate an old useless Cold War relic for us to take with us,” Kovalov said. “The Gigantskiy torpedoes haven’t been used since Kaliningrad sank. That torpedo design is older than my wife.”

“Well, you did rob the cradle, Sergei. Can I borrow another cigarette?”

Kovalov smiled for the first time all day. “Borrow?”

“You know what I mean.”

A woman and a man in uniform walked in the front door and took off their greatcoats. The woman was Alexeyev’s first officer, Captain Second Rank Ania Lebedev. The other man was Captain Second Rank Ivan Vlasenko, the Losharik second-in-command. Alexeyev had only met Vlasenko a few times. He seemed competent enough. Medium height, hair too long out of regulation, slightly overweight, he claimed, due to his wife being a master chef. But it was his sunny disposition that irritated Alexeyev. But then, most optimists did.

Alexeyev glanced at his own first officer, standing and shaking her hand. Lebedev was slender and tall for a woman, with a head of mouse-brown chin-length hair, with no makeup, making her seem washed-out and tired. Lebedev and Alexeyev had sailed halfway around the world for the South Atlantic mission, and Alexeyev and she had literally survived Hell, escaping the burning and exploding wreck of Kazan in the crew escape chamber. Before the mission, Alexeyev had had a dim view of Lebedev, having concluded that she was a cold disciplinarian and careerist, who would step on Alexeyev’s very face to climb to the rank of commanding officer of a submarine. But the mission had changed her for the better. After facing death and the loss of their comrades from their engineering spaces, Lebedev seemed to gain some kind of deep empathy as if it had fallen upon her from heaven. She was human now, Alexeyev thought. And just in time for this ridiculous Status-6 errand. He cautioned himself to show his first officer — and Kovalov’s — none of the cynicism and skepticism that had dominated their conversation so far this evening. Pessimism was best confined to the captain’s stateroom.

The two first officers sat at the table, Vlasenko next to Kovalov and Lebedev next to Alexeyev, and after an exchange of pleasantries, Lebedev signaled to one of the guards acting as a waiter to bring more scotch, and she and Vlasenko poured, and once again they did the traditional toast to the fallen. Alexeyev glanced quickly at Lebedev, and she looked back, her brown eyes seeming deep, as if she and Alexeyev were both remembering Matveev.

“So, Captain,” Vlasenko began, addressing Alexeyev. “Any prediction on when we’ll leave on this mission?”

Alexeyev shook his head. “No idea. It could be three days. It could be three weeks. Ania,” he said, addressing Lebedev, “how is the equipment loadout going?”

“Sir, food and arctic supplies are aboard and stowed as of this afternoon. All we’re missing are the special weapons.”

“Have you and the weapons officer reviewed the operation of the Gigantskiy torpedoes?”

“We’ve had to modify the weapon control software extensively to be able to talk to them and program them for antisubmarine operation. I also reviewed with Sobol the loading procedure. We’ve brought aboard and installed the roller cradles.”

“Roller cradles?” Kovalov asked.

“Sevmash inserted and welded in a chassis of supports and rollers,” Lebedev explained, “so the one-meter diameter Gigantskiys could be stable in the two-meter diameter Status-6 tubes. So tubes one, two, and three will be loaded with Status-6 weapons and tubes four and five will house the Gigantskiys. If and when they’re launched, the Gigantskiys will depart their tubes in swim-out mode, and the rollers will keep them from scraping on the bottom of the tubes.”

“What about the command detonate mode?” Alexeyev asked. “In case we need to punch through a pressure ridge or create a polynya where there is thick ice?”

Lebedev frowned. “We’re still working on that, Captain. Sevmash engineers keep saying they have plans A, B and C converging on the problem all at once, but I think they’re having trouble.”

“I’ll talk to Admiral Zhigunov about it tomorrow,” Alexeyev said. “Unless he makes a surprise visit tonight.”

“You think he’s coming?” Kovalov asked.

Alexeyev shrugged. “I don’t know. From what I hear, he’s getting an earful daily from the chain of command. With the president himself running the mission, the defense ministry and high command of the Navy are all breathing down Zhigunov’s neck.”

“He may want to escape for a late drink with his crews, though,” Vlasenko said, smiling. Alexeyev glared balefully at Vlasenko, who seemed too perpetually cheerful. Perhaps Kovalov’s young first officer hadn’t yet grasped the gravity of their present circumstances.

“What about Losharik, Sergei?” Alexeyev asked. “Are you rigged for sea?”

“Sevmash just replaced the evaporator and the electrical still. Nuclear reactors and steam plants, even tiny ones like mine, go through water like, well, water. We can’t test them pier side — the water isn’t clean enough. We’ll have to wait until we reach open water to fire them up.”

“We can feed you deionized water from Belgorod,” Lebedev offered.

Kovalov nodded. “When you think about it, pure water is mission-limiting. When we’re deploying the Status-6 units, we’ll be in littoral waters. Shallow, silty, sandy, muddy waters. We’ll have to shut down the evaporator and still when we undock to place the Status-6s. We’d better place them damn expeditiously, or we’ll run out of water.”

“You have steam leaks or primary leaks that are eating your water?” Lebedev asked Kovalov.

Kovalov shook his head. “Sevmash groomed primary and secondary systems. Losharik is tight. As tight as they can make it, anyway.”

“While we’re on hold, Sergei,” Alexeyev said, “perhaps you can take Losharik out and test your systems in open water.”

Kovalov shook his head. “We’d be out of position if the mission gets ordered to start suddenly. The Status-6 loadout and Gigantskiy load will only take a day. I’d be two days out if I want to do a shakedown.”

Alexeyev nodded. “Nothing to do now but wait,” he said. “I’m hungry.” He checked his wristwatch. “Where the hell are the zhenshchiny dlya utekh?”

“We don’t call them ‘comfort women’ anymore, Captain,” Lebedev said. “They’re ispytatel’nyye zheny. Test wives.”

“Fine. Test wives. Anyway, while we wait, I’ll go to the kitchen and see what they can cook up. I’m sure the fleet guards can’t provide the full menu of the Lamb’s Valhalla. Which is a shame.”

Alexeyev stood to go to the kitchen, deciding to stop at the restroom. He washed up and stepped to the kitchen, where the staff were stirring a large cauldron. A tantalizing aroma filled the kitchen, making Alexeyev even more hungry.

“What is it?”

“Rabbit stew with homemade dumplings, Captain,” one of the fleet guards said, wiping a hand on his apron. “Are you ready for us to serve?”

“Not yet, we’re missing four people.”

Alexeyev left the kitchen and saw the missing four had shown up and were seated. As he approached the table, the newcomers began to stand to greet him, but he waved them back to their seats.

“Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev,” he said, introducing himself. The woman nearest him shook his hand, her grip soft, her hand warm, and she introduced herself. Alexeyev greeted the other three. They all seemed pretty, but nothing that would tempt him away from his wife, Natalia, he thought, although other married men might not feel their marriages were as solid. He looked over at Kovalov, who seemed to be staring at the oldest of the four. In contrast to the other three, all brunettes, the fourth, the youngest, was a platinum blonde with large blue eyes and puffy apple red lips.

“Have any of you sailed on submarines before?” Lebedev asked the oldest one, who had introduced herself as Captain Third Rank Svetlana Anna.

Anna shook her head. “Our only sea voyages have been on support ships. This will be all new to us.”

Kovalov laughed. “You picked one hell of a mission for your first submarine ride.”

“Can you tell us about it?” Anna asked.

“That’s why we’re here,” Alexeyev said, putting out his hand to Kovalov for another cigarette.

“Op brief!” Quinnivan bellowed. “Get your arses in here, ye scurvy junior officers! And U-Boat, cut the fookin’ crap.”

The deck was trembling violently from the power of the flank bell and had been since they’d dived. Pacino had gotten used to it and barely noticed it unless he placed his coffee cup on the table and saw the waves in its surface form from the hull vibrations. But whenever the ship was running flank, blasting through the ocean, U-Boat Dankleff — who absolutely loved hauling ass at flank — would always do his “flankin’ it, flankin’ it” dance, a ridiculous arm-waving, leg-twisting jig that, to Pacino, just never got old. On Quinnivan’s reprimand, Dankleff plopped down in his seat and feigned contrition, but looked up at Pacino and winked.

“Who are we missing?” Quinnivan asked with an angry expression creasing his features. The man, Pacino thought, looked positively jolly most of the time, but absolutely evil when he was mad.

“Electrical officer,” Engineer Kelly said, but just then Varney hurried into the room and shut the door behind him.

“Sorry, XO,” Varney said, taking his seat. “Watch relief on the conn was delayed.”

Pacino reached for the coffee carafe and refilled his cup. Lunch had been sliders with thick steak fries, and he was drowsy from it. That or his scrambled sleep schedule. He’d gotten off the conn with Short Hull at 0600 and had worked out in the torpedo room, intending to catch some sleep after his shower, but Short Hull had wanted several qualification check-outs. It had never occurred to Pacino that giving a system check-out — a verbal test of knowledge — could be as draining to the person giving it as the person requesting it. Cooper had wanted to start big, asking to be checked out on operating the BQQ-10-V6 sonar suite. A sonar check-out like that could involve three or more full watches of questions, answers and “look-ups,” when the non-qual was assigned to find the answers to questions that he’d failed. That had taken till noon meal, and when the dishes had been cleared from that, the operation brief had been convened by the XO.

“Well, Nav,” Quinnivan said. “Are we here and are we all cleared for this briefing?”

“XO,” Lewinsky said, “the supply officer is on the conn and Long Hull Cooper is aft as engineering officer of the watch. We’ve got everyone else. And, yessir, we’re all cleared.”

“Very well, then,” Quinnivan said. “Madam Engineer, would you be so kind as to call the captain and inform him we’re all present and ready for him?”

Kelly reached for the phone set into a small alcove behind her, dialed the captain, murmured a few words, and hung up. “He’s on his way.”

“Everyone have coffee?” Quinnivan asked, holding the carafe and pouring for himself, then setting a cup in front of the captain’s chair and pouring for him.

Seagraves walked into the room from the forward door. “Afternoon, people,” he said. In unison the officers returned the greeting. He took his seat, nodded at Lewinsky, and took a sip of his coffee. “Let’s proceed.”

Lewinsky pointed a remote control at the flatpanel over the missing supply officer’s seat and the display came to life. It had two pages projected on it, their orders given to the captain before sailing.

“What we’ve been ordered so far,” Lewinsky said, “is to proceed northeast at flank speed to the U.K. Naval Base, Clyde. Faslane, Scotland. Their submarine base. As you can see on page two, we’re to load up arctic supplies, food, and weapons.”

Pacino nodded to himself. New Jersey had sailed with an empty torpedo room, which was like walking into a war zone without bullets. He would have felt better if they’d at least been loaded with two ADCAP Mark 48 torpedoes as a contingency.

“Also, as you can see, we’re to bring on a dry-deck shelter and team of SEALs, the same guys from Task Force Eight Zero who we sailed with on the Panther run.”

Seagraves spoke up. “The Pentagon is now calling that the Battle of the Arabian Sea.”

“Which is odd,” Quinnivan said, “seeing as how it wasn’t really a battle until the South Atlantic. I note, ladies and gents, it remains top secret SCI codeword-slash-special-handling information that we traded torpedoes with the Russians on that op. As far as the open-source media is concerned, we just hijacked that sub, sailed it to AUTEC, then gave it back. The Russian loss of three subs — well, it never happened. And we were never there.”

Pacino glanced at Short Hull Cooper, whose eyes had bugged out at the mention of the details of the Panther run. It hadn’t been discussed since he’d reported aboard.

“Please continue, Mr. Lewinsky,” Seagraves said.

“That’s pretty much it, Captain,” Lewinsky said. “There’s nothing else in the order. And we don’t have an operation order for what happens after Faslane. And we don’t know how long we’ll be in Faslane.”

“Is there any context here from a scrub of the open-source news files and the classified intel digest?” Seagraves asked.

Styxx put out her hand. “I did an extensive search, Captain. There’s some mention of the Russian Omega II submarine Belgorod. A few articles on the Poseidon torpedoes. A few Russian editorials about Vostov deciding to be more confrontational with NATO and the Americans. But nothing very specific.”

“So we’re left guessing,” Lewinsky said. “Captain, with your permission, may I speculate?”

Seagraves smiled. It was perhaps only the second smile Pacino had seen from the captain. “By all means, Navigator.”

“My guess is that we’ll be sent to try to trail the Omega II and see what he’s doing. The under-ice supplies make me believe the Omega II may try to do an ICE-EX and go to the pole.”

“Maybe,” Seagraves said. “But why the SEALs?”

“You’ve got me there, Captain. I can’t imagine we’d try to hijack it like we did the Iranian Kilo,” Lewinsky said. “The Russians got fooled once. They won’t let that happen again.”

“Hey,” Dankleff said, smirking. “Varney, Pacino and I could conn her to AUTEC if the SEALs got us aboard.”

Quinnivan laughed. “I seriously doubt that, DCA. But even if you could, the pole is essentially in Russia’s front yard. They’d send a fleet of submarines to get us if we tried.”

“Perhaps just a deep contingency,” Kelly said. “You know, better to have them and not need them than to need them and not have them.”

“Maybe. But we’re all guessing here, people,” Quinnivan said, looking at the officers sternly. “All we can do is make sure this ship is ready for anything. Eng, what’s your material condition looking like? Most of the sea trials issues were in the engineering spaces.”

Engineer Kelly cleared her throat. “We’re chasing steam leaks, XO. They’re overloading the air conditioning plants and chillers and making more demands on the evaporators. We’ve got a complete inventory of the leaks. Four days, five at most, we’ll have them under control.”

“See to it, Engineer,” Quinnivan said, frowning. “Any other comments? No? Well, people, we’re dismissed. Navigator, please brief the supply officer and RC division officer separately since they missed this session.”

“Aye, sir.”

The room cleared out. Pacino checked his watch and looked at Short Hull Cooper. “You want to continue with your sonar check-out?”

“I think it would help if I took a watch on the sonar stack with Senior Chief Albanese,” Cooper said.

Pacino nodded and Cooper left. Pacino opened his pad computer to the classified news files, wondering if there were anything there that Styxx had missed that might shed some light on this operation. A half hour after he’d been into the files, with no results, Elvis Lewinsky came into the room and brewed a fresh pot of coffee, then took his seat at the XO’s seat’s right side.

“How are you doing, Patch?” he asked. “Coffee?”

“Yes, please, Nav. I’m okay, I guess. I’d be better if we had good news about Romanov.”

“Yeah. I heard XO is getting daily status updates about her, but so far, nothing’s changed. He did mention Blacky Nygard is out of the burn unit and is doing well.”

“That’s a relief,” Pacino said. “He saw the worst of it.”

“He got the flames but not the smoke inhalation.”

“Yeah.” There was an awkward silence, until Pacino said, “Nav, I bet you have a theory about this op.”

“I already did my guessing to the captain,” Lewinsky said, scanning his pad computer.

“Come on. I bet you think more than you said to the captain.”

Lewinsky looked up. “I do.”

“Out with it, Elvis.”

“Patch, what if that Omega II — the ‘BUFF’ as you and Romanov called it — is on the way to deploy some of those Poseidon torpedoes on American shores?”

Pacino sat back in his chair, a frown on his face. “If they were, wouldn’t they just go into the Barents Sea, then into the North Atlantic? Why all these preparations to go under ice?”

Lewinsky shook his head. “Maybe the Russians are worried about the SOSUS sonar network tripwires laid down between the UK, Iceland and Greenland. Maybe they think if they come through the GI-UK gap, they could be detected. Or they’re worried that they could be trailed by an American or British sub if they go that route. And they think they can evade a trailing hostile sub by going under the ice.”

Pacino shook his head. “The long route? Through the Bering Strait and around South America? That would take months.”

“That might be why we’re loaded out with months of food.”

“It won’t matter, Nav. The BUFF is way too big to make it through the icepack.”

“It’s almost September,” Lewinsky said, “so the icepack is at minimum now.”

“Hand me the remote,” Pacino said. He lit up the projection flatpanel and projected from his WritePad. “This is the BUFF. I superimposed on this image a scale image of a Virginia-class submarine.” On the display was a 3D view of the Belgorod, with the deep-diver sub Losharik docked underneath. Next to it was a Virginia-class boat.

Lewinsky looked at the projection and whistled. “Goddamn, that boat is big. It looks like you could fit five or six of us inside that thing’s hull and have room left over.”

“Hence, Big Ugly Fat Fucker, Nav. No way that thing gets through the ice.”

“Shut the wardroom doors, Patch.”

Pacino raised an eyebrow at the navigator, but got up and shut both doors to the room.

“What is it, Nav?”

“This is codeword top secret, so you didn’t hear this from me. But this isn’t the first time an Omega has gone under the ice. The first unit made it all the way to the pole.”

“Really?”

“Sixteen or seventeen years ago or so. In December. Or January. When the icepack was at maximum.”

“How do you know this? There’s nothing in the classified archive about that.”

“Too highly classified. I guess your father never told you about it. Your old man definitely knows how to keep a secret.”

“What do you mean?” Pacino stared at Lewinsky.

“I’ve probably said too much already,” Lewinsky said. “But Omega unit one? It never made it home. Your dad put it on the fuckin’ bottom. And got the Navy Cross for it.”

Pacino stared at Lewinsky with his mouth open, but before he could say a word, the navigator grabbed his pad computer and vanished out the aft door.

12

Weapons Officer Captain Lieutenant Katerina “Ballerina” Sobol frowned from the pier at the weapon loading support ship, tied up at the bow of Belgorod. The second Gigantskiy torpedo was finally about to roll into tube five, for the third damned time, she thought. She looked up in time to see First Officer Lebedev walk over from the conning tower access hatch.

“I’ll wager you’re getting pretty good at this,” Lebedev said.

Lebedev was over a head taller than Sobol, who was petite and had a dancer’s body, which had contributed to her nickname, although she’d never danced. She’d been more into futbol and track growing up. She’d been fast back then, she thought glumly. She hadn’t run more than a kilometer since she had joined this submarine. It was just too busy in port, and all their sea time had been a week here, ten days there, then back into the drydock, then post-drydock sea trials, then back to the pier for repairs, after which they’d repeat the same cycle. It was exhausting. Sobol couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a good night’s sleep. She touched the back of her head, her habit when frustrated, and grimaced that her hair was greasy. She needed a long hot shower, the kind where it didn’t matter how much water she used, she thought. She’d kept her usually shiny raven black hair long, but to conform with uniform expectations, she’d put her hair in a braided ponytail. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken it out, and she just felt grimy. She could almost hear her mother’s voice insisting that a nuclear submarine was no place for a young woman. But if Mother had had her way, Katerina Sobol would be cooking and cleaning at home with four children and a husband, who would probably be an alcoholic like her father, the reason she didn’t drink.

“Third time’s a charm, Madam First,” Sobol said in her soprano voice, which had always irritated her. In college, someone had cruelly said she sounded like a cartoon character. She’d even tried smoking to try to deepen her voice, but the scheme had failed. “I’m hoping this time, they don’t find yet another fault that requires them to take it back to Santa’s workshop and rewire it or reprogram it.”

“Do the Sevmash folks still think the command detonate function problem was inside the torpedoes, not in our battlecontrol system?”

“So they say, ma’am. But they could change their minds again tomorrow. We still have to go through primary testing and then integration to the Second Captain AI.”

“What are they saying about the Status-6 weapons?”

“This morning they said they’d be on their way by noon. They’re four hours late on that projection.”

Lebedev looked at the overcast sky. “You’re going to lose daylight.” It was late August, which meant they’d have over fifteen hours of daylight, but Sevmash’s delivery promises had fallen through three times in the past ten days.

Sobol checked her watch. “Sunset is at 2030 hours, ma’am. It’s only 1600 now.”

“The last four hours of daylight are dim at best. Sevmash might not get here for another two or three hours.”

“I could call for generators and halogen lights,” Sobol said.

Lebedev shook her head. “No. Loading a nuclear weapon in less than full daylight isn’t safe, I don’t care how many lumens you blast at the bow. Bright lights mean shadows. And hell, even at noon, loading weapons is the most dangerous thing we’ll do until we approach the icecap. Did I ever tell you about the torpedo loading accident from ten years ago?”

Sobol laughed. She’d heard the story at least a dozen times. Some idiot removed the safety bolts from a UGST torpedo during loading and the weapon engine started. It walked its way out of the tube, armed itself and flashed across the bay and hit a tugboat, about a tenth of its explosive charge detonating, blowing a hole in the tug the size of a turkey platter. The shipyard had had to scramble to save the tug, tying it off to a rail-mounted crane until pontoons could be mobilized and a patch fashioned that would last long enough to get it into a drydock, which had royally messed up the maintenance schedule of the shipyard. It was fortunate for all that the full power of the warhead hadn’t gone off, or else the entire pier, rail crane and tugboat would have been destroyed.

“Believe me, Madam First, we are absolutely doing this by the book.” She showed Lebedev the dogeared procedure manual, which was opened to the page where the steps were shown that the load crew were executing now.

“Good. Any sign of the captain?”

“No. He’s been at Northern Fleet HQ all day.”

“Well, let me know if you see him coming down the pier, and let me know when the Status-6 units arrive — if they do arrive. I’ll be advising Sevmash that if they’re not here by the time you’re done loading the Gigantskiy, they’ll be waiting until tomorrow for the Status-6 load.”

“Understood, ma’am. Can I ask you a question? I can’t get a feel for how urgent this mission is. How much of a hurry are we in?”

Lebedev grimaced and shook her head. “If we even make speed-over-ground of four or five knots on average to the Bering Strait, I’d be pleased. That could be a hundred days into the operation. So, another day to load weapons and test them out with the Second Captain won’t make a difference.”

Sobol nodded. The Gigantskiy was fully inserted into the tube. Now for the next step of shutting the muzzle door. After that, they’d open the breach door, connect the torpedo to the interface to the weapon control system, shut the breach door and flood the tube. With any luck, that wouldn’t short out the torpedo, which would force them to start all over again.

“Anyway, I think I’ll lay below to see how Michman Yegor is doing with the electronic checks,” Lebedev said.

“He should be well along with the tube four Gigantskiy,” Sobol said.

“Stay alert up here, Weapons Officer,” Lebedev said. “I’ll have hot tea sent up.”

“Thanks, ma’am.” Sobol saluted Lebedev and the first officer returned the salute, turned, and walked back in-hull.

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino leaned over the chart table and glanced at the chronometer in the red-lit control room of the project submarine USS New Jersey, which had deeply penetrated Russian territorial waters, which made them all outlaws. It was surreal being submerged in the Zapadnaya Litsa Fjord, barely a nautical mile from the Russian submarine base, not far from the spot that the Vermont had been simulated to be when the exercise had gone bad.

New Jersey had been loitering on-station for the past day-and-a-half, rigged for ultraquiet and hovering with one side of the engineroom shut down for sound quieting. The flank run to Faslane had ended a week ago, and their weapon load-out had been done by dark of night in a covered structure they’d been winched into. As expected, the Virginia Payload modules had been loaded with fourteen Tomahawk cruise missiles, twelve of them carrying conventional antisubmarine warfare depth charges, two of them loaded with 250 kiloton nuclear depth charges. Usually, the nukes would be useless, since nuclear release authority had to come from the president himself, and obviously the White House would be out of communication when they would be under ice, but perhaps anticipating the need, the ship had sailed from Faslane with advance nuclear release authority, granting to the captain the decision if and when to deploy nukes, which was a chilling development. Someone in the Pentagon had had a nightmare that New Jersey would need to employ nukes. And yet nuclear cruise missiles? They were useless under ice. Big Navy and the upper levels at the Pentagon, Pacino thought, were clueless.

The torpedo room had been filled up with twenty-one ADCAP Mark 48 Mod 9 torpedoes, two SLMM Mark 67 submarine launched mobile mines, and two of the newer swimmer-delivered Mark 80 mines. The dry-deck shelter had been mated to the top of the hull in the same barn, lowered from a bridge crane. Pacino had supervised the shelter being mated to the plug trunk hatch, noting that its height was half the height of the sail. If, when under the ice, they were called on to break through the ice, the vertical surfacing could crush the shelter. They’d been assigned the unit that didn’t have the upper surface hardened for ice collisions. Typical Big Navy, Pacino thought, never thinking ahead to contingencies.

The boat had been towed to another building, where the stores load had been accomplished. The 140-day food loadout had been an all-hands evolution, bringing on and storing what fresh food they could — which would run out in two weeks — and canned food and frozen stores. Like they had before the Panther run, they’d loaded so many twelve-inch diameter cans of food that they were placed on all walkways forward of the engineering spaces, with plywood laid on top, making the headroom of occupied spaces restricted. More than one sailor had banged his head on a valve, unused to the overhead being closer by a foot. As time went by, the crew would eat their way down to the bare deck plates.

Perhaps most interesting items of the loadout, though, were the arctic supplies, all of them coming down the plug trunk hatch in large cylindrical modules with labels. ”Personnel shelter / arctic.” ”Snowmobile.” “Heavy weather gear / arctic.” ”Diesel heater / arctic.” ”Diesel generator / arctic.” Lewinsky had remarked that they would be ready for anything, but Pacino had doubts. After all, in the South Atlantic, Vermont had run out of torpedoes and it had almost proved their downfall.

The crew had been disappointed that there hadn’t been time to take in the sights of Scotland or experience the pubs — or the female companionship. They’d been in Faslane less than 24 hours and it was around-the-clock work. By the time they’d shoved off and headed north, the crew was exhausted. Hell of a way to start a mission.

And oddly, the SEALs hadn’t arrived until the very last minute, just before Pacino and Short Hull Cooper were ready to remove the gangway. And the SEAL officers had yet to eat a single meal in the wardroom. Wondering why they were so elusive, Pacino had sought out his friends, Commander “Tiny Tim” Fishman and Lieutenant (junior grade) “Grip” Aquatong, who were hiding out in the SEAL accommodations aft of the torpedo room. The SEAL area was self-contained, with a small galley, frozen and refrigerated stores, a conference room that doubled as a movie screening room, and a two-hole head with a shower. With this arrangement, the SEALs could isolate themselves in the thought that a top secret mission would preserve its secrets all the better if they didn’t mix with the rest of the crew, but it was a flawed idea, since the SEALs spent hours a day working out in the torpedo room where they rubbed elbows with the crew. That is, until the rig for ultraquiet was imposed, shutting down hot food from the galley and the makeshift torpedo room gym.

Fishman and Aquatong had greeted Pacino warmly enough, but they seemed preoccupied. They probably knew something that they couldn’t talk about, he considered. Fishman was Pacino’s height and solidly built, the clean-shaven and tough-looking black officer rarely smiling, his serious nature seldom reacting to humor. He was working on his doctorate in philosophy at a different university than the one that had rejected his thesis, a theory about life on earth that resembled a religion, but which had helped Pacino gather his courage to invade the Panther. Pacino had hoped Fishman would entertain them at Quinnivan’s midrats with his theory.

In contrast to Fishman, the taller and skinnier Grip Aquatong was the comedian of the pair, and he’d grinned at Pacino and delighted in showing him his new pistol, a Desert Eagle .50 cal, the gun heavier than a box of lead. Aquatong had a mop of black hair and still had his closely trimmed beard, which had started to come in gray, which was odd since the junior grade lieutenant was only twenty-three. But like Fishman, Aquatong had seemed somewhere else, cutting the visit short so he could attend a meeting that Fishman had called, which kept Pacino from greeting the SEAL medic, Senior Chief “Scooter” Tucker-Santos, or his right-hand man, Petty Officer “Swan Creek” Oneida, but Pacino figured the mission had plenty of time for them all to catch up.

Several days out of Faslane, they’d crossed the Arctic Circle and held the traditional Navy “Bluenose” ceremony, but somehow it had lacked the high spirits of the equatorial crossing on the Panther mission. The crew’s mood seemed somehow subdued, Pacino thought. Somber and serious. It just felt different. Pacino wondered if they were all feeling some darkness arriving from their future. And now, off the Russian submarine base, they were rigged for ultraquiet and tiptoeing. The boat seemed wound tighter than a piano wire.

“Petty Officer Sanders,” Pacino called from the chart table to sonarman Walrus Sanders, who had the sonar stack for this watch section. “Anything?”

Sanders had put his hand to his right ear under the headset as if listening hard to something, which had prompted Pacino’s question.

“New sonar contact, designate Sierra Seventeen, OOD. Diesel engine. Sounds like the same support ship we’ve been hearing. Back for another trip.”

“Probably delivering something,” Pacino said.

“Like what?” Short Hull Cooper asked.

“Weapons, food, personnel. Who knows?”

“Sure would be nice if we had an Apex drone overhead,” Cooper complained. “We’d know everything going on. We’d be able to see the BUFF’s captain talking to the admiral on the pier. Down to what brand of cigarettes they’re smoking.”

“You heard the XO,” Pacino said, having stepped to behind Sanders’ shoulder to see the sonar broadband display. “We’re doing this without eyeballs, just using our earballs. Well, hello, you slugs,” Pacino said to the arrival of Squirt Gun Vevera and his under-instruction, Long Hull Cooper. “About fucking time.”

“Fuck off, Lipstick,” Vevera said, smirking. “We’re early.”

“Oh man, Squirt Gun, don’t let XO or Weps hear you call Pacino that,” Long Hull said.

“Hey,” Vevera said, “when I have the deck and the conn, I’m like a king. And besides, I’m a Vehmontah, I do what I wanta.”

“Get that off a bumper sticker, did ya, Squirt Gun?” Pacino asked.

“So, what you guys got?” Vevera said, suddenly serious as he looked over the chart.

“BUFF is still dead cold iron,” Pacino said. “Sierra Seventeen was just detected, a supply boat, most likely bringing the BUFF more shit for his trip.”

“Probably a big load of porno DVDs,” Vevera said.

“No way the Russians are as perverted as you, Squirt,” Pacino said. “Plus, maybe they’re taking along comfort women.”

“No way they’d embark hookers,” Vevera said. “Sure would be nice if we did, though. You ever wonder what it would be like to take those Rooskie submariners drinking?”

“I spent a few hours with some of them on the Panther run. Believe it or not, even after trading torpedoes with us, they seemed like decent guys.”

“And girls, right? I heard that blonde Rooskie weapons officer had a crush on you.”

“Yeah yeah yeah. You guys got the picture?” Pacino said. “Hurry up, I’m hungry.”

“Oh, the XO is in fine form tonight.” Vevera rubbed his tummy, smiling.

“What’s for midrats?”

“XO ordered hot chili, hot in temperature. He violated the rig for ultraquiet. Said he was tired of cold sandwiches.”

“Hey, he does what he wants to also,” Pacino said. “Hard to imagine stirring some chili over a gas flame would alert the Russians.”

“Anyway, I relieve you, sir,” Vevera said.

“I stand relieved. Short Hull?”

“I’m relieved by Mr. Cooper,” Short Hull replied.

“Let’s hit Quinnivan’s midrats,” Pacino said.

When Pacino and Short Hull walked into the wardroom, both Executive Officer Quinnivan and Weapons Officer Styxx were laughing.

“Something funny?” Pacino asked.

Quinnivan frowned in reply. “Your report?”

Pacino nodded at Short Hull Cooper.

“Sir, Mr. Pacino and I were properly relieved by Mr. Vevera and Mr. Cooper,” Short Hull said formally. “As previously reported, we have a new detect. Sonar thinks it’s a supply ship. The BUFF — er, the Omega — is still shut down.”

“Have a seat, gentlemen,” Quinnivan said, his mirthful expression returning.

Pacino took a seat next to Styxx and put his napkin in his lap while Styxx passed him the bowl of chili. He loaded up on it and grabbed a cornbread from the platter. “You want to share the joke, XO?”

Quinnivan beamed at Pacino. “Some new intelligence from our esteemed weapons officer. Madam Styxx, you want to declassify this for Mr. Pacino?”

“I suppose it’s about time, XO.” Styxx looked at Pacino, a slight smile on her lips. “So, Patch, that night you spent with me at AUTEC?”

Pacino’s spoon froze in mid-air on the way to his mouth. He put it down and looked at Styxx. “Yeah?”

She laughed and said, “We didn’t do anything.”

“What?”

She nodded. “You were so drunk you passed out at the entrance door to the BOQ. I had to drag you to the elevator and down the hall to my room. And drop you on the bed. And undress you. Have you ever undressed a corpse? You have to roll it to one side, pull off clothes, then roll it back, on and on.”

Pacino stared at her. “Really? So how do you explain all the lipstick on my face?” And how would she account for the happy, satisfied look on her face that morning? What had she said to him? Good morning, tiger.

Styxx put her face in her hands, laughing and wiping tears from her eyes. “Oh my God, I didn’t want you returning to the boat without making it look like you were a conquering hero. Part of my assignment from a certain Royal Navy officer we all know and love.”

Quinnivan guffawed, looking pleased with himself.

“But the lipstick stains. You kissed me? When I was out cold?”

“No, dummy,” Styxx said. “No way human lips would put that much makeup on your face. I applied it liberally with my lipstick. Took the whole thing. And you bolted out of the room so fast, you didn’t even see yourself in the wall mirror.”

The other officers were snickering, Dankleff pointing at Pacino and snorting, then coughing as cornbread went down the wrong way.

“And no one even suspected I’d done that,” Styxx continued. “You thick-headed males all just assumed Pacino got the lipstick honestly. And no, Bullfrog, that does not give you permission to resurrect Pacino’s stupid nickname.”

It was then the SEAL officers walked in. Pacino felt relief that now the conversation might turn away from him.

“Well, what do you know? Our kick-ass commandos have decided to honor us with their presence,” Quinnivan said. “What, did you run out of triple-X rated movies? Everyone, if you haven’t met them, this is Commander ‘Tiny Tim’ Fishman and Lieutenant (j.g.) ‘Grip’ Aquatong. And speaking of nicknames, Commander Fishman’s actual first name is Ebenezer, so, you know. But what about you, Grip?” Quinnivan looked expectantly at Aquatong.

“My actual callsign is ‘Autoloader,’ except to these assholes I work with. You drop one lousy box of grenades, and suddenly—“ Aquatong smiled as he took an empty seat. “Anyway, we’re here because we heard there was hot food.”

“Load up before it’s gone,” Quinnivan said. “You guys know the old Vermont crew, but you may not know Engineer Kelly here or Weapons Officer Styxx. Say hello, people.”

Fishman looked over at Kelly and, for the first time in Pacino’s memory, smiled. He just said, “Machine. Gun. Kelly.”

Engineer Moose Kelly frowned at him. “I hated that nickname. And how did you know it?”

Fishman’s smile turned enigmatic. “I had intel, Machine Gun.”

Kelly rolled her eyes. “I have to tell you, I like my new name better. Call me Moose.”

Fishman raised an eyebrow. “I can’t imagine a woman as beautiful as you being called ‘Moose,’” he said. “You have a first name?”

Kelly blushed a dark crimson, concentrating on her chili, but she glanced over at Fishman for just a fraction of a second, then just mumbled, “Yeah, my first name is ‘Eng.’”

“You are without a doubt the most gorgeous chief engineer I’ve ever seen.”

Lewinsky laughed. “Hey, Tiny Tim. The last chief engineer you saw was me.”

Kelly’s blush got even deeper.

“Wow,” Quinnivan said. “I had no idea anyone could make our hard-boiled engineer blush.”

The phone handset under the table buzzed, and Quinnivan reached under and pulled it up to his ear. “Command Duty Officer,” he said, his voice instantly serious. He listened for a moment. “Very well.” He replaced the handset. “Well, people, looks like we’re finally seeing some action. The Omega is starting her engineroom.”

“XO,” Kelly said to Quinnivan, “request to restart our port side.”

Quinnivan nodded. “Engineer, you have permission to restart the port side of the engineroom, but get the officer of the deck’s order.”

“Aye, sir, by your leave, XO.” Kelly bolted from her chair and walked out of the room faster than Pacino had ever seen her move.

The phone under the table buzzed again and Quinnivan answered as before. “Junior Officer of the Deck,” he said, “restart the port side of the engineroom.” He looked at the officers as he hung up. “I’d advise you guys to get some sleep. The Omega will probably be shoving off in the coming hours. I want you all alert when he does.”

Back in stateroom three, Pacino took off his coveralls and hung them on his hook as River Styxx walked in and shut the door behind her.

“Sorry about the story, Patch,” she said.

Pacino shrugged, trying to act nonchalant. “I guess I should thank you, River,” he said.

She just looked at him, a kind expression on her face. “Next time,” she said gently, “don’t drink so much.”

“Good night, Weps,” he said as he climbed into his rack, hoping he wasn’t blushing as Kelly had.

“Well, I suppose this is farewell and bon voyage,” Admiral Gennady Zhigunov said to Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev. “Good luck out there.”

“Admiral, you’re absolutely sure you can’t send an attack sub to escort us out?” Alexeyev glanced out to the deep water of the fjord. It was very possible that a British or American sub, or even a French nuclear boat, could be lurking off the Kola Peninsula, lying in wait to trail them.

“You know the answer, Georgy. All the Yasen-Ms are in depot-level drydock maintenance for their atmospheric controls troubles. We already lost one submarine from the oxygen generator coming off its foundation just from the vibrations of running flank. And the fix is invasive. It’s requiring not one, but two hull cuts. And you know how long it takes to seal a hull cut. The weld quality checks alone take a month.”

“But Arkhangelsk is out of the drydock. Her atmo mods are complete. You could send her.”

Zhigunov shook his head. “Arkhangelsk still needs post-drydock sea trials with vibration monitors on all the piping and equipment. We can’t lose another sixty-billion-ruble submarine and a trained crew. And even if you forget the human and financial cost — we’d lose the time it takes to build a submarine, Georgy. So you see, yes?”

“An older boat, perhaps? A 971 Shchuka-B? The Gepard or Kuzbass? Or Vepr?”

“That would do you no good. Their sound signatures are many decibels higher than the latest generation American and British subs, and for all we know, the French as well. And their tonal signatures? To modern frequency-filtering sonars, they ring like church bells. Their design was for a decade long past, Georgy. Today, they are only useful as damned expensive training platforms. You and Losharik must go out there alone, but don’t worry. Sevmash did so many modifications to the Belgorod it’s almost as stealthy as a new Borei class.”

Alexeyev nodded in obedience, but the idea of his crew’s lives being in the hands of Sevmash was not a comforting one. “Understood, sir. I just know my crew will ask me the same questions. I needed your answers.”

“Idi s Bogom,” Zhigunov said. “Go with God. Fair winds and following seas, Georgy.”

Alexeyev saluted and shook the admiral’s hand, then turned and walked over the gangway to the Belgorod, saluted the Russian flag aft, glanced at the men removing the shore power cables, and entered the conning tower access hatch.

When Alexeyev had gone below, Admiral Zhigunov lingered on the pier for a long moment, looking at the huge hull of Belgorod, her lines singled up, the large yard tugboat already tied up on her seaward side, praying that his words of reassurance to Alexeyev would prove true. Finally, he climbed back into his staff truck and motioned the driver to go.

Alexeyev descended to the upper “zero one” level and emerged through the forward door to the command post, which was full to capacity with watchstanders. He stopped at the chart table and studied it, zooming in to their position at the pier, then zooming back out so he could examine the channel, which skirted the double islands in the fjord. He examined their track out of the fjord, then looked over at the navigator, Captain Third Rank Svetka Maksimov.

“You’ve laid out the track to the rendezvous?”

“Yes, Captain,” Maksimov said. Svetka “Velikolepnyy” “Gorgeous” Maksimov was a striking young woman, model-beautiful, even with her hair pulled back in a bun and no makeup on her face. The other officers had been known to tease her about it, but she’d never reacted. As long as Alexeyev had known her, she’d been calm and professional, but quiet. He couldn’t remember her ever contributing to the officers’ mess conversations.

First Officer Ania Lebedev joined them at the chart table. Alexeyev looked at her and nodded solemnly. For the underway operation, Lebedev would be in the command post, monitoring the watchstanders while Alexeyev and Weapons Officer Sobol would lay to the conning tower’s bridge and drive the submarine out on the surface and into the Barents until they reached the dive point.

“It’s time, Captain,” Lebedev reminded him. She glanced at the captain for a moment. Alexeyev was tall and slender, his formerly black hair now streaked with gray, the gray arriving suddenly on their last mission to the South Atlantic. He was wearing his great coat, his officer’s cap clasped under his arm, and still wearing his black eye patch after the loss of his right eye from an infection, also afflicting him in the South Atlantic. He was a strange, quiet officer, Lebedev mused, living deep inside his head, rarely sharing his thoughts with the officers in the mess during meals, only opening up slightly when they were both alone in his stateroom. So far, he had yet to comment on this mission besides the discussion with President Vostov the week before, but Lebedev suspected he might privately have serious doubts about the operation. But as he’d said, they were in business to execute the orders, not formulate them. After what they’d suffered together, Lebedev had gained a deep respect — perhaps bordering on affection — for the enigmatic commanding officer. There was just something about his presence that calmed her, she thought. As long as Alexeyev were here, everything would be okay.

Alexeyev nodded wordlessly and left the command post by the forward door leading to the stairs to the conning tower.

13

Captain First Rank Sergei Kovalov shook out what must be his fifth cigarette in the last fifteen minutes as he stood on the pier waiting for Admiral Zhigunov’s staff truck. He looked at his new command, the Project 10831 deep-diving nuclear-powered special salvage submarine AS-31 Losharik. It was an eighth the size of his last submarine, the Yasen-M attack submarine Arkhangelsk, the boat he’d been pulled off to command Losharik for this mission. That had made sense to Admiral Zhigunov, since Arkhangelsk was occupied with a long drydock repair availability, which had taken her out of action, and this mission demanded a seasoned submarine commander. But Losharik was a freakish submarine, Kovalov thought privately. He’d never give voice to that opinion, not to his crew and not to his wife, but perhaps only to his friend Georgy Alexeyev. The vessel was a deep-diving special purpose boat, designed to dive to 2500 meters and her titanium hull could probably take her several hundreds of meters deeper, to almost three kilometers beneath the surface.

The deep-diving aspect worried Kovalov, giving him recurring nightmares of hull collapse and flooding so far beneath the sea. The boat had no emergency deballasting system, so flooding at depth would likely result in loss of the ship and all hands. And what was perhaps worse was that it carried no weapons. Torpedoes and cruise missiles had always been something of a security blanket for Kovalov. He believed that in an undersea battle, even if he didn’t win and went down with the submarine, at least he could fight back. But this boat? Completely unarmed. With the exception of the cradles installed to allow them to carry Status-6 Poseidon torpedoes, the weapons carried on the port and starboard side of the boat, but Poseidons weren’t defensive weapons. They were little more than expensive time bombs, Kovalov thought, useless in a fight. He consoled himself that Losharik would be docked with Belgorod, and Belgorod had plenty of defensive and offensive weapons. Thirty Futlyar Fizik-2 torpedoes and ten Kalibr submarine-launched cruise missiles, two of them nuclear-tipped in the hundred kiloton range. The Futlyar units had anti-torpedo settings if needed, and could bring down an incoming American or British torpedo. And, of course, Belgorod carried the two Gigantskiy nuclear-tipped torpedoes that had been loaded aboard for this mission, but Kovalov considered them suicide weapons, especially if used under ice. A one megaton warhead? No matter the stand-off range, the shock wave from a weapon that big would deeply damage the firing ship — or sink it outright.

But this mission, not even begun, had impossible challenges. Docking to the submerged Belgorod had been attempted twice, and both times had resulted in failure. And unloading an exercise dummy of the Status-6 Poseidon torpedo from Belgorod to the carrying cradles of Losharik had only been tried once, and they’d dropped the unit to the seafloor of the Barents Sea. At first, it had been thought that Losharik, being a deep-diving ship capable of salvage, could retrieve the unit, but her manipulator arms malfunctioned and had to be repaired later by Sevmash. They’d had to abandon the effort, to the extreme disappointment of Northern Fleet Command.

As if reading his thoughts, his first officer, Ivan Vlasenko, strode up on his pre-watch inspection of the ship and said, “Worried about the mission, Captain?” Vlasenko pulled out his own pack and lit a cigarette, some odd French brand his traveling sister-in-law had gotten him.

“I suppose,” Kovalov said. “But if there is any good news, it’s that sometimes a difficult day in the Navy can distract from a difficult day at home.”

Vlasenko nodded seriously, although he himself lived a life without the heavy problems that Kovalov shouldered. “The troubles with Magna?”

“Still giving me the silent treatment. After two years since the, well, the thing.” Magna was Kovalov’s sixteen-year-old daughter by his first wife Adele. Two years before, when Magna was at the tender age of fourteen, she’d been brought to the apartment by the police, dragged out of a rave party where she had been high on drugs, naked, and having sex with two boys at the same time, a third naked boy watching them. Kovalov’s present wife, Ivana, had been apoplectic and panicky over the incident, and they’d applied what discipline they thought appropriate — yelling, grounding her, taking her computer privileges away. But not two weeks later, in the middle of a Saturday night, the police visited again, and again had the same story, except that the drugs were harder, heroin this time, and there were more boys piling on, and Magna didn’t care about her parents’ disapproval, openly cursing them, waving off any punishment with indifference.

And that had led to what Kovalov mentally called the grand convening of the wives. It must be understood, first, that ex-wife Adele and present-wife Ivana absolutely hated each other. Given an advance presidential pardon and a loaded pistol, each would murder the other without a second’s reflection. But what had united them was their love for Magna, since Magna was born of Adele but taken care of daily by Ivana. It was Ivana’s voice that was the stronger of the two. How much do you love your daughter, Sergei? When he’d stated he would do anything for her, Ivana had looked into his eyes with that penetrating look of hers that seemingly could see all the way through him to his back collar and said, Do you love her enough to hit her? When he looked confused, Adele had joined in, saying If she keeps on like this, she’ll be in a coffin inside a year. Do you love your daughter enough to beat her to get her attention? He’d protested that he could never raise a hand to her, but then Ivana doubled down. We can’t do it. We’re mothers. We’re there to nurture. Shoulders to cry on. You’re the father. You’re the man. So step up and act like a man. You have to beat her. Hard. When he had argued that there was no way he could convincingly beat his daughter physically, that he couldn’t be an actor, that it would be all over his face that he was reluctant, not angry, the wives had stepped closer to him, pelting him with that weaponized question, How much do you love your daughter? He had shut his eyes for five seconds and thought about it. All Magna’s life, he had been a gentle father, if anything, being the one who comforted her when she was angry at Adele or Ivana. Magna had always been a daddy’s girl, with him as her best friend. There simply was nothing he would not do for his beloved daughter. He’d take a bullet for her. He’d willingly give her both kidneys. And then life had come for him and made this terrible demand. The promiscuity and the drugs, the police had said, all lead to only one future for the girl — she will be found lying in an alley, naked, with needles in her veins, fading away into death or already dead.

How much do you love your daughter,Sergei? Do you love her enough to hit her?

Finally, he had looked at the wives and sadly nodded. “I will do as you ask.”

The opportunity had come that weekend while Magna was grounded and against her will was in the truck with Kovalov driving. He started in on her, that her behavior must immediately change. He calculated it would provoke her into cursing at him, and he was correct.

Fuck you, Dad!

As it turned out, feigning anger had not been required. Magna, his adorable little girl, had turned into a possessed demon. Fuck you, Dad! Fuck you fuck you fuck you—and he’d felt the anger rise in him, and instead of taming it as he would normally have done, he gave in to it. He made a fist and furiously punched her so hard on the side of her face that her head hit the passenger window, shattering it, glass flying around the car, blood running down her face, and the sound of her pitiful shocked and horrified shrieks sounded like a mortally wounded animal. How much do you love your daughter, Sergei? He’d turned the vehicle around and sped her to a clinic, where her scalp beneath her hair had needed a dozen stitches and a large bandage. They’d checked her for a concussion, but other than the cut and the emotional trauma from the punch, she was fine.

But there was nothing fine between him and Magna after that. On returning home with the girl sobbing, half her head shaved, a huge bandage wrapped around her head, both Ivana and Adele had waited for him, both of them in on this little conspiracy, but both had acted shocked and horrified that he had dared to lay his hands on Magna. How could you? They shot murderous glaring looks at him and shepherded Magna to her room in the back of the apartment. He could hear the wives’ low voices comforting her and her wailing loudly, barely able to be calmed. When the wives emerged from her room, their eyes were red and swollen from crying.

“You have to apologize to her,” Ivana said.

“What?” he’d said, not believing his ears. “You put me up to this—“

“Shhh!” Ivana hissed. “Never ever mention that this was a plan. This was just something that happened. You got mad and lost your temper. You got that?”

Kovalov nodded seriously. It was never good when his wife’s voice sounded like his mother’s, he thought. “But is an apology appropriate? Considering what she did?”

“It is now,” Adele said. “Trust us. This is the next step.”

He walked back to Magna’s room, knocked, and went in. She was still sobbing, her shoulders shaking, and she wouldn’t look at him. He sat on the bed and tried to touch her arm, but she wailed and retreated to the other side of the bed, crying pitifully.

“Magna,” he said sincerely, “I am so sorry I hurt you. I was much more frightened for you than angry, baby. But I will never hurt you again.”

She was barely able to be understood as she cried into her pillow, but he made out the words, “Get out! Get away from me!”

Those were the last words his daughter had spoken to him for two years. But the sneaking out, the drugs, the partying, the sex — it all stopped. She went back to studying, her grades rising from failing to exemplary. The clothes she picked out no longer looked suitable for a street hooker, but more of what a serious student would wear. She started to speak to her stepmother about going to the university.

But through it all, there was that black silence. Kovalov’s relationship with his daughter was over. He could only interact with her through his wife or his ex-wife, and the pain of it tore his heart out. He tried to console himself that he had answered the question, How much do you love your daughter, Sergei? He’d saved her, it was true, he thought, but in the same moment he had lost her. She’ll come back to you someday, Ivana would say, but he had serious doubts.

And what if this damned mission, this fool’s errand, went bad and he didn’t return? What would that do to little Magna? Just thinking about it made his eyes moist. He took out a tissue and blew his nose, surreptitiously wiping his eyes.

He looked at Vlasenko, who was on the radio with the yard tug that was tying up to the starboard side of the Losharik to tow her out of the bay. Vlasenko put the radio in his belt and shook out another cigarette. “Captain, the reactor is in the power range and the steam plant is started up, keeping the main engine warm by rotating the shaft every few minutes. Systems are nominal and the Second Captain AI has completed all self-checks. We’re ready to go as soon as you finish with the admiral.”

“How are the hydronauts?” Hydronauts were underwater commandos who reported to GUGI, the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, and would assist outside the hull when it came time to deploy the Status-6 units. Kovalov had met their stand-offish commander, Captain Second Rank Kir Krupkin, a tall, muscular, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, square-jawed officer who had little to say to Kovalov. Kovalov got the impression that Krupkin disapproved of Kovalov’s fleshy submariner’s body, the rich food and lack of opportunities to exercise leading to a few kilograms around his waist he could well afford to lose. Just another thing to suffer in this mission, Kovalov had thought, and sent Krupkin off with Vlasenko to his and his men’s assigned bunks.

“Assholes, as I suppose you’d expect of elite commandos,” Vlasenko said. “Once we’re aboard Belgorod, I imagine we won’t be seeing much of them. They’ll keep to themselves.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t just leave port on the Belgorod. Why did they want to ship out with us?”

Vlasenko shrugged. “Maybe they just want to get acquainted with the boat.”

“They’ve been training in simulators for a year. Not sure what a ride on the boat gets them at this point. So who’s driving us out?” Kovalov should have known the action stations for the underway by heart, but he’d been distracted with all his thoughts about Magna and this operation.

“Systems Officer Trusov will take us out,” Vlasenko said.

“Iron Irina,” Kovalov said, smiling. Captain Second Rank “Iron Irina” Trusov had been weapons officer of the ill-fated Novosibirsk, lost in the Battle of the Arabian Sea, and in her file there had been a citation for her Navy Medal for Distinction in Combat — from her former captain, Yuri Orlov, stating that she’d saved the ship and the crew when everyone had been unconscious. Unfortunately, the ship hadn’t stayed saved very long and crew had had to abandon ship in the escape chamber. Yet there was no sign of cockiness, arrogance, or for that matter, trauma, in Trusov’s demeanor. She was a serious, calm professional. Unless he’d read her personnel file, he’d never know about the decoration for bravery or the things she’d done on that day of battle. “She’ll do a good job.”

“Yes, Captain, I know she will,” Vlasenko said, glancing down the pier. “Looks like we have company. Sail ho.” Sail ho was slang for, I detect the approach of a senior officer.

“I’ll meet you in the command post,” Kovalov said, putting away his cigarettes and stomping on his lit cigarette. He tried to stand straighter as Admiral Zhigunov’s staff truck approached, its fender’s blue flags with three gold stars flapping in the wind.

Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev adjusted his officer’s cap, which had been knocked crooked by a sudden breeze. He raised his binoculars to his eyes and glanced down the channel northwest to the unoccupied twin islands at the entrance to Reika Zapadnaya Litsa, the fjord that eventually opened into the Barents Sea. The fjord was glassy calm, but if the wind picked up, it wouldn’t stay that way long. He looked at the noontime sun, the rays of it making the skin of his face warm, and he took a deep breath, knowing that soon canned air would be the only thing he’d be inhaling, that and his cigarettes. He reminded himself he’d have to kick that habit before they returned home, since Natalia hated the smell of smoke.

“Are we waiting for anything, Deck Officer?” he asked Captain Lieutenant Sobol, the deck officer for the mobilization to sea.

Sobol stood at rigid attention. “Belgorod is ready to cast off and leave port, Captain,” she said formally in her high-pitched cartoon character voice.

Alexeyev nodded, faintly recalling that she’d already made that report, but he’d been lost in thought, thinking about the icecap. He’d never sailed farther north than the marginal ice zone, but he reassured himself that First Officer Lebedev and Navigator Maksimov had.

“Take us out, Deck Officer,” he ordered.

“Aye, Captain,” she said, and raised a megaphone to her lips while leaning over the cockpit coaming on the port side, the pier side. “Deck Chief! Cast off all lines!” She watched as Glavny Starshina Maks Alexandr, the auxiliary mechanical systems chief, repeated the order to the line handlers on deck. When the last line was released from its deck cleats and tossed to the pier, Sobol reached under the forward ledge of the cockpit and pulled the air horn lever, and a blasting, booming, earsplitting roar sounded over the slip. She raised the VHF radio to her lips. “Yard Tug Zero Five, take us to center of channel.”

The radio blared with the tug captain’s reply, “Received, taking you to center of channel and commencing movement to the fjord.”

The huge tug’s engines throttled up to a growling hum and slowly the massive vessel began to move away from the pier.

“Navigator,” Sobol spoke into her microphone connected to the electronics box beneath the windscreen, “Ship is underway, moving to center of channel and commencing tow-out.”

“Deck Officer, Navigator, aye,” the speaker on the box crackled with Svetka Maksimov’s voice.

Alexeyev watched as the piers of the base slowly moved by. Once in the wider part of the channel, south of the twin islands, a second tug, that had been waiting at idle, moved over to their port side.

“Submarine Captain, Tug Five Six, request to tie up to your port side,” Sobol’s radio blared. Sobol glanced back at Alexeyev and he nodded at her.

“Tug Five Six, tie up on our port side,” Sobol ordered on the radio.

With the tugs shepherding Belgorod out, there was little to do on the conning tower, Alexeyev thought. He would have preferred to drive the boat out without tugs, but with over thirty-two megatons of nuclear weapons onboard, it made more sense to play it safe and get towed out. It was only ten nautical miles to open water from here. The tugs turned them in the channel when the conning tower moved beyond the twin islands and they proceeded at dead slow on the new northeast course into the deep fjord. The fjord was serpentine, going from northwest at the pier to the twin islands, then northeast past the islands, turning a corner to go due north, then due east, then finally due north. After their dead-slow-ahead journey, taking an hour-and-a-half, the coastline ended and began to fade behind them. After another two miles into open water, they had emerged into the Barents Sea.

“Captain, request to cast off the tugs,” Sobol asked Alexeyev.

“Shove off the tugs, Deck Officer,” Alexeyev ordered.

“Tug Zero Five and Five Six, take in your lines and clear the submarine, and thank you.”

The tug captains acknowledged, Belgorod’s deck crew tossing over the lines. The tugs backed away from the hull, each honking their air horns twice in a gesture of farewell, then turned to return to base.

Alexeyev leaned over the side of the cockpit on both sides, checking that the deck crew had rotated all the cleats flush into the hull and had gone below.

“Deck Officer, Navigator,” the electronics box’s speaker rattled, “deck crew has cleared the deck and gone below. The hatches are shut and dogged. Ship is ready to proceed to the dive point.”

“Boatswain,” Sobol said into her microphone, “ahead two thirds, steer course zero one five.”

The breeze of their passage picked up, the flag raised aft of them starting to flap in the wind.

“Take her to full speed, Deck Officer. I’m laying below,” Alexeyev said, taking off his cap before it blew off.

“Full speed, aye, Captain,” Sobol said.

Alexeyev entered the command post and found Lebedev.

“Any sonar contacts?” he asked her.

Lebedev shook her head. “We had a good sonar look around when the tugs were clear before the speed increase. No contacts. We’re alone in the sea, sir.”

Alexeyev nodded. “Good.”

When he opened his eyes, he was on his small bed upstairs. The room was lit by a rotating globe that projected small points like stars on the ceiling and walls, but also by a blinking string of Christmas lights that Mommy had placed where the walls met the ceiling.

Mommy was downstairs screaming at Daddy. She was very angry. Daddy was trying to calm her down, speaking to her in a low voice. None of their words could be made out, only their emotions.

He got out of his bed and sat on the floor near the door, his legs crossed underneath him. He could hear better here. Mommy was shouting that it was almost Christmas and Daddy was supposed to stay home.

He heard heavy footfalls on the stair treads and his door opened slowly. Daddy stood there in his officer’s uniform, the three gold stripes on his sleeves, his submarine emblem above his ribbons, a circular pin below them that he had explained was given to him because he was the captain of a submarine. He put down a big duffel bag and knelt down.

“Anthony,” he said gently. “I have to go away. I’m sorry. I’m going to miss Christmas.”

Anthony Pacino looked up at his father, feeling tears fill his six-year-old eyes.

“No. Don’t go.”

“I have to, Son.”

Anthony narrowed his eyes at his father. “Are you going to the North Pole again?”

The elder Pacino hesitated as if he were carefully trying to choose his words. Finally he said, “Yes. I’m going to the North Pole.”

“Is there trouble?”

Again his father paused. “It’s a bad situation, Anthony. It’s very important I go up there with my submarine.”

Anthony drilled his eyes into his father’s. “It’s the Omega, isn’t it? Omega unit one?”

Commander Michael Pacino drew back in surprise. “What do you know about that? And ‘unit one’—there’s only one. The Russians named it the Omega because it’s the ultimate submarine. There’s no unit two.”

Anthony nodded. “You’re going to sink it, aren’t you?”

“I should go,” the older man said.

“It has those torpedoes, doesn’t it? Nuclear-tipped? One megaton warhead? A meter in diameter, can go sixty knots for an hour, right?”

Michael Pacino stood, crossing his arms over his chest, and Anthony also stood, still looking into his father’s eyes.

“We call them ‘Magnum’ torpedoes,” Commander Pacino said haltingly.

“The Russians call them Gigantskiys,” Anthony said.

“How do you know what the Russians call them?”

“Perestroika,” the younger Pacino said. “Means ‘openness’ in Russian. We don’t have to use NATO code names anymore.”

“I have to go,” Michael Pacino said again.

“Be careful, Daddy. And good hunting.”

Michael Pacino stared at his son for a long moment, a look of shock on his face before he withdrew through the door. Again there were footsteps on the stairs, getting fainter. The front door of the house opened and shut. Daddy started the engine of his old Corvette and the engine roared and the tires shrieked as he drove off.

Anthony Pacino stood at the door and slowly opened it. But on the other side of the door, it wasn’t the upstairs hallway with the gallery view of the beach house’s main level, but the control room of a submarine. Anthony looked down at himself. He was still wearing his favorite pajamas, the ones with the dolphins swimming together. His feet were bare. No one in the room seemed to think it odd that a bare-footed six-year-old in pajamas stood in their control room.

Rachel Romanov noticed him standing beside her and wordlessly passed him a cordless, one-eared headset. He put it on and immediately heard the voice.

“Fire, fire, fire! Fire in forward compartment middle level! We’ve got a bad fire—”

“I’m going below to take charge at the scene,” Romanov said to him, pulling on her emergency air breathing mask.

“No, Rachel, don’t go!” Anthony said. But by then she was gone.

As the room filled with thick smoke, he heard himself — as if from a distance — bark words into his boom microphone. “Maneuvering, Conn, report your status!”

As if answering him, he heard the sound of a bunk curtain being jerked aside.

“Why, the reactor is in natural circulation and the electric plant’s in a normal full-power lineup,” River Styxx’s voice said, her face close to his, but it was in shadow in the dim light of the stateroom. “Bad dream, Patch? Again?”

Pacino groaned as he climbed out of his rack. “Oh, damn, I’m so tired.”

“Complaints get you nowhere on a submarine,” Styxx said. “Now put on your game face. We’re manning battlestations. The BUFF is underway. Captain’s about to initiate trail ops.”

The rigged-for-ultraquiet control room was lit by dim red lights and the green glow from the BSY-1 battlecontrol attack center on the starboard side, the sonar stacks on the port side and the array of flatpanels at the pilot and copilot ship control station. Short Hull Cooper stood at the starboard side of the command console and handed Pacino a headset. Forward of the command console, Executive Officer Quinnivan stood, looking over the attack center consoles. To Pacino’s left, between the command console and the navigation plot, Captain Seagraves paced between the sonar consoles and the attack center. He saw Pacino and gave him a slight nod. Lieutenant Varney, the off-going officer of the deck, approached and stood between the command console and the captain, facing Pacino.

“Master One, the Omega,” Varney said to Pacino, “bears one eight zero and is proceeding north toward our position. Sonar thinks it’s being towed by two tugs and thinks its screws are shut down.”

“Range to the BUFF?” Pacino asked, looking down at the navigation display that was selected on the command console.

“Mr. Pacino,” Quinnivan said over his shoulder. “Refer to the contact as Master One, if you don’t mind.”

“Sorry, XO,” Pacino muttered, rubbing his eyes, still feeling half asleep. The dream had left him like a vapor blown away by the wind, but he remembered screaming out about the status of the propulsion plant before Styxx woke him.

“Fifteen hundred yards, give or take,” Varney said. “We don’t have a good TMA solution on him, but the channel is only so big, so the contact’s bearing and time since the turn led to that estimated range.”

“Maneuvering’s status?”

“Reactor’s in nat circ, normal full-power lineup,” Varney said. “Answering bells on both propulsion turbine generators. Main motor is warm.”

“Ship status?”

“Hovering at two hundred feet. Both thrusters rigged out to allow us to point south to the contact.”

“Our intentions?”

“Let the Omega drive toward us and pass overhead,” Varney said. “Once it’s out a few hundred yards, put on turns to follow it out of the fjord. Once the tugs are clear, we’ll get her sound signature.”

“Are there plans to do an underhull?” Pacino asked.

“Captain will decide in a few minutes.”

“Weapon status?”

“Tubes one and two powered up, outer doors open. Just waiting for us to send them target information. So, you got the picture?”

“I’ve got it. I relieve you, sir,” Pacino replied.

“I stand relieved,” Varney said, then looked at the captain. “Sir, I’ve been properly relieved as officer of the deck by Mr. Pacino.” He stepped over to the Pos Two seat at the attack center and climbed into its seat, his battlestations assignment to determine the magical package of information about the Omega, her range, course, and speed, the data called the solution. With a solution of medium quality, they could fire a torpedo at her and be assured of a fairly high probability of a kill. With a good solution, they could count on putting her on the bottom.

Pacino looked at Captain Seagraves and reported, “Captain, I’ve relieved Mr. Varney as officer of the deck.” He looked at Quinnivan, whose battle station was firecontrol coordinator, or just coordinator. “Coordinator, are battlestations manned?”

Quinnivan spun to look at Pacino and bowed. “Officer of the Deck, battlestations are manned.”

The sounds came through the hull then, the pulsing whoosh of the tugboat screws and the thrumming of their powerful engines, the noise building up in intensity, getting closer every second. Pacino waited with the battlestations control room crew, holding his breath. The noise reached its peak, moving from dead ahead to directly overhead as the tugs and the colossal submarine sailed over them and continued northward in the channel, now beginning to fade astern.

“Pilot,” Pacino said to Dankleff in the ship control station, “take charge of your thrusters and rotate the ship to heading north.”

Dankleff acknowledged, reporting a few seconds later, “Officer of the Deck, ship’s heading is zero zero zero.”

“Pilot, rig in both thrusters. All ahead one third, maintain depth two hundred.”

Dankleff acknowledged again. The sounds of the tug screws and engines were diminishing ahead of them.

“Kick up your speed, OOD,” Seagraves said. “He’s fading.”

“Aye, sir. Pilot, all ahead two thirds.”

“Master One is drifting right,” Senior Chief Sonarman Albanese reported from the number one sonar stack. “He’s turning.”

“Nav?” Pacino asked, looking at Lewinsky, who stood at the navigation plot.

“One hundred yards to the turn point, OOD,” he said. “New course, zero four five.”

“Very well,” Pacino said, zooming into his chart display to show the northeast portion of the channel.

“Mark the turn to course zero four five,” Lewinsky said.

“Pilot, right full rudder, steady course zero four five.”

“Eighteen hundred yards on this course, OOD,” Lewinsky said. “Next course will be zero nine zero.”

“Very well, Nav,” Pacino said. “Sonar, any sign of Master One using her own screws?”

“Officer of the Deck, Sonar, no.” Albanese said. “Master One bears zero four five. Signal-to-noise ratio is steady.”

Pacino nodded. The tug sounds were constant, so they were at the right engine order to match the speed of the tugs and the BUFF, the Omega being towed out at eight knots. Pacino waited impatiently for the turn point.

“Mark the turn to zero nine zero,” Lewinsky said. “Three thousand yards on this course.”

The navigator guided them through two more turns until they were headed north. The chart showed that they were almost clear of the coastline and that the fjord was fading behind them.

“They should be cutting the tugs loose any time now,” Seagraves said.

But for another fifteen minutes, the tugs continued towing the Omega northward out to sea, until finally Albanese reported, “Master One’s tugboats have shut down.”

“Pilot,” Pacino called, “all stop, hover at present depth.”

“All stop and hover at two hundred feet, Pilot aye, and Maneuvering answers, all stop.”

After five minutes, Albanese spoke again. “Tugs have restarted, bearings diverging from Master One. Tugs are heading back to the barn.”

“Very well, Sonar,” Pacino said.

The sounds of the tug screws and engines came close again, passed overhead, then faded astern.

“Master One startup,” Albanese called. “Master One is making way on two seven-bladed screws.”

“Turn count, Sonar?” Pacino asked.

Albanese listened and manipulated his panel. “Master One is making six zero RPM, both screws.”

“Captain, do you want a TMA maneuver?” Pacino asked. TMA was target motion analysis, a way to get a contact’s range by using passive sonar and parallax geometry by driving the ship back and forth across the line-of-sight to the contact. It was slow and would take at least twelve minutes for an accurate range determination. They couldn’t hit the target with an active sonar pulse or it would give away that they were following him, and it would be risky to raise the periscope and use a laser rangefinder, since the Omega’s crew might detect the laser. One of the prime directives of the submarine force was, remain undetected.

“No time, OOD. Just speed up to eight knots and follow him. We’ll keep an eye on his signal-to-noise ratio.”

“Aye, Captain. Pilot, all ahead two thirds,” Pacino ordered. He checked the bulkhead chronometer. For a long ten minutes, they followed the Omega as he cruised slowly on the surface.

“OOD, Sonar, Master One’s turn count is increasing. He’s speeding up. I have two one zero turns.” Albanese turned to look at Seagraves. “He’s bugging out, Captain.”

“Take it up to full, OOD,” Seagraves said to Pacino.

“Pilot, all ahead full.” He looked at Seagraves. “So, no underhull, Captain?”

“Not at this speed, Mr. Pacino. He may be headed to a rendezvous point with his deep-diver sub. Let’s see what he does.”

“Aye, sir. At least he’s loud on the surface, Captain. Signal-to-noise looks good.”

“Don’t jinx it, Mr. Pacino,” Seagraves said, smiling at Pacino.

14

“Good news, Mr. President,” Tonya Pasternak said to Dmitri Vostov. “The terrorist attack seems to have created sympathy with the people. Your poll numbers are still growing, now up eight percent since the disaster.”

“What’s our lead?” he asked, downing the last of the morning’s tea.

“About four points, sir.”

“I want to see the raw data,” Vostov said.

“It’s on your desk, sir, let me look.” Pasternak stood from the chair in front of Vostov’s massive mahogany desk and stood beside his chair, looking through the files she’d placed there that morning, but it was buried in what seemed fifty other files.

“While you do that, I’m going to the restroom,” Vostov said. He cursed mentally. It seemed like his bladder got smaller every day. It was down to an endurance of three hours now. It was at the point that he had to visit the men’s room just before his official workday began at eight am, then make sure he made another visit before eleven o’clock, or he’d suffer through the pre-lunch meetings. He stood and left Pasternak to rifle through the paperwork on his desk. Vostov hated computers and wouldn’t use one himself. He left that to Pasternak. He’d rather read a printout than a glowing computer screen. Pasternak had once chuckled that his love of paper and hatred of screens was a characteristic of people his age.

Vostov made his way to the large side door of the office suite that opened into an ornate bathroom. He stepped up to the urinal and unzipped, shutting his eyes and allowing himself a moment to think about his four-point lead going into the election. What was it, forty-eight days away? Could he maintain that lead, or open it up even further?

In the office suite, Pasternak stood erect at the desk, consternation crossing her features. Where was that report she’d printed out for the president? As if to cover all the bases, she decided to look into his solid gold wastebasket, the rubbish bin a relic of the era of the Tsars. It must weigh twenty kilograms, she thought. Vostov used it for disposal of whatever papers he’d decided he was done with, regardless of their classification. It fell to the SBP guards to empty the trash can and segregate the classified documents for shredding and burning. The can was half full of papers. She reached down for a stack of printouts, careful to keep her hands away from the soggy tissues Vostov had used to blow his nose into earlier.

In the restroom, Vostov had zipped back up and was washing his hands when the booming explosion from his office threw him across the room and into the decorative tile mosaic on the wall. His head hit the tile, and as his body collapsed, he left a blood trail all the way to the floor.

Captain First Rank Sergei Kovalov knocked gently on the stateroom suite door, wondering if he were blushing.

The door was immediately opened by Captain Third Rank Svetlana Anna, who smiled slightly and motioned him in.

“Good evening, Captain. I was pleasantly surprised to get your note.”

Svetlana Anna was dressed as he’d requested, wearing a simple skirt and business jacket with a silk blouse underneath, with stylish black pumps. She looked like she could be walking into a conference room at an attorney’s office. Her chestnut hair was combed straight, coming down to her shoulders, with the slightest hint of wavy curls. Her face was sculpted, her forehead smooth, her arched brows accentuating her deep brown almond-shaped eyes, her curving nose and strong cheekbones leading to full red lips. Her complexion was clear, a few freckles gracing her nose and cheeks. Her jawline was straight, her throat long and graceful. Kovalov could see how, with her stunning natural beauty, she had succeeded in the ranks of the test wives. Anna was the commander of the test wives and had told him in reply to his note that at her advanced old age of thirty-three, she no longer entertained clients herself, but merely supervised the performance of her younger subordinates and watched out for any problems arising from having comfort women — or the more politically proper term, test wives — embarked onboard a combat vessel. She had written Kovalov that she functioned as the madam or the mamasan. But he had repeated his request to just see her.

“I suppose it was an unusual request, Madam Anna.”

“Call me Svetlana.”

“Svetlana then,” Kovalov said, standing awkwardly by the door. “And call me Sergei.”

“Please, sit, Sergei.” Anna pointed to an area with two large comfortable chairs clustered with a coffee table between them, a small couch on the other side of the coffee table. “May I call for tea?”

Kovalov sank into one of the chairs, thinking this was a small corner of comforting luxury aboard this otherwise all-business naval vessel, as was Svetlana Anna.

“I have no watches to stand until we may need to undock under the ice. So I was imagining something stronger.”

Anna smiled at him gently, her teeth small and white. She really had a beautiful smile, Kovalov thought, but again reminded himself that that should come as no surprise, as she was the military’s version of a call girl.

“I have Tsarskaya and Beluga Gold,” she laughed, “for such special occasions. I’ve never hosted anyone over the rank of captain lieutenant, so we should celebrate.”

“I don’t suppose you have scotch, do you?”

Anna smiled. “Would Glenmorangie 1999 do?”

Kovalov raised his eyebrows. “Good God, absolutely.” That scotch would cost months of his salary, he thought. Probably reserved for a visiting admiral — or the president himself.

Anna went to a credenza and pulled out a crystal decanter and two crystal glasses and poured for them both.

Kovalov raised his glass to her and said, “to fallen comrades.”

She closed her eyes solemnly for a moment, then sipped the scotch and put her glass down. Kovalov kept his glass in his hand.

“I thought we could talk,” Kovalov said, haltingly. He felt in the breast pocket of his submarine coveralls. “May I smoke?”

“Of course, Sergei.”

Anna put an ornate crystal ash tray on the table, then sat back, crossed her shapely legs, and looked at him with just a trace of amusement on her face as he fumbled to find his lighter. His hand shook as he held the flame to the cigarette.

“Forgive me. I am nervous.”

“You can talk to Svetlana. For as long as you need, I am yours.” She tried to give him a significant glance, but he’d looked down, concentrating on lighting his cigarette, finally getting it lit. He blew a cloud of smoke to the overhead. She had the impression he was almost trying to hide inside a veil of smoke, but hiding from what?

“I suppose I am here to experience feminine acceptance. Comfort. Encouragement. Affection. Even if those things are manufactured or fake.”

“My emotions and reactions are always genuine, Sergei,” she said, sipping the scotch. “I don’t act. I don’t have to. I am never with a man for whom I harbor the slightest distaste. I am only with gentlemen I like. Privilege of rank, I imagine.” She smiled at him again, trying to make him feel at ease. “Although it has been two years since I actually hosted a client. My usual function is to find a personality match between the man and one of the test wives reporting to me. But you asked for me specifically. I suppose I should ask you why?”

Sergei nodded, taking a gulp of the scotch. “You’re the same age as my second wife. I can’t imagine I would gain much comfort from the company of a nineteen-year-old, who is only a little older than my little girl.” An expression of agony briefly twisted Kovalov’s features.

“Tell me, Sergei. Is there trouble between you and your wife? Did she gain weight? Lose her looks?”

“Oh no,” Kovalov said. “Ivana is a gorgeous, striking woman.” He laughed, but it came out as a bitter kind of noise. “I suppose she has looks that could have served her well if she had wanted to come into your world.”

“Go on.” Anna gave Sergei an encouraging look, leaning slightly forward in her chair.

“The problem is that she has turned cold to me. I believe she stopped seeing me as a man. She lost respect for me. It came from my parenting of my daughter from my first marriage.” He took another sip and coughed as it went down the wrong way. “She thinks I’m easily manipulated by my daughter. I should say she used to think that. Something terrible happened.”

Slowly, Kovalov told the tale of striking Magna and the agonizing fallout from that single desperate act of fatherly discipline. Svetlana Anna hung on his words, encouraging him when it became overwhelming for him, until finally the story was over.

“So now?” Anna asked. “Your Ivana no longer wants to be with you? Sexually?”

Kovalov nodded. “But it’s more than that. She won’t speak to me. She won’t even look me in the eye. Anyone visiting my house would tell you the marriage is long over.”

Anna moved over to the loveseat. “Join me here, Sergei. Allow me to put my arm around you. Would that be acceptable?”

Slowly, Kovalov stood, put out his fifth cigarette and stepped to the small couch and sat beside Svetlana Anna. He could feel the soft warmth of her body. He shut his eyes for a moment, luxuriating in the sensation of feeling the touch of an understanding woman. A woman who had no hatred or contempt for him.

“You know, it wouldn’t be so difficult if I’d lost my feelings for Ivana, but I am still deeply in love with her. I know it’s over. My relationship with her. And with Magna.”

Anna kissed Sergei’s neck softly, just for a moment. “Your daughter will come back to you. Little girls always do. I didn’t speak to my own father for almost five years. Today we are close.” She took Kovalov’s hand, interlacing her fingers between his. “Sergei, we can move to the bed if you would like.”

“Can we stay like this? Just for a while?”

“Of course.” She stroked his shoulder while she held his hand. Kovalov’s eyes slowly shut as he felt her touch.

“This is wonderful,” he said.

The slight sound of a buzzer came from the wall behind Anna. “Do you mind, Sergei? I have to answer. There could be trouble with one of the test wives.”

He opened his eyes and nodded, finding his glass and emptying it.

“Yes, he is,” she said quietly into the phone handset. “I’ll tell him.” She hung up and looked at Kovalov. “It was the command post. Captain Alexeyev requested your presence there.”

Kovalov stood. “I suppose it is all for the best that we didn’t go any further,” he said sadly.

“There’s always another time,” Anna smiled at him. “Write me on the system and I will clear my schedule for you.”

“I will,” he said, hoping the scotch wouldn’t be detectable on his breath. It was too bad smoking was not allowed in the command post.

Far down the passageway, past the retracted ladder to the escape chamber, he passed the door of the captain’s stateroom, then the first officer’s. He opened the aft door to the command post and walked in.

Captain Georgy Alexeyev stood at the number one periscope on the starboard side by the tactical console lineup of the battlecontrol system.

“Hello, Georgy,” Kovalov said from over Alexeyev’s shoulder.

“Ah, Sergei. I thought you might want to see the icepack. We’re departing the marginal ice zone and diving under complete ice coverage. One last look at blue sky, yes?”

Kovalov nodded and took the periscope, the rubber eyepieces of the optics warm from Alexeyev’s use. He put his hands on the horizontal grips. The left one could change the optical magnification. The right could tilt the view up or down. The deep blue waves of the Arctic Ocean rolled slowly toward the view. In the middle distance was an ice landscape of a thousand colors of white, glinting in the stark sunshine of the cloudless evening, at a latitude where the sun never set in the summer months. A double-peaked mountain range presided over the ice, the valley between them deep but its low point at what seemed at least ten meters higher than the periscope view. Kovalov rotated the scope to look behind them, seeing a few icebergs floating free, most small, two of them fairly large. He returned the view to directly ahead of them.

“Distance to the icepack?” he asked.

Alexeyev said to the watch officer, “configure, energize, and test the under-ice sonar.”

Watch Officer Sobol gave the command to Sonar Officer Valerina Palinkova, who stood at the under-ice sonar stack at the forward centerline of the room. As her panel lit up, the large flatpanel displays on the forward bulkhead came on, showing only a deep blue.

Palinkova manipulated her controls and sent out a test pulse. The sound was a pure bell-tone ping for slightly less than a second, the ping a high-pitched sound audible to the naked ear in the room. After a second, another ping sounded, then a third.

“High frequency tested,” Palinkova said. “Energizing low frequency.”

In between the high-pitched pings, a lower bell-tone sounded, then continued, the high and low tones alternating. On Palinkova’s display, repeated on the bulkhead flatpanels, a faint white rectangle appeared at the top of the screen.

“Distance to the icepack, a little over one nautical mile, sir,” Palinkova announced.

“Your scope, Georgy,” Kovalov said, returning the instrument to Alexeyev. “Did you transmit to Northern Fleet?”

“I did. Admiral Zhigunov knows we’re entering total ice coverage. The last he’ll hear from us in a long while, if all goes well.”

“Let us pray it does.”

“Agreed,” Alexeyev said, snapping up the periscope grips and reaching for the hydraulic control lever in the overhead. “Watch Officer, lowering number one scope.” The optics module silently lowered into the periscope well, the smooth stainless steel pole rolling downward until it stopped with a thump. “Scope retracted. Reduce speed to ahead one third, make revolutions for three knots.” He walked forward to the under-ice sonar console, crossing his arms and watching Sonar Officer Palinkova operate the system.

“Make my depth six five feet, Pilot aye,” Lieutenant Dankleff reported from the ship control console.

“Look-around number one scope,” Lieutenant Pacino said to the room.

“Speed four knots, depth one hundred feet, on the way to six five feet.”

“Very well,” Pacino answered. “Raising number one scope.” The flatpanel on the command console lit up blue, shining brightly in the rigged-for-red control room. Pacino rotated the view while training the scope upward, making sure the Omega hull was not above them, despite sonar believing him to be eight hundred yards in front of them. The display got lighter as Dankleff flew them out of the depths toward periscope depth. Eventually Dankleff called that they were at seventy feet, and the view foamed as it came out of the water and dried off in the sunshine.

“Six five feet, Officer of the Deck,” Dankleff barked.

In the distance, the icecap and its twin mountains towered over them. Pacino rotated the view quickly in a circle, but they were alone in the sea with the exception of a few icebergs floating free in the marginal ice zone. “Icecap in sight.”

“Take a laser range,” Captain Seagraves ordered.

“Laser range aye. Pacino uncovered a toggle switch and flipped it quickly up and back down and replaced the cover. “Range, one thousand eight hundred yards.” He looked at Seagraves. “You still want to keep the under-ice sonar set secured, Captain?”

“Lower your scope and take her back to two hundred, Mr. Pacino,” Seagraves said.

Back at depth, Seagraves looked over at the sonar stack lineup. “I’m convinced our under-ice sonar could be detected by the Omega’s passive sonar. Let’s close the distance to him and follow him under the ice. You think you can do that?”

“Yes, Captain,” Pacino said. “Our signal-to-noise ratio is strong and we have good contact on his under-ice sonar pings.”

“Master One’s turn count is slowing,” Senior Chief Albanese reported from the number one sonar console. “Looks like he’s slowing to three zero RPM.”

“Pilot, all ahead one third, turns for three knots,” Lieutenant Pacino ordered. He looked at Captain Seagraves. “Sir, request to launch the code three SLOT.”

A “SLOT” was a one-way radio transmitter buoy ejected from a signal ejector — a small device resembling a torpedo tube — and would wait the input time delay, then transmit the message in a burst communication to the overhead CommStar satellite, then sink. The message code three indicated the Omega was proceeding under the polar icecap and that the USS New Jersey remained in trail and was undetected by the Russian.

Seagraves nodded. “Launch the SLOT.”

“Nav-E.T., launch the SLOT,” Pacino commanded.

“SLOT is away,” the navigation electronics technician reported.

“That’s the last anyone will hear from us for a while,” Pacino remarked, more to himself than Junior Officer of the Deck Cooper.

From the overhead, a strange noise could be heard, getting slightly louder. It was an eerie groan.

“Sounds like a ghost,” Pacino said. “An unhappy one.”

Seagraves nodded. “We’ve moved under total ice cover. That’s the sounds of the ice shifting. It’ll get louder. Mr. Pacino, I want you to bump the number one periscope out of the sail, just enough to expose the optronics,” Seagraves said. “Squadron thinks in infrared mode, we can see the hull of the Omega. Or at least his reactor plant components. If that doesn’t work, we can switch to visual spectrum and light up the surroundings with the deck and sail under-ice lights.”

“Bump up number one, aye,” Pacino acknowledged, uncovering the hydraulics toggle switch cover and pushing the hydraulic valve to the UP position for just a half second. The screen came to life, but the view was dim, just the underside of the ice over their heads.

“Mark the bearing to Master One,” Pacino called to the sonar operator, Senior Chief Albanese.

“Master One bearing, zero four eight.”

“Training the scope to zero four eight,” Pacino said. The captain looked over Pacino’s shoulder. There was nothing but darkness.

“Light up the infrared,” Seagraves ordered.

Pacino hit the IR button and the seascape came into view, ice above them, a pressure ridge to the right of them, and ahead of them in the distance, a heat bloom, showing up on the screen as a series of red shapes. He increased the magnification. Around the red shapes was the slightest indication of a cylindrical envelope around them.

“I have Master One on IR,” Pacino said. He hit the switch that projected the view on the control room starboard side’s flatpanel display so everyone in the room could see it. He smiled at Short Hull Cooper. “This is turning out to be easier than I thought.”

“Don’t get cocky, Mr. Pacino,” Seagraves said, but he was smiling just slightly.

“Well, people, allow me to gavel this weekly meeting of the Poseidon committee to order,” President Vito Paul Carlucci said, taking his end seat in the Situation Room of the White House.

He seemed in a better mood than the last two meetings on the subject, National Security Advisor Michael Pacino noted to himself.

“What do we know?” the president asked, getting right to business.

CIA Director Margo Allende projected her pad computer to the room’s large displays, the projection showing the earth from high above the north pole. “The red line shows the path of the Omega II as it left its base near Murmansk in the Kola Peninsula. The red ‘X’ not far from the coast, in open water, is where the deep-diver sub docked with the Omega when both were submerged. The USS New Jersey reported that the docking was conducted with no problems.”

Pacino felt a lurch in his stomach whenever Anthony’s submarine was mentioned.

“First time,” Office of Naval Intelligence Rear Admiral Frieda Sutton said. “They’ve never been able to do that successfully before. Not with the Omega submerged. They seem to have fixed their artificial intelligence’s ability to hover the submarine.”

“From there,” Allende continued, “the Omega proceeded northward and exited the Barents Sea and entered the Arctic Ocean. She passed under complete ice coverage two hours ago, as reported by the New Jersey. It was New Jersey’s final transmission before going into radio silence.”

“And,” Carlucci said, squinting at the display, “what do we think this thing, this Omega, is doing?”

“Her course would seem to take her just slightly wide of the North Pole on the Russian side,” Sutton said. “Director Allende, could you plot the extrapolation of her course?”

“If it keeps going like this, Mr. President,” Allende said, “its course would bring it to the Bering Strait and into the Pacific.”

There was silence in the room for a long moment.

“Now, why the hell would it do that?” Carlucci asked.

“All our intelligence intercepts mentioned carrying the Poseidon weapons to U.S. east coast ports,” NSA Director Foster Nickerson said. “So heading to the Pacific is off-script.”

“Maybe Vostov is calling an audible,” Pacino said. “Maybe he’s decided to plant them off our west coast ports.”

“Maybe,” Allende said. “But who knows what he’s thinking at this point? He’s survived two assassination attempts in the last month. Those experiences may be warping his judgement.”

“Two?” Pacino asked. “I only heard about his office bomb.”

“Presidential helicopter was sabotaged,” DIA Chief General Rogers said. “Ball bearings were put into the gearbox. But the mechanism to spit them into the works was supposed to wait till the chopper was at a thousand meters. Something went wrong and instead the bearings were injected at an altitude of one meter. Chopper landed safely. The mechanics involved all disappeared. Probably by the FSB.”

“Or they were disappeared by whoever led the conspiracy,” Allende said. “And as far as the office explosion, we lost our listening devices in Vostov’s office. There was no mention of the Pacific Ocean in any of our sound intercepts. Can you confirm that, General Nickerson?”

The NSA director cleared his throat. “That’s correct, Madam Director. As of the day of the explosion, we only heard about the Atlantic coast as a potential drop-off point for the Poseidons.”

“So now what?” Carlucci said. “Do we do what the cancer doctors call ‘watchful waiting’?”

“Sir, if I may?” Pacino said, glancing up and seeing Vice President Karen Chushi entering the room and walking toward her seat at the end opposite the president. She moved slowly with the aid of a cane and was obviously struggling just to make the twenty steps to her seat. She looked so sick he could barely believe that she’d decided to show up for the meeting. Her face was gray and her features were twisted with pain.

“Please, Patch. What’s on your mind?”

“Based on the fact that the Omega is carrying offensive nuclear weapons with the intention of placing them inside American territorial waters, and based on the fact that it has transited under complete ice cover, and on the fact that a thousand bad things can happen to a nuclear sub under the ice with no one knowing what happened,” Pacino said, coughing and clearing his throat, two thoughts slamming into his mind at the same time, that he himself had gone down under the icecap, and that Anthony was there right now. Not a few hundred yards from a killer submarine, an improved version of the one that had defeated Pacino in combat.

“Go on, Admiral.” Carlucci said. Pacino imagined the president knew what he’d say next.

“I respectfully recommend we sink the Omega before it emerges from under the ice.”

15

Vice President Karen Chushi was shouting while struggling to stand up, leaning heavily on her cane.

“Are you out of your goddamned mind? Seriously?” she screamed at Pacino. “You’re going to shoot at a Russian warship during peacetime? Are you aware that’s an act of war? Against a goddamned nuclear superpower?” Chushi had finally gained her feet. She picked up her cane and pointed it at Admiral Pacino. “You’re a goddamned warmonger, Pacino. And you!” Her cane pointed to Carlucci, causing his Secret Service detail to flinch, but he waved them to back off. “This is what happens when you bring in a goddamned warmonger to run national security! And you know, there’s no need to do every goddamned thing this man says!” Her accusatory cane pointed back at Pacino. “Admiral Pacino, how much of your motivation is driven by revenge for that first Omega sub you shot at under the icecap? And lost to? With the loss of your submarine and every soul onboard except you. Yeah, I got access to the goddamned file, Admiral, I know. And how much of your motivation is that your little warmonger son is on that New Jersey submarine? Because, if you strike at the Omega now, and let’s say you get the drop on it, the Omega sinks, little Pacino Junior won’t be in danger anymore, will he? Well, will he?”

Chushi pointed her cane at Allende, who was staring at the vice president with her mouth hanging open in shock. “And you, Madam CIA Director, this is ultimately your goddamned fault! You and your shady organization did this. Oh, look at the expression on your face, so innocent. Yeah, I said it. You nefarious spooks at CIA planted information into the Russian’s intelligence agencies that prompted this whole Poseidon mess, didn’t you? Isn’t it true, Madam Allende, that your double agents, or your electronic so-called ‘pipelines,’ funneled data to the Russians that was patently false, right? You made the goddamned Russians believe that America had mined all their harbors with two megaton nuclear mines, didn’t you? Poor Vostov is called into a meeting and shown a map with little atomic symbols placed in every port, from Murmansk to Rybachiy to Vladivostok to St. Petersburg to goddamned Kaliningrad. How many megatons did you convince the Russians that you’d planted in their territorial waters, Madam Allende? Forty? Fifty? Seventy? And what the hell else was Vostov to do after that provocation, from those lies that you planted, which he obviously believed, but deploy his own nuclear munitions?”

“Madam Vice President, we did no such thing,” Allende said, stammering.

“And I should believe you? You and your people lie for a living. Oh, I know about your disinformation pipelines, Madam CIA Director Allende. You made the Russians believe in the 80s that the Strategic Defense Initiative missile shield worked and was tested out with a perfect record. You sent fake messages back and forth, messages you knew the Russians were intercepting, that since the missile shield worked, that Star Wars was up and running, that it was time for a first nuclear strike against the Russians, isn’t that true? Isn’t it true that your deception of the Russian intelligence agencies forced Gorbachev to strike his hammer-and-sickle flag and lay down his guns, surrendering to an America that you’d led him to believe was ready to nuke his country to dust? Isn’t that true? No, don’t answer, Madam Director, I already know.”

She pointed to Brett Hogshead, the Secretary of War, and to Jeremy Shingles, Secretary of the Navy. “And you two,” she accused. “Out of the blue you decide to send our frogmen into a Russian Navy port and sabotage their submarine Kursk. It goes to sea on an exercise and blows up and kills the entire crew. And for what? Revenge for an American sub they sank thirty-two years before? What was that, your version of revenge served cold?”

She swung her cane to point back at Carlucci. “As for you, you should call Vostov right now and come clean. There are no bombs in his ports. Ask him politely and nicely to call off his Poseidon deployment.” She slowly walked toward the entrance to the room, the long voyage on her cane taking place while the room remained in shocked silence. Finally at the door, she said to Carlucci, “Mr. President, please consider this my resignation.”

She paused for a moment, just long enough for Carlucci to straighten his tie and say calmly, “Your resignation is accepted.”

Chushi shut the door behind her. Carlucci looked up at the meeting’s participants, raising his eyebrows. “More coffee, anyone?” When the silence continued, he said, “Well, then, this meeting is adjourned. I’m sure you all have pressing things to take care of. I’d like the room cleared with the exception of the Secretary of War, Secretary of State, CIA director, chairman of the joint chiefs and you, Admiral Pacino. I’m going to take a break for biological reasons. Please feel free to get fresh coffee and then come back.”

Pacino followed Allende to the wardroom, where a fresh pot of coffee awaited them. She poured for him first, then herself. Pacino spoke to her in a low tone.

“Is all that stuff Chushi said true?”

Allende waved him back to the Situation Room before answering. She sat and looked at him. “It’s all true except for mining Russian harbors with nuclear bombs. We didn’t do it and we didn’t ‘pipeline’ fake intelligence to the Russians saying we did do it. I don’t know where that’s coming from.”

“So how had the vice president gotten this information? Could it be she had some contact within Vostov’s organization?”

Allende shrugged. “I suppose we could bug her residence at the Naval Observatory and her West Wing office to find out, but I doubt that would bear fruit.”

“With her medical condition,” Pacino mused, “do you imagine that maybe she just got confused? Mixed up briefing information? Maybe heard about a potential plan to deploy nuclear mines, a plan rejected? Or an unexecuted scheme to ‘pipeline’ disinformation into the SVR?”

Allende shook her head. “We never even thought about a plot like that. Maybe one of Hogshead’s Pentagon novelists dreamed something up. You know he’s had thriller writers on retainer ever since seven-seventeen, charged with brainstorming incoming threats that his admirals and generals wouldn’t ever dream up. But if someone did put this idea on a Pentagon whiteboard, we never heard about it. And Hogshead would never embark on a plan like that without involving CIA.”

“What about NSA? Those spooks work for the Pentagon. For Hogshead. They could have put this idea into fake message traffic.”

“No way,” Allende said. “We’re tight with NSA and DIA. Hell, we practically live in conference rooms with those guys, and our people are in their task forces and theirs are in mine. NSA can’t send out an order for Chinese food without my people knowing about it. That goes for DIA as well. And no one is going rogue in our agencies. Ever since Snowden? Everyone with a clearance over top secret has as much surveillance on them as we put on the FSB or SVR.”

When Hogshead wandered back in with Shingles, Allende stopped talking. Once the smaller group was reassembled in the room again, Carlucci walked in, sat down, and poured fresh coffee for himself, then looked at Pacino.

“Well, Patch, let’s talk about this option you’ve proposed. Sinking the Omega.”

“It makes the most sense, Mr. President,” Pacino said. “Waiting for the Omega to drop off these bombs in American ports, even if he’s just making some kind of a statement, could go horribly wrong. What if, while being placed, a circuit shorts or the weapon’s AI wakes up and decides the detonation protocols are correct and just blows a ten megaton hole in Norfolk Harbor? Shooting down the Omega might not be a good idea in open water, but under the polar icecap? No satellites can see or hear it, no overhead aircraft will detect it with their sonar buoys or magnetic anomaly detectors, no helicopters with dipping sonars will find it, no antisubmarine warfare ships will detect it on sonar. The water under the icecap is the most isolated location on the planet. And we have an asset a few football fields away from him with armed weapons, ready to take him out. If you give the order, this miserable crisis ends.”

“From a practical point of view, how would this happen?” Carlucci asked. “I was made to understand that subs under the ice are out of radio communication.”

“Not completely, Mr. President,” Jeremy Shingles, the Secretary of the Navy said. “The Navy implemented a four-letter code group for communications with the New Jersey while she’s under ice. These letters are transmitted in extremely low frequency, Mr. President, so they take a long time to receive, but these radio waves are powerful enough to be received by a submerged submarine. Even under the ice. The transmitters require antennae the height of skyscrapers and take power from dedicated power plants, each of which could light up a small town. It takes up to twenty minutes for a single alphanumeric character to be transmitted and received aboard. The four-letter code group would be preceded by that day’s two letter callsign for the New Jersey. So six letters in total. Two hours to receive the directive, which is a long time, unfortunately, but the transit under the ice will take weeks, or longer.”

“What are these pre-arranged messages?” Carlucci asked.

“There’s an entire codebook of possible messages. For example, one was to break contact and come home. A second was to try to provoke the Omega — bang into its hull or ping at it with active sonar. A third was to order the deployment of swimmer-delivered mines to the hull of the Omega, mines that could be detonated by an algorithm like with the attack on the Kursk, or by a particular sonar signal. A fourth code to shoot at the Omega with torpedoes and take her down.”

“Wait, you can set off a mine placed on the Russian’s hull with a sonar sound?” Carlucci asked.

“Sure,” Allende said. “That’s how we detonated the munitions on the Russian Nordstream pipeline. We placed the explosives under the cover of a Baltic NATO naval exercise with a detonator programmed to go off on receipt of a particular sonar sound. Then, a month or so later, a P-8 antisubmarine plane was sent by Norway to drop a single sonar buoy with a one-hour time delay before it pinged the detonate command. By the time the P-8 landed, boom. Pipeline blew up with none of our fingerprints on it.”

“Ah, I remember now,” Carlucci said. “I was briefed on that. But still, Admiral Pacino, shooting at a Russian submarine carrying all those megatons of nuclear weapons, it’s a little disturbing. Couldn’t they go off? Or scatter radioactive plutonium all over God’s green earth? And the explosion from your torpedoes, particularly if they cause the Omega’s own weapons to blow up, won’t that be detected by seismologists? And won’t the Russians become aware that we killed their submarine? What will they do then?”

“I believe the Russians will stand down,” Pacino said. “Anything else would be a crazy overreaction. Vostov won’t send nuclear missiles over the pole because we put his submarine on the bottom. A submarine that was on a nefarious mission to sneak nuclear munitions to the American coast.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the Russians didn’t do anything in retaliation when we sank the first Omega under the icecap. Nor did they take action when we sank three of their Yasen-M attack submarines this summer.”

Carlucci paused. “Unless losing a fourth submarine is the last straw for Vostov. Secretary Hogshead, what say you?”

The Secretary of War cleared his throat. “Mr. President, I understand the clear driving motivation for taking this offensive submarine torpedo system out, but we’ve had a dozen debates about things like this in the past. We were threatened by, for example, an anti-ballistic missile radar installation outside Moscow, the station bristling with anti-aircraft and anti-missile defenses, which would make Moscow impervious to a nuclear attack, and the station itself was immune to a strike to take it out. It was sort of a miniature version of our own Strategic Defense Initiative. Discussion went to sending in a highly modified B-52 bomber cloaked with anti-radar material, jets with heat signature masking and a new bomb-homing system and a precision laser-guided bunker-busting bomb. I believe the plane had a codename, the ‘Old Dog.’ ‘Allow us to take out the ABM site,’ the Air Force pleaded. ‘The Old Dog can fly in and out without being detected and the bomb will eliminate the radar installation.’ We decided against the plan. It was just too overt and provocative. Plus, if the Russians were to shoot down the Old Dog and capture the crew, it would be a foreign relations nightmare. Instead, we just had CIA and Mossad agents go underground and sabotage it from the inside. Turns out, Madam Director Allende’s methods work better than ours in situations like this.”

“So, what do you think, Madam Director?” Carlucci asked Allende.

Margo Allende swallowed. Pacino realized her loyalty to him and her loyalty to CIA were in conflict. He’d once told her, if that situation arose, to be the CIA director first and his girlfriend last, and she’d looked at him like he was an idiot and said, of course she would. But in reality, he knew she wouldn’t want to pollute their relationship by calling his proposal stupid or ill-advised in front of the president.

“Mr. President, I like the idea of placing mines on the Omega’s hull that we can detonate remotely if we have to. A mine would make the sinking — if we determine the Omega must be put on the bottom — look like a torpedo room accident, like Kursk.”

“Kursk,” Carlucci said. “Refresh my memory, please. Kursk was that Russian sub that sank, what, twenty-five years ago from its own torpedo exploding in its torpedo room. Right?”

“Actually, no, sir,” Allende said. “The news all trumpeted that version. In actuality, when Kursk was in port, our Navy SEALs placed two shaped-charge mines on either side of its torpedo room, programmed with an algorithm. It would wait for depth excursions, time from leaving port, periscope depth trips, the sound of exercise weapons being fired. Then when the algorithm on the master mine was satisfied, it sent a signal to the slave mine and both blew up at the same time. The weapons in the Kursk’s torpedo room blew up in sympathy, with sufficient force to vaporize the entire compartment. The Russians had no wreckage or forensic evidence of the torpedo compartment they could use to put the puzzle pieces together.”

“I had no idea,” Carlucci said, fascinated. “Why did we do that?”

“Retaliation for our submarine USS Stingray, which the Russians sank under the polar icecap. With the loss of all hands.” Allende gave Pacino a significant look. Pacino wondered if Carlucci knew that Stingray’s captain was Commander Anthony Pacino, his father.

“Wait, why would the Russians sink our sub, Stingray, under the ice?” Carlucci frowned in confusion.

“Their reason, Mr. President,” Allende explained, “was that they thought one of our submarines sank their boat, K-129, off Hawaii.”

“Dear God, this just goes on and on, doesn’t it?” Carlucci said in frustration. “What happens when the Russians decide we sank this Omega? We lose another one of our boats? Or they target the New Jersey when it leaves the Arctic Ocean?” Carlucci shook his head. “I’m not ready to shoot down this submarine, people. It’s too aggressive. Let’s just keep watching it and waiting.”

“Sir, are you also rejecting the mine placement plan?” Pacino asked.

“I actually like the mine placement option,” Carlucci said. “But let’s wait on that too. A bomb that goes off from a sonar sound? Sounds risky.” He turned to look at Allende. “And by the way, what about Vostov? How safe is he? With all these assassination attempts?”

Allende shook her head. “We think a third attempt is coming. We’re trying to find out more. So far, we haven’t traced who is responsible for these attacks. And we haven’t yet gotten information on what the third attempt will be. Just some communications chatter.”

Carlucci nodded. “If you find out in time, I could warn Vostov.”

“Why?” Pacino asked. “He’s not exactly acting very friendly right now. Not with this Omega and these Poseidons.”

Carlucci smiled. “A good faith gesture like that? It might change the calculus of his placing these Poseidons. Besides. Devil you know, Patch. Devil you know.”

Margo Allende unlocked her Jaguar and Pacino climbed into the plush leather passenger seat of the slung-back and sleek black sports car.

“Where to, Patch?” she asked, her hand reaching for his.

“I’m thinking the Irish pub,” he said.

“Kelly’s Irish Times it is.” She guided the car out to the street, the way to the pub memorized, as it was practically their watering hole when they were both at the White House.

“How are you?” Pacino asked. “You okay?”

She glanced at him. “Patch, after a day like this, I just want to inhale a big bowl of Irish stew, chug an entire bottle of wine all by myself, then go home, where, if you’ll oblige, you’ll fuck me hard enough to make me lose consciousness.”

“You know, Margo, I’ve always loved your poetic style of speaking.”

“Hey,” she smiled for the first time since the meeting, “I’m a delicate fuckin’ flower.”

They were sitting at the bar while waiting for a table to open up. Pacino had ordered a Macallan 18, double, neat. Allende had opted for a Cabernet from Sonoma. They were just about to start talking about things that weren’t classified, when a commotion broke out at the end of the bar, where one of the flat screen displays that wasn’t selected to a sports channel was playing the 24-hour SNN news feed. Someone had bellowed, “turn that up!”

The bar quieted down as the announcer came on and went to a reporter pictured outside, where an upside-down Lincoln SUV was lying, its top crushed, its front end smashed flat from a bridge abutment. The scroll at the bottom of the screen read, …VICE PRESIDENT KAREN CHUSHI DEAD IN A SINGLE CAR ACCIDENT OFF MARYLAND RT. 50….

Pacino’s cell phone began to ring insistently with the White House’s ring tone. He picked it up, stated the memorized eight alphanumeric code for the day and the White House operator came on.

“Admiral Pacino, the president wants to see you in his study. There’s a car waiting for you.”

Pacino hung up and looked at Allende. “You think we did this?” He asked quietly as he inclined his head to the screen that was still broadcasting about the vice president’s death.

“No telling,” Allende said. “If we did, I don’t know about it. With one whisper to the Secret Service? Carlucci could have done this.”

“Yeah, but Chushi was pretty far gone with cancer, and for all we know, it could have affected her brain, as that outburst in the Situation Room showed. This could be natural causes.”

Allende shook her head. “Natural causes don’t have convenient timing.”

“I guess you’re right. Boss wants to see me in his study.”

“You can take my Jag,” Allende said, searching in her purse for her key fob.

“He’s got a car out front waiting for me,” Pacino said, smiling. “I guess he knows our habits.”

“Your cell has a tracker on it,” Allende said.

“So, the big question is, do I drink this scotch or pour it down the bar sink?”

Allende smiled. “For this meeting? My recommendation is you drink it.”

And Pacino did.

The president’s recently remodeled and windowless study next to the Oval Office was a SCIF, a special compartmented information facility, where the most sensitive secrets could be discussed. It featured dark wood paneling, dark tin-patterned ceiling, deep leather club chairs and a massive fireplace. The seating area was arranged at the end away from the door, facing the fireplace. On the door end of the room, a small desk and high-backed chair with smaller chairs in front was placed. For this meeting, the president had called in Navy Secretary Jeremy Shingles and acting Chief of Naval Operations Rob Catardi. Pacino took one of the club chairs opposite the president, a mahogany and marble coffee table between them, Shingles and Catardi sitting on his left. The president had called for one of the stewards to light a fire in the fireplace despite the September heat, the office’s air conditioning able to overcome the additional warmth. When the fire was fully stoked and the steward left, Carlucci offered Pacino a cigar. Shingles and Catardi were already puffing smoke, though neither looked comfortable.

“I have Macallan 25,” Carlucci said, pouring from a crystal decanter into a rocks glass. “Patch?”

“Yes, please, sir,” Pacino said, bringing the Cuban Cohiba to life with Carlucci’s torch lighter.

“Well, I wanted to see you all to talk more about this option of placing mines on the hull of the Omega, the kind we can light up with a sonar signal.” Carlucci turned to Catardi. “Admiral Catardi, can you describe the nuts and bolts of how this would work?”

“Certainly, Mr. President,” the chief of the Navy said, accepting a glass from the president and passing it to Pacino, then accepting one for himself. Catardi wasn’t a big drinker, but when the president drank scotch and toked on a cigar, so would the admiral. “The New Jersey is outfitted with a dry-deck shelter on her upper hull and there are four SEAL commandos embarked aboard. The SEALs will climb into the shelter with dry suits on and swim to the bow of the New Jersey and withdraw the mines. The SEALs have ultraquiet propulsion units that will take them to the Omega hull. They’ll attach the mines about forty feet aft of the bow, so that they are adjacent to the storage racks of the Omega’s torpedoes, with one mine on each side. Once the mines are in place, they’ll connect the mines with a communication wire between them.”

“Won’t it be tough to swim against the current, with the Omega moving?”

“No, sir,” Catardi said. “Under the ice, any speed over about three knots is not safe. A sub can slam into a pressure ridge and damage the bow or sail. This isn’t the kind of ice like the stuff that floats in your glass. Polar ice pressure ridges are hard as steel and can rip open a hull and sink a ship. Don’t believe me, ask our good friends on the Titanic. So this won’t be a problem. The propulsion units the SEALs will use are powerful enough to haul the commandos and the mines.”

“Will doing this make noise? Won’t the Omega hear a clunking sound when the mines are attached?”

“No, Mr. President. They attach first with the suction from a vacuum pump while a powerful electromagnet holds them fast to the hull. A small unit will come out of the body of the mine, cut away any anechoic foam coating on the hull, expose raw steel, and weld itself to the hull. Then the electromagnets and vacuum pump can turn off, conserving battery power.”

“How long will the batteries last?”

“In testing, about three months. The mines are in a power-saver mode until awakened by the sonar signal. So then the divers swim back, re-enter the New Jersey and they await further instructions.”

“Tell me more about the sonar pulse that wakes up the mines and detonates them,” Carlucci said.

“The sound won’t be anything like a regular sonar pulse. One sonar trigger sound that performed well in testing is the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The ending of the 1812 Overture worked well also.”

Carlucci nodded and refilled his glass, then relit his cigar, which had gone out. “What if we decide to abort the mission? It wouldn’t do to have a couple of our mines attached to the Omega’s hull when it eventually pulls into port.”

“Another sonar signal commands the mines to detach. They torch off the welded lug from the hull and sink to the bottom and self-destruct.”

“Good,” Carlucci said. “I like it. So, gentlemen, execute this plan. Place the mines on the Omega hull. Give the order immediately, Admiral.”

“Right away, Mr. President. By your leave, sir,” Catardi said, standing.

“Thanks for coming, Rob,” Carlucci said, flashing his politician’s smile at the Navy chief.

“You need me anymore, Mr. President?” Shingles asked.

“No, but thank you for coming so late, Jeremy,” Carlucci said. He liked informality when the business was over.

Pacino stood and was about to put out his cigar when Carlucci waved him back to his seat. “Stay a moment, will you, Admiral Pacino?”

Interesting, Pacino thought, that there was no informality now, so the business with him must still be ongoing. Pacino sat.

“Yes, Mr. President?”

“Admiral, your swearing in will be at two pm in the Rose Garden. Figure out who you want to hold the Bible or the Koran or the Code of Federal Regulations for you. Supreme Court Chief Justice McDaniel will swear you in.”

Pacino stared at Carlucci, momentarily confused. Carlucci just smiled and said, “Welcome to your new role, Mr. Vice President.” He stood and offered his hand.

For a moment Pacino was speechless. As he stood, he took a breath to argue with Carlucci that he didn’t want the office, but Carlucci seemed to read his mind.

“Don’t worry, Patch. You’ll retain your national security advisor role and functions, and staff. But now I’ll have a VP I can trust. And you get a bigger West Wing office.”

Pacino shook the president’s hand. What could he say, Pacino wondered. “Thank you, Mr. President. It’s an honor.”

When he opened the door to the hallway, four Secret Service agents were waiting for him. One of them spoke to his wrist, saying, “Devilfish is on the move.”

Hell of a Secret Service code name they’d christened him with, Pacino thought. The name of two submarines under his command that sank.