Terminal Run

9

It was after 0200 Eastern time when Pacino finally entered the engineer’s stateroom. The room was a box less than seven feet on a side, all brown wood grain plastic laminate walls with stainless-steel trim. To the right of the door was a mirror with a fold-down sink on the wall with a dozen cubbyhole doors and hooks with hanging laundry. The bulkhead on the left had two fold-down desks with reading lamps and two steel chairs, with cubbyhole doors above and below. The desk was cluttered with manuals and papers and computer output and several handheld computers. The wall opposite the door contained three sleeper-train-style bunks, each about two feet wide with two feet between the racks, each a coffin like space with a brown privacy curtain. Lieutenant Alameda, in submarine coveralls under a Naval Academy sweatshirt, sat at the desk near the beds. She looked up when Pacino came into the room and smiled for a split second, then frowned at him.

“The aft cubbyhole by your elbow has three poopy-suits in it, nonqual. You can unpack your seabag into it. Your rack is on the bottom. The top rack is for my stuff, and so is the other desk, so don’t count on working in here. Don’t be bashful about changing in front of me, and I won’t around you. If your puritan sensibilities are insulted, that’s tough; this is a combat submarine and it’s just going to be that way.”

Pacino was too tired to react. He nodded and stripped off his uniform and stuffed it into a hanging laundry bag, got on all fours and crawled between the wall and Alameda’s chair to the lower rack, slid aside the curtain and climbed under the covers, then pulled the curtain back and shut off the lamp. He had a momentary thought that he was in a coffin, but he didn’t care.

In his dreams he was watching his father from six-year-old eyes, submerged to test depth on the old sub his father had commanded, and in the mirror was a child staring back at him wearing coveralls with a dolphin pin, and he went into the stateroom and Alameda was there, wearing something filmy and she began kissing him and she climbed into his rack with him.

Lieutenant Carolyn Alameda waited for her pulse to slow, the wait a long, irritable one. As a former five-striper at the Academy, Alameda had always been known for her professionalism and competence. On her first submarine, the Olympia, she had rapidly risen to the station of “bull lieutenant,” the unofficial designation as the ship’s most knowledgeable junior officer — no small task in the man’s world of a nuclear submarine. She had just missed the War of the East China Sea, and having trained for combat her entire adult life, it was her biggest disappointment. The conflict now emerging in the other hemisphere had the potential to break out into a war, but the ship was being sent on what seemed like yet another exercise run. Waiting for a chance at combat was something she could live with, but what she couldn’t tolerate was what was happening to her since the midshipman had come aboard.

All her life Alameda hadn’t felt like her female classmates, who had all been embroiled in chasing boys while Alameda had been more interested in sports and school. Her mother had insisted that a time would come when a man entered her life and she would feel the thunderbolt. Alameda had scoffed, and her relationships with boys had always been unsatisfying. She had resigned herself to a life devoted solely to the Navy until this morning. Until the moment when she climbed to the deck of the Piranha and found Midshipman Pacino waiting topside. She immediately felt like a foolish blushing schoolgirl, and had tried to negate the feeling with a cold professional veneer, but had heard how caustic she had been to the young man and that made her even more self conscious and embarrassed. There was no rational explanation for her feelings, but her mother’s awkward explanation of romantic chemistry was the first thing Alameda thought of — her attraction to the tall, lanky youth made her feel as if she were drunk.

At first she had promised herself that she would simply comply with Navy Regulations and completely avoid fraternization with someone of a subordinate rank. It was the only logical course she could follow. She would be an impersonal lieutenant and chief engineer, and he would be a nonqual midshipman rider, and they would get through this run. But it was as if her own feelings had betrayed her, and she gave that foolish speech about being naked together in the stateroom. She wondered if he saw how red her face must have become, or if he had seen the pulsing of the veins in her neck. It was madness, she thought, suddenly missing her old self, when no man ever impressed her. Why did it have to be this kid, why did he have to be four years younger than her, and why did he have to show up now, in the middle of an operational deployment? She tried to sit at her desk, knowing she wouldn’t sleep, so she tried to work on the thousand pressing things on her list, but all she could do was foolishly sit there and listen to the deep breathing of Midshipman Anthony Michael Pacino.

She bit her lip and commanded herself not to think of him, and to address him calmly but coldly whenever she spoke to him. It was bad enough that this was happening to her, but it would be disastrous if one of the other officers or the captain himself heard something tender in her tone of voice to Pacino. In a few weeks he would be off the ship, she thought, and she could return to her life. But all she could think about was if they would be in port on his last night aboard. She choked the thought off and tried to return to the reactor preventive maintenance reports.

The sound of his rack curtain being violently opened woke Pacino with a start. It was Alameda. He blinked at her guiltily.

“Zero seven hundred, nonqual,” she said, dripping with contempt. “Get out of the rack and get ready for the op brief.”

Pacino climbed out of the cocoon of the rack and padded to the officers’ head at the end of the narrow passageway. The head was a cube finished in stainless steel with a floor of troweled stone. The commode was a stainless-steel bowl with an eight-inch ball valve at the bottom. When he was finished he pulled the ball valve lever and opened a seawater globe valve, washing the bowl to the sanitary tank. He turned on the shower water and stepped under it, turned it off, soaped his body, then turned on the water again and rinsed off. When he was done he cleaned off the stainless-steel shower enclosure and dressed. The face in the mirror looked creased with fatigue, his eyes bloodshot. He walked back to the stateroom to find Alameda naked. He couldn’t keep from staring at her body. She had seemed boyishly slim in her uniform, but in the nude she looked like a model. Her shoulders were slim and muscular, her breasts small but perfectly shaped, her abdomen flat, a small navel ring gleaming in the glow of the stateroom lights. His eyes were drawn to the downy fur between her long, slim legs, the curve of her hips seemingly made by the art of a loving sculptor. For an instant Pacino felt a shock of raw desire, his palms longing to be filled with her breasts, but with an effort he forced himself to remember that she was the chief engineer and fourth-in-command of the submarine Piranha, and only then did his pulse slow.

Alameda flushed crimson for a moment, her mouth open, but then she glared at him as she stepped into her panties, shrugged into her bra, and donned her coveralls and sneakers. Without a word she shut the door behind her. Pacino put on the coveralls she had given him and his running shoes and walked to the wardroom at the opposite end of officers’ country from the head. The room was full of the ship’s junior officers. He got a cup of steaming coffee and slumped in the wardroom couch seat at the end of the table, feeling like a high school kid at a college frat house. The coffee brought him awake while the officers joked with each other, the mood growing serious when the navigator and engineer came into the room.

The executive officer, known simply as “XO,” Lieutenant Commander Schultz, arrived and took her seat at the first seat next to the captain’s chair at the far end. She was tall and thin, her coveralls well worn, the patch on her sleeve bearing the emblem of the submarine Birmingham rather than Piranha. Her blond hair was too short to tie in a ponytail like Alameda’s, and fell below her ears. She wore no makeup and no jewelry other than an Academy ring on her left finger. She used half-frame reading glasses and scanned the computer for the ship’s message traffic.

The lone unqualified junior officer, who did not yet have his dolphins, was an ensign named Duke Phelps. He sat at the end of the wardroom table near Pacino. Phelps stood six-four and towered over the other officers, perpetually slouching and bent over to clear the overhead obstructions. He was studying a piping manual. As Pacino looked over at it, Phelps reached into a drawer and handed Pacino a copy of a similar manual.

“First few pages are a map of the ship. Might help you out.”

Pacino turned to the first plate and tried to memorize the ship map, finding the wardroom on the upper-level port side beneath the sail. Then his stateroom, the crew’s mess, and the middle level with the control room and the captain’s and XO’s staterooms, the lower-level torpedo room. The forward compartment, aft compartment, and reactor compartment were all shown on the map with their levels and equipment identified. But the special ops compartment, the added ninety feet between the forward and reactor compartments, was labeled simply classified. The only detail that showed was the access tunnel leading aft in line with the reactor compartment tunnel.

“Hey, Duke,” Pacino muttered, feeling odd calling an officer anything but “sir” as he had been required since he arrived at Annapolis. “What’s in the special ops compartment?”

Phelps, who had seemed an easygoing youth with a sense of humor, frowned at Pacino. “This run it’s a Deep Submergence Vehicle, a DSV. Three spherical pressure hulls connected by two hatches. Goes to the bottom with SEAL commando divers and NSA spooks.”

“NSA?”

“National Security Agency. The electronic warfare thugs, the guys who eavesdrop on communications and fight off computer hackers. With the network-centric military, an electronic hijacker could disrupt the whole works, or worse, use our own guns against us. So the NSA guys have their own DSV to find ocean-bottom data highway cables and deep-sea server nodes on the sea floor. Since satellites can be subject to eavesdropping, a lot of the intel and sensitive comms are passing through these undersea cables. So our guys go deep, find them, and tap into them. We’ve got half the world wired for sound. When the spooks are onboard, we’re just a bus for them. This run we get to forget them for once and do an actual submarine op. And by the way, since I opened my mouth, all that’s classified top secret, so not a word to anyone. That includes family, roommates, girlfriends, anyone, even other submarine officers. If you blab, you will find your door forced open by NSA guys in black suits and you’ll have a two-man room at Fort Leavenworth Military Prison. The Black Pig is a project boat, Patch, which means it’s top secret from the sonar dome to the propulsor shroud. Got it?”

“Got it,” Pacino said, swallowing, starting to see why his father had never talked about what he did.

Toasty O’Neal came into the room, and the XO glared up at him. “Nice of you to come, Toasty,” she grumbled. “We all cleared for this briefing?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said to her as he took the remaining open seat at the table.

“Nav, you ready?” she asked Crossfield. The black navigator stood up and lowered the display screen against the long inboard bulkhead.

“Yes, XO,” he said quietly.

“Eng, call the captain,” Schultz ordered. Alameda nodded and grabbed a phone and buzzed Captain Catardi.

“Sir, we’re ready for the op brief.” Alameda looked over at Pacino. “Yes, Cap’n, he’s here. Aye, sir.” She hung up and looked at Schultz. “He’s coming.”

The XO passed around the coffeepot and everyone filled up. Captain Catardi came in the forward door. The room was silent as a church. Pacino expected the officers to stand as the senior officer entered, but they remained seated.

“Good morning, Captain,” XO Schultz said formally.

“Morning, XO, Eng, Nav, officers.” His coveralls were pressed and creased and he looked as fresh as if he’d been on vacation. His silver oak leaf collar emblems, dolphins and skull-and-crossbones capital ship command pin shimmered under the bright lights of the wardroom. He slipped into the captain’s chair at the end of the table. “Well, Navigator, let’s hear it.” Schultz poured Catardi a cup of coffee, and the captain took a long pull and sat back expectantly.

“Good morning, Captain, XO, officers,” Crossfield began. Pacino wondered at the contrast between the chummy fraternal closeness of the crew with the formality of expression on and off watch. And not only the formality, but the unique language of the ship. At every turn Pacino found himself corrected when he said something wrong. Alameda had corrected him harshly when he had asked if he should close the door. “Never say ‘close’ on a submarine, nonqual. It sounds like the word ‘blow’ on an internal communication circuit, and ‘blow’ means we’re flooding and the OOD should emergency blow to the surface. You don’t ‘close’ the fucking door, you ‘shut’ it. Got it?”

The display screen showed a chart of the Atlantic Ocean north of the equator, the Canadian coast on the left, the European landmass on the right. A blue line connected Groton, Connecticut, with a dot in mid-Atlantic labeled point november.

The navigator pointed to the display. “The chart depicts our PIM coming out of Groton toward Point November. We have a detour on the way to the Indian Ocean, a major operation that needs to be done before we leave the Atlantic. Somewhere in the Atlantic is the U.S. robotic hunter-killer sub Snare. Many of you remember our last exercise with her.” The wardroom filled with angry murmurs, the ship’s officers resentful of the tactics of the automated submarine. “Quiet, please. Apparently something has gone very wrong with the Snare. She’s out of communication and will not respond. In the other services, the standard operating procedure with an automated combat node that is not responding to orders is to send the unit a self-destruct signal. That is not possible in this case, because Snare carries a nuclear reactor, and a self-destruct could spread enough curies of radioactive waste to kill a moderate-sized ecosphere, not to mention the warheads of the plasma weapons, which would not only be hazardous to the environment but would be quite a prize for an enterprising salvage team to obtain for a terrorist group. So that’s where Piranha comes in. We’re the destruct system. Our mission is to find Snare and put her down, at a location we will report to squadron so they can salvage any undetonated warheads and clean up the nuclear mess from the reactor.”

The wardroom erupted as several junior officers shot questions at Crossfield and others commented to themselves.

“Peace, gentlemen,” Crossfield said. “We have no intel on this submarine’s position, and it’s a damned big ocean. So we’restarting at Point November and doing an outward spiral search. At some point squadron will give us an intel update, with some data on the Snare’s position, and we’ll vector in on it.”

Pacino studied the plans of the robotic submarine opponent, fascinated. Crossfield detailed the robot ship’s capabilities, emphasizing that the ship was expected to be quiet and unpredictable. And that was when Catardi chimed in.

“There’s more news here, officers,” he said, his face a grave mask of concern. “Since the Snare is out of control, the assumption being made by ComSubDevRon 12 is that it has become paranoid. Any attempt to approach it may result in an attack. As of this moment we are to assume that Snare is a hostile combatant. It may have even been able to find out that we were sent to kill it. If so, while we’researching for it, it’ll be searching for us. This robot could be in our baffles with open torpedo tube doors, getting ready to put us on the bottom.”

The room was silent for a moment.

“That is all,” Crossfield said. “XO?”

“We’ll have a tactical meeting in the wardroom every afternoon watch at thirteen hundred, starting today,” Schultz said. “Other than that meeting, you and your men have orders to get as much rest as possible. We will be rigging for a modified ultra quiet with the only exception the galley. I want this crew tiptoeing, no stereos, no heavy maintenance, and no bullshit. Everyone got that?”

The officers nodded.

“That’s all I have, Officers.” Catardi stood and left, and Schultz dismissed the wardroom.

Pacino was still staring at the display when the officers filed out of the room and Crossfield turned off the computerized image. Alameda snarled at him, bringing him back to the present. “Mr. Pacino, this may be a war operation, but I recommend you get working on your diving officer qualifications. You’re no good to us unless you can stand a watch on your own.” She opened a safe and handed him a Write Pad computer. “Diving officer manual is loaded aboard along with the standard operating procedures. You need to know all of that cold before you go on watch at noon. You’ll be diving officer under instruction on my watch section I recommend you don’t screw it up.”

Alameda’s radio beeped. “Engineer,” she said into it. “Yes sir, on the way, sir.” She frowned at Pacino as she left the room. He took a deep breath and turned on the computer and began studying the main ballast system.

One deck below, Lieutenant Alameda knocked on the captain’s stateroom door.

“You called, sir?”

Catardi was reclining in his command chair. “Yes, Eng. I just wanted your opinion on our young midshipman,” he said, looking up at her. Alameda froze, wondering if a reprimand was coming. Could the captain know her thoughts about the midshipman?

“He seems a quick study. Captain, and motivated besides,” she said, hoping she was not blushing. “And he seems to take the punishment of being a nonqual in stride — I’ve yet to see him complain. Even after he was put up to kissing the starboard main engine last night.”

“You’re pretty tough on the kid, Eng.”

“Yes, sir. Should I ease up on him?”

“No,” Catardi said, looking off into the distance. “Let’s see what he’s made of.”

Relief flooded her. She cleared her throat. “Aye aye, sir. Anything else, Captain?”

“That’ll be all, Eng.”

She shut the stateroom door behind her. Catardi stared at nothing for a few moments, remembering his younger days, back to a time when the nine most frightening words in the English language were, “Captain Pacino wants to see you in his stateroom.” If the youngster had a tenth of the old man’s character, he’d make one hell of a submariner, Catardi thought.

The sun had long vanished over the horizon and the drydock floodlights had come on, their glow shining in the half-closed blinds of Michael Pacino’s dockside office. The only other light in the room came from a reading lamp, casting a pool of dim yellow on the scattered sketches on the oak library table. To the side, Pacino’s pad computer had five programs open, calculating hydrodynamic friction functions and thrust curves, with a drafting program showing a three-dimensional rotating diagram of the tail of the SSNX submarine.

Pacino had been in the office since before dawn, immersed in his idea for the torpedo evasion ship alteration. There was really nothing to come home to, not with Colleen still working out of her D.C. offices as her testimony before Congress continued. He leaned back in his seat for a moment, thinking of her, and realizing guiltily that he hadn’t been much of a husband to her since the sinking of the cruise ship. Since Pacino had sailed to the Princess Dragon gravesite, he had felt more like himself, but he still had to make up the year to Colleen. That would have to come later, he chided himself, the beeping of his computer at the end of a complex calculation returning him to the problem at hand. He was bent over the display, barely aware of the office door coming open. Assuming it was one of the shipyard engineers, Pacino kept concentrating on the computer until he could reach a stopping point, when he heard the female voice from the doorway.

“They told me I could find you here. You working the swing shift or just putting in day shift overtime?”

Pacino stared up at his wife, dumbfounded, imagining for a moment that his thoughts of her had conjured her up. She was dressed in a dark suit that accentuated her slender form and her long legs, a string of pearls her only jewelry other than her wedding ring. As usual after not seeing her for weeks, she startled him with her beauty. Her raven-black hair swept to her shoulders framing a beautiful face, with strong cheekbones, large brown eyes, a perfect nose, and a smiling mouth with red lips curving over movie-star teeth. For the thousandth time, he realized he didn’t deserve her as a wife, but the guilt he’d felt a moment before evaporated in his excitement at seeing her. He stood up so fast his chair tipped and crashed behind him. He hurried to her and swept her into an embrace. She laughed in surprise but returned his kiss, then pushed him away.

“You must be feeling better,” she said breathlessly. “I thought maybe I could steal you away for dinner and you could tell me about what you’reworking on.”

“I thought you were in D.C. for the next month,” he said.

“I am. But today is Friday. I don’t have to be back until Sunday night.”

They found a cozy restaurant a half hour from the shipyard, and caught up in a secluded booth. Pacino told her about the sailing trip, Patton’s submarine, and his orders to run the torpedo evasion program and the Tigershark project. Colleen put her fingers to her lips, waving him to silence.

“We’ll talk about that when we’re back in your office,” she said. “Tell me about Janice’s call and Anthony.”

Pacino recited his ex-wife’s conversation verbatim, including Janice’s facial expressions. Colleen’s ability to read Janice’s mind from a distance was uncanny.

“So, are you worried about Anthony Michael?” Colleen asked.

Pacino refilled their wineglasses and thought about it. “I never wanted him to go into the submarine force,” he admitted. “But it might do him good to make this one deployment.”

Colleen nodded. “There’s nothing wrong with him,” she said. “He’s only in trouble all the time because he’s an innovator — like his father.”

Pacino shook his head. “I don’t want him wasting his life chasing mine, trying to be a younger version of me. I want him to find his own way. If he’s doing this because it is all he’s ever wanted, I’ll give him my blessing. But I’m not convinced this is his destiny.”

“You said he’s under the command of Rob Catardi, who you trained on the Devilfish. What kind of skipper is he?”

Pacino stared into the distance for some time, lost in the past. “He’s the best there is,” he finally said.

“Then don’t worry,” Colleen said. “Anthony will be fine, and he’ll learn something.”

A look of doubt crossed Pacino’s face.

“Relax, Michael. I’m his stepmother — I know. When I met him he was a skinny high school kid. I watched him his plebe year at the Academy, saw him get tougher, and watched him grow into an upperclassman. He’s his own soul — there are shadows of you in him, but he’s unique. Let him go, Michael.”

“Thanks, Colleen. For being a good stepmother to him. He’s the better for having had you in his life.”

She just stared at the table for a long moment.

Back in the office, Colleen looked over his sketches.

“So, you want the full briefing?” Pacino asked.

“Tell me everything,” Colleen said.

“In theory, it’s simple. We cut the stern of the SSNX to allow inserting two dozen solid-fueled Vortex engines.” The Vortex missile was an underwater solid fueled rocket that traveled at three hundred knots and steered itself by rotating its nozzle. Although it was called a missile, some physicists called it a supercavitating torpedo, because what allowed it to go such extreme speeds was that its nose cone boiled the water to steam vapor, and the vapor bubble eventually completely enclosed the missile so that the rocket thrust could carry it through the water at the speed of a private jet.

“When the con trolroomhits the switch, twenty-four large-bore rocket engines ignite and the ship gains enough thrust to get up to a hundred and fifty knots.”

“That’s not enough. The latest supercavitating torpedoes go three hundred.”

“So the ship has to eliminate skin friction. This is where it gets more complex.” Pacino riffled the pile on his desk for a sketch. “We run dry piping headers through the ship connected to the high-pressure air system and through valves to the main steam system. At first the high-pressure air banks blow plugs out of the hull surface nozzles. Air covers the skin of the ship, through these ring headers. As the air blankets the surface of the hull, the ship begins to lose skin friction. As the air banks go dry, the main steam system comes on-line to replace the air, and the boiler output dumps into the headers. That will last until the thrust is gone from the Vortex engines. According to the program, as the air banks go dry, ship velocity is up to two hundred ninety-eight knots, and as the steam takes over, we get an additional eight knots. And we maintain that for over twenty seconds, with an acceleration time-to-velocity of—”

“It won’t work.”

“—say, that’s not good, that will put internal acceleration at over ten g’s. Dammit, we’ll mangle the crew with that level of acceleration.”

“It won’t work.”

“I’ll work on the acceleration calcs—”

“You’re not listening!”

“What?” Pacino asked. “What did you say?”

“I said it won’t work.”

“I know — the acceleration’s too much.”

“That’s not why,” Colleen said, frowning. “First, the Vortex engines will melt the propulsor, the rudder, and the stern planes. How will you control the thrust angle?”

“We can’t mount the engines on gimbals,” Pacino said. “It would make the system too complex. And I planned on the stern section melting away.”

“Great — so your aft ballast tank is vaporized, your control surfaces are burned away — there’s nothing to control the ship’s angle. You’ll zip to the surface and come back down, losing your speed, and get hit with the incoming torpedo, or you’ll plunge to crush depth, or worse, corkscrew through the water and kill the crew from being put into a seven-thousand ton blender.”

“We’ll control attitude with the bow planes—”

“It won’t work, Michael,” Colleen said, agitated. “You can’t use the gigantic hydraulics and the slow response of the bow planes to control the ship.”

Pacino nodded. “I think I see what you mean. We’ll have to lock the bow planes at zero angle, then use small trim tabs on them, or upper and lower spoilers, hooked to a dedicated pneumatic system or a separate high-pressure hydraulic mechanism. That would move fast enough to control the ship’s angle.”

Again Colleen shook her head. “The sensors and the computer control won’t have the speed to control the ship. The time constant’s too long. By the time the computer senses a down angle and sends the signals to correct for it, you’re a hundred feet deeper than crush depth.”

Pacino frowned. He had met his wife in a drydock much like the one the SSNX lay in now, laboring over the same hull, when she had come to fix the computer system installed by her company. He remembered her calm, relentless competence and the lionhearted way she had insisted on going to war in the East China Sea with the SSNX when the Cyclops battle control system was still failing. He’d listened to her then, and he would listen to her now.

“This problem’s too big to solve in a day,” Pacino said finally. “I’ll work on it tomorrow.”

“You can’t,” Colleen said, a slight smile coming to her lips. “You’re busy tomorrow.”

“Oh? What am I doing tomorrow?”

“Let’s just say you won’t be getting out of bed and leave it at that,” Colleen said, and took his hand and led him out of the office. Pacino smiled, trying to forget the technical troubles and enjoy his newfound lightness of heart.

But that night in his dreams the skeleton on the motorcycle overtook the bus and smashed it to pieces with his mace.

“Have a seat, Mr. Pacino,” Executive Officer Astrid Schultz said, pointing to a chair on the inboard side of the wardroom table. It was the hour after the evening meal, the normal time for the wardroom to be set up for a movie, but tonight Pacino would face the qualification board for diving officer of the watch. Facing him on the outboard side next to Schultz was Chief Engineer Alameda and Damage Control Assistant Duke Phelps. At the end of the table Captain Catardi sat silent, watching the diving officer qualification board for Pacino. Duke had said Catardi would ask the last question based on Pacino’s answers to the other board members’ interrogation. If Pacino passed the verbal test, they would observe him take the ship to periscope depth, and if that went well, he would be qualified to stand the diving officer by himself. And being on the watch bill meant he was no longer a parasite, a rider. The term “rider” was one of the worst insults used on the submarine, referring to someone who did not pull his weight.

Pacino’s stomach churned and bile rose to his mouth as he sat. It came down to this qual board, he thought. If he blew this, he would be considered unworthy of being his father’s son. Since he’d been aboard, the officers and chief petty officers had at first acted strangely around him, the references to his father’s former position sometimes subtle, other times blatant. A chief petty officer mechanic showing him the trim pump motor starter in the auxiliary machinery room would crack that he should know its location, because after all, he was a Pacino. A sluggish approach to periscope depth was condemned by another chief, mocking him that a Pacino should be able to put the submarine on the exact depth in an instant. But the crew had seemed to be testing him for any signs of arrogance or hubris, and finding none, they seemed to adopt him. Some had never warmed up, insisting that until the day he wore gold dolphins he remained an air-breathing rack occupying nonqual rider. The chief of the auxiliary mechanics, “A-gang,” Chief Keating, the man most responsible for training Pacino, stated in a Texas drawl at the start of every watch, “Mr. Patch, you breathin’ my air, you eatin’ my food, and you got a rack all to yourself while some of my boys is still hot rackin’. Far as I’m concerned, you a nonqual rider, and an officer besides” — the term officer used pejoratively — “settin’ in your wardroom, drinkin’ your coffee with your pinky in the air, pushin’ your papers while we do the real work of runnin’ this ship. You best be livin’ right when you stand watch as dive on my ship, mister.”

“So, Mr. Pacino,” Schultz said, beginning the inquisition, “go to the white board and draw the trim and drain system, and explain how to get a one-third trim on an initial dive after a shipyard availability.”

Twenty minutes later, Pacino took his seat, his armpits soaked. Phelps continued with the next question, about how to line up to snorkel. Alameda asked him a dozen questions about how to rig the ship for dive, the locations of the valves and switches. Schultz asked about ship stability and why a submarine didn’t behave like a surface ship during a roll, Pacino’s answer and the follow-up questions taking another hour. It came time for Catardi’s question. He simply leaned forward and said, “Bowplanes jam dive.”

Pacino shot back, “All back full, switch to emergency hydraulics, try to pull out, sound the general alarm, prepare for the OOD’s order to emergency blow forward.” The immediate action for a jam dive. The diving officer and officer of the deck would take instinctive action, without orders, to try to keep the ship from descending below the depth where the pressure would cause the hull to implode.

“Why not back emergency instead of just back full?”

“A back full order reverses the direction of the main motor and speeds it up in reverse until reactor power reaches fifty percent, the highest power level for running natural circulation. If we order back emergency, maneuvering has to energize the reactor circulation pumps and bring reactor power up to a hundred percent, and the pumps in fast speed come off the non vital bus and are less reliable. There is a possibility that a hurried crew lining up for reactor forced circulation could power-to-flow scram the reactor, and then you’d be in a jam dive with a propulsion casualty. Better to use a reliable safe backing bell at fifty percent and use a forward group emergency main ballast tank blow if back full isn’t enough to pull us out of the dive, sir.”

Catardi nodded. Finally the verbal test portion of the qual board was complete, and normally that would be enough, but Captain Catardi had ordered that Pacino stand a casualty drill watch before he earned his diving officer qualification.

Although it was 2030 hours Zulu time, the military term for Greenwich Mean Time, the local time at that point in the sea was only 1730, and the sun had not yet set. The control room was rigged for white — the overhead lights were on bright — but would probably be rigged for red at the next periscope depth excursion. During an approach to periscope depth at night, the OOD would rig the control room for black, which was the submarine term for turning the lights completely out to keep from ruining his night vision for collision avoidance.

“Mr. Pacino, take the diving officer watch, please,” Schultz ordered him.

“Officer of the Deck,” Pacino called to the navigator, Wes Crossfield, who stood behind the command console, wearing a wireless one-eared headset with a boom microphone and red goggles. “Request permission to relieve Chief Keating as diving officer of the watch to stand as dive under instruction.”

“Very well, Pacino, take the dive.”

“Take the dive, aye, sir. Chief Keating, request permission to take the port seat at the ship control panel.” Keating sat inside a cocoon of consoles resembling an aircraft cockpit, a cramped semi sphere of wraparound displays and instruments and toggle switches. A central console divided the ship-control console area in half, an empty seat on the port side. Keating wore a headset and visor arrangement, which piped the displays in front of him in virtual reality, the consoles and displays in physical space around him all backups.

“Take the port seat, Mr. Pacino.” Keating was on his best behavior, Pacino noticed, the older experienced man usually calling him “nonqual.”

Pacino climbed into the cramped cockpit and settled in the port seat, strapping himself in. He put his hands on the aircraft-style control yoke, which controlled the rudder and stern planes and put his feet into the straps of the pedals that controlled the bow planes.

“I’m ready to relieve you, sir,” Pacino said to Keating as he strapped on a visor. The virtual display surrounded him, the ship animated from a side view, the surface high overhead, the bow planes and stern planes undulating slightly to keep her on depth. The display was a busy one, the animated ship transparent and complete with different-colored tanks and pipes and pumps, the animation able to show valves opening or shutting and water flowing from tank to tank. Other graphics addressed the status of the rig for dive and the ventilation lineup, the ship’s speed and course and depth order, the status of the engineering plant and a few manual entries, called PDL, or pass-down-log. Pacino studied the display for a moment before Keating began to speak.

“As you can see, nonqual — I mean, sir — the ship is at seven hundred feet at all ahead standard, course two seven zero, making bells on both main engines, evaporator making water to the makeup feed tank. We’ve got decent one-third trim, or at least we did two hours ago. We could be heavy aft, but I and Cyclops have entered a compensation. We’re supposed to come to PD in two minutes. You’re just in time. Got it?”

“Got it, Chief. I relieve you, sir.”

“I stand relieved. Off’sa’deck, I’ve been relieved of the dive by Mr. Pacino.”

“Very well, Chief.” Crossfield spoke into his boom microphone. “Sonar, Conn, coming shallow to one five zero feet in preparation for coming to periscope depth.”

The phrase made Pacino’s stomach tense. Now came the trial, with the captain and the XO and Lieutenant Alameda all watching him. Crossfield was about to come shallow, above the thermal layer from the near-freezing waters of the deep Atlantic. Above the layer, the water was heated by the sun and stirred by the waves. Above the layer, things would be completely different, Pacino thought, his mind on the ship’s weight. She might be balanced — trimmed with neutral buoyancy — at seven hundred feet, but in the warmer water above the layer, the buoyancy would change. The hull, with less pressure on it, would expand, taking up more volume, with the same weight of water ballast aboard, making it more buoyant. Above the thermal layer the effect of the shallower water would make them light, and the ship could float up like a balloon. But then, the shallower water above the layer was warmer, and going from cold water to warm water made the ship heavy, countering the lightness of the lowered pressure. Pacino’s mind rushed, thinking. He called up the screens of the Cyclops control system and blinked his way through a complex buoyancy calculation. Catardi and Schultz must have seen what he was doing in the auxiliary display, because just then Schultz murmured something to Crossfield and Pacino’s virtual screen winked out. They were running a casualty drill on him, trying to see how he’d handle it.

“Loss of Cyclops ship control,” Pacino reported, his voice a little too loud. He pulled off his visor and focused his eyes on the wraparound panels. Now the computer would be useless in helping him stay on depth when they went shallow. He’d have to do a mental buoyancy calculation and hope for the best. Even with Cyclops operating he had been taught to do the mental calculation and check it against Cyclops, but he and the computer had yet to agree, and worse, the computer had always been right. Pacino pulled on a wireless headset like the one Crossfield was wearing.

“Loss of Cyclops, aye. Messenger of the Watch, get the firecontrol technician of the watch to control.”

“Aye aye, sir,” a young enlisted sailor called out.

“Dive, all ahead standard.”

“All ahead standard, aye, sir, throttle advancing to turns for all ahead standard.” Pacino put his right hand on the central console’s throttle lever and pushed it gently toward the forward bulkhead. Pacino found the old-fashioned tachometer meter, showing the speed of the propulsor winding up from thirty RPM to ninety.

“Making turns for all ahead standard, sir,” Pacino reported.

“Very well, Dive, make your depth one five zero feet,” Crossfield ordered.

“Make my depth one five zero feet, aye, sir.”

Pacino pulled back on the control yoke, watching the stern planes respond by tipping downward like the horizontal stabilizers of an airplane during ascent. The ship’s depth indicator changed, the depth display of 700 feet changing to 690, then further upward as the ship’s angle — the “bubble” — increased from level to five degrees upward and beyond, until the deck was at an uphill angle of ten degrees. It seemed steep when even a half degree could be sensed by the body. The Piranha rose from the murky depths of the central Atlantic toward the warmer water of the shallow thermal layer.

“Passing depth four hundred feet.”

“Rig control for red,” Crossfield ordered. Pacino reached over by feel and clicked the white lights of the overhead to red.

“Rig for red, aye, passing three hundred feet, sir.”

“Very well.”

Pacino watched the temperature plot as the ship ascended through the layer, the temperature changing from twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit to sixty almost instantly. The warmer water would be making them heavy, while the shallower depth was making them light. Pacino lined up the trim system to flood seawater to depth control two, the tank closest to the ship’s center of gravity. Six thousand pounds, he decided. Better too heavy than too light. He opened the trim system’s hull and backup valves with a double toggle switch and pulled the joystick of the trim system down to the flood position, and sea water came roaring into the ship through the eight-inch ball valves.

“Flooding depth control, sir,” Pacino reported. “Two hundred feet, sir.”

Pacino eased the yoke back toward the panel, taking the angle off the ship as he pulled out of the ascent. The depth control two tank level had risen five percent. Pacino secured the flooding operation, putting the joystick back to the neutral position and using the manual valve switches to shut the hull and backup valves, an operation that Cyclops would normally have done on its own.

Suddenly an alarm rang out in the cockpit.

“Loss of main hydraulics, sir,” Pacino called out, squelching the alarm. He reached for a hydraulic valve control knob to reposition the valve to the right, but it had shifted itself, as it was designed to do. “Hydraulics shifted to auxiliary.” If the auxiliary hydraulic system failed, there was always the emergency hydraulics. Schultz and the captain standing behind the cockpit were obviously making life difficult for him.

Pacino pushed the yoke further down as the ship approached the depth of 150 feet, the angle coming off the ship, while he pushed down on the pedals, the bow planes angling downward to help him level off. He steadied on 150 feet, testing to see what happened when he put the bow planes and stern planes on zero degrees. The ship was steady on the depth, neither rising nor sinking, Pacino’s guess at the amount of water to bring in correct, although they were still flying through the water at all ahead standard, almost fifteen knots.

“Sir, one five zero feet,” Pacino called.

“Very well, Dive, all ahead one-third. Sonar, Conn, prepare to clear baffles to the right in preparation to coming to periscope depth.”

Pacino tensed. At a one-third bell they might rise like a cork or sink like an anvil, depending on his buoyancy calculation. “All ahead one-third, aye, sir, easing throttle to turns for all ahead one-third.” Pacino found the tachometer gauge and pulled the throttle back, watching the needle wind down, his other eye on the depth. When the vessel slowed he might be out of control with all these people watching. The sub was no longer an airplane, it was now a slow zeppelin.

“Conn, Sonar aye,” Sonar Chief Reardon’s voice sounded in Pacino’s headset.

The tachometer needle reached thirty RPM and the ship’s depth immediately clicked upward to 145 feet, then to 141. Pacino pushed his bow plane pedals down, the first line of defense. If he could maintain depth with the bow planes he would only be a few thousand pounds light, but if he needed the stern planes and the bubble, the situation would be much worse. At zero bubble, the ship was back at 150 feet with a four-degree dive angle on the bow planes At seven-tenths of a ton per degree, Pacino calculated he was light by almost three tons, or six thousand pounds. His buoyancy calculation had been off by tons, dammit. There was a good chance Catardi and Schultz would send him back for another week of under instruction watch for a blunder that severe. He lined up the trim system, flipping the manual toggle switches to open the hull and backup valves to depth control two, and pushed down on the joystick to the flood position, watching the manual tank level indicator until it rose another five percent, then released the joystick and secured the hull and backup valves. He zeroed the bow planes The ship was steady on depth at 150 feet. He exhaled in relief. At least he hadn’t “lost the bubble,” the submariner’s term for a drastic loss of depth control, but which also meant losing one’s cool under pressure.

“How’s your trim, Dive?” Crossfield asked from the command console, his voice amused.

“Ship has a satisfactory one-third trim, sir.”

“Very well, Dive,” Crossfield said. “You might want to thank Chief Keating for the inadequate compensation he entered before you took the watch.”

So, Pacino thought, he’d been set up with a light submarine by Keating.

“Conn, Sonar, no sonar contacts this leg,” Sonarman Reardon’s voice crackled in Pacino’s headset.

“Sonar, Conn, aye, clearing baffles to the right.”

“Conn, Sonar, aye.”

“Dive, right five degrees rudder, steady course east.”

“Right five degrees rudder, aye, sir, my rudder is right five.”

“Very well, Dive.”

Eventually the gyrocompass rose wheeled its way past 080 degrees true. “Passing course zero eight zero to the right, ten degrees from ordered course,” Pacino called.

“V’r’well, Dive.”

“Steady course east, sir,” Pacino reported. There was silence in the room. Pacino took a tense breath, knowing the next few minutes would be the worst. If he came up to periscope depth too steeply, he could broach the sail, but if he came up too sluggishly, the OOD wouldn’t be able to see the surface, and they could be run over by a deep draft merchant without even hearing him.

“Conn, Sonar, no sonar contacts in the previously baffled area,” the sonar chief, Chief Reardon, reported over Pacino’s headset.

“Dive,” Crossfield called with a flourish, “make your depth six seven feet!”

“Make my depth six seven feet, aye, sir,” Pacino acknowledged. As he pulled back on the bow plane pedals another alarm shrieked in the cockpit. “Loss of auxiliary hydraulics, sir,” he said, checking the hydraulic lineup. Perhaps main hydraulics were back on-line, but when he shifted the hydraulic spindle valve handle, he still had no power. “Emergency hydraulics engaged, sir.” Pacino reached back to the center console for a vertical lever behind and to the right of the throttle, the bow planes now only controllable by the emergency lever. But it didn’t position the bow planes like the pedals, it was a lethargic “rate controller.” He would have to hunt for the position that would put the planes on the right angle. Sweat broke out on Pacino’s forehead as he pulled the emergency lever back, pulling the bow planes to an up angle of ten degrees, and as the ship’s angle rose, pushed them back to up five degrees. He took a moment to grab another emergency hydraulic lever to nudge the rudder over to maintain course east, then back to the ship’s centerline.

“Emergency hydraulics tested, test sat,” he called out.

“Very well, Dive.” Crossfield’s voice was muffled by his periscope helmet.

“One two zero feet, sir,” Pacino called, the sweat soaking his eyes now, the gauges on the manual displays blurry. “Passing one hundred feet.”

The up angle was too steep, Pacino realized. He pushed the emergency lever forward, easing the bow plane angle, trying to get the bubble back down.

“Ninety feet, sir.”

Pacino struggled, the angle now too flat. He was roller coastering the ship, he thought in chagrin. He reached for the emergency lever for the stern planes and pulled it back, getting the bubble back to an up three-degree angle. He was soaked in sweat now, even his long sleeves dripping.

“Eight zero feet, sir.”

He had to get the angle back down, or he’d broach the sail. He pushed the stern planes down, grabbed the emergency lever for the bow planes and pushed them down to a two-degree angle, then reached for the stern plane lever again and put the stern planes to zero, again reaching for the bow planes and pulling them back to up one degree.

“Seven five feet, sir!”

“Scope’s breaking,” Crossfield called. “Scope’s breaking. Get us up, Dive!”

“Aye, sir, seven four feet.” Pacino’s sweat droplets flew in the cockpit as he pulled up higher on the bow planes until they were at the full rise position, but the ship was heavy as lead. He pulled up on the stern planes to use the ship’s angle, putting a one-degree up bubble on the ship to get up to periscope depth, but the depth meter wouldn’t budge. He needed to pump out some water, and quickly.

“Seven five feet, ship’s heavy,” Pacino reported. He selected the trim system’s hull and backup valves, then reached by feel and found the rotary switch to energize the massive trim pump in the auxiliary machinery room in the lower level. Nothing happened. He rotated the rotary switch again, but the trim pump didn’t start. Instead a red annunciator alarm flashed on the display panel, reading trim pump trouble.

“Trim pump fails to start, OOD, pump trouble light, lining up the drain pump. Seven four feet, sir.”

“Scope’s awash, goddammit. Dive, get us the fuck up!” Crossfield’s irritation was becoming fury. “Handle your fucking casualty and get us up!”

“Aye, sir.” Pacino’s hand shook as he flipped the toggle switches to line up the large bore ball valves from the drain system to the trim piping, then valved out the malfunctioning trim pump. Holding his breath he grabbed the rotary switch for the drain pump and turned it to the start position. Nothing happened. He tried again, a second alarm light popping up to read drain pump trouble. There was only one thing left to do. He clicked the toggle switches to pressurize the depth control two tank with medium pressure air.

“Drain pump trouble light, pressurizing DCT two with seven hundred psi and blowing, sir.”

“Dive,” Crossfield called in exasperation, “scope’s awash, get us up.”

Pacino opened the DCT2 hull and backup valves and raised the hovering system joystick to the blow position, normally a forbidden operation because of the noise it made. Immediately the air in the top of the tank blew its contents overboard into the lower pressure seawater, the ship finally lighting. The depth meter flashed a few feet upward rise.

“Seven four feet, sir. Seven two feet. Seven zero. Six nine feet, sir.” God, Pacino thought, finally. He took the bubble off the ship and relaxed the bow plane angle, the ship steady on depth.

“Scope’s clear!” Crossfield called, the navigator now furiously doing a surface search for close surface contacts, the smallest surface ship able to cut open their hull. By the standard operating procedures, there would be complete silence in the control room until the officer of the deck said the words to stand down, “no close contacts.” Anything else, including the expletive “oh shit,” would be interpreted as an emergency order to go back deep to avoid collision with a surface ship. The submarine’s hull was strong and thick, but it was built to withstand the pressure of the deep, not a puncture force from a surface ship hull.

“No close contacts!” Crossfield called out. Pacino exhaled in relief.

Pacino shut the depth control tank’s hull and backup valves and vented the tank’s pressurized air to the machinery room.

“Six eight feet, sir.”

But now the ship was rising with no angle on the planes. Had he gone too far? He put the bow planes on down one, then down two. “Six seven feet, sir.” Dammit, he was roller-coastering again. Using emergency hydraulics was impossible. “Six eight feet, sir.”

Pacino noticed he’d drifted off course by three degrees. One eye on the depth, he pushed the emergency lever to move the rudder to the right by half a degree, and when he was back on course east he pulled it back to zero degrees. The ship was on ordered depth with zero angle.

“Starting high-power search,” Crossfield called. “Dive, raise the BRA-44.”

The AN BRA-44 was the radio mast to grab the satellite broadcast, Pacino thought, its nickname the BIGMOUTH. He found the lever on the starboard vertical panel toggled it upward. A moan of hydraulics lifted the mast, the emergency system much slower than the main hydraulics normally would be.

“BRA-44 up, OOD,” Pacino said.

For the next two minutes Pacino adjusted the ship’s depth, the vessel much steadier now that it had the proper weight. He was fighting a slight nose-heaviness, but adjusting it could begin the oscillations again, and he figured it would be easier to counter it with the bow planes.

The hydraulics thumped again, the BRA-44 being lowered by the radiomen.

“Conn, Radio, broadcast aboard, BRA-44 comin’ down.”

“Radio, Conn, aye,” Crossfield acknowledged.

Behind Pacino XO Schultz tapped Crossfield on the shoulder. He peeked out of his periscope helmet to see her holding a picture of an approaching aircraft carrier, the photo shot from low in the water directly in the path of the behemoth. Schultz had just initiated another drill.

“Emergency deep!” Crossfield called.

Without thinking Pacino grabbed the throttle with his right hand and the bow plane lever with his left, advancing the throttle to where ahead full should be, and pushing the bow planes to full dive. He grabbed the stern plane lever with his throttle hand and pushed the stern planes to a ten-degree down angle, then lined up the trim system to flood and jabbed the joystick down. He held the joystick with his left hand and reached out to advance the throttle by another ten RPM, then pulled the stern planes back to up five degrees and the bow planes to a ten-degree rise. He released the joystick lever, one eye on ship’s depth, and called out, “Emergency deep aye, ahead full, flooding, down bubble ten degrees.”

A selector switch on the yoke piped his boom microphone into the 1MC ship wide announcing system. He punched the key and heard his amplified voice in the overhead echoing through the ship, “Emergency deep, emergency deep.”

He struggled with the planes until the depth was steady at 150 feet, then pulled the throttle back to turns for ahead one third. “One five zero feet, sir!” The sweat had returned, and in seconds he was soaked again.

But the drill was over, and he had made it. The console buzzed. Pacino punched the squelch button. “Auxiliary hydraulics are back on-line, sir.” Another buzz. “Main hydraulics are back.” He switched the cockpit back to main hydraulics, the nightmare with the emergency levers over. A whirring noise sounded and the screen displays changed, a half-dozen flat panels coming to life. “Cyclops ship control is back online.” He put the visor back on, the ship animation display returning.

“Very well, Dive. Make your depth seven hundred feet, all ahead standard, steep angle.”

Pacino acknowledged, pushing down the control yoke and advancing the throttle, the ship’s down angle plunging to down twenty degrees. For two minutes he hung on the straps of his seat until the Cyclops animation indicated 650 feet. He pulled out at 700 feet and checked the display.

“Seven hundred feet, sir,” Pacino called to Crossfield.

“Mr. Pacino, turn over the dive to Chief Keating.”

Pacino gave his briefing, released the watch to Keating, and climbed out of the cockpit. He was surrounded by the ship’s officers and chiefs, from the captain on down, the crowd suddenly bursting into applause, Catardi’s smile lighting up his face. Even Crossfield was grinning at him and clapping. And Lieutenant Alameda, her normally sour expression gone, was actually beautiful when she allowed herself to smile.

“Gentlemen,” Catardi announced, “I give you Midshipman Patch Pacino, the newest qualified diving officer of the watch, and a damned fine one at that.”

“Hear, hear,” Duke Phelps added.

“Amen, Mr. Patch,” normally surly Chief Keating said with a wink.

Pacino smiled weakly, aware that his coveralls were soaked with sweat. He felt his face flush, embarrassed, knowing the awkward approach to PD could have gone much better. He’d kept Crossfield’s view underwater for a full thirty seconds.

“A fine job, Patch,” Catardi continued. “No one aboard has ever handled the Piranha quite that well in the face of so many casualties. Pay up, everyone. You too, Chief Keating.”

Pacino stared as hundred-dollar bills changed hands, the whole circle of men passing the money to the captain. Keating grinned at him as he passed five twenty-dollar bills over his shoulder to Catardi.

“What the hell?”

“These unfortunate unbelievers all bet you’d either broach the sail or have to ask for a two-thirds bell to get up to depth. Or that you’d lose the bubble completely.” Catardi grinned. “Probably because not a single solitary one of them ever made it to PD on emergency hydraulics with no Cyclops while six tons heavy with a double trim system and drain system malfunction. Any one of these people would have hung up with the scope awash for two minutes and then given up and added power to dry off the periscope. Like I said, we’ve been waiting for you.”

Pacino smiled again, aching to get to the officers’ head to strip off the soaked coveralls and take a shower. As he turned to go Chief Keating called him back to the ship control console.

“Yes, Chief?”

“Sir, sorry I called you a nonqual air breather Keating said gently. “You can breathe my submarine’s air anytime, sir.”

Pacino felt a lump in his throat. Oddly enough, it was one of the highest compliments he could remember receiving.

“Thanks, Chief,” he said, turning and leaving the control room.

He knew he’d be back in three hours to take his first watch on his own, no longer under instruction, but as a qualified watch stander.