Pacino pulled his mask off his neck, spat into it and rubbed the spit across the lens until it squeaked. Satisfied with the antifogging technique, he pulled the mask back down over his face and let it dangle at his throat.
He clamped the regulator into his mouth and tasted the coppery air from the tanks on his back. The regulator worked. He spat it out, the rubber taste lingering.
“Okay,” he said to Paully White, “you got your waterproof bag?” Pacino checked his as Paully confirmed his own items on the checklist.
“Yeah.”
“Tanks?”
“Check.”
“Regulator functional?”
“Yes.”
“Gage?
“Full.”
“Weights?”
“Tight.”
“Mask?”
“Yeah.”
“Flippers?”
“Tough to put on with all the other equipment.”
“Let’s get this thing on the hump.”
“Sirs! Drop zone in two minutes,” the chopper copilot shouted back. The Barracuda was four miles ahead, only its periscope mast protruding from the water. Pacino checked the Rolex, knowing the ship had been submerged at periscope depth, hovering motionless, for the last fifteen minutes, since he and White had been late getting off the deck of the Mount Whitney.
CHAPTER 27
Capt. David Kane sat at his stateroom’s large conference room table. The captain’s cabin on the Seawolf class was done perfectly, he thought. A large rack, a conference table that could comfortably seat a half-dozen men, a large leather swivel chair that could roll between the conference table and his desk, the wheels of the chair locked unless he pushed the travel button.
Set into a soffit in the centerline bulkhead were four widescreen video monitors, the first monitoring the navigation display of the ship’s position, the islands of Japan in the upper right corner, the boundary of the Oparea flashing yellow, now only a hundred nautical miles to the northeast. The second display showed a view of the control room in one window, the maneuvering room aft in the other. The third was also a split-screen view, the left half selected to the view out of the type-20 periscope, the sea quiet, nothing to see but the dividing line between the waves of the deep blue ocean and the light blue sky, the right half of the screen displaying the broadband sonar waterfall screen that showed the ocean empty of other ships within the audible range of the BSY-2 combat system. The screen could also display the combat-control system’s dot-stacker computer display, useful when they were trailing an enemy submarine — the captain could look up and see the solution to the target with a glance, eliminating a hundred phone calls a day when in trail.
Kane was showered, shaved and dressed, the arrival of the Pacific Force Commander announced on a flash message he had gotten from the Mount Whitney the night before. He was particularly bothered by this, the arrival of a meddling admiral onboard his submarine, turning his command of one of the newest Seawolf-class submarines from independent action to little more than a flagship. The arrival of an admiral at sea was always bad news, he thought. His authority as commanding officer would be under constant scrutiny and evaluation in front of his observant crew. In his own memory every time one of his commanders had taken aboard an admiral, that admiral had become a sort of proxy captain.
The captain of a ship was one of the world’s last dictators, but in the world of instantaneous communications the surface-ship captains were no longer fully in charge. They took their orders by the ream from the carrier captains, from the battle-group commanders, from Pentagon bureaucrats, even from the president. But submarine commanders were different. They were submerged below the sea where radio signals couldn’t penetrate — except for slow, uncertain and rarely used extremely low frequency signals — in a tactical employment in which they were prohibited from talking and listening. Sub skippers were chosen for their abilities to operate independently, they were where there was no boss, no appeal, no help. The ultimate authority aboard was with the skipper. The ship was his ship.
But if a captain of a sub were a god, an admiral was some kind of celestial being that pulled the god’s strings. Crew members stared at his stars, awed by a force considered more powerful than the ship’s captain. And when an admiral was seated next to the captain, and the captain spoke, he was as often as not met with a “huh?” as the subordinate stopped looking at the admiral. A flag officer could only be considered bad news. And in this case, Adm. Michael Pacino was doubly bad news. Kane had rescued Pacino in the Labrador Sea from the wreckage of the Seawolf, but by that time he was unconscious, never recovering until months later in the hospital, long after Kane had ceremoniously scuttled the Phoenix. But Kane had heard rumors and stories about Pacino, the folklore that Pacino had lost his first ship, the Devilfish, in the Arctic Ocean under the cover of an airtight top-secret classification. There was something about that that bothered Kane, particularly since it had been Donchez who had always protected Pacino, and Kane had never approved of Donchez.
Pacino was not only an unknown, he was a commander of unprecedented power in the reorganized submarine force. Before the reorganization, the force had been split between Atlantic and Pacific fleets, each running a very different navy, the cultural gap as wide as the one between New York and Honolulu. Pacino had been named by Admiral Donchez, then the chief of naval operations, as head of the newly formed Unified Submarine Command, which sacked Comsublant and Comsubpac, the admirals in command of the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, uniting the organizations under his single command. And the fleet seemed to align itself to Pacino like iron filings to a magnet.
Pacino had a stranglehold on the skippers of the fleet. No one came to command without being put through a test with him watching in the submarine control-room simulator in Norfolk. The simulator tests were renowned for their realistic, harsh battle scenarios. One captain, who had passed the attack-simulator test, had walked from the room and collapsed in exhaustion, waking up in a hospital. Pacino’s setup was absolute — flunk that test and either lose command or say goodbye to the possibility of ever having it in the first place. Up to then Kane was the only commander grandfathered, excused from Pacino’s combat test, having served honorably aboard Phoenix and then appointed to command the Barracuda, but since he had taken over, several incumbent captains at neighboring piers had been fired by Pacino for lack of aggressiveness in the attack simulators. Kane felt Pacino was building a force of submarines commanded by men who were loyal to him, who had his stamp of approval, men he had made. Well, he had been one of the few holdouts from the fleets before the reorganization.
Finally, three weeks ago, Pacino had sent him the message to report with his officers for an evaluation in the control-room simulator, the trial that would determine whether he would keep his job commanding the Barracuda, but before he could show up for the trial, the emergency orders had come in to put to sea for Operation Enlightened Curtain. And the fact that Pacino had decided to give him the trial in the attack simulator meant that his position was not as secure as he’d thought. All his effort in the Muslim war had been for nothing, because Pacino had called him to the evaluation and would replace him if he didn’t perform against whatever computer game Pacino programmed into the simulator. It was almost as if he would have to go to another Admiral Rickover interview.
He tried to remember Rickover’s words to him — I expect you’ll prove yourself to be one of the best nuclear officers who’s ever been in the program. But where Rickover was near-neurotic about reactor safety, Pacino was off the deep end for blood-and-guts aggressiveness. Rickover wanted brains, Pacino wanted balls. Kane had passed Rickover’s test but a doubt had developed whether he would pass Pacino’s. And Pacino’s test was, he felt, one that he shouldn’t have to take — he’d been in command for almost five years now, on the verge of selection to flag rank himself, and now a man his own age who had lost two submarines, would pass judgment on whether he was good enough to keep his command. At least that’s the way he saw it, and he’d built resentment against Pacino ever since that message ordering him to the test. Well, now the admiral would get a chance to see him perform for real, that is, if the admiral allowed him to enter the Oparea in an offensive capacity. He worried that Pacino would want to remain outside the Oparea and watch the sea battle, turning the Barracuda into a flagship no more offensive than the Mount Whitney.