Suddenly the weight of this mission seemed to fall down on Pacino’s head. Was it survivable? For the Panther? For Anthony? For Vermont? For the Russians?
Allende touched his forearm again and looked into his eyes. “It’ll be okay, Patch. Your son will be fine. I promise.”
Pacino nodded, hoping she would prove to be right.
25
Three days ago, the phone call had come in at three in the morning. One moment, he had been snuggled happily in bed with Natalia Orlov, the woman who had bewitched him, with whom he was desperately in love.
Even before answering the jangling phone, he stroked his finger down Natalia’s long naked thigh, wondering at the amazing luck he’d had in winning her affection. Two weeks after he’d been sleeping with her, she confessed to her double sins of having been married to Captain First Rank Yuri Orlov and leaving him for Captain Second Rank Boris Novikov, and then leaving Novikov for him. He remembered that moment, when the world seemed to stand still, and she looked up at him with moisture in her big blue eyes, seemingly waiting for him to dismiss her, to reject her, but he had taken her face in his hands and kissed her, and told her that he didn’t care, that all he saw when he looked at her was the love of his life. He had felt stupid saying that so early, but she had cried happy tears and thrown her arms around him, and they had only left his bed that weekend for food.
He glanced at her face in the dimness of the room, illuminated only by the lit up display of the phone, hoping the buzzing phone hadn’t awakened her, but she slept on. For a moment, he regretted that she hadn’t awakened, since phone calls arriving at three in morning usually meant there was a car waiting for him downstairs and an angry admiral on the other end of the connection.
“Go for Alexeyev,” he said into the phone, trying to sound as if he’d been awake.
“This is Zhigunov,” the deep gravelly voice of the admiral in command of the Northern Fleet said. Alexeyev sat straighter in the bed.
“Yes, Admiral,” Alexeyev had said. “What is it?”
“Get your crew and report to the Kazan. Phone ahead and have the reactor started and prepare to get underway. I shall meet you on the pier in twenty minutes.”
So had this oddball mission begun, unlike anything Alexeyev had ever seen. K-561 Kazan, the first Yasen-M-class submarine built, lay at her mooring on the dark moonless night, lit only by the sodium lamps of the pier, being hastily loaded out by a pier crew, trucks and pallets of food arriving and being offloaded. On the hull, two men were working beside a small handhole in the flank of the conning tower, taking off the shorepower cables. At the gangway, his first officer and department heads waited for him.
He stepped up to them and returned their salutes. It still felt strange, he thought, that the four highest ranking officers under his command were all women. Doubtless the idea of Zhigunov’s deputy, Olga Vova, the first female admiral in the submarine force, a square-jawed bruiser of a woman, who must have outweighed Alexeyev by at least ten kilograms and could probably easily take him in a fight. The famous “Admiral OV” had wanted an all-female officer ship, but Admiral Zhigunov had made her settle for just the department heads and the first officer being female, under an experienced and trusted male captain.
“Madam First, what do we have?” he asked Captain Second Rank Ania Lebedev, a plain-looking woman with short chestnut hair, brown eyes and thin downturned lips, her normal expression one of constant disapproval. He was reminded of when he was a child and his mother informed him that if he made a face, it would freeze like that.
Lebedev frowned and looked at the hull of Kazan. “Well, Captain, the Admiral wants us in the channel before dawn. Perhaps worried about an overhead satellite observation. But we’re held up by the stores load. The boat was almost completely empty of food.”
The ship had been offloaded deliberately last week as a preparation for entering the drydock for a refit. Today, the boat had been scheduled to offload all weapons. Obviously that wasn’t going to happen. Oddly, despite a refit period making the crew work much harder than at sea, the crew enjoyed being in port and with their families for weeks on end, rather than disappearing to sea for months, sometimes being called on for surprise mobilizations, like tonight’s.
“Navigator?” Alexeyev looked at the female navigator and operations officer, Captain Third Rank Svetka Maksimov, who was as lovely as Lebedev was plain, with long shiny black hair, beautiful features, straight white teeth and deep brown eyes. Even gorgeous Natalia had gotten a little jealous at the last ship’s party. There was no doubt, Natalia was still the traffic-stopping beauty of the crew’s families, but Svetka Maksimov was a decade younger and had a way about her that endeared her to the crew. Alexeyev was convinced that even had Maksimov been homely, her outgoing and friendly personality would win over the crew.
“I’ve got the tides and current for the time period from now to dawn, Captain, but once clear of restricted waters in the Barents Sea, I have no idea where we’re going. I can’t lay in a track if the destination is so secret even I don’t know it.”
“Understood, Nav. Engineer?”
Captain Third Rank Alesya Matveev nodded at him. Matveev could have been an Amazon, the crew all thought. She was over 180 centimeters tall and solid. Her hobby was mixed martial arts, and it was said that no man aboard could win a cage fight with her. Her combative nature had made its way to her dour frowning face. Alexeyev suspected if she let her hair down and put on some makeup, she might be pretty, or at least less plain, but that wasn’t Matveev’s personality. Alexeyev suspected, if given the choice to transition her gender to being male, Matveev would jump at the chance.
“Captain, the reactor is in the power range and self-sustaining in natural circulation,” Matveev said in a voice almost deeper than Alexeyev’s, “with the propulsion turbines warm and connected to the load bank. The main motor is likewise warm. Removing shorepower cables now. There are no class one deficiencies. We are troubleshooting a problem with the redundant electrical evaporator. The air banks are full. Oxygen banks are at fifty percent, since we were bleeding them off slowly for the refit, but the bleed is stopped. We’ll make oxygen and recharge once we’re in open sea. The battery charge is at eighty percent. I’d feel better with a battery charge before we submerge but we may have to leave it as-is for now, sir.”
“Very well, Engineer. Weapons Officer?”
“Sir,” Captain Lieutenant Katerina Sobol said in a startlingly high-pitched cartoon character voice, standing straighter, “vertical launch system is loaded with thirty-two Oniks antiship cruise missiles, all conventional warheads. The torpedo room is loaded with twenty-four Futlyar Fizik-2 torpedoes, ten of them tube-loaded.” Sobol was a small woman with a ballerina’s body and looked way too young to be an officer, Alexeyev thought. She still had pimples on her face and tried to cover them up with makeup. She couldn’t weigh a gram over 45 kilograms and barely stood over 150 centimeters. Her best friend aboard was the Amazon engineer. When the two of them went out drinking, people around them insisted on taking pictures of the giant female next to the tiny one.
“Do the Futlyar units have the latest software update for torpedo countermeasure employment?” Alexeyev frowned. Could his torpedoes stop an incoming American torpedo? When Alexeyev had nightmares, they were always of him in the central command post, helpless as the sound of an incoming torpedo sonar got louder and louder.