He looked at her. “That changes everything. Well done.”
“Plus,” Allende said, “it was perfectly timed. When the Iranians saw the hack taking down their surface ships and naval aircraft, they immediately sent the Panther to sea early, hoping it would escape any second wave of the cyberattack. That’s why it jumped early before the Russian escort submarines arrived in-theater.”
Pacino nodded. “This operation has a lot more moving parts than I thought.” He covered his mouth and yawned. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re not boring me, I’m just running on fumes.”
“Come on, Patch. You’re out of gas. Come with me. I’ll have one of our guys go to your Annapolis house and bring fresh clothes. They’ll be ready for you by dawn’s early light.”
Pacino looked at her, her ocean blue eyes imploring him. “Those clean, crisp sheets and fluffy comforter are sounding pretty good right now,” he admitted.
He fell asleep in Allende’s car, waking when she rolled up to her townhouse. He walked in with her, the exhaustion overcoming him. He’d barely made it into the guest bedroom before everything seemed to go black.
In his dreams, there was that high overhead view of the Arabian Sea, and the Russian red dots had turned westward and sped up to chase the yellow laser pointer’s dot. Pacino tossed in the bed, coming slowly to consciousness, finding his phone to see what time it was and wondering where he was, until he remembered that Margo Allende had taken him to her townhouse. It was shortly after three in the morning. He realized he was wearing only his boxers. His memory stopped at the door of the guest room. Allende must have undressed him and manhandled him into the big bed. He’d deal with that in the morning, he thought, setting his phone’s alarm for 0500, then sinking back into sleep. This time, his sleep was mercifully dreamless.
Navigator Captain Third Rank Leonid Lukashenko had the senior supervisory watch in the central command post for the morning watch, the torpedo and missile officer, Captain Lieutenant Seva Laska standing watch officer duty, taking his watch at the command console’s starboard pos three console, occasionally going to the battlecontrol console or wandering to the navigation chart or looking over the sonar console — despite the fact that his command console could display anything from the other stations. Laska was a tall athletic youth, impatient, jittery, always having to be pacing central command or moving from one station to the next, which frankly irritated the hell out of Lukashenko, who could stand an entire six-hour watch without leaving his command chair at pos one of the command console. But Laska just seemed like he was constantly hopped up on caffeine.
Lukashenko scrolled though his displays. During this watch, two hours into their maximum speed run to the west to intercept the north part of the probability oval of the target submarine, his notifications screen had been beeping and blooping every thirty seconds, each notification seeming more stupid and mundane than the one before it. Somehow, there had been no threshold setting dreamed up so that notifications could be divided into emergencies, urgent matters and routine ones. He knew First Officer Anastasia Isakova’s habit was to silence the notification alarms so she could concentrate on what was important — sonar traces, the navigation situation and the health of the reactor plant. But that seemed somewhat reckless to Lukashenko. That was how she’d missed the initial sonar detection of the Panther, the detect only being found by the captain an hour later. Lukashenko could only imagine the reprimand she’d received from Captain Novikov for that mistake. Novikov was an even-handed, fair officer, and a damned fine human being, Lukashenko thought. But still, even Novikov could get angry, and when the captain was angry, life became miserable.
For the five minutes Lukashenko was thinking that, the notifications screen had beeped twelve times. Lukashenko checked his watch. Four more hours until relief and the noon meal. He hadn’t eaten breakfast and he was hungry. He contemplated calling up for something from the galley, but decided to wait. Three more notifications. Port main motor forward bearing temperature was trending up, then down, then up again, probably from some imbalance in engineroom fresh water flow. He’d sent that notification to the engineer, his old friend Yevgeny Montorov. But there were twelve more notifications, many of them coming from auxiliary machinery room number two, mostly temperatures higher than normal, but still within specifications. He sent these to mechanical officer, Michman Danko Filiopovik. Another five minutes, another twelve notifications. He decided to mute the notification alarms, just long enough that he could check their position in the sea and the tactical situation. He stood and stretched and walked across the violently trembling deck to the navigation chart table, the entire submarine buzzing from their maximum speed run. A reminder that they were headed in a hurry into combat.
Lukashenko yawned as he leaned over the chart table, checking their progress since they had started the westward sprint over the last two hours, making 130 kilometers since they’d broken off the periscope depth secure videolink to the Novosibirsk. Lukashenko took out his pen from his coveralls pocket and tapped the display glass, deep in thought. There were still 390 kilometers to travel to reach the probability oval. Four hours from now, at watch relief, they would have covered another 260 kilometers. Lukashenko pursed his lips, disappointed. He had wanted to be on watch when they turned south and penetrated the probability oval. He wanted to catch the target submarine. He wanted to put a salvo of Futlyar Fizik-2 torpedoes into it, claim victory, then get back to the Kola Peninsula homeport. A medal award ceremony, then some well-deserved leave in Murmansk. No, even better, Moscow. It was June — and June in Moscow? The women would be wearing miniskirts and shorts and tank-tops, he thought. He shut his eyes, thinking about how wonderful it would be to go to a club in Moscow and meet someone, someone exciting and special. He debated with himself — did he want to meet a woman just for the night, or a woman for the rest of his life? Both ideas had merit, he thought.
Behind him, the muted notifications screen scrolled through multiple notifications, the list of them coming faster and faster, until the display was blurred with more notification lines than the display could keep up with, the screen finally starting to flash a dull red on and off.
A deck below Lukashenko and fifty meters aft, in the auxiliary machinery room number two, the hydrogen leak from the stainless-steel high-pressure hydrogen receiver from the number two oxygen generator grew much worse, the O-ring seal rupturing at the top flange, high pressure hydrogen spewing out into the room. The oxygen generators took deionized water from the evaporator and fed it into a large cube two meters on a side, the box containing large electrical anodes and cathodes in a high-pressure tank of the pure water, the direct current electricity making the water disassociate into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen was saved, dried and compressed, the machines transferring it into high pressure oxygen banks and simultaneously bleeding it into the ship, the oxygen bleed centered in this room where the fan suction housing distributed air throughout the ship, the oxygen added to the ship’s ventilation systems to make up for the oxygen consumed by the crew. The hydrogen, also collected at high pressure, was vented into the auxiliary seawater system and discharged overboard. There was the worry that advanced submarine detection systems could hunt for this trace of hydrogen in the wake of a nuclear submarine, but so far their own scientists had been unable to detect other submarines from the hydrogen exhaust, so its disposal method hadn’t changed in decades.