Dankleff considered. After a long time, he said, “What are we going to do once they’re aboard? We can’t steam all the way to AUTEC with them.”
“Mumbai is less than three hundred nautical miles from here. Bearing zero-eight-five. We can make it in ten hours. They have good hospitals. And choppers. Who knows? Maybe they could dispatch a rescue ship and rendezvous with us before we reach Mumbai.”
“You thought this out, didn’t you, before we knew there were survivors.” Dankleff frowned.
“I may have run a few whiteboard scenarios,” Pacino admitted.
“Goddammit, Lipstick, this is going to get us court-martialed or killed. Or both.”
“U-Boat. Shut your eyes and pretend. You’re adrift at sea on a raft. The guys who sank you heave to and pop up a periscope. How would you feel if they just took a couple of periscope pictures and then sailed off?”
“Pretty shitty, I guess.”
“Exactly,” Pacino said. “Captain Ahmadi, prepare to surface!” Pacino looked at Dankleff, as if daring him to countermand Pacino’s order.
Dankleff took a deep breath. “Okay, Lipstick. But if I get killed doing this, you’re the one who’s going to have to break the news to my mom.”
Pacino punched Dankleff in the shoulder and grinned. “Captain Ahmadi, blow forward and aft ballast tanks!”
Captain Lieutenant Irina Trusov adjusted the shawl she’d improvised to cover her face from the intense sunlight. Being a natural blonde had disadvantages, she thought. She looked up and saw something startling. “Captain, look!” Trusov waved frantically at the periscope, which had moved closer, now swimming distance from the escape chamber.
Captain First Rank Yuri Orlov opened his eyes and removed the coat from his face, that he’d been using to keep off the blistering sun. He sat up and looked where Trusov was waving and pointing. It was a periscope.
A Russian periscope.
“Thank God,” he said. “We’re saved. Pass the word down to the crew.”
A half dozen crewmen crowded up on the upper surface, several more popping their heads out the open hatch.
“They certainly seem to be taking their time,” Trusov observed. “Why would they just hover there and look at us?”
The answer seemed to land in Trusov’s mind like a cold, dead fish hitting the floor. “That’s not a friendly Russian,” she said. “That’s the goddamned Panther.” Dismay blew into her soul. All was lost. “Oh, no, please God, no. Not the Americans. Please.”
“They’re surfacing,” Orlov said.
The periscope started rising vertically from the water, then the top of a conning tower, the water splashing and foaming around it, then more of the conning tower rose from the waves. There was a painted logo on the side of the conning tower — a prowling black panther. Finally the submarine’s deck rose out of the sea, the long black form right next to them. It was a Kilo submarine. But elongated.
It was the Panther. Unconsciously, Trusov covered her mouth with her hand.
A head popped up from the conning tower, then two, then three, one of them holding an unholstered large pistol.
“Ahoy!” one of the men called. “Does anyone speak English?”
“You do, Irina,” Orlov said to Trusov. “Ask them if they are here to rescue us.”
Trusov glared at the Americans, wishing she could thrash them with her bare hands.
“We are in need of rescue,” she shouted, hating the task, but finding no logical argument against it. “There are sixty-two of us! Will you help us? Perhaps radio for help?”
“Yes,” the first American called. “There’s no easy way to get you from your escape pod to our boat. You’ll have to jump off and swim over. We’ll get you up on deck from aft and bring you inside.”
The hatch opened forward of the conning tower and men emerged, two of them wearing wetsuits and scuba gear. Then more men climbed out, half a dozen of them armed.
“They’re going to take us prisoner,” Trusov said. “They’re going to interrogate and torture us, Captain. When they find it was us hunting them, they will kill us.”
“Nonsense, Irina,” Orlov said, looking at her like she’d gone mad. “They’re just fellow submariners here to rescue us.”
“They are armed, Captain.”
“Probably to keep us from getting any ideas about taking over their ship, which they stole. Wouldn’t you do the same?”
Trusov bit her lip, wondering if she would survive to see another sunrise. From the dark water between their escape chamber and the Panther, several divers surfaced, and more of them, until there were what looked like two dozen people floating in the water.
“Hey up there!” one of divers shouted up at the conning tower. “Lipstick!”
“Who goes there?” the first American shouted.
“It’s Easy Eisenhart! Is that you, Patch?”
“It is indeed. Good to see you again, Easy. What are you and your guys doing?”
“We’re supplementing your crew. If you’re taking aboard five dozen Russian sailors, you’ll need more security to guard these guys.”
“Jesus, you must have just put everyone on Vermont on port-and-starboard watches.”
“Oh yeah, but no matter, Patch,” Eisenhart called as he was helped up on the hull by one of the SEALs. “Captain called ahead to Mumbai. There’s a rescue ship there with a helicopter and medical facilities. Royal Navy ship. I think it’s the HMS Explorer II.”
Anthony Pacino’s face went white. It had been the HMS Explorer II that had rescued him, Catardi and Carrie Alameda from the wreckage of the Piranha. He wondered for a moment if Fishman’s simulation theory could have any truth to it. This was like the universe winking at him, he thought.
National Security Advisor Michael Pacino looked up at the screen shot from the Predator drone, orbiting high above the escape chamber of one of the Russian Yasen-M-class submarines. Heaved to on one side of it was the surfaced submarine Panther. Discernible on the top of the conning tower was his son, Anthony Pacino, leaning over the coaming of the bridge and shouting down to several swimmers in the water. The elder Pacino reached for a tissue from the box on the table and blew his nose to cover up the fact that he needed the tissue for his suddenly running eyes, wet with hot tears of relief.
He felt Margo Allende’s hand on his shoulder. “See, Patch, Anthony’s fine. He did great.”
“Are they doing what I think they’re doing?”
“Your boy is rescuing the very sailors that tried to kill him.”
Pacino shook his head. “That boy’s a maniac.”
Allende smiled. “Like his father before him, if the stories I heard are true.”
“What is Panther doing now?”
“She’ll head due east toward Mumbai, ten hours out, but we’ve scrambled a rescue vessel that was docked in Mumbai — the Brits had a submarine rescue ship there for training. What are the odds?”
“What was the ship?”
Allende paged through her pad computer. “Let’s see. HMS Explorer II. Panther will rendezvous a hundred and fifty miles out of Mumbai with the Explorer II, offload the Russians, then get back to their escape from the Arabian Sea.”