“Zero eight hundred meeting! Zero eight hundred meeting!” Dankleff said. “Pacino, you’re late!”
“I am not, sir, I am right on time.”
“This is U-Boat’s command, AOIC, where, if you’re early, you’re on-time, if you’re on-time, you’re late, and if you’re late, you’re off the team.”
“Damned good thing I’m not late then,” Pacino said. “Being off the team might mean being shot out of a torpedo tube.”
“You have charts? What’s going on? Are you hijacking my 0800 meeting into some kind of nav brief?”
Pacino nodded, stood and unrolled the charts onto the table. Chart one showed the Arabian Sea emptying into the Indian Ocean and the east Africa coast. Chart two showed south Africa, the Indian Ocean to the east, the South Atlantic to the west, Antarctica to the south. Chart three showed the South Atlantic from Africa’s southern coast to the equator, and chart four showed the North Atlantic from the equator to North America’s eastern seaboard. Pacino had marked a course in pencil on all four charts.
On the first chart, he’d marked the pencil line, “PANTHER EXFILTRATION PHASE I,” the line extending from their present position southwest of Mumbai, India, going southward and crossing the equator and continuing south to within 1200 nautical miles north of the Antarctic coast, where the turning point was labeled as “Point B.” He’d marked this segment with the notation, “4200 NM.”
The line then showed the second phase of the exfiltration on the second chart, from Point B due west to the waters south of the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, extending to Cape Town, where the line was labeled “Point C.” The segment was marked “2500 NM.” At a point 600 miles west of Cape Town, Pacino had labeled the location “B-PRIME.”
The third chart showed the exfiltration course line continuing on a great circle route toward AUTEC, with point “C-PRIME” marked 800 miles northwest of Cape Town, with the line’s crossing of the equator labeled “POINT D.” That segment had been labeled “2800 NM.”
Past Point D, on the fourth chart, there were two segments, one going from the Point D at the equator toward the leeward islands of the Caribbean chain, with “POINT E” placed just east of Barbados, with this line marked “2000 NM.” At Barbados, the track bent farther west toward the northern approaches to Andros Island, Bahamas, where the chart labeled their destination “POINT F.” This final segment was marked “1000 NM.”
Dankleff looked at the charts. “I have a headache already. I’m sure there’s some point to all this?”
“There’s a big point, OIC,” Pacino began. “If we use a path off the great circle routes until we get to Antarctica, then go straight on the great circle route to the Bahamas, using our normal six hours at eighteen knots on the reactor to charge the batteries, then eighteen hours at six knots to creepy-crawl slowly to avoid detection, we make a speed-of-advance averaging nine knots overall. Starting now, that has us in transit for seventy days. Chief Goreliki, you’re the unofficial cook and supply officer. How many days is our food loadout?”
Goreliki caught on immediately. She addressed the room. “At our present rate of consumption, we’ve got twenty-five days of rations.”
“How long if we tighten our belts?” Pacino asked.
“Maybe thirty. Five days more if that last week we survive on crackers and apple juice. So thirty-five. But I’ve been on a run where we ran out of food. It’s not pleasant, Mr. Patch. And the worst thing? We only have that many days of coffee. When a submarine runs out of coffee, it’s crazy time.”
“This boat is propelled by coffee,” Lieutenant Muhammad Varney said. “Not nuclear fission.”
Pacino looked around the room, his expression hard. “I know the CIA had these secret evil lemon-scented plans for clandestine resupply, OIC. But they’re complete bullshit. Re-provisioning while hovering submerged? That’s completely insane. It would take days. That would leave us vulnerable to detection and attack. Guys, we all need to face a damned hard truth. There can be no resupply if we’re to complete this mission. We try to resupply, we’re going to get torpedoed. So, sorry to say, but what we have is all we’ll have.”
“Big problem,” Dankleff thought. “What about some kind of resupply from Vermont? We get a message out, they lock out divers with food and bring it to us, we lock it in?”
“Even if you could coordinate that, OIC, the Vermont has the same problem. She was loaded up for a 40-day run, because that’s the maximum you can load unless you get rid of torpedoes, people or equipment. Today, U-Boat, happens to be day thirty.”
“Wait, they loaded stores at AUTEC before we left.”
“Are you sure?”
Dankleff laughed. “You were too busy earning your new nickname, Lipstick, but yeah, we loaded back out to forty days.”
“So forty days from May 15,” Pacino said. “That makes this day twenty-four. Vermont runs out of food in sixteen days. That’s June 24.”
“Hey, Vermont can cut rations down too. If they have sixteen days, they can stretch that to thirty-two, easy,” Dankleff said. “So all the two-hundred pound guys return to port at one-eighty. Builds character.”
“So we agree,” Pacino said. “We can’t continue this nine-knot overall speed transit. That would take us to August 16, seventy days from now. My plan gets us to AUTEC in thirty-four days. July 12. A Tuesday between 1300 and 1400. After thirty-four days? We might be a bit hungry and in caffeine withdrawal, but we’ll make it fine. And so will Vermont. But OIC, that means we start the reactor now and run flank until we get to Point Bravo-Prime.”
“What? Full-out?”
“Yes, and then at Bravo-Prime, six hundred miles from South Africa, we slow down to six knots and sneak through the Cape of Good Hope in case the third Yasen-M is waiting for us there. So we and Vermont can hear him if he’s there, and make the minimum amount of noise until we slip into the Atlantic. Then, when we get eight hundred miles past Cape Town, we throttle back up to flank and we flank it at maximum speed all the way to AUTEC.”
Pacino sat back in his seat, mentally exhausted. He had a headache. Perhaps it was caffeine withdrawal after all. Maybe Irina Trusov was right, that caffeine was invented by the CIA. He smiled to himself, thinking about her big blue eyes when she’d looked at him, wishing he’d met her under happier circumstances.
“Well, who would ever have thought that our tactical plan was based on what’s in the goddamned kitchen?” Dankleff grumbled, looking at Pacino. “But I suppose there’s some iron hard logic in there. You know, we could just say fuck it and take the great circle route out of the Indian Ocean and straight into the Cape of Good Hope.”