“Nope. Vermont is invisible. Presumably, so is the Yasen-M.”
“Well, yell if you do pick something up.”
“Our first sign will probably be Vermont firing torpedoes,” Albanese said.
“Yeah. You doing okay otherwise, Chief?”
“L-T, I’ve run out of cigarettes. I’m miserable.”
Pacino laughed. “Think how healthy you’ll be when we finally make it to AUTEC.”
“Between not smoking and our starvation rations, I’ll be a shadow of myself, L-T.”
“Just keep listening and try not to think about smokes or food,” Pacino said, smiling to himself as he hung up. He dialed the first compartment.
“Torpedo room, Varney.”
“Mr. Varney, you have permission to spin up three and four, shut down one and two, and open and shut outer doors as necessary.”
“Thank you, AOIC. I’ll call up when it’s done.”
Pacino hung up and felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Alexie Abakumov, the Russian reactor engineer. Pacino looked at him.
“You wanted to start the reactor, yes?” he said to Pacino.
Pacino nodded. “Let’s see how the batteries are doing.” Pacino scanned four gauges. They had perhaps 20 percent capacity. It was time to start up the plant to recharge. He looked at his watch. “I’ll get OIC up here to take the watch.” He dialed Dankleff’s sea cabin.
A sleepy U-Boat Dankleff answered. “OIC.”
“It’s Patch. Abakumov needs to start the reactor and I want to perform the startup under instruction.” He and Dankleff had discussed that they needed to know how to operate the nuclear reactor in case something happened to Abakumov.
“I’ll be up. I want to walk under the water and put on fresh coveralls. Give me ten.”
Pacino looked at the Russian. “I’ll be aft in ten. Don’t commence without me.”
Abakumov nodded. He had dark circles under his eyes and his cheeks looked more hollow than usual. He, too, had run out of cigarettes. And vodka. And the cut in rations was hitting him as hard as the rest of the crew. No doubt, Pacino thought, they had to speed up to maximum as soon as they could get past the Cape’s choke point.
Dankleff arrived, holding a steaming coffee cup, his eyes puffy from sleep. “There’s only days of coffee left, Lipstick. This trip sucks.”
“I know, U-Boat. Another nine days and we’ll be done. And tomorrow morning when I come on watch, we’ll crank it back up to flank. At least that will feel better than this tiptoeing. And we can reopen the galley for hot food.” They’d shut down cooking during the Cape of Good Hope transit to minimize noise.
“So, anything I should know?”
“Albanese has nothing but merchant ships. But that’s no surprise. Varney is rotating three and four into readiness and shutting down one and two, operating outer doors. Otherwise, nothing is going on.”
“I relieve you, sir,” Dankleff said formally.
“I stand relieved. I’ll call from nuclear control when we’re ready for your permission.”
Dankleff nodded, yawned and took a pull of his coffee.
Pacino hurried aft, through the hatch to the shielded tunnel that traversed the third compartment where the reactor was housed, out the aft tunnel hatch into the motor-generator room, turning left into the nuclear control room, a cubbyhole created from what had once been a spare parts closet, but now had three walls of flatpanel displays, all of them busy with instrument indications, temperature and pressure graphs, a mimic depiction of the piping, valves and pumps of the primary loop, with the secondary system depicted on a neighboring screen, showing the piping, turbines, condensers and pumps of its systems. On the horizontal portion of the single seat’s console was a section with four large rotary switches and a pistol grip switch that operated the nuclear control rods.
“You should call for permission,” Abakumov said. “We must hurry.”
Pacino hoisted the handset of the aft wall phone to his ear and dialed central command.
“Central, OIC.”
“Nuclear control, AOIC, request permission to start the reactor and place the propulsion turbine on the main motor and the ship’s service turbine on the ship’s load generator.”
“AOIC, you have permission to start the reactor and place turbines on line. Call when we’re on nuclear power.”
“AOIC, aye,” Pacino said, hanging up. He looked at Abakumov. “So. Operating procedure twenty-seven is displayed on the far-left upper display. Initial conditions are set, running one slow speed main coolant pump in each loop. Step one, energize inverters?”
Abakumov nodded.
“Energizing inverters alpha, bravo and charlie.” Pacino pressed the touch screen that depicted the inverters that controlled the rod drive mechanisms. All their lights changed from red to green. “Inverters are on line. So now, step two, latch rods?”
“Yes, Mr. Patch.”
Pacino reached for the pistol grip on the console and pulled it vertically out of the panel, and it came up a few inches. “Latch voltage applied,” he said, then rotated the pistol grip counterclockwise to the nine o’clock position. “Driving control rod drive mechanisms inward.” Three green lights lit above the mimic picture of the reactor vessel. “CRDMs indicate latched,” he said, glancing at the procedure, then putting the pistol grip switch back to its neutral twelve o’clock position and letting it drop back into the console. “Step three, select rod one and pull it to one hundred centimeters while monitoring startup rate?”
“Yes, but pause at eighty centimeters.”
“Pulling rod one to eighty,” Pacino said, selecting the pistol grip so that it was selected to only control rod one, and rotated the pistol grip to pull the rod out.
Ten minutes later, rods one and two were all the way out of the core at 100 centimeters height with rod three at 33 centimeters. The reactor had climbed steadily out of the nonvisible range into the intermediate range and then into the power range. Pacino had opened the valves to pull steam out of the steam generators, boiling them down while warming up the massive steam headers. As the condensed water was forced out of the large bore steam piping system, the venting in the space was incredibly loud.
“Too bad you guys didn’t find a way to muffle that,” Pacino said, his fingers in his ears.
Abakumov shrugged. “Is not combat system,” he said, as if that explained everything.
“I’m losing boiler level. I may have to start a feed pump on the batteries.”
“If you do that, you risk tripping out many systems. Feed pump pulls too many amps. Must make it on boiler steam. This is where men are separated from boys.”
Pacino’s jaw clenched. “Main steam header is clear. Admitting steam to ship’s service steam turbine.” Pacino pressed the touch screen to open the throttle valve to the SSTG. A low-pitched but loud hum came from ahead of them, then the pitch rose from bass to tenor. The turbine was spinning up, sounding like a jet engine on startup. Soon the pitch had risen to a screaming, ear-piercing squeal. “It’s almost like you guys went out of your way to make it loud,” he shouted over the noise.
“SSTG is at three thousand RPM, on the governor and ready for loading. Quick, shut the breaker to the ship’s service generator and open the battery breaker to the ship’s service generator.”
Pacino did as he was told, bringing the ship’s service turbine on line and taking the battery out of the circuit. He glanced at the boiler levels, and they were perilously low. If he didn’t start a feed pump immediately, they’d boil dry and they’d lose the entire plant.
“Ten centimeters of level in the boilers,” Abakumov prompted.
“SSTG has all ship’s loads, battery breaker open, ready to start a feed pump.”