“Yes, sir.”
“And listen up for anything the captain has to say to you, laddie. I read about your underway on the Piranha. You can do this.” Quinnivan clapped Pacino on the shoulder and drilled his gaze into Pacino’s eyes, as if searching for weakness. Pacino swallowed hard.
“Aye aye, sir. Understood.”
“Good luck, lad,” Quinnivan said, his eyes crinkling as he smiled.
“Mr. Pacino, let’s go,” Lomax interrupted seriously.
Pacino looked around control one last time. There was none of the levity of the ship’s party from Friday night, nor even the calm professionalism of officer’s call an hour before. The atmosphere was as tense as anything Pacino had witnessed, even more than those frightening “comearounds” to the upperclassmen during Plebe Summer at the academy.
His heart beginning to hammer in his chest, Pacino followed Lomax to the upper level and the ladder under the bridge access tunnel. “Officer of the Deck to the bridge,” Lomax shouted up the tunnel, then vanished up the ladder. Pacino waited for him to get all the way up, then shouted, “Junior Officer of the Deck to the bridge!” He checked that his lanyard was tucked in, then took the ladder rungs until the submarine’s upper level disappeared and he was in the darkness of the vertical tunnel, only a few hooded lights illuminating the empty cylinder of steel. Above him, he could see the circle of bright light shining down from the outside world, and a momentary flash of memory tugged at him as he remembered something dimly from the Piranha sinking, but he put it aside and climbed close to the upper hatch.
“Junior Officer of the Deck, permission to come up?”
“Permission granted, come on up,” Lomax called, and Pacino climbed up through the upper hatch and stood aside as Lomax put down the grating allowing them to stand on top of the opening to the tunnel. Pacino looked around him. He stood in a crow’s nest of steel, the coaming of the bridge coming to chest level. Pacino slipped past Lomax and went to the port side and leaned over, looking down on the linehandlers on the pier and on the topside deck, all of them looking up at him expectantly. Ahead of him, a large Plexiglass windshield was bolted to the sail, and below it was the bridge communication box, with a microphone on a coiled spring, a large speaker and two rotary switches to select communication circuits and adjust volume. Lomax handed Pacino the microphone.
“Test your comms with all stations,” he ordered.
Pacino looked at the box and checked that it was selected to “7MC,” the maneuvering and ship control circuit.
“Pilot, Bridge, comm check,” he said into the mike, hoping his voice didn’t tremble.
“Bridge, Pilot,” Dankleff’s voice boomed out of the speaker. “Comm check sat.”
“Bridge, aye,” Pacino said. “Navigator, Bridge, comm check.”
“Bridge, Navigator, aye,” Romanov’s harsh voice called back. “Check sat.”
Lomax laughed. “Goddamn, that woman’s voice penetrates to the marrow of your bones. I feel sorry for Bruno.” Pacino smirked.
“Bridge aye, Contact Coordinator, Bridge, comm check.”
“Bridge, Contact, check sat,” Lewinsky’s deep booming voice reported.
“Maneuvering, Bridge,” Pacino called, “comm check.”
“Bridge, Maneuvering,” No replied in his harsh Chicago accent, “communications check satisfactory.”
Pacino looked at Lomax. “Officer of the Deck,” he reported formally, “communication circuits tested, tested sat.”
Lomax nodded. “Very well, JOOD.”
Behind Pacino’s left shoulder, the radar rotated, atop its tall mast, the radar array rotating once every two seconds. To Pacino’s right rear was a small commercial DynaCorp radar unit mounted on a temporary mast tied into the flying bridge handrails. As Pacino had learned on Piranha, sometimes the boat would sneak out of port using only the commercial unit so a waiting spy ship wouldn’t see their unique military spec’s radar signal, but today, apparently, it was acceptable to be identifiable as a Navy submarine. Pacino checked over the port side again, where the lines holding them to the pier were singled-up, linehandlers impatiently standing by. Forward, through the windshield, Pacino could see the nose of the ship sloping downward into the brackish water of the slip. To starboard, on his side, the two tugs could be seen, idling in the channel. At the end of the slip he could see the pier’s security building with its tall guard tower, almost looking like a mid-size airport’s control tower. Pacino frowned, wondering why they’d moored with the bow pointed landward. This would be so easy if they were parked nose-out, but then, bow-in like this had been how Piranha had been moored when he drove her out, back what seemed a hundred years ago.
Pacino pulled out his handheld and mounted it on a support to the left of the bridge box. Lomax’s was already mounted on the right, his display showing the chart. Likewise, Pacino brought up the chart, showing their position flashing on the pier leading into the Elizabeth River’s Norfolk Harbor Reach.
“So, JOOD,” Lomax said, his voice dead serious, “listen up. The captain and XO heard about your ‘back full, ahead flank’ underway when you drove out your midshipman cruise submarine. So the CO wants to see how you’d do that now. You think you can do it again?”
“Yes, OOD,” Pacino said, turning around to see the waters astern of them. He could see the rudder pointing straight aft and the open water of the river far astern. He could feel his heart beating harder and faster than before. Being pulled out by two tugboats would have been so easy. But a back-full, ahead-flank underway? That risked the ship, not to mention his reputation.
“Don’t fuck it up like Man Mountain Vevera did,” Lomax said.
“Why? What happened?”
Lomax laughed, breaking the tension of the morning. “Fucker put on a weak back one-third bell instead of back full. The river current overcame his rudder. Instead of the propulsor pulling the stern south in the river so the bow would point north — the way out of Norfolk — the current pushed the stern north, so that the ship was exactly backwards. Normally the captain would have taken the conn and gotten it all figured out, or at the very least, given Vevera rudder orders so he could recover and get the bow pointed north. But the captain was gagged. It was this oddball exercise simulating a nuclear first strike, with SubCom staff onboard simulating that half the crew were injured or dead, with no comms to command HQ, and one of the simulated injured was the captain. We had to get underway with a random officer, so they picked Vevera since he happened to be the one in the wardroom slamming down sausages when the staff rats walked in.
“So Man Mountain Squirt Gun Vevera, what does he do? Does he bring the ship to all stop and use the thruster to rotate the hull 180 degrees to face north? No. That fucker decided to just keep going backwards. He shifted the rudder so the stern kept coming around from north to east to south again. Eventually he was pointing north in the river, after having executed a full two-seventy-degree turn going backwards. In a goddamned river channel. Goddamn, he got lucky, it was high tide and there were no sandbars, but any other time he would have hit something or run aground. The crew was screaming and howling in hilarity, and the goddamned navigator almost passed out. And the entire time? I think the captain had turned purple in the face, the ComSub staff guy was furiously taking notes, and Vevera? He was as cool as if he had no problem with it at all. As the bow came around to the north, he ordered the ship from back one third to ahead two thirds, then looked up at the staff rat and said, and I quote, ‘I planned that very carefully.’ I’m telling you, it was fucking legend!”