To judge by the selected articles, the future looked far less than peaceful for a submarine like Vermont.
After Pacino finished the required reading, he turned to studying for his qualifications for his dolphins, concentrating first on the diving officer / pilot section. The trim system, the drain system, the high-pressure air system, the steering and diving hydraulics and what to do when each system failed. He shut his eyes for a moment and remembered his qualification watch held for him by Alameda and Catardi on Piranha, when he’d stood diving officer of the watch and had every casualty known to man thrown at him, and when he’d managed to pull through it, every man in the control room exchanged twenty-dollar bills, most betting against Pacino’s ability to prevail, but both Alameda and Catardi betting he would succeed and beat the scenario.
He’d been put on the watchbill for the next week as copilot at the ship control station, he saw from a notice on his handheld. He’d be standing watch beside Chief Dysart, the auxiliarymen chief — A-Gang — who would be manning the pilot station. Dysart had to be the most intimidating presence Pacino had run into in the submarine force, taciturn and wearing a perpetually angry face. The officer of the deck on their watch section would be the navigator, Lieutenant Commander Romanov, and Pacino didn’t relish that idea, not after whatever foolishness had happened at the ship’s party. The sonarman of the watch would be his soon-to-be-chief, Chief Albanese, a wiry redhead who had so much energy he had to be freebasing coffee grounds. Torpedo Officer Li No, the engineering officer of the watch for that watch section, had hinted Pacino would stand copilot watch for a few days, then rotate into the pilot seat, and after a qualification checkout, would start standing submerged officer of the deck under instruction. That, he looked forward to, that and eventually getting his dolphins when he qualified, perhaps eight, nine or ten months in the future, assuming Captain Seagraves waived the one-year requirement. But he couldn’t pick a better qual boat than Vermont, he thought. The coming months promised to be busy with operations, where qualification in submarines went fast. The minute they made port, quals would effectively stop, whether in a liberty port where everyone would be partying or at home port, where the crew would be frantically working to repair the ship and get it ready for the next op.
Hours seemed to pass in a moment, Pacino thought, because already the mess cooks were setting up for evening meal. Pacino looked up from his handheld, coming out of the trance of studying and thinking about qualifications. The deck was rocking hard and trembling violently from the power of the propulsor as the ship rocketed through the waves at flank speed. The motion of the boat that made some people seasick only made Pacino drowsy. At one point the deck was doing slow corkscrew motions, both rolling and pitching in what must be waves a third the length of the ship and as tall as the sail. It felt like being rocked to sleep, he thought. Just then, Lomax walked in wearing foul weather gear, holding a safety rail at the wardroom credenza to keep his footing. “We’ve got the evening watch for the dive, Mr. Pacino. It’s raining hard topside and the sea state keeps climbing, so you might want to think about whether you want to skip dinner.”
“I’m okay,” Pacino said. Lomax called in the mess cook, who set down plates for the two officers earlier than the normal start for the oncoming watch section. “Cold cuts,” Lomax said, packing turkey, ham, cheese and onions into a bun dripping with mustard. “Sea state is too high to cook.” Pacino joined him, making a sandwich and wolfing it down with chips. After what could only be five minutes, Lomax stood and gestured to Pacino. “Go get appropriately dressed and meet me in control. And leave your handheld in your safe. They may be water resistant, but it’s insane out there.”
Pacino got into a full-body rain slicker and pulled a safety harness over it, clamping the blue Vermont ball cap onto his head. He debated leaving his binoculars in his cubby, since it was raining so hard, he’d probably see nothing through them, but decided to hang them around his neck anyway. He traded out his at-sea sneakers for combat boots and headed down to the middle level.
In the control room, Lomax held on to a hand-hold bar at the command console, looking at the periscope display, where Lieutenant Varney had the contact coordinator watch, his headset covering one ear, with a boom microphone extending down his jawline. As contact coordinator, Varney was responsible for tracking surface contacts, using the periscope, the radar set and data from sonar, analyzing their relative motion and making sure there was no risk of collision.
“Anything out there?” Lomax asked.
The unmistakable sound of someone vomiting came from forward, the ship control station. Pacino looked over as the copilot finished puking into a black plastic bag and wiped his face.
“You okay, Copilot?” Lomax asked. “You need to be relieved?”
Torpedoman Senior Chief Nygard, the copilot at the right-side console in the cocoon of flat panel displays, joysticks and interface variable function keys shook his head. “I’m fine, sir,” he said, just before hurling up again. Lomax gave Pacino an amused look. “So, Contact Coordinator, contacts?” Lomax prompted Varney.
Varney shook his head. “Sea state is too high to see much and we’ve got wind-driven rain falling horizontally. We’re not going to get much with optronics on visible light spectrum. We’ve been running infrared for the last hour. Nothing but a few brave seagulls.” Varney checked the bulkhead chronometer, then his watch. “Sunset’s in five minutes, but it looks more like midnight out there. Nothing on sonar to report, but with these waves, everything is drowned out or attenuated. Radar’s as clean as it could get with these waves. So, as best we can tell, we seem to be alone out here. Looks like everyone else had the good sense to stay home.”
“Keep a sharp eye out anyway,” Lomax advised. “We are on or close to a major shipping lane. Merchant traffic is out there somewhere. I don’t want to look up and see the bow of an incoming supertanker fifty yards dead ahead of me.”
“Absolutely,” Varney said, his voice iron hard.
“Sounding?” Lomax asked.
“Only five eight fathoms,” Varney said, turning around to point at the chart. “The continental shelf goes all the way out to here,” he said, pointing to Point Delta, “then the ocean depth falls off a steep cliff. Sixty fathoms here on this side of Delta, almost eight hundred here on the other side.”
Lomax turned to the navigation console, staring down at the chart. Their location, “own-ship’s position,” was marked with a slowly pulsing bright red dot, their path from Norfolk — their “track”—marked with a thin but bright red line. Their intended course extended with a dotted blue line from own-ship’s position ahead in the sea to a second point, this one a bright “X” drawn in blue, marked “Point Delta.” Point Delta was the dive point, where their intended course intersected the hundred fathom curve, where it would be safe to dive the boat. The run out almost due east to the continental shelf was an eleven-hour transit. It must be nice, Pacino thought, to be assigned out of Pearl Harbor, where you could submerge half a mile from the pier. He looked forward to being submerged, because being under meant no rain and no waves — and hot food.
“Mark the distance to the dive point, Mr. Pacino,” Lomax ordered. Pacino manipulated a cursor to own-ship’s position, then extended a line to Point Delta.
“Twenty-eight point five nautical miles,” Pacino reported. At their present speed on the surface of 19 knots, losing a few knots from laboring through these waves, they’d be there in a little over ninety minutes. Of course, just five minutes in this weather would leave them as soaked as if they had fallen overboard.