“Dolphins are always good luck, non-qual,” she said, her voice loud to overcome the gale force wind of their passage.
Pacino lifted his binoculars and scanned the horizon, but they were alone in the sea. The speed of the ship on the surface made the howling wind feel like a hurricane, but it was warm despite the salty sea spray. The sun shone on them brightly, glinting off the waves. Pacino could feel the skin of his face starting to burn despite the sunscreen he’d applied when they’d surfaced. He looked over at Romanov. Her long chestnut hair, gleaming in the sunshine, was pulled back in a smooth ponytail, the ponytail going through the back of her Vermont ballcap, her eyes obscured by her dark Ray{MISSING SYMBOL}Ban sunglasses, her tall, slender form revealed by the working khaki uniform. Pacino scolded himself for being aware of her as a woman and not as his superior officer. Sometimes he wished he could just disconnect his central nervous system, or the part of it that reacted to the opposite sex. Dammit, he thought, this was work. He wondered how long this mission would last.
“So Navigator,” he asked Romanov, “What happens when we get to AUTEC?”
Romanov shrugged. “The captain will disembark and go talk to whomever he talks to after an op like this. Probably an ultra-secure videolink to some mid-level staffer at the National Security Council.”
“Cool,” Pacino said, taking another scan of the sea with his binoculars. The howling wind, the bow wave’s sound and fury, the furious flapping of the flags aft, the sun, the sea, the sky and the ruler straight horizon, all of them seemed to warm his cold soul. He could steam on the surface like this all day, he thought.
The admiral-in-command of the combined U.S. Navy submarine force, Vice Admiral Robert Catardi, emerged from the relative gloom of the Navy Gulfstream SS-12 supersonic eight-passenger jet into the bright sunshine of the strip on Andros Island, Bahamas. His aide, Lieutenant Commander Wanda Styxx, carried his overnight bag and briefcase as well as her own luggage. A waiting staff car had its trunk open. A female lieutenant saluted him and he returned the salute and climbed into the back of the car with Styxx. As the car rolled off the airfield, Catardi took a look around at the volcanic rocks of the island. Andros wasn’t like Nassau — there was no natural beauty here. This place could have been used as a training ground for moon landings, he thought. The unbroken stretches of volcanic rock extended to the horizon in every direction, which accounted for the large island being completely deserted.
Deserted, that is, except for the DynaCorp / Navy AUTEC installation on the east end, the nearest point to TOTO. AUTEC stood for Atlantic Undersea Testing and Evaluation Center, and TOTO was “Tongue of the Ocean,” a vast deep hole in the sea surrounded by shallow shoals, keeping the area a place unable to be spied on by an underwater adversary, since the only entrance to it was a channel that any submarine would have to surface to transit. TOTO was a bathtub used by the Navy as a submarine testing ground, big enough for submarine vs. submarine exercises and exercise weapon shots. The tub was fully instrumented with 3D sonar, where the submarine doing training could see a projection of their battle after the action ended, in a large theater with a giant projection screen.
But this visit had nothing to do with testing or evaluation, Catardi thought. He turned his tablet machine back on and went over the situation report from the Vermont. He studied it for the tenth time, then reread the text of the patrol report. He’d review the video files again when they reached the guest office at AUTEC. He switched to the summary of the decision theory geek, Gustuvson, and his computer simulations of the attack on the Bigfoot.
The car arrived at the AUTEC complex and Catardi and Styxx got out of the car to get scanned into the security post. Long legged and slender Styxx got out on her side, all hundred and five pounds of her, the brunette younger woman thin and lithe, a veritable ballet dancer, making the two of them an odd couple. Catardi was of medium height, solid, perhaps twenty pounds shy of “stocky,” but still an imposing presence. His formerly coal black hair now had pronounced streaks of gray in it, one streak extending from the center of his forehead all the way back to the nape of his neck, looking ridiculously like a skunk stripe, he thought. Every morning in the mirror, he contemplated dying his hair, and every morning he decided against it. Catardi had a rugged, chiseled face with dark circles under his eyes, not from lack of rest but inherited from his Sicilian father. He could have been credibly cast in a cigarette ad or a movie about a Wyoming sheriff — although his thick south Boston accent would make the latter impossible — but in fact he had once been dragged in to get a screen test for a pharmaceutical ad by his then-girlfriend, Monica Eddlestein, the local Channel Eleven news anchor. He’d failed the screen test, he thought ruefully, which he believed had contributed to the eventual breakup.
Since Monica, there had been no one. He had a bitter, standard Navy-issue ex-wife, or as she described herself, a widow of his extended sea time, and a daughter heading into middle school in another year. Those were the women in his life, for now, he thought. There were females he could attract, he knew, including his dark beauty of an aide, one Wanda “River” Styxx, despite some of his fire-and-brimstone ass-chewings directed her way, but life was full and busy with his trying to run the combined Atlantic and Pacific fleet submarine forces.
Life must have been simpler back when there had been one admiral-in-command of the Atlantic and a second in command of the Pacific fleet, but in the reorganization of the military ten years ago, the forces had been combined into one post. He had purview over both fleets and administratively reported to his boss, Commander-in-Chief U.S. Naval Forces Atlantic/Pacific, or CINCUSNAVLANTPAC, Admiral Greyson Rand, who was a brilliant but demanding boss, always just as close to an explosive lava-filled rant as Catardi himself was. And God knew, talk about difficult bosses — the National Security Council’s leader, former Illinois senator and current National Security Advisor Dana Brady-Hawlings, who couldn’t be meaner if she’d had twelve snarling snakes growing out of her damned head, was whom he reported to for the Fractal Chaos projects. Projects executed by his project boat, the USS Vermont.
After being cleared by security, the car dropped them at the AUTEC administration building. Styxx gave the driver orders to take their bags to the bachelor officers’ quarters, the BOQ, then followed the admiral into the admin building, where a petty officer escorted them to a large guest office. Styxx got them coffee from an adjoining galley while Catardi settled down at the desk to go over the sitrep, patrol report and decision theory results again. He sipped the boiling hot coffee and turned to the situation report first.
1600Z12MAY22
IMMEDIATE
FM USS VERMONT SSN-792
TO NATSECADV / NSC; COMSUBCOM
CC COMSUBRON 8; COMSPECWAR NORVA
SUBJ SITREP // OPERATION BIGFOOT
TOP SECRET FRACTAL CHAOS // TOP SECRET FRACTAL CHAOS // TOP SECRET FRACTAL CHAOS
//BT//
1. (S) USS VERMONT ARRIVED ON-STATION SANTA MARTA HOLD POINT XRAY 0320Z12MAY22 AND ESTABLISHED BARRIER SEARCH.