Dammit, Pacino thought. The captain himself knew about this indiscretion.
At the pier, Pacino rushed out, crossed the gangway, hurriedly saluted the American flag, dived down the plug trunk, hustled to his room and dumped the casual clothes on his rack, then climbed into his khaki uniform, pinning the new lieutenant’s bars onto his uniform shirt, then rushing to the wardroom to grab coffee before officers’ call, after which he’d assume the watch in maneuvering to start the reactor.
It was five in the morning, but there must have been eight officers there already, all of them in uniform and all of them sober as judges. The moment he entered the room, all of them broke out in howls of laughter. Pacino looked at Spichovich, who looked like he would burst at the seams from laughing. Li No spurted tea on his tablet computer. And Gangbanger, the supply officer, stood up, pointed and guffawed. Quinnivan looked like he was going to suffer a hernia, bent over and laughing so hard he started coughing.
“What? What is it?”
A scowling Rachel Romanov pulled him roughly down the narrow passageway of officers’ country to the unisex head and shoved him against the sink so he could see himself in the mirror.
Pacino’s face had lipstick smeared all around his lips, from his chin all the way to the bottom of his nose, and twice as wide as his mouth. He looked like he was wearing the makeup of a clown.
“Admiral’s aide, huh?” Romanov said in blistering hostility. “Get the stink of that skank off you and join us in the wardroom for zero five thirty officers’ call. What the hell were you thinking? Fucking gross.”
Pacino washed his face, watching in the mirror as Romanov stormed angrily down the passageway. What was her problem? Could this be — no, not jealousy. Certainly, he and Romanov had the beginnings of a connection, but it was a professional friendship, right? And she was a married woman, right? A happily married woman. Right?
Once the lipstick was scrubbed off, Pacino walked back to the wardroom, thinking he could sneak into his seat without further ado, but Quinnivan pointed his finger at Pacino and said, “your new callsign, Lieutenant, is ‘Lipstick.’ Officers, I present to you Lieutenant Lipstick Pacino!”
Pacino frowned, not pleased at their roaring laughter at his expense. Dieter Dankleff clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about them, they’re just jealous you were the one to get that Styxx chick. She shot down a half dozen of us before she pulled you onto the dance floor. You’re a regular ladies’ man, Lipstick.”
“Oh fuck you, U-Boat,” Pacino said. It was all he could think of as a comeback.
BOOK 3:
POLLIWOGS, SHELLBACKS, PANTHERS
13
Lieutenant Anthony Pacino walked into the wardroom shortly after 0800 and made straight for the coffee machine. He’d missed breakfast so he could find an open treadmill and weight machine in the torpedo room, the breakfast period one of few slack times for the equipment. After a fast shower, he needed caffeine before beginning the grind of a new day of submarine qualification studies and checkouts.
A checkout was a submarine ritual, in which a non-qual studied and memorized a particular system, digging into the tech manuals and SOP procedures, interviewed the men who operated the system and physically touched the major components of it. That could even mean crawling into the oily bilge under the deckplates of aft compartment lower level to touch the drain pump, the massive unit the size of a compact car, able to keep the ship alive during flooding by forcing floodwater overboard through the huge drain piping system. When the non-qual felt he was ready, he would go to a qualified officer and undergo a verbal exam on the system. It usually entailed going over the basics, moving on to making the non-qual draw the piping system or block functional diagram or even the circuit diagram.
Non-quals rarely passed a checkout on the first try. The questions escalated in difficulty and esoteric nature until the non-qual became clueless, and at that point, from one to four “lookups” were handed down from the dolphin-wearer to the non-qual. Tradition had it that reporting with the answers to lookups required bringing the qualified person his favorite drink or snack, spitting out the lookup answers, then getting his “qual card” signed. There were hundreds of checkouts required for an officer to acquire dolphins, and the process could take over a year, depending on the operational tempo of the boat. The most difficult requirement was for the non-qual officer to make two approaches as approach officer, but Pacino had the first one signed off. One to go, and only a few dozen more checkouts, and all that was left was the minimum six-month requirement. By early November, the gods of the seas willing, Pacino should be wearing gold dolphins.
He tossed his pad computer to the table, took his habitual seat and looked over at his boss, Weapons Officer Al Sprocket Spichovich, who was reading his tablet across from the engineer, Lieutenant Commander Elvis Lewinsky. The wardroom was pin-drop silent, and the three of them were the only ones in the room.
“Morning, Patch,” Spichovich said, hoisting a coffee cup and draining the thick black liquid. Lately, Spichovich was the only officer in the wardroom other than the captain who stilled called Pacino Patch. His new nickname, Lipstick, seemed to have stuck much harder. And unlike the other officers, Pacino was rarely referred to by his job title, like DCA Dankleff or MPA Lomax or Communicator Eisenhart. It didn’t sound right to address a person, even if the person were the sonar officer, as Sonar. “Are you looking for another weapons checkout? You know, my sleaziest checkouts are when you play poker with me and the other junior officers while you submit to my interrogation. A zero eight hundred checkout, absent cards, poker chips and cigars? I don’t think even the Feng here could pass that.”
Engineer Lewinsky grinned at Spichovich over his coffee. “Bullshit, Weps,” he said. “I know more about your shit than you know about my shit.”
Spichovich laughed and made a dismissive motion with his hand. “All your shit does is push us through the water. My shit finds the bad guys, then puts warheads on foreheads, the very purpose of us being here. The fucking mission.”
“Yeah, your warheads would still be at the pier if not for me and my boys. Plus, we make the hot water for your shower and laundry and the potable water for your coffee. Where would you be without coffee?”
“Fine,” Spichovich conceded, smirking. “Maybe so, maybe so.” He looked at Pacino. “So, Patch? A checkout?”
Pacino considered the question, glancing at his cup. The coffee in the cup made ripples and waves when Pacino set the cup on the table from the vibration of the deck with the submarine speeding southeast at flank speed in its headlong rush, its dark transit, toward the southern tip of Africa.
“I don’t think so, Weps. Last time I played poker with you, well, I went back to my bunky with my wallet empty.”
Spichovich was a card shark, and loved playing Vermont Hold ’Em, which was just Texas Hold ’Em with aces as low cards instead of high. So far, Pacino had had five easy checkouts during five poker games with no lookups from Spichovich — one on the Mod 9 ADCAP torpedo, another on the conventional Tomahawk land attack and ship attack cruise missile, the third on the new Mod 80 Tomahawk SACM-N, which stood for ship attack cruise missile, twenty kiloton nuclear warhead-equipped, a fourth on the Kakivak Mod EMP and a fifth on the Tomahawk SubRoc antisubmarine cruise missile with a nuclear depth charge, also with a twenty kiloton nuke. Each time Pacino had lost over a hundred dollars in chips, and Spichovich was the bank for the chips, demanding or making payment to cash in or out.