“Another one, Captain?” his first officer, Captain Second Rank Ivan Vlasenko asked. When Orlov nodded, Vlasenko shook out another cigarette, the highly coveted American brand, Camel, almost impossible to get on the Russian Pacific coast. They tasted so much smoother than the Russian brands, Orlov thought, which tasted like toilet paper and left an aftertaste like cleaning chemicals.
“Where did you get these?” Orlov puffed the cigarette to life, inhaling the smoke deeply, then looking at the glowing tip of the cigarette. There was no doubt about it, a man could think with a cigarette between his fingers.
“My wife’s sister travels for business. Somehow she got them through customs. I suspect she has a thing going on with a customs agent.”
“If your wife’s sister is anywhere as good-looking as your wife, I’d say that is totally possible.”
“You know, Captain, having a gorgeous wife is a blessing and a curse. Long sea voyages? With all those hound dogs at the base? It keeps a loving husband up at night.”
“Try being divorced, Ivan. I guarantee you, it is a scenario much worse than having a beautiful, sexy wife whose faithfulness you have to worry about.”
“Damned shame, Captain,” Vlasenko said, blowing out smoke from his nostrils.
“Definitely, Mr. First. Anyway, we should turn our attention to the mission.”
Vlasenko glanced for a moment at Novosibirsk’s commanding officer. Yuri Orlov was tall for submarine duty, with dirty-blonde hair, blue eyes, a sculpted face, though his face was pockmarked from his adolescent acne, but the roughness of his facial skin made him look tough. He was thin, almost too thin, Vlasenko thought. Perhaps that was the fault of the Novosibirsk’s mess cooks. As for his own appearance, Vlasenko didn’t have that problem. His wife was a self-proclaimed master chef, and had fattened him up much more than he had been when they had said their vows, yet another reason Vlasenko worried about his wife finding another suitor more to her liking than chubby Vlasenko.
“Agreed, Captain. If the gods are with us, we should be putting to sea tomorrow.”
Five days ago, a reactor casualty had forced an end to their maximum speed run to the Gulf of Oman, originating from the Pacific Submarine Fleet’s Rybachiy Nuclear Submarine Base in Kamchatka. The reactor controls had alarmed and the unit had tripped, and it had taken the ship out of the deep to periscope depth, barely making way while snorkeling on the emergency diesel. The engineer, Captain Third Rank Kiril “Chernobyl” Chernobrovin had taken an hour to thread through the distributed control system’s history module to diagnose the problem, and when he did, the problem was serious — a dropped control rod from a burned out control rod drive motor. Dropping a rod while critical meant the neighboring fuel modules would pick up the load and it was possible they could reach melting temperature, and melted fuel meant a bad day at sea — radiation levels within the hull rising to near fatal for the crew, and to complicate the miserable situation, a failed rod drive was not repairable at sea. No one carried a spare for that, and to Orlov’s knowledge, no one had ever dropped a rod in real life. It had always been a dreamt-up drill run for training, but here it was, cursing this mission.
The dropped control rod in the reactor that happened the day they arrived in the Arabian Sea had forced Novosibirsk to turn sharply west to pull into the port of Aden, Yemen, to await repair crews to arrive from Vladivostok with the exotic parts and tools needed to repair a control rod drive. And every minute it had taken that crew to arrive and fix the reactor was another minute that that asshole Boris Novikov had to get his submarine in-theater. Orlov frowned. “Mr. First, if that asshole Novikov beats us to the Gulf of Oman, I’m going to be seriously annoyed.”
“Your history with Novikov is the stuff of legend, Captain.”
Orlov nodded somberly. “That scum. I’d torpedo him myself if I could get away with it. But that aside, Mr. First, where do we stand with the repair?”
“Let me call Chernobyl, Captain.” Vlasenko pulled a VHF radio from his belt. “Topside Duty Officer, First Officer.”
The radio clicked as the topside watchstander, who stood aft of the graceful conning tower, waved and held his radio to his lips. “Topside, sir.”
“Get the engineer up here. Tell him we want an up-to-the-minute report.”
“Right away, sir,” the duty officer said, the radio clicking back to silence.
“You know, Captain, this will be our last night ashore for five, maybe six weeks. T.K. Sukolov reported he found a bar called ‘The Tent’ in the Sheraton hotel. We could get a cab, maybe grab some dinner, put away some vodka. You know, for good luck.”
“Fat chance of that, Ivan. You’re standing on the soil of a country that has outlawed alcohol.”
“The Western restaurants allow you to bring in two bottles per party as long as you drink behind closed doors.”
“Really?”
“Sukolov was very hungover this morning, Captain. And very happy. Seems he met a flight crew and they invited him and Dobryvnik to their private dining room. So vodka and a little female company.”
“Sukolov’s a dog,” Orlov said, suppressing a smile. The young communications officer, Captain Lieutenant Mikhail “T.K.” Sukolov, was perpetually looking for excitement ashore, and not the sort that an upstanding citizen would seek. “But let me ask you, Mr. First, do we even have any vodka onboard?”
“Officially, sir? Nyet.”
“And unofficially?”
“Unofficially, Trusov could fill a bathtub.”
The weapons officer, Captain Lieutenant Irina Trusov, was a teetotaler. Everything about that woman was prudish, cold, severe and wrapped up entirely too tight, in Orlov’s opinion, but he wouldn’t say that aloud to Vlasenko. Trusov was Vlasenko’s protégé, his creation, recruiting her personally from a distant branch of his family. They were third cousins, if Orlov remembered right.
“Good plan, having a non-drinker guard the vodka. But tell me, will she give it up if you ask?”
“I’ll probably have to resort to stealing it like Sukolov did.”
Orlov made a hissing sound. “Sukolov probably tried to sweet talk her first.”
“I have it on good authority he hit a brick wall with Iron Irina Trusov.”
“Grab the navigator to come with us, and Irina as well — she can make sure we don’t get into too much trouble. I’m assuming the engineer will have to stay with the technicians to supervise the repair.”
Vlasenko snickered. “And as punishment that it’s his equipment that interrupted our mission.”
Captain Third Rank Chernobrovin stepped quickly down the gangway from the boat to the pier, snapped to attention and saluted Orlov and Vlasenko.
“Engineer, reporting as ordered, sir.”
Orlov casually waved a salute back as he took in Chernobrovin, who wore sweat- and grease-stained blue coveralls with horizontal high-visibility reflective stripes across the top and bottoms of his sleeves. The youth looked underfed and hungry, with a perpetual five o’clock shadow on his face even if he had just shaved, his usual at-sea beard gnarly and atrocious, but he was newly married, and apparently the wife didn’t approve of facial hair. That in itself seemed odd, since a woman who liked baby-faced men would never ordinarily connect with a swarthy lad like Chernobrovin, but who could predict feminine attraction? And there was one perpetual constant in the universe, Orlov thought, the undeniable female urge to change her man from what he was to what she wanted him to be.