“Be my guest. What did you want to talk about?”
“It’s strange, sir,” she said. I’ve been scouring the news from all sources. Egyptian, Israeli, Russian, English, American, French.”
“We all know your amazing talents in languages, Madam First. What did you find out?”
“Exactly nothing, Captain. This situation could go on. The 2021 blockage was a week, but the canal was closed for seven years when the Egyptians and Israelis had a scrape sixty years ago. I suppose the mission could wait a week, but there’s no telling how long this could take. It’s shrouded in secrecy. Something is up. I thought maybe you could call the admiral and ask if he knows anything.”
“I send daily status reports to Northern Fleet HQ. The admiral knows we’re stuck here.”
Anastasia Isakova put her binoculars up to her eyes, but stole a long glance at the captain. Boris Novikov was tall and lanky, with a mop of black hair and dark eyes, a straight nose over strong cheekbones, with a narrow, tough-looking face and a sculpted chin. His teeth, when he smiled, were straight, perhaps unnaturally white — could that be from the vanity of a dental treatment? He reminded her of how the movies depicted Moscow mafia solders or bosses — mean and criminal, with a dark energy seeking release, a large pistol inevitably holstered under a sharkskin sport jacket. That his girlfriend or wife or whatever she was to him, Natalia, had left him seemed incredibly stupid. Isakova had been denying her feelings for the captain for the last year, and had finally started thinking about asking for reassignment.
What had Novikov said at the wardroom table a few months ago? “That pud-thumper Orlov used to always say, ‘put a reasonably attractive female in a room with a reasonable looking male and make them work together for a year, and they’re either going to fuck each other or murder each other.’” And the engineer, Yevgeny Montorov, who had zero tact, had smiled and said, “sometimes both, eh, Captain?” as if he were unaware that saying that would bring Novikov face-to-face with his life crisis, Natalia moving on. And the navigator, Leonid “Luke” Lukashenko, had tried to break the tension by adding, “hopefully in that order, because the reverse would be, well, socially unacceptable.” Novikov had smiled at Lukashenko gratefully for just a split second.
“Maybe a secure video conference is in order,” Isakova said. “Tell him you’re thinking of leaving the Med and going around Africa. With the canal closed, it’s the only way to get in-theater.”
“Draft a message for me to see before you send it, requesting a video link for this afternoon. Maybe we’ll either find something out or get a blessing to go around the horn. Just sitting here cooling our heels won’t do.”
Michael Pacino leaned over and opened the passenger-side door while he pushed the button to open the rear hatch.
Vice Admiral Robert Catardi, clad in jeans, harness boots and a golf shirt with a black sport jacket over it, half jogged up, a briefcase in one hand and an overnight bag in the other. He tossed his bags in the back and the hatch began to close slowly by itself. He stood back a moment, staring at the car. “What. The fuck. Is this?”
“Good to see you too, Rob,” Pacino grinned, holding out his hand. Catardi ducked to fold himself into the sleek black sports car and shook the National Security Advisor’s hand.
“You too, sir,” Catardi said.
“No ‘sirs’ around me, Robby, just ‘Patch’. How long has it been?”
Pacino took the shift lever to first gear and the engine roared as he swung away from the Andrews Military Aviation arrival and departure lounge, the engine screaming as Pacino shifted to second, the car already going insanely fast before he hit third.
“It’s been since the days of the old Devilfish,” Catardi said, reluctant to mention the name of the submarine Pacino had commanded that had so disastrously gone down under the ice, but he hadn’t been in the same room with the older man since then. “And we used to call your son ‘Patch.’”
Pacino looked over as he drove down the winding backroad, taking the scenic route out of Washington.
“I talked to him after you tipped me that he’d be at the — well, where you said he’d be. He sounded like his old self, before the whole, well, you know.”
Before the Piranha sinking, Catardi thought sadly. Their history with sunken submarines was not something either wanted to think about. Catardi decided to change the subject. Plenty of time to talk about the mission of the USS Vermont once they reached Camp David and got into a secure SCIF conference room.
Catardi glanced at Pacino for a moment, seeing what time had done to the man since they’d last met. Back then, Pacino had had a head full of thick hair black as a coal mine, shallow cheeks below strong cheekbones, a straight nose and emerald-green eyes, and stood at a height that should have been too tall for submarine duty. Today, he was still as gaunt and thin as he’d been then and he still had all of his hair, but the hair had all turned pure white. It made for an odd look, since his eyebrows were still black. His eyes were still that weird color of green, but duller somehow. The smile lines at the corners of his eyes had gotten deeper, and he looked tanned. Like Catardi, he was wearing jeans, a golf shirt and a sport coat.
Catardi decided to break the silence and ask about Pacino’s sports car.
“What is this car?” At the moment he asked, they were taking a turn at what had to be over half a G, the car’s engine roaring, then purring, the screaming again as Pacino raked it smoothly through the manual transmission’s gears.
“Aston Martin DB11 AMR. V-12 engine with six hundred and thirty horsepower. She’ll do two oh eight on a flat course, zero to sixty in three point seven.”
“Jesus, Patch. How fast have you driven her?”
“One of my pilot friends took me to an abandoned airfield with an eight-thousand-foot runway. I got to about two hundred and two miles per before I decided I was either going to melt the brakes or go off the end of the runway.”
“This thing must cost a fortune. A lot more than my damned house if I’m guessing right.”
Pacino shrugged. “I sold the sailboat. After that scrape with the drone sub, the sea holds no relaxation for me. I got a good price, from one of my Annapolis neighbors who’d been lusting over it for years. So then I saw this car at a distressed estate sale. Owner found himself in the kind of trouble that needed a million-dollar legal defense, so instead of taking six months to auction it off to some Saudi prince and the hassle of shipping it overseas, he let it go for pennies on the pound. So, really, I paid less than you would for one of those fancy mid-engined Corvettes.”
The truth of it was, Pacino thought, that he’d desperately needed something to cheer him up after Colleen moved out, over a year into her giving him the silent treatment, furious at Pacino that Anthony had chosen to go submarines for his service selection. Seeing him clinically dead and then return had changed her, he thought, and not for the better. He glanced at his left ring finger. This morning he’d decided to take it off and put it in the polished wood box he kept his Rolex in at night. The tan-line on the finger seemed a rebuke.
“Even that price is eye-popping. I hope you’re enjoying it.”
“You know what, Rob? It’s okay.”
Catardi laughed. “Okay, right. Are you getting any time to drive it?”
“Not after Scorch hired me. I guess you can say I’m his consiglieri on military affairs.”
“Scorch?”