“Very well, Engineer.” Orlov checked his watch. It was 0530 hours local time. The tea was helping clear his head, but losing a night’s sleep wasn’t as easy as it had been when he’d been in his twenties. He picked up his phone and dialed the central command post.
“Watch Officer,” the navigator’s voice said.
“Navigator, the repair work will be complete in less than an hour. Are you ready?”
“We’ll set maneuvering stations watch in thirty minutes, sir, then get underway as soon as the repair crew walks to the pier.”
“Very well,” Orlov said, putting up the phone. Finally, this ridiculous wait was coming to an end.
Trusov refilled his cup and spooned two teaspoons of sugar in it for him. “You were saying about the American submarines, sir?” she prompted.
“Yes, Madam Weapons Officer. Consider for a moment, if you will, one of their new Virginia-class submarines. Half our tonnage, twice our crew. That points to less automation. Manual control. Sailors back in the engineroom sweating through long propulsion plant watches. Other sailors in their central command post manually driving the ship. And their weapon control is probably primitive compared to ours. There’s no centralized AI system, no second captain, just a bunch of wobbly, off-the-shelf computers. I think of their crew, bottled up in their submarine, fighting against the sea just like us, scanning their sonar screens, straining to hear one of our subs, going days without daylight, without relaxation, without even a single shot of vodka, with bad canned food, and, well, I feel sorry for them. In a way, they are just like us. We would have more in common with the crew of an American nuclear submarine than with any collection of people off the street of Murmansk. Or Moscow, for that matter. I think, often, perhaps too often, that if we went out drinking together, just we and our American submarine counterparts, we might reach a deep understanding. Perhaps, we could even be friends.” Orlov paused, reluctant to look at Trusov, who certainly wouldn’t understand, and who probably thought he’d suddenly gone soft.
“I wonder,” he continued. “If our souls could move through the ocean, through the waves, through the air and past the clouds, in the direction of the closest Virginia-class submarine to us that’s steaming at sea, and just fly unseen into their central command post, what would we see? What are the sailors of that Virginia-class submarine doing right now?”
17
The control room mid-watch was quiet, the lights set to red in accordance with the rig for ultra-quiet, to remind watchstanders of the need to maintain absolute sound silence. In the old days, when periscopes of submarines featured actual optics, control rooms were lit with red lights to keep the eyes of the officer of the deck night-adapted, so at periscope depth he’d be able to see in the dark. Conning officers in decades past had worn red goggles or even a pirate’s eye patch over their periscope eye, to maintain that night vision capability. Today, with the periscopes constructed of non-hull-penetrating optronics, able to see in normal optical frequencies and also infrared, with laser range-finders, their output piped to high definition flatscreen displays, there was no longer a need for lighting the control room with red lights, and yet the tradition lived on. Somehow, red lights — the human perceiving red as an indicator of danger, from the sight of blood — kept the crew mindful of how close to real danger they all were.
Officer of the Deck Lieutenant Mohammed “Boozy” Varney paced the deck in the crowded space aft of the command console, the display selected to the athwartships beam of the sonar narrowband display of the TB-33 thin line towed array sonar, which showed exactly nothing but multifrequency noise, the array searching for a tonal frequency from man-made rotating machinery, hoping to catch the thrum of the electrical generators or the main motor of the modified-Kilo submarine Panther. But so far, it was all noise.
Varney paged his display software to show the output of the BQQ-10 large aperture bow array, which was scanning for broadband noise, and was full of contacts. All 37 of them — merchant ships all, steaming through the gulf with their three or four-bladed screws, tankers laden with oil coming outbound, or tankers empty and riding high, lumbering inbound to get loaded. He squinted his eyes shut and touched his stomach. He checked the bulkhead chronometer—0110 hours Zulu time, or 5:10 am local time. It was barely over an hour into the midwatch, and already his guts were churning.
“Goddamn chili for mid-rats,” he said to no one.
“Someone feeling Chubby Cruz’s famous hot and spicy Tex-Mex chili?” Radioman Chief Bernadette Goreliki said, snickering, from the pilot station. “Just don’t be polluting the control room air, sir. That’s an atmospheric contaminant for sure.” Chief Antonio “Chubby” Cruz, a bony and gaunt Californian with blonde hair and sparse facial hair that only dimly aspired to be a beard, worked for the supply officer and was the boss of the SK division, which kept the boat stocked with spare parts and food, and as such, he ran the messcooks. Cruz was the one who approved the menus, taking only input from the captain and executive officer, and he delighted in serving gut-busting and spicy mid-rats food.
“Shut up, Gory,” Varney said, smiling. “And mind your panel, Pilot.”
“Yeah,” Torpedoman Senior Chief Roderick “Blackie” Nygard said, piling on, from his station as copilot. “Mind your panel, Pilot.”
“Mind my panel, aye, Officer of the Deck, sir. And Copilot, go fuck yourself.”
Nygard smiled. “Go fuck myself, Copilot, aye.”
Varney paged the software on the command console to display the amidships wide aperture hull array’s acoustic daylight output, thinking that there was a remote chance a submerged contact would appear out of the distant noises of the biologics — the fish — that so filled the gulf with noise, that and the damned crowded shipping lanes. He stepped to the port side forward sonar stack position, a console with three large flat panel displays. In the seat was the sonar division’s leading petty officer and the midwatch’s sonarman-of-the-watch, Sonarman First Class Jay “Snowman” Mercer, who was a youthful, short and slender sonar tech who, like Chief Albanese, had been aboard the SSNX that was lost in the revenge attack on the hacked and hijacked drone submarine. They said it was the horror of that operation that had turned his beard stark white and filled his head with gray, but in truth he’d been going gray since he turned twenty. He kept the beard trimmed to a goatee, and looked almost academic with half-frame reading glasses perched on the end of his nose.
“Got anything?” Varney said, leaning over the sonar stack.
Mercer picked up a grease pencil and, on a small white plastic area of the lower console, wrote a hash mark. The hash marks added up to 11. He looked up at Varney and said in a south central Tennessee accent, “That’s the eleventh time this watch you’ve asked that. And we’re all of an hour in. You’re going to beat yesterday’s record.”
“Fuck,” Varney muttered, wandering back to the chart table, calculating the time on this leg until they’d reach the southwestern point of the bow-tie-shaped barrier search pattern, Point Lima, which was hours away at the slow crawl they were doing, four knots, to absolutely minimize own-ship’s noise, the minimum speed that would keep the towed array from dropping toward the sea floor.
“Actually,” Mercer said over his shoulder.
Varney skidded to a halt at Mercer’s console chair a second later. “What?”