The Russian pulled over a coffee cup, withdrew a flask from his jacket pocket, and half-filled the cup, then took a pull from it.
“Care to share?” Dankleff said, putting a cup beside Abakumov’s. The Russian looked up at him and shrugged, then poured for Dankleff, who sipped the contents and made a sour face.
“What the hell is this?”
“The only vodka I could get, smuggled into Bandar Abbas Naval Base. I know. It’s not exactly Jewel of Russia or Nemiroff, but it takes the edge off.”
“I’d say you could use this stuff to degrease the engineroom if you had enough of it,” Dankleff said.
“The Russians were sending two Yasen-M-class submarines?” Pacino asked.
“That was original plan. Iranians got scared. There was a cyber-worm. Invaded Iranian systems. Made all their aircraft inoperative. Made their surface ship control systems go black. Iranians worried that the worm would infect Panther. So they sent it to sea early. Original plan was to be escorted out by the Yasen-M subs from the moment we left Bandar Abbas.”
“So they’re out there, trying to find us,” Pacino said.
“I thought I heard you talking about starting the UBK-500,” Abakumov said.
“You’re damned right we’re going to start it. If we don’t,” Pacino said, glancing at Dankleff, “we risk running out of fuel in the middle of the ocean, and going too slow for too long, or refueling with some poorly imagined plan, risking getting detected by one of these Russian attack subs.”
“Are you able to start it and put it online?” Dankleff asked the Russian.
The Russian ran his hand over his hair, down to the nape of this neck. “It will be easy.” Abakumov and Fishman stood to go back aft to the reactor controls room aft of the new reactor module. Pacino stood up to go with them, then stopped at the door.
“Goreliki needs to get that radio functional. We’ll have to transmit, to warn Vermont that two Yasen-M submarines are coming for us.”
Dankleff nodded solemnly. “What about the risk of being detected from transmitting?”
“The risk of a Yasen-M surprising the Vermont far outweighs that. And two Yasen-Ms? Fuck, U-Boat. We’re toast.”
“Not if you get that fast reactor started. We could kick this tub into full thrust and get the fuck out of here.”
“Now that thought is worth a shot of that rotgut vodka.”
The watchbill had been completely scrambled by the loss of Varney, Dankleff and even non-qual Pacino. It also put a big hole in the 18–24 watch, where Chief Albanese had stood the watch on the number one Q-10 sonar stack. Lieutenant Commander Mario “Elvis” Lewinsky, the engineer, leaned over the command console, debating calling for the swivel command chair that could be inserted into a hole in the deck directly behind the console. He decided that would be a temptation to sleep, and stood up straighter.
Instead of the engineer’s preference, to stand his daily watch aft as engineering officer of the watch from 0600 to noon — where he could keep an eye on his engineering spaces, the health of the machinery, and the alertness of the watchstanders, and even go through some of the paperwork of his engineering divisions — he found himself on the conn, standing officer of the deck watch. Worse, the watch was on the goddamned midwatch, when Quinnivan and Seagraves wanted someone senior and sharp watching over Panther and keeping a weather eye for any incursion of an opposing attack force.
But Lewinsky felt anything but sharp tonight. In fact, his sleep had been thrashed by this change in schedule. That and worry over the mission. Too many damned things could go wrong. He tried to avoid counting them in his mind when he did have time to lie down in his bunk, but they presented themselves for counting almost like an insomniac’s sheep crowding the fence. So, for the number one malfunction, they could lose sonar contact on the Panther. It was loud when snorkeling — that wasn’t a problem — but it only snorkeled at dark, then maintained slow speed on the batteries. And on batteries, it had a low frequency emission from the main motor and a fifty-cycle whine from the ship’s service generator. And if Panther got out ahead of them too far, it’s signal-to-noise ratio would plummet and it could easily vanish into the noise of the warm Arabian Sea, which was teeming with fish and underwater mammals, all of them calling to each other at once, filling the broadband sonar stack with static. And if they lost sonar contact with the Panther, they would be well on the way to mission failure, because the next submarine to pick up her trail might be Russian.
Which led the way to glitch number two — a Russian attack submarine sent to stop this messy submarine theft. Odds were, an incoming Russian SSN had strict orders to shoot the Panther the second it was detected, to keep that super-secret fast reactor from falling into American hands. And it was up in the air — a fifty-fifty chance — that the attacker could have orders to sink the American escort sub in retaliation for stealing the Panther in the first place. Or out of a defensive analysis, that the best defense is a good offense.
Glitch three? Panther would eventually run out of fuel, and the refueling rendezvous with a disguised merchant oiler could go wrong or an attacking force could find her on the surface when refueling. Or a storm came up while refueling, strong enough to sink her.
The list of worries and glitches went on and on.
Lewinsky knew he shouldn’t worry, that worrying did nothing but erode combat effectiveness, but that was his personality. What had been his personality, anyway, until he’d gotten help. At Annapolis plebe year, his nickname was “Wart,” shortened from “Worry Wart,” because he had sweated everything. Would he fail the next physical strength test? Would the firsties scream at him at the next comearound? Would he fail plebe chemistry? Would his term paper on World War I differences from previous conflicts get an F? Would the company officer barge into his room and find it unsat and give him a class A conduct offense? And if he got a class A, would it snowball into conduct grades so severe that he’d get kicked out of the Academy? Eventually, his worries got so severe he’d had to see a counselor about it, during Christmas break, the sessions kept completely secret in case seeing a psychologist would get him kicked out of the Navy — and that formed yet another worry.
In working with the shrink, a pretty woman named Deb who was perhaps 35, he’d slowly managed to overcome his constant anxiety. Doctor Deb had offered to refer him to psychiatrist to get him anti-anxiety meds, but he’d refused. He couldn’t add to the worry list that some mind-altering medication showed up in a random drug test.
It had taken years with Doc Deb, with her making him learn a technique of visualizing alternate futures, one in which his worry came to nothing, and one where it happened. Then, she taught him, if the worry came true, he would deal with it. He’d have the strength to deal with it.
The shrink’s other effort came in forcing him to have interests outside the military. As with almost all men his age, his most intense interest was in women, but Lewinsky had anxiety levels too high to approach a female, and the only woman he’d seen socially at the Academy was at the plebe “tea dance,” also known as “the pig push,” where random chance matched up plebes with visitors of the opposite sex. The girl that had been forced on him was pretty but quiet and she’d liked him. They’d danced for a few hours before she’d had to leave. But he hadn’t kissed her, worrying that doing that might endanger their connection. And he hadn’t called her later either, because he worried she’d reject him.