He saw the new kid, O'Brien, and smiled to himself. It looked like the nub was just getting over the shock of realizing just who it was with whom he'd shared that flight out from Washington.
He already knew a surprising number of the men aboard… but then, the Navy was a tight little community, and the Silent Service was smaller and tighter still. Lots of men found themselves serving together with old shipmates, given time enough. BM1 Archie Douglas, for instance, was one of Pittsburgh's old hands. According to his dossier, his first cruise had been that memorable op aboard the old Bluefin in the Persian Gulf in 1980. Gordon remembered him well. The kid had dived in after an injured SEAL while the boat had been on the surface under attack, and won a Silver Star for the act.
Gordon had been XO on the Bluefin during that op, under none other than Commander Mike Chase. Geeze,he thought, it's like old home week.
That one over there, the third class in the arms of a startlingly pretty young woman with long hair, was ST3 Dave Kellerman, one of his sonar techs. Nearby was SM/2 Rodriguez, with his wife and two-year-old daughter. Entries in his record suggested he was one of the best sonar men in the service. Rodriguez was due for rotation ashore pretty soon, and Pittsburgh would be losing him. It would be a good idea, Gordon thought, to have Rodriguez and Kellerman work particularly closely together, if the watch schedules could be swung that way, to make sure Kellerman was up to Rodriguez's standard. He made a mental note to talk to Latham about that.
Pittsburgh's Executive Officer was another potential worry, something that was going to require his attention. Latham, too, was nearing the end of his tour as Pittsburgh's XO. According to his records, he was up for consideration for a command of his own. In fact, the Promotion Board should have made him a full commander, sent him to Command Orientation, and given him his own boat.
The question was whether Latham harbored any grudges or bad feelings thinking that Pittsburgh should have been his. Fred Latham was another of Bluefin's officers, and had served with Gordon before. Like Gordon, he was a bit behind the point on his service career curve where he should have been, had he not missed a promotion opportunity a few years back. There were only so many sub-driver billets to go around in the Navy, with many more qualified officers standing in line to take them. Miss the selection board process a time or two, and the next available billet would go to a younger man coming up the rank ladder behind you.
How did Latham feel about that? Gordon needed to know, needed to get to know the man well. The boat's XO was responsible for everything inside the submarine's pressure hull, including, specifically, the crew and all of the crew's individual and personal problems. If he did his job and did it well, Gordon would have a happy, efficient, and well-run boat. If he did not, this coming cruise could turn into sheer hell.
"Good job, boys," Admiral Hartwell said. "Well, they didn't throw anything at us," was Gordon's reply.
"So, shall we see to the final handover details below?" Chase asked.
"Of course."
"I have to get back to headquarters," Hartwell said, "but I'll see you both at the reception tonight. Deal?"
"Deal, Admiral."
"Congratulations again, Gordon. It was a long time in coming."
"Thank you, sir."
They escorted the admiral aft to the brow, where he was joined by some of his staff. "SUBRON 5, departing," a voice called from the loudhailers, accompanying the clang of the ship's bell and the squeal of a boatswain's pipe.
With the admiral safely ashore, Gordon followed Chase down the forward escape trunk ladder into the boat. As they made their way forward through the control room, now his control room, Gordon wondered what Chase was thinking, what he was feeling.
Through the control room and forward to the captain's cabin.
"I think we're done with all the busywork," Chase said, opening the door and ushering Gordon through. He gestured toward the wall safe. "Your orders were delivered by courier this morning. They're in there."
"Thank you."
"Anything else I can tell you? Any other questions you might have?"
"You can tell me about Okhotsk."
Chase sighed and dropped into a chair, leaving the chair behind the compartment's small desk free. Gordon walked around behind the desk and sat down. It wasn't as though this were a new thing for him. He'd commanded a submarine before, the Bluefin.
Did the sense of newness, of sheer wonder never go away?
"Probably not a lot that you can't get from the standard oceanographic charts. It's big, it's deep, it's cold. Ice-covered October through May, usually. Something like six hundred ten thousand square miles. Except for a little fishing traffic along the coasts, it's mostly a restricted preserve for the Soviet Fleet. They've got sonar arrays stretched on the seabed between each of the Kuril Islands and across La Perouse Strait, all the way from Sakhalin to the northern tip of Hokkaido. They have a PLARB bastion there, so it's real tightly controlled and patrolled." PLARB was the acronym for Podvodnaya Lodka Atomnaya Raketnaya, the Soviet equivalent of American boomers, ballistic missile submarines. Soviet naval strategy called for keeping their naval ICBM assets in safely contained and heavily protected areas, or "bastions," secure from prowling American hunter-killers.
"Did you run into any sign of their bastion forces in Silent Dolphins?"
"Hell, we ran into their whole Siberian fleet! But we weren't there long enough to pick up any of their attack subs, if that's what you mean." Bastion areas, according to what was known of their strategic doctrine, would be patrolled by attack boats — Alfas, Sierra IIs, Victor IIIs, Akulas.
"Yeah. I'm not that worried about their surface ASW assets. You need a sub to catch a sub."
It was an old saying among submariners, trite, but no less true for that. In World War II, most sub hunting had been done by surface vessels — destroyers and destroyer escorts— and by aircraft. In the fifties and sixties, however, that had changed. Hunter-killer submarines — as opposed to the ponderous guided-missile boats, the SSBNs like modern-day Soviet Typhoons or American Ohios — were designed primarily to find enemy submarines and, in wartime, sink them… especially the enemy's ballistic-missile subs that hung as such terrible threats above home cities and populations. If war came, some HK assets would be deployed against the enemy's merchant shipping and surface naval forces, no doubt… but their first and by far most important target would be his submarines.
To that end, SSNs on both sides of the Iron Curtain continued to train and, when possible, to spar with one another. A common game in the larger game of Cold War maneuver was to find the enemy's boats wherever they might be patrolling, sneak in close and unheard, and pick up what intelligence you could from passive sonar, signals intercepts, and the like. Hell, frequently, when the other guy heard you, a real battle developed, complete with maneuvers … and terminated not by the sudden launch of torpedoes, but by a loud active sonar ping that, in effect, called out "Tag! You're It!"
Mike Chase continued talking, describing what he'd seen of Soviet ASW assets in the Sea of Okhotsk three weeks before. "It's all in my after-mission report. I'm sure they'll distill it down and include the skinny in their briefing for you."
Gordon snorted. "Yeah, maybe. But sometimes the cult of secrecy gets so thick around here, they won't tell you the name of your own boat or what color she's supposed to be painted."
"I know what you mean. But I'll see if I can get you a copy, just in case."