He decided to make his way forward to the torpedo room. If anything was going to happen, he wanted to be in on it, and that was his current training station.
As he hurried forward, though, squeezing past other crew- men moving swiftly through Pittsburgh's passageways, he found himself wondering what their Soviet opposite numbers in that other submarine would think if they saw Pittsburgh's crew now….
"He's definitely moving away, Captain," Rodriguez said. He was still wearing his sheet and a name tag that read "Wednesday," and presented a less than completely military look. But his voice was all crisp professionalism. "He's making turns for twenty-twenty-five knots, and he's in a hell of a hurry. I doubt that he can hear a thing at that speed."
Gordon nodded. "Okay, Wednesday. Stay on him as long as you can, and let me know if anything changes about the target. Aspect, speed, anything."
Rodriguez grinned. "You got it, Skipper."
Gordon left the sonar room and made his way back to the control room.
"Sorry to interrupt the show, Captain," Latham said.
"Not a problem. It's his fault," he said, nodding toward their unseen adversary somewhere beyond the port bulkhead and forward, "not yours."
He walked aft to the plotting tables. Latham and Master Chief Warren joined him. "I'm interested in this guy," Gordon told them. "You notice anything strange about him?"
"Well, he's in a hurry," COB said. "Not going flat out, but fast enough that it's obvious all he wants to do is get home in a hurry."
"On this course, where would home be?" COB's eyes narrowed as he studied the chart. "Maybe Petro. Pretty good chance, in fact. If not, then he's headed for Oshkosh, and that means one of the other sub bases in there. Magadan, maybe, or Vlad."
"Funny, isn't it? He comes all the way to 'Frisco and picks us up. Starts shadowing us. Then we lose him. He pokes around on that side of the Pacific for a few days, presumably looking for us… then up and tears like hell for home. Why?"
"You're saying he's going to warn them?" Latham asked, sounding puzzled.
"No. He could do that by coming shallow and sticking up a radio antenna. What if he's still hunting us?"
COB's eyes narrowed. "If that's true, it means he knows where we're going. You know, Skipper, I don't really like the implications of that."
"Nor do I, COB. Nor do I." Part of Gordon kept thinking that he was getting way too paranoid. It simply wasn't reasonable to suspect that the Russians were somehow luring Pittsburgh into a trap… that they knew where she was going, and were preparing for her arrival.
On the other hand, he was now captain of a several-hundred-million-dollar piece of United States government property. If he had reason, any reason at all to suspect an attempt to damage, capture, or otherwise dispose of that property, he was going to sit up and take notice.
Unfortunately, the mission he'd been handed required that he take his boat into one of the narrowest, most closely guarded stretches of water in the world, then bring her out again, a risky enough proposition no matter what the enemy knew or was trying to do.
If they knew Pittsburgh was coming, the job was damned near hopeless.
"Right," Chief Allison said. "What happens when the skipper calls down, 'Snapshot, two-one'?"
"Uh… it means the enemy has fired a torpedo at us," O'Brien said, "and we're going to try to launch one back before we're hit. We'll fire tube two, then tube one, and do it without waiting for a complete firing solution."
"Correct. What's 'polishing the cannonball'?"
"Polishing Baldy's head," TM2 Doershner put in.
"Ignore the jerk," Allison said. "Answer the question."
"That's where the Weapons Officer is working and working and working on a firing solution," O'Brien said, "trying to make it better and better, to the point that you might lose your opportunity for a shot. TVot," he added, "a smart idea."
"Never mind the commentary, nub," Allison said. "Just answer the damned questions."
O'Brien grinned. Chief Allison's caustic and often profane comments were an accepted part of life now, a guarantee that all was right with the world. "Aye aye, Chief."
He was still a nub, but he was an accepted nub. Shaving his head had proven that he could take a joke, and even turn it back on the perpetrators. The hazing had decreased significantly since they'd crossed the Line, and with a few exceptions, people called him by name now instead of "Nub," "Useless," or "Hey, you." He sensed the transformation as a kind of internal flowering, an inner growth or expansion that left him feeling like one of the guys… and damned good.
The torpedo room, as always, was crowded, holding as it did not only the regular compartment watch, but four SEALs and four spooks, who had to hot bunk over the Mark 48s in a system guaranteed to make sure none of them got much sleep.
One of the SEALs, the black guy seated on a rack above a torpedo, chuckled.
"What's so funny, frog-face?" Allison demanded.
"Polishing cannonballs," Fitch replied, grinning. "That's a good one."
"Like taking too long to take your shot," Nelson, another SEAL, said.
"So… what is idea, here?" Sergei asked. "Is some kind of class, yes?"
"All nubs have to pass their qualifying exams in each department aboard the boat," Benson replied. "He's finished with Sub School, but it'll take him another year to make a real submariner out of him."
"'Nub'?" Johnson asked.
"Non-Useful Body," TM2 Doershner explained. "On a submarine with a hundred and some crewmen, you don't have room for any nonessential personnel. Right now, Baldy here is a waste of perfectly good oxygen. But he'll learn."
"Everybody aboard knows at least something about every other job. The cooks know how to fight fires or give first aid. A torpedoman can stand a quartermaster's watch… or lend a hand in the reactor compartment aft. This is no place for supernumeraries."
"You mean, folks like us," Mr. Smith, the other American agent said, grinning.
"Well, now that you mention it," Chief Allison said, "yeah."
"What amazes me," Sergei said, shaking his head, "is how much responsibility ordinary seamen have aboard American submarine. In my country, officer runs torpedo room. Officers only man sonar watches. Officers only man key posts in control room. American sailors are trusted with more information, more responsibility than in Soviet Union."
"American sailors are better educated," Doershner said.
"No, this is not true," Grigor, the other Russian national, replied. "What is true is bureaucracy tends toward… how you say? Top-heavy."
"Well," Allison said, "we have that problem, too, in Washington. But on board the Pittsburgh, it's the enlisted men who make things happen."
"We know more, too," O'Brien put in. "I heard they never tell Russian enlisted men anything. But on an American sub—"
"Yeah?" Doershner said. "What do you know about this mission, nub?"
"I know we're headed for Oshkosh," O'Brien replied. "And probably we're going to be poking in and around real close to the coast, somewhere around northern Sakhalin Island, maybe."
"That is not a topic for discussion!" Johnson said, sitting upright so suddenly his head rammed the bottom of the rack above him like a bell. "Shit!"