By then, with all the punches, the pins of the dolphins had made twin deep puncture wounds in Pacino’s chest, and Rachel had taken him by the hand upstairs to clean him up, borrowing a first aid kit and a shirt of Bullfrog’s from Quinnivan’s wife. She shut and locked the bathroom door behind them, pulled off his shirt, sat him down on the toilet lid, found a washcloth, and washed away the blood. She dried him off, then carefully disinfected and bandaged the wounds, putting Quinnivan’s shirt on him when she was done, leaving the long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned. She rinsed Pacino’s bloody shirt in the sink and cleaned the dolphins, handing them to Pacino. She sat on the rim of the bathtub opposite him and told him the news that she and her husband Bruno had broken up, that it had been a long time coming, but that the marriage was finally over. She wiped a tear out of her eye then, and stood from the tub edge and straddled him, her soft thighs warm on Pacino’s.
Her left hand stroked his hair and her right hand touched his cheek, her slim fingers soft and cool on his skin. He looked up at her, and she came close. He shut his eyes as her lips met his, her silky, soft, warm tongue in his mouth, making slow circles around his.
When she finally pulled back, she looked at him, her eyes shining brightly.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Take me to your apartment and make me glad I’m a woman.”
He smiled at her. They stood and she buttoned his shirt. They emerged from the upstairs, and without a word to any of the revelers, walked out to his old Corvette, parked in the driveway next to Feng Lewinsky’s Ferrari. Pacino opened the door for her and Rachel climbed in, folding her long legs into the car. He smiled to himself as he climbed into the driver’s side and clicked the ignition, the supercharger whining as he gunned the engine.
“My place, right?” he said.
She smiled. “Yes, but first — don’t laugh — I am dying for a cheeseburger, with huge steak fries and a regular, old-fashioned, sugary Coca Cola.”
“Hell with Coke,” Pacino said. “After a run like this, I need an ice-cold beer.”
“Take us out of the subdivision and turn right toward the beach,” Rachel said. “I know a place.”
Pacino drove the five miles to a tumbledown diner that had seen better days during the Ford administration.
“Here? You sure?”
“This place has the most amazing cheeseburger you will ever taste.”
At the table, the waitress brought the plates. If she thought it odd that Pacino and Romanov were sitting on the same side of the table, she didn’t show it. Rachel’s hand on his thigh was heaven on earth.
“Coke for the lady. Corona with lime for the gentleman,” the waitress said, handing the drinks to them.
But mysteriously, as Pacino looked up at the server, she flashed in and out of an odd reality for a few fractions of a second. One instant she was simply a waitress in a diner. Then, for just a tenth of a second, she was a skeleton. Then she snapped back to being a waitress. Then, click, she was a skeleton.
He looked at Rachel to see if she’d noticed the strange phenomenon of the waitress. Rachel was wearing a tight red sweater, tight jeans, and tall brown boots. Which was a good thing, he thought. That meant she was real. In his dreams about her, she was always in starched high-collar service dress whites, with full medals. He looked up at the waitress, who still had her hand on his beer bottle, but now there was no sign of her as a normal person. Now she stayed a skeleton. In alarm, he looked over at Rachel, but now Rachel was wearing starched choker whites with her medals, her ceremonial sword, and officers’ cap on the table. He was opening his mouth to speak when she picked up the ketchup bottle and held it over his head while smiling at him. She flipped its lid and started pouring ketchup on his head, and strangely, it wasn’t room temperature, but warm. The skeleton server put down the beer and picked up another bottle of warm ketchup and started pouring it on his head as well.
Pacino spat to get the ketchup out of his nose and mouth, and it was in his eyes. He wiped his eyes and blinked, and he was in the dark. The diner was gone. The skeleton waitress was gone. And Rachel Romanov was gone. He coughed into the silent darkness, wiping what must be blood out of his eyes.
Then he heard Rachel’s voice. Here, baby. You’re gonna need this. And suddenly a heavy weight of a solid object dropped from a height and hit him in the stomach. He flinched, wondering what the object was. It was too dark to see it, but he could tell by feel it was a battle-lantern. If a car battery had a bulb, a lens, and an on-off switch, all wrapped in a rubbery yellow case, it became a Navy battle-lantern. He felt the on switch and clicked it on. By the strong light of the lantern, he could see he was sitting in the dark, silent control room of the submarine New Jersey, leaning against the navigation console. He shone the light around the room. He could see Dankleff in the pilot’s seat, still strapped in, but he was out cold, his head resting on his right shoulder. Pacino looked around the rest of the room. There were bodies piled up forward, some aft, but they were all unconscious, some bloody, one with a compound fracture of the leg.
“Hello?” he called. “Anyone awake?”
He struggled to his feet, feeling a dizziness threatening to toss him back down again, but he grabbed the safety bar of the command console, then noticed that the deck was tilted steeply downhill, and it wasn’t just the dizziness. They were pitched forward, at a crazy thirty-degree angle downward.
He was blinded by a renewed stream of blood in his eyes, and he wiped it away with his sleeve, then felt his forehead. A gash had opened up above his right eye and it hurt when he touched it. He grabbed a box resembling a box of tissues, but filled with paper towels—“Kim Wipes.” He wiped his head and face, dropping the soaking wipe to the deck while he pulled out a fresh one. He stuffed his pockets with the wipes. There was no time to deal with his head wound now. He staggered over to Dankleff’s panel, slipping on a blood trail that he was fairly certain had come from him. He grabbed Dankleff’s shoulder, shaking it.
“U-Boat! Wake up! Dankleff!”
But Dankleff was out cold. Pacino shone the light on the panels, all of them dark. He found the old manual bourdon tube pressure gauge off to the port side of the wrap-around displays, the U-boat era gauge not needing electricity or computers to provide its indication. Pacino squinted at the gauge. The needle pointed to 600 and was rotating toward 650.
The bottom, as Pacino remembered it, was about 700 feet, well above crush depth, but the bottom wasn’t safe. If the ship were sinking, with the reactor shut down and no power, they’d need to surface and get to open water. Otherwise they’d die down here. They’d been directly below a polynya of open water formed by the first Gigantskiy detonation when the second one had exploded. Assuming the boat hadn’t been moved away by the explosion, the open water should still be overhead.
By now, the deck was tilted downward by 35 degrees. Pacino shone his light on the bubble-type inclinometer, another relic of World War II submarining, and it showed the deck going to a 40 degree down angle.
Pacino took a deep breath. “Let’s hope this works,” he muttered to himself. He found the big stainless steel levers of the emergency ballast tank blow system outboard of the copilot’s seat. The one on the right was the forward system. He pulled down the interlock device and rotated the large lever from straight down to straight up.
Immediately a roaring, blasting sound slammed Pacino’s eardrums, and the room filled with thick fog, the condensation from the super-cold emergency blow manifold. He shined the light back up to the inclinometer, which was now showing a twenty-five-degree dive, easing to fifteen. Pacino operated the aft main ballast tank emergency blow lever, and the fog in the room got denser and the blasting noise louder, if that were possible. He checked the depth gauge — now showing 400 feet and trending upward.