Eventually, the supply chief came for them, announcing that lunch would be dished up in the next few minutes. They all walked aft to the wardroom. Pacino stood behind the seat he used to sit in on the Vermont, on the outboard side, facing Rachel when she sat in the traditional seat of the navigator, to the right of the XO, who would sit to the right of the captain’s seat at the end of the table. As tradition demanded, they stood behind their chairs until the captain’s arrival.
The captain entered the room with Driscoll and they all took their seats. Pacino unfolded a guest linen napkin and placed it in his lap. A messcook came by and put two hamburger buns on each officer’s plate, the buns full size. Submarine sliders weren’t the same as what civilians called sliders. A submarine slider was simply a grilled hamburger, but so greasy that it would slide down one’s throat. The onions, tomatoes, and pickles came next, then the hamburger patties.
“Where are your officers, Captain Austin?” Rachel asked.
“I told them to eat in the crew’s mess today, Madam Romanov,” Austin said. “I wanted to talk to you three without my junior officers misbehaving, those ill-mannered scurvy youngsters.”
Quinnivan, Driscoll and Austin soon became deeply engaged in conversation. Old stories about former senior officers, former junior officers, their exploits on former submarines. The buzz of them talking soon faded in Pacino’s mind, and his focus narrowed to Rachel, looking at her while trying to appear that he wasn’t staring at her.
She slowly assembled a hamburger and took a bite. Pacino waited, hopeful, that the taste of the slider would bring her back, but there was still no recognition.
“So, Patch,” Austin said, his voice penetrating Pacino’s trance. “Or do you prefer ‘Death Toll’? Tell us the whole story of Operation Panther. Now that’s it’s declassified, we want to hear it from you, not some stale patrol report — that’s probably just filled with Bullfrog Quinnivan’s lies.”
Pacino put down his burger and looked to the end of the table toward the senior officers.
“Not much to tell,” he said.
“Come on. Modesty is not allowed at my table,” Austin said. “You’ve heard me bragging all morning about the USS New Hampshire. Let’s give those fighter pilots a run for their money when it comes to cockiness. Tell the whole story, Patch. All the details. Leave out nothing.”
“Well, it all started with us trying to hijack a Colombian narco-sub as a dry run,” Pacino began. He told the tale of the narco-sub being run by AI, then the Vermont’s sprint to AUTEC to get new orders from Admiral Catardi. To provoke Rachel, Pacino decided to throw in the story of how he’d returned from a night of liberty at AUTEC and his face was covered with Wanda River Styxx’s makeup, earning him the embarrassing epithet ‘Lipstick,’ after which Quinnivan told how Pacino had looked walking into the wardroom that morning, Driscoll and Austin howling with laughter at the image of Pacino wearing what had resembled clown makeup.
Pacino mentioned that the incident had enraged Rachel and that all during the flank run to the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, she’d given him the smoldering silent treatment. He told how they had arrived in the Gulf of Oman, slowed down and rigged for ultraquiet. Pacino took small bites of his lunch as Quinnivan would add color commentary or answer questions from Driscoll and Austin. Then Pacino told the long tale of how he’d been part of the boarding party that had taken the sub. He decided to say how, just before it was time to lock out of the Vermont and swim to the Iranian submarine, he’d called Rachel on the conn and apologized for the lipstick incident, and how that seemed to break her stony silence.
Engaged in his story, Pacino went on to describe what happened after they’d captured the Iranian submarine, but a few minutes into it, he was startled to see that Rachel had put down her hamburger and was staring intensely at him, her hands in her lap, and as Pacino reached the end of the story, he could see her eyes flooding with moisture. She wiped her face with her napkin, asked Austin if she could be excused, vaulted out of her chair and ran to the officers’ bathroom at the end of the passageway.
Pacino was at the end of the story, so he asked if he could also be excused and left the wardroom and hurried to the officers’ head to talk to Rachel. The door was shut and locked.
“Rachel? It’s me, Anthony,” he said, knocking. “Can you open the door? I need to talk to you.”
He heard the door unlock and it opened slowly. Rachel’s face was red, her cheeks were wet from tears and her mascara had run down her face. She pulled Pacino into the room, shut the door behind him, locked it and pulled him into a hug. He could feel sparks all along his body where her warm, soft body touched his. He hugged her so hard she pulled back to be able to breathe. She looked at him, her eyes liquid and threatening to leak tears again.
“Oh my God, Pacino,” she said, her voice trembling. “I remember! I remember everything. I’m so sorry, I was gone somewhere, and then suddenly, it all came back! God, I miss you so much!”
Pacino looked at her. Her eyes moved from looking at his left eye to his right. He started to smile at her.
“What was it that brought you back?” he asked. “The slider?”
She shook her head, her blonde hair falling into her face for a moment before she shook her hair back.
“It was your voice. Or your story. Or both. You put me right back in that control room at the moment you apologized to me, and right then, everything just returned.”
Pacino breathed a sigh of relief and hugged her tight again.
“Pacino?” she said, almost in a little girl’s voice.
“Yes, Rachel?”
“You know I love you, don’t you?”
He pulled back and grinned at her. “Actually, no,” he said. “I don’t. Why don’t you tell me all about it?”
He felt the impact of her punching his arm in mock anger and he looked at her and laughed.
“Ow,” he said. “But you already know I love you.”
“I want to thank you, Pacino.”
“For what?” he asked.
“For fighting so hard to bring my memory back. It was your idea to get me on another sub, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. I was upset when you said you didn’t want the tour.”
“Seagraves gave me a direct order,” she said. “You must have called him.”
Pacino shook his head. “I didn’t have a chance to bring it up to him. I guess he just decided on his own. You know, great minds think alike.” He looked at the door. “So what happens now?”
“Now,” Rachel said, “we try to act professional and finish lunch, then go back to the New England admin building and finish the work day.”
“And then?”
“And then, you’re taking me to the Snake Ranch and moving your stuff into my master bedroom. And after that? You’re going to make me glad I’m a woman. Preferably, twice.”
“I can do that,” Pacino grinned. “I can definitely do that.”
The officers and chief petty officers of the submarine New England were gathered on the pier, watching the USS Hyman G. Rickover coast to a halt in the Elizabeth River Reach. Two tugboats spun her around so her bow was facing outward, then backed her into the slip so she could tie up, port-side-to.
Once she was tied up, the watchstanders in their informal two-piece working uniforms disappeared below, replaced by sailors wearing dress blues, the crackerjack uniforms made famous by recruiting posters and World War II movies.
The first body bag was lifted out of the hull. The topside sailors put it on a waiting stretcher, covered it with an American flag, and slowly walked it off the deck, up the slope of the gangway and into a waiting black truck. The New England’s officers and chiefs stood at attention, and as the body went by, the captain called for them to render a hand salute, and all of them rigidly saluted until the body was placed in the truck. When the second body came out, the ritual was repeated, until all twenty-four of the dead were placed in the back of the truck.