Romanov’s jaw dropped. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she hissed to Pacino. The room broke out in applause and cheers, Pacino clapping, smiling at her, and patting her on the back. Romanov went to the front of the room and smiled back at the crowd.
“You know,” she said, “I think my amnesia is back. Who the hell are all you people and why are you in my house?”
“Speech!” Quinnivan said, clapping.
“What do I say,” Romanov began. “Well, Captain and XO, it’s an honor to be named to this position. I won’t let you down.”
“We know,” Seagraves said, shaking Romanov’s hand, then Quinnivan shook her hand and clapped her on the shoulder.
“Can I ask,” Romanov said. “If I’m XO — and acting captain — who is the navigator?”
“Ah,” Quinnivan said, “that’s the other part of the flea-flicker.” He looked at Seagraves. “Should I tell him?”
“I’ll tell him,” Seagraves said. “Lieutenant Pacino, come on up. You are the new navigator of the USS New England.”
Pacino stared. The crowd grabbed him and pulled him to the front of the room. “Thanks, Captain, XO,” he said.
“This will extend your tour on the submarine, Patch,” Seagraves said. “It’s an extra year. But somehow I think you’ll be okay with that.”
“I’m okay with that, Skipper,” Pacino said, barely believing how many things had changed in the hour of the party.
“Before we get to the important part of the day, the partying,” Seagraves said, “I have one final surprise.”
The room grew suddenly quiet.
“Some of you may not know this, but the secretary of the Navy, Jeremy Shingles, was at grad school at Yale and was friends and roommates with a man named Philip Dean Sievers III. Does anyone here know who Sievers is?”
The silence in the room continued.
“Well, I’ll tell you who Philip Dean Sievers III is,” Seagraves continued. “He’s the governor of the great state of Vermont.”
“Oh my God,” Rachel whispered to Pacino. “They’re renaming the boat.”
“There was a phone call,” Seagraves continued, “and, reportedly, a box of cigars and a case of whisky changed hands, and you’ve all guessed it. Now hull number SSN-792 will be renamed the USS Vermont. The re-christening ceremony is next week. Get your dress blues cleaned and pressed, gang. And that’s all I have. Now, let’s get this party started.”
Captain Seagraves and Commanders Quinnivan and Cydice stood on the back yard deck of the Snake Ranch at sunset, all of them leaning against the deck railing and staring at the pink sky.
“Red sky at night,” Quinnivan said. “Sailor’s delight. A good omen, yeah?”
Quinnivan passed out cigars, a cutter, and a torch, and they all lit up and blew smoke into the sky for a long moment.
“So, Mikey,” Seagraves said to Commander Cydice. “You didn’t want us to disclose to the boys and girls that you’re nominated to be the Vermont’s new commanding officer. Why is that?”
Cydice blew out a cloud of smoke and looked at Seagraves. “It’s not official until I pass Prospective Commanding Officer School, which is not a given, since the failure rate is, what, thirty percent? And Admiral Patton at SubCom has been ominously quiet about confirming the assignment. There was a slight incident in Hawaii I need to explain away. So I don’t want to jinx it.”
“Incident?” Seagraves asked.
Cydice nodded. “I punched out the squadron engineer. While I was submerged, he was diddling my wife and posting sex videos on the internet with him and her in action.”
Seagraves shook his head in shock and sympathy. “Man, I would have killed that guy. What’s going to happen to him?”
“He’s already been given a dishonorable discharge. Fitting, actually, for all his dishonorable discharging into my wife. My soon-to-be ex-wife.”
“I’m sorry to hear, Mikey.”
“Yeah.”
The three men were silent for a moment.
Quinnivan blew a smoke ring and looked at Cydice. “So anyway, in the meantime, you’re playin’ undercover boss at the Snake Ranch, peekin’ in on our scurvy junior officer pirates, yeah?”
Cydice nodded. “I need to wait here for interviews about the thing. I may as well wait while drinking beers with the boys. I have a feeling they’ll cheer me up.”
“Well,” Quinnivan laughed. “Just don’t be doin’ anything those cutthroats can blackmail ye with, yeah? That would make for a very long tour once Admiral Patton comes to his senses and gives you the Vermont.”
Cydice grinned. “Me? I’m a Boy Scout, Bullfrog.”
Lieutenant Anthony Pacino stopped on the way to the parking lot to lean over the observation platform overlooking Graving Dock Number One. He was usually alone when he visited the platform, but this afternoon, the tall, gaunt figure of Ensign Adam Cool Hand Farina was there, looking at the submarine. The sounds from the dock, though muted by distance, were still loud. Grinding, rail mounted cranes’ backing alarms, the shouts of shipyard workers.
Pacino walked up next to Farina and leaned on the rail. For a moment Pacino didn’t say anything. Then he spoke first.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he said.
Farina snickered. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this. People will talk.”
Pacino smiled. “You know, Cool Hand, I’m surprised you asked to join this crew.”
“You are? Why? This is the hottest-running submarine in the fleet.”
“No, it’s not,” Pacino said, his voice solemn. “We’ve lost the captain. We lost the XO. The navigator’s gone. The engineer is dead. The weapons officer is dead. The communicator is dead. Supply officer? Dead. Reactor controls officer? Dead. So are the COB, the E-div chief, radio chief, AI chief and A-gang chief. And a dozen more. The sub we sailed lies on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. Did you notice that NavPersCom didn’t assign a commanding officer to this boat? That’s because nobody wants the fuckin’ job. And you, after your trouble at nuke school? You got assigned here, not because you fought to get the billet, but because this is a hardship tour. A punishment tour. And meanwhile, the boat is being Frankensteined together from the halves of two other boats, and God knows if that will work, and the shipyard’s rushing it, trying to beat an arbitrary deadline thought up by a pissed-off admiral, and shipyard mistakes cause subs to sink. Don’t believe me, ask our good friends on the Thresher. Not to mention, it’ll be months before this thing gets its hull wet. And all that time will be lost to you for the purpose of qualification progress. It would have been better if you had requested an operating boat where you could work on quals and stand watches instead of waiting here while our boat sits high and dry on the drydock blocks.”
Farina looked at Pacino, the color draining from his face. “I’d always heard you were an optimist. That’s a pretty downer view of things.”
“A military funeral for two dozen of your friends will do that to you. That’s another thing. Despite all the levity at the Snake Ranch party, the crew from the old wardroom, before you new guys showed up, all feel the same. The loss. The sadness. The hopelessness of it all. The dead all died for a cause, I suppose. The mission got accomplished, but not by us. Sure, we tossed weapons at the bad guys, but in the end, those Poseidons were destroyed by the Russians themselves, and they sank themselves with their own goddamned nuclear-tipped torpedo. We were just along for the ride.”