During his first days on the submarine, he had had trouble reminding himself that she was a senior officer. A happily married senior officer. He had caught himself staring at her and would bite the inside of his lip to stop himself. Romanov, thankfully, was unaware of how he felt about her until just before he locked out of the submarine in scuba gear to invade the Panther, when he’d become so convinced that it was a suicide mission that he’d decided hiding his feelings no longer mattered. But despite their short liaison after the Operation Panther victory party, and despite her separating from Bruno Romanov and filing for divorce, Rachel had insisted they keep their relationship platonic and official because anything between them would probably end badly, and that would impact their careers. Reluctantly, Pacino had agreed, and they had gone on as close friends, but nothing more. There were times at the Snake Ranch, when he’d lie awake at three in the morning staring at the ceiling, or standing officer of the deck watch during the midwatch, when he couldn’t help but imagine him and Rachel being together, and in those moments, he was positive he would be much happier than he was just being her friend.
“Officer of the Deck, look,” Romanov said to Pacino.
Something was happening on the pier. There were no longer lines connecting her stern to the jetty, and the gangway had been pulled off by a crane.
“Here we go.” Pacino stepped over to the port side, where the number one sonar stack was glowing in green stripes and graphs. “Senior, you ready?” Senior Chief Tom Whale Albanese manned the main sonar display stack with its triple screens, the upper one selected to broadband waterfall noise, the middle to time-frequency graphs of tonals, the bottom screen showing transient noise detection.
“Sonar is ready, Officer of the Deck,” Albanese said over his shoulder. Pacino walked to the starboard side, where Vevera stood watch at the BYG-1 attack center of the battlecontrol console as the firecontrol officer of the watch.
“You all set up, Firecontrol?” Pacino asked Vevera, clapping his shoulder. Vevera wore his leather motorcycle jacket over his coveralls, the one with gold embroidery of the Indian Motorcycle Company logo on the back. Vevera insisted on wearing wrap-around sunglasses while on watch at the console. “And can you even see your displays with those shades?”
“I hold that BUFF in the palm of my hand, Officer of the Deck,” Vevera said. “And these glasses help me see the displays better. Plus, it has the distinct advantage of making me look cool.”
Pacino laughed and returned to the forward port corner to peer at the drone image. The aft tugboat had pulled the massive hull slowly away from the pier, an angle forming in the dark water of the slip between piers.
“Forward lines are cast off,” Romanov said. “The BUFF is underway.”
Pacino returned to the command console and picked up a phone and buzzed the captain’s stateroom, the earpiece of the phone put to his ear opposite his one-eared comms headset.
“Captain,” the baritone voice of Commander Tim Seagraves came calmly over the phone.
“Officer of the Deck, sir,” Pacino said, “Belgorod has shoved off. She’ll be in the channel momentarily. We’re ready to trail and perform the underhull.”
“Very well, Officer of the Deck,” Seagraves said, sounding almost bored.
“Do you want to station battlestations for the underhull, sir?” Pacino asked.
“No, Mr. Pacino. I’m sure you and your section tracking party can handle it. But call me if something unexpected happens.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Pacino acknowledged, but the captain had already hung up.
“Tugs are maneuvering his hull into the twin island channel,” Romanov called. On the drone display, the tug on the Omega’s starboard side was tied up, pulling the submarine backward into the wide channel. Once he cleared the pier, the second tug cast off from the starboard side and repositioned himself to take station on the sub’s port side, the two tugs carefully moving the ship slowly and steadily westward into the fjord’s basin, clearing the islands and spinning the hull counter-clockwise so that it would point northeast along the fjord’s deep channel.
“Quite a contrast to your ‘back-emergency-ahead-flank-without-tugs’ underway you pulled off from Norfolk,” Vevera said to Pacino.
“Hey,” Pacino said, smiling to himself, “not everyone can be a natural born ship handler.”
“Ouch,” Vevera said. Vevera had famously tried the same maneuver himself and had ended up putting the Vermont into a complete 270 degree out-of-control spin in the Elizabeth River Harbor Reach.
“Let’s not forget what Admiral King said about ship handling,” Romanov said absently. “The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling.”
“That’s probably what the captain of the BUFF is thinking right now,” Pacino said. “Sonar, do you hold narrowband contact on the BUFF on the wide aperture hull arrays?”
“No, not yet, Officer of the Deck, and broadband is a complete acoustic shitshow with the tug engines and screws.”
“An acoustic shitshow—I like that. We’ll put that in the patrol report,” Pacino said, grinning.
“Once the tugs bug out,” Albanese said, “and he’s under his own power, I’ll have his broadband trace called out as ‘Sierra One.’ When the underhull is complete, as long as he’s doing more than five knots, we can stream the towed array and I’ll get a wealth of tonals.”
“We can’t wait for the tugs to shove off before the underhull,” Pacino said. “Let’s hope he heads down the channel nice and slow so we can get this underhull done and back off.”
“We’re going to have to underhull him here in the fjord,” Romanov said. “Fortunately it’s deep enough that the BUFF could have just vertical dived right by the pier if he’d wanted to. I suspect that once he reaches the mouth of the fjord and the Barents Sea, he’ll dive and start hauling ass to wherever he’s headed.”
“That’ll be the easy part of the mission,” Pacino said quietly to Romanov, his hand covering his boom microphone. “Trailing him when he’s making flank turns will be cake. This underhull maneuver will be a bitch.”
Romanov nodded at him in understanding. “He’s in the center of channel now,” Romanov said, “and he’s casting off the tug lines. Looks like the tugs are escorting him out.”
“Attention in the section tracking party,” Pacino called to the room. “The BUFF is headed right for us. We’ll let him pass overhead, then put on turns to match his speed and add revolutions until we close the distance with the number two periscope up and get close to his screws to get a good video shot and a sound pressure level trace. Then we’ll maneuver farther under his hull and check out his cold water injection scoops and then forward until we can see his ventral docking bay and docking hatch. The op-brief wants a glance at his bow to look at the size and configuration of his torpedo tube doors, but by then he may already be ready to dive, and doing that would put us very close to his spherical sonar array in his nosecone, and getting counterdetected by the Omega would be bad for business. So we’ll see what happens. As you were.”