“Hey,” Dankleff said, smirking. “Varney, Pacino and I could conn her to AUTEC if the SEALs got us aboard.”
Quinnivan laughed. “I seriously doubt that, DCA. But even if you could, the pole is essentially in Russia’s front yard. They’d send a fleet of submarines to get us if we tried.”
“Perhaps just a deep contingency,” Kelly said. “You know, better to have them and not need them than to need them and not have them.”
“Maybe. But we’re all guessing here, people,” Quinnivan said, looking at the officers sternly. “All we can do is make sure this ship is ready for anything. Eng, what’s your material condition looking like? Most of the sea trials issues were in the engineering spaces.”
Engineer Kelly cleared her throat. “We’re chasing steam leaks, XO. They’re overloading the air conditioning plants and chillers and making more demands on the evaporators. We’ve got a complete inventory of the leaks. Four days, five at most, we’ll have them under control.”
“See to it, Engineer,” Quinnivan said, frowning. “Any other comments? No? Well, people, we’re dismissed. Navigator, please brief the supply officer and RC division officer separately since they missed this session.”
“Aye, sir.”
The room cleared out. Pacino checked his watch and looked at Short Hull Cooper. “You want to continue with your sonar check-out?”
“I think it would help if I took a watch on the sonar stack with Senior Chief Albanese,” Cooper said.
Pacino nodded and Cooper left. Pacino opened his pad computer to the classified news files, wondering if there were anything there that Styxx had missed that might shed some light on this operation. A half hour after he’d been into the files, with no results, Elvis Lewinsky came into the room and brewed a fresh pot of coffee, then took his seat at the XO’s seat’s right side.
“How are you doing, Patch?” he asked. “Coffee?”
“Yes, please, Nav. I’m okay, I guess. I’d be better if we had good news about Romanov.”
“Yeah. I heard XO is getting daily status updates about her, but so far, nothing’s changed. He did mention Blacky Nygard is out of the burn unit and is doing well.”
“That’s a relief,” Pacino said. “He saw the worst of it.”
“He got the flames but not the smoke inhalation.”
“Yeah.” There was an awkward silence, until Pacino said, “Nav, I bet you have a theory about this op.”
“I already did my guessing to the captain,” Lewinsky said, scanning his pad computer.
“Come on. I bet you think more than you said to the captain.”
Lewinsky looked up. “I do.”
“Out with it, Elvis.”
“Patch, what if that Omega II — the ‘BUFF’ as you and Romanov called it — is on the way to deploy some of those Poseidon torpedoes on American shores?”
Pacino sat back in his chair, a frown on his face. “If they were, wouldn’t they just go into the Barents Sea, then into the North Atlantic? Why all these preparations to go under ice?”
Lewinsky shook his head. “Maybe the Russians are worried about the SOSUS sonar network tripwires laid down between the UK, Iceland and Greenland. Maybe they think if they come through the GI-UK gap, they could be detected. Or they’re worried that they could be trailed by an American or British sub if they go that route. And they think they can evade a trailing hostile sub by going under the ice.”
Pacino shook his head. “The long route? Through the Bering Strait and around South America? That would take months.”
“That might be why we’re loaded out with months of food.”
“It won’t matter, Nav. The BUFF is way too big to make it through the icepack.”
“It’s almost September,” Lewinsky said, “so the icepack is at minimum now.”
“Hand me the remote,” Pacino said. He lit up the projection flatpanel and projected from his WritePad. “This is the BUFF. I superimposed on this image a scale image of a Virginia-class submarine.” On the display was a 3D view of the Belgorod, with the deep-diver sub Losharik docked underneath. Next to it was a Virginia-class boat.
Lewinsky looked at the projection and whistled. “Goddamn, that boat is big. It looks like you could fit five or six of us inside that thing’s hull and have room left over.”
“Hence, Big Ugly Fat Fucker, Nav. No way that thing gets through the ice.”
“Shut the wardroom doors, Patch.”
Pacino raised an eyebrow at the navigator, but got up and shut both doors to the room.
“What is it, Nav?”
“This is codeword top secret, so you didn’t hear this from me. But this isn’t the first time an Omega has gone under the ice. The first unit made it all the way to the pole.”
“Really?”
“Sixteen or seventeen years ago or so. In December. Or January. When the icepack was at maximum.”
“How do you know this? There’s nothing in the classified archive about that.”
“Too highly classified. I guess your father never told you about it. Your old man definitely knows how to keep a secret.”
“What do you mean?” Pacino stared at Lewinsky.
“I’ve probably said too much already,” Lewinsky said. “But Omega unit one? It never made it home. Your dad put it on the fuckin’ bottom. And got the Navy Cross for it.”
Pacino stared at Lewinsky with his mouth open, but before he could say a word, the navigator grabbed his pad computer and vanished out the aft door.
12
Weapons Officer Captain Lieutenant Katerina “Ballerina” Sobol frowned from the pier at the weapon loading support ship, tied up at the bow of Belgorod. The second Gigantskiy torpedo was finally about to roll into tube five, for the third damned time, she thought. She looked up in time to see First Officer Lebedev walk over from the conning tower access hatch.
“I’ll wager you’re getting pretty good at this,” Lebedev said.
Lebedev was over a head taller than Sobol, who was petite and had a dancer’s body, which had contributed to her nickname, although she’d never danced. She’d been more into futbol and track growing up. She’d been fast back then, she thought glumly. She hadn’t run more than a kilometer since she had joined this submarine. It was just too busy in port, and all their sea time had been a week here, ten days there, then back into the drydock, then post-drydock sea trials, then back to the pier for repairs, after which they’d repeat the same cycle. It was exhausting. Sobol couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a good night’s sleep. She touched the back of her head, her habit when frustrated, and grimaced that her hair was greasy. She needed a long hot shower, the kind where it didn’t matter how much water she used, she thought. She’d kept her usually shiny raven black hair long, but to conform with uniform expectations, she’d put her hair in a braided ponytail. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken it out, and she just felt grimy. She could almost hear her mother’s voice insisting that a nuclear submarine was no place for a young woman. But if Mother had had her way, Katerina Sobol would be cooking and cleaning at home with four children and a husband, who would probably be an alcoholic like her father, the reason she didn’t drink.
“Third time’s a charm, Madam First,” Sobol said in her soprano voice, which had always irritated her. In college, someone had cruelly said she sounded like a cartoon character. She’d even tried smoking to try to deepen her voice, but the scheme had failed. “I’m hoping this time, they don’t find yet another fault that requires them to take it back to Santa’s workshop and rewire it or reprogram it.”
“Do the Sevmash folks still think the command detonate function problem was inside the torpedoes, not in our battlecontrol system?”