“Where’s our boy?”
“In bed for hours.” She ran her slim fingers across his forehead, her skin chilled from the glass. “Are you okay?”
Pacino shut his eyes.
“The ship’s a wreck. Somehow we’re going to get her to sea before midnight tomorrow.”
“You never told me what the big rush was about. Another phone call from your Uncle Dick?”
“Did you see the news about the Augusta?”
She sighed. He noticed the crinkle at the bridge of her nose that only came when she was disgusted or angry or confused … or deeply frightened.
“I saw it. It was awful. All those men drowned. All because of a shipyard mistake. And now you’re rushing the yard to finish up, and the same thing could happen to you. Why are you in such a hurry?”
“I can’t believe Rocket Ron is dead,” he said, ignoring the question. “God, I’ll miss him.”
“Rocket Ron? You didn’t even like him! I lived through a year of pure hell when you were his engineer. You were ready to drain his brake fluid one day, remember, you came home at noon in the middle of the week, swearing at the Rocket”
Pacino smiled at the memory.
“Yeah. I knocked back half a fifth that day.”
“I had to put you to bed. What was it he said that set you off?”
Pacino was no longer in the room but back in his state room on the Atlanta, the ship he had been assigned to seven years before as engineer. The captain had been Rocket Ron.
A surprise reactor-board inspection team had come aboard, worked the ship over for two grueling days, then left giving the ship an “Above Average” rating, the highest mark they ever gave, a cause for a major celebration. Rocket had opened the stateroom door holding the board’s report.
Pacino had smiled in anticipation of Rocket’s congratulations.
“The board said the radioactive spill-drill team didn’t decontaminate the man in the tunnel,” Daminski said.
“He frisked out clean ― the drill monitor screwed up”
“I don’t want to hear your excuses, Pacino.” Daminski pointed his finger in Pacino’s face, an eighth of an inch from Pacino’s nose. “Your god damned team fucked up and it’s because you failed to train them. If I can’t count on you to do that what the hell can I count on you for?”
Daminski went off then, slamming the door behind him.
Pacino stared after him, astonishment giving way to fury. He found his car keys and left the ship. He sped home, went into the house and was blind drunk by the time Janice arrived home. After that he remembered nothing until the next morning, when he felt like a pile-driver hammer was smashing into his head at each heartbeat.
On the boat that morning he found Daminski in the control room talking to a chief. When he finished, Pacino started in, knowing he was taking his career into his hands.
“Captain, you were out of line yesterday. That spill team―”
Daminski interrupted, his voice quiet. “I know. Patch. And I’m sorry I hollered at you. You did an excellent job and you should be proud of yourself.”
Daminski turned, his shoulders stooped, and walked into his stateroom.
Pacino didn’t know which bothered him more, the chewing out or the aftermath of contrition. Not that it mattered now, he thought, looking at his wife’s eyes. She still waited for an answer.
“I don’t remember,” he said.
“But I still want to understand,” she continued. “You never liked him and now you’re full of grief. What do you know that I don’t know?”
“We all spent that whole tour on the Atlanta hating Daminski and bitching every second about what a hardass he was and how miserable he made our lives. But when he left it was all the crew could do to keep their eyes dry. At that change of command there was a real sense of loss. See, Daminski, somehow, made us bigger than we were. He challenged the man in every sailor and officer aboard. The best was never good enough for him. We used to say that heaven would regret the day he died, because he’d chew Saint Peter’s butt for the gates of heaven showing dust and improper maintenance. And now that he’s gone I look back and I see that he was a sort of second father to every man he ever commanded. A stern sonofabitch of a father, but underneath, he really cared.”
“Great,” she said. “So what’s the big rush for you?”
He was about to tell her when it suddenly seemed a bad idea. He shouldn’t have told Emmitt Stevens, except that Emmitt needed some real motivation. Janice had nothing she could do with the truth except worry.
“It’s nothing, Jan. Just more Navy bullshit. You were right the first time, a call from Uncle Dick. He can’t stand to see the Seawolf in the dock. And who am I to argue with him? I was the one who told him I wanted to take her to sea one last time before I was relieved. This is probably his Christmas present to me. I’ll be back in an hour.”
Before she could question him he left the room, went out of the house to the beach and started walking in the surf, wondering what Rocket Ron really said to Saint Peter.
Chapter 15
Sunday, 29 December
Ahmed stood in the crowded control room. The screens, as before, were filled with cluttered patterns of light and color.
Four of them in the sensor area were devoted to what appeared to be graphs with curves tracing contours across horizontal axes, the curves forming mountains and valleys that wiggled slowly as he watched.
Commodore Sharef was hunched over the displays.
Sihoud was not in the room, preferring instead to stay in his stateroom and study the tactical maps of the North African Atlas Front. It was difficult for Sihoud to stay in the control room when the information presentations were indecipherable and the officers too busy to tell him what was going on.
As for Ahmed, he was suspended far below the surface in this iron lung driven by men he had no experience with, had no control over and had no reason to trust other than that they wore a uniform similar to his own. He felt a trickle of sweat fall down his forehead and into his eye. He turned away, wiping the stinging eye, and leaned over the computer-driven plotting table to look at the plot between the shoulders of two mid-grade and one junior officer. The plot showed the contour of the narrowing sea-lane between Spain and Morocco, depth shown by the shade of blue — darker in the center of the channel, lighter as it neared the shoreline — a pulsing red mark located a few kilometers east of the narrowest part of the strait.
“What’s the red mark?”
Commander Tawkidi answered, his eyes remaining on the plot.
“Another submarine. Los Angeles-class American, like the last one we encountered.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We?” And at that moment Commodore Sharef spoke, his voice loud.
“Commander, a moment please.”
Tawkidi held up a hand to Ahmed and walked to Sharef at the plotting table.
Sharef’s voice was low now. “The American is at the limit of our sensors. Navigator. I propose we shoot now, before he has a possibility of detecting us. The torpedo will come onto his sonar screens before he knows we are in the area and force him to run west into the strait. There’s a chance that a navigation error could cause him to wreck but he will certainly be hit.”
Tawkidi looked down at the sketchpad Sharef had been doing calculations on. “Sir, the hostile sub is over ninety kilometers distant. That is almost outside the range of the weapon. It can only cover 180 kilometers at search speed, 140 at attack velocity.”
“But if we launch at search speed, seventy clicks, and are lucky, the weapon will approach close to the 688 sub before it is detected. The best case is perhaps twenty kilometers range before the 688 hears the torpedo. The 688 runs, the torpedo locks on and speeds up to attack speed and runs at 130 clicks toward the target. If the target runs at his maximum speed of seventy clicks the torpedo intercepts and kills the target twenty minutes later, with a total run of 115 kilometers, well under the 140 limit. I agree that’s the best case. Now, if detection range is poor at, say, thirty-five kilometers, the torpedo intercepts and kills the target with a run of 135 kilometers, still well below the 140. And that assumes he detects the torpedo and starts a high-speed run away from the weapon. If he is not good enough to hear our unit, the relative intercept speed is even higher. It is a good risk.”