He took a look around the stateroom. One of the walls had been demolished to gain access to the cables inside, and the yard had only had time to replace the steel structure of the wall but not the outer wood paneling. Pacino unpacked the duffel bag, raided his locker cabinet for his heavy olive drab parka, the early morning cool and wet, the sealanes at flank speed promising to turn cool into frigid.
He found his blue baseball cap with the gold embroidery thread forming submarine dolphins with the ship’s name in block letters, the brim done up in gold scrambled eggs. He grabbed his binoculars and left the room to go to control.
The control room was jammed with watchstanders. He found the executive officer. Commander Jackson “Lube Oil”
Vaughn, who had reported aboard only a few months before, when the ship was preparing for the shipyard period; he had yet to go to sea with Pacino. Still, Pacino had full confidence in Vaughn’s capabilities, since Vaughn had played a major role in driving his last ship, the Tampa, out of the hands of the Chinese communists when the sub had been captured during a close offshore surveillance mission.
Vaughn was a tall man who would be thought of as skinny were it not for a very slight but expanding paunch above the belt of his khakis. His face was thin to gaunt, his hair thick if prematurely gray. The gray, Vaughn claimed, was from dealing with a teenage daughter, but fleet rumors held that the escape from the Chinese piers had changed the mostly black mane to nearly white. Vaughn still spoke with a west-Texas accent, his home till the day he left for Annapolis, the home of the high-school sweetheart he had married the day after graduation. Rumor held that he had a tendency to clomp around the ship in cowboy boots at sea, though Pacino had yet to see it in person. Vaughn’s nickname “Lube Oil” was a holdover from an incident during his junior officer tour on the Detroit when he himself had tried to repair a hopeless lube-oil pump and had succeeded just before flooding the lower level with oil. Vaughn hated the moniker but carried it with good humor.
Vaughn, looking over the BPS-14 radar console, had already, Pacino noted, started on his at-sea beard. Pacino would humor him. After hearing about Vaughn’s performance on the Tampa, he had requested him as XO but it had taken time to pry him away from a shore tour teaching seamanship at the Academy, where the admiral in command had taken a liking to him and had been reluctant to let him leave. When he had reported aboard it had seemed a shame that it would be too late to go to sea with him, but now Pacino would have that chance. The two men had become close friends, seeing eye to eye on most things concerned with driving the ship and leading the men. So far their differences were on administrative matters, Vaughn a stickler for details, a perfectionist when it came to pushing Navy paper, while Pacino had always been relatively casual about the mountains of paperwork. Two weeks before, Vaughn had tracked Pacino to a remote office in the shipyard to obtain his signature on an oil-and-water report to some obscure squadron bureaucrat. Pacino had wadded up the report and made a hook shot into a trash can. “You ought to try not sending these reports, XO, and see who squawks when they’re late. My bet is that you could throw away ninety percent of them and the recipients would never know the difference.” But even in this the two had forged a working relationship — while the reports stopped coming across Pacino’s desk they still left the ship on time as Vaughn began to sign and send them without Pacino’s signature. It was all fine with Pacino, who had high on his list the elimination of much of the submarine’s paperwork as soon as he took over as COMSUBLANT.
Vaughn glanced up now at Pacino, showing pleasure at escaping the shipyard and getting back to sea.
“We’re set to bust this joint. Skipper,” Vaughn drawled, handing Pacino a briefing sheet with a tabulation of the river’s levels and currents, the tides in the sea-lane past Norfolk, and the weather report. “Court’s got the conn on the bridge, we’re manned belowdecks and the yardbirds are ready to winch us out of the bathtub as soon as you’re on the bridge.”
“Status of the reactor?” Pacino asked, pocketing the data sheet and grabbing a safety harness and strapping it on.
“Been a while since I asked. Hobart was complaining about your emergency orders but he should be warming the turbine generators about now.”
Pacino grinned and reached for a phone handset. “Maneuvering, Captain.”
“Maneuvering, Engineer, sir,” Hobart’s voice replied.
“Where we at, Eng? I want to drive out on our own steam.”
“If you’ll just hold your horses, there. Captain, I would have called you. We should be switching to a normal full-power lineup in about twenty minutes, then I’ll be cooling the diesel. It should be shut down in another hour.”
“No. As soon as you unload the diesel, shut it down. The fumes and noise are screwing up the bridge watch.”
Pure heresy. Submariners protected the emergency diesel above all else. Hobart paused, obviously unhappy, acknowledged and hung up.
“Must be pretty important,” Vaughn said, still leaning over the radar display. “You gonna brief us once we’re out?”
“That will take all of two minutes,” Pacino said, cinching up the final strap of his safety harness and reaching for the heavy parka. “Once we clear the Norfolk traffic separation scheme, gather the officers in the wardroom. Chiefs too. This will be a trip.”
Vaughn turned to the navigator. “Nav, you ready?”
“First fix is in,” the navigator said from the plotting table. “It’s off by maybe ten feet. Not bad on a global basis.”
“See you at sea, XO. Take care of these guys.”
Pacino left through the open door forward, the steep and narrow staircase leading up to the upper level, past the galley door to the long passageway set at the ship’s centerline.
He strapped his binoculars around his neck and climbed the ladder to the hatch set high in the arch of the overhead, the thick steel of the circular hatch rotated up and over by hydraulics.
He climbed up, vanishing into the circle of darkness, and emerged into a dimly lit vertical tunnel full of cables and junction boxes and valves. He switched ladders and continued the climb, a dim light filtering down and growing until he reached the top of the tunnel, where he could see grating covering the opening, shoes standing on top of the grating surface.
“Captain to the bridge,” he called. The grating was pulled up on a hinge and the men cleared the way. Pacino climbed up into the bridge cockpit, a small cubbyhole on top of the sail crowded with officers and enlisted phone-talkers. He concentrated on the dock below, noting the lines tying them to the pier cleats, the two heavy ones running from the bow to huge winches on either side of the drydock entrance, the flow of water in the river. The weather was wet, not from rain but from mist, heavy and clammy, blown by the wind, the millions of droplets visible as they drifted past the glaring cones of the light from the floods. The noise level was near deafening from the diesel, the exhaust note rumbling as it came out of the sail. It would make communicating difficult but Pacino was not willing to wait for reactor power. In the wet weather the exhaust was white and smoky, but at least the wind was from the head of the dock and blowing the fumes away from the bridge crew.
“What’s the status, Scotty?” Pacino shouted over the roar of the diesel to the combat-systems officer, young Lieutenant Commander Scott Court, a smart officer with a hundred-dollar haircut and impeccably starched uniforms who always seemed to say the right thing, another politically astute mid-grade officer who had already been marked for early promotion and command, a bit too slick for Pacino’s taste. He’d been encouraging Court to get his hands dirtier in the day-to-day operations of his department.