Pastor had been in command for only a year and was still finding himself, his command style, but so far the ratings were good. He had passed Admiral Pacino’s attack-trainer test, having put an Akula Russian submarine on the bottom at the same time he was under attack by a destroyer unit of the Royal Navy — in Pacino’s wild scenarios anyone could be the bad guys. Pastor was considered a tough captain, a disciplinarian, a by the-book man so long as it made sense to go by the book. He was good to his officers, took them out for dinners, which came out of his pocket at a thousand dollars a shot, until Admiral Pacino ordered him to put those expenses on the ship’s account, telling him they were rewards for good performance. When Pastor had said that the men brought wives and girlfriends, Pacino had told him it was the least the captain could do for them in exchange for all their long hours and weeks away. Pastor had been thinking lately about what he would do when his command tour was over, something that every nuclear sub skipper asked himself. Command of an attack sub was the end of sea duty. The day they turned command of the sub over to someone else was a dark day in the lives of most skippers, not unlike giving a daughter away at a wedding. They would be proud to have done a job well, the ship, like the daughter, an accomplishment, but now someone else would be in charge of her. Pastor saw nothing that interested him after command, not in the Navy’s bureaucratic quagmire in Washington, not in the shore-training commands, not in the surface navy. A new program had been commissioned to allow sub skippers to take command of a deepdraft oiler or supply ship as a stepping stone to commanding an aircraft carrier, from which a man could make flag rank. But that would take another fifteen years of going to sea on surface ships. Besides, Pastor now had two lovely daughters, six and eight, growing up in a world that was becoming more bizarre by the minute, and Pastor was beginning to think that all the sea duty, all the time away from home was beginning to affect the girls. Pastor shook his head and brought himself back to the supervision of the ship’s rig for ultraquiet. As he walked the ship he switched lights in the spaces from bright white to red — the red lights kept awareness for the rig foremost in the crew’s minds. In the goat locker, the chief’s quarters, he found a grizzled, veteran chief taking a shower. He felt like killing the man. The rig specifically prohibited showers, laundry and cooking, all of which made unnecessary noise. It didn’t matter how hot and sweaty the men got, the rig was the rig. Pastor chewed the chief out as quietly as he could, then continued on his rounds. He returned to the control room. “Weapon status,” Pastor asked the young officer of the deck, an academy grad named Mark Strait, who was the sonar officer. “Sir, we’ve got all four tubes loaded. One and two are flooded with outer doors opened, torpedo power applied and units warmed. Units in three and four have been powered down from before. We’ll shift in another hour.” The maximum readiness rig specified open tubes, weapons powered up with their gyros spinning, ready to fire at any time. That way if Pastor found a target they could program the torpedo in seconds and launch. The only trouble was that the torpedoes could not remain powered up for more than an hour at a time or the gyros would overheat, and sometimes in the middle of tracking a target the outer doors would have to be shut, the weapons powered down, the alternate tubes opened to sea and their torpedoes spun up. The operation could take ten or fifteen minutes, which meant that long without the ability to shoot at the target. Pastor leaned over the central firecontrol display, the one known as position two, selecting it to line-of-sight mode. The way he figured it, he would have all of one minute to identify the target, put its bearing into firecontrol, set the bearing and assumed range into the torpedo, and fire before the target knew he was there. Maybe less. Birmingham was not a new boat, and the newer Improved 688 class ships were much quieter, but then if Pastor felt his ship shouldn’t be here in the Oparea, ready for combat, he wouldn’t be in command of her. Admiral Pacino would replace him with someone willing to take the risk and fight. Pastor looked over at pos one, the console furthest forward, selected it to geographic plot mode, a God’s-eye view of the sea, showing the coastline of Japan, their wolfpack partner ahead and to the east, the USS Jacksonville, the two submarines steaming on a parallel course up the coastline searching for Destiny submarines. The Jacksonville was the same vintage as the Birmingham, both at the tail end of their service lives. Pastor stepped to pos three, the third console aft, and selected it to line-of-sight mode with the target selected as the Jacksonville, just so that he could see where not to put a torpedo in case things got confused. That done, the firecontrol system was as good as it was going to get with no hostile contacts. Satisfied with the status of the control room. Pastor moved on into the sonar room through the forward starboard door of control. Sonar was lit with blue fluorescents, its screens multicolored displays, the room’s light ghostly after the red of the control room. In charge of sonar was Petty Officer Hazelton, a skinny curly-haired farm boy from Iowa who loved to torture city kids with stories of butchering pigs at pig roasts, his stories of behind-the-barn sexual encounters equally lurid. In spite of his youth and odd interests, Hazelton knew the sonar suite. And Pastor, a sub captain who believed that sonar was the center of the submerged universe, knew more sonar acoustic physics and equipment knobology than many chiefs.
