“Sit down, that’s an order.” Phillips pulled his silver oak-leaf insignia off his collar, pulled Hornick’s gold colored oak leaves off and traded, putting the full commander’s pins on Hornick’s collar, the lieutenant commander’s pins on his own. He pulled the pin off his left pocket, the anchor in a circle of laurel leaves, the capital ship command pin, and pinned it to Hornick’s pocket. Then he left the room, shut the door quietly and came in again.
Hornick was embarrassed completely by Phillips’ role playing.
“Sir, really—”
“Sir? Captain, sir, you wanted to see me, sir? You remember me, sir, don’t you, the engineer? You wanted to talk to me, sir? About the reactor startup, sir? How should we do the startup, Captain?”
Roger Whatney picked that moment to come into the room with a metal clipboard that held the radiomen’s Writepad encrypted computer notesheet, the one used for radio messages that were highly classified and needed to be electronically signed before they could be released to Phillips’ personal Writepad computer. Whatney took a look at Hornick in the captain’s chair wearing the accouterments of command, then over at Phillips wearing lieutenant commander’s insignia, and he pulled the radio Writepad back from Phillips and instead offered it to Hornick. He did not even do a suggestion of a doubletake.
“Captain,” Whatney said to Hornick, “you’d better initial this and get to the bridge. Have you given the order to start the plant yet? By the way, the admiral wants us at full power in three hours, submerged and underway.”
Another reason Phillips wanted Whatney aboard as his XO — the Brit could practically read his mind. Phillips and Whatney looked at Hornick, waiting.
“Oh, all, right, sirs. Engineer,” Hornick said to Phillips! “perform an emergency approach to reactor criticality, when critical perform an emergency heatup, then start the engine room with emergency warmups.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” Phillips tossed Hornick a salute.
Five minutes later Hornick was back aft wearing his proper uniform, as Phillips was swallowing the last dregs of the iced coffee. The navigator came in then, carrying a rolled-up larger version of the Writepad computer, this one big enough to display a chart. Lt. Comdr. Scott Court was a tightly wrapped Annapolis grad with a starched uniform, spit-shined shoes, his academy ring always in evidence. Phillips considered Court maybe the “greasiest” officer he’d ever met, the term a relic from the academy and used to describe men who oiled the wheels of their own political progress. Still, Court was friendly, confident, smart and even-handed with his department.
But then Phillips had the feeling that if he were not Court’s superior officer. Court would not give him the time of day.
“Here’s the chart display, Captain. You wanted to go over it?” “Have a seat, Scotty,” Phillips said to Court, again sprawling into the end bench. Court put the navigation display on the table. The chart showed the Thames River in the vicinity of Groton and New London, its approach into the Fisher’s Island Sound through the Race and into Block Island Sound, and from there into the Atlantic.
“We’ll be towed out along this track. I’m trying to figure out where to submerge on the diesel,” Phillips told him.
“How much room do you want, sir?”
“At a keel depth of eighty feet snorkeling, it would be nice to go down to 150 feet if some traffic came by—”
“You’d have to secure snorkeling and run on the battery while starting up the reactor. Captain.”
“It wouldn’t be pretty, but even if the engineer is running a main feed pump on the diesel and we have to pull the plug to go deep, he’d just stop the pump and stop the steam draw. Hornick could recover from that, don’t you think?”
“Skipper, thank God we’ve got Walt back here. I doubt anyone else could handle this.”
“Okay, 150 feet, with a margin of another 150 feet, that’s 300 feet or fifty fathoms.”
“That’s shallow, sir.”
“Fine, sixty. Where’s the sixty-fathom curve?”
Court touched a software function key and danced with the software until the depth curve he sought highlighted itself. “Right here. Captain.”
“No way, that’s too far out. Give me fifty fathoms… not much better, but that’s the deal… Weather holding up?” Phillips was sneaking Piranha out of town under the cover of darkness and an overcast sky, all the better to keep the watchful eye of the overhead Japanese Galaxy satellite from looking down at them.
“Both good and bad, sir. It’s started to snow, hard.
They’re calling for a foot of snow, and then it’s going to turn to freezing rain and sleet. The snowstorm will keep us hidden from the Galaxy upstairs, but visibility is closing down on us and that makes this trip doubly dangerous.
We’ll have trouble seeing the merchant traffic, and they’ll have problems seeing us.”
“Maybe we should keep the tug longer, stay on the surface and run the diesel until the reactor’s warm.”
