Panic Switch полностью

The officers and chief petty officers of the submarine New England were gathered on the pier, watching the USS Hyman G. Rickover coast to a halt in the Elizabeth River Reach. Two tugboats spun her around so her bow was facing outward, then backed her into the slip so she could tie up, port-side-to.

Once she was tied up, the watchstanders in their informal two-piece working uniforms disappeared below, replaced by sailors wearing dress blues, the crackerjack uniforms made famous by recruiting posters and World War II movies.

The first body bag was lifted out of the hull. The topside sailors put it on a waiting stretcher, covered it with an American flag, and slowly walked it off the deck, up the slope of the gangway and into a waiting black truck. The New England’s officers and chiefs stood at attention, and as the body went by, the captain called for them to render a hand salute, and all of them rigidly saluted until the body was placed in the truck. When the second body came out, the ritual was repeated, until all twenty-four of the dead were placed in the back of the truck.

After the truck drove off, the group on the pier broke up. Anthony Pacino walked down the pier toward officers’ parking, Rachel Romanov by his side.

“It’s hard to believe Styxx and Kelly are gone,” she said. “And Easy Eisy, and Gangbanger.” She sniffed and pulled out a tissue and wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

“And the COB,” Pacino said. “And Gory Goreliki and K-Squared Kim from the Panther op. And Snowman Mercer, who first found the Panther. And we lost our new nub, Long Hull Cooper. Goddamned bad day at sea.”

Romanov sighed. “Let’s get back to the Snake Ranch and do something fun. Grill out some steaks, maybe. I want a happy memory to replace this one.”

“XO made this a long weekend for us all,” Pacino said. “We have no work duties until the funeral on Tuesday. We’ll have to roll out super early that day. Rush hour traffic out of Norfolk and on the way to D.C. will be murderous.”

“Let’s find a five-star hotel in D.C. and stay over Monday night,” Rachel said. She smiled at Pacino as he opened the Corvette’s door for her. “We’ll stay in bed and have scrumptious room service.”

“And some scrumptious other things?” Pacino smirked at her as he started the car, the supercharger’s high-pitched whine and the deep throbbing notes of the powerful engine making him feel better already.

“Maybe,” she said, jutting out her lower lip as if considering the idea, then shrugging. “Depends on my mood.”

“Oh, no problem. I can get you in the mood in two minutes,” Pacino said, grinning at her.

“You’re just lucky you’re with a hot-blooded girl, Pacino,” she said. “I’m always in the mood when you’re around. With the exception of this hour, today.”

“Yeah,” Pacino said solemnly. “And the entire time that you had amnesia. It was almost like you were robotic, like your soul wasn’t in your body. I gotta tell ya, it was unnerving.”

“It felt like a walking nightmare to me,” she said. “One second it was six months ago, then suddenly I’m in a hospital room with Bruno, painful bandaged burns on my legs and abdomen, with Bruno telling me we were divorced, and that I had a new boyfriend and that the boyfriend was this hot-running hero-slash-pirate from an operation where Vermont stole an Iranian submarine. Can you imagine? The U.S. Navy just walking up and stealing the submarine of another sovereign nation? And now I have a boyfriend? And then I meet you, and you’re all handsome and swashbuckling, enough to make a poor girl swoon, but I was sure I had to stay away from you.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t know you. For all I knew, the new Rachel might not even like you.”

“Rachel Romanov not liking me?” Pacino laughed. “Impossible. And did you really think I was, quote, swashbuckling, unquote?”

“You’re a real-life pirate, Pacino,” she said, looking out the window at the industrial side of Norfolk giving way to the bayside high-priced real estate, then to the suburbs of Virginia Beach. “Pacino?” she asked. He noticed that since she came back from her amnesia, she no longer called him ‘Anthony’ or ‘Patch.’ Just ‘Pacino.’ He liked it, he thought. No one else addressed him that way. “Where do you think our dead shipmates are right now?”

“Well, if Tiny Tim Fishman were here, he’d say they all went to the afterlife to contemplate what their lives would have been like had they made different decisions. In some of the multiple universes Fishman believes in, many of them are still alive, so I imagine they watch themselves living out those lives in real time. In essence, they would be haunting themselves.”

“Do you believe all that?”