Panic Switch полностью

As he entered the antique wood entrance doors, he had a sense of stepping a hundred years into the past. The lighting looked exactly like old gas lamps — done with modern and safe LEDs, of course — but everything else within view was antique, with nineteenth century furnishings, even large ceiling fans turned by belts and pulleys. He saw the wrap-around bar, formed of timbers taken from upper floor supports when they’d been removed to allow a high ceiling and space for the brewery vessels. The bar was huge, tended by a half dozen bartenders and had multiple tap setups and a tall set of glass shelves displaying what seemed every alcoholic drink known to modern man. For a moment, Pacino regretted that Commander Bullfrog Quinnivan—Vermont’s exec — couldn’t see this, as it would have put him in heaven. Over the shelves of bottles were huge flatpanel television screens displaying every sports game happening at that moment, except for the one screen tuned to a news channel. On the far side of the bar, Pacino could see Squirt Gun Vevera and U-Boat Dankleff waving him over.

Pacino had checked into the “Q” the night before with the rest of the boat’s junior officers when their airport shuttle had arrived. “Q” was short for “BOQ,” which itself was short for bachelor officer quarters. Now that there were almost as many female officers as there were males, he thought, the term “bachelor” seemed outdated, but he’d leave it to Big Navy to correct any politically incorrect nomenclature. At the Q, he’d slept fitfully, rising late on this Sunday morning to run a few miles around the hilly Groton Navy base overlooking the wide Thames River. After a shower, he logged in and went through his unclassified electronic mail, then tried to relax by reading a novel, but couldn’t concentrate. He considered calling Vevera or Dankleff to see what they were up to, but odds were, they were sleeping off the previous evening’s beer and tequila.

Around five o’clock, he got separate texts from Vevera and Dankleff instructing him to show up for a “command performance” at The Power House, where the attack sub New Jersey’s captain, executive officer, and department heads demanded to meet their new junior officers. Since Commander Quinnivan had given the Vermont junior officers their new orders, there had been no word, not even a whispered rumor, of who the New Jersey’s captain or exec would be. All anyone knew was that the “PCU” captain and XO would not be commanding New Jersey. PCU stood for “pre-commissioning unit,” the designation for a ship not yet accepted by the Navy for combat service. The PCU crew were “drydock rats,” experts at assisting in giving birth to the ship from the millions of components brought to McDermott Aerospace and Shipbuilding’s Newport News assembly plant, but they weren’t combat operators like the officers of Vermont. It was recognized throughout the fleet that Vermont’s crew were the most recent to fire torpedoes and depth charges in anger, and there was a definite prestige that went with that. It was natural that the PCU New Jersey crew wouldn’t take her out on this upcoming special operation, but rather the Vermont-ers, as they began to call themselves. But the success of the crew depended on the success of the wardroom of officers, which was entirely dependent on who the captain and second-in-command were. Great junior officers and department heads were nothing with poor leadership from the skipper and the XO, Pacino thought.

He approached the crowded bar, where Vevera and Dankleff had saved him a barstool. Dankleff clapped Pacino on the shoulder.

“I see you’re twenty minutes early, Lipstick,” Dankleff said, beaming. “Good job.”

Pacino grinned back at him while shaking Vevera’s hand. “That was the first thing you taught me onboard Vermont, U-Boat,” he said to Dankleff. He slumped to give an impression of Dankleff and made his voice sound deep and imbecilic and said, “if you’re early, you’re on time, if you’re on time, you’re late and if you’re late you’re off the team.”

“Fuck you, Lipstick,” Dankleff snorted. “Anyway, Squirt Gun, as I was saying, I’m the bull lieutenant.”

“No way,” Vevera replied. “I got to Vermont two, maybe three months before you showed up as a nub non-qual. So I’m the bull lieutenant.”

The “bull lieutenant” of the boat was the most senior of the junior officers assigned, a title which Pacino had assumed had gone to U-Boat Dankleff.

“Yeah, but you took, what, three? four? entire months off fighting your, well, your diagnosis. So when it comes to time served? I’m the fuckin’ bull lieutenant.”