The navigator, Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov, looked up from the chart at Lieutenant Anthony “Patch” Pacino, fifty thoughts about him flashing through her mind. The youth had walked back to the command console and leaned over it, wearing his black coveralls with the gold embroidered submariner’s dolphins over his name patch on his left pocket, the U.S. flag patch on his left shoulder, the emblem of the USS Vermont on his right. He was tall, just over six feet, and trim without being bulky, as if he were a swimmer or a runner. He had straight, thick, longer-than-regulation chestnut hair that reflected the red of the overhead lamps, all of them turned red under the rig-for-ultraquiet as a reminder for absolute noise quieting. His face at first gave the impression of being rugged, as if it would seem natural to see him in a sheepskin coat on horseback, but on closer examination, his individual features were smoothly refined, almost feminine, his face narrow with strong cheekbones, a sculpted nose over puffy lips that a vain woman would pay a plastic surgeon a fortune for, but the feature that stood out the most were his almond-shaped eyes colored a deep emerald green. There was no doubt that on looks alone, if he desired, he could stop a woman’s heart. Romanov had noticed him on his first day and constantly had to remind herself not to stare at him, hoping he didn’t notice how attracted to him she was. Yet it was clear from his demeanor that Pacino had no idea of his good looks. There was a deep humility to the kid, she thought.
Which was another oddity about Pacino. Only twenty-three-years-old, the sonar officer of the Vermont had a chest of ribbons that twenty-year veterans would envy, one of them the Navy Cross itself. When Romanov had first heard about the medal, she’d dismissed it. It was a fluke from his senior year midshipman cruise disaster, when acting on instinct alone, he’d managed to save three crewmen of the ill-fated submarine Piranha, one of them a VIP admiral who had put Pacino up for the medal, in addition to Pacino being the son of the former Chief of Naval Operations, the admiral in command of the entire Navy, so a green junior officer wearing the Navy Cross could be explained away from a freak occurrence combined with nepotism and office politics. But then the lad had done it again, displaying the same dagger-in-the-teeth courage on the last operation, hijacking an Iranian submarine equipped with a Russian fast nuclear reactor and sailing it halfway around the world, evading the Russian submarines hunting it with search-and-destroy orders, even facing down a front-line Russian attack submarine. The result of the operation was Pacino winning the Silver Star and being granted his submarine dolphin emblem early, the dolphins indicating that he was “qualified in submarines,” only months after being assigned to the Vermont, most of that time spent on the Iranian submarine. The officer cadre of Vermont had at first teased Pacino relentlessly that he hadn’t truly earned his dolphins, but in the month after Operation Panther, Pacino had proved himself an able and competent officer, and the teasing died out.
And that led to today’s operation, in which Lieutenant Pacino had the captain’s confidence to trail and conduct an underhull of the Russian super-sub Belgorod as leader of the section tracking party, which was just a few watchstanders short of full battlestations.
Romanov felt her mind fill with other thoughts about Pacino. Operation Panther had led to the final confrontation with her soon-to-be ex-husband Bruno Romanov, the commanding officer of the missile cruiser Javelin. In early May, Vermont had suddenly been ordered to sea with all communications locked down, and for two months the crew had no contact with the outside world. The Navy had called it a dark transit. Romanov called it a marriage-killer. In the brutal aftermath of the breakup of her marriage, she’d leaned hard on Anthony Pacino, their friendship the only thing that seemed to keep her sane. She’d moved out of the two-story colonial house in Virginia Beach she’d shared with Bruno and had crashed at Pacino’s dark, dreary, nearly windowless apartment. They’d taken turns sleeping on the couch, joking with each other that the crew could tell who’d had the queen bed and who’d had the couch the night before, as that couch was distinctly uncomfortable and useless for allowing a good night’s sleep.
