The deck was trembling violently from the power of the flank bell and had been since they’d dived. Pacino had gotten used to it and barely noticed it unless he placed his coffee cup on the table and saw the waves in its surface form from the hull vibrations. But whenever the ship was running flank, blasting through the ocean, U-Boat Dankleff — who absolutely loved hauling ass at flank — would always do his “flankin’ it, flankin’ it” dance, a ridiculous arm-waving, leg-twisting jig that, to Pacino, just never got old. On Quinnivan’s reprimand, Dankleff plopped down in his seat and feigned contrition, but looked up at Pacino and winked.
“Who are we missing?” Quinnivan asked with an angry expression creasing his features. The man, Pacino thought, looked positively jolly most of the time, but absolutely evil when he was mad.
“Electrical officer,” Engineer Kelly said, but just then Varney hurried into the room and shut the door behind him.
“Sorry, XO,” Varney said, taking his seat. “Watch relief on the conn was delayed.”
Pacino reached for the coffee carafe and refilled his cup. Lunch had been sliders with thick steak fries, and he was drowsy from it. That or his scrambled sleep schedule. He’d gotten off the conn with Short Hull at 0600 and had worked out in the torpedo room, intending to catch some sleep after his shower, but Short Hull had wanted several qualification check-outs. It had never occurred to Pacino that giving a system check-out — a verbal test of knowledge — could be as draining to the person giving it as the person requesting it. Cooper had wanted to start big, asking to be checked out on operating the BQQ-10-V6 sonar suite. A sonar check-out like that could involve three or more full watches of questions, answers and “look-ups,” when the non-qual was assigned to find the answers to questions that he’d failed. That had taken till noon meal, and when the dishes had been cleared from that, the operation brief had been convened by the XO.
“Well, Nav,” Quinnivan said. “Are we here and are we all cleared for this briefing?”
“XO,” Lewinsky said, “the supply officer is on the conn and Long Hull Cooper is aft as engineering officer of the watch. We’ve got everyone else. And, yessir, we’re all cleared.”
“Very well, then,” Quinnivan said. “Madam Engineer, would you be so kind as to call the captain and inform him we’re all present and ready for him?”
Kelly reached for the phone set into a small alcove behind her, dialed the captain, murmured a few words, and hung up. “He’s on his way.”
“Everyone have coffee?” Quinnivan asked, holding the carafe and pouring for himself, then setting a cup in front of the captain’s chair and pouring for him.
Seagraves walked into the room from the forward door. “Afternoon, people,” he said. In unison the officers returned the greeting. He took his seat, nodded at Lewinsky, and took a sip of his coffee. “Let’s proceed.”
Lewinsky pointed a remote control at the flatpanel over the missing supply officer’s seat and the display came to life. It had two pages projected on it, their orders given to the captain before sailing.
“What we’ve been ordered so far,” Lewinsky said, “is to proceed northeast at flank speed to the U.K. Naval Base, Clyde. Faslane, Scotland. Their submarine base. As you can see on page two, we’re to load up arctic supplies, food, and weapons.”
Pacino nodded to himself.
“Also, as you can see, we’re to bring on a dry-deck shelter and team of SEALs, the same guys from Task Force Eight Zero who we sailed with on the
Seagraves spoke up. “The Pentagon is now calling that the Battle of the Arabian Sea.”
“Which is odd,” Quinnivan said, “seeing as how it wasn’t really a battle until the South Atlantic. I note, ladies and gents, it remains top secret SCI codeword-slash-special-handling information that we traded torpedoes with the Russians on that op. As far as the open-source media is concerned, we just hijacked that sub, sailed it to AUTEC, then gave it back. The Russian loss of three subs — well, it never happened. And we were never there.”
Pacino glanced at Short Hull Cooper, whose eyes had bugged out at the mention of the details of the
“Please continue, Mr. Lewinsky,” Seagraves said.
“That’s pretty much it, Captain,” Lewinsky said. “There’s nothing else in the order. And we don’t have an operation order for what happens after Faslane. And we don’t know how long we’ll be in Faslane.”
“Is there any context here from a scrub of the open-source news files and the classified intel digest?” Seagraves asked.
