Styxx put out her hand. “I did an extensive search, Captain. There’s some mention of the Russian Omega II submarine
“So we’re left guessing,” Lewinsky said. “Captain, with your permission, may I speculate?”
Seagraves smiled. It was perhaps only the second smile Pacino had seen from the captain. “By all means, Navigator.”
“My guess is that we’ll be sent to try to trail the Omega II and see what he’s doing. The under-ice supplies make me believe the Omega II may try to do an ICE-EX and go to the pole.”
“Maybe,” Seagraves said. “But why the SEALs?”
“You’ve got me there, Captain. I can’t imagine we’d try to hijack it like we did the Iranian Kilo,” Lewinsky said. “The Russians got fooled once. They won’t let that happen again.”
“Hey,” Dankleff said, smirking. “Varney, Pacino and I could conn her to AUTEC if the SEALs got us aboard.”
Quinnivan laughed. “I seriously doubt that, DCA. But even if you could, the pole is essentially in Russia’s front yard. They’d send a fleet of submarines to get us if we tried.”
“Perhaps just a deep contingency,” Kelly said. “You know, better to have them and not need them than to need them and not have them.”
“Maybe. But we’re all guessing here, people,” Quinnivan said, looking at the officers sternly. “All we can do is make sure this ship is ready for anything. Eng, what’s your material condition looking like? Most of the sea trials issues were in the engineering spaces.”
Engineer Kelly cleared her throat. “We’re chasing steam leaks, XO. They’re overloading the air conditioning plants and chillers and making more demands on the evaporators. We’ve got a complete inventory of the leaks. Four days, five at most, we’ll have them under control.”
“See to it, Engineer,” Quinnivan said, frowning. “Any other comments? No? Well, people, we’re dismissed. Navigator, please brief the supply officer and RC division officer separately since they missed this session.”
“Aye, sir.”
The room cleared out. Pacino checked his watch and looked at Short Hull Cooper. “You want to continue with your sonar check-out?”
“I think it would help if I took a watch on the sonar stack with Senior Chief Albanese,” Cooper said.
Pacino nodded and Cooper left. Pacino opened his pad computer to the classified news files, wondering if there were anything there that Styxx had missed that might shed some light on this operation. A half hour after he’d been into the files, with no results, Elvis Lewinsky came into the room and brewed a fresh pot of coffee, then took his seat at the XO’s seat’s right side.
“How are you doing, Patch?” he asked. “Coffee?”
“Yes, please, Nav. I’m okay, I guess. I’d be better if we had good news about Romanov.”
“Yeah. I heard XO is getting daily status updates about her, but so far, nothing’s changed. He did mention Blacky Nygard is out of the burn unit and is doing well.”
“That’s a relief,” Pacino said. “He saw the worst of it.”
“He got the flames but not the smoke inhalation.”
“Yeah.” There was an awkward silence, until Pacino said, “Nav, I bet you have a theory about this op.”
“I already did my guessing to the captain,” Lewinsky said, scanning his pad computer.
“Come on. I bet you think more than you said to the captain.”
Lewinsky looked up. “I do.”
“Out with it, Elvis.”
“Patch, what if that Omega II — the ‘BUFF’ as you and Romanov called it — is on the way to deploy some of those Poseidon torpedoes on American shores?”
Pacino sat back in his chair, a frown on his face. “If they were, wouldn’t they just go into the Barents Sea, then into the North Atlantic? Why all these preparations to go under ice?”
Lewinsky shook his head. “Maybe the Russians are worried about the SOSUS sonar network tripwires laid down between the UK, Iceland and Greenland. Maybe they think if they come through the GI-UK gap, they could be detected. Or they’re worried that they could be trailed by an American or British sub if they go that route. And they think they can evade a trailing hostile sub by going under the ice.”
Pacino shook his head. “The long route? Through the Bering Strait and around South America? That would take months.”
“That might be why we’re loaded out with months of food.”
“It won’t matter, Nav. The BUFF is way too big to make it through the icepack.”
“It’s almost September,” Lewinsky said, “so the icepack is at minimum now.”
“Hand me the remote,” Pacino said. He lit up the projection flatpanel and projected from his WritePad. “This is the BUFF. I superimposed on this image a scale image of a Virginia-class submarine.” On the display was a 3D view of the
Lewinsky looked at the projection and whistled. “Goddamn, that boat is big. It looks like you could fit five or six of us inside that thing’s hull and have room left over.”
