Pacino shook his head. “Easy!” Dankleff yelled toward the pool table area. A younger man walked up who could be Spichovich’s younger brother, just as gaunt, with the same haircut and rounded face, but with a sharper nose and normal-sized ears. He wore jeans and an ancient Grateful Dead T-shirt.
“You rang?” he asked Dankleff.
Dankleff pointed to Pacino and said, “Meet Anthony Pacino. He’s taking over your sonar slot while you take over comms from Vevera.”
Eisenhart shook Pacino’s hand, his face breaking into a friendly smile. “Don Eisenhart. Don’t get any ideas about my nickname. Someone said I give checkouts too easily and sign people’s qual cards without harsh examinations. Totally not true. I’m the toughest officer on the boat to get a qual signature from. Bear that in mind.”
“Right,” Dankleff said, rolling his eyes for the half-dozenth time that night. “Your easy ways with a pen hovering over a nub’s qual card earned you the name ‘Easy.’” He looked at Pacino. “A while back he was awarded a water-cooled pen by the XO and his little feelings have been hurt ever since.”
“None of that’s true,” Eisenhart said to Pacino, his expression a frown that was trying to conceal a grin. “I was ‘Easy Eisy’ back at the Academy. Probably because I never sweated anything. Exams, PT tests, midshipman cruises, whatever. It’s all easy when you’re ‘Easy Eisy.’”
“He just now made that up,” U-Boat said, smiling brightly.
“Goddammit, U-Boat,” Eisenhart growled.
“You were the class ahead of me, right?” Pacino asked Eisenhart.
“Yeah, and Feng was one of my firsties,” Eisenhart added, referring to first class midshipmen, who acted as drill instructors for the incoming class of fourth class midshipmen, or plebes. Eisenhart drained his beer mug and added, “so he’s been flaming on me for more than half a decade now. You, the Feng, I and the captain are the only Academy grads here now that Squirt Gun is leaving. Everyone else, including Silky, is an ROTC puke. Those morons barely know how to wear their uniforms.”
Easy Eisy looked over at the stairwell entrance door and shouted out, “Lobabes!”
A tall blonde man appeared with a fresh bottle of scotch, this one a sixteen-year-old Balvenie. “Dump that Guinness piss water, Easy, and get a whisky glass.” Without a greeting and without asking, the newcomer uncorked the bottle and poured the scotch into Pacino’s glass. “You look a little dry there, non-qual,” he said, smiling. “I’m Lomax. Kyle Lomax. Mechanical officer. Main Propulsion Assistant, MPA, to the fucking engineer.”
He shook Pacino’s hand, then poured two fingers for himself and downed the scotch like it was water. Lomax was tall, muscular, with a full head of blonde hair, blue eyes and a full mustache. He looked like someone from a recruiting poster, but recruiting for the 1939 German Wehrmacht.
“Good to meet you,” Pacino said. “I’m Anthony Pacino.”
“Boozy!” Lomax shouted over Pacino’s head. “Get over here and meet our new nub!”
A slender medium-height young man with black hair, dark eyes and a smile joined them. “What?” he said to Lomax. “I didn’t even know we were due for a new non-qual.” He looked Indian or Middle Eastern, but his accent was from New York. Brooklyn, perhaps.
Lomax pointed to Pacino. “We were due. Meet the new non-qual,” Lomax explained. “Boozy, meet Pacino. Pacino, this is Boozy. Boozy, what is it you do on this ship, exactly, other than catch loads of bunky?”
Pacino extended his hand and the shorter officer shook it. “I’m Muhammad Varney,” he said to Pacino, ignoring Lomax’s implied insult. “Crew calls me ‘Boozy Moozy’ or just ‘Boozy’ for short. And as Lobabes Lomax here well knows, I’m the electrical officer. Everything from four hundred Hertz to DC. I power your lights, your coffee-maker, your glorified stereo you call a Q-fucking-ten-vee-four, your AN/BYG-1 battlecontrol system and your thirty megawatt propulsion pump-jet. And your oxygen generator. And if Elvis’ S9G reactor shits the bed, my batteries keep your asses alive until you can start U-Boat’s diesel. So you want power? You want electricity? You want to breathe? Just give me a call.”
Pacino couldn’t help his curiosity. “Why Boozy?” he asked.
Varney smiled. “Because I drink despite being a Muslim,” he said. “In moderation, of course. But these infidels act like I’m an alcoholic.”
“Boozy!” Silky Romanov shouted from the bar. “Have a whisky!” She wandered back with two glasses of scotch and handed one to Varney.
Varney smirked. “Listen,” he said to Pacino. “You need an electrical check-out? Don’t go to Easy Eisenhart. He doesn’t know shit about the electrical systems.” Easy sputtered beer in Varney’s direction, but the electrical officer sidestepped. “I’m your man. Knock on my stateroom door and I’ll get you squared away.” He looked at the drunk navigator. “And you, Silky, leave us menfolk alone to run the world — go play with Bruno, will you?”
“I’m gonna find better company,” the navigator said, taking no offense and going off to talk to Seagraves.
Lomax suddenly punched Varney in the shoulder. “He may not look the part,” Lomax said to Pacino, “but Boozy here played first string football for MIT.”
“Running back,” Varney said. “But playing first string for MIT wouldn’t even get you past screening practice at UCLA.”
“True,” Lomax said. “And Navy’s 150-pound squad could beat your asses.”
“We beat Harvard my senior year,” Varney said. “And Yale.”
“But not NJIT.”
“Nobody beats those thugs from New Jersey,” Boozy said, shaking his head.
Pacino looked at the other officers. “So Boozy, you went to MIT, and Lobabes, you’re from UCLA?” It felt odd to call people he’d met seconds before by their nicknames.
U-Boat Dankleff joined the circle, grabbing the neck of the Balvenie bottle in Lomax’s hands and pouring for himself. “Lobabes was a cheerleader,” he confided loudly to Pacino. “For the UCLA football team. A fucking cheerleader. Can you picture Lobabes in a little skirt with pom-poms?”
“And those cute little white sneakers,” Rachel shouted from across the room.
Again, Lomax controlled his facial expression, trying to act like he thought it was funny. “Don’t knock it, U-Boat. You have any idea how many gorgeous female cheerleaders are yours for the taking if you’re a male cheerleader?”
Suddenly the XO was in their crowd. “Zero!” he said, laughing. “They’re too busy scoping out the football players. I hear Lobabes had a dry four years there!”
“Keep it up, Bullfrog,” Lomax said, gritting his teeth.
“But at least his schooling was easy at UCLA, studying,” Quinnivan cleared his throat and said the next words in a sarcastic imitation of a sophisticated English elite, “English literature. I’m still trying to figure out how you got into the American Navy’s nuclear program,” he said to Lomax. “Or how you got qualified in submarines so fast.”
“Easy Eisy graped off his signatures,” Rachel said, shouting again from the bar.
“I did not!” Eisenhart said, his face flushing. He looked up. “Pork Chop,” he called out.
A youth who was medium height, thin, as dark as Varney joined them, and said in a Southern accent that seemed from Atlanta, “Gentlemen. Silky. Howdy do.”