“I suppose every day is St. Patrick’s Day here,” he smirked.
Allende’s auburn hair shone in the soft lighting of the bar, and she looked gorgeous to Pacino. A waitress came, took their drink orders and disappeared, returning momentarily with a Balvenie scotch for Pacino, a Manhattan for Allende.
“This may look like any Irish pub anywhere,” Allende said, “but there are more deals done here than anywhere else in D.C. And it’s also an Agency hangout for when we’re visiting in town.”
“Any food recommendations?”
“You can never go wrong with the shepherd’s pie,” she smiled shyly.
He looked up at her. “Margo, I’m thinking of quitting,” Pacino said.
“What? Why? You’ve got the best job in town.”
“I didn’t appreciate the way the boss treated our people. This was all a little too much of a dangerous game of chess between him and Vostov, and the crew of our boat — and my son — were just pawns on the board. It was a hell of a gamble. The probabilities were stacked against us from the start. We got very lucky. I worry our luck will run out.”
“I know you feel protective of Anthony,” Allende said, taking a sip of her drink. “But maybe you can better protect him as the boss’ advisor than as a private citizen. Plus, there’s another compelling reason you should stay on.”
“Oh really?” Pacino said, raising an eyebrow. “What’s that?”
She leaned in close, a slight smile on her face. “I have it on good authority that you work with a very pretty Agency girl who has a huge crush on you. If you play your cards right, you might get lucky with her.” She winked seductively.
Pacino smiled and scratched his head. “I wonder who that girl could be?”
“I know who she is,” Allende said, “but I’m CIA. I know everything worth knowing.”
“I bet you do,” Pacino said. “But I imagine that gets disappointing at Christmas, on your birthday and before anniversaries. Because you’d always know what your presents would be.”
“Anniversaries,” she said. “I like the sound of that. Can this be the day of our anniversary?”
Pacino sipped his scotch and looked over the rim of his glass. “A first date, if you get right down to it, is a ‘zeroth anniversary,’ so I suppose you’d be telling the truth if you told the waitress today is our anniversary.”
“So this is a date? A rendezvous intended to commence a romantic relationship between you and me?”
“You’re asking? I thought you knew everything worth knowing,” he smiled.
Jeremiah Seamus Quinnivan sat down at the kitchen table, enjoying being fussed over by his wife after their long reunion the night before, the plate of sausage and eggs arriving in front of him with a cup of steaming hot coffee.
“Seamus,” Shawna said, holding out her tablet computer, the display selected to the news files of the Satellite News Network’s world news page. “Did you see this?”
Quinnivan found his new reading glasses, hating them with their admission that he was getting older, but damned if he could read regular-sized print without them. He looked at her tablet’s display and read aloud.
“Let’s see—‘Elias Sotheby, billionaire software mogul and philanthropist, buys office building in Paris for new software company’s headquarters; Sotheby names company Harmaakarhu, Finnish for grizzly bear.’”
“Dammit, Seamus, not that article, the one above it.”
Quinnivan read the headline to himself.
U.S. Navy Commandos Hijack Iranian Nuclear Submarine, Sail it to Bahamas, Then Give it Back
U.S. Attack Submarine Reportedly Involved
Quinnivan read the article, most of it getting the details wrong, and completely leaving out the nuclear attack on the two Russian subs and the torpedo battle with the third, but that was the American press, he thought. That, or the story had been leaked by the Russians, who would prefer to minimize any revelation of their losses. He looked up at Shawna Quinnivan. “What about it?”
“Seamus,” she said, sitting down next to him, a worried look on her face. “Was this you? Did you and Vermont do this?”
And Jeremiah Seamus Quinnivan, Commander, Royal Navy, executive officer of the project submarine USS Vermont, took off his reading glasses, looked his wife in the eye and said seriously, “It never happened. We were never there.”
Afterword
The expression, ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ comes to mind when I think about this book. Bear with me while I list a few examples.
Anthony Pacino’s near-death experience featuring a dark, pulsating tunnel that pulled him deep inside it and stopped him halfway while he floated and listened to spirit voices debating his future actually happened to me in a Navy Scuba School drowning incident.
The teasing and abuse suffered by Anthony Pacino for being a ‘non-qual air-breathing puke’ officer who is not yet qualified in submarines is real, as I experienced it both during a long-submerged midshipman cruise on the Pargo and as a newly reporting junior officer to the Cold War-winning attack submarine Hammerhead. The tradition’s purpose is to motivate the unqualified to learn the boat as quickly as possible for safety reasons, since each crewmember relies heavily on all other crewmembers for survival, and a non-qual crewmember could be useless in saving the ship.
The joking and fun-loving character of the hard-drinking cadre of a submarine’s officers when off duty, juxtaposed to the serious and sober hard-as-steel formality while on duty is real. One day in a liberty port, I was braced up and flamed on, suffering a volcanic verbal tirade from the executive officer, who screamed at me that I was restricted to the ship for being delinquent in submarine qualification progress (known as “being dink”). Seven hours later, he screamed at me to get in civilian clothes and join him at the local bar for a night of drinking. The next morning he screamed at me for illegally leaving the ship the night before, in violation of the previous day’s order. That very afternoon, he shouted at me again to get civilian clothes on and join him at the bar for another night of debauchery. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Showing up hungover to the ship in a liberty port early after a night of revelry in order to start the reactor and drive the ship out, and walking into the wardroom with a lower face smeared with lipstick stains actually happened to me, and earned me the nickname ‘Lipstick,’ which stuck for decades, and which my submarine buddies still call me to this day.
Being a non-qual yet acting as approach officer in a tactical situation is required for an officer to earn his dolphins. Three times, I was approach officer in various attack situations. Those hours were some of the most thrilling of my life.
The crazy, backwards 270-degree turn into the Elizabeth River Norfolk Harbor Reach done by Vermont’s Man Mountain Vevera actually happened exactly as described, to the Cold War-winning submarine USS Hammerhead. And whom do you suppose was on the conn as officer of the deck? You guessed it. T’was I.
The intense, weaponized nightclub-singer femininity of the fictional character Bamanda (Redhead), that morphed into violence in the form of thousands of dollars of damage to an expensive sports car, and changed back again after a reconciliation, was half of a story that actually happened to me. The damage done to my life was far worse than just the destroyed paint job and the unhappiness of my good friends at USAA, who paid for the repairs without complaint. But that second half of the story is for another book.