Pacino climbed down into the bridge cockpit with the Officer of the Deck and the Junior Officer of the Deck.
“Flying bridge clear. Off’sa’deck,” he said to Stokes.
“Raise the radar mast, rotate and radiate.” Stokes passed orders to the control room, and above and behind them the radar hummed and squeaked as it rotated, helping the control room crew below navigate out of Norfolk. Both periscopes rotated furiously, taking visual fixes as the navigator, an Irishman named Christman with red hair and temperament to match, directed them out.
“BRIDGE, NAVIGATOR,” the bridge communicationbox rattled, “100 YARDS TO TURNING POINT. NEW COURSE, ZERO EIGHT ONE.”
“Navigator, Bridge aye,” Stokes drawled into the microphone.
Pacino looked at the sky and the sea. The wind was stiff and cold, numbing his windward left cheek. The sky was a deep blue with white clouds in layer-thin wisps. The sun was bright but cold and low on the horizon. The southern mouth of the Chesapeake Bay was choppy in the wind. The water looked a dirty green, small whitecaps on every wave. Pacino looked through his binoculars down the channel after the next turn and saw a merchant tanker lumbering down toward them, inbound to Norfolk’s” international terminal.
“BRIDGE, NAVIGATOR, MARK THE TURN TO COURSE ZERO EIGHT ONE.”
“Helm, Bridge, right fifteen degrees rudder, steady course zero eight one,” Stokes ordered. Pacino nodded.
“Helm, all ahead standard,” Stokes called into his microphone.
“Off sa’deck, shift pumps,” Pacino said, “we’re about to haul ass.” The ship began to react to the speed increase of 10 knots, the bow wave rising over the bow until the hull forward of the sail started to get wet and the wake aft to boil white.
Stokes spoke into his microphone: “Maneuvering, Bridge, shift reactor main coolant pumps to fast speed.”
“SHIFT REACTOR MAIN COOLANT PUMPS TO FAST SPEED, BRIDGE, MANEUVERING AYE … BRIDGE, MANEUVERING, REACTOR MAIN COOLANT PUMPS ARE RUNNING IN FAST SPEED.” Stokes acknowledged. He looked at Pacino, standing beside him on the crowded bridge.
“Flank it, OOD,” Pacino said, training his binoculars again on the inbound merchant ship and the Thimble Shoals Channel beyond.
“Helm, all ahead flank,” Stokes ordered.
“ALL AHEAD FLANK, HELM AYE … BRIDGE, HELM, MANEUVERING ANSWERS ALL AHEAD FLANK.”
The bridge box sputtered with Rapier’s voice: “BRIDGE, XO. CAPTAIN TO THE IJV PHONE,” requesting that Pacino pick up the UV phone circuit, a more private line than the P.A. speakers.
“Captain,” Pacino said into the handset.
“XO, sir,” Rapier said. “Recommend we keep the speed down in the channel, sir. Last time we flanked it we got a speeding ticket from the Coasties. Max speed in the channel is 15 knots.”
“The Coast Guard has their priorities, we’ve got ours, XO.”
“Your hide, sir.”
The bow wave climbed up the hull until it was breaking aft of the sail. The water stream climbed the sail itself, spraying the bridge officers. The hull vibrated beneath them with the power of the ship’s main engines, two steam turbines driving a huge reduction gear and the single spiral-bladed screw. The wake boiled up astern. The wind blew in the officers’ faces, making communication possible only through screaming. Devilfish rocked in the waves, five degrees to port, then back to starboard. The periscopes rotated, the radar mast whistled as it spun in circles, the flags crackled in the wind and the bow wave roared. Usually the sounds of getting under way filled Pacino’s soul with a near-pure contentment. Today, all he could think about was his father, and a Russian admiral that had put him on the bottom.
CHAPTER 7
In the winter, the polar ice almost reached the northern Russian coast. An icebreaker had to clear the way for the fleet submarine Kaliningrad to get under way, and now it proceeded at full speed under the icecap. Admiral Alexi Novskoyy unpacked his duffel bag into the spacious lockers of the commanding officer’s quarters. Captain 1st Rank Yuri Vlasenko had been surprised by Novskoyy’s arrival on the pier, saying he had not had time to arrange conveniences for an admiral and his staff. Novskoyy had waved the protests aside. There would be no staff, just himself. Vlasenko had quickly given over his captain’s stateroom, where the admiral was now settling in.
A knock came at the door of the outer room of the stateroom suite, which led to the second-compartment passageway.
Novskoyy shut the lockers and unlocked the outer room door.
Standing in the passageway was Captain Vlasenko, dressed in his underway uniform of olive green tunic over pants tucked into boots. Novskoyy waved him into the suite, pointed to a seat and locked the door after him. Vlasenko was a short but powerful man, a champion wrestler at the Marshal Grechko Higher Naval School of Underwater Navigation. His shoulders were so big that his uniforms required special tailoring. Now in his late forties, he was losing a little of his muscle tone. His once blond hair was now grayish silver and wrinkles surrounded his eyes.
Vlasenko stared for a moment at Novskoyy’s hip, where the admiral wore a gleaming leather belt, a shining holster and a fleet-issue semiautomatic pistol. Just as on the Leningrad, Vlasenko remembered, feeling the bile rise. The man affected airs like the American general he’d read about what was his name? Patton, wore pearl-handled revolvers like a fancy cowboy… “Sir,” he began, “I came to invite you on an inspection of the ship.”
Novskoyy smiled slightly at Vlasenko. Why would his old subordinate offer to parade him through the ship he had designed himself? All the credit belonged to him. Vlasenko was the captain only as a result of his benevolence.
“No, I have no time for a tour. I have urgent fleet work, Captain. And besides, I know this ship better than any man alive, including you. I will assume — I will demand — that it is combat ready. Your job. Captain. Dismissed.”
Vlasenko stared at the admiral, managed to nod and leave. As he stood in the passageway, he heard Novskoyy lock the door from the inside. Vlasenko tried to fight down his anger. Declining a ship tour with the captain was an insult, a violation of protocol for a visiting admiral. Vlasenko wondered just what this trip meant. Kaliningrad’s original agenda of machinery tests for sea trials had been cancelled by Novskoyy the moment he had come onboard. Taking an untested vessel under the icecap for a mission was not only unprecedented, it could be suicidal. And Novskoyy was acting like he was in command of the submarine. Vlasenko felt like a First Officer instead of ship’s captain. He concentrated on the ship’s inspection. Novskoyy’s ride wouldn’t last long — in a week or two he would go back to fleet HQ, leaving him in command of the most modern nuclear attack submarine in the Russian Northern Fleet. At least an inspection would get him out of his closet of a stateroom to where he could talk to the men, the kind of walk around that the arrogant Novskoyy would never bother with.
Vlasenko walked out of the First Officer’s stateroom, now that Novskoyy had appropriated his own suite, and moved along a narrow passageway lined by bleached panelling toward the starboard side of the vessel that terminated at the main shaft, the fore-and-aft running upper-level passageway. At the intersection was the ladder to the main escape pod, an enormous 7-meter-diameter titanium ellipsoid. The Kaliningrad, so automated that a relatively few enlisted ratings were required aboard, was manned by 18 officers, 13 warrant officers and 16 enlisted men. In an emergency the main escape pod, accessed from the second compartment upper level, would be able to evacuate about 30 of the ship’s 47 men. The rest would use the control-compartment escape pod, which was designed for 18 men. But many of the Kaliningrad’s missions were under ice, where an escape pod was useless.