Friday, May 6
Lieutenant junior grade Anthony Pacino cut the engine of the old Corvette, the self-doubt and fear infecting him despite the colors of the ribbon of the Navy Cross shining over his left breast pocket.
He looked down at the ribbon for a moment. It sat there, next to the national service ribbon and below his airborne wings, the ribbon a simple blue field with a small stripe of white in the center. He’d shown up at his last command without wearing the ribbon, still feeling unworthy of the medal, the full citation itself so classified that his service jacket would only say the bare bones of the reason for the medal: “Awarded for classified action in the service of the U.S. Submarine Force during a mission in which Midshipman First Class A. M. Pacino—at great risk to his own life and without regard for his personal safety—performed a heroic sacrifice that saved the lives of three crewmembers.” Pacino had insisted once to his father that an award like that should be given for more than just saving a few people.
But when he’d reported for Submarine School without wearing the ribbon, he’d gotten the reprimand of his life from visiting Vice Admiral Rob Catardi, the former captain of Piranha and one of the three whom Pacino had saved, who had nominated Pacino for the award and told him quietly and intensely that not wearing his Navy Cross dishonored the day Pacino had done what he did. What he’d had to do. So Pacino had worn the ribbon on his uniform ever since, not so much for himself or Navy regulations, but for Rob Catardi.
It occurred to Pacino then that his storied father had earned the medal himself twice, both times with citations too classified to tell anyone about and both times from incidents in which his submarines sank with most of their crews lost. Perhaps, Pacino thought, that was the thread that bound him and his father together—not their mutual suffering or their struggles in the submarine force, but that something in their karma seemed to demand that they survive catastrophes while the people around them died, with the twisted result that they would be honored by a Navy that couldn’t see the reality of their losses and only rewarded courage rather than victory.
Not that it mattered. Today was Friday, the sixth of May. His orders required him to report to the Naval Security Group U.S. Submarine Force—“NavSecGru SubFor”—at 1300 and get a security indoctrination, and when that was complete, report aboard the submarine USS Vermont at or around 1500. That was odd, he thought, in a Navy where seemingly everything important started well before dawn and new orders required reporting aboard on a Monday. He found the nondescript building marked only with the number “112” and handed his identification to a guard stationed behind heavy glass with only a slot for the ID card. He scanned his fingerprints and put his eyes up to the retinal scanner. The guard handed back his military ID and the entrance door clicked open. Pacino pushed through it, the steel door heavier than it looked.
A scowling first class petty officer waited for him. He wore the NWU Navy working uniform with its odd-looking multi-color digital camouflage print pattern and multiple pockets with combat boots and a cloth cover, the uniform new since Pacino had graduated from the academy. The petty officer didn’t salute but just escorted Pacino to a cramped, sparsely furnished cinderblock-walled room with only a metal table, metal chairs and a camera in the corner watching him, the dingy space looking like something from a Detroit police station’s interrogation room. The sailor left and shut the door, leaving Pacino to wait. He stared at the wall and for the first time all day, allowed himself to think about her. About Carrie Alameda. Today, like so many days, he was still sleepwalking in shock, almost a year after that night in Boston.
Lieutenant Commander and Engineer Carolyn Alameda had been his mentor on his long first class midshipman cruise on the Seawolf-class submarine USS Piranha, at first a hostile and harsh taskmaster, but softening later as he demonstrated capability in his diving officer qualifications and the studies of the submarine. They’d had to share a stateroom, and soon they both became aware of their mutual attraction, which they had both tried to keep locked down, but it had been a compelling force of nature. He would never forget the first time she had let her guard down enough to give him a smoldering look, igniting a desire in him he’d never experienced. Getting orders to evacuate the Piranha had been both a disappointment and a relief to Pacino—disappointment because he wanted to be with the submarine when she sailed into harm’s way, into genuine combat, but a relief that leaving Alameda behind would avoid them both getting disciplined by “Big Navy” for fraternization, a Naval Academy conduct offense for him but a full-blown court martial for her.
Carolyn Alameda had been unconscious and half-drowned when he had found her after his foolish re-entry into the doomed hull. The miracle of their rescue at the hands of the Royal Navy at first seemed like the universe smiling down upon both of them. Despite the prohibition of U.S. Navy Regulations, Pacino had secretly started to see her on weekends at grad school in Boston, when she would come up from DC, avoiding having him visit her in the town where seemingly everyone was military, where their relationship would raise eyebrows.
For a long moment in Pacino’s life, everything seemed so perfect. Carrie Alameda’s career was going into high gear and Pacino was celebrating completing his master’s thesis, only waiting for his advisor’s nod before graduating and going on to the Navy’s nuclear training program.
And then this brief ray of sunshine turned into black darkness. Carrie had been visiting him at the humble walk-up apartment he shared with two other grad students on Newbury Street in Back Bay Boston. They’d finished dinner, enjoying having the apartment to themselves with Pacino’s roommates out of town for the long Memorial Day weekend. Pacino had carried off the dishes and poured a Merlot for Carrie and three fingers of Balvenie scotch for himself and joined her on the sofa.
“Anthony,” she’d said, looking into his eyes, “I never asked you this. I didn’t want to upset you. But somehow now seems the right time.”
He looked at her, raising an eyebrow.
She went on. “When we were in the deep submergence vehicle and being rescued, you were clinically dead for a while. While you were, you know, out of it, did you see anything?”
Pacino nodded solemnly. “The more time that goes by,” he said haltingly, “the dimmer the memory gets and the more unreal it seems. By now, I only remember a few fragments, and what I do remember seems more like a fever dream than an experience.”
“What did you see,” she asked, her hand moving up to caress his face. “What happened?”
“I was watching myself from a distance for the whole rescue. I saw the DSV’s emergency ascent. I saw the inside of the rescue submersible. I could feel the Royal Navy commander’s thoughts and emotions. I saw the DSV surface. I saw the guys coming in the hatch to take us out. I saw the operating room. They were trying to resuscitate me, without any luck. Then a big black tunnel appeared, sucked me into it. I lost track of time, but I felt like I was inside for a few hours. Something happened while I was in there, and as much as I try, I can’t remember what it was, and it seems important, but it’s like trying to grab a cloud. And then I guess the tunnel sort of spit me back out into the rescue ship. From behind, I saw Colleen leaning over to look at my body and in an instant, I was back in my body again. I opened my eyes and I’m staring right at Colleen, blinking away the visions, trying to understand what the hell had happened.”
Carrie’s lovely smile shone on him for just a moment, then faded. Her face froze, then went blank, and her eyes rolled up into her head. She slumped over and fell to the floor, the wine glass breaking, the red wine spilling in a pool around her unmoving body.
Pacino rushed to kneel over her, trying to find her pulse, which was weak but present. He frantically pulled her into a fireman’s carry, grabbed his wallet, phone and keys and raced down four flights of stairs with her on his shoulder, hardly noticing how he was panting from the exertion. He unlocked his car and poured her into the passenger seat, slapped the seatbelt on her and roared off toward Mass General Back Bay, the emergency room entrance he had driven past a hundred times. He dialed 911 as he drove, barking at the operator to have a team standing by at the ER. He rounded a corner at a red light, the old Corvette’s tires slipping on the streets wetted by an evening drizzle. Finally, he skidded to a halt at the emergency entrance, set the parking brake and left the car running while he ran to the passenger side, pulled her out and carried her into the ER, where the crash team waited with a gurney. He was following when an administrator pulled him away to move his car. He opened his mouth to argue but realized he was blocking an ambulance. He ran to the car, threw it into gear, found what passed for parking in the absurdly crowded lot, then dashed back into the emergency room entrance.
He was forced to wait in misery and shock for what seemed hours, the nurses and administrators refusing to let him back to where Carolyn Alameda lay unconscious in surgery. When the sweat-soaked surgeon walked out, Pacino could see by his expression the news. “I’m sorry, Mr. Pacino, she had a brain aneurism and it was catastrophic. We couldn’t save her. There’s no telling whether the trauma from that submarine incident had caused this or if it were completely unrelated. It could have been waiting to happen for five years, or it could have started developing five weeks ago.”
It seemed so unreal. One moment, the most solid, real, dear person in his universe was speaking warmly to him, and the next she was gone, as if she’d never existed.
He couldn’t remember the day of the wake and the funeral the same way he remembered most things. Unlike the mental video of a normal memory, Carrie’s funeral was just a flash of a hundred intense images—
Her open coffin with her in her uniform with her rows of medals and her gold submarine dolphins, her cap tucked under her arm. Her face resting, as if she were sleeping, that constellation of beautiful freckles sprinkled around her nose, one of the first things Pacino had noticed about her.
A large framed photograph propped up on an easel behind her showing her in dress whites, smiling and standing next to then-Commander Robert Catardi with the gigantic hull of the USS Piranha behind her. Other framed photos of Alameda as a youngster, running track in high school, graduating as a midshipman from Annapolis, all of them showing her brilliant smile, her straight white teeth and singular beauty of her soul shining out in all of them.
The enormous crowd of officers present in the church, both senior and junior, and the enlisted men and women of her former submarine Toledo. Her brothers, one a Marine lieutenant, the other an Air Force colonel. Her grief-stricken father, struggling on a walker with an oxygen bottle attached to it, the Tygon tubing extending from the bottle over his ears to his nose.
The size of the cathedral where the service was conducted, candles lit everywhere. Pacino’s father sitting next to him, the old man’s suit seeming somehow odd when Pacino had always seen him in his officer’s uniform. His mother on the other side of him, holding his hand. Missing, for some reason, was his father’s wife Colleen, who had not been herself since the Explorer II rescue.
The graveside service was held in a dreary cold June rain. The time came to leave in his father’s black town car. His mind drifted during the ride to his father’s house in Annapolis. He heard the clink of a highball glass as it hit the copper surface of the bar in front of the Annapolis house’s stone fireplace, then the sound of the scotch pouring into the glass. From miles away, he sensed the smoky taste of the whisky as it cascaded down his throat. Then more and more until finally his father half-carried him to the guest bedroom.
He woke up the next morning, not knowing where he was. His father stood in the kitchen, tall and gaunt, pouring him a steaming cup of hot black coffee. His father stole a glance at him to see if he were okay, and the answer coming that he most assuredly was not.
The phone call came in from the detailer putting him into a later nuclear power school class and instructing him to take two months off, somehow knowing how hard this had hit him despite the secrecy of the affair, perhaps Pacino’s father having intervened. The days passed, one blurring into the next, Pacino running on the cobblestone streets of the bayside village before sunrise, numbly sitting on the eastern deck staring out at the sailboats on the Chesapeake in the afternoon, quietly drinking scotch with his father in the evening and watching the sun set from the western deck.
Sometimes, when Pacino remembered their last conversation, he wondered at the timing of it. Did Carrie instinctively know she had only minutes left? Did she see the opening of that tunnel behind him as he spoke to her?
His last night at the Annapolis house, he packed his seabag and got ready to leave. It was time to return to his life. He’d reported to Navy Nuclear Power School and buried himself inside the studies and the twelve-hour days. After half a year of that, six months of nuclear prototype, where he studied, qualified on and operated a live submarine nuclear reactor plant. Then three months of submarine school, where he realized that his time on Piranha had taught him most of what they were trying to teach, with the exception of the tactics of how to sneak up on an enemy submerged contact and kill it before it realized it was being stalked. He took a week of leave and spent it at his father’s house, then loaded his scratched and dented ancient Corvette with the modern engine and rolled it south to his newly leased apartment in Virginia Beach, commutable to Norfolk Naval Station, where his orders instructed him to report aboard his new permanent duty station, the new Block IV Virginia-class submarine Vermont.
This morning, a sun-drenched day in May, he donned his starched tropical white uniform with the shoulderboards of a junior grade lieutenant and the damned Navy Cross—but notably and sadly missing gold submarine dolphins that he had yet to earn and which could take over a year to be granted. And not having those dolphins while onboard a submarine would make him a second-class citizen, as berated and dismissed as he had been when he’d reported aboard Piranha as a lowly midshipman a million years ago. And now he’d experience the same strangeness of starting a new life chapter on Vermont. He took a deep breath and consciously brought himself back to the moment. With an effort, he tried to fold up and put away all thoughts of Carrie Alameda, to compartmentalize his feelings, and to some extent over the last month he’d been able to do that, but doing so seemed to drain his energy and leave him with a heavy depressed feeling. He remembered when his father’s wife Eileen had suddenly died in an interstate accident, the old man had been the same way, almost in a walking dead, power-saver mode. It had taken a war that the old man was losing to knock him out of that funk.
The door to the interview room clicked, then opened, revealing a short, corpulent man in his sixties. He shuffled in, wearing over-stuffed pants and vest from a suit, the vest open, an out-of-fashion tie at half mast, the tie bearing a dime-sized stain on it, the man smelling of stale cigarette smoke. Pacino stood to shake his hand, but the gruff man waved him to a seat. He rubbed his hand over his bald scalp and opened a briefcase to withdraw a folder full of papers and a tablet computer.
“I’m Barsky, head of submarine security at SubFor. This meeting is to indoctrinate you into a program. The program’s name itself is top secret. So first, sign here.” The first paper slid across the desk. Pacino scanned it. The paper itself was marked as Top Secret—Fractal Chaos, whatever that meant. It was legalese but amounted to one long threat of life imprisonment or execution if even a minor breach of security could be tied to him. In the event of a major security breach, he’d be treated as an enemy combatant, stripped of his citizenship and Constitutional rights and either tossed into a black program cell or summarily executed. Pacino looked up at Barsky and lifted an eyebrow. “Sign it,” the harsh man said, “or your submarine career ends right now.” Pacino shrugged and signed the nondisclosure agreement in quadruplicate. “That just entitles you to be read into the program, which is named—and the name is special compartmented information, SCI, top secret codeword material—Fractal Chaos—and that codeword is three levels above the classification top secret. You’re aware that SCI material includes the nation’s most closely guarded secrets? Some of them so secret that only a few people know about them?”
Pacino nodded gravely, and the next hour was simply more of the same. He signed more forms, each more graphically threatening than the last, a few of the final agreements not committed to physical paper, but only on Barsky’s tablet computer. The last forms required him to submit knowingly and willingly to any kind of electronic surveillance on himself at any time and to surrender his Fourth Amendment rights, agreeing to any kind of physical search of himself, his home or his possessions at any time. Pacino signed it, beginning to understand why his father had been so closed-mouthed about the operations of his submarines.
Finally, Barsky stood and waved him to the door. A different petty officer, as dour as the first one, waited and escorted him down the corridors to the entrance door, which slammed behind him. He climbed back in the Corvette and drove it to the officer parking lot for Pier 22, home of Squadron Eight and Submarine Development Group Twelve. This late in the day, the open parking spaces were a long way from the pier. He walked to the pier security building that displayed a large emblem of an angry shark pushing a billiards eight-ball, the logo of Squadron Eight, a separate emblem for SubDevGru 12, an image of King Neptune, his chest armor bearing the numeral 12. Pacino produced his identification, rescanned his fingerprints and submitted to the retinal scan. He put the contents of his pockets in a dog bowl that was scanned by the equipment. He walked through the millimeter wave body scanner, then collected his personal items. The guard pointed to his phone. “Your ship will be collecting that from you when you get to it, so any calls, texts or emails, you should send out now.”
“I’m good,” Pacino said, taking the phone and walking out into the early May sunshine to the long and wide concrete runway of the pier. He could see the ship in the distance. The pier was empty except for her. Perhaps an operational tempo surge or exercises were going on, but Vermont was the only submarine at the pier, her sister ships from the squadron at sea. He paused a few shiplengths away to look at her. As usual with nuclear attack submarines, there wasn’t much to see. Just a simple cigar-shaped black cylinder with a vertical conning tower—the sail—presiding over the bow, a number of masts pointing to the sky emerging out of the sail. The sloping hull aft angled into the brackish water of the slip, the rudder sticking straight up farther aft. Doubled up heavy lines bound the sub to the pier, coiling from the bollards on the concrete jetty to the cleats on the top of the ship’s hull. The hull itself was covered in a black, spongy, rubbery coating to avoid bouncing back sonar pings. A gangway, the brow, extended from the pier to the hull, and a banner was tied to the brow’s structure, reading USS VERMONT, SSN-792.
The ship’s seal was affixed to the banner. It showed an attack sub on the surface, a fragment of a Betsy Ross American flag, an image fragment of a square-rigged sailing vessel on the left, and on the right, the 1907 Connecticut-class battleship USS Vermont, BB-20, in the background, then below the sub image, gold and silver submarine dolphins, the seal’s written motto reading, “Vermont—Freedom & Unity.”
Pacino paused, remembering what little he knew about her, the information passed on by his father at one of their cocktail hours. Vermont was what the Navy called a “project boat.” By that, it meant that her missions were “special projects” or operations so secret that they couldn’t be spoken of aloud. She didn’t report like the other boats to the squadron commander or even to the normal command structure of the force, but directly to the National Security Council and to POTUS, the President of the United States.
He walked up to the topside watch sentry, a second-class petty officer in crackerjack dress blues with gleaming silver dolphins and a splash of ribbons above his pocket, the name badge reading WATSON. His emblem showed the symbol of a ship’s propeller, so he was one of the mechanical personnel onboard. Petty Officer Watson came to attention and saluted, and Pacino rigidly returned the salute.
Before he could announce himself, Watson said in a deep South accent, squinting, “You’re Lieutenant Pacino, reportin’ aboard, right?”
Pacino nodded. “How’d you know?”
Watson smirked. “Ain’t ever’ day the son of the Chief of Naval Operations himself walks aboard your ship, and a nub non-qual airbreathin’ puke at that.”
Pacino smiled despite the friendly insult. “Dad’s long retired,” he said. “And I’m just another non-qual junior officer.”
Watson seemed to appreciate Pacino’s humility. He half-smiled. “I’ll need to see your orders, Mr. Pacino, and your identification.”
Pacino took his phone from his back pocket and pulled up his digital orders, the terse text only directing him to report to the NavSecGru and then Vermont, SSN-792. Watson looked it over and compared it to what was displayed on his pad computer. Pacino handed over his identification. Watson put the identification card into a scanner while he held up a portable retinal scanner. After a few seconds, he seemed satisfied at the readout.
“I’ll need your phone,” Watson said. Pacino handed it over. Watson opened a washing machine-sized cabinet and put the phone into a drawer inside. “Faraday cage,” he said. “No signals going out or coming in. You can pick it up when you leave the ship for the day. The yeoman will have a pad computer waiting for you onboard—but remember, it never leaves the ship.”
Watson pulled a VHF radio from his belt. “Duty Officer, Topside.” The radio hissed with static. It took a moment for the duty officer to answer. While he waited, Pacino looked up at Vermont’s sail and saw the other topside watchstander, whose combat-helmeted head protruded from a cubbyhole on top of the tall fin, the man’s high-powered rifle visible. A sniper, Pacino thought. Defense from an invasion, assuming a commando force could penetrate the pier security. Odds were, though, he thought, any commandos would come from the sea, not the shore. Out in the slip between the piers on the starboard side, a heavily armed Coast Guard small boat patrolled slowly, a second one on the other side of the jetty toward the cruiser piers.
Watson’s radio finally clicked with the deep voice of an authoritative young man. “Duty Officer.”
“Sir, Mr. Pacino is here.”
“Roger, copy, on my way.”
A stocky officer in working khakis appeared from the canvas tent over the aft hatch, making Pacino feel out of uniform since he himself wore tropical whites, his shirt and pants white, his hat—his cover—white, and even his belt and shoes white. Tropical whites were the more formal summer uniform, for reporting aboard. The officer approaching had the double silver bars of a full lieutenant on his collars, gold submarine dolphins above his pocket, a key on an elaborate chain around his neck, his name badge reading, DANKLEFF. He was half a head shorter than Pacino, dark-complected, with pockmarked skin showing a distinct five o-clock shadow and wore thick-lensed glasses with thick black rims. Pacino came to attention and saluted, and the duty officer waved a sloppy salute back. He reached out and shook Pacino’s hand, smiling with what seemed genuine joy to meet him.
“I’m Dieter Dankleff,” he said. “I’ll be your sea daddy for the next few weeks.”
“Anthony Pacino,” Pacino said. “Glad to meet you.”
“‘Patch,’ right?” Dankleff asked.
Pacino nodded. “Patch,” his father’s nickname, had seemed to stick to him as well.
“Put this on your belt,” Dankleff ordered, handing Pacino a small black plastic cylinder the size of a cigarette lighter. “Thermoluminescent dosimeter, to be worn at all times on your belt to record your cumulative radiation dose. Even if you’re aboard in civilian clothes, the dosimeter goes on your belt.” Pacino strapped the dosimeter to his belt. “Now, come with me. The captain and exec are waiting for you below.”
Dankleff walked across the gangway, turning to salute the American flag flying aft. Pacino did the same, then stepped off the gangway onto the spongy hull of the submarine, the foam coating glued to the high tensile steel for sound quieting and minimization of returned sonar pings. Aft of the sail, the conning tower, there were two hatches. The forward one had a scaffold-and-canvas “dog house” over it with the emblem of the Navy SEALs—sea/air/land commandos—and was surrounded by a locked chain. Farther aft, a larger dog house had the emblem of the ship on it. Dankleff walked to the aft doghouse, opened the curtain and stepped inside. Pacino followed him into the relative gloom. Inside the doghouse was a huge hatch, twice the size of the hatchway on the Piranha. As if Dankleff knew what he was thinking, he said, “Plug trunk. Bigger hatch to load bigger things without making hull cuts, like widescreen flat panels. Usually, our access is through the lockout hatch forward, but the SEALs have that tied up, what with getting all their shit loaded in.”
“Down ladder,” Dankleff called, then lowered himself into the trunk. Pacino followed, the bright light of the outside world vanishing, traded for the florescent lighting inside the 15-foot-wide cylinder. Inside, it resembled the escape trunk he’d used to leave the Piranha. And to come back inside it, he thought. Dankleff waved him through a large vertical hatch that opened into the aft part of forward compartment upper level. Pacino noticed the smell was exactly the same as Piranha or his father’s boats—an oily mix of cooking grease, amine atmospheric control chemicals, and ozone from the electrical equipment. It made his head spin for just a moment, the scent bringing back both the Piranha and Carrie Alameda so strongly it was if she stood right next to him.
Just like onboard the forward spaces of the Piranha, bulkheads forming the tight passageway were covered with a wood trim laminated coating in the few places where there were no panels, junction boxes, cable runs, piping or valves. Unlike the Piranha, on top of the deck of the passageways were twelve-inch diameter tin cans of food, jammed tight and overlaid with sheets of half-inch plywood, making the overhead a foot closer. Pacino had to slouch down to get through the passageway. He followed as Dankleff continued into a narrow passageway forward and ducked down a stairway to the middle level of the forward compartment. Pacino followed him, stepping off into the crew’s mess, which was oddly deserted. The deck was visible here—no plywood or tin cans. Tables and benches were gathered, café style, with a long food service line. Behind it the packed galley was likewise empty. Dankleff walked forward into the forward passageway, where the cans-and-plywood resumed, past a second set of steep stairs, where there was a door marked “XOSR,” for the executive officer’s stateroom.
“Listen, Patch, the XO is Lieutenant Commander Quinnivan, on exchange from the Royal Navy’s fast attack sub force. Good guy, but tougher than grandma’s leftover steak. In command is Commander Seagraves, who makes Quinnivan seem warm and fuzzy by comparison. So good luck in there,” he said, “and welcome aboard. I just hope you’re braced for a wild ride.”
Before Pacino could ask what he meant, Dankleff reached up and knocked on the executive officer’s door.