Attack of the Seawolf

“Aft compartment. This ship is built with the mechanics in mind — we can rig out virtually any piece of equipment without cutting open the hull, with the exception of the turbines and reduction gear. The motor control room is forward with the reactor control electronics. Those forward turbines are the SSTGs and the aft ones are the main engines.”

The turbines were also big, but Pacino was getting used to the ship’s scale. Still, the main engines, their counterparts only five feet in diameter on Devilfish, were fully a deck-and-a half tall, and the reduction gear casing was even larger. The room was hot and humid from the steam plant but not nearly as humid as on Pacino’s previous boats.

Aft of the reduction gear was the enclosed maneuvering room. Pacino was interrogating Keebes on the procedure to shift from natural circulation to forced flow when the maneuvering phone rang. Keebes answered, listened, hung up.

“Admiral Donchez wants us in the wardroom, sir. Time for the change-of-command.”

Pacino nodded and followed Keebes forward, wondering how long it would take to get used to this new giant. And then, just for a moment, he felt dwarfed by her. Better get over that, he told himself.

CHAPTER 10 FRIDAY. 10 MAY 0125 GREENWICH MEAN TIME

YOKOSUKA NAVAL STATION, PIER 4

USS SEAWOLF

1025 LOCAL TIME

“Attention on deck!”

The officers and chief petty officers in the wardroom came to attention.

“At ease,” Pacino said, surprised at how confident his voice sounded. He had worried about this moment, wondering how the men would see him, and how he would see them … how he could take men he had never met or trained and take them covertly into enemy territory on a combat mission.

Keebes stopped in front of the first man near the door, a slightly overweight lieutenant commander with an intense expression on his face, dark bags under his eyes, the odor of cigarette smoke strong in the air around him. Pacino had the impression of a man on a collision course with a heart attack.

“This is the engineer, Captain, Lieutenant Commander Ray Linden. With us since we laid down the keel. He knows every valve, cable, pump, pipe and switch of the propulsion plant.”

“Hi, Eng. I hear you’ve got some serious horses under the hood back there.”

“Yes sir,” Linden said, squinting up into Pacino’s eyes, “and they’re ready to gallop.”

“Good. You’ll need to make sure they gallop damned quietly.”

“No problem, sir.”

Keebes led Pacino to the next man, a heavyset lieutenant commander with a tightly trimmed beard covering his fleshy jaw, an open expression set into the lines of his face.

“Lieutenant Commander Bill Feyley, our weapons and combat systems officer.”

“Weps,” Pacino said, shaking Feyley’s hand.

“How did the load out go?”

“We did it in record time, given we started in the early hours of the morning with a burned-out weapons-loading crew. But we’ve got what you wanted.”

“Good. Sonar and firecontrol ready?”

“The best, sir.”

Pacino was about to move on, when something struck him as wrong.

“Weps, about the beard … maybe you should wait till we’re underway before you grow that thing.”

Keebes looked at Pacino.

“They changed that regulation two years ago. Captain Pacino,” Keebes said after a moment.

“Submarine officers rate beards now.”

Pacino nodded quickly … He’d been away too long, he thought.

Pacino had memorized key portions of each man’s service jacket, along with a confidential briefing prepared by Donchez’s staff, including things that would never find their way into the official service records but items that Pacino would need to know in tight situations. Such as that Greg Keebes’s wife had recently left him for a neighbor down the street; that Bill Feyley, the ship’s gentleman bachelor, tended to drink and carouse, habitually waking up in port in the arms of nameless women; that Tim Turner, the sonar firecontrol officer, an amiable man with a fashionable haircut, had recently fought with his live-in girlfriend over spending too much time with the Seawolf and not enough with her. It seemed that in a white-hot moment Turner had taken the keys to the new Trans Am he had given her for her birthday and smashed the car into a dumpster, then tossed the keys back to her saying “Happy birthday, babe.” And there was Rick Brackovic, the reactor-controls officer, who had missed the birth of his second boy the week before, not having been granted emergency leave for it, after missing the birth of his first child just fifteen months earlier. His wife was nearly fed up and contemplating divorce. Each briefing sheet listed the pain these men had suffered on account of their commitment to the submarine force, leaving home for months at a time to take a steel pipe to the bottom of the ocean for reasons that often made no sense to their families. And many of the stories seemed familiar to Pacino, whose own personal life had suffered in his climb to command, at one point nearly forcing him to choose between his submarine and his family.