Terminal Run

At the turning point from the Thames River into Long Island Sound, Captain Catardi ordered a speed increase. The deck below the bridge had been rigged for dive, with all the line lockers shut and latched, the cleats rotated into the hull, and the hatch shut and dogged. The hull was clean and streamlined. With relatively open water stretching in front of them, the ship’s surface speed rose to thirty knots at all-ahead flank. The vessel’s top speed of forty-nine knots could only be achieved submerged, since the cigar shape of the hull was not efficient at cutting through the surface effect of the waves. The bullet-shaped nose plowed into the sea, the water curving smoothly down on either side of sail and rising back angrily up at the mid-deck, then spreading into a churning white wake a third of a ship length wide extending to the horizon behind them. The flow of the water was hypnotic. Pacino stared at it, watching the bow wave from the crow’s nest viewpoint of the bridge cockpit. Even more impressive than the sight of the wave was its noise, the jet engine roar of it deafening as it cascaded over the bow. The hurricane wind generated by their flank-run surface passage competed with the noise of the bow wave, the wind alone so loud that it would require a man to scream in the ear of a companion to be heard. The sustained shriek of the sea and the wind could lead to fatigue, but in Midshipman Pacino’s case, the noise was music, a song he had heard in his dreams but had lingered just beyond reach. The deck beneath his feet, a grating over the bridge access tunnel to the forward compartment upper level, vibrated violently from the ship’s fight with the bow wave, the trembling of the ship’s thirteen thousand tons testifying to the sheer horsepower pouring out of the propulsor.

An hour into the flank run, a dolphin jumped out of the water at the bow and vanished back into the sea, then returned, his passage a vision of speed. Soon the dolphin was joined by a second one, but after a few minutes they grew bored and disappeared.

Pacino had remained the junior officer of the deck when the maneuvering watch was secured and the surface-transit underway watch section was stationed for the long haul to the dive point. Captain Catardi sat on the top of the sail, dangling his feet into the bridge cockpit, watching Pacino conn the submarine. An hour later, Catardi ordered the flying bridge rails disassembled, and he vanished down the hatch into the access tunnel to the deck thirty-two feet below Pacino’s boots. For the next four hours, Pacino kept the watch with an annoyed Lieutenant Alameda and the lookout behind them, who had his own cubbyhole hatch coming out of the sail.

Behind Pacino the periscopes rotated, one the property of Crossfield, the navigator, the scope rotating to take visual fixes at the bearings to the landscape navigation aids. The second belonged to one of the junior officers, the contact coordinator, whose function was to concentrate on the shipping in the seaway and help Pacino avoid a collision. Further aft of the periscopes the radar antenna rotated slowly in constant circles, reaching out to the coastline and seeing ahead, the blips on its screen the merchant ships far at sea, the navigator and contact coordinator sharing the display hood down in the control room. Further aft of the radar mast, the telephone pole of the AN BRA-44 BIGMOUTH antenna was bumped a few feet out of the sail. Pacino looked around at the seascape, the lush green coastline, the greenish blue of Long Island Sound, the rushing bow wave, and the white of the wake washing by the hull and flowing to the rudder. He raised the binoculars to his eyes and searched the seaway ahead for other vessels, but other than the occasional sailboat, they were alone in the sea. Another hour into the surface run Pacino realized he was as happy as he could ever remember feeling. The vibration of the deck in his boots and the scream of the wind and sea in his ears were the most romantic sensations he’d felt in his life.

He looked over at Alameda’s hard face, half obscured by the bill of her ball cap and her binoculars. He had attempted to penetrate Alameda’s gruff attitude, without success — his father’s words in one of his E-mails coming back to Pacino that some people would hate him for reasons perhaps even they didn’t understand, and to leave them be. He had been more successful with Wcs Crossfield, the serious navigator, who had gone over the charts and line handling commands with Pacino before the underway. It was strange, that the entire ship was divided between these two officers, Alameda running the aft half with the engineering spaces, Crossfield responsible for the operation of the tactical half, the forward spaces with the torpedoes and electronic control and sensor areas. The department heads reported to Catardi and to his second-in-command, the executive officer, called the universal Navy nickname of “XO.”