Terminal Run

9

It was after 0200 Eastern time when Pacino finally entered the engineer’s stateroom. The room was a box less than seven feet on a side, all brown wood grain plastic laminate walls with stainless-steel trim. To the right of the door was a mirror with a fold-down sink on the wall with a dozen cubbyhole doors and hooks with hanging laundry. The bulkhead on the left had two fold-down desks with reading lamps and two steel chairs, with cubbyhole doors above and below. The desk was cluttered with manuals and papers and computer output and several handheld computers. The wall opposite the door contained three sleeper-train-style bunks, each about two feet wide with two feet between the racks, each a coffin like space with a brown privacy curtain. Lieutenant Alameda, in submarine coveralls under a Naval Academy sweatshirt, sat at the desk near the beds. She looked up when Pacino came into the room and smiled for a split second, then frowned at him.

“The aft cubbyhole by your elbow has three poopy-suits in it, nonqual. You can unpack your seabag into it. Your rack is on the bottom. The top rack is for my stuff, and so is the other desk, so don’t count on working in here. Don’t be bashful about changing in front of me, and I won’t around you. If your puritan sensibilities are insulted, that’s tough; this is a combat submarine and it’s just going to be that way.”

Pacino was too tired to react. He nodded and stripped off his uniform and stuffed it into a hanging laundry bag, got on all fours and crawled between the wall and Alameda’s chair to the lower rack, slid aside the curtain and climbed under the covers, then pulled the curtain back and shut off the lamp. He had a momentary thought that he was in a coffin, but he didn’t care.

In his dreams he was watching his father from six-year-old eyes, submerged to test depth on the old sub his father had commanded, and in the mirror was a child staring back at him wearing coveralls with a dolphin pin, and he went into the stateroom and Alameda was there, wearing something filmy and she began kissing him and she climbed into his rack with him.

Lieutenant Carolyn Alameda waited for her pulse to slow, the wait a long, irritable one. As a former five-striper at the Academy, Alameda had always been known for her professionalism and competence. On her first submarine, the Olympia, she had rapidly risen to the station of “bull lieutenant,” the unofficial designation as the ship’s most knowledgeable junior officer — no small task in the man’s world of a nuclear submarine. She had just missed the War of the East China Sea, and having trained for combat her entire adult life, it was her biggest disappointment. The conflict now emerging in the other hemisphere had the potential to break out into a war, but the ship was being sent on what seemed like yet another exercise run. Waiting for a chance at combat was something she could live with, but what she couldn’t tolerate was what was happening to her since the midshipman had come aboard.

All her life Alameda hadn’t felt like her female classmates, who had all been embroiled in chasing boys while Alameda had been more interested in sports and school. Her mother had insisted that a time would come when a man entered her life and she would feel the thunderbolt. Alameda had scoffed, and her relationships with boys had always been unsatisfying. She had resigned herself to a life devoted solely to the Navy until this morning. Until the moment when she climbed to the deck of the Piranha and found Midshipman Pacino waiting topside. She immediately felt like a foolish blushing schoolgirl, and had tried to negate the feeling with a cold professional veneer, but had heard how caustic she had been to the young man and that made her even more self conscious and embarrassed. There was no rational explanation for her feelings, but her mother’s awkward explanation of romantic chemistry was the first thing Alameda thought of — her attraction to the tall, lanky youth made her feel as if she were drunk.