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He stubbed out the cigarette butt on his shoe, put it in his pocket, and lit a second one. “I want to invite you to my house this weekend to meet my wife Natalia. We’ll cook up something delicious and talk about the new submarine. Just promise not to tell her I’ve started smoking again.” He laughed. “When she smells smoke on me, I tell her it’s from that degenerate, Kovalov.”

“Admiral,” Trusov said, glancing for a moment at the model sub on the gravestone. “This new submarine. Does it have a name yet?”

Alexeyev shook his head. “Only a project number, why?”

“Admiral, I want to be the one to name it.”

Alexeyev smiled. “Do you have anything in mind, Irina?”

She answered immediately. “Mest.”

“Revenge,” Alexeyev said. “I like it already.”

* * *

Lieutenant Commander Tiny Tim Fishman slowly and carefully lowered himself through the open plug trunk hatch of the wreck of the USS New Jersey, switched on his helmet camera, then turned to wait for Grip Aquatong, Scooter Tucker-Santos and Swan Oneida to swim in after him. Once his crew were all inside, Fishman swam through the side hatch into what had once been the forward compartment upper level. He accepted the light unit from Aquatong, set it in place, and turned it on, the strong illumination able to show the entire interior of the forward compartment, or what was left of it. The compartment was only partially a compartment — anything forward of Frame 40 had been blown to shards by the weapons explosion, and the middle third of the compartment was almost unrecognizable, just piles of rubble. The aft third of the compartment seemed to be less damaged, its three decks visible and still standing, and might yield what they were seeking.

Fishman swam down to the blown apart middle level, shining his flashlight left and right, eventually finding an intact passageway aft of what had been the control room, which no longer existed. Down the passageway, he found what he was looking for — the safe in the captain’s stateroom. He accepted the torch handed him by Aquatong, lit it and began torching through the metal of the safe. It wouldn’t matter if the torch destroyed the contents — that was the mission, to destroy the top secret and higher material to save it from any Russian salvage.

A few minutes later, Fishman and Aquatong had pulled the contents of the captain’s safe and the XO’s safe into a bag. The control room safe no longer existed, nor did the wardroom’s safe, but there was a double safe in the sonar equipment space and another in radio. It didn’t take long to see that the radio room and SES were blown to splinters by the torpedo room explosion. It was possible the safes had survived and had just been blown out into the surrounding ocean, but finding them would be for a later mission. This dive was for the low hanging fruit of the intact safes, and tablet computers, if any were visible in the rubble of the wreckage. And there was one other reason passed down from Admiral Catardi, the chief of naval operations.

Fishman and Aquatong swam aft into what had been the crew’s mess and the galley. It was pure chaos, debris scattered everywhere. Then they saw what they were looking for. The door to the frozen stores locker, normally a huge space the size of half a railroad boxcar, storing the food for 120 people for four months. Fishman tried the handle, but it was stuck. He called for the torch and torched off the latching mechanism, then opened the door and shined his light inside. The interior had minimal damage, he noted, just a ruptured area at the top port side.

To the right of the door, Fishman found the bodies, neatly stacked, each in a body bag. He counted twenty-four bodies. He pulled out the body on top and floated it over to Aquatong, who in turn passed it to Tucker-Santos and Oneida. It took ten minutes to pull all the bodies out. Oneida and Tucker-Santos lashed the bodies into a long line so they could be withdrawn from the plug trunk hatch without losing anyone or jamming up the hatch.

Tucker-Santos and Oneida left the hull and received the bodies up above as Fishman and Aquatong handed them up. All four SEALs then grabbed their propulsion units, making sure the bodies would stay tethered, and propelled over to the hull of the Hyman G. Rickover for the trip to the next dive site. Assuming good luck in locating the wreck, the next dive would be to the Russian deep-diver Losharik, then on to Belgorod to see if any of the Poseidon torpedoes had survived. If they did, Rickover’s mission was to bring them to AUTEC for dismantlement and study.

There had been debate about whether to bury New Jersey’s dead at sea, but Admiral Catardi’s directives were to bring them home. He didn’t want any of New Jersey’s dead to lie under polar ice, he’d said.

Inside the dry-deck shelter’s decompression chamber, Fishman pulled off his dive mask.

“Tough day at sea,” he said to Aquatong, who just stared glumly at the deck.