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Vaughn was a tall man who would be thought of as skinny were it not for a very slight but expanding paunch above the belt of his khakis. His face was thin to gaunt, his hair thick if prematurely gray. The gray, Vaughn claimed, was from dealing with a teenage daughter, but fleet rumors held that the escape from the Chinese piers had changed the mostly black mane to nearly white. Vaughn still spoke with a west-Texas accent, his home till the day he left for Annapolis, the home of the high-school sweetheart he had married the day after graduation. Rumor held that he had a tendency to clomp around the ship in cowboy boots at sea, though Pacino had yet to see it in person. Vaughn’s nickname “Lube Oil” was a holdover from an incident during his junior officer tour on the Detroit when he himself had tried to repair a hopeless lube-oil pump and had succeeded just before flooding the lower level with oil. Vaughn hated the moniker but carried it with good humor.

Vaughn, looking over the BPS-14 radar console, had already, Pacino noted, started on his at-sea beard. Pacino would humor him. After hearing about Vaughn’s performance on the Tampa, he had requested him as XO but it had taken time to pry him away from a shore tour teaching seamanship at the Academy, where the admiral in command had taken a liking to him and had been reluctant to let him leave. When he had reported aboard it had seemed a shame that it would be too late to go to sea with him, but now Pacino would have that chance. The two men had become close friends, seeing eye to eye on most things concerned with driving the ship and leading the men. So far their differences were on administrative matters, Vaughn a stickler for details, a perfectionist when it came to pushing Navy paper, while Pacino had always been relatively casual about the mountains of paperwork. Two weeks before, Vaughn had tracked Pacino to a remote office in the shipyard to obtain his signature on an oil-and-water report to some obscure squadron bureaucrat. Pacino had wadded up the report and made a hook shot into a trash can. “You ought to try not sending these reports, XO, and see who squawks when they’re late. My bet is that you could throw away ninety percent of them and the recipients would never know the difference.” But even in this the two had forged a working relationship—while the reports stopped coming across Pacino’s desk they still left the ship on time as Vaughn began to sign and send them without Pacino’s signature. It was all fine with Pacino, who had high on his list the elimination of much of the submarine’s paperwork as soon as he took over as COMSUBLANT.

Vaughn glanced up now at Pacino, showing pleasure at escaping the shipyard and getting back to sea.

“We’re set to bust this joint. Skipper,” Vaughn drawled, handing Pacino a briefing sheet with a tabulation of the river’s levels and currents, the tides in the sea-lane past Nor folk, and the weather report. “Court’s got the conn on the bridge, we’re manned belowdecks and the yardbirds are ready to winch us out of the bathtub as soon as you’re on the bridge.”

“Status of the reactor?” Pacino asked, pocketing the data sheet and grabbing a safety harness and strapping it on.

“Been a while since I asked. Hobart was complaining about your emergency orders but he should be warming the turbine generators about now.”

Pacino grinned and reached for a phone handset. “Maneuvering, Captain.”

“Maneuvering, Engineer, sir,” Hobart’s voice replied.

“Where we at, Eng? I want to drive out on our own steam.”

“If you’ll just hold your horses, there. Captain, I would have called you. We should be switching to a normal full-power lineup in about twenty minutes, then I’ll be cooling the diesel. It should be shut down in another hour.”

“No. As soon as you unload the diesel, shut it down. The fumes and noise are screwing up the bridge watch.”

Pure heresy. Submariners protected the emergency diesel above all else. Hobart paused, obviously unhappy, acknowledged and hung up.

“Must be pretty important,” Vaughn said, still leaning over the radar display. “You gonna brief us once we’re out?”

“That will take all of two minutes,” Pacino said, cinching up the final strap of his safety harness and reaching for the heavy parka. “Once we clear the Norfolk traffic separation scheme, gather the officers in the wardroom. Chiefs too. This will be a trip.”

Vaughn turned to the navigator. “Nav, you ready?”

“First fix is in,” the navigator said from the plotting table.

“It’s off by maybe ten feet. Not bad on a global basis.”

“See you at sea, XO. Take care of these guys.”

Pacino left through the open door forward, the steep and narrow staircase leading up to the upper level, past the galley door to the long passageway set at the ship’s centerline.

He strapped his binoculars around his neck and climbed the ladder to the hatch set high in the arch of the overhead, the thick steel of the circular hatch rotated up and over by hydraulics.