Barracuda: Final Bearing

“Warm up the fish in five and six,” Kane ordered quietly, looking aft toward Pacino’s commandeered stateroom. northwest pacific japanese oparea, off point erimomisaki, hokkaido island USS Piranha Comdr. Bruce Phillips walked into control wearing a multicolored cotton poncho, a dusty Hat-brimmed leather cowboy hat, faded tight jeans, cracked and dirty cowhide cowboy boots and a leather gunbelt with two pearl-handled Smith & Wesson revolvers protruding from the poncho. A hand-rolled cigar was clamped between his teeth, the dirt of a week smeared on his hands and unshaved face.

“Sir,” Peter Meritson said, looking up at Phillips as he mounted the periscope stand, “your boots are violating the rig for ultraquiet. They’re clumping all over the place.”

Phillips stopped his pacing and glared down at Meritson, the sonar officer crisply turned out in his pressed blue coveralls, flag patches on the sleeves, his hair perfect, his face a pleasant triangle that the girls went crazy for, his silver double bars and gold dolphin pin gleaming in the light of the control room, his shoes new black cross-trainers.

For a full thirty seconds Phillips stared down hard at the younger man, then blew a smoke ring in Meritson’s face. He looked around the control room, the displays humming, the fans muted, the section-tracking team members murmuring to each other softly. He clumped into the sonar room, the sonar chief set up in the second control seat of the four-console row. He leaned over the chiefs shoulder. Master Chief Salvatore Gambini sat at the display, his full headset on, his bifocals poised on the end of his nose.

Phillips clapped his hands on Gambini’s shoulder. Gambini was an older Sicilian, a full head of gray hair combed back on his scalp, his face open and fatherly, wrinkling into smile lines, his dark eyes the kind that penetrated. If he liked what he saw, his smile lines crinkled. If he didn’t, his face might as well have been embalmed. “How you doin’ today, Sal?” Phillips asked. He was not one to call a chief, or an officer for that matter, by his first name, but he had made a connection with Gambini that went beyond any professional relationship. Gambini’s file had been rich with detail, perhaps too rich, much of it entered by Admiral Donchez himself. Gambini was too old for the submarine business, having served in attack submarines for a long and distinguished career.

He was now fifty-one and technically not physically qualified in submarines. He had had a bad heart attack during shore duty while teaching the kids out of high school the science of sound propagation and the BSY-2 combatcontrol system’s sonar suite. The result had been an emergency quadruple bypass, more than enough to cashier him from the service, except Gambini’s mind had been too valuable to lose. He had been assigned to the old Pacific Fleet Submarine Command HQ before the submarine force reorganization, before the Muslim war, serving as the command master chief to Comsubpac, the commander of the Pacific Fleet’s submarines. Admiral Donchez. He and Donchez had hit it off, talking over beers in a back street bar away from the base. Gambini and his wife Maureen were prominent at Subpac, giving frequent parties at their seaside home. It had been evident that the two of them were one of those rare married couples who were inseparable, two halves of one soul. At one of the Gambini parties Maureen had buttonholed the admiral and whispered in his ear about how much Gambini missed the submarines.

Donchez had used his powers, being the bureaucracy’s equivalent to a 500-pound gorilla, to reinstate Gambini’s submarine qualification.