Attack of the Seawolf

Admiral Richard Donchez followed a midshipman into a cavernous high-bay dimly lit room. Donchez craned his neck looking up at the heavy steel rafters of the room, holding up another set of steel rails above the concrete walls of a large oblong pool. The midshipman led Donchez up steel stairs to a platform overlooking the edge of the tank. The models used for this tank were huge, some of them fifteen or twenty feet long. Below the tow platform with its trailer was a large model submerged below the surface.

Not much of it was visible, but from what Donchez could see, it was a submarine.

“What is this thing?” Donchez asked.

“Tow tank,” the midshipman replied.

“The platform there can move along the rails above the water, dragging a ship model. The computer systems collect the data and use it to evaluate the ship design.”

The sound of the wave generator startled Donchez for a moment. The angled plates at the end of the tank began pulsing, undulating back and forth, the waves building up in the tank until they were some five feet high.

The platform, with its office trailer on top, suddenly accelerated away from them, the drive mechanism whirring loudly. Donchez had to shout over the noise to be heard.

“Like I said,” Donchez reminded his guide, “I need to find Dr. Pacino.”

“He’s either in the control room or on the platform.”

Seconds after it had started, the model test run was over, the wake of the model and the waves in the tank splashing the surface below. Slowly, the model platform began to return to its starting position.

“I think I see someone in the platform control space,” Donchez said as the model platform drew up to them and slowed.

“Thanks for your help.”

The midshipman nodded and walked back down the stairs and disappeared through the double doors.

The model platform’s trailer door opened on the other side from Donchez. Through the trailer’s windows a man could be seen walking out of the trailer and toward the catwalk between the platform and the observation deck. It was Michael Pacino, who momentarily froze when he spotted Donchez.

“Admiral Donchez?”

“Mikey,” Donchez said, his face crinkling into a smile.

“Been a long time. How’s life as a professor?”

As the younger Pacino approached, Donchez looked him over, inspecting him as if Pacino were a subordinate in the ranks. Or maybe more, as if he were Donchez’s own son, seen for the first time after a long absence. In fact, young Pacino had been the son of Donchez’s Academy roommate, Anthony “Patch” Pacino, who had died in a submarine incident years before. Since his birth Michael Pacino had been as close to a son as Donchez would ever have, and after the father’s death, Donchez’s feelings had intensified.

Still, the younger Pacino had never exactly seen Donchez as his mentor, perhaps still too full of the memory of the day that Donchez had told him of the sinking of his father’s submarine.

Pacino, over six feet tall and thin as ever, had just turned forty, his thick hair no longer jet black but graying. His lean face was tan, unlike the days he had commanded Devilfish, when he wore a pallor from being almost constantly submerged. He was dressed in khaki trousers, a starched white shirt, and a sport jacket, his striped tie cinched up tight to his neck.

Donchez looked for a moment into the younger man’s eyes, measuring him. Pacino’s green eyes at first stared back, then looked away. When Pacino held out his hand to Donchez his grip was strong and steady but moist with nervous sweat.

“What are you doing here, sir? And what’s with the civies? You’re still CINCPAC, aren’t you?”

“I came to see you, Mikey. And easy on that CINCPAC.

I don’t want the Superintendent finding out I came out here without notifying him.”

“You’re what, the number-three admiral in the Navy and you didn’t tell Admiral Phillips you were coming to spy on his little empire?”

“What would I be doing right now if I had told him?”

“Probably reviewing a dress parade after a long tour of the facilities.”

“Right. I don’t have time for that stuff, Mikey.

We’ve got a problem, I need you to help fix it.”

Pacino laughed uneasily.

“What’s a professor of fluid mechanics going to be able to do to fix an admiral’s problems? Come on, let’s get out of this cave.”

Pacino led Donchez down the stairs to the end of the tow tank room and out a door in the far wall to the door that opened outside to a small parking lot fronting a waterfront soccer field.

“So what really brings you all this way from Pearl Harbor, Admiral?”

“I had a stop at the Pentagon …”

They stopped at the midpoint of an arched bridge, looking down on the creek where it flowed past the athletic fields and into the Severn River. To the left, in the distance, the drawbridge of Highway 2 was up while a sailboat plodded slowly through. In front of them majestic houses overlooked the water from the far bank. To the right, the academic buildings gleamed in the sunshine, the black-uniformed midshipmen walking briskly in the few moments between classes.