Piranha: Firing Point

A future in the Navy didn’t hold any great promise for him. After all, what good was commanding a desk after commanding the last remaining Seawolf-class nuclear fast-attack submarine? He had made plans to resign his commission and try a new career. Abby knew of his plans, and she had fully agreed to the temporary separation.

Yet as the weeks apart grew into months, her calls started coming less frequently. More and more she mentioned the managing partner, Albert Donnelly, son of her firm’s founding partner, who had recruited her to the D.C. company and advanced her career beyond her wildest dreams. He learned that Bert had gotten a nasty divorce a year before, becoming one of Washington’s most eligible bachelors. He was interested in her despite her engagement, but she’d held him off. By the fifth month of their separation, she seemed distracted, almost cold. Phillips had shrugged it off, knowing she was susceptible to fairly strong mood swings. On impulse he had invited her to Hawaii for a week to be with him, to grab some fall sunshine, get her tan back before Thanksgiving.

When he met her at the airport, he had dressed in his best tropical suit, armed with a dozen red roses. When Abby appeared, Phillips smiled at her, his arms outstretched.

As she drew closer, though, he saw that something was seriously wrong.

Despite fresh makeup she looked like she’d been crying.

She couldn’t look him in the eye when she came up. Her hands were clasped together, and she seemed somehow small. Her hair was different too, the sleek black gone, now done in soft, brassy red curls, the length far shorter. Her eyes were different too, the brown gone, replaced by the odd blueness of colored contact lenses.

“Abby, what is it?” he asked her, his voice sounding strange in his own ears.

“I came to tell you in person, Bruce. It’s over.” She pulled her diamond ring off and handed it to him. “I’ll start with the part you know and work my way to what you don’t. I love you, I’ve loved you since I first saw you. But, honey, I can’t take the separation, and it’s even more than that. You love that ship and your Navy life more than me. I asked you what your plans were, and I’d hoped you’d leave the Piranha when your rotation came up, but you made a special trip to talk to the admiral and begged for a back-to-back command tour, and he gave it to you. Another three years on the damned Piranha. Well, Bruce, you want her, you can have her. That fucking ship is all yours. And I’m giving you my orders now. This is your honorable discharge, Captain. I’m leaving on the next flight back, and I don’t want to talk anymore. Goodbye, Bruce.”

He’d stood stupidly dumbstruck, his tongue useless in his mouth, watching her walk away, disappearing into a ladies’ room. For a full five minutes he stood there with his mouth open, trying to understand, and starting to understand all too well. He found himself walking into the ladies’ room. He ignored the annoyed shouts, banging on the stall door he thought was Abby’s, only to find it was someone else. Finally a security guard had come and dragged him out.

He’d found a bar on Ward Avenue and had lined up shot glasses of Wild Turkey for the rest of the night.

Finally he was ejected as being too drunk to stay. Somehow he had told a cab driver to take him to his ship rather than his quarters, and he had fallen flat on his face at the pier where the gangway went over to the hull topside. The sentries had carried him aboard and put him into his rack.

The time since then had passed in a blur. He had alternately slept, vomited, was put in the corner as the stewards changed his sheets and mattress, then slept again, vomited again. He had been shaken awake by the duty officer, the executive officer behind him. They’d told him that the ship had emergency orders to get under way. Phillips had waved them off, not caring, angry at the ship that had lost him the only person that had really mattered to him, Abigail Patricia O’Neal. He had rolled over in disgust and gone back to sleep.

Had it been up to him, he would have slept for weeks, but his mouth got so dry and he was so empty that he struggled to his feet, his head spinning, and walked to the sink in the corner of the stateroom. He pulled down the stainless steel sink and clicked on the lights on either side of the mirror. The fluorescents nickered, then caught, revealing a gray-skinned face that he didn’t want to see this morning.

He would have resigned his commission after he’d sobered up, but now the ship was at sea. Even if he had a mind to do that, his second-in-command was a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy, who was there on an American-British exchange program, and who, by U.S. Navy regulations, could take command of the Piranha only if Phillips became physically or mentally incapacitated, and getting dumped by a girlfriend didn’t qualify, no matter how debilitating it was in reality.