Piranha: Firing Point

He held her, thinking about Lo Sun, the submarine, the Americans, and what the future would bring. Somehow, none of it seemed so bad with Mai Sheng beside him.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I want to get away from the water. All water.”

EPILOGUE Friday November 8

EAST CHINA SEA

As the sun rose over the sea, the nuclear submarine Arctic Storm rose slowly to the surface, her buoyancy just slightly positive. The fin penetrated the sea’s surface, then the hull The empty ship was silent and abandoned, the last fact underscored by the open forward escape-trunk hatch through which the Red Dagger platoon had left.

An American destroyer arrived a half hour later when the radar contact had been classified a surfaced submarine.

The USS Princeton pulled alongside and threw over eight lines, made up from the destroyer’s deck cleats to the sub’s. Slowly the ship towed the shutdown submarine back home.

When Princeton docked at Yokosuka Naval Seaport, a man named Akagi Tanaka was waiting on the ridge, looking down on the channel. The submarine being towed in represented the fruit of many late nights. As it sailed by, he waved at it, sniffing as it vanished around the corner of the ridge and out of sight.

YOKOSUKA NAVAL SEAPORT YOKOSUKA, JAPAN

As the USS Piranha first came into view around the corner of the ridge, cheers burst out, a band began to play, confetti and ribbons started flying. On her bow and stern a hundred sailors and officers stood at rigid attention.

Dressed in pressed service dress blues, the men faced the pier. The wind whipped around the dark uniforms, and the American flag flying on the sail flapped in the stiff breeze.

As she pulled up, a hundred ships in the bay began sounding their horns in salute. On the flying bridge, a set of stainless steel handrails on top of the sail. Captain Bruce Phillips, in his dress blues with full medals, stood tall. As the horns blared, he raised his hand to his forehead, the salute not required, but seeming to come of its own volition. Piranha threw over the first line to the pier, the ship back from the mission, the party only beginning.

He looked down on the crowd milling on the pier, the SNN reporters, the cameras, the women, the children, the families flown over by the Navy for this homecoming, particularly celebrated since a dozen submarines would not be returning today. Phillips searched the crowd, looking for her, but Abby O’Neal wasn’t among them.

He pulled out a cigar from the inside pocket of his dress blue jacket and lit it with his USS Greenville lighter. He puffed it to life and took one lingering look down at the pier. No sign of her. Abby had not come.

“Your loss, toots,” he said to no one, his mouth half curled in a smirk.

“Excuse me, sir?” the officer of the deck said.

“Nothing. Never mind,” Phillips said, looking down on the crowd.

A female reporter waved up at him. “Captain! Captain Phillips! Would you agree to an interview? Satellite News Network? I can get you on prime time!”

The reporter was pretty and vivacious, her smile either genetically perfect or the subject of a huge dental invoice.

“How about in my stateroom?” he shouted down to her. “I have champagne!”

“Great!” she shouted back.

Bruce Phillips straightened his tie, clamped the Havana cigar between his teeth, and climbed over the bridge coaming to the sail’s welded-in ladder rungs. The officer of the deck watched as Phillips shook the reporter’s hand and led her to the hatch, holding out his elbow to escort her along the hull.

The Devilfish came around the ridge ten minutes later.

Her crew was also dressed in crisp dress blues, manning the rails, facing the pier, at rigid attention.

As the band struck up again and the horns sounded, the two dozen fireboats in the channel started their pumps. Arcs of water climbed four hundred feet into the sky. A rain of confetti and ribbons came sailing down from the hill overlooking the piers. As the ship came closer, white block letters could be made out mounted on the black sail:

SSNX USS DEVILFISH

High above the sail, on a stainless steel mast, the American flag flapped in the wind, partially obscured by the flag in front of it, with a white skull and crossbones on the black field, the Jolly Roger.

Hanging below the Jolly Roger was an old-fashioned straw broom, swaying in the breezeA television cameraman framed a reporter before the tall black sail of the Devilfish as she slowly hove into view. The reporter spoke into his microphone: “… can be seen flying a broom from the yardarm, which we’ve been told is a tradition passed down from the days of square-rigged sailing vessels, pronouncing that the ship has done’a clean sweep,’ the enemy ships all at the bottom. And as you can see, Brett, the SSNX has almost single-handedly won the battle of the East China Sea…”

The television widescreen was playing in the Oval Office in the White House. President Jaisal Wamer watched as the SSNX drew up to the pier.