Piranha: Firing Point

Not that it mattered, he thought. He tried to force the next thought from his mind, but it was impossible. He was forty-five years old and he felt like he was ninety-five. Today marked the one-year anniversary since the phone call. His new bride, Eileen, had been driving up from Florida to meet him in Virginia Beach. Sometime after midnight on a deserted section of Interstate 95 in North Carolina, a drunk heading the wrong direction in the fast lane had struck Eileen’s car at 105 miles an hour. She had been rushed by helicopter to an emergency room in Rocky Mount, but by the time the chopper landed on the roof she was gone. The phone call had come ten minutes later, finding Pacino at his desk at USUBCOM Headquarters, plowing through his Email so he could take some time off with Eileen. He had heard the video phone buzzing and had clicked in, assuming that it. was her. Instead the concerned face of a North Carolina state trooper appeared on the other end.

Somehow Pacino knew what had happened the moment he saw the man’s face.

Since then Pacino had been sleepwalking through his life and through his job. He had been the commander of the Unified Submarine Force for three years when the call had come, barely a year after the Japanese blockade. After Eileen’s funeral in Boca Raton, Pacino began to spend his days and nights at work, in the office, in meetings, on his commanders’ submarines, in training centers, inspecting ships, giving briefings on the new NSSN attack-submarine program, testifying before Congress.

But he was conscious of none of it. He would wake up at three in the morning and run on the beach— seven, ten, twelve miles, until his chest was tight and his legs burned with pain. Then he would come back to the Sandbridge beach house and pump weights for two hours, then do a treadmill for an hour. His aide wondered aloud if he was trying to kill himself with exercise, but he waved the idea off.

He had met Eileen when he was in a hospital ship cot, blinded in the sinking of the USS Reagan. She had been the nurse aboard the Mount Whitney, and had spent her shifts and her off-shifts talking to him, bringing him back. He had been going through the most terrible time in his life to date, after his divorce from Janice and separation from his son. Tony, and he was certain that a relationship was not in his future. Yet he realized he had feelings for her long before he had set eyes on her.

She was intelligent, funny, and warm, and he felt like he knew her — she seemed familiar to him after he had talked to her for only a few minutes. Best of all, she seemed to feel the same about him.

They were married at the U.S. Naval Academy chapel under the crossed swords of twelve of his closest friends.

Life seemed perfect — he commanded the most advanced submarine force in the world, and he shared it with the great love of his life.

Now that she was gone, he couldn’t seem to get on with his life. Eileen was his last thought before going to sleep, on the nights he could sleep, and she was his first thought when he woke in the morning. It felt like he had a case of walking pneumonia or the flu, a case he couldn’t shake.

The only solution he could think of to make her fade from his life was to work twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day. Today was Sunday. Pacino had spent the entire day at the floating drydock, working, trying not to think.

Pacino looked away from the vessel and over at the walls of the drydock. The floating drydock was normally an open-box structure, with no top or walls on the fore and aft ends, but for this work the shipyard had installed lightweight fiberglass panels on the drydock roof and end walls. The panels did keep out the rain, but they had been installed for one reason only — security. He did not want any pictures taken of this vessel, not by the press, not by photographers in small aircraft, not by spy satellites. This ship was the SSNX, SSN for submersible ship nuclear, X for experimental. The SSNX was the first ship of the NSSN-class, in which the N stood for new, the U.S. Navy’s uninspired name for both the new attack submarine herself and the multi-trillion-dollar program for several dozen of them that would take the fleet well into the century.