Piranha: Firing Point

The early meetings slipped by routinely. It was as if this were a slow news day, little going on in the world.

The videoconference with the Pentagon seemed to confirm the torpor of the defense community. The Chief of Naval Operations, the admiral-in-command of the U.S. Navy, Dick O’Shaughnessy, glared at the screen, watching wordlessly as Pacino reported. The next admiral started up, O’Shaughnessy barely nodded, then the next.

The reports were dry and boring. Finally Admiral O’Shaughnessy, in his baritone voice, closed the meeting, wishing them all the best.

Pacino had been dropped off at the shipyard in front of the Dynacorp New Construction Facility, the NEW-CON building. He went up the elevator and down the hallway to the dock-side conference room, where the shipyard meeting was already in progress. The hull and mechanical engineers were standing to leave, all of them nodding respectfully at Pacino. The shipyard’s traditional “crisis football” was placed at the end of the table. It was an old-fashioned leather football with the words crisis painted on it in white block letters, passed gleefully on by a department solving the problem du your to the one presently obstructing progress. The ball was being passed from the weapons engineers to the electronic types, the engineers responsible for the Cyclops battlecontrol system, which so far was a dismal failure.

The Dynacorp vice president of developmental computer systems. Colleen O’Shaughnessy, was absent from the room when the weapons engineers left. As soon as she entered, she saw the ball, pursed her lips, and dumped it unceremoniously into the trash can.

O’Shaughnessy was young to be a full vice president, Pacino thought, but that seemed more the rule than the exception with the computer types. She was at most thirty. Her looks were also unusual, in fact startling for the shipyard environment. Her passage routinely stopped conversations and shipyard work, though she seemed oblivious. She had black, shining hair, falling smoothly to her shoulders. Her pronounced cheekbones and arched eyebrows framed large, dark, direct eyes.

Though she was of medium height, her legs were long, the muscles toned by workouts. This morning she was dressed in a dark suit with a beige blouse, a simple gold chain at her throat.

Toward Pacino she had at first come off as charming, smiling at him with a set of movie star teeth, shaking his hand firmly and asking after the progress of the SSNX.

For a moment Pacino felt like he was shaking hands with a senator or a judge. Her manner was so natural and confident, comfortable around authority. Not sure who he was dealing with, he had been somewhat curt with her, waving off the pleasantries and asking her bluntly what the status of the Cyclops system was. She had immediately shifted from charming to businesslike, outlining the problems and the proposed solutions. Her words were crisp, her thoughts expressed in complete sentences, her eyes probing his for understanding.

Within five minutes Pacino had known he was in the presence of a competent professional, and had left O’Shaughnessy to her work. Occasionally he’d see her in the hallways of the barge or on the weld-splattered decks of the submarine. He had worked with her for several months before the new Chief of Naval Operations had taken command of the Navy from the outgoing Tony Wadsworth. On Pacino’s first report. Admiral Richard O’Shaughnessy had come up on the videolink.

The handsome older Irishman’s features were oddly familiar, and then Pacino realized that his common name with the Dynacorp vice president was no coincidence.

He had expected Colleen to mention her father, Pacino’s boss, but she had said nothing. Finally, after a shipyard briefing Pacino asked her, “Are you Dick’s daughter?” She smiled shyly, said yes, and asked him about a shipyard problem, as if the fact had no lingering significance.

After that he had expected some awkwardness in their relationship, but Colleen O’Shaughnessy was the same solid professional every day, a reassuring presence in the face of a computer system that refused to work. Eventually her connection to the Navy brass was forgotten, or at least pushed to the background.

This morning she breezed into the conference room, shot him a quick smile and a “Good morning. Admiral,” nodded at the other shipyard officials, frowned at the crisis football, swept it into the trash, sat down, and arranged her papers and Writepad on the table, all in one swift, graceful motion. She scanned her computer display, then looked up at him as she began her briefing.

“The Cyclops hardware and software both failed the C-l hull insertion tests. We’re at a decision point now,” she said, getting right to the point.

The news was so bad that Pacino dropped his jaw.