Piranha: Firing Point

The eighth torpedo had detonated under the control island, slamming Pacino into a bulkhead. Pacino slid down to the deck, leaving a smear of blood on the bulkhead.

As the deck began to incline. White lunged for the admiral, and pulled him into his arms.

Without conscious thought. White carried Pacino to the hatch and down four ladders to the main-deck level.

Pacino’s eighty-five-kilogram frame felt feather light in the wash of the adrenaline coursing through White’s veins. He emerged onto the main deck as the carrier listed far to port, and for a horrible moment he was sure he’d lose his footing and slide to the edge and plunge the twenty meters to the sea below, but he steadied up.

The noise of helicopter rotors suddenly roared from his rear, and he turned to see a Sea King chopper descend madly for the listing deck. White half ran, half limped to the open doorway, flinging Pacino into the opening as hard as he could, then leaping in himself. As the helicopter lurched sickeningly upward, the deck of the carrier rolled to full vertical. The huge control island splashed into the sea and vanished. In the end nothing but Reagan’s hull was visible, a deep crack extending from one side to the other.

The war had come then, Pacino commanding the fleet that eventually prevailed, returning him to the States, to peacetime.

A year later Pacino married Eileen and things had been as smooth as they would ever be at the Unified Submarine Command. Pacino worked constantly trying to get funding for the new attack submarine, the NSSN, and finally the unnamed prototype, the SSNX, was approved by Congress. The keel was laid at Dynacorp’s Electric Boat yard in Groton, Connecticut, and Pacino was in his glory.

As if he had tempted the gods, his good fortune soon gave way to tragedy. White was one room over from Pacino’s office when the awful phone call came late on a Thursday night. That call essentially put an end to the Pacino White had known.

White went with Pacino to the funeral parlor. An hour before the church service, Pacino insisted on seeing Eileen’s body. The funeral director took one look at Pacino and without a word lifted the coffin lid. Eileen’s body was unrecognizable, her only intact feature her hair. Pacino leaned tenderly over her, giving her remains one last kiss. White held Pacino’s right arm as they walked through the rows of tombstones, his young son. Tony, holding his left, and White swore that had Pacino not been physically supported, he would have fallen flat on his face.

The next few months dragged on as Pacino sank deeply within himself. Each day found him worse instead of better, until White suggested a change of scenery.

Pacino scoffed at first, but finally set up Admiral Kane as the deputy force commander in Norfolk so that Pacino could take the SSNX hull to Pearl Harbor naval Shipyard for its fit-out. White went with him, appointing himself the liaison between Pacino’s temporary command post at Pearl and Kane’s headquarters in Norfolk.

White was the glue that had kept this together, but even with all the shuttling between the two commands, the force was beginning to suffer a lack of leadership. Kane was too loyal to Pacino to fill the gap, and Pacino insisted on spending his time with SSNX, refusing to come back to Norfolk and retake his command.

Then the call had come in this morning from Fort Meade, the home of the National Security Agency, one of the remaining intelligence organizations. In the reorganization of intelligence seven years before, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had been merged into the Combined Intelligence Agency. The National Security Agency had been tasked with eavesdropping of any kind, whether intercepting enemy radio signals or phone calls or computer network E-mails. Their tools were as varied as spy satellites and nuclear submarines sneaked into harbors with thin-wire radio antennae, even starting communications companies overseas. NSA had been targeted to come under the same reorganizational ax, to vanish with its functions subsumed by the CIA, but in the last instant the Director Mason Daniels had called in favors from Capitol Hill, and NSA had survived, even flourished, the budget meaty, the gadgets state-of-the-art. NSA was even considered a watchdog, an independent check, on the CIA. Mason Daniels had stepped down and turned over directorship to the former Chief of Naval Operations, Richard Donchez.

Donchez was the subject of this phone call to Pacino.

White had been on the way to the Pentagon for an afternoon meeting when he’d received the call a few minutes ago. Donchez had been found facedown on the carpeting of his office, in a coma. He’d been immediately helicopter-evacuated to Bethesda Naval Hospital. White heard about it before anyone else. His first call was to the Virginia state police barracks, to get the cruiser escort up 1-95. His second was to Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, to Admiral Pacino, whose closest friend on earth was none other than Richard Donchez.