Piranha: Firing Point

The decor was standard twenty-first-century hospital, a nondescript wallpaper pattern framing a window with shut Venetian blinds, the bed against the wall, the man in the bed resting on top of a white sheet. The patient looked small and frail, his coloring not much different from the white of the sheet. The room had enough machinery to be an intensive-care-unit facility, but was located in one of the nameless floors of the cancer ward.

A thought came to Pacino that this was where the hopeless, the inoperable, were carted off to die, but he dismissed it from his mind and concentrated on the face of the man in the bed.

The patient had not stirred. For a long moment Pacino squinted through the gloom at the prone man, trying to confirm his identity, then with disappointment realized that he was indeed Richard Donchez. Pacino advanced to the bed and looked down. This close, Donchez’s breathing could barely be made out in the quiet of the room, the only other sound a faint beep of a heart monitor.

Pacino put his hand on the old man’s sleeve, then touched Donchez’s hand. The flesh was cold and limp.

“Uncle Dick,” Pacino said softly, and when he heard the tremble in his voice, his eyes blurred with moisture.

He bit his lip and swore to himself he would not lose control, not where Donchez could see him. He checked behind him, glad that Captain White had remained in the corridor. “It’s me. Mikey.”

The breathing continued, slow and peaceful. Pacino sniffed, standing over the admiral, his head bent. Pacino stared down, his eyes open but his mind registering nothing.

He was lost in the long past he’d had with this man.

Pacino’s association with Donchez had started even before Pacino was born. Donchez had been Pacino’s father’s roommate at the Naval Academy. The two men had progressed through a parallel submarine career, Donchez commanding the old Piranha and Anthony Pacino the skipper of the Stingray. When the younger Pacino was a plebe at Annapolis, he was called from his room by the main office to see a visiting officer. The visitor was Commander Donchez. Pacino was eighteen years old, his hair shorn, so skinny his ribs protruded, standing at attention in the presence of the commander.

His father’s friend had a haunted expression, and his voice was gravelly as he croaked out the words: Mikey, the Stingray sank off the Azores in the mid-Atlantic about a week ago. We couldn’t confirm it until she was due in.

She failed to show up at the pier today. I’m afraid we have to presume your father is dead. Once Pacino recovered enough to absorb the information, Donchez told him that Stingray had gone down as the result of a freak accident. One of her own torpedoes had detonated in the torpedo room and breached the hull. There had been no survivors.

Two decades later, Donchez was commanding the Atlantic Fleet’s submarine force when young Commander Michael Pacino rose to command the USS Devilfish. It was Donchez who sent Pacino under the polar icecap to find the Russian Republic’s Omega-class attack submarine after showing him that the Stingray had not perished from an accident, as the cover story had maintained, but had been intentionally taken down by a Soviet Victor III attack sub, whose captain was now the admiral-in-command of the Northern Fleet and aboard the Omega.

The loss of the Devilfish in that mission remained information so highly classified that only a half dozen men in the upper ranks of the Navy were briefed on it.

After that mission Pacino resigned from the Navy, disappearing to teach engineering at the Naval Academy.

There he was vaguely ill at ease, a void having formed in his life. Something vital was missing. He denied it to Janice, his first wife, but what was missing was the feeling of the deck of a nuclear submarine under his feet.

He was at his worst when Admiral Donchez appeared in his lab one afternoon and asked him to take command of the USS Seawolf for a rescue mission. The submarine Tampa had been captured spying in Go Hai Bay outside Beijing, and Donchez wanted Pacino to bring her out.

When Pacino heard that his own academy roommate, Sean Murphy, was being held at gunpoint by the Red Chinese, he went with Donchez to Yokosuka, Japan, climbed into Seawolf, and took three Seal commando platoons into the bay to liberate the Tampa.

The Tampa escaped the piers, but the mission had just begun, for the entire Red Chinese Northern Fleet awaited the subs at the bottleneck mouth of Go Hai Bay.

He’d fired every weapon aboard, and Seawolf was almost lost, but eventually after the sinking of several dozen Red Chinese PLA Navy warships, Tampa sailed out into international waters. Some thirty Americans had died while under Red Chinese hands, but the remainder fully recovered.