Piranha: Firing Point

“Boss, we’ll name the SSNX the USS Devilfish. And we’ll tell Wamer that she’ll go to sea, one way or the other, on schedule. Trachea will have to eat that goddamned headline. And don’t worry about me or the Unified Submarine Command. I’m on the case.”

O’Shaughnessy smiled, clapped him on the shoulder, and the two men abandoned the study for the dinner table. The smell of the filet made Pacino hungry for the first time he could remember in almost a year.

But as the staff car drove Pacino back to the Annapolis house, he felt the cockiness leave him again, the emptiness filling him back up. Eileen was gone, Donchez was gone, and now, again, it felt like he himself was gone.

Maybe it had been the scotch talking when he’d told O’Shaughnessy he’d stay, he thought. He wondered whether he’d been right the first time, whether he should resign.

He looked down at the gold embroidered ball cap.

How would it look if instead of reading uss devilfish SSN-666 it read uss devilfish ssnx-i? Would it change anything in a life that had seen too many changes?

ACROSS THE LINE

Chapter 6 Monday November 4

SHANGHAI, WHITE CHINA

It was a few minutes past two in the morning. A few miles out to sea from the shimmering lights of Shanghai, the Shining March cruise missile’s onboard computer noted the stars’ positions overhead, giving it a stellar fix.

It was time to turn back west, in accordance with the mission profile. The fins in the aft part of the ten-ton missile rotated, putting the weapon into a two G-force turn. The onboard gyro rotated through the numerals, the stars spinning overhead. The lights of the city appeared in the nose-cone camera, the reflections glittering on the black water five meters below as the missile sailed west, throttling up to attack velocity. The airframe shuddered momentarily as the unit passed through sonic velocity on the way to MacH 1.2. Over the water, the sonic boom was unnoticed. The city lights grew brighter as Shanghai approached.

The target was within the city center. A palace surrounded by rows of fences, patrols of security troops, and airborne helicopter patrols. The missile was designated as unit number one, its target considered the highest in priority for its mission planners. Along with another three missiles cruising under the detection altitude of the fourteen air-traffic-control radars and the occasional military air-search radar, there was a squadron of Mig-51 Flicker fighters, four of them assigned the same target as missile number one.

The attack would be coordinated. The missiles were arriving from the four points of the compass, missile number one to hit first, the north, west, and south units to come in at 1.5-second intervals afterward. The Flicker squadron aircraft assigned to the palace would come in two waves, the first ten seconds after the last missile, the second thirty seconds after that. In order to accomplish this pinpoint timing, the missile required exact navigation aids. The star fix obtained before was sufficiently imprecise as to mandate another fix on the shoreline.

The coastline approached rapidly. The throttles on the turbojet engine slowed, descending back below sonic velocity.

The weapon was slightly ahead of schedule, and the mission profile called for it to fly slowly past its initial navigation aids. A casino building, the Spade Palace, came into view. The edifice was lit up brighter than a lighthouse, lights of every color shining from each facet of the crystal facade, blinking lights outlining the planes of the soaring skyscraper. Chinese and English signs invited gamblers to enter, even at this late — or early— hour. The casino was the first of three way points the missile needed. It aimed south of the building. The shoreline passed beneath the fuselage as the missile headed over dry land.

Within a hundred meters of the Spade Palace, the missile turned north-northeast, speeding up to approach the second way point, a monument erected to General Wong Chen, who had beat back the Red Chinese during the civil war and was a founding father for White China.

The Wong Monument was in the form of a giant military sword, anchored at its base and soaring two hundred meters above the seaward approach to the bay. The entire carved blade was illuminated by harsh floodlights, with a single red aircraft-warning strobe bulb flashing at the very tip of the sword. Missile number one flew around the Wong Sword at its base, carving a tight circle around the statute, then throttled up the engines. The mission profile called for a swift approach to the Presidential Palace.

The third way point was the Hilton Hotel, soaring over four hundred meters into the night sky. The grandiose monstrosity had been built in the year after White Chinese independence, another tribute to capitalism.

The shining lights of the hotel were visible for dozens of kilometers to sea, the giant English block letters spelling hilton down the seaward edge of the black cylinder.