Piranha: Firing Point

White examined it a long time. Then, in gross violation of Pacino’s standing orders, he withdrew his cigarette pack with one hand and shoved a Camel into his mouth. His USS Reagan lighter brought the cigarette to life, a cloud billowing around him. He looked up through the smoke.

“Is it just me, or did I think I buried this man not two days ago?”

“Three days,” Pacino said, still looking dumbly at the Writepad. “It’s after midnight.”

“Well, I’m Jewish — I don’t believe in guys rising from the dead after three days, not even Donchez.”

“It’s not funny.”

“Double-click on it and let’s see what he has to say,” White said, sinking into a seat.

Pacino clicked into the E-mail software, but there was no written text. There was a video clip, a fairly large one from the listing next to-the symbol of the video file.

He double-clicked on the video clip, and the Writepad’s video software engaged. The screen flashed, the video rolling.

A man in an expensive Armani suit was sitting at a desk, his head bald, a thick ashtray next to the man’s hand, a large cigar lying idle. It was Dick Donchez, perfectly healthy, or at least seeming so by comparison with how he’d looked at Bethesda. He looked into the camera.

“Hello, Mikey,” he said, his tone gentle, which hadn’t often happened. “By the time you see this, I’ll be dead, and you’ll be fighting the Red Chinese.”

He slowly picked up the cigar and puffed it. Diverging from his normal style, he put it back in the ashtray instead of keeping it in his fist.

“They say these things finally are killing me.” He laughed. “Have killed me. Listen, Mikey, and please listen hard. I have a deputy director here, his name is Mason Daniels IV. His enemies call him Jack. His friends, his few close friends, call him ‘Number Four,’ after his three predecessors, who were all in the intelligence game one way or another. I know you’ve never met him before this, but I had great plans for the two of you. I’d hoped one day you would run the CIA and Number Four would take on NSA. That way you two could sort of,” Donchez sniffed, “keep me alive somehow, long after I’ve gone.

“But that’s an old man’s dream. Let’s get to business, which is this old man’s nightmare. First, Mikey, the cancer’s in my throat and my lungs, not my brain. I know, the attending physician at Bethesda told you different, the guy with dark hair, big glasses, never shaves? Well, he works for me. If there’s any doubt at all, you make your judgment by listening to me here. You think I’m sane, you act on what I’m telling you. You think I’m nuts, you just delete this video and remember our good times.

“You’ve either found this next bit out from Number Four or from Tanaka at MSDF. Six Rising Sun subs were hijacked. Not lost, stolen. Number Four has given you a video of their meeting when the subs presumably went down. During the conference one of the captains says he will arm the black-box buoy so Tokyo will know what happened. They never found it, did they? In fact, they never found any of the black-box buoys.

“But that’s not all. Roll the video to track coordinate 1143. All you’ll see on the frame is an open doorway on the Lightning Bolt after the ship’s captain ran to the control room. This is a photograph of the frame in question.”

Donchez held up a grainy photo. In the doorway a blur of black was shown, a hump, a circle, and a vertical protrusion.

“Looks a little fishy, doesn’t it? Look at the computer-enhanced version.”

Donchez put the first photo down and picked up another.

A clear photograph of a man appeared, hunched over in the corridor, wearing a stocking cap, black makeup, black jumpsuit, the vertical protrusion clearly the barrel of an automatic pistol.

“Even more fishy. The man’s height, by the way, shows him to be very tall. In fact, he violates the height standards for the MSDF submarine force. He’d never pass the physical. The weapon is also interesting. It’s an AK-80. Brand-new, made only in Red China for the PLA. None have ever been exported or obtained by our people, so doubtful the MSDF has any.

“All six Rising Sun subs disappeared just before our Pacific sound-surveillance systems picked up noises. The recordings were poor, but we managed to intercept the recordings the Japanese were passing from the salvage ships to Tokyo. Check this out.”

Donchez raised another display board, this one showing six graphs, one atop the other.

“Sound graphs. Shows the explosions as the hulls crushed. Interesting, isn’t it? The six initial explosions were all separate. But look here, starting at this line.

This second explosion is supposedly the noise of the hull passing through crush depth. The second-explosion noises all came at different intervals from the first explosions, but look at the noise profiles of the second explosions.

It’s all the exact same noise, the graphs are the same! Here, check it out.”

Donchez lifted a fourth display board, this one showing the “second explosion” graph blown up.