Piranha: Firing Point

The stateroom of the force commander was cavernous and plush. The bunk was queen-size, the conference table a half acre, the room full of warm, glowing lamps.

On the bulkheads were a half dozen pictures of Henri on the bridge of the Ark Royale.

Admiral JeanPaul Henri sat at his conference table, his Writepad computer angled upward so that it could be used as his personal video phone. Pacino’s face had just winked out, and the paranoid, grandstanding submarine officer’s warning was still ringing in his ears.

Henri sat back and shut his eyes for a moment, thinking.

The fleet was almost a third of the way to the beach, and it was damned late to be thinking about antisubmarine warfare. With the press crawling all over the ship, it wouldn’t do to be conducting massive air operations, launching aircraft and helicopters. He’d be asked why they were launching the S-14s and the Seahawks, and he’d either have to tell them they were patrolling for submarines or to be potentially caught in a lie, and the latter was no way to ascend to CNO.

In addition, the wind was from the northwest. Turning the ship into the wind for flight ops would mean diverging from the base course, which was straight in to Shanghai.

That would lose him time, and according to his orders, time was of the essence. More important, the press was hyper aware of the time. They’d been asking him constantly when they’d be at the beach.

He’d seen something in Pacino’s eyes, Henri thought.

He touched the screen of the Writepad and played the conversation back. The man, Henri’s main competition for the job of chief of Naval Operations, had a haunted look about him. His eyes were hollow. Hollow and frightened. Pacino was scared, Henri thought. If he could believe the reports of some of his old classmates at the academy, it was a rare thing for this guy to be frightened.

Henri reached for a phone. “Officer of the deck, get the captain, the air boss, and the ASW officer to my stateroom ASAP.”

“Aye-aye, sir.” The phone clicked.

It took all of thirty seconds for the officers to get to his stateroom, all of them looking pumped with adrenaline, spoiling for a fight. Good for them, Henri thought. They had no idea what troubles he was shouldering. If they had any idea of the weight of responsibility of fleet command, they’d run for the hills.

“Gentlemen, I want a squadron of S-14 Blackboards brought onto the main deck. I want them and their crews ready for launch in one minute or less. Full alert.”

“Aye, sir,” the captain replied for the men. Henri waved them all out They knew better than to ask him why, and he’d be damned if he’d tell them.

For a moment he considered calling Kagoshima base, where the P-5 Pegasus patrol planes were on standby, but then reconsidered. That would be going overboard.

After all, if Pacino was afraid, maybe that was just because he didn’t possess the backbone that Admiral Jeanpaul Henri did.

That had to be it, he insisted to himself.

NACE-YAKUSHIMA GAP

USS ANNAPOLIS, SSN-760

“The captain’s in control,” the voice shouted out.

Captain Jonathan George S. Patton IV walked into the control room of the USS Annapolis like a gunslinger entering a Western saloon. Patton’s carved face was a harsh mask of anger. He stood five foot ten but appeared taller, perhaps because of his thin frame, his sports preference marathon running. His hair was diesel-fuel black, his skin dark, his eyes black and unreadable.

His typical expression was a frown, at best a neutral penetrating stare. His smile was seen so rarely that it had been the subject of a shipwide underground newsletter.

All captain’s smile sightings were logged and recorded.

Yet despite his hard shell, he was encouraging to his crews, a sympathetic ear to his junior officers in their struggles to learn the ship and attain qualification.

At sea, though, he was crusty, often abrupt, demanding and driven.

Patton was the great-great-grandson of General George S. Patton, the Army general who had flamboyantly whipped hardened Nazi Germany Panzer divisions with a fighting style marked by originality, unconventional and instinctive aggressiveness, and undistilled guts.

The younger Patton’s appointment to the Naval Academy at Annapolis had come almost without his asking for it, as if the Navy admissions staff were recruiting him as a sort of public relations coup against their bitter rival, the Military Academy at West Point, intending to make him a Navy poster boy.

He’d risen through the nuclear submarine ranks, until at last he was admitted to the school for prospective commanding officers, an unforgiving course of study that flunked one-third of the students, who could then never return to duty on board a sub. One of the requirements was to walk into a control-room mockup in Norfolk, Virginia, command a strange crew, and fight a battle programmed by a supercomputer and an oddball group of war-game nuts, all under the watchful eye of the two-star admiral-in-command of the entire submarine force, Admiral Pacino.