Terminal Run

As Pacino’s air ran out, his mental clarity returned with a thump, as if a switch had been thrown inside him. The hull was angling downward in the darkness, he could feel it, and he could almost see it in the light of a secondary explosion from aft — the diesel fuel oil tank exploding. The ship was sinking. His eardrum slammed for a second, from increasing pressure. There was no doubt. Piranha was going down, and for all he knew he — and perhaps Keating — survived when no one else had. The hull was probably a coffin full of dead bodies right now, he thought. The rational thing to do with what little air he had in his lungs was push away the hull, activate the carbon dioxide gas cylinder in his buoyancy compensator, and float to the surface and pull the pin on the distress beacon. If he did that simple act, he would survive, he told himself. He would live. He had lived in the face of two violent explosions, two terrible Shockwaves and the explosion of the fuel tank, and his body was whole. He had been spared, and now it was time to leave the sinking submarine below him and swim for the surface. It was the only logical thing he could do.

For an instant time seemed to freeze, the lack of air in his lungs stopped hurting, and before his astonished eyes the water in front of him started to glow in a yellowish light, then somehow parted and opened wide. His knuckles grew white on the hatch operator in fear as he saw the light brighten and begin to form images. Images from his life. There was no fear, no sense of time, the images coming all at once and surrounding him all at once, yet still experienced individually. And they were not just moving pictures that he saw, they were real, and all the emotions he had felt living them came back to him. It was baffling but natural at the same time. He saw his father’s submarines. He saw his father standing tall above him with three gold stripes on his service dress blue uniform, leaning down to sweep him up and kiss him, his teddy bear falling to the carpeting. His father wearing working khakis in the light of the cracked doorway at Christmas, coming in to sit on the bed. The pillow was stained with tears, because Daddy was going away for a long time. The smell of the submarine was his cologne as his father leaned over to kiss him on his wet cheek. The Devilfish is going to the north pole, Anthony, he said. We have a special urgent job to do, and then we’ll come home. Are you going up to help Santa, his own seven-year-old voice asked, his father looking stunned for a moment. Yes, son, but that is very secret, and you can’t tell anyone. Now get some sleep, and be the man of the house for Mommy. That’s a brave sailor. The rumbling sound of the Corvette’s engine under the stilted house, the car fading away into the darkness. The long days waiting for his father to come home, and then the cigar smoke smell of Uncle Dick, Daddy’s boss, when he told Mommy that Daddy was dead, and that the Devilfish had gone down under the ice. And then Daddy wasn’t dead, he was in the hospital, but he looked dead and slept for weeks and weeks, and the doctors thought he was going to die sometime soon.

The images moved on, the fights between young Pacino’s mother and father over the submarine, their separations never formal legal separations, but always the kind that resulted from new deployment orders. His father gone more than he was there, his mother growing increasingly bitter, aging in front of him. The last battle when the Seawolf sank, Uncle Dick came again with news of the elder Pacino’s death, the next week the news reversed, but this time his mother had taken him away to Connecticut and there was a long year without his father.

He saw the look on his father’s face as he saw the letter from the Superintendent of the Naval Academy granting his son an appointment as a midshipman, and how his father’s harsh face had softened into pride. And his mother’s face, now lined and no longer beautiful, taking the news hard as her son turned down the Ivy League and followed the older Pacino. The troubled times at Annapolis, with grades coming naturally but military conduct his nemesis, the constant class-A offenses, being continually threatened with being kicked out. And the end of the trouble, with the sinking of his father’s cruise ship, when for the third time he’d been told that his father was presumed dead. That had snapped something inside him, hurtling him from childhood to adulthood in one swift stroke, but also stealing something from him, something childlike, a dark heaviness filling him on that day, which was only partially lifted with the news of his father’s survival for the third time. But Admiral Pacino had never been the same, and neither had Midshipman Pacino, both suddenly thrust into a harsher, colder, harder world.