Terminal Run

“Bridge, Navigator, ship is twenty yards west of the center of the channel, recommend course one eight one.”

“Navigator, Bridge, aye,” Pacino called. “Helm, Bridge, steer course one eight one.”

Captain Catardi called down from the flying bridge. “Nice work, Mr. Pacino. Watch yourself on the way out.”

“Aye aye. sir,” Pacino replied, hoisting the binoculars to his eyes, his hands still shaking. For a moment he felt an unaccustomed kinship to his father, knowing that his father had done this maneuver every time he had gone to sea.

3

Michael Pacino walked down the slope of the dock to the boat.

He stopped as he always did and stared at the lines of the sailboat. The sloop-rigged, forty-six-footer Colleen seemed too big to be sailed by a lone captain yet too small to venture out into the high seas. She was Swedish designed and built, an old Hallberg-Rassy with a hundred horsepower diesel, twin generators, teak decks, mahogany furnishings, a modernized computer console at the navigation station aft of the saloon, and a repeater station in the cockpit. She was fitted out with the latest electronics and sail-furling mechanisms and sheet control hydraulics. Pacino preferred to sail her manually, but if he wanted he could stay below for days at a time while the computer trimmed the sheets and took the wheel The artificial intelligence could even skirt a hurricane, uplinked to the orbital Web’s weather forecasts. It was a beautiful and inspired system, but Pacino would keep it running as a backup until he risked sleeping at the helm. Perhaps exhaustion at sea would give him the dreamless sleep he craved.

Pacino was fifty now, but the shape of his face and body had not changed much since he’d been the thirty-seven-year old captain of the Devilfish. He was tall and gaunt, his cheeks thin beneath pronounced cheekbones, his lips full, his nose straight and jutting, his chin still strong. But the signs of his age were not in the shape of his face but in its coloring. The frostbite from the Arctic operation had left his skin dark and leathery, as if he were a fisherman in his sixties, the crow’s-feet wrinkles deep at the corners of his eyes, leaving no doubt that he had spent his life at sea. His hair had turned stark white a month after he was rescued from the icepack, the legend following him that the horror of his brush with death had chased the jet-black out of it, but the more likely culprits the radiation and hypothermia injuries and treatments. His eyebrows contrasted oddly with his white hair, remaining stubbornly black. But perhaps the most startling of his features were his eyes, so brightly emerald-green that he seemed to be wearing the old-fashioned contact lenses that unnaturally changed the iris color. Pacino attracted second and third looks wherever he went. Until now he had assumed that was because of his admiral’s shoulder boards and stripes, but long after he’d resigned his commission the intense stares still followed him.

After Pacino left the Navy he had spent his days on the deck of the Maryland house, staring out at the bay. or working on the sailboat, until his wife. Colleen, had asked that he come to work for her. Colleen O’Shaughnessy Pacino was the president of defense contractor Cyclops Systems, the company that had pioneered the Cyclops Mark I battle control system, a machine that had guided the SSNX submarine to victory in the East China Sea, and had caused Pacino to know Colleen in the first place. But going from being the admiral-in-command of the Navy to a defense contractor didn’t seem to make sense to him. He couldn’t see it being part of his identity, and he had turned her down.

He returned his thoughts to the task of provisioning the boat for the circumnavigation. For the next two hours he loaded the boat and stowed for sea. He was taking a break when Colleen walked onto the pier, her slim form beautiful in the afternoon glare, her hair blowing around her shoulders and into her eyes from the bay’s breeze. For an instant Pacino regretted leaving her.

“Don’t go,” she said, sadness filling her voice and her expression.

“I have to.” he said, his voice hoarse. “Come with me.”

“I can’t. I have to close the contract on the Tigershark system. But when I’m done, why don’t we meet in the Caymans? You could cut a few days out of your round-the-world trip, couldn’t you?”

Pacino smiled, a ray of sunlight penetrating his dark mood for the first time in months. “Cayman Reef Hotel. I’ll meet you at the bar.” he said.

Her expression turned serious. “Listen to me, Michael. Be careful out there. Call me anytime you need me. And for God’s sake, use the distress code if the weather gets bad. We can have a chopper come for you inside an hour. Just leave the boat. I’ll buy you a better one.”

Pacino smirked. He’d never abandon Colleen, the thought sneaking in that perhaps he was deserting her namesake, if only temporarily. “I will,” he lied.