Terminal Run

Pacino felt like a fool as he put on the uniform. When he looked in the mirror, seeing the four stripes on his shoulders instead of stars seemed somehow comfortable. But when he glanced at his half-century-old face and his white hair, the reflection simply did not belong to a Navy captain. He’d just take care of this one thing, then go back to what he was supposed to be doing. Which made him think of something he should try on the Tigersharks, something he’d never considered. If he could make them work, the battle against Snare could be won.

He walked out of the admin building and over the gangway to the submarine. Obviously Patton had passed the word, because when he walked aboard, the 1MC announcing system called out, “Devilfish, arriving!” Pacino tried to deny the feelings that the 1MC call stirred, pride and a feeling of deep belonging, a return to his true home. He was not successful until he reminded himself of Anthony Michael, imprisoned at the bottom of the Atlantic in a cold, stuffy deep submergence vehicle.

Air Force One roared down runway two seven and climbed northwest, Andrews Air Force Base shrinking behind her, the eastern limb of the D.C. beltway passing underneath the airframe as the flaps came into the wings.

President Warner clicked off the video display in her Air Force One office and looked up at Admiral John Patton.

“Can Pacino do this thing, Admiral?”

“I honestly don’t know, Madam President. But if he can’t, no one else can.”

“General Everett,” Warner addressed the Air Force chief of staff, a giant of a man with a hooked nose and hair as red as a fire hydrant.

“Ma’am,” he responded with a two-pack-a-day voice.

“Are your radar surveillance planes and interceptor jets ready to shoot down any cruise missiles coming in from the sea?”

“Madam President, as of right now, you couldn’t throw a football on the beach without an F-16 hitting you with a Mongoose heat-seeker. We’re ready, ma’am.”

Patton glanced at the President to see if she knew the general was being overly optimistic.

“What about the support operation for the Navy?”

“We’reloading up their — what do you call them, Admiral?”

“Mark 12s, General. Mark 12 PLD-AD-SSA, which stands for Passive Long Distance Acoustic Daylight Sonar Sensor Array. They weigh two tons and drop into the sea with a parachute, and deploy a sonar sensor all the way to five thousand feet depth. Anything coming closer than fifty to seventy miles is detected, and the unit sends out an update on a buoy antenna attached to a cable.”

“Right. We’reloading up these Mark 12s now, and they’ll be plopping into the sea over the next twelve hours.”

“Good. Now if you gentlemen will excuse me, I have a call to make to a certain British Prime Minister who’s a bit annoyed at me.”

“What are we waiting for, XO?” Michael Pacino asked impatiently.

“Propulsion and tugboats, sir,” Commander Jeff Vermeers said to Pacino on the bridge of the SSNX, recently christened the Devilfish. Vermeers was the prospective commanding officer whom Pacino had replaced as captain. An eager sort, he was a compact, absurdly young-looking officer with blond hair combed straight back over his scalp, narrow blue eyes, and a square jaw. He possessed an energy level that made him seem jumpy, almost flighty, with a forced cheerfulness that immediately got on Pacino’s nerves. His hands shook as he raised the binoculars to his eyes and stared down the channel.

“Conn, Maneuvering,” the bridge speaker box rasped. “Propulsion is shifted to the main motor, ready to answer all bells.”

“Officer of the Deck,” Pacino called down from the flying bridge on top of the sail to the junior-grade lieutenant, a woman named Chris Vickerson. If the former commander of the unit and now XO Vermeers looked young, Vickerson seemed like she should be in kindergarten, her short reddish blond hair tucked into her SSNX ball cap, her freckled complexion and button nose seeming out of place beneath her wire-rimmed submariner’s glasses. And she was female. When Pacino had left command in the old days, submarine crews were still all-male. He’d awakened with a defense contractor job and a healthy son, and as the sun set his son was in mortal peril and Pacino was back in the Navy, in command of the submarine with the same name as the one he’d lost under the polar icecap, a sub with a mixed-sex crew of children.

“Yes, Admiral,” Vickerson barked, as if responding to a dictator.

“Call me Captain,” Pacino said dryly. “Let’s go.”

“But, sir, the tugboats?”

Pacino looked down on her in the cockpit from his crow’s nest view from the flying bridge. She hadn’t gotten the word, he thought. “OOD, two options for you here. Number one, you can conn this ship as if it’s rigged for a combat mission instead of treating it like this is sea trials. Number two, you can relinquish the conn and I’ll drive her out.”