Terminal Run

Vickerson swallowed, then said in a shaky voice, “Yes, sir. Aye aye, sir.” She glanced at Vermeers as if seeking help, then picked up the bridge box microphone and spoke softly into it, “Helm, Bridge, all ahead one-third.”

“Flank,” Pacino said, putting the binoculars to his eyes.

“But, sir—”

“One last chance, OOD,” he said. Vickerson gulped again.

“Helm, Bridge, all ahead flank, steer course one six zero. Captain, speed limit in the river is fifteen knots.”

“Noted, OOD,” Pacino said, biting his lip to keep from smiling, his stern war face terrifying to this green young crowd of submariners. The bow wave rose up at the bullet nose of the SSNX, the roar of it immediate. Pacino’s gold-leaf

SSNX baseball cap blew off in the hurricane wind of the surface passage. He ignored it and leaned toward Commander Vermeers.

“XO, what’s the status of ship systems?”

“Sir, we have forty forward systems danger-tagged out, including the torpedo tube interlocks and firing mechanisms. We completed pier side steaming aft, so the reactor and steam plants are standing tall, but that’s it. We’re barely watertight, sir. We’ll be depth-limited to a hundred and fifty feet — most of the welds in the seawater system weren’t even x-rayed. The worst is the Cyclops system.”

“Do we have sonar?”

“Yes, we have broadband, narrowband, towed array, onion, conformal arrays, and acoustic daylight arrays, and the system can report it all. But the firecontrol modules are down hard. We can’t use the computer to track a contact, the 3-D virtual displays don’t work, and we can’t send firecontrol information to the torpedo tubes. Not that we’ll be needing the tubes, because we’re supposed to coordinate with the Air Force bombers so they can drop the ordnance, but then the UHF secure voice modules are down hard.”

Pacino looked out at the horizon with the binoculars. They were entering Thimble Shoal Channel, the long runway of buoys on either side of them.

“You got people working on the torpedo tubes?”

“No, Captain,” Vermeers said, the first time he’d addressed Pacino as the ship’s captain.

“Forget about the firecontrol displays. To hell with the UHF, and to hell with the Air Force. You just make sure we can shoot torpedoes out of all four tubes.”

“How we gonna do that with no firecontrol?”

Pacino didn’t answer until after the turning point as the channel emptied out into the Atlantic.

“Tigersharks,” he finally said. “Tigersharks have carbon processors. They don’t need a refined firecontrol solution, just a general idea of what we want them to do.”

“Right,” Vermeers said, overly enthusiastic. “That fuzzy logic thing.”

Pacino glared at him but said nothing. He was beginning to despair that his executive officer would ever understand. Vermeers finally seemed to sense Pacino’s ill mood, and his expression darkened a notch. “Sir, isn’t that a violation of our orders? Not using the Air Force?”

“Listen, XO, let me give you a piece of advice. We’ll speak of this only once. When you’re put in command, you do what you know is right. Not what the Reactor Plant Manual says. Not what the Submarine Standard Operating Procedures say. Not what the Approach and Attack Manual says. Not what U.S. Navy Regulations say. Not Mao’s red book, not the Bible. You follow what’s in your mind and what’s in your heart. You do what you’re here to do, to command the ship and the crew and fulfill the mission, even if it means violating orders. Even if it means the god damned ship sinks. Even if you die, or worse, if you sacrifice your reputation and your sacred honor, you do what you have to do. Remember, at sea, you’reit. There’s no court of appeals, there’s no admiral, there’s no Secretary of the Navy, there’s no President, it’s just you, the captain. Today, it’s me. I’m not talking to a bunch of bombers who couldn’t spell submarine, much less find one in the million cubic miles of seawater it’s hiding in. Today we do what 7 say, and what / say is, we make all tubes ready to launch Mark 98 Tigersharks, and we let the Tigersharks do the heavy lifting. When the dust clears, we’ll sail home and take our medicine. For violating our orders.”

Vermeers stared at him. “All that’s easy to say. sir, when you’re a former four-star admiral, when you’re at sea for one mission before you go back to your regularly scheduled life. When you’re a thirty-eight-year-old three-striper, with the world looking down on you, waiting for you to make a mistake, it’s a lot different.” Vermeers paused long enough to see Pacino shake his head. “Did you operate like this as a captain, when you first were in command?”

Pacino nodded solemnly. “Jeff, I made a career out of it.

The trick is to find out what your superiors want, what their intentions are, and then doing what they need you to do, not what they say they need you to do, and that’s the difference. That’s one of the secrets of command at sea. If you pay attention on this run, you may learn the others.”