Terminal Run

She didn’t say goodbye, just kissed him. ran her fingers again through his hair one last time, and watched him from the pier.

He looked around one last time, nodding a farewell to the massive timber-frame house on the jutting point of land, the property once christened by the Pentagon “Pacino Peninsula.” He took in the bowline, coiled it on the deck, and pulled in the stern line One hand on the wheel, he throttled up the engine and pulled away from the pier and turned down river. He threw a kiss to Colleen and waved until he could no longer see her. The boat made five knots at part throttle as the peninsula faded astern, the Academy grounds likewise shrinking in the hazy distance.

The Chesapeake Bay’s waves rose into a one-foot chop. He raised the mainsail. It flapped violently in the breeze as it filled, the boom creaking to port. Pacino raised the jib and sheeted it in, then jumped back to the cockpit to adjust the sheets of the mainsail. Colleen was on a beam reach, heeling slightly on a starboard tack, heading southward.

He grabbed the wheel and shut down the diesel. The boat crashed into relative silence, the noise now the wind singing in the rigging and the slicing and slapping of the waves forward as the Colleen picked up speed.

Eighty nautical miles out of Port Norfolk, in the deep Atlantic in the dark, the Colleen’s computerized chart counted off the range to the Princess Dragon gravesite. the distance down to five miles. Michael Pacino took a deep breath, trying to face the fact that he could no longer avoid thinking about the cruise ship disaster. It was time to remember, he thought heavily.

More than a thousand of the U.S. Navy’s best officers including forty admirals, a hundred captains, and the most capable junior officers had died here, Pacino thought, shaking his head. The upper echelons of the Navy had stood there on the deck of the Princess Dragon, wearing Hawaiian shirts and drinking Anchor Steam beers, ripe for slaughter. His surviving officers had found and destroyed a Ukrainian Black Sea Fleet attack submarine that had been the culprit, but the Ukrainians themselves proved to be innocent. The submarine’s actions had been directed by previously trustworthy third-party military consultants, whose multi trillion-dollar company had evaporated without a trace. The planners of the attack had never been found, never brought to justice. And with no idea of who the enemy had been, or what the fight had been about, there had been no winning the war.

The distance to Princess Dragon closed to a half mile, then to mere yards. Pacino dumped the jib and the mainsail and coasted to a halt, the boat drifting, rocking on the light waves. He reached into a cubbyhole in the cockpit and pulled out the package, a bag containing a flag that Colleen had gotten for him from the wreckage of the SSNX submarine. It was the first skull-and-crossbones Jolly Roger from his Devilfish, the last thing he had pulled from the broken hull before abandoning her for the frigid icecap, the flag that had inspired the later logo of the Unified Submarine Command. Deep, Silent, Fast, Deadly — U.S. Submarine Force, the script motto read. The skull leered at him. The senior officers of his submarine force had sailed with him under this flag, and not one of them had deserved to die, not the way they did. It was one thing to go down while standing on the deck of a combat submarine while still shooting torpedoes, but quite another to perish while sipping beer and eating hors d’oeuvres.

Pacino had to weigh the Jolly Roger down with something so that it would sink the three thousand feet to the broken hull of the Princess Dragon. But there was nothing solid and heavy that was expendable. His roving eyes finally fixed on the case of Anchor Steam, the unofficial beer of the submarine force ever since Bruce Phillips fell in love with it decades before. He taped the box to the pirate flag, carried it to the side, held it for one final second, then consigned it to the deep. For just a moment the skull and crossbones were visible on the surface of the waves, and then they were gone. Pacino drew himself to attention and saluted.

He sat back down in the cabin, his body aching, and decided to wait for dawn and finish the night here at the grave of his friends. In the first hour he thought about each of them, calling forth their faces, their jokes, their stories. The drowsiness crept up on him, and the night was suddenly cold. He lay on the cockpit seat and snuggled into the thick blanket.

When he woke, he raised the sails and began to make way to the south, leaving behind the Princess Dragon and the past. Colleen sailed peacefully southward, her skipper feeling an unfamiliar lightness. He waited for the usual guilt and self-recriminations to settle back on his shoulders, but this once, the feelings were late.