Terminal Run

Colleen sailed southward on a port tack close haul, the ship heeled far over to starboard. There was no feeling of speed quite like pointing up tight to the wind during a close-hauled run. The seas were tall but manageable, the wind a stiff fifteen to twenty knots, the sky dotted with puffy cotton balls of high-altitude clouds, the horizon sharp as an expertly painted line. Michael Pacino relaxed in the cockpit, steering the forty-six-foot vessel by its round steering wheel at the captain’s binnacle. He could have been below, but when the wind veered to put Colleen on a close haul he had come up on deck, his habit to be topside whenever the boat was close hauled. He wanted to see the sheets and the sails with his own eyes, to feel the spray come over the bow every time the sharp prow bit into the oncoming wave, to hear the rigging sing in the blast of the wind. There was nothing in his experience so exhilarating since he’d conned a nuclear submarine on the surface, back in days far behind him. He’d always thought that sensation would be lost forever, but here it was again, the emotion in his heart not from the high-yield steel of the ship but from the sea herself. The discovery brought a strange feeling of relief.

Although most of the voyage he had thought of the men he had lost on the Princess Dragon, for the last two days they had seemed to be far distant. Perhaps, he thought, they had gone on to wherever one goes after death and had found peace, or more likely had simply ceased to exist entirely and only lived on in the dim corridors of his tortured mind. But with the arrival of this strange new peace came better weather, the overcast clearing and the winds picking up. the temperature warmer now. For a few minutes he enjoyed the sensations of the wind and the sea and the boat without thinking. An hour became two, until before he realized it the afternoon arrived, the hour of noon passing without his usual sextant shot at the sun to confirm his navigation equipment was working. He shrugged, thinking that perhaps tomorrow he would set an alarm to keep from missing the noon fix, when a roaring sound to his left off the port beam attracted his attention.

He stared at the sea for a moment, thinking he was dreaming when a white wave formed out of nowhere and a black object appeared below and behind it, violently pushing the water up and out of its way. No, he told himself, it couldn’t be. The black shape ascended further, rising out of the sea while still keeping exact pace with the Colleen, the white foaming wave now rolling off to either side of the black obelisk rising from the deep impenetrable blue ocean. Pacino was staring at it so intently that he forgot his steering, the boat coming too high into the wind, the mainsail luffing slightly as it spilled its wind. Pacino beared off, regained the wind, and engaged his autopilot. He stood at the port railing, staring at the black shape as it moved further out of the water, the wave below now flowing around a larger shape, a huge horizontal blackness not a boat length away.

The first black shape was the sail of a submarine, vertical and unadorned, with a slight angling fillet bringing it to the deck of the cylindrical shape, the sail identical to that of his old Seawolf, but the hull now appearing beneath the sail too small in diameter to belong to a Seawolf-class. Pacino’s gaze was riveted on the submarine, still keeping up with Colleen’s twelve knots. A periscope pole rose from the sail — it had been absent up to now, he thought abstractly, because anything faster than seven or eight knots would rip the pole off, even with its winglike fairing painted a mottled black and gray. A second periscope rose, then the BRA-38 radio mast in the stern of the sail. The bow wave formed around the bow of the submarine, falling on either side of the smooth bullet nose. It had to be a Virginia-class, Pacino thought. At the top of the sail several crewmen appeared, probably the officer of the deck and a lookout. As he stared stupidly at the submarine one of the officers raised a radio to his lips, and a crackling hiss of static came from the sailboat’s steering wheel console — the VHP bridge-to-bridge radio, forgotten on its charger inside the weatherproof cover, turned on to the international call frequency.

Pacino pulled the radio out of its cover and it burst with static again, then barked out, “Sailboat Colleen, this is U.S. Navy submarine, over.”

She couldn’t identify herself on an open circuit, Pacino thought, the reason the crew didn’t declare the name of the vessel.

“U.S. Navy submarine, this is Colleen captain, over.” His voice was hoarse from not speaking for the better part of a week.

“Good afternoon, sir. We request permission to send over a boat, over.”

How could he refuse, Pacino thought, consumed by curiosity.

“Roger, Navy, permission granted to send over a boat. Recommend you change course to southeast so I can luff the sails.”

“Roger, turning now.”