Terminal Run

Pacino sat up in the shaking bed. An ELF radio transmission had been mentioned in the operation order as the sole exception to radio silence and the avoidance of using the battle network for real communications. The reason that the battle network was being bypassed for this operation was not mentioned, but Pacino assumed that it had been compromised, and the arcane procedures for working around it seemed a weak improvisation. But because there was no way an enemy could transmit ELF without a huge array of large antennae with several tens of megawatts of transmitting power, the Pentagon had continued to use ELF in emergencies.

The Devilfish would lose only the ten minutes it took to come to periscope depth and get their electronic mail from the orbital Web server, and then they could go back deep and return to emergency flank. It would put them five miles behind their achievable track, but Pacino would have to accept that.

“Come shallow to one five zero feet, clear baffles expeditiously, and proceed to periscope depth,” he ordered. “Get the E-mail transmission and return to five four eight feet at emergency flank. I’m coming out on the conn.”

Forbes acknowledged and Pacino got up in the dim light of the desk lamp. He clicked on the red overheads and donned the at-sea coveralls Patton had stocked for him. They fit perfectly and had the American flag patch and the new SSNX emblem, but they felt too new. The tradition at sea was wearing coveralls with the patch of a previous ship, and for an instant Pacino longed for the coveralls he’d worn on the Seawolf, but then realized how ridiculous that thought was. He was in command of a new nuclear submarine for all of a week, and then he’d be back in jeans and steel-toed boots in the drydock. His thoughts returned to Anthony Michael and the rescue operation, and he suddenly thought the message would have some news.

He waited on the conn until the BRA-44 antenna was retracted back into the sail. He took the pad computer and examined the E-mail by the red lights of the conn. It was top secret, marked personal for commanding officer, double-encrypted and required an SAS authenticator. By the time the message was decoded and authenticated, the ship had returned deep and sped back up to emergency flank. Pacino read the message from Admiral Patton. and his face drained of color.

The Snare had been hijacked by two people, one of them a military consultant who had boarded her and helped launch weapons against the Piranha. They had put Anthony Michael on the bottom. And the other hijacker was not just anyone, but someone Pacino had met in person before. On the Arctic icecap. After the sinking of the first Devilfish. The man was Victor Krivak. It was a new name and it came with a new face, but beneath it he was Alexi Novskoyy, the Russian whom Pacino had decided not to kill with his bare hands. This man was the one who had put the Navy’s chartered cruise ship on the bottom of the Atlantic and killed over a thousand of Pacino’s closest friends and comrades. He mentally went back in time to that moment in the Arctic shelter, to the instant that

Novskoyy’s throat was in his left hand, with Pacino’s right hand balled into a fist. Novskoyy shut his eyes in resignation, as if dying by Pacino’s beating would be a relief. It was at that moment Pacino realized it would be like beating a defenseless animal and he dropped the man to the ice. In that one moment of misplaced mercy, he had condemned himself to where he was now — his career disgraced, the top ranks of the Navy dead in their hour of need, his son dying two miles below the surface of the Atlantic. Pacino’s failure to kill Novskoyy had destroyed Pacino’s life and killed thousands. And now he was planning to launch a cruise missile attack that could kill millions more, and by the time he did, Pacino’s son could be dead.

There was one thing he knew — that if he ever again had the power over the life of Alexi Novskoyy, or Victor Krivak, or whatever he wanted to call himself, he would not make the same mistake. Even if it meant life in prison, he would rip the man’s head off his shoulders.

Pacino looked up from his trance and found himself at the chart table aft of the conn. He picked up a pencil and copied the coordinates of Krivak’s planned rendezvous with a motor yacht, the location just inside the range circles of the Javelin IV missiles to Washington and New York. He marked the coordinate on the chart with the cursor and checked the Devilfish’s position, then calculated the time it would take to get there. Pacino could beat the Snare to the rendezvous by ten or twelve hours. He’d get the ship there and orbit, waiting for Krivak.