Terminal Run

The Air Force was saturating the sea with Mark 12 pods, especially near the location of the Snare, but now that there would be a motor yacht there, Pacino realized that there could be no Air Force bombers circling the rendezvous — it would scare Krivak away. Pacino had to convince Patton — and Admiral McKee — to send the Air Force packing, and to persuade them that the Tigersharks would work. Patton had always been skeptical that a torpedo without a plasma warhead could be effective — their arguments about it going back six months — but the admiral would have to believe Pacino.

Pacino drafted an E-mail to Patton, instructed the officer of the deck to load it into a SLOT, a Submarine Launched Oneway Transmission buoy. He instructed the OOD to proceed at emergency flank to the rendezvous point, wrote a strategy for orbiting three thousand yards away, and went below to the torpedo room and the carbon processor bay where the torpedo processors were kept. It was time to work on the Tigersharks. Yet he stared at the torpedo bodies for some time, experiencing a wave of self-doubt.

Perhaps Patton had been right, that the weapons should have plasma warheads, but plasma units took up an incredible amount of space and weight, resources that could be used for fuel to extend the range. Pacino’s design featured the same kind of external combustion B-end hydraulic swash plate motor that the Mark 58 Alert/Acute torpedo had, for propulsion of the unit at a relatively slow and quiet forty knots. When the weapon found the target, it would arm the molecular PlasticPak explosive and the propulsion module would be jettisoned, and a much smaller torpedo would ignite a final-stage solid rocket motor, and the weapon would transition to supercavitating speed on its terminal run. It would hit the target at two hundred knots, a speed that could not be outrun, and the combination of the kinetic energy impact and the PlasticPak explosive would cut the enemy in half — not vaporize it as a plasma unit would, but kill it nonetheless, and the weight and space savings from the plasma warhead would allow the unit to pursue an escaping submarine target to the end of the earth.

While a Vortex or a Mark 58 Alert/Acute could miss, and required a pinpoint solution to the target, the Mark 98 Tiger shark only needed the bearing and approximate distance to the target. Its carbon processor would outwit any enemy-evasion maneuvers known to mankind. In the exercises that were near successes, the torpedo had even shown cunning and had crept up on targets at ultra slow speed, then looped around to activate the solid rocket fuel. In the two cases — out of sixty where the torpedo had hit the target, the target hull had been cut in two.

Of course, the other fifty-eight times the torpedo had decided that the firing ship was the target, and teaching the carbon processor the difference between friend and foe had proved daunting. There were no electronic interlocks possible like the earlier silicon processors had, so the matter had come down to educating the Tigersharks about the mother ship. So far, nothing had worked. Pacino closed his eyes, trying to think, to forget about Krivak-Novskoyy, to forget about Anthony Michael, to forget about the cruise missiles, to forget the cruise ship and the end of his career, and just concentrate on the Tigersharks.

Eight hours later Pacino fell asleep at the torpedo room console, and when the next ELF call to periscope depth came, it took some time to find him.

Anthony Michael Pacino was five years old and watching his father drive the submarine Devilfish to her berth at pier 22. His father waved to him from high atop the sail as the sleek black sub pulled up to the pier, without tugs or a pilot. The lines came over and Commander Pacino ordered the American flag struck as well as the Jolly Roger he illegally flew in violation of his boss’s orders. The gangway was placed on the steel hull by a rumbling crane, and Daddy climbed down from the sail and marched across the brow to the pier, a speaker box squawking, “Devilfish, departing!” The Navy commander ran up and hugged little Anthony, pulling him high into the air and spinning him in circles, his mother’s laughter punctuating the moment. The black-haired commander put him back down on the concrete of the pier and smiled at Mommy and kissed her hard, smiling at her, and the three of them walked down the pier to the car, where Daddy promised that they would have pizza that night. The three of them stayed up late into the night, and when young Pacino dozed his father picked him up and put him in his bed, and when he woke up in the morning

Daddy was still home, taking a week of vacation, and all was right with the world.