Terminal Run

“You what?”

“It doesn’t matter, sir. They are still repatriating us.”

“So they say. We will see. Meanwhile you have confessed to war crimes.”

Zhou shrugged. “That is accurate. That is what I committed, Captain. I owe you an apology. Captain. It was wrong of me to relieve you. And even more wrong to have shot at the Americans.”

Lien said nothing at first, then said haltingly, “What do you mean Battlegroup Three was in the Bo Hai?”

“We lost, Captain. The Americans sank Battlegroup Two. Beijing ordered Three to return, and the PLA has pulled back from the Indian frontier. I saw a BBC news file. The Premier made a statement.”

Lien frowned as the crew served them dinner. Zhou ate tentatively, but cleaned his plate. After Zhou finished, Lien tasted the food, then ate.

“We’re down from PD, Captain,” Officer of the Deck Vicker son said over the phone. “Pad computer’s on the way to you.”

“It’s here,” Pacino said from the torpedo room console. He hung up and stroked the portable unit to his E-mails. There were two, one from Colleen, the other from McKee, both routed through Patton. Pacino opened up Colleen’s, his hands shaking, but when he read it his face fell and a darkness clouded his mind. He could barely concentrate on the message from McKee, which reluctantly agreed to keep the aircraft away from Snare’s rendezvous point, but insisted on them orbiting a hundred miles to the west as a last resort. He handed back the computer to the messenger and returned to his work with the ship’s medical officer, a lieutenant surgeon assigned to the ship — yet another oddity, that since Pacino had left the Navy, doctors had been assigned to submarine crews.

An hour later, he sat back and called the executive officer’s stateroom.

“Assemble the officers and chiefs in the wardroom,” he said flatly.

Ten minutes later, the men who ran the SSNX stood in the large wardroom, the chairs around the table filled, all eyes on Pacino. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the head of the table.

“I’ve got a few words for you all,” he said, looking up at his crew. “The word just came from Patton and McKee — the aircraft are withdrawing. It’s up to Devilfish and the Tigersharks now.” He took a pull from the cup and went on. “I know you are all concerned about the employment of the Tigersharks, and so am I. The weapon is a killer, officers, and if it detects something in the water, it will tear its heart out, whether that detect is the firing ship, an enemy, a surface ship, or even another Tigershark. For the last twenty-four hours I’ve worked on finding a fix to this, and the problem is just too big. I’ve put a bandage on the problem by researching all the work done to date on carbon-processor depressants, and I’ve selected one for use on the Tigersharks while we launch them.”

Vermeers interrupted. “Depressants, sir? You’re drugging them?”

“Exactly,” Pacino said. “The Tigershark processors are not unlike animal brains. And just like sedating a grizzly bear, we’ll be drugging the Tigersharks with only their lower functions on-line. They’ll have the processing power to keep themselves alive, and to maintain depth in a neutral buoyancy hover until the sedative wears off, at which point they will wake up. By then we’ll be out of the area, and whatever comes into their sensor radius will be attacked.”