Terminal Run

But if Pacino could make it work, Project Tigershark would make the submarine looming high above return to her role as the world’s most powerful submarine. The ship had originally been named the SSNX, the SSN for Submersible Ship Nuclear, the X for Experimental, since she’d been a prototype for the new class of submarine that eventually took the name Virginia. Pacino had had a hand in designing her, his hands crafting a submarine that solved all the problems he’d had in previous submerged combat missions in his seventeen years as a submarine officer. He climbed a stairway mounted next to the rear quarter until he could reach out and touch the hull, the cool metal green in the harsh midnight floodlights, the green paint an inorganic zinc primer. The ship had gone by the cold impersonal program name SSNX until Admiral Donchez’s dying wish was fulfilled, and Admiral O’Shaughnessy christened the submarine with the most meaningful submarine name in history — the USS Devilfish. Years before, that name had belonged to Pacino’s first command, a Piranha-class that had been lost under the polar icecap when a Russian admiral named Novskoyy released a nuclear-tipped torpedo that had killed Devilfish as well as the admiral’s own Omega-class.

Pacino had left the Navy after the incident, until the day Donchez told him his best friend’s ship had been taken hostage by the Red Chinese, and the next thing Pacino knew he was standing in the control room of the Seawolf a hundred yards from a Chinese pier, and by the time he had launched the first cruise missile he had managed to put the Devilfish out of his mind, at least until he was promoted to fleet commander and wore the shoulder boards of an admiral. The Reds had taken over the East China Sea with a flotilla of submarines that had put a million tons of the U.S. fleet on the bottom, and Donchez insisted that the SSNX be named Devilfish. Maybe it wasn’t the ship’s incredible sensor systems and firepower that had won that war, Pacino thought. Maybe it had been her name.

Now she lay here on the blocks, back from the dead, her name once again only SSNX. The Navy memos spoke of a tradition of rechristening ships brought up from a sinking with a new name, so that the bad luck of the old wouldn’t contaminate the destiny of the new. There was also something about wetting the ship’s deck with the urine of a virgin, but that had been quietly disregarded. But Pacino knew what he would name her had he been the admiral in command of the submarine force. Had he been given back his old job, he would smash a champagne bottle on her nose cone and christen her the USS Devilfish, sailors’ suspicions be damned. He was the only one who held that view, as the ship’s gangway banner continued to read simply, SSNX-1.

Pacino glanced at his scratched Rolex Submariner, which indicated it was after one in the morning of a Tuesday. It was time to go home, he decided. Nothing further could be accomplished on the failing Tigershark torpedoes or the torpedo evasion idea tonight. He drove the long road to Sandbridge, south of Virginia Beach, and climbed the steps to the door of the beach house. He hated the emptiness of the house, but it beat the impersonal hotel rooms near the shipyard, and there were reminders of his son, Anthony Michael, here. Pacino’s wife Colleen was in D.C.” staying at the Annapolis house until she could return to Virginia.

He put his head on the pillow and tried to sleep. His thoughts returned to his only child, Anthony Michael, who at that moment would be in California on his senior cruise with a fighter squadron, flying training runs with the pilots he worshiped. He missed the boy. It had been months since they’d been together.

He was drifting off to sleep when the phone jangled on the nightstand. He sat up in bed and flipped on the monitor to see the severe face of his ex-wife, Janice Hillary Lakeland, Anthony Michael’s mother. She had been pretty twenty years ago, but now she looked as if all the bitterness inside her had bled through her skin.

“Hello, Janice,” he said heavily. There was the usual storm cloud on her face, he thought, wondering what battle she would start this time.

“Hello, Mike,” she replied, the name grating on him. When they were married, she never called him anything but “Michael,” but five years after the divorce she suddenly began using a name she knew he hated. With either name, her pronunciation made it sound pejorative, as if she were actually saying the word “asshole.” “I see you’ve finally convinced Anthony Michael to follow in his father’s footsteps.” It was the same argument they’d fought for years, ever since Tony had decided to go to the Naval Academy.

“Janice,” he said, his tone flat, “what can I do for you?”

“You can get Anthony Michael off a nuclear submarine, that’s what.”