Terminal Run

“Excuse me?” he said, surprised. “What the hell are you talking about? Anthony’s on a fighter squadron cruise out of San Diego. He’s probably roving the waterfront right now with his friends.”

“Why would you lie to me, Michael?” When she was truly furious, she slipped back into calling him by his full name, but it still sounded like an insult. “I got an E-mail from him just before he left for cruise. He’s on the submarine Piranha on some dangerous mission. I told you when he had the idiotic idea to go to the Naval Academy that I didn’t want him on a sub, and you promised me he’d be an engineer working in a nice safe drydock someplace.”

“I’ll check it out,” Pacino said, his composure back. As shrill as Anthony’s mother was being, he agreed with her. A nuclear submarine was the last place he wanted his flesh and blood.

“And do nothing, as usual,” she sneered. “You know, his hero worship of you is going to get him killed, and then what are you going to do?” Her eyes were filling with tears. “It’s fine for you to go to sea and never come home and have submarines shot out from under you.” That summarized the series of fights that had caused her to leave him, he thought dully. “But this is my baby! He’s all I’ve got.”

Much as Pacino wanted to hang up on her, his son loved her, and Pacino knew he would someday be judged by his son as to how he had treated the boy’s mother. He took a deep breath.

“Give me a number where I can reach you in a half hour,” Pacino said, looking directly into the telephone’s camera. She rattled off her Palm Beach house’s number, and he promised to get back to her.

Pacino dialed in to the Pentagon, bypassing the security switchboard. It was almost two in the morning, so Pacino would have to be content to leave a message for Patton, who was a notorious night owl, but even he would be home at this hour. The display lit up and showed Admiral Patton, who still sat at his desk with his sleeves rolled up, his tie at half mast, and a pair of half-frame reading glasses perched on his nose. Patton asked about the SSNX and Project Tigershark, but Pacino held up his palm.

“I was actually just trying to see what the latest is on my son. Can you look him up?”

“Sure.” Patton slid the reading glasses on and clicked his touch screen through a few software panels, then looked up. “He’s on the Piranha, which is involved in some fleet exercises. There’s a note here from Commander Catardi. Says your boy made a great first impression — says here he did a back full-ahead-flank underway maneuver, just like his old man.”

Pacino recoiled from a triple blow — that Janice had been right, that little Robby Catardi had grown up to command a submarine, and that someone in a uniform had something good to say about the younger Pacino for once.

After all the trouble Anthony had had at the Naval Academy, Pacino thought, one class-A offense after another until he was threatened with separation from the naval service, and then the young man had acquitted himself at sea with honor on a front line nuclear submarine serving under a man Pacino had personally trained. There was no way he could ask Patton to evacuate the boy, not just because Janice was panicked. It was a peacetime exercise, Pacino thought, wondering what the hell he would tell the boy’s mother. He thanked Patton, then dialed the Palm Beach house and brought up her glaring face.

“I’m sorry, Janice,” he said. “You were right. Anthony has a few weeks left on his mission, but I can assure you it’s not dangerous. He’s on a milk run in the Atlantic.”

“That’s what they said about your father’s Stingray.”

Pacino remembered then that he had never told Janice that the Stingray didn’t go down off the Azores, but had succumbed under ice, nor had he told her about what happened to Devilfish.

“It’ll be okay. He’ll be back in a month. I give you my personal guarantee.” He clicked off, then tried to sleep, but troubled dreams invaded his night.

In one of them, a skeleton on a Harley chased a Greyhound bus, the motorcycle phantom swinging a mace. As he approached the lumbering bus, a dozen rockets sprouted from it and ignited, and the bus zoomed off over the horizon and disappeared in a cloud of rocket exhaust.

Pacino sat up in bed and began scribbling on a pad. A half hour later he had the beginnings of a torpedo evasion system detailed on the pages. When he shut his eyes, he slept better than he had in a year.