Terminal Run

“I hope neither of you thinks this will be a high-tech briefing with floating three-dimensional displays and animated national borders,” Patton began, his jaw clenching. “With me you get a paper map and a number two pencil. I’ll get to the point fast and get you both moving. We don’t have much time.” He produced a map of Asia from his pocket, spread it out on the end of the conference table, and stood to lean over it, his subordinates standing with him. “Gentlemen, in two weeks you’ll both be fighting a war.” Patton stabbed the map with his finger. “A war over this.”

2

Midshipman First Class Anthony Michael Pacino slammed the door of the classic Corvette and looked uncertainly at the lower security area of Groton’s U.S. Submarine Base. His mouth filled with battery acid, the way it always did when he was nervous. He had wanted to stay as far away from the submarine force as humanly possible, but a sudden series of fleet exercises had made all the fighter squadrons and SEAL teams unavailable for midshipman cruises. His entire class had been assigned to surface ships except for a half dozen ordered to submarines. There was no possible way he could ever follow in his father’s footsteps, he thought — the old man was idolized by the Submarine Force, and Pacino could only be a bitter disappointment by comparison. There would be no inherited talent in this area — he was too much his mother’s son. He had planned to be a naval aviator, and now found himself in the absurd position of reporting as an apprentice to his father’s Silent Service. One more thing to endure before he flew the jet, he told himself.

He checked the reflection of himself in the car window, adjusting his uniform shirt’s tuck after the long drive up from Annapolis. The midshipman in the reflection was tall and slim with an athlete’s efficiently muscled physique. He wore a starched tropical uniform with its white shirt, pants, belt, shoes, and hat, the uniform contrasting with his tanned skin. A pair of black shoulder boards each carried a thin gold braid stripe and a gold fouled anchor. Above the youth’s breast pocket was a national service ribbon and, above that, silver airborne wings, the eagle’s wings forming a closed oval around the ice-cream cone of the parachute canopy. His black name tag was the only other color on the uniform. He ran his hand through his light brown hair, which fell toward his eyebrows in a wave and swooped low over his ears, the hair longer than regulations allowed, then clamped his cover onto his head, hiding the offending locks. He sneered into the window, hating the face he’d inherited from his mother with its soft, almost-feminine features, his eyes almond-shaped and cobalt-blue, looking out from under long eyelashes, his nose a delicate curve, his cheekbones pronounced, his lips full.

Finally satisfied that his military appearance wouldn’t result in angry phone calls back to the Academy, Pacino shouldered his seabag and walked down to the security building at the barbed-wire fence line to the lower base, where the piers pointed into the Thames River. A petty officer escorted Pacino into the high-security piers to an odd-looking, colossal submarine. A banner on its gangway read USS piranha SSN-23. He had seen the vessel before, in person and in the news, but the thing tied to the peer bore no resemblance to the ship of his memory.

For one thing, the Seawolf-class was distinguished by its gigantic diameter, a fat forty-two feet compared to every other sub’s thirty-two. The width of the hull made the Seawolf-class look stubby, because they were only 326 feet long, shorter than the old 688s. But this boat’s length made her seem slender as a pencil, stretching far beyond the end of the pier. She had to be over four hundred feet long, Pacino thought.

And just as strange, the sail was all wrong. The Seawolf class subs were all built with a vertical slab-sided fin rising starkly to the sky from the deck. But this sail was a teardrop of streamlined curves rising steeply from the forward bullet nose of the ship and extending far aft, then tapering gently to the midpoint of the hull. And further aft at the rudder, the fin that protruded from the murky water of the Thames River was not the usual unadorned vertical surface but was topped by a horizontal teardrop-shaped pod. For a moment Pacino wondered if there was some mistake, that he’d been brought to a giant Russian attack sub. But American it had to be. U.S. Navy khaki-clad chief petty officers and a dungaree-wearing enlisted gang were working frantically at the forward stores loading hatch, bringing on pallets of food and spare parts.

While he’d been looking at the vessel, the topside sentry had been glaring at him. Pacino walked up to him and traded salutes.

“Midshipman Pacino, reporting aboard for temporary duty.”

“Stay there,” the crackerjack uniformed sentry ordered, speaking into his radio.