Terminal Run

Pacino raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure, sir?” Pacino’s father used to say that back-full-ahead-flank under ways were dangerous and risky, even though he always did them. He hated tugboats and pilots, and wanted to make sure his crew knew the ship was rigged for combat. But his bosses had always reprimanded him for the maneuvers.

Catardi nodded. “I want you to show my people how a Pa cino goes to sea. Think you can do it?”

“Yes, sir.” Pacino swallowed.

Catardi smiled. “We’re going to be pretty busy on this run, Patch, but soak up what you can. When things calm down, don’t hesitate to ask any question you want,” Catardi said. “And welcome to the Submarine Force. We’ve been waiting for you.” Catardi disappeared back into his stateroom and shut the door. His last words left Pacino staring after him.

The captain’s stateroom was a fifteen-foot-square cubbyhole with a bunk, a desk, and a small conference table headed by a high-backed leather command chair. Commander Rob Catardi stood at the closed stateroom door, deep in thought. He looked at the mess of his stateroom, beyond the clutter of papers and computer displays to the enlarged photographs bolted to the bulkhead. The face of his daughter, Nicole, smiled out at him, her pigtails tied high on her head, the amusement park ride in the background.

The photo had been taken last summer, the summer he and Sharon had first talked seriously about the end of their marriage. In the winter Sharon left him and made plans to take Nicole with her, back to Detroit. Catardi had tried to fight her from taking his daughter out of state, but the critical courtroom hearing had been scheduled for a Tuesday afternoon. Piranha had been given emergency orders to sortie to the Atlantic the evening before, and while the family court hearing officer decided Catardi’s fate as a father, he had opened the main ballast tank vents and taken Piranha to test depth east of the continental shelf, his legal case — and his daughter — lost. That was the story of his failed marriage — at every turn when his family needed him the most, the Navy demanded even more.

Catardi sank into his deep leather command chair and looked over at the man sitting next to him at the table. He was shorter than Catardi, about his age, wearing a civilian suit with a red-patterned tie. The man wore a deep frown, his bushy eyebrows knitted over his brown eyes.

“Sorry for the interruption. Admiral,” Catardi said. He poured the submarine force admiral and himself coffee from a carafe into two coffee mugs with the Piranha emblem on them, then settled in his chair to listen to his boss.

“Commander, a few months ago you participated in a sub marine-versus-submarine exercise against the USS Snare, SSNR-1, the first of the SNARC-class,” McKee began.

The Snare was a robotic combat sub. the acronym standing for Submarine Naval Automated Robotic Combat system. The ship was small, only 180 feet long with a beam of twenty-six feet and displacing a mere three thousand tons, yet was able to carry a whopping eighty large-bore weapons, almost double the payload of the fleet’s manned submarines. She’d been operational for two months, after her sea trials exercise against the USS Piranha.

“It was a damned tough exercise, sir. We took her in three engagements, but she ambushed us in two. She’s ghostly quiet, and her sound signature shifts all over the place. And whoever programmed her was a sick bastard. She’s tricky and aggressive and fights dirty. She had to have violated (he op order to snap us up those two times. Goddamned bitch of a machine cheats. Admiral.””

“Well, we have you matched against her again.”

Catardi thought back to the facts he’d memorized about the computer-controlled ship. The aft half of the ship was devoted to the reactor, pressurizer, steam generator, a single ship’s service turbine, a single propulsion turbine, and the main motor, all in one small compartment. There was no emergency diesel, no catwalks, no nuclear-control space, no shielded tunnel through the reactor space. Forward of the frame 47 division between the engineering spaces and the forward combat space there was a two-level deck devoted to electronics. The ending of the pressure hull forward marked the beginning of the free flood torpedo compartment. Past that, the forward ballast tank held the twelve vertical launch tubes and a small sonar hydrophone spherical array. There was no sail or fin or conning tower. There was also no protruding rudder above the hull, but rather eight small control surfaces resembling the fins of a rocket, with a shroud around them. The hull shape resembled a stubby torpedo rather than a submarine. The propulsion plant put out thirty thousand shaft horsepower while the reactor made eighty megawatts thermal. It had a thermal efficiency even higher than Piranha’s S20G. The tissue used in the control system was cultured from human brain tissue, the first use of human cells in an electronic battle system.