Piranha Firing Point

by Michael Dimercurio

  They were married at the U.S. Naval Academy chapel under the crossed swords of twelve of his closest friends.

  Life seemed perfect—he commanded the most advanced submarine force in the world, and he shared it with the great love of his life.

  Now that she was gone, he couldn’t seem to get on with his life. Eileen was his last thought before going to sleep, on the nights he could sleep, and she was his first thought when he woke in the morning. It felt like he had a case of walking pneumonia or the flu, a case he couldn’t shake.

  The only solution he could think of to make her fade from his life was to work twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day. Today was Sunday. Pacino had spent the entire day at the floating drydock, working, trying not to think.

  Pacino looked away from the vessel and over at the walls of the drydock. The floating drydock was normally an open-box structure, with no top or walls on the fore and aft ends, but for this work the shipyard had installed lightweight fiberglass panels on the drydock roof and end walls. The panels did keep out the rain, but they had been installed for one reason only—security. He did not want any pictures taken of this vessel, not by the press, not by photographers in small aircraft, not by spy satellites. This ship was the SSNX, SSN for submersible ship nuclear, X for experimental. The SSNX was the first ship of the NSSN-class, in which the N stood for new, the U.S. Navy’s uninspired name for both the new attack submarine herself and the multi-trillion-dollar program for several dozen of them that would take the fleet well into the century.

  The terms NSSN and SSNX had never been replaced with the name of the class—as previous classes had. Usually the initial ship name would label this family of identical ships, as had the Seawolf for the Seawolf class. But this ship would remain simply SSNX, as Pacino had insisted, resisting the urgings of his staff and the brass to lend the program a flashy name that would capture the imagination of voters and Congress alike. Pacino had continued to hold out, telling the Navy hierarchy that this ship was too important to rush to a name that was wrong. Names were vital, he argued—just ask the men who had named the Titanic or the Hindenburg. So, like a baby that went nameless until his parents could look at him, so did the new construction ship remain, as the banners and signs read, simply the USS SSNX.

  But even without a real name, SSNX was breathtaking, from her smooth bullet nose forward past her sleek, tapered conning tower “sail” aft to the raked-back tail fin with the teardrop-shaped pod on top, the tail fin rising up over the hull as high as the thirty-foot sail. As the ship progressed in her construction Pacino began to feel a longing to take her to sea himself, although command at sea was in his past. He was a fleet commander now. Yet the feeling of wanting to return to the sea was the only positive emotion he had felt in these terrible days.

  He checked his watch, not surprised to find that it was nearing eight at night. He had been there since early morning, and with the frantic schedule of Monday meetings, it made no sense for him to stay. But then, given the choice of pacing the dock or lying awake staring at the ceiling, perhaps this was the best option. Slowly Pacino climbed a steep steel staircase to the high wall of the dock and stood at the highest platform to see the ship from above. The shape of the hull seemed comforting, the smooth bullet of the ship seeming to glide through the water even as she lay there, high and dry.

  That was another reason he was here at the Pearl Harbor facility, fitting out the SSNX rather than completing it on the East Coast. There were too many memories of Eileen in Norfolk and Groton, Connecticut— where the hull of the SSNX had been laid down. He had insisted that the ship be completed in Hawaii, and since he was now the bureaucracy’s equivalent of an eight-hundred-pound gorilla, the hull had been shifted to the portable floating drydock and towed here for its completion. The hull and mechanical systems were now complete; the remaining work centered around the electronics, the combat control system, and the weapons tubes. Once the latter construction was finished, the ship would be lowered into the water of the harbor, the interior work continuing for the next year. That gave him a year to try to rebuild his life before he would have to return East. Maybe by then he would be strong enough, but for now he would stay and finish this submarine. He told himself that when it was done, commissioned, and turned over to the fleet, he would step down as the admiral-in-command of the submarine force, and turn command over to Rear Admiral David Kane, the former commander of the Barracuda.

  Looking out over the SSNX submarine, he wondered if he really should relinquish command of the fleet.

  There was no doubt that Kane could command the force. Perhaps it was time for Pacino to leave the Navy altogether and turn his back on this part of his life. But as he beheld the submarine, he had the undefinable feeling that he would be leaving something undone. It was a thread to cling to, and though it made no sense, he would continue on until this undone thing was finished.

  Maybe, he thought, finishing it would give him the peace he sought.

  He was barely conscious of returning to the admiral’s quarters and falling asleep, perhaps even less of waking up and performing all the rituals of showering and donning his tropical white uniform. In his office, he found himself trying to concentrate on the Writepad computer display on his oak desk, another meaningless memo describing a critical problem with the Cyclops command-and-control system of the SSNX.

  He swiveled his chair away from the desk and looked out the window. The shades were partially open, the glass polarization adjusted so that the bright sunlight wouldn’t cause too much glare to see the computer display.

  It was just after six in the morning, and the sun was rising over the Pacific. Another hectic Monday would soon start. There would be a seven-thirty staff meeting, an eight-fifteen videoconference with the Norfolk staff, a nine-thirty videoconference with the Pentagon, a ten forty-five shipyard meeting, two meetings overscheduled at noon, and another five meetings in the afternoon. There were at least six hours of work Pacino needed to do himself when the day quieted down, and his personal assistant had requested the evening off.

  The early meetings slipped by routinely. It was as if this were a slow news day, little going on in the world.

  The videoconference with the Pentagon seemed to confirm the torpor of the defense community. The Chief of Naval Operations, the admiral-in-command of the U.S. Navy, Dick O’Shaughnessy, glared at the screen, watching wordlessly as Pacino reported. The next admiral started up, O’Shaughnessy barely nodded, then the next.

  The reports were dry and boring. Finally Admiral O’Shaughnessy, in his baritone voice, closed the meeting, wishing them all the best.

  Pacino had been dropped off at the shipyard in front of the Dynacorp New Construction Facility, the NEW-CON building. He went up the elevator and down the hallway to the dock-side conference room, where the shipyard meeting was already in progress. The hull and mechanical engineers were standing to leave, all of them nodding respectfully at Pacino. The shipyard’s traditional “crisis football” was placed at the end of the table. It was an old-fashioned leather football with the words crisis painted on it in white block letters, passed gleefully on by a department solving the problem du your to the one presently obstructing progress. The ball was being passed from the weapons engineers to the electronic types, the engineers responsible for the Cyclops battlecontrol system, which so far was a dismal failure.

  The Dynacorp vice president of developmental computer systems. Colleen O’Shaughnessy, was absent from the room when the weapons engineers left. As soon as she entered, she saw the ball, pursed her lips, and dumped it unceremoniously into the trash can.

  O’Shaughnessy was young to be a full vice president, Pacino thought, but that seemed more the rule than the exception with the computer types. She was at most thirty. Her looks were also unusual, in fact startling for the shipyard environment. Her passage routinely stopped conversations and shipyard work, though she seemed oblivious. She had black, shining hair, falling smoothly to her shoulders. Her pronounced c
heekbones and arched eyebrows framed large, dark, direct eyes.

  Though she was of medium height, her legs were long, the muscles toned by workouts. This morning she was dressed in a dark suit with a beige blouse, a simple gold chain at her throat.

  Toward Pacino she had at first come off as charming, smiling at him with a set of movie star teeth, shaking his hand firmly and asking after the progress of the SSNX.

  For a moment Pacino felt like he was shaking hands with a senator or a judge. Her manner was so natural and confident, comfortable around authority. Not sure who he was dealing with, he had been somewhat curt with her, waving off the pleasantries and asking her bluntly what the status of the Cyclops system was. She had immediately shifted from charming to businesslike, outlining the problems and the proposed solutions. Her words were crisp, her thoughts expressed in complete sentences, her eyes probing his for understanding.

  Within five minutes Pacino had known he was in the presence of a competent professional, and had left O’Shaughnessy to her work. Occasionally he’d see her in the hallways of the barge or on the weld-splattered decks of the submarine. He had worked with her for several months before the new Chief of Naval Operations had taken command of the Navy from the outgoing Tony Wadsworth. On Pacino’s first report. Admiral Richard O’Shaughnessy had come up on the videolink.

  The handsome older Irishman’s features were oddly familiar, and then Pacino realized that his common name with the Dynacorp vice president was no coincidence.

  He had expected Colleen to mention her father, Pacino’s boss, but she had said nothing. Finally, after a shipyard briefing Pacino asked her, “Are you Dick’s daughter?” She smiled shyly, said yes, and asked him about a shipyard problem, as if the fact had no lingering significance.

  After that he had expected some awkwardness in their relationship, but Colleen O’Shaughnessy was the same solid professional every day, a reassuring presence in the face of a computer system that refused to work. Eventually her connection to the Navy brass was forgotten, or at least pushed to the background.

  This morning she breezed into the conference room, shot him a quick smile and a “Good morning. Admiral,” nodded at the other shipyard officials, frowned at the crisis football, swept it into the trash, sat down, and arranged her papers and Writepad on the table, all in one swift, graceful motion. She scanned her computer display, then looked up at him as she began her briefing.

  “The Cyclops hardware and software both failed the C-l hull insertion tests. We’re at a decision point now,” she said, getting right to the point.

  The news was so bad that Pacino dropped his jaw.

  “I’d never heard it was this serious,” he said. “Schedule delays, maybe. Cost overruns, sure. Some loss of function, possibly. Capability restrictions in the first operational year, okay. But failing C-l? With the damned hardware too? What the hell happened?”

  “Even I was surprised. Admiral,” she said, her voice level, her eyes drilling into his own, unintimidated. “The hardware problems are major, but the correction strategies are straightforward. We’re much more worried about software.” “You said you were at a decision point,” Pacino prodded.

  “Exactly. The decision is between scrapping the entire code and starting fresh or trying to patch it up. That decision is mine. Since we failed C-l, there have been other decisions, made by my management.” She looked at him, one eyebrow rising.

  “And?”

  “I’m no longer a temporarily visiting executive. I’m permanently assigned to SSNX until the software commission is done at C-9. I’ll be doing the coding myself.”

  Pacino stared at her, startled. He had thought her a business type, an exec. He’d never thought she’d be one to sit at a display and troubleshoot the equipment, much less write the code herself.

  “You’ll be coding?” “Exactly,” she said again, her favorite phrase. “I used to own the company that came up with the Cyclops computer system. The system is called Cyclops for a reason—that was my company’s name before Dynacorp bought us out. Bought us and brought in their programmers.

  Now they—I mean, we—are going back to basics.”

  “How long to get this back on track?” “Good expression” she said, standing and gathering her papers. “Because that’s what this is, a train wreck.

  Admiral, you’ll be the second to know.”

  “And who’ll be first?”

  Her smile flashed at him. He found himself looking at her appreciatively in spite of himself.

  “I will.” She put her bag on her shoulder. “By the way, I won’t be attending any more shipyard meetings.

  No more admiral’s briefings, no Dynacorp videoconferences.

  The only thing I’ll be doing is entering code, eating, and sleeping.”

  “Where can I find you?” “In the hull,” she said, pointing out the window overlooking the dock. “Until Cyclops works, the SSNX is home.”

  As she swept out of the room, the wind of her passage lifted several fliers tacked to a bulletin board near the door.

  Pacino drummed his fingers on the table. Then he stood and walked to the trash can. Pulling out the crisis football, he set it on the window ledge. He was gathering his own things when the yeoman came into the room.

  “Admiral? Sir? There’s an urgent videolink on your Writepad, sir, a Captain White?” “I’ll take it here,” Pacino said. “Shut the door.”

  He clicked into the video connection, wondering what Paully White needed that was so urgent that he couldn’t wait till this afternoon’s scheduled videolink.

  VS. east coast The Lincoln staff car was not a car at all, but a huge four-door sport-utility vehicle painted a glossy black.

  The emblem of the Unified Submarine Command graced the doors and the rear hatch. The logo featured the sail of a surfaced nuclear submarine flying a Jolly Roger pirate flag and, below, three gold stars.

  The Lincoln made its way north at one hundred ten miles per hour, hurtling past Monday late-afternoon traffic on 1-95 outside of Fredericksburg, Virginia, heading for Bethesda Naval Hospital in the northern suburbs of Washington. The beacons of the Virginia state police cruiser ahead flashed into the cabin through the windshield, and the escort’s siren blared intermittently to warn traffic out of the left lane. The windows in the back half of the car were polarized dark black, keeping out the sinking afternoon sun and enabling better visibility for the video screen mounted on the headrest of the right front seat.

  Captain Paul “Paully” White sat in the rear. His service dress blues were not blue at all but a dark black.

  His three rows of ribbons on his left breast pocket were mounted below a gold submariner’s dolphin pin, and a gold rope hanging from his left shoulder indicated he was a flag officer’s aide, along with four gold braid stripes on his sleeves indicating his rank. His face was set in a dark frown as he watched the video screen, waiting for Admiral Pacino to appear.

  Paully White had just turned forty-eight, a subject that grew more sore each year. Despite a chain-smoking habit he had recently gained ten pounds at the belt line, and was not used to seeing a mirror reflection that was other than thin. White had become Pacino’s aide in the blockade of Japan by default, when White’s position as the submarine operations officer of the aircraft carrier Reagan had made him the only fellow submariner aboard. The two of them were on the carrier’s bridge when the Japanese torpedoes had hit. The sixth and seventh torpedoes exploded beneath the keel amidships, breaking the back of the giant aircraft carrier, beginning the list to port that would end in the vessel’s capsizing.

  The eighth torpedo had detonated under the control island, slamming Pacino into a bulkhead. Pacino slid down to the deck, leaving a smear of blood on the bulkhead.

  As the deck began to incline. White lunged for the admiral, and pulled him into his arms.

  Without conscious thought. White carried Pacino to the hatch and down four ladders to the main-deck level.

  Pacino’s eighty-five-kilogr
am frame felt feather light in the wash of the adrenaline coursing through White’s veins. He emerged onto the main deck as the carrier listed far to port, and for a horrible moment he was sure he’d lose his footing and slide to the edge and plunge the twenty meters to the sea below, but he steadied up.

  The noise of helicopter rotors suddenly roared from his rear, and he turned to see a Sea King chopper descend madly for the listing deck. White half ran, half limped to the open doorway, flinging Pacino into the opening as hard as he could, then leaping in himself. As the helicopter lurched sickeningly upward, the deck of the carrier rolled to full vertical. The huge control island splashed into the sea and vanished. In the end nothing but Reagan’s hull was visible, a deep crack extending from one side to the other.

  The war had come then, Pacino commanding the fleet that eventually prevailed, returning him to the States, to peacetime.

  A year later Pacino married Eileen and things had been as smooth as they would ever be at the Unified Submarine Command. Pacino worked constantly trying to get funding for the new attack submarine, the NSSN, and finally the unnamed prototype, the SSNX, was approved by Congress. The keel was laid at Dynacorp’s Electric Boat yard in Groton, Connecticut, and Pacino was in his glory.

  As if he had tempted the gods, his good fortune soon gave way to tragedy. White was one room over from Pacino’s office when the awful phone call came late on a Thursday night. That call essentially put an end to the Pacino White had known.

  White went with Pacino to the funeral parlor. An hour before the church service, Pacino insisted on seeing Eileen’s body. The funeral director took one look at Pacino and without a word lifted the coffin lid. Eileen’s body was unrecognizable, her only intact feature her hair. Pacino leaned tenderly over her, giving her remains one last kiss. White held Pacino’s right arm as they walked through the rows of tombstones, his young son. Tony, holding his left, and White swore that had Pacino not been physically supported, he would have fallen flat on his face.