Piranha Firing Point

by Michael Dimercurio

  “And the last worry on the list is that this mission falls on its face if Cyclops fails. We’d better hope the computer works and doesn’t crash on us.”

  “If it works anything as well as Miss. O’Shaughnessy looks, it’ll do great,” a young voice said from the other side of the room.

  “That’s enough,” Pacino said, suddenly furious, biting his lip. “Any questions? Captain, please dismiss your men and come see me in the VIP stateroom.”

  Pacino left the wardroom and crossed the hall to the stateroom, his heart still thumping in anger. No doubt about it, he’d feel better when Colleen was off the ship.

  Thursday NOVEMBER 7 pacific ocean 270 miles southeast of naha, okinawa USS devilfish, SSNX-1

  “Tanker in sight, bearing mark! Range, mark! Three divisions in low power, angle on the bow starboard five.

  Offsa’deck, take the scope,” Patton called, releasing the grips and turning away.

  “Where’s O’Shaughnessy?”

  “She’s not at the escape trunk, sir,” the helm officer said, putting down his phone.

  Patton and Pacino exchanged a look. “I’ll go for her,” Pacino said. He walked out of the control room, past the door to sonar, and down the forward centerline passageway all the way to the end at the door to the computer room. He tapped in the combination to the button-type lock, the alphanumerics set to “S-S-N-X,” clicked the latch, and walked in. Colleen O’Shaughnessy sat at her console, typing away, as if there were no personnel transfer waiting for her.

  “You’re late,” Pacino said, trying to keep his voice level. “We need to get you going. Wrap up there and get into the suit and tanks.” He pointed at the wet suit on the deck, the scuba bottle lying next to it.

  She just kept typing, ignoring him.

  “Colleen, let’s go.” He reached for her upper arm, and she shrugged him off, continuing to type.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he cried, his anger rising.

  “I’ll tell you what’s the matter with me,” she said, her voice low, quiet, and furious. “You’re treating me like a child. Now, cut it out and leave me alone. I’ve got two terabytes of code to fix.”

  “Colleen, we’ll manage. Turn it over to Commander Porter. We need to get you off the ship.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your life is in danger.”

  “No, it isn’t, yours is. Especially if you kick me off the ship. Admiral, the code’s corrupt. It has maybe an hour at a time to run before it collapses, and I have to cold-start it.” She kept typing while she spoke.

  “Fine, we’ll cold-start it when it shuts down. Now let’s—”

  “You don’t understand. Each time it shuts down, I have to process and fix the error message. It’s how the debug-system module works. We might even lose the system fifty times in an hour if there are fifty lines of code incorrect. And your Mr. Porter won’t be able to do that. So it’s not whether my life or your life is in danger, it’s the mission that’s in trouble. This mission goes exactly nowhere without Cyclops. You said it yourself, Admiral, I am the battlecontrol system.” She stopped typing, dropped her hands into her lap, and looked up at him. “I’ll tell you the real reason you want me off the ship. It’s because of your feelings for me.”

  Pacino dropped his jaw, looking down at her. The ponytail was gone. She had combed out her hair, and it looked freshly washed, shining in the light of the overheads.

  Her skin was as healthy as if she’d been outside in the sun, her eyes shining.

  “My feelings for you?”

  “Exactly. And it’s okay, Michael. I have feelings for you too. I have since the first time I saw you 137 days ago at the Dynacorp shipyard meeting.”

  “I never knew,” Pacino sputtered, his chest so tight he could barely speak. “Why didn’t you say something, or do something? Something to tell me?”

  “You weren’t ready. You’re still not. Besides, I did do something. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  Pacino struggled to think. “But, Colleen, your life is in danger. We’re headed for a combat zone. You can’t be here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Navy regulations, for one thing—”

  “Screw them. Next?”

  “Okay, your father.”

  “If I were a guy, that wouldn’t matter, would it?”

  Pacino pushed against his mental haze. “You’re right.

  Maybe it wouldn’t. But you’re still leaving. I’m not putting you at risk any more than I already have. It was wrong to bring you here.”

  “Look at it this way. Admiral. If this were 1912 and I were on the Titanic, would you evacuate me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, if I were on the Titanic because I alone had the information to prevent it from hitting that iceberg, and that were my purpose, then would you evacuate me?”

  “Dammit, yes.”

  “And have a thousand deaths on your conscience? I doubt it. You’d let me stay to try to save the ship. Because, Admiral, without me this ship is the Titanic.”

  Pacino looked her in the eye for a long moment.

  “You’re right, I do have feelings for you,” he admitted waiting for the pang of guilt to set in, but it was late.

  Colleen smiled. “I want three kids.”

  Pacino laughed, his mouth open to reply, when the door lock clicked, then the latch, and the door opened against the jamb. It was Patton, one eyebrow raised.

  “Loss of battle control!” a speaker in the overhead boomed.

  “Back to work,” O’Shaughnessy sighed, turning back to her panel. Pacino waved at her and left the room, pulling Patton after him.

  “Shove off the personnel-transfer tanker,” Pacino said. “She’s staying with us.”

  “Is she nuts? We’re going to be—”

  “We’re going to be without a battlecontrol system unless she’s onboard to fix it.”

  Patton sighed, walking back to control. When Pacino arrived there, Patton had already ordered the ship to return deep at emergency flank. He looked at Pacino strangely.

  “You got a second. Admiral?”

  Patton waved him into his captain’s cabin. On the table was a package wrapped in brown paper, with an envelope taped to it. The envelope said, personal for COMMANDING OFFICER.

  “I’ve already read the note,” Patton said. “It said to give the package to you when we were close to the operation area.” He looked at Pacino, curious.

  Pacino opened the package. The brown paper was wrapped around a folded black cloth, the material coarse and heavy. As he unfolded it all the way, Patton whistled.

  It was a Jolly Roger pirate flag, the skull and crossbones white on the black field. The flag was large, the size of a bedsheet. Above the grinning skull was the legend in uneven white letters, uss devilfish, and below the crossbones the legend read, you ain’t cheatin, you ain’t tryin. Pacino looked at it, startled.

  The flag had flown on the bridge of the first Devilfish, and it was one of two things Pacino had pulled out of the captain’s stateroom before he had abandoned ship.

  The second had been a photograph of his father standing in front of his submarine, the doomed Stingray. Back in Norfolk, Pacino had taken the flag and the photo to the Stingray monument, a black marble obelisk dedicated to the men who had died in the sinking of the submarine, Pacino’s father’s name engraved first on the list. Reverently Pacino had bent to leave the flag and photograph, and had limped on his crutches away, never expecting to see the flag again.

  He had heard reports about it, though. Someone reported that on a visit to see Admiral Donchez at his Commander Submarines Atlantic Headquarters, the Jolly Roger flew over the building next to the American flag. Pacino had shrugged it off as a false rumor. But here the flag was, yet another reminder of Donchez.

  “Let me see the note,” Pacino said. The note simply said. Give this to Admiral Pacino when the ship is close to the operation area. It was in Dick Donchez’s handwriting.

  Pacino sw
allowed hard.

  “Hang it in the control room,” he said to Patton.

  point echo hold position 40 miles east OF THE naze-yakushima gap USS devilfish, SSNX-1

  Pacino checked his Rolex. Thirty minutes to zero hour.

  He had been pacing the ship for the last few hours, circling between the computer room, control, sonar, and Patton’s stateroom.

  Now Paully White, Patton, and Pacino were sitting at Patton’s conference table, looking at the chart display of the East China Sea. Pacino felt his stomach tense, his pulse racing, the pre-game jitters thrumming through him. He struggled to find something useful he could do.

  He had already brought the Piranha up to periscope depth and briefed Bruce Phillips on the final details of the war plan. There was nothing to do now but wait.

  What if he was wrong? he thought. What if the subs were hundreds of miles south, or dispersed throughout the sea? What would he do then? He could do nothing until the aircraft dropped their Yo-Yo remote sensors into the Naze-Yakushima Gap, and then the battle would begin or he would be forced to switch to Plan B. For a moment he thought about Colleen, but that was like poking his hand into a hornet’s nest, feelings overwhelmingly strong on the other side of that mental wall.

  All he would allow himself to feel was concern for Colleen and hope that nothing happened to her. Or him, he thought.

  When the clock reached 2255 local time, Pacino stood.

  “Let’s man up,” he said, walking forward into the control room. He ducked out through the forward door to the passageway to its end and into the computer room.

  “Man… battle stations!” the overhead speaker boomed, repeating the message.

  “Well, this is it,” he said.

  As Colleen looked up at him, her face was a mask of worry. Her eyes rotated between him and her computer screen. “Good luck, Michael,” she said, and Pacino thought it sounded so strange to hear that from her lips, yet so good.

  “You too, honey,” he said, hating himself for the weird way it sounded and made him feel.

  Her face relaxed for just a second, a serenity coming over her, and then the curtain fell, the frown returning, her fingers typing on the keyboard, a curse under her breath at the computer. He stepped to the door and looked back at her, wanting to remember her like this.

  THURSDAY NOVEMBER 7 kagoshima naval air station kagoshima, japan The P-5 Pegasus Antisubmarine-warfare patrol plane idled at the end of runway one eight. The strip pointed due south toward the dark water of the East China Sea.

  The only light in the cockpit came from the backwash of the instrument panel and the lights of the runway.

  The flashing numerals of the digital chronometer, synchronized with the overhead satellite atomic clock, flashed 53 … 54 … 55 …

  Commander David Toscano’s Nomex-gloved hand was already poised on the throttles to the four fanjet transit engines mounted in pairs on the

  high wings of the ungainly aircraft, and when the numerals 55 flashed, he moved the levers forward to the detents at the instrument panel. The jets howled far behind him, making the plane shake with the power. Toscano’s feet remained planted on the toe brakes, watching as the needles climbed on the electronic analog-mimic instruments—oil pressure, fuel flow rate, revolutions per minute. The jets were coming up normally to full thrust. The heavy bird would need every ounce of power the Dynacorp engines could deliver because the day’s load was heavy, featuring fat war-shot Mark 79 torpedoes, each weighing twenty tons, plus two Yo-Yo Mark 12 over-the-horizon remote-sonar-sensor pods, a massive two tons each.

  Toscano looked over at his copilot, who nodded behind his visor. The clock ticked, 58 … 59 … 00. At zero zero exactly Toscano released the toe brakes. For the first second the P-5, shuddering under several dozens of tons of thrust, did exactly nothing, sitting immobile on the runway. Toscano’s fingers tensed on the control yoke, toes poised on the rudder pedals. The P-5 finally budged, accelerating in the first few seconds to a walking speed, even as the jets aft screeched at full power. Toscano shot a look at the panel—all nominal—then back at the runway. At fifteen seconds they were at a jogging speed. Another five seconds clicked off, and the airspeed needle showed them at twenty knots, only about fifty feet of runway behind them, almost two miles of concrete ahead.

  The big bird slowly gained speed until the ground was rushing by beneath them, highway speed, the aircraft bouncing slightly. To a hundred knots the airspeed climbed, then 120,140, half the runway gone, the plane shaking insistently. At the three-quarter point the jet had made it to safe takeoff velocity, 175 knots, but Toscano held it down, the wings bouncing behind them. To 180, 190, 200 knots—the concrete’s end could be seen ahead. Toscano gently pulled back on the control yoke and the nose came up, only darkness in the windows ahead, the shaking airframe instantly canning, the P-5 airborne over the water of the East China Sea. The needle of the radar altimeter climbed as the jet fought for altitude. As they passed through a thousand feet, Toscano throttled back and put the yoke forward.

  “Gear up,” he said. The copilot hit the lever with the round handle, and the P-5’s wheels retracted into the fuselage. “Raps up,” and the whine behind him indicated the wings fairing in the flap surfaces. The Pegasus was fully airborne.

  Toscano dialed in the navigation chart to the forward display. As the number one Yo-Yo drop zone began flashing, the coastline of the Home Islands faded to the north of the blinking dot representing their aircraft.

  Transit time to the drop zone at jet speed was about fifteen minutes. Toscano concentrated on his navigation and his instruments, the P-5 known to be temperamental.

  At the drop time, Toscano broke his silence. “Start the turboprops.” His copilot hit the auto-start button on the starboard turboprop, the engine with its huge diameter prop feathered during takeoff. The prop windmilled in the airstream, and the engine came up to speed, the copilot monitoring as fuel injection began and the prop came up to idling revs.

  “Number one turboprop is up.” He started the port prop and soon reported it running at idle.

  Toscano pulled back on the jet throttles, their howl dying to a whimper. Quieter than the jets, the grinding turboprops would keep the massive jet hanging above the water at ultraslow speed. Toscano descended to the water. He checked the nav display. They were one mile from the drop of the number one Mark 12 Yo-Yo.

  “Mark 12 forward door open,” he commanded on his boom mike. The copilot hit the lever, and the fuselage opened up beneath them.

  “Eight hundred yards to drop number one,” Toscano said. “Arm the drop mechanism, Yo-Yo unit one power on.”

  “Power on, unit one and engaged, drop mechanism enabled. Ready for Mark 12 release.”

  “Four hundred yards, stand by.”

  SS-403 arctic storm Chu looked out the periscope and commanded, “Darkwing unit two liftoff in three, two, one, mark! And laser guidance, I have the aircraft in the crosshairs.”

  “Darkwing missile two away, sir,” Lo Sun said from the command console. The huge maritime patrol plane was dipping so close to the water that the bomb-bay doors were almost skimming the waves. Chu had gotten the ship to periscope depth, manning battle stations, just seconds before. It was as if the airplane knew where they were. He hadn’t circled or done a search; he’d come right in from nowhere. The Second Captain had given them only about seven seconds’ warning of the aircraft, but in that time Chu had bolted from his stateroom table, shouted at the ship-control officer to take the vessel up, and grabbed the periscope.

  He felt a sudden chill. The Americans were coming for him. This was something he hadn’t anticipated, that the Japanese would have cooperated and told the Americans about the Rising Suns.

  His thoughts were interrupted as the trail of the missile flashed into his view in the periscope.

  Toscano watched the navigation display with one eye, the instruments with the other. It was time.

  “Drop unit one.”

  The copilot pulled up on
the console Yo-Yo drop lever, and the plane lifted slightly as the two-ton weight left the plane.

  There was a brief flash of light from something out the window of the cockpit before the airplane exploded.

  The airframe disintegrated. Toscano’s body was ripped in half at the seat belt, the father of two dead before he even realized he’d been hit.

  Tens of thousands of pieces of debris rained down on the water. A jet engine, nearly intact, splashed into the water not far from the Yo-Yo as the unit sank into the water of the East China Sea, its surface transmitter being barely missed by several pieces of what had been the plane’s tail section.

  Deep underwater, the Yo-Yo unit began transmitting up the cable line to the surface transmitter, seeing the deep water around it with the acoustic daylight imaging.

  The sea around it was full of medium-sized chunks of debris sinking on their way to the bottom. What was left of the cockpit sailed by a few minutes after. Soon the sea calmed, and there was only the ocean and the soli tary shape of the submarine, lurking above at periscope depth, some twelve hundred yards away.

  Five P-5 Pegasus patrol planes had taken off from Kagoshima.

  Five of them took missile hits as they flew near or over the Arctic Storm’s position. Five of them disintegrated and hit the water, their crews all dead.

  The first Yo-Yo made it into the water, but the others blew up with their aircraft.

  No other P-5s were operational at Kagoshima, and if there had been, it didn’t matter, since all the Yo-Yo remote pods were expended. There were no spares.

  Five aircraft down. Admiral Chu Hua-Feng pulled off his sweaty headset, there at the periscope station, and wiped his forehead.

  Though he did not know it, he had won the first round.

  point echo hold position USS devilfish, SSNX-1

  “The AWACS radar plane over Kagoshima reported it lost all five P-5 aircraft,” Paully White reported from the radio repeater console.

  “What do you mean, lost them?” Patton asked.

  “They dropped off the radar. The AWACS watch the aircraft with a look-down radar, since the P-5s fly too low for land-based radar to see them, and they reported that all five Pegasus planes hit the drink.”