Piranha: Firing Point mp-5

by Michael Dimercurio

  “They had a prearranged operational order,” Pacino said.

  “Exactly, Admiral,” Daniels said, a false smile curling across his face. “Donchez said you were smart, but he never said you had a flair for the obvious like this.”

  Pacino frowned, ready to launch into the agency director when the younger man stood.

  “Well, I’ve done my duty for today. Donchez said you’d need to know this stuff. Now you do. And here’s my card.” Daniels produced a business card, the electronic scan strip on the back ready for the receiver to insert into his Writepad. “If you need me, just call. I’m sure by the eighteenth or nineteenth message I may call you back.”

  The door slammed behind him.

  “Nice guy,” White said.

  “Pissed-off guy,” Pacino replied. “Get the file on him.”

  “Already on it,” White said, scanning through his Writepad. “Not much here. Mason W. Daniels IV, Princeton grad, class of ‘01, English major. Harvard Law, Law Review, graduated ‘04, initial service in the National Security Agency, special deputy to the director.”

  “Who was the director then?”

  “General Mason W. Daniels III.” White looked up. “Jesus, he’s Mason Daniels’ son.”

  “Wow,” Pacino said. General Mason Daniels, Donchez’s predecessor, was a legend in the intelligence community, having saved the NSA from the razor of intelligence consolidation, and being credited with numerous intelligence coups, such as the initial warning on the Chinese Civil War.

  “Now what, sir?”

  “Get Kathy back, and put that disk in.”

  JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING

  TETON VILLAGE

  PRESIDENTIAL COMPOUND

  The eight black Land Rovers crunched through the packed snow at the rear entrance to Warner’s ski lodge.

  Pacino bit his lip, wondering what the meeting was going to be like. The staff meeting on O’Shaughnessy’s 777 had never happened, even though they had been flying in with half the Washington establishment due at Warner’s meeting coming up. After Daniels had left the cabin, Pacino had sent Kathy forward to see what was up, but she said the CNO, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Army Chief of Staff were closeted behind O’Shaughnessy’s door. They didn’t emerge until the plane was descending for the airport.

  The other Land Rovers ahead of them contained the entourage they’d flown with but hadn’t seen. In the front was the truck for Stephen “Blowtorch” Cogster, the National Security Adviser, and his personal staff. Behind him, Freddy Masters, the Secretary of State, his staff members crowded in with him. Then came the Director of Combined Intelligence, Christopher Osgood. Number four drove Mason “Jack” Daniels. Next the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Bill Pinkenson, followed by General James Baldini, the Army chief, then Admiral O’Shaughnessy, and finally Pacino and White.

  The next minutes were a blur as Secret Service agents and armed Marine Corps guards crowded around them, taking their bags, passing them through metal detectors, hustling them in the double wood doors to the lower level, then taking them to their quarters. Pacino was led down a hall walled by heavy wood logs chinked with beige mortar. Doors lined the corridor, one on the right marked with a sign showing three gold stars on a blue field, the letters below spelling adm m. pacino, cmdr. unified sub cmd. Looking at it, he felt a vague unease.

  Why had he been selected to accompany O’Shaughnessy on this errand, when the chief hadn’t spent a single minute with him since his coming-to-Jesus talk on Saturday?

  His instincts told him O’Shaughnessy liked him and would help him. And Warner obviously had spoken to the chief, asking him to bring Pacino along. But why?

  This was a ground war going on in White China. Sure, there would be airlift and sealift coming from the Navy, and certainly a Marine invasion with close fighter air cover from the carriers, but all those functions resided with other officers. He was a submarine officer. The only action he’d see in this was detailing the two 6881-class ships to go with the Navforcepacfleet and the Rapid Deployment Force out of Yokosuka. The subs were the Annapolis, SSN-760, and the Santa Fe, SSN-763, both of them modernized within eighteen months, both admitted to drydocks after the Japanese blockade. They would act as an escort for the carrier battle group into the East China Sea ensuring no cheap diesel boats or robot mines got in the way.

  Unless, all that considered, he was here because he was a submarine officer. Hadn’t Jack Daniels mentioned the loss of the Japanese submarines? Was there some connection he was missing? Was there something Donchez’s deathbed soliloquy had meant to tell him?

  He cursed under his breath as he was led into the room. An oversize bed was placed against the left wall, flanked by two oak nightstands, and a large window spanned the opposite wall. Pacino glanced out the window at the view of the village below, the busy ski slopes beyond, then dug out his Writepad from his briefcase on the bed. Furiously he clicked through the menus, selecting a chart of the waters off China, ordering the software to display for him water depth.

  Just as he’d remembered, the entrance to the East China Sea was guarded by a long arc of islands, the Ryukyu chain. The water there was around a thousand fathoms, but a hundred miles west, the entire East China Sea became shallower than a hundred fathoms — six hundred feet. A true littoral water, where sonar sounds would carry for miles, bouncing off the sandy bottom.

  For a submarine, that was both good and bad news. Good, in that a sub could hear a surface ship coming hundreds of miles away. Bad, because the sub itself would find it hard to hide out in a thermal layer. It took stealth away from the sub, its best weapon.

  If the surface forces were up against subs in the East China Sea, they’d have an easy time of it. The frigates and antisubmarine helicopters would quickly sort out any bad guys.

  His thoughts turned to Jack Daniels, who had worked for Donchez at NSA. Daniels had wanted to reach him about the sinking of the Japanese Rising Suns, the information seemingly worth eighteen urgent phone calls, yet anticlimatic when he finally delivered it. Donchez had thought the facts that sea trials were over and that the Rising Suns being at periscope depth was significant.

  Jesus, Donchez and his babbling nonsense, talking about Red subs that Pacino would be “up against.” What was that all about? Was it possible that the Rising Suns hadn’t gone down, that the Red Chinese somehow had gotten their hands on the top-of-the-line advanced-technology vessels? Could Nagasaki Mod II plasma torpedoes in the bows of Rising Sun submarines be aimed at the Rapid Deployment Force? Was that the reason the Reds had chosen now as the time to attack the Whites, because they had a silver bullet in the East China Sea?

  Donchez, Pacino thought, had had lung cancer. The Bethesda attending physician had said the cancer had metastasized to Donchez’s brain. Pacino had heard about brain cancer, from old Master Chief Gambini, the sonar chief of the Piranha. His wife, Maureen, had died of brain cancer, and for the last year of her life had barely recognized her own family, yelling at friends she adored, spitting at her cherished black lab. The brain cancer had turned her inside out. Had Maureen’s logical process changed, or just her emotions? And even if she could remember, would that have any bearing on Donchez? Was all this about the Red subs a sign of senility or loss of brain function; a grand fantasy?

  And if so, should he give voice to that fantasy when Warner was charged with making a decision? If he told her the East China Sea was potentially unsafe, and she pulled the carriers and troop transports back while his subs scoured the area, what would happen then? Two escort subs would take months to sanitize the East China Sea. And the Pearl Harbor boats would take a week to get there, a week lost, and even with all twelve Pearl ships, it would still take a month to search the operational area. If they delayed by a month. Red China would win. Warner, as Paully had said, needed to strike now. And what of the political damage to her administration? Hadn’t she just said: To our friends in White China, I say, hold on, the cavalry is coming? What should he tell her? That the
RDF and the Navforcepacfleet was standing into danger, he thought. That some one hundred ten ships stood a good chance of never making it to the beach. So could he really tell her to turn the RDF around?

  Warner would have to wonder about him. Yes, he’d got the Navy Cross for bravery, but he’d also had two submarines shot right out from under him. Would she think he was gunshy? After all, the ships of the fleet were armed to the goddamned teeth with antisubmarine frigates, antisubmarine destroyers, both carrying depth charges and smart torpedoes. They had variable-depth sonars and towed linear sonar arrays, plus there were Seahawk V antisubmarine helicopters bristling with antisub sonars and more sonobuoys and smart torpedoes of their own. Above all that, the three aircraft carriers had their three squadrons of Blackboard S-14 slow-flying antisubmarine jets, each with over a thousand sonobuoys, a magnetic-anomaly detector, and a couple sub-killer torpedoes, not to mention the ten P-5 Pegasus patrol planes waiting on the runways in Japan. Each one was bigger than a 757, with more sub detection gear than you could put in a warehouse, and deep-diving antisub torpedoes, eight apiece.

  So what had Donchez been worried about? He walked to a table by his couch, picked up the phone, consulted a list done in calligraphy under the seal of the president, searching for Paully White’s number, then punched four buttons.

  “Captain White.”

  “Paully, it’s me. Get in here.”

  “Admiral Pacino, the president requests your presence at the meeting,” the staffer said, discreetly shutting the door after herself.

  “Boss, I’m dying to know what’s going on,” White said.

  “Sorry, Paully, no staff allowed,” Pacino said, annoyed.

  The meeting had been going on for three hours already, well past sunset, and he had not been invited.

  When he had called the chief of staffs office for word, the secretary had indicated he should stand by until the president needed him.

  He and Paully had spent most of the evening looking over the videodisk of the Tanaka videoconference.

  They’d made some progress, but not much. They had decided to go through it frame by frame, but so far it all looked normal, as normal as it could in Japanese with the NSA translation in captions at the bottom of the screen. During breaks in the examination of the disk, they’d put on the news. The Satellite News Network had the best coverage, but eventually even SNN’s reports became stale and repetitive. The Reds were still pushing in the center, consolidating in the north, and attacking Hong Kong by air. The firebombing of Hong Kong had killed SNN correspondent Brett Hedley, a reporter of some notoriety. The video of the fuel-air explosive that had killed him was played several times before SNN decided it was too gruesome to air.

  Meanwhile, Pacino had called for his staff aircraft, a supersonic Grumman SS-12, which had been put back together at Norfolk Naval Air Station’s maintenance section. The jet was due by half past midnight, and the pilot had been given instructions to stand by at the plane rather than drive out to the village.

  “Keep going through the disk, and stay on top of the SS-12. And, Paully, my guess is we’ll be getting out of here soon — Warner doesn’t seem in the mood to play with this thing. So keep your things packed. If it comes to it, we’ll sleep on the plane.”

  “Aye-aye, sir. Good luck.”

  Pacino walked down the log-lined hallway to the end, where half-log steps rose to the upper level. The suit-clad staff woman was waiting with her ID tags around her neck and a radio in her hand. She mumbled into it as he approached. She led him up two nights of stairs to the huge main level. Pacino emerged in a large open area, near a window wall overlooking the twinkling lights of the village. Two stone fireplaces were lit in the open area across the way, framing an arrangement of furniture.

  The fireplace hearths were each big enough to roast a pig in, and the massive logs in them filled the room with warmth. In the center of the sitting area was a coffee table as big as a queen-size bed, cluttered with Writepad computers and printouts, old-fashioned colored paper maps, and coffee cups. Gathered around were four long couches and four deep easy chairs. To the side of the room two pine dining tables had been moved together, their surfaces covered with large notepad computer displays, charts of the East China Sea, and maps of White China. Tacked to the wall was a huge, twenty-foot-tall colored map of all of White China and the East China Sea.

  The first thing Pacino noticed about the men gathered in the room was how casually they were dressed. O’Shaughnessy wore jeans and hiking boots with a ski sweater; James Baldini, the Army chief, looked like he was ready for a cocktail party, wearing a designer sports jacket and gabardine pants; the remainder were wearing ski pants and long-sleeved T-shirts or turtlenecks, after-ski boots. The only exception was Lido Gaz, the Secretary of War, who looked like he was back at the Pentagon, wearing an Armani three-piece suit over a starched white shirt and red-patterned tie. Dressed in service dress blues, Pacino felt like a fish out of water.

  “Admiral, make yourself comfortable,” Jaisal Warner said. She was standing by the fireplace slim and shapely in her ski pants and boots, her hair tucked behind her ears. She held a steaming mug of coffee in one hand, a small Writepad in the other.

  Pacino smiled at her. “Thank you. Madam President.”

  He removed his service dress jacket and placed it on the back of the one empty easy chair, near the window side of the couch arrangement. Warner nodded to the seat, and he sat in it.

  To Pacino’s right was O’Shaughnessy, James Baldini seated on the couch next to him. On the right corner easy chair was Jack Daniels, and in the couch to his right, facing the window, was Chris Osgood and Stephen Cogster. Warner returned to her easy chair in the midst of all of them. On an opposite couch, between Secretary of State Freddy Masters and Vice President Al Meckstar sat the Secretary of War, Lido Gaz. He was of medium height, slightly thick in the middle, in his late fifties, with silver hair and a craggy, coarse-featured face, and usually the best-dressed man in any room. Gaz would impress people on his initial meetings with his charm and his intelligence, but in the Pentagon E-Ring suite where he held his offices, he was moody, explosive, sarcastic, and bombastic. Pacino was careful around Gaz, and that approach had seemed to pay off. Gaz had always treated him with respect and courtesy.

  Between Gaz and Pacino was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Bill Pinkenson, who shot Pacino a dazzling smile. Pinkenson always seemed like a favorite uncle, telling stories and talking to the troops. Yet when he focused on the task at hand, his judgment was sound and invariably on target.

  As Pacino settled into his chair, he found every eye in the room looking at him. A bad taste rose to his mouth, a pool of bile forming in his stomach. This was not the kind of meeting where he would sit in and watch the debate go back and forth. He’d been called to give his opinion. For the tenth time that day, Pacino wondered why he was there, and why O’Shaughnessy had yet to talk to him.

  “Admiral Pacino, I want to thank you for coming out with Admiral O’Shaughnessy.” President Warner smiled.

  “I know we’ve kept you downstairs while we went through some things, but believe me, it was all boring stuff.” At that Lido Gaz frowned, as if saying Warner was going overboard. She sat back, gesturing with a laser pointer to the map. “I’m sure you gentlemen will correct me if I mess up this explanation to Admiral Pacino, and forgive me, Admiral, if I get any of this wrong, but here is how I understand this. You can see on the map, the big board, that our Rapid Deployment Force will be going in with the transport ships of the Naval Pacific Force Fleet. The target, and this is release 24, will be Wangpan Yang, the bay south of Shanghai. The generals think we have a good landing zone there. Our forces will fight their way to Shanghai and take this whole area. We’ve been discussing that for quite some time, so I’ve spared you about two hours of our deliberations. Once the beachhead is secure, our forces will move farther out to here, while we land more troops by airlift and sealift. Although the RDF will be striking qu
ickly, our main force will be landed over the next weeks and months. Meanwhile we are planning to insert the 82nd Airborne Division here, deeper behind the lines, with the Seals and Green Berets here, the Joint Special Forces Brigade. As you may have suspected. Admiral, the key to this entire operation is the sealift and invasion from the sea. Our question to you centers on the East China Sea.”

  Pacino swallowed. Here it comes, he thought. She’ll want to know if they can be assured that the sealift operation would be safe, even though the East China Sea would be an ideal hunting ground for submarines.

  “Our three aircraft carriers of the Navforcepacfleet have two escort nuclear submarines, as I’m sure you’re aware. Admiral,” Warner continued, smiling slightly at him. “They, and the surface force, will be escorting nearly seventy ships, loaded with the Marines and the RDF. Now, you remember the discussion we had before the Japanese blockade, I assume.”

  “Yes, Madam President,” he said, looking her in the eye.

  “As I recall during that discussion, you were critical of the employment of our armed forces. And, as I recall, you were completely right.” Warner eyed the other men in the room. “Which is one reason you see so many new faces at this meeting that weren’t here last time.”

  She was warning them, Pacino thought. It was no accident that O’Shaughnessy, Baldini, Pinkenson, and Gaz had come to power over the last eighteen months. Now that the pre-Japan crew had been fired, this group was being told that their decisions here had better work, or these men would also be sent packing. He glanced quickly at the four Pentagon leaders, and saw four poker faces.

  “And that is one reason you’re here. Admiral. Consider yourself my rabbit’s foot.” The men laughed shallowly, and Pacino shifted in his seat. He was no Pinkenson, able to schmooze with the president and members of Congress, laughing and drinking with people who pushed the buttons on the future of the world. He could never do for a living what Dick O’Shaughnessy did, commanding the Navy on one hand, on the other glad-handing politicians. All he could do was speak his mind, tell his bosses what he thought. Yet here, he was speaking to a commander-in-chief in the face of three levels of his chain of command, any one capable of putting him in charge of paper clips in the Aleutians. He focused on Warner, waiting for her question.