Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

  He joined McKee but waved off the inevitable questions until they landed at the bunker. Once in the underground conference room he greeted Ericcson with a handshake, the taller man’s big hand crushing his palm.

  “Vie,” Patton said, “meet Vice Admiral Kelly McKee, Commander Unified Submarine Command and my acting Vice Chief of Naval Operations for Submarine Warfare. The paramedic outfit is part of the ruse to get him here. Kelly, this is Vice Admiral Egon “The Viking’ Ericcson, Supreme Commander-in-Chief U.S. Naval Forces Pacific—”

  Ericcson shook his head and growled, “Former commander, Admiral Patton. I’ve been demoted to be the commander of the NavForcePac Fleet. And call me Vie,” he said, pumping McKee’s hand. “It’s less formal than The Viking.” “

  Patton grimaced in exasperation. “Admiral Ericcson has been demoted by request to Commander NavForcePac Fleet,

  but he’s still the acting Super-CinCPac. Until I appoint his replacement.”

  “You know, Admiral, it’s not really a demotion until you take away the responsibilities and put someone in the Super CinCPac job

  Admiral John Patton, the Chief of Naval Operations and the commanding admiral of the U.S. Navy, ignored the comment, the crow’s-feet at his eyes wrinkling in a serious expression.

  “I know you guys have a hundred questions about how and why you were brought here. But let’s put all that on the back burner until the briefing is over. Agreed?” Both of his admirals nodded. Patton pointed to the conference table. “Gentlemen, take a seat.”

  Patton glanced over at his subordinates, unable to avoid the thought that they made a damned odd couple. On his right sat Ericcson with his imposing physique. On Patton’s left sat the far slighter form of Kelly McKee, the youthful-looking submarine chief a head shorter than Patton and towered over by Ericcson.

  The two admirals began and ended worlds apart. Ericcson was a supersonic naval aviator who’d earned a Purple Heart and the Silver Star over the Sea of Japan in a dogfight that nearly killed him, and had moved on to command fighter squadrons, deep draft ships, two aircraft carriers, and finally a carrier battle group McKee had spent his life underwater in the operational isolation of a nuclear submarine, his reputation that of an easygoing sailor’s commander, but he had proved vicious and cunning and aggressive in a desperate undersea battle, the crisis earning him the Navy Cross and command of the submarine force. To Patton’s knowledge, the two starkly different admirals had never met before this moment.

  “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.

  From the mid-hull hatch an officer in a working khaki uniform leaped to the deck and hurried down the gangway. Pacino stared at the officer, startled that he was looking at a woman. She was short and petite, her gleaming black hair pulled back in a ponytail. The rank insignia on her open collars was a silver double bar. She wore a blue baseball cap with the gold embroidered letters spelling uss piranha ssN-23 with a gold dolphin symbol above the brim. Beneath the brim, her dark almond-shaped eyes glared at Pacino below arching brows. Her nose was slightly upturned, with a small constellation of freckles on it. She had strong cheekbones and a model’s chin, her sole physical flaw, on a first glance, her jug handled ears protruding below the ball cap and her ponytail. Above her left shirt pocket she wore a gold dolphin pin, the emblem of a submarine-qualified officer, resembling pilot’s wings, but up close consisting of two scaly fish facing a diese
l boat conning tower. The woman moved jerkily, practically jumping out of her skin. It was easy to imagine she’d downed an entire pot of coffee. Pacino came to attention and saluted. He looked into her narrowed eyes, the woman’s face hard and unfriendly, her jaw clenched.

  “You must be Pacino,” she said, her throaty voice pouring out the firehose stream of words. “Welcome to the Black Pig. I’m Lieutenant Alameda, Piranha’s chief engineer. Captain

  Catardi wanted me to meet you and introduce you to the ship, then bring you to his stateroom.” She turned toward the vessel. “Follow me.”

  Pacino stepped off the gangway onto the hull. The black surface was smooth and rubbery like a shark’s skin, the anechoic coating covering the entire hull for sonar quieting. The lieutenant vanished down the mid-hull hatch. From his childhood memories of submarine etiquette, he leaned over the hatch opening and shouted, “Down ladder!” then tossed down his bag, lowered himself into the hatch ring feeling its oiled, shiny, cool steel surface as his feet found the rungs of the ladder. He put his feet outside the ladder rails and slid all the way down to the deck in one smooth motion, his shoes hitting the deckplates with a thump.

  Nostalgia hit Pacino then, the smell whisking him back in time to his youth, the harsh electrical smell of the ship making him remember his father’s submarines. He sniffed the air, the scent a mixture of diesel oil and diesel exhaust from the emergency generator, ozone from the electrical equipment, cooking oil, lubricating oils, and amines from the atmospheric control equipment. The narrow passageway ended at a bulkhead just beyond the ladder. The passageway was finished in a dark gray laminate, the doors and edges crafted from stainless steel like the interior of a transcontinental train compartment. The passageway led forward to the crew’s mess and galley, doors opening on either side, the passageway bulkheads covered with photographs of the ship’s triumphant return from her victory in the East China Sea.

  Alameda shoved a cigarette-lighter-sized piece of plastic at him. “This is called a TLD for ThermoLuminescent Dosimeter. Measures your radiation dose. Put it on your belt.”

  Alameda’s radio crackled: “Duty Officer, Engineering Officer of the Watch.”

  “Duty Officer,” she said into the walkie-talkie. “Go ahead.”

  “Maneuvering watches are manned aft, ma’am. Precritical checklist complete and sat. Estimated critical position calculated and checked. Request permission to start the reactor.”

  “Wait one,” she said, and put the radio in her pocket. “Come with me,” she ordered Pacino. They walked down the passageway past the opening to the crew’s mess to the stairway to the middle-level deck. Pacino followed her down the steep stairs, ending at the forward part of the control room. It was nothing like the Seawolf control room of his youth. The periscope stand and the periscopes were gone, a two-seat console taking their place. The ship-control panel and ballast control had been ripped out and replaced with an enclosure cubicle with two seats, a center console, and wraparound display screens. The clutter of the overhead with pipes and cables and ducts was cleared out, leaving a circular continuous display screen angling between the bulkheads and the overhead, and the starboard row of consoles that had been the attack center was gone, replaced by five cubicles. The only remaining recognizable fixtures were the twin navigation tables in the aft part of the room. There was far more, but he could not absorb the vast changes as he hurried through the room behind the engineer.

  Alameda led Pacino to the aft passageway and knocked on a door labeled cosr, the abbreviation for Commanding Officer’s Stateroom. The door opened and a man stepped out into the passageway and shut the door behind him. He was a scowling, hard-looking Navy commander in a working khaki uniform, Pacino’s height, in his late thirties or early forties with crow’s feet at his eyes, and a touch of gray at the temples of his black hair running down his long sideburns. He had olive-colored skin and the blackest eyes Pacino had ever seen, with deep dark circles beneath them and coal-black eyebrows above, set in a round face with a square jaw and defined cheekbones. He looked at Pacino, and his previously grim expression melted into a smile that seemed to light up the passageway, a raw enthusiasm suddenly shining out of him. The change in the captain’s expression from a dark haunted look to an effervescent brightness was so stark that Pacino doubted he’d seen right. The commander’s hand sailed from out of nowhere and gripped Pacino’s as if he’d seen a long-lost friend.

  “Patch Pacino, great to see you again.” His sharp Boston accent rang out through the passageway, the pitch of his voice a smooth tenor. “You probably don’t even remember me, but I’m Rob Catardi.” He stepped back, looking Pacino over, his expression becoming one of approving wonder. ““My God, look at you. Last time I saw you, you were five years old, sitting at Devilfish’s firecontrol console, asking your dad what a fixed-interval data unit was.” Pacino searched his memory, coming up blank. Catardi’s hand clapped Pacino on the shoulder board “I was a green junior officer on the Devilfish under your old man. Gutsiest god damned submarine captain ever born. We worshiped him. He taught me everything I know about driving a combat submarine. I was transferred off before the old girl went to the bottom.”

  Catardi let go of Pacino’s shoulder, a deep sadness coming to his face. “It’s a damned shame what happened last summer, Patch. How is your dad?”

  Pacino grimaced, the memory one of his most painful. The summer before, Pacino’s father had been the Chief of Naval Operations, the supreme admiral-in-command of the U.S. Navy. A year into his tour as the Navy’s commander he had come up with the idea to take his senior and mid grade officers to sea on Admiral Bruce Phillips’ company’s cruise liner Princess Dragon for two weeks of “stand-down” to discuss tactics and equipment away from the drudgery of the fleet. Princess Dragon had left Norfolk under heavy guard, with an Aegis II-class cruiser, two Bush-class destroyers, and the SSNX submarine screening her for security. Eighty miles out of Norfolk the stand-down plan went horribly wrong. The first plasma torpedo cut Princess Dragon in half and sent her to the bottom. The rest had taken out the fleet task force. Admiral Pacino had been sucked deep underwater with the broken hull of the cruise ship. He hadn’t been found until hours later, and by then more than a thousand of the Navy’s leading officers perished in the surprise terrorist attack. Almost every friend the admiral had lay dead at the bottom of the Atlantic or vaporized by the fireballs of the plasma detonations.

  The admiral had resigned from the Navy as soon as he was

  well enough to walk, and had done nothing since except putter with his sailboat. The elder Pacino was deeply depressed, Anthony Michael thought, but he couldn’t just say that to Captain Catardi.

  “He was in bad shape for a while, Captain, but he’s getting better.” A thought occurred to Pacino. “Sir, how did you know my nickname is Patch?”

  Catardi looked at him with a sort of recognition. “It’s what we used to call your father,” he said gently. Pacino swallowed hard.

  “Excuse me, Captain,” Alameda interrupted. “Request permission to start the reactor and shift propulsion to the main engines.”

  “Start the reactor and shift propulsion to the mains.”

  “Start the reactor and shift propulsion, aye, sir. If you don’t mind, sir, I need to get Mr. Pacino settled.”

  Catardi held up his palm, holding off the energetic chief engineer. “Patch, you’re driving us out. Get with the navigator and get the nav brief. You need to know the current and tides cold, and memo rise (he chart. You done much ship handling

  Pacino blinked as his stomach plunged, his armpits suddenly melting. “Well, sir, they have ship handling simulators at the Academy with a submarine program, and radio-controlled four-meter models in the seamanship lab. I’ve driven the yard patrol diesels.” The answer sounded lame, Pacino thought glumly.

  “You’ll be fine. I know conning a Seawolf-class special project submarine is an intimidating order, but Alameda and I will be up there with you. And I’m expecting a tra
demark Pacino back-full-ahead-flank underway.”

  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.