“Where am I?” he tried to say, but all that came out was a choked rattle. He tried again, seeing that the world was made completely of white, and the person coming close was draped in white, and for an instant he felt a terrible fear that he had died, but then the face of the other came nearer and the face had a bandage on the forehead, and the eyes were his own, but the nose was different and he blinked and realized that it was the face of his son, Anthony Michael, and Pacino tried to find his voice again, and this time it made a sound. “Anthony,” he said.
And then there was another face, this one framed in raven black long hair, large dark liquid eyes, eyes he had first seen in a shipyard laboring over a ship they had only called the SSNX, a ship that was now a forlorn debris field on the bottom of the Atlantic.
“Colleen,” he croaked.
“Don’t try to talk, Michael,” she said.
“Yeah, Dad,” Anthony Michael’s voice said.
“I have to know,” he said, his voice barely audible.
“What, honey?” Colleen asked.
“Novskoyy. What happened to Novskoyy?”
“You mean Krivak?”
Pacino nodded.
“He’s dead, dear,” Colleen said. “Now be quiet and sleep.”
Michael Pacino did as his wife told him and faded back away. A smile remained on his face.
Out in the corridor Commander Jeff Vermeers waited with the surviving crew of the Devilfish, with the commanding admiral of the submarine force, Kelly McKee, and with the Chief of Naval Operations, John Patton. Colleen came out and smiled, and the crowd broke into cheers until she fiercely quieted them down and ushered them out of the hospital.
“Colleen,” Anthony Pacino said, “I have to be somewhere.”
Colleen kissed the youth’s cheek, and he walked down the hall on his crutches to the elevator and down the hall to another room. When he came in, the woman in the bed smiled, her face relaxing into lines of beauty as she did.
“Patch,” she said tenderly.
“Carrie, how are you?”
“I’m good,” she said weakly. “Better now. How’s your father?”
“He’s going to be okay.”
“I’m glad.” She shut her eyes.
Pacino saw someone in the corner of the room. It was Commander Rob Catardi.
“Evening, sir,” Patch said.
Catardi smiled and clapped Pacino on the shoulder. “Good to see you, Patch. Carrie, I think I’ll go visit Patch Senior now, if you’re okay.”
She nodded. When Catardi left, Pacino leaned over and kissed her gently. She kissed him back, but was not gentle in return. Her arm pulled him down to her, her fingers in his hair. After several minutes she sat up higher in bed so she could see him.
“What’s this on your uniform?” she asked, touching his ribbons.
Pacino shrugged. “Navy Cross,” he said slowly. “I think a medal like that is for someone who rescues more than three people. We lost the rest of the ship.”
Lieutenant Commander Carolyn Alameda frowned. “Don’t disrespect the award. You rescued everyone who survived. You saved four lives, including your own, which is the most important one to me.”
Pacino smiled. “I thought we were doing better when we weren’t talking so much.”
“Come here,” she said. “That’s an order.”
Commander Donna Phillips helped Commander George Dixon up the last steps to the lip of the drydock, to the deck with the commanding view of the hull of the Virginia-class submarine taking shape far below. Rail-mounted cranes moved slowly over her, their safety horns sounding over the bay, the scaffolding and equipment so crowded around the ship in the basin of the dock that her shape could barely be made out, but as Dixon looked at her. he saw the beauty beneath.
“Tell me her name,” he said to Phillips. He’d insisted he wanted to see her first before he heard her name.
“She’s the USS Bunker Hill, Captain,” Phillips said. “And she’s ours if we want her.”
Dixon reached into the breast pocket of his service dress khakis and pulled out the smashed gold coin with the mushroomed AK80 round in it. He looked at it, rubbed it between his thumb and palm and put it away.
“I think we have ourselves a new submarine,” he said to Phillips. “What do you say to finishing your XO tour for a few months with me before you move on to your own command?”
“Captain, it would be my pleasure.”
She helped him slowly back down the stairs to the waiting staff car for the drive back to Unified Submarine Command Headquarters, where Admiral McKee waited to debrief Dixon personally. Phillips returned to the drydock lip and breathed in the sea air, and for the next few hours, she stood and watched the construction of the submarine Bunker Hill.
Captain Lien Hua and Leader Zhou Ping and three men from the crew of the Nung Yahtsu stood holding the railing of the Aegis II cruiser USS Valley Forge, all of them staring in disbelief as the Peoples Liberation Army helicopter landed on the aft deck. As the rotors spun down to idle, Lien looked back in hesitation, but the Americans motioned him on, some of them even waving. It was too much to comprehend.
As he and Zhou climbed into the helicopter, he half expected an American missile to sail from the superstructure of the cruiser and blow the chopper to bits, but it never happened. The ride took an hour, to a steaming PLA Navy destroyer. When Lien climbed out, the entire crew was turned out in dress uniforms, and as he set foot on the deck, the crew snapped to attention.
Lien turned to Leader Zhou. “What is happening? I don’t understand.”
Zhou licked his lips. “Perhaps they thought our sinking the American submarine was heroic enough.”
“Even though we lost the Nung Yahtsu,” Lien Hua said. The captain of the destroyer came up, smiling.
“I have this for you, Captain Lien,” he said after saluting. He handed over an envelope.
It was a letter from Chu HuaFeng, the admiral in command of the submarine force, but the letter was on PLA Navy Fleet letterhead, and Chu signed his name as a fleet admiral. The letter was a commendation for what the admiral called valor in action, and in the last paragraph, he promoted Lien to the rank of rear admiral and invited him to join him in Beijing at the PLA General Staff Headquarters. The envelope also contained collar devices—admiral’s stars. Lien looked up in confusion, and the crew around him erupted into cheers, Zhou Ping clapping along with them.
Lien could barely believe it, even when the destroyer pulled into its berth, and Lien’s wife and twin girls waited for him. It was only as he held his wife and hugged the twins that he felt like the long nightmare had ended. He told his family to wait and walked back to Zhou, a question on his lips.
“Why, Zhou? Why did the barbarians let me live when they knew I fired on their survivors?”
Zhou Ping looked at him as if he knew the answers. “Because, Admiral, they knew it was war. When the war ended, so did their hatred of us.”
“Had the roles been reversed,” Lien said, “I would have had them killed, perhaps even tortured first.”
Zhou Ping nodded. “Perhaps, Admiral Lien, they aren’t the barbarians you think they are.”
Rear Admiral Lien Hua was silent for a moment, then nodded. “Perhaps you are right, Zhou,” he said.
He walked back toward his wife, deep in thought.
Admiral Egon “The Viking” Ericcson loaded the golf bag into the trunk, then climbed into the red Porsche for the trip to the office. Saturday afternoon, he thought, the one time he could get two weeks’ worth of work done in three hours. Then he’d dress for the blind date arranged by his new friend, Kelly McKee. As he thought about it, he pressed harder on the accelerator, the car taking the curve faster than usual.
As he guided the smooth Porsche toward the city, he saw the flashing lights of the police car behind him. He cursed as he pulled the Porsche over. The state trooper climbed out of the cruiser and walked over.
“License and registration, please,” he demanded
.
“Is this about my speeding, Officer?” Ericcson asked.
“Yes, sir,” the cop said. “License and registration, sir?”
Ericcson let out a tense breath and broke into a grin, aware of the state trooper staring strangely at him, but not caring.
“Thank God, Officer,” he said as he reached for his wallet. “Thank God.”
MICHAEL DlMERCURIO was an honors graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, a National Science Foundation scholar at MIT, a graduate of the Navy Nuclear Training Program, and a Navy diver. While a lieutenant, he served as a chief nuclear engineer qualified officer and ship’s diver on the USS Hammerhead, a Sturgeon-class fast-attack nuclear submarine of the Atlantic Fleet. DiMer curio and the Hammerhead spent more than fifty days trailing Russian nuclear submarines.
DiMercurio Web site is www.ussdevilfish.com. He can be reached at readermailussdevilfish.com. DiMercurio lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is hard at work on his next submarine novel.
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