Piranha: Firing Point mp-5
Page 37
“I’d be happy to,” he said. He felt her arms go around him, supporting him. The feel of her, the smell of her skin, was deeply relaxing. He fell asleep instantly, without realizing he was utterly spent.
* * *
The seaplane had struggled to get airborne, one of the turbines damaged from the fired bullets. The American fighters had flown high overhead, searching for them while the seaplane hugged the coastline, almost on the water. Eventually, the fighters had given up and flown back to wherever they came from.
Admiral Chu Hua-Feng sat in the canvas seat, holding the bleeding and dying form of his second in command, Lieutenant Commander Lo Sun, in his arms. Lo was bleeding from his chest, and Chu was covered with his blood.
“I’m so sorry, Lo,” Chu said, low enough that no one else could hear him. “I lost your brother, I lost him. He was my best friend, the best weapons officer a pilot could have. He was my friend when no one else would be because I was the admiral’s son. And he’s gone. Now, Lo, you are my friend, the best friend in the world. You’ve gone into two hot submarine hijackings with me. You’ve been my first officer. You’ve taken down a whole convoy with me. We fought for the ship together, and we escaped when it was lost. Lo, please don’t leave, don’t go, don’t die. You are my friend. Please, Lo, I’m so sorry.”
Why did it have to be Lo? He prayed. Why couldn’t he have taken the bullet?
“Chu,” Lo Sun said, his eyes half open. “I’m dying. I can feel it. I’m cold. But there is a light. You must talk to… my mother. Tell her—”
“What?”
Lo’s eyes shut. His lungs hissed, a rasping rattle, and his body was still. And Admiral Chu Hua-Peng, Red Dagger mission commander, wept, his tears washing over the younger man’s face.
* * *
Hours later, when they landed in Tianjin, he stepped out of the hatch, carrying Lo’s body like that of a child’s.
A crew of paramedics took Lo Sun from him. Gently laying his corpse on a white-sheeted gurney, they loaded it into a van and drove off. Chen Zhu and Xhiu Liu came by, putting their hands on his shoulders, then walking off down the pier. The rest of the crew followed them, all the others of his unit surviving except Lo.
For what seemed an hour Chu stood on the pier after the van with Lo’s body drove off. The cold eased as the sun rose in the east, shining out over Go Hai Bay, and he realized he wasn’t alone.
“I waited for you,” she said, the voice music. “I heard that one crew survived, and I was hoping it was you. But no one knew. You’re alive.”
“Mai,” he said, his tone saying everything he wanted to say to her. He stood, looking at her, the weight of the world on his shoulders, the mission behind him, but still vivid in his memory. Impulsively he walked to her and hugged her hard, her arms wrapping around him.
He could feel her heart beating through her tunic, her slim body small in his arms.
“What happened?” he asked. “What is the news? Did we succeed?”
The sadness in her eyes told him all, all of it. “All of the Rising Suns were sunk. The American backup force headed into the East China Sea. Chairman Yang watched them on the news. I was with him when he saw.”
“What did he do?”
“I’m sorry, Chu. He said, ‘Sue for peace. Give the Whites whatever they want. Just don’t let the Americans on Chinese soil, whether Red or White.”
“Then what?”
“Phone calls were made. Our PLA is withdrawing from all fronts. The Whites have taken more territory to the west. We still have Beijing. Peace talks start tomorrow, but the American fleet is ten kilometers off Shanghai, their guns and missiles pointed across White China at us. It’s over. It almost worked, Chu. Almost.”
“Almost is never good enough,” he said.
“Who cares?” She said, burying her head in his shoulder.
“At least you’re safe.”
He held her, thinking about Lo Sun, the submarine, the Americans, and what the future would bring. Somehow, none of it seemed so bad with Mai Sheng beside him.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I want to get away from the water. All water.”
EPILOGUE
Friday November 8
EAST CHINA SEA
As the sun rose over the sea, the nuclear submarine Arctic Storm rose slowly to the surface, her buoyancy just slightly positive. The fin penetrated the sea’s surface, then the hull The empty ship was silent and abandoned, the last fact underscored by the open forward escape-trunk hatch through which the Red Dagger platoon had left.
An American destroyer arrived a half hour later when the radar contact had been classified a surfaced submarine.
The USS Princeton pulled alongside and threw over eight lines, made up from the destroyer’s deck cleats to the sub’s. Slowly the ship towed the shutdown submarine back home.
When Princeton docked at Yokosuka Naval Seaport, a man named Akagi Tanaka was waiting on the ridge, looking down on the channel. The submarine being towed in represented the fruit of many late nights. As it sailed by, he waved at it, sniffing as it vanished around the corner of the ridge and out of sight.
YOKOSUKA NAVAL SEAPORT YOKOSUKA, JAPAN
As the USS Piranha first came into view around the corner of the ridge, cheers burst out, a band began to play, confetti and ribbons started flying. On her bow and stern a hundred sailors and officers stood at rigid attention.
Dressed in pressed service dress blues, the men faced the pier. The wind whipped around the dark uniforms, and the American flag flying on the sail flapped in the stiff breeze.
As she pulled up, a hundred ships in the bay began sounding their horns in salute. On the flying bridge, a set of stainless steel handrails on top of the sail. Captain Bruce Phillips, in his dress blues with full medals, stood tall. As the horns blared, he raised his hand to his forehead, the salute not required, but seeming to come of its own volition. Piranha threw over the first line to the pier, the ship back from the mission, the party only beginning.
He looked down on the crowd milling on the pier, the SNN reporters, the cameras, the women, the children, the families flown over by the Navy for this homecoming, particularly celebrated since a dozen submarines would not be returning today. Phillips searched the crowd, looking for her, but Abby O’Neal wasn’t among them.
He pulled out a cigar from the inside pocket of his dress blue jacket and lit it with his USS Greenville lighter. He puffed it to life and took one lingering look down at the pier. No sign of her. Abby had not come.
“Your loss, toots,” he said to no one, his mouth half curled in a smirk.
“Excuse me, sir?” the officer of the deck said.
“Nothing. Never mind,” Phillips said, looking down on the crowd.
A female reporter waved up at him. “Captain! Captain Phillips! Would you agree to an interview? Satellite News Network? I can get you on prime time!”
The reporter was pretty and vivacious, her smile either genetically perfect or the subject of a huge dental invoice.
“How about in my stateroom?” he shouted down to her. “I have champagne!”
“Great!” she shouted back.
Bruce Phillips straightened his tie, clamped the Havana cigar between his teeth, and climbed over the bridge coaming to the sail’s welded-in ladder rungs. The officer of the deck watched as Phillips shook the reporter’s hand and led her to the hatch, holding out his elbow to escort her along the hull.
* * *
The Devilfish came around the ridge ten minutes later.
Her crew was also dressed in crisp dress blues, manning the rails, facing the pier, at rigid attention.
As the band struck up again and the horns sounded, the two dozen fireboats in the channel started their pumps. Arcs of water climbed four hundred feet into the sky. A rain of confetti and ribbons came sailing down from the hill overlooking the piers. As the ship came closer, white block letters could be made out mounted on the black sail: SSNX USS DEVILFISH.
High above t
he sail, on a stainless steel mast, the American flag flapped in the wind, partially obscured by the flag in front of it, with a white skull and crossbones on the black field, the Jolly Roger. Hanging below the Jolly Roger was an old-fashioned straw broom, swaying in the breeze.
A television cameraman framed a reporter before the tall black sail of the Devilfish as she slowly hove into view. The reporter spoke into his microphone: “… can be seen flying a broom from the yardarm, which we’ve been told is a tradition passed down from the days of square-rigged sailing vessels, pronouncing that the ship has done ’a clean sweep,’ the enemy ships all at the bottom. And as you can see, Brett, the SSNX has almost single-handedly won the battle of the East China Sea…”
The television widescreen was playing in the Oval Office in the White House. President Jaisal Warner watched as the SSNX drew up to the pier.
“You know,” Admiral Richard O’Shaughnessy said, “Pacino did that for you, the letters reading SSNX. He knew you’d been taking heat about it, and he wanted them to remember that the SSNX was your baby.”
Warner smiled at O’Shaughnessy. “Oh, shut up, Dick. You don’t have to push him on me anymore. I’ll accept your recommendation. Pacino for Chief of Naval Operations. Number one admiral in the navy.”
O’Shaughnessy smiled back. “I hate to leave this job, but it’s okay if I’m leaving it to him.”
“Oh, I don’t think you’ll mind too much, Dick, seeing as how you’ll be stepping up to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Hey, you know, that girl standing next to Pacino, she looks like your daughter.”
O’Shaughnessy stared. There on the television screen Colleen and Pacino were side by side as they left the ship, the two of them talking, both of them animated, both smiling and laughing.
“I’ll be goddamned,” he stammered. “He took Colleen to sea? On a combat mission?”
“Sorry, Dick, too late to change your recommendation. But I think you’d better plan for more than just having Pacino be your Chief of Naval Operations. You’d better think about what it would be like having him as a son-in-law.”
PACIFIC OCEAN
ALTITUDE: 51,000 FEET
“Cyclops won this war,” Pacino said. They were airborne in the supersonic SS-12, making its way back to Pearl Harbor.
“It did okay,” Colleen O’Shaughnessy said, her tone modest, but brimming with happiness that he would say that.
“No, I mean it. Without Cyclops and the acoustic daylight, we’d still be out there looking for those damned Rising Suns.”
“Maybe it was in the right place at the right time,” she said, her deep brown eyes looking into Pacino’s.
“Like me.”
He smiled at her. “I like to think we would have come together one way or another, timing be damned.”
She reclined in her seat, shutting her eyes, her breathing deep. Pacino looked at her for a full minute, then reclined his seat next to hers.
The video phone beeped insistently. Pacino half opened one eye and clicked the video on. The face of Mason Daniels, Number Four, came up in the view screen.
“Number Four. Good to hear from you,” Pacino said.
Daniels grinned. “I got you a present for winning the war,” he said, laying into Pacino immediately. The video view moved from Daniels to an object right beside him.
“It’s a grill. I figure you’re an expert at it now. What are you, well done?”
“Go to hell, Daniels,” Pacino said, clicking off but smiling.
As he shut his eyes, he thought about Dick Donchez, and about what he would have said if he had seen Pacino today.
PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII
UNIFIED SUBMARINE COMMAND
PACIFIC SQUADRON SUBMARINE PIERS
Pacino got out of the staff car and slowly walked to the end of the piers where the twelve 688-class submarines had been berthed before they had sailed for the East China Sea mission. For some time he watched the water washing against the piers. Then he turned and accepted a wreath from Colleen, dropping it into the water. The flowers of the wreath floated on the gentle waves of the harbor. Pacino stood there for several minutes before finally drawing himself to attention, his hand coming up in a ruler-straight salute, then dropping it by his side.
Reluctantly he turned and walked back to the staff car. He was still staring at the piers as the car roared off to return to the airport, where the SS-12 waited to take the next Chief of Naval Operations back to Washington.
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