Last came Petri. As he tossed her upward and out of the hatch, he mumbled to himself what the Circuit One PA system usually announced when the captain left: "Devilfish departing." Then he took a last peek into the trunk to make sure he hadn't forgotten anyone. When he saw that he was alone, he tapped twice on the hull with his academy ring and let go of the hatch.
He looked upward at the dim and diffuse light and blew his breath out, shouting, "Ho! Ho! Ho!" as they'd taught at the submarine escape blow-and-go training tank in Groton. The air in his lungs would blow up as he rose into the lower pressures of shallow water. High above his head he could start to see rays of light streaming down from the sunlight of the surface, and soon the bottoms of the waves could be made out. His body rocketed to the surface, driven by the balloon of his Steinke hood, and his entire upper body came roaring out of the water, only to splash back down, then bob in the waves. He pulled off the hood and ditched it. Looking around him, he felt Judison's arms pull him out of the water. A black survival raft was floating on the Atlantic. Dietz had only the merest impressions of the others inside, among them a passed-out Captain Petri.
Exhausted, half poisoned by the atmosphere of the
H machinery room, and more than half drowned, Dietz looked out at the horizon at the Aegis H-class cruiser hull. The American flag was visible even here, miles away, and a helicopter roared out of nowhere and turned to come back around and hover overhead. And Dietz, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy and fifth in command of the submarine Devilfish,
began to laugh and cry at the same time. Mucus from his nose and tears from his eyes ran down his face, and he didn't care.
Because in spite of everything that had happened to him that day, he was still alive.
tire company of them. Their identification tags were checked, then they were ushered through metal detectors and escorted to a large room filled with medical equipment. They saw Colleen Pacino first, sitting in a deep chair. She rose to her feet as they came in. She was of medium height, a stunning brunette, wearing a slim-waisted suit. But she seemed washed out, as if she'd gone a week without sleep, which couldn't be too far from the truth. The admirals shook her hand.
"How is he?" Patton asked.
"He's good," she said, her tone forced. "He has excellent brain activity. They think he could come out of the coma anytime." She hesitated. "Would you two like to be alone with him? I could use a cup of coffee."
"Go ahead, Colleen," Murphy said, a father figure to the younger woman. "Take a break. We'D watch this old seadog for you, make sure he doesn't pinch any nurse's behinds."
"Thanks, Sean," she said, not smiling, sounding exhausted, and she withdrew. They went through a gap in the curtain, and there in the room's center, surrounded by hoses and tubes and wires, lay a pale old man in a hospital gown, his white hair spiked by sweat. Patton barely recognized him as Patch Pacino. His breath caught as he saw Pacino lying there so helpless and near death, and a huge lump formed in his throat.
"What do you think? Will he really wake up?" Patton managed to ask, feeling guilty about talking about his friend in front of him.
"They say so," Murphy said. "Somehow it makes
me feel better just to be here, even if he can't hear us yet."
"You guys went way back," Patton said.
"Patch was my roommate from plebe summer on. He made a career out of saving mine."
Patton nodded. A stretch of five minutes passed with Pacino unmoving. Patton glanced at his watch.
"So, sir, you did hear the news?" he asked Murphy.
"I just got off the phone with the President," Murphy said. "Choppers should be here within a half hour with the survivors."
"Two dozen of them. We lost almost a hundred more souls this afternoon, with the guys aft broiled by the steam leak."
"And you lost your number one warship," Murphy said. "Our only acoustic daylight platform."
"No, Admiral," Patton said, the lump in his throat gone now, his voice hot acid. "The NSSN, the USS Virginia, is on a crash program. You ever heard of a ship supe named Emmit Stephens?"
"Patch used to talk about him," Murphy said, glancing over at the submarine admiral. "Said he got Seawolf to sea in four days when it should have taken a month."
"He's working for me now. Virginia is getting a weapons loadout even as we speak. By tonight Electric Boat will be pushing the down button on the platform. By midnight she'll be starting up the reactor. This time tomorrow she'll be underway on nuclear power." Patton's jaw clenched. "This time next week the men who sank Princess Dragon and Devilfish will be on the bottom."
"Devilfish," Pacino croaked slowly. Both men turned in astonishment.
Pacino's left eyelid was drooping markedly, but his eyes were otherwise clear. His lips were chapped, his tongue appearing slowly, tentatively on his lips. Within seconds nurses and doctors appeared, pushing the admirals aside, evaluating Pacino. They waited for several minutes until a doctor asked them to leave, just as Colleen returned. They tried to hustle her out also, to no avail.
Patton spent the next hour with the survivors of the Devilfish as they were brought in by helicopter. The ship's navigator, a lieutenant commander named Kiethan Judison, and the artificial intelligence officer, Lieutenant Commander Bryan Dietz, were the only two walking wounded. Patton had them wait in the chair area outside the emergency facility while he walked the ER with the attending physician, going from bed to bed, waiting outside the ER's operating room complex for four patients to come out. After a half hour, he found himself beside the bed of Commander Karen Petri. The woman looked as if she'd lost a fight against a gorilla. Her left eye was black and swollen shut, her face bruised, her lips fat from a facial impact, her skull wrapped in a plaster partial cast. One of her arms was splinted, and bandages wrapped her chest.
"Commander Petri," Patton whispered.
There was no reply. Patton left and went to the chair area, where Judison and Dietz were sitting.
Patton began with the same question he'd hit Petri with this morning, a lifetime ago.
"What the hell happened out there?"
Judison and Dietz calmly went through it for him. Patton nodded. He was standing to check on the wounded again and call for his chief of staff when he heard a voice behind him.
"John," Murphy said.
"Yes, sir," Patton said, turning toward the admiral.
"Patch is asking for you. You'd better hurry— I'll catch up in a few minutes."
Patton hurried to the elevator bank.
Kyle Liam Ellison "Kelly" McKee had been drinking since he'd left the fishing pier of the Bay Bridge-Tunnel thirty hours before, mostly Jack Daniel's. His bout had been interrupted just before sunrise when John Patton stopped over to talk to him. He'd droned on and on, but McKee had wobbled on his feet, unshaven, unshowered, and ready to throw up, nodding with mock intelligence as Patton said whatever he came to say, something about the cruise ship and a disaster. Finally Patton had taken him to his bathroom, washed him up, and put him into pajamas. He bodily lifted McKee onto the bed and turned off the light. Finally, the front door had clunked shut, leaving McKee in silence. The sun rose, flooding the room with diffuse dreary daylight through the gauzy curtains Diana had put up, that McKee had always hated but now seemed to love, reminders of his wife. He sank into a half-sleep, at one point certain that the pile of pillows next to him was Diana, back from wherever she'd been, but after holding her and kissing her,
he finally realized it was only a down pillow, and he fell back asleep.
When he opened his eyes again, the light of the afternoon was fading. He walked downstairs to the room that had been his study, where the photographs hung in dusty frames on the walls, where his dead father and grandfather and great-grandfather lived. He walked into the room and past the oil painting of Diana to the central photograph on the wall next to his desk, perhaps the family's most famous, and he stood there staring at it, one minute clicking into the next. He felt as if his ancestors in t
he old photo had called him here, perhaps to scream at him about how he'd destroyed his life. He stepped away, just for a moment, just long enough to take down Diana's oil painting and some of the other photographs on the wall and pile them in the corner. Just the men in his family remained on the wall, staring at him, and as he continued to stand there, something began to happen inside him.
Rear Admiral Jonathan George S. Patton IV skidded on the highly waxed floor outside Pacino's room as he tried to slow down his jog from the elevator. He grabbed the doorjamb and half-vaulted into the room, eliciting the frowns of two interns and the attending. He ignored them all as he shoved past them and approached Pacino's bed. The admiral's eyes were sunken in deep sockets and surrounded by dark circles. A small tube bisected his face, feeding oxygen to his nostrils. IV needles snaked into his left arm; a sheet covered the rest of him. Patton forced his lips to smile.
THREAT VECTOR 445
"You look great, Admiral. How do you feel?"
"You bullshitter," Pacino said slowly, his voice croaking and weak, his speech heavily slurred as if he'd just come from serious dental surgery, the sound of it making Patton's throat heavy again, one of Pacino's lips rising slightly as he struggled to smile. "I hope you're doing a better job running the Unified Submarine Command than you do reassuring patients."
Patton's smile became genuine at that moment, the next words from his mouth coming on their own. "Fuck you, Patch." And both of Pacino's lips rose, a grin on his face, but the effort of it seemed to exhaust him, and he shut his eyes.
"Sit down here and tell me everything, John," Pacino said. "Start with the moment the cruise ship blew apart."
Patton launched into the story while the light dimmed in the room and the sun set to the west outside Pacino's window, the floodlights of the hospital complex coming up as dusk became evening, and by the time it was fully dark, the story was finished. Patton turned in time to see Murphy come quietly into the room, obviously not wanting to disturb Pacino, but not wanting to miss out either. Patton waved Murphy in, and the CNO came over and squeezed Pacino's hand, then sat in the corner.
"So," Pacino said slowly. "Petri's hurt. Devilfish is on the bottom along with most of our senior officers and a surface task force. We never heard the saboteurs or the intruder submarine with our conventional sonars, and acoustic daylight didn't see anything until the torpedoes were inbound.
You think the firing ship was far over the horizon for both attacks, or that the cruise ship went down from mines. It sounds like any way you slice it, we are in big trouble, with an entire fleet bottled up for fear of a submarine attack we can't prevent or even detect."
"Hit the nail on the head, sir."
"And you have ideas on something you can do to get this guy."
"The NSSN, Admiral," Patton said. I've been working on the USS Virginia since I gave up command of the SSNX. If this had happened three months from now, Virginia would be ready, and we would have put this guy down."
"Or it would have sunk just like the SSNX. Look, John, this is coming down to stealth. The element of surprise. Whatever you do, you have to get the advantage of surprise back." Pacino began coughing then, and Colleen rushed over, holding his head and wiping his mouth.
"Just a few more minutes," she said to the admiral. Pacino continued on, waving a hand of acknowledgment at her.
"John, I don't know what to tell you, except find a way to surprise these men. And, John?"
"Yes, Admiral."
"Get McKee. Find him and put him on the NSSN. Get that ship into the Atlantic and tell McKee I said to come back with a broom hanging from the yardarm or don't come back at all."
A broom was the ancient Navy signal that the ship had done a clean sweep, sinking everything.
"Use handcuffs to get him on that sub if you
have to. He's the only sub commander who can do this for us."
Pacino began coughing again, Colleen imploring Patton with her eyes to leave. He touched Pacino's shoulder and his free hand, threw him a rigid salute, and said, "Get better, sir."
When he found Byron DeMeers, Patton spat a string of orders at him, among them the command to find Captain Kelly McKee.
"But he's just a commander," DeMeers said, looking up from his WritePad.
"Not anymore," Patton said. "He's got four stripes and the newest nuclear submarine in the fleet. He just doesn't know it yet."
The photograph in McKee's study had been taken on the aft deck of the fishing boat, a tourist special, with his eighty-eight-year-old great-grandfather Kyle standing proudly with a large sport fishing pole in one hand, his other on his son's shoulder, sixty-five-year old Liam McKee, who had his hand on the shoulder of thirty-seven-year-old Ellison— McKee's father—who in turn had his hand on the shoulder of eight-year-old Kelly McKee, who crouched down with his hand on the large corpse of a grimacing hammerhead shark. And the four generations of McKee men stared steely-eyed at the camera, victors over one of nature's most vicious beasts, a victory made even more significant by the fact that Kyle had served in the World War II submarine Hammerhead —the ship's battle flag tattooed on his forearm—while his grandson Ellison had served in the Cold War version, the Pir-
anha-class nuclear submarine Hammerhead, SSN-663. The McKee between them, Liam, Kelly's grandfather, had forsaken submarines for Navy jets, having flown an F-4 over Vietnam before leaving the service in '67. As McKee stared at his dead ancestors, he could almost hear Diana's voice speaking to him. She'd always hated this photograph, thinking it had brainwashed her husband into following a Hemingway macho fantasy. But as he stood there, still shaky from yesterday's binge, her voice slowly hushed and the voices of the McKees swelled in his mind, and it was as if he could hear them, smell the cigar smoke of his grandfather, the Coors on his father's breath, and feel the sunshine on that day off the Florida Keys when the tour guide had held up the camera. McKee bowed his head and shut his eyes.
An hour later, McKee shaved off two weeks of beard and brushed his teeth. He opened his closet and found the service dress khaki uniform hanging there in plastic just the way it had been before the Wyoming vacation. He put it on, pinning on the ribbons and his dolphins—both taken from the crumpled uniform he'd thrown in the corner when he had returned from the South Atlantic—then snapping on his commander's shoulderboards.
The ringing of the doorbell startled him. He checked the clock on the wall: seven-fifteen. There were two state troopers on his porch and two cruisers in the driveway.
"Are you Captain Kelly McKee, sir?" one of the troopers asked.
"Commander. Commander McKee," he corrected him.
"You're coming with us, sir. Admiral Patton wants to see you."
At first McKee was about to insist that he could drive himself to the pier, but then reached to the crystal bowl by the door and withdrew his keys and wallet, took his Coach briefcase with his WritePad computer inside, and shut the door behind him.
He climbed into the front seat of the first cruiser, not saying a word until the car screeched to a halt at Oceana Naval Air Station in southeast Virginia Beach. McKee walked to the staff truck waiting on the other side of the guard shack, where a frowning muscular petty officer in a crackerjack uniform ushered him into the backseat. The truck sped down a road ending at a huge hangar, where a V-44 Bullfrog tiltrotor aircraft was just starting its huge rotors.
He got out and walked to the airplane, where he saw the stern carved face of John Patton, wearing the shoulderboards of a two-star admiral. Patton's eyes narrowed as McKee straightened and saluted, deciding to put on his own war face.
"Good evening, sir," he said crisply. "You sent for me?"
Patton's look of disapproval lightened, just slightly.
The V-44 Bullfrog landed vertically on the helipad of DynaCorp's Electric Boat New Construction Facility, Groton, Connecticut, shortly before ten. The rotors had barely begun to wind down when Admi-
ral Patton and Captain Kelly McKee stepped out into the balmy air of the
Connecticut coastline.
Inside the plane, Patton had told McKee what had happened to Karen Petri and his crew. McKee had been enraged. He asked several times about Karen's condition, shaking his head at the report of his dead former shipmates, the sinking of his former submarine. After staring out the window of the plane for a half hour, he had finally gotten around to asking Patton where they were going and what he was doing here.
Patton first reached into his briefcase and handed McKee two new shoulderboards, those of a full captain with four gold stripes, then produced a new solid gold capital ship command pin, a gleaming skull and crossbones set within the circle of the pin. The older man then handed over a sheet of paper, official orders from Commander Naval Personnel Command. McKee had looked at it by the light of the plane's dim reading lamp:
250235ZJUL2018
IMMEDIATE
FM NAV PERS COM, WASHINGTON, DC
TO K.LE. MCKEE, COMMANDER, U.S. NAVY
SUBJ OFFICIAL ORDERS
SECRET
//BT//
1. (S) REPORT IMMEDIATELY FOR DUTY DYNA-CORP NEWCON FACILITY GROTON CT AND TAKE PERMANENT COMMAND OF PRECOM-MISSIONING UNIT USS VIRGINIA, SSN-780.
2. (U) YOU ARE HEREBY FROCKED TO THE
RANK OF 0-6 CAPTAIN. PERMANENT RANK TO FOLLOW PENDING SELECTION BOARD APPROVAL
3. (U) CAPTAIN C.B. MCDONNE, USNR, SENDS.
//BT//
McKee was silent at first, pinning on the new shoulderboards and the capital ship command pin below his ribbons and his dolphins. But after that, he still said nothing, and that surprised the admiral. Finally Patton looked at him and asked, "Well?"
"Well what?"
"Don't you have anything to say about being handed command of the NSSN? Or have any curiosity at all about what your mission will be?"
"As far as what the mission is, I assume I'm being sent to track down the hostile submarine. Correct?"
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