Behind Pacino the periscopes rotated furiously as the navigator’s piloting party plotted visual fixes. The radar mast high overhead rotated, making a circle every second. The wind blew into Pacino’s face in spite of the Plexiglas windscreen erected at the forward lip of the cockpit, flapping the fabric of the flags, the stars and stripes and the skull and crossbones presiding over the dark dangerous form of the streamlined submarine.
“Bridge, Navigator, ship is twenty yards west of the center of the channel, recommend course one eight one.”
“Navigator, Bridge, aye,” Pacino called. “Helm, Bridge, steer course one eight one.”
Captain Catardi called down from the flying bridge. “Nice work, Mr. Pacino. Watch yourself on the way out.”
“Aye aye. sir,” Pacino replied, hoisting the binoculars to his eyes, his hands still shaking. For a moment he felt an unaccustomed kinship to his father, knowing that his father had done this maneuver every time he had gone to sea.
3
Michael Pacino walked down the slope of the dock to the boat.
He stopped as he always did and stared at the lines of the sailboat. The sloop-rigged, forty-six-footer Colleen seemed too big to be sailed by a lone captain yet too small to venture out into the high seas. She was Swedish designed and built, an old Hallberg-Rassy with a hundred horsepower diesel, twin generators, teak decks, mahogany furnishings, a modernized computer console at the navigation station aft of the saloon, and a repeater station in the cockpit. She was fitted out with the latest electronics and sail-furling mechanisms and sheet control hydraulics. Pacino preferred to sail her manually, but if he wanted he could stay below for days at a time while the computer trimmed the sheets and took the wheel The artificial intelligence could even skirt a hurricane, uplinked to the orbital Web’s weather forecasts. It was a beautiful and inspired system, but Pacino would keep it running as a backup until he risked sleeping at the helm. Perhaps exhaustion at sea would give him the dreamless sleep he craved.
Pacino was fifty now, but the shape of his face and body had not changed much since he’d been the thirty-seven-year old captain of the Devilfish. He was tall and gaunt, his cheeks thin beneath pronounced cheekbones, his lips full, his nose straight and jutting, his chin still strong. But the signs of his age were not in the shape of his face but in its coloring. The frostbite from the Arctic operation had left his skin dark and leathery, as if he were a fisherman in his sixties, the crow’s-feet wrinkles deep at the corners of his eyes, leaving no doubt that he had spent his life at sea. His hair had turned stark white a month after he was rescued from the icepack, the legend following him that the horror of his brush with death had chased the jet-black out of it, but the more likely culprits the radiation and hypothermia injuries and treatments. His eyebrows contrasted oddly with his white hair, remaining stubbornly black. But perhaps the most startling of his features were his eyes, so brightly emerald-green that he seemed to be wearing the old-fashioned contact lenses that unnaturally changed the iris color. Pacino attracted second and third looks wherever he went. Until now he had assumed that was because of his admiral’s shoulder boards and stripes, but long after he’d resigned his commission the intense stares still followed him.
After Pacino left the Navy he had spent his days on the deck of the Maryland house, staring out at the bay or working on the sailboat, until his wife, Colleen, had asked that he come to work for her. Colleen O’Shaughnessy Pacino was the president of defense contractor Cyclops Systems, the company that had pioneered the Cyclops Mark I battle control system, a machine that had guided the SSNX submarine to victory in the East China Sea, and had caused Pacino to know Colleen in the first place. But going from being the admiral-in-command of the Navy to a defense contractor didn’t seem to make sense to him. He couldn’t see it being part of his identity, and he had turned her down.
He returned his thoughts to the task of provisioning the boat for the circumnavigation. For the next two hours he loaded the boat and stowed for sea. He was taking a break when Colleen walked onto the pier, her slim form beautiful in the afternoon glare, her hair blowing around her shoulders and into her eyes from the bay’s breeze. For an instant Pacino regretted leaving her.
“Don’t go,” she said, sadness filling her voice and her expression.
“I have to.” he said, his voice hoarse. “Come with me.”
“I can’t. I have to close the contract on the Tigershark system. But when I’m done, why don’t we meet in the Caymans? You could cut a few days out of your round-the-world trip, couldn’t you?”
Pacino smiled, a ray of sunlight penetrating his dark mood for the first time in months. “Cayman Reef Hotel. I’ll meet you at the bar.” he said.
Her expression turned serious. “Listen to me, Michael. Be careful out there. Call me anytime you need me. And for God’s sake, use the distress code if the weather gets bad. We can have a chopper come for you inside an hour. Just leave the boat. I’ll buy you a better one.”
Pacino smirked. He’d never abandon Colleen, the thought sneaking in that perhaps he was deserting her namesake, if only temporarily. “I will,” he lied.
She didn’t say goodbye, just kissed him, ran her fingers again through his hair one last time, and watched him from the pier.
He looked around one last time, nodding a farewell to the massive timber-frame house on the jutting point of land, the property once christened by the Pentagon “Pacino Peninsula.” He took in the bowline, coiled it on the deck, and pulled in the stern line. One hand on the wheel, he throttled up the engine and pulled away from the pier and turned down river. He threw a kiss to Colleen and waved until he could no longer see her. The boat made five knots at part throttle as the peninsula faded astern, the Academy grounds likewise shrinking in the hazy distance.
The Chesapeake Bay’s waves rose into a one-foot chop. He raised the mainsail. It flapped violently in the breeze as it filled, the boom creaking to port. Pacino raised the jib and sheeted it in, then jumped back to the cockpit to adjust the sheets of the mainsail. Colleen was on a beam reach, heeling slightly on a starboard tack, heading southward.
He grabbed the wheel and shut down the diesel. The boat crashed into relative silence, the noise now the wind singing in the rigging and the slicing and slapping of the waves forward as the Colleen picked up speed.
* * *
Eighty nautical miles out of Port Norfolk, in the deep Atlantic in the dark, the Colleen’s computerized chart counted off the range to the Princess Dragon gravesite. the distance down to five miles. Michael Pacino took a deep breath, trying to face the fact that he could no longer avoid thinking about the cruise ship disaster. It was time to remember, he thought heavily.
More than a thousand of the U.S. Navy’s best officers including forty admirals, a hundred captains, and the most capable junior officers had died here, Pacino thought, shaking his head. The upper echelons of the Navy had stood there on the deck of the Princess Dragon, wearing Hawaiian shirts and drinking Anchor Steam beers, ripe for slaughter. His surviving officers had found and destroyed a Ukrainian Black Sea Fleet attack submarine that had been the culprit, but the Ukrainians themselves proved to be innocent. The submarine’s actions had been directed by previously trustworthy third-party military consultants, whose multi trillion-dollar company had evaporated without a trace. The planners of the attack had never been found, never brought to justice. And with no idea of who the enemy had been, or what the fight had been about, there had been no winning the war.
The distance to Princess Dragon closed to a half mile, then to mere yards. Pacino dumped the jib and the mainsail and coasted to a halt, the boat drifting, rocking on the light waves. He reached into a cubbyhole in the cockpit and pulled out the package, a bag containing a flag that Colleen had gotten for him from the wreckage of the SSNX submarine. It was the first skull-and-crossbones Jolly Roger from his Devilfish, the last thing he had pulled from the broken hull before abandoning her for the frigid icecap, the flag that had inspired
the later logo of the Unified Submarine Command. Deep, Silent, Fast, Deadly — U.S. Submarine Force, the script motto read. The skull leered at him. The senior officers of his submarine force had sailed with him under this flag, and not one of them had deserved to die, not the way they did. It was one thing to go down while standing on the deck of a combat submarine while still shooting torpedoes, but quite another to perish while sipping beer and eating hors d’oeuvres.
Pacino had to weigh the Jolly Roger down with something so that it would sink the three thousand feet to the broken hull of the Princess Dragon. But there was nothing solid and heavy that was expendable. His roving eyes finally fixed on the case of Anchor Steam, the unofficial beer of the submarine force ever since Bruce Phillips fell in love with it decades before. He taped the box to the pirate flag, carried it to the side, held it for one final second, then consigned it to the deep. For just a moment the skull and crossbones were visible on the surface of the waves, and then they were gone. Pacino drew himself to attention and saluted.
He sat back down in the cabin, his body aching, and decided to wait for dawn and finish the night here at the grave of his friends. In the first hour he thought about each of them, calling forth their faces, their jokes, their stories. The drowsiness crept up on him, and the night was suddenly cold. He lay on the cockpit seat and snuggled into the thick blanket.
* * *
When he woke, he raised the sails and began to make way to the south, leaving behind the Princess Dragon and the past. Colleen sailed peacefully southward, her skipper feeling an unfamiliar lightness. He waited for the usual guilt and self-recriminations to settle back on his shoulders, but this once, the feelings were late.
Colleen sailed southward on a port tack close haul, the ship heeled far over to starboard. There was no feeling of speed quite like pointing up tight to the wind during a close-hauled run. The seas were tall but manageable, the wind a stiff fifteen to twenty knots, the sky dotted with puffy cotton balls of high-altitude clouds, the horizon sharp as an expertly painted line. Michael Pacino relaxed in the cockpit, steering the forty-six-foot vessel by its round steering wheel at the captain’s binnacle. He could have been below, but when the wind veered to put Colleen on a close haul he had come up on deck, his habit to be topside whenever the boat was close hauled. He wanted to see the sheets and the sails with his own eyes, to feel the spray come over the bow every time the sharp prow bit into the oncoming wave, to hear the rigging sing in the blast of the wind. There was nothing in his experience so exhilarating since he’d conned a nuclear submarine on the surface, back in days far behind him. He’d always thought that sensation would be lost forever, but here it was again, the emotion in his heart not from the high-yield steel of the ship but from the sea herself. The discovery brought a strange feeling of relief.
* * *
Although most of the voyage he had thought of the men he had lost on the Princess Dragon, for the last two days they had seemed to be far distant. Perhaps, he thought, they had gone on to wherever one goes after death and had found peace, or more likely had simply ceased to exist entirely and only lived on in the dim corridors of his tortured mind. But with the arrival of this strange new peace came better weather, the overcast clearing and the winds picking up. the temperature warmer now. For a few minutes he enjoyed the sensations of the wind and the sea and the boat without thinking. An hour became two, until before he realized it the afternoon arrived, the hour of noon passing without his usual sextant shot at the sun to confirm his navigation equipment was working. He shrugged, thinking that perhaps tomorrow he would set an alarm to keep from missing the noon fix, when a roaring sound to his left off the port beam attracted his attention.
He stared at the sea for a moment, thinking he was dreaming when a white wave formed out of nowhere and a black object appeared below and behind it, violently pushing the water up and out of its way. No, he told himself, it couldn’t be. The black shape ascended further, rising out of the sea while still keeping exact pace with the Colleen, the white foaming wave now rolling off to either side of the black obelisk rising from the deep impenetrable blue ocean. Pacino was staring at it so intently that he forgot his steering, the boat coming too high into the wind, the mainsail luffing slightly as it spilled its wind. Pacino beared off, regained the wind, and engaged his autopilot. He stood at the port railing, staring at the black shape as it moved further out of the water, the wave below now flowing around a larger shape, a huge horizontal blackness not a boat length away.
The first black shape was the sail of a submarine, vertical and unadorned, with a slight angling fillet bringing it to the deck of the cylindrical shape, the sail identical to that of his old Seawolf, but the hull now appearing beneath the sail too small in diameter to belong to a Seawolf-class. Pacino’s gaze was riveted on the submarine, still keeping up with Colleen’s twelve knots. A periscope pole rose from the sail — it had been absent up to now, he thought abstractly, because anything faster than seven or eight knots would rip the pole off, even with its winglike fairing painted a mottled black and gray. A second periscope rose, then the BRA-38 radio mast in the stern of the sail. The bow wave formed around the bow of the submarine, falling on either side of the smooth bullet nose. It had to be a Virginia-class, Pacino thought. At the top of the sail several crewmen appeared, probably the officer of the deck and a lookout. As he stared stupidly at the submarine one of the officers raised a radio to his lips, and a crackling hiss of static came from the sailboat’s steering wheel console — the VHP bridge-to-bridge radio, forgotten on its charger inside the weatherproof cover, turned on to the international call frequency.
Pacino pulled the radio out of its cover and it burst with static again, then barked out, “Sailboat Colleen, this is U.S. Navy submarine, over.”
She couldn’t identify herself on an open circuit, Pacino thought, the reason the crew didn’t declare the name of the vessel.
“U.S. Navy submarine, this is Colleen captain, over.” His voice was hoarse from not speaking for the better part of a week.
“Good afternoon, sir. We request permission to send over a boat, over.”
How could he refuse, Pacino thought, consumed by curiosity.
“Roger, Navy, permission granted to send over a boat. Recommend you change course to southeast so I can luff the sails.”
“Roger, turning now.”
The submarine turned gently and opened the distance. Pacino took the helm and turned up into the wind, the sails spilling their wind and flapping noisily. He dropped the jib first, the halyard cranking the sail down as he leaped to the foredeck and pulled the sail down to the deck. He turned and eased the halyard for the mainsail, bringing it to the boom where he lashed it down. Colleen slowed and bobbed on the waves, the boom waving dangerously over the cockpit until Pacino cinched down the boom vang. By the time he had Colleen stable, an inflatable Zodiac boat had appeared on the sub’s starboard side, the crew able to work on it now that the ship had come to a halt in the sea, no longer battling the bow wave. The five-horsepower outboard started up, a tall, slim woman in a wet suit the boat’s only occupant. The boat made the crossing from the submarine to the sailboat in a few minutes, rising up on the wave crests and crashing back down in the troughs. When the woman was within hailing distance, she called out to him, “Request permission to heave to!”
“Permission granted, come alongside,” he called, taking the painter line as she tossed it to him. He fed it down the railing to a deck cleat and held out his hand to her. She climbed up to the deck and came over the railing, shaking the spray out of her long brunette hair and smiling at him. Pacino smiled back, suddenly reminded that he had been at sea for a week without Colleen, and reminded also that he had not made love to a woman since before Princess Dragon sank. Why this woman made that thought come to mind was obvious as he took her in without trying to gawk.
“Welcome aboard the Colleen,” Pacino said, trying not to sound ridiculous. “I’m Michael Pacino.” He held out hi
s hand to her, her hand coming into his, her hand soft and warm. Pacino felt his face flush.
“I’m Dayne Valker, lieutenant, U.S. Navy,” she said.
“Are you ship’s company? And what sub is that?”
“No, Admiral,” she said.
So, he thought, she knew who he was.
“The sub is the USS Hammerhead, Virginia-class. I’m a SEAL under temporary orders.”
Hammerhead, Pacino thought. The ship that had avenged the Princess Dragon, except that she didn’t kill the men onboard who had executed the foul mission that had killed his comrades and ruined his life.
“Forgive me please, Lieutenant. May I offer you something to drink? Tea or coffee?” He doubted she would want anything stronger, an official bearing surrounding her, perhaps even a wariness of him.
“No, thank you. Admiral. I’m on official business, as I’m sure you’ve guessed.” She shot a look at the hull of the Hammerhead, drifting a few hundred yards east of Colleen.
“And what would that business be. Lieutenant? And is it so urgent that we can’t sit here in the cockpit?” He waved her to a seat. She sat down, her body coiled in tension.
“Admiral Patton is calling for you. sir. He sent you this.”
She pulled something from a waterproof pocket belted to her thigh. It was a shiny envelope. She handed it to him, and he stared at it for a moment, then opened it, finding a folded page of expensive bond paper with the seal of the United States Navy on the letterhead. The sloping handwriting of John “Blood and Guts” Patton filled the page. He and Patton went back ten years and two wars. If there was one man who could call Pacino back from this trip, it was John Patton. Pacino read the note, looking up occasionally at the Hammerhead, once at the lieutenant.
Dear Patch,
The president of Cyclops Systems told me you have been turning down an important job for the last year. We can no longer afford your absence from two programs that are foundering, and without them our submarine force is stalled at the present level of technology, which is unacceptable. I need you to come to the Pentagon and either take the program director job and forge the fleet of tomorrow, or tell me to my face the reason why you won’t. The lives of hundreds of Americans depend on your next decision, Patch, and you’ve never yet turned your back on the needs of your Navy or your country. I’ll expect to see you in my office tonight, old friend.
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