Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

  The photo had been taken last summer, the summer he and Sharon had first talked seriously about the end of their marriage. In the winter Sharon left him and made plans to take Nicole with her, back to Detroit. Catardi had tried to fight her from taking his daughter out of state, but the critical courtroom hearing had been scheduled for a Tuesday afternoon. Piranha had been given emergency orders to sortie to the Atlantic the evening before, and while the family court hearing officer decided Catardi’s fate as a father, he had opened the main ballast tank vents and taken Piranha to test depth east of the continental shelf, his legal case—and his daughter —lost. That was the story of his failed marriage—at every turn when his family needed him the most, the Navy demanded even more.

  Catardi sank into his deep leather command chair and looked over at the man sitting next to him at the table. He was shorter than Catardi, about his age, wearing a civilian suit with

  a red-patterned tie. The man wore a deep frown, his bushy eyebrows knitted over his brown eyes.

  “Sorry for the interruption. Admiral,” Catardi said. He poured the submarine force admiral and himself coffee from a carafe into two coffee mugs with the Piranha emblem on them, then settled in his chair to listen to his boss.

  “Commander, a few months ago you participated in a sub marine-versus-submarine exercise against the USS Snare, SSNR-1, the first of the SNARC-class,” McKee began.

  The Snare was a robotic combat sub. the acronym standing for Submarine Naval Automated Robotic Combat system. The ship was small, only 180 feet long with a beam of twenty-six feet and displacing a mere three thousand tons, yet was able to carry a whopping eighty large-bore weapons, almost double the payload of the fleet’s manned submarines. She’d been operational for two months, after her sea trials exercise against the USS Piranha.

  “It was a damned tough exercise, sir. We took her in three engagements, but she ambushed us in two. She’s ghostly quiet, and her sound signature shifts all over the place. And whoever programmed her was a sick bastard. She’s tricky and aggressive and fights dirty. She had to have violated (he op order to snap us up those two times. Goddamned bitch of a machine cheats. Admiral.””

  “Well, we have you matched against her again.”

  Catardi thought back to the facts he’d memorized about the computer-controlled ship. The aft half of the ship was devoted to the reactor, pressurizer, steam generator, a single ship’s service turbine, a single propulsion turbine, and the main motor, all in one small compartment. There was no emergency diesel, no catwalks, no nuclear-control space, no shielded tunnel through the reactor space. Forward of the frame 47 division between the engineering spaces and the forward combat space there was a two-level deck devoted to electronics. The ending of the pressure hull forward marked the beginning of the free flood torpedo compartment. Past that, the forward ballast tank held the twelve vertical launch tubes and a small sonar

  hydrophone spherical array. There was no sail or fin or conning tower. There was also no protruding rudder above the hull, but rather eight small control surfaces resembling the fins of a rocket, with a shroud around them. The hull shape resembled a stubby torpedo rather than a submarine. The propulsion plant put out thirty thousand shaft horsepower while the reactor made eighty megawatts thermal. It had a thermal efficiency even higher than Piranha’s S20G. The tissue used in the control system was cultured from human brain tissue, the first use of human cells in an electronic battle system.

  “Good.” Catardi said. “I’d like a rematch with that computerized witch. This time we “II cheat and put her down.”

  “Rob,” McKee said, his eyes narrowed, “this isn’t an exercise.”

  Catardi sat back in his seat, stunned.

  “I was briefed on this by Patton himself. And he heard it from NSA, the National Security Agency. You’ve worked for them before, Rob, so I don’t need to mention that in addition to their missions to spy on enemy radio signals, phone communications, and E-mails, they have an information warfare tasking, to break into foreign military command-and-control systems. While entering one foreign battle command network, they found out that the U.S. Navy computer networks and command-and-control systems have been penetrated. Correction —not just penetrated, taken over. Our command networks and top-secret communications systems no longer belong to us.” McKee paused. “Every radio transmission you make is monitored, intercepted, decoded, translated, and disseminated to the enemy’s highest levels. Same goes for every E-mail and every phone call—cell, landline, or Web—and for the data passed over the Navy Tactical Data System. So commanders can no longer talk to each other. And the penetrators can give electronic orders, disabling our combat systems when we want them to shoot, or turning our own guns against us.”

  “Jesus, that means we’re paralyzed. We can’t do shit without NTDS and our communications network. Who penetrated our command networks? The Red Chinese or the Indians’?”

  “It’s complicated,” McKee said. “The electronic attackers are an independent mercenary group of military consultants, the same company that pulled the trigger on last summer’s terrorist assault on the Princess Dragon. It’s possible they did this on behalf of India, but they may be selling information to both sides. That’s where our need-to-know ends. More important to us is that we agree on how we’re going to talk to each other with our com ms compromised.” McKee reached into his briefcase and produced two pad computers, handing both to Catardi.

  “These NSA computers, used with the paper sealed authentication system, are the only secure means of communication left to us other than mouth-to-ear.”

  The Sealed Authentication System, known as SAS, was a supply of sealed foil packets enclosing paper slips with concealed codes, the packets distributed to each afloat commander. The codes printed on the interior paper slips were used to verify the authenticity of an incoming emergency ac lion message. The system was the only part of the war-fighting network to remain stubbornly nonelectronic. Years before Pat ton had argued to eliminate the system and go completely digital. Thank God he’d been overruled, Catardi thought.

  “There will be two National Security Agency employees assigned to your ship, to operate the electronics of the command network as a disinformation program, to keep the enemy confused. The system will belong to NSA. Your actual com ms will use Internet E-mail, encrypted and decrypted by the NSA’s handheld computers and authenticated by using the SAS sealed authenticators.

  “Since our command network is penetrated and compromised, we’rein deep trouble with the Snare. Since the battle network is penetrated, we must presume Snare to be compromised. We can’t afford for her to fall into enemy hands. With her deployed in the Atlantic, if she has been taken over, she could target our East Coast subs as they scramble to the Indian Ocean.”

  “Indian Ocean, sir?”

  “I’m jumping ahead. For now, I want Piranha on a search and-destroy mission. You know the sound signature and inherent operating behavior of Snare, and you’ll find her first. Put the Snare down and hurry. Then get Piranha to the Indian Ocean. I’ll tell you why once you’re on your way.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Ten minutes later the civilian-clothed admiral stood and shook Catardi’s hand. Catardi escorted him topside, and stared after the man as he walked briskly down the pier. Catardi’s mind was still whirling after the admiral’s briefing. Piranha was at war, and he couldn’t tell his crew until the ship was submerged in the Atlantic. The thought occurred to him that the Snare could be lurking out there waiting for him, and that the computerized sub might kill him before he could kill her. “Screw her,” he muttered to himself.

  He looked over at the Piranha, at Pacino up in the bridge cockpit. The kid was studying the chart computer and the tides, checking the channel with his binoculars, and looking down at the tugs, occasionally speaking into the bridge communication box microphone or his radio. It was eerie—even though his resemblance to his father was slight, he moved just like the old man, his hand mo
tions and facial expressions identical.

  Catardi turned and walked the gangway to the ship. The IMC PA system clicked, the voice broadcasting over the circuit, “Piranha, arriving!” to announce Catardi’s return to the vessel. He climbed the ladder to the bridge cockpit and from there to the flying bridge on the top surface of the sail.

  “Mr. Pacino,” Catardi said, “get underway.”

  Midshipman Patch Pacino’s stomach rolled in nausea when he was ordered to take the ship to sea. He swallowed hard, squinted at Commander Catardi with his best war face and said, “Get underway, Junior Officer of the Deck, aye, sir.”

  Pacino put the megaphone to his mouth and called, “Take off the brow!” The diesel engine of the pier crane rumbled as the gangway was hoisted away from the deck and placed on

  the pier concrete. He made the next order on the VHP radio to the tugs, his uncertain voice echoing out over the other radios on the bridge. “Tugs one and two, shove off and stand by at two hundred yards.” The tugs’ engines roared as they throttled into reverse and faded backward into the river. Pacino lifted the bridge box mike to his lips. “Navigator, we are shoving off the tugs.”

  The navigator, Lieutenant Commander Wcs Crossfield, was obviously not pleased. He’d spent an hour with Pacino going over tug commands, the current and chart of the Thames River. Pacino had liked him considerably more than Alameda. The thirty-year-old department head was a six-foot-four African American, a varsity basketball player at Navy who had forsaken an NBA career to drive submarines. He had a calm authority, and the crew seemed to respect him, but there was something hidden, an indefinable sadness adding to the officer’s seriousness. His scratchy voice called over the 1ME circuit, “Bridge, Navigator, aye. Navigator recommends keeping tugs.”

  “Navigator. Bridge, aye.”

  “Shift your pumps, Mr. Pacino, like we discussed,” Alameda said to him. He nodded, raising the microphone to his lips.

  “Maneuvering, Bridge, shift reactor re circ pumps to fast speed.”

  “Shift main coolant pumps to fast speed. Bridge, Maneuvering, aye.” The speaker box squawked the engineering officer of the watch’s reply. “Bridge, Maneuvering, main coolant pumps are running in fast speed.”

  “Maneuvering, Bridge, aye.” Pacino turned to look at the tugs backing away from the ship and into the wide channel of the river. He looked at the river’s current and felt the wind, then hoisted the megaphone to his lips. “On deck, take in line one!”

  He turned and took a step to the aft part of the cockpit to yell down to the aft line handlers “On deck aft, take in three, four, five, and six!”

  The line handlers scurried to their tasks, the pier line handlers from ComSubDevRon 12 tossing over the lines that were looped around the massive bollards to the deck gang, which coiled them quickly on the deck and stuffed them into line lockers, shutting the hatches of the lockers and rotating the cleats into the hull, the ship beginning to look like it had never been tied to a pier. Watching it made Pacino’s heart thump harder in his chest. He tried to ignore the feeling as he craned his neck over the bridge coaming to look back aft at the rudder pointing into the river. As the lines came off the stern, the current drifted the stern off the pier, just slightly, an angle of brown water forming between the hull and the pier as the ship rotated on the single line made fast to the only remaining cleat.

  “Ease line two!” Pacino shouted into the bullhorn. He watched while the crew paid out the line, then shouted for them to stop. “Check line two!” The order to hold the line tight. The current was pushing the stern further off the pier, which was mixed news. Good because he could back out straight without fears of hurting the fiberglass sonar dome, but bad because his stern was drifting downstream in the current, setting him up to point the bow north, the wrong way.

  “Helm, Bridge, left full rudder,” he barked into the 1MC microphone.

  “Bridge, Helm,” the speaker blared, “left full rudder, aye, my rudder is left full.”

  Pacino looked aft while leaning far out over the cockpit coaming, making sure the rudder rotated to the correct position, to the right as he looked aft. The angle between the ship and the pier had opened up to twenty degrees. He took a deep breath, the next ten seconds seeming to take an hour, the hand holding the microphone shaking.

  “Helm, Bridge, all back full!” he shouted into the 1ME microphone. “Hold line two!” he yelled into the bullhorn to the deck crew forward.

  “All back full. Bridge, Helm, aye, advancing throttle to back full, indicating revolutions for back full.”

  A boiling erupted at the rudder, a geyser of water ten feet tall. Pacino counted to five, waiting for the water flow to build up and roll over the rudder so that the rudder would bite into the river against the current. He had to give the next order quickly before the massive power of the screw parted the single line holding her and cut a line handler in half. The deck trembled beneath his boots from a hundred thousand shaft horsepower kicked into full reverse. Pacino waited with his heart rushing until he could no longer stand it.

  “Take in line two!” he shouted to the deck. The pier crew scrambled to grab the hastily eased thick rope and toss it over to the accelerating submarine. The instant the line was no longer fast to the bollard, the Piranha was officially underway, the pier suddenly moving away from them as the ship surged backward. He turned to his lookout, a petty officer he’d met in the wait on the bridge.

  “Shift colors!”

  The lookout scrambled to hoist a huge American flag from a temporary mast set up aft of the captain. Pacino grabbed a handle in the cockpit near the bridge box, the compressed air horn, and pulled the lever. The ship’s whistle, announcing she was underway, blasted out a screaming shriek, louder and throatier than the biggest ocean liner’s horn. Pacino let it blast for a full eight seconds, watching the ship’s motion in the downstream current as the horn continued to wail over the water of the base. The lookout hoisted the Unified Submarine Command flag next to the stars and stripes, the skull and crossbones leering in the breeze. The horn blasted on, Pacino holding the lever with one hand while craning his neck to look aft.

  Pacino had the barest impression of the pier moving away from them, jogging speed at first, then faster, and he saw an admiral standing on the concrete with his hands over his mouth and his eyes bugging out, and the ship rocketed backward into the river. Pacino looked aft at the wake boiling up at the rudder, and prayed for the stern to turn up into the current. Submarines handled like pigs near the pier, and if the screw “walked the bottom” the ship would turn the opposite direction from the rudder order, which could result in the ship turning to head north instead of south, and the entire world would see that the sub was out of control. The pier was speeding away from them in a blur, the end of it in sight and drawing next to the sail, then speeding past beyond the sonar dome. Piranha was free of the slip and roaring backward into the channel, a white frothing wake at her bow. Come on, rudder. Pacino thought, turn the god damned stern upstream. For two tense, endless seconds it looked like the ship’s stern would go the wrong way. but then finally it began to respond, and as the pier moved further away, the rudder finally bit into the river water and broke her upstream and the ship turned, rotating so the bow was pointed south. Pacino could hear a cheer from the deck crew below.

  “Helm. Bridge, all ahead flank! Rudder amidships! ” “Bridge. Helm, all ahead flank, aye, rudder amidships, aye,” the reply crackled out of the bridge box. “Throttle advancing to ahead flank, my rudder is amidships. Bridge, Helm, indicating revolutions for ahead flank.”

  There was a chance that the ship’s momentum and turning impulse would not obey the latest order. The ship might continue backward and put her screw into the upstream pier, wrecking the hull on the jutting concrete. The deck jumped, shaking violently as the screw turned from full revolutions astern to ahead flank at one hundred percent reactor power. The wake frothed in anger aft of the rudder. Pacino checked that the rudder was back in line wi
th the centerline of the ship, then turned forward to watch her progress ahead. For a few seconds the ship froze in the river. In the action’s pause, Pacino realized that his palms were sweating, his heart was pounding, and he was panting as if he’d sprinted a mile. Finally the ship surged ahead, a bow wave forming below them. “Helm, Bridge, all ahead one-third. Steady as she goes.” “Bridge, Helm, all ahead one-third, throttle eased to all ahead one-third, steady as she goes, aye, steering course one eight two, sir!”

  “Very well, Helm,” Pacino called. “Navigator, Bridge, ship

  has cleared the pier, recommend course to center of channel.” Pacino’s heart was still hammering, with an almost sexual exhilaration.

  Crossfield’s voice was incredulous as he spoke into the circuit. “Bridge, Navigator, aye, stand by.”

  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.