Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

  Fourteen ships survived, and when their captains saw the carnage around them, they steamed through the debris field, looking for survivors, the rescue attempt netting only a hundred or so men, most of whom were injured so gravely they probably would not see the sun set that day. When no one else was found, the straggling ships turned north to attempt a rendezvous with Battlegroup Three.

  Sixteen minutes after the initial attack, a cruel second assault was made, and twelve of the surviving support vessels exploded and sank. Some vanished so quickly that one minute they were steaming in the seaway, and in the next only a gigantic orange rising cloud marked their graves. The two ships remaining after the second wave were a tanker and the Haijui radio relay ship, which made the emergency transmission to the Admiralty, reporting the casualties by ship name and the survivors by name, rank, and ship.

  The Haijui captain shook his head sadly. It had been what his first commanding officer, in his talent for understatement, would call a bad day at sea. The sun had not even risen yet.

  25.

  The phone buzzed in Pacino’s darkened stateroom. He stared at it for a moment, surprised at how deeply he’d slept. He felt so groggy it was an effort to remember where he was, that the past twenty-four hours had not been a dream.

  “Pacino,” he said.

  “Cap’n, Off’sa’deck, sir,” a young lieutenant named Deke Forbes said. “We’re receiving our call sign on ELF, sir. We’re being called to periscope depth.”

  Pacino sat up in the shaking bed. An ELF radio transmission had been mentioned in the operation order as the sole exception to radio silence and the avoidance of using the battle network for real communications. The reason that the battle network was being bypassed for this operation was not mentioned, but Pacino assumed that it had been compromised, and the arcane procedures for working around it seemed a weak improvisation. But because there was no way an enemy could transmit ELF without a huge array of large antennae with several tens of megawatts of transmitting power, the Pentagon had continued to use ELF in emergencies.

  The Devilfish would lose only the ten minutes it took to come to periscope depth and get their electronic mail from the orbital Web server, and then they could go back deep and return to emergency flank. It would put them five miles behind their achievable track, but Pacino would have to accept that.

  “Come shallow to one five zero feet, clear baffles expeditiously, and proceed to periscope depth,” he ordered. “Get the E-mail transmission and return to five four eight feet at emergency flank. I’m coming out on the conn.”

  Forbes acknowledged and Pacino got up in the dim light of the desk lamp. He clicked on the red overheads and donned the at-sea coveralls Patton had stocked for him. They fit perfectly and had the American flag patch and the new SSNX emblem, but they felt too new. The tradition at sea was wearing coveralls with the patch of a previous ship, and for an instant Pacino longed for the coveralls he’d worn on the Seawolf, but then realized how ridiculous that thought was. He was in command of a new nuclear submarine for all of a week, and then he’d be back in jeans and steel-toed boots in the drydock. His thoughts returned to Anthony Michael and the rescue operation, and he suddenly thought the message would have some news.

  He waited on the conn until the BRA-44 antenna was retracted back into the sail. He took the pad computer and examined the E-mail by the red lights of the conn. It was top secret, marked personal for commanding officer, double-encrypted and required an SAS authenticator. By the time the message was decoded and authenticated, the ship had returned deep and sped back up to emergency flank. Pacino read the message from Admiral Patton. and his face drained of color.

  The Snare had been hijacked by two people, one of them a military consultant who had boarded her and helped launch weapons against the Piranha. They had put Anthony Michael on the bottom. And the other hijacker was not just anyone, but someone Pacino had met in person before. On the Arctic icecap. After the sinking of the first Devilfish. The man was Victor Krivak. It was a new name and it came with a new face, but beneath it he was Alexi Novskoyy, the Russian whom Pacino had decided not to kill with his bare hands. This man was the one who had put the Navy’s chartered cruise ship on the bottom of the Atlantic and killed over a thousand of Pacino’s closest friends and comrades. He mentally went back in time to that moment in the Arctic shelter, to the instant that

  Novskoyy’s throat was in his left hand, with Pacino’s right hand balled into a fist. Novskoyy shut his eyes in resignation, as if dying by Pacino’s beating would be a relief. It was at that moment Pacino realized it would be like beating a defenseless animal and he dropped the man to the ice. In that one moment of misplaced mercy, he had condemned himself to where he was now—his career disgraced, the top ranks of the Navy dead in their hour of need, his son dying two miles below the surface of the Atlantic. Pacino’s failure to kill Novskoyy had destroyed Pacino’s life and killed thousands. And now he was planning to launch a cruise missile attack that could kill millions more, and by the time he did, Pacino’s son could be dead.

  There was one thing he knew—that if he ever again had the power over the life of Alexi Novskoyy, or Victor Krivak, or whatever he wanted to call himself, he would not make the same mistake. Even if it meant life in prison, he would rip the man’s head off his shoulders.

  Pacino looked up from his trance and found himself at the chart table aft of the conn. He picked up a pencil and copied the coordinates of Krivak’s planned rendezvous with a motor yacht, the location just inside the range circles of the Javelin IV missiles to Washington and New York. He marked the coordinate on the chart with the cursor and checked the Devilfish’s position, then calculated the time it would take to get there. Pacino could beat the Snare to the rendezvous by ten or twelve hours. He’d get the ship there and orbit, waiting for Krivak.

  The Air Force was saturating the sea with Mark 12 pods, especially near the location of the Snare, but now that there would be a motor yacht there, Pacino realized that there could be no Air Force bombers circling the rendezvous—it would scare Krivak away. Pacino had to convince Patton—and Admiral McKee—to send the Air Force packing, and to persuade them that the Tigersharks would work. Patton had always been skeptical that a torpedo without a plasma warhead could be effective—their arguments about it going back six months—but the admiral would have to believe Pacino.

  Pacino drafted an E-mail to Patton, instructed the officer of the deck to load it into a SLOT, a Submarine Launched Oneway Transmission buoy. He instructed the OOD to proceed at emergency flank to the rendezvous point, wrote a strategy for orbiting three thousand yards away, and went below to the torpedo room and the carbon processor bay where the torpedo processors were kept. It was time to work on the Tigersharks. Yet he stared at the torpedo bodies for some time, experiencing a wave of self-doubt.

  Perhaps Patton had been right, that the weapons should have plasma warheads, but plasma units took up an incredible amount of space and weight, resources that could be used for fuel to extend the range. Pacino’s design featured the same kind of external combustion B-end hydraulic swash plate motor that the Mark 58 Alert/ Acute torpedo had, for propulsion of the unit at a relatively slow and quiet forty knots. When the weapon found the target, it would arm the molecular PlasticPak explosive and the propulsion module would be jettisoned, and a much smaller torpedo would ignite a final-stage solid rocket motor, and the weapon would transition to supercavitating speed on its terminal run. It would hit the target at two hundred knots, a speed that could not be outrun, and the combination of the kinetic energy impact and the PlasticPak explosive would cut the enemy in half—not vaporize it as a plasma unit would, but kill it nonetheless, and the weight and space savings from the plasma warhead would allow the unit to pursue an escaping submarine target to the end of the earth.

  While a Vortex or a Mark 58 Alert/ Acute could miss, and required a pinpoint solution to the target, the Mark 98 Tiger shark only needed the bearing and approximate distance to the
target. Its carbon processor would outwit any enemy-evasion maneuvers known to mankind. In the exercises that were near successes, the torpedo had even shown cunning and had crept up on targets at ultra slow speed, then looped around to activate the solid rocket fuel. In the two cases—out of sixty where the torpedo had hit the target, the target hull had been cut in two.

  Of course, the other fifty-eight times the torpedo had decided that the firing ship was the target, and teaching the carbon processor the difference between friend and foe had proved daunting. There were no electronic interlocks possible like the earlier silicon processors had, so the matter had come down to educating the Tigersharks about the mother ship. So far, nothing had worked. Pacino closed his eyes, trying to think, to forget about Krivak-Novskoyy, to forget about Anthony Michael, to forget about the cruise missiles, to forget the cruise ship and the end of his career, and just concentrate on the Tigersharks.

  Eight hours later Pacino fell asleep at the torpedo room console, and when the next ELF call to periscope depth came, it took some time to find him.

  Anthony Michael Pacino was five years old and watching his father drive the submarine Devilfish to her berth at pier 22. His father waved to him from high atop the sail as the sleek black sub pulled up to the pier, without tugs or a pilot. The lines came over and Commander Pacino ordered the American flag struck as well as the Jolly Roger he illegally flew in violation of his boss’s orders. The gangway was placed on the steel hull by a rumbling crane, and Daddy climbed down from the sail and marched across the brow to the pier, a speaker box squawking, “Devilfish, departing!” The Navy commander ran up and hugged little Anthony, pulling him high into the air and spinning him in circles, his mother’s laughter punctuating the moment. The black-haired commander put him back down on the concrete of the pier and smiled at Mommy and kissed her hard, smiling at her, and the three of them walked down the pier to the car, where Daddy promised that they would have pizza that night. The three of them stayed up late into the night, and when young Pacino dozed his father picked him up and put him in his bed, and when he woke up in the morning

  Daddy was still home, taking a week of vacation, and all was right with the world.

  The vision went slower and slower, finally freezing at a moment when his father smiled at him over lunch, young Pacino’s peanut butter sandwich in the foreground, his father’s smile the last thing he could see as the scene began to get darker at the edges, the darkness growing until it swallowed up everything, even his father’s white teeth in his smiling mouth, and when there was nothing but black darkness a tiny white star of light appeared at the very end and began to grow.

  Commander Peter Collingsworth reversed the thrusters and took the submersible away from the location of the plasma explosive torch. When he could no longer see the hump in the sand that was the broken remains of the Piranha, he called a countdown to the Explorer II high above his head. When the count reached zero, the control room detonated the ring plasma, and a circle twenty feet around and one inch wide ignited to the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within seconds the HY-100 high-tensile steel of the Piranha’?” hull beneath the plasma rig melted, then vaporized. The twenty foot-diameter curved plate separated from the remainder of the hull, and the four heavy lugs welded on kept the plate from collapsing on top of the DSV beneath.

  The Berkshire drove cautiously up to the submarine wreck so that the pilot could see. The plate was still being supported by three structural steel hoops, the cross sections of the hoops two-inch-thick extruded I-beams rolled into circles. The plasma torch had only partially penetrated these last three. The submersible carried explosive charges for this eventuality, and Collingsworth set the charges and reeled out the wires. He would detonate these from the submersible. It took ten minutes to set them, ten seconds to prepare to detonate, and ten milliseconds for the explosions to separate the large circular plate from the surviving hoop frames.

  “It’s free. Take it outside fifty yards and drop it, Control,” he said into his boom mike. He watched through the light of

  his high candlepower flood lamps as the plate was steadily raised by the four cables to the rocking Explorer If. Fortunately, the waves above hadn’t caused the plate to smash into the DSV. He could see the command module of the DSV nestled in the frame bay of the submarine’s compartment. The next chores were to sever the command module from its own airlock and to dislodge the module from the retaining mechanisms of the submarine. Collingsworth shined his spotlight down onto the hemispherical command bubble glass, hoping that it had not been fractured. It was whole. He rubbed sweat out of his eyes and turned to the task of setting up the ring plasma around the airlock to cut it and the cargo module away from the command module.

  When the spotlight illuminated the hemisphere of the command window, the light from the submersible briefly shined into the command module. The lights had gone out, the interior had iced up, and the scrubbers and burners were no longer operating. The four people inside were barely making breath vapors into the polluted atmosphere of the frigid space. Astrid Schultz began to experience a heartbeat palpitation. The lack of oxygen and the buildup of carbon dioxide began to affect the regulatory mechanisms of her brain stem. The fluctuations grew worse. By the time the ring plasma explosive was detonated at the airlock, her heart was beating frantically and ineffectively, in complete fibrillation. By the time the restraining mechanism explosives were detonated, her heart had stopped. As the command module was hauled out of the coffin of the submarine wreck, Catardi’s and Alameda’s hearts began to fibrillate, and in the middle of the third minute of the emergency ascent, Pacino’s heart began to spasm.

  As the cranes on the stern of the HMS Explorer II lifted the DSV command module from the sunken submarine Piranha onto the deck, the inhabitants inside could no longer be called “survivors.”

  A four-man crew stood by with cutting torches in case the hatch from the cut-away airlock didn’t work. One of them spun the operating mechanism, and the hatch dogs retracted.

  He pushed the hatch into the space and stood back. A second eight-man crew wearing Scott air packs blitzed into the command module, the breathing air required since the atmosphere inside was known to be polluted. Colleen Pacino could barely watch. When the first two came out, they carried out a young woman with dark hair. They hoisted her onto a gurney where a five-man emergency medical team went to work on her while they wheeled her into the interior of the ship. Next a man was brought out—Captain Catardi—and he was placed on a second gurney and wheeled away. The third victim was a slim blond woman. Colleen was about to shout at the men in the command module, but finally another two came out carrying the body of Anthony Michael.

  Colleen ran to him and managed to touch his hand, but the boy’s skin was gray and cold and stiff. A Royal Navy officer held her back while they wheeled Anthony Michael into the ship’s medical department. She wandered back on deck, not knowing what to do, and finally decided to enter the command module of the deep submergence vehicle. The interior was airless and stuffy and cold, and there was a pile of blankets to the port side of the hatch. What a miserable place to die, she thought.

  They’d been too late.

  “Mrs. Pacino?”

  “Yes, what is it, Commander?” Colleen looked up, startled, and stood in the passageway outside sickbay. The doctor on board the Explorer II, an emergency medical specialist, discarded his soiled lab jacket and donned a clean one, then pulled off his sweat-soaked cap.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. Your stepson, the young midshipman, had been unconscious too long. His temperature was perilously low when he was pulled out of the vehicle. We attempted three times to restart his heart, but he never responded. He was pronounced dead a few minutes ago.”

  Colleen stared at the rocking deck, steadying herself on a

  hand hold on the bulkhead. Michael will be devastated, she thought. “How are the others?”

  “They all lived. They’re stable, at least, but all three could pos
sibly have suffered brain damage. The women are in comas and Commander Catardi is resting.”

  “May I see him?”

  The doctor was opening his mouth to speak when another doctor slammed the door open. “Dr. Crowther, the boy’s body moved!”

  The doctor dashed back into the room. Colleen followed him, trying to see in the window, but they had moved around a corner. There was no news for the next hour, but finally the doctor returned, a grim expression on his face.

  “His heart seemed to restart spontaneously,” he said, “but this is probably just a postponement of the inevitable. He’s in a deep coma, and we don’t have the equipment we need to evaluate him here at sea. He’s stable for now, so I recommend we sail for England, where we can obtain the best treatment.”

  Colleen nodded. “I want to see Commander Catardi, and then take me to Anthony Michael.”

  Catardi lay on the pillow, his face pasty and swollen.

  “Commander? Can you hear me?” she asked. He looked at her, a question on his face. “I’m Midshipman Padno’s stepmother, Colleen Pacino.”

  “How is he?” Catardi croaked.

  “Not good. Commander,” she said, explaining.

  “The others?”

  “They’ll live, but there may be brain damage.”

  Catardi mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “Patch,” he said. “Patch saved us.” It took a few minutes for Catardi to tell the story, and at the end, he fell asleep in the middle of a sentence.

  Colleen was taken to Anthony Michael’s bedside. She winced as she saw him. He was white as the sheets he lay on and looked as if he’d fallen off a building. Every square inch of his face was bruised and bandaged. She took his hand, the