Attack of the Seawolf

CHAPTER 7

Michael Pacino finished his morning run with a sprint to the back of the waterfront property, stopping in the middle of the yard to rest with Max, his big golden retriever. The sun was already turning the morning into a humid furnace. Legs aching, Pacino climbed the steps to the deck, leaned on the railing and stared across the river at the Naval Academy complex.

For a long time he stood there, staring at the copper roofs of the 150-year-old granite buildings, but seeing instead his own past. Himself as a midshipman two and a half decades earlier. The Academy had always been a time machine, taking him back to his youth, the years that were the best and worst of his life. He had chosen the house for its water view, but not just the view of the water, but the spectacular vista of the harbor of Annapolis, teeming with sailboats, the Capitol dome in the background dueling for grandeur with the Academy’s copper-domed chapel. It was not the only way he brought back the past.

For a moment he looked down at the baseball cap he had been wearing on the run. Dark blue, soaked with sweat, the brim white where the accumulated salt had stained the cap. The cap’s bill had an emblem, the golden embroidery thread forming twin-fish facing a submarine conning tower — submariner’s dolphins.

Above the dolphins, block embroidery letters spelled USS TAMPA; below, the letters read SSN-774. A gift from Sean Murphy, his best friend and former Annapolis roommate who now commanded the Tampa, a new Los Angeles-class nuclear fast-attack submarine out of San Diego.

But when Pacino looked at the cap’s letters they reformed into the name USS DEVILFISH, SSN-666, the name and number of the ship he had lost two years before. The Devilfish was now a crumpled wreck at the bottom of the ocean, the bodies of the men he had lost trapped aboard. Pacino looked away at the water, unaware that his wife Hillary was looking at him from inside the house.

Hillary walked out onto the deck, a glass of ice water in her hand. She set the glass on the deck railing in front of him. He ignored it.

“Michael. You okay?”

There was no answer. She tried again.

“Honey, isn’t it time you got ready for work?”

“I guess,” he mumbled, passing her on the way inside, the glass door sliding shut behind him and the dog.

Hillary looked back at him for a moment, then out at the sun-drenched harbor and the quaint village, the boats getting underway one by one for a day of pleasure sailing. She had hoped the setting and the Academy would help Michael heal, but the truth was, it was making him worse. She and their son missed the man he had been two years before, a confident man, a nuclear submarine commander. Maybe they needed to move inland, get away from the bay and the water and the Academy and all the reminders of his past.

Or maybe what he really needed was to go back to sea, exorcise the beast that haunted him. If the Navy would take him, and if he would go back, and if there were another submarine for him … Finally she too went inside, the ice water still on the deck rail, forgotten.

Admiral Richard Donchez followed a midshipman into a cavernous high-bay dimly lit room. Donchez craned his neck looking up at the heavy steel rafters of the room, holding up another set of steel rails above the concrete walls of a large oblong pool. The midshipman led Donchez up steel stairs to a platform overlooking the edge of the tank. The models used for this tank were huge, some of them fifteen or twenty feet long. Below the tow platform with its trailer was a large model submerged below the surface.

Not much of it was visible, but from what Donchez could see, it was a submarine.

“What is this thing?” Donchez asked.

“Tow tank,” the midshipman replied. “The platform there can move along the rails above the water, dragging a ship model. The computer systems collect the data and use it to evaluate the ship design.”

The sound of the wave generator startled Donchez for a moment. The angled plates at the end of the tank began pulsing, undulating back and forth, the waves building up in the tank until they were some five feet high.

The platform, with its office trailer on top, suddenly accelerated away from them, the drive mechanism whirring loudly. Donchez had to shout over the noise to be heard.

“Like I said,” Donchez reminded his guide, “I need to find Dr. Pacino.”

“He’s either in the control room or on the platform.”

Seconds after it had started, the model test run was over, the wake of the model and the waves in the tank splashing the surface below. Slowly, the model platform began to return to its starting position.

“I think I see someone in the platform control space,” Donchez said as the model platform drew up to them and slowed. “Thanks for your help.”

The midshipman nodded and walked back down the stairs and disappeared through the double doors.

The model platform’s trailer door opened on the other side from Donchez. Through the trailer’s windows a man could be seen walking out of the trailer and toward the catwalk between the platform and the observation deck. It was Michael Pacino, who momentarily froze when he spotted Donchez.

“Admiral Donchez?”

“Mikey,” Donchez said, his face crinkling into a smile.

“Been a long time. How’s life as a professor?”

As the younger Pacino approached, Donchez looked him over, inspecting him as if Pacino were a subordinate in the ranks. Or maybe more, as if he were Donchez’s own son, seen for the first time after a long absence. In fact, young Pacino had been the son of Donchez’s Academy roommate, Anthony “Patch” Pacino, who had died in a submarine incident years before. Since his birth Michael Pacino had been as close to a son as Donchez would ever have, and after the father’s death, Donchez’s feelings had intensified.

Still, the younger Pacino had never exactly seen Donchez as his mentor, perhaps still too full of the memory of the day that Donchez had told him of the sinking of his father’s submarine.

Pacino, over six feet tall and thin as ever, had just turned forty, his thick hair no longer jet black but graying. His lean face was tan, unlike the days he had commanded Devilfish, when he wore a pallor from being almost constantly submerged. He was dressed in khaki trousers, a starched white shirt, and a sport jacket, his striped tie cinched up tight to his neck.

Donchez looked for a moment into the younger man’s eyes, measuring him. Pacino’s green eyes at first stared back, then looked away. When Pacino held out his hand to Donchez his grip was strong and steady but moist with nervous sweat.

“What are you doing here, sir? And what’s with the civies? You’re still CINCPAC, aren’t you?”

“I came to see you, Mikey. And easy on that CINCPAC. I don’t want the Superintendent finding out I came out here without notifying him.”

“You’re what, the number-three admiral in the Navy and you didn’t tell Admiral Phillips you were coming to spy on his little empire?”

“What would I be doing right now if I had told him?”

“Probably reviewing a dress parade after a long tour of the facilities.”

“Right. I don’t have time for that stuff, Mikey. We’ve got a problem, I need you to help fix it.”

Pacino laughed uneasily.

“What’s a professor of fluid mechanics going to be able to do to fix an admiral’s problems? Come on, let’s get out of this cave.”

Pacino led Donchez down the stairs to the end of the tow tank room and out a door in the far wall to the door that opened outside to a small parking lot fronting a waterfront soccer field.

“So what really brings you all this way from Pearl Harbor, Admiral?”

“I had a stop at the Pentagon …”

They stopped at the midpoint of an arched bridge, looking down on the creek where it flowed past the athletic fields and into the Severn River. To the left, in the distance, the drawbridge of Highway 2 was up while a sailboat plodded slowly through. In front of them majestic houses overlooked the water from the far bank. To the right, the academic buildings gleamed in the sunshine, the black-uniformed midshipmen walking briskly in the few moments between classes.

“You ever miss going to sea, Mikey?”

“No,” Pacino said, his voice flat. “What’s going on, Admiral … You tell me you came to see me about a problem, you have no time for tours or dress parades, then you ask me whether I miss going to sea. You trying to recruit me back to the service? And if so, why? Hell, the Cold War’s over. The Navy’s got more hotshot young officers than it has submarines to command, and I’d never even consider coming back to the fleet without a sub of my own. And after I lost Devilfish no squadron commander would ever give me my own submarine again.”

“Okay, Mikey, enough fencing. I did come here to offer you command of a fast-attack sub, the hottest one we’ve got. The Seawolf. If you’re not interested, okay. You’ve got your family. You’ve got midshipmen to teach, research to do, toys to play with …”

“Admiral, why would you want me to take over the Seawolf’! Henry Duckett’s in command of her.”

“He is, but I’ve got other plans for Hank. We have an urgent SPEC-OP for the Seawolf and I need the best skipper for the job. You happen to be the only sub driver in recent history who knows how to handle himself in combat. So, you lost that rust bucket Devilfish? Don’t forget that I ordered you on that mission, and I bear more guilt for it than you do. The point of all this is that you are the best there is for what I need. The commander of this OP will report directly to me, I’ll report directly to the President. That’s all I can tell you unless you take the mission.”

The two were silent for a moment; finally Pacino spoke up.

“Let me understand this. Admiral. You’re willing to give command of the Seawolf to an old Piranha-class sailor who’s been out of the fleet for two years, who knows nothing about the Seawolf class. To a man whose last submarine sank, never mind who was most at fault. The mission is so sensitive that you and the President are running it yourselves, and you can’t tell me what it’s about.”

Donchez said nothing.

“This wouldn’t have to do with the Chinese Civil War, would it? Except what would the Navy be doing with … unless you sent a sub into the waters close to Beijing … what’s the name of that bay … the Gulf of China?”

“Chihii, Gulf of Chihii. The Chinese call it the Go Hai Bay—”

“And something went wrong with the boat you sent in?”

“Bingo.”

Pacino shook his head.

“This must be a rescue mission.”

“You’re close enough, Mikey. I need to know if you’ll change your mind? This is no academic discussion.”

Pacino let the dig at his current academic career go by.

“I’ve been away from the submarine navy too long, Admiral. There are a dozen skippers out there who could handle this mission. Sean Murphy, for one. His Tampa is one of the newest boats in the fleet and Murphy’s damned good. I ought to know, I roomed with that guy for four years here and almost five years after graduation. I’d say Tampa could do this better than the untested Seawolf. Sean’s boat is trained and ready.”

“Only one problem, Mikey. Sean Murphy and the Tampa are the ones being held captive.” Donchez decided he had to gamble in spite of his own rules of security. The risk had obviously been worth it, judging by Pacino’s shocked expression.

“The Chinese have had Tampa tied up at the Xingang piers outside of Tianjin for about sixteen hours. Intel indicates that the crew are being held onboard. The Seawolf made port in Yokosuka last night. Her captain and XO are on the way to D.C. now. I told them they’d be briefing Congress. I have a fast transport jet standing by at Andrews. I figure if you can get packed in an hour we can get Seawolf underway within twelve. What do you say, Mikey?”

For a moment Pacino said nothing. He no longer was registering Donchez’s words, nor seeing the vista of the Severn River in front of him. He was traveling a corridor of time, back to the moments he and Sean Murphy had shared as roommates, struggling against the hazing of their flrstclassmen. Back to the time that Murphy had risked dismissal from the Academy to go A.W.O.L. to see Pacino at the memorial service for Pacino’s father, when only a plea from the senior ranks of the Navy had been between Sean Murphy and life as a civilian. Back to happier times, the double-dates in town. Murphy crashing his car and Pacino picking him up in D.C.” Pacino speeding back to Annapolis to avoid having them both placed on report. Back to the moment before graduation when Pacino had had to pour Murphy into his dress whites, Sean being too hungover to stand on his own from the celebrating they’d done the night before. Back to the following year in Boston when the two of them had been at MIT, getting master’s degrees in mechanical engineering, but also prowling the bars of Boston in search of action. Back to the times of frustration and triumph in the nuclear power pipeline, the prototype nuclear plant training that had them working shift work twelve hours a day, seven days a week until they were qualified as reactor supervisors. Back to the three years they had spent on the USS Hawkbill during their division officer tours. Back to the day Pacino had been Murphy’s best man when he married Katrina, and to the day months later when the roles were reversed as Pacino married Hillary.

And now Murphy was a hemisphere away looking down the barrel of a Chinese rifle, and Sean Murphy’s wife might soon be a widow and his children fatherless.

After a moment Pacino realized Donchez was looking at him, waiting.

“What are we waiting for, Admiral?”

Donchez pulled a document from his pants pocket, sheets stapled together, the large stamp in black letters reading “ORIGINAL.” He handed it to Pacino. Buried in the official message were the words “REPORT FOR TEMPORARY DUTY AS COMMANDING OFFICER USS SEAWOLF SSN-21.”

“These are your orders. I’ve already talked to Hillary. Get home and say good-by to her. I’ve had Tony pulled from school — he’ll be waiting for you. I’ve got uniforms on the jet for you. Just pack your shaving kit, maybe see if you can dig up your old dolphins. We’ll have some poopy suits waiting for you on the boat. I’ll meet you at your place and take you to the airport. I’ll brief you in detail on the jet. I’ve had the Pentagon take care of your boss here. As of zero nine hundred this morning you no longer work here. You’re back in the Navy now.”

Pacino nodded, held out his hand to Donchez, then turned and walked quickly to the row of cars parked near the soccer field.

Donchez watched Pacino drive away, thinking about Pacino’s handshake. There could be no mistake about it. The handshake he had given Donchez before he left was just as firm, but this time it had been dry as a bone.

Donchez threw the stub of his cigar into the creek and walked to the rental car, for the first time feeling that the Tampa was now much closer to freedom than she had been just an hour before.