Terminal Run

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He waited on the conn until the BRA-44 antenna was retracted back into the sail.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’s 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 II. 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 possibly 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 coldness of it making her shiver. She knew the boy’s father would want to know what had happened, so she drafted an Email and sent it to John Patton, for him to relay to Pacino. She returned to sickbay and waited next to the boy and tried not to think about whatever it was her husband was doing, but from what she knew as head of Cyclops, this probably involved the SSNX, and it probably involved whatever submarine had sunk Anthony Michael, because short of taking care of that, there was no force on earth that could keep Pacino from his injured son’s side.

Captain Lien Hua sat quietly at a table in what looked like the officers’ mess of a ship. The photographs on the bulkhead were pictures of submarines on the surface, making it clear this was not a surface ship. He’d been captured by an American submarine, and after Zhou’s orders to fire on the American survivors, this was the worst possible place to be.

The door opened, and two tall, overfed Americans led in Leader Zhou Ping. He seemed pale, but had no bruises, so the Americans must have beaten him on his back. Zhou’s eyes did not seem haunted, and the thought occurred to Lien that Zhou was in a trance or drugged, but his eyes seemed clear enough. The door shut, and Zhou sat down.

“How are you, Captain?”

“Did they beat you? Their torture of me involves making me wait for the beating.”

“They have not beaten me. Their captain and first officer brought me into their stateroom.”

“You spoke to them?”

“They spoke to me. They will be repatriating us to the Peoples Republic as soon as arrangements can be made. A rendezvous with a surface ship is being arranged. A helicopter will remove us from this submarine and take us to the deck of the destroyer. We will wait there for a PLA Navy helicopter to pick us up and take us to one of our own ships from Battlegroup Three, which has left the Bo Hai to get us.”

Lien stared at his first officer. “They’re letting us go, just like that? After you fired shots at their countrymen? Do they know you did that?”

“The second-in-command of their ship Leopard, the one we sank, woke up and told them everything. I confirmed it to them.”

“You what?”

“It doesn’t matter, sir. They are still repatriating us.”

“So they say. We will see. Meanwhile you have confessed to war crimes.”

Zhou shrugged. “That is accurate. That is what I committed, Captain. I owe you an apology. Captain. It was wrong of me to relieve you. And even more wrong to have shot at the Americans.”

Lien said nothing at first, then said haltingly, “What do you mean Battlegroup Three was in the Bo Hai?”

“We lost, Captain. The Americans sank Battlegroup Two. Beijing ordered Three to return, and the PLA has pulled back from the Indian frontier. I saw a BBC news file. The Premier made a statement.”

Lien frowned as the crew served them dinner. Zhou ate tentatively, but cleaned his plate. After Zhou finished, Lien tasted the food, then ate.

“We’re down from PD, Captain,” Officer of the Deck Vickerson said over the phone. “Pad computer’s on the way to you.”

“It’s here,” Pacino said from the torpedo room console. He hung up and stroked the portable unit to his E-mails. There were two, one from Colleen, the other from McKee, both routed through Patton. Pacino opened up Colleen’s, his hands shaking, but when he read it his face fell and a darkness clouded his mind. He could barely concentrate on the message from McKee, which reluctantly agreed to keep the aircraft away from Snare’s rendezvous point, but insisted on them orbiting a hundred miles to the west as a last resort. He handed back the computer to the messenger and returned to his work with the ship’s medical officer, a lieutenant surgeon assigned to the ship — yet another oddity, that since Pacino had left the Navy, doctors had been assigned to submarine crews.

An hour later, he sat back and called the executive officer’s stateroom.

“Assemble the officers and chiefs in the wardroom,” he said flatly.

Ten minutes later, the men who ran the SSNX stood in the large wardroom, the chairs around the table filled, all eyes on Pacino. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the head of the table.

“I’ve got a few words for you all,” he said, looking up at his crew. “The word just came from Patton and McKee — the aircraft are withdrawing. It’s up to Devilfish and the Tigersharks now.” He took a pull from the cup and went on. “I know you are all concerned about the employment of the Tigersharks, and so am I. The weapon is a killer, officers, and if it detects something in the water, it will tear its heart out, whether that detect is the firing ship, an enemy, a surface ship, or even another Tigershark. For the last twenty-four hours I’ve worked on finding a fix to this, and the problem is just too big. I’ve put a bandage on the problem by researching all the work done to date on carbon-processor depressants, and I’ve selected one for use on the Tigersharks while we launch them.”

Vermeers interrupted. “Depressants, sir? You’re drugging them?”

“Exactly,” Pacino said. “The Tigershark processors are not unlike animal brains. And just like sedating a grizzly bear, we’ll be drugging the Tigersharks with only their lower functions on-line. They’ll have the processing power to keep themselves alive, and to maintain depth in a neutral buoyancy hover until the sedative wears off, at which point they will wake up. By then we’ll be out of the area, and whatever comes into their sensor radius will be attacked.”

Pacino clicked a remote, and a display flashed up on the screen. “I’ve sketched out the approach of the Snare to the rendezvous point. We’ll start along his point of intended motion, his PIM, to the east, and we’ll deploy Tigersharks as if they’re stationary mines. They won’t have propulsion, so we’ll have to stop, hover, launch, and move gently out of the way to make sure our wake does not spin or capsize the torpedo. We’ll lay these units left and right of the Snare’s PIM, then withdraw further to the west. As we move out of sensor range of the eastern Tigersharks, they will be waking up, because we don’t want to overdose them, so we’re only giving them enough of a sedative to allow us to clear the area. We’ll withdraw to a point twenty miles to the west of the westernmost Tigershark, which will be deployed here, ten miles west of the rendezvous point. We’ll hover here, rigged for ultra quiet on battery power alone with the reactor scrammed. This ship will not be putting out tonals or transients from reactor re circ pumps, steam turbines or generators, air handlers or anything else. The only systems that will be on-line will be the cooling units for the Cyclops sonar suite, the Cyclops system itself and its displays, and minimal ship’s lighting. Atmospheric control will be off, the ventilation systems will be secured, and it will be damned hot in here, but we will be quieter than a hole in the ocean until we kill the Snare and we’ve accounted for every Tigershark either detonating or flooding itself and sinking to its crush depth. At that point, and only then, will we start up the reactor, return ship systems to nominal, and do a battle damage assessment to the east. Any questions?”

Rick Bracefield, the absurdly young-looking chief engineer, raised his hand as if in a classroom.

“Yes, Eng,” Pacino said patiently. “Sir, with the reactor and steam systems secured, how will we evade a Tigershark detecting us or a Mark 58 launched by the Snare?

Pacino frowned, annoyed at how obvious the answer was. “We’ll make sure the ship is pointed so that the threat vector is astern, on the edge of the baffles, and if we detect a torpedo in the water we’ll activate the TESA, the torpedo evasion ship alteration.” Pacino stopped as he saw the downcast looks of the engineer and weapons officer. “What?”

“Captain, the shipyard never completed the TESA,” the engineer admitted.

“And we haven’t wired it up, sir, because we’ve never figured out if it’s a weapons system or a propulsion system,” the weapons officer, Elaine Kessler, said.

“Clear the room,” Pacino ordered, his angry tone bringing the officers to their feet. “Everyone out but the XO, the engineer, and the weapons officer.”

The officers left, tiptoeing out of the room. The remaining three officers acted like family dogs caught stealing steak off the dinner plates.

“In twenty seconds I’m walking out that door and returning to the torpedo room,” he said in quiet fury. “In ten hours, however the three of you decide, the TESA evasion system will be fully functional, and I don’t care if we have to surface to make a ballast tank entry, that system will work. I want an update every thirty minutes from you, XO, and that update had better not contain the words ‘impossible’ or ‘too late.” Does everyone have that? You will succeed or I’ll have your commissions, assuming we live through this mission. Questions — XO, speak up.”

“Sir,” Vermeers said tentatively, “perhaps we should change the mission. It’s suicide without the TESA, and we may not have it running in time. Sir, hear me out. It’s not just wiring it up so the solid rocket motors ignite in the correct sequence at the right time, it’s the Cyclops ship-control system. The Cyclops time constant could kill us, Captain. If the computer doesn’t control the bow planes with the right response rate, those solid rocket motors going off could plunge us down to crush depth in a second. Or we could rocket out of the sea and break in half smashing back down to the waves.”

Pacino glared at the three officers, wondering what he could do to get this can’t-do attitude erased from their personalities.

“You three and your men get this system working. If you fail, the mission won’t change, and I will deploy the ship exactly as if I’m counting on the TESA. So this is literally door die.” He narrowed his eyes at them, trying to look even angrier than he felt. “Get out,” he said quietly, but all three stood as if bolted to the deck. “Get out! Get the hell out!” he roared, and the three of them scurried out, bumping into each other and the doorjamb.

Pacino shook his head, hoping their fear of him would help them overcome their failure to imagine the system working. One thing was certain — he would not spare the ship. Novskoyy was coming with a bellyful of cruise missiles and torpedoes, and Pacino would stop him, even if it cost him the ship and every life aboard.

Victor Krivak pulled the interface helmet off and wiped the sweat out of his hair.

“Wang,” he called. “We have one hour. I want you to pack our things and wait with them underneath the access hatch. And put on a wet suit. I’ve decided not to surface the ship when we rendezvous with Amorn and Pedro. That way it may make it back to the Chinese.”

“What is this last thing you’re going to be doing before we meet Amorn?”

“Nothing. It is nothing.”

“I’d like to stay aboard and see if I can help One Oh Seven recover,” Wang said. “You can go ahead.”

Krivak considered the request, then nodded. “Fine. Just help me pack the things I brought, and get my wet suit ready.”

Wang smiled, happy as a child. “Right away, Victor.”

“Captain, battle stations are manned,” Jeff Vermeers reported.

Michael Pacino stood on the conn, wearing the wireless one-eared headset with a boom microphone, looking down on his untrained crew, most of them on the same wireless circuit with him.

“Very well. Weapons Officer, mark status of all tubes.”

“Sir, tubes one through four are dry-loaded with Tigershark Mark 98s, with processors loaded and sedated.”

“Very well. Navigator?”

“Sir,” the navigator replied, “ship is at the launch point of Tigershark unit one.”

“Very well. Attention in the firecontrol party,” Pacino said, amazed at how it felt to give the order. “Firing point procedures, tube one, Tigershark one.”

As the Cyclops system barked out the first Tigershark torpedo, Pacino called over the medical officer. “Sixty minutes before it wakes up, right?” he asked quietly.

“Yes sir. You have one hour to get away from it.”

“Let’s hope that sedative works. XO, status of the TESA system?”

“Still working on it, Skipper. We should know by the time the Snare comes.”

“XO, if I have to hit that TESA chicken switch, and it doesn’t work, I’m going to fucking strangle you, the weapons officer, and the engineer to death before the incoming torpedo gets us.”

Vermeers swallowed. “If I could be relieved as firecontrol coordinator, sir, I’ll see to the work on the TESA.”

“Excellent, XO. Navigator, relieve the XO as firecontrol coordinator.”

Pacino glanced down at the geographic plot display of the Cyclops system, showing them the deployment point of the first Tigershark.

“Sir,” the navigator said, “we’re at the firing point for Tiger shark two.”

Pacino nodded, and the weapons left the ship one by one as Devilfish withdrew to the west. After an hour of launching and withdrawing, there was nothing to do but shut down the ship and wait for Krivak and the Snare.

“Maneuvering, Captain,” Pacino said over his headset. “Insert a full reactor scram and rig ship for reduced electrical.”

As the air handlers wound down and the ship became stuffy, Pacino couldn’t help wondering if the ship would ever be started up again. He cautioned himself to remain positive, but it was damned hard to do with a minimally functional ship and crew going up against the best submarine in the world, while his only son lay in a deep coma and was not expected to live. Was that why Pacino was taking so many risks? he asked himself harshly. Was this a death wish?

No, his mind shouted. The only death he wanted was Alexi Novskoyy’s. And that of the USS Snare.