Voyage of the Devilfish

EPILOGUE

“Admiral, Captain Pacino is here to see you, sir,” the intercom buzzed.

“Send him in.”

Donchez stood and walked around his desk to the door to greet Pacino. Pacino had been released from Portsmouth Naval Hospital only the day before. Pacino slouched over his crutches and braced himself so as to hold out his hand to Donchez. He was dressed in blues, his fourth gold-braid stripe added onto the end of his sleeve since his promotion from commander to captain. His extended hand shook slightly. He was thin, twenty pounds underweight. His eyes were shrouded by dark circles and his cheeks hollow. His once nearly black hair showed distinct traces of gray. Donchez took Pacino’s hand, noticing it was clammy.

“Mikey, come on over here and have a seat. You look a helluva lot better since last time.” He had visited Pacino the week before when Pacino had looked white enough to be embalmed. “Hey, you’ve made an incredible recovery, thanks in part at least to sheer guts. Even the medical people didn’t give you much of a chance.”

“Thanks,” Pacino said, his voice still hoarse. He sat on the couch facing the wide glass window that looked out on the Stingray monument. “It looks good from here,” he said, and Donchez knew what he meant.

“I think your old man would have liked it. Well, I’m sure Commodore Adams is happy to get you back.”

“Not exactly. He doesn’t know what to do with me. And without a ship I’m not much good to him.”

“You want me to talk with him?”

Pacino said nothing. An embarrassed silence followed. Pacino was right in a way, Donchez thought, he’d been labelled a captain who had lost his ship, a captain who’d come back without his crew. Never mind what really happened… once again international politics prescribed a cover-up for a nuclear confrontation and exchange. At least in the days of the Stingray the U.S. and Russia were still cold-war adversaries. Today they were officially friends. Pacino had been promoted to full captain and his Navy Cross was sailing through the Chief of Naval Operations’ office, signed personally by Admiral McGee. But a Navy Cross was not much to a man who had commanded a ship and who now had none.

“Admiral,” Pacino said, “I came to give you this.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper on Squadron Seven letterhead. Donchez put on his reading glasses. The letter was Pacino’s resignation of his officer’s commission.

Donchez said slowly, “Have you seriously thought about this?”

“Yes and no, sir. But it’s where I am now. Later, maybe…”

“What would you do if you leave the Navy?” Donchez pressed.

Pacino shrugged. “The first thing I’m going to do when I get sprung from the hospital… they’re still doing tests to see if I need that damn bone-marrow thing on account of the radiation… is go home and get reacquainted with my wife and son.”

“Mikey, after things shake down at home, you’ve got to do something. Any ideas at all?”

“Well, maybe, if they want me, I’ll go back to Annapolis. There’s an opening in Rickover Hall, I hear, teaching fluid mechanics. I could work some more on boundary-layer polymer injection. At least now I know it works.” He didn’t smile when he said it.

“Sounds interesting… just don’t be a stranger, Mikey.”

“Absolutely not. Admiral. And, sir… thank you for sending me on the OP. I got to go one-on-one with Novskoyy. It didn’t work out the way anybody could predict, but at least our collision with the Kaliningrad kept Novskoyy from getting a chance to send his go-order. Jesus, when I think of that…”

“Right. We were lucky to neutralize that SSN-X-27 cruise missile seconds from detonation. If it wasn’t for you, 119 more of those things might well have been flown at us.”

“I’ll try to remember that, sir,” Pacino said as he saluted and left the office. Neither man needed to mention the pilot who had lost his life defeating that single cruise missile. There’d be no monuments to him. By orders from on high…

The black sedan screeched to a halt. Inside were four men in suits and overcoats, with mirrored sunglasses and shoulder holsters. Around the car United States Marines gathered, in utilities and carrying M-16s. To the east the Tupolev jet transport landed, jets roaring as the pilot applied reverse thrust, then taxied to the concrete apron, where the black sedan was parked.

A door opened behind the cockpit windows while a stairway ramp was wheeled to the plane, and out of the door stepped four men in heavy overcoats and fedora hats. They walked down the steps two by two. Behind them eight infantrymen followed, each hoisting a Kalishnikov. They walked across the stretch of concrete to the black sedan, their faces blank and unsmiling. Now the four men in the black sedan got out, and one of them opened the right rear door and pulled out a man in handcuffs. The M-16s of the Marines were at the ready, as were the Kalishnikovs.

The man looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties, his hair unkempt, his most striking feature his penetrating eyes, which squinted angrily at the men around him. He was escorted to the Russian delegation, one of whom took charge. Papers were signed, radios in the sedan spoken into, a camera appeared in the hands of one of the men from the sedan and clicked away. The ritual moved on. The Marines and the men from the dark sedan watched as the handcuffed man was guided to the Tupolev transport, hurried up the steps to the jet. Once he was inside, the stairs were pulled away and the door was slammed shut. The transport throttled up, its massive turbines howling, taxied back to the runway on which it had landed. At first the Tupolev barely moved, finally started to pick up speed until, at the far end of the field, it tilted toward the sky, the sound of its engines slowly fading as it climbed into the overcast sky, shrank to a cinder-sized dot and vanished.

Onboard the aircraft Alexi Novskoyy was strapped into a net-type military-transport seat on the centerline of the jet facing the starboard wing. A man in a greatcoat and fur cap walked down the length of the transport toward him, then sat down next to him. Novskoyy looked at him. “Colonel Dretzski, Ivan Ivanovich, you came…”

Dretzski unlocked Novskoyy’s handcuffs.

“When they said I was being turned over to the KGB, I wondered who in the KGB it would be. How did you… how did you stay out of trouble? What exactly happened?”

“One of your boats launched before receiving an order. The Vladivostok. It alerted the Americans. I had to tell Yulenski that the KGB had discovered a conspiracy in the Northern Fleet. Yulenski recalled the submarines, apologized to the Americans and arranged for your return for trial.”

“How convenient for you, Dretzski. And how typical of our President.”

“I’m sorry. Admiral, but—”

Novskoyy waved him away, then: “What became of Vlasenko?”

“He is now a ranking member of Yulenski’s staff.”

Novskoyy’s face tightened, fists clenched.

“What happened under the ice cap?” Dretzski asked. “Did your transmitter fail?”

“We were trailed by an American submarine,” Novskoyy said bitterly. “Smashed us up, disabled the antennae. I went after him but he put me on the bottom… All those years building the Kaliningrad, all that planning… the plan… all for nothing.”

Dretzski shook his head. “Look at this. Admiral,” he said, and handed Novskoyy a copy of that morning’s Washington Post. The banner headline read:

“Do you believe this?”

“We do, sir. You did it. Admiral. Your plan was to get rid of the Javelins, and now they are gone.”

Novskoyy nodded slightly, then read the article below the headline. At the bottom of the page was a small two-column headline: JCS CHIEF’S DEATH AT PENTAGON RULED SUICIDE — REASON STILL A MYSTERY.

Novskoyy looked up.

“Fishhook? You had him sanctioned at the Pentagon. You are better even than I had imagined.”

Dretzski smiled. “No, Admiral, he did it. He had told the U.S. officials your deployment was an exercise. After the Vladivostok’s launch he was in danger of being exposed. He took the better way out…” Dretzski looked closely at Novskoyy, wondering if he had gotten his message. The two were silent, Novskoyy’s eyes were closed and Dretzski began to wonder if he was asleep.

“You know, Ivan Ivanovich,” Novskoyy said, eyes suddenly open and looking straight ahead, “it is a long trip back to Russia for a dead man.”

“A very long trip, sir,” Dretzski said, knowing that the admiral had, indeed, gotten his message.

As Donchez watched from his office window, a black staff car pulled up to the parking section behind the stone walk to the Stingray monument. A man in Navy blues got out of the car and limped on crutches to the wall of the monument. The monument was a large black marble slab twelve feet tall and eight feet wide. At the top of the slab was a submarine carved from the solid marble, the hull shape of the Skipjack class. In letters on the marble hull were the words USS STINGRAY SSN-589. The wall went north-south. Almost. The length of the wall pointed to bearing zero one four, the exact bearing to the location of Stingray’s wreck under the polar ice cap. On the wall were inscribed the names of the men lost in the Stingray, Commander Anthony “Patch” Pacino’s name at the top. Surrounding the monument, at the four points of the compass, were Mark 37 torpedoes mounted on marble bases, the torpedoes painted a gleaming black to match the marble.

Donchez watched as Michael Pacino slowly made his way to the marble wall, stopping at the base and looking up at his father’s name. After a while he pulled a small black bundle from his pocket and slowly bent and placed the bundle at the base of the marble slab. He straightened, as much as possible with crutches, and saluted the monument, his arm and fingers straight as a ruler. Finally Pacino dropped the salute and limped slowly back to the staff car, which sped off.

Donchez grabbed up his cap and left his office, then walked out into the cold February sunshine, around the corner and across the street to the monument. He went by one of the black torpedoes to the face of the wall and stared up at it, looking for a moment at the sleek marble hull in the shape of the Stingray, then down at the base of the monument at the bundle Michael Pacino had left there. He picked up the bundle. It was a black fabric triangle, a folded flag. He unfolded the flag and saw the white form of a grinning skull above the crossbones. A Jolly Roger pirate flag. Pacino’s tribute to his father, and a long-ago conversation with Patch Pacino replayed itself in his mind, about flying the Jolly Roger after a big OP. That was why Mikey had always flown the pirate banner from the Devilfish.

Donchez felt an intense desire to do something to honor both Pacinos. It seemed wrong that Devilfish did not have her own monument. He searched for an idea, and as he made his way back to COMSUBLANT headquarters in the February gloom, the obvious came to him. He walked up to the flagpole and grabbed the halyard of the COMSUBLANT flag, a boring emblem on a dingy blue field. He hauled it down, unlatched the hook and dropped the COMSUBLANT flag to the pavement. He attached the Jolly Roger to the halyard, and slowly hauled the pirate flag to the top of the pole. He stepped back to look at it flying in the sky, then snapped to a smart attention and saluted it. That day, and every day thereafter while Admiral Richard Donchez was Commander Submarines U.S. Atlantic Fleet, the Jolly Roger flag flew from the flagpole high overhead at the entrance to the COMSUBLANT building, the skull and crossbones flapping in the wind beside the Stars and Stripes.