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  “Excellent, Mr. First. Are there any discrepancies?”

  “Yes, my captain. All class four and lower.”

  “Very well, Leader Zhou.” Lien Hua looked skyward, the water pouring into his eyes. “A foul day to be a mariner, my friend, but all the better to shield us from the orbiting eyes of the barbarians.”

  “They say it is good luck for the heavens to rain on us as we depart,” Zhou said. “But I would be equally content with the sun and a mild sea breeze.”

  Lien Hua laughed and clapped his subordinate on the shoulder. “Prepare to maneuver,” Lien ordered Zhou. He took one last look around at the submarine base and set foot on the gangway. His boot landed on the rubber coating of the hull, and the bright lights of the submarine’s interior drove the gloom from the day. It would be a good run, he told himself as he lowered himself down the stainless-steel ladder to the deckplates below.

  Ten minutes later, Nung Yahtsu cast off her lines and made her way into the deep channel. Lien Hua stood on the maneuvering tower of the fin, barely able to make out the admiral’s staff car with his wife and children inside. At ten minutes before noon the submarine rounded the turn at buoy number two and Lien’s family faded astern.

  “Mr. First, I am going below,” he announced.

  A half hour later the ship submerged and her engines sped up to maximum revolutions, on an intercept course with the Carrier Battlegroup One. By the time the task force entered the East China Sea, the Nung Yahtsu would be ahead of her, guarding her from enemy submarines and the enemy commanders’ evil intentions. Sometime before Nung Yahtsu escorted Battlegroup One to the firing position, she would engage and prevail over the Western submarines.

  6

  Michael Pacino got out of the staff car that had taken him from the Pentagon to the inner-security drydock area of Newport News Naval Shipyard. He still struggled to understand what Patton had found so urgent about the project he’d wanted Pacino to work on, and why it was such an emergency that Pacino had been plucked from his sailboat to perform it. Or even why Patton had needed him for it and not one of the several dozen hotshot MIT engineers who swarmed over the dry docks

  The answers hadn’t come in the CNO suite, but perhaps they would be evident in the field, Pacino thought. He’d been asked to become project director of the SSNX rebuilding program. And not just to rebuild it, but to give it the power to outrun the fastest torpedoes in the inventories of the combat navies of the world. “That’s impossible,” he’d told Patton. “You’re asking me to make a Greyhound bus outrun a motorcycle. It can’t be done.”

  Patton smiled. “It could if you strapped a few rockets to the bus, Patch,” he said in jest.

  Pacino promised to make an attempt, but he was not optimistic. Before he left, Patton asked him if he would also take on program directorship of a new and secret weapons system, the Tigershark torpedo project, a program that up to now had failed dismally.

  “It’s a lot like Project Snare, where we put a carbon processor into a submarine — you didn’t know we did that, did you?”

  After a few minutes of explanations about that, Patton continued. “Project Tigershark is tougher. We’ve been trying to put a carbon processor into the body of a torpedo, but the damned things keep attacking the firing ship. And carbon computers don’t accept interlocks or hardwiring or programmed instructions. The torpedo is a killer, but unless we can guarantee the safety of the firing ship, it’s no good to us.”

  Pacino agreed to accept responsibility for the Tigershark program as well. He spent the evening going over the plans for the SSNX submarine rebuild and getting detailed briefings on both projects, until his mind whirled with the new knowledge. Hours later, long after midnight, he stood on the concrete deck of graving dock two of Newport News Naval Shipyard and stared up at the floodlit hull of the submarine looming high overhead. The ship was so beautiful that it filled him with a sudden sadness that he would never go to sea again, but as he looked at it he felt inspired to give the crew of this ship a combat system that would allow them to complete their missions and come home alive.

  The ship above him had been the most powerful submerged combatant designed when it had been blown in half by the plasma-tipped torpedoes of a Ukrainian sub lying in ambush. Most of the crew had been killed by the attack. The salvage vessels had gathered at the ship’s gravesite and hauled her wreckage back to the shipyard. There was little left of her that could be reused except her hull, but since fabricating a submarine hull was so expensive and time-consuming, Newport News and DynaCorp’s Electric Boat Division had begun construction on an entirely new submarine using the hull brought back from the dead. Even the deckplates had to be scrapped, the hull repaired and rewelded, the damaged midsection sliced away and a new module barged in from Groton to replace it.

  Her mechanical internals — the main motor, main engines, service turbines, steam generators, and reactor — were removed through the gaps in the hull, and new mechanicals were barged in, stolen from the assembly line at Groton, where the new Virginia-class subs were constructed. New deckplates were installed in the forward spaces, the new combat consoles were shipped in — also taken from Groton — and the interior was rewired and re-piped The new sail was welded in place, the new masts modularized. In twelve months, what had started as a rusting misshapen wreck had been transformed into a naval vessel ready for her launching ceremony.

  In another month the ship would have been fitted out and ready to be turned over to the fleet, but the CNO’s orders to make the ship outrun enemy torpedoes had stopped all progress. The SSNX would lie here, helpless on the drydock blocks, until Pacino figured out some way to make the vessel torpedo-proof.

  The weapons for the ship were as stalled as the sub itself. Project Tigershark had a dozen fatal flaws. The test launches had all been disasters. Most of the lethal Tigersharks had decided to home in on the firing ship rather than the enemy, except for the two Tigersharks that had managed to go for the target drone. Short of making the torpedo a launch-from aircraft-only weapon, the program was a dead loss. There just seemed no way to educate the carbon processors that the valid submarine target astern of them was their mother ship, since unlike their silicon cousins, they could not be programmed with safety interlocks. So far no one had been able to replicate the success of the Snare’s carbon processor in the Tigershark torpedo. It had to be based on space constraints, Pacino thought. The Snare’s brain took up the better part of the forward compartment’s deck, while on Tigershark there was at best one cubic foot of space for the unit’s brain.

  But if Pacino could make it work, Project Tigershark would make the submarine looming high above return to her role as the world’s most powerful submarine. The ship had originally been named the SSNX, the SSN for Submersible Ship Nuclear, the X for Experimental, since she’d been a prototype for the new class of submarine that eventually took the name Virginia. Pacino had had a hand in designing her, his hands crafting a submarine that solved all the problems he’d had in previous submerged combat missions in his seventeen years as a submarine officer. He climbed a stairway mounted next to the rear quarter until he could reach out and touch the hull, the cool metal green in the harsh midnight floodlights, the green paint an inorganic zinc primer. The ship had gone by the cold impersonal program name SSNX until Admiral Donchez’s dying wish was fulfilled, and Admiral O’Shaughnessy christened the submarine with the most meaningful submarine name in history — the USS Devilfish. Years before, that name had belonged to Pacino’s first command, a Piranha-class that had been lost under the polar icecap when a Russian admiral named Novskoyy released a nuclear-tipped torpedo that had killed Devilfish as well as the admiral’s own Omega-class.

  Pacino had left the Navy after the incident, until the day Donchez told him his best friend’s ship had been taken hostage by the Red Chinese, and the next thing Pacino knew he was standing in the control room of the Seawolf a hundred yards from a Chinese pier, and by the time he had launched the first cruise mis
sile he had managed to put the Devilfish out of his mind, at least until he was promoted to fleet commander and wore the shoulder boards of an admiral. The Reds had taken over the East China Sea with a flotilla of submarines that had put a million tons of the U.S. fleet on the bottom, and Donchez insisted that the SSNX be named Devilfish. Maybe it wasn’t the ship’s incredible sensor systems and firepower that had won that war, Pacino thought. Maybe it had been her name.

  Now she lay here on the blocks, back from the dead, her name once again only SSNX. The Navy memos spoke of a tradition of rechristening ships brought up from a sinking with a new name, so that the bad luck of the old wouldn’t contaminate the destiny of the new. There was also something about wetting the ship’s deck with the urine of a virgin, but that had been quietly disregarded. But Pacino knew what he would name her had he been the admiral in command of the submarine force. Had he been given back his old job, he would smash a champagne bottle on her nose cone and christen her the USS Devilfish, sailors’ suspicions be damned. He was the only one who held that view, as the ship’s gangway banner continued to read simply, SSNX-1.

  Pacino glanced at his scratched Rolex Submariner, which indicated it was after one in the morning of a Tuesday. It was time to go home, he decided. Nothing further could be accomplished on the failing Tigershark torpedoes or the torpedo evasion idea tonight. He drove the long road to Sandbridge, south of Virginia Beach, and climbed the steps to the door of the beach house. He hated the emptiness of the house, but it beat the impersonal hotel rooms near the shipyard, and there were reminders of his son, Anthony Michael, here. Pacino’s wife Colleen was in D.C. staying at the Annapolis house until she could return to Virginia.

  He put his head on the pillow and tried to sleep. His thoughts returned to his only child, Anthony Michael, who at that moment would be in California on his senior cruise with a fighter squadron, flying training runs with the pilots he worshiped. He missed the boy. It had been months since they’d been together.

  He was drifting off to sleep when the phone jangled on the nightstand. He sat up in bed and flipped on the monitor to see the severe face of his ex-wife, Janice Hillary Lakeland, Anthony Michael’s mother. She had been pretty twenty years ago, but now she looked as if all the bitterness inside her had bled through her skin.

  “Hello, Janice,” he said heavily. There was the usual storm cloud on her face, he thought, wondering what battle she would start this time.

  “Hello, Mike,” she replied, the name grating on him. When they were married, she never called him anything but “Michael,” but five years after the divorce she suddenly began using a name she knew he hated. With either name, her pronunciation made it sound pejorative, as if she were actually saying the word “asshole.”

  “I see you’ve finally convinced Anthony Michael to follow in his father’s footsteps.” It was the same argument they’d fought for years, ever since Tony had decided to go to the Naval Academy.

  “Janice,” he said, his tone flat, “what can I do for you?”

  “You can get Anthony Michael off a nuclear submarine, that’s what.”

  “Excuse me?” he said, surprised. “What the hell are you talking about? Anthony’s on a fighter squadron cruise out of San Diego. He’s probably roving the waterfront right now with his friends.”

  “Why would you lie to me, Michael?” When she was truly furious, she slipped back into calling him by his full name, but it still sounded like an insult. “I got an E-mail from him just before he left for cruise. He’s on the submarine Piranha on some dangerous mission. I told you when he had the idiotic idea to go to the Naval Academy that I didn’t want him on a sub, and you promised me he’d be an engineer working in a nice safe drydock someplace.”

  “I’ll check it out,” Pacino said, his composure back. As shrill as Anthony’s mother was being, he agreed with her. A nuclear submarine was the last place he wanted his flesh and blood.

  “And do nothing, as usual,” she sneered. “You know, his hero worship of you is going to get him killed, and then what are you going to do?” Her eyes were filling with tears. “It’s fine for you to go to sea and never come home and have submarines shot out from under you.” That summarized the series of fights that had caused her to leave him, he thought dully. “But this is my baby! He’s all I’ve got.”

  Much as Pacino wanted to hang up on her, his son loved her, and Pacino knew he would someday be judged by his son as to how he had treated the boy’s mother. He took a deep breath.

  “Give me a number where I can reach you in a half hour,” Pacino said, looking directly into the telephone’s camera. She rattled off her Palm Beach house’s number, and he promised to get back to her.

  Pacino dialed in to the Pentagon, bypassing the security switchboard. It was almost two in the morning, so Pacino would have to be content to leave a message for Patton, who was a notorious night owl, but even he would be home at this hour. The display lit up and showed Admiral Patton, who still sat at his desk with his sleeves rolled up, his tie at half mast, and a pair of half-frame reading glasses perched on his nose. Patton asked about the SSNX and Project Tigershark, but Pacino held up his palm.

  “I was actually just trying to see what the latest is on my son. Can you look him up?”

  “Sure.” Patton slid the reading glasses on and clicked his touch screen through a few software panels, then looked up. “He’s on the Piranha, which is involved in some fleet exercises. There’s a note here from Commander Catardi. Says your boy made a great first impression — says here he did a back full-ahead-flank underway maneuver, just like his old man.”

  Pacino recoiled from a triple blow — that Janice had been right, that little Robby Catardi had grown up to command a submarine, and that someone in a uniform had something good to say about the younger Pacino for once.

  After all the trouble Anthony had had at the Naval Academy, Pacino thought, one class-A offense after another until he was threatened with separation from the naval service, and then the young man had acquitted himself at sea with honor on a front line nuclear submarine serving under a man Pacino had personally trained. There was no way he could ask Patton to evacuate the boy, not just because Janice was panicked. It was a peacetime exercise, Pacino thought, wondering what the hell he would tell the boy’s mother. He thanked Patton, then dialed the Palm Beach house and brought up her glaring face.

  “I’m sorry, Janice,” he said. “You were right. Anthony has a few weeks left on his mission, but I can assure you it’s not dangerous. He’s on a milk run in the Atlantic.”

  “That’s what they said about your father’s Stingray.”

  Pacino remembered then that he had never told Janice that the Stingray didn’t go down off the Azores, but had succumbed under ice, nor had he told her about what happened to Devilfish.

  “It’ll be okay. He’ll be back in a month. I give you my personal guarantee.” He clicked off, then tried to sleep, but troubled dreams invaded his night.

  In one of them, a skeleton on a Harley chased a Greyhound bus, the motorcycle phantom swinging a mace. As he approached the lumbering bus, a dozen rockets sprouted from it and ignited, and the bus zoomed off over the horizon and disappeared in a cloud of rocket exhaust.

  Pacino sat up in bed and began scribbling on a pad. A half hour later he had the beginnings of a torpedo evasion system detailed on the pages. When he shut his eyes, he slept better than he had in a year.

  * * *

  Admiral John Patton paced the deck of the suite of the Chief of Naval Operations, wondering how a midshipman had been assigned to a ship on a wartime operation. But he knew the answer — it was the result of his own orders that no personnel orders should be suddenly changed as a result of the mobilization, lest the spies watching the fleet’s every move draw conclusions — such as the conclusion that a submarine was departing for a wartime patrol because the midshipmen were all reassigned at the last instant. Keeping the personnel orders as is had protected the operation’s security, but
now Patton had a problem — the son of Patch Pacino was on the sub ordered to engage the Snare and then to fight on in the Indian Ocean. Patton would have to find a stealthy way to evacuate the youth, without impacting Piranha’s mission. He owed the older Pacino that much. The question was how he could do that.

  7

  The night descent over the coast of Thailand was breathtaking, the lights of the cities and villages like stars below them. The supersonic Falcon touched down lightly on the asphalt of Bangkok International, coasting to a halt at the general aviation facility near the customs building. They remained onboard until the agent, a pretty young Thai girl, came aboard and asked a few polite questions and welcomed them to the country. The two passengers on the jet — one heavy and one thin and tall, both wearing business suits — stepped off the Falcon, emerging into the steamy summer air. Their Thai assistant, a large man named Amorn with coarse features, dressed in a tailored suit, took their baggage and escorted them to the Rolls-Royce and drove them into the city. The wide city streets were deserted, but in a few hours would be jammed with commuter traffic. At the front entrance of the Oriental Hotel, the Rolls stopped and Amorn opened the door. They were taken to a private elevator in the rear of the ornate entrance hall. At the top, the doors opened to the plush penthouse suite. Both men retired in silence to their bedrooms.