Even before the pilot throttled down Pacino got up from his seat, grabbed his hat and held it against the rotor wash, waved to the pilots and stepped out into the cold night. His light working khaki jacket was no match for the cold front that had just moved over the area. At least it was no longer raining, he thought as he jogged to the edge of the pad, where Donchez was waiting, an unlit Havana cigar clenched in one hand, a smile crinkling his aging features. Pacino smiled back as he approached.
Dick Dohchez had been Pacino’s father’s roommate at Annapolis decades before, the two men joining the submarine force together, always home-ported in the same town, usually taking shore duty at the same command. When Pacino was born Donchez and Pacino’s father were both at sea, both under the polar icecap. By the time they came home, Pacino was two months old. His earliest memories of his father always seemed to include Donchez. He remembered countless Saturdays spent on his father’s ship, the two Pacinos visiting Donchez’s boat for a meal. Eventually when Pacino went to Annapolis, his father commanded the Stingray, berthed one pier over from Donchez’s original Piranha.
When Stingray sank in mid-Atlantic from the detonation of her own torpedo — as the official story had it— Pacino was eighteen years old, a plebe at the Naval Academy. It had been Donchez himself who had broken the news to Pacino that the Stingray had gone down with all hands, and since then the older man had tried to fashion himself as a mentor and surrogate father to Pacino. Yet for twenty years Pacino had distanced himself from Donchez, perhaps, he admitted, linking Donchez to the sinking because he had been the messenger.
Eventually Donchez had become a rear admiral in command of the Atlantic Fleet’s submarine force, and hence Pacino’s boss during Pacino’s first command tour on the USS Devilfish. Donchez had risen to command the service as Chief of Naval Operations, but afterward had left the Navy. There was nowhere upward to go. Donchez had always had an interest in intelligence work and had confided to Pacino that he wouldn’t mind an appointment to CIA, which had always been tight with the upper echelons of the Navy, largely because of the spy duty that US subs had done in the past. But CIA was the personal fiefdom of Boswell Farnesworth Leach III, one of the previous president’s cronies, not to be replaced for some time. Donchez had been appointed Dirnsa, with the implied understanding that someday CIA would be his. That had been eleven months ago.
Donchez looked odd in a business suit, the gold braided stripes that once climbed all the way to his elbows now giving way to the Armani material. The last ten years had worn heavily on Richard Donchez, Pacino thought. It seemed each time he saw him Donchez had shrunk, until he was over a head shorter than Pacino. He had grown thinner, his shirt collars no longer acquainted with his neck. Pacino remembered that Donchez’s hairless head had seemed macho, but now that Donchez was older the baldness added to a look of infirmity that worried Pacino.
Pacino held out his hand to the older man, who pulled him into a bear hug, slapping his back. “Mikey, you look great.”
“Uncle Dick, how you doing?”
“Same as always, Mikey. Glad you could come.”
“My aide mentioned Scenario Orange.” Pacino stated bluntly as they climbed into Donchez’s staff car for the ride to his office. “What’s going on with Japan?”
“I knew that would get your attention,” Donchez said. “We’ll talk about it inside the building. It’s built against the possibility of eavesdropping. Security is better than the White House.”
The limo drove through the dense forest of the complex, low brick buildings every few thousand feet giving the impression of a college campus, the resemblance broken by the fences, the security guards and the large antennae following the satellites overhead.
“Speaking of the White House, sir, how is the new president?”
“She’s great, Mikey. I mean that. She can be tough, at times too tough, thinks she’s Margaret Thatcher, or maybe she thinks she has to look strong as the first elected female President in the history of the country. But I can work with that. Hell, it’s easier to back down an aggressive commander in chief than put backbone in a weak one.”
The speech had come almost glibly, Pacino thought. The old man probably got asked that question all the time.
The car stopped at the front entrance of building 527, Donchez’s new NSA headquarters. The floodlights were on, although it was not yet dark, showcasing the multiwinged building. From the front the protruding entrance wing was a truncated five-story pyramid done in brick and plate glass and copper sheathing, the copper just starting to turn an antique green.
“The copper reminds me of the Academy,” Donchez said. “The rest is sort of modern without looking like a cookie-cutter office building.”
Pacino looked at the low wide pyramid while following Donchez to the doors. The pyramid face was broken by a long row of plate glass set deep into a horizontal groove. The executive suites, Pacino figured.
“Where the hell did you get budget coverage for this? And it should have taken two years to build and you go from concept to finished building in, what, ten months?”
Donchez didn’t smile. “Black programs, Mikey. Ultrasecret. We need the security — the electronic eavesdropping systems of our potential adversaries are getting too good, so we got the budget coverage in a hurry. But believe me, we’re getting more than our money’s worth here. You’ll see.”
Donchez’s office on the top floor was even more of a showplace than his Chief of Naval Operations suite at the Pentagon.
Along the wall were bookshelves filled with dusty volumes and some new books. The wall was covered with framed photographs, Donchez’s old submarines, one showing the icepack with a black submarine conning tower broken through the ice, Donchez standing in front of it wearing arctic gear and a baseball cap with scrambled eggs on the brim — the old Piranha from the 1970s. Model submarines in expensive cases were set in the four corners of the room. Opposite the windows a bar was set behind wood panels.
Donchez threw out his cigar, pulled a new one from a humidor, walked to the bar and poured three fingers of Jack Daniel’s over ice cubes in the highball glass and waved Pacino to one of the leather chairs, putting the drink on a side table and taking the neighboring chair.
“How are you, Mikey? I mean with the divorce at the same time you’re trying to get your arms around the Unified Sub Command?”
Pacino knew he didn’t come up by helicopter to discuss his divorce or how he felt about his job. He was right. Donchez reached into the table between them and pulled out a small keypad, flashing his fingers across it. The room grew dark as the polarized glass of the windows turned the clear glass black. A panel in the high ceiling opened and a screen came down in front of them. The room lights dimmed as a projection television flashed the emblem of the National Security Administration.
The image of the NSA dissolved to be replaced by a map of the north Pacific Rim. The banana-shaped islands of Japan were color-coded orange. The islands zoomed in while Donchez began with basics on Japan, facts about Prime Minister Hosaka Kurita, a brief history of Japan from the Shoguns to World War II through the trade problems of the late twentieth century to the isolation and trade wars of the twenty-first century’s first decade.
The briefing seemed to drag on.
“What about Scenario Orange?” Pacino asked.