Not that it mattered, he thought. He tried to force the next thought from his mind, but it was impossible. He was forty-five years old and he felt like he was ninety-five. Today marked the one-year anniversary since the phone call. His new bride, Eileen, had been driving up from Florida to meet him in Virginia Beach. Sometime after midnight on a deserted section of Interstate 95 in North Carolina, a drunk heading the wrong direction in the fast lane had struck Eileen’s car at 105 miles an hour. She had been rushed by helicopter to an emergency room in Rocky Mount, but by the time the chopper landed on the roof she was gone. The phone call had come ten minutes later, finding Pacino at his desk at USUBCOM Headquarters, plowing through his Email so he could take some time off with Eileen. He had heard the video phone buzzing and had clicked in, assuming that it. was her. Instead the concerned face of a North Carolina state trooper appeared on the other end.
Somehow Pacino knew what had happened the moment he saw the man’s face.
Since then Pacino had been sleepwalking through his life and through his job. He had been the commander of the Unified Submarine Force for three years when the call had come, barely a year after the Japanese blockade. After Eileen’s funeral in Boca Raton, Pacino began to spend his days and nights at work, in the office, in meetings, on his commanders’ submarines, in training centers, inspecting ships, giving briefings on the new NSSN attack-submarine program, testifying before Congress.
But he was conscious of none of it. He would wake up at three in the morning and run on the beach— seven, ten, twelve miles, until his chest was tight and his legs burned with pain. Then he would come back to the Sandbridge beach house and pump weights for two hours, then do a treadmill for an hour. His aide wondered aloud if he was trying to kill himself with exercise, but he waved the idea off.
He had met Eileen when he was in a hospital ship cot, blinded in the sinking of the USS Reagan. She had been the nurse aboard the Mount Whitney, and had spent her shifts and her off-shifts talking to him, bringing him back. He had been going through the most terrible time in his life to date, after his divorce from Janice and separation from his son. Tony, and he was certain that a relationship was not in his future. Yet he realized he had feelings for her long before he had set eyes on her.
She was intelligent, funny, and warm, and he felt like he knew her — she seemed familiar to him after he had talked to her for only a few minutes. Best of all, she seemed to feel the same about him.
They were married at the U.S. Naval Academy chapel under the crossed swords of twelve of his closest friends.
Life seemed perfect — he commanded the most advanced submarine force in the world, and he shared it with the great love of his life.
Now that she was gone, he couldn’t seem to get on with his life. Eileen was his last thought before going to sleep, on the nights he could sleep, and she was his first thought when he woke in the morning. It felt like he had a case of walking pneumonia or the flu, a case he couldn’t shake.
The only solution he could think of to make her fade from his life was to work twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day. Today was Sunday. Pacino had spent the entire day at the floating drydock, working, trying not to think.
Pacino looked away from the vessel and over at the walls of the drydock. The floating drydock was normally an open-box structure, with no top or walls on the fore and aft ends, but for this work the shipyard had installed lightweight fiberglass panels on the drydock roof and end walls. The panels did keep out the rain, but they had been installed for one reason only — security. He did not want any pictures taken of this vessel, not by the press, not by photographers in small aircraft, not by spy satellites. This ship was the SSNX, SSN for submersible ship nuclear, X for experimental. The SSNX was the first ship of the NSSN-class, in which the N stood for new, the U.S. Navy’s uninspired name for both the new attack submarine herself and the multi-trillion-dollar program for several dozen of them that would take the fleet well into the century.
The terms NSSN and SSNX had never been replaced with the name of the class — as previous classes had. Usually the initial ship name would label this family of identical ships, as had the Seawolf for the Seawolf class. But this ship would remain simply SSNX, as Pacino had insisted, resisting the urgings of his staff and the brass to lend the program a flashy name that would capture the imagination of voters and Congress alike. Pacino had continued to hold out, telling the Navy hierarchy that this ship was too important to rush to a name that was wrong. Names were vital, he argued — just ask the men who had named the Titanic or the Hindenburg. So, like a baby that went nameless until his parents could look at him, so did the new construction ship remain, as the banners and signs read, simply the USS SSNX.
But even without a real name, SSNX was breathtaking, from her smooth bullet nose forward past her sleek, tapered conning tower “sail” aft to the raked-back tail fin with the teardrop-shaped pod on top, the tail fin rising up over the hull as high as the thirty-foot sail. As the ship progressed in her construction Pacino began to feel a longing to take her to sea himself, although command at sea was in his past. He was a fleet commander now. Yet the feeling of wanting to return to the sea was the only positive emotion he had felt in these terrible days.
He checked his watch, not surprised to find that it was nearing eight at night. He had been there since early morning, and with the frantic schedule of Monday meetings, it made no sense for him to stay. But then, given the choice of pacing the dock or lying awake staring at the ceiling, perhaps this was the best option. Slowly Pacino climbed a steep steel staircase to the high wall of the dock and stood at the highest platform to see the ship from above. The shape of the hull seemed comforting, the smooth bullet of the ship seeming to glide through the water even as she lay there, high and dry.
That was another reason he was here at the Pearl Harbor facility, fitting out the SSNX rather than completing it on the East Coast. There were too many memories of Eileen in Norfolk and Groton, Connecticut— where the hull of the SSNX had been laid down. He had insisted that the ship be completed in Hawaii, and since he was now the bureaucracy’s equivalent of an eight-hundred-pound gorilla, the hull had been shifted to the portable floating drydock and towed here for its completion. The hull and mechanical systems were now complete; the remaining work centered around the electronics, the combat control system, and the weapons tubes. Once the latter construction was finished, the ship would be lowered into the water of the harbor, the interior work continuing for the next year. That gave him a year to try to rebuild his life before he would have to return East. Maybe by then he would be strong enough, but for now he would stay and finish this submarine. He told himself that when it was done, commissioned, and turned over to the fleet, he would step down as the admiral-in-command of the submarine force, and turn command over to Rear Admiral David Kane, the former commander of the Barracuda.
Looking out over the SSNX submarine, he wondered if he really should relinquish command of the fleet.