O’Shaughnessy was half out of the door of the study, waiting for his wife. He looked back for an instant and said, “Donchez’s second dying wish. Deanna!”
She came into the office, smiling mischievously at Pacino. “Honestly,” she said, going straight to a small side table, in matching cherry to the desk and lamp stand, “Dick, you’d lose your head if I didn’t keep an eye on it for you.” She shot a look at Pacino, smiling again. In spite of himself, he smiled back. “Here,” she said, handing O’Shaughnessy an envelope. “Don’t be in here too long, guys. Dinner’s almost ready.”
The door shut behind her. O’Shaughnessy handed the envelope to Pacino, who sat back down. The letter had been opened neatly along the top by a letter opener.
The printing was unmistakable, Donchez’s handwriting, cramped and untidy with his age.
O’Shaughnessy, I hope you’re watching out for Mikey like you promised.
Pacino looked up at O’Shaughnessy. “I was thinking we could name the SSNX the USS Richard Donchez.,” he said. “Not that it matters. But I’d still like to see it that way.”
“Just read the damned letter.”
Pacino looked back to the page.
You do whatever the hell it is you have to do, O’Shaughnessy. I don’t care what it takes, but you give that submarine the right name, and you make goddamned sure Mikey stays in charge of it.
The name of the new submarine will be — Devilfish.
Pacino coughed, then looked up at O’Shaughnessy, handing the letter back.
“Well?” O’Shaughnessy asked.
“Well, what?”
“What do you think?”
Pacino took a deep breath, thinking of an answer for O’Shaughnessy, then realized he didn’t have an answer.
That Donchez would want to name the submarine after Pacino’s first command seemed at first a cheap gimmick, something Donchez would pull at the last minute, but then something clicked.
As he pictured the hull of the SSNX towering over him in the floating dock, he imagined that she was christened the USS Devilfish. He could see the banners, reading USS Devilfish, SSNX-1, he could hear the shipyard workers talking about “Hull X-1, the Devilfish,” and he could see the documents, the procedures, one of them in his mind labeled USS DEVILFISH INST 5510.1B, and he could see the radio messages reading from: COMUSUBCOM, TO: USS DEVILFISH SSNX-1, SUBJ: OPORDER 13-001 …
And as he saw all that, something inside him began to move, to change shape. It was a feeling he’d had years ago, the first time he’d read the orders from the commander of Naval Personnel ordering him to report for duty and take command of the old Devilfish, for the first time linking his name with the name of that submarine, and for just a moment he could feel again how he had been back then, long before any of this had happened to him. He had a certain something back then, an attitude, a self-confidence, a cockiness. That was the word. Cockiness. And as he imagined the SSNX under the name of his old command, he felt some of that flow back into him, just a shadow of what he had once possessed, that old certainty, this time not coming from his genes or his upbringing, but as a gift from Richard Donchez. He felt it fill his chest as he looked at O’Shaughnessy.
“Boss, we’ll name the SSNX the USS Devilfish. And we’ll tell Warner that she’ll go to sea, one way or the other, on schedule. Trachea will have to eat that goddamned headline. And don’t worry about me or the Unified Submarine Command. I’m on the case.”
O’Shaughnessy smiled, clapped him on the shoulder, and the two men abandoned the study for the dinner table. The smell of the filet made Pacino hungry for the first time he could remember in almost a year.
But as the staff car drove Pacino back to the Annapolis house, he felt the cockiness leave him again, the emptiness filling him back up. Eileen was gone, Donchez was gone, and now, again, it felt like he himself was gone.
Maybe it had been the scotch talking when he’d told O’Shaughnessy he’d stay, he thought. He wondered whether he’d been right the first time, whether he should resign.
He looked down at the gold embroidered ball cap.
How would it look if instead of reading USS DEVILFISH SSN-666 it read USS DEVILFISH SSNX–I? Would it change anything in a life that had seen too many changes?
ACROSS THE LINE
Chapter 6
Monday November 4
It was a few minutes past two in the morning. A few miles out to sea from the shimmering lights of Shanghai, the Shining March cruise missile’s onboard computer noted the stars’ positions overhead, giving it a stellar fix.
It was time to turn back west, in accordance with the mission profile. The fins in the aft part of the ten-ton missile rotated, putting the weapon into a two G-force turn. The onboard gyro rotated through the numerals, the stars spinning overhead. The lights of the city appeared in the nose-cone camera, the reflections glittering on the black water five meters below as the missile sailed west, throttling up to attack velocity. The airframe shuddered momentarily as the unit passed through sonic velocity on the way to MacH 1.2. Over the water, the sonic boom was unnoticed. The city lights grew brighter as Shanghai approached.
The target was within the city center. A palace surrounded by rows of fences, patrols of security troops, and airborne helicopter patrols. The missile was designated as unit number one, its target considered the highest in priority for its mission planners. Along with another three missiles cruising under the detection altitude of the fourteen air-traffic-control radars and the occasional military air-search radar, there was a squadron of Mig-51 Flicker fighters, four of them assigned the same target as missile number one.
The attack would be coordinated. The missiles were arriving from the four points of the compass, missile number one to hit first, the north, west, and south units to come in at 1.5-second intervals afterward. The Flicker squadron aircraft assigned to the palace would come in two waves, the first ten seconds after the last missile, the second thirty seconds after that. In order to accomplish this pinpoint timing, the missile required exact navigation aids. The star fix obtained before was sufficiently imprecise as to mandate another fix on the shoreline.
The coastline approached rapidly. The throttles on the turbojet engine slowed, descending back below sonic velocity.
The weapon was slightly ahead of schedule, and the mission profile called for it to fly slowly past its initial navigation aids. A casino building, the Spade Palace, came into view. The edifice was lit up brighter than a lighthouse, lights of every color shining from each facet of the crystal facade, blinking lights outlining the planes of the soaring skyscraper. Chinese and English signs invited gamblers to enter, even at this late — or early— hour. The casino was the first of three way points the missile needed. It aimed south of the building. The shoreline passed beneath the fuselage as the missile headed over dry land.
Within a hundred meters of the Spade Palace, the missile turned north-northeast, speeding up to approach the second way point, a monument erected to General Wong Chen, who had beat back the Red Chinese during the civil war and was a founding father for White China.
The Wong Monument was in the form of a giant military sword, anchored at its base and soaring two hundred meters above the seaward approach to the bay. The entire carved blade was illuminated by harsh floodlights, with a single red aircraft-warning strobe bulb flashing at the very tip of the sword. Missile number one flew around the Wong Sword at its base, carving a tight circle around the statute, then throttled up the engines. The mission profile called for a swift approach to the Presidential Palace.