“How?”
“You’ll see. Just tell them. Max security.”
“Okay,” White said doubtfully. “No problem, I can do that. Uh, can I ask why?”
“You did ask. We’re putting the SSNX in the water because we’re getting the SSNX underway. Give me the file on the crew.”
White smiled. This was the Admiral Pacino he knew.
He clicked through the Writepad until he reached the SSNX personnel file, then handed it to Pacino.
Pacino frowned, drumming his fingers on the table, wishing he could figure out what to do next.
The stateroom of the force commander was cavernous and plush. The bunk was queen-size, the conference table a half acre, the room full of warm, glowing lamps.
On the bulkheads were a half dozen pictures of Henri on the bridge of the Ark Royale.
Admiral JeanPaul Henri sat at his conference table, his Writepad computer angled upward so that it could be used as his personal video phone. Pacino’s face had just winked out, and the paranoid, grandstanding submarine officer’s warning was still ringing in his ears.
Henri sat back and shut his eyes for a moment, thinking.
The fleet was almost a third of the way to the beach, and it was damned late to be thinking about antisubmarine warfare. With the press crawling all over the ship, it wouldn’t do to be conducting massive air operations, launching aircraft and helicopters. He’d be asked why they were launching the S-14s and the Seahawks, and he’d either have to tell them they were patrolling for submarines or to be potentially caught in a lie, and the latter was no way to ascend to CNO.
In addition, the wind was from the northwest. Turning the ship into the wind for flight ops would mean diverging from the base course, which was straight in to Shanghai.
That would lose him time, and according to his orders, time was of the essence. More important, the press was hyper aware of the time. They’d been asking him constantly when they’d be at the beach.
He’d seen something in Pacino’s eyes, Henri thought.
He touched the screen of the Writepad and played the conversation back. The man, Henri’s main competition for the job of chief of Naval Operations, had a haunted look about him. His eyes were hollow. Hollow and frightened. Pacino was scared, Henri thought. If he could believe the reports of some of his old classmates at the academy, it was a rare thing for this guy to be frightened.
Henri reached for a phone. “Officer of the deck, get the captain, the air boss, and the ASW officer to my stateroom ASAP.”
“Aye-aye, sir.” The phone clicked.
It took all of thirty seconds for the officers to get to his stateroom, all of them looking pumped with adrenaline, spoiling for a fight. Good for them, Henri thought. They had no idea what troubles he was shouldering. If they had any idea of the weight of responsibility of fleet command, they’d run for the hills.
“Gentlemen, I want a squadron of S-14 Blackboards brought onto the main deck. I want them and their crews ready for launch in one minute or less. Full alert.”
“Aye, sir,” the captain replied for the men. Henri waved them all out They knew better than to ask him why, and he’d be damned if he’d tell them.
For a moment he considered calling Kagoshima base, where the P-5 Pegasus patrol planes were on standby, but then reconsidered. That would be going overboard.
After all, if Pacino was afraid, maybe that was just because he didn’t possess the backbone that Admiral Jeanpaul Henri did.
That had to be it, he insisted to himself.
“The captain’s in control,” the voice shouted out.
Captain Jonathan George S. Patton IV walked into the control room of the USS Annapolis like a gunslinger entering a Western saloon. Patton’s carved face was a harsh mask of anger. He stood five foot ten but appeared taller, perhaps because of his thin frame, his sports preference marathon running. His hair was diesel-fuel black, his skin dark, his eyes black and unreadable.
His typical expression was a frown, at best a neutral penetrating stare. His smile was seen so rarely that it had been the subject of a shipwide underground newsletter. All captain’s smile sightings were logged and recorded.
Yet despite his hard shell, he was encouraging to his crews, a sympathetic ear to his junior officers in their struggles to learn the ship and attain qualification. At sea, though, he was crusty, often abrupt, demanding and driven.
Patton was the great-great-grandson of General George S. Patton, the Army general who had flamboyantly whipped hardened Nazi Germany Panzer divisions with a fighting style marked by originality, unconventional and instinctive aggressiveness, and undistilled guts.
The younger Patton’s appointment to the Naval Academy at Annapolis had come almost without his asking for it, as if the Navy admissions staff were recruiting him as a sort of public relations coup against their bitter rival, the Military Academy at West Point, intending to make him a Navy poster boy.
He’d risen through the nuclear submarine ranks, until at last he was admitted to the school for prospective commanding officers, an unforgiving course of study that flunked one-third of the students, who could then never return to duty on board a sub. One of the requirements was to walk into a control-room mockup in Norfolk, Virginia, command a strange crew, and fight a battle programmed by a supercomputer and an oddball group of war-game nuts, all under the watchful eye of the two-star admiral-in-command of the entire submarine force, Admiral Pacino.
Patton had stood on the conn, the elevated periscope stand, of the control room mockup — so realistic in looks, feel, and even smell that Patton could easily imagine he was at sea. He looked down on the crowd, trying his best to look like he was cool, when in fact he was scared to death. Flunking this scenario would mean cashing in his eighteen-year submarine career, going to Marey and telling her that he had failed, that their way of life was over.
The sonar chief called from the sonar space forward: “Conn, Sonar, new sonar contact, designate sierra one, bearing one eight zero. Contact is putting out a medium signal-to-noise ratio on a single pump-jet propulsor. Contact is classified as submerged warship, classification Russian Severodvinsk-class fast-attack submarine. Conn, Sonar, second new sonar contact, designate sierra two, bearing two six five. Contact putting out a strong signal-to-noise ratio on two four-bladed screws. Contact is classified surface warship, classification Russian Kirov. Conn, Sonar, third new sonar contact—”
By the end the chief reported twenty contacts, ships on every point of the compass, each of them ships from the Russian order of battle, each of them bristling with antisubmarine weapons, each of them lethal. Lesser men would have panicked. Patton, knowing he was doomed, leaned over the railing of the conn and said sardonically! “Well, men, looks like we’ve got them surrounded.”
He prioritized the sonar contacts by their threat level, their distance to him, the submarines first. Within five minutes he pumped out four torpedoes at the submerged contacts, drove away from his launch position, and set up on the surface contacts. Taking a wild forty-degree up-angle trip to periscope depth, he confirmed the range to the Kirov class. The ship was a veritable nuclear battleship, armed to the teeth with torpedoes and antisubmarine rockets. Within the second ten minutes of the scenario, he unloaded two loads of tube banks at the surface ships, sending three to the Kirov, two to a Slava cruiser, two to a Moskva class, one to a Kara cruiser, one to a Kresta II, firing methodically at Udaloy II destroyers, pumping torpedoes out at Sovremenny destroyers, until his torpedo room was out of weapons. Then, with half a fleet of enraged surviving Russians, he turned tail and dived deep, running as fast as he could, zigging occasionally. He found a shallow bank, the depth conveniently below a thermal layer — making him invisible to hunters from the surface. He bottomed the submarine, shut down the reactor and everything that made the slightest noise, and the Russian flotilla sailed overhead, none the wiser. In total, he took down sixteen capital ships and damaged several others. Even better, none of the ships overhead, their active sonars pinging angrily, were able to find him.