“Aye-aye, sir,” Copenflager said, his jaw muscles clenching.
“Good luck, Greg. And watch yourself.”
“Same to you. Admiral. Good hunting.”
Copenflager, the admiral-in-command of the backup Rapid Deployment Force Fleet, clicked off and looked over at his staff and the captain of the MacArthur.
“Round up the press, put them in the ready rooms, and confiscate their gear, then blindfold them. Get five Hawkeyes ready to airlift them back to Pearl, and put their gear on the sixth. No more ship announcements until they are all off. Once they’re gone, execute the maximum-dispersion order, cargo vessels no closer than two miles from each other, random distribution, ASW ships in a large-area screen. It’s zero five forty-five now. In one hour’s time I want the reporters off and the formation redeployed. Questions? Very well, gentlemen. Execute.”
The staff rose and vanished. Copenflager stood up, relived. Maybe with Pacino in command, things would be different. They’d better be, he thought, looking out the window at the formation, or else for him it would be a very short war.
The president was glaring at him. Pacino couldn’t remember her ever looking at him like that, even after he got kicked out of the Oval Office before the Japan blockade.
“I’d still like to know what you’re doing. I’ve heard rumors about the SSNX.”
“I’d like to know where you’re getting rumors like that,” Pacino said to the camera, hoping his voice sounded sufficiently hard.
In the background Admiral O’Shaughnessy’s face, as usual, was unreadable, yet Pacino thought he detected just a slight smile. Pacino felt a certainty he hadn’t had in a long time. A single word was running through his mind: Devilfish. He knew it was silly and superstitious, but somehow that name was making a difference to him.
Donchez must have known that the name would bring back other things from that time to him. His old cockiness seemed to be returning, the self that had been lost now beginning to resurface.
“Like I told you, I’ll be damned if the Red force commander learns anything about this mission from the news. And the reason I want to know where you got those rumors is because my plan may be starting to work. Madam President, the absence of news is not enough against this guy. We need to get things into the news that are misleading, some completely false, some edged with enough truth to confuse him. If you’ll just lay low until this operation is over, ma’am, you won’t be embarrassed by anything you say that turns out to be my disinformation.”
Jaisal Warner was not happy. “So I’m just supposed to trust you, and three weeks from now you’ll call up and say you’re at the beach?”
“Not quite like that, ma’am.”
“You’re the supreme commander. Admiral. I’ll give you your autonomy. And you’d better win this thing. If anything goes wrong, I’ll consider today’s developments evidence of your insubordination, and the only thing you’ll command is your Annapolis sailboat.”
Just a few months ago, a statement like that from the president would have upset him. Maybe it was his new-found— or rediscovered — confidence, but instead of just acknowledging the president, he narrowed his eyes at her, stared her down O’Shaughnessy-style, and said: “What do I get if I win?”
Warner tried to look serious, but she was too much an open book. She flashed the smile that had gotten her on the front pages during her campaign. “I’ll prepare something for you that I’m sure you’ll appreciate, Admiral.”
“No, I want to know,” Pacino said, feeling suddenly that he had to get Warner convinced on a gut level that the operation would succeed, even if he himself had his doubts. “Because you’re going to have to deliver.”
“Don’t you have a war to win. Admiral?” she asked, shaking her head.
“This is good-bye for a while, ma’am. Remember, don’t believe the rumors.” He clicked off, turning to face Paully White, who looked at him in astonishment.
“What was all that about disinformation, boss? We didn’t do any of that. We didn’t put out any rumors about the SSNX.”
“I know, but I want Warner off balance about that. If she thinks I’m using the SSNX, then the media will find out, and then our Red force friend finds out.”
“So how will you sneak the sub out of Pearl?”
“Emmitt Stephens and I had a talk about that a few months ago. Emmitt put something together to get SSNX to sea in broad daylight with no one the wiser. I think you’ll like it.”
“What now?”
“Lets shift over to the SSNX. We’ll have to do this so we avoid the telephoto lenses of our media comrades. Get Joanna, she seems pretty good at this sort of thing.”
It took a half hour to get to the pier at Ford Island on the south side, where Emmitt Stephens had berthed the SSNX. When Paul White saw it, he stared, whistled, then laughed.
Bruce Phillips was more hungover than at any time in his adult life. Truth be told, he was probably still drunk.
He lay deep in his rack, in the captain’s stateroom, buried under the covers, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. The air conditioning in the room was turned up to full blast, practically cold enough to make his breath visible. It was early in the morning on a Monday. The ship had been shifted over from Hawaii time to the East China Sea time zone, eighteen hours ahead, resetting the ship’s clocks to just before midnight. Which meant he could get away with sleeping in the bunk even though he’d been in it for hours, trying to sleep off the alcohol.
It had all started Saturday night, when Abby O’Neal had told him their relationship was over. She’d flown into Honolulu for a week’s vacation from her Washington, D.C., job, where she was a senior partner at Donnelly & Houston, a firm of maritime attorneys and lobbyists. They were slated to get married in a year’s time, but the Piranha, Phillips’ command, had been moved four months before from Norfolk to Pearl Harbor as a permanent change in home port. It hadn’t bothered Phillips, since he knew he’d be giving up command of the ship in the next year. It was a long time to be away from his fiancee, but then they were engaged, and he had thought that had meaning to her.
A future in the Navy didn’t hold any great promise for him. After all, what good was commanding a desk after commanding the last remaining Seawolf-class nuclear fast-attack submarine? He had made plans to resign his commission and try a new career. Abby knew of his plans, and she had fully agreed to the temporary separation.
Yet as the weeks apart grew into months, her calls started coming less frequently. More and more she mentioned the managing partner, Albert Donnelly, son of her firm’s founding partner, who had recruited her to the D.C. company and advanced her career beyond her wildest dreams. He learned that Bert had gotten a nasty divorce a year before, becoming one of Washington’s most eligible bachelors. He was interested in her despite her engagement, but she’d held him off. By the fifth month of their separation, she seemed distracted, almost cold. Phillips had shrugged it off, knowing she was susceptible to fairly strong mood swings. On impulse he had invited her to Hawaii for a week to be with him, to grab some fall sunshine, get her tan back before Thanksgiving.
When he met her at the airport, he had dressed in his best tropical suit, armed with a dozen red roses. When Abby appeared, Phillips smiled at her, his arms outstretched.
As she drew closer, though, he saw that something was seriously wrong.