Despite fresh makeup she looked like she’d been crying.
She couldn’t look him in the eye when she came up. Her hands were clasped together, and she seemed somehow small. Her hair was different too, the sleek black gone, now done in soft, brassy red curls, the length far shorter. Her eyes were different too, the brown gone, replaced by the odd blueness of colored contact lenses.
“Abby, what is it?” he asked her, his voice sounding strange in his own ears.
“I came to tell you in person, Bruce. It’s over.” She pulled her diamond ring off and handed it to him. “I’ll start with the part you know and work my way to what you don’t. I love you, I’ve loved you since I first saw you. But, honey, I can’t take the separation, and it’s even more than that. You love that ship and your Navy life more than me. I asked you what your plans were, and I’d hoped you’d leave the Piranha when your rotation came up, but you made a special trip to talk to the admiral and begged for a back-to-back command tour, and he gave it to you. Another three years on the damned Piranha. Well, Bruce, you want her, you can have her. That fucking ship is all yours. And I’m giving you my orders now. This is your honorable discharge, Captain. I’m leaving on the next flight back, and I don’t want to talk anymore. Goodbye, Bruce.”
He’d stood stupidly dumbstruck, his tongue useless in his mouth, watching her walk away, disappearing into a ladies’ room. For a full five minutes he stood there with his mouth open, trying to understand, and starting to understand all too well. He found himself walking into the ladies’ room. He ignored the annoyed shouts, banging on the stall door he thought was Abby’s, only to find it was someone else. Finally a security guard had come and dragged him out.
He’d found a bar on Ward Avenue and had lined up shot glasses of Wild Turkey for the rest of the night.
Finally he was ejected as being too drunk to stay. Somehow he had told a cab driver to take him to his ship rather than his quarters, and he had fallen flat on his face at the pier where the gangway went over to the hull topside. The sentries had carried him aboard and put him into his rack.
The time since then had passed in a blur. He had alternately slept, vomited, was put in the corner as the stewards changed his sheets and mattress, then slept again, vomited again. He had been shaken awake by the duty officer, the executive officer behind him. They’d told him that the ship had emergency orders to get under way. Phillips had waved them off, not caring, angry at the ship that had lost him the only person that had really mattered to him, Abigail Patricia O’Neal. He had rolled over in disgust and gone back to sleep.
Had it been up to him, he would have slept for weeks, but his mouth got so dry and he was so empty that he struggled to his feet, his head spinning, and walked to the sink in the corner of the stateroom. He pulled down the stainless steel sink and clicked on the lights on either side of the mirror. The fluorescents nickered, then caught, revealing a gray-skinned face that he didn’t want to see this morning.
He would have resigned his commission after he’d sobered up, but now the ship was at sea. Even if he had a mind to do that, his second-in-command was a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy, who was there on an American-British exchange program, and who, by U.S. Navy regulations, could take command of the Piranha only if Phillips became physically or mentally incapacitated, and getting dumped by a girlfriend didn’t qualify, no matter how debilitating it was in reality.
Bruce Phillips had a narrow face, strong chin, a flattened boxer’s nose, with several days’ growth of beard.
His hairline was so far in retreat that he wore a tight crewcut. As a quirky consolation prize, he had a nicely shaped head, or so Abby had always maintained, back in the past that seemed like another life. Phillips was short, barely breaking five feet, but muscular, his deep chest and narrow waist somehow compensating for his lack of vertical stature.
Phillips splashed water on his face, wondering if it made any sense to shave, then decided not to. He went into the head between his stateroom and Roger Whatney’s, his executive officer, where he stepped into the shower, letting the heat of it on his shoulders bring him back to life. To an empty life, he thought.
Through the rush of the water he could hear Whatney’s south-of-London accent: “Skippah, we’ve got an urgent call to periscope depth. Seems the admiral wants a little chat with us.” He paused. “Captain, are you okay? Sir?”
“I’m okay, Roger,” Phillips said, shutting his eyes, feeling a headache starting behind his eyes. “I’ll shave and dress and meet you in my stateroom in three minutes.”
“Aye, sir, I’ll set up the video.”
“I don’t think I believe this,” Captain Paul White said as he looked at the thousand-foot-long garbage barge.
Trash was piled up forty feet high the full length of the barge, tied to an oceangoing tug by several thick lines. “It looks like garbage. It smells like garbage. It has seagulls all over it, like garbage.”
“It is garbage,” Pacino said. I told you I could sneak the SSNX out of here right under the cameras of the news-hounds.”
“You’re telling me that — thing — is a security cloak for the sub?”
“Grab your bag and follow me,” Pacino said, stepping on the gunwale of the huge barge. A few feet into the garbage pile Pacino reached for a sheet of waste plywood — which came open on a hidden hinge like a door.
He disappeared inside, his voice calling for Paully to follow him. A tunnel fabricated of plywood and sheet plastic extended deep under the garbage pile, lit by light bulbs hung from the overhead. The tunnel ended in a tall doghouse over the circle of a hatch. A sentry came to rigid attention and saluted Pacino. Turning to the control panel against the plywood wall of the doghouse, the sentry punched a mushroom button. The hatch, propelled by hydraulics, opened, the circle of it shining in a warm yellow light. Pacino yelled, “Down ladder!” and tossed his bag down, then lowered himself out of sight into the submarine.
“I don’t believe it,” White said.
“Didn’t anyone say what this was all about?” Captain John Patton asked, his voice distorted by the oxygen mask and the acoustics of the intercom.
“Sorry, sir,” the pilot said from the forward seat of the swept-wing F-22 supersonic Navy fighter. “They just told me to get you to Pearl Harbor ASAP.”
“So who gave you those orders?”
“Air Boss.”
“Did he say where he got them?”
“Supercinc-Pac, sir.”
“Excuse me?”
“The Supreme Commander-in-Chief Pacific, the admiral in charge of the entire U.S. military in the Pacific and the invasion force on the way to White China. The second force, anyway.”
“Sorry to sound stupid, but I’ve been out of it for a while. I was socked away in a bare room with no TV, and goddamn it, I have no idea what’s going on. Who is this admiral?”
“You ought to know, sir. He’s one of you bubble-head submarine guys, Pacino.”
“Pacino’s the supreme commander?”
“Yessir.”
And he wanted to see Patton badly enough to fly him out on a supersonic fighter, Patton thought with a sinking feeling. How would he explain the loss of the Annapolis’!
Pacino and White had set themselves up in the VIP stateroom aft of the executive officer’s stateroom.
The room was multipurpose. The aft wall was taken up with two large bunks that went into the bulkhead like Pullman compartment sleepers, with a pulldown door that covered up the clutter of them. On the opposite end was a double desk. The center of the room was taken up with a table surrounded by six leather seats, and on the wall opposite the door was a full-width videoconference console. The widescreen television was on, the sound muted, the channel selected to Satellite News Network, which showed a reporter in a studio reading news.