“Off’sa’deck, change ship’s time to Beijing time. That makes it zero five hundred Tuesday, November 5.”
That meant their ETA was 2300 Thursday evening, November 7. And Pacino had said that he’d given the Dynacorp VP until Thursday to get the computer system up and running. Suddenly Patton felt dead tired.
“Off’sa’deck, proceed on course to Point Echo. I’m going to my stateroom. Don’t wake me, I’m getting an equalizer battery charge.”
“Aye, Captain. PD time, sir?” The young lieutenant wanted to know when to slow and pop up to periscope depth to get their radio messages from the orbiting satellite.
“Don’t come up. We’ll be running straight in.” A safe bet, he thought, since the supreme commander-in-chief was aboard. Who else would be sending them radio messages?
Patton waved to Pacino, who was leaning over the chart display, and walked into the door to his stateroom from the aft bulkhead of the control room. At his table he found Byron Demeers drinking a Coke and brooding.
“Byron. What do you think?”
“Skipper, my head hurts. I feel like I’ve been sent back to school, and I don’t know anything. This Acoustic Daylight Imaging system, it’s more complicated than you can shake a stick at.”
“The only thing I want to know about it is, will it work?”
“Who knows?” Demeers said. “We’ll be in deep trouble if it doesn’t.”
“What do you think of the ship otherwise?”
“I’ll tell you what I think. It’s a piece of shit without an operational sonar system. The only thing this tub does is haul around my ears, and if I can’t use them, this thing is just a big 377-foot-long target.”
“Oh, quit crying, you goddamned sonar girl,” Patton said. “And get out of here, I want some rack. You’d better sleep too, you’ve been up around the clock.”
“No time. I’ve got to learn the Cyclops sonar system, or else you are going to be hurting.”
Chapter 10
Wednesday November 6
“I think it’ll work,” Colleen O’Shaughnessy said, staring at her panel in the computer room.
“It has to be more than just a thought,” Pacino said. “This system can’t crash once we penetrate the op area and start looking for the Red force.”
Colleen’s eyes flashed in anger. She looked up at him, taking a breath, her voice acid as she said, “If you want a guarantee, then give me two weeks to do the C-1 and C-9 tests. Otherwise, I guess you’ll have to live with the system as is, just like the rest of us. Besides, if the system has problems, I’ll be here to debug.”
“Not good enough. Colleen. I need you to do whatever you have to do to get that system to be reliable. Our lives and the mission are depending on it. When it’s time to launch a torpedo, we can’t just call you up and ask you to fix it.”
Colleen O’Shaughnessy looked up at the tall admiral.
She had been up for three nights without sleep, ever since the ship left Hawaii underneath a garbage barge.
“Looks like that’s your only choice.”
“I’m telling you, it’s not good enough. It has to be absolutely bulletproof. Colleen. And it has to be that way by 1800 local tomorrow. You’ve got twenty hours.”
“Why 1800? We don’t get to the op area until eleven p.m.”
“We don’t get to the op area. I get to the op area, ship’s company gets to the op area. You get off at 1800. That’s when the personnel transfer goes down.”
“What?”!
“You’ll be donning scuba gear and locking out of the forward escape trunk when we’re at periscope depth. We’ll dive, and you’ll be picked up by an old tanker that will happen to be in the area at the time. I hate to make you leave the ship like that, but we can’t risk surfacing or even broaching the sail.”
“Admiral, I’m coming on this operation. Scrub this personnel transfer or whatever you call it. I need to stay with the Cyclops. You and your country-bumpkin computer operators can’t do this without me.”
“Colleen, I don’t have your father’s permission to take you into a hot operation area. Are you willing to get it from him in writing that you can penetrate the op area? And enter a war zone?”
O’Shaughnessy’s voice rose a full three octaves as she made her attack. “What is this, Pacino? I’m an adult, I speak for myself. What are you doing, talking about my father? Are you just trying to cover for yourself because he’s your boss?”
“Get a hold of yourself. Colleen,” Pacino said, his voice iron. “You’re a civilian and you’re not authorized in the op area. Furthermore, I have to go to your father, because he’s the only man in the Navy who outranks me right now. And I’ll tell you one more thing. If you were my daughter, I’d shoot any man who put your life in danger. You signed on to design the computer for this submarine, not fight it in combat.”
“I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to—”
“Tomorrow. Eighteen hundred. You’ve got twenty hours. I suggest you use them.”
O’Shaughnessy cursed at him, a word he never thought would come out of that pretty mouth. He shut the door and found himself looking at Paully White.
“Can she deliver?” White asked.
“All I can tell you, Paully, is what I think. And you know what? It doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what she thinks.”
“Chilling thought,” White muttered, rolling his eyes.
“Shut up, Captain,” Pacino said harshly. As he walked past him down the passageway to control and aft to their stateroom, White was left staring after him.
“Listen up, scumbags,” Lieutenant Commander Christopher Porter commanded, standing up in front of the crowd in the officers’ wardroom. “Sorry, Admiral, Captain, Captain White, Ms. O’Shaughnessy, I meant them,” Porter amended, suddenly realizing that his favorite way to start a briefing might not be appropriate with the brass.
Porter’s position was the ship’s navigator, the new title a return to the old days, when the navigator was the lead tactical officer. The other officers were all gathered for a training session. A black, curving screen had lowered around them, an expansion of the eggshaped bubbles in the control room. The officers in the room had donned helmets, the eyepieces clear, but each one containing a filter to cause the image of the wall of the surface to seem three-dimensional. The lights lowered, and the screen shimmered with a yellowish light, the appearance of the acoustic daylight. A red form grew close on the yellow background, the form appearing three-dimensional in the glasses of Pacino’s helmet.
“Identify,” Porter called.
One of the junior officers spoke up. “Fish!”
“Correct.” The picture changed as the fish went by, a more distant bluish blob floating into view. “Identify.”
“Submarine contact,” another voice said.
“Correct. Friend or foe?”
The crowd watched for some time.
“Bad guy, Nav. Rising Sun class.”
“Wrong,” Porter said, seeming to enjoy the hapless supply officer’s confusion. “Anyone else?”
“688-class American,” Patton spat out.
“You cheated, Cap’n,” Porter said, smiling.
“The hell.”
“That’s okay, sir. Shows motivation.”
“Let’s wrap, Navigator. The weapons brief is next, then the war plan brief. Anyone needing a cup of coffee, get it now. I don’t want anyone racking in here.”