“Have we got a ship-control readout?” Pacino asked.
Paully nodded. “It’s in the corner inside the lower rack.”
Pacino craned his neck and squinted his good eye. A small panel with three dials glowed in the darkness of the rack interior. The readouts were course, speed and depth. The ship was heading 330 true, the direction of the Oparea, the depth was 654 feet, the speed 44.8 knots — flank speed. Pacino rolled out his chart electronic pad, wondering where they were.
“We’ve got about twenty minutes before we have to talk to the president,” Paully said, looking at his watch.
“We need to bring Kane into the loop,” Pacino said.
“But let’s be careful. I don’t want to call him to this stateroom — that’s a power play. We should do this in his stateroom, with him at his command seat. I want you to be particularly respectful of Kane, Paully — this is a guy who’s not too happy with us aboard. When Kane talks, you and I listen hard. We don’t make phone calls to his officer of the deck. We don’t ask his officers tactical questions. We don’t even ask the nav tech the ship’s position. Our information has to come through Kane. And for that to work, Kane’s got to be on the team.”
Paully found the phone, the special command circuit between the conn, CO’s stateroom, the XO’s stateroom and maneuvering. He buzzed the captain’s stateroom, listened, then spoke quietly, looking up at Pacino.
“Captain Kane would love to speak with us in his stateroom. He said to pop on in through the head door.”
Pacino remembered how uncomfortable he had been as a submarine skipper when an admiral, even though it was Dick Donchez, had been riding the ship at sea. The situation was miserable, all he could wait for was the moment the admiral left. But though he could empathize with Kane now, nothing he could do short of leaving Kane’s ship would make the situation completely comfortable for Kane, but as he had said to Murphy a lifetime ago, they would all need to operate outside their comfort zones. He knocked on the door to the commanding officer’s stateroom. Kane’s voice was muffled as he called Pacino in.
“Thanks for the reception. Captain Kane,” Pacino said. “That shower made me a new man. Your ship is impressive.”
Kane stood, offering Pacino his command chair. Pacino waved Kane into it, sitting in a seat at Kane’s right against the bulkhead.
“Great layout,” Paully said.
Pacino poured a cup of coffee, admiring the ship’s emblem on the cup, the snarling fish swimming past the sail of a submarine, and felt the old urge to command his own ship again.
“The video camera is above the status panels on the centerline soffit. Admiral,” Kane said. “I’ll pipe the Oval Office into the central screen.”
“We’ve still got a few minutes,” Pacino said. “I wanted to brief you on what our approach is going to be. Paully, roll out the chartpad and show Captain Kane what we’re suggesting.”
White dropped his semisarcastic style and slipped into a crisp just-the-facts briefing, showing Kane the Oparea and the deployment of the seven attack submarines on the Pacific side, where he envisioned the placement of the Barracuda. If Kane was upset by the Barracuda acting as a standoff command and control ship, he didn’t show it. But there was also no enthusiasm on his face either, which might have been due to the commitment of the seven ships against the entire Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force submarines.
“Sir,” Kane said to Pacino, “we’ve got the better part of a squadron of submarines steaming two days to a week behind us. There were boats out of Pearl that couldn’t get out of repair for a weekend and worked to get going for a few days before they deployed. Before I’d put a half-dozen 688s into the Oparea I’d recommend a coordinated attack with the other two-dozen ships. We could put that together by, say, the day after tomorrow. We could go into that Oparea and clean it up.”
“I know,” Pacino said. “But the president wants to see results by Christmas. That’s hours away. I can’t wait a week. The blockade has to go back up now.”
“I think the wolfpack idea is a good one, but seven ships, sir, that’s just—”
“Unavoidable,” Pacino finished for him. “But I’m going to see if I can buy some time with President Warner. We should get to setting up the videolink now.”
Kane hoisted a phone to his ear. Within seconds the deck inclined upward as the ship came shallow, preparing for periscope depth. Minutes later the ship rocked gently in the swells near the surface, the radio antennae raised so that they could transmit to the Comstar satellite.
Kane spoke into a phone again, probably to radio, Pacino thought, to set up the videolink. The central screen went blank, then deep blue with a countdown of time on it, the numerals slowly rolling down from two minutes. Pacino laid out his chart pad and Writepad on the surface of the table, waiting for the videolink, preparing his argument to Warner.
When the numbers rolled down to zero the seal of the president of the United States flashed briefly on the screen, followed by the appearance of three people at a table, blue curtains behind them. Pacino recognized the situation room of the White House basement and realized that things must be even worse than he thought. The situation room in the basement was almost never used by Warner.
In the center of the screen was Warner herself. She looked rested and calm, her eyes wide and blue, hair neatly coiffed, makeup light. She wore a cream-colored suit, a simple string of pearls, her hands on the surface of the table. On her right was Adm. Tony Wadsworth in his service dress blues, gold stripes up to his elbows, rows of ribbons under a gleaming surface-warfare pin, a deep frown etched in his face, his eyes black and angry. To Warner’s left was Richard Donchez in a blue pinstriped suit looking as if he’d lost another ten pounds since Pacino had last seen him. Donchez looked emaciated, weak, like he didn’t have much time left. Pacino vowed he’d see him first thing when this was all over.
“Can you hear us, gentlemen?” Warner asked. There was a slight disconnection between the image and the voice, as if the videolink were some old foreign film that had been dubbed. Just one of the problems with the massive amount of data that had to be transmitted for a videolink. It would probably be another five years or even a decade before videolink technology was good enough to replace voice-only telephones.
“Good morning. Madam President,” Pacino said crisply. “You’re coming through fine. Can you hear me?”
There was a delay as his transmission made its way to the other end — another damning trait of videolink hardware that would need to be upgraded. The one-second delay made it impossible to speak in real time — if someone tried to interrupt, it wouldn’t be heard until another sentence down the road.
“I hear you fine. Admiral Pacino. You know Admiral Wadsworth and Mr. Donchez. Who do you have with you?”
She probably didn’t give a damn who was with him, he thought as he hurried through an introduction of Kane and White.
“Well, let’s just get to it, shall we? Are your forces in the exclusion zone yet. Admiral?”
Pacino described his status and his intentions, watched Warner’s face, her brow crinkling in annoyance as he tried to persuade her to give him three more days. Wadsworth’s face was a thundercloud. Donchez’s expression was unreadable. He spent half the time scribbling on a Writepad in front of him.
“Admiral, I don’t have three days, I don’t have three hours. I need some Japanese submarines sunk in the next two days. If you’re not done with that in forty-eight hours I’m going to withdraw the blockade and meet with Kurita. You have forty-eight hours to put those submarines on the bottom. I want a report at seven a.m. my time on the twenty-sixth and I want good news.”