It seemed so unreal. One moment, the most solid, real, dear person in his universe was speaking warmly to him, and the next she was gone, as if she’d never existed.
He couldn’t remember the day of the wake and the funeral the same way he remembered most things. Unlike the mental video of a normal memory, Carrie’s funeral was just a flash of a hundred intense images—
Her open coffin with her in her uniform with her rows of medals and her gold submarine dolphins, her cap tucked under her arm. Her face resting, as if she were sleeping, that constellation of beautiful freckles sprinkled around her nose, one of the first things Pacino had noticed about her.
A large framed photograph propped up on an easel behind her showing her in dress whites, smiling and standing next to then-Commander Robert Catardi with the gigantic hull of the USS Piranha behind her. Other framed photos of Alameda as a youngster, running track in high school, graduating as a midshipman from Annapolis, all of them showing her brilliant smile, her straight white teeth and singular beauty of her soul shining out in all of them.
The enormous crowd of officers present in the church, both senior and junior, and the enlisted men and women of her former submarine Toledo. Her brothers, one a Marine lieutenant, the other an Air Force colonel. Her grief-stricken father, struggling on a walker with an oxygen bottle attached to it, the Tygon tubing extending from the bottle over his ears to his nose.
The size of the cathedral where the service was conducted, candles lit everywhere. Pacino’s father sitting next to him, the old man’s suit seeming somehow odd when Pacino had always seen him in his officer’s uniform. His mother on the other side of him, holding his hand. Missing, for some reason, was his father’s wife Colleen, who had not been herself since the Explorer II rescue.
The graveside service was held in a dreary cold June rain. The time came to leave in his father’s black town car. His mind drifted during the ride to his father’s house in Annapolis. He heard the clink of a highball glass as it hit the copper surface of the bar in front of the Annapolis house’s stone fireplace, then the sound of the scotch pouring into the glass. From miles away, he sensed the smoky taste of the whisky as it cascaded down his throat. Then more and more until finally his father half-carried him to the guest bedroom.
He woke up the next morning, not knowing where he was. His father stood in the kitchen, tall and gaunt, pouring him a steaming cup of hot black coffee. His father stole a glance at him to see if he were okay, and the answer coming that he most assuredly was not.
The phone call came in from the detailer putting him into a later nuclear power school class and instructing him to take two months off, somehow knowing how hard this had hit him despite the secrecy of the affair, perhaps Pacino’s father having intervened. The days passed, one blurring into the next, Pacino running on the cobblestone streets of the bayside village before sunrise, numbly sitting on the eastern deck staring out at the sailboats on the Chesapeake in the afternoon, quietly drinking scotch with his father in the evening and watching the sun set from the western deck.
Sometimes, when Pacino remembered their last conversation, he wondered at the timing of it. Did Carrie instinctively know she had only minutes left? Did she see the opening of that tunnel behind him as he spoke to her?
His last night at the Annapolis house, he packed his seabag and got ready to leave. It was time to return to his life. He’d reported to Navy Nuclear Power School and buried himself inside the studies and the twelve-hour days. After half a year of that, six months of nuclear prototype, where he studied, qualified on and operated a live submarine nuclear reactor plant. Then three months of submarine school, where he realized that his time on Piranha had taught him most of what they were trying to teach, with the exception of the tactics of how to sneak up on an enemy submerged contact and kill it before it realized it was being stalked. He took a week of leave and spent it at his father’s house, then loaded his scratched and dented ancient Corvette with the modern engine and rolled it south to his newly leased apartment in Virginia Beach, commutable to Norfolk Naval Station, where his orders instructed him to report aboard his new permanent duty station, the new Block IV Virginia-class submarine Vermont.
This morning, a sun-drenched day in May, he donned his starched tropical white uniform with the shoulderboards of a junior grade lieutenant and the damned Navy Cross — but notably and sadly missing gold submarine dolphins that he had yet to earn and which could take over a year to be granted. And not having those dolphins while onboard a submarine would make him a second-class citizen, as berated and dismissed as he had been when he’d reported aboard Piranha as a lowly midshipman a million years ago. And now he’d experience the same strangeness of starting a new life chapter on Vermont. He took a deep breath and consciously brought himself back to the moment. With an effort, he tried to fold up and put away all thoughts of Carrie Alameda, to compartmentalize his feelings, and to some extent over the last month he’d been able to do that, but doing so seemed to drain his energy and leave him with a heavy depressed feeling. He remembered when his father’s wife Eileen had suddenly died in an interstate accident, the old man had been the same way, almost in a walking dead, power-saver mode. It had taken a war that the old man was losing to knock him out of that funk.
The door to the interview room clicked, then opened, revealing a short, corpulent man in his sixties. He shuffled in, wearing over-stuffed pants and vest from a suit, the vest open, an out-of-fashion tie at half mast, the tie bearing a dime-sized stain on it, the man smelling of stale cigarette smoke. Pacino stood to shake his hand, but the gruff man waved him to a seat. He rubbed his hand over his bald scalp and opened a briefcase to withdraw a folder full of papers and a tablet computer.
“I’m Barsky, head of submarine security at SubFor. This meeting is to indoctrinate you into a program. The program’s name itself is top secret. So first, sign here.” The first paper slid across the desk. Pacino scanned it. The paper itself was marked as Top Secret — Fractal Chaos, whatever that meant. It was legalese but amounted to one long threat of life imprisonment or execution if even a minor breach of security could be tied to him. In the event of a major security breach, he’d be treated as an enemy combatant, stripped of his citizenship and Constitutional rights and either tossed into a black program cell or summarily executed. Pacino looked up at Barsky and lifted an eyebrow. “Sign it,” the harsh man said, “or your submarine career ends right now.” Pacino shrugged and signed the nondisclosure agreement in quadruplicate. “That just entitles you to be read into the program, which is named — and the name is special compartmented information, SCI, top secret codeword material—Fractal Chaos—and that codeword is three levels above the classification top secret. You’re aware that SCI material includes the nation’s most closely guarded secrets? Some of them so secret that only a few people know about them?”
Pacino nodded gravely, and the next hour was simply more of the same. He signed more forms, each more graphically threatening than the last, a few of the final agreements not committed to physical paper, but only on Barsky’s tablet computer. The last forms required him to submit knowingly and willingly to any kind of electronic surveillance on himself at any time and to surrender his Fourth Amendment rights, agreeing to any kind of physical search of himself, his home or his possessions at any time. Pacino signed it, beginning to understand why his father had been so closed-mouthed about the operations of his submarines.