The sound of the helicopter’s jet engines spooling up could be heard dimly through the bulkheads, the noise swelling as the turbines whined, moaned, screamed. The sounds of the rotors came next, the chopper starting the main rotor.

Paully knocked again. “Chopper’s ready, sir.”

Pacino turned back to Eileen, grabbed her shoulders, pulled her close and kissed her. In a way it seemed absurd, a cliche, the warrior off to war, kissing his woman goodbye. Well, hell, so be it.

He pulled away. “Bet on it, I’ll see you again.”

He stepped out the door to the passageway, shutting it behind him. Paully followed him to the aft helodeck, and as they opened the watertight door to the helodeck Pacino noticed his headache was gone.

He stepped into the Sea King helicopter and sat by the hatch, looking at the ship. Paully waved orders at the pilots and the rotor outside roared, the chopper shaking with the power of the rotating blades. The helicopter lifted off the deck, climbed to the southeast and then turned and sped away, the Mount Whitney vanishing far below.

WM NORTHWEST PACIFIC

Pacino pulled his mask off his neck, spat into it and rubbed the spit across the lens until it squeaked. Satisfied with the antifogging technique, he pulled the mask back down over his face and let it dangle at his throat.

He clamped the regulator into his mouth and tasted the coppery air from the tanks on his back. The regulator worked. He spat it out, the rubber taste lingering.

“Okay,” he said to Paully White, “you got your waterproof bag?” Pacino checked his as Paully confirmed his own items on the checklist.

“Yeah.”

“Tanks?”

“Check.”

“Regulator functional?”

“Yes.”

“Gage?

“Full.”

“Weights?”

“Tight.”

“Mask?”

“Yeah.”

“Flippers?”

“Tough to put on with all the other equipment.”

“Let’s get this thing on the hump.”

“Sirs! Drop zone in two minutes,” the chopper copilot shouted back. The Barracuda was four miles ahead, only its periscope mast protruding from the water. Pacino checked the Rolex, knowing the ship had been submerged at periscope depth, hovering motionless, for the last fifteen minutes, since he and White had been late getting off the deck of the Mount Whitney.

USS BARRACUDA

Capt. David Kane sat at his stateroom’s large conference room table. The captain’s cabin on the Seawolf class was done perfectly, he thought. A large rack, a conference table that could comfortably seat a half-dozen men, a large leather swivel chair that could roll between the conference table and his desk, the wheels of the chair locked unless he pushed the travel button. Set into a soffit in the centerline bulkhead were four widescreen video monitors, the first monitoring the navigation display of the ship’s position, the islands of Japan in the upper right corner, the boundary of the Oparea flashing yellow, now only a hundred nautical miles to the northeast.

The second display showed a view of the control room in one window, the maneuvering room aft in the other. The third was also a split-screen view, the left half selected to the view out of the type-20 periscope, the sea quiet, nothing to see but the dividing line between the waves of the deep blue ocean and the light blue sky, the right half of the screen displaying the broadband sonar waterfall screen that showed the ocean empty of other ships within the audible range of the BSY-2 combat system. The screen could also display the combatcontrol system’s dot-stacker computer display, useful when they were trailing an enemy submarine — the captain could look up and see the solution to the target with a glance, eliminating a hundred phone calls a day when in trail.

Kane was showered, shaved and dressed, the arrival of the Pacific Force Commander announced on a flash message he had gotten from the Mount Whitney the night before. He was particularly bothered by this, the arrival of a meddling admiral onboard his submarine, turning his command of one of the newest Seawolfclass submarines from independent action to little more than a flagship. The arrival of an admiral at sea was always bad news, he thought. His authority as commanding officer would be under constant scrutiny and evaluation in front of his observant crew. In his own memory every time one of his commanders had taken aboard an admiral, that admiral had become a sort of proxy captain.

The captain of a ship was one of the world’s last dictators, but in the world of instantaneous communications the surface-ship captains were no longer fully in charge.