With the Second Captain on the case. Winged Serpent could not fail. It would be, Tanaka thought, as if he were a Wild West gunman going up against blind men.

ALEUTIAN TRENCH, BOUNDARY OF THE BERING SEA AND THE PACIFIC OCEAN

USS PIRANHA

Bruce Phillips leaned the captain’s chair far back in the dark of the wardroom, the large-screen flat panel displaying a classic Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, the bulging muscles of the protagonist exposed, tensing as his arm lifted a hefty weapon and he began firing a machine gun into a crowded city street. Phillips shoved a handful of popcorn in his mouth, listening to the comments of his wardroom as the bullets flew. The phone rang from the conn. Phillips pointed the remote at the flat panel and the action froze, plunging the room into silence. “Mindless violence,” Phillips muttered in mock disgust as he hoisted the phone to his ear. “Captain.”

“Offsa’deck, sir.

We’re leaving the Aleutian Trench now, sir. We’re officially in the Pacific.” Phillips looked over at the speed indicator, the readout showing forty-three knots, the deck vibrating slightly from the turbulence of the seawater flow over the Vortex tubes, particularly since the ship’s hydrodynamics had become uneven with the loss of the number-one Vortex unit. “How long to go at flank?”

“Arrival in the northern quadrant of the Oparea is slated for thirty hours from now, sir.” It wasn’t good enough, Phillips thought. “Put this on the status board and pass it on to your relief, Mr. Porter — we won’t be coming to periscope depth until just before we penetrate the Oparea. And I want us running at flank until then, to hell with navigation errors. In fact, put that in the ship’s deck log, that I ordered us to blow off going to PD until we’re at the forty-fourth parallel. That gives us forty-three knots all the way. What’s that do to the time?”

“Takes it down to about twenty-six hours. Captain.” Still not good enough. “Off’sa’deck, send the engineer to the wardroom.” He hung up the phone, clicked the remote and the bullets continued to fly onscreen. He watched a few moments until he saw Walt Hornick’s head appear at the round red window to the centerline passageway, then got up and walked out into the brightness of the passageway. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee, Eng,” Phillips said, walking the engineer across the passageway to the opening to the crew’s mess. He poured the engineer a cup of fresh steaming coffee, a glass of bright red Kool-Aid for himself, the mixture so sweet he had to wince to choke it down. He steered Hornick to a dinette table in the far corner, pulled out two cigars, one for Hornick, one for himself. He noticed the engineer didn’t flinch this time as Phillips stuffed the stogie into his mouth and lit the end. “Well, Eng, before we get into this I want to ask you a question.”

“Yes sir.”

“Have I ever meddled with your department?

Micromanaged you? Given you rudder orders?”

“No, sir.” Hornick seemed confused. “But I have given you goals to achieve, right? I’ve told you the big picture of what I’ve wanted and left it to you to get it done, right?”

“Yes sir.”

“How do you feel about that, Eng?”

“How do I feel about it, sir?”

“Yeah. How does that feel? I’m assuming you haven’t been treated like that before.”

“You’re right. Skipper, I haven’t. Captain Forbes before you was the ship’s real engineer. I just took orders from him and tried to satisfy him. He was never satisfied. I had a letter of resignation written, I was going to resign my commission and go into business with my father-in- law but Forbes left before I could submit it.”

“Where’s the letter now?” Phillips puffed and looked at the smoke drifting into the overhead. “I tore it up after we did that emergency startup of the reactor, Skipper.” Phillips looked at Walt Hornick, the slightest hint of a smirk on his face. “So how do you feel about this patrol?”

“I’m fully committed to the ship’s mission.”

“And how does your engineering plant relate to that mission, Eng?”

“Sir, we’re a steam-making service. You want RPM, we’re in business to give it to you.”

“Then I want to tell you about a problem I have.” Phillips withdrew his Writepad computer from his shirt pocket and put it on the surface of the dinette table’s checkered oilskin tablecloth. He clicked into the software, finally displaying a small chart of the northwest Pacific, looking down on the earth as if from low orbit. “This is our position.” A small dot pulsed brightly east of the Kamchatka peninsula.