Katoss had been retired for five years, his detractors frequently said, and in fact, at this critical meeting, Katoss was unapologetically on vacation in the Bahamas. Pacino was glad for the man’s absence and wondered why President Warner had chosen him, but then who knew what political obligations she had had? The Secretary of the Navy was likewise missing, President Warner having sent him on a mission to Africa with the chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Anthony Wadsworth, a tough black man, an inch taller than Pacino and who at 250 pounds had been a boxer at the Academy. He and Pacino had crossed paths a decade before when Pacino’s first submarine. Devilfish, had been involved in an exercise against Wadsworth, who then was a full captain and the commanding officer of the aircraft carrier Eisenhower.’ Pacino had had orders to sneak up on Wadsworth’s carrier and act as the aggressor submarine, and Wadsworth’s antisubmarine warfare ships, the destroyers and frigates, were tasked with finding Pacino and Devilfish first. The exercise signal that the operation order specified was a flare, purple smoke, to be fired from Devilfish’s signal ejector to indicate that the submarine was shooting torpedoes at the aircraft carrier. Wadsworth hadn’t planned on Pacino getting in close, since he was scouring the seas around the Eisenhower with S-2 Vikings and the towed array sonar systems of his escort ships. It had taken Pacino all day to set up to penetrate the antisubmarine net around the carrier but he finally had sneaked in past the outer barriers and had gotten in close. He could have simply launched a series of purple flares from the center of the task force, but somehow that didn’t seem enough. Pacino had maneuvered Devilfish directly beneath the Eisenhower, steamed up on her port side, the opposite side of the ship from the island and bridge. Pacino had launched a purple flare from the signal ejector, filming it from the periscope as it arced high in the sky and landed on Wadsworth’s flight deck. The carrier flight-deck crew had panicked, not expecting the burst of purple smoke from out of nowhere. The crew had treated it like a fire, stringing out hoses, alarms blaring. Pacino had gone deep, increased speed to flank and pulled away from the carrier, then when he was a mile away, had come back up to periscope depth and taken a panoramic photograph of the Eisenhower, the purple smoke obscuring half the deck, frantic firefighters scrambling to put out the flames. Back in port after the incident, the squadron commander had called Pacino to his stateroom on the tender and chewed him out for a quarter-hour. Wadsworth had apparently put up a stink about Pacino violating safety rules with the flammable smoke grenade, not to mention violating the Oporder and showing that a lone submarine could humiliate the carrier battle group’s antisubmarine defenses and get close enough to poop a flare onto the carrier’s deck, which, of course, was the idea. All that saved Pacino’s career was that at the time Admiral Donchez was Commander Submarines US Atlantic Fleet, and had admired Pacino’s gutsy move. But even Donchez had taken Pacino aside to tell him to save his aggression for real combat and not embarrass politically connected senior officers. When a few months later Wadsworth had held a reception on board the Eisenhower for the fleet staff, one of Pacino’s junior officers had presented Wadsworth with a framed four-foot-wide blowup of the periscope photograph of Eisenhower with her deck half-obscured by purple smoke, the crosshairs on the picture leaving no doubt who had taken the photo.
Another junior officer had snapped a shot of Wadsworth looking at the huge photo, his mouth wide open in shock and anger. That photo had been framed and hung on the bulkhead of Devilfish’s wardroom. The incident had been somewhat typical of Pacino’s approach to life and to command before the arctic mission Donchez had sent him on, the one that had led to Devilfish’s sinking. The years before that ice-cap mission now seemed so remote as to be from somebody else’s life, but the fallout from them was still real, including Wadsworth’s feelings about Pacino. Pacino emerged from his reminiscence to look at Donchez, closeted as he was with men who were as difficult for him as Wadsworth was for Pacino.
