Panic Switch полностью

At the West Wing portal entrance, a Navy official staff truck pulled up, and out emerged Vice Admiral Rob Catardi, the head of the Submarine Force, but Pacino noticed something immediately. Catardi was no longer a vice admiral. He sported a new star on his shoulderboards, apparently having been promoted to full admiral, a four-star position.

Pacino smiled at his old friend. Rob Catardi had been one of then-Commander Pacino’s junior officers on the original Devilfish, having temporarily detached from the submarine to go to chief engineer school just before the boat’s orders to the polar icecap. Years later, as captain of the Seawolf-class submarine Piranha, Catardi had played host to young Anthony on his first class midshipman cruise, when a nuclear-powered, unmanned U.S. Navy drone submarine — having been hijacked and hacked — came after Piranha and put her on the bottom. If not for Anthony Pacino’s instinctive and brave action, Catardi would have died in the wreck of the Piranha. Two years later, Pacino and Catardi had suffered through the two month mission of the Vermont when she sailed into the Gulf of Oman to commandeer the Iranian submarine Panther, both of them watching in disbelief and horror as Vermont’s skipper Scotch Seagraves had assigned young and inexperienced Anthony Pacino to the Panther boarding party as assistant-officer-in-charge. But despite terrible odds, Anthony and the boarding party had prevailed and the older Pacino and Catardi had celebrated with a steak dinner and thirty year old scotch.

“Four stars, now, Rob?” Pacino said, shaking Catardi’s hand and pulling the younger man into a bear hug.

Catardi nodded. “They made me Vice CNO. And as of now, I’m acting CNO.” The admiral-in-command of the U.S. Navy was called the chief of naval operations, so Catardi was now the deputy to Admiral Grayson Rand, but if Catardi had been appointed “acting CNO,” something was wrong with Rand.

“What’s up with Admiral Rand?” Pacino asked. “And who’s minding the shop at SubForce?”

Catardi followed Pacino into the double doors of the West Wing entrance. As he produced his identification, he looked over sadly. “Rand was diagnosed with a glioblastoma. The kind of brain cancer that takes you in two or three or four months and has you screaming at your family and urinating in your desk drawers. Inoperable. He was trying stem cell therapy and a newfangled vaccine but he got complications. Water on the brain. They took him to surgery to ease the pressure, but it was just a band-aid. Looks like he’s retired to spend his last weeks with his people. I’m filling in for him until the SecNav and the president decide on the appointment of Rand’s replacement.”

Pacino shook his head. “Goddamned hard to hear that, Robby. Grayson Rand is a good man and doesn’t deserve all that. But who stepped in for you at SubCom?”

“You remember John Patton?”

“Sure. He took over for me as CNO after I was out after the Princess Dragon incident. Amazing guy. He put me in charge of the mission to avenge the sinking of the Piranha. But Patton left the Navy years ago.”

“His younger brother, Wally ‘Stiletto’ Patton, came up through the ranks and now he’s got the baton. He should be in our little conference today.”

“Small world, ain’t it, Rob?”

The security forces cleared them, and Catardi, Allende and Pacino walked down to the lower level and the Situation Room. It only had a few aides sitting in wall chairs, but there were pad computers and notepads on the table.

“Looks like the crew is in the mess,” Allende said. “Buy you boys a cup of coffee?”

In the mess, a group of people were gathered around Allende’s deputy director for operations, Angel Menendez. Menendez was a compact, shorter man, wearing a sport jacket over a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt, a black fedora in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other. He saw Allende and burst into a smile.

“Boss,” he said, nodding and smiling at Allende. He looked at Pacino and shook his hand. “Admiral Pacino, good to see you again, sir, although the circumstances aren’t ideal.”

Pacino nodded, looking over at three general officers he didn’t know.

“This is the new head of NSA,” Menendez said to Pacino, indicating an Army general with a chest full of medals and airborne wings with a combat star. “General Foster ‘Nick’ Nickerson. He’s an old paratrooper from West Point, but we don’t hold that against him.”

The National Security Agency chief grinned with a mouth stuffed with white teeth, his mustache bushy for a general officer. “Never listen to CIA,” Nickerson said to Pacino, shaking his hand. “They lie. Just ask Ms. Allende’s predecessor.”

Allende smirked. “Just because the Chinese accused him of lying, doesn’t mean it’s true.”

Nickerson laughed. “Hey, sometimes lying is our business. Just not within the family, right?”