“I was furious when I found out about it. I wanted to report Leonard, but MacLeod begged me not to. He said if I did, the navy would find out the truth about him and kick him out. That same fear of being found out was why he never went to the COB to complain about Leonard. But I did it anyway. I knew I couldn’t prove anything about the drugs without MacLeod’s help, so I did what little I could. I filed a formal complaint about the way the XO was treating him. There was an investigation. Leonard had been up for a promotion at the time, but after the investigation he was passed over. It was his third time getting passed over, and you know how it goes in the navy: three strikes, you’re out. That was the end of his career. Of both their careers, it turned out, because MacLeod was right. The truth about him came out in the investigation and he was discharged, just like he always feared would happen. He never spoke to me again. I thought I was doing the right thing, but I wonder sometimes.”
“It was a tough call to make,” Tim said, “but you definitely did the right thing. If that was who Frank Leonard was, he didn’t deserve to be in the navy.”
“Yeah, but MacLeod did. That’s what stinks.”
He took a deep breath through his mouth. He hadn’t expected to tell this story to anyone, on Roanoke or anywhere else, ever again. He just wanted to put it behind him, but he was surprised how good it felt to get it off his chest.
“Anyway, I learned my lesson: keep my head down and don’t get involved. That was the plan for my time on Roanoke. Guess that went right down the shitter, huh?”
“I’d say risking your neck to kill vampires and save your crewmates is getting pretty damn involved,” Tim stood. “Get some rest. I’ll come back to bother you some more later.”
“No rush,” Jerry said. “I feel like I could sleep for a week.”
Tim turned around to leave the berthing area, but a sailor appeared in the doorway, breathing hard, as if he had run all the way from the control room.
“Spicer, the captain wants you back in the sonar shack now!” the sailor said. “We’ve got a bear on our tail!”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Tim’s first thought was that the Victor that had tailed them before was back. During the time the crew lost control of Roanoke, it had strayed fifteen miles north along the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, which could have given the Victor plenty of time to find them again. The captain had changed their bearing as soon as he had control once more, setting course for the closest American territory—the Aleutian Islands to the east, 1,200 miles off the tip of the Alaskan peninsula. But for the moment, they were still in Soviet waters. If they wanted to get out in one piece, they were going to have to shake the Victor off their tail.
Captain Weber had already ordered Roanoke rigged for ultraquiet by the time Tim arrived in the control room. The screw was slowed, and their speed was reduced to two knots. The control room was still rigged for red, casting everything in a crimson tint. The bodies, both human and non, had been cleared out to make room for the captain’s skeleton crew: a quartermaster, one man in Fire Control, a diving officer, a planesman, and a helmsman. That was it. There was no officer of the deck or chief of the watch. The surviving crew of Roanoke was stretched thin, which left the watchstanding sailors to take their orders directly from Captain Weber himself.
“Spicer, I want your eyes and ears on the Victor,” the captain told him.
“Aye-aye, sir,” Tim said, bolting for the sonar shack.
He took a seat in front of his console and slipped the headphones on. The vampires had broken the lights in here too, but there was still plenty of illumination coming off the display screens, which apparently hadn’t bothered their eyes as much as the overheads. It was Aukerman who had first spotted the Victor. Seated at the next console over, the engineer turned emergency sonar tech pointed out the anomalies in the cascading waterfall display, although Tim had already spotted them as soon as he sat down.
There was surface traffic as well. Two ships floated 500 feet above them, to their north and east. Tim concentrated on the noises they made, identifying one of them as a destroyer, probably Kashin class, a guided-missile ship built in the 1960s. He pegged the other ship as even older: a Sverdlov-class cruiser, a gunboat from the 1950s. That was a stroke of luck. The Soviets could just as easily have had planes patrolling the skies and dropping sonobuoys that could pinpoint Roanoke’s location in seconds. They could have had ships dropping acoustic gear that actively pinged every cubic inch of ocean around them. Instead, the Soviets had sent two antiques to patrol these waters. Their outmoded technology was probably the only thing that had saved Roanoke from being spotted already—spotted and torpedoed. The ships were ancient by technological standards, but that didn’t make their weaponry any less lethal.
Still, as long as Roanoke stayed below the thermocline, he was confident the surface ships wouldn’t see them. The submarine on their tail was another matter. The Victor didn’t look as if she had spotted them yet. She wasn’t running on quiet, just patrolling as normal, but that could change in a matter of seconds.
Captain Weber came to the door of the sonar shack, silhouetted in the red light from the control room. He wore a somber, tense expression. “We’ve drifted right into Victor fucking Central, Spicer, and the timing could not be worse. Has she detected us yet?”
“There’s no indication she has, sir,” Tim said.
“Excellent. Keep an eye on her. If that submarine increases her speed so much as half a knot, I want to know about it.”
With only twenty-three men left aboard, the submarine was eerily quiet. Twenty-three living men, Jerry reminded himself. There were a whole lot more corpses being stored in the wardroom and the empty staterooms until they could be dealt with properly.
The berthing area wasn’t far from the mess, which normally would be so filled with boisterous conversation and sailors horsing around that Jerry wouldn’t expect to get a moment’s peace. Instead, it was deadly silent, which, he discovered, was worse. He strained his ears to hear anything, even the sound of Guidry in the galley, making cold sandwiches for the remaining crew, but there was nothing. Even the culinary specialist had probably been put to use somewhere. He got the feeling the whole middle level was empty except for him.
And then he heard them—footsteps in the corridor outside. They stopped right outside the berthing area.
“Back already, Spicer?” Jerry called. “I didn’t think the Soviets would give up that fast.”
In the murky red light, he saw something small appear at the side of the curtain. From a distance, it took him a moment to recognize fingers grasping the doorframe. A shape pushed through the curtain without bothering to move it aside. The red light fell across the man’s face, illuminating his features. Jerry stiffened.
Warren Stubic, the torpedoman who had frozen to death in Lieutenant Abrams’ freezer, walked into the berthing area.
Tim studied his sonar screen. Roanoke was a small target in a vast ocean, and a moving target at that. As long as they remained at ultraquiet, barely making a sound as they drifted out of the Victor’s sonar range, the Soviets didn’t have a prayer of finding them with their outdated equipment.