McGarvey continued aft through the next hatch into the engine room and pulled up short again. The hairs at the nape of his neck were standing up. A slightly built man was sprawled on his face on the deck, a pistol in his hands. He was obviously dead, but there was something wrong with the skin on his hands and neck. He was covered in suppurating wounds or sores.
“That’s radiation sickness,” he said. “There are nukes aboard and they’re leaking badly. You better tell Frank and your husband.”
Terri found a growler phone on the bulkhead. She dialed up the 1MC. “FX pick up.”
A second later Jackson came on. “Go.”
“Trouble. We got a bad guy down in engineering. Already dead when we got here. Mac thinks it’s radiation sickness.”
“Stay away from the body.”
“Have they found Graham?” McGarvey asked Terri, and she relayed the question.
“Negative,” Jackson came back. “We’ve bagged a dozen bad guys, but there are more than that dead in their bunks. Tapped in the heads at close range. Two down in the con, two in sonar.”
“Have you reached the forward torpedo room yet?” Terri asked.
“I’m at the hatch, but it’s dogged from the inside. How about you?”
“There may be someone else back here. We’re going to finish—”
Dillon broke in over the 1MC. “We’ve got big problems, people,” he said. “We need to get off this boat right now.”
“Where are you, Frank?” Jackson demanded.
“In the con,” Dillon came back. “But you better hurry, we’ve got less than six minutes.”
McGarvey stared at the dead man for a moment longer, then looked up. All the hatches back to the aft torpedo room were open. Nothing moved back here. There were no sounds except for the air circulation fans.
“Mac?” Terri asked.
He had definitely heard something. Someone was hiding back here, but it could take hours to dig him, or them, out. “Right,” he said, and he turned and followed Terri forward to the control room.
Jackson got there at the same time they did. Dillon was hunched over the weapons control panel, on which two lights were flashing. A clock was on countdown mode, with five minutes and twenty-eight seconds showing.
“Whatever’s in tubes one and two is going to fire in about five minutes unless we do something,” Dillon said. “The timing circuits have been sabotaged, so we can’t do it from here.”
“Did they open the outer doors?” Jackson demanded.
“The indicators on the panel show the tubes flooded and the doors open. They must have opened them before Dale and Bob could reach the bow.”
“They were welding something,” Jackson said. “The timer was sabotaged, could they have done the same with the indicators for those two tubes?”
“Yes, but I don’t know why, unless there was a mutiny.”
“We did hear gunfire,” Terri said.
“I need two blocks of Semtex, one with a short fuse for the torpedo room hatch, and the other with a longer fuse to destroy the compartment,” McGarvey said. “We can’t let those missiles fire. If they explode even inside the tubes they’d spread radiation through the river and all of the lower bay.”
“That compartment will be hot,” Jackson said.
“I’ll blow the door, shoot anything that moves, and toss the second block inside.”
Terri had taken a brick of plastic explosive from her pack and was hurriedly molding a small block of it for the torpedo room hatch. “What do we have to wreck inside to make sure the missiles won’t fire?”
“Take out the inner doors,” Dillon said. “Should break the firing circuitry between there and here.”
“You can’t go inside,” Jackson cautioned.
“Neither of us are, honey,” Terri said. “I’ll toss a big enough block to take out the door and the entire compartment. Stand by at the escape trunk, we’re probably going to be in a big hurry.” She gave McGarvey a grin. “For a first date, you’re not half-bad.”
“Terri,” Jackson said softly.
She turned to her husband and a look of complete understanding passed between them. “Be back in a flash,” she said.
McGarvey. The single thought crystallized in Graham’s head as he noiselessly climbed up into the escape trunk. His sneakers were slippery with oil from the bilge, and he nearly fell.
The son of a bitch was aboard. But no matter how the man had gotten this far, he was going to die down here in just a few minutes. Graham only wished that he could somehow see the look on McGarvey’s face when the escape trunk was blown apart and the wall of black water came rushing through the boat.
There would only be a brief moment between the time McGarvey knew he was going to die and the instant when his consciousness was blotted out. But Graham wished he could see it.
He closed the inner hatch, dogged it, and opened the seawater valve to flood the compartment. As the water rose, he donned his Steinke hood.
Within ninety seconds the chamber was filled with water. He undogged the outer hatch and swung it open. He waited for a few seconds, to make sure that no one was waiting outside, then cautiously eased out of the escape trunk.
Somewhere forward, possibly at the bows, two very dim violet lights flickered in the pitch-black water.
It came to him all at once that he knew what the buzzing sounds he’d heard earlier were. Someone was up there welding the torpedo doors shut.
The missiles would fire inside the tubes and when they did, the entire bow section of the submarine would be destroyed.
It was another failed operation, and he was bitter about it. But this time McGarvey would die for certain.
Graham jammed the ten-kilo brick of plastic explosive against the inner hull just inside the escape trunk, set the timer for four minutes, and, holding his waterproof satchel against his chest, kicked off for the surface.
“Fifteen-second fuse,” McGarvey said.
Terri had molded the small block of Semtex around the dogging wheel at the center of the forward torpedo room door. She nodded, inserted the acid fuse into the plastique, and she and McGarvey ducked back around a bulkhead.
“Get the big charge ready to toss,” he told her. He switched his Walther’s safety catch to the off position.
Someone fired a pistol from behind them, the first shot ricocheting off the deck, a piece of the shrapnel catching McGarvey in the left foot. He turned in time to see a tall, slender man waving a large pistol stagger up the passageway from where he had apparently been hiding. He was ravaged by radiation sickness, open, running sores distorting his face so badly that he looked like something out of a horror movie.
McGarvey started to bring his pistol to bear when the dying man fired a second shot, this one caching Terri in her forehead just above her left eye, and she fell back.
“No!” McGarvey shouted, and fired three shots in rapid succession, all of them striking the Arab in the middle of his chest, sending him backwards, dead before he hit the deck.
The Semtex Terri had set blew with a sharp bang, and the torpedo room hatch locks came loose, the door swinging open a few inches.
McGarvey ducked across the passageway to Terri, who was crumpled against the bulkhead. Her blood-filled left eye was open in surprise but she was dead, and there was no power on earth that could bring her back.
He looked up toward the torpedo room, his heart like granite, willing with everything in his soul for someone to come charging out of there. But no one came.
Terri Jackson, whose handle was Lips, was a pretty young woman, who McGarvey thought looked a little like the movie actress Kim Basinger. He shook his head. So goddamned senseless. All of it. All the killing. All the suicide bombers. All the attacks.