Andrea stood as blood trickled from her mouth. Remus chuckled, enraging her.
But before she could launch herself into action, a pair of strong arms reached under hers and then up and around the back of her head. The hands locked tight and held firm. She grunted and tried to free herself, but it was no use. When the man spoke, she was shocked to hear the voice of O’Shea. “I’ve got her.”
“I don’t need your help,” Remus growled as he took a step forward.
“There isn’t time!” O’Shea shouted. “I’ve seen the eyes of the devil, and it must be destroyed!”
Remus apparently didn’t hear and continued forward, determined to finish her off. But Trevor’s light grip on his arm stopped him cold. “The good Father is right, Remus. There isn’t time.”
Remus snarled at Andrea. “Later…”
“To arms! To arms!” Trevor shouted, his excitement for the hunt returning.
As Trevor and Remus returned to the controls, Andrea whispered to O’Shea, “You bastard.”
“I had no choice,” O’Shea whispered back as he dragged her toward the door.
“Liar.”
“They would have killed you.”
“You could have helped.”
O’Shea sighed. “I promised Atticus I would get you off the Titan if things went wrong. And things are going very wrong.”
Andrea’s insides twisted at the thought of Atticus. “What about Atticus?”
“He strikes me as a man who can take care of himself.”
Andrea knew he was right. There was nothing they could do to help Atticus. They were outnumbered and outgunned. Just getting off the Titan would be tricky.
O’Shea’s hands slipped away from around her neck. A moment later she felt a hard object pressed against her back. A gun.
“Get moving,” O’Shea said with authority, jabbing the gun into her back.
“Hey,” she shouted angrily, then moved forward to the door. Her head suddenly yanked back, pulled by her hair. She shouted in pain.
O’Shea filled his voice with anger. “Don’t try anything or-”
“And where might you be off to?” Trevor asked, spinning around slowly with a smile.
“The brig. She shouldn’t be here,” O’Shea said.
“On the contrary,” Trevor said. “Her presence here serves to raise the emotional stakes. She must stay and watch. It will be a much more…well-rounded experience.” Trevor fixed his eyes on Andrea. “Don’t you think, my dear?”
“Go to hell!” she shouted.
“Ha!” Trevor threw his head back with the laugh. “I’m afraid the good priest has cleared me of that fate. Though I imagine after this day’s exploits, I may have need of his services in the morning.” Trevor moved his gaze to O’Shea. “Bring her to the window, where she has a good view.”
After a quickly whispered “sorry,” O’Shea led Andrea to the bridge’s front window. Two decks below, she could see a large, gray gun rising out of the deck, its ominous fourteen-inch barrel at the ready.
She looked back at the video display. Atticus and Kronos still sat silently, staring at each other. Move, Atti, move, Andrea willed him, but he remained fixated on Kronos. Whether it was the beast’s stare or shock over his daughter’s being alive that held him so still, Atticus failed to budge, locked in the path of a madman’s destructive fantasy.
“The chopper is in the air,” Remus said. “The hedgehog is ready to deploy the depth charges.”
“You’re going to get us all killed,” Andrea spat.
Trevor smiled widely. “A coward turns away, but a brave man's choice is danger.”
37
Ray-Jeffery’s Ledge
Gloom fell over the seafloor below Atticus and Kronos. Two hundred feet above, the Titan blocked out the midmorning sun. Kronos swirled into motion. It rose from the seafloor in a flurry, building speed, preparing to flee. But why? The Titan posed no threat to it.
Then he saw them, caught in Ray ’s lights. Yellow cylinders like oversized coffee cans tumbling toward the seafloor. Atticus spun in his seat. They were everywhere. “What…”
Recognition slammed into Atticus a second before the first shock wave.
Ray shook as the first depth charge exploded fifty feet to the rear. The metal shell of the submersible groaned as it pitched forward, burying its nose in the sand. The second explosion, ten feet closer, but to port, almost knocked Atticus from his seat. His mind whirled as he fought with the control stick, urging the sub to free itself from the sand.
“What the hell are you doing, Trevor?” Atticus’s eyes settled on the radiant, yet determined, face of his patron. Had Trevor gone insane?
Atticus realized the truth. He had become expendable, a mere obstacle standing in the way of Trevor’s goal.
Atticus pushed the throttle full ahead and pulled back on the control stick. Ray ’s nose lifted out of the sand, pulling up a mound of the terrain with it. The extra weight made Ray unstable and sluggish. Two more explosions rocked the sub. A second to port and another dead ahead. The shock wave from the second, much closer explosion, lifted Ray ’s nose toward the surface. The sand slid down the surface of the sleek, black sub, covering the lexan bubble. Visibility became totally obscured, but with the throttle still at full, Ray broke free from the seafloor and shot up toward the surface, shedding the sandy covering.
Atticus looked up and saw the hull of the Titan high above-a black swath surrounded by sparkling blue sea. Motion to his right caught his attention. He caught his breath when he saw Kronos rising alongside him. The explosions that continued to pound the seafloor had startled the beast.
Kronos’s movement through the water became erratic, undulating left and right as well as up and down. Atticus realized it was trying to bunch up, away from the explosions below. While he was 100 feet above the explosions and still rising, a large portion of Kronos’s 150-foot body still remained near the seafloor. The creature moved faster than anything Atticus had ever seen in the ocean, but its massive size made attaining that speed a lengthy process.
As a large portion of Kronos’s body moved his way, Atticus rolled Ray over and around the bending body. For a few moments their movements were entwined, each rising and falling, moving in and around, like two synchronous fighter jets. A shallow explosion rocked Atticus to the side. Ray spun away from Kronos, and they ascended on two different paths-Kronos up and away from the Titan, and Atticus up and directly toward the Titan ’s bow.
The bursting depth charges shook the Ray as they detonated closer and closer to the surface. It was dumb luck that Atticus hadn’t been struck by one yet. He guessed the charges had been dropped in a radius, designed to force Kronos to the surface. Trevor knew the charges couldn’t kill it. But what did he have planned for it at the surface? What kind of weapons did the Titan have on board?
A projectile shot across Atticus’s field of view in answer to that question; then four more. Atticus recognized them as MK-54 lightweight, high-yield torpedoes. But they moved like nothing Atticus had seen before. As they shot through the water, he could see a pocket of air blasting bubbles away from the nose of each projectile.
They’re cavitating! Atticus thought.
He’d seen failed tests of cavitating torpedoes on one of his post-SEAL, top-secret Navy projects. His job had been to assess the lethality of the weapons and gauge any environmental impacts the warheads might have. A cavitating torpedo pushes water away from the projectile, allowing it to move through a pocket of air, reducing friction and allowing it to move at incredibly fast speeds. An underwater missile. The ones Atticus had seen worked, but the high speeds made the trajectories erratic, sometimes veering off target. Until guidance technology caught up with the speed, they were unpredictable at best. But the consistency of these torpedoes made it clear that Trevor had overcome the technological hang-up.