Jonah’s clean shirt dropped to the floor as he slammed a single fist into the bulkhead. The smacking impact rang out through the tiny cabin. He leaned forward, pressing his forehead hard against the cold metal surface, clenching his eyes shut.
Freya didn’t so much as flinch at the sound of Jonah’s hand against the wall. “Whatever he was going to do — he already did it, didn’t he?” She stared at him with her full attention.
“Yeah. Sunk an entire Japanese carrier group. Using their own guns. It was the most inhuman thing I’ve ever seen. Most of the sailors were barely out of their teens, and they never had a chance. Civilians, too. Sun-Hi’s people.” Jonah gritted his teeth with every word, the faces of the dead sailors flashing behind his closed eyes. “It was a massacre. Hell of a backup plan.”
A lull fell between the two for a few moments before Freya spoke again. He could feel an almost imperceptible shift in the room’s energy as she sat up a little higher in his bed. It was as though she’d revealed too much of herself and was determined to take back any whisper of lingering vulnerability. She was sitting up fully now, letting the blanket fall just below her collarbone, revealing the bare skin beneath, the hem still lightly clutched in her fingers. She’d been sleeping in the nude. “Can I tell you something?” she asked.
“Depends.”
Freya slowly lowered the blanket a millimeter at a time, revealing the soft crease between her breasts. His skin went cold, unconsciously knowing that the action wasn’t for his benefit, but for hers. She reached out, gently brushing against the back of his hand with her fingertips, beckoning him closer.
“I thought maybe you’d want to know about the last man I slept with,” she said, her voice low, inviting.
Jonah leaned over her, gently placing a thumb on her cheek, his fingers on her chin, physically willing himself to not look down. She closed her eyes and parted her lips ever so slightly.
“Why do I get the sense that things ended badly?” Freya let the blanket drop entirely as she stood. She wrapped both arms around the back of Jonah’s neck, nipping at the lobe of his ear before whispering into it.
“I snapped his spine with my bare hands.”
Hassan looked up to the sound of Jonah slamming his cabin door. “She tell you anything else of value?” he called out.
“Not particularly.” He looked down, suddenly realizing that he hadn’t retrieved a change of clothes from the cabin. Muttering, Jonah ducked his head and tried to hurriedly limp past the doctor in the narrow corridor. But Hassan held up a hand, stopping him from escaping. “What do you want, Doc?” demanded Jonah, irritated at the halt. “I don’t have time for twenty questions.”
“Are you quite alright?” asked Hassan. “You look exceedingly flushed — I’d like to look at your ribs again, take your temperature for good measure. You may be having an inflammatory reaction to the antibiotics, or perhaps you’ve attempted to wean yourself off the painkillers too soon.”
“I’m fine,” Jonah said with a grimacing, slightly embarrassed smile. “Really. I don’t need medication. I just need a very cold shower. And a good psychiatrist while we’re at it.”
“Pardon?”
“Never mind; forget I said anything.” Jonah awkwardly shuffled past the confused doctor before stopping dead and staring up at the hull above. Something had changed, a nearly imperceptible shift in the ambient noises swirling around the sunken Scorpion. “You hear that?”
The doctor looked up, cocking his head. “Yeah. What is it?”
“The fleet’s leaving. It’s time to go.”
CHAPTER 24
Adjusting his grip on the Scorpion’s controls, Jonah exhaled and watched his breath crystallize within the damp chill of the command compartment. The yoke felt loose now, almost drunkenly unresponsive. Each nudge to the course was accompanied by an anxious delay before the rudders shifted, the stalk rattling in his hands like it was about to snap. He sighed and stretched before glancing at the glowing green dials of his analogue dive watch, the only timepiece to survive its encounter with the biomechanical parasite. The hour he’d waited had finally expired. It was time, again, to check the haphazard collection of gauges and instruments atop Vitaly’s dead navigations console.
He stood and stuck a penlight in his mouth as he went from gauge to gauge, tapping each one with an extended index finger to verify the needles hadn’t frozen. The onboard energy discipline they’d resorted to was extreme— every light bulb extinguished, heat off, ventilation systems disabled. The resulting stillness made the dark interior feel smaller somehow, the Scorpion’s cold walls dripping with condensation as they closed in. Jonah could smell the mold already developing in every hidden seam and recess of the ship; a flowering black rot infecting the already stagnant air.
Vitaly slept on the deck in a shared bedroll. The freezing temperatures had brought the two men closer with each passing day, the Russian curled at Jonah’s feet, and each change in shift swifter than the last as they conserved the lingering body heat within the blankets and single pillow. The rest of the crew sheltered with a small heater in the bunks alongside five air-scrubbing calcium hydroxide canisters salvaged from less critical compartments.
Vitaly had completed the most recent battery recharge just three hours earlier, a hazardous maneuver that required the careful piloting of the Scorpion as she raised her exhaust snorkel and intake pipes just above the darkened, stormy surface of the Yellow Sea. The Russian selected a new site within the Japanese convoy every time, running the diesel engines hot and hard for as long as he dared before slipping back beneath the waves. Each twenty-four hour cycle required two recharging periods, one early in the night, and a second just before first light. In the meantime, their days were spent in permanent midnight, stretching each battery to the last trickle, every interminable hour moving them incrementally closer to the tantalizing promise of escape.
Jonah glanced down at a crinkled regional map with Vitaly’s penciled notations upon it. The helmsman had traced a vague extrapolation of the convoy’s route based on compass headings and approximate speed. But dead-reckoning precise coordinates was wholly impossible as each passing hour without GPS or a stellar fix, introduced new uncertainty to his equations, slowly turning them into an exercise in futility.
The convoy had skirted Kagoshima Province, at least as best as Jonah could tell, threading between the southernmost islands of Japan before turning sharply to the northwest. By now they were well past the East China Sea, passing Jeju Island and the western coast of South Korea. Jonah found himself wondering if the convoy was an invasion fleet — it’d make sense, given how fast the region was falling apart.
Vitaly stirred at Jonah’s boots. “Time for Vitaly shift?” he asked sleepily, the darkness answering him with silence. The ships above had become almost comforting in their familiarity. The swish-swish of patrollers was distinct from the churning troopships and rumbling tankers. The Scorpion was a fox at the feet of elephants, concealed and protected so long as the lumbering herd overlooked the sharp-toothed intruder beneath them.
“Your shift isn’t for another two hours,” Jonah lied. “Go back to sleep.”
Vitaly mumbled something and turned over, the last of his frosty breath clinging to the cavern-like damp as he pulled the blanket over his face.