A chill went up his spine. A shipmate, a husband, and a father of two children would drown if he let go. Jake redoubled his efforts, swearing to himself he would not begin his journey by killing an American sailor. He yanked Davis back.
Jake stepped over the drugged sailors and studied the briny water. Five humps appeared on the surface. Near the aft of the ship, two more men swam toward the Colorado.
Five hooded heads broached. Facemasks covered each pair of eyes, and rubber air tubes dangled from each mouth. The mouth belonging to Pierre Renard opened, and a LAR-V rebreather mouthpiece fell to the water.
“The infiltration team is present and ready,” Renard said.
“I ran the security violation drill,” Jake said. “The crew is on the mess deck below. Send your team to the shore power cables and wait for my signal.”
A thumb broke the water’s surface and the heads again submerged.
As Renard and the commandos climbed on the wharf and submarine, Scott McKenzie came into Jake’s view. The mechanic’s brown eyes opened widely.
“They’re here?” McKenzie asked.
He looked spooked.
“Get used it,” Jake said. “This is what we all wanted. Think of the money. Think of your future. You’ll have the entire world to find a new love of your life.”
McKenzie froze. Jake shook him.
“Come on! Wake up! Tell me what’s going on,” Jake said.
“I disconnected the ship internally from shore water, air, and sewage,” McKenzie said. “All I’ve got left is to unrig the connections topside.”
McKenzie’s hands were shaking.
“Everything’s okay,” Jake said. “Finish unrigging topside. We’ll be fine.”
“Unrig topside connections, aye, sir.”
“You going to be okay?” Jake asked.
“I don’t know about this.”
“Hang with me. It’s too late to turn back.”
CHAPTER 12
As his infiltration team had stormed the Colorado, Jake’s confidence grew. The reactor startup, the crew lockdown, and the commando insertion had unfolded per plan.
Jake reached overhead and yanked a metal ring that encircled the port periscope. Hydraulic fluid hammered through pipes. The silver, oil-coated tube slithered upward. Kao stood beside him.
“When you’re not handling communications for me, I’ll need you looking around on the scope,” Jake said.
He snapped down two black handles, pushing one and pulling the other to swivel the periscope’s optics. Then he rolled the handle grips.
“This one controls elevation angle. The other switches magnification between low and high.”
Jake pulled back and gestured at the optics. Kao stuck his eye to the eyepiece and fumbled with the handles.
“You got it?” Jake asked.
Kao nodded.
Jake knelt by a cubbyhole, uncoiled tangled cables, and emerged with a headset, microphone, and phone cord.
After screwing a brass connection into a ship’s communication circuit, he slung a coiled cord over his shoulder, donned the headset, and depressed a button on the mouthpiece.
“Maneuvering, control room, test the sound-powered circuit,” Jake said.
“Control room, maneuvering, test satisfactory,” Bass said.
“Maneuvering, control room, I’m on my way to the bridge. I want the emergency propulsion motor ready to propel us out of here before I get there.”
Jake slung a binocular neck strap over his head. Dangling the phone cord, he climbed three stories worth of ladder rungs through the musty and salty confines of the sail.
A steel girder floor creaked and banged against its hinges as Jake climbed into the eerie yellow hue of the explosive handling wharf. Standing on the bridge, a pit at the top of the sail, he yanked the phone cord’s slack and pinched it under the girder floor.
Atop the submarine, Jake reflected that the Colorado was his.
Having seen fingers ripped off a man’s hand, Scott McKenzie respected nylon lines. He mouthed warnings while draping a line in a figure eight around a cleat and kicking the rope tight against the divot.
“There,” he said. “Now you try it. Here are your gloves.”
A commando unraveled the line and began draping a new figure eight around the cleat.
McKenzie contemplated that spending weeks underwater with the foreign commando could be unpleasant. He tested his demeanor with small talk.
“So,” McKenzie said. “Your mission name is ‘Mister Tiger’. Mister Slate said you would know our names but we weren’t allowed to know yours.”
Tiger stepped back from his figure eight.
“Not bad,” McKenzie said.
The commando placed his rifle on the deck, tied the line around his waist, and thrust lengths of nylon into the water. Tiger now stood at the submarine’s edge.
“My name is to remain a secret,” he said.
“Are you the tiger because you’re the biggest?” McKenzie asked. “It makes sense. Mister Cheetah is the smallest, and Mister Lion looks like the guy in charge, or at least the most experienced.”
“Maybe. Who cares? Your name will be in the newspaper tomorrow but mine won’t.”
McKenzie wanted to add something, but Tiger jumped into the basin.
Dripping, the commando reemerged on the far pier’s ladder. McKenzie watched him strain while lugging the line’s water-logged mass to his feet.
Muscles bulging under his black wetsuit, Tiger draped the line around the cleat twice in a figure eight. He gave McKenzie a thumbs-up.
McKenzie returned the gesture, turned, and repeated the thumbs-up to Jake who watched from two stories above.
Jake raised his sound-powered phone’s mouthpiece.
“Propulsion motor, bridge, all ahead one third,” he said.
“All ahead one third, aye, sir,” Bass said.
Water churned behind the Colorado. Jake cracked a sardonic smile as his two-billion-dollar instrument of vengeance inched forward.
The ship protested and stopped, and Jake realized that a stabilizer, a vertical wall below the waterline, had met the pier’s rubber bumper.
He raised his mouthpiece and contacted Kao in the control room.
“Mister Lion, right full rudder,” he said.
“Full rudder? The display shows degrees,” Kao said.
“Twenty-five degrees.”
“We are turning the rudder now.”
Jake watched the three-story tall rudder rotate, and the boat’s tail glided away from the pier.
While the Colorado glided, the girder walkway brow to the pier popped free from the submarine’s back. The brow skipped as the submarine crawled underneath it. Bolts snapped and yielded the walkway to the whirlpools forming beside the pier.
“Mister Lion, report ship’s speed. It’s a digital display to your right,” Jake said.
“Speed is two point six knots,” Kao said. “Mister Renard is here with me now.”
“I need Mister Renard to raise the other periscope,” Jake said. “I want him to visually fix our position as we navigate the channel. Landmarks are circled in red on the chart.”
The starboard periscope ascended behind Jake.
“Propulsion motor, bridge, make turns for two point six knots,” he said.
As the Colorado’s bow jutted from the covered wharf’s canopy, the eerie yellow gave way to stars painted on blackness. As Jake’s eyes adjusted, he noticed that the front of the submarine had veered toward the pier.
He reached for the mouthpiece jutting up from the sound-powered phone’s chest plate but realized he needed the wireless unit at his hip to contact McKenzie, who roamed atop the ship’s missile deck. As he fumbled to lift the unit from his hip, Jake realized he could use the sound-powered phone, undetectable outside the Colorado, for all communications after McKenzie returned below.