“Raising the radio mast,” Henri said. “Shall I listen for other frequency bands as well?”
“Download everything you can, even the Russians. We’ll store it and see if it’s useful later. But let me know immediately if you have anything from the satellite.”
He heard hydraulic valves click above him, and then a young sailor seated beside Henri garnered the elder Frenchman’s attention with his triage of broadcast headers.
“We’ve got something from Pierre,” Henri said.
“Live or delayed?”
“Delayed. The header says it’s a direct tactical data feed to the Subtics system and a video message. It’s coming slowly due to the jamming, but the frequency hopping is getting it across in broken pieces we can patch together.”
As icons on the chart shifted the Russian hunting party to its truer positions, Jake noticed that the movement was slight for the closer ships. Antoine had nailed their locations independent of Renard’s update from Ukrainian radar support. But the sonar guru’s ability fell short in creating the tracking history beyond his hearing, and that information caught Jake’s attention.
“The Grisha’s zigzags are centered around a base course of two-eight-three,” he said. “It’s going to have to turn back towards us to maintain that course. Is tube four still ready?”
“Tube four is ready,” Remy said.
“Shoot tube four.”
Jake’s ears popped with the pneumatic whine.
“Tube four, normal launch,” Henri said.
“Do you have the broadcast?”
“I have all that’s available from friendly sources.”
“Lower the radio mast. Make your depth one hundred meters. All ahead standard, make turns for fourteen knots.”
His weapon sent, Jake gave the chart a second review and noticed fewer ships chasing him than his imagination had entertained. More ships warmed up their engines tied to their piers than sought him at sea.
“We may get out of this alive,” he said. “The plan is working. Pierre’s plans always work.”
“Excuse me, Jake?” Henri asked. “Was that an order?”
“No, I was talking to myself. But set flags in the system. I want to continue laying a mine every two miles.”
“I’m setting flags to remind us to lay a mine at two-mile intervals.”
Henri tapped his screen, and Jake looked at the silent priest seated to the side of the compartment. Andrew seemed calm as Jake waved him to the elevated conning platform.
“Any comments?” he asked. “Don’t be shy.”
“I sense that your decision to use a heavyweight torpedo bothers you, but I can see that you have to do it.”
“Straight to the point. Yeah, it feels like a slaughter.”
“Remember that your mission is the right thing, even though it must take a toll on human life. Many righteous causes bring unfortunate deaths. You can’t blame yourself.”
“I’m too busy surviving to worry about it.”
“Then perhaps we should talk about it once we’re safe.”
“Speaking of safe, I need to figure out something. I feel too safe, like I have too much time and I’m missing something. The most dangerous threat out there, isn’t really out there.”
“Helicopters?” Andrew asked.
“You’ve been learning.”
The priest nodded.
“I learn a lot from just watching, and your sailors are patient enough to explain their jobs when they have time. The team’s a model of efficiency, even though they make it look easy.”
“The core group has been together for a decade. Pierre, Henri, Antoine, Claude, and me.”
“Claude never leaves the engineering spaces, does he?”
“Pretty much only for bodily necessities, and I doubt even for that sometimes.”
“But you’ve got a team of thirty. You’ve grown since the beginning and have held a good team together.”
“It’s been constant growth until recently. We started small and by accident. It was just me and Pierre when I stole my Trident Missile submarine twelve years ago.”
The words sounded matter of fact, the trauma and the rage of those days feeling distant.
“After that theft, which was technically our first mission, I was financially well off, which led to a boring life of luxury. Fortunately, the Taiwanese government forced Pierre and me back into business. They lent us a submarine much like this one and made us beat back the Chinese for them. That’s when we met Olivia.”
“The lady who’s about to become the head of the CIA?”
Jake surveyed the control room for signs of a crisis, but he deduced that he had the freedom to talk. He considered the walk through history with the priest an acceptable way to fill time.
“But back then, she was just a field officer. Her job was to use me to get to Pierre and uncover his entire operations. That’s not quite how it worked out, and she ended up joining us on the Taiwan trip. She also figured out that a Pakistani submarine had gone rogue so that we could stop it from nuking an aircraft carrier in Hawaii.”
“That story alone is enough adventure for one lifetime.”
“True, but the thrill became addicting, and we all wanted it. Some of the younger guys took the money and ran, but the core group stuck with it and grew. We moved to a Scorpène-class submarine on our next mission. My friend bought it.”
The priest’s eyes popped open.
“He bought it? The submarine?”
“It was more of a lease, sort of. I paid him ten million to help with stealing the Trident, and he turned that into an empire in South America. So he had the money.”
“Amazing.”
“We ended up losing that ship to save an American destroyer, but we stopped terrorists from crippling the United States with electromagnetic pulses from high-altitude nuclear air bursts. You remember the burst we couldn’t stop. It took down the east coast.”
“Everyone remembers that. I can’t believe that was you.”
“Well, it was technically the United States Navy. We just helped protect the destroyer that did most of the work.”
“Still, that’s of epic importance.”
“After that mission, we started to retain crew members. About half the guys you see now joined us in pushing the Chinese back from their blockade on Taiwan. You might remember the low-intensity nuclear exchanges at sea. That was all Pierre’s planning and arming.”
“He seems to be behind anything interesting that happens in the ocean.”
“We then helped with the latest power shift in the Falkland Islands, though I’m not sure the outcome matched anything we intended. But it did get Olivia close to the Argentine president.”
“She gets a lot of good press out of that.”
“She has us to thank, at least for the introduction. But the last piece of this team you see now wasn’t formed until we helped the Philippines establish a defensive structure on one of their Spratly Island land masses. We helped slow the Chinese there.”
“I don’t remember reading about that.”
Jake shook his head.
“No, there wasn’t a lot of press. You probably read about our next mission, though, and didn’t know it. We had the Goliath for the first time on that one. Pierre had it built to transport his submarines at high speed, but it had the extra benefit of being able to rescue a trapped South Korean submarine.”
“I remember reading about some huge North Korean naval exercise that had people worried a few months ago.”
“That’s the one. That’s where we picked up that young ace. I expect him to be as good as Antoine someday, if not better.”
He aimed his head at Julien, who sat beside Remy.
“This is all news to me. You’d only spoken about your life in generalities, but this paints a picture. You don’t have to tell me, but I’m curious if you ever shared any of this with Bishop Francis.”