“Only for the moment. I have a good motive.”
“From your point of view, you mean? Oh, hell, probably from mine, too. Did you finish examining the boat against Devlin’s drawings?”
“It matches, point for point. It’s Devlin’s boat, all right, Ted.”
“Okay. I have to admit that I thought you were right all along. Let me think about this for a couple more days before you do anything.”
“I hear your fee meter clicking,” McCory told him.
“It’s a nonstop meter. Don’t do anything.”
“As long as you’re charging me, do some work, will you? Check on Advanced Marine Development.”
“I’ll see what I can find out about them,” Daimler said. “You talk to Ginger?”
“Showed her the boat.”
“Jesus Christ!” McCory’s attitudes sometimes alarmed Daimler, made him wish the man was not the best friend he’d ever had, or probably would have. “You’d better get hot on composing a marriage proposal.”
“That might be tough. You don’t know her as well as I do.”
“I hope she doesn’t know you as well as I do.”
“Why?”
“I’d never marry you,” Daimler said, and hung up.
Chapter 7
Chief Petty Officer Devlin McCory’s face was a mottled red, confused between anger and frustration. He did not know where to direct his anger.
The tears streamed unabashedly down his cheeks, streaking the dirt caked on his right jaw. His red hair was messy, a glob of grease caught in it on the left rear side. His eyes stared at the wall opposite the one he leaned against.
He was in uniform, but it was stained with oil and tar and paint splotches. The polish on his left shoe was eradicated by gasoline. He had come right from the docks.
People moving down the bridge corridor gave him plenty of leeway. There seemed to be a lot of people. Back and forth. Going nowhere in a hurry.
At the far end of the corridor, a chrome-plated floor polisher whirled on the linoleum. If it got much closer, McCory was going to kick the damned thing into small pieces.
The odors. Medicinal. Chloroform. Antiseptic. Iodine?
“Chief?”
He looked up, bleary-eyed.
The man floated in front of him, all furry-edged and green.
“I’m Commander Hartford, Chief. I’m sorry as hell.”
“Jesus.”
“We did our best. It wasn’t enough.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!”
“You all right, Chief? Maybe I can get you something?”
McCory pushed off the wall, coming to his full six feet. “Where’s the son of a bitch who killed her?”
“He died at the scene of the accident,” the doctor said.
McCory’s shoulders sagged in defeat.
He felt entirely deflated. At Pusan, and earlier, at Guadalcanal and Bougainville and Midway, there had always been someone to strike out at when the ones you liked died.
“Can I see her?”
“You don’t want to, Chief. Believe me.”
He just nodded. The tears continued to stream down his face. McCory had never been beaten before.
He turned away and walked down the hall toward the nurse’s station, leaving Commander Hartford standing by himself.
The nurses who had been tending and playing with his six-month-old son looked up as he approached. Their faces went carefully slack.
McCory leaned over and picked Kevin up from the two chairs that had been shoved together. “Come on, ol’ son. Time to go home.”
The boy’s blue eyes stared back at him, searching his own.
For what?
McCory pulled Kevin close to his chest and pressed his head against his shoulder.
The nurse smiled grimly.
And McCory and his son walked on down the long corridor looking for a door.
Kevin started to cry, too.
“Pretty late in the game for you to get so adventuresome, isn’t it, lady?”
“No one’s going to see us, right? That’s what you told me.” Ginger’s eyes shone in the dim haze of red-blue light from the instrument panel.
“That’s the theory,” McCory said.
She was having a grand old time. Since leaving Ponce de Leon Inlet, Ginger Adams had taken over the helm. The speed seemed to thrill her, and while she managed an almost easterly course, she spent more time playing with the bow and stern cameras and with the computer than with the automatic pilot. The automatic pilot bored her.
For the past hour, McCory had played a little himself. Carrying operating manuals back and forth, he had experimented with the various consoles. He figured out the sonar, wearing the headset that hung on the bulkhead. At their speed of nearly sixty knots, though, he mostly got feedback from the rotary engines. When he rested his forehead against the screen’s hood, he found that the screen was primarily one pale green blip. He estimated that the SeaGhost would have to be below ten knots in order to get a decent interpretation. Even then, it might require an experienced and master sonarman to read the ocean’s sounds. There was a computer link with the sonar set that he hadn’t been able to work out yet. He suspected that the computer could identify and match screw signatures, but he didn’t know how large the database aboard might be. Or perhaps there was a data link through a satellite to a shore-based data center.
He had set the radar on automatic and random scan at thirty miles of range. The alarm had sounded off several times, jolting Ginger the first time, but the marine traffic was miles away from them.
McCory also figured out the range of the SeaGhost. Before leaving Edgewater, he had brought the Kathleen in alongside the dry dock, snaked a hose under the sea door, and used an electric pump to siphon diesel fuel off the cruiser into the SeaGhost’s bladders. Fortunately, the rotaries used diesel.
Based on topping off an empty cell of the four fuel bladders, he determined that the capacity was 880 gallons. His fuel consumption on the trip down from the Chesapeake had varied between 9.8 and 12.6 gallons per hour. Figuring a cruise speed of forty-five knots and a consumption of around eleven gallons per hour, the boat had a 4000 mile range. At sixty knots, while he was teaching Ginger the computer code, the consumption rose to 18.2 gallons per hour, which dropped the range to around 3300 miles.
It was still respectable.
The interior was dimly lit from a single red bulb recessed in the overhead and from the screens and readouts of the helm, radar, and communications panels. The AM radio was locked on a Tampa station, playing Billy Vaughn’s “Blue Tomorrow.” A compromise. McCory liked country and old rock. Ginger Adams liked jazz, classic and new wave.
They had provisioned the galley with peanut butter, bread, orange juice, coffee, and few pieces of china from the Kathleen. McCory got a couple of mugs from the cabinet and poured coffee. The coffeepot was made of some kind of plastic with a ceramic base. It sat in a three-inch-deep recess in the countertop, so it wouldn’t slide around in heavy seas. McCory guessed the Navy paid a couple thousand for it.