He carried Ginger’s mug to her.
“Thanks, Kevin.”
“You tired?”
“How could I be? This is just fantastic.”
“I recall your telling me that you’re not a morning person. Several hundred times. You’re supposed to be asleep now.”
“Are you kidding? And miss this?”
The fingers of her right hand gripped the wheel almost lovingly. Her eyes scanned the panel even as she sipped from her mug. The monitors displayed front and rear views in the night-vision mode, but only a dim, dark green sea and lighter green sky were visible. Through the windscreen, there was only blackness, with an occasional whitecap reflecting the moon’s light. Long swells were running, but the SeaGhost skimmed them, with only a slight up and down motion.
McCory went to the bunk room and found the toolbox he had brought aboard. He got a battery-powered electric drill and loaded it with a quarter-inch bit. Carrying it back to the commander’s desk, he put his coffee on the desk, then sat on the deck. He had to move his head to the side to keep a shadow from the overhead light off the drawer locks. Setting the tip of the bit against the top lock, he squeezed the trigger.
“What are you doing?” Ginger called over her shoulder.
“Breaking and entering.”
It took ten minutes to drill all three locks. There was nothing in the bottom drawer. The middle drawer contained two nine-millimeter Browning automatics and a dozen loaded magazines. The armory. The top drawer contained a ring of keys and several thin books, and McCory rose to sit in the captain’s chair. He turned on a goose-necked reading lamp and leafed through the books.
Uh-oh.
“What’d you find?” Ginger asked.
“Some books I wish I didn’t have.”
“Like what?”
“Like call signs and frequencies. Codes. Instructions for the black boxes back there.”
“Top secret stuff.”
“Very.”
“Maybe we should burn them? Or throw them overboard?”
“You’re quite right,” McCory said, but intrigued, got up and went to sit at the communications console. Flipping the pages of the first book, he found a VHF frequency for CINCLANTFLT operations, along with a series of numbers. He powered up the transceiver and punched the buttons until the digital readout gave him the frequency listed.
The speaker in the panel jabbered in gibberish.
He turned the volume down.
On the scrambler box marked “ONE,” he punched mode two.
Still gibberish, but clearer gibberish.
On the encryption box, he tapped mode four.
“… ask Force Two-Two, CINCLANT authorizes movement to Safari Sector Five.”
“Copy that, Diamond Head. Safari Sector Five. Two-Two out.”
The frequency went silent. McCory didn’t know what he had, but he did know that he ought to hang onto the books for a while. He couldn’t go around throwing away important documents.
He experimented with more frequencies and scrambling modes. When he didn’t get silence, he got what he thought were ships talking to each other or to aircraft. He had been out of the Navy long enough that the radio lingo had lapsed for him, but parts of it came back slowly.
He finally left the set tuned to CINCLANT, turned it down low, and brought Tampa back on another speaker. Chet Atkins doing “Faded Love.” That was better.
Moving over behind Ginger, he rested his hands on her shoulders and asked, “Any idea where we are?”
“Should I know?”
“It’s sometimes helpful. On the computer keypad, on the top row, press the square marked ‘NAV MAP.’”
She found the touch-sensitive pad and pressed it.
“Now, press 3084.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s the latitude and longitude of the top left corner of the map grid you want.”
“Sure it is.”
“Now, press 2575.”
“Bottom right?”
“That’s correct. Now execute.”
She pressed the pad labeled “EXC.”
Ginger scanned the panel. “Nothing happened.”
“The computer’s working on it. Finding the grid coordinates in the data base and checking with the NavStar satellite network. Press the number four pad under the main CRT.”
There were eight numbered pads under each screen. McCory had learned that they selected camera views in normal, night-vision, and infrared modes, navigation maps, radar repeater, and a gunsight for the forward-mounted cannon. The last two buttons always came up blank. Either he had not determined their usage, or they were reserved for future enhancements.
As Ginger pressed the keypad, the screen flickered, then changed to a map. Coordinate lines were shown in light green spaced at every ten minutes. A large orange dot was in the upper left corner. She reached out and tapped it with a clear-polished fingernail. “That’s us?”
“That’s us.”
“Neat.”
“I thought so, too. Watch this.”
McCory stepped to the radar console and switched it to active. Immediately, the interface between the radar and the mapping system put four yellow dots on her screen.
“Those are other boats?”
“Or ships, maybe. I don’t have the antennae aimed up very high, but that one to the far right might be a low-flying airplane, judging by its speed. The closest one is over fifteen miles away from us. And we’re about ninety-seven miles off the coast.”
He flipped to the 220-mile range. Dozens of yellow dots came to life on the monitor.
“That’s at two hundred and twenty miles of range,” he told her.
“I can’t believe there are that many ships out here.”
“Several of them are aircraft. We’re kind of in the track between South America and New York.”
He shut down the radar, just in case some of those yellow dots belonged to Task Force 22, headed for Safari Sector Five. The Navy would be looking for active radar, especially an active radar that appeared where there was no other return.
“Are we far enough out?” Ginger asked.
“I suppose. There isn’t any traffic in the immediate neighborhood, anyway.”
McCory was feeling a little anxious about this, like a kid with a fistful of firecrackers, scanning the alley for a place where the adults wouldn’t hear them go off.
“Well, let’s do it!”
McCory sighed. “The Navy will probably charge me fifty thousand dollars for expended ordnance. Probably more than that.”
“They’re not going to miss just one.”
“They keep careful count,” he insisted.
“You don’t know how to make it work. Is that it?”
He assumed she was pressing his male ego button, but said, “I think I can figure it out. I’m pretty mechanically minded, you know.”
“Sure.”
“Okay. Bring her back to around five knots and maintain headway. There’s a headset hanging under the instrument panel. You might see if it’s fashionable.”
While Ginger slowed the boat, McCory went aft to the cargo bay. Outside the door was a headset on a long coiled cord. He put it on.
“Can you hear me, hon?”
“Aren’t you supposed to use some kind of jargon, like, ‘Missile man reporting in, Captain?’”
“When did you get promoted?” he asked.
It took him ten minutes to load a missile into the sling of the crane, position it over the launcher, and slide it onto the upper left launch rail. The connections were simple. A wire cable and multi-pronged plug hanging from the missile body plugged directly into a receptacle on the launcher.
Forward on the base of the launcher was a small door marked, “POWER.” McCory opened it to find several switches and digital readouts. Knowing the Navy was super-conscious about safety, he thought there would be a disabling system that prevented missiles from being fired while the launcher was in the down position. He hoped that was the case.