“I’ve saved some of my own.”
“Yeah, I know. And the Navy’s payin’ part of it. But I want you to enjoy it a little, too, Kev. Don’t work your ass off all the time.”
“And these?” Kevin picked up the key chain and twirled the keys.
“That’s the sixty-six Chevy. Billy sanded the signs off the doors and repainted them.”
“Damn it, Pop. That’s your newest truck.”
McCory had never owned a new vehicle and had not owned a passenger car since the ’47 Ford sedan, which had been totaled when Kathy was killed.
“You need some wheels.”
“I’ve got a bus ticket.”
“Cash it in.”
They went down the outside stairs together, each of them carrying one of Kevin’s beat-up suitcases, and crossed the parking lot to where the marina vehicles were parked. Three pickups, two forklifts, and three small tractors. The fresh blue paint on the doors of the ’66 pickup did not quite match the oxidized paint of the rest of the truck.
McCory opened the passenger door, and they put the suitcases inside.
“Don’t mind tellin’ you, Kev, I ain’t been lookin’ forward to this day.”
“Me either, Pop.”
“Bullshit. Every kid’s got to get out and kick the world in the ass a little. Let the SOBs know you’re alive and you’re not takin’ their crap.”
They walked around to the other side, and Kevin got in behind the wheel.
“Do me proud, son.”
McCory knew it was way too early in the night to be moving the SeaGhost, but he shoved the dry dock door upward, then went back and boarded the boat. Closing the hatch, he went forward, flipped switches to warm up the radar and computers, then settled behind the helm.
The rotary engines started right away. He shifted to reverse and backed slowly out of the building. After circling back to the south, he shifted to forward, then advanced the throttles.
The SeaGhost advanced silently across the waterway. A number of boats were moving around to the north, apparently putting into Edgewater and New Smyrna. McCory didn’t hurry it. He drifted along at ten knots while the engine temperatures climbed to normal operating levels.
Once he was out of the usual traffic lanes, he turned north and activated the video cameras for night vision, fore and aft. He experimented with his speed, seeing how fast he could go before the wake tattled on him. Fifteen or sixteen knots seemed to be the maximum, and he held that speed.
Swerving the bow toward New Smyrna, he punched the third keypad under the monitor, switching it to the infrared tracking function. What he got was a kaleidoscopic mishmash of reds, oranges, yellows, greens, and blues. The red seemed to indicate the hot spots of exhausts and lights, both marine and automotive. He didn’t think the infrared was of much use, aimed at a beach.
He put the bow back on a northerly course until he reached Ponce de Leon Inlet, then turned eastward. Three miles offshore, he opened the throttles to the forward stops.
The SeaGhost responded immediately, leaping forward, the momentum holding him securely in his wrap-around seat. Within two minutes, he was making sixty-two knots. That was seventy-one miles per hour. On the highway, Florida State Trooper Mickey Myers would have pulled him over.
Myers kept a nineteen-foot Baja cuddy cabin at Marina Kathleen and had stopped McCory in his pickup a couple of times, offering mild warnings.
McCory tried some maneuvers. Sharp left and right turns, getting a feel for what abuse the SeaGhost would accept at various speeds.
She was exhilarating. There was a light chop to the seas, maybe two-foot troughs, and she skipped across the wave tops with ballerinalike ease. The turns at high speed were a little sloppy, but under fifty knots, she was as agile as Devlin might have dreamed.
She could stop on a dollar, if not a dime. To the right of the throttle handles were two levers that, when depressed, dropped curved paddles over the jet exhaust, deflecting the water stream forward. McCory tried using them at various speeds.
He devoted two hours to learning her characteristics, thinking occasionally that, if he had done the same with some of the women he had known, he’d probably be married, offspring underfoot, and the TV in permanent on-mode.
Just after one in the morning, some sixty miles off the coast, McCory set the automatic pilot and switched his attention to the sonar, radar, and radio sets. He spent two hours familiarizing himself further with the electronics.
The radio messages he listened to were a little baffling. CINCLANT and other operations centers seemed to be using code words. Some of the frequencies, and many of the scrambler modes, had been changed. Perhaps they had figured out that the terrorist boat had the ability to listen in on their scrambled conversations.
He practiced setting up the scanner, which allowed the monitoring of a dozen channels in all of the frequency bands.
There was a Task Force 22 in the area, somewhere to the north of him. By the number, he knew it was a task force of the Second Fleet. Normally, it would probably have operated in the Caribbean. He also figured out the TF22 was part of Safari Bravo. There was a Safari Alpha, also, but he didn’t determine what class of ships were included in the designation.
Safari Echo seemed to be a single ship. He heard coordinates and, after checking them on his chart, decided Safari Echo was fifty miles offshore from Kings Bay. Safari, McCory deduced, was the overall code for the search effort.
He resisted the impulse to go on the air and identify himself as Safari Zebra.
Last of the alphabet.
The last chance.
McCory had decided, independently of Ted and Ginger, that he and the SeaGhost had a better chance than anyone else of finding another SeaGhost.
If he wasn’t going to give her back to the Navy, he might as well use her. Devlin would have.
Do me proud, son.
So far, Kevin McCory wasn’t very proud of what he’d done. Or if he had been, he’d changed his mind.
What he could do, though, was monitor the Navy’s frequencies and be ready to step in. He was damn sure he could stop Ibrahim Badr.
If he could just handle all of the control stations by himself.
Ginger had said she’d help him, but there was no way in hell that he was going to further involve her.
All he had to do was learn the boat and her systems as well as he could, provision her, and be ready if he saw his chance.
Being ready meant learning to use the cannon and having the missiles prepared for launch.
McCory went aft to the cargo bay to load the launcher.
Chapter 11
“Mr. Malgard, Admiral Bingham Clay,” Matthew Andrews said, introducing them for the first time.
Malgard leaned forward slightly to shake the admiral’s hand and offered his best smile. Despite the man’s miniature stature, his hand was hard as steel, and his grip was firm. “Happy to meet you, Admiral.”
“Mr. Malgard.” Clay’s voice was neutral.
Why was it that every Navy man he met lately treated him like a distant, uninvited cousin? Damn it, he was a patriot and a defense contractor who had given them a state of the art weapons system. He held contracts worth millions. He was getting tired of the sneers.