“Careful how you talk about my girl.”
McCory eased the throttles forward until the readout showed fifteen knots.
“All right, Omar. One sweep only.”
Heusseini activated the radar, then quickly shut it down.
“It is the Hormuz, Colonel Badr. Six hundred meters dead ahead.”
“Very well,” Badr said.
The night-vision screen was blurry, coated with salty water splashed against it by the heavy waves.
Several minutes passed before Badr made out the tall black shape rising from the sea. A few minutes later, he concluded from the silhouette that it was indeed the tanker.
“All of you may secure your stations. Amin, open the cargo doors and prepare to attach the lifting cables. Allah has done well for us.”
McCory and his son sat in back of the marina office in the late afternoon, drinking Budweiser, and looking out at the new main dock. Fifty yards offshore, a barge was unloading sections of the new floating docks. Over on the left edge of the marina, the floating crane had shut down for the day. The boats had all been moved out of the area, and the crane was pulling old, rotten pilings.
They were both in cut-off jeans and T-shirts, the shirts stained with the sweat of a hard day. McCory had some lines in his face, and his hair was mostly gray, but the damp shirt conformed to bulging muscles that hadn’t lost their tone. Kevin was a lot leaner but just as hard.
“Lookin’ good, Kev.” McCory pointed at the dock with his beer can.
“We should have done it ten years ago, Devlin.” About the middle of his second year in college, Kevin had dropped the “Pop,” and started calling him Devlin. McCory didn’t mind too much, but he kind of missed being “Pop.”
“Yeah, but ten years ago, we couldn’t afford it. You pay for what you get, then you take it and go home.”
McCory had paid off the mortgage the year before, then floated a new loan to upgrade the marina. It had gotten so that new paint wouldn’t cover the cavities in old wood. He had lost quite a few long-time renters to the newer and larger marinas. The shorefront lots on either side of him had become too expensive to acquire, but McCory had gotten permission to extend outward. The renovated marina would handle 250 slips, though he was still going to have to raise the slip rentals a little for most of his people. There would be some griping.
The first mosquitoes of evening moved in. McCory slapped his forearm a couple of times, then said, “Let’s go in.”
They got up and went inside the building, where Amy Clover was tending the counter. Swede Norlich was buying two cases of beer. Kevin picked up a couple of fresh cans of Budweiser from the display case, and they went back into the private office.
It wasn’t much of a private office. A battered desk was shoved into one corner. There were three old, straight-backed chairs, a wooden swivel chair in front of the desk, and a stool in front of McCory’s high drawing table. The walls were papered with drawings of ski boats and cruisers. Centered above the drafting table was a full rendering of the SeaGhost. Above the desk in a small, glass-fronted frame was the only Navy memorabilia McCory had kept: his Navy Cross.
“We need to replace Maintenance Building One, also,” Kevin said.
“You want to take a cut in pay?”
Kevin grinned at him. “Only if you do.”
“You could move back here.”
Kevin lived in his own apartment. McCory knew he wanted the privacy because of the succession of women that went through it. Unlike his father, Kevin wasn’t a one-woman man. Not yet. anyway.
“We’ll do it next year,” Kevin said.
“Sure we will, son. Provided we fill those new docks with people payin’ good money.”
“Are you talking about the Johnsons and the Wheelers and the Corcorans, for instance?”
McCory frowned. “Some of those people have been here twenty-five years and more, Kevin. They can’t afford a big boost in their rents. And they can’t afford to go elsewhere.”
“Their Social Security checks have increased. “
“Not as much as they should have. “
“We’re going to have a state of the art marina, with a bunch of faded and damned near sinking Chris Craft museum pieces tied up in it, Devlin.”
“People have a right to their own lives. I don’t give a shit what their boats look like.”
“They need to pay, just like anyone else,” Kevin argued.
“Money ain’t everything, Kev. It runs second place to principle.”
“There are some big boys between us and them, Kevin,” Monahan said from the sonar console.
“How many?” McCory was at the helm, keeping the speed steady at fifteen knots. The digital readout gave him a compass heading of seventy-six degrees, the intercept course upon which he and Monahan had decided.
Using Monahan’s chart, they had identified the unknown ship on the seventy-one-degree, fifteen-minute track as the Hormuz, then projected her position with a dotted line. If Monahan was right, the tanker had been holding steady at around twelve knots.
Because of the overcast, the skies had darkened early. The seas were still choppy but hadn’t worsened in the last few hours. McCory figured the naval ships were running without lights. He hadn’t seen a one.
“The tanker should be about sixteen miles away,” Monahan said. “I’ve got readings for ships at eight-five hundred yards, nine-three hundred yards, and I think, at ten thousand yards. There are a few more of them out there, but I can’t pinpoint them on passive sonar. Somebody is looking for us on sonar. We got pinged a couple times, but I don’t think the return was strong enough to alert them.”
“Who’s the closest?”
“It should be the Prebble, just north and east of us.”
“And closer to the Hormuz?”
“Yes.”
“Well, hell. I want to be the first one there, Jim.”
“So do I.”
McCory punched the throttles.
“Safari Echo, Deuce Two.”
“Go, Deuce Two,” Perkins said.
The CIC felt hypersensitive. The technicians manning the consoles leaned forward in their chairs in anticipation of something, anything.
Norman stood near the plot, watching the shifting symbols. Target Two, the Hormuz, was eleven miles away. The group with Knox was seventeen miles north of the tanker. Safari Delta was coming up fast from the south, just over six miles out.
“Echo, Two has a Target One on infrared at Baker Two, five-nine, eight-one, bearing seven-six. We make the speed at six-two knots.”
“Copy that, Deuce Two,” Perkins said, turning to look at Norman.
One of the console operators keyed the data in, and a new, red symbol appeared on the plot.
“She’s closing on us,” Norman said.
“Yes, sir. And fast. Less than six minutes away. Do I alert the gun and missile stations?”
“Yes, Al. Do that.”
While Perkins spoke into his microphone, Norman studied the plot. He looked up to the bulkhead where repeaters registered the Prebble’s speed and heading. They were making thirty knots on a heading of eight-four degrees. Both the destroyer and the stealth boat were aiming for the Hormuz. At her speed, the Sea Spectre would pass them and reach the tanker first.