It was medium red as he sat on the other side of the desk from Lieutenant Commander Roosevelt Rosse, who was somewhere in the chain of command of the Navy’s Weapons Procurement Division. Rosse was, by Devlin’s reckoning, far too young and far too low in the chain to be making this decision.
He handed McCory’s drawings back to him, leaning out across his gray metal desk. “I’m afraid, Mr. McCory, that you’re a bit too late with this. Our specialists looked it over, but the Navy has already undertaken a similar program.”
“The hell it has! You’ve already got this boat?”
“Well, no sir. But negotiations with the contractor have been concluded.”
“What the hell happened to open bidding, Commander? I want to be part of the process.”
Rosse didn’t respond to that. Instead, he asked, “What are your qualifications, Mr. McCory?”
“Qualifications! Qualifications! I spent twelve years in your damned Navy. CPO. I’ve got my own marina. I build boats. I’m a master mechanic. I know boats.”
“But no degrees? As it happens, Mr. McCory, the contractor has a staff of marine architects and marine engineers. The Navy is impressed with their qualifications.”
If the lieutenant commander’s office had had a window, Devlin would have put the gray steel desk through it, followed shortly by the lieutenant commander. He managed admirably to hang on to his sanity, however, and found his way out of the Pentagon’s C-ring and back to his Ford pickup in the parking lot.
He counted the money in his wallet and figured he had enough for gas back to Florida, if he didn’t eat much. Pulling out of the parking lot, Devlin McCory finagled his way onto the Henry G. Shirley Memorial Highway and headed south.
Feeling fully defeated by his own Navy and his own country.
And planning the letters he would be writing to anyone holding some kind of power in the Navy.
Ted Daimler owned a cabin on the Chesapeake Bay, just below Rose Haven. It was a rustic thing of three rooms used for poker games and weekends away from the hurdy-gurdy of Washington political life and intrigue.
McCory had let Daimler off on the dock below the cabin at three in the morning. He lodged himself in the hatchway, holding onto the rotting wood of the wharf as Daimler stood on the planks and tested his knee.
“Tell me again, Ted.”
“Hey, I’ve got it down, Mac. I tell the deputy I got down here after dark last night, beat from a long day, and went right into the sack. Get up this morning, and see my Scarab’s gone. That’s when I report it.”
“Good.”
“But, goddamnit it, Mac! We hit that boat.”
McCory could still hear and feel the thump when the hull collided with the Zodiak. “Yeah, I know. It shouldn’t have been there.”
“Like ourselves?”
“Look, Ted, all we can do is watch the newspapers.”
Daimler’s face was haggard in the light from the corridor behind McCory. “I suppose so.”
“If it gets too tense, Ted, you spill it all. Name me.”
“Ah, shit.”
“Just do it.”
“I’m not going to give you up, Mac. We go back too far.” He didn’t mention the almost brotherly relationship that had developed over two decades, the things they had done for each other.
“This is me and Devlin, Ted. I don’t want your ass in a sling because of us. They’re not going to find me, anyway, not until I want them to.”
“Ah… ”
“Sorry about the knee and the boat. I really am. More about the knee, though.”
“I’ll bill you.”
“Do that.”
“Kevin.”
“What?”
“Somewhere down the line, you’re going to need an attorney. I want you to keep me up-to-date on what you’re doing.”
“Ted, I don’t think I’ll… ”
“You are going to negotiate?”
“Maybe. I don’t know yet.”
“Do it through me,” the lawyer said.
McCory looked up at his friend. ‘I’ll let you know.”
“Go on. Get the hell out of here before my backyard fills up with submarines and battleships.”
McCory backed inside, closed the hatch, and made his way to the helm. Three minutes later, the dock, with Daimler still standing on it, disappeared into the gloom.
He had taken the SeaGhost down the bay at full bore, which amounted to fifty-seven knots. He assumed the weight of the spare engines and the missile launcher were taking a toll on the maximum speed.
By eight o’clock, he was 225 miles off the coast, headed south at a leisurely forty knots, and the radar didn’t show another vessel within forty miles of him.
McCory had figured out a few things. The navigation system was keyed into the NavStar Global Positioning Satellite System and precisely plotted his position for him. The automatic pilot was linked into the same system. After a few trials at different speeds, the computer had calculated his rates of fuel consumption. He didn’t yet know how big the fuel bladders were but guessed they were large. A fill-up would wipe out his VISA card. The readout told him he had three-quarters of a fuel load left.
The radar was exceptional. At thirty miles of range, it picked up tiny things that he suspected were flotsam, but he could squelch them out. It looked to him as if the maximum range was about two hundred miles, which meant that an over-the-horizon set of electronics kicked in, bouncing their signals off the ionosphere. The radar was normally operated from the center seat, but one of two small screens behind the plastic face in the helmsman’s panel repeated the signal. The cathode ray tubes in the pilot’s panel could also be switched to show fore and aft views from video cameras mounted in the bow and the stern. The video had low-light and infrared capacity. Besides repeating the radar image, the CRTs also repeated the information found on the sonar set, which was operated from the left-hand seat.
Either of the CRTs could also serve as the display device for the on-board computer. The small numerical keypad was mounted to the right of the instrument panel, but so far, McCory had only learned how to tap into the fuel consumption program.
Below the instrument panel bulkhead, in front of the radarman’s chair, was a hatch into the bow, accessed on hands and knees. McCory had taken a look, finding electronics bays on either side. The radar antenna was mounted on the port side, with clearance enough for a 180-degree sweep. Very likely, there was a similar antenna in the stern, covering the rearward 180-degrees. He figured that the radio antennae, or most of them, were inlaid into the fiberglass of the deck. Directly in front, in separate insulated compartments, he found the video camera mounted behind a transparent panel in the hull, and to his amazement, a six-barreled Gatling-type gun. He thought it was probably twenty millimeter, an M-61, and when he pounded on the side of the fiberglass magazine, it sounded full. The magazine and the gun were apparently accessed for service from a hatch in the deck above. Except for a variable up-and-down arc, it was solidly mounted and, like a fighter aircraft, had to be aimed by steering the boat.
There wasn’t any food in the galley, and he went back to the cross-passage and retrieved his vinyl bag. There were two grenades left, and he put them in the desk drawer on the starboard side. Somewhere in the middle of his rage had been the idea to blow up the boat if he couldn’t appropriate it. Probably, he should have dropped the grenades in the second boat in Pier Nine, but he had forgotten about it.