There was no point in pursuing this argument. The senator was right. McCarthy decided on stating the obvious.
“Because Hawkins is in the White House, and making himself appear to be in total command of the situation, your run for the presidency is about to crash and burn,” he asserted. Picking up a pile of faxes they were just receiving, he glanced at the pages and held them up. “These are the raw numbers from this morning’s polls. We couldn’t get any from New York or Philly, but look at the early numbers from Chicago and St. Louis. We’re not slipping. It’s a goddamn freefall. Look at these comments. The people of America suddenly think we’re at war. Forget about any kind of change in presidents. All Hawkins’ sins are forgiven.”
John Penn walked to the hutch to pour himself another cup of coffee. “Sometimes we’re faced with events that are out of our control.”
“All I’m saying is that we need to be part of these events, sir.” McCarthy looked at the glazed expression that had slid across John Penn’s face. “You like to quote Shakespeare, Senator. How about, ‘There’s a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.’”
“Interesting that you should pick that speech, Anthony. When Brutus says it, he’s trying to convince Cassius to attack Marc Antony. It’s a great speech, but Brutus turns out to be wrong. He wins the argument, but loses the battle, and democracy loses out to monarchy in ancient Rome.”
“I just mean that we need to be proactive now, show the American people that you’re the leader they think you are.”
“Hawkins might have been my opponent for the past year,” Penn replied, waving his coffee mug at McCarthy. “We’ve referred to each other in some pretty unflattering ways. Some of his negative smear ads were downright hateful. But on this day — even if it is the day before the election — Will Hawkins is my president, and I won’t do anything that might jeopardize what he’s trying to do to save the lives of people who are counting on him.”
“Senator—”
“We’re wasting our time here.” Penn shook his head. “For the rest of the day, we’re going to go to work to see if we can help prepare shelters, hospitals, law enforcement agencies… whatever… for what we could be facing at any moment. I’m going to work and help and it’s going to be done without TV cameras. We’re not going to do this for publicity. We’re going to do it because it’s the right thing to do.”
Damn it, if Penn couldn’t talk when he got pumped up, McCarthy thought. Glancing at Greg Moore, he saw the aide discreetly turn off his tape recorder.
Oh yeah. This was better stuff than he could write himself.
They weren’t done campaigning. Not by a long shot.
Chapter 26
“What are we looking at?” Amy whispered.
“Those are the control consoles in Maneuvering, just above us,” McCann told her, pointing at the red gas-plasma monitor display on the MFD. “If I can get in there without them knowing up in the control room, we’ll be able to shut Hartford down.”
“What exactly do they do?” she asked.
“Those three consoles monitor and control the submarine’s entire nuclear power plant.”
She leaned over his shoulder to get a closer look. Despite the sweat and dust and all the places he had to crawl through to get here, there was something raw and intoxicating about his scent. To keep her balance, she rested a hand on his shoulder and felt his muscles immediately contract beneath her fingers. She instantly withdrew her hand, tucking it between her knees, while still leaning forward.
“I’ve never seen the inside of Maneuvering. Once we build the structure, we’re not allowed in there at all.”
“I know.” He pointed to the monitor. “The console to the left controls the electrical system, the center one is the nuclear reactor control panel, and the right one controls the steam turbines.”
“The person manning the panel.” She pointed to the man seated at the consoles. “Is he one of yours?”
McCann didn’t answer immediately, but their faces were close enough that she could feel the heat rise from it.
“Yes, he is,” McCann said finally. “He is a reactor technician, one of my petty officers.”
“Was he the only one on your crew that was left back here?”
“No, three were stationed aft of the reactor — the reactor technician, the machinist’s mate and a machinist. I haven’t seen the two, but that’s why we were so careful coming through the reactor tunnel.”
“You thought they might be guarding the entrance to the engine room?”
He nodded grimly.
She watched as he switched image on the screen to another camera. It was the view they’d looked at a moment earlier. Two armed men were visible, obviously searching the outboard areas between the frames back at the extreme aft end of the Engine room.
“These two are strangers,” he told her.
As they entered the engine room through the watertight door at the end of the reactor tunnel, McCann had led Amy into the closet-like engineering office. He’d wanted to know what they were dealing with, and she watched him switch the screen to more than a dozen views of different locations on the boat. Several cameras appeared to be blacked out. He’d blacked some of them out himself as they’d worked their way to the engine room.
To get here, they’d sneaked past the crew’s mess and down half a deck to the entrance of the shielded tunnel that led straight through the space that held the nuclear reactor. At the end of the tunnel, they’d entered the engine room, a noisy and crowded area that consisted of three decks containing the submarine propulsion plant. McCann told her that when they were operating with a full crew, the reactor tunnel, the control areas including this tiny office and Maneuvering were manned stations.
He’d been cautious coming into the engine room, but there’d been no one at the entrance. A key that he wore on a chain around his neck had opened the door to the engineering office and locked it again from the inside.
He switched back to a view of Maneuvering, and Amy thought about all the different warning signs from the DNR, Director of Naval Reactors. The signs were clear about just who on the boat was allowed past certain points. It didn’t matter that regular people, like Amy, who built these subs looked at the top secret blueprints everyday. Once the sealed reactor unit was delivered and installed in the submarine, the navy controlled it and no one trespassed.
McCann quietly opened the desk drawer and came up with pen and paper. He started taking notes on something he was seeing on the consoles.
Amy’s gaze drifted to the hazard signs that were posted on the walls of the small office.
She worked in the shipyard. Day in and day out, she was exposed to all kind of hazardous substances and high voltage and smoke and gases. She was thirty-two years old, but there were times that she thought she’d be lucky to make it to forty. As far as retirement age, forget it. There was no chance. Accidents happen.
And now this. She was caught inside a hijacked submarine heading God knows where. Never mind forty. Amy realized that she probably would never see the light of day again. She’d never see her babies again.
She forced back her tears and focused on the radiation warning signs.
On top of all the other fears and anxieties, it was a little unnerving to be sitting this close to a nuclear reactor. And it wasn’t even being operated by the good guys.
“Do people who usually work back here have to wear dosimeters?” she asked thinking about the clip-on radiation-detector monitors that looked like tiny flashlights.