“I think so, too. In fact, I’m feeling better.”
“Not me. Not yet,” he replied. “I feel like we’re either working on this case too late, or too soon. We’re neither in a position of stopping anything, nor are we really in a position to start building a case to prosecute. There’s only one thing that needs to be done right now, and that’s making a preemptive strike on that submarine.”
She listened, but clearly had doubts about his suggestion. “That would result in a lot of fatalities.”
“True. But if we don’t stop them, the number of fatalities will be much higher,” Bruce said. “And I’ll tell you what’s nagging at me. President Hawkins has established himself as a warrior. To wait eight hours and still not issue the order to have them blown out of the water doesn’t ring true to me.”
She shook her head and chuckled. “Now, that’s some good venting. You must be feeling better.”
“Not yet.” He really didn’t. There was still something more that he couldn’t put his finger on. Something else that he couldn’t quite see. “But I’m working on it.”
“Tell you what,” she said. “When we get back to the Pentagon, I buy the coffee and cinnamon donuts at the Center Court. Would that make you feel any better?”
Bruce wanted to touch the smile that was tugging on her full lips. He’d skip the donuts for a taste of that. “That wouldn’t hurt my mood any.”
“Good,” Sarah said cheerfully. She casually looped her arm through his. “But could we walk faster? I’m freezing.”
He had no jacket on to offer. And he didn’t get a chance to make a joke about it, either, because his cell phone rang. He looked at the display.
“It’s the Pentagon,” Bruce told her before answering. “They found us.”
Seth was on the line. He relayed the bad news. Admiral Meisner wanted them back at the office.
“What is it?” Sarah asked as soon as he ended the call.
“Hartford has fired more torpedoes.”
“Where?” she asked, lengthening her steps to match his as they headed for the car. “Who did they fire on?”
“You know the exploratory rigs the oil companies — with the president’s backing — put in Long Island over the environmentalists’ squawking?”
“They fired torpedoes at that? The rig isn’t even operational yet.”
Bruce shrugged. “Forget about everything we said before. The President burned a lot of political capital on that project. Those bastards just made the biggest mistake of their life. Hawkins will definitely blow them out of the water now.”
Chapter 32
“Rivera, what’s the goddamn status?” Mako snapped into the headset.
Silence greeted him. But the noises he’d heard before still rattled in his head. He thought he’d heard a gun shot that coincided with the firing of the torpedo. Seconds later, more shots. But nothing after.
“Outer doors three and four open, self-checks complete, no fish loaded,” the man at the firing panel announced.
“Status of tubes, Shayne,” Mako said into the headset at the second man in the torpedo room. Again, only silence at the other end.
He moved to the MFD screen and switched to video. The view of the torpedo room was blank.
“Fuck,” Mako growled, stepping down from the starboard side of the conn and moving past the attack-center consoles to the open door of the sonar room.
“Out,” he snapped at Cavallaro, who was standing at one of the sonar stations, monitoring any movement around them. “Take the conn.”
The young officer jumped at Mako’s command and quickly moved into the control room.
Mako shut the door behind him and switched the channel on his headset. “Kilo, where are you?”
There was a three-second delay before his right-hand man answered.
“Second level, forward, sir.”
“The shit has hit the fan in the torpedo room. It has to be McCann. Send a couple of your men down there,” Mako’s voice was loud and razor sharp.
“I’ll go after him myself.”
“No, I need you for Code Brown. Read me? Code Brown.”
“Time of engagement?” Kilo asked.
“Fourteen hundred. You have a lot to do.”
“Consider it done, sir.”
Chapter 33
Amy Russell helped build nuclear submarines, but not because she believed in war. She wasn’t a person who saw world domination through military superiority as a way of winning security for Americans. She hated the idea of superpowers, of the West dominating the East, and of the Third World resenting the industrial powers. She believed in diplomacy and in tolerance. It was true that she loved building these sleek, efficient machines, but Amy didn’t work at Electric Boat because she loved ship construction. The yard was a dangerous, tough, and dirty environment to work in. You were wet and freezing cold in the winter, and fighting for breath in the stifling heat of the summer.
Amy was there night after night because she had two mouths to feed and it provided the best paying position around.
Amy had never seen anyone die violently before. She’d seen the bodies of three welders taken out of a tank on one of the subs, asphyxiated by a gas leak. She’d seen a painter fall off the top of a section of a hull cylinder, hitting every metal bar and bit of scaffolding on his drop to the concrete pier.
She didn’t think she’d ever known anyone who was capable of ending someone else’s life. That included her ex-husband. Regardless of his career in the military, Ryan Murray could never take a life. But locked inside the tiny engineering office where McCann had left her, Amy had watched on screen two men shot dead in quick succession. Commander McCann had taken those lives without any hesitation.
And she’d silently cheered him on for doing it.
A bubble burst inside her. Watching him aim the gun at the camera, Amy realized she no longer hovered somewhere in a dreamland of idealism. At that moment, life and death became reality. And at that moment, she understood that she could do whatever needed to be done. There were lives out there that depended on them.
Then, just before the screen went blank, Amy saw a sailor coming up behind McCann.
She stared at the screen trying to comprehend all that she’d just witnessed, and then leapt out of the chair. The promise she’d made to McCann about staying where she was evaporated, forgotten, in an instant. She tightened her grip around the handle of the gun, slipped the safety, and opened the door.
There was no one waiting on the outside. She looked each way before running toward the ladder leading to the reactor tunnel.
Amy paid no mind to the warning signs posted in the tunnel. In a moment, she’d cleared the forward end of it and passed under the forward escape trunk.
She didn’t want to think about what she’d do if McCann was hurt. When she saw the man approaching McCann, she was certain he had a gun aimed at the commander’s head.
“Please be there,” she said under her breath, running past the crew’s mess.
When Amy heard the noise ahead of her, she instinctively ducked into the officers’ stateroom. She heard a couple of quick exchanges. A muffled gun shot. She shuddered, hoping McCann wasn’t the recipient of the bullet. She heard footsteps coming her way. Closing the door would draw attention. She looked into the room.
Three built-in bunks lined the far wall. A curtain closed off each one. To her right, two desks offered no place to hide. To the left, cabinets and lockers. They were useless to her. The bunks were her only choice.