“I can be more help than just guarding the tubes, sir. Seriously.”
“I know you can. But for now, I want you here.” He reached over and tore the headset off the dead hijacker. He handed it to Brody. “Don’t say anything into this until you hear my voice.”
“Hold on, Skipper. You’re gonna blast your way like Rambo all the way to the engine room and back and take on all of them yourself, is that it?”
“We can’t let them do this, Brody. You drag yourself up to the control room as quick as you can when I tell you.”
McCann collected all the pistols that had been dropped, and left an extra gun with Brody. He took a quick look at the face of the man at the bottom of the stairs. The dead hijacker wasn’t anyone he knew, and it occurred to McCann that he definitely looked more Scandinavian than Middle Eastern. He stepped over him and started cautiously up the stairs.
Two bodies were lying in the passageway, but there was no one else in sight. He moved quietly to the first of the two. There was little left of the face of the first one, but he was sure it was Kevin Barclay. The second corpse lay outside the officers’ cabin, part of his upper body lying across the threshold. McCann took a step in that direction, and then whirled when he saw a movement in the cabin. He raised his pistol.
Amy gasped and backed up against the paneled wall.
“What are you doing here?” he asked sharply, immediately rushing toward her. He took hold of her hand — the one with the gun pointing at him — and lowered it to her side.
“I saw the gun pointed at your head, so I came up to save you. But there were these people in the passageway and I tried to hide in here… and… and… I saw him,” she said brokenly, pointing at the bunk.
McCann saw Gibbs’s body. He looked back at Amy. Her breathing was unsteady. She dropped the gun on the desk next to her and leaned against it. He pulled her into his arms and she held him, pressing her face against his chest. There was no restraint with her. She was all emotion, up or down.
He wished they had met at a different time, a different place, under better circumstances. The fact that she could have been shot, that she could have been one of the bodies that was lying at their feet, mortified him. He took her hair with one hand and pulled her face away from his chest so he could look into her eyes.
“Why can’t you follow orders?”
She ignored his question and her gaze moved to his shoulder.
“You’re bleeding. Oh my God… you’re shot!” she said urgently, trying to open the front of his shirt.
He trapped her hands against his chest. “Only a scratch. There’s nothing to it, really.”
“Then let me see.”
She tried to push his hands away, but he stopped her again. “We don’t have time, right now.”
He looked around the room, forcing himself to see past the dead young men who were members of his crew only twenty-four hours ago. He had to figure out what the hell went wrong and what made them act the way they did.
McCann turned back to Amy. “How am I going to get it in your head that I need you to stay in one place?”
“No. No way. I refuse to stay in a room with all these dead bodies.”
He knew she wouldn’t stay in any other room, either. Showing up here had proved that much.
“Okay, you follow me,” he told her. “But I expect you to obey orders. Got it?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” she muttered, picking up her gun again.
He pushed the muzzle to the side, so it wasn’t pointing at his chest. “I’m the good guy. Try to remember that.”
As he leaned out the doorway, looking up and down the passageway, he could hear her mumbling under her breath, repeating what he’d said, but twisting the words. He thought that was a very good sign.
There was no one in sight.
“Where are we going?” she whispered.
“Back through the reactor tunnel to the engine room. First, I want to make sure Brody, my sonar man, is still conscious. I left him down in the torpedo room.”
“He’s not with them?”
“Definitely not,” McCann said. “He was knocked cold. He was a little confused at first, but he’s on our side, so don’t shoot him. Understood?”
Her head butted him lightly on the back. He took that as a yes.
McCann looked both ways again before stepping over the sailor’s body. She was right behind him. As they went, he touched his chest, feeling for the key he’d need to get into Maneuvering. It was still there.
In a moment, they were looking down the stairs into the torpedo room. He peered down through the entry. There was no sign of Brody.
“There’s something important that you should know,” she whispered. “There was a man they called Kilo who shot your two men by the officer’s stateroom.”
He stared at her. “You were there when they were shot?”
“Yes, but that’s not the point,” she told him. “I heard this Kilo guy say something to one of the men going down into the torpedo room. He said he was doing a cleanup. There was a mention of fourteen hundred, too, but I don’t know what the context was.”
McCann didn’t know any Kilo, but most submariners went by one nickname or another. He looked down at his watch. It was already 1:25.
Little more than half an hour until 1400 hours.
He wasn’t about to wait around wondering what the hijackers intended to do in another thirty five minutes. The torpedo tubes were shut down, but the Vertical Launch System might be operational if they were to go back up to periscope depth again. Why had they gone deeper?
It didn’t really matter, he supposed. The nuclear reactor could be a disaster at any depth.
“I’m going to do what I planned to do from the beginning. I have to shut the reactor down before they can use that as a weapon, too.”
Just as McCann stopped talking, he heard footsteps behind them, and then the shooting began again.
Chapter 40
There were no new aerial shots of the pursuit of Hartford. The media had been banned from the area, along with all private boats. All nonmilitary aircraft in a five-hundred-mile radius had been grounded. The camera crews of the local affiliates, however, were staying busy, filming from the shore with the most powerful lenses they had. Across the water, the smoke and flames rising from the oil rig made for dramatic footage.
Sarah stood in front of the television in the conference room. The room buzzed with faxes and phone calls coming and going and agents walking in and out. She was in her own world, enclosed in a bubble that blocked out the noise, the people, and everything else.
Her thoughts were on Darius McCann. She was determined to think of him still alive, fighting the hijackers. He had a warrior streak in him, something he’d entered the navy with. She liked to think that it was in his blood, a fighting spirit that came to him through his ancestors. It was in the name his mother had given him. Darius the Great, of the royal family of Achemenides. King of Persia from 521 to 486 BC.
Over the years, Sarah had studied Persian history, its culture, its customs. The curiosity had begun with her interest in Darius, in an effort to understand him. But soon the civilization itself had won her over, the centuries of history and the evolution of the region had fascinated her. It was through this knowledge that she believed she was now better able to understand the conflicts in the Middle East.
Persia encompassed many countries, cultures, and various religions. It had always been a bomb with a slow burning fuse. The centuries-old conflicts had roots running back to the days of the Persian Empire, long before a prophet named Mohammed rode in from the desert. More recently, it has been an area rich in oil, where poverty-stricken people seethe at excesses of the rich puppets who are kept in power by the West in general, and by American oil companies in particular. To many in the Middle East, America and the oil companies mean the same thing — brutality and decadence. What America called democracy and capitalism were simply terms for a Judeo-Christian coalition bent on taking all they could from those living in the region. They saw no evidence to make them think otherwise. They saw no reason to temper their resentment.