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“How far do you figure, Brody?” The sonar man could judge the distance of the torpedo by the time between active sonar pings. The shorter the intervals between pings, the closer the torpedo.

“Range is about three thousand yards,” Brody responded.

They were a sitting duck, fat and passive while a death blow drew nearer.

“No,” McCann muttered. “There is one thing we can do.”

He leaned over Amy.

“Heads up, Brody,” he shouted. “You too, Amy. Emergency blow, fore and aft. We’re taking her up. Amy, pull back on the yoke and try to keep it at a twenty-degree up bubble.”

Amy looked over her shoulder at him, nervously. He gave her a reassuring nod. If this worked, he might get up above the ceiling setting of the weapons… if they had them programmed for it. And even if they were hit, if they could make it to the surface, McCann thought he could somehow save Amy’s and Brody’s lives. A very big somehow.

McCann slammed two steel levers into their cradles above his head, and the sound of high pressure air displacing the water in the ballast tanks blasted in their ears. As the water was forced out of the tanks, the submarine immediately became lighter and began to rise with rapidly increasing speed. As the deck tilted upward, McCann put his hand over Amy’s and helped her keep the ship’s ascent at twenty degrees.

The numbers on the depth indicator flickered as the ship shot up from the depths. The speed indicator read fifteen knots. Eighteen knots. Twenty-one knots.

Over the roar of the emergency blow, McCann could hear Brody calling out the distance of the lead torpedo on their tail. The depth indicator showed three hundred feet to the surface. Two-fifty. Two hundred. He hoped there were no surface vessels above. There were going to burst up through the surface like a rocket.

“Continuous ramp wave on the lead fish.”

The torpedo now had a precise fix on the sub’s location. McCann glanced once more at the depth indicator. One hundred feet.

They weren’t going to make it, he thought, and then three successive explosions rocked Hartford.

Chapter 48

USS Pittsburgh
2:36 p.m.

Captain Whiting and the C.O. of Pittsburgh stood on the bridge and waited. The C.O.’s headset crackled.

“Bridge? Combat,” the voice came through. “Only three of our fish detonated, sir. One torpedo is still on target and closing.”

“Shit,” Whiting muttered. Using their sophisticated electronics, they’d tried to reprogram the torpedoes speeding toward Hartford. It was a miracle they’d been able to get three of them to self-destruct. The problem was that only one MK-48 torpedo was enough to annihilate the submarine.

“Shit,” he said again.

Pittsburgh had surfaced only moments before. Cruising at only one hundred fifty feet below the surface, the sub had risen to the surface after attempting to short-circuit their torpedoes.

“There she is,” the C.O. said to Whiting, but the older man’s binoculars were already locked on the sight.

The bow of the submarine shot up out of the water, her tremendous speed driving her upward until the sail cleared the surface. More of the sleek black hull followed, like the body of a great whale about to breech, until the massive weight of the vessel once again became the dominant force, plummeting the bow of the submarine back to the surface. As she reentered the waters of the Sound, a huge wall of water rose up around her.

At that precise moment, the single remaining torpedo struck the underside of Hartford and exploded, the powerful blast lifting the bow of the submarine out of the water.

With the eye of a seasoned veteran, Whiting judged that the fish must have struck the hull just aft of the torpedo tubes.

Chapter 49

USS Hartford
2:52 p.m.

They’d been hit, and Amy’s ears were ringing from the blast of the torpedo.

She looked around. It appeared that there was little damage to the control room. Even the lights, which had flickered several times, still lit the interior of the sub.

Amy leaned to the side and looked at Brody. He had his head back and was looking up into the overhead. Amy didn’t know if he was saying a prayer or meditating, but it didn’t matter. Somehow, they’d gone through hell and survived. She swung around in her seat to look for McCann. He was flipping switches and pressing buttons. He finished what he was doing and their gazes locked.

“Is it over?” she asked in a whisper, afraid she might be dreaming. She was terrified that they weren’t really on the surface, but dead.

He nodded.

Amy got up from the chair and closed the distance between them. Throwing her arms around McCann, she pressed her face against his blood-soaked shirt. He wrapped his arms around her.

“Thank you,” she said brokenly, overwhelmed with emotion and gratitude. “Thank you. Thank you for saving our lives.”

He raised her chin, and she felt her heart skip a beat. There was no time to say or do anything before McCann’s lips closed over hers. She kissed back hard. It was the hungry kiss of two people who’d just been given a second chance at life.

“We couldn’t have done this without you,” he whispered in her ear as he ended the kiss. But he didn’t let her go.

They both turned and looked at Brody. He was staring at the sonar screen.

“Good work, Brody,” McCann told him.

He turned in his chair. The loss of blood seemed to have caught up to him. His face was very pale and his eyes lacked focus.

“Skipper, I know why they didn’t ask me to go in with—”

Before he could finish, an explosion ripped through the upper deck, tearing the deck plates and blasting a twenty-foot hole in Hartford’s hull. Amy found herself on the deck inside the Communication Center, one of the operator’s chairs on top of her. Her ears felt as if they were blocked. But she was still alive.

She tried to sit up and looked around frantically, trying to find McCann and Brody. What she could see of the control room through the radio room door was a disaster area. The main lighting was out, but the emergency lights were somehow still working.

Daylight was pouring in along with the sea. As the green water rushed in, Amy thought that they couldn’t have been hit by another torpedo. There’d been nothing else on the sonar.

It was either the navy bombarding them from above, she decided, or it was a present that the hijackers had left behind.

At that moment, the vessel pitched, and she looked up in time to see one of the radio panels directly above her tip precariously right before it crashed down on her.

Chapter 50

White House
3:00 p.m.

“My fellow Americans. Once again, good has triumphed over evil. Once again, in the face of danger, the best of America has showed itself.” President Hawkins paused and looked into the cameras. “The crisis is over. As I speak to you, the men and women of our military forces are preparing to board the disabled submarine Hartford. The hijackers that have survived are on the run. Our nation, our way of life, is safe.”

He smiled and then grew serious again. “This has been a trying day for every one of us. Today, the very foundations of America came under attack. But our belief in freedom and our ability to resist evil never faded. Our light never dimmed. We went out there and fought the terrorists who brought this fight to our door. We stood our ground and proved to those nations who support such actions that we are not weak or unprepared or lacking in our determination to stand up for our beliefs. America is strong. We have showed the world that we stand together and that we will never be defeated.”