This was the first time they would take innocent lives, but Laila had practiced. She’d killed her brother and the prince’s bodyguard. “Flood the tube.”
“Flooding,” crackled from the intercom.
It would take a few seconds to fill the torpedo tube with water. The pressure within the tube had to equal the water pressure outside before they could move to the next step. She’d lain in the escape trunk long enough to know the process took time.
Sooner than she’d expected, the torpedo room spoke. “Ready to open the muzzle door.”
The muzzle door was on the outside hull. The torpedo would fire through that opening. Ambra’s teeth worried her lower lip.
“Open muzzle door,” Laila said.
“Open,” the torpedo room confirmed.
“We’re in range,” Ambra said.
“The torpedo is aimed and ready to fire,” announced Rasha.
Laila took a deep breath. She pictured the blood of the innocent crew splashing into the sea, and she looked over at Ambra.
“Ready,” Ambra said.
The die was cast. “Fire torpedo.”
The submarine rocked slightly, but that was the only indication the torpedo had left the ship. Another rock might have meant the torpedo had hit its mark and exploded.
“Surface to periscope height.” She had to make sure.
The periscope was eighteen meters long, so they didn’t have to come too close to the surface to use it. If anyone on the Narwhal was looking, the Siren wouldn’t be spotted, even if the torpedo had missed the ship entirely.
“Periscope height,” said Ambra.
Laila pulled down the handles and looked through the eyepieces. The Narwhal looked unharmed. She moved forward as before.
“We missed,” she said. “Acquire the target and try again.”
She returned to the periscope and watched the hapless Narwhal. It sailed along, completely unaware. That was how she would want to die — happy, unaware, and then gone. “We have to learn before it’s important.”
“Second torpedo in place,” said Rasha. “Target is acquired.”
“Fire second torpedo,” Laila said.
The Siren dipped, and she looked through the periscope. A tremendous explosion of white water blossomed into the air, and the submarine rocked. The outline of Narwhal was barely visible through the white screen.
The water settled back to the sea.
“Target is hit,” she called.
Ragged cheering broke out on the bridge and sounded over the intercom from the torpedo room.
She watched their unfortunate target. Tall flames licked up from the sea. Black smoke billowed into the sky like a cloud from hell. The water roiled white around the ship. The torpedo had struck the Narwhal amidships, and she rode low in the water.
“Nothing on the radio,” Ambra said. “They haven’t sent out a Mayday yet.”
Those left behind might not ever know where their loved ones had died, might wait weeks for the overdue ship, as their mothers and family had waited for news of the women who now crewed the Siren.
The Narwhal’s deck listed, and figures small as ants spilled off the side.
A hand touched her shoulder.
“You don’t have to watch it,” Meri said.
“You should be at your battle station,” Laila said. “In the medical bay.”
Meri squeezed her shoulder and let go.
The tanker burned in earnest now. Flames engulfed the deck. To minimize environmental damage, Laila had waited until the ship had off-loaded the oil, even though she would have liked to have forced her country to take that financial loss. Was the tanker burning up because she carried extra oil, or was this normal? She had no idea, because she’d never seen a ship take a torpedo strike before, not even in the movies.
She swept the periscope back and forth, looking for survivors. Tiny black heads bobbed among pieces of wreckage.
“Mayday message sent out,” Ambra said. “They reported an explosion and are requesting help.”
No one was close enough to help them.
“Admirable performance,” Laila said.
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Rasha on the intercom from the torpedo room. She sounded ready to cry.
“We must discover why the first one missed,” Laila said. “But not today.”
Ambra looked at the periscope, and Laila stepped back to let her use it. Maybe she would be able to see Rasha’s brutal husband die. Laila understood the need for that kind of closure.
During the next new moon, they would rendezvous with Aunt Bibi. She would have new oxygen generators. They would be able to dive and maneuver and fire like a true combat submarine, instead of limping along near the surface. The target would have no chance.
Unless they shot back.
Chapter 25
Joe woke to the sound of a sonar ping. It sounded so much like the device in his yellow submarine that it took him a second to realize where he was — in his bed, with Edison nearby, and his laptop on his nightstand. Exactly where he’d been for hours.
The laptop pinged again, and he rolled over to pick it up. Edison stirred in his doggie bed.
“Shh,” Joe whispered. “Back to sleep, buddy.”
Edison snorted and lay still. Andres had taken him out for most of the day, and the dog was tired out.
Joe checked out his laptop. He was monitoring acoustic buoys around the world’s oceans. They tracked sounds in a range lower than normal human hearing. At that frequency, sound could travel for miles. Whales used it to communicate, and governments used it to monitor nuclear explosions anywhere in the world.
It had taken a bit of doing, but he’d been given access. Nobody thought he could actually figure the sounds out. Once he had access, he’d been assigned an acoustic intelligence officer named Fred Mulcahy. When Joe had invited him over from the submarine base in Groton, Connecticut, Mulcahy had given him a crash course in interpreting underwater sounds. So far, there had been a lot of false alarms. Many things made noise in the oceans — whales, dolphins, boat engines, volcanoes, earthquakes.
For the past few days, he’d been tuning the data to filter out natural and expected sounds so he got alarms only when something manmade and unusual occurred. Pattern recognition was his specialty, and he could see the system improving. Fred Mulcahy had gotten excited about it, and Joe had given Fred the source code in return for his help interpreting sounds. He probably could have built another company off this work, but he wasn’t interested. It was just a tool to help him find the submarine that had nearly killed him.
This was a new sound.
He studied the data that had triggered the alarm. A second loud sound registered, followed by a series of quieter noises with no pattern he could see. The loud sounds looked like explosions — something blew up — and the quieter ones might be something else breaking apart.
The event had happened in the North Atlantic about six hundred (orange, black, black) nautical miles from New York City. While some parts of the ocean had been seeded with naval mines to damage or destroy ships, that part of the ocean certainly wasn’t. The sound couldn’t have been a ship that ran into a mine. It could have been a ship that had had a primary then a secondary explosion — a boiler went, and then some kind of explosive cargo went after.
Or it could have been a ship that just got torpedoed. Twice.
He’d had Fred on alert since he’d discovered the pilot of the princess’s downed plane lurking in the background of a photo on Facebook. The man probably hadn’t noticed he was being photographed by a party at another table, but Joe’s software had tracked him down and matched his facial features beyond a reasonable doubt. He hadn’t been able to track the man further, but it was enough to know that, no matter what the official investigation said, the pilot had survived the crash. If he had, the women very likely had as well.