by Jan Coffey
She’d fired down at the hijacker standing at the bottom of the stairs to the torpedo room, but she wasn’t about to risk shooting McCann in the back. Luckily, the firefight didn’t last long. She didn’t see it happen, but she knew their attacker was killed by one of the commander’s bullets.
“Follow me,” he told her.
She didn’t have to be asked twice. McCann was a lifeline and she wasn’t going to let more than a couple of steps come between them. At the top of the stairs to the torpedo room, he paused.
“How are you holding up, Brody?”
“I’m fine, Skipper. The bastard dead?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want me up there, yet?”
“Not yet.”
“I’m ready, Skip.”
Amy could only make out the top of Brody’s head from the angle she was looking. His voice sounded very weak.
“This is the ship super, Amy Russell,” McCann said quickly to his man. “I told you about her before. She’s been watching my back.”
Amy could have laughed, but she was afraid that her laugh might sound a little hysterical at the moment. Brody moved enough to the side just until he and Amy each saw the other. The young man saluted. She returned the gesture. He looked very pale and there was a bloody footprint on the deck where he’d stepped.
“Stay alert, Brody.” McCann turned and looked past the bodies down the passageway.
“How badly is he hurt?” she whispered.
“He’s got a bullet in the knee.”
“How’s your shoulder?” she asked him, glancing at his blood-soaked shirt.
“What shoulder?” he asked, still looking down the passageway, ready to go again.
“Listen…” she started. She wanted to stay with McCann, but her common sense was nagging at her.
“What’s the matter?”
“Could I do anything for Brody if I stayed with him?” She shook her head. “What I mean is, tell me where I can be the most help to you.”
“How squeamish are you about blood?”
“I have two active kids, and I’ve seen plenty of shipyard accidents.” She looked at his shirt again. “I’ve been watching you bleed to death, and I haven’t passed out yet, have I?”
“No.” He started to tell her where the closest first aid kit was. “I’ve got one down there, but you might want more gauze and tape to bind the wound tighter. I’ll be needing both you and Brody before we’re done.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” she told him as she headed forward to find the first aid kit.
As he disappeared toward the engine room, she had a moment’s regret. She’d just cut the lifeline, and now she was roaming around Hartford alone. She could run into a hijacker anywhere and get her brains blown out.
Amy focused on what she was doing. She’d stayed alive this long.
~~~~
Chapter 42
USS Hartford
1:52 p.m.
“Conn, Sonar. Contact has slowed. He’s on a course parallel path to ours,” Cav announced loudly.
Mako smiled and looked at his watch before starting to bark out more orders.
“Helm, all back two thirds!” he shouted. “Mark speed two knots.”
The deck trembled violently as the two men in the engine room opened the astern turbine throttles and reversed the direction of the propeller. The submarine shuddered as it slowed. Orders continued to be passed along until the submarine was again traveling ahead, but now at a crawl.
“Two knots, Captain,” one of the men reported.
Mako stepped off the platform and looked into the Sonar Room. Cavallaro was carefully monitoring the contact on his screen. The hijacker turned back to the conn before speaking into his headset. “What’s the progress, Kilo?”
The security man’s response came back in seconds. “McCann is still alive, but I’m finished in the engine room. I’m on my way up.”
“Eight minutes to the rendezvous. McCann is finished. You have more work here.”
“Aye, sir.”
Mako turned to the men in the control room.
“Helm, all stop. Diving officer, prepare to hover.”
Paul Cavallaro came out of Sonar and approached the conn, looking perplexed.
“You’re preparing to hover at this depth, Captain?” Cavallaro asked, looking over his shoulder at the instrumentation doubtfully.
Mako ignored him.
“Ready to hover, Captain.”
“Commence automated hovering.” Mako looked at Cavallaro. “Return to your station, Lieutenant.”
As the officer moved back to Sonar, Mako signaled to his men to get ready. They immediately began picking up their equipment and gear.
“Conn? Sonar. Captain, contact is getting ready to connect to the sub,” Cav announced questioningly. “It looks like a DSRV, sir.”
Mako glanced at his watch once more and saw Kilo come into the control room. The captain motioned with his head toward the Sonar Room as the others started filing out.
Paul Cavallaro turned as Kilo entered the room. As he looked up, he was surprised to see a pistol pointed at his head.
It was the last thing he saw.
~~~~
Chapter 43
USS Hartford
1:55 p.m.
As McCann passed through the reactor tunnel into the engine room, he considered the possible reasons for bringing the submarine to a complete stop.
One reason was to hide. As silent as Hartford was, if the hijackers wanted to completely disappear from the sonar of a pursuing submarine, they may have decided to go ‘all quiet’. But the engine room had not been completely shut down yet.
The second reason could have been that they were carrying out their escape. Too much to hope for, McCann thought, moving cautiously up the ladder toward Maneuvering.
He wouldn’t have to break down the door, for he had a key that would give him access. The only thing he worried about was facing any resistance from the operator.
“It doesn’t matter,” he muttered to himself. “You’ll do what you have to do.”
Arriving at the door to Maneuvering, he found it partially open. He moved in quickly.
The sight of two dead bodies immediately stopped him. One of them belonged to his petty officer. He had slumped forward on his face at his station. Blood was spattered across the screen and there was a bullet hole in the panel holding the monitor. On the floor beside the reactor operator, McCann found the machinist mate. His life had ended execution style. He leaned down and checked the pulse on the young man’s neck. The body was still warm, but he was dead.
No one else was in the room. He had a feeling there was another dead machinist somewhere around.
He checked the displays. The reactor was in hot standby mode. Doing what he came to do, McCann went to work. In two minutes, he’d scrammed the reactor, taking it to non-critical.
Immediately, the lights dimmed as the batteries took over.
McCann left Maneuvering and made his way to the reactor tunnel. As he went through, he pulled the watertight door shut and secured it. If there was anyone left in there, that’s where they were staying.
He stood for a moment by the closed door, trying to understand what the hell these people had up their sleeve. Brody was on McCann’s side. With the exception of Cav and Dunbar, the rest of his crew appeared to be dead. He remembered what Amy had heard. Was this the end of their operation and they were cleaning house?
He looked at his watch. It was 1400 hours. Two o’clock.
There was only one place left on the sub to check. McCann ran toward the control room.
~~~~
Chapter 44
USS Hartford
2:00 p.m.
“How does this feel?” Amy asked after she’d finished putting a new dressing on the wound. As she said it, the lights dimmed perceptibly.
“Much better, ma’am.”
She knew Brody was trying to be tough, but she wasn’t taken in. The bullet wound looked like raw meat abo
ve his knee. There was no distinguishing between the cartilage, bone, or flesh. The loss of blood had to be a serious concern. Amy did the best she could, but he might as well have been bandaged up by a blind woman. Nursing was definitely not one of her gifts, and this was a little different than slapping a Band-Aid on a playground scrape.
She actually felt a sense of pride for the young man and his courage and she’d told him that many times while she’d been working on the leg. She’d needed to say those words for her own sake as much as his. She couldn’t even imagine the pain he was enduring—or how much she was making it worse with her poking and prodding.
Amy sat back against the heavy steel supports and looked across at Brody. The racks of torpedoes loomed above them, protection on many levels. She tried not to look at the dead bodies on either end of the aisle. She was certain she’d never be able to work on the construction of another submarine and not remember what they’d gone through here. She closed her eyes for a second and tried to clear her head. She was assuming that she’d survive. That they’d get out of here.
She wondered where McCann was. Everything was too quiet. “What do you think is going on?”
“We’ve stopped and the reactor is shut down,” he said. “The skipper could have done it.”
He fiddled with the earpiece of his headset.
She knew McCann’s survival meant living or dying for both of them. But how could he handle so many of the hijackers alone? The name Kilo flashed into her mind. Amy remembered how brutally he’d shot the two men in the passageway upstairs. And they were supposedly on the same side of the fence as he was. There had been no argument. No word of warning. Just sudden death.
“Silent waters run deep,” she murmured.
“Pardon, ma’am?”
“Nothing.” She picked the gun off the floor, stood and peered around one of the torpedoes toward the stairwell. All was quiet. “Maybe we should go up.”
“The skipper’s orders were to stay down here until he calls for us.”
Amy would never understand the military’s culture of following orders. But they all lived by it. It was engrained in them from their first days of training. They were brainwashed to accept it, to live by it.
She crouched and looked at Brody again. “How come you aren’t one of them?”
He looked at her questioningly.
Amy remembered that he’d been knocked out for most of the morning. “The crew who stayed aboard Hartford are…or were…cooperating with the hijackers. Why not you?”
He bristled, and she watched him look at the body of Rivera before answering. Finally, he shrugged.
“I’m not a traitor,” he said. “I don’t understand them, but I’ll tell you something else. I wouldn’t have betrayed the skipper for any amount of money. They all knew that. Probably figured I’d give them away.”
Brody’s kind of loyalty tended to propagate itself. At least, this was the way things worked in the shipyard. Crews either hated their bosses or liked them. They weren’t too many mixed bags. Amy didn’t know any of the other men on Hartford. The little she’d seen of how McCann treated his crew before the hijacking and how he’d refused to believe that they’d have anything to do with it, made her think of him as the type who would be liked.
Something crackled in Brody’s headset. The young man adjusted the earpiece again. “I’m here, Skipper.”
Amy couldn’t hear what was said by McCann, but she saw Brody immediately sit forward, trying to push himself up. She tried to help him.
“I’m on my way. Yes, sir. I can handle it.”
There was no way he could put any weight on the leg; Amy was sure of it. She didn’t know how he’d be able to handle the stairs. Still, she was amazed by Brody’s determination as he did stand up.
“What’s going on?” she asked when Brody finished listening to the commander’s instructions.
“They’re all gone. The C.O. thinks it might have been a DSRV that took them away. We seem to have the boat to ourselves.”
Amy couldn’t believe it. Did this mean that it was over?
“He wants to talk to you.”
She took the headset from him, and saw him quickly bend down and tape his bad leg to his good one.
“Amy, how familiar are you with Clyde?” McCann asked.
“I know Clyde very well,” she answered as she walked up the aisle between the racks. She stopped at the doorway leading into the large space aft of the torpedo room. It was the same room where McCann said he found Brody tied and gagged. “It’s the auxiliary diesel engine. The back-up power source for the reactor.”
She saw Brody start hopping toward the stairs and hurried back to help him.
“Do you know where it is?”
“Of course. It’s twenty feet from where I’m standing.” Amy was torn about staying where she was or helping Brody up the stairs. He’d tucked his pistols into his pockets and was hoisting himself up the stairs with his arms.
“Good. I need you to go there now. I’ll walk you through the procedure to start Clyde up. We need our auxiliary power.”
She had her answer. She was staying down here. “What’s going on?”
“The reactor is shut down. We’re running on batteries now, but that won’t help us for what we need to do.”
She rushed back to where the hulking diesel engine sat half buried beneath the deck.
“Tell me, McCann,” she ordered quietly. “I’m ready.”
“I’m sending out four SLOT buoys as we speak. That might help, but I can’t guarantee they get any messages on time.”
Amy knew SLOT buoys were one-way transmitters launched from the submarine. They could send a digitally encoded message, but—because of their depth—they were still unable to receive any responses.
“I swear to God, Commander, if you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’ll wrap my fingers around your throat and choke you the next time I see you.”
“I like that. But before you incapacitate me, you should know something.” His voice turned serious. “I have one of our own subs on the sonar, and it’s close to getting within strike range. It may be a matter of seconds before they start firing torpedoes at us.”
~~~~
Chapter 45
Pentagon
2:05 p.m.
Bruce Dunn respected Sarah’s privacy.
He walked away from the conference table where she’d just received a phone call from Commander McCann’s father. He’d never admit it to her, but Bruce had actually arranged for the phone call as soon as he’d learned through one of their field agents that Mina McCann’s condition had stabilized. The older woman had suffered a minor stroke that morning upon hearing the news about McCann. Bruce thought it would be so much more meaningful to hear the good news from the family than from a stranger like him.
Seth McDermott entered the conference room at that moment. Perfect timing.
“Did you get any answers for me?” Bruce asked.
“Admiral Meisner says he’ll see you in two minutes.”
Not exactly what he wanted to hear, but Dunn knew the Director of Naval Intelligence would be able to cut through the red tape and get answers, if anyone could.
“Where?”
“Outside the large conference room,” McDermott said, grinning. “Things are about to get critical in the Command Center, but he had to go to the head. He said he’d give you some answers on his way back.”
“I guess we should be grateful that admirals are human enough to take bathroom breaks.” Dunn looked at his watch. It had to be two minutes by now. He stepped out and spotted Meisner walking back.
“Seth told me you’ve been trying to get some help, but have run into some brick walls.” Meisner talked as he continued to walk. There were no formalities between the two. No ceremony. They’d known each other for about ten years, and Bruce had investigated at least twenty cases for him. He fell in beside the older man.
“More like some paper walls, but considering the ticking clo
ck, I don’t want to waste time. What can you tell me about them? Where can I find them?”
Meisner stopped a step away from his destination. “Let’s see. Whiting happened to be on USS Pittsburgh, the sub chasing Hartford. They’ve been testing two new systems. Which means the chance of contacting him is zilch.”
“How about Erensen?”
“The miserable son of a bitch had quadruple by-pass surgery on Friday.”
“Sorry about that,” Bruce said.
“I tell you it’s the damn retirement.” Meisner shrugged. “I don’t think he’ll be any good to us, at least not today. He’s still in intensive care.”
That explained why they hadn’t seen those two faces beside the president or on talk shows. “How about Captain Barnhardt?”
“Canada. On one of his back to nature survival jaunts up there. This time it’s bow hunting, or some other crap like that. He left last week. He won’t surface until Wednesday or so.”
Bruce had heard about Barnhardt’s fascination with hunting. He regularly led excursions to an island on Hudson Bay. A group of them would get dropped off on an island or in the woods in the middle of nowhere for so many days at a time.
“Can’t we send some Marines or park rangers after him?”
“The bastard would probably shoot them,” Meisner answered.
Bruce recollected that there was no love lost between Meisner and Barnhardt.
“Work with Erensen if you have to. His wife says he’s started talking. He’s at Johns Hopkins.”
Bruce nodded. “By the way, anything from Hartford?”
Meisner shook his head. “All the communication is shut down. Pittsburgh is getting ready to blast them into a million pieces.”
“That’s a shame.”
Meisner looked at him oddly. “You think so.”
“I sure as hell do. From what I can see, McCann deserved better than to go out like this.”
~~~~