by Jan Coffey
“Right. Nothing about Dunbar says he’s connected to any community.” He moved to Sarah’s left to block the wind for her as they walked. “In the case of Rivera, it’s the other way around. Too much baggage. He’s gone through some real tough times, this past couple of years.”
“It appears he was seriously affected by the death of his mother.”
“His girlfriend filed assault and battery charges against him but later dropped them. He was into roughing her up. He got busted for a DWI and a number of lesser charges. He’s been on a self-destruct path for a while now, but everyone around him has been trying to be understanding because of his mother.”
Sarah looked around again. Their arms touched as they walked. “We didn’t come out here because of Dunbar and Rivera, did we?”
“No,” Bruce said honestly.
The intensity of her eyes struck him when they turned on him. “Do you feel it, too?”
He didn’t want to tell her exactly what he was feeling.
“You mean that feeling of being snowed under with information?”
“Like they’re using us as puppets to push lots of paper around and pop the right questions every now and then,” she clarified.
“Well put,” Bruce agreed.
“We have a qualified group of investigators and law enforcement agencies and the CIA and everyone else helping us. But where are the top submarine experts?” she asked. “The ones who know that Systems A and B were installed in which submarine and that only Captains X, Y, Z were trained to operate them?”
“That’s a good point. And I don’t bring that level of expertise to the investigation.”
She put a hand on his arm. “I’m not denigrating what you do bring to the investigation, Commander.”
“I didn’t take offense at what you said, at all. And it’s Bruce.” He regretted when Sarah pulled back her hand. “But I’ll tell you the truth. I’m still at a loss for a motive.”
Sarah nodded. She looked back in the direction of the car. “There’s one thing that keeps nagging at me.”
“What’s that?”
“We’ve talked about it before,” she said. “It’s no secret that there are a lot of countries and political groups in the world that hate us right now. But if they’ve hijacked that submarine to do serious damage, then why haven’t they done it already. Why all this song and dance? Why are they playing hide and seek? Why not make the ultimatum for two hours, rather than twenty-four? They’re not dealing with some poor schmuck who has to pry money out of a rich uncle. We’re talking about the United States government, with cash by the ton at the ready.”
“I can’t have any answers to that,” Bruce told her, taking her by the arm and starting toward the car. He could tell she was cold by the way she leaned against him. “But it’s good to get these things out in the open.”
“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
USS Hartford
12:05 p.m.
“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
USS Hartford
12:06 p.m.
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.
The footsteps grew louder. She ran across the cabin and pulled open the bottom curtain.
Her hand involuntarily covered her mouth, and she gasped. Her stomach constricted as she fought back nausea.
She could not take her eyes off the body in the bunk. The dead man’s eyes stared up at her. Beneath the chalky face, the man’s throat had been cut. She looked at the machine-embroidered name on his one piece coveralls. Gibbs.
She had no time to be sick. There were men nearing the doorway. She pushed herself up against the wall beside a small built-in desk.
“They don’t come up those stairs alive. You hear me?” The commands were sharp.
“Aye, sir.”
“I have to clean up,” the same man ordered. “We engage at fourteen hundred.”
Amy pressed her body closer to the wall, hoping to go unseen. The men paused right outside.
“What’s going on, Kilo?” a new voice asked.
Amy jumped when two consecutive shots were fired. She tried to crawl on top of the desk as she heard the sound of bodies hitting the deck. A forearm of one of the victims flopped across the threshold.
She looked in horror at the door, waiting for whoever killed the two to step in and finish her, too.
~~~~
Chapter 34
Newport, Rhode Island
12:10 p.m.
John Penn had to cut short his plan to visit two New Bedford and Fall River shelters and take a helicopter back to Newport. It was absolutely critical, he was told, that he sit in on the teleconference that his campaign manager, Anthony McCarthy, had set up with Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and President Hawkins’s National Security Advisor.
On the approach to landing at his mansion in Newport, he could see the number of reporters behind the high gates had multiplied exponentially. McCarthy had done his best to get some of these people to chase Penn to the two neighboring cities in Massachusetts. But the reporters had set up camp here, and they weren’t going anywhere. There were different crews waiting for him in Fall River and New Bedford. Penn had a feeling that was McCarthy’s doing.
Although he’d tried to put them off, the reporters had been persistent. They wanted him to talk war. They wanted him to take back everything he’d said during his months of the campaign.
He wasn’t talking. That was the President’s job, and he wasn’t going to undermine any ongoing efforts. Period.
As the chopper touched down on the lawn, Greg Moore and two additional Secret Service agents met Senator Penn.
“McCarthy had to pull out all the stops to set up this call,” Greg told him as they moved toward the house. “They’re just getting started.”
Penn knew what his campaign manager was trying to do. It was risky, but McCarthy wanted to delay the election.
Yesterday, Penn was being told with confidence that he was going to win by a landslide. Now, less than twenty-four hours later, the outcome of the election was anyone’s guess. He figured that this suggestion would make Hawkins’ campaign people happy, too. They had to agree. With the eastern half of the country trying to evacuate to safer areas, an election would be pointless.
He was greeted at the door by his wife, Anna, who kissed him and took his arm. “How is everything out there?” she asked. “As bad as it looks on TV?”
This was one of the million reasons he was still so crazy about his wife after all these years of marriage. She couldn’t care less about the election tomorrow. Her only concern was people. Despite Greg’s prodding, John took two minutes and told Anna about where he’d been and about the spirit of the people he’d seen at each shelter.
She gave him an affectionate hug before he had to go and whispered in his ear. “Don’t forget. It doesn’t matter. If they don’t elect you, it’s their fucking loss.”
Penn was still chuckling when he entered the dining room, which was now set up for the teleconference. Two of his aides were sitting at the table, and McCarthy was already lecturing into the conference phone. He stopped mid-sentence to inform those on the other end that the Senator had joined them.
John Penn exchanged pleasantries with the people on the phone before motioning to his campaign manager to continue what he was saying. He knew Jane Atwood, the National Security Advisor, very well, and Ned Harris from the Department of Justice even better. He’d gone to law school with Harris, and he’d been a pompous jerk back then. These two were nothing, if not devoted watchdogs for President Hawkins.
“What I was saying, Ned,” McCarthy started again, “is that there was a possible precedent set for this during the 2004 elections. After September 11th, Homeland Security recommended that the country be prepared to postpone the election in the event of a terrorist attack on or about the actual day.”
“I remember,” Ned Harris said. “And have you contacted Homeland Security?”
From the bastard’s arrogant tone, Penn figured the paper pusher already had his answer.
“Yes, we have contacted them,” McCarthy said, rolling his eyes at Penn.
“And what did they say?”
“They pushed off all questions regarding the matter to your office. And that’s why we’re on the phone right now,” McCarthy’s tone took on a cutting edge. “We’re not asking you to do us a favor, Ned. There are logistical issues about tomorrow that make voting impossible. Perhaps you’ve heard that the country is facing the possibility of a nuclear holocaust.”
“I believe I heard the President
say this morning that the U.S. Government is open for business.”
“I think the shops in Hiroshima were open for business when—”
“Gentlemen,” Jane Atwood interrupted, “if we could just cut to the chase. I’m rather busy this morning.”
“Sorry, Jane,” McCarthy replied. “Go ahead.”
“There is not enough time to get Congress involved in putting off the election.”
“We don’t need legislation,” the campaign manager argued. “We feel that a legal memo from the Justice Department is all we need. Consider the circumstances. We’re faced with a possible doomsday scenario. Who would even think to challenge it? It’s the only reasonable course of action.”
John Penn watched Greg Moore scribble a note and slide it to McCarthy. McCarthy looked down at it. “If you need some kind of actual precedent, New York officials postponed their September 11, 2001, primary elections after those planes flew into the World Trade Center. It has been done before,” McCarthy said.
“We’re discussing federal elections here,” Ned Harris interrupted. “Not some local primary.”
All of them knew this. But that wasn’t the point.
John sat forward in his chair. “Jane?”
“Yes, Senator?”
“I also want to cut to the chase.” He waved off his campaign manager. “Has this issue come up with the President?”
There was a long pause before she replied.
“Yes, Senator,” she said in an emotionless voice. “President Hawkins has discussed this matter with members of the Intelligence Committee, Homeland Security, and select members of his Cabinet. The election stands as scheduled for tomorrow.”
McCarthy started to argue, but the National Security Advisor stopped him.
“The Administration has taken the position that, in spite of being far behind in many of the polls, the correct course of action is to hold the elections as scheduled.”
