After the first flurry of orders, Sara subsided into her chair on the bridge and watched numbly as the crew went about the tasks of making the ship as secure as possible and to alert command to their present location. Any minute now she expected to see a fleet of aircraft coming over the horizon like the leading edge of an invading army. She ought to go below, inspect the damage, check on the injured.
Hugh was gone. No matter how many times she repeated the words she could not quite believe them. Hugh was gone, and she was alone. No more shared suffering through required parental visits home to Seldovia. No more fights over who had to move where when one of them got transferred. No more quickies in hotel rooms.
No more Hugh. How could she still be breathing? How could she still be here, when he was not?
She became aware of the tears running down her face and of Mark Edelen standing nearby, looking helpless and not a little frightened. “XO-”
“Let her alone.” Tommy’s voice was almost unrecognizable, rough and loud. “Just let her alone, Chief.”
So they did, leaving her bent over in the captain’s chair, tears dripping off her chin and into her lap. After a while she stopped seeing them as they moved around her, stopped hearing their voices when they spoke.
Sometime later she felt a tap on her shoulder. She looked up to see Ops standing in front of her with a concerned look on his face. His mouth moved, but she couldn’t make out the words. She shook her head tiredly and put up her palm to fend him off.
He wouldn’t go. She knew a tiny spark of anger, immediately quenched by grief.
“Come with me, ma’am,” he said, and put a hand beneath her elbow to assist her out of the chair.
“What-” she started to say.
“Please come with me, ma’am,” he said with unaccustomed firmness, and such was her state of mind that it was easier to follow him off the bridge and down the outside stairs to the main deck.
He led her to the bow. There were a half dozen small boats clustered around them by now, fishing boats and a couple of skiffs. A small cruise ship had a line to what was left of the cutter’s bow, its foredeck all but obscured by a crowd of paying passengers gaping at a sight that for sure hadn’t been on the itinerary.
Ops said something.
Sara could not make it out. “What?”
Ops took her firmly by the shoulders and turned her in the direction of the cruise ship. He pointed over her shoulder so that she had no choice but to follow the direction of his finger.
She couldn’t see what Ops thought was so important. There must have been fifty people on board the little cruise ship. Who went for a boat ride for fun in January?
And then she saw his face staring up at her, wet hair matted on his brow, eyes intent on hers, a smile of such joy breaking across his face.
The next thing she knew she was balanced on the gunnel and reaching for the rope mooring the cruise ship to the Sojourner Truth. She grabbed the line with both hands without a thought to seeing if it was on belay and launched herself from the cutter, swinging into space over the water.
There were alarmed shouts from both ships. She ignored them, wrapping her ankles around the line and going down hand over hand so fast that later she found rope burns on her palms.
She hit the deck of the little cruise ship and before she had regained her balance she was in his arms.
EPILOGUE
EVERYONE WAS THERE, FROM the secretary of state to all of the Joint Chiefs, even though no one was ever going to be allowed to admit to attending.
“How many killed?” said the representative from the Senate Armed Services Committee.
They looked at the Coast Guard captain, a nondescript man of middle age with a carefully cultivated air of dullness. “Seven killed. Thirteen wounded. Those are just our own casualties, you understand. There are ninety-seven crew members on the Agafia and eighteen on the Star of Bali yet to be accounted for.”
“Who is handling the interrogation of the surviving terrorists?”
The FBI agent said, “That’s us, sir. It’s slow going but we’re getting some good stuff from the hired hands. I think we’ll have a pretty solid report for you soon.”
“What about the missile?”
“The wreckage has been recovered.”
“And the payload?”
“The payload was dispersed upon impact and detonation.”
“Dispersed where?” This question came a little more sharply.
The FBI agent looked at the Coast Guard captain, who looked at the mad scientist on his right. His hair looked more Donald Trump than Albert Einstein and he wasn’t really mad, but when your job was primarily providing worst-case scenarios it helped if the people to whom you were delivering them thought so. “Impact was about twelve miles south of Seward, in Spoon Glacier, at an elevation of about twelve hundred feet. There was a steady onshore wind of fifteen to twenty knots. The cesium-137 was dispersed across the northern half of Resurrection Bay. We estimate that the fallout would disperse most heavily on the maximum security prison on the east side of the bay, but that the wind was blowing strongly enough that some of it would have reached the town. However, not in such quantities as to prove an immediate hazard to the health of anyone living there.”
For those who were listening for it, the stress on the word “immediate” was readily apparent. No one commented on it, though.
“So that’s good news, then,” the president’s man said. “Nothing that can’t be explained as a conventional missile. No reason to tell anyone otherwise.” He looked around the table for opposition to this eminently sensible viewpoint and of course found none.
The mad scientist made a noncommital noise. His report had gone in days before, and the president’s man knew full well that it would be years before the effects of the fallout would be known. The cesium had dispersed over a wide area covered with snow and ice that would melt into streams and rivers and flow eventually to the bay and the sound. In the meantime, the Centers for Disease Control would maintain a quiet watch through local clinics to monitor the health of the community, in particular the incidence of cancer.
“Very well,” the president’s man said with satisfaction, “our line will be that a terrorist attempt to attack the homeland was unsuccessful due to the diligence of our own counterterrorism forces, who had the operation under continuous surveillance from the moment of its inception. When the terrorists were discovered, they fired off the missile prematurely in the hope of doing random damage. Due to the vigilance and skill of the United States Coast Guard”-he inclined his head toward the Coast Guard captain-“no such damage was suffered.” He shrugged. “There was no serious threat to the public at any time.” He cocked an eyebrow. No one contradicted him, but the air force general was displaying less enthusiasm than he liked to see. “General? Something you wanted to share with the rest of the group?”
The air force general raised his head. “Why Anchorage? There are half a dozen ports on the West Coast with military bases to target and far more people to kill, and therefore that much bigger a message to send. Why Anchorage?”
“We weren’t looking for them to attack Anchorage for precisely those reasons,” the man from the CIA said. “I think it’s fair to say they took that into account in their planning of the attack.” He shrugged. “And besides. It’s Anchorage. What’s more, it’s Alaska. Most Americans think Alaska floats off the southwest coast of California, right next to Hawaii, with occasional appearances on the Discovery Channel.”
There was a rich chuckle all around at this witticism. When it died down, the man from the White House looked at the man from the CIA. “And the motivation behind this attack?”