“Don’t shove me,” said a sailor. “I gotta viz this.”
“You can’t do that,” whispered another. “He’s dead. You know the rules.”
“XO’s coming,” a voice hissed, and the crowd tensed and drew back into order, parting to allow Simmons through.
“Nothing like a morning swim, Horowitz,” Simmons observed with a smile. “You solid?”
“Aye, sir,” Horowitz replied. “Can’t say the same for my swim buddy here.”
A sailor pulled off the diver’s mask to reveal bulging eyes. Horowitz felt his stomach turn. The left side of the man’s jaw was bloody and caved in, but the rest of the dead man’s features were still intact. With his cropped blond hair, he looked almost like a sleeping Viking.
“We get the right guy?” asked one of the sailors. “He don’t look like any jihadi I’ve seen before.”
Someone handed Simmons the broken dive mask. He turned it over in his hands, careful not to cut himself on the shards of plastic, and then knelt down to look closer at the body. A delicate scar on the chin and a nose that looked as though it had been broken as regularly as a boxer’s.
“Roll him over,” said Simmons.
As they turned the man, Horowitz noticed that the diver’s suit wasn’t neoprene; it was made of something thicker. Then he saw the man wasn’t wearing conventional scuba gear.
“Sir, that’s a closed rebreather unit,” said Horowitz. “SEALs use them to swim without the bubbles. The wetsuit’s got some thermal masking going on too.”
Simmons nodded and studied the gear being stripped off the body. The dive computers strapped to the dead man’s wrists looked sleek, clearly mil-grade. They also had Chinese markings on a protective cover.
The men looked confused as the XO sprinted back to the bridge without a word.
It wasn’t a big ship, and Simmons was at the bridge within twenty-five seconds. Riley was there now, still in his skivvies but wearing his blue USS Coronado baseball cap with the CO’s scrambled-eggs insignia sewn in gold thread above the brim. Jefferson was playing the REMUS video back for him. Riley turned to see Simmons burst into the room. Simmons didn’t walk around the projected screen but went right through it, rippling the picture.
“Got him?” said Riley.
Simmons seemed to ignore him and looked right at the communications officer.
“Get PACOM on the horn, now! Prep an OPREP-Three Pinnacle message.” Any message with Pinnacle in the identification line was automatically flagged of interest not just to the entire Navy chain of command but also to the National Military Command Center, which monitored events for the Joint Chiefs and the president.
“That’s a little extreme for one diver, XO. Let’s notify the duty sonar ship first and see if they have any further info,” said Riley.
“Too slow. We need to send a Pinnacle out now, sir,” said Simmons.
The communications tech looked from Simmons to Riley. “Sirs, nothing’s working here. I can’t even get my own phone to hook on to the network. It’s like the whole spectrum is down.”
On the main deck below, Horowitz rubbed the ache at the base of his neck. He angrily slammed another magazine he’d cadged from a fellow sailor into his M4. They’d found his weapon still lying on the deck. He absent-mindedly ran his tongue across his lips, realizing he was thirsty despite being soaking wet. He’d read that this was what happened when you went into shock, but he wasn’t going to say anything about it now. Falling off the ship and then bitching about being scared seemed like a good way to blow his shot at becoming a SEAL.
Horowitz looked around the harbor at the wall of U.S. Navy steel assembled there. He couldn’t wait to get to sea and wreak some revenge on whoever had done it.
Then the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier tied up just across the harbor, seemed to lift a few feet from the water, as if the hundred-thousand-ton ship were being conjured skyward. The shove of the blast wave pushed him back to the bulkhead.
As he scrambled to his feet, Horowitz stared, agape, as the Nimitz-class carrier settled back into the water with orange flames and black smoke pouring from its deck. He watched as the carrier’s hull begin to break apart about two-thirds of the way down from the bow.
“Oh, shit. The reactors,” muttered Horowitz.
Pier 29, Port of Honolulu, Hawaii
What the hell? They weren’t supposed to be offloading for another day.
When he’d first seen the ramp come down, Jakob Sanders had pulled out his tablet to recheck the manifest. The Golden Wave, 720 feet, flagged out of Liberia. A RO/RO carrying cars from Shanghai. It had been pre-cleared on the manifest but it was twenty-four hours early. And now it was mucking up his day.
Even standing in the guard shack in the neighboring parking lot, he could feel the impact of the doublewide metal ramp slamming down onto the pier. Sanders had always thought the big roll-on, roll-off ship had the aesthetic appeal of a Costco plunked down on top of a boat. But that was the idea. It could carry 550 vehicles, and those vehicles could drive right off the ship and into his lot. Where they would then sit, waiting to be driven to various dealerships around the island.
Sanders tried to raise his boss on the radio but all he got was static. He shook his head and looked down to check the time and date on his Casio G-Lide watch. Yep, he had it right. They were offloading too soon. More important, the web-enabled watch’s last update showed that the offshore buoy readings looked promising for some head-high swells. Just five more hours in the lot and then he’d be free of his guard shack and back in the water at Kewalos. If the surf was as good as his watch promised, it would be one of those days when it just didn’t matter where you’d gone to school or that you wore a black polyester uniform on land.
A series of distant booms snapped his attention from his watch. He hit the deck and covered his head with his arms as the shack’s flimsy metal walls shook. After a few seconds, he got to his knees and peered through the open door at the fuel-tank farm next to pier 29. No fire. Blue skies didn’t indicate thunder. Then the pier began to vibrate again from another low rumble, like an earthquake. Damn, he didn’t want to be caught here by the water if it led to a tsunami.
More distant booms echoed off the hills, but the noise was washed out by hundreds of motors starting up inside the Golden Wave. What were they doing? Didn’t they feel the quake? There could be more aftershocks.
Sanders remembered the public-service announcements he’d watched as a kid said you should stand in a doorway during an earthquake, but he looked at the flimsy shack walls and then crawled outside. He felt more booms reverberate and saw some smoke rising behind the Golden Wave, but the bulk of the huge ship blocked whatever was happening across the harbor.
Then one of those new Geely SUVs rolled down the ramp. Maybe they were trying to get the cars off before another quake? But where were they going to park them? They’d be better off keeping them on the ship and riding it out.
Sanders watched as another and then another of the SUVs moved down the ramp and parked. He’d always thought the Geely looked like a ripped-off Range Rover Defilade. But they were so cheap that he could almost afford one. The paint sure sucked, though. The first dozen were a decent silver or blue. But the rest were a faded matte green.
Then he heard a piercing squeal, like something gouging the steel deck of the ship. Behind the last SUV, what looked like a telephone pole on its end gradually emerged and pointed down the ramp. Behind that pole was a massive green bulk that slowly nosed its way out to the top of the ramp and then tilted downward.
Shit, that was a tank! Then another tank moved down the ramp, followed by an eight-wheeled vehicle that looked like a tank’s little brother.