“McKenzie, hold line eight,” he said.
“Hold line eight, aye, sir,” McKenzie said.
Jake watched McKenzie yell to Tiger, who used the friction of figure eight turns to fight the Colorado. Arms bulged under Tiger’s black wetsuit, and water wrung from the nylon line.
The commando played tug-of-war with the Colorado’s sideways momentum, the mooring line acting as a fulcrum to rotate the submarine seaward.
Its bow edging away from the pier, the Colorado crawled toward the open river basin. Jake aimed the ship between Crab Island, a mound of dredged silt, and the covered wharf’s empty mirror image three hundred yards ahead.
“Mister Lion, rudder amidships.”
“Rudder mid… I do not understand.”
“Let go of it. Now!”
The rudder glided in line with the ship.
“McKenzie, take in line eight.”
“Take in line eight, aye, sir”
McKenzie drew his hand across his neck. Tiger unraveled the figure eight and the Colorado dragged the rest of the line from the pier’s cleat.
As the rope spat water, Jake watched the commando follow it into the basin. Now that he had control of the submarine, Jake wasn’t sure that he cared if the commando boarded the submarine again or was left behind, but Tiger pulled on the rope and kicked his way to the tapered tail of the creeping vessel.
The first of the river’s five illuminated ranges, pairs of sticks that marked the center of a channel, came into view. The range sticking up from Crab Island marked the Colorado’s first leg toward the sea.
A mile behind, the Nebraska was a blurry shadow. Jake knew that in the darkness, the Colorado remained invisible.
Tiger, the huskiest and now wettest commando, descended the ladder into the engine room and sealed the lower hatch with a clunk. He spied the blue dungarees of Michael Gant bent over a forest of valves, reached over his back for his rifle, and pointed it at Gant.
“Who are you?”
“Gant. I’m Michael Gant!” he said.
“Where is the injured man?”
Gant pointed, and Tiger walked to maneuvering, the engine room’s control room.
Tiger hoisted Dowd’s wrapped body over his broad shoulder. He then carried the unconscious sailor out of the engine room, up the missile compartment hatches, and lay him topside. Climbing back into the missile compartment, he found life vests in overhead compartments and threw them into a pile.
“Propulsion motor, bridge,” Jake said, “Shift propulsion to the port main engine. Forget the warm up. It can survive one cold iron start-up.”
Water churned behind the Colorado as evidence that vapor hot enough to melt human bone inundated the port main engine steam turbine. The breeze caused by the Colorado’s nearly doubled speed fanned Jake with humid air.
“Mister Lion, right full rudder. Steady course one-five-two,” Jake said.
With novice drivers, the ship turned as if driving on ice. The bow swung far right, but the Taiwanese commandos proved attentive.
“We have overshot our course,” Kao said. “Mister Renard recommends from his chart that we turn left.”
Jake glanced back at the range markers. Five degrees separated the upper and lower lighted sticks, indicating that the Colorado had drifted toward shoal water.
“Left ten degrees rudder, steady course one-four-seven.”
The Colorado inched back into the channel as it rounded a bend, but the turn revealed the USS Miami at the visiting submarine pier.
Jake had forgotten that the Miami’s berth held a narrow but clear view of the channel. He lifted binoculars to his eyes and spied the Miami’s two topside sentries standing under incandescent lighting.
The Miami’s sentries were watching three off-duty sailors staggering on the pier. The inebriated trio teetered and bounced off each other as they sauntered along the concrete. Jake saw the drunkards hollering, but they were as inaudible as mimes. They distracted the sentries as Jake slipped the Colorado by the Miami unnoticed.
Realizing he was holding his breath, Jake exhaled. As awareness replaced his fear of being discovered, he recognized Kao’s voice in his earpiece.
“Mister Slate,” Kao said. “Mister Renard holds you left of track.”
Jake returned his attention to navigation. He snapped his head forward as the Colorado’s bow pointed at a red flashing light atop a buoy that marked the channel’s left side. He cringed as the buoy’s tethering chain rumbled across the Colorado’s hull and realized he had to react before the chain snared the Trident by its stabilizer.
“Left full rudder. Back emergency. Give me everything you’ve got. Now!”
Water churned behind the rudder as it twisted and pulled the submarine’s tail and its port stabilizer beyond the reach of the chain. Although the rudder drew the submarine from the chain, it steepened its angle toward the islands confining the channel’s outer fringe. The rumbling stopped, but the ship drifted toward shoal water.
“I need a visual fix,” Jake said.
Jake watched the periscope behind him swivel toward the taller light of the nearest range. The periscope swiveled again to the edge of an island and then to a distant range marker. The ex-commander of the Amethyst captured the fastest triangular fix Jake had seen.
Renard’s voice crackled through speakers that felt like muffs over Jake’s ears. He didn’t trust the Frenchman yet, but he welcomed his nautical advice.
“We have shoal in front of us and on either side,” Renard said. “We cannot turn. We must back out.”
“I’ve got a backing bell on,” Jake said.
“We have less than seventy yards to our stern.”
“That’s tight, but I can handle it,” Jake said.
“A submarine of this size backing down on the surface?” Renard asked. “It will have a mind of its own. How can you be so confident?”
“Check the current in the channel,” Jake said.
“Ah,” Renard said. “Pushing against us. It should help straighten us out and reorient us in the channel. Your rudder and engine commands should work.”
Shaken by the Miami, the buoy chain, and the shoals, Jake had paid no attention to which way the current was flowing. But by faking confidence, he had garnered the advice he needed and had looked strong.
“Just a scare,” he said. “Everything’s okay.”
Surviving in the Chicago Board of Trade war zone took a combination of killer instincts and analytical control. By making million-dollar trades, Grant Mercer had learned to replace his heart with an ice-water pump.
After Jake’s phone call, he had moved millions of dollars from a payphone outside his Chicago apartment. His two million was in one account and Jake’s five million in another.
Not caring if his withdrawal drew attention, he forewarned his bank and took out two hundred thousand dollars in cash and stuffed it into a duffel bag for his flight through Canada.
Wearing leather gloves, Mercer grabbed the wheel of the used Honda he had bought with cash. He turned on the ice water pump in his chest, shifted the Accord into first gear, and watched his past vanish in the rearview mirror.