In the privacy of his stateroom, John Brody swallowed his fourth shot of Jack Daniels. His mind danced with demons.
Carole Brody lay in bed. Her naked body invited the touch of a stranger. Her brow furrowed as she faced Brody.
“Failure!” she said.
The image disintegrated.
A new image crept into his head.
Towering over a group of officers, Slate’s commanding officer, Commander Thomas Henry, approached a podium. He accepted his appointment to admiral and spoke into a microphone.
“I accept this promotion as the token nigger admiral because John Brody was too stupid to sell out. Hey John, you didn’t even make captain, did you?”
“Fuck it,” Brody said. “After Jake stole your submarine, your career’s going down with mine.”
Next image.
Standing on the bridge of the USS Colorado, Jake studied the seas as wind blew his hair. He grinned.
“Hey, John. How are you doing?” he asked. “Were you the dip-shit I just outsmarted?”
“Fuck it,” Brody said and slammed a fifth shot. Another shot later, he was crying over a picture of his wife. Then he wiped his eyes and studied his face in the mirror. He saw nothing he respected.
Desperate to feel an iota of dignity, he grabbed his bottle of whiskey and emptied it into his toilet.
The next morning, Brody felt dehydrated and queasy as he addressed the Miami’s officers.
“I expect that in a few days, the Commodore will let us come home. I’m going to let Pete Parks run the show. I just wanted to thank you guys for being the best wardroom a skipper could have.”
While sad faces remained somber, the wardroom door opened. The short, stocky image of Senior Chief Schmidt, Brody’s sonar technician, scratched his grayish brown mustache while reporting in a gritty baritone.
“Captain, you told me to let you know if I found something.”
“Yeah?”
“I found something.”
Brody followed Schmidt up the stairs to the sonar room. Stinking of body odor and grime, the sonar technician huddled over an audio machine.
“I think you’re right about the Colorado, Captain.”
“I had a feeling this guy was too good to get sunk,” Brody said. “What do you have?”
“There’s no doubt a warhead exploded under where they found the Colorado’s buoys. What bothers me is the implosion of the hull.”
“Go on.”
“Well, sir. First of all, the Colorado has four compartments, if you count the reactor compartment. Most likely we’d have heard several compartments implode, but we only heard one.”
“The compartments could have equalized pressure on the way down.”
“That’s possible, but what I really don’t like is the timing. The Colorado’s sinking seemed fast, so I listened with a stopwatch. The hull imploded twenty-one seconds after the explosion. That’s too quick.”
“Maybe the Colorado was deep when it was struck.”
“Still, sir,” Schmidt said, “there’s one important thing missing — the creaking. I don’t have to tell you that high-yield steel puts up a good fight, but we had only twelve seconds of catastrophic creaking before the pop.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Senior.”
“That’s my point, sir. I already had two other guys check the timing and my logic. Something exploded and something sank, and the Colorado’s doomsday buoys were found on top of it all. But it doesn’t compute.”
“Okay, Senior. Let’s get the officers and sonar team together. We’re all going to listen to this tape.”
Jake popped Brussels sprouts into his mouth while he watched the Frenchman swivel the periscope.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“I just returned from the navigation center with a GPS fix,” Renard said. “Our gyroscopic navigators are tracking. Scott is raising the radio mast. You could save us time at periscope depth by handling the radio download for me.”
“No problem. Are we alone?”
“Nothing on sonar or visual,” Renard said. “No ESM. I never thought I would enjoy such isolation.”
Jake placed his microwaved bowl of canned sprouts on a counter and flipped switches to align the radio antenna.
He listened to the whir of a radio transceiver as it accepted a download. Then he walked from the module and lifted a microphone to his mouth.
“Mister Renard, I’ve got the transmission,” Jake said. “Lower the radio mast and take us deep.”
Jake popped the last sprout into his mouth as he ripped off the printout. Reading as he walked uphill against the ship’s diving angle, he returned to the control room.
“Sweet!” he said.
McKenzie, Renard, and Tiger turned to listen as Jake read aloud.
“At a press conference today, President Lance Ryder stated that the USS Colorado, underway under suspicious circumstances since May 11th, was sunk at sea two days ago. He will not confirm details of the situation, but sources state that a reactor accident—”
“Thank God. Now, no one will be chasing us,” McKenzie said.
“Congratulations, Jake,” Renard said. “Your maneuver with the Custom Venture worked perfectly. I cannot help but think that you’re charmed. However, we need to keep our wits about us. That statement by your president could be a deception in its own right.”
“Maybe, but I think it’s safe to speed up.”
“Agreed,” Renard said.
“I don’t know about this fairwater damage, though. What do you think about nine knots — at least until we’re under the ice?”
“Nine knots will add almost a week to our journey versus our planned speed of twelve,” Renard said.
“I planned leeway into the timing. I don’t think Taiwan will mind waiting,” Jake said.
“That may depend. How is the situation there?”
Jake scanned the news report. A blurb on the subject followed a story about a Middle East terrorist group bombing a London subway.
“China lost a destroyer during an exchange with an unnamed Taiwanese combatant in the Western Pacific, but the Taiwanese combatant had to be scuttled at sea,” Jake said. “Then there’s something about Chinese submarine attacks against oil tankers inbound to Taiwan and insurance companies refusing to cover Taiwanese commercial vessels.”
“It’s as I’d feared. The mainland stranglehold is in place, and even as it resists, the Taiwanese fleet is too small and can ill afford one-for-one exchanges. If this journey takes too long, Taiwan may not be around to receive the warheads.”
“Our doubts about the Colorado sinking reached the CNO,” Brody said. “He’s skeptical, but he’s sent the Boise and the Philly to look for the Colorado in the Gibraltar shipping lanes. The extra P-3’s are standing down — and so are we.”
“Forgive me sir,” Parks, his executive officer, said in a drawl, “but the Colorado was your battle, and you’re the one who discovered that it might be alive. Why do other people get to chase him? It isn’t right.”
“The Squadron Commodore did me a little favor, Pete. He got SUBLANT to let me stay out four extra weeks with any patrol area I request. We get any water we want outside of allied submarine patrol areas.”
“Really? What did you have in mind, sir?”
“If the Colorado is alive and going where we all thought it was, then Slate gets eaten alive before Gibraltar.”