The message drained Renard’s life force and left him shaking with anger.
“Merde!”
He launched a punch. The thud against the bulkhead echoed in his chamber, and avulsed skin burned his knuckles. He whipped open the door to his room and marched forward to the operations room.
Seated at the ship’s control station, Henri looked up with concern, as did Antoine Remy from the forward-most Subtics sonar monitor. Jake turned from the periscope and approached.
“Well?” he asked.
Renard could muster no words but gestured for Jake to follow as he turned back to his stateroom.
Jake was pulling a chair to a foldout desk as Renard slammed the stateroom door shut. Jake cringed and seemed astonished and frightened.
“Don’t ask,” Renard said. “Just look.”
He pointed to his screen. Jake leaned forward and read the message.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” he said.
Renard sensed himself trembling, losing control, and struggling for balance. He reached for his deck to stabilize himself, and he felt Jake clutch his shoulders.
“Are you okay, Pierre?”
“Dear God. I don’t know why this upsets me so much.”
“It’s okay,” Jake said. “It’s actually good news, in a way,” Jake said.
“For whom?”
“Let’s talk about it when you’re feeling better.”
Catatonic, Renard let Jake think for him. Jake decided to submerge the Mercer, navigate the waters to the south of France, and gain familiarity with the ship’s systems. There was little else to do.
Feeling the submarine submerge and commence the business of patrolling homeland waters dulled the bite of Renard’s anger, revealing an underlying sadness. With the Mercer drifting into a tertiary supporting role of practical irrelevance, Renard sensed that the greatest days of his life were behind him.
He reflected upon the three topics of the note from Rickets. First, the Israeli’s blinked during their last communiqué of diplomatic poker and admitted to the Leviathan behaving beyond their will. Second, the Leviathan had escaped its trailing American submarine and had spent the last two days at whereabouts unknown. Third, the last known track laid down by the Leviathan hinted that it was heading toward an American aircraft carrier task force steaming in the Mediterranean Sea.
Rickets had shared the information with an order for Renard to stand down the Mercer’s hunt while American forces regrouped. A submarine had been detached from the task force to help find the Leviathan, and the Mercer had to stay out of the way.
Renard reclined in his rack, pondering that the loss of contact on the Leviathan signaled the end of the Mercer and his last chance to lead a submarine at sea.
He heard tapping at his door.
“Come in,” he said.
Jake entered and pulled a chair beside Renard.
“I think I figured out why this is bothering you.”
“Do tell,” Renard said.
“Well, shit, Pierre, you’re not getting any younger. I can see it in everyone else’s faces, too. Even Henri looks bummed. This is the end of the gang.”
“You seem rather relieved.”
“Yeah,” Jake said, running his hand through his hair. “I didn’t have a good feeling about this.”
“Indeed,” Renard said. “That aura of charm protecting you since we first met had waned in recent weeks.”
“My brother didn’t help either. He filled my head with omens.”
Renard rolled to his side and looked at Jake.
“That was a fine reunion.”
“He didn’t do it intentionally,” Jake said. “He’s a super-sensitive guy and into new age sort of stuff. When he talks about death, he means it.”
“Then metaphorically he was correct. The Leviathan is indeed rogue, and if I were ten years younger I would find the means to place this ship within striking distance of a killing blow, regardless of Rickets’ orders. But instead I feel defeated — dead if you must — and cannot muster the strength.”
“I see what you mean. You look drained.”
“And you,” Renard said. “You were the spark I used to turn to, but you have decided that submarine warfare is in your past, have you not? I could not see it before, but now it’s obvious. I’ve brought you here against your will, and you joined me out of loyalty alone.”
Jake lowered his gaze.
“It’s okay, my friend,” Renard said. “You have many adventures and a long life ahead of you. But this is the winter of our adventures together.”
“There’s still a chance that the Leviathan pops up and we’re needed for a kill shot.”
Renard could sense that Jake preferred the more likely scenario where the Mercer remained useless.
“If everything is aligned as it appears,” Renard said, “we will hear of the Leviathan’s demise somewhere between its last known location and the steaming carrier task force. I fear that we will accomplish no more than the shakedown of this ship for its Malaysian customers. It’s now time for me to think of… other things.”
The next day, Olivia scrolled through six months of email confiscated from Farah Ghaffari’s mail servers associated with the Iranian professor’s accounts. She had little traffic beyond communications with students, staff, and faculty at Old Dominion and brief personal exchanges with her fiancé.
Mundane meanings filled most of Ghaffari’s emails until her fiancé had headed to sea on the Bainbridge a week ago. Olivia read words of an emotional heart longing for a distant object of love, but she sensed that the professor was incapable of experiencing the feelings she claimed.
A recent and larger email file caught Olivia’s attention. When she opened it, a picture of Commander Richard Pastor wearing his camouflage uniform appeared. She thought it odd that a man would send a photo of himself to his fiancée until she noticed that he was standing on the weather deck of a ship.
There were no identifying marks of the ship other than a doorframe through which the picture was taken, either by an assistant or a camera perched on a tripod with a timer. Based upon Pastor’s supposed unapproachable personality and the meek puppy dog expression on his face, Olivia decided his portrait was a solitary effort.
The backdrop was purposefully romantic with the moon over his shoulder, a stuffed puppy dog with a big read heart on its chest under his arm, and a piece of construction paper with the phrase “195 days” written on it. Olivia surmised that the days represented a countdown to the wedding. After rummaging through an Internet search of wedding announcements, she verified her assumption.
She thought little of the photo until she came across a different email with a note from Pastor thanking Ghaffari for the little surprises she had planted in his sea bag. The email held a photo with him in the same pose, in the same place, but he held a giant Hershey kiss wrapped in red foil and a piece of construction paper reading “193 days”.
Olivia leaned back in her chair and reflected. She leaned forward again and lifted a cappuccino off her desk. As the hot liquid energized her, she realized that she needed expert perspective on a question taking shape in her mind.
She called the few naval veterans she knew in the agency. Each verified that it was normal for a partner to leave cute and romantic gifts in a bag for her man while he was at sea, and that even the saltiest of sailors would cast aside his ruggedness and take pictures of himself to send back to a woman he loved, if asked.