“I know, sir.”
“The fleet suffers from a horrible manpower shortage, but I won’t tolerate that as an excuse for incompetence.”
“Nor should you, sir.”
“Good. Then I assume you’ll have the crew rounded up for remedial training early tomorrow.”
Having returned to port on a Friday evening, Cahill had planned on personal time over the weekend, as had the entire crew. He swallowed his desire to be with his fiancée and prepared to dash her hopes and those of his sailors.
Though harsh, his commanding officer was right. His tactical team would die if faced with real combat.
“Of course, sir. I’ll see to it.”
Fast-forwarding in his dream, he met his would-be wife at the Stirling base’s officers club. Her athletic lines shaped a black evening gown that failed to hide the musculature of the former gymnast’s body.
She frowned and sat without speaking.
“Thanks for coming,” he said.
“Do you know how long it took me to get those reservations you just made me cancel?”
He had no idea.
“A long time.”
“Three months. It’s the most popular restaurant in Perth.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I needed to be on the telephone this evening and call the crew back to work tomorrow. I couldn’t possibly have made the trip.”
“But you expected me to make the trip out here instead?”
“I wanted to see you. I hoped you wanted to see me.”
“I did,” she said. “But this is all I get? One night in this waterfront hangout for sailors. Then you’re back at it tomorrow?”
“Sometimes duty calls.”
Her face glowed an ugly red, the remembered pain morphing his subconscious mind’s imagery.
“Well, life is calling me, Terry, and I can’t wait for you to go back and forth to sea on your deployments. This is no way for me to advance a career. This is no way for us to start a family.”
“What are you saying?”
She ripped her finger off and flung it like a javelin into his chest. With each pump of his dying heart, blood spurted over the engagement ring.
Time slipped to a nearer nightmare, and he stood in the port bow section of the Goliath. The ringing of a torpedo’s acoustic seeker hammered the barren walls of the lonely ship.
The echoes pounded his head.
He was alone.
Darkness surrounded him.
Louder… louder… impossibly loud in his bones.
Detonation.
Deluge. Burning lungs. Drowning.
Death.
Cahill awoke with the rapping at his stateroom door, and he choked out a response.
“Enter.”
“Terry,” a sailor said. “Liam wants you on the bridge.”
“How urgent?”
“He says to take your time, but he needs you in the next fifteen minutes. He has an update from Mister Renard.”
Allowing himself an abridged toiletry routine, Cahill made himself presentable before exposing himself to the skeletal night crew.
As he stepped through the berthing area and into the tactical control room, his heart fluttered when he saw Dahan walking behind the men seated at consoles.
Trying to mimic normal, he clenched his jaw to avoid verbalized stupidity.
“Captain,” she said.
“Major,” he said. “I see we’re both awake at an odd hour.”
“Yes.”
He struggled for words.
“Are your accommodations to your liking?”
“The tunnel between the hulls causes an unnecessary delay between my team’s berthing and the control center.”
“I can’t shorten the length for you. It’s made of steel and has dimensional constraints I can’t change.”
“You can move my team into starboard berthing. You have enough spare racks.”
“But you’d lose your privacy. You’d be… exposed… to conceivably every man aboard.”
Her glare negated his statement.
“I see that you don’t care,” he said.
She cocked her head.
“And apparently any concern I have about the matter is irrelevant. Very well, I’ll have your team moved to the starboard side in the morning.”
She cleared her throat and folded her arms. Over her shoulder, he saw his evening watch sonar supervisor bury his chin into his chest to hide a giggle.
“I see,” Cahill said. “May I assume that you’ve already identified four racks of your choosing for your team and will move yourselves at your leisure?”
“Yes.”
“Well then,” he said. “It’s settled. Good night, major.”
“You’re not very observant.”
“What now, major?”
“Did you notice that my team’s evening watch is missing?”
Having avoided eye contact with his own men for fear of ridicule, he’d missed the absence of the empty seat he’d reserved in the control room for the section’s Aman soldier. To protect a shred of his dignity, he lied.
“There are other places on the ship where your team can listen to radio traffic.”
“Two,” she said. “The port control center, which doesn’t interest me since it’s separated from your team, and the bridge.”
“Okay. So he’s with Liam.”
The hard shadow her brow cast over her eyes suggested he’d epitomized buffoonery.
“Yes,” she said. “And with your permission, I will join you on the bridge.”
“So, you had your night watchman wake you when he saw Liam wake me?”
“That’s part of my standing orders to my team.”
“I could make this easier and have you informed any time I’m summoned. No need to go the trouble of spying on me.”
“If you wish,” she said. “But it’s no trouble at all.”
On the bridge, Cahill cowered against the port end of the room’s circular boundary, wishing for a corner in which to hide. Trying to avoid Dahan, he stared into the starry night outside the plexiglass. Despite its energized nautical running lights, the Goliath remained a blackened silhouette bouncing atop the waves.
The makeshift port bow section withstood its stresses better than Cahill’s nerves.
“Captain Cahill?” Dahan asked.
He turned to face her, Walker, and an Aman soldier who appeared muscular for an intelligence technician. The soldier’s voice was deep and strong.
“I intercepted orders mobilizing our airborne reconnaissance and early warning craft, manned and unmanned,” he said.
The Aman man speaking in the first person about Israeli assets concerned Cahill.
“You need to refer to Israeli craft as ‘Israeli’ and not ‘our’. Our assets consist of the three ships in Renard’s fleet.”
Dahan shot a glance at the soldier.
“I apologize,” he said. “It’s a habit.”
“It’s also part of the charade,” Dahan said.
“Which charade?”
Hearing the Frenchman’s familiar voice over the loudspeaker, Cahill stepped closer to the room’s center to see his boss on a screen.
“The charade that Aman remains loyal to the prime minister,” Renard said. “Such pretense may serve us well.”
Cahill realized the deployment of Aman personnel aboard Renard’s ships had happened beyond the knowledge of the military forces upon which they spied, allowing them an influx of trusted sensitive data.
He felt himself a fool for having failed to see that advantage. After he grasped it with Renard’s prompting, the tactical value of Dahan and her team doubled per his estimate, and he shamed himself for letting her sexual allure blind him to ways she could help him succeed and survive.
“Yes,” he said. “That charade. It’s understandable, but to avoid confusion aboard this ship, we must refer to Renard’s fleet’s assets in the first person and Israeli assets in the third person.”