Terminal Run

The chopper flight had gone on for hours. Finally the chopper hovered over the rear deck of the Explorer II and lowered her down to the deck. By the time she was taken inside she was soaked from the high winds and the driving rain.

Commander Peter Collingsworth met her in a narrow passageway. He had a solid body that could stand to lose a few pounds and stood taller than average, with a full red beard, a tangled mop of reddish-brown hair, jolly blue eyes, a freckle covered nose, and a firm handshake. His voice was higher than his body would suggest, his manner open and friendly. Colleen threw the hood off her head and shook out her hair in the towel she’d been given, gripping the Royal Navy commander’s hand.

“I’m Colleen Pacino,” she said. “I’ma defense contractor sent out by Admiral Patton. One of the survivors in the Piranha is my stepson.”

Collinsworth nodded seriously, releasing her hand. “Welcome aboard Explorer II. I’m the venture commander. The captain of the ship is Kenneth Knowles, who is on the bridge. I’d offer you something to drink, but I assume you’ll want to get to business. If you’ll use this empty stateroom, you can take a shower and change into dry coveralls. I’ll meet you in the control room in five minutes.”

Colleen nodded, ducked into the stateroom, dived under the warm fresh water shower, toweled off, and donned the British coveralls with the odd emblems above the pockets. When she emerged, a crewman was waiting to take her to control, a large but crowded space jammed with monitors, computers, radios, and other equipment. She could hear Collingsworth talking to one of his officers, his voice calm and confident. When he was done he came over to Colleen. She expected him to give a speech about the weather being too severe and the rescue taking too much time.

“Mrs. Pacino. here’s how we see things. Emerald has shoved off and hightailed it out of the storm. She’s disconnected from the hydrophone cables and left the buoy locator for the wreck floating, and we’re retrieving it now. Once we have it aboard we’ll set up the stabilizer system to hover in place over the wreck. The submersible will be going overboard next with the hull-cutting rig.”

“Where is it?” Colleen asked. “I didn’t see it on the deck.”

“It’s in the belly of the ship. It goes down from inside, so we’re not weather limited. It’s lowered by two arms that take her clear of the keel, and that way she can dock on the way up even in a hurricane. There’s something about bad weather and sub wrecks that go together like tea and milk. The Admiralty wouldn’t let a little weather stop a rescue.”

Colleen smiled genuinely for the first time in days.

“Now, the rescue won’t go as planned because we’re out of time. According to the chaps on the Emerald, the sounds have stopped from in-hull a few hours after Captain Catardi reported that the oxygen levels were falling whilst he was suffering from extremely cold temperatures. If we don’t have those crewmen up here in four hours, we’re all wasting our time. We propose using an experimental and potentially dangerous plasma explosive torch over the command module of the sub’s DSV. The idea is it will slice through thick steel in minutes instead of hours. But anything that has the energy to melt through submarine hull material has energy enough to damage the survivors, even breach the hull of the DSV. But there’s no time for anything else. Can you authorize us to use this method?”

“How long will it take?” Colleen asked.

“An hour.”

“Then hurry,” she said.

Collingsworth nodded and jogged down the passageway and disappeared into a hatch. Colleen checked her watch. In an hour, dead or alive, they’d have Anthony Michael back.

“One, display the chart with the cruise missile range circle and our position, and show the estimated time to arrive at the range mark. Good, now please set up a targeting routine with a close-up of the following locations for target selection.” Krivak had no idea what the latitude and longitude of the White House was, but he’d zero in the crosshairs on Washington, D.C.” until he found it. Then he’d lock in the target and move on to the next missile. He worried briefly that One Oh Seven would refuse to launch the missiles, but he wouldn’t know until he fired the weapons.

He thought for a moment that he should approach the firing point in a random zigzag, to throw off any American military units that would try to stop him. It seemed excessively paranoid and would make the time to missile impact much longer. He ruled the idea out. Snare would proceed straight on. He might even speed up from thirty-five knots to fifty, but that might create a train wreck of noise and invite detection. No. the middle course was best. He congratulated himself for his good instincts, and when the targeting was done, there was nothing left to do but wait.