Terminal Run

Colleen ran to him and managed to touch his hand, but the boy’s skin was gray and cold and stiff. A Royal Navy officer held her back while they wheeled Anthony Michael into the ship’s medical department. She wandered back on deck, not knowing what to do, and finally decided to enter the command module of the deep submergence vehicle. The interior was airless and stuffy and cold, and there was a pile of blankets to the port side of the hatch. What a miserable place to die, she thought.

They’d been too late.

“Mrs. Pacino?”

“Yes, what is it, Commander?” Colleen looked up, startled, and stood in the passageway outside sickbay. The doctor on board the Explorer II, an emergency medical specialist, discarded his soiled lab jacket and donned a clean one, then pulled off his sweat-soaked cap.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. Your stepson, the young midshipman, had been unconscious too long. His temperature was perilously low when he was pulled out of the vehicle. We attempted three times to restart his heart, but he never responded. He was pronounced dead a few minutes ago.”

Colleen stared at the rocking deck, steadying herself on a hand hold on the bulkhead. Michael will be devastated, she thought. “How are the others?”

“They all lived. They’re stable, at least, but all three could possibly have suffered brain damage. The women are in comas and Commander Catardi is resting.”

“May I see him?”

The doctor was opening his mouth to speak when another doctor slammed the door open. “Dr. Crowther, the boy’s body moved!”

The doctor dashed back into the room. Colleen followed him, trying to see in the window, but they had moved around a corner. There was no news for the next hour, but finally the doctor returned, a grim expression on his face.

“His heart seemed to restart spontaneously,” he said, “but this is probably just a postponement of the inevitable. He’s in a deep coma, and we don’t have the equipment we need to evaluate him here at sea. He’s stable for now, so I recommend we sail for England, where we can obtain the best treatment.”

Colleen nodded. “I want to see Commander Catardi, and then take me to Anthony Michael.”

Catardi lay on the pillow, his face pasty and swollen.

“Commander? Can you hear me?” she asked. He looked at her, a question on his face. “I’m Midshipman Padno’s stepmother, Colleen Pacino.”

“How is he?” Catardi croaked.

“Not good. Commander,” she said, explaining.

“The others?”

“They’ll live, but there may be brain damage.”

Catardi mumbled something.

“What?”

“Patch,” he said. “Patch saved us.” It took a few minutes for Catardi to tell the story, and at the end, he fell asleep in the middle of a sentence.

Colleen was taken to Anthony Michael’s bedside. She winced as she saw him. He was white as the sheets he lay on and looked as if he’d fallen off a building. Every square inch of his face was bruised and bandaged. She took his hand, the coldness of it making her shiver. She knew the boy’s father would want to know what had happened, so she drafted an Email and sent it to John Patton, for him to relay to Pacino. She returned to sickbay and waited next to the boy and tried not to think about whatever it was her husband was doing, but from what she knew as head of Cyclops, this probably involved the SSNX, and it probably involved whatever submarine had sunk Anthony Michael, because short of taking care of that, there was no force on earth that could keep Pacino from his injured son’s side.

Captain Lien Hua sat quietly at a table in what looked like the officers’ mess of a ship. The photographs on the bulkhead were pictures of submarines on the surface, making it clear this was not a surface ship. He’d been captured by an American submarine, and after Zhou’s orders to fire on the American survivors, this was the worst possible place to be.

The door opened, and two tall, overfed Americans led in Leader Zhou Ping. He seemed pale, but had no bruises, so the Americans must have beaten him on his back. Zhou’s eyes did not seem haunted, and the thought occurred to Lien that Zhou was in a trance or drugged, but his eyes seemed clear enough. The door shut, and Zhou sat down.

“How are you, Captain?”

“Did they beat you? Their torture of me involves making me wait for the beating.”

“They have not beaten me. Their captain and first officer brought me into their stateroom.”

“You spoke to them?”

“They spoke to me. They will be repatriating us to the Peoples Republic as soon as arrangements can be made. A rendezvous with a surface ship is being arranged. A helicopter will remove us from this submarine and take us to the deck of the destroyer. We will wait there for a PLA Navy helicopter to pick us up and take us to one of our own ships from Battlegroup Three, which has left the Bo Hai to get us.”

Lien stared at his first officer. “They’reletting us go, just like that? After you fired shots at their countrymen? Do they know you did that?”

“The second-in-command of their ship Leopard, the one we sank, woke up and told them everything. I confirmed it to them.”