Terminal Run

Slowly, painfully, Victor Krivak opened his eyes and blinked at the sea around him. He had no memory of what had happened. It seemed as if a second ago he had pushed off the hull of the Snare and now he floated here with his ears ringing, with blood on his face and in his mouth — it felt as if he’d bitten clear through his tongue. His ears were bleeding, and his back ached where the tanks were touching him. Something had happened, perhaps a self-destruct charge the Snare had set off. Damned lucky thing he’d gotten out in time, he thought. He wondered for a moment if the ship had suffered an attack for the launching of the missiles, but it was impossible. He’d detected no one, the Snare had the acoustic advantage over every submarine on the planet, and there were no aircraft he could see or hear. It had to have been a self-destruct charge.

Krivak yawned to clear his aching ears and found the equipment pack on its tether. He hauled it up and found the life raft, and pulled the carbon dioxide pin on it. The yellow rubber raft inflated until its four-meter diameter floated on the meter-tall waves. Krivak threw the rest of his equipment in. took off his scuba gear and threw it in the raft, then vaulted in, his back and head aching. He opened his waterproof equipment container and pulled out the satellite phone and dialed Amorn. A do/entries, and nothing but a busy signal. This never happened to Amorn’s phone. Something had gone terribly wrong, he realized.

He listened to see if he could hear Amorn’s yacht’s diesels. He scanned the horizon, but there was no yacht visible. Krivak cursed that he had not thought of putting binoculars into the emergency kit, but it shouldn’t have mattered. It was doubly odd. since he had distinctly located the yacht before he fired the cruise missiles. He’d have to use the fall-back plan, and pull the pin on an emergency locator beacon, and concoct a story for whatever civilian authorities picked him up. Odds were, it would be the Americans who came for him. He chuckled at the thought as he pulled off the wet suit and donned cotton coveralls, pulling on the belt over them and stashing the silver-plated.45 in the belt after checking the clip — it wouldn’t do to be attacked by a shark without his Colt, he thought. He opened up some of the ration containers and chewed on a protein bar. After fifteen minutes, he leaned against the side of the raft to wait, and a few minutes later he fell asleep.

“Sir, over there!” Vickerson said, handing Pacino the binoculars. “There’s something yellow floating there.”

“Get out the oars,” Pacino said, looking in the binoculars. “Row all rafts toward that spot.”

For the next hour the four rafts from the Devilfish rowed toward the yellow object. When it was visible, Pacino stared in astonishment. “There’s someone alive,” he said.

It could only be one man, he thought. Victor Krivak. Alexi Novskoyy.

Pacino’s jaw clenched in anger. He rooted through the emergency bag and withdrew a diving knife in its scabbard and looped it onto his belt, hoping no one had seen him.

“Stop rowing.” he said. “Don’t get any closer.” Pacino looked over at Vermeers. “XO, this is a direct order. Don’t allow anyone to come after me. You’rein command.” Pacino dropped off the side of the raft and began swimming to the raft, ditching his life preserver ten feet from the raft so he could swim faster, his body aching, but the pain tolerable. Much more tolerable than the fact that Alexi Novskoyy still lived.

The orbiting P-5 Pegasus antisubmarine patrol plane got the radio orders to investigate an emergency locator beacon at the location of the explosions that the Mark 12 pod had detected. On the orders of Admiral McKee, they had stayed out of the area, out of range of the Snare’s Mark 80 antiair missiles. But after all the underwater detonations — the last one probably taking out the Mark 12 pod itself — McKee had judged the seas safe, and had vectored in the P-5.

Far to the west, fifty miles off the coast of Washington, New York, and Philadelphia, several squadrons of Air Force Scorpion interceptors orbited over the Atlantic, all of them in touch with the KC-10 AWACS radar plane orbiting at forty thousand feet and searching at peak alert for the incoming cruise missiles. Had the Snare managed to shoot the missiles in secret, they would have flown in stealthily, below the level of the air search radars, and finding them would have been a miracle, but with the warning from the Devilfish of the exact time and location of launch, the Air Force had been able to scramble every asset with wings to search for the elusive plasma-tipped weapons.