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  Amy stood up and he pulled her behind him as two sets of footsteps came back down the passageway. McCann was certain that the two men went down the steps to the torpedo room.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going from here?” she asked.

  “We’re heading aft.”

  “What are you trying to do?”

  McCann wasn’t accustomed to giving reasons for decisions and orders on his own ship, but he knew this was a special case. Having already seen her persistence in action, he figured it was easier and quicker to explain.

  “We know there are at least two of them forward, probably in the ship’s office. There are two below us in the torpedo room. I don’t know how many of them are up in the control room, so it would not be too wise charging up there and trying to overpower them.”

  “Good thinking,” she said encouragingly. “Especially when your own men are against you.”

  “Not all of them,” he said for the second time. “I found my sonar man knocked out and trussed up in the torpedo room. There could be more of them on board in the same situation as him.”

  “Then, aft it is. But we have to pass the stairs to the torpedo room. They might spot us.”

  “We just have to be quick and careful.” He was ready to go, but Amy grabbed his arm, holding him back.

  “In case we’re separated, where are we going exactly?”

  “We’ll be taking the tunnel through the reactor.”

  “To the engine room?”

  He nodded.

  “You’re going to try to shut down the reactor, aren’t you?”

  She was reading his mind. And if he didn’t get her moving, she’d be asking next for the sequence of what he planned to do. She’d even have him draw a schematic of it.

  “We’ve got to go, Amy.” He took her by the hand and pulled her out into the passageway.

  ~~~~

  Chapter 23

  USS Hartford

  9:15 a.m.

  Once the BSY-1 sonar consoles started coming—one by one—back to life, Paul Cavallaro began running tests on them. Mako waited until the navigation officer gave him a thumbs-up before he turned to his security officer.

  “They went out the hole on the outboard side of the office,” Kilo told him. “I had one of the men follow the passage they cut. They went down to the torpedo room.”

  “The two stationed down there to work the tubes didn’t see them?”

  Kilo shook his head.

  This was a problem. Mako had wanted the commander where he could keep an eye on him. He considered the situation from McCann’s perspective. He wanted to believe that Darius McCann wouldn’t destroy his own submarine, but he wasn’t so sure about that. Navy officers—and submarine commanders, in particular—can be real cowboys at times, and they can do incredibly heroic and stupid things in situations like this.

  He would have liked to keep him alive. But Mako didn’t foresee any complications in their plans. They’d sent off the first communication. Everything was moving ahead right on schedule. McCann was just making his own survival less viable.

  “How are the two they knocked out?”

  “Still out,” Kilo told him. “They’ll be no good to us considering our schedule.”

  Mako would have liked to have more under his command, but it wasn’t possible. He couldn’t afford to lose many more at this point. “Have you been monitoring the multi-function display terminals?”

  “We have, but nothing’s shown up. McCann knows where the cameras are and he’s been avoiding them.”

  Mako thought about that. McCann also knew where the other MFD units were located, which meant he’d be able to access views of the control room. He frowned, mulling over the possibility of the sub driver being able to identify him. That made McCann’s survival even less tenable, but Mako didn’t like it. McCann might have already seen who his enemy was.

  He motioned toward the two cameras in the control room. One was trained on the conn itself.

  “Have these disabled now,” he told Kilo. After the command was passed along, he motioned Kilo to join him in the radio room, where he was out of earshot of the others in the control room.

  “Take another man and start a search through the boat. Start in the captain’s stateroom, just in case. Make a quick sweep of the living quarters. McCann is too charged up to hide in some bunk or under a table.”

  “The woman might.”

  “That would be good news for us,” Mako said thoughtfully. “Find her and we’ll be able to use her as a bargaining chip with the commander. He’s the hero type. He might not want to let the girl die.”

  Kilo nodded curtly. Mako knew his man wouldn’t have any problem killing a woman or anyone else. He would do what he was ordered to do. Case closed.

  “Lock doors as you go. Searching the torpedo room thoroughly is critical. With all the munitions there, we don’t want to tempt him with the opportunity of doing any serious damage. Also, make sure the engine room is sealed off.”

  “That will take some time. There are a lot of places to hide on a submarine.”

  “Then start now,” Mako ordered. “Keep thinking what would be the biggest bang he can get for a buck. And buy us time. Even if you keep him on the run, we’re moving closer every minute to our objective. That’s the most important thing.”

  “What do you want done with him when we find him?”

  “Either he surrenders or you kill him.”

  “And the woman?”

  “She’s of no real use to us, and you know the complication she’d be if she lives.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  ~~~~

  Chapter 24

  Pentagon

  9:45 a.m.

  Seth McDermott cruised into the conference room waving a copy of Hartford’s hijackers’ demands before Bruce and Sarah even knew that communication had been established.

  “They don’t identify themselves,” Seth told the gathered team. “But it sounds strictly al-Qaeda. They’ve identified two dozen prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. They’re demanding their immediate release.”

  Bruce Dunn took the piece of paper and quickly scanned the names of the prisoners on the list. He didn’t recognize any. He passed the list to Sarah and turned to one of their assistants.

  “Don’t bother with an A to Z, yet. I need to know where they came from and how they got there. I also need to know how long they’ve been there. Anything you need besides that?”

  “No,” she said, handing the list to the assistant.

  “Then get going,” Bruce snapped. “I want it done ten minutes ago.”

  The young officer took off with the list.

  “Is that all of it?” Dunn asked Seth.

  The young man shook his head. “They’re demanding the transfer of five hundred million dollars to a bank account in Switzerland and safe transport out of the country.”

  “Or what?” Sarah asked.

  “If their instructions aren’t followed, they intend to detonate the submarine in New York Harbor at 0600 tomorrow morning,” Seth relayed the information. “And if there is any attempt to stop them, they’ll launch every Tomahawk cruise missile on the sub at targets up and down the Eastern seaboard and then self-destruct right there in Long Island Sound.”

  “The end result is the same,” Sarah said.

  “Worse,” Bruce replied grimly. “We’ll have mass destruction in the cities from the missiles and radiation poisoning that will make much of the region, including New York City, uninhabitable. It’ll make the meltdown at Chernobyl look like an afternoon in the park.”

  For a long time, Dunn had felt that the East Coast was way too vulnerable. The entire region was so densely populated and, in the event of an emergency, there was really no place for people to go. Not in a short time frame like the one they were facing now.

  Seth wasn’t finished. “You’re right. They say they have the VLS weapons locked in on an unspecified number of nuclear power plants—starting
with Waterford, Indian Point, and Three-Mile Island.”

  “The question is whether the president will order a strike,” Sarah said, looking at Bruce.

  “They’re also claiming that their sonar is fully operational,” Seth added. “They say they have the ability and the will to sink any ship and down any aircraft that directs hostile action against them.”

  “Jesus,” one of the team murmured.

  Dunn put a checkmark next to the name of Paul Cavallaro before looking around the room. Between those assigned to the job and others who were in and out with information, there were a dozen people in the conference room. But after Seth’s news, you could hear a pin drop. The impact of this could be so far reaching, the fatalities unimaginable.

  “What’s the mood next door?” Sarah asked the question that had also been forming in Bruce’s mind.

  It was all fairly straightforward, Bruce thought. Does the U.S. lie down and submit, hoping that these hijackers would honor their promise? Or do we take the old approach of acting tough, of charging in and having the situation very literally blow up in our faces.

  Seth said. “No one is committing to anything yet. They’re trying to sort out the information before putting together a number of possible responses.”

  And most of the senior officers were probably already aboard choppers en route to the White House. Potential plans would be formulated next door, but the final decisions would be made by the man on top, President Hawkins. Well, Bruce thought, by Hawkins and the string-pullers behind the curtain.

  “New reports are in from FBI on the pictures from the shipyard’s surveillance cameras,” Sarah announced, looking at her computer screen and the message that had just popped up. “Let’s get back to work people and see if we can figure out who these bastards are.”

  ~~~~

  Chapter 25

  Newport, RI

  10:00 a.m.

  All modes of transportation on the East Coast had come to a screeching halt. The airlines were grounded. Private planes were not being given permission to fly, either. The skies had to be left clear for military aircraft. The rails for most of New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts ran along the shoreline, so Amtrak and all commuter lines shut down, too. The traffic jams on every highway leading from the coast—from Atlantic City to New York to Boston—had paralyzed the entire region.

  In short, the East Coast was in a state of panic.

  Anthony McCarthy could handle panic. For three decades, he’d been in the business of politics. He worked on his first presidential campaign, stuffing envelopes, while still in high school. Now a nationally connected political operative, he was a principal in one of Washington’s most sought-after lobbying consulting firms. Many present and would-be political figures believed that, if you wanted to get elected, Anthony McCarthy was absolutely the best man out there to run your campaign.

  He had skills, he thought matter-of-factly. And he had a few gifts.

  One gift that McCarthy had recognized in himself early on was his ability to predict during the last three months of campaigning the outcome of any race. Not just most of the time. One hundred percent of the time. In presidential races, he’d been correct in every one of the past seven elections, and his own candidate wasn’t always on the winning ticket.

  The Hawkins-Penn presidential race had been in the bag for the past six months, if not longer. Hawkins had done everything he could to alienate the world, and the American public had grown tired of it. In fact, McCarthy was so relaxed about the outcome of the election that he’d gone along with his client’s decision not to campaign the final day. When John Penn wanted to go home, he’d just passed the word, made the requisite cancellations and apologies, thanked everyone for their support, and let the affected organizers know that President Penn wouldn’t forget them down the road.

  But then the tide had turned.

  This morning, in his house in Georgetown, McCarthy woke up sweating, staring up at the dark ceiling, knowing that the bottom had dropped out. A moment later, his phone had started to ring.

  Transportation was a colossal problem for everyone on the East Coast. But for a man who’d helped generals and admirals and astronauts win Senate seats, it was a non-issue.

  McCarthy had pulled out all the stops. He twisted arms and called in favors. Inside of an hour, he was on an Air Force jet that took him from Washington to Quonset Point, Rhode Island. And from there, a navy chopper delivered him to Newport, depositing him on the front lawn of Senator John Penn’s mansion on the water.

  Striding across the soft wet ground now, looking at the mist clinging dismally to the white edifice, McCarthy wasn’t worried that a nuclear submarine was about to blow a few million people off the face of the earth. No, he had more important things to worry about. He wasn’t ready to arrange for the burial of a campaign. They might be done. Defeated. Kaput. But they could at least go down with some dignity.

  Inside, the mood of his client and the staff and aides was far worse than McCarthy had foreseen. Congressman Peter Gresham, Senator Penn’s running mate, was stranded in Ohio where he’d been campaigning the day before.

  McCarthy rolled his sleeves up and went to work.

  “There’s a line of reporters at least ten deep out by the gate,” he announced to the roomful of gloomy faces. “We’re calling a news conference, Senator.”

  “And say what?” the senator asked. “Repeat what they already know? I’ve made a dozen phone calls to the Pentagon, the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security. I’ve even called the White House, but there’s not one iota of material that they’re not controlling carefully.”

  Despite McCarthy’s connections, he hadn’t been able to get anything out of Washington, either. “President Hawkins had a press conference at nine o’clock. The White House has already announced that he’s planning to have another one at eleven o’clock. And knowing the crew that’s pushing his campaign, he or the Vice President will continue to have one every two hours after that.”

  “He’s updating the people with what’s going on. He has a legitimate reason to be on camera,” Penn argued. “I don’t. This isn’t the time for politics.”

  “Excuse me, Senator, but why do you think he’s on? He could put any number of his people in front of those cameras. He has a press secretary to do the job.”

  “This is different.”

  “Is it?” McCarthy argued. “In 2001, Bush only appeared on camera once on September 11th.”

  “That wasn’t an election year,” Greg Moore chirped in.

  “You got it.” McCarthy pointed to the young man. He looked around the room, waiting for his enthusiasm to start to ripple through the rest of them. Everyone seemed to be avoiding eye-contact.

  Two of the aides rushed to get a fax that was printing in the next room. Another aide rubbed on an imaginary spot on the coffee table. A young woman reached for the phone practically before it rang. They were all scared shitless. This was not the same firecracker bunch that had helped get them to this point.

  “Anthony’s right, honey,” Penn’s wife said from the doorway. “We have to find a reason to put your pretty face on TV.”

  McCarthy hadn’t noticed the willowy red-head come in. She was wearing a white turtleneck shirt under faded jean overalls and holding her wet lap dog, a yappy and beloved shiatsu, under an arm. As always, Anna Penn looked so completely opposite to any potential First Lady ever. But Anthony didn’t think her husband minded, nor did the segments of the population they’d polled over the past year. People simply liked her as she was—crazy and unpredictable to the bone. Somebody else would have to rein her in once they were in the White House. It was just his job to get them there.

  “Actually, coming up with a reason for a press conference is easy,” she continued, winking at McCarthy. “We’ll just have Aileen take Owen out for some air in his wheelchair and push him down the Forty Steps and off the Cliff Walk.”

  The suggestion elicited a small gasp from one of the jun
ior aides. McCarthy eyed the young woman. She obviously hadn’t spent much time in the company of the senator’s wife. If she had, she’d have known of the woman’s sometimes bizarre sense of humor.

  “It’s raining outside,” Penn responded to his wife with a smile. “Even if Owen is willing, I don’t think Aileen will go for it. You know how she hates getting wet. No, honey. We’ll save that one for another day.”

  “Just trying to help, dear.”

  As she went out, the senator turned his attention to McCarthy. “Look, Anthony. I already looked like a fool once today. I’m not doing it again. I’m not going before TV cameras knowing less than they know.”

  “We can come up with a reason” McCarthy said, looking around the room, hoping for some contribution. “Perhaps not what Mrs. Penn is suggesting, but something legitimate and meaningful,”

  “You can volunteer to be on any team that will negotiate with the hijackers, Senator,” Greg Moore suggested.

  John Penn shook his head. “No. You can bet Jesse Jackson is already putting together an expedition.”

  “Maybe he hasn’t.” McCarthy said with enthusiasm. “We should try.”

  “I’m not about to risk making this situation worse by jumping into the middle just to get a little attention,” Penn said shortly.

  “You brought up Jesse Jackson. If the hijackers aboard that ship will respect a black American—”

  “Stop right there,” Penn said, standing up. “I want everyone out…except Anthony and Greg.”

  The aides quickly cleared the room. Greg Moore looked uncomfortable. When the door closed, Penn turned to McCarthy.

  “Look, Anthony. I’m in the position I’m in today because, in the view of my party, I represent a philosophy of governing that is better than the man in the White House. They back me because I have a record in the Senate that says exactly what I stand for. I’m a lawyer and I stand firmly within the mainstream of U.S. political thought. Jesse Jackson has made a career out of being an outsider. Whether he really is an outsider or not is beside the point. He has met with successes negotiating with some of America’s enemies because of his status as an outsider.”