Chapter Twelve

As his infiltration team had stormed the Colorado, Jake’s confidence grew. The reactor startup, the crew lockdown, and the commando insertion had unfolded per plan.

Jake reached overhead and yanked a metal ring that encircled the port periscope. Hydraulic fluid hammered through pipes. The silver, oil-coated tube slithered upward. Kao stood beside him.

“When you’re not handling communications for me, I’ll need you looking around on the scope,” Jake said.

He snapped down two black handles, pushing one and pulling the other to swivel the periscope’s optics. Then he rolled the handle grips.

“This one controls elevation angle. The other switches magnification between low and high.”

Jake pulled back and gestured at the optics. Kao stuck his eye to the eyepiece and fumbled with the handles.

“You got it?” Jake asked.

Kao nodded.

Jake knelt by a cubbyhole, uncoiled tangled cables, and emerged with a headset, microphone, and phone cord.

After screwing a brass connection into a ship’s communication circuit, he slung a coiled cord over his shoulder, donned the headset, and depressed a button on the mouthpiece.

“Maneuvering, control room, test the sound-powered circuit,” Jake said.

“Control room, maneuvering, test satisfactory,” Bass said.

“Maneuvering, control room, I’m on my way to the bridge. I want the emergency propulsion motor ready to propel us out of here before I get there.”

Jake slung a binocular neck strap over his head. Dangling the phone cord, he climbed three stories worth of ladder rungs through the musty and salty confines of the sail.

A steel girder floor creaked and banged against its hinges as Jake climbed into the eerie yellow hue of the explosive handling wharf. Standing on the bridge, a pit at the top of the sail, he yanked the phone cord’s slack and pinched it under the girder floor.

Atop the submarine, Jake reflected that the Colorado was his.

 

*

Having seen fingers ripped off a man’s hand, Scott McKenzie respected nylon lines. He mouthed warnings while draping a line in a figure eight around a cleat and kicking the rope tight against the divot.

“There,” he said. “Now you try it. Here are your gloves.”

A commando unraveled the line and began draping a new figure eight around the cleat.

McKenzie contemplated that spending weeks underwater with the foreign commando could be unpleasant. He tested his demeanor with small talk.

“So,” McKenzie said. “Your mission name is ‘Mister Tiger’. Mister Slate said you would know our names but we weren’t allowed to know yours.”

Tiger stepped back from his figure eight.

“Not bad,” McKenzie said.

The commando placed his rifle to the deck, tied the line around his waist, and thrust lengths of nylon into the water. Tiger now stood at the submarine’s edge.

“My name is to remain a secret,” he said.

“Are you the tiger because you’re the biggest?” McKenzie asked. “It makes sense. Mister Cheetah is the smallest, and Mister Lion looks like the guy in charge, or at least the most experienced.”

“Maybe. Who cares? Your name will be in the newspaper tomorrow but mine won’t.”

McKenzie wanted to add something, but Tiger jumped into the basin.

Dripping, the commando reemerged on the far pier’s ladder. McKenzie watched him strain while lugging the line’s water-logged mass to his feet.

Muscles bulging under his black wetsuit, Tiger draped the line around the cleat twice in a figure eight. He gave McKenzie a thumbs-up.

McKenzie returned the gesture, turned, and repeated the thumbs-up to Jake who watched from two stories above.

 

*

Jake raised his sound-powered phone’s mouthpiece.

“Propulsion motor, bridge, all ahead one third,” he said.

“All ahead one third, aye, sir,” Bass said.

Water churned behind the Colorado. Jake cracked a sardonic smile as his two-billion-dollar instrument of vengeance inched forward.

The ship protested and stopped, and Jake realized that a stabilizer, a vertical wall below the waterline, had met the pier’s rubber bumper.

He raised his mouthpiece and contacted Kao in the control room.

“Mister Lion, right full rudder,” he said.

“Full rudder? The display shows degrees,” Kao said.

“Twenty-five degrees.”

“We are turning the rudder now.”

Jake watched the three-story tall rudder rotate, and the boat’s tail glided away from the pier.

While the Colorado glided, the girder walkway brow to the pier popped free from the submarine’s back. The brow skipped as the submarine crawled underneath it. Bolts snapped and yielded the walkway to the whirlpools forming beside the pier.

“Mister Lion, report ship’s speed. It’s a digital display to your right,” Jake said.

“Speed is two point six knots,” Kao said. “Mister Renard is here with me now.”

“I need Mister Renard to raise the other periscope,” Jake said. “I want him to visually fix our position as we navigate the channel. Landmarks are circled in red on the chart.”

The starboard periscope ascended behind Jake.

“Propulsion motor, bridge, make turns for two point six knots,” he said.

As the Colorado’s bow jutted from the covered wharf’s canopy, the eerie yellow gave way to stars painted on blackness. As Jake’s eyes adjusted, he noticed that the front of the submarine had veered toward the pier.

He reached for the mouthpiece jutting up from the sound-powered phone’s chest plate but realized he needed the wireless unit at his hip to contact McKenzie, who roamed atop the ship’s missile deck. As he fumbled to lift the unit from his hip, Jake realized he could use the sound-powered phone, undetectable outside the Colorado, for all communications after McKenzie returned below.

“McKenzie, hold line eight,” he said.

“Hold line eight, aye, sir,” McKenzie said.

Jake watched McKenzie yell to Tiger, who used the friction of figure eight turns to fight the Colorado. Arms bulged under Tiger’s black wetsuit, and water wrung from the nylon line.

The commando played tug-of-war with the Colorado’s sideways momentum, the mooring line acting as a fulcrum to rotate the submarine seaward.

Its bow edging away from the pier, the Colorado crawled toward the open river basin. Jake aimed the ship between Crab Island, a mound of dredged silt, and the covered wharf’s empty mirror image three hundred yards ahead.

“Mister Lion, rudder amidships.”

“Rudder mid...I do not understand.”

“Let go of it. Now!”

The rudder glided in line with the ship.

“McKenzie, take in line eight.”

“Take in line eight, aye, sir”

McKenzie drew his hand across his neck. Tiger unraveled the figure eight and the Colorado dragged the rest of the line from the pier’s cleat.

As the rope spat water, Jake watched the commando follow it into the basin. Now that he had control of the submarine, Jake wasn’t sure that he cared if the commando boarded the submarine again or was left behind, but Tiger pulled on the rope and kicked his way to the tapered tail of the creeping vessel.

The first of the river’s five illuminated ranges, pairs of sticks that marked the center of a channel, came into view. The range sticking up from Crab Island marked the Colorado’s first leg toward the sea.

A mile behind, the Nebraska was a blurry shadow. Jake knew that in the darkness, the Colorado remained invisible.

 

Tiger, the huskiest and now wettest commando, descended the ladder into the engine room and sealed the lower hatch with a clunk. He spied the blue dungarees of Michael Gant bent over a forest of valves, reached over his back for his rifle, and pointed it at Gant.

“Who are you?”

“Gant. I’m Michael Gant!” he said.

“Where is the injured man?”

Gant pointed, and Tiger walked to maneuvering, the engine room’s control room.

Tiger hoisted Dowd’s wrapped body over his broad shoulder. He then carried the unconscious sailor out of the engine room, up the missile compartment hatches, and lay him topside. Climbing back into the missile compartment, he found life vests in overhead compartments and threw them into a pile.

 

*

“Propulsion motor, bridge,” Jake said, “Shift propulsion to the port main engine. Forget the warm up. It can survive one cold iron start-up.”

Water churned behind the Colorado as evidence that vapor hot enough to melt human bone inundated the port main engine steam turbine. The breeze caused by the Colorado’s nearly doubled speed fanned Jake with humid air.

“Mister Lion, right full rudder. Steady course one-five-two,” Jake said.

With novice drivers, the ship turned as if driving on ice. The bow swung far right, but the Taiwanese commandos proved attentive.

“We have overshot our course,” Kao said. “Mister Renard recommends from his chart that we turn left.”

Jake glanced back at the range markers. Five degrees separated the upper and lower lighted sticks, indicating that the Colorado had drifted toward shoal water.

“Left ten degrees rudder, steady course one-four-seven.”

The Colorado inched back into the channel as it rounded a bend, but the turn revealed the USS Miami at the visiting submarine pier.

Jake had forgotten that the Miami’s berth held a narrow but clear view of the channel. He lifted binoculars to his eyes and spied the Miami’s two topside sentries standing under incandescent lighting.

The Miami’s sentries were watching three off-duty sailors staggering on the pier. The inebriated trio teetered and bounced off each other as they sauntered along the concrete. Jake saw the drunkards hollering, but they were as inaudible as mimes. They distracted the sentries as Jake slipped the Colorado by the Miami unnoticed.

Realizing he was holding his breath, Jake exhaled. As awareness replaced his fear of being discovered, he recognized Kao’s voice in his earpiece.

“Mister Slate,” Kao said. “Mister Renard holds you left of track.”

Jake returned his attention to navigation. He snapped his head forward as the Colorado’s bow pointed at a red flashing light atop a buoy that marked the channel’s left side. He cringed as the buoy’s tethering chain rumbled across the Colorado’s hull and realized he had to react before the chain snared the Trident by its stabilizer.

“Left full rudder. Back emergency. Give me everything you’ve got. Now!”

Water churned behind the rudder as it twisted and pulled the submarine’s tail and its port stabilizer beyond the reach of the chain. Although the rudder drew the submarine from the chain, it steepened its angle toward the islands confining the channel’s outer fringe. The rumbling stopped, but the ship drifted toward shoal water.

“I need a visual fix,” Jake said.

Jake watched the periscope behind him swivel toward the taller light of the nearest range. The periscope swiveled again to the edge of an island and then to a distant range marker. The ex-commander of the Amethyst captured the fastest triangular fix Jake had seen.

Renard’s voice crackled through speakers that felt like muffs over Jake’s ears. He didn’t trust the Frenchman yet, but he welcomed his nautical advice.

“We have shoal in front of us and on either side,” Renard said. “We cannot turn. We must back out.”

“I’ve got a backing bell on,” Jake said.

“We have less than seventy yards to our stern.”

“That’s tight, but I can handle it,” Jake said.

“A submarine of this size backing down on the surface?” Renard asked. “It will have a mind of its own. How can you be so confident?”

“Check the current in the channel,” Jake said.

“Ah,” Renard said. “Pushing against us. It should help straighten us out and reorient us in the channel. Your rudder and engine commands should work.”

Shaken by the Miami, the buoy chain, and the shoals, Jake had paid no attention to which way the current was flowing. But by faking confidence, he had garnered the advice he needed and had looked strong.

“Just a scare,” he said. “Everything’s okay.”

 

*

Surviving in the Chicago Board of Trade war-zone took a combination of killer instincts and analytical control. By making million-dollar trades, Grant Mercer had learned to replace his heart with an ice water pump.

After Jake’s phone call, he had moved millions of dollars from a payphone outside his Chicago apartment. His two million was in one account and Jake’s five million in another.

Not caring if his withdrawal drew attention, he forewarned his bank and took out two hundred thousand dollars in cash and stuffed it into a duffel bag for his flight through Canada.

Wearing leather gloves, Mercer grabbed the wheel of the used Honda he had bought with cash. He turned on the ice-water pump in his chest, shifted the Accord into first gear, and watched his past vanish in the rearview mirror.