Chapter 36

 

USS Hartford

12:20 p.m.

 

To Amy, it sounded as if the shooting was still happening right in the passageway. No, she decided, it had to be down one level.

As scary and nerve-racking as that was, at least it meant McCann had to be alive. The hijackers must have been shooting at someone in the torpedo room.

She stood against the wall beside the open door, holding the heavy pistol in her hand. She would use it. But she had no illusions about her ability to shoot. Before today, she’d never held a gun. She didn’t know if she’d be a help or a hindrance if she were to enter the fray.

The shooting continued. Finally, Amy just couldn’t wait any longer. She crept toward the door. Crouching down, she felt for a pulse on the man who lay slumped in the doorway. There was nothing. She noticed that he was wearing the same coveralls as Gibbs. He was probably one of McCann’s crew, as well.

She angled her head into the passageway. A second body, again in Hartford coveralls, lay in a twisted pose a few feet away. Amy couldn’t help but cringe at the sight of the blood that covered the man’s face.

Something was happening. It was obvious that they’d started killing the crew members of Hartford. Whoever had killed these two men—they’d called him Kilo—had done so in cold blood. There had been no provocation. Amy wondered what had suddenly changed. She remembered what Kilo had said. Clean up.

Clean up seemed to mean death. The end. Fourteen hundred. Military time for 2:00 p.m. Engagement in less than two hours.

Amy took a couple of deep breaths and made sure she was holding the gun correctly, the way McCann had instructed her to. She jumped as more shots echoed in the passageway. The shots were definitely coming from below.

She moved to the top of the stairs and looked down just as McCann called out below. At the bottom of the stairs, crouching behind a pair of pressurized bottles, a man began to shoot in the direction of the commander’s voice.

Raising her pistol with both hands, Amy squeezed the trigger.

The pistol almost bucked out of her grasp, but the man at the bottom of the stairs looked up in surprise, raised his gun and fired a shot at her. She pulled back, feeling the buzzing heat of the bullet an inch from her ear before it buried itself in the wiring above, showering her with sparks.

Stumbling over the bodies behind her, she backed away from the stairs.

Shots continued to ring out below, and then everything fell completely silent. She didn’t know if she’d even hit her mark.

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