Chapter 49

 

USS Hartford

2:52 p.m.

 

They’d been hit, and Amy’s ears were ringing from the blast of the torpedo.

She looked around. It appeared that there was little damage to the control room. Even the lights, which had flickered several times, still lit the interior of the sub.

Amy leaned to the side and looked at Brody. He had his head back and was looking up into the overhead. Amy didn’t know if he was saying a prayer or meditating, but it didn’t matter. Somehow, they’d gone through hell and survived. She swung around in her seat to look for McCann. He was flipping switches and pressing buttons. He finished what he was doing and their gazes locked.

“Is it over?” she asked in a whisper, afraid she might be dreaming. She was terrified that they weren’t really on the surface, but dead.

He nodded.

Amy got up from the chair and closed the distance between them. Throwing her arms around McCann, she pressed her face against his blood-soaked shirt. He wrapped his arms around her.

“Thank you,” she said brokenly, overwhelmed with emotion and gratitude. “Thank you. Thank you for saving our lives.”

He raised her chin, and she felt her heart skip a beat. There was no time to say or do anything before McCann’s lips closed over hers. She kissed back hard. It was the hungry kiss of two people who’d just been given a second chance at life.

“We couldn’t have done this without you,” he whispered in her ear as he ended the kiss. But he didn’t let her go.

They both turned and looked at Brody. He was staring at the sonar screen.

“Good work, Brody,” McCann told him.

He turned in his chair. The loss of blood seemed to have caught up to him. His face was very pale and his eyes lacked focus.

“Skipper, I know why they didn’t ask me to go in with—”

Before he could finish, an explosion ripped through the upper deck, tearing the deck plates and blasting a twenty-foot hole in Hartford’s hull. Amy found herself on the deck inside the Communication Center, one of the operator’s chairs on top of her. Her ears felt as if they were blocked. But she was still alive.

She tried to sit up and looked around frantically, trying to find McCann and Brody. What she could see of the control room through the radio room door was a disaster area. The main lighting was out, but the emergency lights were somehow still working.

Daylight was pouring in along with the sea. As the green water rushed in, Amy thought that they couldn’t have been hit by another torpedo. There’d been nothing else on the sonar.

It was either the navy bombarding them from above, she decided, or it was a present that the hijackers had left behind.

At that moment, the vessel pitched, and she looked up in time to see one of the radio panels directly above her tip precariously right before it crashed down on her.

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