The ship took a huge upward angle, and Pete slid aft, against the conn. Frank’s dead body did as well, leaving a red smear of blood along the deck, all the way to the dive chair.
Somehow Moody had fought her way to control. “What the hell is going on?”
“Torpedo!” said Pete. “They’re trying to stop us before we get to Eris!”
She stepped over Frank’s body, barely giving him a look. “What happened to him?”
“He was getting in the dive chair as the torpedo hit. He fell—”
“How far are we from the shoals?” she interrupted. “From the island?” Pete needn’t have worried about providing a detailed explanation about Frank. For the moment, Moody was laser-focused on saving the ship and fighting the enemy.
Pete pictured the chart in his memory. “We’re right on top of the shoals … maybe two miles away … nine miles from the island. Four miles until we’re inside the safety radius…”
“Safety radius?” She looked at Pete quizzically.
“Just trust me,” he said. “That’s where we’ll be safe from the drones.”
“Four miles at twenty knots…”
“Twelve minutes.”
“Good enough,” she said. She lunged for two red levers over the dive chair and pulled them forward: the emergency blow system.
An enormous whoosh of air filled the control room as the actuating valves opened. All around them, huge banks of compressed air shot into the main ballast tanks of the Polaris, pushing out thousands of tons of seawater, making them instantly buoyant. The submarine shot to the surface.
“Ahead flank!” she yelled, and the automated system acknowledged the order with a ring of its bell.
The computer counted down their depth as they raced upward. Ninety feet … eighty … seventy …
Finally they broke through the surface, the ship actually rising fifteen feet into the air. It crashed back into the ocean with a splash, and soon reached equilibrium.
“We’re still at an angle,” said Pete.
“Because of the torpedo hit,” said Moody. “We’ve taken on a lot of water aft, weighing it down … maybe we’re still taking it on. Automatic flood control should limit the damage. On the surface, like this, can we make it over those shoals?”
Pete raised the scope after briefly glancing at their speed. Even at ahead flank they were moving at only seventeen knots, perhaps limited by the flooding and the angle of the ship. Moody scrambled forward and operated the trim system to limit the damage, frantically cutting out alarms to limit the noise in control.
The scope came up and Pete put his eye to it, quickly trained it toward the island. Directly in front of him, he could see the discoloration in the water that marked the shoals that surrounded Eris. Farther ahead, he could see the low brown shimmer that was the island. Above it flew a swarm of drones.
“We’re right on top of the shoals…” said Pete. Just then, they heard the hull scraping bottom. The whole ship shook as they slid over the top.
Just as soon, it was over. Pete kept his eyes on the scope. A drone, a scout, was directly over them, soaring into the sky, signaling their presence.
“It doesn’t sound like that worsened the flooding,” Moody said when the scraping stopped. “Flood control has completely sealed off the engine room.”
Pete took his eye off the scope to check speed; it was dropping. When he looked back outside, three drones were low to the water, flying directly toward them.
“Drones!” he said. They disappeared from view as they flew directly overhead.
The first bomb hit the missile deck directly behind them and exploded. The noise inside the ship was deafening. That part of the deck, however, was superstructure, and acted as armor for them, absorbing the explosion without further damaging the pressure hull. Through the scope, Pete saw a hole ripped in the steel, a jagged gash, but the pressure hull below was still watertight.
“How many drones?!” shouted Moody.
“Three so far,” said Pete, just as the second bomb hit.
It landed right next to the sail. The scope jerked so hard from the force that Pete felt like he’d been punched in the face. The scope started to drift downward, but Pete fought to hold it up so he could keep looking.
“External hydraulics is damaged,” said Moody, cutting out an alarm. “Pressure dropping fast.” Pete watched as the third drone swerved to avoid its comrade. As a result, it dropped its bomb slightly off target, and it landed harmlessly in the ocean off their port side.
He barely had time to feel any relief before he looked up and saw at least a dozen drones heading directly toward them from the island.
“More on the way,” he said.
“How many?”
“Too many.”
They both looked at speed.
“How far do we need to go?” she said. “How far to this safety radius?”
“Maybe a mile left,” he said. Speed had dropped to fifteen knots. Pete did the math: four minutes until they reached safety.
The Polaris kept churning through the water. Pete knew they couldn’t survive a coordinated attack by that many drones, especially in their already damaged condition. One more hit might rip open the hull, ignite a fire in the missile compartment, and spread radioactive debris from the warheads. They were pointed directly at each other, the Polaris and the incoming swarm of drones. The island was clearly in sight now; he could see the control tower on the north side. More drones were taking off, sweeping up into the sky, ready to finish them off. The ESM alarms throughout the control room screeched.
Moody fought her way to the command console. “We’re five and a half miles from the island!”
Pete kept his eye on the scope. “We have to make that five-mile line.” The drones were screaming toward them.
“Four hundred yards,” she said. “Three hundred … two hundred … one hundred.”
“Brace yourself!” said Pete as the drones reached directly overhead. The lead drone dropped its bomb, which landed on the aftmost exposed part of the deck, tearing a new hole in it.
But then the rest of the drones pulled up, and circled them. They had made it, slipped across the five-mile line.
“Yes!” shouted Pete.
“All back full!” said Moody. It took Pete a second to realize what she was doing. While they were now safe from the drones, they were speeding at fifteen knots toward the jagged coral shore of the island. The big ship reluctantly slowed, then stopped.
The big engines changed directions, and the ship started to slow. Pete watched as the island loomed in front of them, the magnification of the scope making it seem like collision was inevitable. But the ship slowly ground to a halt, the speed dropping to zero.
“Are we good?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. Through the scope, he felt like he could almost reach out and touch land. “Somehow.”
Pete rotated and searched behind them—no sign of the Typhon boat. He knew now precisely where the five-mile line was, having seen the drones relent. But Carlson was out there somewhere. He had an idea.
“Keep backing up,” he said.
“Why?” said Moody.
“We want to get close to that five-mile line,” he said. “As close as possible.”
“Without going over.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“All back one-third,” she said.
He watched through the scope, trying to fix in memory the exact point where the drones had relented. “Here!” he said as they approached.
“All stop!”
The ship slowly drifted to a halt, dead in the water. Only the nose of the ship, and the tower, was above the surface, the aft end of Polaris weighed down by the flooding. Pete knew they were inside the five-mile radius—because the curious drones swooping above them weren’t dropping their bombs. But he hoped they were very close to that line.
“They’re out there somewhere,” said Pete. “Watching us. They could kill us now if they wanted.”
Moody shook her head grimly. “Those shoals might protect us—not sure how well their torpedoes would navigate over them. And they may not want to shoot us now. They could have done it long before. They may want to board us—seize us. Save their man McCallister. Find out what we know. Dissect every piece of technology onboard. There’s no way I’m going to let that happen.”
“We’ll fight?”
“Not in this condition,” she said. “But I’ll scuttle the ship before I let those bastards have us.” She started heading aft, and Pete yelled after her.
“We might not have to. We’re safe here. But they’re not safe where they are.”
“Are you sure?”
“We’re right on the line. Maybe we can lure them to the surface, let the drones attack them.”
“Well,” Moody said as a new flooding alarm shrieked and the Polaris continued to take on water. “I don’t have any better ideas.”
* * *
They hurried to the forward hatch, walking up a steep angle to get to it. As they left the control room, they could hear the rushing of water behind them as it flooded into the ship. They didn’t have much time. Moody spun open the hatch, and together they muscled it open and climbed topside.
The sun blinded Hamlin at first; he hadn’t realized how dark it was inside the ship. The equatorial heat, as well—the humidity, the sea breeze—it was almost too much to bear. He found himself gasping, his body starved for good air. As he breathed it in, he could feel himself getting stronger. Seagulls swooped overhead, their shadows crisscrossing the battered deck of the submarine.
But they weren’t gulls; they were the drones. Agitated, like bees, and the Polaris had approached too close to the hive. They swooped overhead, buzzing Pete and Moody so closely that they ducked. Each one clutched a bomb in its talons, but obedient to their coding, they didn’t drop them. Hamlin noticed that they looked old, their wings battered in some cases and frayed, their bodies no longer shiny. But they still flew with deadly, precise alacrity.
“Out there,” said Pete, pointing. “The Typhon boat is out there somewhere.”
“They won’t surface. They know better, with all these drones out.”
“When they see the drones are avoiding us … maybe they’ll think they’re safe. Maybe they’ll think the shoal line is the safety barrier. If we’re right on the line and they surface out there—”
“The drones will get them.”
“That’s my plan,” said Pete.
“So what are they waiting for?”
“Our surrender,” said Pete. He quickly stripped off his uniform shirt, and then his white T-shirt. He waved it in the air. He did it for five minutes, hoping someone on the Typhon boat was observing him through their periscope. The sun pounded on his shoulders, and soon he was sweaty with exertion.
“There!” said Moody, pointing. Pete stopped waving his shirt momentarily, and looked in the direction Moody was pointing.
It was a periscope.
But instead of driving straight at them, the submarine adjusted course, and drove to the south.
“What are they doing?” said Moody.
“Not sure,” said Pete. He could see them driving south a few hundred yards before turning back toward them.
“Which way is north?” Pete asked Moody, the realization dawning on him. She pointed forward.
If the direction north was twelve o’clock, the Typhon boat had driven itself to seven o’clock. Precisely the location of the break in the shoals.
“That’s the break in the shoals,” said Pete. “The one place they can pass at periscope depth. Somehow they knew.”
Moody nodded grimly, her thoughts confirmed once again: they’d been betrayed.
The enemy submarine glided easily through the break in the shoals. It crept closer and closer to them; he could just barely make out the small V of water it left in the periscope’s wake. Pete imagined Jennifer Carlson looking at him through the scope, magnified, with the crosshairs of the reticule on his chest. Soon it looked so close that Pete could see the glass of the scope lens. He was worried the two ships might collide.
Then suddenly, the giant submarine rose from the water.
The enemy boat rose faster than the water could fall from it, so the sea poured off it in sheets as it surfaced. Just as Carlson had told him in shaft alley, the ship had been at sea for years; its paint was chipped, and starfish adhered to the hull. It looked like an ancient ghost ship that the sea was relinquishing to them.
Instantly the drones adjusted their flights, a contingent of them peeling off the Polaris and swarming over the enemy boat.
But none dropped their bombs.
“Shit,” said Moody.
“They’re too close,” said Pete. “Inside the five-mile line, just like us.”
“So now what do we do?”
“We have to make them back up,” he said. “Just a few feet.” He thought for a minute, thought about what little he knew about Carlson, her fearful voice on the radio in shaft alley. Now that they knew they were safe from the drones, an armed boarding party was starting to climb out of the Typhon submarine, methodically loading two small inflatable boats and putting them over the side.
“How…” she said, but Pete was already climbing back down the ladder to enter the Polaris.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“Take this,” he said, handing Moody his shirt. “I have to make a call.”
* * *
He ran aft, aided by the angle of the ship, running downhill all the way. The angle had grown steeper, and the smell of seawater, and the sound of it rushing in, permeated the ship.
Through the missile compartment and into the engine room, almost falling as gravity aided his sprint aft. He opened the door into the tunnel and ran into the turbine room.
Water was up to the deck plates. Some of the turbines were still running, but the noises were unhealthy. The symphony of machinery he’d heard earlier, machines lovingly maintained by Ramirez, was now discordant. Gears were grinding, and steam was hissing from the turbines and pumps that were in their death throes. Pete continued running aft, to the ladder to shaft alley. Looking down, he saw there was just about a foot of space remaining above the water; he hoped the radio was still dry and functional.
As he stood at the top of the ladder, he also considered that the water might not be seawater—it could be coolant leaking from a damaged reactor, which would be lethally radioactive. It might also be alive with electricity, through the bared wires or deranged generators that were submerged beneath it. But there was no time to check, and he was running out of options. He took a deep breath, and dropped down the ladder.
The water was up to his chest, and got deeper as he fought his way aft. When he got to the alcove where the radio was hidden, only his head was above water. He reached in and pulled it out. He pressed the red button and spoke. “Typhon, this is Polaris.”
He waited a moment, hearing nothing but static. He was about to give up when a response came.
“Hamlin, this is Captain Carlson. Is that gushing water I hear? Are you coming around now that you’re about to sink?” The voice was clearer than he remembered it, perhaps aided by their proximity.
“No time to argue,” he said. “You need to surface and send a boat over here so we can surrender to you. Moody is ready.”
“I see her waving that flag. A boarding party is on the way.”
“Thank god,” said Pete. “We’ve got sick people onboard. Very sick.”
There was a pause. “Nice try, Hamlin,” she said. “I’ll have to see that for myself.”
“Send your doctor.”
“I’ll see if he’s available,” she said. “I think today is the day he golfs.” She disconnected.
He shut off the radio and climbed out of shaft alley. He ran forward, through an engine room that was now almost completely dark.
At the watertight door, Doctor Haggerty met him: somehow he always knew when Pete was in shaft alley. He looked panicked. “Are we sinking?”
“Looks that way,” said Pete.
“We’ve got to get out of here! Aren’t we right next to Eris Island?”
“How did you know that?” asked Pete.
The doctor shrugged nervously. “I’ve been paying attention, glimpsing at our position on the chart when I can. We’ve got to get to that island!”
Pete stared hard at him.
“And we need to help Finn,” the doctor added.
“You’re right. Let’s go.”
They ran forward to the escape trunk, uphill all the way, fighting the steep angle of the ship. When they got there, they found Finn sitting calmly on his steel bench, seemingly resigned to going down with his ship. He looked awful; his days locked in the dark had taken their toll. His skin was sallow, his eyes sunken. He looked, Pete confirmed, like a very sick man.
“Wake up, Captain,” said Pete.
“Look who’s here,” he said, opening his eyes. “What’s going on?”
“Port call,” said Pete. “The doctor and I thought we’d take you out for some fresh air.”
“I don’t know if I can today, I’m pretty busy.”
Pete was already unbolting the grid that had kept Finn captive. He was dripping wet, and water pooled around his feet as he worked. The grate dropped to the deck with a clang. The captain started to climb down.
“No,” said Pete. “We’re going to use your little room here, if you don’t mind.”
The doctor climbed up the ladder. Pete handed up three hoods from the locker, followed by a tightly packed inflatable raft.
“Grab that one, too,” said the captain, pointing to a tightly bundled canister wrapped in the same Day-Glo orange nylon. “That’s the motor.”
Soon all three men crowded into the escape trunk with the two bundles. Pete pulled up the bottom hatch behind them and turned the locking ring until it was tightly shut. It was suddenly quiet as they were sealed off from the rest of the noisily sinking ship.
“How far below the surface are we?” said the captain. “I can feel the angle.”
“I think about twenty feet right here,” said Pete. “The forward trunk is completely out of the water. The engine room is almost completely flooded. And we’re getting deeper.”
The captain moved deftly around the trunk, verifying that all the valves were lined up correctly, then he handed each of the men a yellow hood. “Put these on. They’ll help you get to the surface.”
Soon they each had a hood on, and gave a thumbs-up. Finn opened a valve, and the trunk began to fill with water.
“We’ll fill it up first!” he shouted above the noise. “Then we’ll equalize pressure, and we’ll swim out.”
The water was soon up to their knees, and it was hard not to feel panic as they sat in a small steel chamber that was rapidly filling with water. Pete felt his heart pounding as the waterline reached his neck. The doctor looked even more stricken, his eyes wide with fright through the clear plastic of his hood.
“Will that raft hold all three of us?” Pete shouted over the sound of rushing water.
“It should,” said the captain. “I used to look at that thing when we were eight hundred feet deep in five thousand feet of ocean—always made me laugh. I couldn’t think of a situation where it would ever be useful.”
“Those engineers at Electric Boat think of everything.”
The water finally stopped pouring in. “The pressure is equalized,” said the captain. “We can open the escape hatch now.” He pointed down, into the water.
“I’ll go first!” said Haggerty, not giving them a chance to discuss it. He then dived below the waterline and disappeared. They heard a clank outside as the doctor egressed.
“You’re next,” said the captain.
“Are you sure?” said Pete.
“Go,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the top.”
Pete took a deep breath, then stuck his head underwater. In the murk, and with the ship’s steep angle, it was difficult to find the escape hatch, even in the close confines of the trunk. He hit his head hard on the way under, and fought off the natural instinct to avoid diving into a dark, water-filled pipe.
But once he was inside, the natural buoyancy of the hood and his own body took over. He made his way through the open hatch and felt himself being pulled to the surface, and before he could even remember to say HO HO HO, he broke through, his head once again exposed to bright sunshine and clear air.
McCallister came up soon after. The orange raft popped up immediately after that, and began to unfold and inflate immediately with a hiss. They ripped off their hoods and paddled toward the raft. The captain pulled himself in first, then leaned over and pulled Pete in with a strong arm.
“Over there!” said the captain. The motor canister was bobbing a few feet away. They both leaned over and paddled toward it until the captain could pull it onboard.
He ripped off the protective casing and soon had the parts spread out on the floor of the boat. He popped out the blades of the propeller, pulled off a plastic tag that activated the battery. He then hung it off the back of the boat, on a mount that was designed for it. The final step was to thread together two small poles, the larger of which had a ribbed rubber grip: the till. It was done in minutes. He pushed a button, and Pete could hear the engine switch on.
“It’s got a high-capacity battery, and only one speed,” said the captain. “It’ll last about thirty minutes.”
Pete looked forward. Hana Moody was still standing on the front of the ship, waving his white shirt; she hadn’t noticed him escaping with Finn yet. And Haggerty, he saw, was eagerly swimming away. Toward the Typhon boat.
“Haggerty!” shouted the captain. “We’re over here!”
Haggerty looked back briefly but continued swimming toward the other submarine. It didn’t surprise Pete at all: a final confirmation.
“Head for the shore?” said the captain.
“No,” said Pete. “The other direction.”
“To rescue Haggerty?”
“No—screw him. I just want to get close to them.”
“Why?” said Finn. “Don’t they want to kill us?”
“Probably,” said Pete. “I’ll explain later. But do me a favor—lie down. And try to look sick.”
The captain did as Pete asked, and he turned the boat toward the Typhon sub, about one hundred yards from the Polaris. They were gaining on Haggerty, who was frantically swimming away from them. Pete looked down at the captain, who looked, for all the world, like a dying man.
Pete saw a woman on the main deck, looking shocked as they approached. She gave an order, and men with rifles trained their guns and shot—bullets whistled over their heads. His gambit was having the desired effect. Pete began waving his arms frantically and pointing at the lifeless body of McCallister, as if begging Carlson to let them aboard. The small engine of the boat whined loudly, making it seem like they were approaching much faster than they were. In fact, they were moving against the tide and the waves, and were barely making progress. The distance and the motion of the waves, he hoped, would keep them out of the range of the riflemen.
A shot cracked against the casing of the motor, splitting it, but it kept running.
“Are you sure about this?” said the captain.
“Not at all!” Pete said. He kept the little boat pointed at Carlson.
They were close enough that he could see the concern in her eyes. Playing the part perfectly, McCallister began coughing violently, and leaned his head over the side to spit out a giant glob of phlegm. Carlson suddenly relented, shouted another order, and the ocean behind her began to churn as her submarine’s massive engines turned and pulled the submarine away from them.
She was backing away from them, panicked that a deadly epidemic was heading her way in an orange life raft. Just as Pete had intended.
The huge engines worked quickly, and the drones continued to fly in their seemingly random patterns overhead. Carlson wasn’t worried at all about the drones, Pete could see; she was fixated on the raft that seemed to be speeding toward her with a cargo of disease. She backed up twenty feet, then thirty. Even as they moved away, though, some of the sharpshooters’ shots came closer to the raft, as the men adjusted their aim. Pete could hear bullets whistling by them in the boat, and some shots hit the water so closely that spray hit them, and drummed against the side of the raft. Come on, thought Pete, cross that line.
The Typhon submarine continued to pull backward while the sharpshooters shot at them. The drones dived over both submarines and the raft without dropping their bombs.
Then finally, as Carlson and her ship crossed that invisible five-mile line in the ocean, the drones attacked.
The first bomb exploded on the main deck of the Typhon ship with a loud pop, seemingly causing no damage on the thick metal. It had landed on the aftmost part of the deck, far from where the men were boarding their inflatables—the part of the submarine, Pete realized, that crossed the five-mile radius first. Carlson’s crew looked at her in shock. She looked at Pete with a grim smile.
“Kill the engine!” said Pete, and McCallister quickly sat up, turned off their small outboard, and turned the till so that they stopped moving forward.
While the first bomb had done little damage, the other drones were attacking in a frenzy now, dropping their bombs in a fury as the marines on the main deck took cover and scrambled to get in their small boats. The big submarine continued to move backward, exposing more and more of herself to the drones’ attack. The drones ignored the inflatables, told by their programming to focus on the big target.
It was fascinating to watch.
The whole Typhon boat was now under attack. Some of the bombs began to have an effect, opening holes on spots on the deck that had previously been hit and weakened. Carlson realized what had happened and cut the engines, the water no longer churning behind the boat. But she weighed thousands of tons, and her momentum was slow to reverse, carrying her farther into the free-fire zone.
In the shower of bombs that the drones dropped upon her, one fell straight into the conning tower. A shower of sparks shot into the sky, followed by a column of black smoke. The other drones took note, and poured more bombs into the wound.
As they did, each flew away in an orderly straight line, back to Eris Island to reload.
The two inflatable boats from the Typhon were now full. A few men, some wounded terribly, were swimming in the sea. Their shipmates stopped firing at Pete and McCallister as they tried to pull their comrades aboard. The submarine was mortally wounded, smoke and fire pouring from multiple holes, the ship listing badly to port.
“She’s dead,” said McCallister.
“You’re sure?” said Pete.
“Listen,” he said. “You can hear the air banks exploding.…”
Pete did hear it, a series of deep explosions coming from beneath the waterline. He could feel the concussion in his feet through the soft bottom of the raft. A tower of flame now roared from the Typhon conning tower.
“All that compressed air is feeding the fire,” said the captain. “Turning it into a blast furnace inside. God help anyone who’s still onboard.”
The ship rolled suddenly all the way on its side, toward them so that they were looking into the top of the conning tower.
“We need to get away!” said McCallister. “When that tower hits the waterline, it’ll sink like a rock. The suction could take us with it!”
The conning tower drifted closer to the water, and just as McCallister had predicted, once the giant opening hit the waterline, the ship sank with stunning speed.
Pete could feel the suction at work, trying to pull their little boat backward. But they had gone far enough, had the tide working in their favor, and were soon speeding toward the beach. The small boats from Carlson’s sub were still pulling survivors from the water, ignoring them for the moment.
“Let’s go,” said Pete, pointing toward Eris. “We’ve got a head start.”
“Do I still need to look sick?” said Finn.
“No,” said Pete. “Look like a captain. And get us ashore.”
He quickly pulled the till, and turned them around.
Moody, still holding Pete’s shirt, watched in shock from the deck of the Polaris as they passed.
“Fuck you!” she shouted.
Finn’s eyes were trained on the shore. But as he kept his left hand on the till, he flipped her off with his right.
* * *
Commander Carlson jumped from the deck into one of the rubber boats, landing only halfway on; the sergeant of the marines pulled her the rest of the way aboard. “Get away!” she said, pointing toward the island. The drones continued hammering her submarine behind her, which was belching fire and smoke, and groaning as it died. Her small rubber boat pulled away, and the drones ignored it. They were prioritizing, she realized. Her dying submarine was a bigger, better target. As they sped away, she saw that they were in parallel with her other rubber boat. Her XO, Lieutenant Banach, was on that one. He gave her a slight nod, and she was flooded with relief to see that he was alive. She nodded back.
She’d been fooled, she realized. And it had worked because she’d been afraid. That little boat had started moving toward them, with the sick man onboard, and she had reacted out of fear. She was a woman who had stared down death a hundred times, from torpedoes and bombs, and the multitude of ways that the deep ocean can end human life. But for fear of a disease, she’d backed the big ship up, directly into a trap. They must have been inside some kind of safe zone, she realized now, a buffer around the island. She’d been trying to fool Hamlin, but he had fooled her instead. That clever boy had tried to get her to surface outside of that, and when that didn’t work, he let her drive herself right out of it. He knew what she was afraid of. And because of that, she’d lost her ship.
She wouldn’t let fear drive her again.
Banach’s boat veered suddenly to port, drawing her eyes to the surface of the water.
It was Dr. Haggerty, her spy. He stopped dog-paddling and waved his arms wildly at her.
She’d never seen him in person, just a photograph in his file, but she knew it was him. That type of person, she supposed, and the intelligence he provided were vital to the war effort. To any war. Trying to trick Hamlin into cooperating had been his idea; he said they could convince Hamlin that he had worked for them all along. Said the man was unstable and distraught, and that he would be easy to manipulate. So much for that, she thought, as she looked back at her burning submarine. Because she was a warrior, she despised disloyalty, despised spies, even if they were working for her. And because she was smart, she knew she could never trust the doctor.
“Shall we stop?” yelled the sergeant as they neared him.
“No!” she shouted. “To the island.”
She looked back briefly at Haggerty as they sped by him. He continued waving his arms for a moment, but then seemed to realize that he’d been abandoned. He started swimming toward shore, but they were almost five miles away, and the doctor was old and out of shape. The swim would have been challenging even for an athlete. Carlson watched without emotion as his head went under, then disappeared.