PACIFIC STORM

Still not warm.

She shivered as she dressed in the spare uniform she kept in her locker: long-sleeve black athletic shirt with her name and the glinting badge part of the weave, and black knee-length cargo shorts. Ivan could fire her tomorrow. If they had a tomorrow.

She combed her wet hair, then picked up her shoes, rinsed clean in the shower but still wet. Shoes in hand, she rode the dedicated elevator up to the operations center.

Ivan had warned her, when they were safe in the ready room, “From now until the storm has passed, no one goes out no matter what.”

“No matter what we see on camera?”

“Yes.”

“But you went out after me—and you saw me on a camera, didn’t you?”

“Gideon spotted you. But the wind hasn’t reached hurricane force yet.”

“When it does, maybe we should turn the cameras off, so we’re not tempted.”

“No. I won’t close my eyes. I know you don’t want to, either.”

The elevator doors opened. Ava stepped out past the little Christmas tree with its colorful LED lights, and into the operations center, where she was met with a barrage of hugs, good wishes, and the repeated phrase, We thought we’d lost you. Besides Ivan, there was a shift supervisor, a dispatcher, a researcher, and two officers on duty—all from day shift. The rest of the staff had been sent home.

Akasha lay in a cot beside the observation window, her head propped on a stack of blankets, wound glue gleaming on her scalp where her dark hair had been clipped away.

She gazed at Ava with the wide-eyed look of someone who’d been cursed with a vision of apocalypse and couldn’t get it out of her head. “It was all real, then?” she asked as Ava crouched beside the cot.

Ava nodded. “It was real. Is real.”

Gideon sat cross-legged on the floor at the foot of the cot, a tablet on his lap. He studied Ava with narrowed eyes. “You figured out a way to get the Angel Dust on that submarine.” A twitch of his lips that might have been a smile. “Hope it works.”

She turned, to gaze out past the rain-hammered windows to the raging sea . . . until she remembered to ask, “Where’s Matt?” A pistol had gone off as she ran through the park—but his shotgun had instantly answered. “He’s okay, isn’t he? I need to talk to him. Confirm some things.”

“Too late for that,” Gideon said. “They got him. He’s dead.”

“Oh . . . please, no.”

Ivan came over and confirmed it. “The two armed males in the vehicle you were pursuing—both were found with gunshot wounds, severely injured. But one could still pull a trigger.” Ivan touched his throat. “Domanski took a bullet right here. It’s too bad. I had questions for him, too.”

This news grieved Ava—she’d liked Matt—but it stoked her anger, too, and left her feeling cheated. She wanted the truth, all the truth, and with Matt gone, she didn’t think she’d ever get it.

“What about the two sailors?” she asked. “What’s their status?”

Ivan shrugged. “Both were critical when they reached the hospital, but we’re not going to know any more than that. The navy’s claimed them, and they’re untouchable.”

“I found your secret agent,” Gideon volunteered.

“You did?” That was something. “Show me.”

Ava moved to his side, kneeling to look at his tablet. It displayed a still image, taken at a distance, of a tall woman who resembled Lyric only in her height. This woman was heavyset, with large breasts, her hair thick, long, and wound into a neat twist down her back. “That’s not her.”

“It is,” Gideon said. “Here.”

He shifted to a night shot taken along Nimitz Highway. “Image is from a public traffic camera. This is right after she disappeared from that settlement. See, she gets into a cab. And then . . .” He scrolled through a succession of still shots: a cab on the airport viaduct; a cab on the airport exit ramp; a cab at the curb of the airport terminal, with a heavyset woman exiting it.

“She had her get-away set up,” Gideon concluded. “She must have hacked the cab, pre-loaded it with her gear, and then pulled off a quick change on the way to the airport. Voila! When she gets out, she looks and walks like someone different. But it’s her.”

Ava looked doubtfully at Ivan.

“HADAFA denies any connection between the two women,” he told her. “But I’ve gone over the sequence and I’m convinced. Whoever that woman is, she’s got high-level connections and a security rating that lets her use HADAFA to fake her identity, or hide it altogether.”

Stolen credentials? Or legitimate? Either way, it only proved again that HADAFA could not be relied on to interpret truth.

Ava asked, “Where did she go after that?”

“Into the terminal,” Ivan said. “That’s what the outside camera showed. But by the time we got authorization to access the internal surveillance, the subject wasn’t there. HADAFA had scrubbed her presence from the record.”

Ava grimaced. “And changing her appearance protected her from private cameras and eyewitness recollections. So we don’t know if she caught another cab, or got picked up . . .”

“Or if she had a seat booked on a flight out of here,” Ivan finished for her. “She could be anywhere, this time tomorrow.”

Ava squeezed her eyes shut as a blush rose in her cheeks, pushed by a heated combination of embarrassment and anger.

Deep breath.

She stood up again and stepped to the window, to look out at the storm. Lightning flickered on the horizon. “We talked to her, Matt and I. She claimed she’d recruited a Marine general who was standing guard at the door of the facility where she was working.” Her stomach knotted. “She was probably drinking champagne in first class at the time.”

Ava pressed her fingers to the heavy, hurricane-proof glass, steadying herself as a mental haze descended over her. What was real? What was a lie? And who was Lyric, really? What side had she been on? What was her game?

Kaden had said Matt was first to propose the idea of using a nuke to kick off a “cleansing war.”

Had Matt done it at Lyric’s direction?

Had the puppet master been playing both sides of the game from the very start? Had Lyric ignited the scheme and then, when it got out of hand, scrambled to quash it?

And when would it be game-over?

Stupid, to sit by a window waiting for a nuclear detonation. Ivan pointed this out. “I want everyone not on duty to move downstairs. It’s safer there, with no windows.”

Ava helped Akasha down, but then she returned to the observation deck, and bundled up again in her blankets. One of the officers brought her a hot meal from the kitchen. Sometime after that she dozed, only to waken, startled, her fingers clawing at the floor as she felt the building swaying. Wind roared past the window. Rain hammered. Lightning flashed. She could not see more than a quarter mile and it was so dark outside it looked as if dusk had fallen.

“What time is it?” she shouted, voice cracking in panic.

Someone answered from the pit: “11:30 AM.”

“My God.”

Was the city still out there? Or had it already happened?

Surely I would know if it had happened . . .

She walked around the observation deck, trying to calm her racing heart. Her only company, the researcher and the dispatcher still at their stations in the pit, monitoring the video feeds.

“How are the cameras holding out?” Ava asked them.

The answer came back, “Surprisingly well. We’re prepared this time. It’s not going to be like Nolo. We’re going to get through this, and be okay.”

Ava wanted to believe that.

Satellite images mapped the progress of the hurricane. Ava dropped into the pit every twenty minutes or so to check the latest. Huko stuck to its projected path, its center on course to plow across O‘ahu. But it moved faster than expected, as if it wanted to escape any part in Sigrún’s conspiracy.

In late afternoon, everyone came up from downstairs to witness as the eye of the hurricane skirted the coast. The curtain of rain drew back first, and then the wind abruptly eased. Sunlight broke through. Blue sky appeared directly overhead, decorated in streamers of thin high-altitude clouds. But the ocean still raged, and all around there stood an ominous dark cloud wall.

Ava watched the sky, though she knew if the missile came it would be too small, too fast for her eyes to follow.

After half an hour, the wind returned, shifting direction, roaring again like a jet engine, and within a few minutes every tree along the promenade and every coconut palm around the now sand-filled lagoons snapped and broke. Branches hurtled through the air and broken stumps wobbled on the lawns . . . but somehow they were still alive. The city still lived. The missile had not come.

Not yet.

The light faded long before the sun went down. Ava continued to watch and wait, well into the night.

Akasha came up to stand beside her. “It’s almost over.”

Ava nodded agreement. She didn’t want to say it out loud, but surely it was too late for Sigrún to strike. They’d waited too long. They’d lost the cover of the storm. Or maybe, in the end, Kaden had changed his mind?

She hoped that was the reason.

Successive satellite images showed Huko steaming away to the north at a furious pace. The wind’s roar eased and the clouds broke apart. The moon and a handful of stars shone through, mirrored by a few surviving lights out beyond Harbor Station. Lightning still flickered, but far away.

Her gaze shifted to the shoreline below, visible now in the moonlight, and barely recognizable.

All up and down the length of Kahanamoku Coastal Park, the massive dunes had been worn down, reduced to low berms. Their sand, redistributed inland, had filled in the lagoons and frosted the promenade.

Beyond the eroded dunes the ocean still churned, white foam lacing the dark water. Tumbling waves washed up a wide beach strewn with debris, some of it identifiable, even at this distance. A tree trunk, a couple of tires, the broken-off prow of a small boat, a long section of two-by-four. Most of it, though, lay anonymous in moonlight.

Directly off the tower in which she stood, the white hull of a crushed fishing boat lay grounded in the shallows, each incoming wave crashing over it, throwing spray into the air. Off to the east, a fountain of white water marked another casualty.

Ava crossed the observation deck to get a better look. Diaphanous moonlit clouds scudded across the night sky above Diamond Head’s familiar profile. Halfway to that landmark, a massive dark shape lay in the wave-churned shallows, far bigger than the fishing boat.

Another fountain of spray caught the moonlight as a wave broke against it.

Ava’s tired mind strove to understand what she was seeing. Was it an exposed reef? The beached carcass of a great sperm whale? A freighter’s overturned hull?

Recognition swept over her.

“Oh God,” she whispered, flush with horror.

She rushed for the rapid-access ladder. Slid down it into the pit. “Get a tracker drone into the air,” she snapped at the dispatcher. “We’ve got a large vessel aground. Vicinity of the Imperial Garden. I want eyes on it now.”

“Hey, that’s Denali!” Akasha shouted from the observation deck. “It’s gotta be. Denali has run aground!” She appeared at the top of the ladder. “You did it, Ava. It worked.”

Ava rejected this with a wave of her hand. “We don’t know what happened. We don’t know for sure that’s Denali. And if it is, we still don’t know what went on inside that hull.”

Ava meant to find out, though. She would do her best to find out, before the navy locked the truth away behind impenetrable walls of classification.

She headed for the elevator. “I’m going out there. Look for survivors.”

“Yeah, I’m going too.”

Ava turned back in time to see Akasha slide down the ladder—and wince as she hit the floor.

“You’re injured, you idiot.”

“And you don’t have working comms,” the dispatcher reminded her. “You can’t go out, either.”

True enough, about the comms. Ava had come ashore with her smart glasses still in her pocket, but they’d failed to turn on. Her tablet and tactile mic had been lost in the water.

Akasha caught up with her, passed her. She slipped her smart glasses on, then slapped the button to open the elevator doors.

“You’re in no condition to go,” Ava insisted.

“I’m going.”

The glint in her eyes promised an argument Ava didn’t have time for. “Fine. You’re my comms.”

She turned back to the dispatcher. “If you need to talk to me, relay through Akasha or through the tracker drone. Record everything. And keep a local copy. Keep it somewhere HADAFA can’t reach.”

Open-mouthed shock from the dispatcher. “How am I supposed to—”

“I don’t know,” Ava interrupted. “But I know you can figure it out—and let Ivan know where we’re going.”

She joined Akasha aboard the elevator. They descended with ear-popping speed. In the ready room, she picked up her dive mask and her regulator. Akasha started to do the same.

“No.” This time, Ava insisted. “You are not going in the water.”

As she spoke, the elevator opened again, delivering Ivan to the ready room. “Neither of you are going in the water,” he said as he stepped out.

Ava grabbed a scuba pack from the wall rack anyway. “Got no choice, Ivan. We’ve got to check for survivors.”

“That’s your excuse?”

“Sworn duty.” With practiced hands, she secured the regulator’s first stage to the pack, adding, “No real hazard from Angel Dust, since I’m bringing my own air.”

He tried one more time. “You’re too tired for this.”

“We’re all tired.” She looked up. Met his gaze. “You coming with me or not?”

He gritted his teeth. His lip curled. “Hell, why not?” He got his own dive equipment out, grabbed another scuba pack. “I want to see how badly we were played. Let’s get there, before the navy shows up.”

The ocean still churned and rumbled. Waves still broke hard against the sand, carrying debris up and down the shallow slope of the beach—but the waves no longer reached all the way to the eroded feet of the dunes.

Left behind by the ocean’s retreat was a strip of compact wet sand where Ava could ride, dodging mounds of fishing nets tangled with plastic trash and seaweed. Driftwood too, and green branches, palm fronds, even a plastic bumper cover from a car and a section of asphalt-tiled roof. Chunks of foam insulation cluttered the sand, along with dozens of coconuts, and dead fish everywhere. Each object appeared briefly in the beam of her headlight as she zig-zagged past.

Akasha called out from behind her: “Hope none of this shit is radioactive!”

Ava kept on, to where the submarine lay just offshore. Then she brought her bike to a skidding stop.

They weren’t the only ones to have noticed the grounded vessel. A small crowd of fifteen or so, a mix of hotel staff and guests, had ventured outside. They’d gathered just above the reach of the waves, talking excitedly among themselves, talking on phones, taking videos as another breaker churned past the sub’s black hull. No one had entered the water yet, not that Ava could see, anyway.

“Akasha, secure this area. Keep everyone back.”

“Got it.”

Ivan said, “Amber and Van are a couple minutes behind us. They’ll help you set up a perimeter.”

Another breaker rolled in. Ava watched it sweep the length of the hull. It took some time. The vessel was huge. Maybe four hundred feet in length? The sail towered into the night sky, a cluster of sensor masts rising above it.

No visible name, of course. This was a stealth weapon, its curved hull a black box designed to hide its very existence within the lightless depths of the ocean. A deadly weapon, capable of taking the lives of millions. Now awkwardly exposed.

What had gone on inside? Who had caused the vessel to run aground? And why?

Ava’s mind raced with hypothetical scenarios. She envisioned a faction, struck by the enormity of what they were about to do, rising up, initiating an internal struggle for control of the boat. Or maybe it had been a single crew member, stirred to action by a troubled conscience as the moment drew near, committing an irrevocable act of sabotage.

Or had her own desperate move succeeded? If success was the right word for what she’d done. Had there been panic among Kaden’s crew as spores of Angel Dust spread among them?

Red light washed over, accompanied by the hum of a tracker drone, the sound abruptly audible over the grumbling waves. She looked up at the device hovering six feet overhead. The dispatcher spoke through it: “HADAFA has confirmed the identity of the submarine as USN Denali. A navy helicopter is incoming. No one is to approach the stranded vessel ahead of the navy’s arrival.”

Ava scanned the horizon for navigation lights but didn’t see any. She didn’t hear the rhythmic beat of an approaching engine. “They’re not close,” she concluded. “And we need to check for survivors.”

“Agreed,” Ivan said. “Get a light on that hull.”

Out over the water, a light flicked on: the white search beam of a second tracker drone. As the froth of a passing wave drained away, the beam explored the black hull, beginning at the prow, sweeping toward the stern.

No one visible. Hatches still closed.

“No panicked egress,” Ava observed. “And the sensor masts are deployed. Someone would have to do that, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s an automated system. Or maybe they are okay in there. If so, they’ll wait for the surf to drop before they open up. They won’t want to flood the interior.”

Ava pulled on her mask, her voice going nasally as it sealed against her face. “We have to check it out. They’ve got a three-sixty view through one of those masts. They’ll see us coming. If they need help, if they’re desperate enough, they’ll open up.”

“Yeah, I want to know too.”

Fins in hand, Ava followed a retreating wave down the beach, the weight of the scuba pack dragging at her shoulders. Popping the regulator into her mouth, she strode for deep water, slipping on the fins between one wave and the next. The tide helped to pull her out.

A few minutes later, she surfaced alongside the submarine—and heard the beat of helicopter rotors over the sound of the surf. At least two incoming. Probably three. She looked around for Ivan, but didn’t see him. No time to wait.

Another swell was rolling in, not quite breaking. She let it lift her up along Denali’s smooth side. Just like riding a swell up and out of the ocean along a rocky shore. She’d done it a hundred times. This time, she hauled out at the midpoint of Denali’s long hull.

Never turn your back on the ocean.

She checked for the next swell. Saw it rising at the stern of the submarine, but not high enough to submerge the hull. She slipped off her fins and stood, feeling Denali subtly shift as the wave rolled past. One tracker hovered with its spotlight fixed on the hatch just behind the sail. The other dropped close to Ava. The dispatcher spoke through it. “Motion detected. Someone’s coming out.”

Ava bit down hard on her respirator and moved toward the hatch as it began to lift, pushed slowly by a trembling hand. A man emerged to his shoulders within the white glare of the spotlight, his face familiar despite the reddened eyes and a complexion mottled with capillaries freshly burst just beneath the skin. Fuzzy white flecks infested the dark line of a cut in his lower lip. Tyrone Ohta.

Did he know who she was? Could he recognize her, standing outside the spotlight’s narrow beam, with her mask still on and her lips sealed around the respirator that she held clenched between her teeth?

No.

A grunt of sound came from him as if he meant to speak, but then he ducked his head, coughing hard as the next crashing swell showered them both in spray.

Salt water ran down his cheeks when he looked up at her again. What did he see, but a silent dark silhouette? She must have appeared to him as a co-conspirator, come to hear his report before the official navy arrived. “Robicheaux refused,” he told her in a hoarse voice so charged with fury it rose easily over the low roar of the surf. He coughed again, then looked up in the direction of the approaching helicopters. “Tell them that. He betrayed us. He refused to let us enter the code.”

A hand grasped Ava’s upper arm. She jerked her arm away, ready to dive back into the dark sea. But it was only Ivan. Sparks of reflected light glinted in the glass face of his mask. No way to speak without removing their respirators, and neither dared to do that. Instead, Ivan motioned with his head: Come away.

Together they slipped back into the cool dark anonymity of the night sea. Fins on, and then a sprint for the beach while she turned over in her mind Tyrone Ohta’s furious testimony: Robicheaux refused.

She would never know why. Maybe, with the moment imminent and real, Kaden’s conscience had finally overcome the toxic righteousness that had let him join Sigrún. Or maybe his own impending death, with Angel Dust blooming in his lungs, had opened his eyes to the gross horror of what he’d agreed to do.

Or maybe Kaden had changed his mind for her.

She peeled off her mask as she reached the shallows, salt water washing away her salty tears. A wave foamed toward her. She ducked under it, then waded ashore beneath the deafening racket of the navy helicopters. A glance back showed rescue swimmers already dropping into the water.

Ivan had come ashore. She rushed to join him beyond the reach of the waves. “Ivan! We need to warn the navy that sub is a biohazard zone.”

“Word’s gone out,” he assured her. “They know.”

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