Submerged

Chapter Twenty-Two

Burrowed deep beneath a small island, in a bunker forgotten and ignored by most of humanity, in a room bristling with electronic gear, sat a broad-shouldered man in his late forties. The politically correct sheep would call him “African American” or whatever was deemed acceptably au courant, but he had long ago learned to laugh at such silly distinctions as skin color. In fact, he despised the significance of melanin demanded by mountebank social activists. His name, when he had been part of the world erroneously called “real,” had been Captain Junius Sinclair, USN.

Now, he was known only as Sinclair, and he liked that just fine. He had just received an encrypted message from a division of a very powerful entity known only as the Guild.

It was brief, but intriguing: U-5001 found. See Datafile 2947-C. Action memo to follow.

While he waited for whatever might be coming through the pipeline, he used the time to access the datafiles on the U-5001. He began to read what turned out to be a fascinating story. Of course, he — like most people — had one of his own…

Captain Junius Sinclair’s recruitment into the Guild had been a familiar replay of the tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, spies, and techies who’d come before him. As it had been doing for an unknown number of centuries, the Guild sought out the disaffected, the outraged, the maligned, the unjustly accused, and even the crazy ideologues. The Guild had well-honed techniques for finding these kinds of people — those who had been misled or cheated or overlooked by their governments or their employers, those whose anger and need for revenge could never be quelled. The process, containing the elegance of both complexity and the obvious, had been successful for a long, long time for a variety of reasons.

But the main one was surely the inevitable ability of abusive power to piss off someone else.

Junius smiled as he mused over that simple truth.

The Guild had approached him while he was still in Special Ops for the Navy’s Deep Sea Rescue/Recovery Division. What made his job “special” had been the assignments nobody ever read about in the paper. If it had anything to do with the ocean, being under it, and bad guys, Junius had been involved.

He’d been a captain on the top secret Sea Viper, a DSR Vehicle that made the descent to oceans’ deepest ridge vents feel like a dip in the backyard pool. When the Kursk choked on one of its own torpedoes and sank in the Barents Sea, Junius had been lurking in the cold depths, close enough to watch the Russians botch their attempts to get twenty-three sailors to the surface. The U.S. had offered to do the job, but a spillover of Soviet self-delusion, pride, and fear by the Russian Admiralty nixed the deal.

He’d also been involved in too many other missions the details of which the public never knew — and never would. Junius had been very good at what he did, he liked his job, and back then, he liked his employer.

But all that changed one evening several years ago.

The details were too numerous and tedious to recount, but the distillate of Sinclair’s life-altering moment came when CIA intercepts revealed a terror attack planned against the Norfolk Navy Yard. Sinclair had been in charge of the underwater defense net. But when suicide scuba divers slipped through undetected to plant charges against the hull of the Atlantic Fleet’s flagship carrier, and even though the C-4 failed to detonate, the Navy needed a fall-guy in a hurry.

Before he could open the hatch on his SeaViper, Sinclair found himself holding a very short straw and feeling a lot like the Indianapolis Captain, Charles McVay III. Military court martial, demotion, big hit on his pension, and all the bad media they could muster. To suggest one man was responsible for the attack on a supercarrier in its own harbor was absurd, but the public and the Pentagon didn’t want to hear anything other than simple scapegoated excuses.

Sinclair’s sacrificial ashes were barely cool on the altar when he was contacted by a Guild op, who offered a path toward salvation. Like thousands who’d been shown the same path, Sinclair never hesitated. He wasn’t the kind of guy who needed to be mugged more than once before getting the message someone was out to get you.

When he thought about it, Sinclair could still recall most of the conversation with the tall, broad-shouldered man with Scottish accent who represented the Guild. When asked, he volunteered he’d once upon a time been one of the Royal Marines Special Boaters. Tough guys.

“My grandfather had been in one of Churchill’s original commando units,” he continued. “No. 9. The Black Hackles.”

“Is that why you wear the black feather in your beret?” Sinclair could not help notice the flamboyant addition.

“Kind of, I guess. But in general, a Scot wearing this means you’ve got an ongoing quarrel with someone.”

Sinclair didn’t want to know who that might be. But he was curious about this “Guild.”

“Sounds like the Bilderberg Group,” he said.

The op waved off the remark with a dismissive gesture. “Young amateurs! They haven’t even been around a hundred years… and we have infiltrated them so thoroughly they are just a puppet show.”

“So who or what is the Guild?”

“Not easy to explain them,” said the big Scot. “Began as a loosely structured subculture — bunch of craftsman and merchants who banded together during the Renaissance. They wanted to ensure the continuity and influence of men like themselves.”

“That long ago? It seems hard to believe.”

The op smirked through his heavy reddish mustache. “Not really. Enough of the bullshit. You interested?”

“Intrigued, at least. Go on.”

“All right, let’s see.” The Scot cleared his throat, continued. “Having been part of the mercantile process for centuries gave Guild members a certain leverage… Not only were they present at the inception of the industrial revolution, but they were definitely the first organized group to fully comprehend what it was.”

“Okay, I follow you,” said Sinclair. “And somehow they kept organized through all the wars, all the changes of power. Across the centuries and continents, right?”

The Scot harrumphed his assent. “Yes, and you have to figure it was probably a very hard thing to do — except for one thing.”

“Let me guess. They understood the power of money.”

“Spot on,” said the Scot. “Trade. Commerce. Other than religion, it was one of the only things that transcended national borders. Other than food, it was the only other item everyone needed to survive. The early leaders and organizers of the Guild understood this simple truth very, very well. Money not only became the glue that bound them together, but it became their most potent weapon as well.”

Sinclair nodded. “I can’t even imagine how many rulers and kings and emperors they had to deal with. All those years.…”

“True. But one fact is irrefutable — the Guild did it. It survived. And prospered… for a good reason. All those kings and emperors, and everybody else looking to conquer everybody else… they all needed two things: weapons and financing for their campaigns.”

“And the Guild filled these needs?” Sinclair frowned. “How?”

“Don’t forget where the original members of the Guild came from — not only tradesmen and bankers but also craftsmen. As time went on the Guild became manufacturers, or even better, the controlling interest behind the manufacturers. The great European and Asian families of arms merchants that rose up in the Eighteenth Century were all started with Guild investment capital.”

“These guys were the original opportunists.”

The Scot smiled. “Indeed. And eventually the families and their businesses and their inventories became absorbed into the greater body of the Guild itself.”

“They sound very scary. They can show up anywhere and look like anybody else trying to make a buck.”

“They are scary, and you’ve hit on one of their greatest strengths — they’re totally invisible most of the time. Nobody is looking for them. No idea what kind of manipulations they exact on the world. And during the Twentieth Century, with the explosion of technology, the Guild became even more powerful and less visible.”

“You make it sound like they run the show.”

“Just ‘sound like’? No, Sinclair. They do. Although, it depends on what you mean by ‘run’.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, from what I can see, the Guild has never been totally in charge of things. I don’t think it wants to take over the world or anything like that.”

“Then what does it want?”

The op shrugged. “Oh, I’d say it wants what anything wants — to survive, and be comfortable doing it. And that’s more like what the Guild does — not by ‘running’ things, but more like influencing things. You know, like nudging things in directions that will ultimately be good for the Guild and its members.”

“Makes sense when you think about it.” Sinclair was thinking out loud. “They’re older than any current nation.”

“They’ve had plenty of time to get it right. They’ve learned how to make wars happen and how to make them stop. How to control the flow of money and credit and resources throughout the civilized world.”

“So…” said Sinclair. “Nations, governments, sovereigns… whatever you want to call them. They’re what? Necessary inconveniences to them?”

“Yes, the Guild is ‘supra-national,’ if you will. They operate outside the bounds of national borders, and represent no official charter, constitution, or political agenda.”

“Other than continuing to exist,” said Sinclair.

The Scot grinned ironically. “Can’t hold that against them, laddie.”

“Okay, you have a point there.” Sinclair searched the big Scot’s face for any sign of deception, found it clear. “But aren’t there other entities that go beyond national borders — The Unilateral Committee, The Cambridge Club, The Consortium for Global Unity… probably more I’ve never heard of.”

“Mostly dodges. And definitely small-time.”

Sinclair chuckled.

“There’s one thing you haven’t mentioned. What about the terrorist network?”

The Op shook his head in mock disapproval. “Now, Mr. Sinclair, you can’t be serious, can you?”

“Hmmm?”

“The terrorists operate largely at the pleasure of the Guild. Funding, supplies, locales — all propped up to benefit a variety of Guild interests. They are considered a tool just like any other. If they ever use up their utility, they’ll be tossed in the dustbin.”

“Okay, okay. I believe you. But I have to ask — why’re you telling me all this? You want me to help you stop them?”

“Are you funnin’ me a wee bit? Nobody’s going to stop them. I want you to join them.”

Sinclair nodded. He knew where things had been headed. He just needed to hear it. “And what happens if I say no? Do you kill me because I know too much?”

The Scot chuckled. “You know about the sun in the sky, but you can’t stop it from burnin’! The Guild doesn’t care what you know. It’s simple: they think you could perhaps be useful to them. Nothing more or less.”

“Fair enough.” He was not stupid. They might not care what he knew; but they’d kill him all the same. These were people who liked to keep things neat and orderly. Sinclair paused to consider the reality of his recruitment, and what it might actually mean in his life. “Tell me how it would work…”

The Scot smiled, then talked about the details.

And so, after a tragic “disappearance” during a weekend sail off the Atlantic coast, he had a new employer. His family probably missed him for a little while then started to enjoy his fat life insurance policy. He was free of all the things that weighted him down, other than a reason to get up every day, which the Guild provided.

Leaning back in his chair, he stared at the LCD which displayed the global situation map. Various colored geometric shapes indicated hot-spots of Guild intervention or manipulation. Considering the complexities of monitoring and analyzing the billions of geo-political data-bits coming into the Guild’s computers each day, Sinclair was impressed with his organization’s ability to make fast, accurate decisions.

His present ops base was a small, rocky bar forty-one miles off the North Carolina coast called East Camden Island. Having served as a Coast Guard watch station during World War II, it had been abandoned in 1946 and remained so until retrofitted by the Guild in the late nineties — only because of its proximity to an undersea data haven being built by the United States. Such havens had become the sexy way to preserve civilization in the twenty-first century. Sink giant modular cubes underwater, bolt them together, attach them to the sea floor and blow air into the sealed unit. The idea was to create a vault to store, process, and dispatch information in a series of redundant arrays within a protective environment impervious to nuclear strike, EMP penetration, comet or asteroid impact, and just about anything else short of a certain G-type star going nova.

A great concept unless somebody was hanging around while the heavy lifting was going on.

“Somebody” was; and his name had been Sinclair.

Initially used to observe the construction of the underwater concrete cube which ran 200 meters per side, East Camden Island became the Guild’s extraction point for all data contained within or passed through the data haven. Sinclair and his team of underwater engineers had been able to compromise the facility because they had been present during all phases of its construction. A year before things went online, Sinclair’s people had inserted micro-taps into the optical strand cables that connected the data haven to the outside world. They worked in total stealth, utterly invisible to the construction crews all around them. By compromising the optical strands so early in the creation phase, the taps showed up as nothing more threatening than anomalies in thickness or tension when powered up.

Once online, the Guild had access to enormous data-streams. Sinclair understood very well that knowledge is indeed power. When combined with their centuries-old network of human information conduits, such recondite incursions into the cyber-world reinforced the Guild’s position as the most powerful entity on the planet.

There was no communication on earth not vulnerable to a Guild intercept or decrypt — which was exactly the way its leaders preferred it.

As far as who those leaders might be, Sinclair had no firm information, although he had more than a few ideas. Not always specific names, but titles and power positions filled and unfilled by visits from the reaper. All part of the plan, the vision ensuring the Guild had been built to last. It bespoke a belief in the system and the philosophy that had held the organization together for five centuries. In his private moments, he imagined the Guild had long ago strayed from the purposes of its original creation, opting out for existence for its own sake.

A soft, electronic chime punctuated his thoughts. It was a signal someone had entered the sallyport — a kind of airlock-like chamber affording the only access in and out of the camouflaged command bunker. Turning in his chair, Sinclair regarded the LCD display. It provided multiple views of the pass-through chamber and the figure who stood staring into the retinal scanner by the outer door.

Entwhistle. The new Number Two had come from the Britain’s MI5, and had been assigned to East Camden because of his expertise in data extraction and decryption. Unlike Sinclair, who also used the island base as the occasional staging platform, Entwhistle would be spending most of his professional time within the clandestine facility.

Another soft chime as Sinclair watched his Second clear the first security door, step into the bright-white tube where a series of secondary scans warped over him. If he carried any chemical or biological agents, any kind of conventional weapon, or even an unapproved scrap of paper, the scanners would activate an aerosol injection of Sarin-3 gas into the chamber. And he would no longer be a threat.

Not this time. A third chime signaled the second door opening, and Sinclair watched Entwhistle enter the com. He was a short, well-built, red-haired man in his mid thirties, who spoke with the remnants of a Welsh accent. His voice was deeper than his wan appearance might suggest, and he usually had an impish grin just waiting to happen behind the soft angles of his face. Sinclair liked him well enough, even though the guy liked to talk a lot.

“Reporting for duty, Captain,” said Entwhistle with a smile. “What’s on our plate for today?”

Sinclair glanced up at him then gestured toward the primary console and some papers he’d printed out. “Not sure yet. Waiting on a full briefing.”

Entwhistle looked at the message. “Hmmm. What’s the U-5001?”

Being as concise as possible, Sinclair gave him a history of the submarine compiled from intelligence files dating all the way back to the end of World War II. “Everything we have is from a variety of interrogations and separate individuals. No one, it appears, knew the whole picture. There were never any official documents on the boat or its mission. We don’t even know who crewed her. We believe it stopped at the secret Nazi base called Station One Eleven. We know it carried a crude atomic bomb. We know the mission aborted and that it went MIA. That’s pretty much all we know.”

“A bloody lot more than I ever did.” Entwhistle couldn’t hide his surprise. “So the stories about them not having a bomb were crap?”

“U.S. Intelligence never wanted the Germans to look as good as us. They buried that one with disinformation.”

“But the sub and the bomb…” His second sighed. “You say it’s been found. After all this time?”

“Not confirmed. What you see here is all we know for now.”

“And what was ‘Station One Eleven’?”

“From what we can tell, it was the northern equivalent of the Antarctic Nazi base they called ‘Station Two Eleven’.”

“Oh yes,” said Entwhistle. “I’ve heard some of the stories about that one. Almost mythic, wouldn’t you say?”

Sinclair looked at him. “What stories did you hear?”

“One called ‘Operation High Jump’ I remember best. Admiral Byrd and a US Navy task force. Supposed to have ‘invaded’ Antarctica in 1947. Scuttlebutt always claimed they were looking to wipe out a secret base under the ice.”

Sinclair grinned. “Is that all they told you in London?”

“Well, there’re rumors they ran into trouble, came limping back with their tails stuck in their arse cheeks…”

Sinclair nodded. “That’s pretty accurate.”

“They say the krauties had some of their scientists down there creating superweapons or some such tripe. I heard that one too.”

“Not sure what they were doing there,” said Sinclair. “But I know they were there. The Navy captured two U-boats in Buenos Aires in late 1946, and the crews admitted they’d been down there. The Germans had the engineering know-how to set up something under the ice. You ever see anything on their underground factories and the labs of the Nordhausen complex? In the Harz Mountains. Amazing. The Kahl installation at Thuumlringen is a big bastard too.”

“Right-O,” said Entwhistle. He raked his thin fingers through his red hair. “So what ever happened to them? At the south pole, I mean?”

Sinclair shrugged. “Not sure. I’ve seen the docs about Byrd being grilled by Forrestal. Not pretty.”

“Not long after that, they had Forrestal committed as a loony, right?”

Sinclair nodded. “Until he took a dive from the Bethesda Naval Hospital tower.”

“MI5 always believed he was thrown out that window.”

“They’re not alone. A week later, Truman authorized a secret atomic bomb test — at the south pole.”

Entwhistle smiled, revealing dental work that could only be called adequate. “Hmmm. I’d guess that was the spot-on end of Station Two Eleven.”

“So the story goes. But they never found the other one at the North Pole. That’s why everyone was interested in the U-5001. We know it was dispatched there on a rescue and recovery mission.”

“Okay,” said Entwhistle. “I can see why we’d want that bomb. No doubt it may come in useful at some point.”

Sinclair nodded. “Oh, I think we could find plenty of interest in weapons-grade fissionable material — either for us, or somebody we need to influence.”

“Right-o, but what about the base? We want to find that base exactly why?”

“Because of what we’ve been able to piece together about it. Fragments of memos from postwar interrogations, mostly. Suggesting the Nazi scientists were into all kinds of weird stuff. Anti-gravity, heat-rays, sonic canons, and, of course, advanced aeronautics and nuclear technology.” Sinclair gestured at the datafile he’d been reading before his Second had arrived.

“Fucking Teutonic bastards! Bloody slick, they were.”

“Did you ever hear of something called ‘the Bell’ or as the Nazis called it, ‘Die Glocke’?”

“Can’t say that I have, why?”

“They talk about it in these datafiles I’ve been reading. It was a top secret device they were working on, but no one has been able to figure out exactly what it was supposed to do. They called it a ‘torsion field generator’.”

“Really? What the bleeding hell is that?”

“Some people thought their scientists were playing around with time travel or spatial displacement.”

Entwhistle chuckled. “Bollocks is all that is!”

Sinclair picked up the file, flipped through to a page, and read aloud:

“According to some captured Czech documents, the Bell was reportedly a metallic object, approximately 9 feet in diameter and 12 to 15 feet tall, which vaguely resembled a bell, which gave rise to the codename die Glocke. It was comprised of two counter-rotating cylinders. Like centrifuges. Inside was a purplish, liquid-metallic-looking substance which was code-named ‘Xerum 525’ by the Germans. The machine rotated the Xerum 525 at extremely high speeds. The substance gave off an extremely high amount of radiation which the Germans called ‘Tau,’ and they kept the substance in lead-lined containers twelve inches thick.”

Entwhistle had leaned forward, clearly intrigued. “Is there more?”

Sinclair nodded, continued: “The Bell required outrageously high amounts of electrical power to operate, and could only be run for approximately one to two minutes at a time. It apparently gave off strong radiation and/or other electromagnetic or unknown field effects. Rumors insist many scientists and technicians were killed during the lifetime of the experiments with the device.”

“What the fuck were those jokers messing with?”

“No one knows for sure,” said Sinclair as he resumed. “Another captured document claims that tests involving various plants and animals caused them, in every case, to be transformed into a ‘blackish ooze’ without normal putrefaction, within a matter of a few minutes or hours after exposure to its field effects when in operation. In addition, technicians near the Bell during these experiments reported metallic tastes in their mouths after being exposed to it. The chamber where the Bell was tested was lined with ceramic bricks and rubber mats, all of which were replaced after each test. The removed linings needed to be burned in a high temperature furnace, and the unlined chamber walls were scrubbed with brine by concentration camp laborers.”

Entwhistle shook his head slowly. “What happened to it? To the people who worked on it? How come nobody ever spilled the beans?”

“It says here the project was so classified, all but the top scientists were routinely executed and replaced on a rigid schedule. The Bell itself was transplanted out of Silesia to a destination that has never been discovered. It is believed Dr. Bernhard Jaeger was a project director on the Bell, along with General Hans Friedrich Karl Franz Kammler, but they, along with their device, simply vanished, never to be seen again.”

“Sounds like mythology to me,” said Entwhistle, but his tone of respect belied his supposed skepticism.

“Well, somebody believes it. The most prevalent theory based on incomplete evidentiary shreds suggests that both the Bell and Jaeger were transported by U-boat to a base outside of the Reich.”

“Station One Eleven, of course.”

“It is a possibility.”

“I need to have a look at all that claptrap.”

Sinclair grinned, handed him the folder. “It’s all in there. After you’re through, just be sure to put it through the heat-shredder.”

“I wouldn’t dare forget,” said Entwhistle. He paused, as if ordering his thoughts, then: “So what do you think? If the Guild is interested in that base, do you think we’ll be having any competition from the rest of the world?”

Sinclair shook his head slowly. “Hard to figure that. You never know how efficient any clusterfuck bureaucracy is going to function.”

His Second smiled. “On target, there, mate.”

“If any of them took notice of the U-5001 news, it may take some time to work its way to the right desk. Or… it may never happen.”

“But we work from the assumption everyone is as sharp as we are.”

“Only way we stay in business.” Sinclair smiled. “But you can bet the farm if there’s anything of use to the Guild, they will want it and they will get it.”

Entwhistle nodded, picked up the datafile, began reading through it. Sinclair tapped his fingers silently on the console, wondering what kind of action they would be taking, and upon whom.

Twenty minutes later, Sinclair received an updated briefing. And as he was fond of saying… it wasn’t pretty.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Morning.

Coffee. Dream fragments still bubbling up to the surface of his thoughts. Dex was certain his deep sleep had been filled with images and ideas from Bruckner’s journal, but there was no remembering much of it.

Didn’t matter, though. He knew he had to concentrate on the business of the day. This was it. Last dive. Dex could just feel it.

After stowing all his gear, including the slab of inter-matter, in the F-150, he headed out down to the docks. As he drove the familiar streets just as the sun was coming up, he kept going over what he’d learned about the mystery U-boat, and what it could all mean.

The Nazis had used the five-thousand level numbering sequence — most likely to indicate a new model, a new class — and it had never made it into their registries probably because the war ended so soon after it had been launched.

So what was it?

Dex had a pretty good idea and that was why today’s dive had him more than a little freaked. So much so he hadn’t shared his thoughts with anybody yet.

The Germans classified their boats by “type” as well as number. They obviously scrambled to get out a special boat that was probably a new type as well. Dex knew they’d gotten a few jet fighters off the ground — until we B-17’d their jet fuel refineries. They even had mini-ICBMs — the V2 rockets. They might have been planning some kind of really nasty sub, maybe like a boomer.

Dex had seen film of V-1 rockets being launched off the decks of the Type XXIs. Their engineers were years ahead of us. If we hadn’t pounded their factories when we did, they could have made things a lot worse on us, that’s for damned sure.

When he reached the Sea Dog, he was glad to see Don Jordan already on deck waiting for him. Andy Mellow and Kevin Cheever were there too.

“Hey,” said Dex. “Still waiting on Doc and Tommy?”

Don nodded, then pointed up at the sky. “Looks like we might get some rain. Some chop too. How long you figure you guys’ll be down there?”

“Just two of us to start — me and Tommy on the first dive. I want to check a few things and maybe cop an ID tag in the torpedo room. We’ll know almost right away whether or not we can get to it.”

“That it? Nothing else?”

Dex sat down on the bench by the suit lockers, shrugged. “Well, I think I’d like to get a look inside that hangar deck.”

“Okay, but we gotta keep an eye on the weather,” Don said.

“Gotcha.” Dex peeled off his jacket and sweatshirt, feeling the cold, early morning air brace him. When he was halfway into his drysuit, he saw Tommy pull into the parking lot. He jumped out of his vehicle with a duffel in one hand.

“All we need is Doc and we’ll be ready to go.”

Andy moved next to Dex, sat down. “How long before the Coast Guard does us in?”

Dex shrugged. “Hard to tell how much publicity Mike’s wife wants on the whole thing, plus you never know when you’re dealing with bureaucracy and the media. We could be national news… or not even show up on the radar.”

“Crazy,” said Kevin. “But sadly true.”

“So look, let’s get out there and see what we find, okay?” Dex checked his regulator. “If the story breaks, like I said before, we most likely won’t have a chance to get down there like this ever again. I don’t want to be anywhere near this thing when all the treasure-hunters start showing up.”

“It could be that bad, huh?” Andy said.

Dex nodded. “Trust me.”

The sound of a horn blowing in the parking lot caught their attention as Larry Schissel pulled to a halt with a screech of tires on gravel.

“Gang’s all here,” said Don.

They all continued to get ready to depart as Doc jogged up the dock and gangwayed aboard. “Sorry I’m late, guys.”

“No big deal,” said Dex. “Take your time getting suited up. You can go down on the last rotation.”

Doc grinned. “Fine with me.”

Don Jordan headed for the bridge. “I’ll flip on the base unit and get us outta here ASAP.”

Dex nodded, waited few ticks till Don clicked on the bridge’s Divelink.

“Okay, sound check,” said Don. “You copy?”

“I got ya, captain. Ready to shove off?”

“Any time you are. Loose those ties.”

Dex heard the big Detroit engines kick in as he unmoored the Dog. The boat eased out away from its slip, moved into the harbor and headed for the Bay. Row after row of silent vessels flanked their departure like a deployment of sentries lining the path from their fortress. Dex moved back to the bench, next to Tommy. His many years of Navy training started to kick in and he went with it.

Feeling his anxiety warp his thoughts, he knew there was no place for that kind of crap underwater. No matter how pressured he might feel, he had to slip into a state of calm resolution. Don’t let anything cloud his judgment, his ability to survive in or around that wreck.

Take a couple of long, slow, deep breaths, he told himself, then headed up to the bridge to make sure he and Don had everything under control.

“Okay, Chief, I’ve locked in the coordinates,” said Don. “We’ll be there in no time.”

Dex nodded, he thought about telling him what he found in the log, then figured it could wait till they got to dry land.

“You getting any weather reports?” he said as he looked up at the gray dome of sky all around them.

“Not great. Could be a storm in a few hours or it might blow over. Either way, we won’t have too many pleasure boaters around to get in our way.”

“Okay. If things look iffy, you call us in. You’re in charge up here, remember that.”

“Got ya,” said Don, who looked out across the bleak water as the silhouette of the Bay Bridge appeared out of the mist dead ahead. Turning to Dex, he spoke softly. “So, what’s it all mean? What’re we gonna do with the sub?”

Dex shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess we can finish up our research about it. Feel good that we added to history a little bit. And forget about it. It’ll be a popular spot for the rest of the wreck-and-salvage guys for awhile. I don’t want anything to do with that.”

“Sounds good to me.” Don smiled and returned his attention to the thickening gray sky, which was making the water of the Chesapeake look like old dishwater.

“I’m going down and check the tri-mix in the tanks,” he said. “Give me a yell when we’re getting close.”

Don nodded as he helmed the Sea Dog farther south into the Bay.

Climbing down to the main deck, Dex opened the hatch to the dive salon. Once inside, he ran through a series of checklist stuff on their equipment — regulators, dive computers, Ikelites, collection bags. Everything looked fine. Dex grabbed the underwater videocam, and hooked it to his utility belt. Last chance, probably, to get any good images. Then he clipped on a mesh collection bag and sealed the metal slab inside it. If he was going to keep that thing close at hand, that was about as close as you could get it. Besides, it was good dive ballast. Just then Don yelled down to them: “Five minutes, guys!”

“Okay, we’ll be ready!”

Pulling on his tanks, Tommy moved toward the aft end of the crew boat, staring down into the murky water. “Just give me the word…”

Dex moved next to him, said nothing. They were both standing on the dive platform at the end of the boat, watching the bridge for Don to give them the thumbs-up as soon as he spotted the safe-line buoy.

“It’s weird,” said Tommy, still staring into the water. “After reading that stuff last night, I feel like I know so much more about those guys than the last time we went down there, you know?”

Dex nodded.

“So the three guys, they scuttled the boat right out here, right below us.” Tommy whistled. “That is so weird, huh?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” said Dex.

“Wonder what happened to them?”

“I’m thinking the same thing.”

Tommy shook his head. “Too bad. Like, we’ll never know, huh?”

Dex said nothing. He’d just seen Don give them the signal, and sure enough, there was the marker buoy on the starboard side of the Dog.

Adjusting their mics and masks, they both dropped into the Bay.

This late into spring, the water was supposed to be getting warmer, but its wintry pulse still tried to penetrate Dex’s suit as he knifed beneath its choppy surface. Tommy’s effervescent entry beside him marked the beginning of their descent — a mission they would need to conduct with great care. Visibility was surprisingly clear, especially if there were storm currents gathering, and Dex didn’t figure on much hassle.

He was right. At fifty-seven feet, he could see a darker shape against the bottom. Reacting almost simultaneously, Tommy kicked downward and eased on down to the conning tower where they’d left the hatches open. Dex checked on the sealed case of videocam, then handed it to Tommy.

“You wanna go first?” he said.

“Nah.” Dex waved him in. “I’m right behind you.”

Tommy nodded, switched on the video, and started in.

Without warning, Dex was smacked with a memory of the last time he’d been in this sub, when he’d been trying to keep Mike Bielski alive. The images of Mike’s eyes behind his faceplate still haunted Dex, and he forced it from his thoughts. No way he could allow himself the distraction.

Once inside the control deck, Dex followed his torch beam to show the way to the forward torpedo room. Checking his tool belt, he eyed the mini pry-bar, snips, and pliers he might need if they found what they were looking for. The passage was remarkably clear, and all the hatches down the line were open — because of the scuttle, no doubt. That made their progress almost effortless without the need to struggle with any sealed doors or stuck handles.

“Okay, Don,” said Dex into his mic. “We’re about halfway down the aft section. All clear so far.”

“Copy that. Just be careful.”

Despite the easy access, he and Tommy still moved slowly. Their torchlights played along the steel bulkheads, occasionally touching on an object still recognizable beneath the crust of marine growth. Shelves of canned goods, junction boxes of wires and pipes, and a fire axe caught Dex’s eye. Tommy was getting good images of everything.

As he moved along, he was again impressed by the sheer size of the vessel. Even by today’s standards, this remained a big sub. Absently, he wondered how she’d handled, and imagined her German engineering was the only reason a crew of three had been able to drive her to this final destination.

“Okay, what’s that up there?” said Tommy. “That the one we’re looking for?”

Up ahead, glowing faintly in Dex’s light, he saw the half-open door; its red paint indicating the torpedo room, was flaking off in many places.

“That’s it. And I guess I don’t have to tell you to be extra careful in there. Just in case they left any live rounds laying around,” said Dex. “You on that, Donnie? We’re almost there.”

“Gotcha. Keep me in the loop.”

“Didn’t the captain say he dumped all the torpedoes?” said Tommy.

“The captain said a lot of things.”

“What’s that?” said Don.

“Tell you later,” said Dex as he motioned Tommy to sshhh.

“Okay, why don’t you go first?”

“Sounds good to me.” Dex eased his shoulder against the hatch and exhaled slowly as he felt it move with little resistance. Once he floated past the bulkhead, the first thing he noticed was the amount of open space in the chamber — another testament to the larger size of the boat.

Torpedo racks ran the length of the room on both sides, and true to Bruckner’s log, all were empty.

“Looks clear, Tommy. Come on in.”

As his dive partner slipped past the open hatch, Dex moved close enough to inspect the doors to the torpedo tubes, and saw what he was looking for almost right away. Under the strong beam of his torch, he could see the outer edge of a metal tag on the center tube door. Scraping the faceplate clear with the edge of his pry-bar, Dex could read the engraved lettering clearly:

The boat’s number, shipyard, city, and launch date. That locked it up, and gave that extra layer of proof to the log and the translation.

“That’s it,” he said. “U-5001. We got all the positive ID we need. Get a little closer and get some good shots.”

“Got it,” said Tommy. “You were right on the dime, Chief.”

Using his tools, Dex broke the tag loose without extensive effort, and slipped it into his collection bag. He checked his gauges, then signaled Tommy to back out of the torpedo room.

“We have enough time to check that hatch to the aft deck-housing if you want,” he said.

Tommy gave him a thumbs-up. “This might be our last chance. Let’s do it.”

Several minutes of careful maneuvering had them in the engine room amidst the crumbling banks of batteries. Atop a short ladder lay the access hatch to the deck above them. Tommy floated up and gave the wheel a wrenching yank counter-clockwise — it should have been enough to break open the seal, but the hatch refused to disengage.

“Hmmmm,” he said. “Stuck.”

“You’re kidding,” said Dex.

Tommy braced himself as best he could with tanks and equipment in the way, pulled again.

This time, there was a loud squeak as the hatch wheel turned.

“How ’bout that? You want me to go up first?”

“Easy. Slow. Just get your head up there and take a look first, okay?

Tommy nodded and he worked his hand holding his big flashlight up ahead of him. “Looks really dark up there.”

“Get yourself through the hatch and wait for me.”

Tommy slipped through the opening and Dex squeezed through as soon as he cleared the space. The darkness of the hangar was enhanced by the open area, nothing close enough to reflect nearby light. Dex played out the yellow-white beam of his torch and suddenly broke the surface of the water.

What?

Looking to his right, he saw the bright red color of Tommy’s suit, gestured at him.

“There’s an air pocket in here.”

“Yeah, amazing…”

“All this time, and it’s still tight as a crab’s ass.” Dex figured he should lift his mask to check the air, which would be stale and foul at best. If bearable, they could save some of their mix.

At the same time, Tommy’s light touched the fuselage of a plane painted in green and gray camo. “Wow! Check it out, Dex.”

They were both standing on the hangar deck, with water just past their knees. Tommy took a step toward the plane, and Dex reached out to stop him. “Hold it. You don’t know what’s in there.”

“Huh?”

Holding up his index finger, indicating him to wait, Dex lifted his mask off his face, sucked in a quick breath. He could almost taste the air, like putting your tongue on a slab of metal.

“Hey, guys?” said Don Jordan through the Divelink. “What’s going on? You forget about us?”

“Looks like we’ve got a light-to-medium bomber in here. Seaplane. You copy, Donnie?”

“No kidding. In good shape?”

“Looks perfect,” said Dex. “Never used.”

Tommy began to video the scene and Dex moved closer to touch the engine cowling. Even in the shadows beyond their torchlights, Dex could see the configuration of a sleek, pontooned plane, its pinioned wings tucked tight against it fuselage like a falcon sleeping on its perch. Along the bottom of the fuselage, he saw the bomb bay doors cantilevered to their widest open positions.

Tommy moved closer, still shooting video. “Hey look… how come the bottom’s open?”

“Approach with extreme caution,” said Dex. “There’s something I should tell you.”

“Huh?” said Don in the headset. “What? What’s going on?”

“Hang on…” said Dex. “I’ll let you know in a sec.”

Motioning Tommy away from the open bomb bay, Dex moved in to shine his light up into the belly cavity. He hesitated for an instant, not sure he wanted to see what he knew lay in wait for them.

“Hey, Dex!” Donnie’s voice sounded sharp and high on the radio. “Looks like we’re getting some company.”

Dex gestured to Tommy to hold up, then he spoke into his mic again: “What’s that? Who? What’re you talking about? What is it?”

“Don’t know. Some kind of aircraft. Still way out there.”

“Maybe you should check in with the Coast Guard?” Dex said quickly. “See if it’s them?”

There was a short pause as Dex moved through the murky confines.

“Okay, I just did. No reply yet…”

“Keep me in the loop. We’re on our way up.”

“Copy that.”

Dex looked up at the open belly of the bomber, then backed away. Alarms were going off in his subconscious. They were telling him to get out. Now.

“Tommy, get down the hatch. We’ve got to get topside.”

“Gotcha.”

Dex watched him slip beneath the stale water and enter the hatch. Precious seconds passed, then: “I’m clear,” said Tommy.

“Right behind you.” Dex flashed his light on the seaplane one last time, re-adjusted his mask and regulator before he slipped into the water. When he descended through the hatch, Tommy was half-floating past the bank of batteries, panning his torchlight back and forth, waiting for him. Dex gestured toward the bulkhead door that would get them back to conning tower and the hatch to the bridge.

“We’re getting ready to exit,” said Dex into his mic. “You copy, Donnie?”

There was another pause as Don left the base unit mic open, then: “Hey, I can see it now — a chopper heading this way, from the southeast. Low. And Jesus, this mother is fast! Coming up on starboard and—”

There was a blur of sound that could have been helicopter rotors or… a slurry burst from a big automatic weapon.

Then the Divelink went dead.

Dex followed Tommy out through the hatch and once in the open, he strained to see his red suit through the brackish water.

“Dex, you hear that? What the fuck!”

“Don’t know yet. Head up slowly. On an angle.” Pulling out his Spyderco marine blade, he sawed through the safeline attached to the inflatable buoy.

“Huh?”

“We need to get away from that line and the wreck! You hear me?”

Muffled sounds pushed through the water, dissipated by distance and the currents. Sounds that could be anything from an aircraft in trouble to gunfire. Tommy gave him a thumbs-up, and starting flippering horizontally away from the 5001. Dex caught up and guided him farther west of their position. He didn’t like it. Sounded like very bad news up there.

He’d caught up with Tommy and continued to swim away from the wrecksite as fast as possible. Checking his air, they had less than five minutes left in their tanks.

A lot could happen in five minutes.

He touched Tommy’s shoulder, pointed to his Divelink mic, unplugged the lead as he jettisoned the transceiver. Looking at Tommy, he gave him a thumbs down. No more talking on that thing.

Tommy nodded, disconnected his own unit and dumped it.

Dex didn’t want anybody using it to track them. Watching the units sink out of sight made him feel a little less exposed.

They spent the next sixty seconds angling slightly up and as far from the wreck as possible. There was no way to tell how far they’d moved laterally, but they had closed the distance to the surface by twenty feet or so. Tommy looked over and Dex gestured for him to continue along the same generally ascendant course when the explosion resonated through water behind them.

Dex barely had a chance to twist himself around, turning face-up to the surface, when the shock wave rippled over him. Like being whacked with a wide paddle, the wave starched him flat, then passed through the soft tissues of his organs. Like getting hit by car, so hard that his breath pushed the regulator out of his mouth like a bellows. Dex fought to force it back between his teeth and pull another lungful of air before he passed out. Luckily he and Tommy had gotten far enough away to avoid the lethal perimeter of an underwater blast.

No way the Sea Dog had been so lucky.

The force of the shockwave had been dangerously powerful — especially for a boat whose hull was mostly above the waterline. If Don Jordan’s crewboat had absorbed the force of that blast, it had been shredded into grapeshot.

No way to tell if anybody had still been on board.

He checked his air. Less than two minutes. They had to surface soon.

Then a second, more powerful explosion and another one-two shockwave rushed through them. Unlike the first one, the follow-up blasts felt as if they’d detonated completely beneath the surface. Depth charges? That meant kill shots at any divers still down. The extra distance they’d pulled had probably saved their lives but Dex’s eardrums were clanging in pain from the sudden compression.

Tommy was hanging in the clearing water, staring through his faceplate with wide eyes. Dex indicated he follow him and began a series of leg kicks upward at the appropriate angle. He could sense the seconds clocking past as he watched the flat silvery ceiling of the sea get closer and closer with each kick.

He didn’t want to think about what might be waiting for them when they cracked the surface, but he had no choice…

Chapter Twenty-Four

The incident report was short, and not very sweet.

The Blackbird assault copter had landed a team on the dive boat, neutralized the crew almost instantly, and swept the premises within desired parameters.

No evidence of the 5001 found.

The team leader had intercepted, but had not defeated, a call from the target to the Coast Guard just before the incursion had been initiated. This factor had compressed the operation timeline, and because of this, the team had no chance to confirm or deny any target personnel unaccounted for. There was an assumption that at least one diver was in the water, but this had not been confirmed. Anti-personnel depth charges were dropped with no indication of success or failure.

The dive boat had been destroyed utterly with some C4 placed between its twin engines.

Follow-up recommended.

No kidding, thought Sinclair.

Less than an hour had elapsed since the incursion, and the Coast Guard was investigating a terrible boating accident. Tragic, but… well, these things happen. Having ops in so many governments and so many corporations for hundred of years afforded the Guild a certain leverage in dealing with things like the sinking of the Sea Dog in the Chesapeake Bay. They operated and existed through continued covert placement of their own people in every organization in the world.

An article in the Baltimore Sun, a few minutes on WBAL-TV evening news, and the accident would be forgotten.

Not by everyone, of course. Entwhistle was working through all the information conduits to find out everything he could about the dive boat and its crew. If there had been more than the four men on board, then there was additional clean-up to be done.

A job worthy of any competent Guild team, but nothing out of the ordinary. Sinclair selected men for the job, assigned them to Entwhistle, and assumed they would have plenty of data as soon as possible.

But Sinclair’s real work was just beginning.

Before the Blackbird chopper had even reached the dive boat, he’d assembled his crew for the undersea phase of the operation — the “follow-up” the incident report had fatuously suggested. His vessel was a prototype of the Dragonfish — a deep-sea assault and rescue submersible being built for the Navy. The contractor, Sea Dynamics, because it was ultimately Guild owned, always found ways to provide Guild forces with renditions of its vessels. Sometimes, one of their test-models suffered an “accident,” which covertly provided the Guild with state of the art equipment.

The Dragonfish was fast, stealthy, and capable of inserting a SEAL team just about anywhere, including any sheik’s private bath. Its crew and dive team would have no trouble compromising the U-5001 right under the unsuspecting noses of the Coast Guard. In fact, Sinclair was anxious to pull it off just to see how good the new DSAR actually was.

He stood in the launch bay with his helmsman, a short stocky guy named Taggard, and his navigator, a Navy-retired graybeard named Sypniewski. Sinclair had trained both men; they were top-notch sailors. He trusted his life to them, which said it all.

“Dive team ETA?” said Sinclair.

“On schedule,” said Sypniewski. “When they arrive, we we’ll be ready to launch, sir.”

Sinclair nodded and they boarded the long, lean underwater craft. Looking very much like its namesake, it bristled with the latest weapons and two prehensile arms which folded invisibly into the hull when not in use. Sinclair sealed the hatch behind him, looked at his helmsman and nodded.

Taggard adjusted the ballast vents, toggled up the reactor-powered electric screws, and eased the DSAR into the Atlantic. Sinclair strapped into the captain’s chair as the Dragonfish traversed a short undersea tunnel that exited him and his men beyond the island’s breakers. Just as they cleared the shallows, Sinclair looked at the sky through vessel’s eye-like starboard bubble.

Beautiful day. Sky a serene blue dome with few clouds. Even the Atlantic surface looked calm. He continued to scan the horizon until a seaplane rose above it on a course that would intersect theirs within minutes.

“Right on time,” said Sypniewski.

Sinclair nodded. “Recognition code hailing frequency. Defensive systems ready until you get the code-back.”

Taggard keyed in the encrypted code, sent it. Routine protocol, thought Sinclair, but you never assumed anything when you worked as covertly as the Guild. He exhaled as the correct reply code came back to them.

The three-man dive team entered the Dragonfish and began suiting up in the belly assault bay. Before the seaplane had even lifted off, Taggard had begun to slip the DSAR beneath the surface. Once fully submerged, the vessel cut through the cold water at an impressive forty-plus knots.

They would be onsite within four hours, and that’s when Sinclair figured things would get interesting.

Chapter Twenty-Five

His pulse had jumped and the extra pulmonary action had used up his tri-mix at a precipitous rate; his tank was damned close to zero when he reached the surface. Regardless, Dex tried to make his return to the air world as unnoticeable as possible. Yanking off his mask, he arched his back to maneuver his nose and mouth above the surface, gulped some air and chanced a quick 360 scan of his position.

Nothing.

No sound.

No boats or planes anywhere. Barely even a trace of smoke. Other than a lot of very small pieces of flotsam, he saw nothing in any direction. The exception being the long swipe of the Bay Bridge in the distance and a scattering of distant white dots — sailboats out doing not much of anything.

A splash to his left announced Tommy’s ascent, and he gasped and sucked in air with all the noise he could muster. He looked around with half-panicked expression. So much for being careful.

“Dex! You okay?”

“So far…”

“Jesus, what happened? Where’s the boat?”

“Gone, Tommy. They blew it to hell.”

“Jesus! What! Who?”

As the easy bay chop bobbed them lightly, Dex searched the sky. “I don’t know… could be anybody.”

Tommy looked around the empty water and sky for a moment. “What about… what about the guys?”

“Doesn’t look good. That was one big mother of a blast.”

“Oh, man… you’re kidding…”

Dex shook his head. “The debris’s just a bunch of little pieces of nothing. Hardly any smoke. Whatever happened, it was quick. And efficient.”

“You sure it wasn’t some kinda accident, maybe?”

“The last thing Don said was something about a chopper.”

“Coast Guard?”

“Again, maybe. No way to tell.”

“Jesus, well what’d they do — put a freakin’ missile on ’em?!”

“Could be.”

“I can’t believe anybody’d kill ’em. Just like that.”

“Look, we can’t be sure anybody’s dead yet. I’m just saying it doesn’t look good.” Dex paused, did some quick computations. “I mean, we couldn’t have gotten more than three or four hundreds yard from the wreck, and there’s pretty much nothing out here. Nothing.”

Tommy’s expression had changed to something like anger, but his voice belied his anxiety. “Bastards. What’re we gonna do? We gonna make it?”

“We’ll be okay. Let’s ditch these tanks. Our suits will just about keep us afloat.”

As they both wriggled free of the straps, Dex tried to keep his focus on what had just happened. What it could mean.

“Mine’s loose,” said Tommy. “What’s next?”

“We swim easy. Side, or backstroke.” Dex had retained the utility belt with his tools, the video, and the collection bag, even though he knew it was extra weight. Weight that might become significant if things got sketchy.

“Swim where? Where’re we headed?”

“For starters, anywhere away from here. Whatever blew up our boat might be back.”

Tommy rolled his eyes. “Hadn’t thought of that. Okay.”

“I figure we head for Gibson Island.”

“How far?”

“Two or three miles. Maybe more.”

“Man, I don’t think I’ve ever tried to swim that far.” Tommy didn’t sound too good.

“We’re not in a race. We take it nice and easy.”

“Still… miles?”

“People swim the English Channel. That’s more than twenty. We can do this. We just take it slow.”

“Okay, and what do we do when we get there?”

“Don’t worry about it. Gibson Island’s mostly woods. We can hole up till we figure out what’s going on.”

Dex pointed them in the right direction and they both started pushing the water with nice long strokes that wouldn’t fatigue them too quickly.

After a few minutes, the shoreline didn’t appear any closer, but Dex knew it was an illusion. They were making progress. A few sailboats were visible in the distance, but that was it.

Tommy paused to float on his back for a moment and catch his breath. “What’ll we do if the Coast Guard shows up?”

“I think we avoid everybody until we get things sorted out,” said Dex.

“Even those guys? I mean, isn’t that their job to save people in the water?”

“Listen,” said Dex, indicating they should keep swimming. “We just saw our boat get vaporized and we have no idea who did it.”

“Huh?” Tommy talked between strokes. “Which means what?”

“You kidding me? Which means that we can’t trust anybody. Especially for the absolute right now.”

“That is some scary shit you’re talkin’,” said Tommy. “And I seriously hope you’re wrong.”

“Yeah, me too, But don’t count on it.” Dex glanced shoreward. They were definitely getting a little closer, but they would still need to pace themselves. “Let’s put all our energy into the swim. We talk later.”

They continued to head toward shore in silence for another ten minutes. A sailboat meandered closer to their position, but whoever was on the rudder hadn’t spotted them, or if so, had chosen to ignore them. Thankfully, it was mostly overcast; a high sky with a bright sun hammering down would have made the journey twice as hard. Tommy pushed the water past him, behind him, but his motions began to get erratic, less rhythm and pacing. Dex was watching him closely, giving him words of encouragement. Even though he was plenty younger, Tommy was edging toward the panic state people reach when they’ve been in a vast body of water too long.

Another ten minutes, with a few in between to rest by back-floating, and they were very close to catching the tide off the channel — a big assist that would pull them toward the southern tip of Gibson Island. Good thing too. Tommy was running out of steam, and Dex figured the guy was just this side of giving up. He’d seen it happen to people marooned in the water. So, a few minutes of calm on their backs was a good idea right about now.

But before he could suggest it, he saw the approach of the cutter from south. It was way below them, but he could ID its profile along the horizon line. The next few minutes would be critical.

“Coast Guard,” he said, and pointed to the far-away ship.

“They lookin’ for us?” Tommy barely got the words. He was exhausted.

“Could be. I don’t know. Just keep moving. We’re not trusting anybody at this point, remember?”

They sidestroked their way toward the shallows. Not much farther now.

“Man, I hate this.” Tommy’s voice was getting weak.

“Almost there, man. C’mon.”

Out in the bay, at least a couple miles out, Dex saw the Coast Guard boat move in lazy circles in the general area where the Sea Dog had blown. If they were looking for Dex and Tommy, they were doing a damned good job of disguising it. More likely, they’d responded to a garbled distress call, and were now confused to find nothing in the vicinity. If they spotted any debris, it would keep them focused on that general area.

And away from us, thought Dex.

“We should be close to touching bottom,” he said. Tommy needed something to work for.

“You sure?”

“It gets shallow pretty far out. Any second now. Just keep pushing that water behind you, okay?”

“I’m with you.”

Dex said nothing as he continued to pull himself toward the sloping sand. He was just about used up. Every pull with his arms had become a near impossible task. Rolling over on his back for maximum flotation, he reached down and unclipped the videocam from the utility belt, consigning it to the oblivion of the sandy bottom. The slight lessening of weight allowed him to move forward in the water just a little easier. But at this point, every ounce was enough to mean something. Next, he unclipped the heavy iron prybar, and he felt instantly lighter. His arms felt as if they were ready to disconnect from his shoulders; Tommy was probably way beyond that. Dex forced himself forward. No idea how far they’d swum, but he’d most likely underestimated it.

“Dex… Dex, I’m done.” Tommy’s voice sounded so weak, so frail.

“No you’re not, man. Don’t talk like that.”

“I can’t do it! I feel like I’m not movin’ forward anymore. I got nothin’ left…”

“Hang on,” said Dex, feeling a fire in his thigh muscles as he tread water in languid half-assed leg-pumps. “Tommy, roll over on your back. You’ll float naturally till I get to you.”

“I can’t…”

“Yeah, you can.” Dex closed the several feet of distance between them, and it felt infinitely farther. When he grabbed Tommy’s arm, and helped turn him onto his back, he was amazed at how massive the kid felt. “Easy now. That’s it.”

Tommy rolled over, but his breathing increased as he started to panic, not believing he could keep his head above the light chop.

“Just relax, I’ve got you.” Dex was helping him float, but not entirely. Now he reached across his stomach, fumbling for the release on Tommy’s utility belt. “I’m going to get this off you. You’ll be lighter. You’ll be able to float better.”

“Okay…” Tommy’s voice remained shaky, on the edge of panic. But his breathing had steadied as he slowly realized he wasn’t sinking.

When he squeezed the edges of the quick-release buckle, Tommy’s belt fell away instantly, and he noticed the difference in weight. “All right, stay on your back, and I’m going to tow you. Kick your legs to help… but only if you can.”

“I’ll try.”

“We’re gonna be fine. We’ll make it.” Dex looked ahead to the shoreline, which hadn’t appeared any closer lately. The seabed should be sloping up soon, getting more shallow. Eventually. And Dex hoped he could make it with Tommy as lax as he’d become. Dex had seen it before where guys just reached a point where they couldn’t push it another inch. Where it became weirdly preferable to let everything go and slip beneath the water.

“Okay, here we go. Ready?”

Tommy tried to nod, and the water splashed around his ears. Dex felt him tense. He hooked his arm under Tommy’s and across his chest, then stretched out and did a modified sidestroke to start towing him toward shore again. They should be in the soft currents that run westwardly and even if Dex did nothing but drift, they might eventually make the coastline.

But might can be a very dangerous word.

Minutes dragged past them like the brackish water, and Dex’s arms and legs screamed from maximum muscle burn. Each pull, each kick agony. Like he was trying to pull a bank safe through quicksand.

Too much weight. He was at the point where every ounce became critical, and he knew what he should do next. The only thing still attached to his own belt was the specimen bag and that weird metal slab. Half the thickness of a brick, it weighed at least five time a brick’s weight. Dex knew it could make the difference between getting ashore safely or not.

Can’t let that go.

Thoughts flashed though him in alternating currents of doubt and conviction, and he knew there was only one choice. Reluctantly, with his free hand, he reached down and squeezed the release on his utility belt. As soon as the bag with the heavy slab slipped free, he felt immediate added buoyancy.

Partially psychological, certainly, but it was enough to revitalize his energy and his resolve. Despite the fire in his limbs, Dex yanked them through the water.

Tommy must have sensed it because he started kicking weakly. It wasn’t much, but it helped. Big time. Every joule of extra energy helped, and they were going to make it.

More minutes, more splashing and pulling the dead weight of the water. The best way to do it was just wipe your mind clean and slip into a trance-like state where the motions of survival became the total sphere of your existence.

There was no room for recriminations about losing the most important piece of evidence of what the 5001 might signify. No sense even worrying about it. That weird slab of metal lay fathoms beneath them, already losing itself in the silty bottom.

They continued to struggle toward the shore. There wasn’t much beach due to the erosion at the south end of Gibson. This had happened despite the presence of substantial jetties spaced evenly along the eastern shoreline. Dex had been vaguely steering them to bisect a couple of the jetties where plenty of trees stood as close to the water as possible. Best place where they could duck into quick cover.

It didn’t seem possible, but the fire in his legs became more intense. So much so, he knew the next stage was some kind of autonomic paralysis. If he could—

Suddenly his feet and knees touched the mushy sand and mud beneath him.

Was it real? Or had he imagined it…

Kicking downward, he was rewarded with the resistance of the packed shoreline sand.

Automatically he righted himself, stood up in the chest-deep water. “Touchdown!” he said weakly.

“Oh Jesus,” said Tommy as he tried to stand, wobbling to stay upright. “That feels so freakin’ good.”

“Easy now. Up to the beach, and head for those trees, okay?”

“I’ll try.” Tommy slogged forward, and either he tripped or his knees gave way; he toppled facedown into the brackish water. He thrashed upward, shaking his head like a big dog. “Man, I think I hate the water! I think my diving days are done, man.”

Reaching the beach, Dex resisted the urge to just collapse across its cool coarse bed. No way. Get the hell away from the water. Now. Crawling up off his knees, he grabbed Tommy under the shoulder and heaved him up to his feet. They covered the small stretch of sand in several staggering, arthritic, zombie strides, crossed a small unpaved service road and slipped into a thick wood of evergreens and tall poplars. As soon as they penetrated the green shade, they folded up like cheap lawn chairs. Even though soaked and trembling from the cool air, they felt unexposed and fairly safe.

“Jeez, I can’t move,” said Tommy. “That was brutal. Just freakin’ broo-tull.”

Dex pulled himself to a sitting position, back against a tall tree, tried to control his breathing. “Now we hope nobody saw us.”

“Huh? This place looks plenty deserted. You mean people live here?”

“Didn’t you see some of the slips when we were coming in?”

“I didn’t see shit. Too busy staying alive to do much sightseein’.”

“Well, anyway, yeah — there’s people here. Rich people. The houses are big and far apart.”

“No kiddin’.” Tommy had been laying flat on his back, but now he eased himself to a sitting position. His red diving suit a stark contrast to the muted colors surrounding them.

“I think some of the land is like state parks or something like that.”

Tommy nodded absently as if that info wasn’t terribly important to him. “So what do we do now?”

Dex half-grinned. “I had a feeling you were going to ask me that.”

Tommy tilted his head. “Meaning what — you have no ideas?”

“No, actually, I have plenty. Just not sure which are the good ones.”

“Well, whatever you got in mind,” said Tommy. “I hope it’s got some down-time in it — I’m beat. Can’t move.”

Dex nodded. “I’m thinking we sit tight for an hour or so, but then we should get going.”

“Like where?”

“We need to assume whoever hit the Sea Dog didn’t want any survivors. They dropped underwater charges on us, remember?”

“Yeah, you’re right about that.”

“No way to tell if they know who we are yet. But they probably will.”

“How you figure?” Tommy looked only half as interested as he was in maybe catching a few winks.

“If they know they hit Don Jordan’s boat, then they might be able to check who he charters to — which would include the dive shop. That might get them everybody’s name.”

Tommy grinned. “You think Don kept good records like that?”

“Probably not, but I’m figuring worst case for us. And that the people who did this are real pros.”

“Really? You think these guys’re that good?”

“Tommy, I got no idea how good they are. Or who they are. But so far, I have to figure they’re good. Real good.”

Dex didn’t want to say anything, but he was kicking himself for telling that Coast Guard Ensign so much. He didn’t want to think he was the reason the guys were dead. And then there was Kevin Cheever’s buddy at the lab — if he’d talked to that Naval Historical bunch in D.C.… well, maybe that’s how the “bad guys” found out. If they had connections to the military or one of the alphabet agencies, it would be easy.

Tommy had been weighing what Dex had said: “Okay, they’re good. But I still don’t get it.”

“Way I see it, the most probable deal is that people in the military knew about our U-boat, the one with the A-bomb, okay? They knew about it for a long time — probably back when the Germans were first getting it ready, but they never found it. They probably knew the mission was launched, but they never found out what happened to it.”

“Wow. One of them unsolved mysteries, huh?”

Dex nodded. “Something like that. And when we found it, somebody didn’t want us talking about it.”

“So they’re going to try and find us, shut us up too?” Tommy was looking more awake than several seconds earlier. “You jokin’ me?”

“No joke. I figure, if we’re lucky, we have maybe an hour or two to safely get back to the dock and get our vehicles out of there. If we don’t, somebody’s going to notice there’s a lot of cars sitting around with no owners showing up to claim them. A real red flag.”

“Oh yeah, I see that.”

“Of course, that could be wildly optimistic. They might already know who we are, and they could have people staked out watching our cars to see if we show up.”

Tommy shifted uncomfortably, said nothing.

“And,” Dex continued, “if they get wind of our identities, they’ll be going through our houses like rats in a wheel of cheese.”

“These bastards mean business.”

“And let’s not forget — right now, we don’t have clothes, money, or even access to it. If these guys are top drawer, they can lock up our bank accounts, credit cards, everything.”

Tommy rolled his eyes. “You make it sound so easy for them, like hitting a beachball right over the plate.”

“Could be.”

“So what do we do?”

Dex shrugged. “Not a lot of options. We get off this island as fast as we can, get out of this gear. Once we find out how hot they’ve been looking for us, we gotta make some decisions that will greatly affect our futures.”

Tommy shook his head. “You know, I don’t know how you’re thinkin’ so clearly about all this stuff. Sounds to me like we’re in deep shit.”

Dex grinned. “I’d say that’s a pretty cogent assessment.”

Standing up, Dex scanned the immediate area. The trees were not so thickly spaced they couldn’t move north on the island without being seen. At least for a little while. Then there were some McMansion neighborhoods that would be very tough to negotiate in the daylight. And they couldn’t afford to wait all day for the cover of darkness.

He explained all this to Tommy, not really expecting much assistance, but he wanted to keep him in the loop. Dex looked at him and gestured north.

“We need to get moving.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Tommy stood up, stretched. “What do we do if we run into anybody?”

“Worry about it when it happens.”

They moved as far as they could in the wooded land until they reached a tree line bordering a large home enclosed by a manicured, landscaped lawn. To the east lay a paved road and the Bay. Dex held up for a second, assessing the scene.

“You know, I think we’re crazy to try to stay hidden. Somebody will see us and call the cops.”

“Can’t the cops help us?” said Tommy “I mean, c’mon, we haven’t done anything wrong.”

“At this point, I trust no one in the power grid, okay? Not till we find out who killed our friends.”

His last words kind of lingered in the air, and they seemed to affect Dex and Tommy with equal weight. It was as if actually articulating the truth of what had happened somehow made it all the more real. Kevin and Don and Doc and Andy — all dead, their bodies probably blown into chum for the bottom feeders. Dex squirmed at the thought.

Tommy looked as if he wanted to speak, but said nothing.

Dex pointed past the house and yard in front of them to a residential street. “Let’s just cut across to that road and start walking. The only way off this island is up the causeway road. We’ve got no choice anyway.”

“Guess you’re right.” Tommy followed him as he angled along the trees and the presumed property line to the road.

“We’ve got to get back to Annapolis as soon as possible,” said Dex. “We need to see if the cars have been covered yet.”

“You know the way to get there?”

“I have a good idea.”

They didn’t talk much for the next ten minutes as they walked along the shoulder of Broadwater Way. Tommy’s red dry-suit was brighter than Dex’s pale green, but both made them as conspicuous as highway maintenance workers. As the two of them moved deeper into the heart of the wealthy neighborhood, Dex felt more and more exposed. He could feel the gaze of clandestine eyes burning him from all directions.

As they passed a gated driveway, Dex saw a woman dressed casually, carrying a pair of gardening gloves and wearing a straw hat, stop to stare at them through heavy black iron posts.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” she said, erecting a flimsy smile.

Dex paused, smiled back, and approached the gate. “Actually, maybe you can.”

As he drew closer, he could see the woman was probably a well-preserved seventy or so. She didn’t back away or look apprehensive, and held her jaw high and proud like Katherine Hepburn in any of her films. She waited for him to continue, so he did.

“We lost our rubber dinghy,” said. “Had to swim ashore down by the point.”

“How unfortunate.” She looked at them as if they were a couple of little boys lying through their teeth. Despite her age, there was an impish, gamine quality about her.

Dex decided he liked her, and stood mute for a long few seconds. He smiled before speaking. “Sorry, but I thought I heard you ask if you could ‘help’ us…”

“So I did. My name is Eleanor. Eleanor Winthrop.”

Dex held out his hand, eased it between the bars of the gate slowly. “Dexter McCauley, US Navy, retired. This is Thomas Chipiarelli, Baltimore City Fire Department.”

“Very nice to meet you. Are either of you injured?”

“No ma’am,” said Tommy. “But thanks for askin’.”

“Very well,” said Eleanor. “What can I do for you? I could call the police, if you’d like.”

“Hmm, maybe that’s not such a great idea.” Tommy smiled and looked down as if embarrassed.

Dex looked at him, wondering what the hell he was talking about and hoping he wasn’t going to say something really stupid.

“Really?” said Eleanor Winthrop. “Why ever not?”

“Well, it’s hard to explain, but us guys in the Fire Department… well, we’ve kinda got this rivalry thing goin’ with the Police guys, you know?” Tommy paused, grinned his little boy grin that he probably used on younger women to great effect.

“Oh, I didn’t realize that.” Eleanor smiled. Apparently Tommy’s charm knew no age barriers.

“Yeah,” he said. “And I gotta tell ya — if word gets back to the Baltimore City precincts we were dumb enough to sink our own boat, we’d never live it down.”

Not bad, thought Dex. He joined Tommy in a chuckle of agreement.

“Oh my,” said Eleanor. “Well, we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

She grinned like a schoolgirl flirting. Either she really liked Tommy and his line of bull, or she was as sly and suspicious as they come. Dex had no idea, but he figured it was time to find out.

“Actually, if we could get a ride back to Annapolis, that would be great. We lost our wallets and all our gear out in the Bay.” He paused to see her reaction, but she remained silent and unexpressive. “You think maybe your husband could give us a ride?”

She stood there looking at them between the black iron bars of the gate, holding her gardening gloves up near her chin as if in offering. Then she tilted her head, smiled wistfully. “No, that won’t be possible. My husband passed away right around Christmas last year.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” Dex felt stymied, even more exposed.

“But that wouldn’t preclude me driving you up to town,” she said.

“Really? That would be great.”

Reaching into her pocket, she produced a cell phone. “Of course, I’d at least like to be sure you’re who you say you are.”

“Oh sure, of course,” said Tommy, with a wink.

Dex had been thinking ahead. There was a decent chance anyone looking for them didn’t know about Tommy yet. He hadn’t been with the dive group all that long, and Dex couldn’t remember if he’d ever even written down his name anywhere at the shop. Tommy had paid cash for his gear, telling Dex he hated credit cards because they always got him in trouble, so that was a good thing too. Hardly anything connecting him to Dex and Don Jordan or the Sea Dog. Of course, there would be cell phone records, but they might require some time or bureaucracy to access, and even then, there would be lots of names to sift through.

“Is there anyone I could call?” said Eleanor.

“Engine House No. 5,” said Tommy. “Ask for Tommy Chipiarelli.”

The lady squinted at him through her glasses. “And how do I know that’s really your name?”

Tommy smiled, walked closer to the gate, and held up his left wrist where his silver ID bracelet dangled.

“Here we go,” he said, disengaging the catch, and handing it to her.

After scanning it carefully, she gave it back to him, and googled the fire house location, then called the listed number.

Dex and Tommy waited for her to finish her brief conversation with whomever had answered.

“They said it was your day off, and I could reach you tomorrow during the day shift.” She closed the lid on her little phone, tilted her head in that coquettish way she had.

Tommy smiled. “They don’t need to remind me. I’ll be there.”

Eleanor put away her phone, reached into her garden apron and produced a remote control, which she depressed. Instantly, electric motors buzzed and hummed and the big iron gate began to slide off to the right. “Why don’t you two follow me up to the house, and we can get ready.”

“Thank you very much,” said Dex. “We really appreciate it.”

Things got even better. While they were waiting on the spacious deck that wrapped around half the house, Eleanor came out with a large cardboard carton — filled with men’s clothing. She dropped it between their chairs with a detached expression.

“Some of my husband’s. I’ve been meaning to give them away, but… I guess I could never get myself to do it.”

“Mrs. Winthrop,” said Dex. “You don’t have to—”

“No, no. You boys should get out of those silly suits. You look like a couple of lollipops.”

An hour later, dressed in casual golf attire that was little tight on Dex and a little baggy on Tommy, they rode along Ritchie Highway in Eleanor’s Lexus hybrid SUV. She had become quite comfortable with them and clearly enjoyed being able to simply talk to people. Dex could easily imagine how isolated she must feel in her day-to-day existence. A CD of string quartets played softly below their conversation, which she kept igniting with questions designed to uncover some adventurous tales of Tommy’s firefighting and a sprinkling of details from Dex’s Navy days.

He preferred to let Tommy do the talking while he tried to figure out how they were going to get through this mess. He wanted to have a plan or at least a series of alternatives. But he didn’t know enough about their adversaries, or how much they knew about him. It was going to be tough to take a step without worrying if it would be the wrong one.

Dex hated this kind of situation. After a career of having to make critical, often impossible decisions, he’d retired in the errant belief there’d be very few left in his life.

Wrong.

Or… not. There might be only one more bad choice, and then it would be lights out.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Target approaching,” said Sypniewski, who sat hunched over a screen which switched among a choice of displays with a touch of his index finger. “Depth 69.7 feet. ETA five minutes.”

Sinclair nodded, said nothing. He sat in the command chair peering out through the bubble head of the Dragonfish even though the green-brown suspension of the Chesapeake Bay ratcheted visibility down to murky at best. The DSAR’s instrumentation provided vision and a clear view better than any pair of human eyes ever could. The central LCD outlined the old U-boat as it lay on the sandy bottom, its humpbacked shape distinctive and memorable. He had seen classified blueprints from the old OSS files back when he’d been USN. The fate of the U-5001 had been one of those almost mythic mysteries in the Pentagon for a long, long time. To finally be a part of the unraveling was very satisfying to him — especially since he was no longer part of the system.

Of course, the Guild had a larger agenda than merely uncovering the fate of a World War II relic. Since the end of the war, its scientists and military people had known about the order from Doenitz to visit Station One Eleven. The Guild also had fragmentary data suggesting the Arctic station was the repository of innumerable technological wonders. But they — like everyone else — had never been able to discover its location. Finding the U-5001 might provide a key to the proper coordinates. And of course, there was one other pesky problem with this mission — a 70-kiloton weapon that may or may not be operational.

“That’s a damned big boat,” said Sypniewski. His simple observation yanked Sinclair from his thoughts.

“By the folks who brought you the Bismarck,” said Taggard, adjusting his speed and descent angle.

“Dive team — stand by,” said Sinclair. He watched his screens intently as the 5001 materialized right in front of the DSAR. Taggard reversed the engines, then dropped to a full stop. “Okay, gentlemen — get in the water.”

Sinclair watched their progress via remote-cam, but the visibility was terrible. He relied more on the running narrative of the team leader, a very capable diver named Lansdale, as they entered the submarine through the open hatch on the conning tower. The other two comprised a Tactical Officer named Barrett and Waldrop, the Weapons Tech. Once they gained the boat’s interior, their remote cam’s images became remarkably clear. Sinclair saw no evidence of damage anywhere, which gave credence to the theory that boat had been scuttled all those years ago.

But why? Part of a larger story, no doubt.

Tense minutes passed as the three divers worked their way through compartments of the boat. Sinclair watched his screens with intimate interest, as if he were right along with them. The team leader assessed their progress so far: “Looks like we were late for this party, sir. The captain’s quarters has been picked. If there ever was anything here, it’s gone now. Nothing anywhere else either. You copy that?”

“Loud and clear,” said Sinclair. His orders had been laid out in very simple terms: find anything that might lead to the location of Station One Eleven. He had no idea why his superiors needed that information, but he would work under the assumption it was vitally important. If he needed to know more, they would tell him. It was a comfortable paradigm and to tell the truth, he didn’t really care what the Guild wanted or why. Sometimes the hours were long, but they paid him well and his life was generally good.

“Proceed to next phase?” said Lansdale.

“Affirmative.” Sinclair exhaled slowly, clearing his mind as best he could. No sense worrying about what was coming next. It had to be done.

“Entering the hangar deck,” said Lansdale.

Sinclair watched the screens as they revealed the dive team’s progress. The sight of the seaplane bomber proved galvanic, even to a jaded veteran like him. To think it had come close to being a part of history was chilling. When he noticed the bomb bay doors open, he wondered why?

He watched the number 2 camera’s display, Waldrop’s, as it revealed the underbelly of the German plane. “We have a problem,” said Waldrop, who had once been in charge of the nukes on one of the supercarriers.

As the diver moved directly under the plane, looked up so that Sinclair shared his view of the interior, he said: “No bomb.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Wow,” said Tommy. “What a nice old gal, huh?”

“She was great, and I felt bad about blowing off her offer for lunch, but we just don’t have the time.” Dex checked his watch out of habit, and scanned the neighborhood where he’d asked the woman to drop them off on Charing Cross Drive. The area was a pleasant, innocuous-looking collection of townhomes, and the traffic along the main connecting artery was sporadic. As they walked along a shady sidewalk, Dex was forced to admit absolutely nobody paid them a lick of attention.

“How far to your house?” said Tommy.

“About five blocks — long blocks.” Dex reached the intersection at Reidel, and took a left heading northeast toward his townhouse. “We need to be careful, or it’s ballgame.”

His plan was simple — check to see if anyone had found out where he lived. It would happen eventually, but they still had a chance to be ahead of that particular curve. With Tommy following along, they walked slowly, as if they were in no hurry — just in case someone was watching. When they reached the street one block down from Dex’s, Tommy waved casually as he parted company and headed down the tree-lined lane. Dex continued on, past his street, to the row of trees that bordered all the back yards on his block and defined by a service road for sanitation and utility vehicles. Dex cut in behind the row of trees and walked down the road to the gate which opened into his backyard. He didn’t open the gate, but leaned against the latch and waited for Tommy.

The plan was so basic, it would probably work. Tommy walked around to the next block, turning up Dex’s street. Whether or not he noticed any unusual activity or vehicles, he was to continue walking until he joined up with Dex waiting by the gate.

Five minutes. Then he saw Tommy turn the corner and approach leisurely, smiling. That made Dex feel better already. “Well?”

“Man, this neighborhood is beat… There is like nobody around except some kids in the sprinkler.”

“No cars?”

Tommy shrugged. “Damned few. Coupla little ones.”

Dex exhaled, drew in another breath. “You take a look at my place?”

“Yeah, everything looked normal, I swear.”

Dex considered this for a moment. It looked almost too easy, plus he felt outrageously exposed in the bright sunlight. But there was little choice. This would be his only, best chance to get into his house and get a few of the things he would need. Sooner or later, there would be people crawling all over his stuff, and odds were they were already on the way.

“Okay,” Dex said. “Here’s what it comes down to. If they’re in there waiting for us, it’s just a matter of time before they close the net. If they’re here, we’ve probably already been seen, marked, and catalogued.”

Tommy looked at him with an expression that suggested his version of deep thought. “Looks to me like we’ve already made our decision. What’re we waiting for?”

“That’s what I figure. Let’s go.” Unlatching the back gate, Dex entered his backyard — a swath of grass he cut only under duress. He hated lawns and all the stuff you needed to maintain them. The yard was enclosed in an eight-foot fence of pressure-treated planking he never bothered to stain. The area contained not one piece of decoration, enhancement, or furniture.

“Fancy.” Tommy whistled. “You get a landscape designer to do this?”

“Wasted space,” said Dex, moving quickly to a collection of rusting paint cans under the small wooden deck that ran off the back of the townhouse. The lid on the Behr ceiling white was warped from a screw driver and lifted easily as Dex reached in to retrieve a Ziploc bag holding a key.

“Nice security system too,” said Tommy.

“Hey, it worked, didn’t it?”

Dex climbed the steps to the deck, keyed the back door’s deadbolt and regular lock. Tommy followed him as he stepped into the kitchen where everything looked exactly as he’d left it this morning. As agreed, Tommy took the stairs down to the basement rooms and the garage. Dex glided quickly through the first floor, and finding it empty, carefully ascended the carpeted steps to the top floor.

With each step he felt more confident they were alone. His survival instincts, which had served him so well in all those Navy years, had kicked in — especially what he called his “proximity sense.” It had functioned as a kind of personal, mental radar that almost unfailingly warned him when something… troublesome… might be approaching or at least nearby. Dex trusted it and right now it was telling him nobody was waiting for him in any of the upstairs rooms.

But he still moved quickly in and out of all of them, checking in closets and under beds even though he started to feel silly. Reaching into the nightstand drawer by his bed, he smiled as he peered down at the number one item he’d come home for — his SIG-Sauer P-226, modified to accept a double-column magazine holding 15 rounds of 9mm Parabellum ammunition. Reaching down, he picked it up, marveling as always at its light weight. Racking the magazine, he felt immediately better knowing it was ready to rock. At the back of the drawer was a box of extra ammo, which he grabbed as well. From the hook on his closet door, he grabbed his conceal carry underarm holster.

Time to check on Tommy.

As he descended to the middle floor, he heard the footsteps in the kitchen. Slow. Deliberate.

As Dex reached the bottom step, he wheeled around the corner with the 226 leading the way.

“Whoa!” said Tommy, hands up and out in front. “Whaddya doin’?”

“You were supposed to be whistling if everything was okay — what happened?”

“Shit, I forgot. Sorry.”

“You could’ve been a lot sorrier.” Dex lowered the gun, took off his shirt and shrugged into the holster. “I assume everything was normal down there?”

“Yeah, I mean you’re not the neatest guy in the world, but it doesn’t look like anybody’s been here yet.” Tommy opened the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of Guinness. “You mind?”

“Drink up. We can’t take it with us. And we’re leaving soon.” Dex finished adjusting the holster and slipped the gun into it. “Keep a watch on the front street while I get some stuff together.”

Tommy nodded, moved to the bay window by the front door, took a pull off the bottle of stout.

As he did this, Dex moved quickly through the house, gathering up things he would need, starting with a Mountainsmith Travel Trunk Duffel. It was light, superstrong, and its 33 inches was exactly the right length to hold his Mossberg 500 Persuader — the absolutely best six-load shotgun in the world. When you were talking close-range anti-personnel, the weapon had no equal. Dex had bought it for home security because he didn’t want to have to worry about something as pesky as aiming at a target that would be coming at him in a darkened room or hallway. And like the ads said, a mean guard dog needed to be walked, groomed, and fed. All the Persuader needed was a little oil.

He also gathered up all the cash he kept in the house — which was considerable because he never really trusted banks after all the recent insanity in the world of money. His wallet with his credit cards was in his F-150 parked at the 2nd Street Wharf, and he had no way of telling whether or not they’d be accessible… but he planned to check it out.

He changed into his most durable, comfortable shoes — a pair of Timberland Trailscapes — then a baggy shirt to conceal his holstered sidearm, and denim cargo pants with plenty of pockets, and an Orioles cap. He also grabbed a windbreaker, his Spyderco Endura knife, and the extra set of keys to the F-150. Traveling light, but protected, he would buy anything else he needed as he needed it.

When he regained the second level, Tommy was still keeping his watch, alternating between the front and back yards. “Nothin’ shakin’,” he said.

“Okay, we’re pushing our luck. Let’s get out of here. The back door.”

“What’s in the bag?” Tommy eyed the sleek, black duffel.

“My guard-dog,” said Dex with a lopsided grin. “Okay, outta here.”

As they casually exited the neighborhood, Dex kept looking for any sign they were being watched or followed, but saw nothing. Either their adversaries were very, very good, or he and Tommy were still ahead of them. Crossing Davidsonville Road, they walked through a maze of back streets to an array of strip malls on the other side of Crain Highway. The traffic was heavy and everybody seemed like they were in too big of a hurry to pay any attention to them.

“In there.” Dex gestured to a Giant Food supermarket, where he paid cash for two Trac phones, and some quick foods — nuts, dates, energy bars. Before leaving the store, Dex activated both phones by calling in the codes, then gave one to Tommy.

“Memorize my number. Don’t put it in the speed dial, just in case.”

“In case what?”

“In case they get you or this phone. If my phone rings, I want to be sure it can only be you on the other end, okay? Same for your number — I’m going to be the only one who ever calls you, got it?”

Tommy nodded.

Dex dropped the phone into one of his cargo pockets. “They can’t trace any calls we make on these, plus we add as many minutes as we need with extra calling cards.”

Tommy regarded him with quiet admiration. It was a look Dex knew well from all the Navy years, where he’d learned to be a take-charge guy, and he wore the responsibility like a hand-tailored uniform.

“Man, it’s like you had this all figured out ahead of time.” Tommy chucked him on the arm as they headed for the automatic doors at the exit.

“Not really. I’ve just been thinking some of this through.” He stopped on the sidewalk, pulled out the Trac phone, called for a cab. When they sat on the bench outside the supermarket to wait, Dex had plenty of time to assess the situation — and he didn’t like it much. He had been trying to figure who hit the Sea Dog and why, but nothing was making sense yet. Could be the Coast Guard or maybe the Navy if Kevin’s friend had alerted somebody at the Naval Yard in D.C.

But Dex didn’t like it. He’d spent too much time in the Navy, and this scenario didn’t have their fingerprints on it. Same for the Coast Guard. This was either an alphabet agency or maybe even terrorists or some other rogue operation. And if any of those guys were after him, he didn’t feel good about his chances.

He also used the time to have Tommy call Augie and explain things to the old guy, who was clearly an X-factor nobody knew about. Tommy asked him to watch around the neighborhood for anything suspicious around on the street, and to not let anybody in or near the backpacks with Dex’s gear. Augie loved the opportunity to be doing something useful and promised he wouldn’t let them down. Tommy told him to expect them later in the day.

They waited more than a half hour for the taxi guy to show up. It was one of the local outfits whose major business was either runs to BWI airport or taking home drunks from the myriad bars in the area. There wasn’t all that much business midday, and that meant less than spectacular service. The old Caprice sedan that pulled up to the curb from Bay City Cab was downright skeevy. As Dex and Tommy slid into the grimy backseat, they were overwhelmed by the stifling afterglow of stale cigarette smoke. The driver looked back at them like they were bothering him, and Dex decided there wasn’t much chance of a tip in his future.

Dex directed the cab to a bar on the corner of 3rd Street and Chesapeake, which placed them within walking distance of the wharf parking lot.

“Okay, let’s see what’s going on,” he said, as they turned north on 3rd, then a right on Severn. As they approached the next corner and turned left to walk the long block to the wharf, they knew something was amiss.

“Jeez, look at all the cars.” Tommy gestured at the crowded street ahead of them.

“We are so stupid,” said Dex as they both stopped on the sidewalk. “I should’ve checked the news. Looks like the Sea Dog caught somebody’s attention.”

At the end of the block, flanking the entrance to the parking lot to the 2nd Street Wharf and Marina, were the mobile transmission vans of all the TV stations in Baltimore and Annapolis. A police cruiser, flashers dormant, was double-parked at the end of the block. Tommy shook head. “We’re fucked.”

“Maybe not,” said Dex.

“How you figure?”

“Keep walking, like we have no idea what’s going on. Like I said before, there’s not much chance anybody even knows you were onboard. I’d be surprised if anybody’s looking for you yet. When we get to the lot, you take my keys and fire up my truck. Start heading out of the lot and I’ll flag you down.”

Tommy took the keys, nodded once. “I can do that.”

“Yeah, but take your time. Give me a minute or two to get the scoop from somebody.”

“Like who?”

Dex shrugged. “I’ll see if I recognize any of the regulars. Otherwise, I’ll do what everybody else does, I’ll ask a cop.”

“Jeez, you sure that’s smart? Suppose they’re lookin’ for you?”

Dex tugged on his Orioles cap, adjusted his sunglasses. “I look like a million guys like this. I think I’m okay.”

“You better be.” Tommy forced a grin. “Anything happens to you, I got no plan.”

“Trust me,” said Dex.

Tommy nodded and headed down the left side of the street, weaving his way through the vans and cars and into the gravel lot. As he did this, Dex walked straight ahead along the right lane sidewalk and up to a few young guys in dress shirts and ties near one of the news vans. They were either interns, techies, or maybe reporters.

“Hey, man, what’s going on?” he said in a bit of an exaggerated Tidewater accent.

The nearest of the group regarded him with a feckless expression. “Charter boat blew up out on the Bay,” he said.

Dex revealed just the right amount of surprise, and asked some of the obvious questions, ending up with: “Any survivors?”

The guy shook his head. “Don’t think so. The Coast Guard’s been out looking all day.”

Thanking them, Dex turned and headed back down 2nd Street as he saw Tommy wrestling the F-150 out of the lot and in between a couple of vans. As he pulled alongside, Dex yanked open the passenger door and hauled himself in.

“Where we goin’?”

“Let’s get back to Little Italy and get our stuff.”

“Then what?”

“Not sure yet.”

Tommy pressed down on the accelerator as they cleared the traffic, then glanced over at him. “So, are we safe, or what?”

“Hard to tell. For now, we’re listed among the missing. Which could mean nothing at all.”

“Huh?”

“Could be a cover story. You know, so we’ll let our guard down.”

“Yeah, well we ain’t, right?”

“I’m thinking we did, at least a little bit, by taking the truck.”

Tommy nodded, but his expression belied his incomprehension. “How so?”

“When they finally figure out who was on the boat — whoever “they” might be… from the bad guys to the good guys — they’re going to see that everybody’s cars are still in the lot but one.”

“So they’ll know you’re still alive.”

Dex shook his head. “Not at first. I could’ve gotten a ride to the wharf with one of the rest of you. But that’ll change as soon as they get a look in my garage.”

“Then what’ll they do?” Tommy had cleared the 6th Street Bridge and was angling onto Route 301.

“You know, I’m not sure,” said Dex. “The bad guys will figure I’m on the run, which is a reasonable assumption. But… with me not showing up and talking about what happened, the good guys might have me on their list as a possible perp.”

“Oh, man, you’ve got to be jokin’ me!”

“No, Tommy, that’s how they think.”

“Okay, but how do you think of this stuff?” Tommy whistled a tuneless burst.

“It just comes to me,” said Dex, but there was a part of him that wished it would not. Sometimes, he believed, being smart was more of a burden than he could handle.

Whoever had hit the Sea Dog wanted them out of the way. Why?

That depended on how much they knew about the 5001… or how much they wanted to know.

Either way, Dex had to stay one step ahead of everybody, and one of the best ways to do that was run a little interference and drop a few obstacles in their path.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“So what does all this mean?” said Entwhistle, who couldn’t hide his amusement.

Sinclair didn’t respond right away. It had been more than an hour since returning from the wreck. The two of them had just reviewed the situation reports and recommendations from their Ops Center.

Neither of which he liked very much. When he boiled it down and rendered off the fat, it came to this: he was off his leash and could run with the 5001 assignment in any direction. But he didn’t like the implications.

“I say, still with us, chappie?” Entwhistle tapped his pen on the desktop to get his attention.

“Sorry, just thinking things through.” Sinclair shared his evaluations of what they were up against.

Entwhistle grinned. “Personally, I prefer it like that. Less meddling from people who aren’t up to their elbows in the muck, that’s my ticket.”

“Glad to hear you’re so confident. I don’t like it.”

“Why not?”

Sinclair leaned back in his chair, cracked his knuckles softly. “I think Operations is throwing in the towel on this one.”

“Why? How?” Entwhistle appeared surprised, as if he’d never considered Sinclair’s suggestion.

“Because somebody upstairs is thinking they’ve made a fatal error. They shouldn’t have jumped the dive boat like they did. Too presumptuous. And now all they have is an empty sub and their dicks in their hands.”

Entwhistle smiled. “Better than my dick, I always say.”

“Right, but do you see where I’m going with this?”

“Maybe, but why don’t you just tell me.”

Sinclair liked his exec, but he had a penchant for waffling that bugged him. “They’re cutting their losses. They don’t want to look any worse than they do. We get the job of cleaning up the latrine, don’t you see it? If we find anything worthwhile, everybody gets credit. If we don’t, it gets quietly forgotten as another false lead that never panned out.”

“You sure they’re not using this as a test — you know, to see what kind of stones we’ve got?”

Sinclair shrugged. “Does it matter? All I know is we’re on our own here. So the real question is do we pursue, or play cover-our-ass?”

Now it was Entwhistle’s turn to pause to consider his answer. After a few tugs on his mustache, he sat up straighter in his chair, placed his elbows evenly on the desktop. “Assuming the location of Station One Eleven could be extremely valuable, I say it’s worth pursuing.”

Sinclair nodded, picked up one of the reports, which listed the identities and backgrounds of the dive club members and the crew boat captain. “Intercepted police reports confirmed that the vehicles of Cheever, Schissel, Mellow, and Jordan had been found at the wharf,” he said. “Only one car missing, an ex-Navy diver. McCauley.”

Entwhistle shook his head. “Probably a fairly tough nut, eh what?”

“Probably. So we need to decide — why is his car missing from the lot? Either he’d ridden to the wharf with one of the others, and it had never been there in the first place, or somehow he survived the attack.”

“And came back to get his truck.” Entwhistle tapped the desktop with his pen. “Pretty plucky chap, if he did.”

“We’ll need to start digging.”

Entwhistle continued to speculate. “I mean, if the navy diver really did survive, and if he has any information he pulled out of the wreck, then—”

“That’s two very big ifs, don’t you think?”

“What else do we have to do? I don’t know about you, but routine assignments don’t excite me. And besides, if we do get lucky and pop the weasel, we get benefited at some point. That’s the way the Guild works, remember?”

Sinclair did indeed. Founded on the principles of responsibility and the integrity of the transaction, the Guild had survived by always rewarding hard work. “Okay, so I take it you want to go out and poke around.”

“You bet your arse… This is boring in here.”

Sinclair nodded. They would be able to delegate the data haven surveillance to other East Camden staff without much of a ripple. They would also have access to any Guild personnel below them on the food chain. Assistance from lower-level techs, information clerks, and even tactical people would not be questioned. “All right, we move on this. How many extra people did they give us?”

Entwhistle keyed up a screen, glanced down at the display. “Looks like three field specialists currently available out of Baltimore and D.C. — Wilson, Spruill, and Winter. Others as they come off assignments.”

Sinclair considered the list. Good people all, but Spruill was the most methodical. He might be the one they needed to do some digging. “Okay, I’m going to get them out there ahead of us — beat the bushes a little.”

Entwhistle gave him a thumbs-up. “Just give me the where-and-whens and I’ll get them moving.”

“What about you? Anything else you want to throw out there?”

Entwhistle leaned forward on the work desk, idly sheafed through the papers in the reports. “No ideas, really. Not yet, anyway. Anything I say is going to be rehashing…”

“Let me hear it anyway.”

Entwhistle exhaled slowly. “We wasted lots of hours mucking around that wreck. Now we need to make up the time. Whatever was on that sub got picked clean by our dive club friends. And let’s not forget the fissionable material, for Christ’s sake. They really fucked the monkey on that one, you know. No way to figure a bunch of amateurs would haul an atomic device out of there.”

Sinclair shook his head. “We know it wasn’t on their boat. The team swept it clean — nothing. They also scanned that whole quadrant in the bay — no radioactivity.”

“So where is it?”

Sinclair had already been pondering the central question of the missing bomb. “There are only two possibilities — either they took it out and hid it somewhere or… it had never been there.”

“Never there?” Entwhistle looked up from the papers he’d been scanning.

“Either the whole story about the bomb was Nazi disinformation or the sub crew dumped it when the mission was scrammed.”

“What’s your gut telling you?”

Sinclair considered the question. “I’m leaning toward never there — in the bay, at least”

“And why is that, laddie?”

“Just a feeling. With that ex-Navy guy in the mix, I seriously doubt if he would risk trying to move an atomic bomb with, as you say, a bunch of amateurs.”

Entwhistle grinned. “Good point, that.”

“I think our best ally on this will be good intercepts from the police and the Coast Guard. They can do a lot of our work for us.”

“As is our wont…”

Sinclair stood up, uncramped the muscles in his neck. “Okay, let’s pack some gear. We’re going to need some weapons, false IDs, and electronics, the usual.”

“I’m on it,” said Entwhistle. “And some travel arrangements, as well.”

Sinclair nodded as the Brit headed for the door from the conference room to the operations center. Turning to his terminal, he keyed in a request for any additional police intercepts, and was surprised to see one from the local Annapolis boys.

Follow-up interrogation of witnesses at the wharf had conflicting information — there was a possibility there had been an additional diver on the Sea Dog. And there was a Camaro in the parking lot that belonged to a member of the Baltimore City Fire Department, which had been there since the morning of the dive boat’s last trip.

Printing out the info, he knew it could be important. “I want Spruill to find out about that Camaro in the lot. Track down the firefighter who drove it there.”

“I can get Spruill into Baltimore within the hour.”

“Do it.”

He felt good about their decision to pursue, and he felt even better about pulling it off. In fact, the only thing that bothered him even a little bit was the Navy guy.

Navy guys could be trouble.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

They got hung up in the rush hour traffic as they approached the city from the south via I-97, into overflow traffic where it fed I-95, then threaded their way around the harbor toward President Street. But for once, Dex welcomed the delay because the endless river of slow-moving vehicles was perfect cover for him and Tommy. If anyone was looking for them, they had little chance of doing it while they were in transit past the mixing bowl of ramps and connectors in and out of the city. In addition, it would be far better to have the cover of darkness when they approached Augie’s house, and he said as much to Tommy.

“Yeah,” he said. “And we can get in through the back alley, it’s right past the Bocce courts. There’s a little wall right there — ain’t nobody gonna see us.”

“Good thinking.” Dex paused as he switched lanes to avoid a UPS van blocking his view of the traffic flow ahead. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you — you got any guns?”

Tommy chuckled softly. “Well, legally… no. I mean, I got a couple big revolvers down in the basement. They were my uncle’s. Came with the house, and I have no idea where he got ’em. But you can bet your ass he never registered with this stupid State, or whatever you’re supposed to do with them.”

Dex smiled. “What kind of revolvers. Police stuff?”

“Smith and Wesson?” Tommy shook his head. “Nah, I think they’re Colts. Big caliber stuff.”

This was good news to Dex. He liked his firepower on the big side. He never saw anything wrong with killing a fly with an elephant gun. “Sounds like good stuff. They’re not antiques, are they? You know, like the wild west?”

Tommy shrugged. “Not sure. They don’t look super-old. I never really messed with ’em, so I can’t really say.”

“I’ll take a look if we can get into your place safely. Otherwise, we’ll have to move on without them.”

Tommy looked ahead at all the cars snaking through the city. “Which reminds me — just exactly where’re we ‘moving on’ to?”

“I’m still working that out,” said Dex. “Once we see what’s going on at Augie’s, I’ll firm it up and tell you what I’ve been thinking.”

“Not now? How come?”

“Because it might sound dumb as hell if the situation doesn’t warrant it. Just give me a few hours to think it out, okay?”

Tommy rolled his eyes, trying to add a little humor to the mix. “Hey, you seem to dig this mess a lot better than me. I can wait.”

He drove forward in silence for a few minutes until he snailed their way closer to the toll booths for the McHenry Tunnel. “Okay, here’s a problem.”

“What?”

Dex pointed to the little white square on his windshield. “If they have access to the right computers, they could track us with the EZ Pass transponder.”

“You’re kidding.”

“And we don’t have any cash to get through the tunnel.”

“You’re givin’ the bad guys a lot of credit,” said Tommy.

“Listen, until they show me they’re a bunch of fuck-ups, I’m going to assume otherwise.”

He drove through the electronic toll booth and hoped for the best.

By the time they reached Little Italy, the daylight was starting to fade. After parking the truck on South Central between a dumpster and van, they waited until dark when the dinner and tourist crowds would begin to fill the neighborhood with pedestrians. Walking the narrow sidewalks among lots of people would be sufficient cover to get them the four blocks west and into the alley by the bocce ball courts.

Dex was hungry and thirsty. He needed to stretch out and assess the situation, then hope he made the right moves. The streets were already lined with cars looking for curbside parking that didn’t exist. Parking valets from many of the larger restaurants were helping to jam things up even more. Tommy weaved through the people while Dex carefully scanned the random faces they passed to see if anyone was paying more than cursory attention to them.

Nobody was.

“Holy Mother of God!” screeched Augie. He’d just peeked around the crack of his open kitchen door, and under the dangling security chain, saw Tommy standing in the shadows on the back concrete stoop. “Hang on, hang on!”

Dex waited on the lower step while Augie closed the door, followed by loud rattling and scraping and some cursing. Tommy chuckled. “He always has a hard time with that chain.”

“I don’t have the heart to tell him they’re worthless,” said Dex. “Once he opens the door, a good leg kick can take out the chain and the jamb.”

More rattling and chunking of metal, and a latch being thrown. Finally, the door swung inward to reveal the little Italian guy with the rounded shoulders and scoliatic spine. He was still wearing his Orioles cap which looked like it was being stabilized by his large ears. Augie’s smile was wide and genuine, accenting the deep lines in his face. He was a very old guy, but he also looked very healthy.

“C’mon, get in here, you two… I was startin’ to get worried about you boys.”

“We’re cool,” said Tommy. “Just a little hungry and plenty tired.”

“My baby sister brought over a big dish of lasagna — we got somethin’ to eat, don’ worry aboudit.”

Augie led them through the kitchen, which looked like it had been outfitted in 1959. There was a small formica table with chrome tubular legs, and matching chairs with red vinyl seats. The toaster and the stove and the refrigerator were big retro-looking things, only Dex knew they were actually electric antiques. The clock on the wall looked like a cat, and its eyes moved to the swing of its pendulum tail. It was like they’d stepped out of a time machine, and the place had tons of kitschy charm.

“Take a load off in the livin’ room. I’ll heat up the oven. You guys need a Natty Boh?” Augie waited for their answers as he leaned slightly to the right with his head tilted that way.

“You betcha,” said Tommy. “Grazie, Augs.”

The old guy smiled, then shuffled into the kitchen. Dex continued to look at all the old furniture crammed into the narrow confines of the house. The décor had been a pleasant distraction from the pressures of their situation, but he needed more information. There was a small television opposite the couch where he sat, and a remote control on an ottoman with feet that looked liked claws holding spheres in their taloned grips.

He flipped it on, checked his watch, and thumbed through the channels. “Looks like we missed the local news.”

Tommy leaned forward. “Try the cable stuff.”

Just then Augie re-entered the room with two bottles of National Bohemian lager and handed them out with obvious pride. “Baldymore’s finest, amici! Drink up.”

They thanked him as he sat down in a big worn Barcalounger and looked at them with sudden seriousness. “Your boat was on the news…”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you. What’re they saying?”

Augie looked upward as he tried to recall the exact words. “They didn’t say much — said there was a boating accident on the Bay. Four people confirmed dead and that they were looking for possibly two other divers — and I almost shit when they gave your names, right on the air.”

“Christ, Dex, you were right. They got onto us quick!”

Dex nodded. “They say anything else?”

Augie brightened. “Yeah, they said the crew was investigating a sunken Nazi sub.”

“Probably got that from the Coast Guard.”

“They give the name of the sub?” Dex wondered if it even mattered. He could feel the net closing in on them already.

“Can’t remember,” said Augie.

“If the old gal who gave us the clothes and the ride saw the evening news,” said Tommy. “I’ll betcha she’s already called the police.”

“We can’t stay here.” Dex looked around as if he’d find some answers within the cramped space of Augie Picaccio’s living room.

“What’re we gonna do?” said Tommy.

“They’re going to be all over this place.” Dex stood up.

Augie chuckled. “Forgot to tell you — they already have.”

Anger flashed through Dex as he looked at the little gnomish figure, but he quelled it right away. No sense being angry at a guy who has trouble remembering what he said five minutes ago. “What? Who?”

Augie warmed to the chance to be in on the action. “A big tall guy, in a suit, going bald, them little wire eyeglasses. He knocked on the door about an hour before you guys got here.”

“Jesus, Augs, why didn’t you tell us before?”

“Tommy, c’mon… I just remembered it, you know?”

Dex retained a neutral expression. No sense getting the old guy worked up. “What did the suit want? What questions did he ask?”

Augie looked up at the ceiling as if the info he needed might be written there. Then: “Well, he wanted to know if I knew Tommy, and I told him hell no — he was a fireman workin’ weird hours and the rest of the time he was out chasin’ the girlies. I told him I hardly ever saw ’im, but didn’t know ’im from Jack Robinson.”

“Okay, you did good, Augie. What else?” Dex was grateful the old guy had paid attention to Tommy’s earlier phone call.

“He asked me if I’d noticed anything strange going on around the house, any strangers coming or going, and of course, I said I didn’t know nothin’. I told ’im I watch the Orioles games and Turner Classic Movies, and other than that I don’t see much of anything.”

Dex grinned. “He go for that?”

“Yeah, I think so. I wasn’t nervous or anything. At my age, lyin’ ain’t the worst of my problems.”

“Did you see him leave?” said Tommy.

“I peeked through the blinds. He climbed into one of them SUV-things — you know, the big ones. It was black. Then he drove off real slow.”

Dex considered this, then: “Odds are he’s still hanging around. Probably watching your place, Tommy. We took a chance coming here. If there’s a team in place, they might know we’re here already.”

Tommy looked worried. “Augs, I’m really sorry we dragged you into this…”

“You jokin’ me? This is the kinda crap makes life worth livin’. Let’s eat while we figure out what to do.”

“If they come for us, we have a decision to make,” said Dex.

“You mean fight or give up?” Tommy sucked down the rest of his beer.

“Something like that.” Dex moved to the front window and eased a heavy fall of drapery away from the glass a tiny sliver of an inch. His vantage point of High Street was too obscured to see anything. “And I can’t see us giving up when we have no idea who we might be surrendering to.”

“Good point,” said Tommy. “So what’ll we do?”

Dex was thinking. An odd, impulsive thought hit him, and he pulled his Trac phone from his pocket, started keying in the number of his Verizon answering service. “Hang on,” he said. “I just had a nutty thought.”

Tommy and Augie watched in silence as he waited for the automated prompt for his password to get his messages. He punched in the numerical equivalent of “diveshop” and waited.

You. Have. Seven. Teen. New. Messages. You. Have. No. Saved. Messages, said the computer voice, followed by instructions to access the new ones. Dex listened to the beginnings of each one — a variety of sales pitches, requests for donations, and a few ominous hang-ups. There were also a few forwarded calls from Barnacle Bill’s, his dive shop, and the stack of calls on his service were typical.

Except for the last one.

“Hello,” said the voice of a young man. It was tentative and questioning. “I’m trying to reach someone called Dexter McCauley. I hope this is the right number. My name is Jason Bruckner, and I have a message for Mister McCauley. A message from… from Erich Bruckner.”

Chapter Thirty

Around 9:30, Jason unlocked the door to Manny’s Tap Room. It was a ritual he’d been doing since his days at Penn State, when his father had started to teach him the family business. More than twelve years now.

Pushing open the front door, Jason smelled the familiar aromas of exhaled smoke, spilled beer, and fried foods. As he lifted the shades in the front windows, late spring sunlight blasted the old, dark woods of the bar and surrounding fixtures. As he walked through the place, inspecting everything for the neatness and cleanliness his father had always demanded, he nodded. The night crew had done their usual good job and Manny’s looked as ready as ever.

Grabbing the remote off the back bar, he keyed on the big flat screen, where he’d catch up on the world with a little Fox News, then slip over to ESPN for some scores. He wasn’t the biggest sports fan in Lancaster, but if you owned a bar, you needed to know enough to talk a good game.

Most taverns would love to be like Manny’s — a comfortable, affordable place with local charm and genuine warmth. Jason’s father, Richard, had always worked hard to maintain that standard; and even though these days he spent most of his time driving golf carts around the Overlook course.

The television droned on with a story about highway fatalities on Memorial Day weekend, and Jason hardly listened as he re-counted the deposit from the bar register. But when the next story splashed in from a Fox correspondent in Baltimore, Jason found himself more than half-listening to a young blonde female reporter as she unfolded a tale about a dive boat explosion in the Chesapeake Bay. It was one of those “news alerts” with few early details. As with most unfolding tales of tragedy, the network promised updates and film as soon as it became available.

Jason was distracted by the front door opening. A flash of blonde hair and a fresh white polo shirt signaled Nevah’s arrival. She was Manny’s most popular waitress for a lot of reasons — the way she looked in low-slung jeans and her effusive personality being up there near the top of the list.

“Hey, Jase, how’s it going?”

“Can’t complain,” he said as he watched her glide past him on the way to the kitchen.

“Cedric not here yet?” she said, noticing their short-order cook’s absence.

“He’ll be here. He always is.” Jason continued to get the bar ready for the first customers of the day.

It wasn’t until around 2:30 that the lunch business slacked off, giving Jason and his staff a breather. As he polished the bar, Nevah started talking, making small talk as she normally did, and for the first time in hours, Jason could actually hear the audio on the big TV.

Even though he had been barely paying attention, something hooked him in his subconscious and he began screening out Nevah’s words. He grabbed the remote, notched up the volume.

“—explosion in the Chesapeake Bay this morning. We have an update from Roger Powell on the scene in Annapolis.”

Jason watched as the face of an earnest young TV journalist appeared with a marina in the background. “Thanks, Allyson. The Coast Guard has identified the boat as the Sea Dog, which was a charter vessel out of Annapolis. Early this morning, its captain, Donald Jordan, had taken members of a dive club out on the Bay to investigate a sunken ship. So far, the cause of the explosion which killed the captain and divers Andrew Mellow, Kevin Cheever, and Lawrence Schissel is unknown. Ensign Gary Hawkins of the Coast Guard had this to say…”

The screen cut to an interview with a young officer, who said, “It’s really strange because we had a distress call for this boat just yesterday — they had a diver drown while he was inside the shipwreck.”

“What kind of wreck had the divers found?” said the reporter.

“World War II submarine.” The Ensign looked on the clipboard he was carrying. “It was called the U-5001. It’s the second Nazi sub ever found in the Chesapeake Bay waters and—”

“Hey, Jason, we’re running out of napkins!” Nevah emerged from the kitchen with a half empty pack of them.

“Wait!” he said, waving her off and looking up at the screen.

“What?”

“Ssshhh!” Jason glared at her, then back to the screen, where the segment played on with the reporter wrapping it up. Jason grabbed a pen and a waitress’s order pad. “What did they say the name was?”

“—and local police are investigating the possibility there were two additional divers on the boat still missing. Thomas Chipiarelli, a firefighter from Baltimore City, and Dexter McCauley, the proprietor of an Annapolis dive shop. More on this tragic story as it develops, Allyson. This is Roger Powell, Fox News.”

“What’s wrong?” said Nevah. True concern in her voice.

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “I… just wanted to hear that story, that’s all.”

“Well, we’re going to need more napkins by tonight,” she said.

“Okay, you can go up to BJ’s and get some,” said Jason, who was trying to collect his thoughts. There was something about that news story that nagged at him. He wasn’t sure he’d heard it right, but it sounded like that guy had said U-5001. If he’d heard her right. Could it be possible?

“Okay if I leave now? While it’s slow?” said Nevah.

“Sure, go ahead.” Jason said absently, then: “I need to stop back at the house. I’ll be back in a little while.”

U-5001.

The mention of the name struck deeply in him. Oh, man, he thought, are you kidding me?

Ten minutes later, Jason pulled his Murano SUV up to the house on Foxshire Drive. Everything looked serene, and it was.

Dad was probably finishing up the front nine by now — something he was doing with great regularity since Jason started to assume most of the duties down at the bar. Jason was happy to see the old guy have some time to enjoy himself after sending two kids to private schools and college. Richard Bruckner had become obsessed with turning in a card that broke 80 at least once before he died.

His mother was in the backyard working on her gardens, which had become a hobby years ago, and now consumed her with constant weeding, pruning, and replanting. The lawn behind the house had long ago disappeared and the multi-tiered gardens looked like something out of an English village in the Cotswolds. As he passed through the gate on the side of the house, he saw his mother doing something to a bed of day lilies that already looked spectacular.

“Hey, Mom, how’s it going?” She looked nowhere near her true age, never having needed to dye her strawberry blonde hair or torture herself with crash-diets. She’d lived an active, fulfilled life working at Manny’s, raising two kids, and lately becoming a horticultural expert.

“Jase, what’re you doing over here? Is there something wrong?” She took off her gardening gloves with the little green dots all over the inside fingers.

“No, not at all,” he said, smiling his best disarming smile. “I need to ask Opa something.”

Mom looked at her watch. “Your grandfather’s taking a nap, I think.”

Jason grinned, nodded. He loved the old man, and it was mutual. Opa Erich had long ago decided he loved Jason more than anyone in the world, and had made it his lifetime job to teach his grandson everything he knew about everything. And it had been a great ride. Some of Jason’s most favorite memories involved time spent with his grandfather — or as he’d preferred to be called — his “opa.”

The old man had taught Jason how to fish, to sail, to use just about every tool on the bench, how to use a gun, how to read the weather, how to stay alive in the wilderness, and a hundred other things from whittling a piece of wood to repairing broken appliances.

One time, when Jason had been maybe ten or eleven, he asked Opa how he knew so much about so many things. The old man looked at him and smiled, touched the side of his head, and said, “I am curious. I ask questions and I do whatever is needed to find the answers.”

That made a lot of sense, even to a young boy, and Jason had let his grandfather’s words inspire and guide him into adulthood. Even back then, Jason had a sense of the special bond between him and his grandfather. Of course they loved each other, but it was more than that — they understood each other.

“Go on,” said Mom. “Go on in and talk to him. You know how much he likes to see you.”

“Okay.”

He entered through the back door on the deck into the kitchen. There was fresh coffee in the pot, so he poured two mugs, then headed down the hall to a small suite of rooms realtors always called an “in-law” apartment. For as long as Jason could remember, this place had been called “Opa’s rooms,” and so they remained. But even though he still looked healthy and way younger than his age, the old guy was so old now, Jason wondered how much longer that would be true.

Gently tapping on the bedroom door, Jason listened for a response.

“Ya? Who is it?”

Jason smiled as he heard the old man’s voice. Rather than the frail reedy peeps of most old people, his grandfather’s voice remained solid, full of timbre, still strong and confident.

Opening the door, Jason stepped into the room, which smelled faintly of medicine and liniment. “Just me, Opa. How ya doin’?”

His grandfather was laying back on his sofa, wearing a sweatshirt that said Nittany Lions and a pair of baggy khakis — because he thought the air conditioning was always too cold.

“Jason. Good to see you!”

“I brought you some coffee.”

“Coffee. That is good. Your mother keeps it so cold in here.”

Despite being in his early nineties, he still had most of his teeth and more hair than a lot of men half his age. Erich Bruckner looked lean and remarkably healthy as he stood with deliberate slowness. Age had not cramped his posture or his bearing, and he’d kept his weight under control by maintaining a careful diet. Smoothing his hair, he faced his grandson like a recruit acknowledging his drill sergeant.

“What brings you to me?” he said as he accepted the mug, brought it carefully to his lips.

Ever since Jason could remember, his Opa had always looked fit and strong, and his gradual slide toward a highly advanced age had never seemed dramatic because he’d looked pretty much the same for as long as Jason had ever known him. And there remained a light in his eyes that still burned fiercely — a beacon telling all that his mind remained ever sharp.

“Remember a story you told me when I was a kid — about Uncle Manny and how he served in a German sub?”

The light in his grandfather’s eyes flared more brightly, as if someone had thrown gas on banked coals. “Yes…”

“You told me the name was the ‘U-5001’. I remember because you said it was the highest number they ever used on a U-boat.”

“That is correct,” said the old man, as he moved to sit in a chair in front of his desk. The muscles in his jaw tightened. “Why are you telling me this now?”

Jason sat down on the bed, faced him. “Well, it seemed very important to you at the time. You said if I ever saw U-5001 written down anywhere, or if I ever heard anyone mention it… I should tell you right away. Do you remember telling me that?”

“Yes, I do.” He looked away, as if seeing something distant, then blinked his eyes. The old man took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “So, tell me — where did you see the name?”

Jason recounted the newscast, and as he did, his grandfather acquired an odd expression as if he were trying to see through a veil of thick fog, looking at something far, far away.

“Opa, you okay?” Jason tried to grin, failed. “What’s this all about?”

“I have often suspected there was a reason… a reason I’ve lived so long. But now I am thinking there may also be more than one.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jason, there are a few things I need to tell you. Things nobody in the family ever knew…”

Jason looked at him with a growing sense of anxiety. The old guy was unnerving him a bit. Because English had been his second language, his grandfather had always spoken very precisely, but now there was even more formality in his words, and it was unsettling.

“Okay, I’m listening.”

“A long time ago, I learned there was more to the world than I ever imagined. Since then, I have looked at things differently than most men.”

“Huh? What happened to you?”

His grandfather smiled. “Uncle Manny was not the only one in that submarine…”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I will explain,” said the old man. He was looking at something only he could see. “And after I do, I think I will want you to make a phone call or two for me — but not from here, and not from that little thing you carry around all the time.”

Jason looked at him oddly. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I want you to use a pay phone, all right?”

“Sure… Sure, Opa, but why?”

The old man shrugged. “Maybe because I have been watching too many bad movies… or maybe because it is important. We will not know… until later.”

Chapter Thirty-One

“You gotta be kiddin’ me,” said Tommy. “Whaddya gonna do?”

“Who’s Bruckner?” said Augie.

“I can’t believe it. Bruckner has family here — in the states. His grandson says he left a message for anybody who ever found his boat. That just can’t be.” Dex ran a hand through his hair as he grappled with the new information. As soon as he wrote down the contact information for Bruckner, he erased all the calls from the Verizon service — just in case there was a way to access them, and there probably was.

Which made him consider something else. “Tommy, you have a house phone?”

“Yeah, but I don’t use it much. I guess I don’t really need it, you know, with my cell…”

“Is it listed in your name?”

“Yeah, sure. Who else?”

Dex nodded. “You got an answering machine?”

“On the house phone? Yeah, it was my uncle’s. I just left it hooked up, why not?”

“Who’s Bruckner?” Augie was completely out of the loop on the conversation.

Dex had to ignore him for the moment. “Any way to access the machine remotely?”

Tommy looked at him, shook his head. “Nah. It’s old as shit. Has a big slow cassette in it.”

Dex figured as much. “Hate to say this, but we have to get into your house. Even if they’ve got people watching it.”

Leaning forward, Tommy looked confused. “Huh? Why? What’s the deal?”

“The deal is this: Jason Bruckner tracked me down from the newscast. If he tried to reach you the same way, and left a message on your machine…”

“Aw shit,” said Tommy. “Then the bad guys will know as much as we do.”

“Who’s Bruckner?” Augie wasn’t going to let it go, so Tommy tried to get the old guy up to speed while Dex let all the variables settle into place. He’d always believed he was an analytical guy, but their present mess was making him wonder if he had what it took.

“Just thought of something else,” Dex said. “You have a spare key to your house?”

Augie smiled, smacked Tommy’s arm. “Your uncle gave me one thirty years ago — for emergencies and stuff. It’s hangin’ in the kitchen.”

“Good, we might need it.”

Picking up the Trac Fone, he wondered if the message could have been a trap. Could the people after them be so clever? Sure they could, but the Trac Fone would protect him from immediate danger. Hey, no guts, no glory, He punched in Jason Bruckner’s number, waited for someone to answer.

“Hello?” It was the same young voice on the answering service.

Evenly, Dex spoke. “This is Dexter McCauley. I’m trying to reach Jason Bruckner.”

“That’s me. Man, I can’t believe I found you so easy!”

That notion rocked Dex. How many others would find the task equally simple? “Actually, I was pretty shocked myself.”

“Mr. McCauley, I don’t know how to explain this, so I guess I’ll just start.”

“Go ahead.”

“The news said you found a sub called the U-5001, is that true?”

“Yes.” Dex’s pulse had jumped and his voice felt like it might crack. He never, ever, got a case of nerves, but he was getting one now.

“My grandfather knows that boat, and he said it’s very important that I get in touch with you.”

Dex cleared his throat, spoke quickly. “You said your ‘grandfather’…?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Dex swallowed, paused. “Is his name Erich? Erich Bruckner?”

“Yes sir, it is…”

“My God, how can that be? I mean — he’s still alive?”

“Oh yeah. Very much so. My grandfather’s in his nineties — but you’d never guess it.”

“Amazing. And he wants to talk to me…”

“Yes, sir. He says it’s very important.”

“Okay, can you put him on?” Dex exhaled, rubbed his eyes. How weird was this going to get?

“Well, Mr. McCauley. He says he’d like to talk to you in person. He says it’s important, and he rather not say anything about it on the phone.”

“Where’re you calling from?”

“Lancaster. Pennsylvania. He says it’s not that far from you. You live in Maryland, right?”

Dex hesitated, but then felt silly. Of course Bruckner would know that if they looked up his number. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“So, can you come see him?”

“You mean now?”

“As soon as you can.”

“All right, I’ll tell you what — tell him I’d very much like to meet him. Get me some directions, and I can be on the road within the hour.”

Jason waited for Dex to get paper and pencil, then gave him what he needed. He could back it up with an internet map site if he had to.

“Okay, Jason… one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“When you tried to contact me — did you call anybody else?”

“Uh, yeah, I called the fireman, the guy with the Italian name.”

“Chipiarelli.” Dex exhaled sharply as he digested the bad news.

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“You leave him a message?”

“Yeah, on his machine, why?”

Chapter Thirty-Two

After getting a chopper to a private airfield east of Gaithersburg, Maryland, Sinclair and Entwhistle crossed the tarmac to a waiting Lexus hybrid SUV. As dusk leached color from the landscape, they drove north on Route 97, a pleasant drive through soft hills and farmland, to intersect with I-70 toward Baltimore.

“Winter and Wilson are still in Virginia and Jersey. Neither will be available tonight, maybe not even tomorrow.” Entwhistle closed his laptop where he’d been decrypting the latest messages.

“Anything new from Spruill?” Sinclair was driving for two reasons: one, he liked it, and two, he couldn’t stand the way Brits drove in the States — very shaky.

“Since he started the stake-out? Nothing.”

“Next time he checks in, tell him I want half-hour updates — even if it’s about his fingernail clippings.”

Entwhistle re-opened the laptop, started encrypting a terse transmission. They drove in silence as the vehicle’s headlights played over the trees and meadows lining the winding road. As Sinclair glided around a gradual bend, a deer stood poised to spring across the road, then flinched back under the beam of the light. Just what they needed right now was a collision — that would be just about enough delay to jeopardize the operation.

Sinclair rubbed his chin with the back of his hand, an unconscious gesture he’d displayed most of his life. So how did he feel about this assignment? Did he really care if it went south? His superiors had evidently cast it into the “maybe file,” the status for anything not worth getting top-tier hands dirty.

The Guild had survived by applying basic rules of economics to other aspects of human conduct in the geopolitical and military arenas. From what Sinclair had managed to glean from his ability to read between the lines, the Guild ascribed quotients of risk-to-benefit, and based most strategic decisions on a series of formulae tested through centuries of hands-on application. They had mastered the manipulation of global conflicts, investing in both sides of every war, and profiting beyond imagination.

While he found a certain level of interest in this kind of planning and execution, he didn’t care enough to push himself up through the ranks to learn it well. Sinclair, when being honest with himself, was a man who had given up not only his idealism, but his need to excel at anything ever again. He was just doing a job — that was it.

As he drove along in silence, he let his mind wander, replaying old scenes and incidents from his life. Flash-cuts of video memory: days at college, basic training, his first apartment, the birth of his first child. All of it seemed so long ago, so foreign to him. Like watching a docu-bio of someone only vaguely familiar. It had been so long since anyone had used his first name, he barely remembered it himself. Symbolic, really, how everything he’d ever felt important in his life had begun an inevitable slide into meaninglessness — including his position within the endless labyrinths of the Guild. Did he truly care about anything now?

Sinclair grinned softly, as he tried to imagine what his superiors would think if they ever divined his innermost thought. It made him smile — because they may already be doing it. Maybe that’s why he spent most of his time holed up in an abandoned base on a forgotten island…

“Interstate 70 coming up,” said Entwhistle.

“I see the ramp.”

Entwhistle glanced at his watch. “Spruill missed his check-in.”

“Did he acknowledge your last message?”

“He did indeed.”

Sinclair knew how easy it was to wander off schedule. “Give him fifteen minutes before we get concerned.”

Entwhistle nodded. “I figure we have at least 40 minutes to his rendezvous point. More than enough time to put himself in a jolly jackpot.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

“Whaddya mean, you’ll ‘cover me’?” Tommy’s voice was low and controlled, but tinged with equal parts anxiety and indignation.

Dex was checking his Sig-Sauer as they stood in Augie’s kitchen. The overhead ceiling fixture was off, and he could see Tommy’s angular handsome face dimly highlighted by a small night-light plugged into a socket over the old counter-tops. “I just told you — we need to get that tape off your answering machine.”

“Suppose they’ve already been there? Suppose they already got it?”

Dex looked at him with a neutral expression. “Then at least we’ll know what we’re up against, and that we’ll be having some extra guests up in Lancaster.”

Tommy exhaled, drew in a long, calming breath. “Okay, okay. I’m cool with it.”

Dex nodded, opened the back door which led into Augie’s unkempt backyard, little more than an oblong of weeds and knee-high grass enclosed by eight-foot high cinder block walls. He looked at Tommy. “Just like we rehearsed it, right?”

“You got it, Chief.” Tommy swallowed hard and followed him out into the night.

The only problem was — they hadn’t really rehearsed it very well. What Dex had done was run down a very quick series of “what-ifs” and tried to reach a consensus on how to deal with each of them. The consensus he had in mind was him and Tommy, but Augie kept spouting off with slightly askew remarks that suggested he wasn’t always tuned-in to the same station as everybody else.

Now, as he stood in the backyard, looking up at the sparkling burn of stars, he thought for an instant on the strange place to which his life had come. Despite his frequent statements he’d never been happier since retiring from the Navy, he knew now that was a lie. Most of the time, he was half-bored out of his ass, and never realized how much he’d needed some sort of tension in his life. And right about now, as he coolly regarded Tommy, he felt every fiber of his being thrumming like a cable full of high amp current. He felt alive and ready for whatever was waiting for him.

And he liked it.

Tommy stood behind him, lifting himself up and down on his toes, and Dex could feel the nervous energy coming off the guy in waves.

“We ready?” he whispered.

“By the numbers, okay?”

Tommy gave him a thumbs up, turned and headed for the back gate.

Following him in the dim light of the service alley, Dex watched Tommy unhook the crude latch and slip into the narrow concrete strip crowded with trash cans and bordered by the high wall of the bocce court. The gate to Tommy’s yard swung inward on bent hinges, a monument to years of neglect and an insufficient maintenance budget of his deceased uncle. The yard itself was crammed with junk that never quite made it to the alley for collection or disposal. Dex had to be extra cautious to not collide with any stray boxes or cans that might make enough noise to announce their presence.

Ascending the small set of brick steps to the back door, Tommy slipped Augie’s spare key into the old lock, twisted it to the right. He made no attempt to quiet this maneuver, acting as if he were casually entering his home, expecting no trouble. As he stepped into the narrow galley kitchen, Dex inched in right behind him like they were wearing the same set of clothes.

Dex pulled the mini maglite from his pocket and used its tight beam of light to guide them through the first floor of the house. He noticed a heavy security slide bolt on the door to the cellar — it was clicked solidly into place, which meant there was nobody down there waiting for them. Dex gestured they move on. While they maneuvered among the pieces of heavy, old furniture, Tommy tried to recall if anything looked disturbed. “Looks okay so far.” His voice was beneath a whisper.

With his Sig-Sauer drawn, Dex pointed it past a newel post up toward the second floor, then set upon the first carpeted step. Slowly, they ascended the narrow staircase, pausing to listen for any sound not theirs. But the old house held on in total silence. As they reached the cramped little landing, Dex followed Tommy into his bedroom. The tiny room was practically filled by the bed, armoire, and a long, low dresser. There was no closet and no one waiting for them. After checking the bathroom, including the space behind the shower curtain, and the second bedroom in the rear of the house, Dex exhaled a breath he’d been holding way too long.

Unless their adversaries were meticulous as surgeons and cloaked by invisibility, it appeared the house had not been breached.

“So far, so good.” Dex moved to the stairs. “Let’s check that answering machine.”

Moving back to the first floor, guided by the thin beam of the mini flashlight, Tommy pointed to the pre-Cambrian equivalent of home electronics — a Code-A-Phone that housed a standard audio cassette.

“Check your messages,” said Dex.

Tommy depressed a flat lever-key, followed by a series of clunks and the whirr of a rewinding tape, another clunk, and beeps preceding each message. The first six or seven were either hang-ups or automated ads for mortgage refinancing, donations to police benevolent associations, and a solicitation for a free trial subscription to the Baltimore Sun. The last message was from Jason Bruckner — simple and direct, with a phone number for contact.

“Looks like we got lucky,” said Dex, punching the stop button, then lifting the cassette from the machine. “At least in the analog world.”

“Huh? What’s that mean?”

“Nobody else heard this tape. But there’s no way to tell if the bad guys had a wire on your phone line, or a way to trace every call that’s come in here.” Dex jammed the cassette deep in his pocket.

“What’ll we do about that?”

“Nothing we can do.”

Tommy shook his head as though disgusted, then: “So… time for ‘phase two’? Looks like our luck’s holdin’ pretty good.”

“Why not?” said Dex, aiming the beam toward front door which opened onto High Street. “But don’t kid yourself — we’re making our own luck.”

Grinning, Tommy moved through the shadows, unlocked the deadbolt, and twisted the tumbler lock on the knob to the open position. “Okay, let’s go fishin’.”

Dex checked the magazine on his weapon, nodded, and headed for the staircase which ran down the wall and opened facing the front door. “I’ll be waiting right here.”

He gave Tommy the maglite, watched him weave through the furniture into the kitchen. He made only the softest sounds as he exited the back door and locked it behind him.

As soon as Dex heard the solid slap of the deadbolt, he checked his watch. No more than a two minutes needed for Tommy to circumnavigate the block, walk up High Street past the valet parking attendants for Da Mimmo’s and ascend the steps to the house.

While he waited, Dex thought about Tommy Chipiarelli and the other guys in the dive club. Up till now, he’d been ignoring the stark truth he’d never see Kevin or Donnie or Andy or Doc again. Just keep it out of your mind and it won’t haunt you so completely. The idea was to keep that kind of stuff from debilitating him from the basic job of survival. Same went for Tommy. He was a fireman, for Christ’s sake, and put his life on the line every day. No need for Dex to beat himself up about possibly getting the kid killed.

No need.

Sure.

Fact was — Dex had a very bad feeling about the whole mess. He hadn’t really figured out much to do about it other than react step-by-blind-step to each new development.

A sound at the front door pulled him out of his thoughts.

It was the scrape of metal against metal. Tommy going through the motions of inserting a key in a lock. Anybody watching him would have no idea his key could not open a door already unlocked. With a studied casualness, Tommy slowly pushed open the door and took a step into the darkened room.

But that was it.

A step.

Before he could take the next one, a tall, wide-shouldered figure materialized behind him. He tapped Tommy on the base of his skull and he collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. Dex eased back deeper into the shadows of the stairwell as he watched the attacker ease Tommy to the carpet, then turn to lock the front door behind him.

Despite the dim light, Dex’s eyes had adjusted well. He could see the guy was big and bald. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, a black turtleneck and dark pants. Towering over Tommy, some sort of slick handgun dangling from his left hand, the guy scanned the room coolly, then moved to the answering machine on the end table. When he discovered the cassette missing, he swept it off the table and sent it clattering against the wall. Then he straightened and paused as if deciding what would be his next target.

Tommy stirred slightly and that got the guy’s attention for an instant, which was plenty long enough for Dex.

His twenty years of deep sea rescue — both in training missions and the real thing — had taught him the utter necessity of acting on that single tick of the clock. That solitary notch on the ever-turning gear of time, when you do it. When all the accumulated wisdom and balls and stupidity combine in some kind of weirdly righteous alchemy to allow you to do exactly the right thing at exactly the right instant.

Which is what happened next.

“Right now,” he said in a low whisper.

The sound of his voice so obviously startled the big guy, he hardly moved — other than slowly raising the weapon toward the still inert Tommy.

“Right now you drop it.” Dex spoke in a loud voice now. “Or you will die.”

The intruder’s arm stopped rising, and he gently dropped the handgun to the carpet. “Even though I’m not sure I believe you, dying wasn’t on my ‘to do’ list today. Advantage yours.”

“Move back, palms open, knuckles against the wall.”

The man did as instructed, said nothing.

“We need to talk,” said Dex.

“You’re the Navy guy.” It was not a question. “And I’m sure you’ve got a lot of questions. I know I would.”

“Why’d you blow our boat? Try to kill us?”

The big man shrugged. “No idea, really. Grapevine says it was a mistake. Somebody getting a little too zealous. We believed we had a serious situation.”

“Who are you guys?” Dex had moved down the stairs to face the intruder, his weapon positioned for a headshot where there could be no chance of hitting Kevlar.

The guy chuckled softly. “I was wondering when I’d get that one. Everybody always asks.”

“So enlighten me.”

“Too complicated. We’re not government, though. I can tell you that. And listen, I got no agenda here. Strictly a job, okay?”

“What were you looking for? What do you want?”

Before he could answer, Tommy stirred on the floor, slowly got to his knees, but neither Dex nor the other guy were distracted.

“Tommy, you okay?” Dex kept the Sig-Sauer trained on his target’s face. “Tommy, answer me.”

“Jeezuz, what the…?” Tommy shook his head in an attempt to wake himself up. Obviously dazed and hurting, he forced himself to his knees.

Dex waited until some clarity returned to his buddy. After an agonizing minute or so, Tommy stood up, pulled the heavy drapes tight over the front window before flipping on a dim table lamp. He regarded the bald guy, but said nothing.

“You okay now?”

“Better. That the fuck who hit me?”

“Good guess. You got any duct tape?”

“Huh?” Tommy looked at him dumbly for a second before getting Dex’s intention. “Oh, yeah, downstairs, I think.”

“Hurry up.”

Tommy moved as quickly as he dared to the cellar door, flipped on a light, and descended the old stairs.

Dex continued staring at the big guy. “Let’s talk while we wait, whaddya say?”

“If you insist.”

“What do you guys want?”

“Information.”

“What kind?”

The guy considered how he might answer. “The bomb, for starters. They want to know what you did with it.”

Dex nodded, paused himself. Whoever they were, they knew about the 5001 and its mission. “The bomb wasn’t there. No shit.”

“Well, yeah, at least when we got there. We know that much. What happened to it remains an interesting question, don’t you think?”

He was right about that. “Can’t help you. Is that it? You kill my friends because you thought we had the bomb — a very old bomb?”

“Like I said — this is just a job for me. If my people want me to find something, I try to do it.”

Dex had trouble not believing this guy — he contained just the right mixture of ennui with his assignment and fear for his life to make him very convincing.

“What else?”

“Hmmm?”

“What else are you looking for?”

Before he could answer, Tommy reappeared with a fat roll of silver-gray tape. “Got plenty,” he said.

Dex nodded, stared at the big guy. “Don’t move. I really don’t want to shoot you.”

“But you will, right?” The big bald guy grinned.

Dex had Tommy empty the guy’s pockets — revealing a cell phone, wallet, money clip with cash, and a small Spyderco knife.

“Check everywhere,” said Dex. “And take off his shoes and throw ’em over here.”

A more thorough pat-down revealed a compact Taurus Millennium Pro in an ankle holster, which Tommy appropriated for himself. After removing the guy’s size fourteen shoes, Tommy taped his ankles together. Then his hands behind his back with enough tape to keep a couple of I-beams together.

“If you’re as good as you should be,” said Dex. “You’ll be free sooner or later.”

“Thanks.” The hulking figure lay on the floor with additional tape stringing ankles to wrist in a kind of modified hog-tie.

Dex gathered up the intruder’s primary handgun, a Glock G18, which could do plenty of damage in a hurry, plus all the pocket stuff. Then he ripped the phone cord out of the wall just to make things a little more inconvenient.

He looked at the big guy, who seemed more than content to just lay there quietly. “I keep getting interrupted, but I need to know a few more things.”

“Yeah, don’t we all…”

“I believe I was asking you — what other info are you looking for, and how do you know we have it?”

The guy inhaled slowly, then let it out as though bothered by the effort. “I’m just an errand-boy.”

“You gotta know more than us.” Dex sat down on the couch, leaned close to the guy and admired Tommy’s creative use of duct tape.

“My people know the history of that sub you found. They know it visited a secret Nazi base, and every government in the world has wanted those coordinates for a long time now.” The agent paused, uttered another of his low, guttural laughs. “And I have no fucking clue why — they don’t bother to tell me that much.”

Dex grinned. “And what makes you think we know?”

“We don’t. We’re just playing the odds.”

“How many of your people involved?”

“No idea. Truth.”

“How about telling me who writes your paycheck.”

“Some cover corporation you’ve probably never heard of.”

Tommy stood over him, kicked him in the knee. Hard. “I owed you that one, you fuck!”

The guy winced but said nothing.

“Make it a little easier. Who are you guys?” Dex leaned closer, lightly placed his handgun behind the bald guy’s ear. But as he did it, he felt awkward and stupid. No way he could kill somebody like this. If it was a self-defense thing, probably, but Dex had too many controls in place.

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. And since you both seem way too civilized for torture or execution, why don’t we just leave it at that?”

“Who the goddamn sent you, Disney World?” Tommy stood up, prepared to kick him again. “Cuz you’re right, I wouldn’t believe that one.”

The guy broke into a mocking grin. “How’d you guess?”

Tommy wound up for another one, and Dex stopped him with a gesture. Then: “Why do you care whether or not we know? Is it going to change anything?”

“Probably not. If they want you and whatever info you’ve got, they’re going to get you sooner or later. If they don’t, it’s because they lost interest.”

Dex was getting tired of this. Plus he had a feeling this guy was just the first of many converging on this place. He was wasting time. One more try, with some humor. “Just tell me this — are you the good guys or the bad guys?”

Bald Guy smiled. “I like you, Navy. Tell you what — I don’t think we’re either bad or good. We kind of reside outside that whole arena.”

“What’re you — a bunch of aliens?”

“That’s a good one. Haven’t heard that one before. Look, let’s just say my bosses are ‘business people,’ okay?”

Dex shook his head slowly, then looked at Tommy. “We have a train to catch.”

Tommy nodded and headed toward the kitchen and the back door. Turning off the table lamp, Dex blinked as the room fell into shadow, limned only from the nearby neon of High Street restaurants seeping along the edge of the drapes. He stood over the intruder. “Good luck with that tape.”

He followed Tommy to the kitchen when he heard Bald Guy’s voice.

“Hey, Navy…”

Pausing, Dex answered. “Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

“For what?”

There was a pause, then: “For being better than me. I would’ve killed you both.”

Five minutes later, from Augie’s cluttered basement, they’d gathered up Dex’s backpack which held the laptop, Bruckner’s log and papers, and the translation. It would have still held that weird metal bar if Dex hadn’t thought its extra weight would be the reason he drowned.

He shook his head. No sense going there. Forget it. As they headed for the back door, Augie grabbed his sleeve.

“What’s up, my friend?”

“C’mon, Chief, you can’t leave me here.”

Tommy looked at his leather-faced neighbor. “Huh? What’re you talkin’ about?”

“What am I gonna do if I get a visit from the bad guys?”

Dex had already thought about this, but had pushed it to the side of his concerns as they’d prepared to get on the road. But the old guy had posed a very good question.

“Jeez, Augs…” Tommy raked his fingers through his thick dark hair. He looked deeply distressed. “What’s a matter?”

Augie adjusted his Orioles cap, winked. “I wouldn’t tell ’em where to find their own ass, you know? But they might wanna hurt me — then what? I wouldn’t wanna let you guys down.”

Dex looked at the little old man with the impish grin. He looked like a weathered lawn gnome. “You have any relatives nearby? Any place you can go?”

“My niece lives around the corner. My son’s out in Harford County.”

“Your niece is too close. You got a way to get to your son’s?”

Augie pretended to think about this, then: “I guess I could, but I was thinkin’-a somethin’ easier.”

“What’s that?” said Tommy.

Augie grinned. “Take me with you.”

Dex considered it. “It might be very dangerous. Our friend next door was already kind enough to tell us he’d have killed us if necessary.”

“Mr. McCauley,” said Augie. “Look at me — I’m-a eighty four years old and I need somethin’ to keep me goin’. If they get me, at least they did when I was trying to be useful.”

“You sure about this?” said Tommy. “Things could get rough.”

Augie cocked his head. “I was a teenager when they sent me to New Guinea to kill Japs. How rough could this be?”

Dex smiled. The old guy had a point.

“Okay, get whatever you think you might need, and let’s get out of here.”

Augie nodded, opened the back door on the mini-jungle of his back yard. “I got false-a teeth. I don’t even need a toothbrush. Let’s go.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

His estimate of time and traffic proved less than accurate. The pleasant spring weather had tourists and locals out in force along many of the downtown area’s major streets. They didn’t reach Little Italy for an hour, and that, combined with Spruill’s silence concerned him.

Following the always-on homing beacon of Spruill’s Escalade, Entwhistle located it on the corner of Albemarle just off Eastern Avenue. The hulking black vehicle was vacant and had acquired a citation from the police for parking longer than the posted signs allowed. Bad sign, that. Combined with his failure to check in on schedule, the odds were increasing he’d been removed from the gameboard.

“I’m betting he’s still at the target address,” said Entwhistle.

“Sounds like a winning play.” Sinclair threaded the Lexus through the crowded streets until he reached the next restaurant that offered valet parking. “Let the college boys dump this thing.”

As the valet approached, Sinclair gave him a bill several times larger than a generous tip, then walked up Stiles Street toward the home of Thomas Chipiarelli. With Entwhistle at his side, Sinclair weaved his way along the sidewalk, automatically surveying the pedestrian traffic for any signs of suspicion or worse, potential aggression. But they were thoroughly ignored by everyone who passed, and that was either very good or very bad — depending on too many other factors to weigh and consider.

“Are you thinking the direct approach is the plan?” said Entwhistle.

“Modified. I’ll knock via the front door. Casual. Unassuming. You get in the back entrance any way you can.”

As they reached the corner of High Street, Sinclair watched his exec continue up the block toward the alley behind the block of row-homes, then he turned left and headed directly for the address of the firefighter. Passing the entrance to an upscale restaurant and a departing crowd of patrons, Sinclair reflected on how totally oblivious the average citizen remained to what was taking place all round them. From the vague, wondrous mysteries of quantum physics to the covert thoughts and actions of shadow people like himself, the range of existence beyond the scope of most people would be truly terrifying if they ever caught even a glimpse of it.

Ascending the absurdly small front steps to Chipiarelli’s residence, Sinclair knocked with his left hand while placing his right inside his jacket to the Taurus in his underarm holster. It was a small, powerful weapon, fitted with the latest noise suppression technology which rendered it almost silent in even the most quiet environments. It was his instrument of choice whenever he had the need to perform in public places.

He knocked on the door, waited, knocked again, and was not surprised to get no response. He stood before the door, looked at his watch as if a visitor who could be too early or too late, and waited patiently for Entwhistle to gain entrance and make contact.

His cell phone rang, and he answered it with no greeting because he recognized the ID. “I’m in. I’ve got Spruill.”

“Alive or dead?”

A tersely mannered chuckle, then: “Very much the former. Stand by. I’m opening the door now.”

Just as the connection ended, the sound of a thrown bolt accompanied the opening of the door into deep shadow. Entwhistle could barely be seen in the absence of light. But as soon as Sinclair stepped inside, sealing the door behind him, he toggled a wall switch.

The sudden splash of light from a small table lamp revealed his exec pointing into the kitchen at the rear of the narrow house. Walking into the space, Sinclair looked down at Spruill curled up on the ancient linoleum trying to manipulate a paring knife into a position that would sever some of the duct tape trussing him up like a turkey.

“Are you going to cut me loose,” he said through gritted teeth. “Or am I part of the show?”

Sinclair nodded to his exec and Entwhistle produced a small Spyderco Raven from his back pocket, slicing expertly through the layers of tape.

“You want to tell me how you managed this?”

“They were waiting for me. ‘Navy’ is a competent man. Nothing fancy or complicated. He was business.”

“How much business? Did you have to tell them anything?”

Spruill shook his head, reached down to start yanking the tape off his ankles after Entwhistle had freed his hands. “Nah. He’s the best kind of adversary — one with a conscience and a moral code. He’s not going be hurting anybody unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

“Any idea where they’re going?”

Spruill pulled a considerable amount of hair off his left wrist, swore like a Scotsman. “None. But the tape’s missing from the answering machine. They may have gotten a call from somebody we should know about.”

“Extremely likely,” said Entwhistle. “Why else would they get rid of it?”

“I’ve got Winter on his way to McCauley’s place. He may find something there.”

Entwhistle shook his head. “I don’t know — that guy seems to be pretty sharp.”

“Something goes snafu sooner or later.” Spruill’s tone was a subtle blend of anger and embarrassment.

“For now,” said Sinclair. “I’m going to assume they removed something of value from the sub.”

“And why is that?” Spruill winced as he yanked the remaining tape from his other wrist.

Sinclair shrugged. “Because it was picked clean.”

“Quite,” said Entwhistle. “Whether it’s of value remains to be determined.”

Spruill nodded. “What’s to stop them from turning it over to the Pentagon?”

Sinclair grinned. “Other than extreme paranoia and fear… nothing.”

“Echelon really gave this one a royal blue fucking,” said Entwhistle. “If they hadn’t been so inclined to terminate, we wouldn’t be in this bloody hound and hare game.”

“Yeah, it ups the ante, doesn’t it?” Spruill eased up to his feet, stretching out muscles constrained by the hog-tie. “Do we start tossing this place?”

Sinclair nodded as the tall, broad-shouldered Spruill joined Entwhistle in a thoroughly professional examination of the premises. They moved with a slowness that bespoke a meticulous eye and touch rather than the silly ransacking and mayhem depicted in cop dramas. The men knew they would find nothing of value from the submarine still here. But if they were careful, they might at least uncover indicators of what was missing and what they might be looking for.

As Spruill and Entwhistle worked small quadrants of space with practiced precision, Sinclair tried to decide what would be the best way to pick up their trail. The missing answering machine tape might be the key.

Punching a number into his cell, he waited until connected to a routing center, then tapped in his encryption key, followed by a voice recognition password. After a very short pause, he was connected to an ops center.

“How can I help you, Sinclair.” The voice was young, female, professionally bored.

“Need a download to my onboard. All calls logged to the following landline for the last forty-eight hours.” He provided the phone number feeding into Chipiarelli’s answering machine. Behind him, Entwhistle emerged from the cellar, moved through the front room and ascended the stairs to the top floor.

“Done. Anything else?”

He provided her with McCauley’s landline and cell numbers. “I also need the call logs on these too. If there’s voice mail, I need all messages from the digital services on both numbers.”

“Done,” said the voice which could not sound more disinterested.

“School me — is there a way to retrieve digital messages once they’ve been erased by the citizen?”

“Is that a legal query or a technical one?”

“I don’t give a damn about anything legal, so what do you think?”

The voice chuckled ever so softly. “Retrieval may be possible — depending on the type of system still employed by the carrier.”

“Execute on both numbers, forty-eight prior.”

“Done. What else?”

“Could you have a Grey Goose martini delivered? Three olives.”

Another soft chuckle that ended in a purr. “Goodbye, Sinclair.”

As he pocketed the cell phone, he looked up to see Spruill’s wide frame emerge from the narrow door leading to the cellar stairway.

He held an index card. “Not a complete strikeout.”

“What’d you find?”

Spruill placed the white card on the kitchen table where tiny dark spirals and jagged fragments lay. “This is from a drill press on a workbench down there. Looks like it was recent. These are metal chips from the bit and maybe some traces of paper or cloth.”

“Suggesting exactly what?” Sinclair looked at it as Spruill rummaged around the kitchen pantry shelves.

“Who knows? If the lab can determine what they were drilling, or ID the paper or cloth, we may be able to draw a few conclusions.” Spruill grabbed a plastic self-sealing food bag from a box, inserted the index card and the forensic artifacts, then pinched it closed. “It’s all we’ve got.”

“How much longer in here?” Sinclair glanced at his watch.

Spruill shrugged. “I’m done. It’s up to your Brit buddy.”

“I have some downloads waiting for me that may get us off the square,” said Sinclair. “Go up there and facilitate. We need to at least act like we’re doing something productive.”

Fifteen minutes later, all three were in the Lexus looking at the laptop screen. Entwhistle had decrypted the record of calls on the logs of both Chipiarelli and McCauley. He set up the data on a split screen and compared incoming calls with times and originations.

“Here’s a bit of a heigh-ho,” he said, pointing at one list of numbers, then the other. “To each of the two numbers — all within five minutes of each other. Looks like all from the same location.”

“Which is where?” said Sinclair.

Entwhistle massaged the keyboard, punctuated by a few mousepad slides. “Pay phone. Lancaster, Pennsylvania.”

“Not far from here at all,” said Spruill.

“Doesn’t tell us enough,” said Sinclair. “We need to know who made the calls. What’s the latest on McCauley’s voice mail?”

Entwhistle shook his head. “He erased everything. We have people working on it. No way to know if they can find anything yet. We’ll know when they know.”

“Can’t sit around waiting for data that may not exist.” Sinclair keyed the ignition and the hybrid hummed into a state of readiness.

“I presume Lancaster is in our future?” Entwhistle said with a tired expression.

Spruill cleared his throat. “What about me? I’m going to need to be re-supplied.”

Entwhistle laughed lightly. “Is that what they call it these days?”

“What?” Spruill scowled.

“Getting your tail yanked out from between your legs — or in your case, directly out of your arse.”

“You think I should have played hero? Fuck you.”

Entwhistle laughed heartily. “Just a bloody joke, Spruill. You need to relax or kindly bugger off.”

Spruill said nothing.

As Sinclair drifted the Lexus through the narrow neighborhood street, he looked back at Spruill. “Get yourself debriefed at the nearest OC. Then stand by until you hear from us.”

Spruill nodded, waited until the vehicle stopped alongside his matching Lexus, then departed without a word.

“He’s cranky,” said Entwhistle.

“We need to catch these clowns,” said Sinclair. “They’re a couple of amateurs and they’re making us look helpless. They both got calls from the same pay phone in Lancaster. Not a coincidence.”

Entwhistle nodded as he keystroked a few connections. “Confirmation from the phone data retrieval — the erased voice mail not available.”

Sinclair was getting pissed. No way they were going to hit the wall on this one. “All right. Get us the names of all the residences and businesses within a square mile of that target pay phone.”

“On it,” said his exec, and he started the onboard printer. “It’s going to be a big list.”

Sinclair watched the pages filling a tray in the console between them. “I also want a list of the names of the citizens behind the business names — owners, partners, corporate officers.”

Entwhistle began keying in the searches. “That’s going to take some digging.”

“So, dig. We have a little bit of a ride ahead of us.” He exited Little Italy and took a right on President Street following it to the beginning of Interstate 83.

“Okay, then what? Once I get the list, what exactly are we looking for?”

As he accelerated onto the elevated highway, Sinclair considered the question. “I don’t know yet. I just have a feeling the answer is on one of those lists.”

“Quite so, but we need some sort of winnowing factor, don’t you think?” Entwhistle finished keyboarding, and now waited for the printouts.

“I’m working that out.” Actually, Sinclair was working out not much of anything.

He felt like he was stumbling around in the dark, hoping to touch something that felt even vaguely familiar. The calls from Lancaster were the only ones shared by McCauley and Chipiarelli — that was significant. What else? They occurred in the afternoon after the story on the dive boat explosion hit the news. Did that mean anything? Maybe.

If they could find out the identity of the caller, it was possible everything else might fall into place… or not.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Dex, Tommy, and Augie had cleared the town of York and were heading east on US-30. They were less than a half hour from the Bruckner residence. Augie had slipped into a doze while Dex and Tommy tried to anticipate what their pursuers might be doing. While neither of them had become anything close to comfortable with their situation, they had at least accepted it.

“So you gonna do it?” said Tommy when he noticed Dex holding the disposable cell phone and looking at it like it was some kind of artifact.

He and Dex had come to an agreement — they were up against forces and interests who would eventually overwhelm them. Big Bald Guy’s employers had power and access, and even though Dex may have won Round One, he was scared of starting Round Two. They needed to widen the loop, get more people on their side, or they were going to end up like the rest of guys on the Sea Dog—an event Dex would be trying to forget the rest of his life.

“Do what? You mean call up some old friends?”

“Yeah.” Tommy continued to negotiate the traffic which was getting heavier now.

Dex looked at him nodded. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot. It’s too big to deal with on our own. We’ve got to trust somebody.”

“You gonna get things rollin’ before we get to Bruckner’s place?”

“I’m going to try. I’ll start with my old C.O. If I can’t trust him, then we can just forget about it.”

“Yeah — what’s his name again.”

“Whitehurst. He came from a military family in Virginia. All Navy all the time.”

“Yeah, there’s fireman families like that.”

“I just hope I can track him down. It’s been years since I even talked to him.” Dex dialed directory assistance and started the byzantine process of finding the right office that could help him track down Captain Parker Whitehurst. Countless numbers, phone carousels, and receptionists later, he discovered the old guy had finally been kicked into a Rear Admiral’s office at the Pentagon. And of course, he was unavailable when Dex finally reached his aide, a Commander Pye Hanson. Dex gave him a cryptic message with a few tantalizing details and buzzwords, and Hanson promised a callback from the Admiral as soon as he returned from lunch.

Dex looked at his watch after disconnecting the call. “Jesus, twenty minutes to get through to somebody — what a joke.”

“What’s the deal?”

Dex shrugged, held up the Trac Fone. “He’s supposed to call me back.”

Tommy cocked an eyebrow, trying to look quizzical. “Think he will?”

“If he gets my message, yeah. Whitehurst knew me a long time — we’ve got history. We respect each other.”

“How much you gonna tell him?”

Dex shrugged. “Well I was thinking of starting with everything.”

Tommy laughed. “Yeah, that oughta do it.”

Dex looked ahead on the highway; they were entering what looked like some smaller farms and suburbs.

“We’re about ten minutes outside of Lancaster,” said Tommy. “This is gonna be somethin’, huh?”

No doubt. Despite the distractions and paranoia, Dex anticipated the meeting with the man who’d written the logbook stashed in his backpack. It was one of those things that didn’t seem possible when you really thought about it.

“Yeah. I guess we should wake Augie, huh. He’s been out like a bad light bulb.”

Dex regarded the little old guy tilted into the corner on the truck’s jump seat, his mouth open, a series of soft snores rippling every breath. When he tapped him lightly, Augie stirred into wakefulness.

“We there yet?” he said. “I could use a candy bar or somethin’.”

“Almost,” said Tommy. “We’re coming to the 283 junction right now.”

Dex went over the directions as they negotiated the streets of the Pennsylvania town, which had an interesting blend of new and old on every corner. It was one of those places with character and instant appeal, and he could see why people would like living here. With each turn and the passage of each block, he felt his pulse getting stronger.

But when Tommy pulled up in front of the archetypical suburban house, Dex laughed out loud — as much to dispel the anxiety that had been stewing in him for the entire trip up I-83 and across Route 30. There was something ironically humorous in going to meet a Nazi U-boat captain in Home-Depot-Ville. Early evening sunlight cast everything in warm shadows, and the neatly landscaped colonial looked prototypically American.

Parking at the curb, Tommy helped Augie down to the sidewalk. Dex walked up to the front door carrying the backpack and knocked. Tommy and Augie stood silent behind him. Almost immediately, the door was opened by a guy who looked around thirty. He was dressed in jeans and a golf shirt and had a nice honest looking face.

“Hey, you must be Mr. McCauley. I’m Jason Bruckner.”

They shook hands.

“Just call me Dex.” He turned and tilted his head toward his friends. “This is Tommy Chipiarelli, and… his Uncle Augie.”

“Nice to meet all of you,” said Jason. “Come on in.”

Jason led them into a living room where a middle-aged couple were both seated on a large couch with floral upholstery. He introduced everyone all around and the three of them sat down with Richard and Peggy Bruckner as if they’d stopped by to have a cup of tea. It was starting to feel a little surreal, and Dex was wondering where the old Captain might be.

“I guess I should tell you,” said Richard. “This is all a really big shock to us.”

Dex just sat there with a half-smile on his face as Richard confessed to knowing nothing of his father’s career in the German U-boat service. The family had always believed Erich’s assertion that he and his friend Manfred Fassbaden came to America in 1947 to work in a mutual friend’s restaurant.

“How much has he told you?” said Dex. “About the U-Boat.”

“Not much. He started to tell me about his last mission,” said Jason. “He said his crew rescued some scientists under the ice in Greenland. But he also said there’s more.”

“That’s why he wanted to see you,” said Jason’s father. “He says he has to tell you the rest of the story.”

“Any idea why?”

Jason shrugged. “He says you might know what to do about it.”

“About what?” said Tommy.

“He didn’t say. He wants to talk to both of you first.”

Dex grinned, trying to hide his impatience. “Well, here we are. Where’s your grandfather?”

Jason looked at his father then back to Dex. “He said he didn’t want to talk about it here at the house. He says he feels more comfortable at Manny’s”

“Okay…” said Dex. He had no idea what or where Manny’s might be, but he was going to find out.

“He’s there now. Come on,” said Jason. “I’ll take all of you over.”

Standing up, Dex looked at Jason’s parents who remained seated. “We’ll be staying here,” said Richard. “My father wants to talk to you alone.”

Dex nodded, then added, “Listen, I’m feeling a little awkward here. I apologize if we’ve done anything to upset your family or anything like that.”

Richard smiled. “Not at all. You did nothing wrong. My father’s always been a character, you know? You never get used to things like this, but you try not to let them surprise you either.”

A few minutes later, Dex, Tommy, and Augie were riding into downtown Lancaster with Jason, who had seemed to relax visibly after leaving his parents’ house.

“Manny’s Tap Room is the family business,” said Jason as he turned onto a main boulevard. “Bar and grill. I run it with my dad. But my grandfather and Manny opened it around fifty years ago. They built it up from nothing. It’s like part of the landscape now. Everybody in town knows Manny’s.”

Dex nodded. “Sounds like a good spot.”

“You’re right about that,” said Jason as he turned onto Prince Street and pulled the maroon SUV into a capacious spot along the curb. “Here we are.”

As they all climbed out, Dex saw that Manny’s was no hole-in-the-wall tavern. Big, with lots of windows and awnings, hunter fans and tiffany chandeliers. Typical in a sense, but homey and comfortable too. No wonder it buzzed with customers. Jason held the door and they all filed inside.

“Where’s your grandfather?” said Dex as they weaved their way among the tables toward a large bar.

“Upstairs. Used to be an apartment where Uncle Manny lived. Now we use it for offices. Come on — this way.”

Passing through a busy clanging kitchen dominated by a huge black guy wearing a floppy chef’s hat, they followed Jason into a short hallway leading to a staircase. It was narrow and lit by a single bulb above the landing at the top of the stairs. The dim, cramped space reminded him of the path down the gut of the old U-boats, and Dex felt a lump begin to form in his throat. A conflux of feelings washed through him as he realized he was going to meet a man he felt he already knew in a way few people ever do.

Jason reached the door, tapped lightly on it.

Slowly it opened, peeling back to reveal a thin, older man with deep, penetrating eyes and a stern, jutting jaw. He still had plenty of hair, and not altogether gray. Few wrinkles carved up his handsome features, and he looked like he was in his mid-sixties — tops. Hard to imagine he was close to a hundred — impossible, really. Dex had an image of the young, rakish Captain from his soldbuch photo, and it was obvious this guy was the same person. Some things about a face just never change.

“Hallo,” said the man in a voice full of resonance as he extended a hand in friendship. He was wearing baggy khaki pants, a plain white button-down shirt, and a sleeveless golf sweater with a Slazenger logo. “I am Erich Bruckner… and I understand you found my boat.”

Dex reached out, shook his hand. “Dexter McCauley. And yes, sir, I did.”

Bruckner grinned, shook his head slowly as if to dispel the weirdness of the whole scene. “Please come in. Let’s sit down and talk.”

Dex entered the room and introduced Tommy and Augie. Captain Bruckner grinned when he shook Augie’s hand — an instant bond of age and the wisdom of years formed between them. Everyone followed the Captain through a large room crammed with files, cabinets and a desk, and into another that looked like a den or a great place to spend Sundays watching football on the big TV in the corner. The floor thumped softly from the music playing in the bar below. Bruckner settled into the big chair with an extra pillow for back support, gestured to his grandson. “Jason, get us all something to drink. What would you like, Mr. McCauley? Tommy? Augie?”

“I’ll take a beer,” said Augie.

“Make that two.” Tommy held up two fingers.

“Bourbon, rocks would be great. And, please, just call me Dex.” He sat down in the chair closest to Bruckner and placed the backpack on the floor next to him

“Only if you will call me Captain.” The old man laughed. “Just kidding. Please… call me Erich.”

Dex liked him immediately. He remained as sharp and perceptive as he’d been all those years ago. While Jason disappeared back down to the bar, Bruckner asked Dex a quick series of questions designed to get him up to speed on how they’d found his boat, how it looked, and what had caused the accident.

Dex and Tommy provided the details as concisely as possible. They didn’t say anything about the attack and the people chasing them — not yet. Bruckner seemed pleased to learn Dex was also a navy vet, and expressed surprise the 5001 had remained in such good shape. But there was something couched behind the old man’s eyes which suggested there was more than just a nostalgic interest in his old boat.

“Tell me more about my boat,” said Bruckner. “You were able to get inside, yes?”

Dex nodded.

“You saw the plane?”

“We got up into the hangar, we saw it.”

“What else? What else did you find?”

Reaching down, Dex picked up the backpack, unzipped it to retrieve the steel box from the captain’s locker. “Well, we also found this…”

“Mein Gott!” said Bruckner. His English was so natural, the German expression sounded almost odd falling from his lips. “I can’t believe it. May I see it, please?”

Dex handed it to him and he was unlatching it just as Jason returned with a tray of drinks and some bar snacks.

“Jason, look at this…” Bruckner opened the lid and Dex could see him get lost in the vision and the memory of the last time he’d touched that box, the last time he’d closed it.

“What is it?”

“Pieces… pieces of my life,” said Bruckner. He reached in, picked up the fragments of his medals, his soldbuch, and finally his log. Holding up the last item, he showed it to Jason and the others. “Jason, this is the story I was telling you. Right here.”

“Amazing,” said Jason as he took the log, turned its fragile pages carefully.

Bruckner looked at Dex sternly as he indicated the log. “Did you read this?”

“I did.” He pulled his printouts from the backpack. “Had to translate it first.”

“Oh, of course. I forgot — it is in German.” Bruckner looked embarrassed as he spoke. “So, you know what we were sent to do?”

“Well, I think I do. I’d rather hear it from you.”

The old man waved his hand dismissively. “There is more. That is why I knew I must reach you. There is more I must tell you — just in case.”

Dex had picked up his glass for a small sip, but paused. “In case what?”

“Just in case anyone else ever visits that place again.”

Dex took a taste of his drink, leaned closer. “What do you mean? Why?”

“I am not sure how to phrase this,” said Bruckner. “But have there been any… incidents? Anything you know about?”

“What do you mean by ‘incident’?”

Bruckner shrugged. “Anything. Anything at all that might be out of the ordinary. Anything happening around the Greenland Shelf?”

Dex wasn’t sure what he meant. “You mean like now? Recently?”

“That is correct.”

“Nothing I know about. I mean, nothing you’d see in the news or the ’net.”

Bruckner held up his index finger like a teacher bringing up a single point. “No, I meant something you may have heard while in the Navy, something that would not be on the news.”

Dex considered this, shook his head. “Sorry…”

Bruckner picked up his bottle of beer, allowed himself a small swallow. “Well, regardless, I must tell you the rest of my story.”

“Believe me, I want to hear it,” said Dex.

Bruckner nodded, then gestured to his grandson to hand him back his logbook. Taking out his reading glasses and fitting them slowly to his face, the captain began to turn through the thick pages with great care.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I must find the dates I am looking for, to see how I… how I phrased things back then, and how much explaining I will need to do now.”

“Take your time,” said Dex.

The old man flipped through the brittle pages.

“You should know,” he said slowly. “The events of… let me see… on the 3rd of May… well there was something I did not put in the log… something I could not bring myself to record.”

Dex said nothing. Although he was getting antsy as hell watching Bruckner and his deliberate manner, there was no rushing him. He’d come this far — another few minutes didn’t mean a thing.

“Very well.” Bruckner sat up a little straighter in his chair, moved a hand over his button-down shirt as if to smooth it for an inspection. His eyes, clear and bright, deepened as he began to relive a day more than six decades distant…

Chapter Thirty-Six

Upon returning from lunch, he sat behind his big polished desk in an office that was part of the vast honeycomb of rooms in the D-Ring. It was typical of the warrens they reserved for the guys who’d served well — the military’s version of the fancy CEO suite. Parker Whitehurst liked where he’d ended up so far, but at fifty-five, he wanted to believe he wasn’t done yet. And he hoped his superiors felt the same way. Although he still had a shot a Full Admiral’s pension, he also knew time was running out. As the head of the Navy’s Deep Sea Rescue Ops, his assignment represented the final stepping stone to getting his own fleet. But there were more candidates than fleets to go around, which was the way it should be, he supposed.

The topic of his pension was never far from center court in his thoughts, but there were always plenty of other tasks to keep him occupied. In the hour and a half he’d been away from his desk, a new stack of call-memos had accumulated and twice as much e-mail on his screen. Absently, he shuffled through the small sheets, recognizing all the notes except one — Dexter McCauley.

He hadn’t seen that name in a few years, but it jogged memories of a guy who had been one of the finest men who’d ever served under him. Why would he be calling? And how did he ever find me?

Picking up the memo, Parker read its contents carefully: I have information on the following: Station One Eleven, U-5001, and coordinates Longitude 39.49 W / Latitude 69.60 N. Very important I speak with you.

Now what the hell was that stuff all about?

Checking his watch, he had a meeting coming up with a budget advisor within the hour. He knew Chief McCauley extremely well, and the man wouldn’t have called him to just say hello or see if he wanted to play eighteen holes. McCauley knew he wouldn’t get an immediate call-back unless he did something to get Parker’s attention.

He looked at the three items, casting about in dimmer corridors of memory for some meaning to attach to the words. Station One Eleven. He vaguely recalled seeing something on that, but what had it been? The other two references meant nothing.

But they must mean something important to McCauley or he wouldn’t have included them in his message. And that was enough for Parker to take action. Calling in his aide, he instructed Commander Hanson to get all the information he could on the three subjects from the memo. ASAP.

By the time he finished arm-wrestling with the budget wonks, maybe he’d have some answers.

Almost four hours later, when Parker returned to his outer office, Pye Hanson looked up anxiously. “Admiral… that stuff you wanted me to check on?”

“Yes? What about it?”

“Sorry it took so long.” Hanson grinned. “But there’s plenty in the archives. Look at this…”

Parker regarded a stack of files as thick as the New York phone book. No way he would have the time to go through all that shit — even if he took it home, and he’d made a habit of doing that as little as possible. Not so much he cared what Karen might say, but more to guarantee himself some down-time from his job.

“Pye, are you kidding me?”

“No sir.”

“Well, can you give me the condensed edition on any of it?”

Hanson stood up, nodded. “I can try…”

“Inner sanctum,” said Parker. He headed into his private space with Hanson lugging the stack of folders right behind him.

They moved to the small conference table by the window and Commander Hanson spread out some of his paper. “Okay, let’s see — Station One Eleven is the code name for a secret Nazi base in the Arctic region. It was—”

Parker snapped his fingers — an old habit he hated, but couldn’t break — and nodded. “Of course. I knew I’d heard that name. We never found it, right?”

“No sir, not a trace.” Hanson shook his head. “OSS swore it was real. But it was never located and a lot of people believed it might have been mythological. Disinformation, maybe.”

Parker recalled some of the stories surrounding One Eleven, linking it to its Antarctic counterpart, Station Two Eleven. The latter had been very much a real entity, and had been the target of a post-WWII task force called “Operation High Jump.” Parker knew many details from the Top Secret files — in 1947, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal sent 40 ships under the command of Admiral Nimitz, Admiral Krusen and Admiral Byrd to find and destroy a Nazi base under the ice that had survived the end of the war in virtual autonomy.

Parker gestured to his aide. “What do you have on the other things?”

Hanson picked up a single file folder. “Not much on U-5001. Not much at all. It doesn’t fit any of the standard German submarine designations, and officially never existed. There is one report — undocumented — which suggests it was the prototype of a new class of U-boat that never got off the drawing board. Some kind of secret weapon.”

Parker nodded. “That it?”

Hanson grinned. “As far as our records, yes. But there’s been an item on the news — I guess you didn’t catch it — about some divers who found a Nazi sub in the Chesapeake Bay, and—”

Parker made a habit of never watching any news programming. Most of it was so editorially skewed as to be worthless. “Let me guess. It’s called the U-5001.”

“Yes sir, but that’s not all. The dive boat exploded, killing everybody on board. One of the divers’ names was Dexter McCauley.”

Okay, now this was getting more than strange. “But you said he just called me, left this message.”

“Yes sir.”

“So what the fuck is going on here?”

“Sir, I’m not sure, but there’s more…”

Parker exhaled. When he’d been up to his elbows in Deep Sea Rescue, he used to rely on an internal alarm system that had grown reliable from equal parts experience and instinct. And oddly enough back then, he relished the feeling of possible danger or unpredictability. He’d been out of the game for a while now, and obviously a part of him missed it.

He gestured for Hanson to continue.

“The coordinates pinpoint a position just off, or slightly beneath, the Greenland Shelf. And that location, or ones damned close to it, turned up in a few really weird files,” said his aide.

“Weird like how?”

“I mean, like totally unrelated… and I started wondering what the odds would be of that. And what the connections could be.”

“Go on…”

Hanson flipped through some pages. “Fish-kills,” he said.

“What? What’re you talking about?”

Hanson laid out sets of pages on the conference table. “Each of these are incidence reports from a variety of agencies and private companies. They document a series of fish-kills at or around those coordinates. Large areas in the sea which contain huge populations of fish — dead and floating belly-up.”

“Just fish?” said Jeff. “Or everything?”

“Actually, everything. Every type of sea creature — right down to the plankton.”

“Wow… and how ‘large’ an area are we talking about?”

Hanson shrugged. “Not sure. The estimates vary depending on how soon after the ‘killing event’ has happened. But it’s at least 20 square miles.”

“Hmmmm. Nothing to sneer at. That’s a lot of fish. Could be significant. Depending on how many times it’s happened.” said Parker.

“I agree.” Hanson checked another file, then: “But we can’t be sure about that. We can only work from the instances it’s been observed — the first time was in December of 1946, and thirteen times since then.”

“What? Thirteen’s a lot. Any pattern to the occurrences?”

“A cyclic pattern is suggested of approximately every five or six years. The gaps in the pattern might be times when nobody noticed it.”

“Is it possible there’s some naturally occurring phenomenon causing it? Temperature drops? Vulcanism?”

“From what I can find, nothing much has been done about it, other than make note of it. But funny you mention vulcanism — a routine Geophysical Satellite mapping survey uncovered something strange at essentially the same coordinates.”

Parker’s instincts were humming like a high tension wire in an electrical storm. What the hell had McCauley sent him? “Tell me.”

“The satellite’s instruments detected an unusual heat signature several hundred feet below the surface and also some unexpected data to suggest widely varying densities in a localized section of the shelf.”

“Heat signature like what?”

Hanson shook his head. “Not sure. I didn’t have enough time to dig into it. But I’m telling you, Admiral, there’s a lot going on at those coordinates — if we can pull it all together.”

“Looks like my old Chief McCauley already did.”

Hanson looked a bit sheepish as he picked up another folder. “Well, sir, there’s something else…”

“Are you serious?” Checking his watch, he saw his work day slipping away, but Parker had a feeling he’d be cancelling anything else on the planner. He motioned his aide to keep talking.

“I found an unconfirmed report that the Russians lost a hunter-killer class near these coordinates.”

“What?”

“1981. One of their Alfa class. Naval Intelligence was never able to verify verbal rumors with either documented evidence or SOSUS data.”

“What in hell’s damn does all this crap mean?” Parker sat on the edge of the desk, aware of the alarms in his head. The papers spread before him had a strange and terrible but unknown significance.

“I have a feeling we’ve barely gotten a glimpse.”

Parker nodded, glanced at the chronometer on his desk, one of those engraved commemorative things they give you when they ease you out of an assignment. He looked at his aide. “Time to close up shop, Pye. We can schedule more time for this tomorrow.”

Hanson looked disappointed. He gestured at the spread of files and printouts on the table. “Very well, sir. Should I leave this here, or—”

“You can leave it. No one will be in here to bother it.”

“What about McCauley? If he calls again?”

Parker grinned. “He won’t. He knows he’s given me all I need to get back to him.”

After dismissing his aide, Parker called his driver and told him he may be delayed in leaving the building. Then he called Karen and told her the same thing, but she had long ago stopped caring about things like that.

As he sat down behind his desk, holding the memo from McCauley in his left hand, Parker Whitehurst reached for his phone with the other.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The interior of the 5001 clanged and rocked with celebrations. Erich wanted to join them, but there was one final thing still troubling him. His friend and Exec had also kept his elation under control, and was just standing there, awaiting the next order. Erich spoke softly to him.

“Manny, will you join me topside?”

The night was cold and clear and the light of a thousand stars burned over their heads as they emerged from con’s hatch. Both men pulled their parkas tightly around their necks.

“Well, Captain, it has unfolded as you imagined.”

“But we have one final, loose thread to gather in.” Erich looked at his friend while Manny fumbled to light a cigarette in the cool air.

“A thread? Is that what you call it?”

Erich chuckled. “Thread… actually more like a hawser.”

“I assume you are talking about our secret weapon.” Manny pulled on his cigarette, its tip glowed brightly in the cold air.

Erich nodded. “I say we get it off this boat. As quickly as possible.”

“You mean toss it overboard?” Manny looked apprehensive at this solution.

Erich shrugged. “That is one possibility. But perhaps fate has prepared something different for us?”

Manny exhaled a thin plume of smoke, pretended to study its shape and dissolution. “All right. I am listening.”

“I am not normally so mystical,” said Erich. “But I believe we found that place for a reason. There is something… wrong about it. Maybe even… evil. I don’t know if I can even explain why I feel it — I just do.”

“I don’t follow you. What are you saying?”

Erich cleared his throat. “There is only one place for that device…”

“What?” Manny’s tone revealed his sudden understanding. He looked at him, then out across the cave-dark sea toward the Greenland shore. “You… want to go back? Down there? In there?”

“Crazy. Yes, Manny, I know. But I feel it. Just like I feel we carry a great terror on this boat. You suspected. You knew.” Erich paused, felt oddly embarrassed as he discussed his orders. “I wanted to confirm it for you, but my orders forbade it.”

Manny smiled. “We talked, remember. You did not have to verify it.”

Neither man spoke for a minute or two.

Manny exhaled, his breath captured briefly in the frigid air. “Well, we have time to make rendezvous and… and still do what you want.”

Erich looked at him, pulled an envelope from his pocket. “These are sealed orders for you and Kress.”

“Kress?”

Erich nodded. “Yes. At rendezvous, when we were supposed to take on the pilots from the Sturm, Kress would be required to arm the bomb. Just before we launched the ME-5X.”

Manny laughed lightly, not from any humor in the words, but rather its maniacal obverse. He looked at his friend, his mirth suddenly gone. “We are all insane.”

Erich nodded. “Does that mean you agree with me?”

Manny looked toward the shore. “We have carried this evil in our bellies for a while now. Even just suspecting it had sickened me. Let’s heave it up. Here. Now.”

When Erich gave the command to return to the ruins, his crew could not mask the shock on their faces. Even Massenburg and Ostermann could not maintain their decorum. Erich ignored their attempts to get more information — only telling them the 5001 had a final addendum to the new orders they’d received.

“Take her down,” Erich said to the helmsman, and almost instantly felt the big boat respond to his command. The thought of returning to that strange and terrible landscape was anathema to him, went against the silent vow he had made when he had closed the hatch on it not twenty-four hours ago. But he believed he had little choice in this.

Manny stayed at the viewing port relaying visual information as the boat re-entered the under-ice passage. Slowly, they retraced their initial path until they surfaced on the dead calm of the nameless sea. As they floated near their entry point, Erich stood in the nest of the conning tower, peered through his Zeiss field glasses, looking for the location to suit his purpose. Although destruction of the city would be ideal, he would be happy with merely sealing it off, collapsing the cavern and the underwater entrance.

His problem was that he had no real appreciation for the power in the device they carried. Without witnessing the hellish display, no man could understand. High Command had tried to convey a sense of it to him, but it was only theoretical. Conjecture was never the same as reality.

“We are ready when you are,” said Manny, who had appeared in the hatch.

Erich nodded. “Open the hangar.”

Manny nodded, scurried down the hatch. Erich turned to watch the blister-doors of the hangar deck. There was a clanging sound, the whir of an electric winch and the sealed panels cracked open, swinging wide to reveal the seaplane with its wings tucked under itself like a sleeping raptor. Yawning wider, the doors uncovered three men standing on the deck — Manny, Kress, and Massenburg. While Kress eased himself under the belly of the seaplane to gaze up into the open bomb bay, the other two men carefully swung a wooden motor-launch, a powered lifeboat, over the side and hand-cranked it down to the water. The boat was to have been used by the launch crew as they readied the seaplane for take-off, but Erich had other plans for it now.

Erich watched all three of his men, waiting patiently until they had finished their preliminary preparations. Manny and Helmut had pulled themselves back up to the deck as Kress levered himself out from under the plane.

Standing up he looked up at Erich. “I am ready, Captain.”

“Can you do it?”

Kress held some folded paper in hand. “Ja. We have the means.”

“Very well. Get it into the boat.”

Kress snapped off a salute and enlisted the other two men to help him. Their first task was to lower the bomb from the Messerschmitt’s bomb rack with the set of dual hydraulic jacks used to originally load it. The jacks had been designed to raise and lower the device as needed during the arming process. The trick, Erich knew, was the re-engineering of the crane and winch. If successful, the assembly could easily get the bomb into the launch, rather than swing the seaplane out off the deck and lower it into the water.

The process proved time-consuming although not as difficult as he imagined. The bomb was more than 3 meters in length, and less than a half-meter in diameter. But its size was not as challenging as its weight of more than two thousand kilograms. Which is why they needed to employ the crane to lower it into the launch, and why it demanded time and care, as well as leverage.

Several hours later, Erich joined them in the motor-launch and directed them toward a small cove along the nearest shoreline. They towed a rubber dinghy behind them as they paired up and flanked their terrible cargo supported by the hydraulic jacks.

“Tell me one more time, Herr Kress,” said Erich.

Nodding slowly, Kress kept one hand on the bomb’s outer shell, as if to stabilize it. “The detonation design is called the ‘gun method’,” he said. “It uses a standard 105mm shell casing to fire what the orders describe as ‘sub-critical material’ into the bomb’s target rings which are made of the uranium isotopes.”

“And you can make this work without killing us?” Manny looked at him cautiously.

“I think so, yes.”

“Then you are not certain?”

“The orders and instructions are fairly straightforward. I have modified a timer and shaped charges from one of our scuttle packages,” said the engineer. “I will give us up to an hour to be quite far away.”

Erich nodded. “And the charge will be enough to detonate the 105 shell?”

Kress grinned in the spirit of all young boys who like to blow things up. “Oh. yes, Captain. It should be more than adequate.”

Erich looked ahead as Massenburg maneuvered the launch into the cove. The beacon tower and the nameless city lay on the opposite shore shrouded in mist. They were almost invisible, but Erich could sense their presence like a weight hanging over his head.

“Well, then,” said Erich. “My only concern is an answer we cannot obtain — how far away do we need to be to be safe from this thing?”

Kress shrugged. “I think we will know soon enough, Captain.”

Ten minutes later, the motor launch, with its massive deadly cargo, lay beached in the small cove. Erich, Manny, and his Chief Warrant Officer all hunkered down in the rubber dinghy watching Kress, who turned a spring loaded dial, depressed the timer, and sloshed through the water to join them as fast as he could.

“Now we must be quick,” he said.

More than fifteen minutes elapsed before they had sealed the hatches and slipped beneath the surface. As Manny guided the 5001 through the under-ice maze, Erich kept watching the sweep-tick of his watch, which seemed to moving faster than he had ever seen it.

How far would they get? How far would they need be?

Erich and his three accomplices sweated out the diminishing minutes as their boat cleared the ice shelf and broke into the open sea. The rest of the crew went about their tasks with not an inkling of the terrible force they now fled.

When they finally surfaced several kilometers south of their exit-point, Erich left the control deck with Manny and Helmut, joined Kress in the engine room. All of them held their timepieces in front of them. Now the notching of the tiny hands slowed. The final minutes fell away with stubborn resolve. Minutes finally reduced to scant seconds.

They studied them and each other’s faces, and…

Nothing.

The allotted time had slipped past them and they felt nothing, heard nothing.

“Could it be possible to be… so insulated?” said Manny.

“No, not at all,” said Kress. “We would hear a torpedo at this distance.”

“What happened?” said Massenburg. “A dud?”

“Perhaps only for the moment,” said Erich.

But it had proved to be wishful thinking.

If he would make rendezvous, Erich could not remain in the vicinity to acknowledge any delayed activity. He had no choice but to accept failure — either in his own plans or those of the men of Project Norway. The bomb remained silent, impotent as the rest of the Nazi war effort. It was beyond his control now, and so would it remain.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

He had been driving in silence, cursing their inability to draw in the net closer. Driving toward Lancaster on a calculated hunch was all they had for the moment, and he had no guarantees things would improve. Sinclair was gambling right now, and he hated being pushed to that final tactic. It was not how he’d survived all these years. Throwing dice up against a wall was no substitute for shrewd analysis.

As he headed east on US 30, Entwhistle began downloading some responses to his last set of queries to thin out the data he’d requested. “Hel-lo!” he said slyly. “I think we have something here.”

“Fill me in.” Sinclair adjusted to changing traffic patterns but listened acutely.

“The pay phone was in a Stop’n’Go petrol station on the corner of Chestnut and Prince Streets.”

“And that is significant why?”

“You’re going to like this.” Entwhistle chuckled. “The pay phone is across the street from an establishment called Manny’s Tap Room.”

Sinclair shook his head. His exec’s habit of stretching out information as if playing a game was sometimes infuriating. “Why should I ‘like’ that? Get to the fucking point.”

“The ‘Manny’ referenced is listed on the original papers of incorporation as Manfred Fassbaden and the other name is Erich Bruckner.”

Sinclair knew he should be connecting the dots by now, but he was tired, pissed off, and having trouble keeping his thoughts focused. He’d just passed a sign announcing the proximity of Lancaster: seven miles. “Just tell me what you’re getting at.”

“Both men were officers in the U-boat service.” Entwhistle’s voice was low and deliberate.

“No such thing as coincidence.” Sinclair, who felt a sudden flash of vindication in heading toward Lancaster. “A good first step, but we need more than that.”

“I’m not finished yet. Fassbaden and Bruckner graduated the unterseeboot academy at Flensburg together. They served on different vessels until April, 1945, when they were both slated for a secret mission. No details beyond that, but it connects them rather well, wouldn’t you say?”

“No such thing as coincidence,” Sinclair repeated. “How can we use it?”

Entwhistle chuckled. “Try this: I have a Richard and Margaret Bruckner living on Foxshire Drive in Lancaster.”

“Any other Bruckners in this town?”

“None.”

“Put that address into the GPS. That’s where we’re going to wrap this thing up.”

Entwhistle began punching in the correct digits. “Do you foresee extreme methods?”

Sinclair eased out a breath. “Probably…”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“Hold it…” said Dex. “You left an atomic bomb under the Greenland Shelf? And — you left it hot?”

“That is correct,” said Bruckner. “You see now why I wanted to speak to you?”

Dex grabbed the remains of his bourbon, poured it down his throat, but barely felt it. This whole story was getting way too strange now. “I don’t know how those things work — is it dangerous? After all this time?”

The captain shrugged, shook his head. “I have no idea. I was hoping you would.”

“Me?” Dex shook his head, still trying to wrap his thoughts around this latest piece of the story.

Tommy nudged him softly. “Any way we can find out?”

“We’re going to need to talk to the right people,” said Dex. “This is so out of our league…”

Jason moved to put a hand on his shoulder. “Opa, this is crazy, man. You’re not kidding us, are you?”

Bruckner looked at him with irritation. “I may be old, but I am not a… a nut. Of course it is true.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything? Till now?” His grandson looked embarrassed, panicked.

“It is something you never want to think about. And so I tried to forget. Besides, as long as the secret, along with everything else stayed buried…”

“What did it matter, right?” said Dex, finishing the thought.

“That is correct.” Bruckner closed his log book with a small dramatic flourish as if to emphasize the point, then put the old fragile book in the side pocket of his golf jacket.

“But now, we might have trouble. No way to know if the Navy or anybody else found your little surprise. Not yet anyway.”

“I… do not want anyone to get hurt because of something I did so long ago.”

Dex looked at Bruckner — he looked concerned, distressed, maybe, but a long way from incompetent.

“Man, after all this time, I have no way of knowing if it could still go off,” said Dex. “We need to talk to the right people.”

Jason looked at his grandfather. “Does Dad know any of this?”

Bruckner shook his head. “No. Nobody ever did — except Manny and Freddie Hausser. And they are both in the Great Beyond.”

“Did either of them ever share it with anyone?” Tommy asked the question in a half-whisper.

Bruckner shrugged. “I do not know. But I would think not.”

“Unbelievable,” said Jason. “This is just crazy.”

The old man regarded his grandson. “Why do you think I told you about the number of the U-boat? Because I knew what I had left inside it. My log could lead people to find those ruins, and what I left there. And over the years, I had seen stories, Jason. Like the Titanic. More and more people have been finding wrecks, and—”

“You were very smart to be cautious,” said Dex. Whenever he contacted Parker Whitehurst, he was going to have a hell of a punchline to his story.

“I have many times told my grandson — there had to be a reason God has let me live so long. I believe this is it.”

Augie, who’d been sitting in stunned silence through most of this, now stood and walked over to Bruckner, placed a thin hand on his shoulder. “I understand what you mean. I’ve had thoughts like that myself.”

“What’re we going to tell Dad?” Jason was looking at his grandfather with an expression equal parts admiration and anger.

“Ha!” Bruckner smiled. “Nothing! We tell him nothing for now. My son is not built for this kind of thing. You want to give him a heart attack?”

Dex grinned despite the revelations; he really liked the old captain. He was ready to make a suggestion on how to proceed when his Trac Fone started chirping. The sound so startled him, for an instant, he felt confused and wary… until he realized he’d been expecting this call. The impact of Bruckner’s story had deflected Dex’s anticipation, but he smiled when he saw the 202 area code on the ID screen.

“Would everyone excuse me for a minute,” he said. “I’m going to need to take this.”

“Of course, of course.” Bruckner, gesturing him toward the other room. “Jason, could you go downstairs and get everyone a refill?”

As the grandson complied, Dex moved quickly into the office area, sat behind a desk, and pushed the right button on the disposable phone.

“Hello, Dex McCauley here…”

“Chief, this is Admiral Whitehurst. Before we go any further, I should tell you some newscasts are telling people you’re a dead man.”

“That was, as Twain said, ‘exaggerated’.”

“Maybe.” Whitehurst paused. “How do I know you’re who you say you are?”

Dex had been prepared for this. “Ask me something only Dex McCauley would know.”

The Admiral chuckled, then paused. “All right, sailor. Back when you were just getting started at Panama City, I was driving a car I liked a lot back then — what was it?”

“Austin Healy. Bug-eye Sprite. British Racing Green, sir.” Dex said without hesitation, then paused. “I… I don’t remember the year.”

“That’s okay. Very good. Now, one more thing. My secretary had a bad habit of sending your recruits out for ice cream — what flavor?”

“Butter pecan, sir.”

Admiral Whitehurst laughed in relief. “All right, all right. Now, McCauley, whatever you’ve got to tell me better be damned good.”

The two men spoke with a casual familiarity that bespoke twenty years of serving together. Skipping any small talk, Dex answered frankly. “I think you know me well enough, sir. I wouldn’t have contacted you without good reason.”

“I know that, Chief. I did some preliminary checking on your list — now fill me in.”

Dex did his best to summarize the sequence of events that pushed him to make the call. When he’d finally finished, Whitehurst didn’t speak for a moment. Then: “Jesus Christ, you’re serious, aren’t you? About all of it… and the old U-boat captain, he’s really still alive?”

“Yes sir, all true.”

“I need some time to let all this settle, to see the larger picture. If that secret base is even close to what you think it might be…” Whitehurst paused again.

Dex waited, then risked interrupting his thoughts. “Admiral, sir?”

“Yes?”

“I… I just need to know. And I don’t want you to get upset with me for even asking a question like this, but… those guys who’re after us…”

“Stow it, sailor,” said Whitehurst. “They’re not ours. We wouldn’t do that to our own. You’ll be safe with me, McCauley.”

“Well, I must’ve already believed that, or I’d never have called you.”

“Noted,” said Whitehurst. “However, you should know we’re going to need to pick you and your people up. You’re still in danger.”

“Any idea who those guys could be?”

“We’ll find out.”

“So, what’s our next move?”

“How many in your group are we talking about?”

“Four.”

“I’ll scramble a Sea Ranger from the Naval Hospital in Philly. They’ll get it there within the hour, I’m sure. We need to get you and your people down here to DC for a debriefing. Can the old bastard fly?”

“Pretty sure. He looks plenty healthy to me,” said Dex. He was feeling an electric surge in his pulse, a coiled spring tension in his shoulders and arms. He’d almost forgotten what that sense of readiness was like. But it was as comfortable as an old shoe, and Dex smiled.

“The pilot will call you when he’s close to the field. I’m assuming Lancaster has an airport — if not we’ll coordinate as soon as I get a confirmed LZ, okay? But I think you should get started right away.”

“Yes sir, and thank you for calling back, Admiral.”

“Let’s just say you got my curiosity. Get moving, sailor.”

Disconnecting the call, Dex re-entered the room and told everybody the plan. When Captain Bruckner learned of the Navy’s plan to fly him out, his eyes brightened, warming to the suggestion of adventure.

Dex was about to suggest they start making plans when something occurred to him. One of the things he’d always done in Rescue was have a back-up plan, and with this in mind, he spoke to Bruckner.

“Captain, is there any way you might be able to make me a map? Can you remember what that place looked like? Enough to give me an idea where you left the bomb?”

Bruckner nodded. “Yes. I will never forget that place.”

Moving quickly, Erich found some copy machine paper and a pen from the office area. He cleared the drinks and snacks off the tray and let the old man start sketching. As he watched him slowly connect a series of shaky lines, Dex became aware of the music playing beneath their feet. The steady thump of a bass line sounded like the beating heart of a great beast, buried, but slowly awakening — which was exactly what was happening, wasn’t it?

While he watched Bruckner, the door opened at the landing and Jason appeared with new drinks and some bar snacks. Dex thanked him and explained what his grandfather was trying to do.

Jason nodded, put the tray on the table between the chairs. Quietly, he gestured for Dex to follow him back out of the room where the old man couldn’t hear them.

“You know,” he said. “It’s funny, I keep going over all this — everything I’ve found out today — and I keep trying to figure out whose fault it is.”

“Hey, come on…” Dex started to say something.

Jason waved him off. “I mean, that’s how they teach us to think these days — that it’s always somebody to blame, right? So I’m thinking — how did all this shit get so complicated? So fast? And every time I look at that sweet old guy, the guy who’s loved me and taught me so much since I was just a kid, I… I can’t believe he did anything like this.”

“He did what he had to do,” said Dex. “Just like he’s doing now.”

“So, you’re… you’re okay with him?” Jason looked apprehensive.

“You kidding?” said Dex. “‘Okay’ with him? Your grandfather’s an officer — I’m counting on him.”

Jason absorbed that simple truth, and unleashed a genuine smile.

They returned to the room to see that Bruckner had finished his map. Although the lines were a little shaky, and the scale wasn’t altogether accurate, the relative positions of things he’d described were all there. He showed it to Dex with an expression of obvious self-satisfaction.

“Not bad, eh?” he said.

“Pretty good, actually,” said Dex. “We may need this at some point. I can keep it, right?”

“Of course.”

As Dex folded it up to stash in his pocket, the old man looked away for a moment as if replaying another memory.

“You know, there is something else,” said Bruckner. “One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

The old man grinned, waved his finger chidingly at Dex. “No, I must show you. Telling would do no good.”

“What’re you talking about?” said Jason.

Erich sighed. “As I said before, as the time passed, and nothing ever came of our sunken boat. Buried under the bay, and forgotten. There was only one thing to tie us to any of it, and Manny and I had to decide what to do with it.”

Dex nodded. “And what thing is that?”

“Something we retrieved from the wreckage,” said Bruckner. He shook his head, as if to indicate there was no way he could relate it to them.

“Was it a piece of metal? Shaped kind of like a brick?”

Bruckner looked surprised. “How did you know that?”

“I read your log, remember?”

“Oh, yes, of course. And yes, I’ve kept it all these years.”

“Plus, we found another one,” said Dex. “Right where you must have left it — by the aft hatch.”

“Yes, I remember… when it dropped away from me.” Bruckner’s gaze was somewhere else in the corridors of his memories. “Where is it? Do you have it with you?”

Dex shrugged, not feeling like this was the best time to unravel the rest of his story concerning the attack on the Sea Dog. “No… we… lost it… in an accident. It’s back in the Bay.”

“No matter. I made provision to keep the one I took. It was the only solid proof I had… the proof we had really been there.”

“Where is it now?” Dex looked around at the small group, then directly at Bruckner. “You can tell us all, Captain — we’re all in this together.”

The old man looked at his grandson. “Jason knows. He was with me when I secured it there. Conestoga Memorial Cemetery. Next to Manny’s headstone, we buried it there, right after he died, remember?”

Jason nodded. “I remember,” he said in a solemn voice.

“I had kept that object with me all these years, in a box I kept by my bed. It was the only thing that proved to me it had all been real. But when Manny died… I don’t know, there was nothing left to connect me to the past.”

“I think we should leave it there for now,” said Dex. “Believe me, sir, you don’t have to prove anything to me.”

Bruckner considered this for moment, then nodded. “Perhaps you are right,” he said. “And now, should we prepare for our trip?”

“Yeah,” said Dex, looking at Jason, who was standing at his grandfather’s side. “Is there anything he’s going to need before we leave?”

“He has a bunch of prescriptions, some clothes, I guess, right?”

Dex nodded, gestured to everybody. “Sounds good to me. Let’s get going.”

While Jason carefully helped the elder Bruckner down the stairs, into the corridor that exited Manny’s Tap Room, Dex did the same for Augie, who complained he didn’t need any help, but the whole time held onto Dex’s arm in a deathgrip. Tommy followed everyone out into the parking lot. The sun had set while they’d been inside, and the night sky burned clear and starry above them. The muted sounds of bass-driven music buffeted the back door of the bar. As Jason helped the two old guys into the spacious back seat of the Murano, Dex caught Tommy’s sleeve as he looked around in the darkness and the phalanx of cars all around them.

“Hey,” he said in a whisper. “Keep an eye out. I feel very exposed out here.”

Tommy tensed, put a hand in the pocket of his windbreaker to touch the grip of the Glock 18. “Jeez… you think—?”

“I don’t know what to think. But we have to be careful, No way to know if our big bald friend’s gotten loose or not.”

“Gotcha.” Tommy climbed into the shotgun seat looking very uncomfortable.

As Jason backed out of the parking space, Dex looked over at Bruckner. “There’s more to your story, Captain. Do you mind telling us what happened after your last entry in the log?”

“Hmmm?” Bruckner looked up from his thoughts.

“Well, basically,” said Dex. “I’m curious. How’d you get from there… to here?”

“Yes, I suppose there is more to the story.” The old guy grinned, nodded.

“He’s right, Opa,” said Jason. “I don’t think I’ve heard all this, either.”

“All right,” said Bruckner. “We have a little bit of a ride. I can tell you all the rest of my story.”

Chapter Forty

Ostermann was the last to leave the boat. “Are you certain you want to do this, Captain?”

Erich shook his hand. “A captain stays with his ship,” he said. “I will try to get her where she belongs.”

His navigator saluted, then headed for the Sturm. There had been no need to share his intentions with the rest of the crew. As Manny and Hausser watched the big cruiser glide away from them, Erich was already charting a course for the short run south to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. They would be forced to remain on the surface because they would not have enough crew to perform even the most rudimentary diving or surfacing operations.

Erich had no choice but to gamble they would not be discovered. For the scant hour or so of daylight, a low cloud cover was in their favor if the Americans had continued recon flights along the coast despite the war’s end.

Hours later, rocked in the cradle of midnight, the U-5001 tossed gently on the surface of the Bay. They had made it. It was very dark — and the cloud cover remained heavy with the possibility of a storm. Frederich Hausser stood by an inflated rubber dinghy, tied up alongside the rear hatch. He stood at the ready to unleash it in case of an emergency. After all this planning, Erich did not want the sinking submarine to pull their life raft down with it.

Manny was not certain how close they might be to any onshore installations or homes, and for that reason he did not want to place any charges. If sounds of detonations drew attention, they would be risking capture. Erich did not want the Americans to know anything about his boat’s true mission. And so, it was necessary to scuttle the boat by hand in a fairly deep drop off in the seabed.

He and Manny opened the ballast doors, overflowing all tanks. The effect was immediate and much faster than they imagined and the brackish water rushed in the open hatches around their feet in an instant.

“Get to the aft hatch!” yelled Manny.

As they ran, Erich could feel the boat was lowering itself into the water with great speed. He knew they had little time before all open hatches were breached. When that happened, she would go down.

As he rushed headlong past his captain’s quarters, Erich paused, debating for an instant whether he had time or inclination to bring his small footlocker — containing his papers and the ship’s log. He’d previously convinced himself he would be starting over with a whole new life, but when the moment came to let everything go, he felt hesitation.

But it was short-lived. Manny ran up behind him, pushed him along, yelling like a maniac. “No time! No time!”

Erich trailed his friend as they scrambled up the ladder to the escape hatch. At that moment, the strap to Manny’s rucksack snagged on a jutting pipe. When it pulled taut, its flap opened and one of the metallic bars he carried fell away, clattering to the deck below. Erich paused, thought about trying to retrieve it, and Manny yelled something unintelligible as he grabbed his captain by the neck of his sweater and yanked him up the ladder.

Water breached the hatch; a torrent roared past Erich just as Manny pulled him clear. If he had not done that, Erich could have been trapped.

And then it happened so quick after that. He was stunned how fast the water took her down. Jumping into the dinghy, he barely had time to turn and salute his last command. The U-5001 slipped beneath the shimmering black bay and was gone.

It had been a sobering scene.

So final.

After seeing it, the three men paddled slowly, trying to make as little noise as possible. Without the bright, clear chart of the stars, they had no cues for direction, but they could see a pale, distant scattering of lights, which defined the shoreline and the general north-south orientation of the Bay. At that moment, Erich tried to concentrate on their position rather than think too deeply upon the enormity of what he was doing. But one thought would not leave him: he was certainly a very desperate young man.

They fought against the tide for several hours before finally reaching a muddy embankment. With no moon, the land was dark as a coalmine, and the lights they had seen from a distance had become lost in a thick tree line. Insects thrummed and Erich thought he heard the occasional rattle of a vehicle on some distant, unknown road.

“Hide the raft,” he told his small crew, and they punctured the dinghy and did a poor job of hiding it beneath some underbrush. However, it only needed to stay undiscovered until they were far enough away to never be connected to it.

Hausser had said they must work their way north, toward Baltimore, but slowly with great caution. Once in the city, they could find his uncle’s restaurant, and the hope of sanctuary. Erich felt this was a simple plan, but he was concerned about his poor English skills. Like Manny, he barely recalled any of his grammar school drills. Hausser claimed to have a decent vocabulary from his letters to his American cousins, but Erich believed in no guarantees at that point.

There were other concerns as well — they had no American money, no real sense of direction nor distance, and were very afraid people might not yet know the war had ended. What would happen, Erich mused, if they were caught and discovered to be Germans by an uninformed populace?

Manny felt it wise to head toward the sound of vehicles, which promised a road and a means of orienting themselves. They reached a paved two-lane highway just as dawn arrived, giving them a compass heading. Manny figured the road headed in a general northwest direction, which suited their purpose. However, they decided to remain in the woods and brush bordering the road, moving as best they could, but undetected during the day. The landscape was mostly peppered by farms and the occasional intersection.

When darkness fell, they were fighting exhaustion and had used up the small amount of rations they’d brought along. Although risking capture was almost unthinkable, Erich knew they would not get very far without food or water. And so, when they stumbled on a small rural gas station and grocery which had closed for the evening, they had no choice but to break inside and gather provisions.

For almost a week, they moved only in darkness, abetted by one additional burglary. It was slow and they had no idea when they would reach the city. However, as the farms became more plentiful, so did available supplies and well water, which kept them alive. Manny seemed particularly terrified by the idea of capture. Erich was getting to the point of no longer caring what happened to him, while the young Hausser seemed to be genuinely excited at the prospect of seeing his relatives.

On the evening of the sixth day of their wandering, they saw a glow beyond the horizon, signaling a large city. The outskirts of Baltimore. Crowded. Dirty. Industrial.

They entered the area through the southeast where steel mills still blazed around the clock and shipyards swelled with dry-docked vessels in for repairs. The war with Japan was very much in doubt, and America still labored to earn victory. Everyone working so hard. So much activity that Erich felt safe walking in the streets. Wearing non-descript khaki and denim, they looked like other workers. No one gave them a second glance.

They became more comfortable, and Hausser became downright bold. “We need money,” he said. “I will get it for us.”

Erich and Manny waited in an alley, while their young cook begged for coins on a street corner.

Within the hour, he had a handful of nickels. “Watch this, Captain,” he said.

Erich and Manny followed him into a tiny corner store selling cigarettes, newspapers, and American soft drinks. Hausser smiled as he spotted what he was looking for in the rear corner of the establishment. But first he moved to a refrigerated chest, lifted its lid and pulled out three bottles of Coca-Cola. The glass felt cool in Erich’s hand, and he realized they had no way to open them. A small boy squeezed past him, retrieved his own bottle, and snapped it open on a small lip attached to the side of the cooler.

Smiling, Manny nodded and they all opened their first bottles of Coke in America. It was a moment Erich never forgot.

As they edged to the back of the store, Hausser directed them to the original object of his quest — a wooden phone booth with a split hinged folding door and a large book attached to a shelf beneath a telephone.

Hausser spent considerable time searching through the listings… until he found what he needed. “It is the Continental House,” he whispered in German. “I found it!”

A phone number. Using one of his begged coins, he successfully telephoned his Uncle Herman at the restaurant. Hausser was so proud of his ability to do this, his smile looked as if it would explode off his face.

After hanging up, Hausser guided them outside into the noisy street, then told them how shocked his uncle had been to receive a call from young Freddie, as they all called him. But the elder Hausser did not hesitate to act.

One half hour later, Herman and his son, Dickie, arrived in a 1938 Plymouth, a beat-up black sedan, covered in road dust. He drove up Hanover Street through a neighborhood he called ‘Sobo’. The uncle was tall with thin blond hair and small, round spectacles. He had been clearly overjoyed to see his young nephew, and if he was suspicious of Manny and Erich, he did not show it. As he drove slowly up the crowded streets, he told Erich with evident honesty he could not have helped them if the war in Europe had not been ended.

Erich nodded, tried to relay in half-English-half-German, his appreciation and understanding. He tried to tell Herman he would have done the same. At that moment, Erich had acknowledged the day would come when they would face questions from the Americans and their answers would have to be good ones.

When they reached the Continental House, Erich was impressed with the size and popularity of the restaurant. Herman ran it with his wife, their two daughters and their husbands as the wait-staff. They had a German chef named Kimmel, a few kitchen helpers, and that was all. Herman had come to America as a small boy with his family, who had been in the meat business as butchers and packers. He started his restaurant after the Depression, originally calling it the German Haus, but he had changed the name after Hitler invaded Poland and occupied France.

Erich and Manny were taken in by Hausser’s family with a promise they would be safe until they could get established. Back then, Baltimore was very much a patch-quilt of tight little neighborhoods demarcated by nationalities. The Haussers lived in Morrell Park — an area which had been heavily German for a hundred years, and because of that, no one paid much attention to the poor English language skills of Erich and Manny.

Nephew Freddie went to work in the family restaurant’s kitchen, where he learned the secrets of the great chefs and how to speak passable English quite quickly. Herman found Manny work as a neighborhood handy-man with older residents who needed odd-jobs and who still spoke a fair amount of German. Finally, he was able to arrange employment for Erich as a helper on an ice-truck. It was backbreaking work, dragging blocks of ice into stores and taverns. And, because he spoke so little English, the pay was very low.

As the months passed, slouching into a humid Baltimore August, Manny and Erich learned to speak the language of the locals. At first, it was difficult, and peppered with colloquial aberrations, but Erich persevered because of the utter necessity of it. He, Manny, and Freddie were becoming a familiar part of the neighborhood, and no one questioned their presence there. As Erich learned more English, he was able to comprehend more of what was happening in his home country. And, as he and Manny had suspected, Europe and Russia were planning to punish Germany in a very large way. Both were grateful to not be there — either to witness or suffer it.

Japan surrendered when it felt the punishing force of an American atomic device. When Erich saw the notices later that month of a terrible weapon that had leveled two Japanese cities, he thought immediately of the device he’d left behind… and only then had any true sense of what kind of weapon it might have been.

Erich would have never imagined ever spending a Christmas in America, and his first was a memorable one. He and Manny had been making friends throughout the neighborhood and the city itself. There was a lot to like about their new country, and they had both decided to become permanent citizens — if they ever wanted better jobs, better housing.

Like so many of his friends, Erich wanted a family. But there was only one way to do this — he would need to rise up from hiding. Herman Hausser suggested waiting at least a year after the end of the war before placing himself at the mercy of the American authorities. Time has a way of smoothing out rough spots, and Erich hoped the American Navy would be tired of the war and have little interest in him or his Executive Officer.

While keeping a low profile until the proper time, he and Manny, along with Freddie Hausser, concocted a history for themselves. A history that would allow them to keep the truth buried — hopefully forever.

By the next summer, they were ready. Thankfully, Erich recalled the story of the U-1020, under the command of a very young captain named Eberlein. In January, 1945, it had disappeared during its mission to scout aerial defenses of major harbor cities along the East Coast of America — part of the preparation for the 5001’s secret mission. When Erich and the others officially turned themselves in, Erich told the federal agents they had been part of an adjunct training crew on that submarine, which had been sunk in the Atlantic, south of the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. They had been the only three survivors — washing ashore south of Norfolk.

Erich had been confident the Americans would believe him — for several reasons. One, he gave them real names, and the feds were able to verify all three of them had been members of the German Navy. Two, there was no record of Manny, Hausser, or Erich sailing on any other boats — the 5001 never officially existed and adjunct crew were routinely omitted from regular boat crew-lists. Three, the Navy did have records of attacking and sinking U-boats sighted off the Virginia and Carolina coasts in January of ’45. which made it more than likely they sank the boat carrying Erich and the others. And four, Erich had no reason to be lying.

They did believe them, and eventually, after passing through the bureaucracy, Erich, along with Manny and Freddie Hausser, went about the business of becoming Americans.

Chapter Forty-One

As Jason maneuvered along the not-crowded streets of downtown Lancaster, Dex listened to Erich Bruckner, who had proved himself a decent narrator.

“Opa, you never told me any of that before,” said Jason.

“I hedged my bets, as they say.” Bruckner looked out the window wistfully. “I was hoping I would never need to.”

“It must have been hard to keep all that in, all this time,” said Augie, who’d been listening with rapt attention.

“For a long time, I had Manny who shared our secret — who believed in staying silent as much as me. Of course, often, that can be a problem.” Bruckner turned to look at Dex, smiled. “Ben Franklin said something about such a situation, Mr. McCauley. Did you ever hear it?”

Dex smiled. He knew the quote well. “Two men can easily keep a secret… as long as one of them is dead.”

Bruckner nodded. “And that has been the case for seven years now.”

“But what about before then?” said Jason. “How did you keep it so quiet?”

Erich regarded his grandson, pausing to find the right words. Then he said, “Manny and I were… what is the word… haunted by the ruins we’d found. And the suggestion that something had been awakened in the base after the explosion. We agreed the place was best left alone. Forgotten. Like a tomb with a curse. And the curse turned out to be the Project Norway bomb.”

“Yeah, I can understand that,” said Jason.

“Besides,” said Erich. “The odds of anyone ever finding a passage under the Greenland Shelf seemed almost impossible.”

“Yeah, but what about the science stuff? That beacon thing?” Jason spoke softly, with a very respectful tone. “I mean, whoever built that, they sounded so much more advanced than us. Maybe we should try to—”

“No,” said Erich, holding up a hand. “Better left alone. Maybe we should not know what became of them.”

“Hmm, yeah,” said Tommy. “I never thought of it like that, but you’re right, you know.”

Bruckner continued: “I had one other overriding concern. Remember, I had left my logbook in my quarters on the U-5001. For many years, I worried about that. I wondered if anyone might ever find the remains of our boat. If they did, I wondered if they would be able to discover facts regarding our true mission.”

“But the years went by, and Manny and I carried on our lives. We married American girls, saved our money. We opened our first bar near the Cross Street Market in Baltimore. We did well. When we discovered the old world ways and the German influences up here in Pennsylvania, we decided to sell the bar and move our families, and open a new place. It was a fine idea.”

“Yeah, Opa, you did great, you really did.”

Bruckner smiled as he patted his grandson’s shoulder. Then he turned to Dex: “All that time going by, and no word on our U-boat. Manny was convinced it was gone forever, but my instincts told me to never be certain of anything — that’s why, after Manny died, I told Jason his ‘uncle’ had been in the German submarine service, that his boat was called the U-5001, and I stressed to him if he ever saw any mention of the boat — any at all — I would be interested in knowing about it.”

“Okay,” said the grandson. “It’s all making sense now.”

“All that time,” said Dex. “And then along comes me and my divers.”

“Yes,” said Bruckner. “In all these years I have learned many things — one is to not be surprised by the workings of fate.”

While the old man had been talking, Dex had been partitioning his thoughts, wondering how much he should tell Captain Bruckner about the people who were after them. He was an officer, and deserved to know, but it would probably be best to wait until the Admiral’s people reached them.

As much as Dex hated to even think about it, not only Bruckner might be in danger, but the rest of his family as well.

So what did he say? And when and to whom?

He remained silent as Jason pulled onto the Bruckner’s street. As the SUV drifted into a lazy turn into the driveway, Dex tapped Jason on the shoulder.

“Can you stop here for a sec? I need to get something from my truck.”

Tommy looked at him initially with surprise, then understanding. He didn’t want to alarm the others, but he didn’t want to go walking into a trap.

Reaching his hand into the pocket of his windbreaker, Tommy nodded. “You go on,” he said. “I’ll go in with Captain Bruckner and see if he needs any help.”

“I’m right behind you.” Dex turned and walked out to his F-150 on the sidewalk. Just as he reached it, he heard the first whump-whump sounds of a helicopter somewhere above them. Why hadn’t Whitehurst called back to confirm it?

Jason and his grandfather had reached the front door, followed by Augie and Tommy. Dex couldn’t move, seized by indecision. He had the Mossberg in the truck, but that was a desperation weapon. Useless in a crowd when not everybody in the crowd was a bad guy. Quickly opening the passenger door, he grabbed his backpack from the rear cab and rummaged an extra magazine for the Sig. With his hand in his jacket, he clicked off the handgun’s safety, and headed for the Bruckner house, where the group had entered and closed the door behind them.

Now that was weird…

The night sky resonated with the distant beat of rotor blades — were they getting louder, closer?

Jesus, he wasn’t trained for this kind of situation, and besides that, he was feeling too old to pull it off. He knew they’d been dumb-lucky the first time they’d locked horns with the enemy, but Dex had a very bad feeling they wouldn’t let themselves be that stupid twice.

Rotor blades whumping in the darkness. Definitely drawing closer. The Lancaster airport was dead north of his position, and only by a few miles.

What now?

Pulling out his Trac Fone, he hit the re-dial. If the connection locked him into the infinite carousel of the Pentagon routing system because it was after hours, he was fucked. If it—

“Whitehurst,” said a voice.

“Admiral, it’s McCauley — what’s going on? I never heard from you and the chopper’s on its way.” His gaze moved skyward as he spoke; now the running lights of the Sea Ranger, as well as its engine, had become a faint signal of its approach.

“That’s a negative,” said Whitehurst. “That’s why I haven’t confirmed yet. Philadelphia can’t get their bird airborne. Trouble with the fuel line…”

His hand tightened on the Sig’s grip. “What’re you talking about? I got one homing in on me right now.”

There was a pause on the other end. “No good, McCauley. Get everybody outta there! That’s not us!”

A little late for that, thought Dex. His pulse jumped so quickly, he felt an instant of pain behind his ears, a blur of vision. “I’m gonna need some help here!” he said, then punched off the call, knowing he should be doing something.

He moved away from his pick-up, leapt over the hedge and ran along the left perimeter of the front lawn. Interior lights blazed from most of the windows on that side of the house, like beacons to guide him in for a closer look.

Rotors were slashing and beating the air above him. Looking up, he saw a dark fuselage silhouetted briefly against the low cloud cover then it vanished. The aircraft had cut its running lights and only the increasing baffle of it blades belied its proximity. Dex wondered if it carried heat-sig scanners which would reveal his position instantly.

Can’t worry about it now.

Moving to a window under a flower bed, he wedged himself in between two large manicured shrubs. Thin, designer blinds shuttered the light from inside, but remained slanted just enough for him to squint into the thin horizontal opening.

Just enough to see a very bad situation.

Richard and Peggy Bruckner lay on the floor, hands and ankles bound by Monadnock plastic restraints — the kind now used by most cops. Dex couldn’t hear them, but Richard was muttering something as his wife sobbed demonstrably. Jason Bruckner was on the carpet as well, but seated and leaning against the wall — he’d taken off his shirt and was trying to staunch a heavily bleeding wound in his leg. His expression a combination of shock and abject terror.

No sign of Augie, Bruckner, or Tommy.

Jesus, what the fuck now…?

As if in answer, the rotor noise above him changed pitch and the chopper’s engine surged with power and intention. Wedged in between the cover of the large bushes, Dex look up to see the black aircraft careen over him at a severe angle, skimming the nearest decorative trees in the front yard as well as the peaked roof. Then it dipped and swooped like a gigantic, predatory insect as it dropped to the wide expanse of lawn behind the Bruckner’s colonial. It was small and sleek, and he didn’t recognize the model or the manufacturer, which meant it could be some exotic foreign bird.

The ratcheting rotor noise was loud and fearsome. Porch lights of neighboring homes were switching on, doors were opening as neighbors were checking on the disturbance.

Moving along the edge of the house, Dex reached the rear left corner, using a stand of small evergreens for cover. The bay door of the chopper had slid open to accept its cargo — which had moved into view simultaneously upon touchdown.

Tommy, hands bound behind his back, being rousted along by a tall, rangy dark-skinned guy wearing all black. The man’s right hand wedged a handgun under Tommy’s chin while his other arm held him close as human shield. Right behind him, a shorter stocky red-haired man with a mustache, who was basically supporting a wrist-bound Captain Bruckner, held in the same shield maneuver.

Even though Dex had raised his Sig, he knew — no way he was getting off a shot.

Anger and frustration caused his arm to tremble and waver.

Clusterfuck. Complete and total.

The thought burned through him as the black chopper angled skyward in a savage leap, its engine screaming with power and menace. Within seconds, it had tilted and twisted westward into the night sky, the beat of its blades dopplering away into a faint mocking whisper.

It was only then, he was aware of his Trac Fone chirping at him.

Slowly, he lowered his weapon, tucked it away just in case someone saw him and got the wrong idea. The ambient sounds of people yelling and moving about left him in an impotent haze, as he keyed on the phone.

“McCauley…” he said in a raspy voice.

“Jesus Christ, Chief! What’s going on? Why’d didn’t you pick up?”

“Situation Fubar, Admiral. Can’t talk now. I’ve got casualties…”

He punched off the call and moved quickly to the back entrance of the house where the patio sliding glass door yawned open. As he moved quickly through the kitchen he heard a woman still moaning and sobbing.

He started yelling to announce his presence. Last thing he wanted was to create more panic. “Jason! Mr. Bruckner! It’s Dex!”

The Trac Fone started chirping, but he ignored it.

Peggy Bruckner was screaming, so loudly she effectively masked whatever it was Richard Bruckner was trying to say. Turning the corner out of the kitchen, Dex entered the room he glimpsed through the slatted blinds. Augie’s still form on the carpet remained in the same position — not good. Against the far wall, Jason had slumped over, conscious but growing pale. He looked like he was bleeding out, although slower than from an arterial wound. Peggy continued to wail, lost in total hysteria.

The Trac Fone went silent.

Kneeling by Richard, Dex pulled out his Spyderco and ripped through the restraint’s tough plastic with the knife’s inner serrated edge.

“Get ’im out of here! He’s hurt bad!” yelled Richard.

“What happened here—quickly!” Dex handed him the knife to cut his wife free, turned to Jason.

“They shot him in the leg! Hit the old guy pretty hard… dead, I think. And they said there’s a bomb!”

Are you fucking kidding me?

The thought pressed down on him like an enormous slab, threatening to flatten him into total surrender. But Dex kneeled, tightened the shreds of Jason’s shirt above the wound, started to yank him to an upright position. The Trac Fone started again, but he was way too occupied to answer it.

Peggy’s screaming had settled into a heaving series of soft cries, like some kind of weird seabird, which blended into the chirping cell phone. Richard had cut her free and as she had begun crawling on all fours toward the kitchen, he joined Dex to sling Jason between them.

When they’d caught up with Peggy, Richard urged his wife to get up, to get out of the house. But she kept half-crawling, half-dragging herself across the tiled floor, still sobbing and trying to catch her breath. “Anybody call for help?” said Dex as he and Richard dragged Jason toward the back door.

“They said they’d blow us up if we tried to call,” said Richard Bruckner. He was overweight enough to be gasping for breath and enough strength to push on. Dex figured the bomb thing might have been a bluff to immobilize everyone, but he still needed to get everybody clear of the house just in case.

His Trac Fone went off again as he struggled with Richard and Jason down the wooden steps of the deck, and reached the far corner of the yard. “Stay with him,” said Dex. Angrily, he punched off the ringer, then flipped his Trac Fone to Richard. “Call 911! Now!”

Then he was running back to intercept Peggy at the back door, who was feebly trying to sit up, to get to her feet. Reaching under both arms, Dex finished the job for her, and guided her out into the yard. She moved like someone under heavy sedation and her eyes rolled around, unable to fix on anything. The whole scene was surreal, like something from a distorted molasses-like dream. With each step, her weight seemed to be doubling. Finally, he reached the far corner of the lawn.

He heard Richard Bruckner say, “They’re on the way!” Even though Dex stood right next to him, his words sounded as if they were traveling a great distance, strained and weak.

Dex was already turning back to the house. Even if a bomb had been planted, even if Augie was already dead, Dex knew he had to go in there and try to get him.

And he hated himself at that moment. Hated himself for his sense of duty. But also for not wanting any parts of this hero crap. He knew himself too well. He knew he’d retired out of the Navy because he’d grown tired of the risk, of the demand to be a hero if the job required it. The demand to always be tough, always be hard, always be ready to die.

The day he realized he was no longer ready to do it — that was the day he knew he had to change whatever was left of his life.

But here he was falling right back into it. And it felt good, felt right—like putting your hand in the baseball glove you’ve been using for fifteen years.

You’re a mess is what you are…

The thought wormed through him as he moved quickly through the kitchen to get Augie. With each step, he expected to see a flash from the explosion he’d never hear, but he kept moving anyway. As he turned into the room, he dropped down to scoop up the little old man on the carpet. Still wearing his Orioles hat, Augie felt as light and lifeless as a bag of sticks, and Dex felt a surge of sadness go through. He’d barely known this man, but he’d really liked him.

He ran from the room, and out into the night.

Chapter Forty-Two

Almost two hours had elapsed since the attack on the Bruckner home, and Admiral Parker Whitehurst was up to his elbows in red tape, potential lawsuits, and threats from the Secretary of the Navy to clean up this mess as quickly as possible. Richard and Margaret Bruckner, in addition to their son, Jason, had survived the ordeal and were still being attended at the adjacent Naval Hospital. The son had lost a lot of blood from a 9mm wound to his left thigh, but his prognosis was good. The only casualty had been Augustino Picaccio, who’d suffered cardiac arrest when the intruders roughed him up.

Upon arriving on the scene in a commandeered V-22 Osprey from the D.C. Naval Yard, Parker’s first priority had been to convince Dex McCauley the attack had not originated from within the Navy or any of the other branches of service. When the rescue and backup arrived, McCauley was half nutty with rage and frustration. He wouldn’t talk to anyone other than Parker, and who could blame him? He’d been through a balls-out crazy ordeal and was doing his best to keep his balance.

Parker had seen it many times during a long career of dealing with good men pushed to the brink — sometimes you had to let them vent or spin out of control, and just hope they had enough inner strength to pull it all back together.

If they didn’t, you moved on. If they did, you had a much stronger individual on the team than you did before.

But McCauley would always have a special place in Parker’s heart because, quite simply, he’d been the best man he’d ever had in his unit. The guy had guts, compassion, discipline, and a moral compass that never went wonky. That’s why the Admiral had gone out of his way to present his old Chief with documented proof that black helicopter hadn’t come from inside the barnyard. He even allowed Dex to personally punch up the maintenance logs on the Sea Ranger, which showed all the proper check-marks on the aircraft’s fuel pump and lines.

But that didn’t stop McCauley from stating the obvious — if the Sea Ranger had been sabotaged, then the Navy had a serious problem with internal security.

Parker agreed. If an outside entity possessed routine access to all levels of communication in the United States Navy, the nation was in big trouble. McCauley had called him on an untraceable cell phone, but somebody intercepted the call anyway. The only logical conclusion dictated that all internal Naval command communications were being monitored all the time.

And that was simply unacceptable.

Despite the lateness of the hour, Parker had launched a massive coordinating operation to assemble the most knowledgeable personnel on every aspect of the U-5001 mission.

Time was against them, and every minute that passed without the Navy having a plan was diminishing their odds of success.

Because of logistics, Parker had designated the old Philadelphia Navy Yard as the best place to assemble the initial phase of the mission. Although officially closed back in 1995, the Navy had maintained some of the space, renovated and reconstituted with the formation of the Department of Homeland Security. The confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers remained a strategically important location, and the Navy had been smart to not abandon it just because of budget cuts.

Parker waited n a Briefing Center several levels below ground. The room was replete with the usual hi-tech toys, and LCD displays of various geophysical and geopolitical hotspots. Beyond several smoked glass walls, personnel hunched over keyboards and consoles. To Parker, it remained Spartan and functional, and not very sexy. Fake sets pretending to be like this one — in cheap and expensive movies alike — all looked a hell of a lot better.

Because of its connections to counter-terror missions, the Center enjoyed the latest encryption security technology, and Parker had insisted on private keys for everyone involved in this final pre-launch meeting. If any information became compromised, Parker would have a very small suspect pool.

He was seated at a table with Dexter McCauley, who still carried his backpack with laptop and papers; Commander Chuck Drabek, of SEAL Team 9, who handled Task Units specialized in covert operations with minimal prep time. Also onboard was Harry Olmstead, a regional Director of the Counter Terrorist Group, who had access to the latest actions of all known threats to the nation. That he was a keen mind with a ruthless streak didn’t hurt, either.

They all sat facing a single LCD screen which had elevated out of the table top, located so that everyone could see its display — which for the moment remained blank.

And that was the problem.

Parker was getting pissed off as they waited for the final member of the meeting to join them, albeit electronically onscreen He could feel the tension growing among the assembled personnel as time raced away from them.

He gently nudged McCauley who was seated to his left. “Feeling any better?”

“Physically, a little.” McCauley’s voice was raw and he spoke softly, but in a tone that said he didn’t care who was listening in. “Head-wise, I’m still… fucked up.”

Parker could only nod, saying nothing. McCauley had definitely taken his rage down several notches, but he continued to shoulder all the blame for the civilian’s death, and the abductions of Chipiarelli and Bruckner. He wasn’t listening to anybody else’s tortured logic right now. Parker understood — because he’d been down into that same abyss himself — McCauley needed to feel responsible. Because it gave him the strength to keep going.

The LCD flickered, went black, then totally white, finally resolving into the face of an older man in service khaki. His brush cut hair was graying nicely and he wore wire-rimmed glasses with squared off edges just like his hair and his jaw. Despite his archetypal look of the rough career non-com, he radiated the confidence and intelligence of a university doyen.

“Chief Petty Officer Warren McGrath, checking in…”

“Welcome aboard, Mr. McGrath,” said Parker, quickly introducing the newcomer all around.

“Sorry I’m late, Admiral, but I wanted to get as much archival data as possible and not everything we have is digitally accessible.”

“I understand,” said Parker, looking at the others around the table. “Mr. McGrath has access to all historical classified materials in the Service Archives. He may have some materials that will help us make the quick decisions we need.”

Everyone nodded, waited for Parker to continue. “Very well, gentlemen. First, a little good news — we have some leads on who or what we may be up against… Mr. Olmstead?”

The Director from CTG nodded. He was in his late forties, and had kept himself in shape with time in the gym. His hair was getting thin, but hadn’t gone too gray, which added to his youthful aspect. He looked at McCauley. “Thanks to your input, our digital forensic sketch technology scored some hits on the identities of your intruders.”

Olmstead opened his file folder, handed several photographs to McCauley. “Are these your guys?”

McCauley barely looked at them as his jaw muscles tensed. “That’s them.”

Indicating the first photo of a red-haired man, Olmstead spoke quickly. “Stewart Entwhistle. Ex-MI5. Reputation as brilliant data guy. Specializes in decryption, cryptanalysis, digital espionage. But also a competent field mechanic. Dropped off the radar five years ago. Vanished. Until this.

“The other guy is Junius Sinclair. Captain, US Navy. He—”

“Christ on a crutch!” said Parker. “I know that man! He was in DSR.”

“That’s right,” said Olmstead. “On a fast track until the Norfolk incident.”

Parker shook his head. “He got CYA’d. Broke him back to Lieutenant Commander. I remember it like it was yesterday.”

“Not long after that, he was reported lost at sea in a storm. His own sloop,” said Olmstead. “Obviously bullshit.”

“So who’re these guys with now?” McCauley continued to stare at the photos.

Olmstead shrugged. “Most likely one of several New World Order entities. Nobody believes they exist except the conspiracy nuts… and of course people like me who know they do.”

“How powerful are they?” McCauley’s complexion had deepened, his voice sounded stronger. “How dangerous?”

“Extremely. They’ve cultivated access to the best technology and info access in the world, no matter what country controls it. And they can manipulate a lot of money as well,” said Olmstead. “I’m talking on the world market level.”

The SEAL Commander nodded. “They prefer a very covert presence. This kind of bold strike is out of character. Usually, any up-profile action is disguised as terrorism.”

McCauley shook his head. “They didn’t seem interested in disguising much of anything this time.”

Olmstead looked at him. “That tells me they were in desperate mode. Obviously they’ve placed a high value on Captain Bruckner… or what he knows.”

Chuck Drabek tapped a pencil on his legal pad. “We need to ascertain their objective, then form our own. Quickly.”

Parker looked at everyone at the table. “I’m assuming you have all read Mr. McCauley’s debriefing documents… that should provide us with a good jump-off point.”

Drabek, the SEAL Commander, nodded toward Dex. “Chief McCauley, this thing about the ‘inter-matter’, I mean, you can swear to this?”

“I can swear to seeing a piece of something weird, something Captain Bruckner says can be converted into any known substance. But I don’t know if it’s what they say it is…”

Parker looked at the face on the screen. “You’ve had some time to research this, McGrath. What can you tell us?”

Everyone looked at the archivist. “The biggest problem is there is no single folder or file on Station One Eleven. The Germans got sloppy with their record-keeping during the final months of the war.”

“Which means…?” said Olmstead. He adjusted his tie unconsciously, a nervous habit.

“Which means I’ve been pulling out data from so many places, it’s like one of those puzzles with the really tiny pieces and half of them are pictures of a blue sky, and the other a dark woods. Even after I retrieve them, I still have no idea how they fit together. See what I mean?”

“I do,” said Parker. “And I’m sure we all sympathize with the task I’ve given you, but can you just tell me what the hell you do have, sailor?”

McGrath cleared his throat. “Well, since very little of this is sequential or connected by secondary source threads, I’ve had to do some conjecture.”

Olmstead nodded. “Please… go on, all right? We won’t hold it against you if you’re wrong.”

Parker smiled to himself on that one. Yeah, right. One of the military’s prime missions is to punish mistakes — the enemy’s… or yours.

“First thing I checked, because it was the easiest, was the two ships mentioned in the log. The Sturm was a light cruiser in the German Kriegsmarine, reported lost at sea in late spring, 1945. The Nebuchadenezzar is a lot weirder. It was a whaler out of Innsmouth, Massachusetts — last seen entering a strange, glowing fog bank off the coast of a small island, Ponape, in the South Pacific. I found that in the captain’s log of another whaler, the Miskatonic, who witnessed its vanishing.”

“Greenland’s a long way from Micronesia,” said Dex, wondering what the hell he’d stumbled into.

McGrath nodded. “Yessir, it certainly is.”

“What else?” said Parker. The business of the sailing ship gave him a bit of a chill. No easy explanation for it. “You have anything to give us a better idea what’s under the Greenland Shelf?”

The archive specialist paused to consider his answer. “Well, I don’t have anything relating specifically to it. But I have some documents on the 1947 expedition to neutralize a Nazi base under the ice in Antarctica.”

“I know something of this.” Parker nodded. “Give us the condensed version, Chief.”

McGrath adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, nodded. “Well, basically, even though the war had been over for more than eight months, Nimitz and Forrestal sent a Carrier Task Force to destroy a hold-out Nazi base called ‘Neu Schwabenland’ also know as ‘Station Two Eleven’. The action was called Operation High Jump. Admiral Byrd had five thousand men under his command, and they had a hell of a battle with plenty of casualties on both sides. A bunch of Nazis escaped by submarine to Argentina.”

“I’ve seen these files,” said Olmstead. “Truman authorized another remote nuclear test to finish it off. The Germans were entrenched and weren’t about to give the place up.”

Parker had heard sanitized versions of Admiral Byrd’s exploits at the South Pole, but this one sounded a lot more interesting. “Did we get inside the base? See what was going on?”

“I don’t have anything verifying we did,” said McGrath. “Just some speculation the Germans had found evidence of an advanced civilization.”

“That sounds familiar.” Dex grinned. “They seemed to be pretty good at doing that.”

The archivist ignored the remark, kept looking through his notes. “Admiral Byrd reported to Forrestal that reports of ancient ruins under Antarctica were very possible. He claims to have used airborne magnetometers to detect large hollow spaces under the ice. Byrd also cited reports of ruins in Micronesia — a place called Nan Madol, or Nan Matal, where divers and archeologists have found a sunken city that could be a half million years old. And oddly enough, those ruins are off the island of Ponape where the Nebuchadenezzar vanished. Byrd also mentioned an immense platform in Baalbek, Lebanon — the largest consciously designed construction on earth — that some scientists believe it’s just as old.”

“I think we’re getting a little far afield,” said Olmstead. “We need something more concrete.”

If this comment bothered McGrath, he didn’t seem to show it. He looked down at some papers beneath the purview of the webcam, shuffled them. “I also found some transcriptions from Werner Heisenberg’s diaries. He was pretty prolific, but I had some of my staff scanning the entries for anything pertinent.”

“And?” Parker liked that McGrath was thorough, but his delivery was a little too slow for his tastes.

“And it looks like he visited something code named ‘Triple One’… three times… by U-boat.”

“Station One Eleven,” said Dex.

“Unbelievable,” said Commander Drabek. “So everything Bruckner said is true…”

Parker looked around the table. “None of us here are the right people to evaluate what that place might mean for scientific or military applications. We’re going to need other eyes on this site.”

Commander Drabek nodded. “I’m no scientist, but from the briefing docs, it looks like the Nazis might have been fooling around with a possible answer to our energy problems.”

“It’s vital we secure control of this facility,” said Olmstead. “Once we do that, we can get some investigative teams, military and scientific in there.”

Dex held up his index finger. “I think that’s what the bad guys are thinking, too, don’t you?”

“In a race to get there first,” said Drabek. “They’ve already got a jump on us.”

“Maybe not,” said Olmstead. “They’re facing the same problems we are. Maybe even worse.”

Parker was trying to take it all in — the implications, the logistics, the need to get the highest decision-makers into the loop.

He looked at Olmstead. “Harry, there’s not going to be time to do a lot of convincing. Either the Joint Chiefs and the President get onboard in a hurry, or this isn’t going to happen.”

“I know,” said the CTG Director. “Looks like you and me have a few conference calls to make.”

Drabek held up a hand. “Okay, our priority is to get to that site first, and secure it. But if we get there second, then what?”

Olmstead shrugged. “I don’t think we can determine our action until we know what we’re up against. We need to know the size of the enemy force, their hardware, and their intentions.”

Drabek grinned, shook his head. “If we wait for that data, we might be sitting on our hands for a long time. We’re running blind here, and we should assume it’s not about to change. I need to get an ops protocol in place so I can get my men briefed. I’m voting for ‘worst case’—the enemy is in place, in total control of the environment, and two, the enemy is formidable and will require extreme force to neutralize.”

Parker nodded. His pulse was up, and he was feeling not just the urgency of their plans, but the challenge and the excitement of being in “action” again. He’d been dulled into a stupor when they’d installed him behind the big desk. “I think we will also need to consider the stability or fragility of the site as well. Don’t forget, they left an armed nuke in there.”

Drabek shook his head. “Armed but quite probably impotent. We need some info on the viability of a device that old. My guess is it’s as dead as Hitler himself.”

“I think you’re right,” said Parker. “About the info, I mean. We need more input, and we need it fast. I have no idea how dangerous that bomb might be.”

Olmstead tapped his pencil nervously. “There’s no indication the Germans ever successfully triggered a nuke. No way to tell if that thing would’ve even worked.”

Parker didn’t want to be so dismissive. “We cannot make that assumption. I want some nuclear experts in your unit, Commander.”

“I’m counting on you getting me what I need.” Drabek looked around the table with no expression. “Personnel — as well as equipment. I need to be ready whenever the rest of you are, and that takes a little time, even for a Task Unit.”

“Assuming we get top-level clearances,” said Parker as he spread his palms down on the tabletop. “How fast can we get there?”

“From Philly?” Drabek paused, weighing the variables. “We’re talking roughly two thousand miles, Admiral. That’s a hell of a hump.”

“And we’ll need our best underwater vehicle to get under the ice shelf,” said Parker.

Drabek nodded. “If you want a full Team, I’ll need two Dragonfish.”

“I can get them,” said Parker.

Drabek looked a little surprised. “How fast?”

“I have everything we need in Portsmouth, which is fractionally better than here.” Parker paused to do a little estimating. “By the time we get to New Hampshire, the hardware will be waiting for us.”

This didn’t seem to placate Drabek. “Once we get underway, with the DSARs at full speed, we’re still looking at something like thirty-six hours.”

McCauley grimaced. “That’s a long time in close quarters for an elite attack unit.”

“I agree,” said Drabek. “Talk about losing your edge… Jesus…”

Actually, Parker had already considered this problem. “I’m going to run every logistics solution we may have, depending on the deployment of the various elements of the Atlantic Fleet. There’s a possibility we may have an LHD or a Sub Tender close enough to facilitate.”

Parker referred to an Amphibious Assault ship or a submarine support vessel, which could launch a couple of big CH-53 choppers carrying the Dragonfish as payload.

“If we do, what’s your plan?” said the SEAL Commander.

“The CH-53’s can refuel in flight, giving them unlimited range. If they can maintain 175 knots, they’d cut your transit down to less than twelve hours. Still not optimum, but far more tolerable.”

“Agreed, Admiral. I assume you’ll advise.”

Olmstead held up his pencil to get everyone’s attention. “Any chance we can get one of our hunter/killers in place to monitor the entrance to the site?”

“Good question,” said Parker. “I have it on my list, but that’s something for the JC and the Secretary to decide. All submarine data is always classified. There’s no way to know if any of our boats are close at hand unless the right people want to tell us. We put in the request and we see what happens.”

“That would make things easy — if we could park a Virginia Class by the front door.” Drabek chuckled, and everyone joined him in the tension-breaker.

“Anything else before we get started?” Parker looked around the table, and saw McCauley hold up his hand. He liked his old Master Diver, and if any of the others had anything negative to say about him being included in the operation, he would set them straight. “What do you have, Chief?”

McCauley tried to appear nonchalant as he spoke. “Well, I don’t want to sound sentimental or silly, but nobody’s mentioned we have two hostages…”

Everyone looked from McCauley to each other, wondering who should address this issue. Parker decided to take charge. “I think the rescue of the two hostages is a given, Mr. McCauley. The details of how this might be carried out will be included in the operation protocols.”

“I understand that, Admiral. But, that’s not what I meant.” McCauley paused, waiting for permission to continue.

“Go on then,” said Parker.

“Well, as I stated in my debriefing — I can’t say for sure why Chipiarelli and Captain Bruckner were abducted, but my gut says it was for information more than anything else. I think the enemy using them as bargaining chips isn’t all that likely. They want to know whatever Bruckner knows about the location of One Eleven. Beyond that, I don’t think they give a good goddamn about either one of those men.”

“Point taken,” said Drabek. “That doesn’t mean getting them out alive isn’t a priority. It is.”

McCauley nodded. “Just wanted to make sure we’re on the same page.”

“We’re not forgetting them, if that’s what you were thinking.” Parker stood up, signaling the end of the meeting. “Now, I think it’s time we got started. We all have jobs to do. Chief McGrath, I’d like to thank you, for all of us, on your quick work. I’ll need you on stand-by if we need more data from the archives.”

McGrath acknowledged him, then signed off. After his LCD went dark, Parker touched a small keypad in front of him, which lowered the screen back into the tabletop. Then he regarded the others. “Commander Drabek, you can take the V-22 to Portsmouth and assemble your team. Harry, you and I need to conference the brass and the white house. McCauley, I haven’t decided what to do with you, yet.”

“I’d like to be involved, sir.” McCauley stood straight, a determined look on his face.

Drabek’s eyebrows lifted, and he appeared ready to say something negative, so Parker held up a hand. “I know how you feel, Chief. I’ll advise.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“All right, gentleman,” said Parker. “Let’s see if we can save the world.”

Chapter Forty-Three

When he opened his eyes, he felt so oddly disconnected, he had no sense of orientation or touch. It was as if he were a pair eyes, and only eyes. Or less than that — perhaps just a window providing a view. And the view was nothing more than a hazy expanse of gray nothingness.

An unsettling thought pierced him: if this was death, then it was truly horrifying.

But, no… he felt somehow still alive, but in a tenuous fashion. He felt as if he’d come back to consciousness from a totally blank state. No memory of time, sleep, or anything that preceded it.

Erich forced himself to concentrate on the gray smear that comprised his world, and slowly, it changed as his eyes regained the power to focus, to process information.

And he knew he was looking up at the ceiling of a room.

From that simple discovery, he became slowly aware of his body. He lay supine in a bed, and with great effort he moved his head to the left to see a gray wall. Some kind of metal. Something familiar about the feel and color — he was on a ship.

And he’d been given some kind of powerful drug.

As sensation and thought gradually returned to him, like the rising tides on a beach, he compared this experience to coming back to awareness from his series of operations for gall bladder, a hip replacement, and several heart procedures. The numbing effects of anesthesia receded, and he tried to remember what had brought him to this point of disorientation. Was the room moving? There was something familiar about it.

Lifting his arm, he felt alarmed at how difficult a task it had become. His bones felt dense, heavy, and all his muscles screamed. Only great effort of will and strength allowed him to push on the mattress, and turn to face away from the wall. Then as his vision cleared (thank God he’d let Jason talk him into the Lasik operation), he assessed his situation.

The Spartan fixtures of a ship’s sick bay had not changed since his days in the Kriegsmarine. He knew where he was, but he had no idea who had put him here. The nightmare of the assault on his son’s house now fell back on him like the impact of a cresting wave. And he feared for the lives of Margaret and Jason as well. The harsh bark of gunfire, the terrifying ratchet of the helicopter, and being roughly dragged into the aircraft… all had the surreal quality of being like a bad dream that just might be true. He knew he must keep his thoughts rational. If he dwelled on the possible fates of his family — things over which he had no control — he would be useless. He knew he could not blame himself for what happened because he felt as though he were answering to forces much larger than himself.

Strapped to the wheel of fate.

Across the room, on an adjacent hospital bed, lay another person, staring at him with dark eyes.

“You’re awake,” said Tommy. “Man, I was gettin’ worried. You were out for awhile. Longer than me, I mean.”

Erich glanced at his wrist, a lifelong habit to consult time’s passage, but his watch was not there. “How long?” he said. “Where are we?”

“You? About eight hours, I’d guess. Me? I think I’ve been awake for a couple.” Tommy sat up on the edge of the bed. He was dressed in T-shirt and boxers, just as Erich.

“And what kind of boat is this?”

Tommy shrugged. “Not sure. They’ve got us locked in. Can’t see much from the porthole. They took our clothes too.”

Erich tried to lift himself to an elbow, tried to sit up. When Tommy saw how challenging a task it was, he slipped off the bed, moved to help him.

“Thank you. You are a good man.” Erich’s head felt light as he gained an upright position. The effects of the drug were still subsiding. He hated feeling so infirm, so frail.

“You remember anything after they got us into the chopper?” Tommy’s dark, longish hair looked matted from perspiration.

“No. Nothing. Perhaps it will come back to me. What about you?”

“Just bits and pieces. That’s the way it’s comin’ back for me. I got a feelin’ they don’t want us to remember, but I do… some.”

“What did they do to us? Where are they taking us?”

“That motherfucker, the guy with red hair and the mustache… I think he killed old Augie.”

“Your friend…” Erich felt a twinge of anger, and yet also a bit of relief that the poor old fellow was out of pain, out of the discomfort that comes with great age. In one small way, Erich envied him.

“He smacked him in the side of the head. I didn’t like the way he fell… and then he… he just never moved after that.” For Erich, the image of Augie challenging the two intruders returned. The old gentleman had walked up to the stocky, red-haired man, yelling into his face.

“Those bastards,” said Tommy. “I owe those fucks — for Augie.”

“You may get your chance. But patience needs be your ally.”

Tommy looked at him, started to say something, but remained silent. Instead, he patted Erich on the shoulder, then turned to look out the porthole where a brassy sun beat down on the flat sea like a hammer.

“What else do you remember?”

Tommy turned from the porthole. “They hit us with those injection guns as soon as we were all in the helicopter — you know like those things they vaccinate the kids with? And I guess it knocked us out pretty fast.”

“Yes, I would agree.” Erich had no memory of anything other than the roar of the rotors and the open bay door of the aircraft. If they had injected him, the effect of the drug had erased the experience.

“But then, I think when they got us here, or somewhere after the helicopter, I remember being in a chair — like at the dentist, you know?”

There was something familiar at the mention of the chair. Leaning back. A bright light. Erich listened, getting frustrated at the inability to clear his head. “They probably interrogated you. Me as well. But I am having trouble remembering.”

“Man, I wonder what we told them?” said Tommy, who stood again, began pacing from the bed to the porthole and back. He appeared tense, agitated, and ready for trouble. Erich recalled his own youth, and how easy it had been to slip free of society’s conventions, to express anger and outrage.

“The effectiveness of drugs like…” Erich struggled to recall the words, “.… sodium pentothal or scopolamine are overrated.”

“Really?”

“From what I have read, there is nothing in the drugs that can force you to be truthful. You will be relaxed and open to suggestion, but you can still withhold information if you truly want to.”

“Hmmm, I wonder if I did.”

Interesting that he was concentrating on that fact. Had he told them everything he knew? Or only everything they wanted to know? It all depended on asking the right questions. He was beginning to recall the faces gathered around him, enquiring, but not their exact words — and certainly not his.

That could be a significant difference. Erich considered this. “That fact that we are still alive tells me that we did not yet tell them what they wanted to know, or that we remain of some use to them.”

Tommy grinned without humor. “Yeah, I gotta feelin’ you’re on the money with that one.”

Erich nodded. “I think so. Even though our captors did not have the look of totally ruthless men, I fear they nevertheless possessed that trait.”

“So what do we do when they come for us? Do we see what they want? Or should I try somethin’?”

Again, he was reminded of his early days with Manny. It was almost unthinkable to accept, but they were so young for what had been heaped on them. Men in their twenties with no understanding of how fragile life could be. He remembered acting so often on impulse, rather than reason or information. “We need to know more of our situation before we can act with any chance of success. Or we jump from the pot to the fire, yes?”

Tommy nodded slowly. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Besides… I am a very old man.”

Tommy looked at him and smiled. “You might be as old as you say you are, but I gotta tell you — you look way younger. Maybe sixty, but that’s it.”

“I have been told that ever since the end of the war — that I never looked my age. And I think I know why…”

“What do you mean?”

“The metal bar — the intermatter — the scientist told me about radiation they were working with. Tau-rays, he called it. I have often wondered if keeping that object in my bedstand all those years, if the radiation did something to me.”

Tommy chuckled softly. “Yeah, you mean like keeping you from aging, huh?”

“Something like that, yes. When I think about my age, I can hardly believe I am still alive. But I can tell you truly, Mr. Chipiarelli, I will do whatever I can to defeat these people.”

Tommy grinned. “Hey, c’mon, Captain. Tell me somethin’ I don’t know.”

Erich grinned, said nothing. He could hear a low-frequency vibration, a rhythmic beating in the air that grew ever stronger, louder. Tommy moved to the porthole, gestured for Erich to join him.

“I hear a helicopter,” he said. “You think it’s for us?”

Erich took a breath slowly and exhaled with equal measure. He remained on the edge of the bed because, at the moment, the idea of walking across the room seemed a little adventurous. Ever since awakening, he’d been feeling a hint of arrhythmia, which — radiation or not — his doctor had told him could be the harbinger of something worse. While he fully understood the tension and anticipation in Chipiarelli, he knew he was not physically able to keep up.

The sound of the approaching aircraft grew louder and more insistent. The air above the boat vibrated and shook, telling Erich that something large and powerful lumbered above them. “Do you see it?”

Tommy kept his attention on the sky. “Yeah, it’s one of those big ones. Like a flyin’ crane. Big. Propellers on both ends. It’s carryin’ some kind of little boat, looks like a sub or somethin’.”

Erich nodded. That made sense. Things were flowing into place, and he felt himself warming to the confluence of events. He felt flashes of memory from his days on the command deck, and he relished the chance to be in that position one final time.

After twenty years of dealing with choices no more important than Cheerios or a poached egg, he’d almost forgotten what it felt like to make a decision that actually mattered.

Chapter Forty-Four

Logistics had never been his strong suit. The strings he’d been pulling for the last eight hours — just to get things into motion — had pushed him to the edge. Much of it involved justifying his needs to superiors he either didn’t know or didn’t like. Sometimes, he wondered if his involvement with the amorphous Guild was worth it. It made him feel as if his entire life had been a waste of time.

Right now, he stood on the bridge of the Isabel Marie, a merchant freighter sailing under the flag of Panama, even though it belonged to an entity ultimately controlled by Guild chieftains. Such an arrangement was called a “flag of convenience” because the cost of personnel and supplies was economically favorable in countries like Panama, Liberia, Bahamas, and Madagascar.

However, you get what you pay for, the ship’s First Mate had warned him, and the lowlife crew on the Isabel Marie had questionable skills and absolutely no loyalty. The boat’s availability and proximity to the Northeast coast of North America made it the only viable choice, but nothing could disguise it as anything but a worn-out, rusted wreck hardly fit to transport its own bilge much less anything of value. But also because of this, it provided a perfect cover for the operation.

The freighter was headed northeast toward the coordinates found in Bruckner’s papers, but would not reach them for several days. By that time, Sinclair planned to have the initial phase of the operation well over. He watched with apprehension as the slipshod crew secured the Dragonfish to the foredeck with enough tie-downs to make the submersible look like a bug in a spider’s lair. The Erickson Aircrane which had transported the small submarine had already lifted off to rendezvous for an in-flight refueling.

Now, Sinclair awaited a second, smaller Bell Long Ranger which had plucked a nuclear technician named Hawthorne from his retirement cabin on Presque Isle Lake. The man had not been happy to be interrupted from the rest of his life, but he had no choice. When you sell yourself to the Guild, it’s a non-refundable transaction, there’s no such thing as a gold watch or a retirement dinner.

Sinclair hadn’t liked the idea of trusting the outcome of the mission to such an older, out-of-the-loop character, not even an expert in fissionable materials and weapons. Hawthorne had been in charge of arming nuclear warheads on cruise missiles launched from Ticonderoga-class ships. The man was probably competent, but if time were not of the essence, Sinclair would have held out for a scientist with credentials worthy of the Oak Ridge National Lab.

As he watched the lackadaisical crew finish securing the submersible, he checked his watch. Hawthorne was due any minute now.

Time. Was it working for or against him? He needed satellite surveillance reports on the progress of any forces marshalling against them, but they were very hard to hack from the NAVSAT scramblers. Most assuredly, McCauley had used his connections in the Navy to get them interested. And there was no readily reliable data on locations of Virginia-class attack subs — unquestionably the most deadly, unstoppable weapon he could encounter. Going balls-out against the superior forces of the USN was a great risk, he knew, but the David-and-Goliath scenario was a classic for a reason.

The Guild had survived a long time working under that model.

A larger lumbering adversary often moved slowly, and when you add in a layer of bureaucracy, mortared with incredulity, the advantage could easily belong to the smaller, less encumbered party. If he could move with speed and confidence.

Sinclair had no choice. He would arrive at Station One Eleven as quickly as possible. If the United States Navy was waiting for him, he would have to take his final card and hope it was not the joker.

The sound of an approaching aircraft coincided with a coded transmission to the radioman, and both events effectively yanked him from his thoughts. He watched the small, agile chopper drop down to the pitching deck where one of the large, flat hold-covers served well as a landing pad.

Sinclair exited the bridge. It was time to get Hawthorne up to speed.

“I’m going to edit through the interrogation video, and hit the important stuff,” he said. “See if you can tell me what to expect — from what the old man told us, that is.”

Hawthorne nodded as he sat in front of the small monitor. He was an almost bald, gray man who looked every bit of his sixty-three years. Too many sandwiches and six-packs had given him a generous belly, overflowing his belt and baggy jeans cinched way too low. Wearing a flannel shirt and an angler’s vest, he looked worn out and totally disinterested.

Sinclair hit the play button and the screen jittered into motion:

The scene was from the Isabel Marie’s infirmary/barber shop quarters — tight quarters with a single bed on a swivel base that could be converted, with the throw of a few levers, into a kind of chair as well. Drab yellowing walls that had once been white, plus dented cabinets and scarred counters completed the locale.

Reclining at a forty-five degree angle was Erich Bruckner, eyes closed, flesh tight against the planes of his facial bones, and looking younger than Hawthorne. Sinclair and Entwhistle flanked him and a third man, the ship’s medic, stood off in the background, ready if needed.

Sinclair spoke: “We’ve read your KTB, Captain. And we need to ask you a few questions. Will that be acceptable?”

Bruckner spoke but his eyes remained closed: “Yes.”

Sinclair: “You retrieved a scientific sample from the Station. What happened to it?”

A pause, then: “Lost. McCauley retrieved it from the sub. But then lost it.”

Sinclair: “How did he lose it?”

Bruckner: “When his dive boat sank.”

Entwhistle nodded, spoke softly: “What about the, ah… the bomb? Can you tell us about it?”

Bruckner: “What do you wish to know?”

Sinclair: “Why did you leave it at One Eleven?”

Another pause: “Because I felt uncomfortable transporting it. I did not want it on my boat.”

Entwhistle: “Yet you did not just remove it from your boat — you armed it. You tried to set it off?”

Bruckner: “Yes.”

Entwhistle: “And why would you want to do such a thing, Captain?”

Another pause. Then: “Because it was an… evil place.”

Sinclair: “Why do you say that?”

Bruckner: “Old. Very old. Not us. We were… intruders there.”

Sinclair: “Were you threatened?”

Bruckner: “Not sure.”

Entwhistle: “Look here, Captain, do you have any idea what the kiloton rating of your device might have been?”

Bruckner: “I… cannot recall.”

Sinclair: “What about its size. Can you give us the dimensions?”

Bruckner: “Perhaps six or so feet in length, and a diameter of two and a half feet.”

Entwhistle: “How did you arm it?”

Bruckner: “I… I am having trouble remembering the exact procedure. My engineer, Herr Kress, had been in charge of sealed instructions. He was the one who actually armed the device.”

Sinclair: “If it was an aerial bomb, was the detonator altitude-dependent?”

Bruckner: “I do not know. Or if I did, I have forgotten.”

Entwhistle: “Is that all Kress did — followed his instructions, like a bloody tinker toy?”

Bruckner: “No, he had brought along one of the packed charges used to scuttle a boat. He used the timer. And ordnance from the 105 deck cannon.”

Sinclair: “What kind of ordnance? You mean a round?”

Bruckner: “Yes, a 105 millimeter shell. Kress aligned it with… I cannot remember the name… some kind of rings.”

Entwhistle: “Do you have any idea why it failed?”

Bruckner: “None.”

Entwhistle: “Do you remember the location? Where you left the device?”

Bruckner: “Possibly…”

Entwhistle: “What about the source of the inter-matter? Do you remember its location?”

Bruckner: “I… think so.”

Sinclair keyed off the video, looked over at Hawthorne, who was grinning slyly as if he’d just figured out the punchline to an in-joke.

“That old buzzard. Absolutely amazing,” said the nuclear tech.

Sinclair didn’t share the joke. “Does his story make sense?”

“In what way?”

“In every fucking way! Hawthorne, don’t make yourself sound more dull than I suspect you might be…”

“Sinclair, come on now — you yanked me out of retirement and I’m supposed to feel good about that?”

He leaned close to the florid face of Hawthorne and whispered, “You know there’s only one way to ‘retire’ from our happy little club… and I don’t think you’re asking for that, are you?”

“No, actually. I guess I’m not.”

Sinclair stepped back, glared at him. “Then just answer my questions. We don’t have time to fuck around.”

“I understand.” Hawthorne paused, suddenly attentive and obviously concerned his superior wouldn’t find his answers satisfactory.

“Start talking.”

“Everything he says is plausible.”

“Okay,” said Sinclair. “Let’s start with that 105 shell. Could it still be live?”

“Sure. They can be live for generations. And in this case, we’re not talking some third world crap. German, remember? I’d put my money on anything from the Krupp war machine.”

Sinclair agreed. “Better to err on the side of caution, not reckless assumption.”

Hawthorne rubbed his hands together, a nervous habit. “So let’s assume that shell is very much live.”

“Okay, then… any idea why the timed detonation failed?”

“Not without looking at it. Could be a loose connector. Bad battery. Anything. Gotta figure the engineer knew what he was doing if he’d been trusted to arm their first nuke.”

“Okay, what about the nuke itself. What’s the chance it’s a dud?”

“Again, I need to look at it. Any way we can get radiation readings ahead of time?”

Sinclair had no idea. He’d have to check on that. “All right, what else can we expect?”

Hawthorne rubbed his chin, a parody of deep thought. Sinclair was not happy about having to trust this guy with the fate of the operation and perhaps his life. “Based on OSS records, the basic German design was sound. The materials they said they used would produce a very stable core.”

“Which means what?”

“Basically, the bomb itself would remain fissionable for an indefinite amount of time. So, in that sense, yes — hot and not much chance of being a ‘dud,’ as you say.”

Sinclair could have hoped for something less challenging. “What about the detonator? Does is sound like the engineer could have made it work?”

Hawthorne shrugged. “Yeah, probably. The old guy mentioned a ‘ring,’ right? That’s how they’d set it up back then. Simple and almost foolproof.”

“Why?”

“They called it the ‘gun design’ because the detonator was exactly that — firing a controlled blast. It’s crude, but it almost always guarantees adequate compression of the detonator ring to create fission.”

Sinclair didn’t like this at all. “How dangerous? To get in there and disarm it?”

Hawthorne chuckled. “Well, it’s not like changing the spark plug on your lawn mower, you can bet on that. Hard to say definitively without having a look. In general I’d say it depends on the status of the device to ‘fire the gun,’ so to speak…”

“You’ll get your chance.” Sinclair spoke in a calm, deliberate tone.

“Huh?” Hawthorne’s expression belied the question.

“No choice. We have a small window of opportunity — if any. We need to get in, sanitize it, and get the technology out.”

“And you want me to be the guy?”

Sinclair looked at him with unmasked disgust. “Actually, no, I don’t… I’d rather have a real nuclear expert. But we’re looking at a closing window, and we can’t get anybody — anybody good — here in a reasonable amount of time.”

“But I’m—”

“Look, I’m done explaining myself to you. You’re going in. End of story.”

Hawthorne’s expression said it all. He was angry and terrified and more importantly resigned. He would do what he was told, and he’d do it as best he could — even if that wasn’t very good.

Sinclair checked his watch. As soon as the Erickson returned, bloated with fuel, they would be ready to depart. It was time to roust Chipiarelli and Bruckner.

As Sinclair exited the bridge and headed for the First Mate’s cabin where Entwhistle awaited him, he thought about their situation and figured the odds might be with them. All bets covered the Navy wanting the same things we do at One Eleven, he thought. We have a little bit of a jump on them, and we have the Nazi. They don’t have jack right now.

Sinclair smiled. He liked the uncertainty.

Chapter Forty-Five

He would have been surprised if his old C.O. had kept him out of the mission, but Dex knew Whitehurst had to throw his weight around to make it happen.

It was obvious Drabek, the SEAL Commander, didn’t want any part of civilians when the brown matter hit the whirling blades. And being ex-Navy didn’t matter to guys like Drabek. Either you were a SEAL, or you were the rest of the world. Period.

That’s why Dex was sitting by himself in a ready room by the dock. It was a small room with about 15 chairs with fold-down desk tops. There was a screen along the front wall and a digital projector on at the back. No windows, not even a photo of the President on the wall. He was tired and he was pissed. Even though he’d flown up to the Naval Yard with Drabek and some of his unit in anticipation of joining the party, the final decision had come from the highest offices. Dex would not be allowed into the Dragonfish entering One Eleven with the assault team. The Pentagon and the White House had authorized a classified rescue and recovery mission, which meant Dex had been relegated to observer-status and would be joining Parker Whitehurst at sea. Although Parker had not ruled out going in on the second wave after things had been secured.

The only civilian going in would be the unfortunate guy they dragooned from MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Lab. Having been the nearest thing to an expert they could grab on short notice, they grabbed. He would be coming in on the same V-22 Osprey that would be taking Dex out to join Admiral Whitehurst and Harry Olmstead, who had flown direct to rendezvous with the USS Cape Cod. It was a LHD, an amphibious assault ship pulled from Atlantic Fleet maneuvers and full-heading it to the coordinates off the Greenland Coast. Based on the sum of Bruckner’s logs and what he’d told Dex, the DoD and the White House had decided they needed a look at whatever was left of the German base, its technology, and whatever they’d unearthed from hell-knew-what civilization.

Just like the bad guys, they wanted a piece of inter-matter. They wanted to brush their hands across the philosopher’s stone. Dex could save them the trouble because he was one of the only people who not only knew Bruckner still had his piece, but also its location.

But Dex wasn’t about to let anybody know it for the time being. If he did, the Navy might be less driven to get into the place Werner Heisenberg had called “Triple One.” Which meant, the chances of rescuing Tommy and Erich Bruckner would plummet.

Better to let things play out, Dex had decided.

Even though no one was talking about it — because the exact locations of the Navy’s submarines were always ultra-classified — it was apparent to Dex there weren’t any hunter-killers close enough to locate and effectively block the entrance to One Eleven. That had forced the Pentagon and Counter Terror Group to rely on surface vessels and limited range helicopters to get into position.

The target coordinates were under heavy satellite surveillance and as far as Dex could figure, since no one was really telling him anything, the area remained clear. But that didn’t mean the enemy couldn’t show up at any moment. There was simply no way to know where they were or when they might appear.

The worst part was the waiting. As the hours dragged past, he’d tried to get some sleep, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Tommy and Bruckner. Where were they? What did the bad guys have planned for them?

Dex kept asking himself that question even though he had a damned good idea what the answer was. They needed the old man for the same reason the SEALs would have wanted him along — the location of the nuke and the safest way to disarm it. Only one problem: was Bruckner healthy enough to survive it. Dex had no idea how tough all the travel must be on a guy his age, but it had to be plenty brutal.

And Tommy…

If Dex knew him even a little bit, his young friend would try something ill-advised as soon as he got the chance. But that wouldn’t be an issue if they’d already killed him. Dex knew it wasn’t much of a stretch to assume something like that, given what they’d done to the Sea Dog. He wished more than anything they’d let him go along under the ice shelf, but he knew there was no chance of it.

A door opened to his right, and an unlisted man leaned in. “Mr. McCauley? Your ride is here.”

Getting out of the chair, Dex nodded, then saluted the sailor. He followed his guide down several corridors through a couple turns and a flight of stairs. Commander Drabek was standing by a set of double doors that exited onto a rooftop helipad. He nodded at Dex, gave him a sly grin. “Thanks for all the help, Chief,” he said, and he sounded like he meant it. “And don’t looked so pissed. You’re getting a front-row seat.”

Dex said nothing.

He pushed through the door, and walked out into the chilly evening where the VTOL aircraft awaited him. Spring came late to the rocky New Hampshire coastline, and the temperature was dropping steadily as Dex pulled his parka tighter around him. Of course, where they were taking him would make this weather feel tropical.

There were two men in the cockpit watching him approach their aircraft, and another sailor waiting at the open belly door. As he climbed inside the cabin, the crewman directed him to one of three passenger seats near the front, then clanged the pressure door shut. The rest of the interior was comprised of jumpseats to hold as many as twelve troops.

Instantly the aircraft’s twin props increased rpms, whining and lifting the Osprey straight up. As its airspeed increased, it started to pitch forward incrementally as the wing and engine assembly rotated into the airfoil position. Within sixty seconds, the craft was ripping northward toward the arctic air.

As he settled in for what would be a long flight, he replayed Drabek’s comments. Maybe the guy was right. Dex shouldn’t be all that steamed they’d cut him out of the last hand. In these kind of operations. There was that situation called “knowing too much,” and he didn’t want to be in that place. If they thought they’d given you a key to the clubhouse and secret decoder ring, then you were part of them, and they owned you.

As Dex sat in the belly of the Osprey, a single thought kept whispering though his mind like the passage of a scythe: maybe they already did. Because Dex already knew a lot more than civilians were ever allowed to know.

That would be very bad news. Despite having very much enjoyed his time in the Navy, he’d called it quits on the military life, and had carved out a nice existence for himself in the civilian world. To think that might all be taken away chilled him.

He could feel the Osprey reaching altitude as its engines smoothed out, climbing above the turbulent cloud cover. Dex tried to get comfortable in the functional but not accommodating seat. Best thing would be to get a few hours sleep. It was going to be a long ride, and he was starting to feel his old alarm instincts kicking in.

Never a good sign.

Chapter Forty-Six

A clang! woke him from an uneasy sleep. It was a sound he had known since his earliest days at sea — the latch being thrown on a watertight bulkhead door. But there was one difference, this one had also been locked from the outer corridor.

Looking up, Erich saw the door swing open to reveal a swarthy merchant seaman, who could be Portuguese or perhaps from a North African country. He banged his hand on the metal wall and gestured for Tommy to come forward.

“What’s goin’ on?” said the young firefighter, who was sitting up on the edge of his bunk.

The man said nothing, but reached into his insulated vest and pulled out a pair of plastic restraints.

Tommy looked at him with mild disgust as he extended his wrists. “What, again? We’re on a boat in the middle of nowhere — I’m not goin’ anywhere, okay?”

Erich watched the crewman secure Tommy’s hands together, then indicate he should step into the corridor. The seaman pointed at Erich, giving him the same message. As soon as he did so, he saw another crewman waiting for them with two extra greasy-looking parkas. Where were they taking them now?

“Put. On,” he said.

A frigid draft of air snaked through the corridor, and Erich gratefully slipped into the heavy, insulated coat with a fur-lined hood. As he’d gotten older, he’d found cold weather increasingly difficult to bear, and the temperature even inside the ship’s passageway was close to intolerable.

“Where’re we goin’?” said Tommy.

“Shut. Up. You. Go.” The second crewman looked at him, pushed him forward toward a case of steel stairs leading abovedecks.

Erich followed him. Feeling the pitch of the deck beneath his feet, as he moved, he felt overwhelmed by memories of gaining his “sea legs” when he was so much younger.

Within minutes, they had reached the hatch leading to a wide, flat waist deck aft of the fo’c’scle. There were huge steel hatch covers sealing off an array of cargo holds, overlooked by the superstructure of a massive crane. On one of the hatch covers, crewmen were busy rigging a strange-looking boat — surely a submersible craft — to the cargo crane. The sky above the scene was gray and flat, whipped by a blistering, arctic wind.

Erich shuddered.

In an eyeblink, the memory of being corralled on the exposed deck of the 5001’s conning tower iced through him. He had never imagined suffering that terrible cold again.

He stood with Tommy, flanked by two rough-looking seaman, who both appeared to be awaiting further orders. Across the waist deck, a bulkhead door beneath the bridge swung open and two familiar figures emerged — the tall, muscular black man and the shorter red-haired man with the pasty complexion. Erich found them to be an incongruous pair, but that did not keep them from radiating an air of true menace. Especially the smaller, pale-faced man. His dark eyes appeared pressed into his face like raisins in dough, and they regarded everything with a terrible flat gaze that reminded Erich of a shark. The eyes of something capable of killing you without a thought.

The two men wore jumpsuits under their parkas, and they paused to give the submersible and crane assembly a quick evaluation. Behind them, four men carrying automatic weapons emerged from the bulkhead door. They escorted a thin man wearing horn-rimmed glasses, carrying an aluminum attaché or instrument case. As this second group began boarding the submersible, the black man approached Erich and Tommy.

“Captain Bruckner,” he said, his deep voice cutting under the wind. “I think you have some unfinished business.”

Everyone had moved with smooth, quick precision, getting Tommy strapped into a jumpseat along the rear compartment of the small submarine. One of the armed men assisted Erich into a seat in the forward cabin with the huge glass viewports that looked like the bulging eyes of a deep sea predator. His seat was center, middle, behind the two forward positions — one of the armed escorts sat to the left, the surly black man to the right.

While both men had excellent views through the glass, Erich could duplicate what they saw on one of several screens. The interior of the sub was far roomier and comfortable than he would have ever imagined, and he was coolly regarding the details of its controls when the crane jerked it off the deck and slowly swung it out past the gunwale of the Isabel Marie.

As the cable payed out, dropping the vessel very slowly into the angry arctic chop, Erich’s stomach resisted the sudden motion. He distracted himself by concentrating on the array of controls and digital display screens, looking to see if he could detect any of its armaments. Such a vehicle had been inconceivable the last time Erich had been beneath the waves.

Beneath the waves.

The notion touched a chord deep within him, resonating with memories of the sour-pickle confines of his U-boats. The last time he’d cruised under the cold sea, he’d been a young, young man. Erich shook his head.

Barely out of boyhood, really. It did not seem possible. Had it really happened like that? Had he ever been so young? And had such boys really been in charge of such killing machines?

He watched through the glass bubble and also the screens as the submersible slipped deeper into the dead dark sea. Here was a rattle and a loud snap as the crane’s cables and grapples released them, then the crewman in the left seat assumed control by activating four powerful halogen beams to guide their descent.

The black man touched his throat-mic, spoke into it. “Topside… and Relay, we are a go. Scanners clear. Please advise if your data contradicts that.”

“Our instruments confirm — clear.” A voice sounded from unseen speakers.

“Looks like we beat ’em to the punch,” said the pilot.

The black man shook his head. “Unless they’re already deep under the shelf. Already waiting for us.”

The pilot smiled. “Well, I think it’s time we found out.”

Erich watched the black man pull a note pad from his pocket, check it, then enter a few strokes into a keyboard. “Coordinates keyed-in. Going to a-nav… now.”

For the next ten minutes, no one spoke. All attention remained fixed on the digital screens which displayed a startling variety of real and computer-generated views of the massive shelf of ice under the surface. Erich felt the vessel move with grace and precision in almost total silence and with unimagined speed. He felt a tightening in his gut, and he could almost hear his own pulse pounding behind his ears.

Could it be possible the U. S. Navy was waiting for them? If so, Erich had no idea how things might go. Of course, if the Navy was not waiting for them, Erich felt equally uncertain what lay ahead.

“Sinclair, confirm position.” The voice from the speaker startled Erich as much from the breaking of the silence as giving a name to the black man.

“Approaching the rift,” said Sinclair. “Steady as she goes.”

Erich stared through the left front viewport. The beams of four powerful lamps probed the dark water and walls of ice. As the submersible dared ever closer, a shadow fell vertically across the shelf.

A minute passed. Close. The shadow resolved into an absence. A split in the ice. An opening. Another minute. So close now that Erich could see it clearly — an undersea chasm yawning ahead. Revealed so brightly by the halogen beams, the scale of the Greenland Ice Shelf shocked him. He had not remembered the place to be so overwhelming in scope.

“A-nav to hands-on.” Sinclair nodded to the crewman-pilot, who keyed a touchpad on his control console. Sinclair gripped a joystick that reminded Erich of an oversized version of the video games his grandson used to play.

As he consulted the sonar display, Sinclair also appraised the distance between the submersible and the ragged, open maw of ice.

Now the vessel decelerated silently as the walls of jagged ice loomed along the starboard and port sides. The sight of the dangerous passage struck Erich with a renewed respect for his U-boat and its crew, and how they’d run this gauntlet with fearless ignorance and primitive technology.

He shook his head slowly and the memory faded. He had not anticipated how strongly the images from the past would affect him. It made him think of his old crew — hard-as-nails Kress, the avuncular Massenburg, Ostermann, and so many other young faces that refused to come clear in his mind.

“Look familiar yet, Captain?” said Sinclair, turning to lean back and face him.

Anger flared in Erich, and he calmed himself with effort. “Somewhat. My memory… it is not always good.”

“It was plenty good enough to get us this far.” Sinclair grinned. “And I’m sure we can shake it up a little more.”

Erich said nothing. He knew why they needed him on this mission.

They wanted the secrets of Station One Eleven, but they also needed to find the bomb and ensure it presented no threat to their exploration of the ruins.

Back then, he had no real appreciation of its destructive power. It wasn’t until years later, on American television, that he saw what such a device could do.

He had carried it across the Atlantic on the broad shoulders of his boat before casting it out. And now it lay under the ice like a sleeping beast. Did there remain a touch that could awaken its intended fury?

How had he spent the last sixty years in such complacent ignorance? How had he watched all the newsreels and all the television shows and all the mushroom clouds without shuddering with complete terror at what he’d escaped, what he’d left undone?

How had he indeed? The thought was like a blade twisting through him.

Had there been, throughout all that time, a grim understanding?

“ETA with surface in two minutes.” Sinclair touched his mic. “You copy, Topside?”

The screens in front of Sinclair were aglow with graphics; a soft beeping emitted from an unseen speaker. Outside, under the probing beams of the vessel, the chambered ice slipped steadily past.

“Copy that,” said a voice in the speakers.

The final minutes dragged past.

“There, look. It’s a little lighter. See it?” said Sinclair’s pilot.

“Steady now,” said Sinclair. “We’ve got a visual on the surface. Ascending… Stand by.”

Erich’s gaze held on the panorama beyond the glass bubble port. As the vessel veered upward, a dull, orange-red light from the surface imparted a soft sheen to the barrier they would soon penetrate. He felt his pulse jump, his eyes began to water.

The submersible punctured the calm surface like a fisherman’s bobber, and as the water streamed away from the curving glass port, Erich felt a soft punch in his bowels as he saw the nightmare landscape take shape all around them. The images and memories ghosted back with such power, such immediacy, it was as if he only departed this place yesterday.

“We are in. On the surface,” said Sinclair. “You should now have our visual feed, Topside. We are scanning for intruders now.”

“We copy.”

The red-haired man with the Scottish accent moved forward to get a better look. “Bloody hell! What the fuck is this place?”

Sinclair said nothing. He could only stare at the strange place in defiant respect.

“The area is clean,” said the pilot as he consulted a variety of displays concerned with the presence of any other vessels or entities. “No activity detected.”

“Okay,” said Sinclair, turning to face Erich. “We move to the next phase, Captain Bruckner.”

Erich stared at him, said nothing.

“Captain Bruckner, you will now lead us to the place where you left the nuclear device.”

“What if I refuse?” He already knew the answer to this, but needed to hear them articulate it.

The red-haired man smoothed his mustache, smiled. “Come on, now, Cappy… surely you must’ve realized why we’ve bothered to bring along that numbskull friend of yours, now don’t you?”

Erich understood all too well. There was a good chance he and Tommy would be eliminated regardless of his actions. But as any submariner will tell you — even a small chance is better than none at all. He nodded, said nothing.

The pilot vacated his seat to Erich as Sinclair assumed full control of the submersible. The view through the eye-like bubble port was slightly distorted by the curvature of the thick plastic, imparting an even more surreal aspect to the strange subterranean interior.

“Which way, Captain?”

“I need to get myself oriented properly.” Erich pointed to the digital displays. “Is there a map you put on there with our position?”

Sinclair said nothing, but he keyed in a command which produced a CGI map on one of the screens. Erich squinted at it as he tried to make the topographical display agree with his memory. The more he looked at the representations, the more familiar it became, and he remembered.

“Very well,” he said. “Do you prefer compass headings or visuals?”

Sinclair remained expressionless. “Whatever works for you.”

Erich supplied a heading which angled the vessel across the vast underground sea at a cautious speed. As it closed slowly on the far shore, Erich watched Sinclair, who tried to remain stoic as he regarded the strange landscape. Not much chance of that.

Outside, the surface of the inland sea barely rippled. Bruckner stared at it, looking in the direction where he now remembered they had taken the bomb. There had been a small cove with a shallow shoreline. The dinghy carrying the device had drifted easily to a place where they’d dragged it up to the soft shore.

The minutes passed in a silence punctuated only by the occasional narrative of Sinclair to his relay contact called Topside. As the distance between the shoreline and their vessel closed, more details became discernible, but Erich could not see anything that looked like the wooden boat they had beached so long ago.

The rising walls of the great cavern drew into sharper definition as Sinclair eased within 30 meters of the shore. He tested his depth with sonar and advanced with caution.

“Do you see anything familiar, Captain?”

Erich shook his head. He had been certain this was close enough for a visual confirmation. Was it possible the device had been found sometime in the past?

Easing the boat ever closer, Sinclair’s expression suggested he might be thinking Erich was playing games with him. “Captain, I am a patient man. But you don’t want to piss me off, okay?”

Erich opened his mouth to reply, but the red-haired man interrupted him. “Hell-lo! What’s that?”

He pointed to a dark smudge against the tan clay and stone of the shoreline. Erich found it, allowed it to resolve into something familiar. It could be the upper half of his deadly cargo, but… there was something not right about it. There was a layer of water-hugging mist that kept all details along the beach indistinct. They would have to be very close to know for certain what they were looking at.

Guiding the submersible safely past the obscured object to ensure against any chance of collision, Sinclair eased it aground on the soft bottom.

“Let’s get out and have a look around,” he said, reaching his hand out to Erich.

Erich would have loved to tell him he didn’t need the assistance but decided a feigned weakness might serve him later. Straightening out and moving through the small egress was a challenge, but Erich was fit and strong beyond his years. His captors didn’t need to know that.

As he emerged from the hatch, he looked up to feel, as much as see, the curved vault of the gigantic enclosure. In the incandescence of the distant towered sphere, the mist hanging over the water seemed to carry a subtle glow.

Everyone except the pilot clambered free of the submersible, mucking through soft sandy clay to drier, firmer ground. One of the armed men hustled Tommy, still cuffed, from the hatch. The other two crewman, Sinclair, the red-haired man, and the studious-looking man in the angler’s vest and flannel shirt followed. They all paused to take in their bizarre surroundings — each man trying to reconcile the impossibility of what they witnessed with its reality.

“Sweet mother…” That was one of the armed crewman whispering a soft exclamation as he took in the total strangeness of the place. He was wearing a remote cam on his helmet, relaying a feed back to somewhere unknown.

Sinclair looked around with a slack expression. Erich could not tell if he was in total awe or merely bored.

East of their position, far away, the suggestion of the scarp of ancient buildings lay in fog. Seeing it brought Erich back through time, reaffirming the exact position from so many years ago.

Sinclair pointed through the annoying mist at the odd collection of struts and what appeared to be an oblong dome rising from the mud.

“Is that it?” he said.

“We beached the boat at the foot of a small cove. Just like that one.” Erich pointed at the object that could be the bomb.

“Get closer,” said the red-haired man. “That bleedin’ fog’s too dodgy.”

“Slowly, easy,” said the man with the horn-rimmed glasses and the flannel shirt. “We do not wish to disturb anything until I have a chance to fully inspect the mechanism.”

“Right-o, Doc.” The red-haired man slowed his pace, motioned to the armed escort, one of whom had been assisting Erich along the soft shore, holding him by the arm.

As they approached the object with great caution, Erich kept watching the man they’d called “Doc.” With each step closer to the object, the man appeared to be trying to look as casual as possible. His face was a blank slate, his eyes distorted behind thick lenses.

The closer they grew, the mist appeared thinner, less of a problem. When they were within several meters, Erich could see clearly enough to know they’d found it.

“Is that it?” said Sinclair.

Erich nodded. “Yes. But it is not as we left it.”

“What’s that? ‘Left it’—like how?” The tone of the red-haired man revealed his growing anxiety.

Erich on the other hand, felt a curious calm descending upon him. His initial sensation of dread and panic at returning to the site had dissipated. It was as if this place had been patiently waiting for him, and he for it. An unexpected comfort grew in him, and with it, confidence.

Doc, apparently a scientist, felt differently. “Oh, man, this does not look good.”

“What the hell happened here?” said Sinclair as he touched his wireless mic, activating it. “Topside, we have located the objective, but we may have a problem. Maybe a big problem…”

Chapter Forty-Seven

When the V-22 touched down on the Cape Cod’s flight deck, Dex looked across the passenger bay at Dr. Robert M. Schaller, the nuclear guy from MIT, and smiled. The scientist didn’t reciprocate. He looked like a candidate for a firing squad as he struggled to unhitch his safety straps.

Dex had talked to him sporadically during the long flight, partially to add some detail and color to his briefing notes. Schaller had seemed grateful to gain a fuller understanding of why he’d been “selected” for the job. He was a soft-spoken, no-nonsense kind of guy sliding into his fifties with a full head of graying hair, a stylish goatee, and an athletic build. Dex figured him for a squash or tennis player.

A latch clicked and the belly door was thrown open by a seaman wearing a heavy, hooded parka. A bitter slap of super-cooled air rushed in from behind him, threatening to stand Dex up like an uppercut. Apparently the Cape Cod had been in a good position to effect a very northern rendezvous point.

“Doctor Schaller. Mister McCauley,” said the young sailor. “Welcome aboard!”

He guided them across the windswept deck to the storm door, a short corridor, and a stairway up to the bridge. Once inside, despite the absence of the wind, Dex could still feel the intense cold leeching the heat from his bones. How did these guys stand it?

After being escorted onto the command deck, Dex and Schaller saw a man wearing a crisp, tan service uniform look up from a display console, then approach them. “I’m Captain Danvers,” he said. “Good to see you fellows could make it.”

Everyone shook hands. Dex looked around at the clean, Spartan control area. The digital age had wrought huge changes in the last twenty years. “Nice boat you have here.”

Danvers grinned. “Thanks, Chief. The Admiral has a meeting scheduled for Dr. Schaller, but you’re welcome to stay and check things out, if you’d like.”

“Sounds good to me.”

The Captain motioned to an ensign who was manning a navigational station. The young officer moved quickly to escort Schaller off the bridge. Dex looked around.

“How far from the target area?” he said.

“Several hundred miles southeast of the coastline coordinates.” Danvers spoke with a slight western accent, probably Texas.

Dex glanced through the glass at the gray sky and matching ocean. “Is that good?”

The Captain shrugged. “Not sure yet. We’re within range of the CH-53 to airlift a Dragonfish in good time. But… we’ve picked up a vessel on radar at the target coordinates.”

“What kind of boat?”

“We have a SeaDrone on recon to get a visual right now. Looks fairly large, though. Could be something like the Cod, or maybe a merchant class. Also trying to get a spy-sat to catch some images on the next go-round. We should have data from either source any minute now.”

“Hmmm, what’re the odds some freighter’s parked right where we want to be?” Dex shook his head.

“Yeah, looks like we’re on tit number two, and the Admiral’s not happy about it.”

“Any idea who the interlopers might be?” Dex appreciated the Captain speaking so freely to him, and wondered if Admiral Whitehurst had given explicit orders to do so. Whatever the reason, Dex wasn’t going to bring it up. Being left out of the mission was bad enough, but being kept off the information list would have been more than he could swallow.

“Not yet. As soon as we get visual, we can track it down pretty fast.”

Dex nodded. He knew a variety of agencies had compiled stored image profiles of just about every registered ship on the sea, from every conceivable port, nation, or private entity. No hiding from the eye-in-the-sky and a decent database.

“Any idea when they plan to approach the target?”

“Waiting on Whitehurst right now. I imagine they want to get that science-guy up to speed first. We have the CH-53 and the Dragonfish rigged and ready — that would get them to the access point within 30 minutes, tops.”

Dex nodded. “Guess it’s hurry up and wait now.”

Captain Danvers grinned. “Same old Navy, right? Listen, Chief, feel free to take a tour around the boat, check her out. I’ll send for you as soon as we know something.”

“I might just do that.”

But not just then. The USS Cape Cod was a state-of-the-art boat, worth seeing, but he wanted to be around to hear any new developments. He couldn’t stop thinking about Tommy and Bruckner. Once he knew they were safe, there would be time later to take a leisurely tour.

Besides, he already knew this was a special ship. A ship designed to ensure that any air or deep sea rescue/recovery mission the Navy might encounter would be assisted with the best technology in the world. It made him think back to his early days in the Navy, when they trained guys in the old rubber and canvas suits with the brass diving helmets and vulcanized rubber air hoses.

Talk about primitive. Not to mention dangerous…

Dex remembered his Chief from those training missions — a guy named Magnuson, who’d been a salvage diver when he was a teenager on the gulf coast. When he’d volunteered for the Navy after Pearl, he already had more experience than half the guys in Underwater Rescue.

Being a diver is the most dangerous job in the world, Magnuson used to tell them. And it’s also the simplest. Script’s always the same—somethin’s down there; somebody wants it; you go get it.

Dex smiled as he reminisced those days. Twenty-two years ago? Where did the time go?

He remained on the bridge despite feeling the frustration he couldn’t do more to help. For now, all he could do was wait and stand by the glass to regard the harsh sea. Somewhere out there, beyond its dark gray chop, lay the distant icy shoreline of Greenland.

Every once in a while, he’d check his watch as he tried to imagine what it was like for Tommy and the old man. With that unknown boat already on station, it was a good bet they’d been packed into a sub headed toward One Eleven. Dex wondered how Bruckner was holding up, especially with people who seemed as ruthless as his captors. Tommy would be okay — as long as he didn’t mouth-off to them. And in a pinch, he could be counted on to attempt whatever was needed to survive.

But Dex needed details, he needed input. Not knowing jack crippled him.

Five minutes of useless, quiet speculation ended when the ensign on the communications console spoke softly into his headset mic. “Updates on ‘unknown’ coming in. Stand by…”

Everyone glanced at the officer, waiting. Dex did his best to be unobtrusive as he anticipated the new info.

“Let’s hear it,” said Captain Danvers.

“Satellite confirmation at 99-plus certainty — freighter Isabel Marie. Panamanian registry, ownership Colchys International Line in Greece.”

The Captain considered this. “Any history on the owners? Any good, innocent reason for that boat to be parked at the entrance to One Eleven?”

“Nothing yet from Colchys. Regardless, we should know more any minute now. SeaDrone ETA four and counting.”

Dex clenched his fists, held them. Finally, some answers.

“We’ve got video,” said the ensign. He keyed his console and one of the LCDs on the bridge array blinked from dead black to an aerial view of the gray ocean from low altitude. Everyone focused on the screen as the SeaDrone’s hi-res cameras suddenly captured a startlingly clear image of the Isabel Marie—a merchant ship that had seen better days.

“Jesus, what a tub…” said someone.

“Wait a minute, there’s a big chopper, see it? Right there on the waist deck.”

“Don’t let its looks fool you,” said the ensign. “I’m not getting any confirmation of legitimate activity from any of the ‘alphabets’… this looks like a rogue.”

Dex kept his position, figuring the best way to stay in the mix, was to stay out of peoples’ way. If the NSA and CIA and the rest of the agencies didn’t like that boat, then it must be bad news.

“SeaDrone on aggression mode/stand-by,” said Captain Danvers. “Communications, hit the target with all hailing frequencies. Request immediate identification and destination.”

“Aye, sir,” said a crewman with a headset and a sophisticated bank of controls in front of him.

As the Cape Cod attempted contact with the rogue vessel, Dex wondered if they’d found it in time. There was a possibility Tommy and the old man were still on that boat, which greatly increased their chances of surviving this whole thing. “Contact,” said the communications officer. “Isabel Marie reports engine trouble. Adrift. Awaiting assistance.”

Danvers grinned, shook his head. “Assistance? Right, sure they are. Tell them we will assist.”

The crewman reestablished contact. A pause, then: “They are refusing assistance, Captain.”

Danvers nodded. “Tell them they are impeding a United States naval operation, and their cooperation is requested.”

“Captain,” said another crewman at a different station. “I’m getting a heat signature consistent with a small missile launch.”

“What?” Danvers moved to looked over the seaman’s shoulder at a display.

“It’s a SAM!” said the crewman.

“Evasive action on the SeaDrone! Now!”

As Danvers spoke, one of the screens went dark.

“Impact,” said the crewman. “We lost it.”

“Son-of-a-bitch!” Danvers’s face had flushed as he slammed his fist on the corner of the console.

The communications officer was now holding his headset closer to his ears. “Uh, Captain, I’ve got contact with the freighter. Says they need to talk to you.”

“Put it on speaker!” Danvers said as he tried to compose himself.

The crewman toggled the output.

“This is Captain Danvers, United States Navy. Identify.”

From unseen speakers, the transmission crackled onto the command deck, static threatening to mask it at any moment. “Advise you disengage at once. We have two American hostages.”

“Isabel Marie. Please stand by.” The Captain looked at his communications officer. “Patch me into the Admiral’s quarters. Now!”

“Aye, sir.”

Dex was surprised to hear his old boss’s voice booming over the loudspeakers: “Admiral Whitehurst.”

Danvers cleared his throat, then reprised the situation.

“Stand by, Captain. I’ll be right there.”

Several long, silent minutes later, Whitehurst and Harry Olmstead stood with Danvers staring at a screen which held a hi-res sat-image of the rogue freighter. Dex had tried to fade into the bulkhead. He kept having this feeling he’d be asked to leave the party if someone took much notice of him.

“Olmstead and I expected this,” the Admiral was saying. “Drabek says we can still get a unit in there and effect rescue.”

“It would help if we had recon,” said Danvers. “We don’t even know who these guys are.”

Harry Olmstead held up his index finger. “Actually, some of us have a pretty good idea, but—”

“But it’s classified.” Danvers looked disgusted, and Dex understood how he felt. He couldn’t count how many times he’d been kept out of the loop because of that catch-all bullshit.

Olmstead nodded. “Actually, yes.”

“Advise the rogue vessel we need proof of ID and proof of life on the hostages before we make a decision,” said Whitehurst. “And we’ll need it quickly, or any decisions we make will be made based on the delay.”

Danvers nodded to the communications officer, who relayed the Admiral’s command. Then: “Standing by, sir.”

“Will they comply?” said the Captain.

The communications officer tilted his head slightly. “Not certain, sir. They didn’t say no… they advised us to stand by.”

Dex leaned against the bulkhead. Now, at least, he would know if they were still alive. If for any reason Whitehurst didn’t get the proof he needed, then Dex could be pretty damn well sure his friends were dead.

And that made him think about Bruckner again. Even though he’d just met the old man, Dex felt like he really knew him, and did consider him a friend. Weird how time and culture didn’t mean a whole lot in situations like this.

And the more he thought about it, the more he realized how the old man might be the key to the whole thing.

Chapter Forty-Eight

“This is Relay,” said the voice in Sinclair’s headset. “What is the nature of your problem?”

“You have video?” Sinclair said.

“Affirmative. But not sure what we are looking at. Detail it.”

Standing motionless, Sinclair looked at the scene in front of him, trying to decide how to begin.

“Relay, we found the egg, but they’d left it in a wooden dinghy.”

“Which is… where?”

“What you see there is all that’s left. After all this time, the slats and ribs have mostly rotted away. Everything — the bomb and detonation device have been slowly sinking — right into the muddy shoreline.”

“Affirmative. Continue.”

“There’s been a lot of thawing and freezing and shifting in that mess. No way to tell the complete effect of this. Not just by looking at it. Not more than thirty percent of the device is still visible. The rest has been absorbed into the sand and mud. We’re going to need to get our hands dirty.”

There was a pause as personnel at the Relay point considered this information. Then: “You have opinion from Hawthorne?”

“He’s wired. Ask him.” Sinclair looked at Hawthorne, whose expression reflected a standard portrait of single-minded fear. If ever a guy looked like shit, Hawthorne might be that guy. His lower lip trembled as he tried to speak into his headset mic.

“Ah… Relay?”

“We copy. Your assessment?”

“Uh… your video should show the amount of natural debris. That’s probably the dorsal surface and fin of the bomb casing. From what I can see, it looks something like Little Boy — if you’ve seen the pictures. Part of the original crate that held the firing mechanism is visible. But it’s rotted out pretty bad. We’re going to need to do a little digging and clearing. To get inside. To check the mechanism itself. See if it’s still in place.”

“How soon will you have an answer?”

“Depends on how difficult it will be to clear the mud and sand. This looks like a job for a paleontologist.”

“Get started. Time is crucial.”

“We copy, Relay. Video feed will keep you in the loop.” Sinclair looked at Hawthorne. “You’re in charge. Do what you need to do, and do it fast.”

The nuclear technician swallowed with effort. “Right…”

Turning to the three armed crewman, Sinclair gestured toward Hawthorne. “Do whatever the doc needs done. Entwhistle and I will take care of our friends.”

The trio lay down their weapons and joined Hawthorne as he dropped to his knees to begin carefully clearing out the soft earth and sand in small handfuls. His analogy had been close to dead on, thought Sinclair. The four men looked liked they were freeing a dinosaur fossil from its ancient prison.

As Entwhistle stood closely behind their hostages, Sinclair focused on the task before them. For the first time, the notion he could die at any moment surged through him. But more oddly, that truth had no effect on him. He seemed balanced between humor and nihilism.

He had hoped his place in the Guild would return a sense of meaning to his life, but so far, it still eluded him. He knew in one sense, his utter detachment had been an asset, but that was always subject to change, wasn’t it?

“Sinclair.”

The voice of the Relay Communications HQ shattered his philosophical musings.

“I copy.” As he spoke into his mic, Entwhistle and his charges listened in.

“USN encroachment within the hour. We have them stalled because of the hostages. But they require proof of life and ID.”

Sinclair had been expecting this complication. Indeed, even with hostages, there was no guarantee they would not insert a SEAL team into the arena. The Navy was playing with the same deck. They knew what kind of technology might be at stake. Besides, when did the lives of a couple of civilians ever stop any military from doing whatever it wanted?

“How do you want me to proceed?” Sinclair glanced back at Chipiarelli and Bruckner. The former appeared jittery and ready for a fight if he could get one, the latter stooped and utterly fatigued and done with living. In his experience, Sinclair knew which of them was the most truly dangerous.

“Give them a headset. We’ll patch them through.”

He repeated the instructions to Entwhistle who removed his communications gear, then fitted it to Chipiarelli’s head.

“Your mates from the U. S. Navy,” said Entwhistle. “Wanting to make certain the both of you’re still among the living. Go on now, chappie — make ’em feel at ease.”

Chipiarelli appeared skeptical, but that didn’t deter him enough to be uncooperative. “Hello? This is Thomas Chipiarelli.”

“This is Captain Danvers, U.S.S. Cape Cod. Do you copy?”

“I hear you, Captain. What do you need me to do?”

“Tell me where you are and if you’re safe.”

“They took us under the ice — we’re at the old German base. We’re okay… so far.”

“How’s Bruckner?”

“He’s okay. He’s a tough guy.”

“Good to hear it. Listen, Chipiarelli, we need to verify you are who you say you are and not some digital construct, okay?”

“Really? They can fake people now?”

“They try.”

“Sure. What do you need?”

“Dexter McCauley says you know the nick-name he calls his ex-wife.”

Chipiarelli grinned. “That’s easy. He calls her ‘Queen Bitch-Tifa’.”

Danvers suppressed a chuckle. “Ah… let me verify that.”

“Sure…”

After a brief pause: “That’s confirmed. Stay well, Chipiarelli. We’re going to get you out of this.”

“Yessir, I know you will.”

After Chipiarelli returned the headset to Entwhistle, he and Sinclair received an update. “We have no back-up on this operation,” said Relay. “Given the lethal nature of the situation, it is quite possible the Americans will not intervene. But time remains critical.”

“Acknowledged. You will stay in the video loop.” Sinclair touched the mic, silencing it, then looked at the old man. “Captain Bruckner, soon we’re going to need your help.”

The submariner looked at him with almost total disinterest as if he were staring at something far more distant and more meaningful. After a pause he spoke softly in German, “Was immer Sie wünschen.”

“What’s that?”

“Whatever you wish,” said Bruckner. “I am weary of this.”

Scoop by scoop, Sinclair watched as the men unearthed the device, which now protruded from the mud and sand like a piece of ugly, post-modern sculpture. All the while, he wondered if the Americans would be good to their word.

Down on his mud-caked knees, Hawthorne cleared a final handful from the edge of a rotten slat. They cleared enough debris to reveal the warhead and casing of a very menacing looking piece of ordnance — a 105 mm shell — which remained aligned with the bomb laying in a makeshift cradle. Attached to the flat end of the shell was a rectangular object.

“That ordnance looks good,” said Hawthorne pointing to a cradle, which held a very lethal looking artillery round.

Erich remembered Kress at his machine bench in the engine room, sleeves rolled, black grease tattooing his thick forearms. Relying on his uncanny knack for anything mechanical, Herr Kress had bolted together a gun detonator for the atomic device. Crude, but efficient.

Erich nodded. He was impressed with how clean and unsullied by time and elements the casing and ammo appeared. “We should assume we have a live round,” he said.

“You think so?” said Hawthorne.

“I leave it up to you. But I am very familiar with the reliability of Krupp’s arms factories.”

Hawthorne wiped his sweaty hands on his shirt. He looked up at Sinclair with an unreadable expression. “We need to take a break. Then I think I might be ready…”

The last thing he wanted right now was to suggest any move that would prove a fatal mistake. Sinclair nodded, and the four men moved away from the excavation, stretched their legs, arched their backs, and tried to forget they were playing in the sand with a fissionable device.

Turning again to the old Nazi, he waited until the man looked up, engaging his gaze.

“Captain Bruckner, I know we’ve been over this, but one more time, please?”

“All right.”

“We can see the 105 shell and the demolition pack. Does it look… as you left it?”

Bruckner moved closer, but made no effort to touch anything. As he inched forward, lowering himself for a better view, Sinclair kneeled with him to give him support. They regarded a frame of steel bands, bolted together to hold a cube, twelve inches on a side, wrapped tightly in what looked liked canvas impregnated with a waxy substance.

“That is what we called a Kohlenkübelbeutel—a scuttle pack,” he said. “The dynamite was waterproofed, of course.”

Sinclair studied the pack without touching it. “Looks tight. I think we have to assume that charge is dry and live.”

“Oh yes,” said Hawthorne from several steps behind them. “Dynamite is very stable. And this is probably a high grade — if it was intended to blow off a hatch or a hole in the hull.”

Sinclair looked at Bruckner, as if awaiting his confirmation. The old man looked wobbly, even on his knees, despite the soft sand that held him, and he forced himself to speak. “You are correct. I have seen it in action.”

“Anything else?” said Sinclair.

Bruckner paused as if considering a random thought. He stood, looked at Sinclair with a calm, seemingly disinterested expression. “There is something missing.”

“What?” said Hawthorne, wheeling quickly. He adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses over his wide eyes.

Bruckner gestured toward the collection of objects which looked both silly and terrifying. “See those wires? They were connected to the timer for the scuttle charges. But I don’t see it. The timer.”

“Jesus Christ…” said Hawthorne. “Is it still in that fucking mud?”

“I would think so. Yes.”

Sinclair gestured Hawthorne closer. “Dig it out. Now.”

Hawthorne nodded almost imperceptably and moved with a total absence of enthusiasm.

Glancing at Bruckner, who remained standing, his arms hung straight down from his shoulders like a marionette whose strings had been cut, Sinclair had an odd sensation pass through him like a burst of cold air. The old man did not move, nor did his gaze waver from the bomb.

“Captain Bruckner, you okay?”

He looked at Sinclair as if he were transparent. “Okay? Yes. I suppose I am.”

But there was something bothersome about the way Bruckner had spoken. Either he was getting terribly fatigued, or he was surrendering to the fearful grip of this place.

Several minutes passed as Hawthorne began to use his fingertips to follow the thin wires into the mud and sand. The man moved with a painful slowness, making it obvious he didn’t want to touch the wires or disturb them in any way as he cleared the debris away almost grain by grain.

Too slow, thought Sinclair. This is much too slow.

At one point, Hawthorne looked up at him, removed his glasses to wipe them on sleeve of his flannel shirt, then spoke. “If anything looks critical, if anything doesn’t feel right, we get out of here, right?”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” said Sinclair, who managed a smile that felt embarrassingly phony from the inside-out.

At the same moment, Bruckner moved forward with an awkward robotic effort. He was close behind the nuclear technician.

“Captain,” said Sinclair. “Is there something wrong?”

Bruckner turned his head slowly without moving his shoulders, like a gun turret. He said a single word: “Yes.”

Chapter Forty-Nine

Dex said nothing as Admiral Whitehurst considered his options with Harry Olmstead and Captain Danvers.

“How long to get a CH-53 and Dragonfish to the target coordinates?” said Whitehurst.

Danvers didn’t hesitate. “We’re closing the gap with every minute. Less than twenty, I’m sure.”

Whitehurst looked at Olmstead. “What’re you thinking, Harry?”

The Counter Terror Group Director tilted his head and grinned. “I’m thinking we’re wasting time. We take out the rogue vessel. ASAP.”

“What about the hostages?” said Danvers.

Olmstead waved off the question. “They’re not on board.”

“He’s right,” said Whitehurst. “They’re already under the ice shelf. They’re using Bruckner — to disarm the device.”

Danvers nodded. “So we neutralize the freighter, which forces the team inside the station to deal with us.”

Whitehurst nodded. “It’s risky, but it’s all we’ve got. Time isn’t with us on this one. If the enemy has a warship or a submarine on the way, it won’t matter if we take out the freighter.”

Olmstead crossed him arms as if suddenly chilled. “What’s the ETA on our Virginia Class?”

Danvers shrugged. “Almost four hours. Best case.”

“We can’t fuck around that long,” said Whitehurst. “Get Drabek up here. On the double.”

As Dex waited for the next phase of the mission to kick in, he tried to construct a way to get himself included in the action. He knew he had to just keep his silence and wait for the right moment. His instincts for protocol and military leverage had always been pretty good.

When Commander Drabek arrived on the bridge, they briefed him in lightning-round mode. “Just get us there, Admiral. We’ll do the rest.”

Whitehurst nodded. Then to Danvers: “Now about that rogue, Captain — take the bastards out.”

Danvers looked at the Admiral with a smile he made no effort to hide. It emphasized his strong jawline and high cheekbones. He had that classic Annapolis-look that hadn’t deserted him as he slid into his forties. Dex had known plenty of officers like Danvers over the years, and in general they were a decent bunch.

And like all officers, he’d been itching for a chance to fight a real fight ever since the day he threw his midshipmen’s hat in the air.

Not that Dex could blame him. Whoever these guys were, they deserved to be hammered for killing everyone on the Sea Dog. All those years in the Navy had taught him there was only one way to handle the death of your brothers, and that was keep a lid on it until the distraction couldn’t make you just as dead.

“Forward SSM battery,” said Captain Danvers. “Confirm target coordinates lock.”

“Target locked.”

“You may fire, gentlemen.”

Everyone on the bridge, including Dex, had turned to look through the glass at the forward missile battery as it rotated slowly into optimum position. There was a loud whoosh! as two SeaHawk surface-to-surface missiles leapt in tandem into the cold gray sky. For an instant, they seemed to hang as if suspended by unseen wires before the thrust of their rockets reached full throttle and they disappeared in a burst of eyeblinking speed.

“Birds away. ETA three minutes four seconds.”

Despite his experience with weaponry and how quickly it evolved and changed, Dex was still knocked out by the SeaHawks’ capabilities. Homing in on the target at four times the speed of sound, the two missiles would chew up the hundred-plus miles so fast, the enemy would never see it coming. And even if they did, they wouldn’t have the time or technology to do anything about it — except explode.

Which is exactly what they did.

“Impact,” said the ensign as Dex watched the digitized target on one of the LCDs blink red several times before vanishing from the screen. The Isabel Marie was gone.

The usual round of cheering filled the bridge, and Dex knew what would be next. Time was running out for him, especially since Whitehurst had taken no notice of him whatsoever.

The loudspeaker interrupted his thoughts. “Seal Unit ready for launch in five.”

Whitehurst smiled as he heard the update, then spoke into his mic. “Get in there and get them, gentlemen.”

That was his last chance, thought Dex. Now or not at all.

Moving away from the bulkhead, advancing to the group of men by the array of command consoles, Dex moved to face Admiral Parker Whitehurst.

“Sir.” Dex tried to look resolute and somehow nonchalant. “I need a favor.”

Chapter Fifty

He had no idea how long he stood, watching the soldier and the scientist. The two men had been down on all fours, kneeling, half-sinking into the muck, peeling away layers of grit and glacial mud like mini geologic strata.

The silence held them like a vacuum chamber, pierced only by an occasional whisper of caution or instruction. Erich slipped into a brief flash of memory when Manny and Kress had originally placed this demon device on this spot. How quickly and with such cavalier confidence they had worked. Of course, back then, none of them could have ever imagined the power of such utter destruction which slept beneath their fingers.

Sinclair touched Erich’s elbow, and he ignored it.

He almost felt giddy, as if he might start laughing — at something not at all funny, which increased his feeling of inappropriate levity.

He was actually standing here one more time. In a place he’d vowed he’d never see again. In a place he had found so… so disturbing, and believed it best to destroy it. And not surprisingly, he still felt exactly the same way.

The oppressive weight of the giant cavern, its ruins, and the air itself began to press down on him. He blinked his eyes, and there he stood. Right behind Hawthorne as he unearthed the final strands of wire and the remains of Kress’s impromptu detonator-timer — which had sat there in total refusal to do its job for seventy years.

“There it is,” said the nuclear tech. “That little bastard.”

Hawthorne swallowed hard, wiped beads of sweat from his forehead, then produced a railroad kerchief which he used to clean the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses.

Sinclair exhaled very slowly, softly. In a low voice, he continued. “Okay, we got the last piece. How’s it work?”

The apparatus was standard equipment in all U-boats to ensure an event catastrophic enough to send a submarine to the bottom. Admiral Doenitz had proclaimed it far better to destroy an entire submarine then allow the Allies a chance to get their hands on the Enigma Device — the heartspring of the German code.

Other than the sandy grit, everything looked unscathed by time, as free of corrosion as the day it had been placed in position. Slowly, Erich pointed out each component, explaining all to the best of his memory. When he finished, he exhaled slowly.

“Is that timer mechanical,” said Hawthorne. “Spring-driven?”

“Yes, I think so,” said Erich. “I would say yes.”

Entwhistle leaned close. “Still looks pretty good, like it could still work.”

“Stainless steel,” said Erich. “Nothing was spared on something so important. Only the best materials.”

Hawthorne leaned closer, squinted. “So we’d better be thinking it’s still able to function.”

“Yes,” said Erich. “But, remember — it did not work as my engineer had planned it.”

Hawthorne nodded. “Well, I’d sure like to know why… before I started messing with it, don’t you think?”

Nobody answered him for a moment, then Entwhistle cleared his throat before speaking. “Does that mean you think this piece of flapdoodle could pop off?”

“Original configuration looks intact. If the timer had worked, it would definitely have ignited the dynamite.”

“Is that enough?” said Sinclair. “For the actual detonation of the nuke?”

Hawthorne shook his head slowly, licked his lips. “It looks elegantly simple and direct. The concussion and heat from the explosive round… well, that fires the plate-piercing shell into the nose of bomb, which compresses the fissionable material. The result is an atomic reaction.”

“Sounds like a lot of things have to go right,” said Sinclair “Are you sure about that?”

“The only reason it didn’t happen is the timer — it never worked.” Hawthorne looked pensive, tilted his head a bit as he shrugged. “The problem is that timer. Everything else had a built-in inevitability to it. Once the chain of events kicks in, there’s no stopping it. In fact, it’s essentially instantaneous.”

“So what went wrong with the timer?” said Sinclair.

“Good question,” said the scientist. “It could be as simple as a piece of dirt or other foreign material stuck in the spring’s trigger. If that’s the case, even the slightest movement could fire it.”

One of the crewman shook his head. “If it was that delicate, the ballgame would be over by now. We already moved it some — just by digging it out.”

“Was there any gross movement when the dinghy sank into the sand?” Sinclair looked at the technician.

“Not necessarily,” he said. “I think this change in state was very, very gradual. The rot and the water and the shifting sand. All so slow as to be imperceptible.”

“So where do we bloody stand?” said Entwhistle.

Hawthorne paused to consider this question. The moment of silence was ominous, overwhelming. As they all huddled around the device, enclosed by the immense underground cavern, Erich could feel a heavy pallor descending over them.

“The basic problem,” said the technician, “is actually twofold — we don’t know why the timer didn’t activate the detonator, and we don’t know if any of the components have degraded enough to be non-volatile.”

“What happens if we just extract or cut the wires to detonator cap?” said Sinclair.

Hawthorne looked at Erich. “What about that, Captain?”

“The timer-cap assembly had a dead-man circuit,” he said quietly.

Entwhistle cursed.

“Is that as bad as I think it is?” said Sinclair.

Hawthorne hesitated. “I’m not sure. I don’t really know much about demolition.”

“We covered the basics in DSR,” said Sinclair. “If it’s like the classic rig, once everything is connected you can’t disconnect it. Cutting a wire or breaking the circuit by pulling it free — that’d be the same as pushing the red button. Right, Captain?”

Erich nodded. “That is correct. If by chance, the enemy could get aboard a U-boat before the charges went off, they still could not stop the scuttle operation.”

“We can’t risk this,” said Hawthorne. “We need something more sophisticated than what we have with us. Liquid nitrogen would do the trick — super-freeze everything. It would be neutralized.”

No one spoke for a moment, and Erich suppressed a smile. They were in quite a fix and they knew it.

“So what in faggoty hell does this mean?” said Entwhistle. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling altogether cheery about this.”

“Maybe we should take a vote,” said Tommy.

Erich looked at him and grinned. Up until now, he’d been keeping silent and watchful, as if waiting for a chance to make a move.

“A vote.” Sinclair looked amused.

Tommy continued. “Because if I get one — I’m for stoppin’ right now, and gettin’ out of Dodge.”

“You don’t get a vote. So I’d advise you to—” Sinclair paused. He touched his headset, seating it more firmly in his ear as he received a sudden transmission.

Watching him closely, Erich strained to catch the message, but could not. However, Sinclair could not mask his reaction to what he was hearing. Whatever it was, it was not good.

“Stand by,” said Sinclair into the mic. Then to Entwhistle: “That was Tanner. He’s lost contact with the Isabel Marie.”

Entwhistle looked abruptly concerned. “He give you a reason?”

“He thinks they took a missile.”

Entwhistle grinned beneath his red mustache. “Your old Navy chaps showing some stones, are they?”

“So it seems.” Sinclair’s expression a mixture of anger and uncertainty.

Tommy chuckled softly. “Looks like it’s a new ballgame, dude.”

Entwhistle wheeled around, bringing up his right hand in a blur, to impact with Tommy’s jaw. Erich was stunned by the savage suddenness of the attack. That Tommy had kept his feet, much less his consciousness, was a testament to the kid’s toughness.

“I hate that word—‘dude’,” said Entwhistle. Then he turned back to Sinclair. “Now, back to business. Our next move?”

Sinclair tried to affect a bored expression. “Without the support vessel, we’re on our own. The Navy probably has a hunter/killer on the way. And you can bet we’ll have some SEALS in here a lot sooner than that.”

“You have any ideas?” Entwhistle said.

Hawthorne had turned, looked up with great dread in his eyes. “Are we in trouble?” he said lamely.

Ignoring them, Sinclair touched his headset mic, activated it. “Tanner, send a signal to that Navy boat. Tell them we know their intentions. Tell them to back off… or we detonate.”

Bruckner saw everyone’s eyes widen ever so slightly. All these kill-hardened men. All of them thinking the unthinkable. None of them particularly ready to die.

“What?” said Hawthorne. Sweat ran down his forehead into his eyes. He yanked off his glasses, tried to clear them. “I… didn’t sign on for this! I… I can’t even be sure it would work. It… it won’t work!”

Sinclair removed his sidearm, raised it slowly to the technician’s head. “You didn’t ‘sign on’ for this either.”

The man whimpered, closed his eyes.

“Do what you’re told, or it’s over for you.” Sinclair lowered the weapon, but did not holster it. “No matter what.”

“All right. All right. I will. Please. I will.” Hawthorne spoke softly as if reciting a prayer. He made an effort to control his trembling, replaced his horn-rimmed glasses and got to his feet slowly. Then he stood in silence, like a soldier awaiting his next orders.

“What’s the play?” said Entwhistle.

Sinclair continued his effort to look bored. “If they respond at all, that means they’re willing to talk about it. We should know their minds pretty soon now.”

No one spoke as they all waited for a reply that might never come.

Chapter Fifty-One

Whitehurst was looking at him like he was sixteen and had just asked for the keys to family sedan. The Admiral walked him off to the glass, where both stared straight ahead at the angry ocean. Dex listened as his old C.O. stood straight and unmoving, assuming a commanding posture. “Chief, what you’re asking me is way out of bounds, you know that.”

Dex spoke softly. “Isn’t this whole operation ‘out of bounds’?”

The Admiral ran a hand through his short, graying hair, exhaled slowly. “I could lose my rank for something like that. They’re called civilians for a reason.”

Dex cast about for the right response when the bridge communications officer interjected. “Excuse me, sir, I’ve got a message from the enemy.”

“They have this channel?” said Danvers with obvious surprise.

“They’re not amateurs,” said Harry Olmstead. “Trust me on that one.”

“Patch them in,” said Whitehurst.

As intrigued as Dex might be regarding the latest wrinkle, he wasn’t happy to have his argument stalled. But he listened with everyone else on the command deck as the bad guys made their ultimate threat, realized that everything had changed.

Whitehurst let the message settle in, then he looked at Olmstead. “You think that device is still hot?”

The CTG Director didn’t hesitate. “Not having seen it, I have no idea. But you remember what Dr. Schaller said — given the German reputation for making things right, it’s a good bet it’s live.”

Whitehurst nodded. “The real question is whether they’re serious or not.”

“It also answers a big concern,” said Dex. He didn’t want to infuse himself into the discussion, but he couldn’t help himself. Before anyone could stop him, he pushed on. “They wouldn’t even make that threat if they knew they had back-up on the way.”

“He’s right,” said Olmstead. “We can pretty much rule out any enemy subs coming to the rescue.”

“It also makes sense strategically in terms of the base,” said Whitehurst. “If the bad guys can’t control it, then nobody will.”

Olmstead was nonplussed. “This is a no-brainer. We tell them we’re backing off, and we go in anyway. We have the SEALS. They don’t.”

“Okay,” said Whitehurst. “What happens if they follow up — as soon as they see us coming?”

Harry Olmstead shrugged. “We gambled and lost. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Dex faced the Admiral. “But you’ve got civilians involved. Weren’t we just talking about that subject?”

“I think you can pretty much write them off as bargaining chips, Mr. McCauley.” Olmstead smirked as if he found something amusingly simplistic in Dex’s question. “If the enemy is willing to blow itself up, they have no problem taking the hostages along with them.”

Whitehurst appeared distracted with his own thoughts. He looked at Dex with growing irritation. “We’ve got some decisions to make. Get to the point, Chief.”

Dex hesitated but just for an instant. “Given the latest twist, I’m thinking you’ve got a volunteer situation.”

Olmstead chuckled. “Not with SEALS we don’t. This is the kind of stuff they live for.”

“I was thinking of the MIT guy,” said Dex. “And… me. If he doesn’t want to go, I’ll take his place.”

Olmstead was ready to speak, but Whitehurst held up his hand. “We’ll need to talk to Dr. Schaller about the latest developments. Is he already aboard the Dragonfish?”

“Yessir,” said Danvers, who’d been listening in with professional deference. “They’re waiting for the go.”

“Don’t let them off the pad till I talk to him,” said Whitehurst. “Patch me through.”

Olmstead held up an index finger, touched his nose thoughtfully. “Does that mean we’re in agreement, Parker?”

Whitehurst paused as he adjusted the headset mic to the front of his face. “You bet your ass it does.”

Chapter Fifty-Two

He stood alongside the nuclear technician who most likely wished he was just about anywhere else on earth. Just slightly behind him were Tommy and one of the crewman as his constant guard. The other two underlings were still on their knees in the muck surrounding both sides of the bomb and the recently-excavated timer. Hawthorne had suggested they be in position to steady it — in case some unexpected movement jostled it.

Facing the device almost head-on stood Sinclair and the red-haired Entwhistle, who looked grimly anxious. Everyone had been silent as though attending a solemn ceremony, waiting for a response to their ultimatum.

When it came, Sinclair could not disguise his relief.

Everyone started moving again, in small jittery ways. Tension-reducing things like clenching and unclenching fists, shifting weight from one foot to the other.

Everyone but Erich. He remained rigid and alert.

“Do you believe them?” said Entwhistle.

“It doesn’t matter.” Sinclair holstered his weapon. “We’re leaving.”

“What?” said Hawthorne.

“Why not? We’re at a stalemate, here. We’ll tell them we’ll exchange these two for our escape, and we run to fight another day.”

“I think I see where you’re treading with this one,” said Entwhistle. “Let the bleedin’ Yanks deal with this mess. If they blow themselves to hell and back, it’s not our problem.”

Sinclair nodded. “But if they don’t, we’ll just steal the technology later.”

“After they do all the heavy lifting.” Entwhistle chuckled. “Righty-O. It’s not like we haven’t done it that way before.”

“We were seduced by the chance to take the easy road. The Guild rarely works that way.”

“It was worth the shot,” said one of the crewman. “Right?”

Sinclair shrugged. “When you realize we revealed more of our profile than normal… probably not. But it’s too late to worry about it now.”

Entwhistle smiled, straightened his mustache. “I like you’re thinking, mate.”

Sinclair wasn’t listening. He’d activated his mic and instructed the man on the submersible to inform the Americans of the change of plans.

As he spoke, Erich considered the situation with a cool head. For the first time in uncountable years, he found himself in what they called at the academy a “command situation”—a pivotal moment when a specific decision must be made.

As Sinclair spoke and everyone else listened, he felt himself pulling away and out of the scene. As if he were viewing it from a distance in some global, all-encompassing fashion. He felt like an interloper, eavesdropping on his own thoughts, a dispassionate Nietzschian observer.

And that was perhaps the strangest part of the entire metaphysical equation — Erich himself did not actually know until this same moment.

The knowledge of what must be done.

What he must do.

The notion and the intent had been circling his thoughts like predatory birds, or more appropriately, like carrion eaters, waiting to feast on the remains of his torment. But up until this moment he had forced himself to look away. To pretend it wasn’t there. The solution that had been as obvious as it was solitary from the very beginning.

How could the others not feel the terror of this place? Locked in the ice like something out of distant myth, it had waited patiently for them, but Erich realized he was the only one who truly comprehended its unspoken message of doom.

He knew he would never return to this place. But more importantly… he would never leave it.

Chapter Fifty-Three

After Dr. Schaller respectfully declined to be part of the assault mission, volunteering instead to be part of the “second wave” that could go in and neutralize the nuclear device with a higher degree of safety, the parameters of the mission changed yet again.

And that’s how he’d ended up on the Dragonfish.

While Drabek’s team worked out the logistics of the entry under Greenland Shelf, and had locked in the coordinates where Tommy and old Bruckner would be waiting for them, Dex had finally won over Parker Whitehurst.

It was just going to be a taxi run — like a hack picking up a fare.

As Dex settled into the sleek submersible, he could see how much things had changed in just the few years since he’d retired. The Dragonfish was like something from a science fiction film, only it was real. The technology was such that it would keep getting better and keep getting obsolesced faster than it took to build the newest toys, that’s what Kevin Cheever had always told him. But Dex had never really believed him until he’d taken a jumpseat in the latest Deep Sea Assault and Rescue vessel.

Kevin Cheever.

Having recalled his friend and dive mate, Dex finally let a breaker of pain and culpability curl over him. In the weird, twisted logic of true guilt, Dex knew there would always be a part of him believing he’d been the sole reason Kevin and the rest of the Deep Six (that dumb name they’d all insisted on) had been killed.

Sure, it was a stretch, and it wasn’t much different from the professional responsibility he’d accepted for all the Navy boys he’d failed to rescue or had sent into a harm’s way that had turned out to be fatal. It wasn’t any kind of crushing weight that would prevent him from surviving or functioning in the future, but it was like a chronic ache that would never go away.

And honestly, Dex was okay with that. He’d feel worse about himself if he’d ever been able to seal it off like Fortunato in the wine cellar and never think of it again. No, it was better to think about it. Live with it like all the other things that create a life.

“Approaching the access point,” said the Dragonfish pilot, a kid who looked too young to be in the Navy. Dex had noticed the name Voelker on his nameplate.

“We copy.” That was the Cape Cod. “Maintain heading and confirm sonar contact.”

“ETA ten minutes,” said Voelker. “Sonar is a negative.”

“You have a window for contact. Advise when confirmed.”

Supposedly, the bad guys had placed a warning buoy at the end of the underwater tunnel into Station One Eleven. A marker signaling the entrance to what Bruckner had described as a vast cavern and lake. Dex knew the buoy was more than a beacon. It was symbol of the honor of the deal. And as far as Dex understood it, if Tommy and Bruckner were picked up safely, the bad guys got their Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card from the top of the deck.

A soft ping emanated from the pilot’s console. Once. Then a series of repeats. A pattern.

“Contact,” said Voelker.

“Steady as she goes.”

Then just as suddenly as they’d begun, the signals from the marker buoy stopped.

“Hey,” said Voelker. “What the—?”

Chapter Fifty-Four

He would never leave it.

In that instant of realization, Erich felt a release, a benediction of such cleansing strength, he felt invulnerable.

As he stood next to Hawthorne, he turned and spoke vaguely in Sinclair’s direction. “I… I feel… funny,” he said. “Something is—”

“What’s the matter?” said the technician, who reached out to steady Erich. It was a helpful, human gesture, and Erich felt a brief pang of guilt for the deception.

Pretending to lean into Hawthorne for support, Erich used him as a base, a pillar, and finally, a launching point. With all the power and feeble energy he could summon, he pushed off propelling himself forward.

Forward, at the Rube Goldbergian structure of the Project Norway device and the detonation mechanisms of Herr Kress.

Everyone moved.

Lunging for him. Hands reached out from both sides — Hawthorne and one of the crew — and even though their talon-like fingers caught the hood and shoulder of his parka, he twisted and stretched as he fell.

“Get him!” yelled Sinclair.

Erich felt his body stretching, laid out almost horizontally, as if he were trying to fly toward the bomb. And it was in that instant that he realized how old he actually was. Despite his mind being sharp and clear and as agile as it had been so many years ago, and despite the curious refusal of his body to age at a normal rate, he had still become weaker than he wanted to admit.

And therefore, what he intended and imagined as a forceful, lunging attack was nothing more than an attempt at a rapid movement in mocking painful slow-motion.

But in spite of this, he had instilled a great instantaneous panic in all of them around him, and they didn’t dismiss his age or his lack of mass or power. They converged on him and physically detained him, freezing his progress and yanking him backward from the device.

He had failed.

And everyone seemed to expel their pent-up, fear-choked breaths at once.

All but one.

In that brief interlude of collective relief as the men relaxed, knowing they had stopped him, and were transporting him back and away from his target, Erich saw rapid movement at the periphery of his vision.

So quick. Almost a blur. Like a torpedo at launch, the shape burst past him and the bodies who held him.

Tommy.

And in that instant of belated realization, he was beyond them, flying through the air like a linebacker making a tackle. One of the crewman rose up to meet him, to collide, to stop him.

And he did, but not before Tommy reached out with a final surge of power and will, his thick, gnarled fingers barely touching the wires.

The wires that connected the frozen timer with the detonator cap embedded in the waterproof pack of explosives.

The wires running through the dead man’s switch.

Turning, Erich saw the red wire slip free, and—

— flash

— white

— nothingness