Hostile Contact. Gordon Kent

rolled over and sank. Clearly the American boats could do the same. His antiquated attack boat had just fallen even farther behind, because the ability to run fast without cavitation, the designers’ dream since the 1960s, placed the new American boomer in the fourth generation.

      He timed out the channel’s length on his own watch. The second he was sure he had depth under his keel, his voice rang out.

      “Make our depth 300. Turn to port heading 270. Make our speed two knots.”

      Turning gradually broadside to the expected vector of the target, exposing the length of the towed array to get the maximum signal, diving to avoid an unexpected ambush.

      Time gurgled by down the hull.

      “All stop.”

      Nothing.

      “Sonar?”

      “No contact.”

      The captain was a thorough professional and he didn’t quit. He searched in ever-increasing spirals for twelve hours, sprinting and drifting, risking detection and flirting with disaster if the American sub was lurking in the deep water just north of the channel. But he took such risks only because he already knew the answer: his opponent had raced down the channel and into the deep water and had vanished to the north.

      Sleepless, grimy, sweat-stained, he rose from his command chair and addressed the bridge crew.

      “This is not a total loss, comrades. We have unprecedented sonograms on the American; we know that he was headed north. We know more about their patrol routes and procedures than any boat in Chinese history. And they have no idea that we’re here.”

      “Do we go north, then, Captain?” asked his first officer.

      “No. No, we return to our patrol area, study our sonograms, and wait.”

      Until Jewel gives us the next one, he thought. But Jewel was too precious, and he couldn’t say that to the crew.

      The submarine set a course for the waters off Seattle.

      

      Suburban Virginia.

      The gleaming new S-3 sagged a little, turning on final for the carrier; his break had been weak, and he knew that no self-respecting LSO would give him an okay on any part of this trap so far. Now he was in the groove but chasing his lineup like a nugget, all of his motor coordination sluggish and unresponsive, like a bad hydraulics system in an old airplane. His brain knew where his hands should go, but his injured hand lagged and the signals seemed to move too slowly, too jerkily, and the plane, like a horse that knows that the hand at the reins is weak, seemed to fight him.

      He eyeballed the lineup, called the ball in his head, and tried to recapture the flawless rhythm that he had once had at this game. One mile, six hundred feet, one hundred and forty knots. He knew the numbers, but the response seemed to lag and he wanted to blame the equipment, wanted to suddenly press a button and have all of those reaction times and skills come flooding back, and then he jerked physically to realize that he was there, the deck was THERE.

      His angle of attack was too steep, tending to sag at the very end and fighting his near-stall speed for altitude; the plane had nothing to give him; his correction was too late, and the immovable laws of physics and mathematics grabbed his plane and flung it into the back of the ship, just a few feet above the neat, white lettering that said “USS Thomas Jefferson.” A brilliant orange-and-white explosion obliterated his control screen—

      —and he picked up the joystick in his good, strong right hand and smashed it through the wallboard of the living room, screaming his frustration at the top of his lungs.

      “Fuck! FUUUCK! Jesus FUCKING Christ!” He was roaring with anger, sweat and failure dripping from him, and the shards of a piece of expensive computer equipment broken by his own stupid rage prodded him to a sicker, meaner level, as he thought of what he had become with one wound—two fingers shot off his left hand in Pakistan and he was half what he had been. Less than half.

      There was a small irregular hole in their rented livingroom wall. “Fucking stupid JERK!” he shouted. His face left no doubt whom he meant. He threw the shattered remnants of the joystick across the room, where they left a nick in the paint on the wall under the stairs. He clenched his hands, savoring the awful feeling of the missing fingers. A noise distracted him.

      Crying.

      His son was standing on the stairs, terrified by a side of his father he had never seen, never should have seen.

      “Oh, my God, Mikey!” Alan said, his voice bruised from shouting.

      Mikey stood, whimpering, looking afraid. Afraid of his father, the hero. Alan took a step toward the stairs and Mikey bolted for his room, and the front door opened, and there was Rose, beautiful and healthy in her flight suit, the poster child for women in naval aviation. She stopped as soon as the door opened; he could see in a heartbeat that she saw it all, knew it all.

      He threw himself into an armchair he didn’t like, facing a television he hated. He hated the room and he hated the house. It might have been better if it had been his own house, but this was merely a place they had found in the hectic last days of the Shreed business, when Rose had been temporarily attached to the Chief of Naval Operations, and then he had got hurt. The house was too small and too mean, but it was what she could find in one day. And he hated it.

      Now, she came into the room, trying, he knew, to mute her own joy at feeling good about herself and her life, going down to Pax River to fly every day, preparing to get her heart’s desire by going to Houston.

      She kissed him lightly on the top of the head and went into the kitchen, and seconds later she was back.

      “You know—” and she kept her voice light, “—you could have done something about dinner.”

      “Because I don’t do anything but sit here on my ass all day? Right!” He shot up and headed for the kitchen. Upstairs, the baby started to cry. “And shut that kid up!” he shouted.

      It was as if he hated her, too. As if hurting her, the thing he valued most in the world, was the only way to express his rage. She wouldn’t have it, however; she had a ferocious temper of her own, and she could be sweet Rose, forgiving Rose, good-wife Rose for only so long. Grabbing his arm from behind, she spun him halfway around and shouted, just as loudly as he had, “That’s your kid up there! If you don’t like him or me or us, get the hell out!”

      “I might do just that!”

      “Well, do it! We’re all sick of tiptoeing around so you can feel sorry for yourself and stare at your wounded hand and think how bad the Navy’s treated you. Get a grip or get out!”

      And he raised his hand.

      

      Washington.

      Mike Dukas came out of his shower, his heavy, hairy body pink except for the livid red scars along his collarbone. Seeing it in the bathroom mirror, he made a face—the first bullet he had ever taken, and it had been a doozy. He still couldn’t lift his hands above his shoulders, and drying himself made him wince, and when he went out into the world he still had to wear a plastic harness that held his hands up in front of him so that he looked like the Easter bunny.

      “Fucking George Shreed,” he muttered.

      George Shreed dominated his life now: he had taken the bullet capturing Shreed, and now he was paying for it in the paperwork that waited at his office—reports and explanations and assessments. “The thanks of a grateful nation,” he said aloud and thought, Well, at least I don’t feel as bad as Al Craik. Craik, he knew, was in a deep depression.

      He needed a change, Dukas thought. God knows, he needed something.

      Time was, he would have thought he needed to fall in love. He fell in love easily, hard, usually badly. This time, however, he didn’t have the urge, as if scraping death’s fender had warned him off the risk. Even now, there was a call on his