Silent Waters

Chapter 30

The floor shook as another torpedo fired.

With his weapon drawn, McCann rushed forward along the passageway. No one appeared to be around. It all came down to a matter of priorities. He had to do what he could to lessen the damage they could inflict upon innocent people on the outside. Keeping Hartford intact was no longer the primary objective of his plan. As bad as a reactor leak would be if the submarine were to sink in Long Island Sound, the resulting problems would be secondary to the damage the hijackers could wreak on the population of the East Coast if they started firing the missiles.

Two of those Tomahawks in the VLS were tipped with nuclear warheads, and McCann was beginning to wonder if they didn’t need him to arm the weapons.

He now had to operate under that assumption, and his first priority was to stop them from firing anything.

At the top of the stairs to the torpedo room, McCann got down on his hands and knees, peering as far as he could into the lower level. He could see no one, but the sound of operating torpedo racks reached his ears.

Before moving, he assessed his position. At the bottom of the stairs, three sets of torpedo racks stretched forward, filling the room. On either side of the center rack, a narrow passageway led to the torpedo tubes.

As McCann slid down the stairs, he saw Rivera operating the small crane while the hijacker helping him muscled the nose of the torpedo into tube number 3. He quickly dropped behind the starboard rack and then cautiously peered up over it. Both men were wearing headsets.

McCann, keeping his head below the level of the center torpedo rack, moved silently down the aisle toward Rivera’s back. The time to let anyone surrender was past. The numbers had to be diminished. What he knew about each member of his crew was sealed and put away in the recesses of his mind. They were now the enemy.

He reached Rivera just as the hijacker shut the breech door. McCann was close enough that he heard the order from the conn through Rivera’s headset.

“Match bearings and shoot.”

The firing of the torpedo coincided with McCann shooting point blank into the back of Rivera’s head. The muscular seaman went down like a rock in the passageway. McCann stepped past him and fired again as the other man turned, his hand still on the tube’s flood drain mechanism. The second shot echoed loudly throughout the torpedo room, but the shot was true. The bullet struck the man in the chest and he went down, dead before he hit the deck.

McCann took another look at Rivera, who was lying in a spreading pool of blood. He had been a trusted crewman. A shipmate.

“Stay focused,” McCann muttered to himself.

He glanced at the VLS control panels, located in the center of the ship, between the torpedo tubes. It would take him only a moment to remove the back of the panel and rip out the internals of the firing connections.

Before moving to that task, McCann turned and fired two shots at the camera above the racks.