Silent Waters

Chapter 6

Amy would have crawled into one of the cabinet drawers to give him more room, but the narrow office had the maneuvering space of a coffin. There was nowhere to go. She managed to wedge herself sideways into a corner between a floor-to-ceiling cabinet and the paneled outboard bulkhead.

McCann attacked the door like a raging bull, but there was no moving the steel barrier. He’d shouted from the top of his lungs, but no one answered from the other side. Calling the control room over the intercom had produced no response, either.

Neither of them considered for a moment that his crew was pulling a prank on them. Amy had seen a masked man with a pistol in his hand reach into the room and grab the door handle. Before pulling the door shut, she’d seen another masked man behind him. She’d immediately told the commander what she’d seen.

“I’ll have every one of your sorry asses court-martialed,” McCann bellowed into the intercom before turning to where Amy was pinned against the wall.

His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. He was over six feet tall, very wide across the shoulders. He exuded an explosive power, and his physical presence seemed to fill the small office space. His anger heightened the feeling. He appeared angry enough to break the entire submarine in two. Turning back to the intercom, he punched a button and held it down as he barked into the unit.

“Captain here. Code Red. Repeat…” He stopped, glancing at her and muttering. “The PA is down.”

Amy nodded. A phone hung on the wall, and he picked it up, listened, and slammed it back in the cradle. Whoever was responsible for this had taken down the communication system.

Her mind raced a hundred miles an hour as she tried to consider every possibility of what could be happening to them. Suddenly, in the middle of the confusion, the faces of Kaitlyn and Zack — her seven-year-old twins — came into sharp focus. Her neighbor Barbara was with them. She came over and stayed with the twins five nights a week, while Amy was working third shift. Most days, Amy got home before the two second-graders had to leave for school. Not today, though.

She’d known that she might be running late this morning, and Barbara was going to get the children ready and walk them to the bus stop. Still, what would happen when she didn’t show in the lunchroom? They knew Amy was scheduled for volunteer duty today. She’d never missed her turn before. The twins would know something was wrong. And what would happen when they took the bus home? No one would be there. Barbara had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. And Amy’s parents were not flying back from California until Wednesday. Where would the kids go if no one were there to meet them?

She shook her head as panic clawed its way into her throat. She felt chilled and feverish at the same time. Amy looked around the tight quarters before her eyes settled on Commander McCann. He was doing something on the PC.

“What do you think is happening?” Her voice sounded strained even to herself. She tried to bind a tight rope around her emotions. The last thing the sub captain needed right now was a hysterical woman on his hands.

“Someone, a group of people, are trying to take over my sub,” he said tensely, continuing to type away on the keyboard.

Amy forced herself to move away from the paneled wall. Walking on rubbery knees, she moved behind him, looking past his shoulder. He was trying to get into different networks. Every one of them seemed to be down.

“Do you mean… like a hijacking?” she asked, shivering.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

Amy didn’t want to distract him. She knew there was no one more familiar with the systems and operations of this sub than the man sitting before her.

“The network is shut down. From what I can tell UHF, HF, VLF, and ELF systems are locked down, too.”

She knew he was talking about frequency channels in the communications system.

He continued to mutter. “That’s against SUBSAFE rules and a dozen other regs.”

He stood up. Amy backed away quickly as he started opening the cabinets and drawers. He was looking for something.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked, feeling useless just watching.

“Do you have anything on you? Tools? A knife? Anything that we could use as a weapon?”

The joke around the shop had always been that if Amy ever fell in the water, she’d never surface. She tended to carry too many tools on her. If fact, the union had written formal complaints against her for carrying them. It didn’t stop her.

She patted her jacket pockets and started emptying them on the desk. A crimping tool, a pair of pliers, a wire cutter, a screwdriver that doubled as a voltage detector. She stripped off her blue coat and threw it aside, taking out a tape measure from the pocket of the vest she was wearing under it. There were also some cable straps and banding crimps. McCann wasn’t waiting for her to give him an inventory. He continued to search the drawers, pulling out anything that could be used as a sharp object or a tool and adding it to her pile.

“Do you think some of your crew is involved with this?” She realized this was the wrong question to ask the moment it left her lips.

His expression became even fiercer. The drawers opened with more vengeance. “I have no information on that right now.”

No ship’s captain would take the idea of mutiny lightly.

As she patted the back pockets of her jeans, her gaze fixed on the laptop that she’d hurriedly tucked under the desk.

She pointed to it, excitedly. “Remote access to the network. I might be able to connect to the shipyard’s system and send a message out. We could warn them what’s happening here.” The news she’d received not too long ago came back to her. “That fire…”

“What about it?”

“It was probably a decoy. They’re trying to distract everyone.”

He reached under the desk for the laptop and handed it to her. “Don’t build your hopes up about getting connected. You’re talking about a signal that has to penetrate two inches of HY-80 steel.”

“We have to try.” Amy unzipped the bag and booted the computer up. The wait felt forever. Finally, the Windows start-up icons appeared. She searched for network access.

“It shows a remote signal,” she said, turning the laptop to face him.

“It could be from our in-house router in the control room,” he said thoughtfully, “but we’ll take whatever they give us.”

He started typing, his fingers flying over the keyboard. Most of it was gibberish to her, codes, time, date. He pressed Send, and the computer started grinding. The cursor locked, nothing happening.

“Come on, damn it,” he said under his breath.

The clocked cursor stared back at them.

“We lost it. It’s not there.”

He was talking about the signal. The bars had disappeared. Amy forced down her disappointment.

He turned the laptop toward her. “Don’t give up. Keep searching for the signal.”

She squeezed by and watched him go back to search the drawers and cabinets. A box cutter’s sharp edge introduced a whole new realm of possibilities. Her attention returned to the screen. No signal.

“You were going to remove the paneling in this ceiling to get to the wiring of the navigation system in the sonar equipment room,” he said. “Is there any chance of climbing through?”

She shook her head. “No, from the stage where they do the wiring installation in the modular sections at Quonset, there’s no space. We’ve stuffed ten pounds of shit into a one-pound container… at your request. There’s no way to get through up there.”

He’d reached the last set of cabinets and methodically began to search them.

She now knew what he was planning to do. They had to work their way out of this room, since the door was locked from the outside. This was one of many restricted areas on the sub.

He pulled two pairs of scissors from a drawer before crouching down to inspect the bottom shelves.

Amy felt a faint shudder in the deck, and she knew something had gone wrong. McCann’s gaze went to the door, then to the ceiling and bulkheads.

“What’s going on?” she asked in a whisper.

He stared at her for a long moment before answering.

“We’re moving.”