Stepping up to the lieutenant’s infirmary cot, he said to the bleary-eyed young officer, “Well, then, I hear you’ll be back and bothering me in engineering in no time.”

John Hunt smiled at the older petty officer, “Looks that way, sir, sorry about that. How is the port driveshaft, it hasn’t warped, has it?”

Bill Shadley shook his head. The young officer’s hair was clearly singed, his eyebrows all but gone, and here the little bastard was thinking about the job even now. But the lad’s instincts were bang on, the engineering officer had just returned from a meeting with the captain and XO. The driveshaft itself was not warped, hardened as it was to withstand attack by torpedoes and worse, but it would need to be rerun, and the sheathing rings would require a complete overhaul.

“Well, you’ll be happy to know you are going to be doubly popular with the ship. Not only did you save three sailors’ lives, but because of the need for a dry dock to repair the damage, we’re going to be spending two weeks in sunny Virginia.”

The apparently recuperating lieutenant nodded somberly. The explosion had happened as they made their way through the Anguilla Straight en route to the Panama Canal, and the nearest allied dry dock capable of taking them, as the Agent well knew, was the US Navy Yards in Norfolk, Virginia.

Chapter 23: The Setting Sun

It had been a difficult two weeks for Neal since India. He had been fighting a rising tide of guilt over the loss of his two friends. He knew his mourning had been cut short by the sheer scale of the challenge he and Madeline now faced. He felt certain that if Laurie and James were here they would tell him to move on and focus on the greater issue at hand; but such speculation was, it turned out, not very much consolation at all.

No doubt at some point in the future he would let the whole event wash over him, allow himself to wallow, to grieve, to crawl into a corner somewhere and sob like a part of him keened to. But he had to fear that instinct, had to set it aside, and categorize it as the base, cowardly urge to flee he was afraid it truly was. No, before he could process the death of his two friends, he had to force himself to face the crisis at hand. He had to find out how deep the situation ran. There were so many questions to be answered; he knew he would have to leave grieving, or running away, for another time.

With that rationalization giving him a form of license to harden himself against the events in Kodikkarai, he had started to form a plan. Working with Madeline both before and after James’ funeral in Florida, they were now finally gearing up for his next step.