“Well, yes,” the captain answered. “There are electrical and other conduits that run through the hull. He could disable the sub.”

“Then I think we should disable him,” Austin said.

He asked the captain to have his men keep watch over the guards who had been neutralized, then plucked a flashlight off the bulkhead wall, turned the compartment lights off, and slowly opened the door. He stepped into the next compartment, flicked the flashlight on, and played the beam over the open elevator shaft. The elevator cables were thrumming inside the shaft. The elevator car then clanged softly to a halt at the top.

Austin went over and pressed the elevator’s DOWN button. He and Zavala stood to either side of the doors with their weapons ready, but when the elevator car returned it was empty. Zavala took a fire extinguisher from the wall and stuck it between the doors to keep the car in place.

After a quick conference, Zavala climbed the stairs to the catwalk to drive the guard toward Austin, who then would cut him off at the other end of the hold. Austin had spent a lot of time at the shooting range using both hands and was confident that he could get off a reasonably accurate left-handed shot if he had to.

The vast interior hold, which had once housed missile silos and twenty city busters, took up almost a third of the sub’s length. When the silos were removed, large loading-dock doors had been installed in the deck overhead and partitions installed to separate one cargo from another in their own bays.

Austin stepped into the first bay and found a light switch. Floodlights hanging from the catwalk turned night into day. He made his way along a corridor between the metal containers until he came to a partition. He stepped through an opening into the next bay and repeated his search.

As Austin made his way through the hold bay by bay, Zavala kept pace along the catwalk. Austin had crossed the hold without incident until he came to the last bay. Haste made him careless.

Austin assumed that the guard was still ahead of him, caught in the pincers of their maneuver. But the prey had figured out the intention of the maneuver and had hidden in a narrow space between container stacks. He waited for Austin to pass and then silently emerged behind him. Moving quietly on bare feet, the guard lifted his gun with both hands and carefully took aim between Austin’s shoulder blades.

“Kurt!”

The shout came from Zavala, who was peering over the rail of the catwalk. Austin glanced up and saw his friend’s pointing finger. Without a backward glance, he ducked around a big metal container as a bullet twanged off its corner. Then another gunshot rang out, this one from above. A moment later, Zavala called down.

“You can come out, Kurt, I think I got him.”