“Chairman, we’ve got a Russian sub parked about four and a half miles off our starboard beam. She just opened two torpedo tubes.”

“Get out of there,” Juan ordered.

“Shot fired!” Mark yelled. “Torpedo in the water.”

It would take a few seconds to accurately calculate the torpedo’s course, but all the men listening knew instinctively that the torpedo was on a course toward the Oregon. The only real question was whether she was the target or they were gunning for the derelict ship she was hovering over.

Max wasn’t the strategist Juan was. He was a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy who left planning to others, so he took his cue off Cabrillo’s last order. “Helm, flank speed.”

The inertia of eighteen thousand tons of steel idling on the ocean’s surface was a massive force unto itself, but it was no match for the magnetohydrodynamic engines. The cryopumps spun up and went infrasonic as they pumped liquid nitrogen around the magnets that stripped free electrons from the water forced through the drive tubes. A creaming explosion of froth erupted at the Oregon’s fantail, and within ten seconds of Max’s command the big former freighter was moving.

That they were under way also meant that within seconds they would be beyond their radio’s limited range to communicate with the divers or Eddie in the submersible.

“Max, just before you gave the order I heard a second torpedo launch,” Mark told him. With the ship under way, the passive sensors were deaf to everything except the noises the Oregon herself produced, the shriek of her engines and the building hiss of water against her hull.

“Juan, did you catch that?”

“A second torpedo.” Cabrillo didn’t hesitate before issuing his orders. The underwater radios weren’t encrypted, so the Russian captain knew there were people on the wreck. What he’d done was cold premeditated murder. “Sink ’em.”

There were only about seven minutes until impact. The Oregon would be safely outside the torpedoes’ sonar range, but the wreck was a sitting duck.

“You got it. Mark, let’s tell this guy he picked the wrong dance partner. Hit him with the active sonar, maximum gain, and keep hitting him until I tell you to stop.”

Murph gave a wicked grin and fired off sonar pings. The returns showed the Akula hadn’t yet started to make her escape.

“She’s still sitting there, and her torpedoes are staying deep.”

“Waiting around to see her fish hit the wreck. Bad mistake, my friend,” Max said. “You should have hightailed it the moment you fired. ’Course, you couldn’t know that we were listening or know that we can track you.”

Eric Stone rushed into the op center and took the helm seat next to Murph. With the exception of the Chairman himself, young Mr. Stone was the best helmsman aboard and could thread the Oregon through the eye of a needle if necessary.