“We’re within the torpedoes’ range and waiting for your signal.”

“Okay.”

What Juan thought was an eruption of spray blasting over the front of the ship turned out to be a microburst of heavy rain. It slackened after a few seconds but didn’t entirely abate. They had been running under two unforgiving deadlines. One was to prevent the tanker from completing its turn, and the other was to lay the explosives and be back aboard the Oregon before the rain made flying impossible. He could only hope they had better luck with the former.

Eddie started laying the explosives across the width of the ship along one of the seams where two hull sections had been welded together. Juan was busy with the detonator, testing it a couple of times with the remote control he carried in his pocket before jacking it in to the first length of Hypertherm. It took six twenty-foot segments to span the tanker’s beam. Each one contained a battery that when activated generated a magnetic field that anchored the explosives to the steel deck and prevented it from rolling with the ship.

Eddie and Juan had to work together to lower a length over each of the tanker’s sides so that some of the Hypertherm dangled in the water. Again the electromagnets clamped it to the hull along one of its welded seams. When they were finished they had a line of explosives that covered every inch of the ship above the waterline. The extra lengths they left piled on the deck.

Juan radioed George for extraction as soon as Eddie made the final connection. The rain was growing heavier, near horizontal sheets that cut visibility so the distant superstructure was as nebulous as a ghost. As Adams prepared to make the trickiest pickup of his distinguished career Cabrillo called Hanley.

“Max, the charges are laid. Go ahead and fire the torpedoes. We should be out of here by the time they arrive.”

“Roger that.” Max replied.

Back in the op center Mark Murphy opened both outer tube doors and brought up the torpedo control program on his computer. Linked through the ship’s radar and sonar systems, a three-dimensional wire frame representation of the tactical picture came up on his screen. He could clearly see the Gulf of Sidra steaming seven thousand yards from the Oregon. In the parlance of World War Two submariners, this was going to be a turkey shoot.

“Wepps, on my mark fire Tube One,” Max ordered. “Mark.”

Cocooned in a bubble of high-pressure compressed air, the twenty-one-foot torpedo shot from the tube and put nearly twenty yards between itself and its mother ship before the silver-zinc batteries engaged its electric motor. It took just a few seconds for the Test-71 to ramp up to its operational speed of forty knots.