The tanker seemed impossibly long, her bows like a horizon that never grew closer. The heat radiating from the deck made his pores run with sweat and each time his left foot slapped the ground he could feel the blisters popping. He ignored it all and sprinted on.

“Two minutes,” Max said over the radio when Cabrillo finally reached the string of Hypertherm bisecting the ship.

When Singer had yanked the battery from the detonator, he had torn the wires that carried the electricity to set off the charge. Juan had to first disconnect the detonator from between two lengths of the explosives so he didn’t accidentally complete the circuit. Using the pocketknife Eddie had recovered at the Devil’s Oasis, he had to peel back the plastic insulation to expose the copper before he could twist the wires back together. There were three of them and it took twenty seconds each.

A status light embedded in the detonator turned green. He had a complete circuit.

“One minute, Juan.”

He clipped a length of Hypertherm to one side of the detonator and was moving to the second when he heard over the radio. “Chairman, it’s Murph. Torpedoes are a hundred and fifty yards out.”

“Keep them coming. I’ve almost got it. There!”

The string was complete. He turned and started running aft, hampered by the stinging pain radiating from his charred foot. He was now in a race against two torpedoes homing in on the ship at forty knots. He’d covered a hundred feet when Murph reported the torpedoes were a hundred yards away. He accelerated through the agony, not caring that he was crying out with every step.

“Fifty yards, Chairman,” Mark said as if it were his fault.

Juan let it go for another few seconds, gaining a couple more feet before pressing the remote.

In a blazing arc that rivaled the sun, the Hypertherm ignited, its magnesium core spiking to two thousand degrees. The burn raced from the center of the ship like lightning, making the steel deck as soft as wax and then heating it further so it dripped into the hold like water. The bow was wreathed in a noxious cloud of smoke and scorched metal. The light it gave off filled the sky, turning the cheerless gray into brilliant white. The explosive cut completely across the deck and then continued on, slicing open the hull down to the waterline in a blink of an eye.

Juan could feel the intense thermal shock on his back from three hundred feet away and had it not been for the rain he probably would have lost the hair on his head.

As quickly as it had ignited and burned through the ship, the Hypertherm exhausted itself, leaving in its passing a long narrow gash with edges that glowed with residual heat.