“Dan, you think that because we’ve shared an intense period of excitement, where we found ourselves physically attracted, and then intrigued by the strangeness that sits just under our similarities. We’re sexually compatible. I suspect we’re emotionally and intellectually well matched, too. And before your face gets any longer, it’s a two-way street, I think I’m falling in love with you, too.”

They nearly missed the ride back to Pearl.

Chapter 38

38

HMAS HAVOC, 2003 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

The control room of the Havoc was unnaturally quiet as the navigator, Lieutenant Malcolm Knox, manipulated a dozen icons on the meter-wide touch screen at his workstation. Without GPS satellites, the task of position fixing was much more difficult. The sub’s inertial navigation processors could place them with reasonable accuracy about three hundred nautical miles south of the Japanese home island of Shikoku, but Captain Willet wasn’t a reasonable woman. She’d often said that without GPS coverage the modern military couldn’t find its own arse with both hands in a small, well-lit room. The joke had come back to bite her.

“How’s that fix coming?” she asked the navigator.

“Just scanning for the last beacon, ma’am.”

They’d placed three position transmitters on the way over, on small rocky islets for which they knew the exact holomap reference points. Willet practiced a breathing exercise while she waited for the Havoc’s quantum arrays to calibrate and align the incoming signals. She watched a small blue bar crawl across a window in the navigator’s flatscreen. When the bar was filled, a series of faint chimes sounded and Knox gave her the thumbs-up.

“We have a firm position fix, ma’am. CI is plotting firing solutions for the drone launch.”

“Thank you, Mr. Knox. Weapons?”

“VLS Three is armed, Captain. Boards green. And we have the solution.”

A soft, familiar tone sounded once as the submarine’s Combat Intelligence downloaded flight data to a Tenix Defense Industries surveillance mace.

“Take her down to one hundred meters and launch,” Willet ordered.

The voice of the CI, a factory default mid-Pacific accent, warned the crew to prepare for a dive. The conning tower was sealed. Nobody had gone topside when they surfaced, so there were no hatches to shut. Procedure had to be followed, however, and the officer of the watch cycled through all the CCTV cams, calling each one clear as he checked for personnel who couldn’t possibly be on deck.

Captain Willet felt the nonslip flooring tilt beneath her feet and reached for a grab bar with practiced grace. Strapped into their chairs, the Combat Center sysops continued to work at their stations, leaning against the angle of the sub’s descent.

“One hundred meters, ma’am.”

“Launch the Big Eye,” said Willet.

“VLS Three launching, Captain, in five, four, three, two, one, launch.”