“Matter of opinion, Cawdor. I am the senior officer here, and I will decree when we disembark.”
“I might have something to add to that,” Ryan said. “We still headed for the commune?”
“We are. You think you are going to stop us?”
“No, I just wanted to make sure I packed the right clothes.”
“I harbored all sorts of grandiose plans for the maiden voyage of the Raleigh, Cawdor. Once she was one hundred percent ready, there were continents to visit, feats to duplicate, lands to conquer. Now here we are, barely off the Georgia shore, and already we need to turn back.”
“Fine by me,” Ryan said.
“Well, we can’t. Our mission, minus one detour to the mass of windmills and tents that has been laughingly called a commune, is to find a new home. A safe base. Your destination, on the other hand, is oblivion,” Poseidon noted.
“Not if I send you there first,” Ryan said, and slapped off the comm unit.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ryan sighed deeply and took a hard look at the circular rad detector on the wall directly above the comm panel. Some of the sub’s detectors had indeed malfunctioned, their colors dead with age. Others showed a color shift from green to red, confirming what his deductions had already told him.
The Raleigh was a death ship. The great reactor that served as her heart was damaged.
Ryan decided to help it along. For his own safety, he exited the large reactor room and went into the next compartment, which housed the turbines. If he could get them to stop working, the submarine would be unable to function properly on either the generator or on fuel supplies.
But before he could begin the sabotage, the deteriorating condition of the submarine did the job for him. Ryan’s timing was perfect. A moment more, and he would have been standing unprotected within the reactor room when the elderly system blew out, flooding the area with radiation and making the back of the Raleigh list uncontrollably.
“Fireblast!” he hissed as the explosion rocked the submarine. He hadn’t expected it to blow so quickly. The rear ballast tanks between the inner and outer hull were already filled with water from the dive, but now were cracked open to the inside of the submarine, releasing a torrent of seawater. The reactor and engine-control rooms began to flood as the mighty power train of the vessel ground to a halt.
The extra strong steel alloys and elaborate welding techniques used in the sub’s construction couldn’t handle the age and wear, and this was the final insult.
All electrical power aboard the sub blinked out when the reactor died. Secondary systems and emergency power kicked in, but in a greatly diminished capacity, and as the Raleigh continued to sink, Ryan knew that if he didn’t figure out a way to escape soon, he’d be trapped inside the sub on the ocean floor until the air ran out.
He exited the turbine room and glanced down the passageway.
“Turn and face me, Ryan Cawdor,” a deep bass voice said from behind him.
Across the cramped aft compartment, in front of a thick watertight wall that had dropped down across the bulkhead to seal off the ruptured lower hull, stood Poseidon. His uniform was soaked dark with water, and his nautical cap with the tiny trident patch on the front above the brim was gone. There was grease on his face and hands. Part of his beard looked singed.
Ryan had to squint to see him clearly. The space was beginning to fill with wet, hot steam. The two men had ended up meeting in the auxiliary equipment room of the Raleigh, where the sub’s heat exchanger was housed between the nuclear reactor and the main turbine.
Poseidon knew he was now held hostage behind the safety wall that was straining to keep the water out and the air inside the compartment. But the large man’s posture remained ramrod straight, and his hair was slicked back neatly from his broad forehead.
The Admiral was holding the Glock, the same blaster he’d used to reprimand Coleman back at the docking pens.
The pistol was aimed right at Ryan’s heart.