Ocean Black (Sub Zero Book 2) by William H. Lovejoy

Author:William H. Lovejoy [Lovejoy, William H.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2016-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

CALIFORNIA ORDERED TO SEA ASAP,

ACCOMPANIED BY MAHAN AND FLETCHER.

CAPTAIN JONATHAN F. HARRIS

DESIGNATED COMMANDER, TASK FORCE 36.

RPT DIRECTLY TO CINCPAC.

PROCEED ON HEADING 245, CONTACT

CINCPAC 1900 HOURS ZULU FOR FURTHER

ORDERS.

After reading the skimpy words from the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, who was Admiral David Potter, twice, Harris looked up and through the windshield at the people waving frantically from the pier, the families eagerly welcoming their men and women home from the sea. It was a large crowd.

And it would be a disappointed one.

Commander George Quicken, his first mate, was supervising the mooring, and he turned away from his post beside the helm when Harris called to him.

“Captain?”

“Read this, Commander.”

Quicken frowned when he was through. “Not very timely, is it, Captain?”

“Not at all. Let’s go to sea, Commander. Mr. Evans, contact the captains of the Mahan and the Fletcher for me, please.”

*

0955 HOURS LOCAL, THE ARIENNE

32° 39’ 26” NORTH, 137° 32’ 16” WEST

“You’re sure you got the numbers right, Wilson?” Mark Jacobs asked.

Overton flipped through his notebook and compared the coordinates written there with the readout on the Loran.

“They’re correct, Mark. One thing I always do, I always get my facts straight.”

Jacobs gave him a skeptical look.

“There’d be no reason for the Earthquake Information Center to give me the wrong coordinates.”

Jacobs waved his arm expansively toward the sea outside the windows. For as far as they could see, there was only ocean, and it wasn’t a particularly gentle ocean from Overton’s point of view. He had a sensitive stomach when it came to oceans. Only Jacobs’s seeming unconcern about the height of the waves reassured him.

They were on the bridge of the yacht, and the rain thrummed steadily on the overhead canvas. Both the glass windshields and the plastic side curtains were faintly fogged over. Visibility through them wasn’t all that great, and the overcast skies and rain limited it further, perhaps to two miles, though Overton’s visual perceptions got all screwy when he was the center of nothingness.

With the engines almost at idle, the pitching of the boat was more pronounced, and Overton stayed close to the passenger seat, where he could hang onto its back cushion.

“Brande’s got to be out there somewhere,” Overton said. “I know it.”

“Uh huh.”

Overton showed Jacobs the second of the three sets of coordinates he had gotten from Golden. “Where’s this?”

“North and west.”

“Let’s try there.”

Jacobs leaned toward the Loran and dialed in the numbers. He shoved the throttles forward, and when he engaged the autopilot, the bow of the boat came around a few degrees to the north. It took several minutes to come up to speed, and then the pitching subsided.

Overton felt a little better about it.

“If we don’t find him in the next couple hours, Wilson, we’re going back to San Francisco.”

“We’ll find him,” Overton said.

“It’s a big, big, ocean.”

“I’m going down and call the Earthquake Center. Maybe they know something more.”

*

1046 HOURS LOCAL, THE ORION

33° 39’ 48” NORTH, 139° 9’ 57’WEST

They weren’t getting oral reports from the submersible, but the telemetry readouts had been telling the same monotonous story for some time.

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