21

Tyler sat on a stool next to the navigation table after his men had retaken the conning tower. An hour and a half had passed since Heirthall and the Event Group escaped into Ice Palace. They had brought the warheads, which had been stored in one of the vast caverns where they had not run into Collins or any of the others, and had installed all thirty of the MIRV weapons on the missiles buried inside their launch tubes. Tyler looked at his watch. In record time, too, he thought.

Tyler looked around at the security men and midshipmen at their consoles, then at the captain’s chair above him. He was tempted to climb into the large chair, but felt that since Alvera was forsaking the seat of power, he would also. He felt there was no need to risk a power showdown before the launch was complete. Then he could take command with his men at the controls.

“Putting to sea while Captain Heirthall is free is a foolish and unnecessary risk,” Tyler said as he stepped up to the navigation table where Alvera was studying the hologram of the Ross Sea.

Alvera raised her eyebrows and straightened up from studying the coordinates where the missile launch would take place. Eight circles of red were targeted for the opening salvo of Heirthall’s grand invention—the very first breed of stealth cruise missiles. The main naval ports of the United States, France, England, Russia, China, Germany, and Australia were the hard targets of the strike. Eight reentry warheads would be targeted for each nation, which would effectively destroy each of the deepest water ports, knocking out a good percentage of those nations’ surface and subsurface fleets without them putting to sea. The rest of the threats could be taken care of from another launch location.

“Heirthall is nearly dead; the others with her will be located soon by the syms. No, Sergeant, these people are no threat.” She looked at Tyler and briefly smiled. “As easy as it was for them to escape you and your men, they won’t be so lucky against my family. My family will find them and kill them all. Now, let’s get under way, shall we?”

“Sonar, conn, anything close aboard?” she asked over the intercom.

“Inconclusive contacts at this time. The movement and instability of the ice shelf above us may be masking any potential threats.”

Alvera looked down at the chart and made her final straight line from under the Ross Ice Shelf.

“You seem worried,” Tyler said.

“That American Virginia class submarine could be lurking in open water, and we wouldn’t know it until she put two torpedoes into us.”

“Leviathan can take anything Missouri can throw at her.”

“That vessel is a Special Operations platform—do you understand what that means? Let me enlighten you, Sergeant—they are stealth capable. They can sit for hours and we wouldn’t know they were there unless we put our laser web on them. Here’s one more fact for your files, since you seem to have missed the captain’s classes on the subject of American capability. She may have nuclear weapons onboard, and unless Leviathan is protected by depth, it is possible that they can destroy her. It would take a lucky shot, to be sure, but it’s still possible.”

“Then we rely on your ability to evade. After all, you were personally trained by the captain.”

Alvera ignored the false compliment by Tyler. “Watch officer, make your depth six hundred feet, course heading three-three-zero degrees at fifty knots,” Alvera ordered. “Weapons, load tubes one through twenty with Mark sixties, activate and warm up vertical tubes one through thirty with SS-twenties—special war shot.”

“Aye.”

Alvera reached for the dive alarm and looked at Tyler one last time.

“All hands prepare for dive.” She hit the horn. “Dive—dive!”

Leviathan spewed more than a million gallons of seawater straight into the air as she started sliding beneath the trapped inland sea. What remained of the now-stranded Event Group, along with Robbins and Farbeaux, watched from a distance, behind a wall of calved ice.

“Good luck, Jack,” Niles Compton said as Sarah joined him at the edge of the ice.

She looked around and then above them. The ice looked even more unstable than it had an hour before.

“Look at this,” Lee said, making Sarah and Niles turn away from the view of the giant Leviathan disappearing underneath the Ross Sea. As they did, they saw ten of the children emerge from one of the carved-out ice buildings. They reached Henri Farbeaux first as they gathered around the group.

“Some of them made it out,” Alice said.

“I’m afraid their escape may be for naught, my dear Mrs. Hamilton,” Farbeaux said as he looked beyond the children who gathered around him.

Compton and the others turned to see the clear-skinned hand of a symbiant taking hold of the ice and starting to pull itself up.

“Get the children inside,” Sarah said. “We don’t stand a chance out here.”

As they turned to herd the children back, more syms swam to the surface and started making their way ashore.

The Group’s only hope now was that the few hurt and tired men, women, and children left aboard Leviathan could somehow stop the missile launch and then return to save them.

It was now all in the hands of Captain Heirthall and Jack Collins.