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  Seventy-five yards out from the starboard side of the Enterprise’s island, the first Tomahawk exploded, shaking the ship.

  Bowser grinned but then felt fire in his shoulder as a 20mm bullet grazed by.

  He had no time to home in on the second missile.

  His instincts told him to push himself out of the now smoking cockpit and he did, for what little good it might do.

  Chapter 67

  TARGET LOCKED

  Lieutenant Doug Smith’s F-18 Hornet

  WHEN THE SECOND Tomahawk flashed only twenty yards from the ship, Bird Dog hoped he hadn’t killed anyone—yet.

  He flew through the cloud of debris caused by the 500 pounds of high explosive and pulled back on the stick, lifting the jet fighter vertically from the Enterprise. As he climbed, he jerked his head over both shoulders, attempting unsuccessfully to see what damage had been caused. The G forces that pinned him momentarily were taken instinctively, his mind undeterred from his concern for Vic and the Enterprise.

  As he throttled down, shoved the stick hard left and jammed the left rudder peddle to the floor, the plane obeyed and slipped an about face that headed it in a dive toward the stalled aircraft carrier’s deck.

  Dropping from fifteen hundred feet, he could see that the F-14 that had been firing at the first Tomahawk had been demolished. The fierce explosion was so close to it that the intense pressure created by the weapon’s detonation had caused it to explode, also. The rest of the ship seemed to have suffered only surface damage. But there was no sign of life.

  Now was not the time to worry about one man, even though it could be Vic.

  At five hundred feet, Bird Dog pulled back on his stick to begin his attack on the Atchison as his on board audio warning sounded, “Altitude! Altitude! Altitude!” He passed over the Big E’s deck and noticed a tiny figure wave with both arms while emerging from the smoking wreckage of the F-14. Doug smiled, threw his stick hard to the right and did a victory roll while leveling out.

  “Yes!” he said and punched the air like a schoolboy celebrating a sandlot victory.

  That childish maneuver cost him a hundredth of a second and he realized it when he passed over Cards’ belly-up fighter plane.

  He tried to get down to business. He had no time to think of Spurs on the Atchison, that his next action would probably kill her. He had no time to think about that, but he did. At the end of his tour, two months from now, he’d be going home to tell his father and mother that he had killed the woman he had once been engaged to and was now in love with a man that he’d nearly killed, also. His world had really gotten screwed up.

  The attacking frigate was now less than fifteen hundred yards out.

  He slowed to give himself enough time to line up on the ship’s bow. Armed the Harpoon missiles. Locked onto the target before him. Fired. Fired again. Doug watched, wide-eyed as the two Harpoons dropped to within a few yards of the sea’s surface, then straddled the Atchison’s hull. He’d fired them too close to their target. The first missile did bump the frigate’s stern and exploded, but most of the force was deflected. Now, seeing the escaping ship preparing to ram the carrier, he had no other choice.

  Chapter 68

  CHARDOFF’S STING

  USS Atchison

  AS THE SMALL ship jerked and yawed from the Harpoon’s detonation, North tripped, his toes striking an M-14 rifle lying next to a brave, dead sailor. It was Ingrassias. Spurs came down on top of both of them. They lay in a pile only a yard from the side of the ship.

  They had watched as the two Harpoon missiles shot from Doug’s F-18 fighter and parted to each flank of the frigate. A deluge of exploding sea splashed down on them. It slapped hard against the back of Spurs’ head and shoulders, driving her face into North’s midsection. But the damage done by the glancing blow from only one of the weapons was nowhere near a George Foreman knockout punch.

  As Spurs pushed off of North, she saw that the tourniquet had come loose and his thigh now gushed deep, red blood.

  Doug’s F-18 had turned quickly, and, from long distance resumed firing. The 20mm projectiles snapped over their heads. They zipped by, some clanking, punching holes through the steel and aluminum. Some ricocheted. Hand-sized pieces of metal splintered and tore loose from the frigate’s skin, then rattled on the hard deck.

  Spurs could make it over the side now and live, but looking at the life leaking from North’s thigh, she realized he would bleed to death in the water. She yanked the rag tourniquet tight. Her hand slipped. North looked to her, helpless, weak, eyes wide begging for life. She grabbed the shirtsleeve tourniquet again. Tugged hard. The flow of red stopped. She tied the knot.

  Now what? Overboard. They couldn’t stop the imminent collision between the two ships. They could possibly save themselves—if the resulting explosion didn’t trigger the huge aircraft carrier’s high explosive ordinance or cause a disastrous radioactive leak from its nuclear reactors.

  In the mist, five hundred yards away, the Enterprise waited for destiny. The Atchison was closing fast. Spurs wished that time could stop, allow her to devise a plan to save the proud, gray lady. But the clock ticked on.

  Someone swung the starboard bridge hatch open and it hammered against the bulkhead. Chardoff emerged, a stinger antiaircraft missile hefted to his shoulder. He looked toward Bird Dog’s plane and pointed the deadly little heat-seeker.

  “No!” Spurs screamed.

  Chardoff glared at her as steel-penetrating depleted-uranium bullets popped around him. He smiled, open-mouthed, ignoring the danger. Turned and put his eye to the sight. Aimed.

  Spurs reached to the deck. She released the bolt of the heavy M-14 that lay beside Ingrassias as she raised the rifle. She hoped it had chambered a round and not just empty air from a spent magazine. The weapon was much heavier and more awkward than the M-16 she’d shot earlier and trained with in OCS. Nothing like the little .22 rifle her uncle Paul had taught her to use to plink cans on his ranch in Oklahoma.

  Her target stood twenty-five yards away. He’s going to murder Doug. She aimed. I’ve got to stop him. Over the span of no more than a second, her thoughts raced. I have to shoot him. The barrel wavered, sights circling Chardoff’s torso. He’s trying to sink the Enterprise, over six-thousand sailors and Marines aboard. She had never shot a man. They depend on me. She did not want to shoot even Chardoff. This is the break we need. She took a deep breath. Get past Chardoff, we can turn the ship. Held it. This son-of-a-bitch is a traitor, the bastard of all time. Her hands trembled. He’d put Benedict Arnold to shame. The heavy rifle bobbed. Hurry, before it’s too late. The front sight rotated around Chardoff’s head. My aim must be good.

  She squeezed the trigger.

  The weapon’s kick stunned Spurs. It forced her thumb to punch her cheekbone. The results of her shot stunned her more.

  She would get a black eye—but Chardoff?

  His head jerked back, exploding. Half of his skull and brains decorated the bridge’s outer bulkhead.

  The M-14 could not have fallen to the deck faster if it’d leaped from her arms on its own, and nausea churned her stomach immediately.

  But, the twitch of the dead man’s finger dispatched the heat-chasing weapon.

  Spurs’ eyes trailed the missile to the rapidly closing jet fighter. It seemed in slow motion. Surreal.

  The F-18, now only a hundred yards out, received the stinger missile just in front of the inlet nozzle of its left engine. It flashed, shredding the vertical stabilizer above it like confetti.

  Bird Dog’s plane spiraled from the sky, but it seemed a somewhat controlled fall. He didn’t attempt to eject. His intentions were obvious.

  Hands. North’s hands twisted Spurs’ body toward the side, but her head did not follow. She froze, gripping the lifeline along the side of the ship.

  “Eject Baby,” she whined in a whisper, her jaw catching with emotion as she witnessed the horrific event.

  Doug would die before her eyes. This was the man she had
thought she would marry just four short months ago. She would have had his children, grown old with him. Her heart felt as though a pitchfork had been driven through and was being twisted inside. Unbelieving shock hypnotized her and she could not turn away.

  “In our next lives, Spurs!” came “Bird Dog” Doug Smith’s last words from the abandoned radio speaker, next to the missile station.

  Just as Doug’s war bird slammed into the Atchison’s fantail, causing a monstrous eruption of flames, Spurs felt North’s hands on her back once again. The explosion was deafening.

  Suddenly, she found herself shoved overboard and tumbled the twenty feet to the churning sea.

  The intense heat baked her back as the ensuing fireball overtook and surrounded her. Fragmented pieces of ship and plane zipped past, peppering the sea.

  Chapter 69

  OCEANS OF FUN

  THE WATER CAME quickly, but, upon submerging, Spurs found it was not the murky sea she expected. The underworld glowed, illuminated by the inferno erupting on the surface. The combined explosive power of Doug’s F-18 and the two, dormant cruise missiles had done a big job.

  Shock waves tremored through her lungs and eardrums painfully. Coming toward the surface, she hunted for a spot free of flames. The water had become engulfed. She swam underwater away from the ship, desperately looking for a clear and safe area. Her lungs ached, seeming to have less capacity than they should. She hadn’t taken in enough air to stay below long and her life vest wanted her topside. Grabbing the water frantically, she searched for safety.

  Finally, she found it, madly pulled at the water and at last burst into the air gasping. The warm Mediterranean waters tasted saturated with salt and oil, and what she could not cough out was involuntarily swallowed. She threw her collar length blonde hair back from her eyes and felt the globs of black bilge in its matted, water-tangled strands.

  The entire ship’s weather deck now fried, crackling in steel-melting conflagration, as Spurs watched bobbing on the huge swells of Mother Ocean. The smell of burning fuel oil and melting metals hung pungent in the thick sea air.

  The frigate still drifted forward, but slower. Yet the speed would be sufficient to do terrible damage to the Big E.

  Slower. Slower. Now only a hundred and fifty yards away.

  Slower. The rough seas helped. A hundred yards.

  Slower. Closing. Slower. Fifty.

  It nudged the Enterprise with an echoing steel thud that reverberated through the water. Terrific screeching complaints came from the grating metal. The Atchison pushed back, leaving only a dent in the giant aircraft carrier’s hull amidships the size of a Volkswagen, but no hole. No unrepairable damage.

  More explosions shook the sea and rocked the Atchison as it listed to its starboard side. In seconds, its stern took on water and bow raised from the surface.

  Again, shuddering explosions ripped through the metal.

  Huge pieces of mangled steel blasted away from the blistering ship’s deck and hurled through the air. They pummeled the sea’s surface, some close enough to send cascades of water deluging Spurs.

  Smoke billowed.

  In the next sixty seconds, the gutted Atchison slid slowly, almost gracefully, stern first into the deep.

  Spurs watched in awe of the sight. It had happened so quickly. Violently.

  But now, there were other concerns. The raging sea pushed the burning fuel on its surface, shifting the flames randomly around her. She had to remain vigilant for her own safety.

  And where was North? He had pushed her overboard but had he made it?

  As she struggled in the water and searched for her fellow agent, Cards’ belly-up F-18 Hornet came into view. Miraculously, still floating with its nose pointing away from the aircraft carrier, the flames seemed to be avoiding it. She swam to the plane pushing away floating debris, life jackets and cushions. She found a life preserver on a line and hooked her arm through it for extra buoyancy in the rolling waves.

  Spurs made her way to the remaining left wing of the jet and hung on to help stabilize her position in the water. The F-18 lay with its tail slightly submerged, angled about five degrees up to its nose, the wing still clutching one of the huge Harpoon missiles. She noticed the cannon plug connecting the control wiring harness to the missile. The ends were together but slightly angled from each other as if not lined up and fully connected. Cards’ Harpoon missile had misfired. She remembered again Doug telling of the several misfires Cards had because of a loose cannon plug. He had been having trouble with the damn cannon plugs. This one was definitely loose. If it wasn’t for that bad connection, she might have been killed by the missile—had it been launched when intended. They wouldn’t have had time to make it over the side from where they had been on the ship.

  Now a body appeared, floating with the ship’s American flag over its face. A Navy officer’s body.

  Could it be North? Whoever it was seemed life-less—dead. She swam the ten yards to the body to find out who it might be.

  Chapter 70

  THREE’S A CROWD

  REACHING THE BODY, Spurs took hold of the flag covering its face.

  She hesitated.

  Took a deep breath.

  Pulled the flag back.

  Commander Nick Reeves. Hair singed. Parts of his face charred.

  “Reeves!” she said and shook his shoulder.

  She splashed water on his face, but there was no reaction.

  “Reeves,” she said again, “for God’s sake, wake up!”

  No apparent respiration. If he was alive, she couldn’t tell it. For now, she could do nothing for him, even if a spark did still exist.

  Where had he been? What had happened to him? She was unable to put those pieces of the puzzle together. The last time she’d seen him, he was standing in the dark on the flight deck as she left in the chopper with the recon team. He had waved. She had not waved back.

  He must have been held hostage by the terrorists. She hoped he had not been tortured, that his death had come mercifully.

  Spurs could not leave Reeves’ body to the sharks. When help came, maybe they could revive him. But help would have to come very soon.

  She placed the life preserver over his head. Struggling, she finally brought his arms through, then pulled the attached line around his shoulders and tied it to prevent him from slipping out.

  With Commander Reeves in tow, she swam back to the tail of the F-18. After a thought of securing the hundred-foot line to the plane, she quickly discarded the idea and tied the end of it around her waist. The plane would soon sink.

  The Enterprise was only eight hundred yards away. Rescue parties would be sent. It wouldn’t be long. Soon, she would be safe.

  Poor North. She could have fallen in love with a guy like that. He was not the man that everyone thought. He was not the man that even he portrayed. Under his gentle, boyish exterior, he was tough as hardtack. She remembered how her body melted in his arms without her wanting it to in Algeria. He was the type of man she had searched for and dreamed of loving—not Doug, not Nick Reeves.

  A bitter taste came to her mouth and a shiver tingled her spine. Her eyes burned.

  She remembered that for a short time, she had been somewhat attracted to Reeves.

  Now they were all gone.

  Something brushed her left calf as she slowly scissored her legs.

  Shark!

  Spurs drew her feet up, hoping whatever it was would go for a larger meal like Chardoff’s body, if there were any of it left.

  It didn’t.

  Something took her right ankle. Now knee. Now thigh.

  Spurs screamed.

  The water erupted in front of her.

  She cringed.

  It was North.

  He gasped, lungs frantically raking in air.

  She pulled him to her.

  “My God, Dare! Are you all right?”

  He still gasped.

  “Darren, are you okay?

  He gasped.

>   “Darren!”

  “Shut up,” he said. “Give me—a chance.”

  She smiled and embraced him, her eyes clamped shut.

  It was over. All over and they were safe.

  They pulled back from each other and gazed with smiles. Nervous laughter erupted spontaneously from both.

  Spurs thought of the body, and said, “I found Commander Reeves.” Her smile wearing away, she said, “By the plane. I think he’s dead.”

  North didn’t look. His face became somber.

  “There’s something I didn’t have an opportunity to tell you,” he said, holding her by the shoulders as they kicked and treaded water.

  Spurs frowned back, waiting.

  “I found out who the Chameleon. . . .”

  Suddenly, North sucked air. This time he gasped as violently as the very first time when he came up to breathe. His body stiffened. His face filled with pain and surprise. Then just as suddenly, he became limp.

  Spurs released him, shocked, not understanding, and his body seemed to be shoved toward the downed aircraft.

  Commander Reeves had come back from the dead and was before her glaring. His right hand held a huge knife, the end driven deep into North’s back. Reeves wrenched it out and North’s pain-weakened body floated against the Hornet’s wing. Still conscious, his hand reached feebly for the gouged wound in his back.

  Chapter 71

  CHAMELEON OR JUST A SNAKE

  SHOCK TOOK OVER and Spurs pushed away from Reeves. It was a Marine’s K-bar knife with seven notches shining from its blackened and now bloody blade. He must have gotten the knife from Chardoff. He must have been on the bridge in control of the ship when Chardoff came out with the stinger. He was the Chameleon. He was the leader. The traitor. He was a turncoat to his country; had forsaken everything for money.

  “Take it easy,” Reeves pleaded. “North’s the bastard we were after. North was behind all this. Don’t you see?”