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Final Bearing

Guzman yelled ahead again.

El Jefe, what is so important that we stay out here like this? Even if we don’t fall to our deaths, we can’t make the camp until morning anyway.”

Guzman could hardly make out the dark figure of the most dangerous man in Colombia when he abruptly stopped on the trail and turned back to answer him. He later swore that he could see the sparks flashing in the leader’s eyes as he spoke. His words were soft, determined, but the wind carried them as surely as it did the fine icy vapor.

“Guzman, my friend, we must get back as soon as we can in order to continue what has already begun. There is much to do and many pieces to put in place. This will be a night you will tell your grandchildren about. This is the night the final victory begins.”

Chapter 2

Commander Jonathan Ward slapped up the periscope handles in obvious exasperation. Reaching over his head, he grunted in disgust, and snapped around the large red periscope lift ring, lowering the scope.

“Dammit, XO! That damn merch just won’t move!” he complained to his executive officer. “He’s still sitting up there and we can’t shoot ‘til he leaves. How much longer until the launch window closes?”

Ward wiped the sweat away from his forehead with the back of his hand, half dreading the answer he would get to his question. His blue poopie suit had long since wilted. Wide, dark streaks of sweat ran down its back. He paced across the side of the periscope stand, trying to walk off the nervous energy while he waited for his XO to finish checking figures.

Except for the skipper’s footsteps on the deck, the crowded control room of the nuclear attack sub Spadefish was surprisingly quiet. The only other sound in the stifling air was the hum of the vent fans, straining to remove the body heat of twenty closely packed human beings.

Lieutenant Commander Joe Glass finally looked up from the chart table jammed into the forward starboard corner of the control room.

“Another five minutes, Skipper. Not enough time to shoot,” he reluctantly reported.

A chart of the Southern California coastline was spread out on the table before him. It was crisscrossed with colored lines representing all the ship traffic in the area. Joe Glass was trying his best to find an open spot somewhere in the mess of tangled spaghetti surrounding a dot that represented Spadefish. There simply wasn’t one.

Glass was the perfect counterpoint to Jonathan Ward in several ways, some obvious from appearance, others not. Where Ward was tall and razor slim, Glass was short, stocky, and prone to a paunch. Ward’s thick shock of blonde hair was a contrast to Glass’s rapidly receding brush of dark hairline. Ward tended to assay a situation instantly, then moved quickly and decisively. Glass was more likely to ponder a problem studiously before moving toward the solution. The crew had long since dubbed them Mutt and Jeff, but only when they were for certain beyond earshot.

Lieutenant Steve Friedman turned from the computer console where he sat. He too had a complex picture before him, a mess of dots on the screen that he had been intensely staring at for the last several minutes. Now that Glass had broken the silence, Friedman chimed in with his own report, speaking slowly, precisely, exactly as he had been trained to do, but in a thick Southern accent.

“Captain, I have tracking solutions on sierra four-five, sierra four-nine and sierra five-four.”

Ward acknowledged with little more than a nod.

“Skipper,” came another voice from across the control room. It was Stan Guhl, the Spadefish’s weapons officer. He turned away from his launch panel to speak once the captain had looked his way. His accent was flat and nasal, “New Yawk” all the way, almost certainly Queens or Brooklyn. “The torpedo room reports the Tomahawk in tube two has another ten minutes before we need to down-power it.”

Ward nodded and quickly absorbed all the information he had just garnered.

“Very well, Weps,” was all he said though. He stepped down from the raised periscope stand and looked over Friedman’s shoulder. “Whadda you have, Steve?” he asked quietly.

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