Maden Mike - Tom Clancy Firing Point

The sound of the explosion was like a shotgun blast in Jack’s unprotected ears. The pressure from the detonation behind Jack was heavy enough to knock him forward, slamming his head into a wall, but he managed to stay on his feet.

He turned, dazed, and staggered back toward the direction of the explosion. Broken bodies lay in the narrow street in front. He didn’t stop to help them. They were dead.

Blood and shredded flesh spattered the wrecked doorway as he picked his way through the debris and into the restaurant. The ringing in his ears muted the anguished cries and moans of the few survivors. Jack’s limited emergency medical training under the watchful eye of Adara Sherman kicked in, but without a medical kit there wouldn’t be much he could do. He stepped around the wounded and the dead, pushing past overturned chairs and tables, desperately searching for Moore. His eyes finally fell on her crumpled form, one arm twisted unnaturally against the hinge of her elbow, her blouse torn away by the blast.

Jack fell down at her side, broken plates and glasses crunching beneath his weight. Her swollen face oozed blood from her nose, mouth, and ears. He laid a hand on her neck to check for a pulse, certain she was dead, but her bloodshot eyes suddenly startled awake. Jack nearly shouted for joy that she was still alive. Her swollen lips began to whisper.

“Babe, it’s me, Jack. Lie still. An ambulance will be here soon.”

Moore’s dimming eyes pleaded with Jack. She tugged on his shirtsleeve with the bloody fingers of her one unbroken hand. He leaned in close, his ear next to her mouth. He saw her eyes fluttering, and the whites suddenly showing. But with her last, ragged breath she managed to whisper a single word:

“Sammler.”

4

SOUTH PACIFIC

ON BOARD THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION NAVY SUBMARINE GLAZOV

Captain First Rank Nikolay Grinko read the notice a third time and swore.

It wasn’t a complicated instruction. Far from it. The extremely low frequency transmission (ELF) from the ZEVS transmitter near Murmansk was only capable of sending out minimal communications.

The ELF data rate was so low that submarine comms were limited to receiving messages only from Murmansk, and those were little more than “bell ringer” notices. The microscopic data rate had always seemed ironic to Grinko. The ZEVS transmitter was the most powerful in Europe. It required up to 14 megawatts of electricity fired through two sixty-kilometer-long antennas in order to generate an 82 Hz signal with a massive wavelength of 3,686 kilometers. Only China’s ELF transmitter—five times the size of New York City—was larger and more powerful.

The low data-transmission rate was the trade-off for the ZEVS’s capacity to send a signal through several hundred feet of polar ice or ocean water almost anywhere on the planet. The Glazov was currently submerged at 137 meters below the surface of the Pacific, deep enough to avoid any surface sonar detection from air or ships. A submarine like his only survived by remaining undetected. ELF was designed to help him remain so.

Unless, of course, the bell ringer message was telling him to surface and receive new instructions from a high-density satellite communication, which it was.

Grinko swore again.

“No mistake?”

“No, sir.”

Grinko searched the man’s eyes for any sign of doubt. There was none. He wasn’t surprised.

The senior enlisted man standing in front of him was utterly reliable, as were the rest of his crew. The information systems technician—Grinko still called them radiomen—didn’t write the new orders; he only delivered them.

“Thank you. Dismissed.”

The man quietly closed Grinko’s cabin door. Grinko couldn’t believe it. What was the point of changing position? The first test of the latest version VA-111 Shkval 3 (“Squall”) supercavitating torpedo had gone perfectly and, equally important, undetected by the opposition. It had taken all of his crew’s best efforts to avoid them to arrive on station.

Propelled by a solid-fuel rocket motor and a terminal guidance system, the new Shkval 3 had achieved underwater speeds approaching three hundred miles per hour and struck its target with a range in excess of twelve miles.

Keeping the weapon secret meant the Americans couldn’t develop defenses against it. Why risk being found now by moving? For what purpose?

Grinko rubbed his clean-shaven face, resigned to his fate. Submarine captains in the Pacific Fleet carried out orders from Vladivostok HQ, not the other way around. So be it. He picked up his phone and called his XO, issuing the order to redeploy to the new coordinates.

Grinko’s resignation turned to confidence. He was captain of one of his nation’s most advanced submarines, carrying some of its most potent weapons. Vladivostok was handing him another opportunity to demonstrate to the arrogant Americans that their dominance at sea was at an end.

5

BARCELONA, SPAIN

Who the hell was Sammler?

“Sammler” was the last thing she ever said, and last words mattered the most, Jack told himself as he gently closed Moore’s eyes. His hand hovered over her breathless mouth. He touched her lips.

A last good-bye.

Still wet with her blood and his skull pounding with a near-migraine headache, Jack glanced over at a middle-aged woman lying against the bar, whimpering in Spanish. Her eyes were shut against the blood oozing onto her face from a scalp wound and the stabbing pain of her injured left hand. Sirens screamed in the distance.

Jack dashed over to her side. He snatched up a handful of paper napkins from the floor and pressed them hard against her scalp wound. He took her one good hand and switched it for his.

“Su mano, empujar aquí,” he said. “No, not empujar . Sorry. I don’t know the word. Just . . . press hard.”

But the woman understood Jack’s middle-school Spanish well enough. She pressed her good hand hard against the makeshift bandage as Jack took her other hand and inspected it briefly before pulling out a large shard of glass from her palm. It bled, too, but not as badly as the scalp. Jack pulled another stack of napkins from a dispenser lying next to him, compressed it into her palm, and folded her hand into a fist.

“Hold this, tight, okay?” Jack said, as he turned around to see who else he could help, his clothes even bloodier now than they were a moment ago.

On the floor just a few feet away he saw Moore’s purse. A few cautious pedestrians crept into the wreckage of the restaurant, faces white with terror but eager to help. Ambulance sirens screamed just beyond the door.

As tires screeched to a halt outside, Jack reached down and picked up Moore’s purse, its contents scattered on the floor. He dug through the nearly empty purse looking for her smartphone, thinking that whoever this Sammler was, maybe he’d called her earlier or she had his contact information stored on her phone.

Spanish EMTs charged through the doors with medical gear in hand, followed by four local police, their uniforms marked GUÀRDIA URBANA .

One of the cops, bearded and burly, saw Jack standing in the middle of the carnage, rifling through Moore’s purse like a looter, and began shouting at him in Català.

Still dazed by the blast and numbed with grief, and with his ears ringing and a headache crushing his skull, Jack couldn’t make out a single word of what the cop was saying, but it wasn’t hard for him to figure out the guy was pissed.

More sirens blared outside and more tires screeched to a halt as even more police and EMTs arrived, charging through the broken doors.