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Everyone on deck in life preservers on the double!”
    Rocky Jackson grabs an orange flotation vest from an officer, then hurries out on deck. “Has anyone seen the skipper?” She turns to the officer directing the crew into the lifeboats. “O’Malley, have you seen—”
    Shrapnel rains down upon her, a fragment of hot metal grazing her forehead as a helicopter blade shatters across the heaving deck, the rotor craft bursting in flames.
    Men race to save the pilot.
    Rocky is in a daze. “O’Malley, where’s the skipper?”
    “You’re bleeding, Jackson, now get in the goddamn boat!”
    Strong arms lift her into the life raft.
    “Fuck this, I gotta find Hatch!” Rocky jumps out of the life raft, reenters the superstructure, and races down a listing gray corridor in search of her husband.
     
    The water has reached Captain Hatcher’s waist by the time he enters the Ships Signals Exploitation Space, a top-secret chamber containing data links to all national and theater-level intelligence systems. The SSES anteroom is dark, the ship’s power out.
    Hatcher stumbles across three bodies, two officers and an MP. All floating facedown. All dead.
    “Admiral?” Hatcher rolls Brian Decker over, blood pouring from several bullet wounds. “Oh, Jesus …” He glances up at a flashlight’s beacon coming
from within the SSES operations room, his security reflexes taking over.
    Hatcher removes the sidearm still holstered to the dead MP. He sloshes forward, peering into the high-level security chamber.
    Commander Shane Strejcek lurks by a computer terminal. Images flash rapidly across the screen, a remote palm-sized device attached to the hard drive downloading the sensitive data.
    “Strejcek? What the hell are you doing?”
    The XO turns. An explosion of heat slams Hatcher back against the far wall, a warm wave of blood pouring down his shirt, quenching the fire burning in his chest as a numbing paralysis sends him slipping to his knees in the crimson water.
    Strejcek approaches, Hatcher unable to raise the gun from the water. He has no strength to move, let alone speak.
    Strejcek stares serenely at his dying commander. “I’m sorry, Skipper, but I serve a higher calling.”
     
    Ignoring the cold water paralyzing her lower torso, and the warm blood oozing from her forehead, Rocky wades through the flooded corridor, the torrent rising fast, the fluorescent bulbs overhead flickering, threatening to plunge her into darkness. “Hatch?” She enters the open SSES chamber, then rushes forward, crying out as she sees him.
    “Hatch!” Rocky clutches her husband’s lifeless form to her chest, his blood pouring out across her life jacket. She holds his head above water, her right hand brushing against the pistol he is clutching, even in death. “Oh God, Hatch—”
    Looking up, she sees Strejcek. “Shane, help me—”
    Strejcek is caught off guard. “Rocky, what are you doing here?”
    “Help me, Goddamn it, someone shot—” She stares at the gun barrel pointed at her head. “You?” She feels for the weapon in her husband’s hand, now underwater.
    “You should have abandoned ship.” Strejcek bends over and reaches for her with his free hand.
    In one motion Rocky leaps to her feet and jams the muzzle of the MP’s gun into Strejcek’s open mouth. “Drop the gun!”
    Strejcek complies.
    Her teeth chatter against the cold, her hand shakes with emotion. She removes the muzzle from her superior’s mouth, mustering one adrenalinepacked syllable. “Why?”
    Strejcek exhales. “You’re so beautiful, Rocky, but you’re so blind. The world has cancer, and you’re still in the denial stage.”
    The ship lurches beneath them. Strejcek pushes her aside, diving for his weapon.

    Unfazed, she fires.
    A wad of blood and brain tissue splatters against the far wall as the boat’s traitorous second-in-command falls backward with a splash.
    Before she can catch a breath, the supercarrier is wrenched to starboard beneath her, as