Kilo Class Read Online Free PDF Page B

the corner with a loaded submachine gun and opened fire.
    Inside the communication room, Dick Elkins heard two bursts of machine-gun fire. He raced to the bridge window and tried to assess the situation. He knew there was little time, and he charged back into his office and slammed both locks home. A half-minute later, the first ax crashed through the top of the door.
    Dick had only split seconds. He opened up his satellite intercontinental link, punching out a desperate message… “
MAYDAY… MAYDAY… MAYDAY
!!… Cuttyhunk
49 south 69… UNDER ATTACK… Japanese
…”
    At which point the message to the Woods Hole command center was interrupted by an ax handle thudding into Dick Elkin’s head.
    Nothing, repeat, nothing, was ever heard from the US Oceanographic Institute research ship again. No wreckage. No bodies. No communication. No apparent culprit. Not a sign.
    And that was all eleven months ago.
     
     
    At forty-one years of age, Freddie Goodwin was resigned to remaining a local newspaper reporter for the rest of his days. He had always wanted to be either a marine engineer or a marine biologist, but his grades at Duke University were not good enough to gain him a place in the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic doctorate program.
    Which more or less wrapped it up, deep-seawise, for Freddie. He decided that if he could not conduct scientific research on the great oceans of the world, he would write about them instead. And he would leave the academics to his much cleverer first cousin Kate Goodwin, with whom he had always been secretly and privately in love since he first met her, when she was just nineteen, after the death of her father… and his uncle.
    Freddie set off into the rougher, more competitive path of journalism and was offered a place on his local newspaper, the
Cape Cod Times
, after submitting an incisive interview with a Greek sea captain who had been sufficiently thoughtless during a storm to dump a twenty-thousand-ton sugar freighter aground on Nauset Beach near Freddie’s family home.
    He attracted the editor’s attention because of his somewhat nifty turn of phrase, and his obdurate tenacity in running the captain to ground in the back room of a Cypriot restaurant in south Boston. The purple pen, which had unhappily proved to be an insufficient weapon to impress the MIT professors, with their tyrannical insistence on FACTS, was just fine for the
Times
.
    The news department in Hyannis also liked facts, but not with the furtive missionary fervor of the scientists. Within a very few years Freddie Goodwin became the lead feature writer on the paper and could more or less pick his own assignments, unless something really big was happening over at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, where he was always a welcome visitor.
    He was a bit of a hell-raiser by nature, a striking-looking man, and talented, and he probably could have made it in Boston or New York had he been able to tear himself away from Cape Cod. As it was he felt contented enough when his feature stories were syndicated to other papers, including the
Washington Post
. On reflection, he preferred to live along the humorous, unambitious edges of journalism.
    Cape Cod, the narrow land of his youth, his family’s headquarters for four generations, would always be home. He had never married — some said because no one quite measured up to his beloved, unobtainable Kate — but he had his boat, he even had a lobsterman’s license, and he had a stream of girlfriends. In the summer he crewed in the Wianno Senior racing class, and he watched the Cape Cod Baseball League, supporting the Hyannis Mets. In the winter, when the population of the Cape crashes by about 80 percent, he tended to drink too much.
    On occasional assignments “off-Cape,” as the locals referred to the world outside their sixty-five-mile-long peninsula, Freddie Goodwin quickly missed the sight of his homeland — not just Mulligan’s bar up in Dennisport, but also the great