End Game by Dale Brown Page A

decoy, a versatile torpedo-tube-launched noisemaker that could employ a variety of techniques to confuse a tracking ship, including jamming sonar and simulating the sound of a large submarine.
    â€œYou have a contact with the sub that launched it?”
    â€œNegative. We didn’t hear the tube flood or launch, either. Tubes could have been open for a while. Not adding up, Captain. Now we don’t have any contacts at all.”
    â€œNothing!”
    â€œI know, I know,” said Eyes quickly. “We’re looking, Storm. I don’t know why we can’t find it.”
    This was the point in the chase where a hunter had to be patient; sooner or later the prey would make a mistake and give himself away. No matter how clever—and the captain of the submarine had proven himself quite clever—he would eventually slip.
    The problem was, Storm was not a patient man. He staredat the holographic display, trying to puzzle out where his adversary had gone.
    â€œYou’re sure he’s not trailing that tanker?”
    â€œNegative.”
    Oh my God, thought Storm, what if he managed to get underneath us?
    Impossible.
    But a logical explanation.
    â€œChange course—hard to starboard,” he shouted to the helmsman behind him on the bridge. “Eyes—make sure the SOB isn’t hiding right beneath us or in our wake somehow.”
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    S TARSHIP SKIPPED OVER THE WAVES , STARING AT THE INFRARED feed and trying not to let it burn through his eyes. There was nothing on the surface of the water—no periscope, no radio mast, no nothing.
    Navy guys stared at the sea all the time, and claimed to love it. How sick was that?
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    T HE SUBMARINE WASN ’ T UNDER THEM . B UT NEITHER WAS IT anywhere in the five mile grid they marked out in the ocean as its most likely location, nor in the wider circle that Storm had the ship patrol after the grid proved empty.
    They’d been beaten. And the worst thing was, Storm didn’t even know who had done it.
    A hard-ass Russian submarine captain in a Kilo, who’d wandered close to Port Somalia by accident and then thought it best to get away before he got blamed?
    Or the captain of a submarine who had in fact picked up the saboteurs and scooted clean away?
    â€œAll right,” he growled into his microphone. “Eyes—we’re going to have to call off the search. We can’t stay here forever.”
    â€œAye aye, Captain.”
    Storm’s anger flashed as the command was passed and the crew began to move, tacitly accepting defeat. His righthand formed into a fist but he restrained himself from pounding the bulkhead.
    He thought of that later, in his cabin, when he stared at the ceiling instead of sleeping. It was a measure of how much he had changed in the months since the fight with the Somalian pirates.
    Whether it was a change for the better, he couldn’t tell.
    Las Vegas University of Medicine,
Las Vegas, Nevada
5 January 1998
1723
    T HE DAY ’ S WORTH OF TESTS WERE MOSTLY VARIATIONS ON ones Zen had already gone through before Christmas. He was injected with a series of dyes and then X-rayed and scanned, prodded and listened to. The technical staff took a stack of X-rays, MRIs, and ultrasounds. Then they hooked him up to a machine that measured nerve impulses. This involved inserting needles into various parts of his body. The doctors had done this several days before. Now they inserted more, and left them in for nearly two hours.
    He didn’t feel the ones in his legs, but he did get a prickly sensation in his neck when they were inserted along his upper back. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but lying there was more difficult than he had imagined.
    â€œDone,” said Dr. Vasin finally. Two aides came over and helped Zen sit up.
    â€œSo I can walk now?”
    â€œJeff.”
    â€œHey, Doc, loosen up. Just a joke.” Zen pushed his arms back. His muscles had stiffened. “Tomorrow I go under the