Page 110 of Radar

“Who’s there?” he asked Hiro.

“White, Finley, and me.”

“I think I have it figured out,” Xander said. “I’m sending you a map.”

He waited for White to say, “Received. What are we looking at here? It’s like a wishbone.”

“The point at the tip of the angle is the chateau outside of Sainte-Mère-Église.”

“Normandy. You didn’t make it to London yet,” Finley said.

“I’m not going to London. I’m going to that vertex. Let me explain what Elyssa came up with and see if you agree with my theory. First, though, we’re out of electricity in France. Where has it spread?”

“Along the Baltic. Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Poland,” Hiro said. “But only along the Baltic and North Sea shores.”

“The outages are not country-wide in those nations, right? And they’re all west of Kaliningrad Oblast, the Russian exclave?”

“That’s correct,” White’s voice was tight. “Russia’s moving something up the Baltic, do you think?”

“The Russians could take advantage of the blackout by cutting communications cables in the Baltic. I wouldn’t rule it out. But I don’t think that’s their goal.” Xander thought for the first time in a long time that there was a glimmer of hope. He had committed to finding and destroying the Zoric machine. If he did that, then he was going off on his own, doing his own thing.

With his inheritance from all four of his grandparents that he’d split with his brother Adam, along with his military retirement, Xander was set to live a comfortable life, figuring out what made him happy for happy’s sake.

He felt like he'd done enough; he could move on.

Tink had done it.

Scott had done it.

Unless the whole damned family went down, Anna would never be done. Never. She knew that when she signed up, but she signed up before she fell in love with Finley. And now she was trapped in her decisions.

Xander wondered if she had regrets.

Granted, without The Family, she and Finley may never have crossed paths.

Just like he would never have found Elyssa except for the evils of Orest Kalinsky.

“What was that?” White asked.

“What?” Xander looked around him, then back at the screen.

“That look on your face. It looked like you had a hopeful thought, but you let it slide into a scoff.”

“I did. Didn’t I? I remembered I was getting out over my skis. Let me tell you what I have. Let’s call the left side ray 1. If you follow ray 1 from the vertex of Sainte-Mère-Église, you pass through five points in France and Portsmouth in England to arrive at Her Majesty's Naval Base Clyde in Faslane, Scotland.”

“That’s the only European dock where US nuclear submarines are regularly stationed,” Hiro said.

“If you follow ray 2 from the vertex with five boxes—or points—in France and one in London, you land on—”

“Faroe Islands,’ Hiro said. “We need to escalate this. We need to get to the president and get into the situation room. Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”

“What’s on Faroe Islands?” Finley asked.

“We had a Virginia-class submarine up there,” White said. “It bounces between Faroe and Iceland, it’s up there for fears of Russian subs getting into the Atlantic Ocean because they can get situated off American shores and threaten cities like D.C. and N.Y. “

“Right,” Xander said. “When we were at Iniquus, Adele mentioned that Orest was doing research into how the warming temperatures of the oceans were making it harder to hunt subs. That’s been tumbling over in my mind. Last year, the waters off Florida hit record highs. Those waters curved up the East Coast making those waters warmer, too. It would take some time to move the subs from the Baltic across the Atlantic. Once the water warmed in summer, they could position, undetected, very close to shore. Strike range.”

“Subs,” White said flatly.

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