Page 67 of The Captain
Langford glanced at the gray suit again, then back to her.
“It’s complicated. If word gets out, that vessel could vanish. Timing’s critical, and if we wait for the right ships and subs to deploy, the Russians could be long gone.” He turned to Marcus, Ryker, and Atlas, his voice steady. “Dominion Hall has resources. Can you assist?”
Marcus grinned, his eyes glinting with that warrior’s edge I’d seen yesterday, the kind that bites into a mission and doesn’t let go.
“Of course, we’ll help,” he said, his smartass tone laced with steel. He pointed at me, his grin widening. “As long as Captain Dane’s good with it, I’d like the Marine Corps to come along.”
Every eye in the room turned to me, even Camille’s, her gaze steady but searching. The man in the gray suit’s stare hit hardest, flat and unreadable, like he was weighing my soul.
Who the hell was he?
My confidence roared, a fire I hadn’t felt since my last op.
I nodded, my voice firm. “I’m in. But Dr. Allard gets the credit.”
Langford laughed, a short, dry sound. “It won’t be official, but yes, the Navy’ll owe you, Dr. Allard.”
I grinned, the fight calling me, my blood up. Whatever this shadow was, we were going to hunt it down, and I couldn’t wait to get in the game.
29
CAMILLE
In the days after the meeting, a rhythm found us like tide finding its line.
Jacob had moved in without the ceremony of suitcases. My closet, my drawers, my little bungalow that had always felt temporary grew a new shape around his quiet possessions. His dog tags lived under my lemon-scented dish towels at night. His boots learned to wait by my back door.
Mornings started with the sound of the river lifting and his hands already heating the kettle. Coffee in my chipped blue mugs. His “morning, Doctor” said like a joke and a vow. A text check to the facility. Becca’s numbers. Miguel’s notes. Tamika’s gruff emojis. Then the days had unscrolled the way our days do here: a report of another animal seen rolling in the break and a run that ate an hour we didn’t own, a good breath count from the little Kogia that made us generous with one another, a bottlenose that quit riding her own panic and let us be useful again.
He had split his hours—half at my side as a pair of big patient hands, half with the Charleston Danes in those rooms that tastelike money and gun oil. He had come back from Dominion Hall with that particular fuel in his eyes that men get when a plan starts to gather weight and edges. He’d stand in my kitchen while I chopped apples for the electrolyte cooler and lay out their pieces—boats, aircraft, quiet sensors, the Coast Guard’s good will—and ask where they should stitch them to our charts of tides and sandbars and places my whales like to be when the world isn’t hurting them.
At night, he let sleep come to me the old-fashioned way—body against body until whatever I’d been bracing for all day remembered it didn’t have to win. Then he’d fall asleep faster than is decent and I’d study the name of his new breath until mine matched it.
We were becoming, somehow, the kind of adults who put dinner on a calendar. My mother had texted to say she had Saturday free if that “friend from the beach” wanted to be introduced to a proper roux. My father had rolled his eyes at the phrase “friend from the beach” and then volunteered to sharpen the knives because men make offerings where they can. Jacob had read the text thread over my shoulder and said he’d bring a bottle that wouldn’t embarrass anyone. It made my stomach do a small, clean trick.
The strandings hadn’t stopped for our sweet domestic experiment. We’d lost a calf that first night to a heart that refused the math, and I’d cried into the towel like a girl behind the pen gate while Tamika stood where she didn’t have to say anything and said everything, anyway. The next morning an adult that had been rubbing her jaw bloody had let the water hold her differently when Miguel spoke to her in Spanish for the length of a song. Small victories.
On the second afternoon—today—McGuire had sent a terse line:working; sit tight. Ryker had sent an even terser one:eyes up.
By dusk we were wrecked, hungry, and not quite ready to be quiet. Salty Mike’s called to us the way a familiar vice calls—a place where the floorboards are used to holding up heavy things and the crab traps on the wall don’t care who you are.
We took the stools we took last time, like the bar had remembered our outlines. The dock outside ricocheted sunset into the room. I ordered an oyster po’boy I’d pretend wasn’t a betrayal and a Diet Coke I’d pretend balanced it. Jacob ordered a basket of fries like he was feeding a teenager and a beer with a label that swore it had been brewed by men who respected pine.
“How is it fair,” I said to the ketchup bottle, “that we get smarter and the ocean doesn’t get quieter?”
He didn’t correct me. He set his hand on my thigh under the bar with that easy heat that blew the fuse on my bad mood just enough to keep me from becoming a menace.
“It isn’t fair,” he said. “And that’s not the bar we’re measuring against anymore.”
“They’re still coming in,” I said. “A baby yesterday. The adult today. The quiet in their heads is broken and we’re telling them to breathe, anyway, and I—” I felt the coil start. I let it wind one more turn, then let it go. “The price they’re paying so we can play chess is too high.”
He turned toward me and I could feel the attention like a hand between my shoulder blades. “Camille.”
I glared at the beer taps like they had a vote. “What?”
“This isn’t chess. It’s a bomb squad. We rush, we die. We spook them, they vanish. We do it wrong, and the price the animals pay gets higher, not lower.” He didn’t say who they were. He didn’t have to. The word that had been in the air since the briefing didn’t need to be repeated to do its damage.
I took a breath because I know a truth when it comes in a voice that isn’t trying to win points. “I know,” I said, even thoughpart of me didn’t want to know it. “I want to drag the ocean open with my hands and pull the bad thing out. I want it that simple.”
