Free The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) by Jon Land Page A

that failure need not exist at all. Everything depended on attitude, and she learned to become the master of hers.
    If only she had known, then …
    Then what? That night in the woods when the second phase began, when she became Danielle, maybe she would have let herself die. But they had pushed the right buttons to activate the desired response. They had made her in the image they desired, and she had become their prisoner, instead of a prisoner of the camps. That night in the woods had accomplished the final forging of her persona, determining her shape through years to come until …
    “ … so I couldn’t make any sense of the contents of the pages under standard infrared or ultraviolet,” the man with thick glasses was explaining. Danielle realized her mind had drifted while her eye had been pressed to the lens. She looked up from it. “So what I did,” the man continued, “was I retreated the pages entirely. Risky business since we mighta lost everything in the process, but I laid the overcoating on by hand to assure the smoothest impression, and”—dramatically now—“ voilà! ”
    Danielle returned her eye to the lens and spun the focusing wheel. The picture that sharpened was the government seal that had drawn her here in the first place.
    “Yes,” she commented. “I told you about that.”
    “You told me it was just government. Actually it’s a Defense Department seal reserved for the touchiest documents. Top secret, highly classified, and all that sort of stuff. Anyway, you actually brought me fragments of two separate documents, from what the salvaged excerpts indicate. The one you’re looking at now was the most damaged. It was probably lifted off microfilm which would have meant loss of resolution even without the fire. Best I could do was that one seal and a single word noteworthy for its repetition.”
    “What word?”
    “Spiderweb.”
    “That’s all?”
    “That and the fact it was under what they call ULTSEC for ‘ultra-secret.’ The second document wasn’t as badly burned, and it was infinitely more interesting.” The man carefully slid the piece of retouched Kodak paper aside and placed another sheet beneath the computer-keyed lens. “Here we go. Have a look.”
    Danielle rotated the lens. What she saw was a mass of lines, measurements, and notations that were meaningless to her. “Plans,” she said simply.
    “Yes,” the man acknowledged, and he slid the page to place a specific section under the lens. “Now look.”
    Danielle’s vision sharped to recognize a pair of letters. “EB … Electric Boat?”
    “The very boys up in Groton, Connecticut, who make some rather impressive subs.”
    “Then these are plans for a submarine?”
    “Fragments of them, yes, and not just any sub either. From what I can gather, you’re looking at the midship of the new Jupiter class of super-Tridents. Soviets would pay a fortune to get their hands on these.” He paused. “Is that what this is about?”
    She looked down through the lens again and then back up at the man. Her eyes hardened.
    “Okay,” he said fearfully, “just forget I asked.”
    Danielle went back to the lens, mostly to keep the man from seeing any fear in her own face.
    The plans for a new class of Trident submarines.
    Something in the Defense Department called Spiderweb.
    And somewhere a connection between the two.

Chapter 8
    COMMANDER MCKENZIE BARLOW lay twisting on his cot fighting against sleep. The battle was between a body that craved rest and a mind terrified that more hours lost would make more distant the awesome task still ahead.
    Seventeen days now. Seventeen days of confinement and disgrace aboard his own ship. Seventeen days. In that period Mac had been allowed out of his quarters on only five occasions and then only to transmit a code signaling that all was well on board the Rhode Island .
    A lie. A great big fucking lie.
    The Rhode Island was the prototype for a new class of super-Trident submarines,