Countdown to Midnight

Forty-Three

From the small navigating station atop the submarine’s tall sail, Nakhimov stared through his binoculars — transfixed in horror by the gruesome sight of Danilevsky and all of his Raven Syndicate soldiers abruptly transformed into blazing human torches. Writhing and screaming in eerie, high-pitched agony that could be heard across the water even that far away, they flailed wildly at each other before toppling into the oil fires that were now roaring skyward all around the Gulf Venture.

He lowered his binoculars, feeling nauseated.

At that instant, a powerful explosion ripped through the very top of the tanker’s aft superstructure, lighting up the night sky for miles around. First, a blinding flash silhouetted the large bridge windows from within and then they all blew out simultaneously. A huge cloud of smoke and shards of shattered glass and burning debris billowed outward, cascading down across the tanker’s weather deck and into the sea.

“Sukin syn,” Nakhimov murmured, scarcely able to believe what he was seeing. “Son of a bitch.” But then he leaned forward and punched the intercom to the control room. “Helm, this is the captain. Full left rudder. Come left to zero-nine-zero degrees and increase speed to ten knots.”

“Full left rudder. Coming left to zero-nine-zero degrees. Making revolutions for ten knots, aye, sir,” the helmsman repeated from below.

Nakhimov felt his submarine heeling sharply as it began executing the rapid turn he’d just ordered. He wanted out of this damned oil slick before they too were engulfed by the flames he could now see rippling outward across the ocean. He raised his binoculars again, tracking back toward the tanker.

A plume of gray-white smoke curled away from the ruined bridge. The open-air platform just above it was now a tangle of fallen radio and radar masts. He frowned. Moscow’s orders in this situation were explicit. Whether or not the Iranian missile launch was successful, there must be no survivors left alive for anyone to interrogate. And now that Danilevsky and his Raven Syndicate mercenaries had failed so miserably, that task fell to him.

“Control Room, this is the captain,” Nakhimov snapped. “Get me Captain Second Rank Arshavin.”

“Arshavin here,” his executive officer replied.

“Listen closely, Maxim,” Nakhimov said. “I want you to plot an immediate torpedo attack against that tanker, using two of our UGST wire-guided torpedoes.”

For one brief moment, there was only silence. But then Arshavin came back on the intercom. “Understood, Captain. I’ll report when our torpedoes are ready.”

Groggy, with his ears ringing from the enormous blast, Nick Flynn pushed himself back up — first to his knees, and then, with a renewed effort, all the way onto his feet. He stood there swaying for several seconds. Then he shook his head to try to clear it and peered through the roiling smoke at what was left of the tanker’s bridge. Small tongues of flame guttered red and orange through openings that had once been windows. He limped forward toward the hatch. The watertight door was just… gone, blown off its hinges by the blast and hurled out to sea. One of the ship’s radio masts had fallen across the port wing and now partially blocked the opening with a bent and twisted metal pole and a snarl of broken wiring.

Awkwardly, he climbed over the obstruction and entered the ruined bridge. Consoles, tables, and other furnishings had been converted to mounds of crumpled metal and splintered, charred wood. He averted his eyes from the explosion-pulped remains of those he’d gunned down earlier.

Swallowing against the sour taste of bile, Flynn edged his way carefully around the worst of the wreckage until he came right to the edge of the jagged hole his demolition charges had blown through the deck. He looked down — and saw a scene of carnage and destruction. The mangled bodies of white-coated technicians who’d been ripped apart by flying steel splinters or crushed by the blast were heaped across smoldering equipment consoles. A couple of monitors flickered eerily in the red-tinged darkness, somehow seemingly left intact by the massive shockwave that had smashed down across the compartment.

Flynn let his breath out. No one would be firing that rocket now, he thought coldly. Not from a shambles like that. MIDNIGHT was dead, as dead as all those charged with launching the genocidal attack on the United States from this ship.

He straightened up. His job now was to get the survivors of his Dragon team off this vessel. He switched the frequency on his tactical radio. “Lariat One, this is Dragon Lead. Requesting evac soonest. Over.”

In reply, he heard only a hash of fuzzy, indistinct static, perhaps broken by what might have been blurred words or, more likely, simply the meaningless pops made by random radio waves as they sleeted through the ionosphere.

Flynn repeated his call. There was still nothing distinguishable coming through his headset. He frowned. Either his radio was on the fritz, knocked out by the blast he’d just set off, or all the metal debris heaped across the ruined bridge was interfering with his signal. Or just possibly his hearing was still damaged from that shattering explosion, he thought. Turning, he carefully made his way back outside onto the open wing.

“Arshavin here, sir,” Nakhimov heard his executive officer report over the intercom. “The Torpedo Room reports ready to fire.”

“Stand by, Maxim,” he replied, again raising his binoculars and focusing them on the Gulf Venture. His submarine was now roughly three thousand meters off the big tanker’s port side. Surrounded by a widening ring of burning oil, the Iranian vessel was still steaming straight ahead at barely five knots. He nodded to himself. That was as close to a sitting duck as anything moving at sea could ever be. He leaned over the intercom. “Torpedo Room, this is the captain. Shoot!”

“One fired!”

Nakhimov hadn’t even felt the weapon go. That wasn’t really surprising, he supposed. Compared to the Podmoskovye’s eighteen thousand ton mass, the energy involved in launching a two-ton, wire-guided torpedo was like an elephant flicking a fly away with its tail. He waited another several seconds before ordering the next launch to avoid the risk of either torpedo interfering with the other. “Shoot!”

“Two fired!”

Tensely, Nakhimov counted in his head. Both torpedoes were now slashing through the water at sixty knots. At a range of roughly three thousand meters, their run should take about ninety seconds. Which meant the first weapon should reach the tanker and detonate under its keel just about… now.

A huge plume of water and foam erupted around the forward section of the Gulf Venture. The blast was powerful enough to shake the massive tanker from stem to stern. Only seconds later, the second torpedo exploded, this one almost directly below its aft engineering spaces. Propelled upward by the enormous shockwave generated by the underwater detonation, the stern of the Iranian ship visibly rose out of water before crashing back down. Within moments, the tanker lay dead in the water with its back obviously broken. Fires now raged across its foredeck, fed by oil gushing out of torn storage tanks.

That vessel was doomed now, Nakhimov knew. No ship, no matter how large, could take so much damage and stay afloat for long.

With a groan, Viktor Skoblin rolled over and sat up. He mopped at his face, trying to clear his vision. His hand came away stained red with blood. The rapid succession of three massive explosions had tossed him around the inside of this small metal compartment like a dried pea rattling around inside a tin can. He had a hazy memory of striking the walls, door, and even the ceiling before ending up splayed across a far corner. His assault rifle lay across his legs, apparently undamaged. He scooped it up.

What the hell just happened, he wondered? Was all that noise and confusion produced by the Iranian rocket as it roared aloft? Or had it blown up on the pad? The deck tilted beneath him, settling suddenly toward the stern.

Skoblin’s eyes widened in terror as he realized the truth. The tanker was sinking! He had to get out. And get out now. Swearing, he scrambled upright and struggled across the sloping compartment toward the door into the corridor.

Fadeyev, Zaitsev, and Linnik were already there. All were injured in some way, but they still carried their weapons.

“Where are the others?” Skoblin demanded. His voice sounded far off in his numbed ears.

Fadeyev shook his head. “Dead,” he mouthed. “Their necks were broken.”

Skoblin nodded grimly. The same thing could have happened to any of them. He gripped his rifle tighter and hobbled along the corridor. Beyond the blast-scorched doorway ahead, the night sky glowed with reddish-orange light. There were fires raging somewhere outside. “Come on,” he snapped. “We’re getting off this damned ship before it sinks under us. Shoot anyone who gets in our way.”

Growling their agreement, the three survivors of his Raven Syndicate team swung in behind him. They didn’t see the two grenades rolling across the deck toward them until it was far too late.

Tony McGill saw the twin flashes as his grenades detonated and smiled thinly. “Too bad, so sad, chums,” he muttered. With the ship obviously going down, he’d figured the bastards holding out near that missile control center would finally make a break for it.

“Nice work,” Shannon Cooke said tightly through pain-clenched teeth. He gripped the forearm of his broken left arm with his right hand. When those explosions rocked the tanker, they’d both been bounced across the deck, ending up being slammed against the nearest railing, and unfortunately his already-injured arm had taken the brunt of the impact. “So now what do we do?”

“We’re leaving, and pronto,” they both heard Flynn say wearily. He’d just slid down the ladder from the bridge wing above them. “This tub is going down fast. And I don’t plan on letting any of our guys who’re still alive go down with it. So come on.”

McGill and Cooke levered themselves off the deck and followed him down the stairs to the next catwalk, holding on tight as they stumbled down the steeply inclined steps. The Gulf Venture was listing to port now as more and more seawater poured into her ruptured storage tanks. Ahead, the ocean was on fire. Oil-fed flames danced across the surface. A thickening cloud of greasy black smoke hung low above the inferno.

Biting down hard to avoid screaming, Hossein Majidi painfully pulled himself along the slanting deck. He left a spreading trail of blood behind him. He knew he was dying, but the faint glow of a working computer console — the only one left intact in the bomb-ravaged control center — drew him like a moth to a flame.

Gasping aloud, he slid the horrifically mangled body of one of his technicians aside a few inches, just far enough so that he could see the display and reach the console’s keyboard. The dead man must have shielded this equipment from the worst of the blast. All the steel shards that would otherwise have ripped through the computer had instead shredded his corpse.

Through a fog of almost unendurable agony, Majidi studied the readouts currently displayed on the screen. Most indicators glowed red. A small inset on the display showed images captured by the single surviving external camera mounted on the Gulf Venture’s superstructure. In it, he could make out the ring of fire surrounding the sinking tanker, along with the shark fin — like sail of the Russian nuclear submarine slicing through the water not far off.

Carefully, focusing all of his remaining energies, he tapped a control on the keyboard, opening a new menu. It was labeled special weapon parameters. With the shattered halves of the ship flooding fast, successfully launching the Zuljanah rocket was no longer possible. That left him with only one remaining choice. He coughed once and then found he could not stop coughing. Blood dripped down his chin and spattered across the console. His life was fading, along with his vision. Knowing he had only seconds remaining, Majidi very deliberately altered several key parameters governing the nuclear warhead’s operation. He hung on just long enough to see several of the readouts on his screen turn green and fell back, dead.