Painkiller

57

When Deng’s twin torpedoes struck the hull of the PX-38 U.S. Navy reconnaissance launch boat, the vessel and its crew erupted in an explosion so overwhelming that within twenty-five seconds not a single scrap of shrapnel remained on the ocean’s surface. One moment the thirty-eight-foot sea-to-land attack craft had been skimming the Caribbean at thirty-five knots; in the next, there was a thud; the third marked an explosion that blasted the boat into a cloud of shrapnel mist.

Then the Caribbean returned to the state in which it had found itself prior to the boat’s arrival.

Deng was able to savor the destruction of the launch boat for two full seconds.

In the third, his War Room monitors told him two additional torpedoes had been released into the sea in fatally close proximity to his submarine lair. He knew immediately what this meant, and since he also knew there would be little time to do anything else, he simply set his jaw and stared with satisfaction as the last seconds of his life ticked off the countdown clock.

Now that he’d destroyed the reconnaissance boat, Deng knew the countdown would continue.

No one could stop it.

Eight seconds following the direct hit of Deng’s torpedoes against the launch boat, the Hampton’s modified Mk-48 nuclear-tipped torpedoes commenced a dual-stage explosion that resulted in the complete disintegration of three-quarters of Deng’s submarine.

The first Mk-48 detonated mid-hull on the starboard side of the sub, vaporizing most of the sub’s steel skin. This resulted in an implosion; the submarine folded partly in on itself, sucking over a million gallons of water into its cavities, a brief underwater black hole. On the ocean’s surface fifteen fathoms above, an oval-shaped area depressed by two inches.

Then the second Mk-48 struck; with so many of the sub’s cavities flooded, the detonation blasted outward in all directions. At sea level, the ocean shot suddenly skyward in a geyser of salt water and shrapnel.

Because they took place beginning at T-minus 00:13:39 on the Mobile War Room’s countdown clock, the twin Mk-48 explosions meant that Premier Deng Jiang would not live to witness the manifestation of Operation Blunt Fist.