32

EAST CHINA SEA
55 MILES WEST OF KUME SHIMA ISLAND
1247 HOURS ZONE TIME; AUGUST 19, 2006

“Letter from your ex-wife, Doc?” Amanda inquired with a half-smile.

“Better,” Golden replied with a theatrical sigh. “It’s a letter from my ex-wife’s lawyer. The dance may be over, but the malady lingers on.”

The majority of the Cunningham’s senior officers relaxed around the wardroom table as the steward served lunch. The exception was Ken Hiro. With the ship closed up to wartime cruising mode, the Duke’s exec and C.O. were going on watch down in the Combat Information Center. This meal was Amanda’s chance to stand down a little from the load.

The ship’s surgeon made a show of refolding the page and tucking it back into his pocket. “Captain, you should be very grateful to Marilyn.”

Amanda set down her coffee cup. “How’s that, Doctor?”

“Because of her, you get me. If I leave the service and go up on the beach, she can get her claws into me more easily. However, if I stay out at sea, I get a little intermittent peace and quiet. There’s no contest!”

A ripple of laughter ran around the table.

“Come on, Doc,” Arkady needled. “It couldn’t have been all that bad. You married the woman.”

“Listen, flyboy,” Golden replied synthesizing a Yiddish accent. “my ex-wife and I first moved in together, she had to get rid of her cat. I’m allergic. If I’d have known then what I know now, I’d have kept the cat and gotten rid of Marilyn! For the cat, I could have taken pills!”

It was a good light moment, but it couldn’t last.

“Hey, Captain,” Chief Thomson said. “What’s the latest on the sub hunt?”

“We’re still pretty much where we stood last night,” Amanda replied, cutting the first bite from her hot turkey sandwich. “The mission intent is still to keep the Reds from breaking out into the open Pacific.”

Amanda found herself sliding back into her briefing mode, the attention of her officers fixing on her. “Just now, all deepwater exits out of the East China Sea are being blockaded by a multinational submarine and surface task group. The Korean Navy is covering the Straits of Korea. The Taiwanese have the Formosa Strait. The Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force has the northern end of the Ryukyu island chain, and Seventh Fleet has the southern.

“All the perimeter secured, the containment area will be systematically saturated with ASW assets. We find the boomer, fix its location, and then we kill it. By the book.”

“Does anyone have any theories about where this sucker is now?” Frank Mckelsie asked.

“Look under your chair,” Christine Rendino said. “The current sitguess is that the Reds are hiding out here in the deep waters west of the Ryukyus, waiting for the chance to make a bolt for one of the channels.”

“Then what are we doing hanging around out here on our own?”

“We’re not quite on our own,” Amanda replied. “A secondary picket line of surface units is being deployed out along the Ryukyu trench ahead of the main line of containment. Our mission intent is to flush the Red wolfpack back into the shallower waters nearer the China coast.

“It’s a mixed bag of units, JSDF and Taiwanese Navy mostly. Since we haven’t had the chance to work up as part of Task Force 7.1’s regular ASW team, we were the logical contribution from the U.S. force pool.” She paused for another sip of coffee. “Or at least that was how it was explained to me.”

“Yeah.”

The Duke’s officers turned to their meal, each striving to ignore an unspoken truth that hovered over the table. The atomic submarine is the ultimate oceanic predator, the deadliest enemy of the surface warship. Hunting for one out in the deepwater jungle is something like being a sapper probing for a hidden land mine. Sometimes “success” takes the form of a sudden terminal explosion.

They were granted time enough to eat. The mess man was just cutting the dessert on the sideboard when the overhead speaker cut in.

“Wardroom, this is the CIC.”

Amanda’s command headset was lying in its usual place beside her plate. Snatching the earphones up, she settled them into place. “Wardroom, aye. What’s up, Ken?”

“Somebody’s initiated an active sonar search off to the southeast. Range unknown, but over the horizon. We think it may be the next picket ship down the line.”

“Any sighting report?”

“Not yet. We … stand by … Sighting report coming in now. Taiwanese Navy frigate Po Yang now reporting a possible SSN contact. They are pursuing the target, attempting to identify.”

Everyone around the table had their eyes fixed on Amanda, awaiting her word.

“Chris,” she whispered off mike. “The Po Yang, what do you have?”

“Ex-U.S. Navy Knox-class frigate. Purchased 1995. Systems updated in Taiwanese yards. ASROC ASW launcher forward, two triple sets of torpedo tubes amidships. Facilities for a single Kaman Super Sprite LAMPS helo.” A computer might have been using the Intel’s voice as she rattled off the list of facts. “SQS-26 hull sonar and an SQR-18 towed array, both with augmentation packages.”

Amanda’s-gaze flicked across to her tactical officer. “Dix, a Knox versus a Han or a Xia. Who has the edge?”

The TACCO shrugged. “If it’s one-on-one, ma’am, it’ll go to whoever gets off the first shot. On the other hand, if this is one of our bogeys, he may have a couple of swim buddies out there with him.”

Vince Arkady shoved his chair back. “Captain, maybe I’d better get out there and have a look.”

Amanda caught him with a quick shake of her head.

“Hold it. Let’s see if this firms up a little more first.”

The remnants of lunch forgotten, they waited through the slow crawl of the minutes, sipping their beverages or toying with dessert as a nervous mess man began to clear the table.

The overhead speaker clicked again. “Wardroom. Sonar is reporting an underwater explosion.”

“Ours or theirs?” Someone quietly voiced the question.

Ken Hiro answered a moment later.

“Captain, we are receiving a distress call from the Po Yang. They have just been torpedoed. Position, twenty-two miles south-southwest of us.”

“Right! Ken, sound general quarters. Close the range with the Po Yang. All engines ahead full!” Amanda continued to snap out her stream of orders against the backdrop of the alarm klaxons. “Communications Room, make signal to the Po Yang: ‘Hold on. We are coming to assist you with all possible speed.’ Then get on line with Seventh Fleet. Repeat the sighting report and inform them of our intent. Ask if they can get us some additional support out here.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Her officers were poised around the table, awaiting her command. “Mr. Arkady, you’re with me for a second. The rest of you, stations! Let’s go!”

They scattered. The aviator was on his feet, straining at the leash, ready to move.

“Arkady, given the rate of knots we’re going to be turning, our passage noise is going to take our sonar arrays off line. We’ll be going in deaf. Get out there with both of the helos, assess the situation, and sterilize the area. Find me that sub!”

“Will do!” He gave her the briefest of nods, then he was gone, heading away to the hangar bay aft.

“Captain, this is the Communications Room. The Po Yang has just reported that she has been hit by a second torpedo. She’s gone off the air, and we’re receiving life-raft transponders on that bearing.”

“Acknowledged. I’m on my way down.”

* * *

In the hangar bay, the helipad elevator descended with a howl of hydraulics and a flare of warning lights.

“Go! Go! Go! Put your shoulders into it!”

Aviation ratings rolled Retainer Zero One forward out of its servicing spot and onto the lift. The Sea Comanche had been undergoing mission maintenance and other AC hands sidled along the helicopter’s flanks, securing access panels.

“Gus! Where are you?” Arkady bellowed as he ducked in through the entry hatch.

“Here, Lieutenant!” AC-1 Gregory “Gus” Grestovitch, Arkady’s systems operator, was already at his gear locker donning his flight equipment.

“What’s the pod status?”

“We’ve still got the package from this morning. MAD pod and a sonobuoy dispenser. Fifty-fifty mission mix: passive and active.”

“Okay. Have‘ upload a Mark 50 and a life raft. Expedite!”

“Aye, aye, sir!” The lanky AC snagged his helmet from the locker and dashed off to confer with the ordnance handling team. Arkady geared up himself. Moving onto the lift pad, he swung into Zero One’s forward cockpit and started his preflight.

He knew full well that his handling crews were working as rapidly as possible, but the Lady was counting on him.

Impatiently, he twisted around in his seat and watched as the life-raft pod and the little Barracuda antisubmarine torpedo were trundled into position under the helo’s snub wings. The ordnance hands were still shackling them up as the elevator began its rise to deck level.

The skies were clear, their blue paled by the blazing sun of a summer noon. A single cumulus dome rose on the north horizon. Its white color matched the occasional flash of foam on the wave crests and the long plume of wake trailing behind the Cunningham.

The Duke moved out. Heat shimmer boiled the air over the exhaust stacks and the decks shuddered as the propeller revs climbed. Amanda was driving her ship hard to reach the distressed crew of the Taiwanese frigate.

She was also stretching her tactical safety envelope right to the limit as well.

Dammit! He was supposed to be out there covering her.

“Come on! Let’s get this bird off the deck! Let’s move!”

The rotors were being swung out and locked into position.

The ordnance hands were backing away, waving the safety pin streamers overhead to verify that the stores were cleared to drop.

Grestovitch dropped into the rear cockpit and the canopy was slammed down.

“Gus, what’s Zero Two’s position within her search quadrant?”

“Lieutenant Delany was way out to the northeast, sir. Air One has got her turned around and headed for the contact now.”

“Ah, nuts! Stand by for engine start.”

“Set. The word is we’re going after a Chinese sub, sir.”

“We are, pal.”

“Word also is that they’ve already blown another can away.”

“They have.” Arkady flipped his throttles to the start detent and energized the starters. “Crank!”

* * *

“Captain’s in the CIC!”

“Okay, Ken. I’ve got her.”

“Captain has the con!”

Amanda dropped into the command chair and whipped it around to face forward toward the Alpha screen. “What’s our status?”

“The ship is at general quarters,” Hiro replied crisply from his position at her shoulder. “Steering one nine oh degrees true. All engines ahead full. Making turns for thirty seven knots.”

“Tactical Officer. Ordnance status?”

Dix Beltrain looked up from the master weapons station at Amanda’s right. “Port and starboard torpedo bays armed, ma’am. Vertical Launch ASROC flights are hot. The problem is, we don’t have a target.”

The story was written on the topaz expanse of the Aegis system’s Large Screen Display. The position hack of the doomed Nationalist frigate glowed dead ahead along the Cunningham’s course line. A graphics circle was looped around it, its radius being the maximum range of a Red Chinese Type 53 torpedo. Somewhere inside that line, the hunter-killer boat that had destroyed the Po Yang very possibly still lurked, silent and invisible. They would be sharing that space very soon.

A single Y-shaped helicopter symbol marked with a Cunningham ID hack hurried southward toward the zone. It would arrive in the target area ahead of the destroyer, but not by much.

“How about the Nationalist LAMPS helo, Dix?”

“It was apparently caught on the deck, Captain. He didn’t get off.”

“Zero One’s status?”

“Air One reports he’s arming up now. Arkady should be launching within the next couple of minutes.”

“Other available assets.”

“JSDF Orion has been diverted south, and Task Force 7.1 will be launching a Viking as soon as they can get one turned around and refueled. Both units should become factors within the next three quarters of an hour.”

“Damn, damn, damn. That’s not going to be soon enough.” Amanda tapped her fingernail on the arm of the captain’s chair. “Ken, before you head up to the bridge, I’d like your assessment of the situation. Yours too, Dix. Are the Reds going to hang around out there waiting for us, or are they going to beat it?”

Her exec shrugged. “That Red wolf pack is trying as hard as it can not to be found. When that Nationalist frigate chanced across them, they killed it. Now their primary concern is going to be to get lost again. They’ll go deep and try to clear the area running at good quiet.”

“That makes sense, ma’am,” Dix Beltrain added. “But on the other hand, they could have left a rear guard behind. One of the two attack boats might have dropped out of the formation. He could be hanging around out there in the surface duct, covering the withdrawal of the other two guys.”

Amanda lifted an eyebrow. “Thank you both for sharing that with me, gentlemen.”

“Captain,” the Aegis systems manager called. “We’ve just lost the skin track on the Nationalist frigate. She’s gone down, ma’am.”

Instinctively, the little group of officers looked up at the monitors of the Mast Mounted Sighting System. A heavy smudge of grayish smoke was lined out along the southern horizon.

“CIC, this is Air One. Retainer Zero One now taking departure.”

A droning roar came from overhead, and a Sea Comanche helo appeared on the television screens. Nose down and gaining speed, it pulled away toward the dissipating smoke cloud.

* * *

“Talk to me, Gus. What do we have out here?”

“Multiple static surface contacts, Lieutenant. They look like life-raft radar reflectors. No transitories. No moving targets. Nothing I’d call a periscope contact. We’ve also got Zero Two out there at about our nine o’clock.”

Looking to port, Arkady caught the strobe flash of the Cunningham’s second LAMPS helo. He thumbed the transmitter key on the end of his collective controller. “Two, this is Zero One. We are airborne and inbound to the target area. You got a copy on me, Nancy?”

“I read you, Lieutenant,” Lieutenant (j. g.) Nancy Delany replied. “How do you want to play this, sir?”

Even with her recent promotion, the Duke’s number-two pilot still couldn’t manage to be casual with her Air Group Leader.

“I want to put a four-buoy box around the area. We’ll use our last fix on the sunken frigate as our central datum point. I want buoy placement two miles out from the CDP with a four-mile separation. Buoy coding will be clockwise relative, Alpha, Bravo, Charley, Delta. Passive search. Read back.”

As his wingwoman repeated the mission outline, Arkady looked ahead, beyond Zero One’s nose. He could make out a stain on the vivid blue of the ocean, the dark shimmer of a considerable oil slick. Also, a cluster of Day-Glo specks in its center.

“Okay, Zero Two. That’s the mission package. I’ll put down buoy Delta, then check out the survivors. You circle the box perimeter and set Alpha, Bravo, and Charley. Do you verify that you have a dunking sonar on board?”

“Roger, Zero One. I verify.”

“Okay. Once you get those buoys drilled in, drop another click south and run a deep listening line. I want these suckers kicked out of the brush.”

“Better come right to bearing two zero zero to line up on drop point Bravo, Lieutenant,” Grestovitch cut in from the rear cockpit.

“Doin’ it, Gus.”

To the airborne submarine-hunter, the sonobuoy is the equivalent of the fisherman’s glass-bottomed bucket. It gives an ASW aircraft the ability to peer beneath the surface of the sea. A miniaturized sonar system sealed in a watertight casing, it is dropped to the surface of the ocean. There, it lowers a sound head into the depths and lifts a radio antenna into the sky, broadcasting its findings back to a mother station aboard a friendly ship or aircraft.

“Buoy Alpha is down. Buoy Bravo is down. We’ve got positive datalinks.”

“Good enough, Gus. Start working‘. I’m moving in on the survivors.”

Arkady had flown a good number of search-and-rescue missions in his time, but he had never before orbited over the grave of a newly killed warship.

Heavy oil and air bubbled steadily to the surface, the black blood of the fallen vessel. The smell of it flooded the cockpit.

Wreckage drifted within the slick. Human forms as well, some that moved and some that didn’t. Survivors clustered around a scattering of life rafts, staring up at the hovering helicopter as the inmates of hell might stare at an angel.

Arkady sidled his aircraft near a group of weakly struggling men at the edge of the debris drift and dropped the raft pod he carried. It was the only aid he could give. With its narrow fuselage and two-place fore-and-aft cockpit, the Sea Comanche was incapable of doing conventional rescue and recovery work.

“Gray Lady, this is Retainer Zero One. I am holding over sinking site now. It looks like we may have about a hundred and fifty men in the water. Maybe a few more. A lot of wounded.”

“Acknowledged, Zero One,” Amanda Garrett’s filtered voice replied. “We’re ten minutes out.”

Arkady lifted his eyes and scanned the horizon. The Cunningham’s camouflage paint rendered the ship invisible against the distant haze, but her bow wave flashed white against the blue of the sea.

* * *

In Sea Comanche’s rear cockpit, Gus Grestovitch plied his trade. Of all the skills of the maritime warrior, sub hunting is still infused with the largest share of black magic. The systems operator was now focusing past the cascade display in front of his eyes and the audio input in his earphones and was feeling for the submarine with his soul.

He wasn’t having much luck. The sea itself was damaged here. The wreck, trailing away beneath them, was scrambling the local acoustic environment. Escaping air churned upward. Fire-heated metals sizzled and cracked. Fittings tore loose from the hulk and tumbled away into the deepwater night.

Maybe there was even life left inside that hull. Someone who hadn’t been able to get clear before the water closed over the decks. Someone whose last seconds of existence were flickering away in the blackness of some lost air pocket.

Grestovitch closed his eyes and shook the image out of his head. He sure as shit didn’t need that just now. He tried to refocus on his instrumentation. As he did so, he noticed something on a secondary readout. He shifted the displays on his multimode telepanel, then shifted them again.

“Hey, Lieutenant?”

Arkady glanced back over his shoulder. “Yeah, Gus?”

“We should have a couple of thousand feet of water under us here, right?”

“Yeah?”

“Then how come the wreck of the frigate is still sitting just under the surface?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Check the Magnetic Abnormality Detector. We’ve got a big hunk of metal right underneath us.”

Arkady goggled over the cockpit rail for an instant and then called up the MAD board onto his own screen.

“Ah, shit! Gray Lady! This is Zero One! We’ve got a Red sub station keeping right under the survivors! It’s an ambush!”

* * *

“Helm, hard about one hundred and eighty degrees!”

Amanda’s voice rang in the Combat Information Center.

“All engines ahead emergency!”

The duty helmswoman spun her rudder controller and firewalled the throttles and power levers. The engine song rose into a keen and the hull framing groaned. The deck tilted beneath their feet as the Duke began to fight her way into the commanded turn.

“Sonar, how the hell did we miss this guy?” Dix Beltrain demanded from the tactical officer’s console.

“His plant noise was masked by the audio clutter from the wreck,” Foster called back from Sonar Alley. “Getting transitories on the bearing now. Sounds like he’s flooding tubes.”

“Shit, he’s taking a shot! Captain, we have a firing solution. Ready for a snap shot with the V-ROCs.”

“Negative! Check fire!” Amanda shook her head vehemently. “He’s holding right under the survivors. We drop a torpedo on him and we could kill dozens of those men in the water.”

“Then what do we do, Captain?”

“We run!”

“Fish swim out!” Foster’s voice had risen an octave. “Captain, we’ve got torpedoes coming our way!”

* * *

Two decks down, in Main Engine Control, the state of the world was gauged by two parameters. One was the all pervasive, steady-state howl of the power-room turbogenerator sets. The other was the faint but equally pervasive vibration that radiated up the support pylons from the huge, radial-gap electric motors in the propulsor pods.

The howl was now a scream, and the vibration was beginning to make the coffee mugs dance on the console tops.

Chief Engineer Carl Thomson paced his set path behind the chair backs of his systems operators — thirty feet to port, then thirty feet back to starboard — his eyes flowing from one telepanel to the next.

“Main Engine Control, this is the CIC.” Thomson paused his pacing and lifted one hand to his headset, pressing the earphone tight to cut out the outside sound. “Main Engine, aye.”

“Chief, this is the Captain. We have hostile torpedoes inbound and we’re trying to outrun them. I need everything you’ve got. Right now!”

“You’ll get it, Captain.” There was nothing more to be said on that front.

Thomson lifted his voice. “Heads up! We’ve got a couple of wake chasers coming up behind us. Stand by to put her to the wall!”

“Chief, all mains and auxiliaries are already at one hundred percent output,” one of the Motor Macs called back over her shoulder, fear dawning in her eyes. “We’re at redline limits all across the board!”

“That’s the problem with this modern generation of marine engineers,” Thomson replied, leaning in between two of the operators’ seats. “Some damn fool paints a red line on a dial and you kids think it means something. Smith, kill the anticavitation programs. Set blade trim to manual. Swensen, you call up your IPS flow charts. Let’s see where we can scavenge some extra juice.”

* * *

“We got fish in the water! Lieutenant, they’ve fired at the ship … Son of a bitch!”

Gus Grestovitch snatched for the cockpit grab bar as Retainer Zero One’s nose dipped toward the ocean. The Sea Comanche’s engines shrieked and she accelerated out of her hover with all of the thrust and lift her rotors could produce.

“Lieutenant! Where the hell are we going?” Gus asked.

“Back!” Arkady replied grimly.

* * *

“Dix, what about our own torpedoes? Could we try an intercept shot with a Mark 50?”

The TACCO glanced across at his commanding officer.

Amanda sat erect in the captain’s chair, her fine-boned features set, her eyes level and controlled.

“No good, ma’am,” he replied. “To use the Barracuda’s antitorpedo program, we’d need to use wire guidance and the main-hull sonar arrays. We’d have to slow way down and turn in to target to acquire it. I don’t think we have the sea room.”

The tactical situation was being sketched out on the Alpha screen before them. The Cunningham’s own sonars had been deafened by the flow noise of her own passage through the water. However, the data flow from the sonobuoy pattern was being used by the Aegis battle-management system to build a display of the tactical situation.

The Duke’s position hack was fleeing back down its course line. Closely pursuing it were two overlapping dot centered-in-cross icons, glowing in red, the mark of an active, hostile torpedo threat. The separation between the ship and weapon symbols was perceptibly shrinking.

“It looks like we’ll have to run them out of fuel, then,” Amanda said determinedly.

Beltrain didn’t reply. The Duke’s senior weaponeer was deep into assembling a critical equation on his console repeaters. Calling up time of launch, range estimations, and performance statistics from the torpedo data annex, he was trying to dispel an ominous gut feeling.

“Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus!”

“Dix, what is it?”

“The Red fish have a range overlap. They got us, Captain! Impact in four minutes!”

* * *

Twenty feet off the deck, Retainer Zero One blazed back along the bearing line toward the Cunningham.

Unbidden, the story of the Japanese Zero pilot who had dived into the path of a torpedo to save his carrier came to Vince Arkady’s mind.

Futilely, he scanned the wave tops for some sign of the passage of the hostile weapons. Nothing. Old-model fish would leave a telltale stream of steam bubbles behind. Modern units left no more wake than a passing shark.

Beyond having Gus’s life to consider, he was denied even the Zero pilot’s option. They were targeting the ship commanded by his Lady and there was absolutely nothing on God’s green earth he could do about it.

* * *

“Set LEAD decoys for ten-second activation delay. Stand by to drop.”

“LEADs set, Captain.”

“Drop LEAD decoys. Helm, ten degrees right rudder.”

The Launched Expendable Acoustic Devices rolled off the Cunningham’s stern and into her boiling wake. Upon activation, they would produce the simulated sound signature of their launching ship, literally screaming “Hey, I’m a destroyer!” into the face of the oncoming homing torpedoes. Hopefully, their mimicry would be sufficiently convincing.

The LEADs were the last technological trick left in the Cunningham’s bag.

“Man, I sure hope that’ll do it,” Beltrain said fervently.

“Even if it doesn’t, we’re still going to be okay.” Christine Rendino had left the intelligence bay and was now standing behind and between the command and tactical officer’s stations. Squeezing in beside Beltrain, she was studying the performance graphs on Beltrain’s flatscreens.

“What are you talking about, Chris—” Amanda’s demand was cut off by a heavy thudding concussion. On the aft-view television monitors, a towering column of white water leaped into the air half a mile astern.

“We got one!” the sonar chief yelled from the sound bay.

“The lead fish just killed the decoys. The second torpedo is … shit! The second fish is still running hot and tracking. It’s still on us, Captain!”

“Stand by, second LEAD set!” Amanda twisted around to face her intelligence officer. “Now, what are you saying?”

“That fish won’t reach us.” Christine’s finger stabbed at the torpedo stats on the flatscreen. “We’re right at the edge of the range envelope for a Type 53.”

“Yeah, but there is still overlap,” Beltrain insisted.

“Not for real, Dix. The analysts frequently dial a fudge plus factor into the opforce stats listed in our data annexes. The logic is that it’s better to overrate enemy weapons performance than it is to underrate it.”

“I can’t count on that, Chris,” Amanda snapped. “Drop LEAD decoy set two! Zero time activation! Helm, ten degrees left rudder!”

The single scarlet cross-dot symbol of the remaining torpedo still crawled up the Cunningham’s course line like a spider on a thread.

Now the blue square-dot of a decoy marker appeared in the Duke’s wake, a barrier between the fleeing ship and its lethal pursuer. Would it hold? All hands in the CIC gave up on breathing until they learned the answer.

Cross-dot and square-dot merged … and passed through each other.

“Captain, torpedo has not decoyed! Continuing to close the range! Ninety seconds to impact!”

“Damn, damn, damn!”

“Then here’s something you can count on!” Christine continued relentlessly, grabbing for Amanda’s shoulder. “The listed range we have for the Type 53 torpedo is for the original weapons design as used by the Russian Navy. The fish that’s been fired at us will be a Chinese copy of the simplified export model — what they call a monkey-version weapon. There will be a performance degradation! It’s not gonna reach us!”

“I hope you’re right.” Amanda’s hand struck the interphone key. “All decks, this is the Captain! Evacuate all compartments below the waterline and all frames aft of amidships! Rig for torpedo impact! Expedite!”

* * *

“That’s it!” Chief Thomson yelled. “Lock down your breaker boards and get out of here. Move!”

The temperature in Main Engine Control was climbing fast and the atmosphere stank of ozone and burning insulation.

The air conditioners had been powered down to divert every last critical amp into the drive train. A growing constellation of red and yellow indicator lights glowed on the consoles as system after system climbed into overload.

The watchstanders yanked off their headsets and scrambled for the hatchway and the ladder beyond it that led upward to sunlight and safety. The last Motor Mac out paused for a second and looked back. The Chief hadn’t moved; he was still leaning in over the master panels.

“Hey, Chief?”

“Get going, son. I’ll be along in a second.”

He wouldn’t be. They both knew it.

The hatch thumped shut on its gaskets and Thomson slid back into the center seat. An arc warning alarm sounded in the starboard propulsor pod, and he hit the key sequence that killed it with a jet of nitrogen gas.

You don’t walk out on your watch when things are looking a little rough. Not if you read out of Carl Thomson’s book.

The digital iron log was flickering at fifty-one knots. Thomson grinned down at it as his fingers closed around the master power levers.

“Okay, old girl, now let’s see what you’ve really got.”

* * *

The USS Cunningham and Retainer Zero One thundered along side by side. The big destroyer was ripping the sea open in her desperate race for survival. Her bow wave, shaved from the ocean’s surface by her razor-sharp prow, sheeted up and back cleanly, nearly to the level of her foredeck.

Back aft the snowy arc of her rooster tail rose to deck level and above. Every seventh wave she encountered exploded at the touch of her stem, wreathing her in its spray.

This was a moment frozen in the minds of Vince Arkady and Gus Grestovitch. Never would the Duke appear any more beautiful than she would in these last few seconds before her imminent destruction.

* * *

“Tracks are merging!” Charles Foster’s voice cracked despite the fight he was making for control. On the Large Screen Display, the torpedo graphic was overlying that of the Cunningham.

“Sound collision alarm!

The two-toned electronic yelp filled the CIC. All hands grabbed for a solid hold and braced themselves. All except Christine Rendino. The Intel continued to stare forward into the Alpha screen, her arms crossed defiantly.

“Tracks still merging … “

Amanda caught sight of a familiar shape out of the corner of her eye. One of the exterior monitors had locked onto Retainer Zero One. Almost of its own volition, her hand went to the camera controls, zooming in on the helicopter’s cockpits seeking for the face of the man in the pilot’s seat.

“Frequency shift! We have a frequency shift!”

When the executioner’s ax is falling, dare you believe in life?

“We have track separation! Torpedo is slowing! Torpedo is slowing … Torpedo has run out of fuel, Captain. Torpedo is no longer a factor.”

“All engines ahead standard.” Amanda had to force the words out of her throat. The scream of the Cunningham’s turbines trailed down into a protracted sigh.

She counted slowly to ten before opening the 1-MC circuit. “All hands. This is the Captain. We had a little trouble there, but we’re out of it now. Resume stations. We’ve got a sub to go after.”

All around the Combat Information Center, aching lungs accepted oxygen and the copper taste of fear was swallowed away. A plume of coolness roared out of the air-conditioning ducts, heralding the return of normalcy. Christine Rendino folded over on the console divider between the command and tactical stations, her breath emptying out of her.

Dix Beltrain gestured toward her with his thumb. “One of these days. Captain, this gal has got to be wrong about something.”

“Fa” sure,” the Intel’s muffled voice replied. “But ain’t you guys glad today wasn’t it!”

Загрузка...