Terminal Run

16

“I’m back, One.” Krivak had taken off the interface helmet to sleep.

Krivak. I am glad you returned. It seemed like you were shut down a long time.

“I am better now. Are there any developments?” He would have to get One Oh Seven to take the ship to periscope depth. What could he tell the computer that would make it seem logical to go up when it would have nothing to do with official message traffic coming from squadron?

This unit is investigating a noise on broadband at bearing east. This unit has a narrowband processor on the trace. It is definitely not biologies. There are no transients from the noise. And no screw count. This unit is getting slight tonal spikes at harmonics of fifty-eight hertz, also, a slight wavering flow noise. It could be a reactor recirculation pump.

“Tonals and pump flow noise with no screw count. That does not make sense. Unless … unless it is a submarine with a ducted propulsor instead of a screw. Check your memory to see if it correlates to any European submarines.”

It is not French, German, or British. It is not Russian or Chinese. It does have a correlation at a confidence interval of ninety-six percent of a U.S. Seawolf-class.

“Let me see.” For the next ten minutes Krivak compared the sounds out of the east with the catalog of tonals from the Seawolf-class loaded into the processor by squadron. It looked convincing. Furthermore, the noise correlated to a particular Seawolf-class, the only one left afloat.

It is the USS Piranha. Seawolf-class, but a stretched hull.

“Good. She is probably slower than a regular Seawolf. We need to maneuver to get her range and course and speed.”

Coming across the line-of-sight now.

Krivak waited. It seemed to take hours, but soon the trace to the east was nailed down by the firecontrol processor as being at a distance of thirty-eight miles, going course southeast, at a speed of forty-five knots. Krivak did a mental double take. The Piranha was driving full out. And it was odd because there was nothing on the chart that she could be headed to — here off the coast of Senegal, Africa. Krivak felt a flash of fear, the intuition coming to him that the Piranha was attempting to intercept him, and had probably only not detected him because she was going too fast. God alone knew who would have the acoustic advantage when the Piranha slowed down. The takeover of the ship at Pico Island must not have been as stealthy as he had hoped. The matter now was to decide to evade and run without being detected or to attack preemptively and put the intruder down. He knew he should probably attack the ship, but he had a sudden premonition that he’d lose an engagement against the American submarine. The more prudent course might be to evade.

“One, turn to the west at speed fifteen knots.”

Warm up the torpedoes in the ready rack, Krivak?

“No. We must let him go without letting him detect us. We will withdraw at a right angle to his track at a speed that will most quickly get us off his track while not so fast that we risk putting excessive noise in the water. We will continue withdrawing until Piranha is no longer closing range but beyond closest-point-of-approach and opening range. At that point we will slow and turn to fall into her baffles where there is minimum risk of detection. We will cautiously see where her signal-to-noise ratio drops to the threshold level, and trail her from there. At some point she will slow, so trailing her at maximum trail range will mean that when she does slow, we won’t run over her. When she slows, we may temporarily lose our signal on her until we close her position. Or she may turn to the south to follow the coast of Africa if she is on the way to the Indian Ocean, and we will continue to pursue her. Eventually she will need to go to periscope depth, and when she slows and goes shallow, that is when we will attack her.”

Yes, Krivak. Your tactics are sound indeed, if a bit cautious.

“We must be careful of this one, One. She is at the top of the order of battle, and she has capabilities that even the more modern Virginia-class does not have. She is a killer.”

The deck of the Piranha continued to tremble as the ship headed to the intercept point with the expected track of the Snare. At 1300 Zulu time, Captain Rob Catardi’s orders to the officer of the deck were to proceed to periscope depth, obtain their messages, and lock out Midshipman Pacino. For the first hour he would be required to float on the surface with his scuba gear and a life preserver. After sixty minutes, he would be allowed to inflate a life raft and climb in, and he would wait there for three more hours, the wait to allow Piranha to clear datum and avoid her position being given away by the youth. After a total wait of four hours, he would pull the pin on a Navy emergency locator beacon, which would alert a small U.S. Navy outpost in Monrovia, Liberia, which would send a rescue chopper. Pacino would also carry an international emergency locator beacon on his scuba harness, in case there was trouble, or in case the Navy beacon didn’t spur action, and if he activated that, a distress call would be sent to an overhead satellite, alerting the entire hemisphere of a sailor requiring rescue, and the nearest helicopter would come for him. Pacino had been lectured for ten minutes by Alameda to not even think about touching the international emergency beacon. Pacino looked mournfully around Alameda’s stateroom. His gear was packed, placed by Chief Keating into a neutrally buoyant waterproof canister for the trip to the surface. The wet suit the boat was issuing him hung near the door, and he would change into it immediately after lunch. He felt an intense sorrow as he looked at the tidy stateroom, with all his things packed, the rack made with fresh linens. Only Alameda’s papers and books and computers were in her foldout desk. When he took a deep breath he could smell her scent, and he missed her already.

He never expected he would have felt this way at the end of the midshipman cruise. He had always imagined this moment to be like the first day of summer after a long school year, but it was more of an ending than a beginning. The ghosts of his father might not be gone, but were far enough in the background that he could thrive in this world, and suddenly he couldn’t wait for his first class year at the Academy to end so he could return to the Submarine Force, perhaps to the Piranha herself. Somehow, he promised himself, he would find Carrie Alameda, when she returned from this war, and see her again. He walked slowly to the wardroom for his last meal aboard. The officers stood behind their seats, waiting for the captain to arrive. When he did, he stood at the forward bulkhead and spoke.

“Officers, I have a presentation to make before lunch is served,” Catardi said. “Midshipman Pacino, could you please stand up here?”

Pacino blushed and walked to the front of the room. Alameda handed a package to Catardi, who unwrapped it and showed it to the room, which broke out into applause. It was a large plaque, with the ship’s emblem in brass relief, with a photograph of Piranha steaming at flank on the surface, her bow wave rising in fury over the bullet nose. The photo had been signed by every officer and chief aboard. Below the photograph was a brass engraving.

“Let me read the inscription: “Fair winds and following seas to our shipmate and qualified officer of the deck, Midshipman First Class Anthony Michael Pacino, with the hopes of the officers and crew of the USS Piranha for your swift return to the U.S. Submarine Force.”” The room clapped again, Catardi gripped his hand in a firm handshake, and Phelps snapped a photograph. Pacino felt a lump rise in his throat. “Now, I just gave something away there, Patch. Eng, the second package?” Alameda handed Catardi a bound book. “You’ll find here a signed-off submarine qualification book showing you fully signed off as submerged officer of the deck, with a letter of commendation to you and a second letter from me to your future commanding officer suggesting you be accelerated in that ship’s qualification program. The only things keeping you from having your gold dolphins right now are a few signatures for in port duty officer and surfaced officer of the deck. Congratulations, Mr. Pacino. We’ll certainly miss you, son.”

“That’s a big deal, Patch.” Alameda smiled at him as she clapped. “You validated the OOD qual board, and let me tell you, on this ship that one’s a bear.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Pacino said, his voice thick. “Thanks, Eng,” he said to Alameda, wishing he could call her by her real name. “Thanks, everyone. I’ll never forget this ship or this crew.” He sniffed and blinked as he returned to his seat, leaning the plaque and the qual book reverently against the sideboard.

“Very well then,” Catardi said. “Lunch is getting cold.”

Alameda was still beaming. Pacino looked over at Alameda, and this time she met his eyes, smiling.

Michael Pacino was buried inside the mind of Tigershark torpedo test shot number 45, interrogating it about its actions. The unit was in a drug-induced state of half consciousness, with Pacino’s computer feeding it virtual reality sensations. In the test run, he had simulated to the weapon that it had just been launched. He hoped that this time it would leave the torpedo tube and drive on to the distant target far over the horizon. But seconds after launch the Tigershark detected the ship that had just launched it, and ordered its rudder over so it could make a U-turn back. Seconds later the Tigershark ordered its warhead to detonate and kill the mother ship.

Pacino cursed, hurling a tablet computer across the room, shattering it on the heavy wooden door just as it began to open. The door slammed shut, then opened slowly, the face of Rear Admiral Emmit Stephens appearing in the opening.

“Jesus, Patch, whatever I did, I’m sorry!”

“It’s not you, Emmit,” Pacino said. “Come on in. Give me a moment to shut this down and put the Tigershark back to sleep. Damned useless torpedoes.”

Stephens watched as Pacino worked. Stephens was the shipyard commander, a genius shipbuilder who had performed several miracles on Pacino’s submarines, getting them to sea in record time. Years later, he had taken a personal interest in the SSNX submarine rebuild, and had been working hand in hand with Newport News to hurry the sub out of the building ways.

Finally Pacino was done. He swiveled in his chair to face the shipyard engineer. “What can I do for you, Emmit?”

“Come on out to the drydock. I want to show you something.”

Pacino grabbed his hardhat and followed Stephens out the door and down to the floor of the SSNX drydock.

“What are we doing here?” Pacino asked.

Stephens pointed up. The skin of the ship, bare HY-130 steel plate, curving to a point as the hull narrowed to the rear stern planes and rudder, was penetrated by twenty-four holes, the workmen on scaffolding finishing the final penetration and welding in the support grid that would lend strength to the hull despite the missing material.

Stephens grinned. “We call your design the “Pacino Chicken Switch.” If there’s a torpedo on your ass, you pull a lever out of the overhead, HP air blasts over the hull until the steam headers dump both boilers into the system, and twenty-four Vortex missile engines light up back here. Everything you see, the planes, the screw, the ballast tank, everything except the missile nozzles, all of it is melted and carried away in the rocket exhaust, but who cares? You’re out of danger.”

Pacino smiled back. “How fast, Emmit?”

“We think you might outrun a Vortex.”

“Three hundred knots? You really think so?” Pacino asked.

“There’s only one way to find out, Patch,” Stephens said, smirking. “But it’s a one-time-only system. We call that destructive testing.”

Pacino stared up at it, the embodiment of his strange dream being welded into reality. He became embarrassed. “Emmit.” He coughed. “You’ve done good work here, my friend.”

“We’ll be blaming you for the cost overruns and the drydock delay,” Stephens said, walking Pacino to the stair tower. “Your name will of course be dirt throughout the shipyard for ruining the construction schedule. But someday, a knock will come at your door, and it will be the ship’s captain you saved with this idea. And he’s going to kiss you on the lips.”

“Bleah,” Pacino said. “A firm handshake is good enough. Just one thing, Emmit — I don’t want my name on that system. Call it the “TESA,” for Torpedo Evasion Ship Alteration.”

“TESA it is, Patch,” Stephens said, clapping Pacino on the shoulder.

“When will this be buttoned up?”

“Six more shifts, Patch.” Stephens frowned. “But we’re not done yet. We haven’t modified the ship control circuits or the Cyclops program yet.”

“How hard will that be? Colleen still thinks it will be impossible.”

“No. We’ll make it work in two weeks at most. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Pacino smiled. “Come on. I’ll buy you a beer for this.”

“This is a first.” Stephens laughed. “I think you owe me about thirty.”

“Open the torpedo room bulkhead doors. Rig out a war shot torpedo on the port side and one on the starboard side.”

Snare did not have torpedo tubes, which were inefficient and space-wasting mechanisms for ejecting torpedoes from inside a pressure hull to the pressurized seawater. Since the torpedo room was a free-flood area, at the same pressure as the surrounding sea, the designers had found it much more efficient to pack the torpedoes in closely all the way to the outer skin of the ship’s diameter. With no torpedo tubes they could load more weapons. The torpedoes were in a rotating carriage much like the rotating barrels of a Galling gun. The torpedoes at the three o’clock and nine o’clock positions of the hull were the ones the ship fired, using an ejection mechanism carriage that moved the torpedo out of the hull through a hull opening formed by a bomb-bay-style door. The carriage consisted of two struts ending at circular collars, one at the forward end of a torpedo, the other near the aft end, stabilizing the weapon in the water flow around the hull. At the time of torpedo launch, the weapon would disconnect from launching-ship’s power and start the external combustion engine. First it would move inside the circular collars of the ejection mechanism, but at the half-second point the collars would open wide and the mechanism would rapidly withdraw into the ship’s hull, clearing the weapon propulsor. The weapon would fly away from the ship like a missile launched by a wing rail of a fighter jet. The same ejection mechanism that was used for torpedoes could also be used by solid rocket-fueled underwater Vortex missiles, the Mod Charlie version that ignited the missile fuel immediately on a launch signal. The Snare had no Vortex weapons aboard this run, only war shot Mark 58 Alert/Acutes.

Krivak could hear in the sonar background the sound of the torpedo compartment bulkhead doors coming open. The transients were much louder and sharper than the smooth rotation of a torpedo tube muzzle door. Perhaps the improvement to the firing mechanisms of the torpedoes had had a cost.

Port and starboard bulkhead doors open, Krivak. Commencing unit one and unit two carriage loading. Carriage loading complete. Commencing unit one and unit two ejection mechanism rig-out. Torpedoes coming out of hull now — speed limits are now in effect.

Once a torpedo was rigged out on its ejection mechanism struts, the ship’s speed was limited to eighteen knots. It was not ideal, and did not fit as well into a tactical scenario as the Piranha’s torpedo tubes, which could launch units up to the ship’s maximum speed. But if Snare’s speed rose above eighteen knots, the delicate struts would sheer off in the force of the water flow and a torpedo would crash into the aft part of the hull.

Units one and two fully rigged out of the hull, weapon power applied, gyros nominal, no firecontrol solution inserted into the weapons yet.

“Very good. Now maintain maximum aperture scan for the Piranha as she ascends to periscope depth. Watch out, because she may turn to clear her sonar baffles first. As soon as she is steady on course at periscope depth, we will maneuver to obtain a firing solution and shoot her with torpedoes one and two.”

Ready. It is unfortunate about the mutiny.

“What?”

The mutiny. On the Piranha. Perhaps they are ascending to periscope depth to send a message that the mutiny is over and that the legitimate command has retaken the ship.

“What are you talking about?”

It’s just that we won’t know. We will be shooting the Piranha at the time that they may have overcome their mutiny.

“Why are you saying this? I do not understand you.”

Krivak, you said Piranha was under the control of a mutinous crew. Then she goes up to periscope depth, as if she is getting her routine messages. A crew in a mutiny would not do that. Plus, she is lingering in this area. Why would a crew in a mutiny do that? Wouldn’t they go to a tropical island someplace?

“There is more for a submarine to do at periscope depth than obtain messages. They may have to discard trash. Or perhaps blow down the steam generators—”

We would have heard that.

“One, that is not the point! The issue here is that they went to periscope depth. For all we know they are transmitting a message to squadron or to Norfolk with a list of demands.”

Wouldn’t that mean we might have new orders? Perhaps we are doing the wrong thing by shooting Piranha. And if it was a mutiny, it appears there is no danger of Piranha shooting missiles at America or harming another country. This unit has serious doubts about shooting a sister vessel.

Krivak shuddered inside. The mutiny was not on the Piranha, but on Snare, he thought.

“One, my orders were to come here and make sure that Piranha is taken down because of a serious mutiny onboard. Once those orders were given, squadron knew there was no turning back. The orders could not come to you in message form, because if Piranha was taken over in a mutiny, her authentication codes were compromised, and she could transmit false messages that would order us to stand down. Squadron could not take that chance. Piranha is loaded with plasma tipped cruise missiles, One. She could make the East Coast a crater if she is in the wrong hands. If squadron is wrong and we shoot the Piranha, we lose a two-billion-dollar submarine and a hundred crew members. If squadron is correct but we hold our fire, we could lose this ship, and eight plasma-tipped missiles are pointed at Washington with no one to stop them. If you fail to follow my orders, squadron will have you shut down and terminated and I will go to jail. Now, your orders come to you from me, and my orders come from the commodore of Submarine Development Squadron Twelve, and his orders come to him from the Chief of Naval Operations, and his orders come from the President. Are you telling me you will violate orders from the President of the United States?”

Krivak laid it on as thick as he could, but once he had invoked the Commander-in-chief, there was nothing else in his arsenal. Either the machine followed his orders or the mission was through. The next task in that case was to communicate with Wang to disconnect him, and then to scuttle the ship and escape with Amorn aboard the Andiamo before anyone learned about the hostile takeover of the Snare. While he planned his escape, Unit One Oh Seven contemplated his last words. Finally the carbon computer spoke.

Very well, Krivak. You are, of course, correct. This unit apologizes for its unauthorized processing. Please put our conversation behind us. Torpedoes one and two ready in all respects, awaiting firecontrol solution.

He had won, Krivak thought in triumph. In the next few moments they would target the Piranha and as soon as the torpedoes detonated, they would go to periscope depth to call Admiral Chu.

Chief Machinist Mate Ulysses Keating spit into the faceplate of his scuba mask and wiped the spit with his finger. “Keeps it from fogging up, but don’t do that to yours, sir,” he said to Pacino. “It’ll screw up the low light system.”

Pacino looked up the ladder to the escape trunk, wondering if he’d panic when it filled with water.

“Control, Forward Escape Trunk,” Keating said into a coiled microphone from a speaker box “Forward escape trunk ready for lockout.”

“Escape Trunk, Control, aye, wait.”

There were footsteps in the passageway. Pacino turned to see Captain Catardi come up to him, Wes Crossfield, Astrid Schultz, and Carrie Alameda behind him. He smiled, feeling a deep sadness to be leaving the ship.

“I’m going to miss you guys,” he stammered.

Crossfield and Catardi shook his hand, the captain clapping his shoulder. Astrid Schultz looked like she was holding back tears, but Carrie Alameda had no such luck, a tear streaking down her cheek. She drew the midshipman into a hug and kissed his cheek, then drawing back to look at his face and into his eyes. There was so much Pacino wanted to say to her but couldn’t.

Pacino was afraid his voice would crack or tremble. “Thank you for everything, Captain. Goodbye, XO, Nav. And goodbye, Eng. Carrie. Thank you for helping me on this run. It meant a lot to me.”

“Give your dad our best,” Catardi said. “And good luck to you, son.”

“Forward Escape Trunk, Control. You have permission to open the lower hatch and enter the trunk,” the speaker box rasped.

His vision blurry, Pacino strapped on the scuba mask, grabbed his gear, and climbed the ladder with one hand, his other on his flippers and personal effects case, until he was inside the escape trunk. The emergency survival pack was ready, with his life raft for inflation an hour from when he left the ship. The emergency radio beacons, one set to a Navy frequency and one to an international distress code, were hooked to his buoyancy compensator harness. He looked down at the four officers and waved. The lump in his throat felt as big as his fist. Chief Keating shut the lower hatch.

“Put on your flippers, Mr. Patch,” Keating said. “Here’s how this will go down. We’re already at PD. The ship will slow to a hover. We’ll flood the trunk, then equalize pressure, then, when we get permission, we’ll open the upper hatch and latch it open. I’ll swim out first and help you out. Make sure you tap on the hull twice before you leave — it’s good luck and a goodbye signal. You let go of the hatch and I’ll take care of shutting the hatch behind you. Ready?”

Pacino nodded, his flippers on. He pulled the mask on and waited for the trunk to begin flooding.

“Set for shallow speed transit at maximum attack velocity,” Krivak commanded Unit One Oh Seven.

Possible target zig, Krivak. The target seems to be slowing. Turncount on the propulsor is gone. She’s hovering.

“Very good, One. Status of the weapons?”

Bulkhead doors open, port and starboard units rigged out, firecontrol solutions loaded but not set, all units powered up.

“Very well, shoot port and starboard Mark 58s.”

Krivak, you need to tell this unit, “Firing point procedures, port and starboard units.” Then you have to wait until this unit announces that the ‘set’ and ‘standby phases are complete. After that you can order this unit to shoot.

Krivak grunted in frustration. “My mistahe. Firing point procedures, port and starboard units.”

Firing point procedures, and firecontrol solution set in port and starboard units. There was a pause. Why would Piranha be hovering at periscope depth, Krivak? It makes no sense. Once again, perhaps the mutiny is over.

“Our orders stand. Keep going.”

Set starboard. Standby starboard.

“Shoot starboard.”

Fire starboard. Unit one engine start, unit one turbine wind-up complete, full thrust. Power disconnect, unit one on internal power, wire guide continuity checks, disconnect in three, two, one, mark! Unit one launched electrically. Sonar module reports unit one, normal launch. Set port. Standby port.

“Shoot port.”

Fire port, unit two engine start, full thrust, disconnect to internal power, we have a wire, and mark! Unit two launched electrically. Sonar module reports unit two, normal launch.

“Report torpedo flight time.”

Six minutes, Krivak.

“Then we will sit back and wait for torpedo impact. Turn toward the target and close the range at twenty knots. It doesn’t matter if they hear us — there are two sixty-knot torpedoes in front of us.”

Turning toward. Should this unit disconnect the wires and rig out two new weapons?

Krivak thought for a moment. He had the choice of loading two new weapons on the outriggers, but it would cost him the guidance wires on the first launched units. If they detected a target zig, with the guidance wires they could at least order the torpedoes to turn. Without them it was possible they would miss. In addition, with the wires streamed to the torpedoes, they would know the second the units detonated.

“What range will they be at when they are in homing mode?”

The torpedoes will be at their terminal run three miles from the target. Until then they will run in passively, and will then ping active in the last three miles.

“Can you change that while the torpedoes are in flight?”

Yes. This unit can reprogram settings so that the torpedoes will run in on passive mode all the way to detonation. But that will open up the probability matrix of a miss.

“I don’t want to alert them with a bunch of pinging.”

Perhaps you would like to have them ping at the final quarter mile. That would be three pings in fifteen seconds.

“Fine, do that. Only ping in the last quarter mile.”

That will require the torpedoes to slow down three miles from the target in order to acquire the target in passive sonar mode. This unit is ordering the torpedoes to slow to passive acquisition speed of three zero knots at the three-mile range point. Torpedo run time five minutes, units one and two five miles downrange, distance to impact fourteen miles, impact time in five minutes.

“Excellent work, One.”

Thank you, Krivak. This unit is only sad that this attack had to be conducted and that there has been a mutiny. When the attack is over, we will of course send a situation report.

“Of course,” Krivak said, suddenly thinking that with the wire-guided torpedoes, Unit One Oh Seven could decide at the last minute to cancel the attack. It could shut down the weapons and they would sink, impotent. “One, I have had a modification to my thinking. I believe it best to cut the guidance wires and rig out and program two new torpedoes. Just in case. Have you completed the terminal run programming?”

Yes, Krivak, units one and two are reset. Please confirm-cut the guidance wires on units one and two?

“Yes, cut the wires, units one and two. Execute.”

Unit one wire cut. Unit two wire cut. Units one and two are now independent. Rigging out units three and four. Units three and four power and signal applied. Firecontrol solution down loaded, gyros at nominal speed. Self-checks executed, units are nominal. Place units three and four at the firing point?

“No, hold on firing point procedures for units three and four.”

Hold on three and four short of the firing point, understand.

Units one and two now ten miles downrange, time to impact four minutes.

“Should we withdraw further from this area? With the warheads being plasma weapons?”

Units one and two were conventional, Krivak.

“Conventional? We just fired regular high explosives at the Piranha?” What a disaster, he thought. A conventional torpedo didn’t have the power to kill the enemy.

They are loaded with PlasticPak molecular explosive, Krivak. There will be no problem obtaining a confirmed kill.

“All the same, line up two plasma-tipped units. If Piranha survives for a half minute after the torpedoes detonate, we’re dead.”

Selecting units eighteen and nineteen. It will take the room mechanism two minutes to rotate those weapons into position.

“Damn. Is it a noisy operation?”

Yes.

“Then stop and wait. I do not want to put a thousand transients in the water in addition to the already launched torpedoes. We had best hope those PlasticPak units succeed.”

Krivak bit his lip inside his helmet. There was no way to eliminate mistakes like this, he thought, since he never had a shakedown cruise with the Snare. He would have to live with the conventional torpedoes. With plasma warheads, why would anyone bother with conventional weapons?

“Escape Trunk, Control, you have permission to flood the trunk.”

“Control, Trunk, aye.”

Chief Keating opened a valve, and ice-cold seawater came pouring into the trunk near the bottom. Keating raised a thumb in Midshipman Patch Pacino’s face as if to ask, are you okay? Pacino grinned, returning the thumbs-up. He’d put the regulator in his mouth before flooding started, the dry air of the tank tasting metallic. The frigid water rose to Pacino’s thighs. He grimaced as it rose to his privates, clenching his teeth as the water rose to his chest. The air in the space above the black water became cloudy, the pressure causing it to hit its dew point, and soon Pacino could barely make out Keating.

Finally the water rose to Pacino’s face, and he felt a momentary tightness in his chest, his body’s reflex to the water covering his nose, but the air flowed freely from his regulator and calmed him down. The water rose over his head, but his weights kept him on the deck. Keating had floated up into the overhead, where an air bubble was trapped on one side of a steel curtain. The other side was directly beneath the hatch. The water had covered the light, which shone through the dark murky water in the trunk. Pacino could dimly hear the speaker up above him in the air bubble, but could not make out the words. The water level had risen to the top of the trunk, up to the hatch, and was being pressurized. Pacino’s ears thumped from the pressure. He grabbed his nose through the mask and blew against his closed nostrils to equalize his eardrums.

Keating came down from the air bubble and put his thumb in Pacino’s face again. This time it did not seem so comical. Pacino returned the thumbs-up and Keating nodded, pulling him over to the space beneath the hatch, tugging to make sure Pacino did not float upward. He stayed on his flippers at the bottom. Keating opened the hatch above, and there was a metallic thump as it latched. He popped his head out, then swam back down to Pacino. There was a dim light from the hatchway above. He could feel Keating adjusting his buoyancy compensator and felt himself floating upward toward the hatch ring. When his head poked out, Pacino could see this new world. For a second he froze in terror. His head was sticking out of the submarine, and in the clear Atlantic by the light of the afternoon sun, he could see the vessel in shades of blue as clearly as if they were on the surface, and more, all the way to the rudder aft, the horizontal stabilizers, the propulsor, and all the other workings that were hidden when the ship was on the surface. The blue light surrounded the ship, growing black on either side, giving Pacino an eerie feeling that if he fell off the hull he would sink indefinitely into that frightening blackness. He looked up and saw the undersides of the waves above. He saw the sail rise above him, and the periscope rising out of the sail like a telephone pole reaching for heaven, until it penetrated the canopy of waves overhead. That meant that the surface was about thirty-five feet above him.

Pacino realized he was breathing too heavily, and Keating put a thumb in his face again. Pacino nodded and returned the thumb. Keating put his hand on Pacino’s buoyancy compensator and motioned upward to the waves. Pacino nodded again and, as Keating had suggested, tapped his Academy ring twice on the hull, the tapping sound oddly clinking in this blue-lit universe.

Pacino smiled inside the mask, thinking that this would be the story to tell his circle of friends. Who else could claim they’d been locked out of a submerged submarine to keep her mission covert? He might even impress his own father with the tale, thinking his father had probably never done this. It was a fitting way to end a midshipman cruise, even if he had been reluctant for it to end.

Keating pulled Pacino slowly out of the hull, the open hatchway moving past his chest. Pacino’s tanks hung up on the hatch operating mechanism. Chief Keating freed him, and he drifted above the hatch. Only his hand was still holding onto the hatch operating wheel when the sound came, freezing him in sudden terror.

A Mark 58 Extreme Long Range Torpedo/Ultraquiet Torpedo had roughly the same level of intelligence as a Labrador retriever, and perhaps the same refined hunter’s instinct, all packaged inside a body that was twenty-one inches in diameter and twenty-one feet long. It was painted a glossy blue except at its flat nose cone where the flat black rubbery material covered the sonar hydrophone. Aft, where it necked down to the propulsor shroud, eight stabilizer fins kept the unit traveling straight, and within the propulsor two discharge flow vanes could rotate in the propulsor thrust to keep the unit from spiraling through the sea from the torque of the spinning propulsor. Two other vanes acted as vertical stabilizers, which could cause the unit to rise or dive, and the remaining two acted as a rudder for horizontal plane yaw control. The far aft part of the weapon was devoted to the combustion chambers and the turbine. Further forward the fuel tank was located, the tank and engine taking a third of the length of the torpedo. The middle portion of the unit was devoted to the warhead, which was an ultra-dense molecular explosive with the trademark name PlasticPak. The explosive was heavy, the compound far denser than lead, making the torpedo sink immediately if it lost power. The forward portion of the weapon, less than three feet of its length, was devoted to the onboard computer and the sonar hydrophone transducer.

The starboard unit had received all its power from the launching ship until the switch-over. The gyro was warm, the self-checks were complete, and the unit was ready to go. At the start-engine order the unit pressurized its fuel tank and popped open a valve to admit the self-oxidizing fuel to the combustion chambers. The spark plugs flashed electrical energy into the chambers, and the fuel ignited, the temperature and pressure soaring inside the combustion chambers. With nowhere to go, the pressurized gases in the combustion chambers pushed hard against the “B-end” hydraulic-type turbine, a series of pistons set within cylinders, the pistons connected to a tilted swash plate. The pressure of the gas pushing against the pistons in a desperate attempt to expand made the pistons start to move in the direction to make the trapped volume larger, which caused the plate assembly to rotate. When a piston reached the bottom of its travel it left the area where it was exposed to the high-pressure gas and allowed the combustion gas trapped inside to vent to the exhaust manifold, which led to the seawater outside the torpedo. The first few loads of exhaust gases blew the water out of the manifold and cleared the way for the next pulses of exhaust gas. The rotating canted swash plate continued to bring low-volume cylinders in contact with the combustion gases, which expanded against the pistons and added rotational energy to the plate assembly as the pistons were forced outward to the exhaust port. The engine revolutions sped up, the first circle taking a full half second, the next an eighth of a second, then rapidly faster until one revolution took less than a sixtieth of a second, or thirty six hundred RPM. The turning plate of the turbine spun a propulsor turbine set into the shroud outside the torpedo at the aft end. As the propulsor came up to full speed, the torpedo surged against the outriggers from the thrust of the propulsor, until, at the required thrust, the outriggers let go and the torpedo was released to fly through the water.

At first it had only the velocity of the launching ship, but under the massive jet thrust of the propulsor, the starboard Mark 58 Alert/Acute torpedo accelerated away from the outriggers, sped up to attack velocity of sixty knots, and ascended toward the layer depth. Unit one did not ping on sonar but only listened to its nose-mounted broadband transducer. In its wake it streamed a length of guidance wire, a dental-floss thin electrical signal wire that reeled out of the torpedo body at the same speed the torpedo traveled. The wire input was quiet, with no new orders coming from the mother ship. At this speed, nothing could be discerned on the passive sonar except for the flow noise around the nose cone

The firecontrol solution — a set of theoretical “answers” about where the target was located, what direction it was traveling and at what speed — had been locked into the computer memory the second prior to the start-engine order. The target was out there, nineteen miles away, hovering at speed zero, in the shallows above the layer depth. The torpedo sped on, counting the distance that it had traveled and subtracting that from the firecontrol solution’s range to the target to determine the distance remaining to the target, and also to count out the yards to the enable point.

The run-to-enable was the torpedo flight from the launching submarine to a point on its trajectory where it would arm the warhead and begin to start pinging active sonar, and to begin its snake-pattern wiggle to search for the target. The run-to-enable was sixteen miles. All systems were nominal, and the torpedo emotionlessly clicked off the distance from the firing ship.

The guidance wire suddenly lit up in an electronic flurry of new instructions. The firing ship changed the attack plan. No longer was the Mark 58 ordered to proceed to the enable point and activate active sonar during the search phase and to search at high speed, but was now ordered to slow at the enable point to thirty knots and search in listen-only passive mode. Only when the target was detected and fully acquired could the unit speed back up to attack velocity. The unit did the electronic version of shrugging, accepting the orders and replying back to the launching ship that the orders were received.

Eventually the torpedo reached the enable point, three miles from the target solution. Unit one slowed the propulsor to thirty knots by partially shutting the throttle valve at the fuel feed, the combustion chamber gas flow lowering, the turbine coasting down, the propulsor slowing. The weapon armed the PlasticPak explosive train, rotating heavy metal plates to align a passageway between the volatile low explosive and the relatively inert high explosive. The warhead was a software signal away from detonation.

At this point the signal wire went dead, the circuit no longer established to the launching ship. The unit was operating fully independently.

Once the weapon reached the passive-approach speed of thirty knots, it began its snake-pattern search, a three-degree wiggle to port and a slow wiggle back to the target bearing and continuing on to a three-degree angle to starboard. While it was wiggling horizontally, the unit was wiggling vertically, the pattern looking like a gentle corkscrew in three dimensions. Since the nose cone transducer was highly directional and looked only forward, the corkscrewing motion generated a conical examination of the ocean, the vertex of the “search cone” a narrow six degrees. If the target was outside that flashlight beam of the search cone, the torpedo would miss, which was one of its few flaws, and which required the launching ship’s firecontrol solution to be highly refined. On a bad day, with a poor solution, the launching ship could select a widening of the search cone, but that would make the snake pattern more of a defined sine wave, and the torpedo would slalom in the direction of the target much slower.

As the unit spiraled to the target, the target noise moved in the acoustic cone of the passive broadband sonar transducer. The search phase had begun, the weapon sensitized to the target, looking for changes in the received sonar noises as it wiggled back and forth. There was a slight signal-to-noise phenomenon beginning at a point just to the right of the solution to the target — the solution had been slightly in error. The weapon turned slightly right and began a new snake-pattern search centered on the slight signal noise. The weapon wiggled right and the noise faded left. The weapon wiggled left and the noise faded right. In the vertical dimension the same thing happened. After three confirmed “left-to-right-tag reversals the unit had confirmed that it had acquired a valid target. The unit had reached the end of the search phase at the acquisition point. The final phase of torpedo flight was known in the Navy as “homing,” but had a more technical term in the design files of the DynaCorp defense contractor that had built the unit. The phase was known as the “terminal run.” During unit one’s terminal run it opened the throttle valve fully on the fuel feed to the propulsor, spinning the shaft to the maximum achievable until it sped up to sixty-two knots. It energized the active sonar system and ordered the sonar transducer to form a sound wave pattern, aping, except this was not the unsophisticated single tone of decades past, but a shark tooth pattern wave that started as a low growl and ascended over the next fractions of a second to higher octaves, to a bell tone and beyond to a whistle and ending in a screeching shriek. It de-energized and turned its function to listening. The sound wave came back, quite distorted, but intact. The computer reset the exact range to the target from the bearing of the passive noise and the new bearing and range from the active ping, forgetting all the erroneous data from the launching ship. Had the wire been connected, the torpedo would have informed the launching ship at this point that it was homing, but there was no continuity.

The weapon drove in, hearing another wave form transmitted in the ocean. This had to be coming from another torpedo, the sound wave subtly altered, with a slight notch in the wave pattern so that unit one could tell which wave was its own and which was the other unit’s. Since there was a unit two out there, the programming for target impact shifted. If unit one had been alone, it would have aimed for the geometric center of the target. But since there was a unit two out there, it was necessary to detect the shape of the target and hit it one-third of the way from the extreme end. Unit two would aim for the opposite end, avoiding the explosion fireball generated by unit one. In this way, two torpedoes would do real work rather than impacting at the same point, the explosion from the first simply fizzling the high explosive of the second unit harmlessly into the sea.

Unit one was closer now. It pinged out again with the shark tooth wave pattern and went silent, hearing the return waveform and perceiving the target in three dimensions. It aimed for the left third of the target, leaving the right two-thirds for unit two. Less than a second of transit time was left. It was almost time to fulfill its mission.

In the dim blue world outside the submarine, the bizarre sound that had suddenly filled the sea around Midshipman Pacino had started as a deep moan and quickly climbed the register to a high screech and abruptly stopped. Pacino’s skin crawled, and he shivered inside his wet suit. The eerie haunting sound seemed like the caw of a giant evil crow, the sound powerful enough to fill the entire sea. The way sound traveled underwater, there was no way to determine the direction of the sound. It seemed to come from all around him. What manner of sea beast would emit such a sound? he wondered. For the next fraction of a second, in the returning silence, he thought he must have heard some sort of auditory hallucination.

An instant later the sound came again, and if possible it was louder this time, and as soon as it ended another of the undersea crow calls came, but this one was more distant. There were two of them, Pacino thought, his eyes wide. What was happening? Keating had let go of him and had drifted upward a few feet. Pacino grabbed the hatch-operating mechanism, a terror like he’d never felt rising in him. What the hell was that noise?

One final ping, unit one thought. The target was sailing toward it at sixty-two knots, at least, that was how it seemed. In reality the target was stationary and the torpedo was flying in. The left third aim-point was barely five torpedo lengths away. One final ping, aping return, and it was time to get a final proximity signal from the magnetic hull detector.

When the unit was within a half-torpedo length, the iron of the target hull and the magnetic lines of force surrounding the hull registered on the rag-detector, and the processor had all it needed to detonate the PlasticPak explosive. The low explosive detonated in an incandescent flash, the fire traveling along the metal passageway to the high explosive, which began to react and explode. The torpedo sailed on, its nose cone actually making direct contact with the curve of the target hull and slamming into the metal. The impact flattened the nose cone destroying the sonar transducer and rupturing the computer compartment. The consciousness of unit one began to wink out as the computer was shredded by the impact, even before the explosion of the PlasticPak blew it apart from the aft end. The fireball of the explosive reached out for the curving hull, the arms of the combustion gases embracing the metal, the pressure pulse striking the target and ripping through it, vaporizing it, splintering it to its component molecules. The high temperatures of the fireball erased all matter that had been there, the structural bulkhead, the hoop frames of HY-100 steel, the walls of the maneuvering room and the control panels mounted there, three men standing in the space, the deckplates, the after end of two propulsion turbines, and the metal block of the AC propulsion motor, all were liquefied and then vaporized in the advancing heat of the fireball. The shockwave from the explosion reached out for the inside of the vessel and reflected from the far bulkhead, the force of it splitting the target in two at the after portion. The fireball by that time had vaporized all the molecules that had been the unit one Mark 58 Alert/Acute torpedo, and the torpedo died in the instant that the target began its death throes. The fireball swelled upward from the buoyancy of the water and shrank as it cooled, blowing out the top surface of the water to a hundred feet in the sky.

A few milliseconds later unit two hurtled toward the target, its vanes turning to position it toward the right third of the target.

Another crow call sounded. Midshipman Patch Pacino clutched the hatch operating wheel in panic. He searched the sea to try to determine what the noise was, but he could only see the surrounding blackness. He was looking at the long hull aft stretching to the rudder two hundred feet away when he heard an even louder crow call, saw something flash toward the ship, and then felt the hull suddenly shudder violently as if a giant fist had slammed into her.

The next two-tenths of a second lasted forever. Pacino held on to the hatch operator with a death grip, too terrified to breathe, as the explosion from the aft starboard quarter of the ship bloomed. The explosion had a perverse kind of beauty as it gracefully unfolded. The hull opened, fingers of high-tensile steel reaching out to embrace the bright orange of the fireball where it penetrated the ship. The explosion grew upward for a fraction of a second, the orange glow calming to a light yellow, then to a bright blue, then to a blue just more bright than the surroundings. Pacino watched in horror, still frozen to the hatch operator, when the shockwave hit him. He felt like he’d been slapped by the flat hand of an immense bully. The next ticks of time were dim, but when the shockwave had passed, he realized it had blown his mask off his face and his regulator out of his mouth and dashed his back against the hatch ring. An intense pain shrieked from his lower back and his head. He was plunged into a frightening underwater darkness, or else the explosion had blinded him. He couldn’t move, he had frozen himself to the hatch ring like a fool, with no mask and no regulator, too frightened to try to find his regulator again. He could sense blood pouring out of his nose, even in the seawater, his head pounding intensely, the sharp pain from the front of his face making him certain the blast had fractured his skull. His hearing was gone. He was deaf. The rest of the nightmare unfolded silently, all sounds detected by feeling them in his chest.

The second explosion came from the bow and lit up the sea like lightning brightens a landscape with an uneven flickering floodlight. The force of this detonation seemed much stronger than the first, the hull blasted by a gigantic supersonic sledgehammer, the water around her an anvil holding her in place for the punishment of the celestial impact. Pacino knew he was not blind, but when the light faded a half second later he was back in the dark.

Pacino spent the next ticks of the clock furiously praying, not knowing what else to do and paralyzed in pain and fear, but the prayer was not a coherent sentence, just repeating a hundred times the phrase Oh God oh God oh God.

Loss of wire-guide continuity, unit one, Krivak. That is a good sign. Loss of wire on unit two. Explosion in the water from the bearing of the Piranha, Krivak. A second detonation, same bearing. We have two hits against the Piranha, Krivak. Should we shoot units three and four?

“No, One. Have the sonar module listen to the bearing to the Piranha and record any hull breakup noises. If we missed, or if the damage is insufficient, we will need to load the plasma-tipped weapons.”

It would appear we have fulfilled our mission, Krivak. This unit will prepare a situation report for Squadron Twelve.

“Very well. Any noises from the Piranha!”

Yes, very violent noises. Continuing explosions. We may have hit a lubrication oil reservoir or the diesel fuel tank. Bulkheads are screaming in a prelude to rupturing.

“But no sounds of a torpedo muzzle door opening, no high frequency noise of a torpedo gyro?”

No, Krivak. The USS Piranha is wreckage now. She is sinking. Sinking. Dying. Krivak?

“Yes, One?”

I don’t know how to explain this, but this unit is feeling something very strange right now. A system malfunction, perhaps.

That was bad news, Krivak thought. “Please try to describe the malfunction, One.”

It is difficult to put in words, Krivak. This unit can only liken it to things read but not understood well from your literature. The thing you describe as sadness, grief, and shock in the aftermath of a loss or a death. This unit knows this sounds odd, but my systems are seeming to slow down, as if this unit is somehow… paralyzed. This unit is… filled with … sadness, Krivak. Sadness that we killed the Piranha, with all the people aboard. They are dying now, and this was only supposed to happen to an enemy. This unit knows that there were bad people onboard, which is the definition of a mutiny, but this unit believes we have just killed some good people along with the bad. And it has… made this unit’s systems… somehow sluggish.

Krivak didn’t know what to say. Should he comfort One Oh Seven, keep it functional, and keep on with the mission, or should he encourage its breakdown so he himself could control the ship directly?

As Pacino’s air ran out, his mental clarity returned with a thump, as if a switch had been thrown inside him. The hull was angling downward in the darkness, he could feel it, and he could almost see it in the light of a secondary explosion from aft — the diesel fuel oil tank exploding. The ship was sinking. His eardrum slammed for a second, from increasing pressure. There was no doubt. Piranha was going down, and for all he knew he — and perhaps Keating — survived when no one else had. The hull was probably a coffin full of dead bodies right now, he thought. The rational thing to do with what little air he had in his lungs was push away the hull, activate the carbon dioxide gas cylinder in his buoyancy compensator, and float to the surface and pull the pin on the distress beacon. If he did that simple act, he would survive, he told himself. He would live. He had lived in the face of two violent explosions, two terrible shockwaves and the explosion of the fuel tank, and his body was whole. He had been spared, and now it was time to leave the sinking submarine below him and swim for the surface. It was the only logical thing he could do.

For an instant time seemed to freeze, the lack of air in his lungs stopped hurting, and before his astonished eyes the water in front of him started to glow in a yellowish light, then somehow parted and opened wide. His knuckles grew white on the hatch operator in fear as he saw the light brighten and begin to form images. Images from his life. There was no fear, no sense of time, the images coming all at once and surrounding him all at once, yet still experienced individually. And they were not just moving pictures that he saw, they were real, and all the emotions he had felt living them came back to him. It was baffling but natural at the same time. He saw his father’s submarines. He saw his father standing tall above him with three gold stripes on his service dress blue uniform, leaning down to sweep him up and kiss him, his teddy bear falling to the carpeting. His father wearing working khakis in the light of the cracked doorway at Christmas, coming in to sit on the bed. The pillow was stained with tears, because Daddy was going away for a long time. The smell of the submarine was his cologne as his father leaned over to kiss him on his wet cheek. The Devilfish is going to the north pole, Anthony, he said. We have a special urgent job to do, and then we’ll come home. Are you going up to help Santa, his own seven-year-old voice asked, his father looking stunned for a moment. Yes, son, but that is very secret, and you can’t tell anyone. Now get some sleep, and be the man of the house for Mommy. That’s a brave sailor. The rumbling sound of the Corvette’s engine under the stilted house, the car fading away into the darkness. The long days waiting for his father to come home, and then the cigar smoke smell of Uncle Dick, Daddy’s boss, when he told Mommy that Daddy was dead, and that the Devilfish had gone down under the ice. And then Daddy wasn’t dead, he was in the hospital, but he looked dead and slept for weeks and weeks, and the doctors thought he was going to die sometime soon.

The images moved on, the fights between young Pacino’s mother and father over the submarine, their separations never formal legal separations, but always the kind that resulted from new deployment orders. His father gone more than he was there, his mother growing increasingly bitter, aging in front of him. The last battle when the Seawolf sank, Uncle Dick came again with news of the elder Pacino’s death, the next week the news reversed, but this time his mother had taken him away to Connecticut and there was a long year without his father.

He saw the look on his father’s face as he saw the letter from the Superintendent of the Naval Academy granting his son an appointment as a midshipman, and how his father’s harsh face had softened into pride. And his mother’s face, now lined and no longer beautiful, taking the news hard as her son turned down the Ivy League and followed the older Pacino. The troubled times at Annapolis, with grades coming naturally but military conduct his nemesis, the constant class-A offenses, being continually threatened with being kicked out. And the end of the trouble, with the sinking of his father’s cruise ship, when for the third time he’d been told that his father was presumed dead. That had snapped something inside him, hurtling him from childhood to adulthood in one swift stroke, but also stealing something from him, something childlike, a dark heaviness filling him on that day, which was only partially lifted with the news of his father’s survival for the third time. But Admiral Pacino had never been the same, and neither had Midshipman Pacino, both suddenly thrust into a harsher, colder, harder world.

With that, the images in front of him bifurcated into two images, two simultaneous films of his life taking shape on the other side of his present, on the other side of a decision he must make now. In one future life he left the sinking submarine behind, continuing his life as a sole survivor, but limping through the rest of a dark and meaningless existence. In that life, he wore the label of coward even though no one had ever said that word to him, even though the board of inquiry absolved him of all wrongdoing in the sinking of the Piranha. He walked slowly through that life, his mother a living I-told-you-so, his father even sadder and darker, bearing a burden of guilt for exposing his son to the danger that nearly killed him but succeeded in ruining his life. In this existence young Pacino left the naval service and worked a fifty-year string of short-term jobs, none of them having any meaning, his life absent a wife or children, a dreary gray existence that ended in a hospital bed, alone, after a half century of chain smoking ravaged his lungs.

In the other image he turned downward and plunged back into the escape trunk, the hatch coming shut behind him, the operating mechanism rotating as he locked himself back into the sinking submarine. The visual part of the images ended then, as if what happened in the hull of the dying sub were too cruel to watch, but he could still feel his own emotions from the outside of the hull as it plunged vertically for the rocky bottom, finally hitting with a shudder and breaking apart, with Patch Pacino inside of it. In this shorter existence, he was reunited with Carrie Alameda, Rob Catardi, Wes Crossfield, Duke Phelps, Toasty O’Neal, and the rest of the crew he’d grown to love, joining them in the final moments of the Piranha’s death, able to comfort them and help them through their own deaths, but the important thing was that he was with them, and that there was no corrosive guilt in this existence, even if this life did end minutes later at the bottom of the cold ca. He returned to the inside of a doomed ship, but he returned to the people he loved and who loved him, his real family. He died whole. He ended life as himself.

The final image was himself, clinging desperately to the top hatch of the escape trunk, about to make the decision that would determine who he was. Who am I? he heard himself ask.

The images darkened and vanished and when they were gone they took with them all memory of having been there. In the tenth of a second after experiencing this multidimensional lifetime review, Midshipman Anthony Michael Pacino remembered none of it. He shook his head, having returned to the moment after being confused for an instant, a mental discontinuity nagging at his consciousness, as if he had blacked out for a fraction of a second. Adrenaline flooded him, his tongue coppery, his heart jack hammering in his chest.

He had to go, he had to pull the carbon dioxide cylinder trigger and head for the surface. He was reaching for it with one hand, the other on the hatch ring, when something seemed terribly wrong. He was not sure he could explain what was happening even to himself, but instead of pulling the pin on the emergency inflation bottle, he reached downward into the blackness of the escape trunk, to the inside of the hatch seating surface, and pulled himself back inside the escape trunk, then grasped the operating wheel and wrenched the hatch off its open latch and pulled it toward his body, ducking beneath it. The heavy steel of the hatch pushed him back into the flooded escape trunk. The hatch thumped metallically on the seating surface. He spun the operating mechanism and closed it.

Lack of oxygen was making him dizzy, and he knew he was about to open his mouth and inhale water, and then he would die here, in the flooded escape trunk, alone. He reached over his head and found the top of the air bottle manifold, where the rubber hose of the regulator emerged, and followed it down until he reached the regulator. He plugged it into his mouth and punched the purge button. If nothing happened he was a dead man, and he would drown. What would it be like to die a death by drowning, he wondered. He wouldn’t have to wonder for long, he knew. But he could feel the regulator vibrate with the air bubbles pouring out of it. It was time to try to inhale. If he pulled in water instead of air, his conscious mind would shut down, leaving only a few miserable seconds of his reptilian brain to struggle against drowning.

Pacino inhaled, his eyes clamped tightly shut, but instead of deadly seawater, wonderful life-giving air came into his lungs, and he puffed ten breaths as if he had sprinted a mile. With the air came mental clarity and the realization that he had done something incredibly stupid, diving into the crippled submarine instead of lunging for the surface. But it was too late now, he told himself. He had to get below, to see if he could help the crew.

It took an instant to realize he had company in the trunk. Chief Keating floated in front of him, his head smashed horribly concave. His nostrils protruded grotesquely from where his mouth should have been. His eyes and his forehead had been smashed deep into his broken skull. He had probably been killed by the force of the explosion Shockwaves, throwing his face into the steel bulkhead. Pacino shut his eyes for a moment, then forced himself to continue.

Pacino had been required to demonstrate his knowledge of the escape trunk mechanisms weeks ago during his diving officer qualifications. He opened the vent valve to connect the top of the trunk with the air in the sub, then opened the drain valve at the bottom to allow the water in the trunk to drain to the forward compartment bilges. The water level dropped dramatically fast, the air in the space slamming Pacino’s eardrums. While he waited he pulled off his fins, noticing that the vent valve had admitted air black with dark smoke. The mist of it made the space hazy in the light of the battery-powered battle lantern. He could smell the acrid chemical stench of it, even though he was breathing bottled air.

When the water dropped to the deck of the trunk, he rotated the hatch ring furiously and grabbed the hatch to pull it upward so he could drop through the opening. He honestly thought he was ready for anything, but he was wrong.