Terminal Run

26

Michael Pacino stood on the conn of the Devilfish, his coveralls drenched in sweat in the steaming control room. The room was airless and stuffy, the enclosing of a high-temperature steam plant in the pipe of a submarine only a good idea in the presence of a massive and redundant air-conditioning plant. There was nothing to do but stand and sweat and wait for the first Tigersharks to wake up. If the situation did not go well, the units would begin circling in wider diameter circles until they detected the SSNX, and chased him. Or homed on the other Tigersharks. If the Snare showed up late, it would be a disaster — the Tigersharks would all have chased each other or run out of fuel and shut down, and the torpedo room of the Devilfish was completely empty. Not only was the SSNX defenseless, but among the deadly threats to her were her own weapons.

Pacino stared down on the geographic plot, the God’s-eye view of the sea showing the position of the launched Tigersharks, their own position, and the track of the Snare. Come on, Pacino thought, get to your rendezvous position.

“Conn, Sonar,” Pacino’s headset crackled. Finally, he thought. “We have multiple transients to the east, sir.”

“Sonar, Captain, classify,” Pacino ordered.

“Conn. Sonar, torpedo engine startups.”

“Very well. Sonar. Do you correlate to the bearings of the Tigersharks?”

“Conn, Sonar, yes. Also, we have a distant diesel engine and twin four-bladed screws, from a light surface vessel.”

“Very well, Sonar.” Pacino looked over at Justin Westlake, the navigator, who had taken Vermeers’s function as Pacino’s number two while the XO supervised the repair of the TESA system. “Could be the rendezvous yacht,” Pacino said.

Westlake, a thirty-two-year-old, tall, soft-spoken black officer with wire-rimmed glasses and a nasal Chicago accent, nodded. “He’s late, Skipper.”

“Sonar, Captain, anything on the two five four hertz Snare tonal?” Pacino flipped through the command console’s sonar display to the narrowband processor.

“Conn, Sonar, we’re getting a slight peak on the towed array, but it’s early to call.”

“That’s him,” Pacino said to Westlake.

“I agree with sonar, Captain, that peak is too broad to call yet.” Westlake said.

“I know that’s what the system says, Nav, but I’m telling you, that’s him.”

“If that’s the case, then the Tigersharks should be homing on him by now, sir, and we have nothing.”

“Wait for two minutes,” Pacino said. “I’m telling you, that’s him. Sonar, Captain, report beam of narrowband detection on the two five four.”

“Captain, Sonar, the two five four is selected to beam seven, which is seeing bearings zero eight five and one six five.”

“To the east, Nav,” Pacino said. “That’s him.”

“Conn, Sonar, we have Tigershark engines bearing east, speeding up.”

Pacino smiled. “Sonar, you have any solid rocket engines yet?”

“Conn, Sonar, no — correction, yes, sir! We have solid rocket ignition. Tigersharks have something, sir!”

“One, bring the ship to missile firing depth,” Victor Krivak ordered. “Fifty meters keel depth. Slow to five knots.”

The deck angle increased as the Snare rose from the deep cold.

“Show the chart again, same scale as last time, with superimposed range circles.”

The ship’s position was flashing right at the intersection point of the Javelin IV missile range circle to Washington and Philadelphia. “Raise the scale. One, until display width is one hundred miles.” The chart grew until he could see that the point in the ocean depicting the ship was slightly east of the range circles, too far by five miles from the target objective. He wanted to slow early and come above the layer, and launch the missiles once he was certain there was no one else in the area, and to make sure the chartered yacht was at the rendezvous point. When the ship came above the thermal layer into the shallows, where the water was much warmer, he commanded the computer to seek diesel engine noises. The chart flashed to the bearing of the twin diesels. The yacht that Amorn and Pedro had hired was exactly where he’d ordered it to be. An excellent sign.

“One, display missile status and targeting.”

The display for the cruise missiles came up on the display, showing missile one targeted to the White House. Krivak considered changing the coordinate from the center of the White House residence to the West Wing, where the President and her staff would likely be, but Admiral Chu wanted the symbol of the presidency destroyed. It seemed a waste. He debated deleting the Philadelphia missile’s target so that he could add the West Wing, but Chu wanted the Independence Hall vaporized. It was a bit odd, but then it was a client request. Krivak left the targets set as he had originally set them, and monitored the display as the missile gyros started up.

“One, make missiles one through twelve ready in all respects, and open outer doors missiles one through twelve.”

The flashing dot of their position crossed the range circles just as the missile doors came open. It was time to launch.

“One, all stop and hover at fifty meters. When the ship is hovering, fire Javelin cruise missiles one through twelve at preset targets,“ Krivak ordered. “When launches are complete, change depth to twenty meters and shift control of the escape trunk to local control.”

Krivak pulled off his interface helmet and made his way down the ladder to the middle level to the landing pad of the escape hatch, where Dr. Wang waited. As the first tube launched, shaking the deck, Wang looked at Krivak oddly.

“What’s going on?” he asked, his eyes wide.

“We’re launching cruise missiles at Washington,” Krivak said as he reached into his duffel bag.

“What!” Wang said, his jaw dropping as a second tube launch made the ship shudder.

“You know, the White House, the Capitol. A few more targets. Then the ship will sail to Chinese waters, assuming it doesn’t get destroyed by the Americans in the next few hours.”

“This was never part of the deal!” Wang screamed. “You can’t use this ship to fire at American land targets!”

The third tube launched. “Actually, I just did,” Krivak said, finding what he was looking for, a silver-plated heavy Colt .45 automatic, with the clip already loaded. Krivak clicked off the safety and pulled the weapon out just as Wang threw himself across the narrow passageway. The .45 spoke with a loud, authoritative voice. Wang took three rounds to the heart, the momentum of the bullets stopping his charge and sending him back against the bulkhead. His eyes were still open with a fading accusatory look as he sank to the deck. Krivak knew it would be wasting a bullet, but he put the barrel to Wang’s open eye and pulled the trigger. The top half of the good doctor’s head burst open like a rotten melon dropped to the floor. His brains and scalp and skull made a nasty pattern against the already gore-strewn laminate of the wall panel.

“Thanks for all your work, Dr. Wang,” Krivak said as he put the .45 on the deck and pulled off his shirt. The fourth missile launched as he tossed the garment to the deck. “I hope you find your severance package satisfactory.” Krivak dropped his pants and stepped into the wet suit. By the time he had the wet suit on, the fifth and sixth missiles were away.

Krivak opened the lower hatch of the escape trunk and peeked in at the control panel, satisfied that One Oh Seven had shifted control to the local panel. He pulled in his things and unlatched the bottom hatch to shut the escape trunk.

“Goodbye, Wang. Have a good trip.” Krivak slammed the hatch shut and waited for the depth gauge to show the ship coming shallow, listening to the other missile launches.

What a beautiful sound, he thought.

The fourth-launched Mark 98 Tigershark torpedo struggled to an angry consciousness, its sonar receiver fully tuned to the ocean around it. The weapon started its external combustion turbine to begin to search the sea, but there was nothing. The unit was surrounded by open, empty space. It turned a wide circle, five hundred yards in diameter, but heard nothing. It opened the circle and drove around again, but it was still alone. After the fifth, wider circle, it decided to rise up to the layer depth and see if it saw anything there. Slowly the unit drove above the depth where the water temperature suddenly changed from freezing to warm, the higher temperature water keeping the sound waves here above the layer.

As soon as the unit climbed above the layer, it heard something, and it wiggled its fins to see if the sound moved, and it did. The sound was close, inside of a mile. The Tigershark wiggled again to refine the range to the target, and it instructed the engine to shut down. It jettisoned the first stage as the explosive bolts around the unit’s midsection fired, cutting it in half. In the next tenth of a second a high-pressure air bottle in the nose cone behind the sonar sensor lit off, blowing air over the tip of the coasting torpedo, and the solid rocket engine ignited. The bubbles of high-pressure air streamed down the torpedo length to the solid rocket engine nozzle. As the torpedo felt full thrust the bubble of air was replaced, the entire torpedo now encapsulated in a supercavitating bubble of steam. It sped up to 100 knots, its aim at the target unwavering, then 150 knots, finally speeding up to 200 knots, and by then the distance to the target had been eaten completely up.

The torpedo blew into the hull of the target, the kinetic energy of impact shredding the bow, and just as the remains of the torpedo were traveling through the fragments of the target the PlasticPak warhead detonated, and the rest of the target exploded upward into the atmosphere. A red cloud of atomized blood marked the passage of the men named Amorn and Pedro as their motor yacht ceased to exist.

“Captain, we have transients on broadband bearing zero eight eight, sir. It sounds like solid rocket engine ignition.”

“Understand, Sonar.” Pacino said, pursing his lips, “you already reported that — Tigershark engine startups.”

“Conn, Sonar, no. These are missile launches, Captain. Cruise missiles!”

Pacino opened his mouth to give the next order just as XO Vermeers came into the room, a dark scowl on his face as he grabbed a wireless headset. He looked at Pacino and held out his fist with his thumb pointed down. There was no time for anger at Vermeers. Pacino shouted to the diving officer, “Vertical rise to periscope depth, seven five feet, raise the Type 23 and the BRA-44!”

The ship rose sluggishly as the diving officer blew high pressure air into the depth control tanks. “BRA-44 BIGMOUTH coming up, sir!” he called. “Eighty feet, sir!”

“Get us up,” Pacino ordered as he pulled on the Type 23 periscope helmet. “Arm the Mark 80 SLAAM missile battery,” he said, his voice distorted by the helmet. The Submarine-Launched AntiAir Missiles might be able to catch up with a Javelin on solid rocket thrust, as long as he could launch them fast enough. He frantically strapped on the thigh control pad, cursing that he had failed to anticipate that he might need to use the periscope.

“Seven five feet, sir!”

By the time Pacino had turned on the periscope visual, the unit was out of the sky. He trained his view to the sky and immediately saw four arcing smoke trails from the horizon to the cloudy sky.

“SLAAM panel armed, Captain,” Vermeers shouted.

“Mark 80 launch!” Pacino called, stabbing the joystick of the Type 23 on his thigh, the heat-seeking antiair missile launching from the sail and immediately taking off in pursuit of the Javelin cruise missiles. He launched five heat seekers, then a sixth as another missile flew out of the sea, its rocket engine lighting off just above the waves and hurling it skyward. “I don’t have any explosions,” Pacino called, but just then one of the Javelins exploded into flames — one of the Mark 80s had caught up with the missiles and blown it apart.

Pacino continued launching Mark 80s as the Javelins came flying out of the sea. There was one major problem — he had only eight Mark 80s and the Snare out there on the horizon had twelve Javelins.

“XO!” Pacino barked as he launched Mark 80 number seven, and as the third Javelin cruise missile exploded in the clouds. “Get on a UHF circuit to the Pentagon and call in an OP REP-Three on these missiles. Tell them there are four Javelins inbound from this position.”

To Vermeers’s credit, he asked no questions as he threw his headset to the deck and dashed to the radio room. He could have been patched in from the conn, but that would have taken thirty seconds of coordination with the radiomen, and there was no time.

Pacino launched his eighth and final Mark 80 and watched the eighth Javelin cruise missile explode, his face a mask of impotent fury as the ninth Javelin rose from the sea. The damned Snare was right there, twenty miles away on the horizon, and as yet there had not been a single Tigershark detonation.

“Conn, Sonar, we have an explosion in the water.”

“it isn’t the Snare, Sonar,” Pacino said, annoyed. “She’s still launching.”

“Explosion is on the bearing to the motor yacht, sir.”

“Very well. Sonar, continue to examine bearing zero eight eight for Tigershark acquisition.”

“Conn, Sonar, aye, but nothing yet, sir.”

“Dammit,” Pacino muttered.

“Conn, Sonar, we have Tigershark rocket motor ignition on the edge of the starboard baffles, bearing zero eight five.”

“Finally,” Pacino said, his periscope crosshairs on the horizon as the tenth Javelin cruise missile rose out of the sea. If the Snare detonated now, there would only be two cruise missiles that had evaded his counterattack rather than four.

“Conn, Sonar!” the headphone screeched painfully in Pacino’s ear. “Bearing drift to Tigershark torpedo is left, not right! I’m calling torpedo in the water! Tigershark is targeting own ship!”

Pacino ripped off the Type 23 helmet, the helmet bouncing on the deck, and shouted to the diving officer, “Emergency deep! Flood depth control at max rates! Make your depth thirteen hundred feet, and expedite!” He grabbed the 1MC microphone and shouted into it, “Maneuvering, Conn, execute fast recovery startup, emergency rates!” He dropped the microphone and found Vermeers and shouted, “Arm the TESA!”

Vermeers’s eyes grew wide and he shook his head rapidly. “Sir, we couldn’t tie it into the Cyclops system! If you light it off, the bow planes won’t be under Cyclops control, and we’ll go through crush depth in a second!”

“Conn, Sonar! Tigershark incoming! We have confirmation on acoustic daylight imaging! It’s about to light off its solid rocket fuel, Captain!”

“Captain, depth thirteen hundred feet, sir,” the diving officer called, a frightened kid in the wraparound ship-control console. “Securing flooding depth control two and hovering at test depth, sir.”

Pacino froze for a second. Then an idea formed in his mind, the idea seeming foreign, as if he were being whispered to by someone both far away and standing immediately next to him, and he could hear the words in a mental voice not his own, shouting in his mind, Hit the chicken switch at test depth with a quarter-degree rise on the bow planes. Pacino frowned, but there was nothing else he could think of.

“Conn, Sonar, Tigershark torpedo rocket motor ignition, close range!”

“Diving Officer!” Pacino yelled, knowing he was about to give his last order on the Devilfish, his last order on earth. “Hold one-quarter-degree rise on the bow planes and emergency blow forward, now!”

“Quarter…” the diving officer said, his voice in a deep bass, a slow-motion sound as if Pacino’s time sense had blown up so that a second would now take an hour. Pacino’s eyes found the twin yellow plastic-covered steel levers in the overhead above the command console.

“Degree…” the diving officer’s oddly distorted and slowed voice said as Pacino reached into the overhead with both hands and grabbed the Pacino chicken switches, the twin actuators of the TESA torpedo evasion ship alteration system.

“Rise…” the diving officer called as Pacino felt the grips of the TESA levers in his hands. He pulled the levers down as hard as he could.

“On … the …”

Pacino pulled down the TESA levers out of the overhead, held the levers down and twisted, his face a mask of fury as he waited for the system to light off.

“Bowplanes… and… emergency…”

Nothing was happening, Pacino thought, telling himself to keep the TESA actuators down.

“Blow… forward…”

The steam generators of the reactor should have been blowing to the emergency steam headers along the ship’s skin, blowing steam through the rubbery anechoic coating of the ship, trying to create a vapor bubble at the skin. Forward, the high-pressure air system should have been pressurizing the emergency TESA headers at the skin of the ship and forcing out air bubbles that should be collecting around the hull and forming the bubble that would grow to become a supercavitating ship-length vapor sheath as the emergency engines started.

“Aye …” The diving officer’s voice had slowed to a barely recognizable baritone slowed-down growl. Pacino glanced between the extended TESA actuators at the diving officer, seeing his hands reach slowly, slowly into the overhead console for the emergency blow levers, and it seemed his hands would never reach the levers.

Vermeers’s mouth was open, his lips quivering slowly, looking like curtains billowing gently in the wind. ““Caaaptaaain, ” he shouted in slow motion. Pacino’s mind was far away, aft of the reactor, aft of the ship service turbines, aft of the propulsion turbine generators, aft of the maneuvering cubicle, aft of the hydraulic plant, aft of the skin of the ship, aft of the number three ballast tank with its oil-enclosed main motor, aft of the number four ballast tank where the TESA rocket motors were mounted, and further aft, outside the envelope of the hull and aft of the rudder and stern planes and propulsor shroud and further aft into the sea, looking ahead at the ship, at the rocket motors of the TESA system with the explosive charges blowing off the seawater protection cowlings and the bottom and top rocket motors igniting into white-hot incandescence, then the port and starboard motors igniting, then the pair at one o’clock and seven o’clock, lighting off in pairs around the ship, until all the rocket motors were at full thrust, the rocket exhaust melting away the thick steel of the rudder and the stern planes and the structural bulkheads of the number four ballast tank, and the bubble of air and steam over the ship grew and the ship accelerated and formed its own self-perpetuating supercavitating bubble over the surface of the ship until the ship was going fifty knots, then a hundred, the ship’s speed climbing to two hundred knots.

His mind shifted back to the control room, where the sound of rocket motors grew to an earsplitting shriek and there was suddenly no more sound, because either Pacino’s time sense had slowed the world to a stop, or because he had grown deaf, and still he wasn’t sure if it had worked, until he felt himself go quickly horizontal, his body hanging by his hands on the TESA actuators, hanging straight down, but the deck was parallel to his body, and he suddenly weighed a thousand pounds and his hands could no longer hold his weight and he let go and the control room deck moved beneath his feet and he didn’t know whether he was flying through the air of the control room or if the control room had suddenly decided to fly forward and he hit the aft bulkhead of the control room so hard that his body collapsed and his head hit the inertial navigation binnacle and the control room dissolved into a gigantic hurricane of sparks and the world became slowly black.

The rear hull of the USS Devilfish erupted in a roar of flames as the two dozen solid rocket engines of the large bore Vortex Mod Alpha missiles ignited in pairs, until all twenty-four had lit up at full thrust. The rudder and stern planes and propulsor of the ship vaporized in the high-temperature blast.

When the torpedo evasion system actuated, the ship was at her test depth with a quarter-degree rise on the bow planes and an emergency blow in the forward ballast tanks. What had before been a nuclear submarine hovering at thirteen hundred feet suddenly became a huge underwater rocket. The air and steam bubbling at her skin grew until a vapor bubble enclosed the hull from her nose cone to the Vortex engines, and the ship accelerated at ten g’s through 50 knots, through 100, blowing through the seas until, at the moment the engines ran out of fuel and cut off, the ship was going 205 knots, with an up angle of two degrees. The ship rocketed away from the Tigershark rocket-propelled torpedo pursuing her and roared upward toward the thermal layer. The periscope and BRA-44 radio antenna mast had broken off in the slipstream, and as the submarine flew through the sea, the sail and the sonar dome became crushed in the force of the flow. Before the ship rushed above the layer, the acceleration forces had ripped the starboard steam piping off the number one turbine generator, and the steam system leaked rapidly into the engine room with enough energy to cook every soul aft like a boiled lobster.

The Tigershark torpedo in pursuit sensed that its rocket fuel was running out, and the warhead of PlasticPak explosive detonated a thousand yards aft of the retreating form of the Devilfish. The pressure wave of the explosion ripped into her aft hull moments before the ship roared out of the sea. The aft hull was breached in the number three ballast tank from the Tigershark as the hull arced and flew back down toward the water of the Atlantic. The deceleration forces of the ship hitting the water caused everything that had been accelerated aft to be suddenly thrown forward, and the forces were strong enough to cause equipment to fly off foundations and rip the deckplates off their mountings. The USS Devilfish came to rest floating on the surface, a barely recognizable hulk with a flattened sonar dome, a crushed sail, and a burned and broken aft hull.

The ship began taking water aft and settled slowly into the sea.

The eleventh and twelfth missiles shook the deck as they left the ship. Victor Krivak grinned as he waited for Unit One Oh Seven to rise to twenty meters, mast broach depth, so he could flood the escape trunk and leave the Snare before the American search vessels and planes found her here at the base of the missile flame trails. There was the chance that she would escape and make it around South America for the trip to Red China, but the carbon processor was probably too far gone in its catatonic state to evade any search-and-destroy antisubmarine action. The pressure gauge in the escape trunk began to rise, slowly at first, then smartly to the depth of sixty-five feet — the American pressure gauges marked in feet — where Krivak began the procedure to flood the airlock. He had already pulled on his combined buoyancy compensator and tanks, his fins and his mask, and his supplies were tied to him by a tether.

He ordered the local panel to open the vent valve to the interior of the command module, and when the valve indicated open, he ordered the flood valve opened, bringing seawater into the chamber. The chamber water level rose rapidly with warm Atlantic seawater, until it climbed to the level of the upper hatch. The control panel and Krivak’s head were in an alcove behind a steel curtain, with a bubble of air trapped there. Krivak shut the vent valve and allowed the chamber to rise in pressure until it was equalized to the seawater. The pressure in the chamber rose slowly. When it was the same as the surrounding ocean, he would open the top hatch and get out of here.

The first-launched Tigershark woke later than the other units, in time to hear the carnage as the second-and third-launched units tore each other apart in mutual explosions. The Tiger shark started its engine and began a slow target-seeking circle, but there was nothing but the cloud of bubbles from the previous explosions. A second and third circle, with wider diameters, revealed nothing in the seas. The Tigershark rotated its fins and aimed shallow, hoping for a target above the layer.

The unit was amazed at how close the target was. and yet how invisible it had been from below-layer. The Tigershark armed the warhead, circled around to give itself some room, jettisoned the first stage, and lit off the rocket motor, the target growing in its seeker.

Krivak ducked under the steel curtain below the open upper hatch of the escape trunk of the Snare. He pushed with his flippers and rose until his head protruded out of the hatch. He put his hands on the upper surface, knowing that he had only twenty seconds before the Snare took control of the hatch and shut it on him, and the hydraulics were strong enough to cut him in half. So naturally, the tether of his equipment bag got hung up on a manual valve handle. Krivak debated leaving the equipment, but ducked back down, freed the tether, and pushed rapidly back up, his eye on the hatch. He swam out of the ring of the hatch, the equipment package following, and he pulled it all out of the hull. The hatch began to shut slowly behind him. He reached down to the hull and tapped it twice in farewell, then kicked to the surface.

Tigershark Unit One saw the target grow larger and larger until it blotted out all else, and just before it made contact with the fat submerged hull it detonated the PlasticPak explosive. The stern section of the submarine target came open in a violent explosion that separated the forward half of the ship from what was left of the aft half. The shock wave of the explosion reached out for the swimmer leaving the target’s hull.

There was nothing left of the Tigershark when the orange flame ball of the explosion had collapsed and cooled and disintegrated into a mass of a quadrillion vapor bubbles. Just as the explosion calmed and the front half of the hull of the target began to sink, two more Tigersharks swooped down on it and blew it to molecules just before it reached its crush depth.

The bow section of the SSNX Devilfish rose slowly out of the surface as the stern section began to sink. Twenty miles astern of her, the two remaining Tigersharks were turning circles, searching for targets.

Captain Michael Pacino lay on the aft sloping deck of the control room with Vermeers screaming silently in his face. He opened his eyes and tried to sit up, but it felt as if every bone in his body were broken. The lights were out except for the emergency battery-operated battle lanterns, which were flickering dimly. Pacino opened his mouth to speak, when suddenly his hearing returned and Vermeers’ voice slammed into his eardrums, shrieking, “Have to abandon ship, sir!”

Pacino managed to stand, leaning heavily on Vermeers, and allowed himself to be dragged to the middle level, where men and equipment were being evacuated through the hatch. Pacino felt his legs give, and his body slammed into the bulkhead, the world spinning around him.

“… there are more Tigersharks out there! Hurry!” Vermeers shouted at the crew at the escape trunk. “By the time we hear their rocket engines, they’ll be here. Now, go!”

Pacino felt himself pulled and pushed up the ladder and into the escape trunk. He felt he was about to vomit, and tried to hold it. There was a circle of light above him, a searchlight so bright it hurt his eyes, slamming his eyes flat in his eye sockets, until he realized it was the sun — the ship was on the surface. He was pulled out of the hatch onto the tilted deck topside, and had a momentary impression of the sail ripped off the hull and the aft part of the ship in the water, the deck inclined in a severe aft pitch. He staggered on his feet as other crew members were pulled out of the hull. His stomach lurched and he threw up on himself. Then the world grew dim.

Michael Pacino fainted and fell off the hull and splashed in the water on the port side of the hull, the same side that the Tiger shark torpedo approached.

“Vickerson!” Vermeers called. “Get the captain to a life raft!” The young lieutenant dived into the water carrying a spare life jacket. She caught up to Pacino, strapped his limp form into it, and towed him around the stern of the sinking ship to one of the life rafts floating on the other side.

Pacino came to as the last of the men and emergency equipment were pulled from the hull. The smashed-in nose of the ship tilted toward the sky as the ship began to sink to the depths. Pacino saw the forward escape trunk hatch sink below the waves, the hull taking water forward, until only the place where the nose cone should have been poked slightly above the waves, until it too vanished in a ring of foam.

He saw it go and looked dejectedly down at the life raft. The mission had failed. Four cruise missiles had gotten by the Devilfish, and the Tigersharks had gotten them instead of the Snare.

“Give me some binoculars,” Pacino said to Vickerson.

As she handed them over, the sea where the Devilfish had been exploded in a volcano of foam. A second explosion came ten long seconds later. For the next two minutes the foam rained down on the life rafts.

“What the hell was that?” Pacino asked.

The sonar chief looked over at him, shaking his head. “Two more Tigersharks, Skipper. We got out just in time.”

“Did we lose anyone, Vickerson?” Pacino asked.

She looked at him sadly. “We only evacuated forward, sir. Aft was flooded and had a major steam leak. We couldn’t get the hatch open. None of the nukes made it out.”

Pacino sighed.

“Binoculars, sir?”

“Which way is east? I want to find the bearing to the Snare. Is there any chance we hit it?”

“We couldn’t tell, sir,” the sonar chief said.

Victor Krivak floated in the sea, his face exposed, his mask half off, his regulator blown away from his face. For a half hour after the explosion of the Snare he floated there, breathing but unconscious, floating with the buoyancy of his wet suit, the buoyancy compensator filled with air before he left the escape trunk.

A booming roar sounded through the seas, from the east.

“What was that?” Pacino asked. He looked over at one of the other life rafts, where Vermeers scanned the sea with his binoculars. “Did you see anything?”

“No, Captain,” Vermeers called over, “but it was from the bearing of the Snare. I think we got her.”

Pacino nodded, looking over the horizon at the bearing. Fingers of foam from an underwater explosion reached for the sky. “Excellent.”

“Vickerson, did you pull the pin on the emergency beacon?”

“Half an hour ago, sir,” she said. “I thought we had aircraft orbiting to the west.”

“Maybe the beacon didn’t work,” Pacino said.

“Then this will be a long wait,” Vickerson said.

Slowly, painfully, Victor Krivak opened his eyes and blinked at the sea around him. He had no memory of what had happened. It seemed as if a second ago he had pushed off the hull of the Snare and now he floated here with his ears ringing, with blood on his face and in his mouth — it felt as if he’d bitten clear through his tongue. His ears were bleeding, and his back ached where the tanks were touching him. Something had happened, perhaps a self-destruct charge the Snare had set off. Damned lucky thing he’d gotten out in time, he thought. He wondered for a moment if the ship had suffered an attack for the launching of the missiles, but it was impossible. He’d detected no one, the Snare had the acoustic advantage over every submarine on the planet, and there were no aircraft he could see or hear. It had to have been a self-destruct charge.

Krivak yawned to clear his aching ears and found the equipment pack on its tether. He hauled it up and found the life raft, and pulled the carbon dioxide pin on it. The yellow rubber raft inflated until its four-meter diameter floated on the meter-tall waves. Krivak threw the rest of his equipment in, took off his scuba gear and threw it in the raft, then vaulted in, his back and head aching. He opened his waterproof equipment container and pulled out the satellite phone and dialed Amorn. A do/entries, and nothing but a busy signal. This never happened to Amorn’s phone. Something had gone terribly wrong, he realized.

He listened to see if he could hear Amorn’s yacht’s diesels. He scanned the horizon, but there was no yacht visible. Krivak cursed that he had not thought of putting binoculars into the emergency kit, but it shouldn’t have mattered. It was doubly odd, since he had distinctly located the yacht before he fired the cruise missiles. He’d have to use the fall-back plan, and pull the pin on an emergency locator beacon, and concoct a story for whatever civilian authorities picked him up. Odds were, it would be the Americans who came for him. He chuckled at the thought as he pulled off the wet suit and donned cotton coveralls, pulling on the belt over them and stashing the silver-plated .45 in the belt after checking the clip — it wouldn’t do to be attacked by a shark without his Colt, he thought. He opened up some of the ration containers and chewed on a protein bar. After fifteen minutes, he leaned against the side of the raft to wait, and a few minutes later he fell asleep.

“Sir, over there!” Vickerson said, handing Pacino the binoculars. “There’s something yellow floating there.”

“Get out the oars,” Pacino said, looking in the binoculars. “Row all rafts toward that spot.”

For the next hour the four rafts from the Devilfish rowed toward the yellow object. When it was visible, Pacino stared in astonishment. “There’s someone alive,” he said.

It could only be one man, he thought. Victor Krivak. Alexi Novskoyy.

Pacino’s jaw clenched in anger. He rooted through the emergency bag and withdrew a diving knife in its scabbard and looped it onto his belt, hoping no one had seen him.

“Stop rowing.” he said. “Don’t get any closer.” Pacino looked over at Vermeers. “XO, this is a direct order. Don’t allow anyone to come after me. You’re in command.” Pacino dropped off the side of the raft and began swimming to the raft, ditching his life preserver ten feet from the raft so he could swim faster, his body aching, but the pain tolerable. Much more tolerable than the fact that Alexi Novskoyy still lived.

The orbiting P-5 Pegasus antisubmarine patrol plane got the radio orders to investigate an emergency locator beacon at the location of the explosions that the Mark 12 pod had detected. On the orders of Admiral McKee, they had stayed out of the area, out of range of the Snare’s Mark 80 antiair missiles. But after all the underwater detonations — the last one probably taking out the Mark 12 pod itself — McKee had judged the seas safe, and had vectored in the P-5.

Far to the west, fifty miles off the coast of Washington, New York, and Philadelphia, several squadrons of Air Force Scorpion interceptors orbited over the Atlantic, all of them in touch with the KC-10 AWACS radar plane orbiting at forty thousand feet and searching at peak alert for the incoming cruise missiles. Had the Snare managed to shoot the missiles in secret, they would have flown in stealthily, below the level of the air search radars, and finding them would have been a miracle, but with the warning from the Devilfish of the exact time and location of launch, the Air Force had been able to scramble every asset with wings to search for the elusive plasma-tipped weapons.

Instead of frantically searching for the missiles, the crews had the luxury of arguing over who would get the privilege of shooting them down. In all cases, the squadron commanding officers took their shots. The Mongoose heat-seeking missiles ripped the Javelin IVs to shreds, the plasma warheads shattered and falling to the sea in fragments. As news of the destruction of the Javelins reached the presidential evacuation bunker, the President’s 888 was called in, and the President and staff returned to Andrews Air Force Base. Admiral Patton took a limo to the Pentagon to await news of the Devilfish.

Michael Pacino made his way slowly to the raft and swam to it, approaching it from underwater as he got close. He popped his head up, trying not to make noise with his breathing, and pulled the diver’s knife from its scabbard. He looked up at the bump of the raft occupant’s head, knowing it was Victor Krivak — although in his mind Pacino decided to remember him as Alexi Novskoyy. Pacino took a breath, and shot his arm out of the water and grabbed the man by the throat and pulled him into the water. Just before he fell in, Pacino had a glimpse of a man in his forties, a man as handsome as a movie star, but there was no surgery on earth that would change those ugly eyes, eyes that Pacino had looked into on the Arctic icepack so many years before. These eyes belonged to the man who had torpedoed and destroyed the first Devilfish, and who was now responsible for four cruise missiles being launched at Pacino’s home, who was responsible for the loss of the second Devilfish, and most of all, who had put Pacino’s son at death’s door. It was the last of these that earned him the thrust of the knife deep into the side of his throat as he fell in slow motion into the water, the red spurting blood spraying into Pacino’s eyes.

In the time it took to blink the blood out of his eyes, Novskoyy had knocked the knife from Pacino’s grip with his arm, and had wrenched toward Pacino. Novskoyy was much stronger, and he smashed his fist into Pacino’s face, breaking his nose. Blood sprayed into the water. Pacino reached for Novskoyy just as the war criminal lunged for something in his belt. Pacino connected with Novskoyy’s face in a hard jab, the force of it sending him backward in the water away from the Russian. Pacino struggled to get close again, and suddenly found himself staring into the barrel of the pistol Novskoyy had pulled from his belt. Pacino froze for an instant, then dived into the water, wondering if a gun could fire when it was wet.

Victor Krivak had been napping pleasantly, awaiting rescue, when he was grabbed by the throat and pulled violently into the sea. He barely had a look at the man who had assaulted him, for a moment thinking it was Wang, the thought of the doctor coming back for vengeance filling him with adrenaline. He was trying to punch the man when the knife entered his throat and cut him hard. At first there was no pain, just a dizzying feeling of floating. His blood was everywhere, and it was probably not something he would survive, which made him fight all the harder. He managed to connect with a punch to the intruder’s nose, the man’s face covered in blood both from his broken nose and from the blood he’d drawn from Krivak’s neck. Oddly, the white-haired fiend seemed somehow familiar. Krivak reached down for his belt, hoping the silver plated Colt was there, as the world became dim around the edges. He pulled it out of his belt with his right hand and held it high out of the water. With his left hand he gripped the collar of his unknown attacker, and as he aimed the .45 at the man, he caught a glimpse of his nametag, which read PACINO. He knew that name was familiar, but he was getting cold and groggy, undoubtedly from the knife wound, and he couldn’t place the name.

He brought the Colt to the man’s face, but the man tried to dive below the waves. Krivak aimed lower and fired off four shots and waited for the man to return to the surface. As the seconds ticked off, the waves and the sky were no longer blue, but like something from an old black-and-white movie. The sound of the waves and the wind was missing, and the sunlight began to fade into dusk, though it had to be much too early for sunset.

He waited for the body to float back to the surface, and finally it did, but the man’s hands clawed at Krivak’s chest, and clutched at the gun, and by this time Krivak was becoming too weak to resist. As the man named Pacino grabbed for the pistol, it went off one last time, and Krivak wondered if he had finally connected and made the kill. He realized slowly that he no longer cared. Oddly, in spite of the adrenaline of the fight, he suddenly felt cold and sleepy.

It must be the darkness, he thought, as he felt the pistol leave his grip.

Pacino dived deep, but not deep enough. A slicing pain shot through his left shoulder, another one hitting his right thigh. A third seemed to slice into his ear, and that was when he opened his eyes and tried to see Novskoyy in the water. All he could see was a dim shape thrashing in front of him, one of his hands above the surface, a glint of silver coming from above. Pacino swam in, needles of pain invading his mind from his leg, and he lunged for the pistol. He found it, but as he curled his fingers over it, the muzzle flashed and it seemed as if that last bit of light drew the rest of the world’s light away, and Pacino was plunged into darkness, and it was as if one moment he was alive and fighting and the next he was in a deep dungeon and his body was swimming away from him and he couldn’t seem to catch it.

He remembered thinking of Anthony Michael and trying to say his name, but it was as if he had forgotten how to talk, and he was floating and the words up and down no longer meant anything, and the world rotated slowly around him and he fell and spun away, gradually at first, and then rapidly, until he forgot his son’s name and Colleen’s name and his own name and he stopped existing and so did the world, and it was over.