The first one failed to make contact, but the second one struck their Mark-48, causing it to detonate instantly.
The subsequent shockwave rocked the Omega Deep.
Sam met Commander Bower’s hardened stare. “How long to load and fire another torpedo?”
“Too long, I’m afraid,” the commander replied. “The enemy ship has a full complement, which means they’ll be able to get off multiple shots for every one of ours. We can’t keep this up. Our best bet is to break free of these shallow waters, and dive.”
“Could we fire multiple torpedoes at once?” Sam asked.
“Afraid not. If we had a full team, we might be able to shift them quickly, but with our skeleton crew, it would be impossible. Our only hope is that we can reach the open ocean, dive beyond their crush depth.”
Sam said, “I have a better idea.”
“I’m listening.”
Sam pointed to the navigation table. “Can you take us into this narrow valley?”
Commander Bower raised a thick eyebrow. “Anywhere, in particular, you want to go?”
Sam pointed at a small grotto about half a mile in. “Right there.”
“No way the Omega Deep’s going to enter that cave.”
“I don’t plan for it to.” Sam said, “The question is, can the Omega Deep be piloted into the valley?”
The commander inputted the route into the digital route-planner. “It will be a tight squeeze, and we’ll need to slow right down, but it can be done.”
“Good. Let’s do it!”
“We’d be nuts to go in there. We’re lining ourselves up to get trapped. This valley zigzags wildly. It will be hard for them to target us, but harder still for us to get a shot off.”
“That’s okay,” Sam said. “I’ve got no intention of firing another shot.”
Commander Bower’s lips curled in a wry smile. “What are you thinking of?”
Sam stood up and started to don his scuba gear. “Letting the USS Gerald R. Ford do the job for us.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
The USS Omega Deep tacked hard to the starboard side, entering the narrow valley.
Inside the dark confines of the lockout escape trunk, Sam felt the inertial shift of the monstrous submarine to the side. He imagined the massive predator, racing through the narrow straits like a race car. A rally to the death, the modified Russian Typhoon class nuclear submarine was hard on their tail.
Three minutes later, it shifted again.
Sam imagined it was like trying to thread a needle. Only, in this case, the eye was the width of a football field, and the thread was nearly half the field wide and twice as long.
He flooded the lockout trunk.
When the internal pressure equalized with the outer seawater, the lock-out trunk hatch opened.
He adjusted his buoyancy control device until he was neutrally buoyant and swam out the horizontal escape trunk.
The Omega Deep was moving slowly. Less than four knots, as it weaved its way through the narrow-submerged valley. He prayed the larger Typhoon class submarine trailing them would have to reduce its speed even more.
Sam stared at the ground below.
The Omega Deep steered to port, its bow thrusters whirred into life, as the massive vessel turned on its axis, to slip through the hair-pin turn.
Below him, Sam saw the entrance to the grotto that he’d spotted earlier.
He swam down, taking refuge inside the dark opening.
Once there, he removed the two magnetic homing beacons from his buoyancy control device and waited. It was a total of eight minutes before he spotted the round bow of the Typhoon class submarine.
He waited.
The enemy submarine looked massive in the narrow valley. It edged slowly toward the hairpin, making the maneuver almost at a complete standstill.
Sam swam round its swollen steel belly and placed the two magnetic homing beacons to the side of the predator’s hull.
The beacons turned from red to green, confirming they were armed.
Sam let go and watched as the enemy submarine slowly pulled away. He’d done all that he could do. Now it was up to the weapons team on board the USS Gerald R. Ford to do the rest.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
On Board the USS Gerald R. Ford
The weapons officer said, “The Omega Deep’s on the move, ma’am.”
The secretary of defense looked up from her laptop. This was it. Her heart leaped into her throat. “How can you tell?”
“The homing devices we gave Mr. Reilly just became active, and they’re moving.”
“You’ve located the coordinates of the signal?”
“Yes.” The weapons officer showed her on the bathymetric maps the Maria Helena had made when Sam had first surveyed the area. “The signal is coming from inside this narrow valley, here.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Why are they heading deeper into the remains of the 8th Continent?”
“We don’t know ma’am. The signal’s going to pass the region that the Maria Helena charted within another ten minutes.”
“Can you get a lock on them?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What speed is she doing?”
“Four knots.” The weapons officer then explained, “The channel is so narrow, the Omega Deep’s having to make very slow maneuvers.”
She sighed. “Interesting. What are they trying to do?”
“We don’t know. And we’ve no way of knowing for certain if we’ll maintain our line of sight to the target once they get much farther.”
“All right. If she’s moving, she’s no longer under our command.”
The weapons officer asked, “What are your orders, ma’am?”
Her emerald eyes flashed with defiance. “Fire with everything you’ve got!”
“Understood, ma’am.”
The secretary of defense stood up from her desk at the back of the bridge. She casually wandered to the port side and stared out the windshield.
The ship rang out with the constant ring of the automated warning bell – meaning that torpedo doors were opening and the torpedoes were now live – and on the port side of the hull four torpedo bay doors opened.
Inside a total of four separate Mark-32 shipboard torpedo launchers – armed with three Mark-46 torpedoes – rotated 80 degrees silently and trained at its target.
Her mouth was set hard, and her eyes flashed defiance. She felt tears come to her eyes. She blinked them down, telling herself that she was sorry for the loss of the Omega Deep and the substantial technological advancement that the submarine represented. But in her heart, she knew that she was mourning the loss of the crew from the Maria Helena.
“Goodbye, Mr. Reilly.”
In the shallow water, long strips of whitewater remained where the torpedoes raced toward their target.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
On Board the Arkhangelsk
James Halifax glanced at the sonar monitor.
The lines in his face seemed to deepen and darken in the bare light. His mind was twisted in a battle of logic, unable to accept the inevitable outcome. There were four torpedoes approaching his submarine simultaneously. They were inside a narrow valley, with nowhere to maneuver. And they could release just two CATs.
The Countermeasure Anti-Torpedoes could only take out one torpedo each. The math came out the same way no matter which way he looked at it.
They were going to be hit.
The question was, could they sustain such a hit, and survive?
His rational mind knew the answer, but eons of evolution have made it difficult for the human mind to be rational when it comes to determining their own demise.
Halifax said, “Weapons! Deploy the remaining CATs.”
“Understood, sir. Launching the remaining countermeasures.”
“Pilot!” Halifax watched the sonar monitor where their CATs and incoming torpedoes were on a collision course. “On my mark, I want you to turn full starboard rudder.
”
“Aye, sir.”
“Ballast,” Halifax shouted. “On my mark. I want you to blow everything, let’s see if we can get some cover in that reef.”
“Aye, sir.”
Halifax watched as two of the incoming torpedoes detonated on impact with the two CATs.
“Pilot, full starboard rudder.”
“Aye, sir. Full starboard rudder.”
Halifax shouted, “Ballast. Full blow.”
“Aye, sir. Full blow.”
On the sonar monitor, he watched as the remaining two torpedoes rounded the nearby explosion, undeterred, and dipped into the channel, in preparation for their final run.
What the hell happened?
There was nothing more he could do.
It was as though his submarine was emitting a homing beacon, to which the two torpedoes were now locked.
Halifax gritted his teeth and gripped the grab bar on the side of the command center.
There was no reason for it.
He knew there was no way the torpedoes would miss their mark now. It was impossible his submarine could withstand the hit.
Halifax opened his mouth to scream.
But the sound never had the chance to escape. In a split second, the first torpedo ripped a hole through the hull, followed two-thirds of a second later by the second one. Their time-delay explosion, fired a full second later, causing the submarine’s hull to implode.
Chapter Sixty
Open Waters, 8th Continent – Two Months Later
USS Gerald R. Ford’s bow sliced the water of the South Pacific Ocean at a cautionary 10 knots. At 110,000 tons, the aircraft carrier, seemed almost indifferent to the large seas, as her bow cut through the water.
It was a little after midday when the aircraft carrier appeared to reduce speed for no more than a few minutes, before picking up its original course, and head toward New Zealand, to participate in a series of war games. In the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean, such a deviation in course and speed was nearly imperceptible. Yet in that time, a single yellow object was discarded into the deep water below.
The little yellow private submarine hit the water with a slight jolt, resting on the surface for no more than a couple minutes before sinking into oblivion beneath the waves.
Sam Reilly gripped the joystick in his right and gently pushed it forward.
The submersible’s multiple electric thrusters immediately started to whine and the Orcasub, slipped farther under the waves, at a measly 6 knots.
It was three weeks after Sam and Tom had arrived, unexpectedly to their own funerals, after everyone had presumed they had died on board the Maria Helena or the imploded USS Omega Deep, both men were back at the edge of the submerged 8th Continent.
The very same place where everything had started when the Omega Deep had first sighted a little yellow Orcasub, and Commander Bower had made the catastrophic decision to follow the submarine.
Sam maneuvered the sports submarine, kind of a cross between an airplane and a two-seater submersible, the machine flew with precision, gliding its way through the narrow valley. They had set a course along a south to southwesterly direction along the remnants of an ancient submerged valley.
The submarine’s exact dimensions were: 20 feet of length, beam 14 feet – with a 7-foot wingspan – and a height of 5 feet. There were two glass bubble domes positioned forward and aft of each other, where a single pilot and copilot were housed. The overall shape of the submersible was sleek, like a sports-car, or more accurately, a sports underwater airplane, with narrow wings and a V-shaped tail-wing. The two wings even had two large thrusters fixed to each wing, like jet-engines on an aircraft.
It was identical to the one that Commander Bower had tracked nearly six months earlier. Sam pulled back on the joystick, and the little submersible rose out of the higher cliffs of the nearly three miles wide valley, leveling out after its rapid ascent, across an ancient waterfall.
Emerging onto the tabletop of the 8th Continent.
The ancient river opened up to a shallow underwater tabletop, covered in vivid and impressive coral gardens. It was a unique tropical playground that didn’t belong anywhere near where they were. Coral reefs provided homes for tropical fish, sponges, mollusks, giant manta rays, sea turtles, and giant clams. The diversity of form and color was the sort of thing that inspired humanity to explore beneath the waves in the first place.
A small pod of dolphins raced beside their submersible, swimming upside down and by its side.
Sam said, “Someone looks like they’re enjoying their day.”
“What’s not to enjoy?” Tom replied. “They live in an undersea paradise.”
The depth of the tabletop was roughly fifty feet, with a narrow chasm. Sam gripped the joystick, easing the Orcasub up to a depth of 100 feet.
Sam said, “We’re approaching the place.”
“I see it,” Tom replied. “It’s at your 3’Oclock position.”
“Got it.”
Sam slowed the Orcasub, as he approached the end of the chasm, taking it to a stop at the mouth of a large underground chamber, roughly twenty feet high by thirty feet wide. He switched on the submarine’s overhead lights, which shined like two little bug-eyes from the top of the sub. The cave formed out of the mouth of a small rocky outcrop on the coral tabletop, like a monolith.
“You ready?” Sam asked.
Tom said, “Yeah. Take us in.”
Sam dipped the joystick forward, and the Orcasub’s propellers whined as he edged her through the mouth of the opening.
The tunnel descended steeper until they were at a completed dive. At 160 feet, the rocky passageway appeared to level out, before ascending again.
At 140 feet the passageway opened, and seawater ceased. The submarine surfaced into a gigantic, air-filled grotto that extended so far back, that neither Sam nor Tom could see where it ended. A giant light filtered through the top of the cavern, like the rays of the sun, glistening on the spectacular white beach.
Sam eased the Orcasub forward, until she became gently beached on the sandy beach. Confident that the submarine was securely grounded, Sam disengaged the hatch and climbed out. He removed his MP5 submachinegun and slung it over his shoulder.
He had no intention of taking any chances.
The wooden remains of a 16th century Dutch Fluyt with its distinctive pear-shaped hull – most likely used in early exploration of the southern seas – rested high up in the sand.
Toward the southern end of the beach, a Lockheed Model 10 Electra American twin-engine, all-metal monoplane, rested in near perfect condition, like the main feature of a rare antiquities museum.
Sam recognized the aircraft instantly.
And who wouldn’t have?
The airliner had been developed by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in the 1930s to compete with the Boeing 247 and Douglas DC-2. The type gained considerable fame, not just for her renowned reliability, but as the one that was flown by Amelia Earhart on her ill-fated around-the-world expedition in 1937.
Tom pointed at the plane and whistled. “How do you think something like that ended up in here?”
Sam shrugged. “It might have crashed nearby and been washed inside.”
“No way,” Tom dismissed the explanation without hesitation. “Impossible.”
“Why?”
“Look at the tracks.”
Sam ran his eyes across the tracks in the level, white sand. They started nearly 100 feet away, digging deep into the sand, and then turned 180 degrees, as though the pilot had set up for another takeoff.
The mystery made Sam grin. “All right. So, I suppose the more relevant question is how did an aircraft land on a beach that’s now nearly 80 feet under water?”
“The island used to be above ground, but rising sea levels changed all that?” Tom teased, knowing it was impossible.
“Not 80 feet…”
“Maybe the aircraft landed, and then, later, a volcanic event brought the beach to
the bottom of the sea?”
“The volcanic event’s a possibility, but it does little to explain why the tracks in the sand are still here, and the aircraft itself shows no sign of water damage.”
“What about a vortex?”
Sam grinned. “What?”
“You know, like a type of whirlpool that intermittently sucks aircraft and boats alike deep into its confines, never to release them again.”
Sam shrugged. “That’s insane.”
Tom said, “Come on, let’s have a look inside.”
It was a short walk, across the sandy beach to the wreckage of the antique aircraft.
Sam opened up the hatch toward the middle of the fuselage and made his way carefully to the cockpit.
Sam squinted, shining his flashlight into the barren cockpit.
There were no skeletons inside.
Instead, there was a single aviator jacket lying casually across one of the seats. Sam picked it up to examine. Sam felt his heart race. There, at the lapel were the letters, A. M. Earhart.
Sam expelled a deep breath of air and tried to remove the jacket, but something was preventing it from coming free. He leaned in and found what was causing the jacket to become snagged.
It was a Kodak 620 Duo camera.
Chapter Sixty-One
Sam secured the 1930s era camera and what appeared to possibly be Amelia Earhart’s aviation jacket inside the Orcasub, unwilling to risk losing or damaging either item. He had no idea about the recovery of such photos but was certain there would be a historical specialist who would be capable of printing the photographs stored inside.
“Strange place,” Sam said.
“I’ll say,” Tom replied. “When you’re ready, shall we penetrate farther, and see what this place is really hiding?”
“Sure, which way?”
Tom said, “I spotted a series of footprints in the sand, heading east. The path is well worn, so it looks like someone’s frequented the place.”
Omega Deep (Sam Reilly Book 12) Page 25