RED SUN ROGUE

by Taylor Zajonc

  Nor was he prepared for the bodies. Seeing them from the deck of the Scorpion as they drifted by was one thing, but the seas were thick with dead men, forcing Jonah and Vitaly to push aside blown-apart arms and legs as they slowly made for the carrier. Alexis stopped following him for a moment, treading water in place as she vomited bile from her empty stomach.

  A wave picked them up and carried them forward, swirling more eye-watering diesel in Jonah’s mouth and nose. His hands and feet were already numb from the frigid cold, but his face cracked and pulsed with dry, blinding heat from the fuel fires just a dozen feet away. And then he caught the chain railing, bracing his feet to pull himself halfway out of the sea, helping Alexis and Vitaly onto the slick flight deck. They slumped, catching their breath as they leaned against the nearest towering dome-headed Phalanx gun.

  The white, pill-shaped gun dome was peppered with small-arms fire, the bright white plastic torn away to reveal sophisticated semi-autonomous radar technology within. The entire robotic emplacement faced the wrong direction. Black, six-barreled cannons smelled of cordite and carbon, and the odor of old gunfire penetrated Jonah’s nostrils even over the burning oilfield below.

  Alexis gasped for air as she stole a look back towards the Scorpion and then up to the distant bridge tower above. “We can’t get up that incline,” she shouted over crackling fire and slapping waves, filthy seawater dripping from her lips as she spoke. “Has to be a fifty, sixty degree angle.”

  “This way,” said Jonah, pointing towards a massive platform elevator a short distance across the deck from their tenuous position. Used to transport helicopters and equipment up from the hanger deck below, the half-descended elevator had now become the only entrance to the black maw of the carrier’s destroyed interior.

  “No way,” said Vitaly, shaking his head furiously. “Is— is suicide!”

  Part of Jonah agreed with the bleak assessment. Waves swirled and slapped against the tilted, open elevator shaft like sea cave. They’d need to swim under the lip of the flight deck in order to make their way into the dark interior.

  “Use your pony bottle,” he instructed. “There’s too much oil and debris in the water to see, so feel your way along the side edge and then come straight up once you’re inside.”

  “Easier said than—” began Alexis, but Jonah was already underwater, swimming into the mortally wounded ship. Impenetrable darkness swirled around him as he guided himself by touch alone, fingers brushing against freezing metal railings and the interior bulkheads of the partially submerged hanger deck.

  He surfaced within hell itself. The cavernous hanger deck was illuminated by plumes of burning aviation fuel and the flickering red tones of the failing emergency lighting. It had become a River Styx of churning waves, bodies, and floating equipment. Unconnected aviation battery packs snapped and sparked, electrical arcs leaping into the oil-soaked waters. Waterlogged, destroyed helicopters and missile dollies were crushed together against the low side of the hanger, roiling in the dark, nightmarish flood.

  Jonah brushed aside the thick strap to his uninflated life vest and flicked on an anglehead flashlight. The powerful light illuminated a too-small patch of churning seawater as Alexis and Vitaly surfaced behind him.

  Alexis wiped the filthy water off her face, coughing as she sucked in a lungful of smoky air. “Christ,” she exclaimed, her eyes taking in the destruction as she secured her pony bottle.

  “This way,” shouted Jonah over the din of waves, shrieking metal, and crackling electricity. He pointed towards a wide bulkhead hatch forty feet above the waters, no doubt the stairwell entrance to the bridge tower. Jonah began to climb hanging cargo webbing, using the thick nylon straps to pull himself out of the water and towards the dark, tilting stairwell above. He reached down, pulling Vitaly and Alexis up and through the threshold of the massive entrance.

  The trio paused for a moment, sitting on a wall as they caught their breath and prepared for the next ascent. The climb up the flight control tower wouldn’t be easy—nearly five stories of sideways metal stairs separated them from the command deck above. The darkness inside was infinite and all encompassing, penetrated only by their powerful flashlights. If the carrier heeled over and turned turtle, it’d be over in seconds—a gush of foamy waters as the seas flooded in, trapping them as the carrier plummeted into the abyss below.

  Jonah led Alexis and Vitaly upwards, climbing the railings of the angled stairwell as they slowly made their way towards the command deck. “We’ll try to see if we can get the emergency generators running,” he heaved, his breath exhausted from his lungs. The smell of oil and aviation fuel was everywhere, in every pore. “We’ll pump water from the flooded holds into the dry ones, see if we can get this carrier stabilized. She’ll ride low, but it could give her just enough time for more help to arrive.”

  “Is good plan for once,” said Vitaly. “No more ‘Vitaly, crash submarine into this or into that.’ No crash this time.”

  “I thought we’d see survivors by now,” said Alexis as she pulled herself up over the railing and onto the next flight of the cramped, dark stairwell. A swell caught the carrier from far below, swinging the tower like a metronome. The trio froze, clutching the handrails with white knuckles as rumbles echoed up from deep within the vessel.

  “This is not good sound,” observed Vitaly.

  “We’re running out of time. We have to move faster,” said Jonah. The trio scrambled up the two final flights, reaching the open door to the tower command deck. Shattered glass and torn-apart, uniformed bodies lay scattered. The windowed compartment had been viciously strafed, gutted before the crew even had time to take cover. Decapitated of command officers, the carrier would have been helpless as the protracted, systemic onslaught continued.

  “Everybody dead.” Vitaly whispered before radioing an update to the Scorpion. There was no way to tell if the transmission made it through, they heard only crackling interference in response.

  “Everybody’s dead again,” added Alexis, gulping down another dry heave. “This is seriously fucked up.”

  Jonah silently fished a laser pointer out the blood-flecked breast pocket of the crumpled second officer. Bracing a foot against a computer terminal, he pushed the pointer deep into a deep bullet gouge in the nearest steel bulkhead. A faint green line shone through the blown-out angled windows and thick black smoke, the single pinprick of light coming to rest against the white radar dome of a burning, drooped-barrel Phalanx gun. The cannon still pointed across the length of the flooded flight deck. Jonah and Vitaly stared at each other in confusion.

  “Their own guns—could they—?” began Alexis.

  “Not possible,” insisted Vitaly.

  “First things first, we have to find where the carrier is taking on water,” ordered Jonah. “I need to know how we can save this ship before we can think about who—or what—did this.”

  Vitaly nodded in grim acknowledgement as he pulled a tablet computer from his waterproof backpack and plugged it into the only powered computer terminal. Although the screen was blasted apart, the CPU had survived the volley of fire from below. The tablet churned through gigabytes of data, pulling files directly from any accessible hard drive as Vitaly scrolled through radar data, daily logs, and maintenance reports before reaching the central damage-control server. A semi-transparent computerized construct of the listing carrier leapt onto the glassy screen, the 3D model showing live readings and statistics on the flooded compartments and active fires. The interior was a mess of flashing red warning notifications—waterlogged and gutted, nearly every internal system destroyed beyond repair.

  The Russian pointed to the upper terminus of the underwater compartments on the rotating diagram. “These watertight doors will not last long,” he said. “Not designed for this pressure.”

  Alexis looked around her. “What happens when the doors go?”

  Vitaly shrugged. “We definitely sink. Maybe roll over first?”

  “Can you access
any of the emergency generators? Get them pumping water, balance out the ship?” Jonah asked.

  Vitaly and Alexis together scrolled through the available subroutines—the vast majority were locked out by internal security, or connected to nonresponsive systems. Vitaly shook his head. “Not through usual protocols.”

  “What are we supposed to do? Check them one at a time until we find one that works?” said Alexis. “That could take hours.”

  Jonah was quiet for a moment. “We’ll need to go straight to an operational generator and start it by hand. Vitaly, can you use the internal cameras to increase our chances?”

  Vitaly pulled open one window after another, initializing direct camera feeds throughout the sinking carrier. Most were filled with static, the feeds severed, others smoke-filled and invisible. Jonah caught a glimpse of the ship’s enclosed gym. Exercise equipment sheered from anchor bolts and piled like broken toys against the lowergmost bulkhead as the overhead fire suppression system hissed inert gasses over the bodies of asphyxiated sailors.

  “I think I can narrow down,” muttered Vitaly, inputting a rapid-fire string of commands into the touchscreen pad. The screen froze for a moment, processing the instructions as the first two generators popped up on the display. Located in different compartments, the first was encased in ice from a destroyed refrigeration system, and her twin was flooded up to the control panels as more seawater spewed through the rubber seals of the nearest sealed hatch.

  “So . . . not these,” said Alexis.

  “Keep looking,” ordered Jonah. Vitaly scrolled through more feeds, finding only more ruined generators and more static.

  “This is end of live feeds,” said Vitaly, closing out the last window. “The rest disconnected. I check recorded footage—maybe find working generator this way?”

  “Quickly. Any remaining battery backup power this computer has won’t last long.”

  Vitaly handed the tablet to Alexis and slid down the slick deck towards a row of consoles to reroute power into the failing grid.

  “You good to go—try again,” he said, flipping her a thumbs-up.

  Alexis brought up the first pre-recorded security camera feed, displaying a full-frame image of the bridge tower command deck as seen from the interior. It was already a scene of total destruction. Phalanx deck guns raking their own tower with arcing salvos of searing cannon fire, others robotically eliminating flight crews as they fled across the deck. Helicopter drones circled the carrier like birds of prey, emptying their rocket pods into the hull and strafing the decks with machine guns. One detonation after another erupted from beneath the mammoth vessel’s waterline as the survivors rushed the inflatable lifeboats.

  “They weren’t attacked by planes or ship,” said Alexis. “My god—their own systems turned on them.”

  Jonah opened his mouth to speak, but Vitaly called out from the terminal bank, unable to see the recorded feed from his position.

  “I found a working generator! Restarting now—who is best of best?”

  “No!” shouted Alexis and Jonah simultaneously. Alexis flung the tablet aside as she and Jonah threw themselves down the steep, rocking deck to stop him. Lights around the bridge flickered as the Phalanx deck guns twitched and swiveled on their mounts far below. But it was too late to stop the power-up. Rushing sounds rumbled up from deep within the carrier as one watertight door after another began to open autonomously, filling the already sinking ship with new torrents of seawater. The waves coming over the deck were larger now, one after another, a single swell enveloping two of the Phalanx guns just as their cannon barrels turned towards the command deck once more.

  “I only start generator!” protested Vitaly.

  “Hold onto something!” shouted Jonah. “We’re going down. Get ready to swim!”

  More rumbles rocked the stricken carrier like a ten-point earthquake, shaking her to the keel. Alexis held on tight to the nearest console as the entire ship began to go down, white frothing geysers of escaping air erupting from the deck below, the bridge tower tilting dangerously as the ship threatened to turn over.

  Charging waves crossed the sinking carrier from both sides engulfing the last of the flight deck. Only the tower was above the waves now, the building-sized steel structure plunging unstoppably downwards.

  Jonah flicked on his radio, shouting instructions to his crew, unsure if they’d even hear him over the cacophony of the sinking command deck around him. He realized too late that he should have used the time to hold his breath instead.

  And then they were under, seawater exploded in through the broken flight tower windows as if a dam had burst. The trio took cover as the heaving compartment flooded, the white waters swirling with bodies and debris. Jonah grabbed at Alexis, holding her fast by the arm against the roaring flood as he clutched to the edge of the navigations console with one hand. The sucking current threatened to pull them deeper into the wreck. His muscles strained to hold on for just a few moments long, and he forced air into his ears as the pressure around them built, the influx of water slowly equalizing. But the carrier was sinking faster now, building up speed as the last of the tower slipped beneath the surface. Jonah boosted Alexis towards the shattered observation windows with both hands. She swam through, kicking herself free of the sinking carrier. She yanked downward on her life vest straps, the pressurized-air canisters erupting with a hiss as they filled the inflatable bladders, rocketing her toward the surface.

  The rushing waters had pinned Vitaly against the terminals, violently yanking the tablet computer from his grasp. Jonah grabbed the young Russian by the collar, pulled him against the current, and dragged him out the observation windows. The ocean’s surface was distant now, fifty feet or more above, the winter sun barely piercing the oil-slicked waves above. Both men pulled the releases for their air canisters and their life vests roared as they filled with buoyant air.

  Jonah and Vitaly broke the surface beside the Scorpion. Alexis had already started to pull herself aboard, while Marissa hurled a life preserver to the shivering men. Not all was lost, however. Dozens of other survivors had escaped from the shelter of the lowest decks in the last moments, the uniformed men clinging to each other within an ever-growing sea of floating rafts and debris. Hearing a distant thumping, Jonah turned to the sky to see a helicopter circling high above.

  “Looks like the first rescue chopper made it!” shouted Jonah through chattering teeth.

  Marissa just shot him a scared look in return. “Hurry up—we have to get out of here now.”

  “Why?” said Jonah as he slumped onto the deck. Vitaly fell beside him. “Let’s try to hail the copter. Coordinate a plan to help the survivors.”

  “They won’t respond,” insisted Marissa. She pointed skyward. “They’re filming us for a live television news feed in Japan. They just broadcast the carrier going down—and they’re blaming it on the Scorpion.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The submarine drifted awash in the cold waves, her conning tower, periscope, and antenna masts camouflaged among burning diesel fuel and floating wreckage. Jonah and his crew huddled in the command compartment. Alexis and Vitaly shivered as they toweled and stripped down from their wet, stained coveralls and equipment. Ocean swells lurched the Scorpion intermittently with sickening motion, tossing the crew back and forth within the cramped, windowless compartment. Still, their eyes were glued to the satellite television feed on the bulkhead-mounted monitors.

  A map of the East China Sea flashed onto the screen along with intermittent images of the burning amphibious ship vanishing beneath the waves. The Scorpion surfaced amidst the videotaped chaos, her purposeful, angular bow callously pushing through clusters of shredded rafts and oil-slicked bodies. Jonah didn’t speak a word of Japanese, but the implication was clear—their trial by media had already rendered a verdict.

  Someone had worked very, very hard to plant the story. The submarine Scorpion and her mercenary crew had been on a secret rendezvous within a North Korean milit
ary installation, returning to the open sea to attack a Japanese fleet in cold blood. He had to admit it was a pretty great story. His mind raced. How long had they been a patsy? All he knew was that their unknown enemy had tipped their hand with the news story. Such detailed information about an unfolding disaster never travelled this fast, not even in the information age. Someone had set it all up well in advance.

  “Well this is goddamn fantastic,” said Alexis, first to break the silence. The television screen was displaying images of the Scorpion’s crew now, beginning with security footage of Jonah and Hassan. Both men were bound with hands tied behind them like criminals. Jonah on his knees as blood dripped from his mouth. The doctor’s barely conscious body pushed upright against the corner of the penthouse elevator.

  Jonah couldn’t help but wince at his own image. So the rumors were true: a salvage team had reached the sunken remains of Anconia Island, even managed to rescue a few key hard drives from the deep.

  Next was a composite of Dalmar Abdi’s face. The computer-rendered image of the grinning Somali almost resembling fan art. Dalmar grunted and tapped his foot, preemptively skipping his usual dread-pirate, famous-terrorist routine.

  Alexis was shown in more security footage, only her grainy image was paired with her decidedly dated senior picture. The result was all Patty Hearst—a young, All-American girl turned to the dark side. The images only lasted seconds before cutting to an announcer droning on in rapid-fire Japanese.

  “They say Alexis brainwashed,” piped in Sun-Hi. “Maybe hostage?”

  Alexis snorted. “Of course they say that. Because there’s no way I made up my own goddamn mind.”