Alvera, shaken, turned and looked down at Collins.
“What?” she asked, looking from Jack to Tyler, who only smiled and raised his automatic to silence the pest before him once and for all.
Tyler froze when one of the midshipmen who had been seated at the closest console silently stood and placed a gun to the back of his head.
“He’s lying—my intention is to fulfill our bargain. Leviathan will protect the trench syms.”
“The task of maintaining something as daunting as Leviathan is far beyond the scope of a mercenary, Yeoman. She would soon succumb to her own age, or the nations of the world would track Tyler down and destroy him because this idiot couldn’t sail her—just as the Missouri tracked her to this point,” Jack said, nodding toward the red blip speeding right at Leviathan.
“Call the doctor to the conn, we’ll ask him,” Alvera said, never letting her eyes leave Tyler’s.
“You can’t. He was found dead in the observation compartment. It had to have been a stray bullet,” said Jack.
“That’s very convenient.” Alvera turned and studied the oncoming weapon, then looked back at the sergeant.
“After all of our planning, you are going to actually listen to this outsider?” Tyler asked as he felt the pistol push into his head.
“My breast pocket. You’ll find a little notation from Heirthall’s medical file, written by someone who wasn’t an outsider.”
Alvera reached down, plucked the paper from Collins’s pocket, and looked at the open entry.
“I suspect with your intelligence you’ll recognize Dr. Trevor’s handwriting?”
Alvera read the scribbled notation outlining Tyler’s real plan, which included the doctor, and then looked up angrily.
“Trevor says that you never had any intention of using Leviathan for our protection. You were going to sail her into the nearest port after our return to the sea and—”
“Sell her off, system by system,” Heirthall said from the darkness of the companionway. “Avarice—mere money. If he had known where the Heirthall treasure had been hidden, he would have taken that also.”
Alvera watched as security surrounded Captain Heirthall and Virginia, who was assisting the captain in remaining upright as they came into the light of control. She locked eyes with Jack and nodded her head ever so slightly.
“Yeoman, you have been betrayed, just as you and the others have betrayed me and my family,” Alexandria said as she was helped into her chair, guns still pointing at her.
Alvera threw the paper at Tyler, striking him in the face.
“Have your men stand down, Sergeant,” Heirthall ordered as she slumped in her raised chair. “Or I will allow the yeoman’s misguided maneuvering in evading Missouri‘s strike to stand. You can’t outdive that weapon, Yeoman,” she said as she opened her eyes and smiled.
The security men lowered their weapons. Jack and the others stood and rushed forward to take them, but several midshipmen rose from their seats and pointed handguns in their direction.
“Colonel, they will shoot to kill,” Alvera said.
Alvera swallowed as she saw the red blip getting closer to the diving Leviathan. She gestured for the midshipmen to return to their stations, but to keep aware of Collins and his three men.
“Captain, I am still launching the strike. We as a species have no other choice. We tried to do it without loss of life, as you had planned so thoroughly with the help of your symbiant—”
“You mean with a little coercion … and brainwashing from Dr. Trevor’s invasive procedures,” Alexandria said, her eyes partially closed in pain.
“Yes. You would never have allowed such a plan against the world’s navies in a normal state of mind. Your family’s influence over us ends today.”
Heirthall sat motionless in her chair. “You will do what you have to do, Yeoman.”
Alvera nodded, then walked to the weapons station. She raised the protective cover over the red flashing button. She looked at the other midshipmen operating their stations, each doing their duty, and then she pushed the button.
A brilliant flash of light burst from every manned station in the control room. Midshipmen didn’t have time to scream or move before twenty thousand volts shot through their bodies. A few of them who weren’t touching any metal on their consoles rose in shock when they saw what happened to the others around them. Jack and his men quickly subdued them. He looked at the frozen Alvera. She was still touching the weapons console and was clearly dead, lying across the panel as the short-lived electrical strike ended. All around them, midshipmen lay dead against their stations.
It took only a few moments for the action consoles to regain their holographic imagery.
“Lieutenant Ryan, bring in the remainder of my crew, please. We have very little time.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
Heirthall looked down at the deck as her crew removed the dead midshipmen. Virginia could clearly see the tears as they streaked down her cheeks.
Jack pulled Virginia aside as the crew started up their consoles and awaited orders.
“You did well, Doc. That was one hell of a wiring job you did, rigging those consoles.”
“I killed children, Jack. I don’t know—”
“You did what you had to do, Virginia, just as we all do. And in answer to your next question, no, you never learn to live with it.”
Virginia watched as Collins walked by a shocked Tyler and sat next to the weapons control station.
Sergeant Tyler knew for a fact he was a dead man. As Collins sat down, with lightning speed Tyler turned and elbowed Mendenhall in the stomach, then leaped at the weapons console, slamming his palm down on the launch button. The plastic cover smashed under the blow, and the red blinking button slammed home. Then he quickly turned and escaped through the hatch leading to the forward compartments.
Collins cursed and started to pursue Tyler. Everett started after Jack.
“Keep your station, Captain, and assist in Leviathan’s defense,” Collins called out as he vanished from control.
Everett stopped his pursuit of Jack and Tyler, slamming his hand against the bulkhead.
“He really does have a death wish,” Everett said with clenched teeth. ‘Well, don’t just stand there, damn it. Go after him!”
Ryan and Mendenhall grabbed two weapons and went after their boss.
“Vertical launch in one minute,” came the computerized warning.
“Helm, are we getting answering bells … on the console?” Alexandria asked, becoming weaker.
“Yes, Captain, Leviathan is answering all commands.”
“Very well,” she said calmly. “We need to turn the boat one hundred and eighty degrees. Bring our speed up to a hundred knots and blow ballast. Take her up to the ice.”
“Alex, are you sure you want to do that? You’ll box Leviathan against the ice.”
“Ginny, we are caught between a rock…. and a hard place, as the saying goes. We cannot stop the launch of those missiles; on the other hand, Missouri has made our running away impossible. I can only be at one place at any given moment—Leviathan will die today no matter what I do.”
“Do what you need to do,” Virginia said.
“Ginny, Ginny, give me some credit, I fully intend to take the lesser of the two evils. The high … road, you might say.”
“Thirty seconds to launch,” the computer announced. “Obstacle at launch coordinates detected. Launch in twenty seconds.”
“Conn, sonar, we have thirty-five miles of broken ice and pressure ridges dead ahead. Ten seconds until we have limited open sea.”
“Maintain speed and rudder, helm.”
“Aye, ma’am, maintain heading.”
“Sonar, how thick is the ice?”
“We are currently ranging from one quarter to half a mile of ice.”
“Thank you,” Alex said as calmly as if she were just ordering dinner.
“Launch in ten, nine, eight, seven—”
“Leviathan h
as just gone under the ice.”
“Three, two, one—vertical tubes one through thirty successfully launched.”
The computerized voice prepared all hands for the minute jolt as compressed air shot thirty missiles from their tubes.
“Helm, evasive maneuvering, take Leviathan down forty degrees. Dive the boat … deep and fast,” Heirthall ordered, allowing her head to droop onto her chest.
As Leviathan shed the missiles, she started a steep dive for the seafloor, three and a half miles down.
At six hundred feet, the specially designed missiles fired a solid rocket booster that would carry them to the surface of the sea. Unfortunately, they weren’t near the surface. There was a half-mile-thick ice sheet above them. As they approached at more than a hundred miles per hour, the conical-shaped weapons slammed into the blue bottom pressure ridges of the dying Ross Ice Shelf, smashing them to oblivion and sending the warheads to the bottom of the sea.
“Captain, we have Missouri’s torpedo closing at sixty knots. She is still acquiring our sound signature—it must be locked onto our damage. Estimate impact in one minute.”
“Very well, maintain course and speed. Ballast control; stand by to blow all tanks.”
“We dodged one nuclear disaster, but we’ll never avoid this one,” Everett said as he and Virginia took a handhold. The blip on the hologram became one with Leviathan.
Collins hit the winding staircase that led down three decks to the engineering level. The captain had sealed off the elevators, and Jack knew that Tyler had no choice but to go down.
The massive engineering room contained the reactors. They were starting to scream at 115 percent power as the main water jet of Leviathan tried desperately to push her forward-flooded sections down through the sea. The operational stations were all empty as every available crewman was in control or battling flooding on the other decks. The smell of burning rubber and hot steam permeated the air. Jack rounded a console and was taken aback when Tyler made his final stand. He grabbed Collins by the leg and pulled him to the deck.
Jack slammed against the rubber decking and bounced into the reactor control station. Tyler was trying to gain his feet, hitting Jack three times in quick succession as he rose. Collins shrugged off the blows and then lashed out with his boot, catching the larger Irishman in his right knee, producing a satisfactory, and sickening, crunch as the blow cracked the shin and tore ligaments in the sergeant’s knee. He still maintained his footing, but with very great effort. He steadied himself on the bad leg, raised his left, and tried to bring it down onto Jack’s neck, but Collins rolled free just as the boot struck the rubber matting.
Collins jumped to his feet and struck Tyler three times in his side, making the security man cough and grimace in great pain. Instead of going down, he collected himself faster than Jack realized he could and swung backward, hitting Collins in the chest and driving him back against the bulkhead. Collins bounced off, but he used the rebound action off the hull to his advantage. He came forward and caught Tyler with three straight, powerful blows to the face. Tyler reeled and spun away just as the pitch of the electric motors changed, screaming at even more power than before. Then the world changed as Leviathan started heading straight down, sending both Collins and Tyler sliding down the deck as if they were on a giant, very precarious slide.
Jack never had a chance to end the fight with Tyler. The Missouri‘s nuclear torpedo struck, and the world went dark.
“Okay, give me ninety-degrees dive on the planes. Increase ballast in the forward tanks to one hundred percent,” Alexandria said calmly, closing her eyes to think, but still with her head lowered.
She was ticking off the seconds until detonation. When the American torpedo’s computer detected the change in the angle of attack, the weapon would detonate as a preprogrammed precaution against losing contact with its target. This was exactly what she had hoped for. Alexandria suddenly opened her eyes and leaned forward in her chair.
“Hard-left rudder—one hundred percent down on fore and tower planes—all up on aft planes—all-ahead flank—full emergency power!” Everyone in the control center was shocked at the strength coming from Heirthall.
Leviathan started a straight-down, headlong run just as the torpedo reached its target area. In essence, what the captain did was bring the great vessel to an attitude where the hull would be less exposed—bringing the strongest portion of Leviathan’s hull head on against the detonation and the thickened composite armor at her protected stern. Running at close to one hundred miles an hour toward the bottom of the sea, Leviathan was still vulnerable as an egg in a cattle stampede.
The American warhead detonated ten thousand yards from the massive stern section of Leviathan. The tremendous heat generated by the warhead turned the sea to steam in a microsecond. The pressure wave shot in all directions, even down into the exposed jet ring-rudder of the giant submarine.
The first sensation for all inside was the feeling of free falling, as the seawater around her started running faster than Leviathan herself. The second sensation was that of the great boat flipping over as if it were a twig caught in a flashflood. The shock wave tore free the directional ring acting as the main rudder for Leviathan. Then the same heated wave assaulted the jet-thruster housing, causing the main seal to fail. The shaft that sent high-pressure water outward from the main engines, giving the submarine her thrust to the four water jets, backwashed and forced the rubber seals to melt, and then fail, allowing seawater to enter the pressurized hull with tremendous force.
Jack was thrown to the deck, and then it was as if he were on a sheet of ice as Leviathan made her run for the bottom of the Ross Sea. Then the detonation effects actually made the centrifugal force of the submarine faster than Jack’s fall, and he found himself free-floating above the deck.
Tyler wasn’t as lucky. He seemed to hit every engineering console in the compartment on his slide down the ever-increasing steepness of the deck. Just before he was crushed in the final fall toward the bulkhead, the same strange force that halted Jack’s fall stopped Tyler in midair. Then, almost as soon as the floating effect started, it ceased, as Leviathan again caught up with the speed of the rushing seas.
Both men started free-falling toward the bulkhead at crushing speed as the inner hull was breached in engineering. Tyler landed at bone-crushing speed, and Jack landed on top of him.
As Collins was trying to figure out if he had any broken bones, Tyler moved from under him.
“Help … me,” Tyler whispered.
Collins tried to turn to hear what Tyler was saying, but the automatic damage-control system was pumping compressed air into the compartment to push back some of the flooding covering both men, as the submarine was still in a nosedown attitude. Water soon covered Tyler as Jack quickly thought about his options. Decided, Collins raised Tyler’s head from the bulkhead until it was just free of the rising water. Tyler spit and tried to clear the saltwater from his mouth and throat.
“Don’t let me drown,” the broken Tyler said as loud as he could.
Jack remembered the people at the Event Complex lost, and all the people Tyler was prepared to kill for the sake of money and power. The nuclear strikes would have caused the deaths of millions of innocents. Then the thought of Sarah, Lee, Alice, and those children so callously abandoned at Ice Castle made his decision for him.
“Sorry,” Jack said as he took Tyler by the shoulders and slowly pushed him back into the water.
As the level of the flooding rose, Jack had to crane his neck to keep it above the water while he held Tyler down. He stayed that way until the large Irishman’s struggling ceased. Collins turned away and floated until he was as far away from his deed as he could get.
The restraining belts were holding the crew in their seats, with the exception of Everett, who was dangling from the navigation console.
“Engines all back!” Heirthall yelled over the sound of the flooding alarms—the effort causing a large flow of bright red bloo
d to fill her mouth. “Blow all ballast tanks. Give me full rise on the planes!”
“Captain, we have serious flooding in engineering—it’s a major hull breach!”
“That will not affect power. All back!”
Leviathan started to bring her already-flooded bow up, but her speed was so great she continued to fall toward the bottom.
USS MISSOURI (SSN-780)
Jefferson knew that the flooding was overwhelming Missouri‘s ability to pump it out. The forward weapons room had to be abandoned, and all the ballast he could send out to the sea had already been pumped out.
“Captain, we are about to lose the reactor—we’re losing her,” Izzeringhausen said, holding onto the nav table.
“Maintain revolutions! Launch the rescue buoy!”
Izzy did as he was ordered, but knew no rescue buoy in the known world would allow anyone to reach them almost three miles down; they would soon be crushed to death in a quarter of that depth.
Missouri had lost her fight for survival.
LEVIATHAN
Jack felt the deck straighten, but knew through his stomach that Leviathan was still sinking at incredible speed. He struggled toward the intercom and smashed his hand against the button.
“Conn, this is Collins in engineering!” he screamed. “We have a massive breach open to the sea!”
“Abandon the compartment, Colonel … seal the area!” Heirthall responded.
Collins shook his head and fought his way through the chest-high water. He didn’t have to go far when the flooding and current grabbed him and threw him toward the hatchway. He grabbed for the coming and held on. Then he gained his feet and struggled with the heavy hatch, attempting to close it as the water rushed out of engineering. The torrent was just too much, and he knew that the next compartment and companionway would soon flood and be too much for Leviathan‘s pumps to shed.
Collins was losing the entire deck.
ICE PALACE
Leviathan: An Event Group Thriller Page 39