"So, what did happen?" Eve had pushed the Ray-Bans up into her bangs, the bright green of her eyes staring into his.
"Oh, hell, Eve, it was a long time ago and it doesn't matter anyway. I've got to change."
He left her there staring at him, half angry, half astonished. Inside his stateroom he pulled off his uniform, taking a moment to look at his Navy Cross, the one Donchez, the former Chief of Naval Operations had given him for the mission that lost the Seawolf. Somehow the decoration was supposed to compensate him for the loss, he thought.
He knew he had to shake off this sudden melancholy somehow. He hung up his uniform and donned his tropical vacation clothes, hoping they would lighten his mood. But it was no use. Without Colleen here, he was half of himself. He looked in the mirror, bit his lip, smoothing his windblown white hair, and left the stateroom. When he emerged back onto the promenade deck, he could see that Eve had left their spot on the railing and had found a pilot friend; the two of them were
deeply involved in a conversation. Pacino manned the rail, staring out to sea, although Cavalla looked over at him once, smiling at him.
"Better be careful, sir," a whiny voice said in his ear.
Pacino looked up at Rear Admiral Paully White, his Vice CNO and old friend from the Japanese and Red Chinese wars. White was a few years older than Pacino, a few inches shorter, a few pounds heavier, but with a full head of hair as black as when he'd been a teenager. The pounds had arrived when he'd quit smoking, but in the last year White had become an exercise fanatic, as habit-bound with that as he'd been with cigarettes, but he fought the fact that now he could taste his food. White was from the Kensington area of Philadelphia and spoke with an accent as thick as any Pacino had ever heard. When he'd first met White the accent had been a severe irritant, but they had become fast friends, and today that whining speech was musical.
"Why's that, Paully?"
"Cavalla has her eye on you."
"That's absurd. I'm married." Pacino's tone was peeved. "She's twenty-five years younger than me. And . . . I'm married."
"And she's not. And the way she was looking at you. Like a tiger looks at a steak."
"Paully."
"Nice day, ain't it, sir?" White changed the subject as if it had never been raised.
"Beautiful."
"Absolut and orange juice, please, and another
Anchor for the Big Boss," he said to the waiter. "Don't it just make you wish we'd left behind the phones and the radios and the computers?"
"Yeah. But any particular reason you mention that?"
White scowled in worry, looking left and right to make sure they were alone.
"Oh, yeah. You'd better put your warrior's hat on for a minute, sir. The Admiral Kuznetsov put to sea a half hour ago. The Ukrainians are doing this thing, they're really going to do it. The situation is going just the way our simulation went."
Pacino nodded, thinking.
"Any intelligence on the Ukrainian Black Sea Fleet submarine force?"
"Nothing, sir. The subs are cold iron ever since the Vepr went down."
"They've got to be grounded."
"It'd be nice to know instead of guessing, though, Admiral."
"We should talk to Number Four at NSA." Number Four was their friend Mason "Jack" Daniels IV, the National Security Agency Director. "Daniels should be able to set up a better harvest of naval base communications. We need to know what they're up to."
"I'll see if Number Four can come up on video tonight."
Pacino thought. They had a light schedule that day, the first day at sea devoted to relaxation. The first seminars weren't scheduled until Tuesday morning, tomorrow.
"Okay, see what you can do."
White left without a word, leaving Pacino staring out to sea. They had left Norfolk far behind, the only thing around them the sea and the sky and the three surface warships escorting them out, now at various distances and bearings from the cruise ship, screening her as if she were an aircraft carrier. A few miles astern the new SSNX-class submarine Devilfish could barely be made out, visible more from her white wake than from her superstructure. A seagull swooped by. At the bow a single dolphin jumped next to the bow wave. Pacino smiled. It was impossible to worry with the seascape around him. A contentment filled him for a moment, and he didn't ascribe it to the beer or the sea, but simply enjoyed it.
"Did you want to do a voice-over in the chopper?" The cameraman shouted at her and into his boom microphone, his voice scratchy and full of static on her Mickey Mouse headset.
"No," she shouted back. "I'll do it in the sound studio. All this noise makes it hard to hear my own voice, and if I can't hear myself I sound like a moron."
Victoria Cronkite shook her long brunette hair, wanting it off her shoulder while she concentrated. She was a segment producer and news special reporter for Satellite News Network. She'd traveled down from Washington to Norfolk to capture the departure of the U.S. Navy's boondoggle to the Caribbean on a cruise ship, the most flagrant waste of taxpayers' money she had ever witnessed. She would not be reporting daily, since the cruise was
not significant enough to make it into the nightly news. Her executive producer had instead told her to cover the entire course of the "stand-down." Then a segment report on Correspondence: Confidential would be perfect to expose this racket for what it was. So she would do the voice-over later.
She looked over at Doug, who was shouting something.
"What?"
"Vicky, do the voice-over up here anyway. It will sound more dramatic inside the chopper. You know, 'We're here two thousand feet over the American convoy which is not bringing a big stick to advance U.S. foreign policy, but a big suitcase full of bathing suits and Hawaiian shirts.' It'll sound more immediate than a sterilized version from the sound stage."
"Okay, fine. But you know I can't modulate my own voice up here. If I sound like a Mongoloid, we're erasing tape and starting over again, even if we have to pipe in phony helicopter noises."
Doug laughed over the intercom. "Ready to roll in three, two, one."
Immediately Cronkite's voice changed to that of a seasoned veteran reporter, the one she mockingly called her TV voice.
"This is Victoria Cronkite reporting for SNN news, and as you can see from here above the waters of Hampton Roads, five ships of a U.S. Navy task force are departing Norfolk Harbor for a secret mission. The ships of the force include the front-line destroyers Tom Clancy and Christie Whitman as well as the massive nuclear missile cruiser
USS Hyman Rickover, with the SSNX submarine Devilfish bringing up the rear. But, you might ask, what is this confidential mission? What are these ships doing on today's highly classified sortie?"
She went on like that for some moments more as the cruise ship approached the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.
The first Barrakuda mobile mine had attached itself to the hull of the cruise ship about a third of a ship length from the bow, some five meters behind the location of the ship's bridge, the navigation control center. The weld had held steady since the unit's electromagnets had turned off, and the seawater-environment epoxy had solidified.
The mine waited patiently, its only power going to the ring laser inertial navigation system and the onboard computer, which clicked off the time and watched the ship's position. When the navigation module indicated the ship was eighty kilometers southeast of Norfolk, the unit looked to its time delay setting for the correct interval after the eighty-kilometer point. The read-only memory indicated a time delay of zero, which made it time to activate the arming device.
The arming module came to life on the orders of the central processor, doing the silicon equivalent of a morning yawn in its full series of self-checks. Immediately after a report of satisfactory, the central processor ordered the unit to detonate the low-explosive charges at the forward and after ends of the mine.
During a single ten-microsecond interval the for-
ward and after low explosives received intense e
lectrical signals. The resistive effect caused their temperatures to soar until combustion began, the ignition of the thumb-sized charges constrained by thick forged casings fore and aft, the flame front and blast effect propagating toward the center toward a dual metal disk called the fail-safe plate, which was normally arranged to be a closed door, but which had been rotated to align two centimeter-diameter holes with the butt end of the low-explosive charges on the action of the arming circuit. The holes led to a passageway to the intermediate explosives, slightly larger charges with five times the explosive power of the low explosives, but much less sensitive, requiring much more than a small electrical signal to explode.
The flame fronts from the low-explosive charges ignited the secondary explosives, which were each the size of a soda can, and like the low-explosive charges, constrained on all sides but one by thick forgings, so that their blast effect was directed toward the warhead center, where the high-explosive charges lay waiting and inert.
The high explosives were shaped charges, arranged in a chevron so that their detonation would focus most of their blast effect in a single direction, both detonating in a synchronized explosion and focusing their energy on the warhead center.
The pulsing hammer impact of the high-explosive charges each blew a cone of plutonium from the warhead ends to a waiting doughnut of plutonium in the center of the warhead. The plutonium was blown into a single dense sphere, beginning the fu-
sion explosion trigger of the plasma warhead. The plutonium sphere was not so different from what it had been before the high-explosive detonation, the same mass, but three chunks of the mass had been blown together into a single ball, and that had extreme significance to a nuclear physicist, because the surface area of the plutonium had suddenly decreased, leaving much less space available for neutrons formed by plutonium fissions to escape into space. Instead, the background level of fissions caused the neutrons to remain mostly inside the sphere of plutonium, causing more fissions, which led to more neutrons, which caused even more fissions and an explosion of neutrons, until the nuclear chain reaction spiraled in a runaway. The fission bomb converted the mass energy of the plutonium to thermal energy as the plutonium temperature soared from twenty degrees Centigrade to two hundred to two thousand to twenty thousand and beyond. In the igniting energy of the fission trigger, bags of heavy water, deuterium, joined in. The nuclei of the heavy deuterium fused together to form lighter helium, the whole less than the sum of its parts, and what mass was no longer present converted to pure energy. The deuterium was fused entirely to helium while the plutonium atoms fissioned into fragments. The temperatures at the center of the warhead roared up to two million degrees, then to twenty million.
The warhead so far had progressed from being a high-explosive bomb to an atom bomb to a hydrogen bomb. Had its design stopped there, the resulting explosion would have caused a mile-wide
mushroom cloud and radioactive fallout, the nightmare of the previous century.
But just as the hydrogen bomb had piggy-backed on the fission bomb to become even more destructive, the plasma bomb was built using a fusion-bomb trigger. A host of substances lying waiting between deuterium canisters added to fury of the nuclear fire. The fusion bomb's explosion diameter was scarcely a half meter, the soaring temperatures activating what the physicists called "star dust." Its effects had been discovered in the high-energy colliders built in the early twenty-first century and put to use before the end of the first decade, its result the confinement of the massive energy of the nuclear explosion in a small volume, the thermal energy of it focused within itself, held within a rapidly generated and incredibly powerful magnetic field instead of propagating outward in the explosion of a hydrogen bomb. The same energy of the nuclear detonation held within the genie's bottle of the magnetic field caused the mass contained inside to continue to soar in temperature, past a hundred million to two hundred million degrees, so hot that the atoms' electrons flashed off into space, followed by a piercing wave of gamma radiation. The incredibly hot plasma, a cubic meter sliced out of the bottom level of Hell, glowed there in the space coordinates of what had once been the innocent underbelly of a pleasure cruise ship.
The accords of the first decades of the new century had outlawed fission and fusion bombs, taking them off the shelves of the militaries of the world, until the nuclear physicists demonstrated the first
plasma warhead at the famous DynaCorp Labs in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Placed inside a mock building in a mock city, the plasma warhead showed how much the technology had further tamed the atom. Instead of the explosion flattening the city to ruins, the plasma detonation had confined all the unfocused thermal energy within one room of the building, carving a perfect sphere in the concrete walls before bringing down the building and only the target building, the effect solely one of temperature and missing the horrors of wide-pattern radioactivity and blast effect that had led to the condemnation of nuclear weapons in the first place. As the demonstration showed, the plasma bomb was unlike its father and grandfather, the atom bomb and hydrogen bomb, both weapons of mass destruction. It was a surgical incendiary device. Within months, conventional weapons were replaced with plasma warheads on the cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs of the U.S. military.
The first use of a plasma warhead in a full-scale military test had been in the Bahamas submarine test range, where then-Captain Michael Pacino witnessed its underwater detonation in the warhead of a Vortex missile, in the early days of World War III against the United Islamic Front.
The first use in warfare had come weeks later as Pacino targeted the UIF supersub in the Labrador Sea even as his USS Seawolf blew apart from the detonations of the Nagasaki torpedoes, the plasma Vortex detonation taking out the dictator of the entire United Islamic Front of God, which then sued for peace in an early end to the conflict while
the Labrador Sea incident remained cloaked under the veil of a top secret classification.
The second use had come during Operation £n-lightened Curtain, when Pacino, then a rear admiral, had targeted Japanese Destiny II-class submarines with plasma-tipped Vortex Mod Bravo missiles, putting almost all of them on the bottom of the Pacific.
The third use had come in the Chinese Second Civil War, when Red China executed its massive sneak attack on White China, employing plasma warheads in firebombing of Shanghai and Hong Kong, and in the same war against the American rescue Rapid Deployment Force—Operation White Hope —when stolen Japanese technology had been turned on the Americans, the stolen subs then targeting the advancing American surface fleet with plasma-tipped torpedoes. It was Vice Admiral Pa-cino's counterattack with plasma-tipped Vortex Mod Bravo and Charlie missiles that had won the battle.
Some would later say that perhaps it was fate that the ship carrying Admiral Michael Pacino, the first man to use a plasma warhead in anger, came under the surface-of-the-sun-glow attack of a plasma mobile mine.
But whether it was fate or irony or coincidence, the plasma front grew upward into the hull of the Princess Dragon and ignited it into a scene from Dante's Inferno, and in time, the result of the plasma detonation would become only smoking fires and smoldering debris on the sea.
Admiral Michael Pacino was looking down at the water washing aft along the cruise ship's hull, en-
joying the hypnotic effect of the wake, when it happened.
At first there was the flash. The sea around the amidships portion of the ship changed from dark blue with whitecaps to burning red. Pacino's eyes widened in astonishment as the red glow burst out from their hull and traveled through the water outward, forming a giant circle around the ship. The next thing he noticed was that everything else had frozen. The waves, the wind, the very passage of time. A seagull flying some ten feet away from him had come to a stop, not budging an inch from where it flew next to the ship. With dismay Pacino recognized what was happening. It was not that time had stopped or slowed; it was that he had just been hit with a surge of adrenaline.
The red glow had pulsed outward about a half ship length around the vessel, calming from its earlier stark bright red to a glowing pale orange, but as the color faded, something changed. What a moment before had been the glowing surface of the water now became white as the sea around them burst into foam. The foam ignited into a rising cloud of white, as if he had found himself next to the nozzles of a rocket pointed upward.
As the white explosion of foam happened, Pacino dimly realized that there was no sound. This freakish event was completely silent. If there had been a sound, perhaps it had made him deaf. But there was no time to ponder that thought. The seagull was slowly being blown upward by the blast of white from the sea around them, rising and flipping, his wings breaking in the violence of the gusher.
Pacino felt the deck roll to port, five degrees, then ten, the railing now on an uphill angle. He had a moment to peer down over the side, and felt as if he'd peeked through a window into Hell itself. Where there had been ocean before was now a fireball, flames boiling up in an orange-and-black cloud that was rising slowly along the hull. He pulled back in time to watch the fireball blow upward past the railing where he had just had his head.
He realized he was slowly falling toward the deck, probably blown by the shock wave of whatever the rising explosion was. He was facing aft now, falling slowly and watching stunned as something happened to the hull. Before his eyes it opened up along a fault line in the deck. The ship split in half, the after portion rolling away from him to starboard, the forward section to port. He could see the insides of the aft portion of the ship, the deck below, people inside, being tossed like dice on a crap table, but their bodies tumbling in slow motion.
Ahead of him he could see several people on the deck, bouncing slowly as they hit. A woman in a short silk skirt slammed into the side of a bulkhead, her legs flying, her head hitting the wall. Blood burst out and something else, something gray and oozing—her brain. She came to rest with one hand smashed behind her back, her legs spread, one broken, and her head laid open against the wall, painting a pattern on what had been a white surface. Except what before had been a bulkhead, a vertical wall, was now seemingly below him, becoming a
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