Threat vector

by Michael Dimercurio

  floor under him, as Pacino realized the ship was rolling.

  All this time there hadn't been a sound, not until this very moment, when all the violent energy of the explosion hit his ears at once, as if someone had suddenly turned a firehose on each ear full force.

  By then the aft hull had spun so far relative to Pacino's forward hull that he caught a glimpse of the blue of the hull paint, then where it turned black, then the scorched metal of what must have been the keel itself. But the instant after that the smoke rolled through the grisly field of Pacino's vision, the flames and rolling black clouds of smoke now pulling his horizon in close, and he could see no more than ten or twelve feet in any direction.

  An instant later, finally, he smashed into the deck. The impact with the polished wood of the deck somehow kicked him back into normal time, with all the horror that came with it. Two bodies flew over him and smashed with ungodly force into the same bulkhead that the woman had hit, their broken bodies adding to the gore of her broken frame. Pacino skidded hard along the deck into the pileup, smashing his head into a rib cage. His vision became blurred, and a sickening feeling came to his stomach, not just from the horrible burning smell or the feel of three dead bodies, but at the motion of the hull sailing sideways. The deck was becoming a wall while the bulkhead was now solid beneath him, a new deck, but even that changed as the wood deck continued to roll over his head. Then he was staring up at the deck rail where he had stood not seconds before, the sky peeking out

  between gaps in the black smoke rolling up from the wreckage of the cruise ship. But even as Pacino stared up at the railing, he could see the sky moving in the spaces between the rails. The hull was rolling still, and the deck was tilting over so far as to become more of a ceiling. The sky disappeared from between the rails, only smoke visible, until there was a splash, the railing smashing into the sea.

  For the railing to go into the water meant that the forward hull had rolled so far that it was completely capsizing. But if that were true, Pacino tried to reason, he should be underwater. Instinctively his lungs filled with a smoky breath of air, and as if in answer to his thought, a crashing wave of black seawater hit him like a fist. Underwater, the noise of the flames and explosions changed to a deeper bass. But there was something else going on with his ears—they were pounding on his skull. Pressure. He was being taken deep, and his ears were popping. He had to get out, a screaming voice in his head shrieked.

  Holding his breath, he pumped his arms madly, kicking his feet, trying to get away from the bulkhead. As panic began to nibble at the edge of his thoughts, he felt the railing with his hands and the wood of the deck with his head, and without further thought he hand-over-handed the railing, kicking himself over it, knowing that if he failed to get on the other side of the railing the ship would take him down with it. He cleared the railing, swimming in darkness.

  He realized his eyes were closed, and he forced

  himself to open them. If he swam the wrong direction he would drown. By the way his ears had popped, he could be fifty or a hundred or 150 feet underwater by now, and the only thing that would save him would be a mad rush for the surface.

  When he opened his eyes, he could see nothing. The effect of the darkness and the horrifying sounds of the rolling explosions in the deep was hideous, and he felt fear fighting the logical part of his thoughts, struggling for control.

  Then the explosions came, lighting up the world around him in a frightful and eerie glow. Over to his left, just for an instant, he could see the giant hull of the ship sinking, upside down, the ripped portion amidships angled downward, the bow pointing mournfully up to the surface, and Pacino had the merest impression of the waves high overhead. The ship was so huge that the forward fragment of it was distant in the haze of the water, but he was looking far up at it, its exhaust stack pointed downward. He had to be two hundred feet deep, and the lit-up hull fifty feet to his left was sucking him downward. He didn't know what was worse— seeing that huge misshapen hull in the ghastly light of an explosion, seeing how frighteningly deep he was, or not seeing it when the light of the explosion went out as soon as it had come, a lightning flash.

  Suddenly Pacino was as frightened as a child in the grip of a nightmare. He wanted to scream in fear, and his eyes felt odd, as if even under the seawater he was crying. It came to him then that this was how he would meet his end, this is how he would die. He had always wondered what the

  last moment would be like. And even though he had emergency-blown through thick ice from the crippled Devilfish, and escaped the broken hull of the Seawolf, and been pulled from the wreckage of the USS Ronald Reagan a week after crashing onto her deck in the flames of a fighter jet accident, he had never before felt a finality nagging at him as he did now. Suddenly he saw all the past scrapes with death, saw them for what they were, something that would make him tougher, and saw this for what it was—his end. With that thought a flaming rage burst out of him, and he made a decision, that he would live. He bit his lip until he could feel the blood, and he aimed for the surface and swam with every ounce of energy left in his frame.

  He swam for where he could remember the waves being, pumping his legs, pulling his arms. The crushing force on his chest was intense, the depth squeezing him. His ears felt as if they'd ruptured from the explosions or the pressure. He swam upward for what seemed like several minutes, his air running out. He wondered if he was fighting the rush of downward water from the sinking of the ship, and whether he had gotten vertigo when the light of the underwater explosion had gone out, and was no longer swimming upward. The pressure should have eased on his lungs and ears by now, he thought. It would soon be too late to matter. He had perhaps only another sixty seconds of endurance left.

  He swam, counting his strokes. Count to sixty, he commanded himself. Pumping his legs and arms, counting, he reached forty, then fifty, soon sixty,

  with no sign of getting close to the surface. He kept on, seventy, eighty, ninety. He was becoming exhausted. His legs could barely move, his arms were lead. He couldn't hold his head up. He tried to keep his eyes open, to find the surface, but there was nothing but blackness. And his air was out. He couldn't fight the impulse to breathe any longer, even though he knew he was underwater. He knew the second he took in water he'd panic and it would be over. But there was nothing more he could do.

  All the anger of a few moments before had evaporated into his exhaustion. He felt as if he were ninety-eight years old, and with the physical fatigue came resignation. There was nothing he could do to save himself, and perhaps this was meant to be, this was his answer, his destiny.

  He tried as hard as he could to stop it, but nothing helped. His body was on automatic now. His mouth opened and his lungs pulled, and water came crashing in. With it came a furious panic like nothing he'd ever experienced. He pumped his arms and legs, thrashing, mindless, blackness growing at the edges. The awful shrieking horror of the pain in his chest felt as if he were being ripped open by a giant rusted fishhook, but mercifully the part of his mind that felt pain was shrinking, receding. The black tunnel of his mind began to eat away at the light. Just like a television screen going dark and shrinking to a single point of light, so did his rational mind fade, the smallest kernel of it all that was left in a sea of blackness, until even the tiny light went slowly out, and miraculously he could hear voices, dimly at first, then louder, more dis-

  tinctly, but the voices were not from this world— they were the voices of his father and Dick Don-chez and the crew of his old Devilfish and the dead men from the Seawolf, but they weren't dead anymore, and he could see his father, see him as if he were standing right there in front of him, and he was young, as he was when Pacino was very small, and he looked so big, so tall, as he had when Pacino was a boy, and he wore a robe so dazzlingly white that it almost hurt Pacino's eyes.

  He felt his father's arms go around him, his voice soothing, an inner peace arriving with his father's touch, Then there was a young and vi
gorous Dick Donchez on the other side of him, and they were walking with him and carrying him and he could hear himself saying his father's name and hear his father's laughter. He called Donchez's name and Dick laughed back, and it was then that he knew that he had arrived somewhere, that he had reached a destination, a better place, and the heaviness, the sadness, that he had carried with him for so many years since Devilfish went down was finally lifted.

  ripped the Mickey Mouse ears off and stared out the window, trying to see over Doug's camera. There below them the Princess Dragon was barely visible in the smoke and flames, but Cronkite could make out the hull ripping in half, the bow rolling to the left, the stern to the right and capsizing, but where blue hull should be only a scorched jagged blackness. The stern soon vanished into the water. The surface was now covered with flames from fuel or the remains of the burning explosion. The bow section took longer to go under, the stack exploding, then the superstructure continuing to roll until the hull appeared, also black and scorched, but this part of the ship sinking much faster.

  "Did you keep the camera on that?" Her voice sounded barely audible in the noise of the chopper and the rolling explosions, now calming slowly, but her hearing was half lost.

  "I got it all!" Doug shouted. "Do a real-time commentary! We'll be live with the tape rolling. Give me fifteen seconds."

  Cronkite looked out over the boiling sea where a cruise ship bigger than one of the World Trade Center towers had exploded and sunk in less than sixty seconds. But as she began to think about what to say, the warships escorting the task force to sea—all of which had turned quickly around to come to the rescue—exploded in the same sort of eerie sequence, Doug's camera capturing it all.

  The explosions shook the bridge of the Devilfish a few seconds after the blinding flash erupted from where the cruise ship had been.

  Captain Karen Petri was looking aft, trying to see if the aircraft carrier was leaving Hampton Roads, when the first flash lit up the sky behind her. Its glow reflected off the masts and antennae reaching out of the sail. The exclamations of the officer of the deck and lookouts were drowned out by the shock wave, a pulsing roar strong enough to be felt deep in the chest. Before Petri's stunned eyes the cruise ship disappeared in a fireball that ascended to the sky. When the smoke of the mushroom cloud cleared after some minutes, the ship could again be seen, but it looked nothing like it had before the explosion. Petri's jaw dropped as the giant ship broke in half and capsized so fast that within a few seconds it seemed to be pulled under as if by a clawing hand from the deep.

  She was about to order the ship to close the distance to the dying vessel, to see if they could help the survivors, when the destroyers exploded, one after the other. The same roaring sound wave knocked them against the bridge coaming, coming in a double hammer blow, and mushroom clouds marked the former positions of the destroyers. The only thing recognizable in Petri's binoculars was the transom name of the second ship in line, the block letters spelling uss tom clancy, visible for a split second before the stern vanished in the cloud of black smoke. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left.

  "I have the conn. All ahead flank!" Petri said on instinct, grabbing the bridge-box microphone out of Dietz's hand and yelling into it. "Mark the bearing to the cruise ship."

  "Bearing one zero five," the navigator's shaking voice said.

  "Helm, Captain, steer one zero five," Petri commanded. The clearing smoke at the bearing to the cruise ship was some two thousand yards ahead, a nautical mile. She would be there in two minutes at thirty knots.

  Up ahead, the massive profile of the USS Admiral Hyman Rickover could be seen as it turned to render assistance. As it came around to the west, the flash burned Petri's eyes as it too exploded into a spectacular fireball and began to sink.

  Dietz stared open-mouthed at the grisly scenario. Petri didn't know what force had allowed her head to be clear while those of the men around her were in fog, but she prayed a silent prayer of thanks, and drove the ship on toward the wreckage of the Princess Dragon.

  Fleet Admiral Richard O'Shaughnessy, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, looked up at the supersonic bomber high overhead. The aircraft had flown in to Andrews Air Force Base for his inspection. General Nick Nickers, U.S. Army, and Air Force chief General Paul Gugliamo stood next to O'Shaughnessy, proudly explaining the significance of the jet. They were about to escort him onboard when four Lincoln staff trucks came roaring down the strip toward them, all of them flat black with flashing beacons on top.

  Nickers craned his neck to look, his eyebrows rising over his aviators sunglasses. Gugliamo stepped out in front of the other general officers,

  trying to find out what was going on. The trucks were going at least a hundred miles an hour down the runway, only braking at the last minute, skidding to a halt just in front of the bomber. Before the trucks stopped, the doors of all four opened and commandos rushed out, machine guns in their hands, bandoleers of grenades on their fatigues. The commander held a MAC-12 machine pistol in one hand, an Uzi in the other. The three officers were surrounded by the commandos within one second of the trucks' arrival.

  "Code seven," was all the commando leader said, seizing O'Shaughnessy by the arm and hurling him into one of the trucks. The older officer banged his shoulder on one of the other commandos entering from the other side. Four doors slammed and the wheels screeched as they accelerated. The other officers were in two other trucks, each going a different direction. O'Shaughnessy removed his cap and glared at the commando in the front seat.

  "What's going on?"

  "Security code seven is all I'm authorized to report, Admiral, until we have you in the NMCC bunker."

  Code seven meant little to the JCS chief, who knew it only as a dimly recalled security emergency involving the top ranks of the military, a contingency plan practiced in earnest by the security troops charged with the physical security of general officers, but scoffed at by the general officers themselves, men who had fought wars and feared no terrorists' bullets. O'Shaughnessy waited, his lips narrowed in a furious grimace, until the truck came

  to a halt at a Sea Serpent CH-88D command helicopter. The black-clad commandos hustled him into the chopper. The rotors throttled up, and the wheels came off the pavement even before the hatch shut.

  "What's going on?" O'Shaughnessy asked one of his captors. The senior man, a Navy commander, produced a WritePad computer. A few clicks of the software admitted the admiral to the SNN website, where a video clip was playing in one window as text news scrolled next to it, another window showing a news reporter speaking about the tragedy at sea. O'Shaughnessy froze as the images played on the screen.

  "So this is why you grabbed me."

  "We're not sure how widespread the attack is, sir," the commander said. "But anyone over the rank of brigadier general is assumed to be a target and brought to the code one point of security. We're taking you to the Crystal City bunker outside of D.C"

  "No. I'm not going to any bunker. Take me to the Pentagon."

  "Sorry, Admiral, that's impossible. Washington is not a good place to be right now. The Pentagon is considered unsecure, sir. With an attack like this on the senior officers of the Navy, we must presume the Pentagon is a secondary target. It's been evacuated except for NMCC and a Joint Special Warfare guard team, and the flag is being shifted to the NorVa Bunker, the underground National Military Command Center in Crystal City."

  "Goddammit, I said no. If the Pentagon is ruled

  out, take me to the White House, and don't give me any more nonsense, Commander, or I'll fly this chopper myself. You read me?" O'Shaughnessy hadn't had to throw his weight around since the Battle of Iran, and felt out of practice, but the maneuver worked.

  "Major! You heard the admiral! White House South Lawn, now!"

  The aircraft banked steeply as the Marine pilot flew them north toward the Beltway. There was relative silence in the aircraft for a few moments, until O'Shaughnessy addressed the SEAL commande
r again.

  "What's the status of informing the President about this?"

  "Secretary of War Masters was with her when this happened, sir. The press secretary came in and informed them."

  O'Shaughnessy was silent for a moment, watching the awful replay of the sinking of the Princess Dragon. Men, his men, were dying right before his eyes, one of them his own son-in-law, and he thought about his daughter, Colleen.

  "I wonder how she's taking the news," O'Shaughnessy said aloud. The commander shook his head, thinking the admiral was speaking about President Warner.

  The hearing room was huge and intimidating. A long horseshoe-shaped elevated table faced the witness table. The high-backed leather chairs were occupied by the senior senators and representatives of the Armed Services Committee, listening while

  she read her statement about the Cyclops Bat-tlespace Control System, now into its fortieth page.

  Colleen Pacino paused to take a sip of water while the committee chairman, National Party Senator Arlen Ridge of Pennsylvania, held up a hand to her. A Navy lieutenant aide had hurried into the room to whisper into Ridge's ear. Colleen Pacino cocked her head, staring at the exchange, beginning to think it looked serious. Ridge was glancing at her in between staring at his table while the aide spoke. The aide put a WritePad down in front of Ridge, who looked at it for a moment, his skin going ashen.