Threat vector

by Michael Dimercurio

"No motion, Captain."

  Petri waited, the deck still trembling but nothing further happening. She would need more power.

  "Depth control one going dry, Captain."

  "Blow depth control two."

  "Blowing two."

  "Very well." Petri waited, but other than the shaking of the ship, there was no result.

  "OOD, do you have motion?"

  "Nothing, Cap'n."

  "Captain, depth control two dry, shutting down."

  "Very well, Pilot. OOD?"

  "Nothin'."

  "Pilot, on my mark, we're going to bubble the aft ballast tanks with the EMBT blow system, but be ready to vent immediately."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Pilot, emergency blow aft, back full!"

  "Blowing aft," the helm officer snapped, pulling up a stainless-steel handle while pulling the throttle lever back to the full detent, "back full—"

  "We're moving! Point five per second, one point five, two feet per second—" Dietz shouted over the pilot.

  Petri expelled the next order in one word: "Secure the blow! Vent aft! Flood depth control to the interlock!"

  "Blow secured, venting aft main ballast tanks, flooding DCTs one and two."

  "All stop."

  "All stop, aye!"

  "Three feet per second reverse, down angle on the ship two degrees," Dietz said.

  "Full dive on the bowplanes!" Petri ordered. "All ahead standard."

  "Two feet per second aft," Dietz called. "Point five, zero, ahead point five."

  "Pilot, take charge of your bowplanes and make your depth one hundred feet, all ahead two thirds,

  right five degrees rudder, steady course south. Off -sa'deck, secure at the inertial panel and take the conn."

  "Energize unit three when you're ready, Nav," Grachev ordered, glancing at his watch.

  "Aye, Captain. Command inserted, central processor is up, self-checking hydrophones, continuity sat—"

  "Fuel cell readout?" Grachev asked.

  "Two minutes remaining with the unit online. Should last for twenty hours at standby. Wait a minute . . . Captain? I think we have something."

  For the next three seconds Grachev piped the hydrophone output into his headset, his eyes growing wide. "Warm up one and two and send the signal to four also! Prepare all units for synchronized command detonation."

  "Aye, sir," the navigator said, flashing his fingers over his display in the virtual-reality cubicle. "Units one and two processors coming online, no response from four."

  "Come on," Grachev said. The sounds in his headset were clearly a rotating screw, air bubbles, and scraping metal on sand.

  "One, two, and three are up, sir."

  "Command-detonate sequence, captain's code reinserted."

  "Second Captain has the units, and two, one, mark."

  The sounds of Grachev's headset—the propulsor noise, air bubbles, flow noise, and scraping of metal—vanished. Only silence remained.

  * * *

  The lengths of the thin fiber-optic wires on the ocean floor that linked the Bora II torpedoes to the torpedo tubes of the Vepr varied by as much as two thousand meters, but the total lengths of them from the termination inside the interface cabinets of the Vepr's middle-level torpedo room to the terminations inside the torpedo bodies were identical to the tenth of a millimeter, which was vital because the optical signals generated by the Vepr's Second Captain traveled at the speed of light, arriving simultaneously to the interface modules of the three plasma-tipped torpedoes. This activated the weapon processors to detonate the high-explosive triggers of the three warheads, which bloomed into plasma incandescence within milliseconds of each other.

  Although the three warheads of the torpedoes were quite distant from each other, they formed a sharp triangle which contained the submarine USS Devilfish. And the American sub, the newest in the fleet, the pride of her designer, Admiral Michael Pacino, found itself in the center of a triple hammer blow of steel-shredding force. The overpressure of the shock waves of the three detonations hit the hull of the Devilfish in rapid succession. The first would have been bad enough to cripple her, scramming the reactor as the inverter breakers tripped open from the shock, the rods beginning to descend into the reactor core, the power level plummeting. The ship was jarred sideways, the sail taking the overpressure and making the ship heel over to port, exposing the top of the hull to the second and third shock waves, which arrived almost at the same

  time. The double impact was sufficient to rupture the HY180 high-tensile steel stretched between the I-section structural hoop frames along a compartment hull weld. The rupture further opened as the force of the plasma detonation pushed hard on both ends of the ship. The tremendous force broke the back of the submarine, and the ship came to rest on the sand of the bottom in the shape of a boomerang, the sail reaching horizontally to a new mountain of sand that had been scooped up from the bottom by the giant hands of the plasma blasts. The rupture in the hull had occurred at the bottom of the reactor compartment, immediately flooding the space with seawater and stopping the beating heart of what had been one of the most powerful warships in history.

  Bryan Dietz had no idea the submarine had just been smashed by three plasma explosion shock waves inside of two seconds. All he knew was that one second he was standing by the inertial readout repeater panel on the port side of the control room, feeling calm if not exactly safe and secure. The next two seconds of his life contained as much detail as entire years of his memory.

  He was just turning his head to walk to the periscope stand and take the conn from Captain Petri and get the ship out of the shallows when the nightmare began. The room began a violent and sudden tilt. For just an instant his mind turned to the diving trainers at the sub training facility in Norfolk, which were mounted on hydraulic legs to give the feeling of severe angles, but never in the trainer had the

  deck ever flipped like this. It took less than a quarter second for the deck to be rotated a full ninety degrees. If the deck had plunged beneath his feet, leaving him literally hanging, it returned in an instant to smash him in the head. Its tiles were the next thing he saw as his field of view rotated forward, capturing the blur of the rotation of the room. The lights clicked out, and the consoles sputtered into darkness. He bounced on the surface below him, crashing down into it with his rear end, his legs flying out in front of him. The thing he'd fallen on had a strange shape to it—the inertial navigation console he'd been looking at moments before. Soon after that he hit his head again on the vertical surface beside him— the former deck, now a wall. A moment later he was tackled, the officer crashing past his head onto his shoulder and slamming him in the gut. The body of the man who'd hit him landed in his lap. Another body landed on the cabinets to his left, followed by the mighty impact of one of the navigation plotter tables as it slammed down to Dietz's left.

  Only then did Dietz perceive the first sounds of the event. A rushing sound, a fire hose at full force, but worse, as if he'd put his head into the nozzle of an F-22 dual jet fighter as it lifted off at full afterburners. The noise was so loud and so violent that it existed for only a heartbeat. Either his eardrums ruptured or his brain was so overloaded with sensation that he could hear no more.

  The next ticks of the clock happened in total darkness, mere impressions of falling objects— manuals, books, rulers, pencils, coffee cups, another body. The sound then returned, no longer a roaring

  but two explosions, one rapidly after the next. They were followed by another roaring sound, but this one different, closer and from his left, a howling whistle at first, then dying to a dim flowing sound, and then the screams of the men in the room. One of the shrieks was coming from his lap.

  His hand had drifted down at that point, encountering a face, a head, long hair, and a dim part of his mind was at first surprised, then linked the long hair to the ship's captain. He shouted, "Captain! Captain?" His other hand joined his first as he tried to pull the captain off his lap. He wondered if he
might be breaking her neck or paralyzing her, but he had to move. They might all be dying. He stood, trying to be careful not to step on her, pulling himself to his feet by something overhead, a piece of metal he couldn't identify, and he forced himself to think about where the control battle lantern was. When he was finally able to remember, he had to mentally rotate the room by ninety degrees, find the inertial panel at his feet, slippery with a liquid, and then put his hand into black space where the lantern should be. Finally he found it and clicked it to life. The spreading beam of it ended one nightmare and started another as Dietz looked around him at the wreckage of the room and began to comprehend how close to death he was.

  The chief engineer and battlestations engineering officer of the watch, Lieutenant Commander Todd Hendrickson, instinctively reached out for a handhold in the maneuvering room in the upper level of the aft compartment. He looked up in time to

  see the reactor operator fly out of his seat and tumble to the door of the room. The RO blew through the heavy glass of the door and vanished, and the engineer realized that the deck was no longer horizontal but had become a wall.

  While the glass door to the space was shattering, a sixteen-inch main steam pipe on the starboard side, pressurized on the inside to seven hundred pounds per square inch, ruptured, spilling the high-energy saturated steam into what had been the hull of the aft compartment. Within seconds, the steam generators depressurized into the aft compartment, filling the entire space with high-pressure, high-temperature steam, turning the entire space into a lethal pressure cooker.

  Steam blasted into the maneuvering room from the man-sized hole in the heavy glass door left by the fall of the reactor operator. The next breath Hendrickson took was to form a scream that died in his throat as his heart stalled, the fluids in his body starting to froth, his blood boiling even as he stood there in his boots. His flesh tinned lobster-red and then black.

  Like Hendrickson, the other men in the compartment died before their first screams finished, their flesh roasted in mere seconds by the double-ended pipe sheer and the skyrocketing temperatures in the compartment. The aft compartment remained connected to the reactor compartment by the steel that had ruptured in the ship's central hemorrhage, which remained connected to the forward compartment. Running from one compartment to the other were thousands of cables, wires, and fiber-optic ca-

  bles, including phone circuits, PA circuits, and sound-powered phone lines, which were always on, always transmitting.

  A hundred feet southeast of Hendrickson's body, Lieutenant Commander Bryan Dietz stood staring at the room, only now realizing in his numbness that he was standing with one foot on the console of the ring laser inertial navigation cabinet and the other on Captain Petri's left leg. He stepped off and put out his hand slowly, dreamily, toward the command console. He found one of the sound-powered phones in time to hear one last echoing scream and the horrible rush of steam.

  He looked down slowly at Commander Karen Petri, now visible in the light of the battle lantern. Her left coverall sleeve had been ripped half off, and there was a deep gash in her shoulder. Her face wa marred by a black eye that was swelling shut, and a tooth was missing from the bottom row, but at least she was staring back at him, and she was alive. He pulled her to her feet, relief pouring into him that she stayed standing; she wasn't paralyzed as he'c feared. He starting speaking to her in a rush.

  "Captain, I think we may have lost the aft compartment. Major steam leak if my ears are sti working."

  But Petri looked back at him stunned, her left eye no longer visible. She looked at him intensely, then said, "Dad? Daddy? Where are we?"

  Dietz put one hand on Petri's shoulder and one on her waist and sat her down on the inertial cabinet, wondering what the hell to do next.

  tactical stations and get some rest. Mr. First, join Mr. Novskoyy and me in my stateroom, and have the cook prepare a hot meal for the crew."

  Bryan Dietz leaned over the chart table, which had come to rest on top of the radio repeater console on the port side of the USS Devilfish's control room, now the floor of the crippled ship. The righting moment built into the ship would normally never allow her to stay rolled over, Dietz thought. They were either buried in sand, partially flooded, or broken in half.

  There was a hand protruding from the table with an academy ring on one finger. Dietz rolled the chart table off and found himself looking into the startled eyes of the navigator, Kiethan Judison.

  "You okay, Nav?"

  "Never better," Judison groaned, staggering to his feet. "Where's the skipper?"

  "You're not going to like the answer," Dietz said, but Judison didn't wait, finding Petri sitting on the upper part of the inertial navigation binnacle with her back leaned up against a bank of piping that used to form the overhead. She was staring steadily into the room with her right eye, her left completely swollen shut in a dark shiner.

  Judison leaned over her, looking into her right eye, and then pulled open the flesh to see her left. He turned to Dietz. "Pupils are different sizes. That's not a good sign."

  Dietz waved his arm around the room. "Try to find a fucking good sign here, Nav."

  There had been ten officers in the room when

  the explosions had gone off. At this point Judison and Dietz were on their feet, Captain Petri and Dick Van Dyne were semiconscious, and Paul Manderson and David Dayne were covered with blood. Together Dietz and Judison went through the space, starting with Manderson and Dayne. Manderson's neck was broken, he wasn't breathing, and he had no pulse. Dayne had been spurting blood from a neck wound, and the bleeding had stopped on its own. He was not breathing, and his gray flesh was growing cold. Toasty O'Neal was lying on his left arm but seemed whole. Evans, Horner, and Daniels were breathing but unconscious. Daniels was turning white, possibly from internal bleeding. It had been a bad day throughout the control room, Dietz thought.

  "You realize with the ship canted like this, the escape trunk won't work," Dietz said to Judison. "And neither will the emergency blow system. Even if it works and puts air in the ballast tanks, it might turn us upside down, and we'd be in worse trouble. Looks like we'll be waiting here for rescue."

  "Listen," Judison said, his usual booming voice back to normal. "That escape trunk will work, even if it becomes a dumb airlock and we've gotta hold our breath while it floods. As long as the inner and outer hatches still work, we're in business. We've got to get everyone alive to the escape trunk. I'll go to the upper level and drag down the supply boys. You start on the middle level and lower level. Here," Judison said, handing Dietz a handheld

  VHF radio from the navigation storage locker. "Channel one. Tell me what you've got."

  Dietz picked up the slot buoy message coder from the wreckage on the navigation console. It seemed to work.

  "We should send one of these before we start," he said. "It would be nice to have someone waiting for us. Especially if you're wrong about the escape trunk."

  Easygoing Judison—never one to take offense— nodded. "Find a slot buoy in radio on your way to the lower level. Combination is K-L-E-M. Captain's initials. At least the former captain."

  Dietz nodded, taking a wall-mounted battle lantern into his hand, tucking the slot buoy coder into his coveralls, and strapping the radio to his belt with the mike on his collar. "Radio check," he said into the mike.

  "Good. Let's get out of here."

  "It doesn't make much sense to stay," Grachev said to Svyatoslov while they waited for Novskoyy. "We've put down their only acoustic daylight platform and the only truly capable submarine. The surface forces are something to watch out for, but we could put them down too if we burn up all our weapons."

  The door opened before the first officer could reply. Novskoyy came into the room and collapsed on a seat, pulling the plate of fish over and eating hungrily. Grachev was not hungry. Even the coffee tasted bad.

  "Well," Grachev said. "Can we get out of here

  now? Or do you have more bad news for the
se Norfolk bastards?"

  "Aerial recon photos?" Novskoyy asked.

  Svyatoslov reached for the remote and clicked one of the widescreens to life. He selected the Antay EHF receiver output pulled from the still-orbiting Azov unmanned aerial vehicle, being flown by the deck officer in the control compartment. The surface force could be seen driving northwestward, having spread out and slowed to search speed.

  "Put the reticle on the coordinates of the torpedo detonation," Novskoyy said, taking a spoonful of soup.

  Over the position of the three plasma detonations there was an oil slick and what looked like a truckload of floating debris.

  "No rafts, no survivors." Svyatoslov stopped chewing and stared at the display.

  "We killed her, from what I can see," Grachev said. "What's next?"

  Novskoyy wiped his mouth and sat back. "We're finished here. We need to withdraw slowly and quietly to the southeast. Walking speed. I want us to go no faster than thirty clicks, and lay in a serpentine departure course. No one is to track us. Let's hurry and pull Out before the search from the surface ships becomes more serious."

  Grachev pushed his plates away, having eaten nothing. "And then what?"

  "Take us to the equator at twenty-five degrees west longitude. We'll rendezvous with the Black Sea Fleet surface task force and screen them for the journey to Uruguay. Your ship is charged with

  delivering those ships safely to the beaches. Now that the American admirals and their acoustic daylight platform are gone, that mission should prove . . . routine."

  Grachev said nothing, waving the first officer out with his head, hurrying up the ladderway to the control compartment. Once there, he stepped behind his command console and issued a flurry of orders to the deck officer.

  "Man tactical stations. Command-self-destruct the Azov and confirm it's down, then withdraw the Antay pod. Rig out the horizontal plane thrusters and bring up the idle turbines."