lights had gone out, plunging the room into darkness.
Grachev put his fist on the top lever. In his peripheral vision he could see flashes of light as the battle lanterns clicked to life and then clicked out again, and in the silent-movie effect of the battle lanterns strobing to life, he could see Svyatoslov frozen in motion running toward him.
Grachev threw the top lever, the one designed to isolate the compartment. The dual inner and outer hatches dropped like the blade of a guillotine, slamming shut in their framing and isolating the compartment, making it watertight. The circuit also slammed shut massive watertight doors in the heavy-walled air ducts, further sealing the compartment.
Next, Grachev reached for and threw the second lever, which ordered the sixty explosive charges built into the structural steel and titanium to sever the structural connections between the control compartment and the hull. The lever also activated the circuits of two hundred explosive bolts designed to rip open the sail and blow it away from the control compartment, to allow the compartment to ascend to the surface. The battle lanterns clicked to life again arid then went out, revealing Svyatoslov closer by almost a half meter. Grachev's hand reached the bottom lever beneath the already-thrown third lever, the one that would detonate the final explosive train and rocket motors that would thrust the control compartment upward and away from the main hull.
All four levers thrown, Grachev reached for a
handhold next to the panel. The room vibrated with a slamming explosion—but it was only the hatches and the air-duct doors forcefully hitting their seating surfaces. The explosions from the second lever kicked in, a sustained, booming roar rather than a quick report.
The emergency lights clicked again and held, and Svyatoslov was almost all the way to him, although what he was doing Grachev could only guess. High overhead, the detonation of the explosive bolts could be heard as small pinging noises, small-caliber bullets ricocheting down a metal hallway.
The next sound Grachev didn't expect—the noise of a thousand buildings falling—and he felt as if his eardrums had ruptured and blood was spurting out of his head. What he would not realize until ten seconds later was that the noise was only the first of the plasma detonations from the torpedoes sent to destroy the warships of the surface task force he'd been ordered to guard.
Grachev had released the handhold and begun to put his hands to his ears when the next plasma explosion rocked the ship, and by the time his hands did reach his ears another plasma warhead had gone off. He was beginning to sink to the deck when the rocket motors distributed around the bottom of the control compartment lit off, starting to blast the compartment away from the main hull.
Grachev began to smile as he felt himself dashed to the deck, flattened there by the acceleration of the rocket thrust. His last-resort action had worked. He'd been successful in punching out the compartment. The smile faded as he realized he had proba-
bly been too late. He had taken too much time. In just heartbeats, the first rocket torpedo would be impacting the hull, and the plasma explosion that came next would rip open the metal of the compartment and kill every man left aboard.
the south the first plasma explosiogs began to detonate as the Mark 58 torpedoes caught up with the lagging surface ships. The Doberman warhead was a densely packed carbon-fiber microstructure wrapped around an inner charge of high explosives and stuffed into a chamber with segment charges along its four seams. On the signal from the onboard processor, the segment charges exploded, ripping the skin of the chamber open on the four seams, just as the inner ovoid of high explosives blew up, further exploding the chamber walls and scattering the carbon-fiber structure. The expanding gases of the fireball drove the structure out into the water, while small hidden charges went off. These were more directional shaped rocket motors than explosives, carefully crafted to propel the carbon-fiber structure farther outward from the central explosion. In the next second the intention of the designers became clear. The carbon-fiber structure spread out, its matrix expanding into the sea. What once was a densely packed ball of carbon became a widespread finely woven net, spreading outward in a disk. The tiny rocket charges opened it out fully until it became an undersea spiderweb, waiting directly in the path of the incoming torpedo.
The Bora II torpedo, having no sensing mechanism fine enough to see the netting spread out before it, drove unsuspecting into it. The netting flexed like a drum, then tensed. The momentum of the sixty-five-knot torpedo stretched the fibers of the net more and more until they began to approach what material scientists called the elastic
limit. Beyond this point, the removal of the stress would not result in the return of the material to its previous state. Instead the material would be permanently stretched, like a pair of stockings tugged on by a dog. The netting stretched farther, lengthening and absorbing the torpedo's momentum until the fibers reached the rupture point. The force required to capture the heavy torpedo was much more than the designers had calculated, and finally the netting broke and the unit sailed through.
If the weapon had fouled its propulsor vanes on the netting, it would likely not have driven on toward the Hammerhead, but the propulsor continued spinning. Had the torpedo been knocked downward, upward, or sideways more than forty degrees, it might have tumbled the gyro and caused the torpedo to spin out of control, sparing the Hammerhead. But it didn't, turning a mere ten degrees, easily able to correct its course. After a short period of lessened stability, the torpedo recovered, found the target, and continued driving on.
In the control room of the Hammerhead, Lieutenant Commander Kiethan Judison's jaw fell open.
The rocket charges at the base of the control compartment escape pod grew weaker as the solid fuel was exhausted. The charges died just as the first underwater missiles arrived at the main hull of the Vepr, some two hundred meters below. The escape pod had been rising rapidly in the warm layer from the force of the rocket charges and the buoyancy
of ballast spaces at the bottom periphery and foil balloons that had filled with compressed nitrogen. The pod had risen until it was only twenty meters deep when the first plasma explosion detonated below. The shock wave blasted upward and impacted the pod.
It rolled over forty degrees but continued to rise, its pressure envelope intact, but the contents hammered. The second underwater missile's plasma warhead exploded as the pod was breaching the calm surface seastate. The pod bobbed on the sea while the next two missiles exploded.
The first plasma detonation vaporized the forward 60 percent of the main hull, turning the low-magnetic carbon steel hull into carbon and iron molecules. The plasma expanded and melted the hull in a fifty-meter radius and shredded what was left aft. The remainder began to sink to the bottom. The second missile's blue laser seeker homed on the aft remaining hull, turning it into a shovelful of the sun's surface. The next minute, nothing was left. The third missile sailed in and homed on the expanding gas cloud, which to the blue laser seeker registered as a hull. One downfall of the terminal guidance system was that if the first unit was drawn off by a decoy and detonated, the follow-on units would home on the explosion. But there was almost nothing capable of drawing off the Vortex Mod Delta missile, its design refined over five years of abject failure, and it had flown true. The fourth and final missile homed on the other explosions and added to the conflagration. None of the units saw the control compartment pod high above.
One minute after the fourth missile detonated, the sea had calmed. The four torpedoes launched earlier by the Hammerhead were sailing in. But their passive sonar systems saw what sound engineers referred to as a "blueout," the presence of so much noise in the water that the units were blinded, the same way a skier could become snow-blind by the glare from the slopes. Ten minutes after that, the first torpedo arrived, circling the blueout, and seeing it as a curtain of noise filling the sea. Its onboard processor had a preset for this condition, because a plasma blueout would render the unit ineffective. But the present was set t
o deto-nate-on-blueout, leaving no stone unturned in a combat situation. The explosion, it was assumed, would add to the damage an enemy vessel suffered if the target had evaded the immediate vicinity of the plasma detonation. Extensive testing had shown that a ship would not need to experience a direct hit. A detonation within a nautical mile was usually enough to cripple or sink most test vessels. When the first torpedo measured the blueout, it made its predestined decision and detonated, adding to the conflagration in the cubic meters of ocean where the Vepr had once been. The second, third, and fourth torpedoes likewise detonated, adding to the shock waves that had already hit the floating pod above. Any Los Alamos physicist presented with the data and asked to evaluate the chances of people in the control compartment escape pod would have shaken his head in pessimism and respect for the dead.
Inside the pod, one disaster added to the next. The plasma detonations were so violent that no one was conscious to hear the third. The fourth explosion reverberated through the sea, reaching the men's ears, but no brains received the information. By the fifth explosion, the pod had been so tossed by the impact of the shock waves that the heartbeat of the ship control officer, Navigator Captain-Lieutenant Grigory Tenukha, stopped.
While the explosions continued, the body of Captain Pavel Grachev remained wedged between Ten-ukha's control couch and the bulkhead where the panic panel was. The lights had been out since the first shock wave. The pod was tossed by the following shocks until finally the sea quieted. Only the rush of bubbles from the explosions rose around the pod, the sound like boiling water, but after twenty minutes in the stuffy pod, that sound died down too, until the only sound left was the breathing of the survivors. That sound continued for some time until it was joined by sound of the flow of water as the flooding in the pod began.
Lieutenant Commander Bryan Dietz tried his hand, sailing toward the incoming torpedoes in the second-fired Mark 17 Doberman.
"Don't go early," the captain's voice said in his ear. McKee's voice still sounded iron-hard and self-assured, a miracle, Dietz thought in the background of his mind. What he needed now was a second miracle—the shooting down of the incoming torpedoes. But there were still four on the way in, and only three Dobermans. The other two were tube-
loaded and ready, but McKee had held off on shooting them.
Dietz could "see" ahead of him the incoming torpedoes. A tag on his virtual world counted down the distance between him and the incoming units. The closest one's range rolled down to 2,600 yards, down to 2,200, 1,950, down, down, until the tag read 400 meters, Dietz's signal to detonate the warhead.
Like the first, this unit's canister blew apart, and the high-explosive core blew the net outward, the rocket charges at its boundary further opening the rose petals of the net. As the distance between the first-fired torpedo rolled down to zero, the Bora II torpedo hit the netting.
But like the first netting, this spiderweb was no match for the momentum of the high-speed unit. The netting material stretched and then ruptured. Slowed by the net, the unit slowly regained speed, the target ahead becoming dimly visible in its sonar seeker.
"Still inbound, Captain," Judison said, with a rising note of concern.
"I'm done with Dobermans," McKee said, pulling off his helmet in disgust. "Give me Vortex vertical-launch tubes five through eight. Webs, pressurize tubes five through eight, open outer doors, and lay in phantom targets from my console."
McKee's fingers flashed over his panel, finding the God's-eye view of the sea, the location of the incoming torpedoes relative to the position of Hammerhead in the center. He tapped the screen,
commanding the Cyclops system to transmit to Van Dyne the locations of his finger stabs. McKee was laying out a pattern of plasma detonations. The distance of the future blasts from the ship would translate into a time delay in each missile. He hesitated at the last unit, because he would need to put a plasma detonation within a nautical mile of the ship if he wanted to make sure he either decoyed the incoming torpedoes or destroyed them from the direct blast effect or the consequent shock wave. But a plasma blast inside of one nautical mile would kill the Hammerhead, and her depth would make things much worse. The pressure of the deep was already stressing the hull so that when the shock wave arrived, it would rip it open like an overinflated balloon hit by a razor blade. Finally he hit the display panel, ordering the final plasma detonation to occur seventeen hundred yards away, inside the lethal radius of a plasma warhead.
"Enter the solutions and shoot when ready," McKee shouted.
"But, Captain, the distance to the final unit—"
"Shoot on generated bearing!" McKee interrupted.
The forward vertical-launch tubes began barking as their motors propelled the Vortex Mod Delta missiles away from the ship. McKee counted four launches, biting his lip as the last unit was launched. At three hundred knots and a run-to-detonation of less than a nautical mile, he had only a second after solid rocket ignition before the Vortex detonated its plasma warhead. That last-fired Vortex missile
was about to make a bad day worse, McKee thought.
"Unit eight solid rocket ignition," Van Dyne said as the first missile lit off, a few hundred yards to the west.
"Sir, we're in the kill zone, hovering and deep," Judison said.
McKee looked at the XO. Judison's armpits were soaked completely through, and there was a wild look in his eyes. McKee deliberately withdrew a cigar from his pocket, praying that his hands weren't shaking.
"I know."
"Unit nine, solid rocket ignition!"
"Very well."
"Sir, we've got to run."
McKee had pulled the Cohiba's wrapper off.
"Unit ten, solid rocket ignition."
"Pilot," McKee said, the cigar between his teeth, "emergency blow forward."
"Blow forward aye! Blowing forward!"
The noise in the room became deafening as the emergency blow system blew the water out of the forward ballast tanks. The deck began to rise as the hull started upward toward the surface from a standing start near test depth.
McKee lit his cigar while watching the depth display, one hand grabbing a handhold on his console. The deck climbed upward to ten degrees, fifteen, then twenty. The room began to fill with condensation boiling up from the super-cold piping of the emergency ballast tank blow system, competing with the ball of smoke around McKee's head.
Inside that head, Kyle Liam Ellison McKee was staring at the shadows of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, wondering why they didn't grab for handholds in the tilted-up control room, then nodding to himself that they were ghosts, apparitions that came to a man in the final moments of madness before death. He looked away from the shadows and continued puffing on the Cohiba.
"Unit eleven, solid rocket ignition, sir."
"Depth six hundred feet, Captain."
"Pilot, emergency blow aft," McKee said calmly.
"Blowing aft, sir!"
The noise in the room became even more frenzied from the air blasting into the aft portion of the emergency blow piping. The air added to the noise of the solid rocket motors of the Vortex missiles as they blasted away from the ship.
"Unit twelve, solid rocket ignition!"
"Depth four hundred, up angle thirty degrees, sir!"
"Secure the forward blow and vent forward," McKee said between puffs. "Ahead emergency flank."
"Securing emergency blow forward, sir, venting forward, ahead emergency flank!"
The deck began to tremble violently as the engineering section aft answered the emergency flank bell.
"Secure the aft blow, vent aft."
"Securing aft, sir. Blow aft secured, venting aft."
McKee took a deep puff and blew the smoke out his nose. "Pilot, maintain depth one five zero feet, course east."
"One-fifty feet, zero nine zero, aye, sir." The plasma detonations happened next, the initial shock wave hitting them from the closest Vortex missile. With the sea as an anvil and the
explosion as a hammer, the ship took the shock wave, but it didn't take it well.
The interior of the compartment had not fared well under the multiple impacts of the plasma explosions. Panel displays had shattered, bulkheads had fallen, valves were hanging from sheared pipes. The flooding water rose slowly, but he could not find the source. And it didn't matter—they had to get out.
The next several minutes passed in blur as Grachev found the collapsible ladder to the emergency hatch—normally leading up into the free-flood space of the fin interior, the accessway for maintaining the masts in the fin—and unfolded it. He climbed up a rung to grab the wheel with his good arm and tried to open it. He had an instant of panic, wondering if the stress of the impacts had jammed the hatch shut, but it had been intentionally built with additional clearances to enable the compartment to take severe overpressure. The wheel turned, the hatch dogs rolled back, and he opened the hatch upward into the airlock space, a bare cylinder of steel leading to the upper hatch. The upper hatch was the next challenge, but its wheel spun easily. Grachev pushed the hatch up to its latch, and bright sunshine streamed downward into the compartment. Fresh-smelling sea air seemed as exotic as the surface of another world, and to an extent, it truly was. For a second he allowed himself to luxuriate in the smell and feel of the outside, then steeled himself to descend back into Hell.
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