Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

  “One, make missiles one through twelve ready in all respects, and open outer doors missiles one through twelve.”

  The flashing dot of their position crossed the range circles just as the missile doors came open. It was time to launch.

  “One, all stop and hover at fifty meters. When the. ship is hovering, fire Javelin cruise missiles one through twelve at

  preset targets,”7 Krivak ordered. “When launches are complete, change depth to twenty meters and shift control of the escape trunk to local control.”

  Krivak pulled off his interface helmet and made his way down the ladder to the middle level to the landing pad of the escape hatch, where Dr. Wang waited. As the first tube launched, shaking the deck, Wang looked at Krivak oddly.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, his eyes wide.

  “We’re launching cruise missiles at Washington,” Krivak said as he reached into his duffel bag.

  “What!” Wang said, his jaw dropping as a second tube launch made the ship shudder.

  “You know, the White House, the Capitol. A few more targets. Then the ship will sail to Chinese waters, assuming it doesn’t get destroyed by the Americans in the next few hours.”

  “This was never part of the deal!” Wang screamed. “You can’t use this ship to fire at American land targets!”

  The third tube launched. “Actually, I just did,” Krivak said, finding what he was looking for, a silver-plated heavy Colt .45 automatic, with the clip already loaded. Krivak clicked off the safety and pulled the weapon out just as Wang threw himself across the narrow passageway. The .45 spoke with a loud, authoritative voice. Wang took three rounds to the heart, the momentum of the bullets stopping his charge and sending him back against the bulkhead. His eyes were still open with a fading accusatory look as he sank to the deck. Krivak knew it would be wasting a bullet, but he put the barrel to Wang’s open eye and pulled the trigger. The top half of the good doctor’s head burst open like a rotten melon dropped to the floor. His brains and scalp and skull made a nasty pattern against the already gore-strewn laminate of the wall panel.

  “Thanks for all your work, Dr. Wang,” Krivak said as he put the .45 on the deck and pulled off his shirt. The fourth missile launched as he tossed the garment to the deck. “I hope you find your severance package satisfactory.” Krivak dropped his pants and stepped into the wet suit. By the time he had the wet suit on, the fifth and sixth missiles were away.

  Krivak opened the lower hatch of the escape trunk and peeked in at the control panel, satisfied that One Oh Seven had shifted control to the local panel. He pulled in his things and unlatched the bottom hatch to shut the escape trunk.

  “Goodbye, Wang. Have a good trip.” Krivak slammed the hatch shut and waited for the depth gauge to show the ship coming shallow, listening to the other missile launches.

  What a beautiful sound, he thought.

  The fourth-launched Mark 98 Tigershark torpedo struggled to an angry consciousness, its sonar receiver fully tuned to the ocean around it. The weapon started its external combustion turbine to begin to search the sea, but there was nothing. The unit was surrounded by open, empty space. It turned a wide circle, five hundred yards in diameter, but heard nothing. It opened the circle and drove around again, but it was still alone. After the fifth, wider circle, it decided to rise up to the layer depth and see if it saw anything there. Slowly the unit drove above the depth where the water temperature suddenly changed from freezing to warm, the higher temperature water keeping the sound waves here above the layer.

  As soon as the unit climbed above the layer, it heard something, and it wiggled its fins to see if the sound moved, and it did. The sound was close, inside of a mile. The Tigershark wiggled again to refine the range to the target, and it instructed the engine to shut down. It jettisoned the first stage as the explosive bolts around the unit’s midsection fired, cutting it in half. In the next tenth of a second a high-pressure air bottle in the nose cone behind the sonar sensor lit off, blowing air over the tip of the coasting torpedo, and the solid rocket engine ignited. The bubbles of high-pressure air streamed down the torpedo length to the solid rocket engine nozzle. As the torpedo felt full thrust the bubble of air was replaced, the entire torpedo now encapsulated in a supercavitating bubble of steam. It sped up to 100 knots, its aim at the target unwavering, then 150 knots, finally speeding up to 200 knots, and by then the distance to the target had been eaten completely up.

  The torpedo blew into the hull of the target, the kinetic energy of impact shredding the bow, and just as the remains of the torpedo were traveling through the fragments of the target the PlasticPak warhead detonated, and the rest of the target exploded upward into the atmosphere. A red cloud of atomized blood marked the passage of the men named Amorn and Pedro as their motor yacht ceased to exist.

  “Captain, we have transients on broadband bearing zero eight eight, sir. It sounds like solid rocket engine ignition.”

  “Understand, Sonar.” Pacino said, pursing his lips, “you already reported that—Tigershark engine startups.”

  “Conn, Sonar, no. These are missile launches, Captain. Cruise missiles!”

  Pacino opened his mouth to give the next order just as XO Vermeers came into the room, a dark scowl on his face as he grabbed a wireless headset. He looked at Pacino and held out his fist with his thumb pointed down. There was no time for anger at Vermeers. Pacino shouted to the diving officer, “Vertical rise to periscope depth, seven five feet, raise the Type 23 and the BRA-44!”

  The ship rose sluggishly as the diving officer blew high pressure air into the depth control tanks. “BRA-44 BIGMOUTH coming up, sir!” he called. “Eighty feet, sir!”

  “Get us up,” Pacino ordered as he pulled on the Type 23 periscope helmet. “Arm the Mark 80 SLAAM missile battery,” he said, his voice distorted by the helmet. The Submarine-Launched AntiAir Missiles might be able to catch up with a Javelin on solid rocket thrust, as long as he could launch them fast enough. He frantically strapped on the thigh control pad, cursing that he had failed to anticipate that he might need to use the periscope.

  “Seven five feet, sir!”

  By the time Pacino had turned on the periscope visual, the unit was out of the sky. He trained his view to the sky and immediately saw four arcing smoke trails from the horizon to the cloudy sky.

  “SLAAM panel armed, Captain,” Vermeers shouted.

  “Mark 80 launch!” Pacino called, stabbing the joystick of the Type 23 on his thigh, the heat-seeking antiair missile launching from the sail and immediately taking off in pursuit of the Javelin cruise missiles. He launched five heat seekers, then a sixth as another missile flew out of the sea, its rocket engine lighting off just above the waves and hurling it skyward. “I don’t have any explosions,” Pacino called, but just then one of the Javelins exploded into flames—one of the Mark 80s had caught up with the missiles and blown it apart.

  Pacino continued launching Mark 80s as the Javelins came flying out of the sea. There was one major problem—he had only eight Mark 80s and the Snare out there on the horizon had twelve Javelins.

  “XO!” Pacino barked as he launched Mark 80 number seven, and as the third Javelin cruise missile exploded in the clouds. “Get on a UHF circuit to the Pentagon and call in an OP REP-Three on these missiles. Tell them there are four Javelins inbound from this position.”

  To Vermeers’s credit, he asked no questions as he threw his headset to the deck and dashed to the radio room. He could have been patched in from the conn, but that would have taken thirty seconds of coordination with the radiomen, and there was no time.

  Pacino launched his eighth and final Mark 80 and watched the eighth Javelin cruise missile explode, his face a mask of impotent fury as the ninth Javelin rose from the sea. The damned Snare was right there, twenty miles away on the horizon, and as yet there had not been a single Tigershark detonation.

  “Conn, Sonar, we have an explosion in the water.”

  “it isn’t the Snare, Sonar,�
� Pacino said, annoyed. “She’s still launching.”

  “Explosion is on the bearing to the motor yacht, sir.”

  “Very well. Sonar, continue to examine bearing zero eight eight for Tigershark acquisition.”

  “Conn, Sonar, aye, but nothing yet, sir.”

  “Dammit,” Pacino muttered.

  “Conn, Sonar, we have Tigershark rocket motor ignition on the edge of the starboard baffles, bearing zero eight five.”

  “Finally,” Pacino said, his periscope crosshairs on the horizon as the tenth Javelin cruise missile rose out of the sea. If the Snare detonated now, there would only be two cruise missiles that had evaded his counterattack rather than four.

  “Conn, Sonar!” the headphone screeched painfully in Pacino’s ear. “Bearing drift to Tigershark torpedo is left, not right! I’m calling torpedo in the water! Tigershark is targeting own ship!”

  Pacino ripped off the Type 23 helmet, the helmet bouncing on the deck, and shouted to the diving officer, “Emergency deep! Flood depth control at max rates’ Make your depth thirteen hundred feet, and expedite!” He grabbed the 1MC microphone and shouted into it, “Maneuvering, Conn, execute fast recovery startup, emergency rates!” He dropped the microphone and found Vermeers and shouted, “Arm the

  TESA!”

  Vermeers’s eyes grew wide and he shook his head rapidly. “Sir, we couldn’t tie it into the Cyclops system! If you light it off, the bow planes won’t be under Cyclops control, and we’ll go through crush depth in a second!”

  “Conn, Sonar! Tigershark incoming! We have confirmation on acoustic daylight imaging! It’s about to light off its solid rocket fuel, Captain!”

  “Captain, depth thirteen hundred feet, sir,” the diving officer called, a frightened kid in the wraparound ship-control console. “Securing flooding depth control two and hovering at test depth, sir.”

  Pacino froze for a second. Then an idea formed in his mind, the idea seeming foreign, as if he were being whispered to by someone both far away and standing immediately next to him, and he could hear the words in a mental voice not his own, shouting in his mind, Hit the chicken switch at test depth with a quarter-degree rise on the bow planes Pacino frowned, but there was nothing else he could think of.

  “Conn, Sonar, Tigershark torpedo rocket motor ignition, close range!”

  “Diving Officer!” Pacino yelled, knowing he was about to give his last order on the Devilfish, his last order on earth. “Hold one-quarter-degree rise on the bow planes and emergency blow forward, now!”

  “Quarter…” the diving officer said, his voice in a deep bass, a slow-motion sound as if Pacino’s time sense had blown up so that a second would now take an hour. Pacino’s eyes found the twin yellow plastic-covered steel levers in the overhead above the command console.

  “Degree…” the diving officer’s oddly distorted and slowed voice said as Pacino reached into the overhead with both hands and grabbed the Pacino chicken switches, the twin actuators of the TESA torpedo evasion ship alteration system.

  “Rise…” the diving officer called as Pacino felt the grips of the TESA levers in his hands. He pulled the levers down as hard as he could.

  “On … the …”

  Pacino pulled down the TESA levers out of the overhead, held the levers down and twisted, his face a mask of fury as he waited for the system to light off.

  “Bowplanes… and… emergency…”

  Nothing was happening, Pacino thought, telling himself to keep the TESA actuators down.

  “Blow… forward…”

  The steam generators of the reactor should have been blowing to the emergency steam headers along the ship’s skin, blowing steam through the rubbery anechoic coating of the ship, trying to create a vapor bubble at the skin. Forward, the high-pressure air system should have been pressurizing the emergency TESA headers at the skin of the ship and forcing out air bubbles that should be collecting around the hull and forming the bubble that would grow to become a supercavitating ship-length vapor sheath as the emergency engines started.

  “Aye …” The diving officer’s voice had slowed to a barely recognizable baritone slowed-down growl. Pacino glanced between the extended TESA actuators at the diving officer, seeing his hands reach slowly, slowly into the overhead console for the emergency blow levers, and it seemed his hands would never reach the levers.

  Vermeers’s mouth was open, his lips quivering slowly, looking like curtains billowing gently in the wind. ““Caaaptaaain, ” he shouted in slow motion. Pacino’s mind was far away, aft of the reactor, aft of the ship service turbines, aft of the propulsion turbine generators, aft of the maneuvering cubicle, aft of the hydraulic plant, aft of the skin of the ship, aft of the number three ballast tank with its oil-enclosed main motor, aft of the number four ballast tank where the TESA rocket motors were mounted, and further aft, outside the envelope of the hull and aft of the rudder and stern planes and propulsor shroud and further aft into the sea, looking ahead at the ship, at the rocket motors of the TESA system with the explosive charges blowing off the seawater protection cowlings and the bottom and top rocket motors igniting into white-hot incandescence, then the port and starboard motors igniting, then the pair at one o’clock and seven o’clock, lighting off in pairs around the ship, until all the rocket motors were at full thrust, the rocket exhaust melting away the thick steel of the rudder and the stern planes and the structural bulkheads of the number four ballast tank, and the bubble of air and steam over the ship grew and the ship accelerated and formed its own self-perpetuating supercavitating bubble over the surface of the ship until the ship was going fifty knots, then a hundred, the ship’s speed climbing to two hundred knots.

  His mind shifted back to the control room, where the sound of rocket motors grew to an earsplitting shriek and there was suddenly no more sound, because either Pacino’s time sense had slowed the world to a stop, or because he had grown deaf, and still he wasn’t sure if it had worked, until he felt himself go quickly horizontal, his body hanging by his hands on the TESA actuators, hanging straight down, but the deck was parallel to his body, and he suddenly weighed a thousand pounds and his hands could no longer hold his weight and he let go

  and the control room deck moved beneath his feet and he didn’t know whether he was flying through the air of the control room or if the control room had suddenly decided to fly forward and he hit the aft bulkhead of the control room so hard that his body collapsed and his head hit the inertial navigation binnacle and the control room dissolved into a gigantic hurricane of sparks and the world became slowly black.

  The rear hull of the USS Devilfish erupted in a roar of flames as the two dozen solid rocket engines of the large bore Vortex Mod Alpha missiles ignited in pairs, until all twenty-four had lit up at full thrust. The rudder and stern planes and propulsor of the ship vaporized in the high-temperature blast.

  When the torpedo evasion system actuated, the ship was at her test depth with a quarter-degree rise on the bow planes and an emergency blow in the forward ballast tanks. What had before been a nuclear submarine hovering at thirteen hundred feet suddenly became a huge underwater rocket. The air and steam bubbling at her skin grew until a vapor bubble enclosed the hull from her nose cone to the Vortex engines, and the ship accelerated at ten g’s through 50 knots, through 100, blowing through the seas until, at the moment the engines ran out of fuel and cut off, the ship was going 205 knots, with an up angle of two degrees. The ship rocketed away from the Tiger shark rocket-propelled torpedo pursuing her and roared upward toward the thermal layer. The periscope and BRA-44 radio antenna mast had broken off in the slipstream, and as the submarine flew through the sea, the sail and the sonar dome became crushed in the force of the flow. Before the ship rushed above the layer, the acceleration forces had ripped the starboard steam piping off the number one turbine generator, and the steam system leaked rapidly into the engine room with enough energy to cook every soul aft like a boiled lobster.

  The Tigershark torped
o in pursuit sensed that its rocket fuel was running out, and the warhead of PlasticPak explosive detonated a thousand yards aft of the retreating form of the Devilfish. The pressure wave of the explosion ripped into her aft

  hull moments before the ship roared out of the sea. The aft hull was breached in the number three ballast tank from the Tigershark as the hull arced and flew back down toward the water of the Atlantic. The deceleration forces of the ship hitting the water caused everything that had been accelerated aft to be suddenly thrown forward, and the forces were strong enough to cause equipment to fly off foundations and rip the deckplates off their mountings. The USS Devilfish came to rest floating on the surface, a barely recognizable hulk with a flattened sonar dome, a crushed sail, and a burned and broken aft hull.

  The ship began taking water aft and settled slowly into the sea.

  The eleventh and twelfth missiles shook the deck as they left the ship. Victor Krivak grinned as he waited for Unit One Oh Seven to rise to twenty meters, mast broach depth, so he could flood the escape trunk and leave the Snare before the American search vessels and planes found her here at the base of the missile flame trails. There was the chance that she would escape and make it around South America for the trip to Red China, but the carbon processor was probably too far gone in its catatonic state to evade any search-and-destroy antisubmarine action. The pressure gauge in the escape trunk began to rise, slowly at first, then smartly to the depth of sixty-five feet—the American pressure gauges marked in feet—where Krivak began the procedure to flood the airlock. He had already pulled on his combined buoyancy compensator and tanks, his fins and his mask, and his supplies were tied to him by a tether.