by Jeff Edwards
Many of the crew were gone now—the injured to hospitals for treatment, the dead to their families for burial. Some of the injured would return to Towers when their wounds were healed, but not many. The next time the destroyer put out to sea, much of the old crew would be gone, replaced by newcomers to whom the battles that Towers had fought would be the stuff of legend.
“She put up a hell of a fight, sir,” a voice at his elbow said.
Captain Bowie turned to find Chief McPherson, her right arm still in a cast from shoulder to wrist.
The chief saluted with her left hand. “It’s tough to get used to saluting with the wrong hand.”
Captain Bowie returned her salute with a shadow of a smile. “It won’t be for much longer. You’ll be out of that thing pretty soon.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be all patched up and ready for battle.” She nodded toward the ship in the dry dock. “Just like the grand lady down there. Weld on a couple of hull plates, run some wiring, slap on a fresh coat of paint, and we’re both as good as new.”
She sighed. “We got lucky, sir. If that last sub had gotten past us, the Brits would be gearing up for war right now.”
Captain Bowie nodded. “We did get lucky, Chief. But I think our little tango in that minefield used up the last of my four-leaf clovers.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“They’re taking her away from me,” the captain said. “I got a heads-up call from SURFPAC this morning. Vice Admiral Hicks is hand-carrying my orders over himself.”
“I’ve never heard of SURFPAC hand-delivering orders before,” the chief said.
“I have,” said Captain Bowie. “Sometimes that’s how they do it when you’re being relieved of command.”
“What?” the chief said. “Relieved of command? They can’t do that!”
Captain Bowie smiled. “I’m afraid they can, Chief.”
“They’ve got no grounds to relieve you, sir.”
“Yes they do,” the captain said. “A ship under my command was sunk in combat, and that hasn’t happened since World War II. Not to mention that we lost every helo attached to our SAU. Apparently, the upper command thinks I mismanaged the situation pretty badly.”
“Mismanaged? Sir, with all due respect, that’s bullshit! Nobody could have done it any better than you did.”
Bowie shook his head and stared down into the dry dock at his wounded ship. “I worked for this my whole life,” he said. “I never gave a damn about making full-bird, and I never even thought about admiral. I wanted to command a destroyer at sea.” He shrugged. “I was lucky enough to live my dream, for a while anyway. I always knew that my time as CO of Towers would go by too quickly. But I never expected to get pulled out of the game early.”
He looked up the pier and pulled his walkie-talkie from its belt holster. “Quarterdeck, this is the Captain. Sound six bells. Admiral Hicks is approaching.”
“Quarterdeck, aye.”
A few seconds later, the ship’s bell rang six times—three groups of two bells each, followed by the Petty Officer of the Watch’s voice over the 1-MC. “Commander, Naval Surface Force Pacific—Arriving.”
Captain Bowie and Chief McPherson came to attention as the admiral approached. When he was about eight paces away, they both rendered hand salutes, the captain with his right hand and the chief with her left.
The admiral promptly returned their mismatched salutes with a snappy one of his own. “At ease.”
They dropped into slightly more relaxed postures.
Vice Admiral Douglas Hicks had a folder tucked under his left arm. He looked down and tried to brush a smear of dirt off the right leg of his uniform pants. “I shouldn’t have worn my whites to a shipyard,” he said. He looked up. “But this is an official visit, so it seemed appropriate.”
He retrieved the folder from under his arm and held it out to Captain Bowie. “Do you know what’s in here?”
Bowie accepted the folder but didn’t open it. “My orders, sir?”
The admiral smiled. “I like you, Jim. But I wouldn’t have bothered to trot my fat carcass down here to deliver an ordinary set of orders.”
Captain Bowie started to open the folder and then stopped himself. “I’m not being transferred, sir?”
The admiral shrugged. “That’s up to you, son.” He nodded toward the folder. “What you have there is what amounts to a blank check. They’re orders all right. Signed by the Secretary of the Navy himself.”
The captain looked puzzled. “Where am I going, sir?”
“Anywhere you want,” the admiral said. “You can take your pick of any O-5 billet in the Navy. And I have it on the highest authority that, if your dream billet is taken, the bureau will move somebody to make room. You think about it for a while and then get back to me when you’ve made up your mind.”
“I don’t need to think about it, Admiral. I already know where I want to go.” He pointed into the dry dock where cascades of welding sparks were falling. “Right there. I want to do another CO tour aboard the Towers.”
The admiral grinned. “You just won me fifty bucks. I told my chief of staff to pencil you in for the Towers. He said I was nuts.” The admiral reached out and shook Bowie’s hand. “You’re a good man, Jim. And Towers is a hell of a ship. I envy you. And on that note, I’ll have to take my leave. There’s a stack of reports on my desk a foot high, and my name is on every damned one of them.”
Captain Bowie and Chief McPherson came to attention and saluted. The admiral returned their salutes and then turned on his heel and walked briskly back up the pier.
Captain Bowie radioed the quarterdeck and shortly afterward they were treated to a 1-MC broadcast announcing the admiral’s departure.
When the speakers had faded to silence, Captain Bowie turned to Chief McPherson with a grin. “What do you think, Chief? Are you ready to do it again?”
EPILOGUE
WASHINGTON, DC
FRIDAY; 22 JUNE
3:07 AM EDT
The phone woke President Chandler on the third ring, but it took him five rings to grope for it and get the receiver to his ear.
“Mr. President, this is Lieutenant Feinstein in the Signals Office. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is requesting your presence in the Situation Room, sir. Something has come up.”
The president turned on the bedside lamp and did a quick check to make sure it wasn’t shining in Jenny’s face. “What kind of something?”
“Sir, it’s China.”
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following people for their assistance in bringing this book to life:
Bill Keppler of the State Department Office of Protocol; Michael A. Petrillo, Arabic linguist and Middle Eastern cultural specialist; Cathy Monaghan of the British Embassy in Washington, DC; the staff of the Los Angeles office of the British Consulate-General; the Chinese Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego; TM1(SW) Gary D. Johnson; TM1(SW) Charles Copes; Peter H. Zindler, marine engineer; and several others, some of whom asked not to be named, and others whose names have slipped my leaky brain. The information I received from these fine people was superb. Any errors that have crept into this work are mine, not theirs.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to Master Modeler Richard Melillo of The Modeler’s Art (TheModelersArt.com) for building me an extraordinary model of the DMA-37 torpedo.
Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my editor and close friend, Don Gerrard, for believing when I had forgotten to, and for making me go back and do the hard parts until they were right.
THE SEVENTH ANGEL
Jeff Edwards
San Diego
To Vailia Dennis
For a lifetime of friendship, love, and shared wisdom
— all squeezed into a few short years.
“…we witness today, in the power of nuclear weapons, a new and deadly dimension to the ancient horror of war. Humanity has now achieved, for the first tim
e in its history, the power to end its history.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
September 19, 1956
“And there came a seventh angel, his robe hemmed with fire and the sword of doom in his hand. Written upon his brow was the name of death.”
Jashar 10:21
(Sefer haYashar)
Lost book of the Old Testament
Translation circa 1552, from the private archives of Giovanni del Monte.
Image used by permission of NORTON DEEPWATER SYSTEMS, Inc.
PROLOGUE
The deck gun fired again, sending another ninety-six pound naval artillery round thundering into the night. For an instant, the muzzle flash from the big gun stripped away the concealing darkness, revealing the low angular profile of a U.S. Navy destroyer.
The vessel revealed in that microsecond of illumination was strange-looking. The squat pyramid shapes of her superstructure and the steep angle of her mast gave the destroyer very little resemblance to any previous generation of warships.
The flare of light was as brief as a camera flash, gone almost the instant it appeared, and the ship was once again hidden against the dark waves of the Northern Arabian Gulf.
The ship’s name was USS Towers, and she was the fourth (and last) of the Flight III Arleigh Burke Class destroyers. She was a blend of superb naval engineering and cutting-edge military stealth technology, a combination that had caused a great deal of hype and wild speculation.
News magazines had taken to calling her a ‘ghost ship,’ and a growing body of Internet mythology credited the destroyer with capabilities that could only be managed by Hollywood special effects wizards. The reality was impressive enough, but it was considerably short of the myth, and well within the boundaries of known physics.
The vessel’s radar cross-section, infrared profile, and acoustic and magnetic signatures were all severely minimized, and a layer of phototropic camouflage made the ship difficult to detect and track visually. Even so, the Towers was far from invisible, despite the ever-growing body of myth that surrounded her name.
But hype didn’t matter now, and neither did speculation. USS Towers was wounded, and she was running for her life.
Three-thousand yards aft of the ship, hidden beneath a dark blanket of seawater, a second torpedo was coming to finish the job that the first had begun. No amount of myth or hype could stop it, or even slow its approach.
The deck gun fired again, and the strange-looking warship was again silhouetted against black water for an instant. The gun barrel was at maximum elevation, and the firing charge was reduced, making the trajectory very high and extremely short. The round crashed into the wave tops a few hundred yards ahead of the ship.
To either side of the bow, the ship’s smaller guns followed with their own lesser furies, hammering .50-caliber machine gun bullets and 25mm chain-gun rounds into the waves just forward of the vessel. It was a tactic of purest desperation.
The ship was surrounded by a field of naval mines, their numbers and locations hidden by black water. Any one of those mines could crack the hull of a warship like an eggshell. The guided-missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts had learned that lesson the hard way two decades earlier, in this very same body of water, just a few hundred nautical miles to the south. The Samuel B. Roberts had nearly been blown in half. Whether or not Towers was about to repeat that lesson was still yet to be seen.
Under any other circumstances, the proper tactic would have been to maneuver at two or three knots, locating each mine with the ship’s Kingfisher sonar, and mapping a safe route to the edge of the minefield. But moving slowly was not an option now. The torpedo was getting closer by the second. It was locked on to the ship’s acoustic signature like a cybernetic bloodhound, and the deadly machine was following the trail with a ruthless precision that no living creature could equal.
The Towers needed every ounce of speed that her engineers could squeeze out of their wounded vessel. Every fifty yards of forward motion was another second of life. But it wasn’t going to be enough. The torpedo was faster, and—unlike its target—it was not slowed by damage. The weapon was rapidly overtaking the destroyer. The seconds were beginning to run out.
Standing behind the Tactical Action Officer’s chair in the air-conditioned semi-darkness of Combat Information Center, Captain Bowie watched the chase rushing toward its conclusion on the giant Aegis display screens. The fingers of his left hand gripped a steel crossbeam in the overhead, steadying his body against the motion of the ship. His right hand rested casually on the back of the TAO’s chair. His posture was carefully-relaxed, and he concentrated on keeping the tension out of his facial expression.
He knew without looking that the men and women of his CIC team were watching him out of the corners of their eyes. They were measuring his reactions, drawing confidence and hope from the calm assurance of his demeanor.
His crew needed hope right now. They were scared, and they had every reason to be. They were exhausted, and their bodies were bruised and bloodied. More than a few of their shipmates were already dead. Their ship was grievously damaged, and the fight was not over yet.
Bowie ran a hand through his short black hair, and relaxed the set of his shoulders. He looked more like an accountant than a naval officer, and he knew it. His long face and narrow cheekbones gave him an air of clean efficiency, and the slight downturn of his mouth tended to make him look pensive, even in the most relaxed of circumstances. The effect was usually offset by his quick brown eyes and his easy laugh, but there was nothing to laugh about tonight. Nothing at all.
This was the craziest tactical situation Bowie had ever heard of. Even the worst-case everybody-dies training scenarios weren’t this bad. His plan for dealing with the situation was even crazier, if such a thing was possible.
It was not a good plan; Bowie knew that. Maybe it wasn’t even an entirely sane plan, but what the hell else could he do? If there were other options, he hadn’t been able to think of them.
There was no time to sniff out a safe path through the minefield. If they reduced speed enough for sonar to detect the mines, the torpedo would catch them and kill them. If they tried to run without seeing the mines, they were nearly certain to hit one. That would kill them just as quickly.
On the big display screen, the Towers appeared as a small green cross, enclosed by a circle. A single green speed vector protruded from the center of the symbol, like the stick of a lollipop. The symbol was pointed southwest now, inching toward the irregular red boundary that represented the edge of the minefield. They were moving in the right direction—toward safe water—but the flashing red torpedo symbol was less than 2,500 yards behind now, and moving a lot faster as it continued to close the gap.
The mines didn’t appear on the tactical display at all, except the general outline showing the boundaries of the minefield. That information had come from COM Fifth Fleet, via the Special Warfare unit attached to U.S. Navy Central Command. But there were no coordinates for the mines themselves: no clues to their locations, or even how many were there. It might be a hundred, or five hundred, or five thousand.
The Towers couldn’t map a safe route through the minefield, and the ship could not survive without one. The only choice was to create their own path through the mines, clear a safe route where none existed.
Out on the darkened forecastle, the deck gun continued to pound the water with naval artillery shells every two and a half seconds. The forward machine guns and the two chain-guns continued to hammer their own projectiles into the wave tops. The ship was pumping a tremendous amount of mechanical force and shrapnel into the sea. Theoretically, some of that brute kinetic force should penetrate far enough down to reach the mines. That was the plan: to pulverize the water hard enough to trigger the mines at a distance, clearing the way ahead of the ship.
But it wasn’t working. Bowie’s crazy plan, which had seemed at least distantly feasible when he’d given the order, did not seem to be bearing fruit. There
were no answering explosions to show that the guns were finding targets. For all of the racket and thunder, the guns had not yet triggered a single mine.
Bowie felt a hand on his left shoulder. He turned to find his second in command, Lieutenant Commander Peter Tyler, standing behind him. Pete was a good man, and a damned fine executive officer. Just the kind of guy you’d want in your corner if things got ugly.
He leaned in close, and spoke quietly into his captain’s ear. “Do you think this’ll work?”
Bowie shrugged. “Frankly, I have no idea. I just know that it’s better than sitting around waiting to die.”
His last word seemed to echo in the chilled air of CIC, and Bowie wished instantly that he hadn’t said it.
He opened his mouth to add something else—anything—to wipe that dreadful word out of the air. Before he could speak, a thundering boom shook the entire ship.
For a half-second, Bowie thought they’d been hit, but the Officer of the Deck’s voice came over the Tactical Action Officer’s communications net. “TAO—Bridge. Close-aboard explosion off the port bow!”
The TAO keyed the microphone of his headset to acknowledge the report, but his voice was drowned out by a second explosion.
“TAO—Bridge. Close-aboard explosion dead off the bow!”
All around him, the members of Bowie’s CIC team began exchanging glances. He knew what they were thinking. Maybe the skipper’s crazy plan was going to work. Maybe … just maybe, they were not all going to die tonight.
On the Aegis display screen, the symbol for Towers was moving toward the boundary of the minefield. The torpedo had closed within 2,000 yards and was gaining fast, but it looked like the ship might be clear of the minefield before the weapon struck. If the ship could make it that far, they could maneuver without fear of mines. They could crack the whip—run the tricky evasion maneuvers designed to throw pursuing torpedoes off the scent. They might have a chance.