Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.
PROLOGUE
In the language of its builders, the weapon’s name was
It was not even aware of its own existence. It waited in its shipping canister, cradled as snugly in the cylindrical steel container as a high-powered bullet in the chamber of a rifle. Cold. Sightless. Unfeeling. Not sleeping, merely unawakened.
R-92 was a state-of-the-art acoustic homing torpedo. It was a cybernetic predator: an electro-mechanical killing machine. Fast. Smart.
Unbelievably lethal. Every component, from the shark-like hydrodynamic form of its fuselage — to its multi- spectrum acoustic sensors — to the axial-flow turbine that formed its engine, was optimized for the undersea environment. Its brain was a fifth-generation digital computer, hardwired for destruction with a machine-driven relentlessness that no living predator could match. R-92 and its brethren had been honed for the chase and the kill by two and a half centuries of technological evolution.
But R-92 knew none of these things. It simply waited.
CHAPTER 1
Bowie timed it carefully, lifting each foot at just the right second as he ducked through the hatch combing of the open blast door and ran out onto the forecastle of his ship. Twenty-one laps around the deck today and his breaths were still coming evenly, but the air was hot and so humid that it felt like breathing soup. Sweat plastered his short black hair to his forehead, and his sleeveless U.S. Naval Academy T-shirt stuck to his skin, the faded goat mascot logo blending into the perspiration-darkened fabric.
It wasn’t even noon yet, and the sun was already fierce enough to blur the visual horizon with rapidly evaporating water. At least the seas were calm at the moment — not exactly a given in the Arabian Gulf this time of year.
His crew called him Captain Jim Bowie, which was a technical misnomer on two counts. In fact, his name was Samuel Harlan Bowie, and his actual rank was commander. The title of
The
Bowie curved to his left, cutting between the ankle-high platform of the forward missile launcher and the low wedge of the 5-inch gun mount.
From a visual perspective, the gun was the most arresting feature on the forecastle. Its strange geometric shape and steeply angled sides gave it little resemblance to any of the generations of naval artillery that had preceded it, but the long steel barrel that protruded from the forward slope of the wedge left no doubt as to its purpose.
Situated aft of the gun, the forward missile launcher was not nearly as visually impressive. To the untrained eye, the launcher looked like a grid of square hatches set flush into an ankle-high steel platform. The innocuous- looking hatches were armored with Kevlar-reinforced steel, and every hatch concealed a vertical missile silo, known as a “cell.” Loaded in those cells, and their twins in the aft launcher, were the missiles that comprised the ship’s real destructive force.
When he reached the far side of the launcher, Bowie curved left again, back toward the superstructure. Another of the tricky step-duck maneuvers carried him through the port side blast doors and into the port break. This short stretch of enclosed passageway shielded him from the sun, giving him a few seconds of shade and relatively cool air. Then he dashed out into the sun again, running down the port side main deck toward the stern.
At first glance, Bowie was more likely to be taken for an accountant than a naval officer. His long face and narrow cheekbones gave him a clean and efficient look that his neatly trimmed black hair seemed to echo.
His lips were thin and slightly turned down at the corners, creating a permanently thoughtful expression that reinforced the image of humorless efficiency. The laugh lines around his mouth were the only giveaways of the imaginative and playful spirit that hid behind his somber brown eyes.
A shade under six feet tall, he had a compact physique that was neither skinny nor overtly muscular. At thirty-eight, he was in the best shape of his life. He was also at the pinnacle of his career, and he knew it. No matter where he went from here, it would be downhill.
Certainly there were more promotions in his future (barring death or major screw-ups), but this was his one shot at his lifelong dream: command of a warship. He was trying very hard not to count the days, but he knew he had less than four months left to enjoy it. Then Bowie would have to turn command of the
His next chance to command at sea would probably be as commodore of a destroyer squadron, overseeing other people’s ships. Command of a squadron was an important job, but it was too much like being an astronaut’s boss, instead of an astronaut. If he was very,
He reached the amidships break, where the forward deckhouse ended and a narrow section of open deck separated the forward superstructure from the aft superstructure. He edged closer to the lifelines as he ran, giving himself a cushion of space in case someone opened one of the watertight doors without warning. He’d made that mistake years ago, as a boot ensign on the USS
Bowie passed an exhaust vent and caught a half-second blast of what seemed to be cooler air. The temperature differential was a sensory illusion, caused by the movement of the air over his skin. In reality, the exhaust from every vent on board was precisely monitored and alternately heated or cooled to match the ambient temperature of the air surrounding the ship. The system was expensive, and a pain in the ass to maintain, but it
