Ignoring the cold water paralyzing her lower torso, and the warm blood oozing from her forehead, Rocky wades through the flooded corridor, the torrent rising fast, the fluorescent bulbs overhead flickering, threatening to plunge her into darkness. “Hatch?” She enters the open SSES chamber, then rushes forward, crying out as she sees him.
“Hatch!” Rocky clutches her husband’s lifeless form to her chest, his blood pouring out across her life jacket. She holds his head above water, her right hand brushing against the pistol he is clutching, even in death. “Oh God, Hatch—”
Looking up, she sees Strejcek. “Shane, help me—”
Strejcek is caught off guard. “Rocky, what are you doing here?”
“Help me, Goddamn it, someone shot—” She stares at the gun barrel pointed at her head. “You?” She feels for the weapon in her husband’s hand, now underwater.
“You should have abandoned ship.” Strejcek bends over and reaches for her with his free hand.
In one motion Rocky leaps to her feet and jams the muzzle of the MP’s gun into Strejcek’s open mouth. “Drop the gun!”
Strejcek complies.
Her teeth chatter against the cold, her hand shakes with emotion. She removes the muzzle from her superior’s mouth, mustering one adrenalinepacked syllable. “Why?”
Strejcek exhales. “You’re so beautiful, Rocky, but you’re so blind. The world has cancer, and you’re still in the denial stage.”
The ship lurches beneath them. Strejcek pushes her aside, diving for his weapon.
Unfazed, she fires.
A wad of blood and brain tissue splatters against the far wall as the boat’s traitorous second-in-command falls backward with a splash.
Before she can catch a breath, the supercarrier is wrenched to starboard beneath her, as if tugged by the hand of Poseidon. Rocky tumbles sideways, regains her footing, then leaps into the heaving corridor, head-on into a wave of rushing water.
The sea races through the inclined passageway like a raging creek, the torrent dragging her with it. Gasping and kicking, Rocky endeavors to grab a ceiling pipe, succeeds, then arm-walks the chasm like a mountain climber dangling from a rope bridge as she drags herself toward the diminishing light at the end of the tunnel.
The cold water saps her strength, yet her world-filling anger refuses to allow her any rest. The sea is rising at her from behind as the ship groans a final tocsin warning of her impending death. Her fingers numb, her hands too frozen to maintain a controlled grip, Rocky stubbornly continues to ascend, her feet slipping wildly on the slick steel walls.
Ducking through a knee-knocker, she fights to maintain equilibrium as an intersecting current sideswipes her from the galley.
The boat rolls again, its bow rising, sending a four-foot wall of water racing straight for her—
Rocky grabs the pipes, sucks in a desperate breath, and ducks, as the swell buries her, pounding her chest as it hurtles down the passage. She opens her eyes, shivering from the cold, then climbs faster, the daylight winking at her, teasing her from a dismaying thirty feet up.
A minute later she emerges from the open hatch, the gray sky rolling away as the deck heaves backward, threatening to send her spilling back into the corridor. She leaps sideways, then screams, dropping to her belly as an F/A-18E Super Hornet slides sideways across the tilting tarmac, its mangled bulk threatening to crush her. She covers her head, squeezing her eyes shut as the wreckage passes over her and crashes into the flight deck’s tower, now pitching backward as the carrier’s failing buoyancy yields its weight to the sea.
Rocky crawls out from under some trailing debris, her fingers creating indentations in the soft top layer of the torn deck as she moves toward the rising portside rail. Dodging yet another avalanche of debris, she grabs onto one of the carrier’s now-loose retractable antennas as the deck climbs to an angle too steep even to kneel upon.
Reaching up, she pulls herself to the rail and peers over the edge.
The pitching sea is eight stories below but nowhere to be seen, concealed beneath the carrier’s keel, which is rising from the sea like a glistening steel whale poised to swallow her.
Unable to jump, she holds on, praying for the ship to stop rolling. Shaking uncontrollably, she closes her eyes to shut out the vertigo and the wail of tortured metal, her trembling hand reflexively wiping the blood crusted on her half-frozen brow.
The carrier stops rotating—and suddenly drops like an elevator. Rocky holds on, as water splashes across her face and the sea rushes up from below.
The cold wind rushes past her ears until she plunges feetfirst into the roaring ocean, sinking like an anchor. As she hits the water she inflates the vest, and its buoyancy halts her descent at twenty feet. Kicking and paddling, she fights her way back to the surface, the frothy layer appearing so close, yet always an arm’s distance away.
Finally, her head pops free, somehow slipping into a valley between swells. The rolling ocean lifts and drops her, the nausea overwhelming her stomach and head. A current tugs at her from behind. Turning, she is horrified to witness the
A steel-cold current of choking brine reaches out and grabs her. Panicking, she starts swimming, but the vortex is too strong, sucking her backward as it inhales her within its fury. Ocean swells become mountainous barriers, rising higher as she spins faster.
Rocky sucks in a last desperate breath as the cavitation of the displaced mass of the carrier snatches her about the waist and drags her below.
She kicks and paddles in protest, wasting precious air as she fights to swim upstream against the maelstrom, the unfathomable suction spinning above the now-submerged wreckage.
Her pulse pounds in her ears.
The haunting sounds of the depths envelop her. Rocky pinches her nose and blows, attempting to rid the pain from her ears. She looks down, falling feetfirst into the deep blue sea. Far below, the
At one hundred fifty-eight feet, the carrier releases her.
The air space in Rocky’s flotation device has been compressed flat beneath six atmospheres of pressure. No longer buoyant, she continues falling, flailing in slow motion, a marionette dancing for Death’s amusement before He takes her.
