his submarine shallower. This had always been standard doctrine in tactical nuclear war at sea, to benefit from surface cutoff effect, the venting of fireball energy into the air. The Cold War might be long over, the enemy different now, but the underlying physics hadn't changed.
Taylor went back to his screen. It was time to trigger those last two ADCAPs. Commands were relayed; the water around Texas heaved. The resounding cracks, so close, were much sharper this time, punishing Taylor's ears. The vibrations were much sharper, too. An overhead light fixture shattered, and nearby crewmen protected their eyes.
A phone talker, young and already scared, pressed his hands to his bulky headset, listened intently, and raised his voice. 'Flooding in the engine room, lower level port side!'
Too many things were going on at once. Taylor ordered the XO aft, to oversee repairs. The weapons officer deftly stepped in as Fire Control Coordinator. The tactical plot was refreshed. The nearest threat icons showed up with very high position confidence, the enemy torpedoes so noisy now as they ran at endgame speed. Two Axis fish were still closing in from starboard, one from port, clearly picked up on Texas's side-mounted sonar wide-aperture arrays.
The ASDS tried to raise the Texas by underwater telephone, but the message was unintelligible, conditions out there were so bad. Then the minisub started to ping, on maximum power. Taylor realized it was trying to act as a decoy, to protect its more highvalue parent. The two men aboard, two good men Taylor knew well and liked and cared about, must know that they'd die: The ASDS was unarmed. One Axis torpedo acquired it; the others pressed on toward Texas. Again Taylor had to squelch down his emotions: Around him, man and machine were melded into a conflict that wiped out any possible sense of personal future or past.
Tubes one through four on Taylor's weapons status window flashed green, ready to fire. There was a heavy roar from astern, and the ASDS icon on the main plot pulsed, then vanished.
There was a pair of distant roars; more shock waves pummeled the ship. Taylor heard several men shouting at once.
'Units from tubes one and three have detonated!' 'Close-in hits on Master One and Master Two, assess both targets destroyed!'.
Then from the phone talker: 'Flooding aft is worsening, Captain, two feet deep in the bilge!'
The chief of the boat worked his console with tight concentration, trying to preserve neutral buoyancy and maintain level trim. He'd put in his papers to retire at twenty just days before the war broke out — forget about that now.
There were still two incoming torpedoes, spaced wide apart off the port and starboard quarters. Taylor ordered tubes one through four fired, more defensive nuclear snap shots. But the inbound weapons were so close now it was a toss-up whether they could be knocked down in time. Even if their proximity fuses were set very tight, buying Texas a few extra seconds, the ADCAPs might not reach safe separation quickly enough for survivable preemptive blasts. Again Taylor studied his screens. A week-old image forced its way into his mind, his wife and their two teenage girls, making good-byes on the pier in New London.
'Detonate the weapons,' Taylor ordered. He knew it was too damned close. The explosions, reinforcing each other, knocked him off his feet. His shoulder struck an unyielding corner; an awful pain shot through his chest. Console tubes imploded. The deck shook so hard his vision was blurred, and the air began to fill with pungent smoke. He saw men dazed, others moving and speaking, then realized he was deafened and he tried to read their lips. The phone talker, bleeding profusely from a flattened nose, mouthed each word carefully. 'Flooding in Engineering is out of control.' The bilge pumps couldn't keep up.
Taylor turned to the chief of the boat, and commanded an emergency blow. Surfacing into the tons of radioactive steam and fallout topside appalled Taylor, but it was their only chance. The bottom-mapping sonar was useless in such chaotic acoustic conditions, but the inertial nav plot told him enough. The seafloor here went way down past their crush depth.
Compressed air screamed and roared. The helmsman tried to plane up, just like he'd trained. The deck tilted steeply, and the vessel strove for the surface as her ballast tanks were forced dry. Taylor noticed more blood. One crewman had compound fractures of both forearms, from bracing himself the wrong way. Another man lay on the deck, the stillness of death upon him, his neck badly twisted, broken. Other crewmen donned their emergency air breather masks, before the thickening smoke could kill them all. Firefighting teams went to work. Taylor felt a jumble of pride and anguish, at their skill and their courage, their wounds and their dreadful pain. His people — kids, really, most of them — were his surrogate family, and around him they were dying.
Taylor struggled to his console, tried to lift the red handset to Damage Control back aft, and realized his right collarbone was smashed. He grabbed for the phone with his left. Every breath came with agony. He vomited, then almost blacked out. He made himself go on, of sheer necessity; one-handed, he pulled on his mask. There were a hundred thirty-five people aboard — including the SEALs — all his to lead, to protect; their wives and kiddies collectively totaled twice that. He'd seen them on the pier, too, making their goodbyes.
Taylor knew the crew needed to stop the flooding very quickly once on the surface, then resubmerge, or they'd be picked off by a nuclear cruise missile. The Axis antishipping campaign was conducted with numbing ferocity. As if to emphasize the point, more explosions rumbled in the distance from the now one-sided convoy/U- boat fight. The Texas broached nose first, consummating her sickening upward trajectory, then smashed back flat on the surface, forcing Taylor to his knees. The ship wallowed, rolling heavily, obviously settling fast. The engineer back aft tripped the panic switch, valving shut all sea pipes, which shut down propulsion too, but the water kept roaring in. Vital welds had cracked, in places difficult to find amid the blinding incoming spray. COB had already blown what he could, but the Texas was going down.
Taylor knew that if he ordered Abandon Ship, the few men who'd get out would perish horribly. He didn't activate a photonics mast — to see the multiple mushroom clouds would alarm the men to no purpose.
He stared very hard at a digital chart. A few nautical miles away lay the spur of a jagged seamount peak, an extension of the Azores volcanic chain. The spur's depth was almost seventeen hundred feet, challenging Virginia- class crush depth, especially after the beating Texas just took. The remainder of the seamount was sheer-sided basalt cliff; if they missed the spur they were doomed. But it was their only hope, to huddle down deep and await a harrowing rescue, and pray their SEAL raid against a crucial German weapons lab could somehow be pulled off before it was too late.
Taylor ordered the sea valves reopened, to get the propulsion shaft turning again. He ordered all nonessential personnel to evacuate the engineering spaces, which were all one giant compartment when it came to truly watertight doors. He knew the men were coming when his aching eardrums crackled and he felt the air get warm; the incoming water was squeezing the atmosphere.
The watertight hatch was closed again, and Taylor told COB to put more high-pressure air in the engine room, to help hold back the water. Its influx would only grow stronger as Texas drove for the seamount spur, her depth increasing by the minute, all reserve buoyancy lost. American SSN's simply weren't designed to float with one entire compartment flooded.
The XO conveyed by sound-powered phone that he'd stay aft with a handful of seasoned men. He knew that what Texas needed the most was speed, and people had to be there to override the safeties as the freezing seawater rose. Taylor authorized the reactor be pushed to one hundred eight percent.
Taylor eyed a depth gauge and watched the vessel's rate of descent, then glanced back at the nav chart. Maybe they'd make it to the spur, and maybe not, and even if they did they might crash-land too hard to live.
In simulator training his crew would have called this scenario grossly unfair. Taylor was fatalistic, staying detached. He tried not to think about the men working aft, who couldn't possibly survive.
The COB and the helmsman fought their controls, as the main hydraulics failed. The turbogenerators went next, and console systems switched to batteries.
'Rig for reduced electrical,' Taylor said, and Texas labored her heart out, the propulsor refusing to quit.
The phone talker reported the seawater aft had risen well past the tightly dogged watertight hatch. It was time to scram the reactor. Texas kept going on built-up momen-tum, sinking like a stone on her glidepath into oblivion.
'Collision alarm,' Taylor ordered, as the crucial moment neared. He hoped his inertial nav fix was good and the local bottom charts accurate — with the ceaseless nuclear reverb and swirling bubbles all around, the bottom- mapping sonar only showed meaningless snow. He wished his boat had a gravimeter, which would have removed any doubt, but someone had decided some ten years back that gravimeters were too expensive.
