Crush Depth

Van Gelder from other parts of the ship — nothing major yet.

Van Gelder watched on the periscope as the tsunami of the detonation approached Voortrekker quickly, even as the mushroom cloud grew taller in the air. The tsunami was a solid wall of foaming, boiling seawater. Spume and spray blew backward from its breaking crown, as a man-made wind was sucked in toward ground zero by the updraft of the mushroom cloud.

“Lower all masts and antennas!” ter Horst ordered.

All the imagery went blank. Van Gelder gripped his armrests, white-knuckled, waiting for what was to come.

The ship rolled and corkscrewed madly, and Van Gelder’s stomach rose toward his throat. Voortrekker dipped and heaved as the tsunami passed right overhead with a terrifying watery roaring sound.

“Raise all masts and antennas!” ter Horst shouted above the diminishing noise.

The satellite imagery came back. On Van Gelder’s display of Diego Garcia, the screen showed nothing but snow for a moment, then a lurid hot-violet glow flickered beyond the horizon on the picture.

“That blast should be them, not us,” ter Horst said. “The island’s outer defenses have gone nuclear after all.” Probably a destroyer or cruiser, Van Gelder thought, trying to smack the inbound missiles down.

A string of blinding lavender-violet fireballs bloomed, just over the southern horizon from the recon camera’s point of view.

“Oh dear. A whole wall of them, across our missiles’ line of approach. This I don’t like. I’m sure we lost some missiles there.”

Ter Horst sounded worried; Van Gelder was torn between praying for failure or success. He felt pity for the people on the atoll. Then he looked at the local periscope picture, at the fresh mushroom cloud that smashed the incoming enemy jet, standing now like a beacon marking Voortrekker’s location — he felt pity for himself and his crew.

“There.” Ter Horst pointed at his screen. “Our weapons are still in the air, a few at least.”

Conventional antiaircraft guns, shorter-range weapons, opened up from the atoll. Guns began to fire from ships stuck in the harbor too — some just couldn’t get up steam or warm their big diesel engines fast enough to leave. Van Gelder saw the gun flashes, vivid in the evening twilight. The shells invisibly flew away from Van Gelder, toward the south, and burst low over the ocean, leaving black puffs of smoke but showing no hits on incoming missiles. Van Gelder saw Allied fighters jinking to avoid the friendly fire, making less effective their own strafing runs against surviving hostile missiles. Van Gelder saw the surface of the lagoon roil from the firing concussions of heavy ack-ack guns. The surface of the sea splashed and rippled from the ack-ack’s falling shrapnel. Sometimes there were bigger splashes, when dud shells hit the water. There seemed to be a lot of duds. Ter Horst laughed.

More antimissile missiles took to the sky, or leaped from the wings of fighter jets as afterburners strained. Van Gelder followed the moving glows of the exhausts against the dusk. A few defensive missiles connected with something, in stabbing secondary blasts, and sheets of liquid fire rained to the sea.

“Shit,” ter Horst said. “Well, it’s out of our control. We may need another salvo after all.” Van Gelder’s gut tightened at the thought, with the Reagan’s planes so near. Fire-controlmen reported more airborne search radars, closing on Voortrekker fast. The warning strobes and beeps of his console seemed to set the pace for Van Gelder’s rising heartbeat.

Tracers, bright red and green, began to stitch the heavens over Diego Garcia — in the tropics, dark came quickly. The defenders still had targets, which meant Voortrekker’s cruise missiles still flew.

“You know, Number One,” ter Horst said, “it all makes a lovely light show.”

Dutifully, Van Gelder watched his screens. The last rays of the sunset cast a pink pall on the island bastion. Detonations right at sundown were part of ter Horst’s plan: it made Voortrekker’s egress easier, and medical care on the shattered atoll that much harder to provide.

Ter Horst tapped his chronometer. “The real fireworks are about to begin… now.”

Things happened fast.

All of Diego Garcia’s military assets were on the left arm of the atoll’s V. In rapid succession there blossomed six prolonged blinding flashes.

“Yes,” ter Horst exclaimed. “Some got through!”

Crewmen cheered.

“Quiet in control!” he snapped.

Van Gelder stared at his screen, transfixed.

As the glare died down, shock waves spread from four points on the atoll’s arm and two in the lagoon. Van Gelder saw gigantic domes of mist, where the moist tropical air condensed behind the spreading shock fronts. The mist domes quickly dissipated, and there they were, the atomic fireballs, six of them glowing and churning, ascending into the sky. Each was a breathtaking golden yellow, expanding as it rose: living, fulminating globes of unimaginable fire.

Pillars formed beneath the fireballs, black for the ones that hit land, white for the ones that hit water. The fireballs provided their own illumination for the nighttime scene around them; each cast livid shadows of the other mushroom clouds. At ground level, smoke and dust and fog-spray spread in fluffy, lethal disks. The shock waves of the different warheads met, rupturing the air.

Still the fireballs rose, and expanded, and cooled slightly. They sucked in more air at their bases. The pillars of the mushroom clouds grew thick, and lightning sizzled. Nothing on the ground could be seen through all the smoke and dust and steam and flying debris, no ships or planes or people. The water of the lagoon, farther off, foamed where it was punished by the shock fronts, and huge waves spread away from the two water bursts. Tall trees on the far side of the lagoon exploded into flame from the searing radiant heat of the blasts. The entire atoll seemed to burn.

Now the fireballs were more than two miles high. They broiled less fiercely. Smoke rings formed atop their crowns. They were interlaced with ethereal purple glows, the air itself fluorescing from the intense radiation. More lightning flashed from the tremendous static charges.

Ter Horst switched to the infrared feed. On Van Gelder’s screen, in this mode, the fireballs still seared frighteningly. But infrared could see through smoke and dust. At ground level, fires burned everywhere. The petroleum-products tank farm was now one huge inferno, and the inferno spread. More flaming fuel oil covered the surface of the lagoon, and in the lagoon, ships burned and broke apart. The four deep craters on the ground all glowed intensely hot; not one but two missiles had hit the runways of the airbase.

Van Gelder was awestruck in spite of himself. I helped do this. Some primitive part of his being rejoiced at the combat success. An unspeakable part of his soul soared with exhilarated joy at the sheer pleasure of such push-button mass destruction. In a sick way it was fun to unleash fission bombs, see mushroom clouds erect themselves, smash someone else’s toys and get to watch.

Am I becoming a monster, like my captain?

“Atoll denial, Gunther,” ter Horst said.

“Sir?”

“That’s what this is about. Atoll denial.”

Van Gelder nodded. He grasped ter Horst’s point. The cruise missiles all had plunging warheads, designed to bore in deep and throw up terrible local fallout — soil, vaporized wreckage, and radioactive seawater steam. From these appallingly dirty blasts, Diego Garcia would be unusable for many months, maybe years. The image jumped, then steadied, as each shock front finally reached the unmanned recon drone, the force too weak by now to knock it down.

“They think an island is an unsinkable aircraft carrier,” ter Horst said.

“I’ve heard the saying, Captain.” Ter Horst distracted Van Gelder, who was trying to make better sense of