Tidal Rip

“Inbound torpedoes now held as direct path contacts on both port and starboard wide-aperture arrays!”

Beck had Challenger caught in a vise. There was no place Jeffrey could run: seamounts in front and behind, four atomic torpedoes charging at him fast from the right and four more from the left. Noisemakers were useless this deep, strangled by the weight of miles of seawater pressing down. Challenger’s brilliant decoys had a crush depth similar to her off-board probes — at fifteen thousand feet they’d implode in the tubes the moment the pressure was equalized.

In the control room, Jeffrey felt many pairs of eyes glance his way. Those faces showed everything from panic to dependency, to an almost childlike faith that the captain — their father figure in a crisis — would find some way for them to survive.

All these thoughts and glances happened in fractions of a second.

“Fire Control,” Jeffrey rapped out, “firing point procedures, nuclear Mark Eighty-eights in tubes one through four. Set warhead yields to maximum.” One kiloton each.

“Preset!” Bell shouted.

“Snap shots, tubes one through four, fan spread, due north, shoot.” A snap shot lacked a firing solution, but launching fish this way, unprogrammed, saved precious time.

Four Mark 88s dashed from the tubes and into the sea. “Tubes one through four fired electrically!”

“All units running normally!”

The four Mark 88 fish ran through the mountain pass, toward the Angola Basin, trailing their guidance wires.

“Helm, ahead flank. Thirty degrees right rudder. Make your course due north.”

Meltzer acknowledged. Challenger turned north and gained speed.

“Fire Control, aim one Mark Eighty-eight at each of the inbound Sea Lions to the north. Set them to blow by timer within kill range of those enemy weapons.”

“The weapons may try to evade.”

“Not in this narrow pass. They’ve got no more maneuvering room than we do.”

“Lost the wire, LMRS from tube eight,” a fire-controlman yelled. Challenger’s hard turn north had overstrained the fiber-optic tether to the probe that Jeffrey had holding to the south side of the Wust Seamount.

“My course is due north, sir!” Meltzer shouted.

“Very well, Helm!”

The ride became rough as Challenger’s speed built up toward fifty knots.

“Sonar,” Jeffrey snapped, “any more torpedoes inbound? Any contact on von Scheer?”

“Negative,” Milgrom said. “Negative.”

“Shut the outer doors, tubes one through four and seven and eight.”

“Lost the wires, all empty tubes!”

“Fire Control, tubes one through four and seven and eight, reload, nuclear Mark Eighty-eights!”

Bell relayed commands. Jeffrey pictured everything as below, at the special-weapons control console and inside the huge but cramped torpedo room itself, Lieutenant Torelli and his men were hard at work. He prayed there were no malfunctions or mistakes.

Jeffrey eyed the tactical plot. Four torpedoes were coming straight at him from directly ahead. His own atomic fish charged in their direction at a net closing speed of almost a hundred and fifty knots. Jeffrey charged after his own fish, doing fifty knots himself. Four enemy torpedoes gained at him from behind, at a net closing speed of twenty-five knots.

This’ll be close. The timing has to be perfect.

“Units from tubes one through four have detonated!” Bell shouted.

The signals, through the fiber-optic cables, moved at the speed of light. The noise and shock force, Jeffrey knew, moved only at the speed of sound in water. The ranges were so short, his time to live or die so fleeting now, that the fiber-optic signals beat the blast fronts on their race to Challenger by much too little time to think.

Four one-kiloton nuclear blasts went off at once ahead of Challenger. An all- consuming demon of painful decibels and shaking smashed at the ship from every side. Challenger continued her hard sprint forward, into the midst of Jeffrey’s self-made thunder in the deep. Noise battered the ship in every octave, and vibrations tore at her with every resonance period from high to low. They made Jeffrey’s feet and buttocks jar and ache like pins and needles. They made his teeth chatter as Challenger shook, and his skeleton seemed to rattle inside his body. Challenger rose and fell like a roller coaster as Meltzer and COB fought to regain control.

Crewmen’s arms and legs flailed as they tried to cover their ears and open their mouths — to relieve the pressure against their eardrums from the cacophony outside.

Then the aftershocks and blast reflections began to hit.

The four fireballs pulsated as they plunged for the surface. Each time they collapsed and rebounded, more noise and more hard punches were thrown at Challenger.

More noise and pounding reflected off the seamount walls to right and left. The roller-coaster ride went on. The deck — alive with buzzing and humming that came right up through Jeffrey’s legs and into his genitals — seesawed as the ship’s nose bucked.

“The gravimeter,” Bell shouted.

Jeffrey forced his eyes to focus. Gouges and scars appeared in the seamount walls to either flank. Avalanches, triggered by the forces of the blasts.

Above all the other noise and shaking, Jeffrey felt sharp, hard blows. Falling boulders, bouncing off our hull. One hit on our vulnerable stern parts and we’re finished.

The vessel shimmied and yawed. Sloshing ocean, kicked up by the avalanches.

Damage reports poured in, and repair crews went to work as best they could — so far, nothing fatal to Challenger’s ability to fight. But reloading the tubes was slow going.

“Assess enemy inbound weapons from north destroyed!” Bell shouted above the continuing racket. “Four torpedoes to the south still closing!.. Inbound torpedoes have gone to active search!” The surviving Sea Lions had started to ping.

Jeffrey checked the speed-log gauges — the digital readings and backup analog dials agreed. Challenger’s speed was fifty-three knots, everything she had.

Torelli signaled he was waiting.

Jeffrey and Bell entered their special-weapons arming codes.

“Make tubes one through four and seven and eight ready in all respects including opening outer doors.”

Jeffrey ordered the Mark 88s in tubes one through four fired as countershots against the weapons to the south.

The fish dashed from the tubes, spread out, changed course, and ran off back behind Challenger.

Jeffrey pondered his options. He was about to enter the wall of tortured water ahead of the ship, where her first four torpedoes had gone off. Four more were about to detonate behind him, unless those inbound Sea Lions got Challenger first — which was a very real risk since the engagement distances had grown so tight.

“Firing-point procedures, nuclear Mark Eighty-eights in tubes seven and eight! Set warhead yields to maximum!”

“Ready!” Bell acknowledged.

“Snap shots, loop north of the Wust Seamount and then course two seven zero.” West. “Preset units for active search when steady on two seven zero.” The units would ping with their own built-in target homing sonars.

“Preset!”

“Shoot.”