Tidal Rip

Felix was overcome by curiosity. He went back to the porthole.

Through the soot, he made out a staggering number of glowing golden-yellow fireballs. Each was rising higher and higher into the air. Beneath each widening fireball was a solid pillar of white. He knew this was water and steam — and fission by-products from the warhead itself, the worst form of nuclear waste. Felix knew the mushroom clouds would be horribly radioactive: neutron bombardment by the initial weapon flash while underwater would act on metals dissolved in the sea — sodium especially — transforming their atomic structure into unstable isotopes. Those isotopes would decay, giving off alpha and beta and gamma rays, and more neutrons.

The wind is from the east. That stuff is coming right at us.

Felix barely had time to form these thoughts when the airborne shock waves hit. They pounded the hull of the burned-out cargo ship, in a repetitive hammering action that was a result of the mushroom clouds being different distances away. The hulk rocked back and forth. The cracked porthole bulged inward. Rust and ash and blistered paint were shaken loose and drifted in the air like an infernal blizzard; it was harder to see inside the compartment where he and his men had taken shelter. Their suits were sprinkled and dusted by the clinging unholy black snow. Felix’s well-trained eardrums felt the air pressure constantly change; his suit faceplate was squashed or made to swell as the overpressures and following partial vacuums plucked at his lungs. As each shock front passed over the Rocks, the compounded noise of all the explosions increased. The noise made talking impossible.

The noise makes thinking impossible.

Then Felix saw the thing he dreaded most. The thing his protective suit could offer no protection from. The thing from which the hulk’s steel plates gave no real shelter at all.

In the distance, a long stretch of the horizon seemed oddly higher than before. Felix watched in morbid fascination as this strange phenomenon drew near.

It was the expanding tsunami, not a true seismic tidal wave but a huge wall of water kicked up by the force of the sixteen atomic blasts.

He yelled for his men to hold on. But there was little to hold on to besides one another.

Felix watched as the monster wave moved relentlessly closer.

When it came into shallower water near the Rocks, just as he expected, the wave began to pile up upon itself. It started to form an almost vertical churning, roiling wall. The wall climbed higher and higher, racing inshore.

Now Felix heard the noise of it, even above the continuing noise of the fireballs in the distance. The new noise was a terrible, deep-pitched roar.

He pulled himself from the porthole and, together with his men, cowered on the opposite side of the compartment. The noise became louder and louder. The wall of water was so close and so high, it blocked the sun from outside. The compartment grew totally dark.

The tsunami engulfed the hulk with a crash that made Felix’s skeleton shake inside his body. The porthole was smashed and a solid column of water jetted in.

The hulk began to list, to lean over from the force of the wave.

“We’re capsizing!” one of the SEAL chiefs shouted.

As water streamed in through every hatchway, down every ladder, between every crack in broken welds, the hulk leaned over more and more. There was a new sound now, of screaming metal, as weakened steel was further strained by the movement of the ship falling onto its side.

Felix and his team scrambled for their lives as the cargo ship tilted and seawater sloshed. In slow motion the deck became a bulkhead, and a bulkhead turned into the deck.

The hulk settled down with a teeth-jarring crash and sagged from its own redistributed weight. Felix knew the superstructure would collapse or break loose entirely, crushing him and his men under hundreds of tons of debris.

But at last the shaking and tumbling died down. The screaming of steel subsided into scattered moans and bangs. The roaring of the tidal wave receded into the distance.

Everything dripped. Sunlight came into the compartment again, through what was now acting as the overhead, the ceiling: the porthole Felix had looked out before. Yet another sound began, a whistling screech — wind was blowing through the mangled superstructure, a different sort of wind than before, as air was pulled in and upward toward ground zero, toward the cluster of ever-rising voracious mushroom clouds. Electric blue flashes flickered in the otherwise clear sky, followed by distant rumbles: the cooling moisture- laden mushroom clouds, with their heavy burden of static charges, were beginning to act like man-made thunderheads.

Felix was amazed that any of his men had survived the ordeal. The two men with broken bones were in great pain, and two others had suffered new fractures, including one of the chiefs. It made Felix feel guilty to know that others’ bodies had cushioned his own as they’d all gone rolling and falling.

But he and his people were, first and foremost, U.S. Navy SEALs.

“You, you, and you,” Felix said to the men who seemed in best physical and mental shape. “We have to find a way out of here, make contact with the minisub somehow, and then come back for the others…. Chief, stay put and take care of the wounded. You three with me, let’s go. You see any Germans, remember. Head shots only.”

Beck had expected the worst, but nothing could have prepared him and his men for the reality of what happened.

Sixteen nuclear torpedoes had gone off at once, at his command, in an arc like a scythe several miles across. His mind and body were still reeling.

He squinted and shook his head to try to get his vision to focus. The vibrations through the deck were so wild, the pitching of the ship so violent, Beck’s knees kept buckling as he tried to stand. His organs felt as if they were flying apart inside his body. Many of his crew were in obvious pain from injuries.

But time was of the essence now.

Speech was out of the question as the noise of the tortured ocean continued to echo from all around, barely diminished by the thickness of the von Scheer’s immensely strong hull.

Beck struggled to the pilot’s station. He made his intentions known by hand signals, by pointing at the pilot’s controls.

Slow to ahead one-third, make engine revs for three knots. Hug the bottom, conceal the ship in terrain as much as you can. Right five degrees rudder, gently, steer due south.

All sonars were rendered useless by the endless reverb of nuclear bubble clouds. Jeffrey’s only outside data came from the gravimeter — which fortunately still worked.

Jeffrey realized his ship continued making flank speed, heading east.

Good. Everything still works, then. We can’t have serious damage.

But Jeffrey felt so addle-brained from all the sensory overload, he was having trouble thinking clearly much beyond that.

Then he realized that his ship was charging straight into the center of the watery maelstrom kicked up by the nuclear blasts. Her thick hull and shielded condenser pipes would stop the radiation out there, and clean seawater farther on would quickly wash external surfaces clean — but the maelstrom beckoned.

Meltzer, at the helm, seemed stuporous from a near concussion. COB kept blinking and shaking his head, in not much better shape. Bell appeared to be unhurt, but his console had gone dark. Jeffrey badly needed data, and needed to make some major judgment calls, but his thoughts moved like molasses, too much happening everywhere at once.

“Sonar!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. The noise from all around beyond the hull was impossibly loud.

Milgrom turned. Her face was pale, but her eyes were alert, and she showed no visible signs of serious injury. “Captain?”

“How many warheads went off?”

“I think all sixteen of theirs!”

Jeffrey was already getting hoarse from shouting, and the cacophony from outside refused to diminish. He mouthed each word carefully. “I need to know if any torpedoes are still running!”

If only one had survived, and it found Challenger, they were dead.