The Seventh Angel

desperation.

The ship was surrounded by a field of naval mines, their numbers and locations hidden by black water. Any one of those mines could crack the hull of a warship like an eggshell. The guided-missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts had learned that lesson the hard way two decades earlier, in this very same body of water, just a few hundred nautical miles to the south. The Samuel B. Roberts had nearly been blown in half. Whether or not Towers was about to repeat that lesson was still yet to be seen.

Under any other circumstances, the proper tactic would have been to maneuver at two or three knots, locating each mine with the ship’s Kingfisher sonar, and mapping a safe route to the edge of the minefield. But moving slowly was not an option now. The torpedo was getting closer by the second. It was locked on to the ship’s acoustic signature like a cybernetic bloodhound, and the deadly machine was following the trail with a ruthless precision that no living creature could equal.

The Towers needed every ounce of speed that her engineers could squeeze out of their wounded vessel. Every fifty yards of forward motion was another second of life. But it wasn’t going to be enough. The torpedo was faster, and — unlike its target — it was not slowed by damage. The weapon was rapidly overtaking the destroyer. The seconds were beginning to run out.

Standing behind the Tactical Action Officer’s chair in the air-conditioned semi-darkness of Combat Information Center, Captain Bowie watched the chase rushing toward its conclusion on the giant Aegis display screens. The fingers of his left hand gripped a steel crossbeam in the overhead, steadying his body against the motion of the ship. His right hand rested casually on the back of the TAO’s chair. His posture was carefully-relaxed, and he concentrated on keeping the tension out of his facial expression.

He knew without looking that the men and women of his CIC team were watching him out of the corners of their eyes. They were measuring his reactions, drawing confidence and hope from the calm assurance of his demeanor.

His crew needed hope right now. They were scared, and they had every reason to be. They were exhausted, and their bodies were bruised and bloodied. More than a few of their shipmates were already dead. Their ship was grievously damaged, and the fight was not over yet.

Bowie ran a hand through his short black hair, and relaxed the set of his shoulders. He looked more like an accountant than a naval officer, and he knew it. His long face and narrow cheekbones gave him an air of clean efficiency, and the slight downturn of his mouth tended to make him look pensive, even in the most relaxed of circumstances. The effect was usually offset by his quick brown eyes and his easy laugh, but there was nothing to laugh about tonight. Nothing at all.

This was the craziest tactical situation Bowie had ever heard of. Even the worst-case everybody-dies training scenarios weren’t this bad. His plan for dealing with the situation was even crazier, if such a thing was possible.

It was not a good plan; Bowie knew that. Maybe it wasn’t even an entirely sane plan, but what the hell else could he do? If there were other options, he hadn’t been able to think of them.

There was no time to sniff out a safe path through the minefield. If they reduced speed enough for sonar to detect the mines, the torpedo would catch them and kill them. If they tried to run without seeing the mines, they were nearly certain to hit one. That would kill them just as quickly.

On the big display screen, the Towers appeared as a small green cross, enclosed by a circle. A single green speed vector protruded from the center of the symbol, like the stick of a lollipop. The symbol was pointed southwest now, inching toward the irregular red boundary that represented the edge of the minefield. They were moving in the right direction — toward safe water — but the flashing red torpedo symbol was less than 2,500 yards behind now, and moving a lot faster as it continued to close the gap.

The mines didn’t appear on the tactical display at all, except the general outline showing the boundaries of the minefield. That information had come from COM Fifth Fleet, via the Special Warfare unit attached to U.S. Navy Central Command. But there were no coordinates for the mines themselves: no clues to their locations, or even how many were there. It might be a hundred, or five hundred, or five thousand.

The Towers couldn’t map a safe route through the minefield, and the ship could not survive without one. The only choice was to create their own path through the mines, clear a safe route where none existed.

Out on the darkened forecastle, the deck gun continued to pound the water with naval artillery shells every two and a half seconds. The forward machine guns and the two chain-guns continued to hammer their own projectiles into the wave tops. The ship was pumping a tremendous amount of mechanical force and shrapnel into the sea. Theoretically, some of that brute kinetic force should penetrate far enough down to reach the mines. That was the plan: to pulverize the water hard enough to trigger the mines at a distance, clearing the way ahead of the ship.

But it wasn’t working. Bowie’s crazy plan, which had seemed at least distantly feasible when he’d given the order, did not seem to be bearing fruit. There were no answering explosions to show that the guns were finding targets. For all of the racket and thunder, the guns had not yet triggered a single mine.

Bowie felt a hand on his left shoulder. He turned to find his second in command, Lieutenant Commander Peter Tyler, standing behind him. Pete was a good man, and a damned fine executive officer. Just the kind of guy you’d want in your corner if things got ugly.

He leaned in close, and spoke quietly into his captain’s ear. “Do you think this’ll work?”

Bowie shrugged. “Frankly, I have no idea. I just know that it’s better than sitting around waiting to die.”

His last word seemed to echo in the chilled air of CIC, and Bowie wished instantly that he hadn’t said it.

He opened his mouth to add something else—anything—to wipe that dreadful word out of the air. Before he could speak, a thundering boom shook the entire ship.

For a half-second, Bowie thought they’d been hit, but the Officer of the Deck’s voice came over the Tactical Action Officer’s communications net. “TAO — Bridge. Close-aboard explosion off the port bow!”

The TAO keyed the microphone of his headset to acknowledge the report, but his voice was drowned out by a second explosion.

“TAO — Bridge. Close-aboard explosion dead off the bow!”

All around him, the members of Bowie’s CIC team began exchanging glances. He knew what they were thinking. Maybe the skipper’s crazy plan was going to work. Maybe … just maybe, they were not all going to die tonight.

On the Aegis display screen, the symbol for Towers was moving toward the boundary of the minefield. The torpedo had closed within 2,000 yards and was gaining fast, but it looked like the ship might be clear of the minefield before the weapon struck. If the ship could make it that far, they could maneuver without fear of mines. They could crack the whip—run the tricky evasion maneuvers designed to throw pursuing torpedoes off the scent. They might have a chance.

“I think this is working,” a voice behind him said. “Looks like you might still pull the fat out of the fire, sir.”

Bowie turned, expecting to see his XO. Instead, he found himself staring into the eyes of Lieutenant Clinton Brody, the pilot of the USS Towers helicopter, Firewalker Two- Six.

A prickle ran down the back of Bowie’s neck. Something wasn’t right here. He felt a stirring in his gut: an indefinable certainty that some crucial element of reality had suddenly veered off in an unexpected direction.

The gun roared again. The sound had a different character to it — muted, with a sort of weirdly-metallic echo. A report blared from one of the overhead speakers, but the voice was tinny, and too garbled to understand.

Bowie’s gaze was still locked on the young pilot’s face. Lieutenant Brody was not supposed to be here. No, that wasn’t right. He couldn’t be here. It wasn’t possible.

The realization came instantly, and it brought another abrupt shift in the fabric of reality. The world seemed to stutter and then freeze in place, like a film break in an old-fashioned movie projector, the last frame of broken celluloid still trapped behind the lens. All action had stopped, but that last image persisted, Combat Information Center and its crew held motionless in an instance of frozen time.

Lieutenant Clinton Brody could not here, because the man was dead. His body had