matte-gray missiles leaped from out of the deep, riding trails of urgent flame and billowing smoke. Their winglets unfolded on leaving the water. They accelerated to near Mach 1 in the twinkling of an eye. The missiles settled on course, gaining speed steadily, skimming right above the surface, blowing spume back off the waves. They quickly reached full speed, Mach 2.5—faster than any carrier-borne fighter plane could go. Some aimed for the convoy; others targeted the distant Truman carrier group, far beyond the horizon.
Beck sensed a change in the pitch of the convoy noise. They'd seen the Shipwrecks. The escorts tried to shoot them down with Sea Sparrows, Mach 3.5 antimissiles of their own. But they were too late, perhaps because of battle damage and human stress. Beck looked at his screens. Missile trails crossed every which way. The convoy flagship — the commodore's ship — was changing course, trying to veer away from the inbound Shipwrecks, trying to defend herself. Red tracers arced toward the missiles as men on deck used heavy machine guns. Countermeasure launchers on the flagship loosed off bursts of silvery chaff. Magnesium flares on parachutes began to burn as infrared lures. Aluminized decoy blimps inflated, stiffened, and drifted on the wind. The Honeybee picture bloomed featureless white, making Beck's eyes ache. When it cleared, a violet-lavender fireball blossomed off the flagship's starboard side. Her paint burned off in an instant, and blew away in a puff of smoke. Her American flag simply vanished, her machine gunners shriveled to ash. The masts, the superstructure, the hull, all cast stark shadows away from the blinding, sizzling glare. Beck could see the airborne shock wave of the A-bomb begin to spread, like a swelling sphere of ghostly condensation. The force of the blast hit the ocean. A tsunami grew The air-and waterborne shock waves hit the flagship; the vessel broke in half. The aft end still drove forward as her insensate props kept turning, scooping up tons of seawater. The bow section flipped on its side, exposing red bottom paint and green sea-growth fouling. The sea growth began to smolder at once, from the heat of the blast. The swirling atomic fireball, now a beautiful orange-yellow, rose higher into the air. Beneath it a pillar of smoke and steam formed rapidly, drawn by the powerful updraft. A zone of fine mist spread from the pillar, dispersing as the mushroom cloud shot even higher. Lightning flashed on its crown, near an ethereal purple glow, the very air fluorescing from the radiation's intensity, Other Shipwrecks struck their targets.
'Convoy not dispersing,' Beck shouted. 'Frigates heading toward sites of the Shipwreck launches!' Eberhard's neat attack had become a disorganized melee. Coomans reported through the copilot that the countermeasures- room flooding was secured, but both launchers would be out of action for at least an hour — an eternity. Three men were dead from the force of seawater influx.
Beck shuddered: They'd been dashed to pieces by the jet spray at three hundred atmospheres pressure. But that was the least of his concerns. 'Sea Lion from latest salvo about to reach troopship Cape Fear.'
'Put Cape Fear on a main display screen,' Eberhard said. Beck hit the command. There was the container ship, with its stacks of habitation modules. The vessel tried to fight back; launchers fired off antitorpedo snares, voluminous nylon netting laced with explosive detcord. But the snares fell short. Cape Fear was hit. She heaved and snapped in two.
Cargo containers went flying, and seawater rushed for the heavens with ultimate force. The makeshift troopship was swallowed whole, as the ocean gave birth to another brandnew sun, a too-fast dawn from the wrong direction, west. Cape Fear simply evaporated amidships, steel and soldiers vaporized in a million-degree nuclear furnace. The stubs of her stem and stern were thrown bodily into the air in opposite directions, spinning end over end, spewing flattened containers. It was impossible in this chaos to make out bodies, but thousands of people had just died.
Other eruptions sounded all around through Deutsch-land's hull, as technicians called more Sea Lion detonations. More antisubmarine rockets from surviving frigates' launchers went off, too, aimed at invisible tormentors that weren't there — the nonexistent Class 212 wolf pack, Eberhard's sleight of hand.
Beck knew the frigates wouldn't stay fooled much longer, and then Deutschland would pay. 'Shock force from Cape Fear blast will reach the liquid natural gas carrier soon.'
'Show me,' Eberhard said.
The vessel loomed on the screen. The spreading shock fronts overtook her through the sea and through the air. She shuddered as the twinned forces pounded her hull. The airborne shock wave dented the big domes on her deck, the tops of the spherical tanks containing the super-chilled natural gas. They tore open, and insulation flew.
'That mist,' Eberhard said. 'The cold gas is condensing moisture in the air…. We should get a nice gas-versus oxygen mix very soon.'
The crew realized it — they were jumping over the side. Several of them staggered, then collapsed on deck.
'Asphyxiated,' Eberhard said; he was transfixed. The freezing mist continued to spread, forming ice slurry on the sea. The men in the water grew still. 'Now all we need is a good ignition source. A static spark from all the charged atomic particles up there, a bit of burning debris from the sky…' Whatever did it, the LNG tanker suddenly vanished in a heaving white-hot plasma jet that shot higher than the clouds in a gigantic V. The resulting quasar flare-up was more powerful than the air-burst that had killed the commodore's flagship. The pressure wave expanded in all directions.
The blast front reached the Honeybee. The Honeybee disintegrated. The detonation's undersea force reached Deutschland. Its impact was unbearably loud. The force knocked the submarine out of control. Light fixtures shattered in their mountings. Crewmen were pounded in their chairs, saved from broken limbs and concussions only by their seat belts. A sonar screen imploded, then caught fire. A hideous roaring reverb went on and on.
The gravimeter display went blank.
'Working to reboot,' a nav tech shouted.
'Pilot, decrease depth,' Eberhard ordered. 'I don't want us hitting terrain…. Make your depth two thousand meters.'
Coomans and the copilot fought their controls. 'Crewman trapped in port-side autoloader mechanism,' the copilot said.
'Get him out of there,' Eberhard said. 'I don't care how! Get that equipment repaired.'
'Convoy aspect change,' Haffner said.
'Confirmed,' Beck said. 'They're fleeing toward the carrier group. New course is northwest.'
Beck eyed the imagery screen, and gasped. Two dozen mushroom clouds were visible, twisted, distorted, savaged by each other's conflicting blast fronts. The tons of radioactive steam had started to condense, and some of the clouds shed rain like infernal thunderheads. The surface of the ocean was an insane whirlpool of blowing spray and rogue waves, as each rising fireball sucked air toward its base, and each tsunami traced an ever- enlarging circle.
Everywhere were giant splashes, as smoking wreckage plummeted from the sky. The convoy formation was ruined. The ocean itself seemed to burn, as huge pools of oil and gasoline marked where fuel tankers had gone down. The pyre of the LNG carrier loomed over everything else.
Yet still, beneath it all, U.S. and Royal Navy frigates did their work. They were well poised now to wreak a terrible vengeance: Deutschland was almost helpless with her autoloaders damaged and with empty tubes.
'New ASROC torpedoes in the water,' Haffner screamed. 'Random spread, six or eight weapons… One is closing on us fast!'
'New weapons are between us and the convoy,' Beck announced. 'They're trying to drive us back.'
'Status of autoloader?' Eberhard snapped.
'Both sides out of action,' the copilot said. 'Crewman is badly pinned…. Manual loading will take several minutes.'
'Pilot, steer due east.' Coomans turned the ship hard. 'Incoming torpedo has active lock!
'High-pitched dings came over the sonar speakers.
'Pilot, make a knuckle.'
Beck was rocked to port and then to starboard. 'No effect.'
'Captain,' the copilot said, 'torpedo room man-incharge requests avoid all radical maneuvers, to aid repairs.'
If they couldn't make good knuckles, and they couldn't launch any countermeasures, and they had nothing to shoot back with..
The dings repeated, louder. Deutschland was making flank speed. 'That Mark fifty is gaining on us,' a fire control technician yelled.
