America

order for the violent turn that he knew was coming. 'Anything doesn't work, we'll write a hot letter to Electric Boat.'

The Los Angeles-cass attack submarine that had sailed into the midst of the torpedo duel at twenty knots was USS Colorado Springs. Her sonar operators heard the thrashing of La Jolla's prop, then the echo-ranging ping of America's sonar. No neophyte, the captain knew precisely what he was hearing — torpedoes had been fired. The sonar quickly provided bearings to the active sonar and the accelerating sub. The problem, of course, was determining which sub contained the pirates and which one held good guys.

Within seconds his leading sonarman confirmed his first deduction. Mk-48s were indeed in the water, several of them. The distinctive sound of the swash-plate piston engine — which burned Otto-fuel, nitrogen ester with an oxidant — driving the pump-jet propulsion system was one he had heard many times before on exercises.

Seconds later the sonarman told the captain that at least one of the torpedoes was closing on Colorado Springs.

At least now, the captain reflected, he knew which sub was which.

'Fire two fish on the bearing of the incoming. Quickly now, let's do it, people.' Fortunately the integrated sonar/combat control suite performed automatically. As the sonar derived a bearing, that data was fed into the system, which calculated the presets and electrically set the selected torpedoes while the tubes were being flooded.

When the outer doors were opened, the two torpedoes were ejected from their tubes by compressed air, their engines started, and they raced away, accelerating swiftly. The crew of the Springs did not elect to let the fiber-optic wires reel out behind them, however. Already the boat was accelerating. The captain intended to maneuver as violently as he could to cause the incoming fish to miss; fiber- optic wires would probably be broken, and they probably weren't long enough anyway.

With both torpedoes gone, Colorado Springs laid over in a hard turn designed to put the incoming torpedo forward of the beam, forcing it into a maximum rate turn, which might make it miss. And she launched a half dozen decoys.

Ruben Garcia's screaming voice in his earphones startled P-3 pilot Duke Dolan. 'Torpedoes in the water, noisemakers. They're shooting at each other.'

The P-3 Orion was orbiting at 25,000 feet, fifty miles from the center of the sonobuoy set. Gauzy cirrus aloft softened the afternoon sunlight, diffused it. Four miles below, the surface of the sea appeared a deep blue. The haze and the sea merged twelve or fifteen miles away, so there was no horizon. The surface of the placid ocean was flawless, unbroken by a single ship or wake. And yet, it wasn't empty.

'Tell SUBLANT,' Duke told the TACCO. 'Get permission for us to go back in. There may be survivors or something.'

'Roger.'

'Tell me if you hear any explosions.'

'Got it,' Garcia snapped and flipped switches so he could talk to SUBLANT on the radio.

Aboard America, Eck and Kolnikov heard the high-pitched pinging of the incoming torpedoes as they locked onto their target. La Jolla's decoys were pouring noise into the water, but Eck's sonar was so advanced that the decoy noise was easy to filter out. The Mk-48 Kolnikov had fired, however, lacked Revelation's sophistication.

Although he had ordered America to increase her speed drastically, Kolnikov had not ordered a turn for fear of breaking the fiber-optic wire unreeling behind the war shot aimed at La Jolla.

Eck studied the torpedo sonar data displayed on a separate screen.

He had too many targets. He couldn't tell which was the real one, so he made the assumption that all the targets were false and the submarine was behind them. Eck turned the torpedo to go around the targets he could see and come in behind, where he hoped the forty-knot fish would find La Jolla. He was so intent on his task that he didn't hear the antitorpedo weapons being fired from the sail and accelerating away, though the sonar faithfully captured the event.

Kolnikov glanced up at the bulkhead-mounted sonar panels and stood frozen, mesmerized. He could see the decoys, like newborn stars, and the river of disturbed water that was La Jolla's wake, which appeared as a luminescent flow of gases in a darker universe. The sight that captured his attention, though, was the streaks left by the wakes of the speeding torpedoes — both his going away and La Jolla's incoming.

He couldn't take his eyes off the two incoming fish, racing toward him like tracer bullets.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught the streaks that were the antitorpedo weapons. The one on the right went straight as a flashlight beam for the incoming warhead — and hit it. The detonation of shaped charge rocked the submarine slightly and appeared on the screen as a brilliant flash of white light.

The second antitorpedo weapon missed.

Involuntarily he grabbed for the table, braced himself, unable to tear his eyes from the screen.

Now a series of strobing lights flashed across the screen as more than 150 transducers buried in America's anechoic skin began emitting sound in a pattern that was designed to confuse the acoustic receivers in the nose of the torpedo and cause it to turn.

Racing in at forty knots, the incoming death ray seemed to turn away from the center of the screen at the very last second and disappear out the side.

The torpedo had missed!

Vladimir Kolnikov exhaled convulsively.

Over the noise of the incoming torpedo, Buck Brown heard the explosion caused by the premature detonation of La Jolla's first torpedo and assumed it had struck America. He also heard the active sonar countermeasures of America, but the reality of what he was hearing didn't register. He was too busy tracking the incoming torpedo and ensuring that the tactical plot was correct.

Junior Ryder also heard the first explosion and thought for a fleeting instant that he had torpedoed America. That thought died when he heard the active countermeasures. Although he had never heard it before, he had been briefed about it and recognized the sound for what it was. Still, these thoughts occupied only a corner of his consciousness — his attention was devoted to the tactical plot, a two-dimensional computer presentation of the tactical situation. His submarine was in the center of the plot. America and the Springs were depicted in their relative positions… as was the track of the incoming torpedo.

He could see that the torpedo was being steered around the acoustic decoy cloud. He ordered more decoys deployed and called for a hard turn into the oncoming torpedo to try and force an overshoot.

If his boat had been going faster, the maneuver would have worked.

Ryder's eyes widened and he involuntarily grabbed the table as the torpedo track merged with the center of the plot.

The explosion rocked the boat.

Aft! It hit aft!

Then the lights went out and the computer screens went blank.

The explosion of the shaped charge in the warhead of the Mk-48 ruptured the hull of USS La Jolla. The enormous pressure of the ocean did the rest. The engineering spaces were crushed. The watertight hatch leading forward held for a long moment… as the steel carcass that had been a sub settled deeper into the sea. Down she went, slowly, the pressure building inexorably.

'Emergency surface. Blow the tanks!'

Junior Ryder shouted the order over the groans of steel being twisted and deformed under the enormous pressure. They heard the compressed air being released, heard the rumbling of water being forced from the ballast tanks.

The generators had failed. In the glow of the battery-operated emergency lantern, Junior watched the depth gauge. If he could get the sub to the surface he could save some of his men — the ones still alive. If not…

Behind him the talkers on the sound-powered circuit were trying to raise the men in the engineering spaces.