almost due south… and sliding gently once again into the Typhoon's baffles. As with combat between fighter planes, the combatant who first spotted the other usually had the advantage. Montgomery was not about to lose it again.
'Mr. Villiers?'
'Tubes one through four are loaded, sir. Mark 48 ADCAP. Outer tube doors are open.'
'Are you tracking Mr. Ekhart's target?'
'We're tracking.'
'Fire one.'
'One away. Running hot and clean, positive guidance.'
'Fire two.'
'Two away. Positive guidance.'
'Fire three.'
'Three away.' Montgomery saved the fourth torpedo against the unexpected. Running time for the Mark 48s at a range of one mile was just under one minute.
'Torpedoes in the water! Very close! Bearing zero-zero-three, coming in directly astern!'
'Release countermeasure decoys!'
'Decoys away!'
'Come hard left! Full speed now!'
'Coming left.'
'Engineering! I want one hundred ten percent! Now!'
'Yes, Captain!'
'Captain! Torpedoes closing! Estimated range four hundred meters…'
'Move, damn you!' he screamed at the helmsman. 'Put the helm hard over!
Stand the bastard on his side!'
'I knew you should have fired the missile when you had the chance,' Strelbitski said. 'I will see to it that-'
'You are at liberty to report me to Moscow,' Dobrynin said. The deck was tilting now at an angle of nearly thirty degrees, forcing him to grab a stanchion to support himself. 'Assuming we survive the next few minutes.'
'Two hundred meters…'
'Release more countermeasures!'
Ekhart heard the increase in the pitch of the fast-pinging active sonar as the lead torp sprinted the last few yards to its target. He whipped off his headset. 'Thar she blows!' he called as the rest of the sonar operators pulled off their earphones as well.
The first explosion rumbled through the water, louder than the blast that had rocked them earlier, but not nearly so damaging this far beneath the ice.
Galveston rocked to starboard, shuddered, then tilted back to port.
An instant later, the second torpedo struck home, the detonation thundering through the water close on the heels of the first.
The third torpedo did not detonate. Either it had been seduced by the Typhoon's noisemaker decoys, or the first two explosions had damaged it. No matter. As soon as Ekhart slipped his headset back on, he could hear the unmistakable sounds of water flooding a large, empty space, a rushing, thundering sound, punctuated by startling popping noises.
Homing on her screws, striking the Typhoon in the stern, the first ADCAP must have ruptured the seal around one of her drive shafts, sending water pouring into her engine spaces. As he continued to listen, Ekhart heard a low, eerie groan building to an almost human wail of agony as steel warped under incredible stress, not from depth ? the Typhoon was not nearly deep enough for that ? but from unbalanced loads surpassing engineering tolerances.
He was hearing the sound of the huge sub's back breaking as her after spaces flooded and started dragging her down.
'Captain, this is Sonar,' he said. 'Two hits. I'm picking up breakup noises.'
'Pipe it over the ICS.'
He flipped a switch, transmitting the death cries of the giant Russian sub throughout the boat. Ekhart had half expected the crew to break into cheering, but the Galveston remained death-silent. Now he could hear the rustle of air bubbles streaming into the void. The target was changing aspect too as it dropped away into blackness.
'Now hear this' rasped over the ICS speaker. 'This is the captain speaking. All I can say, men, is congratulations to each and every one of you on a job very well done. The details of this mission may have to remain secret, but I can tell you that Washin ton had information that our target was a Russian Typhoon that had surfaced in order to launch her nuclear missiles.
Your action prevented that launch, and the country and the world owes you a very large debt.
'Sonarman First Class Ekhart, I want to extend to you a very special job well done. That was good work, picking out the Typhoon's screws from the background garbage. You may have saved the boat, and you certainly contributed to the success of our mission. I'll be writing you up in my after action report, recommending you for special commendation…'
Ekhart did not feel like he deserved commendation. His… talent, his ability to feel out an opponent in the darkness of the ocean, had just been put to the ultimate test, and 150 people had died. True, they'd been trying to kill him and his shipmates at the same time, but it was still not something he could feel proud about.
The sonarman sitting beside him clapped him on the shoulder. 'Real number-one job, Rudi.'
'Yeah,' another said, grinning from ear to ear. 'The Old Man usually ain't none too free with his 'well dones.' Good work!'
Somehow, though, Ekhart had never felt more distant from his shipmates than he did at that moment. He felt both proud of his skill and ashamed of the fact that he'd just helped kill 150 men, submariners like himself.
He wished that he'd never joined the Navy.
The news that Galveston had torpedoed a Russian PLARB had everyone in the Crisis Management Group keyed to fever pitch. All expected some form of Russian retaliation, either against American submarines in the Barents Sea, or more likely, against the carrier battle force at Bear Station. Oddly, while the Kola bases remained on full alert, no new air strikes, no cruise missile attacks had been launched.
'Since that time,' a military aide, a Navy captain, was saying, 'there have been five additional incidents in the area. We're still checking on some of them, but it appears that at least four more Russian submarines have been sunk during the last three hours.'
'What kind of subs were they?' someone in the audience asked.
'Two were PLARBs. Not Typhoons, but older models. A Yankee II and, we think, a Delta IV. We don't know that they were part of the Krasilnikov ultimatum, but they were heard to be flooding their missile tubes in preparation for launch. The other two were attack subs trying to work their way toward our task force at Bear Station.'
The doors at the end of the room opened, and a close-knit cluster of men in suits and in uniforms walked in. 'Ladies and gentlemen,' Gordon West announced from the head of the pack. 'The President of the United States!'
The people at the table stood with a rumble of pushed-back chairs.
