they walked back into the interior ship and headed forward toward their cabin.
Suddenly, off to the right of the screen, a new contact popped up. Ten miles away, but it had come up so suddenly that it had to be an extremely tiny contact. Perhaps a cabin cruiser, or one of the foolish small boats that regularly made the trip between California and Hawaii. On more than one occasion, Gaspert had had to slow to provide assistance to them in the form of fresh water, fuel, or simply sailing directions to Hawaii.
“What is—” Gaspert started to ask, intending to have the officer of the deck raise the new contact on the radio. But before he could finish the sentence, the contact jumped across the screen, closing the distance from
“
“Roger,
Then the forward lookout began howling. “Contact, bearing zero four five relative, position angle three — Captain, it’s a missile!”
“General alarm,” Gaspert snapped, ordering the civilian equivalent of general quarters. A gong began sounding immediately, and a recorded voice directed all passengers to return to their staterooms. Gaspert ran to the bridge wing, as though there were some way he could ward it off by his mere presence there. He could see it now, too, without the binoculars. It looked like a white sliver against the field of stars now emerging in the sky. But it was a deadly splinter, a contrail marking its course through the air. It was homing in on
Unlike her military counterparts, the
“
Gaspert keyed the mike as he shouted out damage control and maneuvering commands.
Coyote slouched in the elevated chair in the center of the compartment. His truncated sleeping hours were starting to catch up with him. “Any coffee left, Chief?” he asked the senior mess management specialist, who had come into TFCC to see when the admiral wanted to eat.
“Yes, sir. And what will you…?” A startled yelp from Commander Hanson, the flag TAO, stopped him.
“Vampires inbound!” The TAO’s voice cut through the activity immediately.
“What the bloody hell?” Coyote said. The hard gong of general quarters began sounding throughout the ship.
“Missile launch, from the Russian ship,” Hanson said. “It’s headed our way, Admiral.” Without pausing, he began conferring with the officer of the deck, ordering last-minute maneuvers that would probably be futile.
“Set EMCON Echo! Nothing radiating, nothing.
If the missile was targeting one of the rich sources of electromagnetic energy radiating from the carrier, shutting down all the radars and sensors could make it go stupid. There was nothing more really to do at this point, but Coyote could not bring himself to sit in his chair and simply watch. He paced behind Hanson and the watch officer, itching to give an order, any order. But it wasn’t necessary.
As he watched, the speed leader pointed directly at the carrier. It inched forward steadily. The computer evaluated the continuous radar hits, and then corrected the display. The speed leader was now pointed away from the carrier at a sixty-degree angle, and at a new target.
“
“Dear Lord,” Hanson breathed. He grabbed the marine radio mike and said, “
The ship-to-ship circuit was a babble of shouted commands and answers from the cruise liner. The mike was keyed, but no one answered the carrier’s call-up.
Just then, the speed leaders from the American missile intercepted the speed leaders from the Russian missile, directly over the symbol marking
FIVE
On the fantail, one of the men Erica had been flirting with muttered, “Bitch.” He turned to stare out at the sea. A flash of light caught his attention. He perked up immediately. “Hey, fireworks!” He had just tapped his buddy on the shoulder to get him to turn around when the first missile struck.
After flashing through the air at almost impossible speeds, it penetrated the skin of the ship just above the waterline. From there, it continued through the ship for twenty feet before the delayed fuse detonated the warhead. This particular fuse was guaranteed to ensure the missile exploded deep inside a ship where it could create the most damage rather than simply piercing the outer compartments.
The compartment it finally entered was the main engineering space. This compartment housed the four boilers that were connected to steam turbines, as well as the reduction gear and the beginning of the propeller shaft.
Three engineers were in the compartment, although the normal watch required only one. One was working on a bilge pump, garnering some overtime. The man on watch was monitoring the gauges and dials that spelled out every detail of the ship’s engineering plant. A third was studying his emergency procedures book in preparation for the next Coast Guard classification exam.
They had just a split second to hear the soul-shattering noise of metal crumpling and twisting before the warhead detonated. The engineer on watch stood, and had taken one step toward his console when the warheads detonated.
Four point five kilograms of heavy explosive converted the metal immediately around it into molten fluid and shrapnel, and catapulted those droplets in all directions at once. They ripped through everything in their path, piercing more metal, until one shard punctured a fuel line.
The body of the missile continued on through the compartment, shoving the rest of the flaming debris in front of it. The remaining propulsion fuel in the weapon’s main body was ignited by a fireball, and contributed to the devastation.
The men in the compartment were flashed into charred corpses. They never knew that something had gone very, very wrong.
Although the engine compartment itself was surrounded by watertight compartments, it was not designed to withstand this assault. Additionally, none of the damage control hatches had been secured. The expanding ball of fire and hot gasses blew them off their hinges, and superheated steam, burning fuel, and fire poured to the upper
