Goliath Page 3

  “Solution ready,” the XO reports.

  “Weapons ready. Thirty-five percent fuel remaining, run-to-enable two-five-hundred yards.”

  “Ready—shoot!”

  Two Mk-48 Advanced Capability wire-guided torpedoes spit out from the Jacksonville’s bow, homing in on the unknown aggressor.

  “WEPS, release countermeasures, come to course three-one-zero—”

  Petty Officer Cope grabs his headphones as an explosion tears at his eardrums. Then he hears something he has never heard before—the frightening crunch of an imploding steel hull.

  A heavy pulse of structural vibrations shudders the Jacksonville. Power flickers off. Emergency lights illuminate the frightened faces of the junior members of the crew, hyperventilating at their stations.

  “Conn, sonar, sir, that explosion … it was the Hampton.”

  “Skipper, contact has launched two more torpedoes, both active—”

  Two hundred and fifty yards to the west, the Jacksonville’s two Mk-48 ADCAP torpedoes have slowed to forty knots. Onboard sonars ping, searching the sea for the enemy contact, the weapon’s real-time computers sending highly processed data back to the sub via a trailing fiber-optic wire.

  Two consecutive returns. The torpedoes accelerate, pinging faster—

  —before slamming nose first into two antitorpedo torpedoes.

  The concussion wave from the double detonations sends reverberations through the Jacksonville’s interior hull, as it rolls the submarine hard to port.

  “Conn, ship’s own were struck by antitorpedo torpedoes! Both ADCAPS destroyed—”

  Captain O’Rourke stares at his XO, a cold chill running down his spine. His sub, one of the finest in the world, has been outgunned and outmaneuvered.

  “Skipper, incoming torpedo! Impact in ten seconds—”

  “Brace for impact!”

  A resounding double explosion from beneath the hull cracks open the Jacksonville’s keel. A massive jolt—the sub suddenly blanketed in suffocating darkness. Shouts, screams, and yells rise above an insane chaos of shearing metal and ripping bulkheads. Steam bursts from unseen pipes. A shower of sparks illuminates a gallery of ghostly faces—petrined, confused, their shattered minds screaming in the terror of one final, unified thought—I’m going to die—as Death reaches for them.

  It breaks through the hull with sonic speed, crushing its victims with an icy embrace.

  Aboard the USS Ronald Reagan

  Captain Hatcher rushes into the Command Information Center, grabbing hold of a console as his ship lurches beneath him. “Report!”

  Rocky Jackson stands. “It was a series of underwater munitions, four in all, very powerful. Totally blew out three of the four props and compromised both layers of the hull’s torpedo-protection system. The engine room’s taking on water, with water already reported as high as deck four—”

  “My God …” Hatcher feels the blood drain from his face. An American supercarrier sinking? Impossible …

  “Sir, it’s not just us, the entire fleet’s under attack, and I’ve lost contact with both subs.”

  “Goddamn it.” Hatcher looks around. “Where the hell’s Strejcek?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Commander, order everyone but the catapult and Pri-Fly crews on deck. Launch as many birds as you can while we still have electricity for the catapults—”

  A groan of metal drowns out Hatcher’s last order. The ship’s steel plates wail in protest, straining to support the floundering carrier’s rising bow.

  “Hatch—”

  “I need to get to the SSES. You have your orders, Commander.” Hatcher grabs the watertight door of the CIC to keep from falling, then turns to face his wife. “Rocky, get your team out on deck—now!”

  Two decks up in Pri-Fly (Primary Flight Control), Air-boss James “Big Jim” Kimball and his miniboss, Kevin Lynam, bark out commands to their LSOs (landing signal officers), who are frantically working on the flattop six stories below. The control tower is electric with activity. Kimball, the choreographer for the chaotic jet-fighter ballet taking place on the flight deck, is demanding his crew launch no less than twenty aircraft within the next six minutes, an impossibility from which he refuses to back down.

  “Heads up on deck. Get ready to shoot Hornets five, six, and seven. Clear shoot lines. Clear catwalk—”

  Beneath a turbulent atmosphere of noise and exhaust, four hundred men and women attired in team colors scramble across a lurching flight deck that has suddenly become more carnival ride than airport runway.

  Twenty-year-old Ensign Rogelio Duron swears luridly in staccato Spanish as he tugs the parking blocks from the front tire of a Joint Strike Fighter—then screams as he is lifted off his feet and sucked headfirst into the engine inlet, blood and brain matter spraying the deck.

  Kimball slams the control tower window with a futile fist. “Goddamn sonuva bitch!” The Air Boss looks up to see an air wing returning from the east. “Shit—Kevin, get those two CSAs in the air before our Tomcats start dropping out of the fucking sky.”

  Belowdecks, frightened catapult technicians rush about in ankle-deep water as they hurriedly reset each cable, near panic with the horrible realization that they are involved in a high-stakes game of Russian roulette. Communication between the flight-deck crews and the tower is coming in too fast; it is just a matter of minutes before another deadly mistake happens. Precise prelaunch pressure loads must be fine-tuned to each aircraft’s weight, but there is no time for the usual measurement—nominal values being hurriedly guessed and set manually. Settings too low will fling a pilot and his aircraft straight into the water, too high and its structure will fail.

  Circling the melee is the E-2C Hawkeye Early Warning Aircraft, identifiable by the flat radar rotodome affixed horizontally atop its fuselage. Within the air-watcher, a team of operators use the APS-145 radar to organize the returning jet fighters’ midair refueling. From the Hawkeye’s cockpit, pilots and copilots stare in disbelief at the surreal disaster taking place below—warship after American warship sinking with inglorious rapidity beneath the lead gray waters of the Atlantic.

  Back on the carrier, another Joint Strike Fighter races down the runway as the bow of the Ronald Reagan heaves upward from the sea like a breaching humpback. The JSF pilot veers off the rising deck, airborne, until the dark ocean rushes up at him and his jet smashes nose first into a ten-foot swell.

  Jim Kimball sees the runway splinter as sections of the fractured prow fall back into the water. “That’s it, everyone out! Everyone on deck in life preservers on the double!”

  Rocky Jackson grabs an orange flotation vest from an officer, then hurries out on deck. “Has anyone seen the skipper?” She turns to the officer directing the crew into the lifeboats. “O’Malley, have you seen—”

  Shrapnel rains down upon her, a fragment of hot metal grazing her forehead as a helicopter blade shatters across the heaving deck, the rotor craft bursting in flames.

  Men race to save the pilot.

  Rocky is in a daze. “O’Malley, where’s the skipper?”

  “You’re bleeding, Jackson, now get in the goddamn boat!”

  Strong arms lift her into the life raft.

  “Fuck this, I gotta find Hatch!” Rocky jumps out of the life raft, reenters the superstructure, and races down a listing gray corridor in search of her husband.

  The water has reached Captain Hatcher’s waist by the time he enters the Ships Signals Exploitation Space, a top-secret chamber containing data links to all national and theater-level intelligence systems. The SSES anteroom is dark, the ship’s power out.

  Hatcher stumbles across three bodies, two officers and an MP. All floating facedown. All dead.

  “Admiral?” Hatcher rolls Brian Decker over, blood pouring from several bullet wounds. “Oh, Jesus …” He glances up at a flashlight’s beacon coming from within the SSES operations room, his security reflexes taking over.

  Hatcher removes the sidearm s
till holstered to the dead MP. He sloshes forward, peering into the high-level security chamber.

  Commander Shane Strejcek lurks by a computer terminal. Images flash rapidly across the screen, a remote palm-sized device attached to the hard drive downloading the sensitive data.

  “Strejcek? What the hell are you doing?”

  The XO turns. An explosion of heat slams Hatcher back against the far wall, a warm wave of blood pouring down his shirt, quenching the fire burning in his chest as a numbing paralysis sends him slipping to his knees in the crimson water.

  Strejcek approaches, Hatcher unable to raise the gun from the water. He has no strength to move, let alone speak.

  Strejcek stares serenely at his dying commander. “I’m sorry, Skipper, but I serve a higher calling.”

  Ignoring the cold water paralyzing her lower torso, and the warm blood oozing from her forehead, Rocky wades through the flooded corridor, the torrent rising fast, the fluorescent bulbs overhead flickering, threatening to plunge her into darkness. “Hatch?” She enters the open SSES chamber, then rushes forward, crying out as she sees him.

  “Hatch!” Rocky clutches her husband’s lifeless form to her chest, his blood pouring out across her life jacket. She holds his head above water, her right hand brushing against the pistol he is clutching, even in death. “Oh God, Hatch—”

  Looking up, she sees Strejcek. “Shane, help me—”

  Strejcek is caught off guard. “Rocky, what are you doing here?”

  “Help me, Goddamn it, someone shot—” She stares at the gun barrel pointed at her head. “You?” She feels for the weapon in her husband’s hand, now underwater.

  “You should have abandoned ship.” Strejcek bends over and reaches for her with his free hand.

  In one motion Rocky leaps to her feet and jams the muzzle of the MP’s gun into Strejcek’s open mouth. “Drop the gun!”

  Strejcek complies.

  Her teeth chatter against the cold, her hand shakes with emotion. She removes the muzzle from her superior’s mouth, mustering one adrenalinepacked syllable. “Why?”

  Strejcek exhales. “You’re so beautiful, Rocky, but you’re so blind. The world has cancer, and you’re still in the denial stage.”

  The ship lurches beneath them. Strejcek pushes her aside, diving for his weapon.

  Unfazed, she fires.

  A wad of blood and brain tissue splatters against the far wall as the boat’s traitorous second-in-command falls backward with a splash.

  Before she can catch a breath, the supercarrier is wrenched to starboard beneath her, as if tugged by the hand of Poseidon. Rocky tumbles sideways, regains her footing, then leaps into the heaving corridor, head-on into a wave of rushing water.

  Jesus … this isn’t happening …

  The sea races through the inclined passageway like a raging creek, the torrent dragging her with it. Gasping and kicking, Rocky endeavors to grab a ceiling pipe, succeeds, then arm-walks the chasm like a mountain climber dangling from a rope bridge as she drags herself toward the diminishing light at the end of the tunnel.

  Don’t stop …

  The cold water saps her strength, yet her world-filling anger refuses to allow her any rest. The sea is rising at her from behind as the ship groans a final tocsin warning of her impending death. Her fingers numb, her hands too frozen to maintain a controlled grip, Rocky stubbornly continues to ascend, her feet slipping wildly on the slick steel walls.

  Ducking through a knee-knocker, she fights to maintain equilibrium as an intersecting current sideswipes her from the galley.

  Don’t stop, don’t think, just go faster …

  The boat rolls again, its bow rising, sending a four-foot wall of water racing straight for her—

  Rocky grabs the pipes, sucks in a desperate breath, and ducks, as the swell buries her, pounding her chest as it hurtles down the passage. She opens her eyes, shivering from the cold, then climbs faster, the daylight winking at her, teasing her from a dismaying thirty feet up.

  A minute later she emerges from the open hatch, the gray sky rolling away as the deck heaves backward, threatening to send her spilling back into the corridor. She leaps sideways, then screams, dropping to her belly as an F/A-18E Super Hornet slides sideways across the tilting tarmac, its mangled bulk threatening to crush her. She covers her head, squeezing her eyes shut as the wreckage passes over her and crashes into the flight deck’s tower, now pitching backward as the carrier’s failing buoyancy yields its weight to the sea.

  Rocky crawls out from under some trailing debris, her fingers creating indentations in the soft top layer of the torn deck as she moves toward the rising portside rail. Dodging yet another avalanche of debris, she grabs onto one of the carrier’s now-loose retractable antennas as the deck climbs to an angle too steep even to kneel upon.

  Reaching up, she pulls herself to the rail and peers over the edge.

  Oh, God …

  The pitching sea is eight stories below but nowhere to be seen, concealed beneath the carrier’s keel, which is rising from the sea like a glistening steel whale poised to swallow her.

  Unable to jump, she holds on, praying for the ship to stop rolling. Shaking uncontrollably, she closes her eyes to shut out the vertigo and the wail of tortured metal, her trembling hand reflexively wiping the blood crusted on her half-frozen brow.

  The carrier stops rotating—and suddenly drops like an elevator. Rocky holds on, as water splashes across her face and the sea rushes up from below.

  Now! She climbs upon the listing rail and leaps.

  The cold wind rushes past her ears until she plunges feetfirst into the roaring ocean, sinking like an anchor. As she hits the water she inflates the vest, and its buoyancy halts her descent at twenty feet. Kicking and paddling, she fights her way back to the surface, the frothy layer appearing so close, yet always an arm’s distance away.

  Finally, her head pops free, somehow slipping into a valley between swells. The rolling ocean lifts and drops her, the nausea overwhelming her stomach and head. A current tugs at her from behind. Turning, she is horrified to witness the Ronald Reagan’s superstructure slip beneath the waves, expelling its last dying belch as it disappears into the vortex created by its own descent into the unforgiving sea.

  A steel-cold current of choking brine reaches out and grabs her. Panicking, she starts swimming, but the vortex is too strong, sucking her backward as it inhales her within its fury. Ocean swells become mountainous barriers, rising higher as she spins faster.

  Too strong …

  Rocky sucks in a last desperate breath as the cavitation of the displaced mass of the carrier snatches her about the waist and drags her below.

  She kicks and paddles in protest, wasting precious air as she fights to swim upstream against the maelstrom, the unfathomable suction spinning above the now-submerged wreckage.

  Forty feet … her diving watch displays, unheeded.

  Her pulse pounds in her ears.

  Sixty feet . . . sinister pressure assaults her eardrums as her limbs turn to lead.

  Eighty feet, forty seconds, thirty-one years … and still she is plummeting, ever downward.

  How deep can a human go and survive on a single breath of air? She remembers seeing specials on free-diving and wills herself not to waste precious energy by fighting.

  The haunting sounds of the depths envelop her. Rocky pinches her nose and blows, attempting to rid the pain from her ears. She looks down, falling feetfirst into the deep blue sea. Far below, the Ronald Reagan groans back at her as the once-mighty vessel disappears into murky shadows, approaching its final resting place.

  Please let me go …

  One minute … the pressure dragging her below easing only slightly, the pinch in her ears now daggers.

  One hundred twenty feet … still falling, strength and resolve diminishing with every foot.

  One fifty, her throat and chest on fire.

  At one hundred fifty-eight feet, the carrier releases her.

&n
bsp; The air space in Rocky’s flotation device has been compressed flat beneath six atmospheres of pressure. No longer buoyant, she continues falling, flailing in slow motion, a marionette dancing for Death’s amusement before He takes her.

  She closes her eyes, her body no longer hers, her mind in a fog, the sea ready to squelch the flames in her lungs. Pills were easier. Wish I had my pills. No more pain … no more gain, no more brain, no more fame, no more blame. Good-bye, Mom. Good-bye, Papa Bear.

  Something enormous sideswipes her face. Her eyes burst open against the tremendous impact, its brutality jolting her with adrenaline.

  A cloud of buoyant debris races up from the sunken carrier.

  Willing her arms to move, she reaches for the closest object, misses the first, then the second. She twists her torso, close to passing out as she aims for a large object rising from below … waiting … waiting … her eyes nearly popping out of their sockets as the object suddenly slams into her gut, her chest exploding as she latches on to the bucking bronco, her nose inhaling seawater, her mouth vomiting it back out.

  And still, she refuses to let go.

  The object twists in her grip as it pushes her higher, the helicopter tire somehow settling beneath her, driving her to the surface, spinning her as it rises.

  Rocky loops both legs and the crook of one arm around the tire, pinching her nose with her free hand as Death’s pressing blackness continues pushing in on her peripheral vision. A warm feeling fills her chest as she rises higher, the residual molecules of air in her lungs expanding, easing the scorching pain. With newfound strength, she grips the wheel’s strut tighter, gently expelling air to prevent her lungs from bursting and to keep dissolved nitrogen from forming deadly bubbles in her blood.

  The life vest reexpands, nearly pushing her from the tire.

  And then the incredible sound of life returns in one mighty swoosh as her body is literally launched from the sea. Thrown from the tire, she haltingly inhales a lungful of blessed air, her salt-burned throat heaving with the effort.

  Moaning involuntarily, she swims back to the tire and climbs on, hugging it as feeling slowly returns to her oxygen-deprived limbs.