“Snapshot tube one,” Pastor called. “Alter presets to set in a ten-thousand-yard run to avoid homing on the Jacksonville.” Pastor waited. At least he was going to get a shot off at this bastard. The pinging of the torpedo blasted into the room, getting closer with each ping, until he could hear the screw noise of the incoming torpedo.
“Weapon ready, sir,” the weapons officer shouted over the latest ping.
“Fire,” Pastor ordered. He realized that he hadn’t heard a ping in the last few seconds, only the sound of the torpedo’s screw noise. He watched as the weapons officer rotated the trigger to the standby position.
Still no ping from the torpedo. A moment of hope. It would be too good to be true, he thought, getting to counterfire at the Destiny and having the Destiny’s torpedo be a dud.
As the weapons officer pulled the trigger to the fire position. Pastor abruptly realized it was Christmas Day and his children on the other side of the world would be awake, opening their presents. The sound of the torpedo-ejection mechanism blasted into his eardrums as the torpedo in tube one was launched, the Birmingham’s answer to the Destiny’s Nagasaki weapon.
“Merry Christmas, Destiny,” Pastor said, as another booming crash hit his eardrums.
The second noise was the sound of the first Nagasaki torpedo detonating on the top surface of the hull, the explosion ripping down from aft of the sail, blowing a hole in the hull big enough to drive an eighteen-wheel truck into the ship. The hull rupture was located just aft of control, and the ripping metal and wave of water, the pressure of it enough to cut a man in half at that depth, slammed into Pastor and sent his body hurtling forward to the bulkhead at the ship-control panel, ripping his flesh and bone. The force of the water blasting into the hull at a thousand feet beneath the surface was enough to bend the hull to a thirty-degree angle, not quite enough to break it in half.
The second, redundant Nagasaki hit them, and this explosion did fracture the hull already weakened by the first detonation, the aft end of the ship separating, both hull fragments drifting to the ocean bottom 2000 feet farther down. The hulls hit the rocky bottom, groaning and creaking and breaking apart still further, littering the bottom with broken pipes and tanks and pieces of equipment. There were no recognizable bodies.
Seven miles to the northeast another hull hit the rocky bottom and disintegrated, two of its weapons detonating as it hit the bottom. The USS Jacksonville had arrived at its final resting place.
Three thousand feet above the remains of the Birmingham, the SLOT buoy reached the surface, extended a whip antenna and transmitted Birmingham’s last message to the US Navy Comstar satellite, then flooded and sank, coming to rest near the screw of the ship. Several hours later, when the bubbles had died down and the reactor metal had cooled, the ocean bottom was, once again, quiet.
The buzz of the phone rang in Tanaka’s stateroom. It was Mazdai in the control room.
“Sir, the torpedo fired from the first target went far off course and just shut down. It seems to be sinking and imploding now. The threat is gone.”
There never had been a real threat, Tanaka thought, concentrating on his sonar screen, looking for the next contact.
He had put the phone down and continued looking at the display, his aggression seeming to fuel him. He wasn’t hungry or thirsty. He wanted blood, the Americans’ blood. He stared at the console a full five hours before the next contacts came, another two American ships, both of them 688-class ships as the first two had been.
An hour after that Tanaka had made a second quick trip to the control room, four more Nagasakis had been launched and two more hulls were wreckage at the bottom of the sea. Tanaka then called one of his officers to paint small American flags on the bulkhead in the control room to show the sinkings they had made. With the sinking of the first ship in the Sea of Japan, this now made five flags for the officer to paint. Five ships. Perhaps another two dozen to go before Tanaka could rest.
The ship carried only twenty-one weapons. He had launched ten. It was time to stop doubling up. He had been launching two weapons at each target to insure that if one failed, the other would score a kill. But now with the success rate this high, and the use of torpedoes this swift, he would only launch one per target. Which gave him eleven more targets.
The Winged Serpent continued northwest, hunting.
CHAPTER 33
The afternoon watch on Christmas Day passed without incident. The ship had been at periscope depth for most of the day. The men were happy; they had received their familygrams, transmitted by USUBCOM headquarters, each man aboard allowed one short transmission from his wife or kids or girlfriend or parents.
Pacino’s familygram had come in from Tony on the Writepad. The youngster was almost a teenager, twelve years old, missing his father, but then, Pacino being away had been almost normal. All the sea duty had kept him away from the boy for too long. And now, nearing the end of his naval career, Janice had left him and taken Tony with her. The familygram from Tony was brief and gut-wrenching. Pacino put it down on the fold-out desk, staring off into space, missing his son, missing his old life, wanting to toss the football with Tony, race against him in the Go Karts, hang out with him at the amusement park, cruise the beach with him in the sports car.
All the things they’d done in the past, but hadn’t realized would vanish into the past. It had seemed that Tony would always be there, and now he was living somewhere in New Jersey, over 300 miles away from Virginia Beach, which was over 13,000 miles from this Japan Oparea.
The Writepad’s annunciator alarm went off, beeping into the quiet of the stateroom. Pacino silenced it before it could wake up Paully, who was asleep in the upper rack, having been awake for more than twenty hours and only agreeing to go to bed when Pacino had ordered him. Pacino knew he should hit the rack himself but couldn’t seem to slow down his mind. He stroked the software keys of the Writepad, going deeper into the software until it displayed the E-mail he’d just been beeped for, and realized it was a second familygram, this one from Eileen Constance—
MICHAEL, JUST WANTED TO WISH YOU LUCK. I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU AGAIN. MERRY CHRISTMAS.