Victoria instinctively ran to the side of the flight deck and gripped one of the rails. The ship’s aft end was beginning to rise out of the water. Sailors scrambled toward the sides and jumped overboard. The center of the ship had buckled and snapped, its back broken. The bow was moving upward, angling itself opposite the stern. Everything amidships was already underwater.
Victoria recognized the frantic voice now on the 1MC. It was the XO, whom she had met less than an hour ago. He called out, “ALL HANDS, ABANDON SHIP! I SAY AGAIN, ALL HANDS ABANDON SHIP!”
Her grip on the flight deck rails tightened. She was now looking down through the open hangar door. Dark gray water flooded in through an open hatch, with a pair of sailors surfacing and heading toward daylight.
She heard dozens of splashes in the ocean as sailors began jumping overboard en masse. Victoria found herself recalling stories of Pearl Harbor and the people trapped in compartments and spaces below the waterline as the ships sank.
She felt conflicting impulses. The intense fear of her survival instinct, followed by an illogical but overwhelming urge to dive into the rising water. To swim into the flooded passageway of the sinking warship. The urgent need to find someone — anyone — to save. She couldn’t leave without trying…
“Boss! Let’s go! Jump!” Plug was screaming from the other side of the flight deck. Then he leapt off and fell, legs and arms flailing, into the ocean.
Victoria began backtracking on the flight deck, heading higher and aft… climbing toward the stern, which was now up and out of the water.
A distant thunderous boom broke the sound of rushing water. Her eyes snapped toward the starboard horizon and she saw a geyser of seawater, metal, and fire. The other destroyer. Another torpedo had hit its mark.
“JUMP!”
Her vision shifted to port. A few sailors were floating in the water, buoyed by their inflatable vests. Others were treading water nearby, yelling for Victoria to jump. The water was rising faster by the second, the ship making impossible dull creaking noises under the strain — a metallic warrior giving herself up to the sea.
“MA’AM, JUMP!”
Victoria edged to the side of the ship, climbing over the flight deck nets. She pulled the black beads around her flight vest and heard a pop as it filled with compressed air. Then she jumped, plunging into the water, the weight of her heavy boots and flight gear momentarily pulling her under. She rose up to the surface, buoyed by the inflatable vest that formed a horseshoe around her neck.
“SWIM AWAY FROM THE SHIP, MA’AM!”
Twenty yards away, the group of survivors floated in the water, watching the ship sink. She recognized one of them as one of the ship’s senior enlisted, a chief. He was waving his arm to get her attention, and motioning for her to swim to them. He was right. She needed to get away from the ship. The destroyer’s cavities were now filling with water, and soon the massive metal object would plunge into the depths. This would create powerful eddies that would act like a rip current, dragging its victims into the deep.
Victoria heard someone shouting behind her. She turned and risked a glance, swimming sidestroke. She now had a better view of the bow and stern, each angled upward like Poseidon himself had snapped the ship in half.
A sailor fifteen yards behind her thrashed around, his screams muted by large gulps of seawater. Victoria almost swam back to him but stopped as she realized what was happening.
A few sailors were there, in no man’s land. They were being dragged toward the sinking ship like it was a whirlpool or black hole. The last visible pieces of the superstructure, bow, and stern disappeared beneath the waves. The handful of sailors who had been too close soon followed.
Victoria watched in horror as at least a dozen young men went under. An incredibly powerful undertow pulled anything and anyone nearby into the death trap, only to be replaced by oil slicks and loose gear.
She turned and swam as hard as she could toward the group of sailors in the opposite direction. Hard strokes, cupping the water with her hands, pulling and kicking. Swallowing gulps of ocean and cursing and coughing.
A few moments later, she reached the group of survivors and allowed herself to rest, floating in the waves. The chief took a muster.
She looked back toward the now-empty sea. A few other groups of sailors were scattered in a wide area around the remnants of the ship.
Helmets and vests and papers and… and a few bodies, floating face down. No lifeboats. Just a few people who had jumped off in the chaos.
Plug was on the other side of the oil slick. Eventually, he and the others swam to join Victoria’s group, about three dozen of them in all. A few didn’t have life vests. They were treading water, using the dead man’s float. Plug shimmied out of his vest and flight suit. Then he placed his vest back on and created a makeshift inflation device by tying the flight suit’s arms and legs together to capture pockets of air in the legs. He handed it to one of the vest-less survivors.
Some were crying. Some were hysterical. Some were quiet, in shock. Many were bleeding from wounds received during the attack. As they floated in the rolling Pacific, Victoria thought about all of the shark attacks during World War Two. Many crew members had survived being sunk by torpedoes only to live short, hellish existences while packs of hungry sharks tore them and their shipmates apart. Would that happen to them?
One of the young sailors pointed to the west. “Hey, here comes a SAR bird!” His voice was filled with hope.
Victoria turned, squinting to see through the sun’s glare. The dark silhouette of a helicopter made its way toward them.
“It doesn’t sound right.”
Plug twisted around in the water to face her. “Chinese?”
She didn’t respond.
The helicopter looked similar to the French Dauphin. It approached with speed and then turned and began circling their group at low altitude. The cabin door opened, and a crew member trained his machine gun on them.
A bright red star was painted on the aircraft’s tail.
8
David sat at the head of the table during the Silversmith team’s morning intel brief. Susan was absent, working on the other side of the base on her special program again. More and more lately, David had been taking her place as the senior member of these meetings. His ascension over the past year was lightning-fast. One of the ex-military officers joked that David was on the wartime promotion track.
The initial suspicion David received after the Chinese red cell incident had faded. Over the past two years, David had earned his chain of command’s trust and admiration through repeated contributions to the Joint Task Force Silversmith. His experience as a technologist, and his natural flare for strategic planning, made him a valued addition to the war planning team.
Over the past several months, David had attended intense training sessions throughout the country. Most of his classmates had been new CIA recruits, future case officers and analysts preparing for a life of clandestine operations. Outwardly, David and his classmates were thrilled by the excitement of their work. Inwardly, each worried about the dangers they would soon face.
Now, sitting in Susan’s chair, David wasn’t just acting as an analyst. He was making decisions on how Silversmith would use their intelligence information, deciding what would be kept secret, what would be disseminated, and what would be leaked. This level of security preserved the future flow of intelligence.