John and Erica Cabot were on their second honeymoon, hoping desperately to patch up their differences. Erica, whose tolerance for alcohol was significantly lower than John’s, was not in a mood to try particularly hard.
“We should have gone to the dining room,” she said for the seventh time. “I like the people at our table. That’s why you don’t want to go, isn’t it? I was having too much fun.”
“That’s not it at all, as I told you. I just thought that since it’s such a nice night, we might—”
“Sit by the pool and watch half-naked women?” Erica sneered. “Well, two can play that game.” She bounced away to the other side of the pool, sat down on an empty deck seat in the middle of three men, and started talking to them.
John started after her, and stopped. What was the use? She was right. What would it have hurt for him to go along with the dining room routine? Just because he didn’t like dressing up didn’t mean he shouldn’t compromise from time to time.
Emboldened by the alcohol, he rounded the pool and sat down on Erica’s chair. The three men who had been chatting with her immediately backed off. Erica shot him a scornful look.
“You’re right,” he said rapidly, trying to get it all out before he changed his mind. “It was selfish of me to insist on coming to the pool. Come on, if we hurry, we can get dressed and still make it for dessert.”
Amazement followed by love dashed across her face. “Thank you,” she said. “Oh, John, thank you.”
She left her hamburger sitting on the table as she rose to join him. Hand in hand, hips and elbows touching, 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 Montego Bay to half of what it had been a second earlier.
“Montego Bay, this is Jefferson!” The voice from the carrier cut through the static on the ship-to-ship radar.
“Roger, Jefferson, what the—shit!” The truth took a few seconds to sink in. His first thought was that there had been a radar malfunction, and a picture had simply corrected itself. If that was the case, the contact was within five miles of the cruise ship and it was even more critical that they keep a close eye on her.
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 Montego Bay, closing the distance every microsecond.
This can’t be happening. Not with four hundred and twenty-seven passengers on board.
Unlike her military counterparts, the Montego Bay was not built with watertight integrity throughout the ship. Certainly, her hull kept the ocean at bay, and there were a few watertight doors between decks. But she was riddled with elevator shafts, passageways, and large areas of space divided by only the flimsiest bulkheads. She was not designed to take much damage and keep floating.
“Montego Bay, this is Jefferson!”
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. Now!” Coyote could already hear the odd patches of silence as sensor operators began shutting down their gear. The constant background noise was noticeable only in its absence.
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.
“Jefferson, Lake Champlain TAO. Snapshot procedure — two birds launched. Be advised we are standing by to launch additional rounds.” The TAO’s voice shivered slightly, as though the speaker had just realized what he’d done.
“Dear Lord,” Hanson breathed. He grabbed the marine radio mike and said, “Montego Bay, this is Jefferson. Do you copy?”
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 Montego Bay’s location. The circuit went dead.
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.