Jannike flashed awake, reaching for her inhaler just as the door to her room opened in a blaze of light from the office beyond. Stricken by the asthma attack, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. Dr.
Passman staggered into the room. He wore a bathrobe and his feet were bare. It looked like the front of the robe and his face was covered in blood. Jannike sucked greedily on the inhaler, blinking to clear her eyes of sleep.
Passman made an obscene cawing sound, and more blood dribbled from his mouth. Janni gasped. He took two more faltering steps, and it seemed the bones of his knees dissolved. He fell back, and his body hit the linoleum floor with a wet smack. Janni saw that wavelike ripples traveled the length of his body, as though his insides had been liquefied, and in seconds he was surrounded by a viscous moat of his own blood.
She clutched her sheets tighter, drawing on the inhaler as she began to hyperventilate. Then another figure came into her room. It was Karin in her little black dress. She was coughing violently, wet, racking convulsions that spewed blood in a bright spray. Janni screamed through her own coughing fit, terrified at what she was seeing.
Karin tried to speak, but all that came out was a watery gargle. She stretched out with her arms in a supplicating gesture, her pale fingers reaching for Jannike. Janni hated herself for recoiling back to the far side of her bed, but she could not will herself forward. A crimson tear escaped the corner of Karin’s eye and left a thick red streak down to her jaw where it dripped, blooming like a rose when it pattered against her chest.
Like Passman seconds earlier, Karin could no longer support herself. She tipped backward, making no move to break her fall. When she hit the floor, it was as though her skin didn’t exist. Blood exploded everywhere as Karin’s body came apart, and in the instant before Jannike Dahl went into catatonic shock she was certain she was going insane.
CHAPTER 5
JUAN CABRILLO STUDIED THE TACTICAL DISPLAY ON the forward bulkhead of the Op Center for a few seconds, time he knew he didn’t have but needed to take anyway. Three of the four torpedoes fired from the Iranian Kilo Class sub were fanning out and tracking toward their targets, while the sonar showed the fourth had slowed so much that the computer gave only its approximate location.
There was less than two miles separating the containership Sagafrom the first torpedo, while the two-hundred-thousand-ton supertanker Aggie Johnstonhad another mile-and-a-half cushion. The third torpedo was coming straight for the Oregonat more than forty knots.
Cabrillo knew the Oregoncould take a direct hit, thanks to the reactive armor along her hull that exploded outward when struck by an incoming torpedo and negated the detonative forces, though it would likely damage critical systems. He could also dodge the incoming fish, using the Oregon’s superior speed and maneuverability, but the overshooting torpedo then would home in on the Sagaas a secondary target and seal her fate. There was simply no way for him to protect the two merchantmen and the Oregon, especially with the reserve torpedo lurking out there.
He was dimly aware of Hali Kasim sending a radio alert to the two ships about the inbound torpedoes, not that there was anything they could do. A ship the size of the Aggie Johnstonhad a pathetically large turning radius, and needed five miles to stop from her current cruising speed.
“I’m tracking two fast movers off the carrier,” Mark Murphy said from the weapons stations. “I suspect they’re S-3B Vikings, antisubmarine warfare planes armed with either Mark 46 or Mark 50 torpedoes.
That Kilo is going to have a real bad day starting in about ten minutes.”
“Which is five minutes too late for us,” Eric said.
“Hali, what’s the range to the fish tracking us?” Cabrillo asked
“Six thousand yards.”
And for the Saga?”
“Thirty-two hundred.”
Cabrillo straightened in his chair, his decision made. It was time to roll the dice and see what happened.
“Helm, increase speed to forty knots, put us between the Sagaand the torpedo headed for her.”
“Aye.”
“Wepps, open the ports for the forward Gatling and target that fish, slave your computer to the master sonar plot, and you might need the targeting reticle from the crow’s nest camera.”
“Just a second,” Mark said.
“Mr. Murphy.” Juan’s tone was sharp. “We don’t have a second.” Murph wasn’t listening. He was engrossed with something taking place on a laptop computer he had jacked into his system. “Come on, baby, learn it, will you,” he said anxiously.
“What are you doing?” Cabrillo asked, leaning over to compensate for the Oregon’s sharp curve through the water.
“Teaching the Whopper a new trick.”
Whopper was what he and Eric Stone called the Oregon’s supercomputer, having stolen the name from an old Matthew Broderick movie about a young computer hacker who breaks in to SAC/NORAD and almost starts a nuclear war.
“We don’t need new tricks, Wepps. I need that Gatling online and spooled up.” Murph spun around in his seat to look across the room at Max Hanley, who was engrossed with his own computer. “I don’t think this is going to work.”
“Keep at it, lad,” was all Max said.
“You two mind telling me what’s going on?” Juan asked, looking at each man in turn.
“Yes! Yes, yes, yes,” Mark crowed, jumping up from his chair and pumping his fists over his head. He began typing furiously, not bothering to sit again, his fingers flying over the keyboard, as dexterous as a classical pianist’s. “Logarithm’s lining up, targeting’s coming online. The onboard computer’s in sync with ours. I have full control.”
“Of what?”
Mark glanced at him with a fiendish grin. “We’re about to have ourselves a whale of a time.” Cabrillo blanched and spun to glance at Max. Hanley looked as inscrutable as a Buddha statue. “You can’t be serious,” Juan said but knew his second-in-command was. “You do know the last time the Russians tried to fire one of those things it blew a hole in the side of the Kurskand killed all one hundred and eighteen aboard? And this one’s an Iranian knockoff, for the love of God.”
“There’s a thousand yards between the Sagaand the torp,” Linda Ross said. With communications swirling among the freighters, the American battle group, and the fast-approaching ASW aircraft, she had taken over the sonar station so Hali Kasim could concentrate on the radios.
“Just giving you an option, Chairman,” Max said broadly.
“Don’t ‘Chairman’ me, you crafty old bastard.”
Juan studied the tactical display again, noting the Oregonwas about to slip between the incoming torpedo and its intended target. Because of the water density they needed to be directly in front of the torpedo if they were to have any realistic chance of hitting it. By the time they got into position, there would be less than five hundred yards between them and the weapon barreling in just ten feet below the surface.
From the camera on the loading derrick, Cabrillo could see the wake line of the incoming torpedo, a faint disturbance in the otherwise tranquil water. It was approaching at better than forty knots.
“Wepps, we need to take it before it dives for the keel.”
“Tracking,” Murph said.
Eric Stone slid the Oregoninto position, using her athwartship thrusters and a heavy blast from the magnetohydrodynamics on full reverse, to place them directly in the path of the torpedo.