Then the contrail disappeared.
Phantom torpedoes drifted to the back of his mind as he digested the latest menace of a submarine-launched anti-ship missile. A canister had breached the surface. The weapon had then ignited, flying into the sky and revealing its exhaust. Then it had reached a waypoint and turned towards Taechong Nineteen, becoming an invisible spec.
His ship lacked the technology to track the missile, much less shoot it down. His heart climbed into his throat, and he forced himself to spit out an order.
“Incoming missile! Deploy chaff!”
The fake wind carried the popping thud of canisters belching metal into the sky. He doubted the airborne shards would fool the incoming missile’s seeker, but he lacked better options.
He surprised himself with his next thought — calculating missile flight time. Assuming ten nautical miles of distance at launch and a speed of six hundred knots, he decided his men had less than a minute to react.
But it was plenty of warning to abandon ship.
He opened his mouth to give the order, but then he reconsidered, wondering if his admiralty would view such compassion as cowardice.
“Prepare damage control teams,” he said. “Don firefighting gear and man hoses.”
He waited as time accelerated with his anguish.
“Damage control teams are manned, sir,” the executive officer said.
“Have you sent our tactical data to the squadron?” Kye asked.
“Yes, sir. We will be credited with the sinking.”
A sick feeling overtook him. Replaying the vision in his mind, he tried to convince himself that his torpedo’s explosion had followed the enemy’s missile launch. Perhaps his eyes had missed the contrail’s early evidence.
No, he concluded. The detonation had preceded the incoming missile, and submarines with cracked keels don’t launch missiles.
His torpedo had hit something else.
Staring at the water churning behind his propellers, Kye recalled the nautical chart, and in a moment of stunning clarity, he understood.
The enemy had fled into the search area of a friendly Sango class submarine, drawing his torpedo towards his countrymen and killing them. A pit burned in his stomach until the howl of the approaching missile rattled him.
He looked up, and a deafening sound carved an arc over his head. His startle reflex scrunched his lean frame, and he felt a shockwave catapulting him as he lost consciousness.
Salt water burned his abraded leg, waking him as he bobbed. The pain heightened the anger surging within him when he noticed the billowing flames and black smoke enveloping his ship. He hoped that men would survive and that the ship would stay afloat, but he knew the blast had rendered his vessel useless.
Kye raised his hand, screamed, and smacked the water.
He had used the proper search technique to find his adversary, and he had been decisive in his attack. But somehow, with an inexplicable mix of skill and luck, his enemy had achieved a resounding victory.
A solitary thought pushed all others aside.
Revenge.
CHAPTER 5
Terry Cahill commanded the world’s most versatile vessel.
He stood at the corner of the bridge that jutted from the ship’s starboard bow. Through the polycarbonate windows that interlaced steel bars backed and reinforced for submerging, he watched the long prow slice through the waves at the Goliath’s maximum encumbered speed of thirty-two knots.
A glance over his left shoulder showed the laser cannon’s raised hatch on the left half of the ship. With the entire twenty-six- man crew tending to propulsion and preparing to submerge the vessel, he expected the laser’s covering, which seemed part of another vessel, to sheathe the weapon from corrosive saltwater.
A farther twist of his torso revealed the Goliath’s cargo, the Scopène class submarine, Specter. Rising at forty-five degrees, arms reached upward from the Goliath’s starboard hull to ribs that embraced rolled and arced steel plates, which supported a mesh-like grated rubberized surface to cradle the Specter’s underbelly.
Spray shot from the sea, offering periodic kisses to the cradle’s underside, which extended convex shapes downward. The pontoon-like ballast tanks below the bed offset part of the cargo’s weight when submerged.
From his elevated height on the bridge, he saw the hydraulic presses that worked with gravity to hold the Specter in place.
To Cahill, a former submarine commander, the world on the water’s surface felt alien and exposed. Though it would restrict his speed, he welcomed submerging the Goliath. His mercenary boss, Pierre Renard, had just sent a message that Chinese warships sprinted on a course to intercept him.
“Making turns for eight knots,” he said.
He tapped a capacitive touchscreen, and the Goliath’s hardened, redundant array of hard drives and data cables sent a command signal to slow both of the ship’s electronic drive motors.
Liam Walker, his executive officer and a former mariner from an Anzac class frigate, kept his binoculars pointed at the window.
“Doesn’t it feel weird to give a command to yourself?”
“No,” Cahill said. “I’ve always believed that it’s more efficient to do something meself when I can do it faster than telling someone else to do it.”
“Suit, yourself, Terry. You blokes were always more informal on submarines.”
Hearing an underling address him by his first name gave him mixed emotions. It reminded him of the abrupt end to his naval career when the Australian admiralty had stripped him of command for shooting a limpet torpedo at a Chinese submarine. His less-than-lethal attack’s success and tactical genius had failed to spare him from punishment.
Released from his nation’s service, he had accepted Pierre Renard’s offer to join his mercenary fleet as its second commanding officer, in the mold of Jake Slate.
“Shall I secure the turbines, or would you prefer the honor?” he asked.
“Given how advanced this ship is,” Walker said, “I’m surprised you just can’t think it and shut them down.”
“Very well,” Cahill said. “Duly noted that me executive officer is too lazy to secure the turbines. I will handle it meself. Securing turbines.”
He pressed an icon on the touchscreen and then tapped a pop-up confirmation image. A message told him that the ship’s twin gas turbines were spinning towards silence.
“Head valves are shut,” Walker said.
Cahill smiled.
“I see that. I see the indication, and I see it in the high-resolution display from one of our topside cameras. This ship feels like a five hundred million-dollar video game.”
“If you ever spent time in engineering, you might think otherwise. Grease is still grease, and oil is still oil.”
“Very funny,” Cahill said. “Why don’t you tell me how our propulsion system is doing?”
Walker lowered his optics to his chest, nodded at a monitor, and reached out a finger to a touchscreen.
“Both gas turbines are secured,” he said. “All six MESMA systems are running normally, bearing the electric strain. Propulsion is running on air-independent power. Maintaining eight knots.”
With the liquid oxygen and ethanol-fueled, French-designed MESMA air-independent propulsion modules, Cahill appreciated his abundance of underwater power.
“Are we ready to dive?” he asked.
“The ship is, but I may not be,” Walker said. “It still gives me the willies. I sometimes wonder why I signed up for this.”