Piranha: Firing Point

Ten seconds after that torpedo detonation there was nothing left of the 110,000-ton ship bigger than a few meters across. Some of the debris began to rain down on the sea, which was now white boiling foam two kilometers in diameter. Other debris was already sinking rapidly to the ocean floor, including the two reactor cores, each the size of a house and made of high-tensile alloys, mostly intact while they sank, boiling the seawater that had flooded their coolant passages. Some of the debris floated on the water, mostly from the island, which had taken the least damage, since it was in the middle of the ship and high above the water. Included in the flotsam on the foam were chunks of wood conference tables, a few rubber hoods that had shrouded the radar scopes, pieces of paper, several foam mattresses from the amidships berthing spaces, and twenty or so bodies in various states of dismemberment. The naked torso, arms, and head of one man bobbed in the gentle waves, one of his hands gone, the other missing fingers.

The body was lit up by the lights of the exploding plasma fireballs to the east as the carriers Roosevelt and Kinnaird McKee began their cycles of death. The man’s face was slightly charred, the flesh of his face partly red from blood, partly black from the flames, and his right eye was punctured, leaving behind a misshapen hole and running flesh, but still he was quite recognizable. His clothes were burned away, leaving no trace of the three silver stars he had worn on his collar or the fleet command pin he’d worn beneath a surface warfare insignia — crossed swords in front of the bow of a destroyer. There was also no sign of the name pin that he had worn over his right pocket, which had read vice adm. jeanpaul henri.

USS JOHN GLENN, DDG-85

Captain Eddie Maddox threw his binoculars to the deck and lunged behind the helm console, blinded by the first flash.

As his husky frame turned and began to fall to the deckplates, the shock wave hit the slanted glass of the bridge. Twenty panes of silicon matrix glass exploded into the room, the shards of glass more lethal than hand-grenade shrapnel. The first shards ripped into his left arm and opened his flesh. Just a moment before, he had raised the binoculars to his eyes, for some reason sensing something wrong at the position of the lead carrier, the Webb. He had begun his twisting lunge with most of his body already shielded by the console, only his left shoulder and arm above the level of the top of the panel.

As Maddox fell, the second blast sounded from the direction of the Webb, and the hull of the John Paul Jones-class Aegis destroyer USS John Glenn below him trembled in the pressure wave of the explosion. Above him, the helmsman took a thousand shards of glass full in the face and chest. The enlisted man, still on his feet, was already dead as his body began to collapse, over twenty pieces of glass embedded in his now nonfunctioning brain. Maddox fell below the helmsman’s belt, a third detonation sounded from west northwest, the bearing to the carrier McKee. The light in the bridge deck flashed and flickered from the fireballs ahead, while a fourth detonation sounded, again from the McKee, then immediately afterward an explosion to the left, where the Roosevelt had been steaming.

The helmsman’s knees began to buckle as the dead youth tumbled to the deck. His hand was still gripping the gas turbine engine combined throttle, and as he fell, he pulled the throttle lever fully back to its stop detent.

Four more explosions followed, two so close that they could have been a single detonation, as Maddox’s frame hit the deckplates, smashing the side of his skull into the hard vinyl-covered metal. His body bounced, and as it flew upward an inch, another explosion sounded and the helmsman was tilted backward, his knees fully folded, his torso nearly horizontal, the glass still flying over his head and into the aft bulkhead of the bridge. Maddox hit the deck a second time, his eyes clamping shut in fear and pain. Glass ricocheted from the aft bulkhead and rained down on him, but the horizontal torso of the helmsman partially shielded him. Maddox came to rest on the deck while Ray Hargraves, the helmsman, fell toward him, his back sailing toward Maddox’s bleeding arm and shoulder. Two more explosions ripped into the bridge, these detonations closer, from ahead.