Piranha: Firing Point

“Don’t know, sir. The carriers went up in huge mushroom clouds.”

“Radars?”

“Can’t tell, sir, I’m steering around four ships that are sinking.”

“How many ships down?”

“Sir, you’d better ask, how many ships are still afloat.”

“What?” Maddox tried to move his left arm, but it wouldn’t move and he had no sensation from it. His right seemed to work, but is bulk was on it. He pushed himself half up, shoving away the dead body and fallen glass, and reached up to the console handhold. Grasping it and pulling as hard as he could, his body a mass of aches, he managed to stand, then tried to open his eyes, but there was nothing but blackness. He was blind.

“I can’t see,” he said flatly.

A new voice.

“Nav? What the hell?” The young officer fresh from surface warfare officer school, Engiga Boyd.

“Boyd, take the helm,” the navigator. Lieutenant Commander Bosco, ordered.

“Yessir.”

“Course south, ahead flank.”

“Relieve you, sir.”

“Stand relieved. Captain, I’m checking on the radar.”

Footsteps. A door opening, being pushed, a scraping noise. Maddox felt dizzy and weak.

“Nav,” he said, “Where’s the navigator?”

“Back, sir.”

“Where can I sit?”

“Here.” An arm on his right side. “Gotta get the doc to look at that arm. Captain. Let me get the glass off.

Okay, here’s the captain’s chair. You look pale, sir.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Maddox said. “Do we have radars?”

“All gone. Captain. Phased-array panels are blown apart from the shock waves. Electronics are fried. The rotating structures are blown off, and the masts are gone.

Sir, anything exposed to the weather is damaged and scorched.”

“What about the Seahawk?”

“It was stowed. It could be okay.”

“Find Robinson. Get him up. I want a full report on the fleet. Meanwhile, keep steaming east to the Pacific.

Get us the hell out of here.”

“Aye, sir.”

Lieutenant Brandon Robinson had been in his stateroom in a deep sleep after being up all night standing watch on the bridge, trying to cross-qualify in surface warfare.

Completing surface quals wasn’t a requirement, but it filled the time, and it could pay off if he stayed in the Navy. The midwatch had gone from midnight to six in the morning, and he was beat. He could remember the exact moment he had gone from sleeping to stark consciousness, that first booming explosion. He hadn’t waited for the crew to call battle stations; he had run aft and down to get to his, at the Seahawk, the onboard light antisubmarine-warfare helicopter, his chopper. He ran to the helodeck, the ship taking one shock wave after another. When he finally arrived, in the darkness, he had had to manually open the helodeck door. The power returned, allowing him to get the heavy roll-type door open. And out the aft-facing. doorway he had watched as the fleet disappeared, the first flashes of detonations knives in his eyes. He had to turn away, flashing lights swimming in his vision, the merciless noise of the ships exploding rocking his eardrums.

The ship’s engines suddenly throttled up to maximum revolutions, and the deck rolled hard to starboard, then leveled, then rolled again to starboard, finally leveling again. Whoever was on the bridge had taken matters into his own hands, Robinson thought, and was maneuvering them out of the convoy formation, as the op order allowed if the formation came under attack. He waited by the Seahawk, stowed in the helodeck and cabled down, chancing the occasional look out the aft door. The sea was empty astern except for smoke and foam on the surface, now far in the distance, the destroyer’s wake white and boiling behind them. They were alone.

The navigator burst into the room, a look of determination on his face.

“Battle comm circuits are out,” he puffed. “Launch the Seahawk, Robinson. Cap’n wants a patrol and then an ASW look ahead.”

Robinson’s airman had not shown up after the explosions.

The navigator helped him get the chopper rolled out and preflighted. Within ten minutes, Robinson was at idle, Bosco saluting him as he lifted off the deck.

It didn’t take long to survey the situation. Robinson flew west for a few miles, seeing nothing left of the fleet except patches of foam, one or two smoking wrecks, and the flame from a burning oil slick. There was nothing else. One hundred ten ships, all gone except for his.

And what were the chances of that? He wondered, feeling oddly like the sole survivor of a holocaust. He snapped off the images of the dead sea with his digital camera. His orders were to transmit the images directly to the Comstar Navy communications satellite, to get the information back to the Pentagon with a forward marked oprep 3 pinnacle, the code for an emergency message that needed to go immediately to the president.

The photo survey done, he turned and flew back ahead of the Glenn, which was far east of the convoy’s position when it had met its fate.