Piranha: Firing Point

He could still see the wake of the ship leading north to the blast zone, but the ship was completely gone. The flames rose higher, blown eastward by the prevailing winds, and all Robinson could do was watch, dumbfounded, as his ship burned. The mushroom cloud rose high above him, at a thousand feet mostly dark smoke blowing up into the atmosphere.

Angry and frightened, Robinson checked his fuel gauge. Onboard were two torpedoes, and if he could find the enemy sub, he could shoot it and put it down before he ran out of fuel. He had two full tanks of JP5.

That should keep him up the few hours it would take to find this murdering bastard. He turned the chopper slowly to the east and flew on to a spot a mile beyond where he’d been. There he set up to hover and dropped the sphere.

SS-405 EARTHQUAKE

“Captain, I think we should consider shooting AT-1.

He’s coming back around and heading east. I think he’s mad.”

“Let him come a little closer. I want you to have a clear view on low power.”

“Low power, sir? He could get a shot off.”

“Weps, we enabled in laser guide-in mode, Darkwings one and two?”

“Yessir,” the weapons officer barked.

“Wait, Mr. First.”

The seconds clicked off, until the chopper stopped to hover, only a few kilometers away, and lowered his dipping sonar. The pulse of it was so loud that Ko Tsu could hear it with his naked ear. He smiled.

“Mr. First, that’s close enough for me,” he said.

“Weps, shoot Darkwing one. First, enable the laser and guide it in.”

Driven by the steam gas generator at the base, the missile erupted from the fin-mounted missile tube pointed at the waves above.

Still enclosed in its protective bubble of steam generated by the rocket motor inside the fin, the nose cone of the missile penetrated the surface. The two-meter-long missile burst into midair. Gravity momentarily took over from the impulse of the steam force, and the missile was starting to fall back toward the water when the low-G contact clicked in and the solid rocket fuel ignited in a full-thrust rush.

The missile zoomed skyward, accelerating to three hundred clicks as it soared up to a height of a kilometer.

As the weapon finished its ascent and turned downward, it found a laser signal from the periscope mast of the submarine. Then, much fainter, it received the laser signal bouncing off the target, which coincided with the heat from the target’s engine exhaust. The missile dived toward the target, accelerating to four hundred clicks, then five hundred as the target grew large in its seeker window. The exhaust nozzle was white-hot, and the missile arrowed straight for it. When the windshield of the target was within a meter of the missile nose cone, it detonated.

Within milliseconds the missile metamorphosed into a growing white-hot fireball and blast shock wave. The explosion expanded until it enveloped the target, the vaporized helicopter joining the fireball.

Robinson had just stopped to hover and drop the dipper, sensing somehow that he was getting closer.

Just then a white exhaust trail of a missile climbed a thousand yards into the sky. Robinson watched it dumbly, slowly registering that the missile had come from nowhere, from a patch of featureless blue sea no different than the rest of the ocean. It rose so high that for a moment it was invisible, above the limit of his windshield view. Then he realized that it would be descending for him. He had to try to get away.

He moved his hands on the collective and hit the rudder pedal. His finger stabbed the switch on the cyclic grip that would ditch the sonar dipper and free him to fly away. In the fraction of a second it took to do that, the white flame trail of the missile became visible again.

The missile grew huge in his windshield.

He never even felt the blast.

As the fireball grew, encompassing the target in the orange flames, pieces of helicopter flew off into space and fell toward the sea.

Among the parts were the highspeed rotors, which detached from the hub and hurtled horizontally away from the wreck. The tail had been sheared off, and it fell end over end to the sea, just fifty feet below, splashing into the white foam and sinking. Most of the rest of the helicopter was unrecognizable molten or flaming chunks of aircraft.

One of the chunks falling to the sea was a scorched flight helmet reading lt. b. robinson uss john glenn.

Inside the helmet was a black mass, burned and crusty, beige bone showing through burned flesh. The helmet tumbled until it hit the water. It splashed and floated at the surface for a few seconds, then sank to the sea floor 850 fathoms below.

“Helicopter AT-1 is down. Captain,” the first officer said.

“Anything at the bearing to the surface contact, WT-25?”

“Yes, Captain, a column of smoke, maybe two kilometers high.”

“Nav, any sonar detect at the previous bearing to WT-25?”

“No, sir, the destroyer is gone. We’re alone again.”