Piranha: Firing Point

In three motions of Demeers’ hands a hunk of limp rubber appeared on the waves with them. Demeers pulled the COZ bottle and the life raft inflated. Patton was exhausted, giving in to shock. He barely remembered being pulled into the raft by the senior chief. Then he was lying on his back, his left forearm throbbing and swelling, nausea threatening but nothing but dry heaves shaking his body.

“Is it just me,” he croaked, “or were we, just four minutes ago, aboard the Annapolis steaming southeast at emergency flank?”

“We were. Skipper. And now we’re all that’s left.”

Demeers’ face took on a grim look. He frowned deeper as be pulled the pin on the emergency satellite radio, a device resembling a grenade, that would broadcast their distress signal to the overhead Comstar satellite.

“There were 134 men aboard. Senior. One hundred thirty-two of them just died. And so did my ship. What the hell happened?” “Had to be a torpedo,” Demeers said.

“Well, hello,” Patton said, sitting bolt upright. He’d noticed a periscope close enough to swim to in ten strokes. “I think you’re right, Byron. Look.”

Demeers’ eyes bulged out, his face turning red.

Patton glared at the periscope, the design of it strange-looking, and without thinking, he nipped it his middle finger. “Fuck you,” he muttered.

As quickly as it had come, the periscope vanished, sinking vertically into the water.

“Did I imagine that?” he said, dizziness starting to overtake him.

“No, sir. I saw it too. I’d like to kill that murdering bastard with my own two hands.”

Patton didn’t hear him. Darkness had come to claim him at last.

The crew of the American submarine named Santa Fe heard the torpedo coming and turned to run. The ship’s superior speed slowly opened the distance, but the vessel was unable to overcome the effects of the plasma detonation within five kilometers, and the ship’s hull ruptured.

The Santa Fe’s men, all 138 of them, died not from fires or smoke inhalation, but from a hull fracture that opened up the entire forward compartment at test depth. The water poured in with such force that it separated flesh from bone, turning muscle and organs to liquid that mixed instantly with the seawater, and they were no more.

The hull of the Santa Fe came to rest eleven kilometers from the position of what had once been the Annapolis, and when it did, what had once been the most powerful naval force in the history of the planet ceased to exist with barely a sign left on the surface of its passing.

Not far from the ocean bottom that had become a field of debris. Admiral Chu Hua-Feng, PLA Navy, climbed out of his cramped command-console cockpit and limped to his bunk in the captain’s stateroom. His muscles were aching and tired as he lay down to sleep.

When he closed his eyes, the faces of the doomed men in the life raft were staring back at him, the angry black-haired man raising his middle finger again and again.

Chapter 9 Monday November 4

BARBERS POINT NAVAL AIR STATION

OAHU, HAWAII

The SS-12 cabin was heavily soundproofed, yet the sounds of the flaps and slats could be heard whining as their mechanisms lowered them into the slipstream of the airflow around the supersonic jet, making its final approach to runway zero four, illuminated by bright white lights in the predawn darkness. None of this registered with the admiral, sunk in deep concentration.

“Time’s our enemy,” Pacino said. “If the backup rapid deployment force leaves now, it’ll take them five days and six hours to get to the East China Sea. That’s dawn on Sunday the tenth, local time. The Pacific Submarine Force we sent yesterday, at emergency flank, arrives late Friday the eighth. That leaves thirty hours to try to scour the East China Sea before the BU-RDF arrives. It’s not enough.”

“We’ve got to think long and hard about the 688s,” White said. “Still no word.”

“How long has it been since the second ELF call to periscope depth?”

“Ninety minutes, sir. We should have heard an hour ago one way or the other. I think we may have to presume the Annapolis and the Santa Fe are unable to hear our radio call.”

Pacino felt a black feeling. He knew that the 688’s radio receivers or transmitters weren’t the problem. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he did. Annapolis and Santa Fe were gone. And with them at the bottom of the ocean were his two handpicked, personally trained commanding officers, Chris Carnage and John Patton.

He bit his lip. The war had suddenly become personal.

With those officers almost three hundred highly trained crewmen of Pacino’s Unified Submarine Command were gone. He felt an anger rise in him like none he’d experienced in years, perhaps exceeded only by the day Dick Donchez had told him his father had been murdered. And now these men, his sons, had died at the hands of a rogue submarine commander, and that commander and his men were still lurking in the East China Sea, mocking him.