Terminal Run

Keating came down from the air bubble and put his thumb in Pacino’s face again. This time it did not seem so comical. Pacino returned the thumbs-up and Keating nodded, pulling him over to the space beneath the hatch, tugging to make sure Pacino did not float upward. He stayed on his flippers at the bottom. Keating opened the hatch above, and there was a metallic thump as it latched. He popped his head out, then swam back down to Pacino. There was a dim light from the hatchway above. He could feel Keating adjusting his buoyancy compensator and felt himself floating upward toward the hatch ring. When his head poked out, Pacino could see this new world. For a second he froze in terror. His head was sticking out of the submarine, and in the clear Atlantic by the light of the afternoon sun, he could see the vessel in shades of blue as clearly as if they were on the surface, and more, all the way to the rudder aft, the horizontal stabilizers, the propulsor, and all the other workings that were hidden when the ship was on the surface. The blue light surrounded the ship, growing black on either side, giving Pacino an eerie feeling that if he fell off the hull he would sink indefinitely into that frightening blackness. He looked up and saw the undersides of the waves above. He saw the sail rise above him, and the periscope rising out of the sail like a telephone pole reaching for heaven, until it penetrated the canopy of waves overhead. That meant that the surface was about thirty-five feet above him.

Pacino realized he was breathing too heavily, and Keating put a thumb in his face again. Pacino nodded and returned the thumb. Keating put his hand on Pacino’s buoyancy compensator and motioned upward to the waves. Pacino nodded again and, as Keating had suggested, tapped his Academy ring twice on the hull, the tapping sound oddly clinking in this blue-lit universe.

Pacino smiled inside the mask, thinking that this would be the story to tell his circle of friends. Who else could claim they’d been locked out of a submerged submarine to keep her mission covert? He might even impress his own father with the tale, thinking his father had probably never done this. It was a fitting way to end a midshipman cruise, even if he had been reluctant for it to end.

Keating pulled Pacino slowly out of the hull, the open hatchway moving past his chest. Pacino’s tanks hung up on the hatch operating mechanism. Chief Keating freed him, and he drifted above the hatch. Only his hand was still holding onto the hatch operating wheel when the sound came, freezing him in sudden terror.

A Mark 58 Extreme Long Range Torpedo/Ultraquiet Torpedo had roughly the same level of intelligence as a Labrador retriever, and perhaps the same refined hunter’s instinct, all packaged inside a body that was twenty-one inches in diameter and twenty-one feet long. It was painted a glossy blue except at its flat nose cone where the flat black rubbery material covered the sonar hydrophone. Aft, where it necked down to the propulsor shroud, eight stabilizer fins kept the unit traveling straight, and within the propulsor two discharge flow vanes could rotate in the propulsor thrust to keep the unit from spiraling through the sea from the torque of the spinning propulsor. Two other vanes acted as vertical stabilizers, which could cause the unit to rise or dive, and the remaining two acted as a rudder for horizontal plane yaw control. The far aft part of the weapon was devoted to the combustion chambers and the turbine. Further forward the fuel tank was located, the tank and engine taking a third of the length of the torpedo. The middle portion of the unit was devoted to the warhead, which was an ultra-dense molecular explosive with the trademark name PlasticPak. The explosive was heavy, the compound far denser than lead, making the torpedo sink immediately if it lost power. The forward portion of the weapon, less than three feet of its length, was devoted to the onboard computer and the sonar hydrophone transducer.