Terminal Run

Fang yawned, the mid watch always seeming hours longer than a morning or afternoon watch. Fortunately, he would only stand the mid watch for the next week. Then he would rotate off the watch bill for four days and return to the morning watch for a week. He picked up his binoculars and scanned the ships of the formation, checking their running lights to make sure no one had turned early in the zigzag pattern, the risk of collision more of a danger than any lurking submarine. He put his face in the radar hood, confirmed the ranges to the surrounding ships, then picked up his binoculars. The carrier Nanching was not quite over the horizon. She was still visible, though hull down, at bearing zero nine zero true, on the port beam. The image of the carrier was an array of lights rather than the actual outline of the hull. It would be another three hours before dawn began to break, and the carrier’s haze gray color became evident in contrast to the dark blue sea and the light blue sky. Fang was about to drop the binoculars when the windows of the bridge exploded inward. The blast shock blew him back against a bulkhead, the flying glass slicing his flesh, only his face spared by the uplifted binoculars. In the two seconds it took him to sink slowly to the deck, he watched in disbelief as the Nanching exploded in a white ball of flames. His retinas were burned by the fireball, the sparks dancing in his field of vision. Explosions lit the seascape. The night vanished and was replaced with noontime suns all shining on the horizon as the other ships of the formation were replaced by the glaring detonations. Fang’s hearing was gone, he realized, the first explosion deafening him. He sank lower, so that he could no longer see out the glass-less windows, but the flickering daylight still came in the bridge, the room alive with the light of the fires of the fleet.

He wondered for a second if the enemy would target a fleet support ship such as the Taicang. As if in answer to his question the deck rose slowly and became vertical. Fang could see out of what used to be a tiled floor at the bow of the ship, which was enveloped in flames, the fireball blasting into the bridge from the ragged gash in the deck. The force of it ripped Fang’s body in half, his consciousness freakishly continuing in hellish slow motion as the bridge fell back into the flames of the explosion. As the fire surrounded him, Fang finally, gratefully, passed into the calm blackness, and his war ended.

Around the horizon, the fires of the explosions calmed, and the seascape gradually returned to normal, the few oil fires left extinguishing in the gentle waves of the East China Sea. Thousands of scorched bodies littered the sea, joined by empty life preservers, capsized lifeboats, mattresses, and assorted flotsam, some of the bodies blackened by the oil slick that covered a mile diameter around the site of the former fleet.

Fourteen ships survived, and when their captains saw the carnage around them, they steamed through the debris field, looking for survivors, the rescue attempt netting only a hundred or so men, most of whom were injured so gravely they probably would not see the sun set that day. When no one else was found, the straggling ships turned north to attempt a rendezvous with Battlegroup Three.

Sixteen minutes after the initial attack, a cruel second assault was made, and twelve of the surviving support vessels exploded and sank. Some vanished so quickly that one minute they were steaming in the seaway, and in the next only a gigantic orange rising cloud marked their graves. The two ships remaining after the second wave were a tanker and the Haijui radio relay ship, which made the emergency transmission to the Admiralty, reporting the casualties by ship name and the survivors by name, rank, and ship.

The Haijui captain shook his head sadly. It had been what his first commanding officer, in his talent for understatement, would call a bad day at sea. The sun had not even risen yet.

25

The phone buzzed in Pacino’s darkened stateroom. He stared at it for a moment, surprised at how deeply he’d slept. He felt so groggy it was an effort to remember where he was, that the past twenty-four hours had not been a dream.

“Pacino,” he said.

“Cap’n, Off’sa’deck, sir,” a young lieutenant named Deke Forbes said. “We’re receiving our call sign on ELF, sir. We’re being called to periscope depth.”