Thorne grimaced, as he knew he was moments away from losing his ship. He quickly turned to the navigation console and studied the map. He then ran for the sonar shack. The run was downhill and totally out of control as the down angle increased. Thorne finally arrested his run and entered the tight space of the sonar room. He immediately saw the sonar supervisor was busy putting out an electrical short with a fire extinguisher.
“Captain, we’re at nine hundred feet, approaching crush depth.”
Thorne ignored the frantic call from the control room and instead leaned over the nearest sonar operator. His eyes moved rapidly until he found what he had been looking for. It was the same thing he had just spied on his navigation chart.
“Eleven hundred!”
“Jesus, we implode at twelve hundred,” one of the youngest operators said in a shaky voice.
“Stow that shit, mister,” Thorne said as he quickly calculated what it was he was looking at. He hit the intercom. “XO, fifteen degrees starboard. When I give the command, flood the aft torpedo room and give me full rise on all the planes!”
“Aye, Skipper. What do you have in mind?”
“I think we have to crash-land Houston.”
Without explanation, he called out to his sonar operators, “That mountain range, find me a shelf… now!”
“A what?” one of the operators asked in confusion.
“A place to land this damn thing!”
All four operators went facedown into their scopes until the one who had commented on their crush depth pointed. “Large shelf, bearing five degrees starboard.”
The order went out to basically call for Houston’s destruction. The venting inside the sealed and isolated aft torpedo room was open to the sea, weighing the stern of the giant submarine down and bringing her bow up. The powerful electric motor of the boat still screamed in reverse as Houston plummeted.
“Thirteen hundred and fifty feet!”
“Come on, come on. Rise, damn you, rise!” Thorne prayed aloud. Then into the intercom: “All hands, brace for impact!”
The USS Houston slammed into a shelf on the side of the Challenger Rise mountain peak. The long, ledge-like protuberance circled the mountain in a twisting road-like run downward. Houston hit at a little over thirty knots. Her bow plowed into the rock and sand with a noise like that of tearing paper and ripping steel. She bounced once, twice, and then finally came down on the small valley shelf, sliding to a stop only seven hundred feet from a drop of two and a half miles.
Captain Thorne never realized they had made it as the lights and Houston’s power plant shut down, along with the conscious minds of her entire crew. She settled onto the bottom with no power, and the sensation of a liquefied deck and hull plating once more became solid to those sailors who had become aware of it.
USS Houston was sitting alone on the bottom of a world that had changed around them in a momentary flash of brilliant light and sound.
Captain Kreshenko, along with his entire bridge crew, saw the devastation coming right at them. He saw through his binoculars the massive wall of water as it built in ferocity. He knew without thinking that the Simbirsk and the two NATO vessels had been destroyed as he had lost them soon after the bright burst of light from the area thirty miles out. The initial detonation looked momentarily as if a giant bubble of light had formed over the old Russian ship, and the American and Dutch surface vessels were caught in that bubble.
“Order the Admiral Levchenko to take the wave head-on!”
“Too late!” Dishlakov said as he watched in horror through the bridge windows. Kreshenko saw the heated wave of water and light as it struck the smaller destroyer and flipped her completely over from stern to bow, not once but twice. The tough old ship snapped into three sections and then settled into the calming waters. Then a tremendous explosion erupted underwater, and then that wave of destruction also reached out for Peter the Great. Just as both walls of water, electric-filled light, and fire reached them, every man ducked as the ship was caught in the massive bubble the Americans had experienced.
The captain’s last thoughts were wasted trying to grasp the might of the American weapon that had been used on them. They had fired on NATO ships, and this was their just reward for doing so.
Fire erupted over the deck of Peter the Great. Every man who was exposed burned to death or melted into her superstructure as the intensity of light and flames from the exploding destroyer consumed all flammable material just as it had on board Shiloh. Men scrambling to get belowdecks found their feet sinking into the solid steel plating of the decking. One man tripped and fell. His head and shoulders smashed into a bulkhead, and the upper portion of his body vanished. His legs kicked momentarily until he died. Others fell completely through to other decks far below. The sensation of pliability was no longer just that; it was real, and the Russian battle cruiser was experiencing it.
Kreshenko felt his ship roll to starboard and not right itself. He knew Peter the Great was going to capsize. The last sensation he felt was the rolling of the enormous cruiser and the strangeness of his own steel deck as it warbled and waved underneath him. He attempted to raise his head to give the order to abandon ship when the decking came up with his movement. It was like his face had been stuck in tar. He collapsed with his mind flowing in horrid understanding.
Then Peter the Great vanished in a flash of light that would have been mistaken for a nuclear detonation — if anyone would have been left alive to have witnessed it. The bubble of light that had emanated from Simbirsk engulfed them and then contracted to a smaller ball, and then the air and sky popped like a rubber band being stretched beyond endurance.
The sea inside the eye of Hurricane Tildy was calm and also void of all life — sea or land — for one hundred miles in all directions. Even aquatic life caught in the phase shift vanished beneath the waves.
As the North Atlantic began to settle, the outer edges of the eye of Tildy collapsed, just like a falling curtain. Its dark clouds flowed downward into the sea and upward into the sky as if some giant god had waved a magic wand and disbursed the hurricane. The darkness of the swirling clouds fell into the roiling waters, and then the storm and the clouds that made up her bulk dissipated and then vanished.
Hurricane Tildy was gone as if never there.
9
Jack awoke to men screaming in agony. As he tried to raise his head, he felt the skin on his cheek being tugged at. He pulled harder and then felt the searing pain as some of that skin was torn free. He shook his head and felt the area where skin had been. His fingers came away bloodied. He looked next to him as Carl was slowly rising from the same eerily pliable deck. Jack saw that Everett had lost some skin also but knew he was all right as he stumbled over to assist Ellenshaw, who was lying still over one of the engineering consoles. The calls for help came in English and Russian.
As for Colonel Salkukoff, he had been saved when he fell on one of his men. That man was now dead. Half in, half out of the floor decking. Others were in the same pose of death. But it became quickly evident that this effect did not apply to all areas of the mighty ship. Collins quickly deduced that the laws of physics did not apply to every scene of death. Some men were fried beyond recognition, while others had succumbed to the strange atomic makeup of the ship itself. Jack quickly looked for his team and was glad to see the master chief and Ryan had survived and were even now administering first aid to those who needed it.