The ship that had been christened the USS James Webb was now only half a ship. The forward section had been either consumed by the plasma, vaporized by the plasma after effect into a gas, melted by the intense heat of the post-plasma blast, burned into flames by the continuing fireball, or sent hurtling outward and upward.
The place where there had been a ship’s bow, was now a spherical ball of high-temperature molecules of steam and condensing iron vapor and combustion products from the burned steel. The sphere was two hundred meters in diameter, and was cooling as it expanded, now turning from orange to a reddish glow, some of its periphery darkening into black smoke. The sphere was beginning to change shape, the physics of hot air rising and cool falling causing it to press upward and collapse below. As it did, the sphere began to rise from the hull waterline.
The sphere, rising above the deck, started an effect called thermal radiation. The intensely high temperatures emitted infrared energy at an enormous rate, and the traveling waves of heat melted the glass of the island that had looked down at the deck, then moved farther aft and set the bodies of forty-three crewmen on fire, burning their flesh rapidly down to the bone, igniting their lungs and cooking their brains, though not nearly as quickly as the bodies in the bow. The radiation wave reached the aircraft anchored on the aft deck and ignited them all to balls of burning carbon fiber and jet fuel.
The deck surface was now engulfed in an orange volume of names.
The radiation waves continued in a shock wave. The air surrounding the surface of the earth acted as a drum, the explosion as a drum beat. A double shock wave traveled outward from the sphere, smashing into the island, where the 117 men inside had already been busy dying from the radiation and blast effects. The wave blasted over the naming ruins of the aft deck aircraft to the two other aircraft carriers — still untouched — smashing every glass window in their islands and blowing them inward.
The shock wave weakened as it progressed outward, breaking only a third of the glass windows of the Aegis cruisers’ bridges.
The bow fireball, now a hundred milliseconds after having breached the deck, rose over the island, transforming from a sphere to a mushroom cap, leaving below it a thick stern of rising black and brown smoke and orange flames, feeding the rising orange and red ball continuing to rise into the sky, the buoyancy of the atmosphere bringing it higher. As it rose to a level five hundred meters above the deck, the ship seemed suddenly to take notice of the fact that it no longer had its front half. The ship had been going thirty-five knots, or sixty-five kilometers per hour, some eighteen meters per second. Since the explosion the hull had continued moving almost two meters, the effect of the blast slowing the ship slightly, but as the first full second moved into the second, the half hull moved another two meters forward into water that had flooded into the crater of steam.
Where there had once been a steel structure that kept seawater out, only a ragged, blasted, burning edge where the ship ended and the sea began still existed. Water flowed remorselessly into the hull, submerging ruined equipment and dead, broken bodies, invading aft where there had once been watertight bulkheads and now were ruined and ruptured pieces of steel. The ship’s forward part, at the front half of the island, listed slightly into the water as the event passed into its third second. The aft deck began to tilt upward, the still rotating screws beginning to emerge from the water.
In the fourth second the ship pitched forward as the water rushed in and filled the hulk of the vessel. The screws came completely out of the water aft, still turning, water droplets cascading everywhere. The burning airplanes on the deck — those that hadn’t been blown overboard — began to slip forward, sliding down the deckplates toward the sea. As the first flaming jet was about to hit the water, five seconds after the torpedo detonation, the second Nagasaki II torpedo detonated under the aft hull.
Ten seconds after that torpedo detonation there was nothing left of the 110,000-ton ship bigger than a few meters across. Some of the debris began to rain down on the sea, which was now white boiling foam two kilometers in diameter. Other debris was already sinking rapidly to the ocean floor, including the two reactor cores, each the size of a house and made of high-tensile alloys, mostly intact while they sank, boiling the seawater that had flooded their coolant passages. Some of the debris floated on the water, mostly from the island, which had taken the least damage, since it was in the middle of the ship and high above the water. Included in the flotsam on the foam were chunks of wood conference tables, a few rubber hoods that had shrouded the radar scopes, pieces of paper, several foam mattresses from the amidships berthing spaces, and twenty or so bodies in various states of dismemberment. The naked torso, arms, and head of one man bobbed in the gentle waves, one of his hands gone, the other missing fingers.
The body was lit up by the lights of the exploding plasma fireballs to the east as the carriers Roosevelt and Kinnaird McKee began their cycles of death. The man’s face was slightly charred, the flesh of his face partly red from blood, partly black from the flames, and his right eye was punctured, leaving behind a misshapen hole and running flesh, but still he was quite recognizable. His clothes were burned away, leaving no trace of the three silver stars he had worn on his collar or the fleet command pin he’d worn beneath a surface warfare insignia — crossed swords in front of the bow of a destroyer. There was also no sign of the name pin that he had worn over his right pocket, which had read VICE ADM. JEANPAUL HENRI.
Captain Eddie Maddox threw his binoculars to the deck and lunged behind the helm console, blinded by the first flash.
As his husky frame turned and began to fall to the deckplates, the shock wave hit the slanted glass of the bridge. Twenty panes of silicon matrix glass exploded into the room, the shards of glass more lethal than hand-grenade shrapnel. The first shards ripped into his left arm and opened his flesh. Just a moment before, he had raised the binoculars to his eyes, for some reason sensing something wrong at the position of the lead carrier, the Webb. He had begun his twisting lunge with most of his body already shielded by the console, only his left shoulder and arm above the level of the top of the panel.
As Maddox fell, the second blast sounded from the direction of the Webb, and the hull of the John Paul Jones-class Aegis destroyer USS John Glenn below him trembled in the pressure wave of the explosion. Above him, the helmsman took a thousand shards of glass full in the face and chest. The enlisted man, still on his feet, was already dead as his body began to collapse, over twenty pieces of glass embedded in his now nonfunctioning brain. Maddox fell below the helmsman’s belt, a third detonation sounded from west northwest, the bearing to the carrier McKee. The light in the bridge deck flashed and flickered from the fireballs ahead, while a fourth detonation sounded, again from the McKee, then immediately afterward an explosion to the left, where the Roosevelt had been steaming.
The helmsman’s knees began to buckle as the dead youth tumbled to the deck. His hand was still gripping the gas turbine engine combined throttle, and as he fell, he pulled the throttle lever fully back to its stop detent.
Four more explosions followed, two so close that they could have been a single detonation, as Maddox’s frame hit the deckplates, smashing the side of his skull into the hard vinyl-covered metal. His body bounced, and as it flew upward an inch, another explosion sounded and the helmsman was tilted backward, his knees fully folded, his torso nearly horizontal, the glass still flying over his head and into the aft bulkhead of the bridge. Maddox hit the deck a second time, his eyes clamping shut in fear and pain. Glass ricocheted from the aft bulkhead and rained down on him, but the horizontal torso of the helmsman partially shielded him. Maddox came to rest on the deck while Ray Hargraves, the helmsman, fell toward him, his back sailing toward Maddox’s bleeding arm and shoulder. Two more explosions ripped into the bridge, these detonations closer, from ahead.