“Incoming contact, Captain. It’s the same thing that was out by the team, sir.…I think.”
Izerman wished the man sounded more certain. “I hope you have more details this time,” he said.
“Yes, sir, but it’s still not totally clear—”
“I’ll take what you’ve got.”
“It’s moving fast, better than fifty knots, and closing in on our position.”
“What?!” Izerman lurched to his feet again, knowing that nothing natural moved at that speed. “Torpedoes!”
“Torpedoes, aye!” came the return cry.
“Collision course!”
Izerman grabbed the squawk, keying open the mic. “All hands, brace for impact!”
He dropped the mic, then nodded to the weapons station. “Fire all tubes.”
“Fire all tubes, aye!”
Outside, on deck, the rush of exploding gasses vented across the ship as her two Mark 36 launchers fired their six Mark 46 ADCAPs into the rolling sea.
“Fish in the water!” the sonar station called out. “They’re tracking! They’ve gone terminal!”
“Already?” Izerman snapped, grabbing hold of a nearby wall. “Sound collision! Hard to starboard!”
“Hard to starboard, aye-aye!”
Alarms blared across the ship as the men and women on board took a second from their duties to make sure they weren’t about to be thrown across the decks, then immediately returned their focus to their jobs.
“Jesus, Captain, it’s almost right underneath us already—”
The sonar operator’s exclamation was cut off by a plume of water erupting just off the bow of the boat, showering the foredeck with water. The Arleigh Burke — class destroyer rode the shockwave, barely shuddering as it drove on. The second and third explosions threw them a little to one side, knocking around some things inside the ship, but the fourth through sixth detonations were considerably less powerful as the Fitzgerald began to put some distance between itself and the things that went boom.
As the concussions quieted down, Izerman looked around. “Sonar, do you have anything?”
There was a long silence as the sonar operator tried to clear up the noise he was reading and differentiate between an actual contact and the residual sounds of the explosions. After a long moment he looked up. “No contact, Captain.”
There was a collective exhale, the atmosphere noticeably relaxing as the captain nodded and moved over to the communications station.
“Get on the horn to the Seahawk. I want to know as soon as they locate the team.”
“Aye, sir,” the commander answered.
Izerman shook his head, walking across the command deck to the sonar station. “You reading anything out there? Even wreckage?”
“That’s the weird thing, Cap.…There’s nothing. It’s like whatever it was just disappeared.”
“Yeah, well I wouldn’t count on that. There aren’t many things capable of surviving six hits from our torpedoes.”
The sonar operator nodded in agreement.
“Keep looking. Just in case.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Izerman walked over to his first officer, his face grim as he pondered the events of the last few moments. “Any ideas, Evie?”
Yvonne Sanderson shook her head. “Never seen anything like it, sir. Fifty knots, at the size sonar was reading — I didn’t think it was possible.”
“Me either,” Izerman said softly, glancing around, “other than a swarm of torpedoes, but if that was it—”
“We’d be dead.”
“Maybe not — we probably would have gotten a lot of them with the six we fired, but still…”
Commander Sanderson nodded. “It still doesn’t make any sense.”
“Right on the money.”
“Do you think the ship was Chinese, sir?”
Izerman winced. “I sure as hell hope not, but what else could it have been?”
She shrugged, shaking her head. “I don’t know.…”
“Captain! Contact!”
Izerman twisted around, looking over at the sonar operator with a fierce expression. “Location!”
“Three hundred feet directly under us and rising! Two fifty! Two hundred!”
“Ahead flank!”
“One fifty!”
The ship surged forward under full military power, her engines sending a whine through the steel of the ship as it swished against the water surrounding it.
“One hundred!”
Izerman staggered over to the sonar station, leaning in close in time to see the rising contact. It was huge, bigger than he’d seen before, and it was indeed coming right up under them.
“Seventy-five feet!”
The Fitzgerald was accelerating forward, but it was obvious that they weren’t going to get clear in time.
“Fifty feet.”
“Sound collision!” Izerman ordered.
“Aye-aye!”
The collision alarms began blaring again as the sonar man announced twenty-five feet and grabbed his console to brace himself. The captain did likewise as the sonar image became an amorphous blob that was too close and too large to distinguish.
For a moment nothing happened, and Izerman entertained the absurd hope that it had all been some bizarre system malfunction. He looked around, took a breath to speak, and then was cut off by a shocked scream. When he looked over, a young ensign was pointing wordlessly out the window at the foredeck. Izerman shifted his gaze and was transfixed by what he saw.
Outside, on either side of the ship, thick limbs had risen from the sea. They were towering over the ship, shedding water on all sides as the Fitzgerald surged onward, looking for all the world like the massive tree trunks of some insane jungle they were sailing through. Izerman was at a loss for words and ideas, his mind boggled by what he was seeing.
Then the strange limbs began to fall back toward the sea, only instead of sinking they were toppling across the deck of his ship.
WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
The shocking vibrations shook the destroyer as they all braced themselves through the slamming impacts. Izerman shook himself free of his stupor and managed to call out his next orders.
“Master-at-Arms! Draw weapons from the armory and have security report on deck to repel…boarders.” He finished the order a little weakly, but he had no idea how else to say it. He certainly couldn’t order them to report on deck to clear it of giant squid tentacles?
Because that was what they looked like, he realized. Tentacles tightening around his ship as if around prey. It was insane, not to mention utterly impossible, yet it was the only comparison that worked.
Men were already pouring out on deck, and small-arms fire was roaring loud enough to be heard in the command center. They watched as the men poured fire into the things, some of them even grabbing fire axes and hacking at the tree-trunk-sized limbs. The effect was less than impressive.
A groan of metal stole Captain Izerman’s attention away from the action on deck, and he looked around, trying to identify the source.
“What the hell was that?”
“Not sure, sir. The engines are starting to heat up, but they’re well within tolerance.” The commander sounded concerned, but not too worried just yet.
Izerman nodded vacantly, still looking for the source of the groaning sound even as it came again. He looked out at the deck, then beyond it, at an oncoming wave. Izerman’s eyes widened as he watched the wave actually break over the deck, and he frowned. It wasn’t that rough out there.
“What on…,” he trailed off as his eyes widened. “We’re being dragged under!”
A sharp cry of surprise rose up around him, at first tinged with disbelief, then with fear. The waves were now washing over the deck with regularity, and several of his men had been washed overboard.
“Launch the rescue craft!” Izerman ordered. “Engines full astern! Break us free!”