Then the aftershocks and blast reflections began to hit.
The four fireballs pulsated as they plunged for the surface. Each time they collapsed and rebounded, more noise and more hard punches were thrown at Challenger.
More noise and pounding reflected off the seamount walls to right and left. The roller-coaster ride went on. The deck — alive with buzzing and humming that came right up through Jeffrey’s legs and into his genitals — seesawed as the ship’s nose bucked.
“The gravimeter,” Bell shouted.
Jeffrey forced his eyes to focus. Gouges and scars appeared in the seamount walls to either flank. Avalanches, triggered by the forces of the blasts.
Above all the other noise and shaking, Jeffrey felt sharp, hard blows. Falling boulders, bouncing off our hull. One hit on our vulnerable stern parts and we’re finished.
The vessel shimmied and yawed. Sloshing ocean, kicked up by the avalanches.
Damage reports poured in, and repair crews went to work as best they could — so far, nothing fatal to Challenger’s ability to fight. But reloading the tubes was slow going.
“Assess enemy inbound weapons from north destroyed!” Bell shouted above the continuing racket. “Four torpedoes to the south still closing!.. Inbound torpedoes have gone to active search!” The surviving Sea Lions had started to ping.
Jeffrey checked the speed-log gauges — the digital readings and backup analog dials agreed. Challenger’s speed was fifty-three knots, everything she had.
Torelli signaled he was waiting.
Jeffrey and Bell entered their special-weapons arming codes.
“Make tubes one through four and seven and eight ready in all respects including opening outer doors.”
Jeffrey ordered the Mark 88s in tubes one through four fired as countershots against the weapons to the south.
The fish dashed from the tubes, spread out, changed course, and ran off back behind Challenger.
Jeffrey pondered his options. He was about to enter the wall of tortured water ahead of the ship, where her first four torpedoes had gone off. Four more were about to detonate behind him, unless those inbound Sea Lions got Challenger first — which was a very real risk since the engagement distances had grown so tight.
“Firing-point procedures, nuclear Mark Eighty-eights in tubes seven and eight! Set warhead yields to maximum!”
“Ready!” Bell acknowledged.
“Snap shots, loop north of the Wust Seamount and then course two seven zero.” West. “Preset units for active search when steady on two seven zero.” The units would ping with their own built-in target homing sonars.
“Preset!”
“Shoot.”
“Tubes seven and eight fired electrically!”
“Units running normally!”
These two fish will hunt for von Scheer, give Ernst Beck something to worry about.
“Units from tubes one through four have detonated!”
My defensive countershots, against those four torpedoes closing from the south.
The blast forces hit at once from directly behind, while the brutality of the first four blasts ahead had barely diminished.
The awful punishment renewed: noise, vibrations, crew injuries, ship damage. Pitching, rolling, yawing, heaving.
Jeffrey was nearly deaf already, but the shocks and aftershocks and blast reflections never let up. There was terrible pain in his ear canals and a silvery whistling and ringing in his head — it got worse and worse as the punishment went on. Still, he forced himself to think.
“Helm! Right ten degrees rudder, make your course one eight zero!”
Meltzer turned his head toward Jeffrey as his bloodless hands gripped the control wheel. His lips moved, but Jeffrey couldn’t tell what his own helmsman said — the noise, the deafness, were winning. Jeffrey realized both men simply could not be understood verbally.
Jeffrey used sign language. He mimed holding the control wheel, then mimed turning it right. He held up all ten fingers. Ten degrees. He pointed at a gyrocompass and held up one finger, then eight, then touched index finger to thumb to form a zero. Course one eight zero. South.
Meltzer nodded and went to work.
In the churning, surging, hellish Jacuzzi now swirling in the deep-water pass — between crumbling seamounts and opposite walls of million-degree atomic bubble clouds and multikiloton turbulence — Challenger altered course. The ship banked into a turn to the right, as sharply as Jeffrey dared at flank speed. Challenger swung back the way she’d just come, still moving as fast as she could.
Jeffrey leaned toward Bell. He had to bellow at the very top of his lungs. “Reload tubes one through four and seven and eight, Mark Eighty-eights!”
Bell nodded. The wait seemed endless; at last the reloading was done.
Jeffrey issued more orders. He sent two more snap shots after his two already in the water: north and then west around the Wust Seamount again, to also hunt on their own for von Scheer.
“Why not south for those two?” Bell shouted. “Pinch him from both sides like he just did to us?”
“You’ll see.”
“Aye aye!”
“Sonar!” Jeffrey yelled.
Milgrom didn’t respond.
Jeffrey unbuckled his seat belt and struggled toward her. He gripped stanchions on the overhead to steady himself. Aftershocks and body blows came as each throbbing fireball finally broke the surface far above; hard pounding continued from avalanche rocks and viciously stirred-up water. The pummeling almost threw him from his feet. Sharp console edges and metal equipment seemed to beckon for his head and for his groin.
Jeffrey grabbed the back of Milgrom’s seat as Challenger rolled and bucked yet more. “Any inbound torpedoes?” he yelled in her ear.
“Impossible to tell!” she shouted back.
Meltzer turned toward Jeffrey. Meltzer pointed at a gyrocompass. His course was steady on one eight zero, due south.
Jeffrey forced his way back to his seat. He ordered Bell to reload tubes seven and eight, and make tubes one through four and seven and eight ready for snap shots.
Jeffrey watched the gravimeter and the confused, outdated tactical plot. He had Challenger heading straight for the wall of acoustic and hydrodynamic chaos from his own most recent atomic Mark 88 blasts.
Jeffrey used his console keyboard to send a message to Engineering through the ship’s LAN. “Push the reactor to one hundred fifteen percent.” The control-room phone talker was lying on the deck, stunned and with a bloody nose — and conversation through the sound-powered phones or intercom was impossible anyway.
A quickly typed message came back: “115 %, aye.” The ship picked up a few tenths of a knot.
“Helm!” Jeffrey shouted.
Meltzer turned.
Jeffrey pointed up. He gave hand signals for one, then two, then zero, then zero, then zero. Make your depth twelve thousand feet. He needed to take Challenger away from so close to the seafloor terrain.
Meltzer pulled back his wheel, and Challenger’s bow nosed up.
She charged into the curtain of reverb, countless collapsing bubbles of steam, invisible whirlpools, and monstrous thermal and turbulence updrafts and downdrafts.
Sitting beside him, Bell pointed at Jeffrey’s waist. Jeffrey remembered to buckle his seat belt just in time.
Challenger twisted and turned like never before. She needed every foot of added clearance from the bottom. The noise was now so loud it no longer registered. The ship’s instruments showed that the vibrations and flexing of the hull itself, and inside, were stronger than ever. But Jeffrey was so physically numbed it hardly seemed to matter. He eyed the gravimeter carefully and gave thanks it didn’t care about the noise. He gave thanks to God and the contractors that the device was still even functioning.