“All sixteen, sir?”
“Sixteen. Please.”
Jeffrey leaned forward with anticipation. Any second now it would be time to detonate his fish as they closed fast to lethal range of von Scheer.
Red warning lights flashed across Bell’s console. “Lost the wires, all tubes!”
“What the—”
The signals through the fiber-optic guidance wires from the torpedoes traveled at the speed of light — instantaneously. The blast force of undersea nuclear weapons took a little longer to arrive.
A tremendous crack resounded, a thunderclap that rattled the ship like the first impact of an unfolding earthquake. The warheads had detonated all at once, but from the geometries and distances involved, their shock fronts through the water got there one by one a few moments apart.
It was as if a giant’s jackhammer began to smash at Challenger’s hull. Vibrations inside were so strong and so vicious, Jeffrey’s vision blurred. He could barely see his instruments as standing crewmen were thrown from their feet. He was jolted hard against his seat belt and his headrest. The entire vessel shivered and rolled as conflicting turbulence from different bearings punished her amid unendurable shaking and ungodly noise.
The continuing decibel level quickly became so loud that Jeffrey lost all hearing. The scene of chaos and pain around him refused to relent, but now it showed itself in an otherworldly silence. He felt booms and rumbles deep in his gut, telling him what constant eruptions his eardrums were simply too overloaded to pass through the nerves to his brain.
Light fixtures shattered. Console screens went dark. Cabinets that were locked burst open; manuals, breather masks, laptops, and pencils went flying. Jeffrey ducked. He began to cough as the air was filled with choking dust from flaking paint and heat insulation.
Sadistic aftershocks hit, reflections of the original blasts off the surface and the bottom. Jeffrey held his armrests in a cringing white-knuckled death grip. The aftershocks sent grating tremors up his ass and tried to crush his spine. He stamped the deck with his feet involuntarily as his leg muscles forfeited any control and his lower limbs flailed about wildly.
Each of the sixteen atomic fireballs pulsated in a process Jeffrey knew too well. They started at the instant of fission at a temperature of a million degrees, swelled outward fast against the deep-sea pressure, then fell back as the pressure took charge. They rebounded outward violently, sending out a whole new shock front. The merciless throbbing happened over and over: the spheres of steam and vaporized weapon parts were buoyant. Each raced for the surface and rebounded outward again. Once more each reached a limit, then was squashed back in by the weight of the sea. Once more each sphere collapsed, only building up strength to rebound. Again each rebound threw off more concussive force.
Each new shock front reached for Challenger, hitting the ship and her crew with a seemingly conscious intent to shatter them. Sixteen separate fireballs did this, over and over without end.
Jeffrey’s body grew numb from the ongoing punishment, yet the unforgiving ocean still raged and swirled. At last the fireballs broke the surface. There was one final series of tremendous jarring blows, and the fireballs leaped into the air.
Survival had to come first. When the kampfschwimmer made no rapid counterattack, after they’d withdrawn into the water, Felix decided he needed to change tactics. He regrouped his men deeper inside the cargo-ship hulk’s superstructure. Additional layers of steel, he knew, would further block the impending gamma rays.
He also told his men to huddle in a circle, on one charred compartment’s deck. Since the human body was mostly water, and water gave some shielding against gamma rays and neutrons, one SEAL’s body could help to further protect another’s. This huddling was a common-enough SEAL practice, but normally it was done for mutual protection against bad weather: wind and cold.
Well, we’re on an atomic battlefield now.
Felix, as the officer in command, felt an obligation to maintain his situational awareness. He peered out the nearest porthole, which was almost totally black from caked soot and faced east. He had a hunch the action would happen in that direction. Africa was east.
Leaning against the bulkhead next to the porthole to help support the weight of his body and his equipment, he studied the spiderweb of cracks in the armored porthole glass. He felt horribly thirsty and hot. His mind began to play tricks, and Felix became obsessed with licking his own sweat off the inside of his protective-suit helmet. He knew this was the worst thing he could do: the sweat was not only salty, but held other bodily wastes, and to drink it would make him even more dehydrated than he already was. But it was very hard to resist taking at least a little lick.
Face it, we’re in pretty desperate straits here.
Then Felix felt the thing he’d dreaded, a series of tremors through the deck of the cargo-ship hulk. He saw the surface of the ocean churn a foaming white.
The underwater shock wave always comes first.
There was a blinding glare from outside and he had to look away. He dashed toward where his men were sitting together and placed his body between theirs and the glare.
Soon the glare subsided and was replaced by an eerie quiet. Tremors continued to come through the water and rattle the hulk.
Felix was overcome by curiosity. He went back to the porthole.
Through the soot, he made out a staggering number of glowing golden-yellow fireballs. Each was rising higher and higher into the air. Beneath each widening fireball was a solid pillar of white. He knew this was water and steam — and fission by-products from the warhead itself, the worst form of nuclear waste. Felix knew the mushroom clouds would be horribly radioactive: neutron bombardment by the initial weapon flash while underwater would act on metals dissolved in the sea — sodium especially — transforming their atomic structure into unstable isotopes. Those isotopes would decay, giving off alpha and beta and gamma rays, and more neutrons.
The wind is from the east. That stuff is coming right at us.
Felix barely had time to form these thoughts when the airborne shock waves hit. They pounded the hull of the burned-out cargo ship, in a repetitive hammering action that was a result of the mushroom clouds being different distances away. The hulk rocked back and forth. The cracked porthole bulged inward. Rust and ash and blistered paint were shaken loose and drifted in the air like an infernal blizzard; it was harder to see inside the compartment where he and his men had taken shelter. Their suits were sprinkled and dusted by the clinging unholy black snow. Felix’s well-trained eardrums felt the air pressure constantly change; his suit faceplate was squashed or made to swell as the overpressures and following partial vacuums plucked at his lungs. As each shock front passed over the Rocks, the compounded noise of all the explosions increased. The noise made talking impossible.
The noise makes thinking impossible.
Then Felix saw the thing he dreaded most. The thing his protective suit could offer no protection from. The thing from which the hulk’s steel plates gave no real shelter at all.
In the distance, a long stretch of the horizon seemed oddly higher than before. Felix watched in morbid fascination as this strange phenomenon drew near.
It was the expanding tsunami, not a true seismic tidal wave but a huge wall of water kicked up by the force of the sixteen atomic blasts.
He yelled for his men to hold on. But there was little to hold on to besides one another.