Ghost Sub полностью

Danny looked at the fire control screen. She was 800 yards almost directly in front of them.

The torpedo counted down its distance to the Boise and broadcasted the range back to them. They watched the numbers on the screen countdown… and then disappear.

A dull thump sounded in front of them.

The torpedo was designed not to kill directly with its explosion. Ideally, it wasn’t even supposed to contact the target vessel. Against a surface ship, it was designed to explode well beneath the target. A steam bubble would then raise up against the hull, lifting it, and break the ship’s back.

It worked slightly differently against the Boise, which was not vulnerable to being lifted up in the air like a surface ship. The fuse of the torpedo sensed when it was close to the Boise and detonated the Mark-48’s 650 pounds of high explosive, plus the large amount of fuel that remained inside the weapon. A huge, superheated steam bubble was created instantly, its walls moving outward in all directions faster than the speed of sound. When the bubble reached the hull of the Boise it attached itself to the side of the ship. The steam bubble collapsed in the water, then expanded again, oscillating. It was a massive, twisting, murderous amount of force.

In sonar, the supervisor tore the headphones off his head. What was a dull thump to the rest of the crew was a blast of noise to him. After hours of straining to hear the slightest trace of Boise, it was like a flashbulb going off in a darkened room. He put the earphones back on as soon as the blast noise waned.

Immediately after the boom came the groaning, wrenching sound of the Boise’s hull being torn apart. It was a sound he’d never heard before, but it was instantly recognizable. He could see in his mind the keel bending and the steel bulkheads giving way and admitting the sea. It reminded him of the sad cries the whales made.

Next came a loud, high-pitched hissing.

“What’s that?” said one of his men.

“Air banks,” he answered. The sound grew louder, as the tanks tore apart releasing thousands upon thousands of pounds of compressed air into the ocean, the emergency air banks that were supposed to save the Boise but never would. Soon he heard a similar hiss, but oscillating, falling away. He realized it was small gas cylinders sinking, punctured or with their valves torn off, spinning as they fell, the escaping gas spinning them like pinwheels.

Next came loud, staccato popping. It was a sound that they recognized from improperly conducted trash disposal: the sound of glass bottles popping as they passed through their own collapse depth. It’s why they kept a metal rod in the TDU room, to smash glass bottles before ejecting them. But there was no one left on the Boise to worry about it. Bottles of salad dressing and mayonnaise, every glass jar on the ship, fell to the bottom, until it could stand the pressure no more and imploded in an instant with a sound like a gunshot that travelled for hundreds of miles. As the hissing subsided, those random pops grew in frequency, like a string of fire crackers. As it reached its crescendo, the supervisor pictured a school of bottles floating downward together, tumbling, until they were obliterated by sea pressure a mile below the surface.

The pops slowed and disappeared.

The ocean was silent again.

Master Chief Cote was cleaning out his desk; after more than three decades it was his last day in the Navy. He’d declined to have a retirement ceremony, even though he was certainly entitled. He always found them a little embarrassing, and uncomfortably reminiscent of funerals.

It was a day at some level he thought would never come; he couldn’t picture himself out of uniform. He saw those other retirees puttering around, they tended to hover around the military towns they were comfortable with, to be close to VA medical facilities and people who understood their sea stories. They were easy to spot, the men with white hair kept short, and “casual’ clothes that were pressed a little too well, khaki shorts with razor creases and golf shirts tucked in tautly, RVs that were cleaned as if ready for inspection.

His office had accumulated a lot of crap during his shore tour, and he had to sort it into three piles: His personal possessions which would follow him home. Items that were classified because of medical privacy, patient records and the like. And items that were classified because of military secrecy, anything with the record of a specific ship’s movement or details about its mission. He’d briefed his replacement about all the navy material he was leaving behind, and the personal stack was small; he could fit it all in a box on his way out.