Phillips walked back into the control room, tried to reassure himself that Pacino had fixed the problems with the missile, or else they wouldn’t have been sent out with it.

In any case, they’d soon know.

The ship had finally put several miles between itself and the ridge. Phillips turned the ship around and again faced the ridge.

“Ready, Weps?”

“Yes sir.”

“Okay, here it is, men. Firing point procedures, Target One, the ice ridge ahead. Vortex unit one.” “Ship ready,” Katoris said.

“Weapon ready,” McKilley said.

“Solution ready,” Whatney said.

“Hit it,” Phillips said, wondering if those would be his last words.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Oh, right, fine, shoot on generated bearing.”

McKilley hit the firing trigger and the noise from outside blasted into the ship. Phillips held his ears, realizing he had just launched a solid-fuel rocket with its engine little more than twenty feet away. The video screens at the bow went to white-out, the rocket motor exhaust blinding them.

“Dammit, the video’s probably a goner,” Phillips said, a smile coming to his lips as he found Whatney’s face in the room. The missile had worked. It had launched without killing them. Now if it could just do its work on the ridge ahead.

“I’m dropping the unit-one guidance tube,” McKilley said.

“Jettison the tube.”

“Tube one disconnected.”

A click and a slight bang and the guidance tube outside the hull for the Vortex missile disconnected from the ship and fell away.

The noise of the weapon was still loud but it was fading now.

“Impact in three, two, one…”

Phillips watched the bow video display, which had refocused on the sea ahead, no longer blinded by the missile exhaust.

The explosion was so violent it threw Phillips against the chart table, gashing his forearm. The lights flickered. Phillips’s ears rang. The video display had whited-out again, only now coming back to normal.

“Well, XO, let’s go back and see if there’s a Piranha-sized hole up ahead, or if we made it worse.”

“You think it could be worse?”

“Sure. This is a cave. We might have caused a cavein. No way to tell until we see it.”

It seemed to take forever for the ship to move back to where they had been. When they got to the ridge Phillips stared at the video screen, amazed at what he saw. The ridge was gone, and there was a half-milewide patch of open water above. The heat of the fireball had vaporized ice two hundred feet thick.

“Bring us under the open water, Katoris. I want to grab our radio traffic and tell Pacino what’s up.”

Katoris gave the orders. Piranha came slowly up to periscope depth while hovering, the periscope mast able to receive the satellite transmissions. Phillips looked out the scope, saw the water around the ship begin to freeze in the arctic cold. It was only a few minutes before Katoris was ready to go deep, and already the water had skinned over to ice a quarter-inch thick.

Back deep, Phillips watched the video and sonar screens as Katoris drove them on. He was afraid that there would be another ridge, or that the missile had blown up prematurely and the original ridge would be waiting for him, but the ice overhead seemed thinner.

And then the ocean floor below got deeper, falling away under him to form an arctic trench. Phillips looked at the fathometer and the SHARKTOOTH and realized he could make twenty knots for the next few hours. He gave the orders, the ship accelerating.

Soon he’d be out in the Pacific, with a chance to hit the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force. Or so he thought until he saw the message the ship had received while at periscope depth. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead, and suddenly Phillips realized he was out of uniform.

Slowly he walked to his stateroom, handing the Writepad to Whatney just before he shut the door.

He took off the construction worker’s duds and slowly put his poopysuit back on.

He could not believe it. The entire USS Reagan carrier-action group.

Sunk. Down. Every god damned ship blown away except for one mid-sized radio command and control ship, the Mount Whitney, which had picked up survivors. No one knew why the Japanese had let the Mount Whitney go, except perhaps because it had no weapons, no gun-mounts or torpedoes or missiles, just radio antennae. Maybe that last was the point — they wanted Washington to listen to what had happened from their own people.

WM 25 NORTHWEST PACIFIC

USS MOUNT WHITNEY

“Admiral? Sir? Can you hear me?”

Pacino’s head was swimming. He tried to open his eyes but saw nothing. He put his hand to his head and felt the gauze wrapping around his face.

“Where?”

“Sir—” It was Paully’s voice. He sounded okay.

“We’re on the Mount Whitney, the command and control ship. For some reason the Japanese spared it and let the helicopters drop us here.”

“What — my face?”

“A little glass in the eyes. Your right eye is actually okay but the left got surgery this morning. Also a bad concussion. You’ve been in a coma.”

“How long?”

“Day and a half.”