“Paddle away from the hull,” she ordered loudly. “Taussig, did you find the emergency locator beacon?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Pull the pin and make sure it’s transmitting.”

The USS Leopard settled slowly in the water. Fifty yards to the east, three four-meter life rafts floated in the four-foot swells of the East China Sea. Lying in them were a total of forty-one survivors, sixteen of them unconscious — including Captain George Dixon. For those in the life rafts, there was nothing left to do but watch the ship sink. The nose cone and the sail were all that were visible. The aft deck vanished beneath the waves. The ship took a severe up angle until it faded backward The forward hatch went underwater, the sail vanished, then finally the bullet nose of the bow lowered until it disappeared between wave crests, and the Leopard was gone.

A tear rolled down Phillips’s cheek just as the double rolling booming noise of the plasma destruct charges exploded far below them in the depths of the sea. For them. Phillips thought, the war was over.

19

Patch Pacino shivered in the cold of the command module of the Piranha’s deep submergence vehicle. The space heaters had been consuming too much power, and Captain Catardi had switched them off a few hours ago. He would only use them to keep the space’s equipment running, and the machinery functioned perfectly at freezing temperatures. The four survivors would try to fight off hypothermia by using warm blankets and warm liquids.

Alameda and Schultz had not yet awakened. Pacino had bundled them tightly together, keeping only one thin blanket for himself and one for Catardi. The women’s faces were covered except for their noses and mouths. He could see the vapor plumes of their breathing. He checked them every hour, and their temperatures seemed normal. They were slumbering through a cold winter night.

The issue was whether they would be found and rescued. There were no procedures for this, according to the captain. The DSV was a temporary addition to the spec-op compartment, which had been hastily reconfigured for it in a shipyard availability, and it had been scheduled to be removed, a new mission and a configuration change awaiting the ship in the next dry dock availability. The fact that they could not use the sub-sunk buoy would doom them, and the pitiful pounding of the emergency percussion device — the automatic hull-hammerer-was not enough to attract serious attention unless someone hovered directly over them, and even then, with the strong layer depth overhead, the sounds from it might just bounce back deep. So they were all trapped in an HY-100 steel tomb, surrounded by eighty-three dead crew members.

“Patch.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“What happened to Keating?”

“He was smashed up inside the escape trunk. I was in the water hanging from the operating wheel of the hatch, so I should have had it worse, with explosions in water being deadly. But I guess the chief was tossed into the bulkhead.”

Catardi stared at him. “Wait a minute. You were outside the ship?”

“Yes, sir. I heard the incoming sonars. I saw the torpedo hit the engine room. It blew my mask off and the regulator out of my mouth.”

“So how did you — what did you — you came back in? What the hell did you do that for?”

“I don’t know, Skipper. It just seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Oh, God, your dad is going to kill me. Why the hell didn’t you go topside? You realize what a boneheaded move that was?”

“I know, sir. I should have lit off the emergency beacon.”

“Hell with that. You should have saved your skin. Dammit, now I feel worse — at least you could have lived. Now you’re going down with us.”

“You don’t think there will be a rescue?”

“I don’t think so, Patch,” Catardi said gently. “We’rein the middle of nowhere. All the other submerged units were either in the Indian Ocean or the East China Sea or on the way there. We’re off the great circle route to the IO from the U.S. East Coast. We can hope for merchant shipping traffic to hear the hammering device, but odds are, even if someone were to hear it, they wouldn’t know what it was.”

Pacino nodded. “How long till the atmosphere runs out?”

“We’ve probably got five days, if the cold doesn’t get us first. I’m sorry, Patch. It’s a bad death, but can you think of a good one?”

“Well, at least we’re dying with our boots on.”

“Hell, we didn’t even get a counterfire in the water. We’re dying after getting bushwhacked by that damned robot sub.

Hell of a useless way to go.”

There was nothing else to say, so Pacino just stared at the deck until he felt too sleepy to keep his eyes open.

“Admiral, flash traffic for you, coded personal for commanding admiral,” the radioman said as he woke McKee and handed him the pad computer.