Shadow Strike

“Damn. Have there been any storms in the vicinity, or known pirate attacks?” Taylor asked. “If a commercial vessel sank in these shallow waters, there could be survivors about. What about it, Ears?”

“Possibly a civilian wreck, Captain,” the sonar operator replied. Eyes tightly closed, he held the earphones in place with both hands. “But it would have to have been a small ship, maybe a fishing boat or pleasure craft. I’m not hearing any metal below, just lots of wood and plastic.”

“Sounds like a speedboat to me,” James stated, crossing his arms. No metal meant there was no threat to the convoy. “Ears, what’s the depth?”

“Five hundred meters, and rising,” the sonar operator called out briskly, hunched before the glowing computer screen.

“Lieutenant, send out a couple of hovercraft… No, belay that,” Taylor said with a grimace. “Uncork a Lynx helicopter and do a sweep for any survivors. Hundred meters, three hundred and five. Move quick now.”

“Debris spotted in the starboard water, sir!” an ensign interrupted, touching his headphones. “Multiple lifejackets, broken wood and general flotsam!”

“Get that Lynx flying, Lieutenant,” Taylor snapped, sitting in the command chair. All around her banks of video monitors strobed into life, showing every aspect of the colossal vessel. “Helm, increase speed to maximum. Chief, have one of the frigates stay behind and conduct a full S and R op.”

“Search and rescue, aye, aye, ma’am,” he said with a brisk salute. “But may I suggest—”

Just then, the entire destroyer rocked from the force of a powerful explosion.

“What the bleeding hell just happened to my ship?” the captain demanded, glancing at the overhead monitors. A forward compartment was taking on water—not much, but steadily. A port side depth charge launcher had gone off-line, and two of the crew had vanished, last seen near the anchor chain winch.

“Unknown, ma’am!” the sonar operator reported crisply. “Sonar is clean. There is no hot noise in the water! Repeat, no hot noise!”

“Thank God for that. What about radar?” Taylor demanded, twisting her head.

“Clean and clear, Skip,” the ensign replied. “Five by five. Whatever is happening is coming from below.”

“The water is clear,” Ears repeated sternly.

“Well, something just hammered us like a Christmas bell!” Jones snarled, just before a second explosion shook the vessel, closely followed by another, then six more in rapid succession.

Reaching up, the captain grabbed a hand mike from an overhead stanchion. “All hands hear this, all hands hear this, battle stations! I repeat, battle stations!” she snapped. “This is not a drill. We are under attack!”

Instantly, Klaxons and horns began to hoot all over the destroyer, and swarms of sailors poured out of hatchways to surge across the tilting deck and take their assigned positions at the weapons stations.

“How could you possibly know this is an attack, and not a catastrophic mechanical failure?” Jones demanded, grabbing on to a stanchion as the ship shook again, even harder this time.

“That wreckage on the ocean floor,” Taylor growled in reply. “It had to be a trick to make us stop!”

The ship rocked again as a water plume rose off the starboard side.

“But we accelerated!”

“Then let’s hope we escape!”

By now, the overhead monitors showed several breaks in the primary hull, with multiple compartments taking on water faster than the gauges could read. One engine was already dead, and screaming was coming from the galley.

“Helm, evasive tactics!” Taylor said calmly, her heart wildly pounding. “Sparks, call Gibraltar for rescue! Engine Room, all pumps to maximum!”

Just then, there came a deafening explosion, and one of the escort frigates rose from the ocean on a boiling column of steam and flame. As the stunned bridge crew of the Reliant watched, the frigate broke in two, spilling crew and machinery into the water.

“Are we being nuked?” Jones demanded, blood flowing from the palm of his clenched fist. “Did we hit a ruddy volcano?”

“I have no idea,” Taylor said honestly, her hands pressed firmly to the cushioned arms of her chair.

Another powerful explosion shook their vessel, and a sailor yelled as he went over the side. Several water columns appeared alongside another frigate, and the armored hull ripped open wide to show the burning decks inside, broken human bodies flying away in chunks. Diesel fuel and oil spread across the choppy waves like thick blood. The second frigate was listing badly to the side, while the third was already nose deep in the water and quickly sinking.

“Ma’am, the Cardiff is gone,” the radar operator said in an emotionless voice, his face deathly pale.

“What in the… Captain, sonar is dead!” Ears called out, staring in horror at the screen. It was glowing a solid, featureless green, every attempt by the onboard computers completely overwhelmed.

“Well, fix it!” Captain Taylor bellowed, as the destroyer rocked again and a water plume rose high on their port side. Honest to Jesus, if she didn’t know any better she would have sworn that was an underwater mine!

Ears held out his hands, his fingers hovering inches away from the complex controls. “But I don’t even know what’s wrong, Skip! This…this is impossible!”

“Fix it anyway!” Jones demanded, as yet another explosion shook the warship.

“Forget target acquisitions! Every station fire blind into the water!” Taylor shouted into the hand mike. “Weapons Officer, set depth charges for—” That was when she saw a dozen metallic spheres rise to the surface of the ocean surrounding the convoy. They were covered with short, dull spikes and…

Mines! The convoy was being attacked by bleeding underwater mines! she realized in shock. But any British navy ship could withstand the concentrated attack of a dozen conventional mines, maybe twice that number!

Except that as she watched, more and more of the dark spheres appeared on the waves, dozens upon dozens of them, until they made the sea look like a cobblestone street. Taylor could barely believe the sight. It was a nightmare come true. There had to be thousands of them! There wasn’t a ship in the world that could withstand that sort of mass attack. But how had the things gotten so close? Had the sonar been sabotaged? That was the only logical answer, because otherwise it would mean that—

The entire ocean seemed to erupt into a solid sheet of flame as the jostling mines clanged into one another to start a hellish chain reaction, a nonstop series of bone-jarring blasts that filled the universe. Briefly, men and women screamed as there arose the terrible keening of tortured metal being twisted out of shape. But even as Captain Taylor dived for the self-destruct button that would destroy the communications code in the main computer, she felt the ship heave upward, and for an unknowable length of time there was only pain and chaos.

FIGHTING HER WAY back to consciousness, Captain Taylor found herself waist deep in water, with the strange sensation of being in an elevator that was descending. Sinking, my ship is sinking! But that was difficult to confirm at the moment. Her left eye wasn’t working, her chest ached and both legs felt oddly numb. The ceiling lights were gone, but a couple of the emergency wall lights had survived intact and were emitting an eerie green luminescence.

Glancing around, the captain discovered that she was trapped in an air pocket on the bridge—the inverted bridge. The deck was above her head, and she was awkwardly standing on the ceiling. Smashed electrical equipment crackled from the control boards, blood was everywhere, and pieces of her command crew bobbed about in the water like fishing chum. A jumbled array of tattered arms and legs swirled in the water, then the head of Lieutenant Jones floated by, his face contorted in a final scream. Her stomach lurched at the grisly sight, but she banished those thoughts, and concentrated solely on staying alive. Her job now was to destroy the main computer and then escape from the sinking wreck. Of course, the only two exits were blocked by folded layers of crushed steel, but that wasn’t her main concern at the moment.

As Taylor feebly splashed her upside-down chair toward a sparking controls board, she noted that the only reason she was still alive was that the windows were all still intact, the bulletproof plastic merely scratched. She felt a sudden jarring from below, and loose sand swirled outside the windows. They were at the bottom already?

Creaking and groaning, the Reliant began to settle into place, the crippled vessel warping around the steel-reinforced shell of the bridge.

“God bless all navy engineers!” the captain panted, then gasped at the sight of moving lights outside the windows. In growing astonishment, she saw a dozen scuba divers swimming along the murky seabed, heading her way.

Wild hope of rescue flared just for a second, until she realized those were nonregulation diving suits, and the masked strangers were carrying acetylene torches and crowbars.

In a surge of cold adrenaline, Taylor fought her way through the morass of body parts to reach the glowing SD button, smash the glass covering and press hard. She felt it click, and there was an answering thump through the water from the pressure of the explosive charges cutting loose. Now the military codes of her nation were safe, the communication chips and data files utterly destroyed. Whoever these bastards were, they would learn nothing from those molten remains!

Just then, a scuba diver riding an underwater sled drove into view, and she bitterly cursed at the sight of a net being dragged behind the sled. The nylon threads bulged with gold bars…and corpses, the faces of the dead sailors familiar to her. These weren’t enemy spies, but common, ordinary thieves—and for some unknown reason, body snatchers.

“Filthy bastards!” Taylor screamed in white-hot rage.

As if hearing the curse, the driver slowed and looked about for the source. He seemed quite startled to see the live naval officer on the other side of the cracked window. Then he smiled and waved hello.

Sputtering expletives, Taylor irrationally drew her sidearm and fired all fifteen rounds. However, the 9 mm slugs merely smacked into the heavy plastic and stayed there like flies in amber. The resilient material that kept in her precious air supply also prevented her from reaching out to the thief.

Grinning behind his face mask, the skinny driver waved again and continued on his way.

Raging impotently, the captain holstered the pistol, unable to think of anything else to try at the moment.