“Four . . . three . . . two . . .”
Forte grabbed the top rung with his final reserve of strength and breath. He felt a hand seize his trouser leg. Holding tight, he kicked. The hand held fast.
“One! Initiate!” blared the loudspeaker.
From port and starboard, from bow, midships, and stern, came six staccato cracks! as explosive charges severed the hawsers tying the ship to the bollards on shore. Simultaneously, another explosion neatly cut the gangway in two, and it fell with a splash into the water.
The Texas, which had been prisoner in still water for half a century, was finally free.
So was Gwillam Forte. The sudden explosions had taken Caulkins-unlike Forte-completely unawares, and he relaxed his grip long enough for Forte to kick his leg loose and fling himself onto the flag bridge and out of sight. The frustrated Caulkins snapped off two shots at him, missing by a large margin. Then he began to mount the ladder.
Waiting until he was nearly halfway up, Forte stood up and looked down at his adversary.
“Your shooting’s rusty, Hobe,” he said mildly. “Maybe a little oil would help.” Whereupon he liberally doused both rails with oil from the long-spouted can and watched grimly as Caulkins again fought the losing quest for the oily rails and slipped heavily back to the navigation bridge.
Forte dashed through the doorway into the flag bridge, dogged the door tight behind him, and shot the bolt. He was safe from Caulkins now, but it was the safety of a man who nails his coffin shut-from the inside.
He crossed the bridge quickly to the control panel. He slumped in the padded high chair and reached for the phone on the bulkhead.
“Ed.”
“We see you, Will,” said Ed Curry somberly. “We didn’t know Caulkins was still-”
“Never mind that.”
“No. Is there any way to get clear before the ship-”
Forte shook his head. He was safe from Caulkins in the flag bridge, but the ship and everything aboard it was doomed. If he opened the dogged-down door, he would be dead even sooner.
“No-no way.”
“There must be,” Curry insisted, knowing he lied.
“No.” Forte felt suddenly drained. On this ship he had lost three-quarters of himself more than fifty years ago. Today he would lose what remained. He laughed bitterly. At least there wasn’t much left to lose.
A jagged sound, like the ripping of a thousand sheets, tore through the ship. Looking forward through the bridge’s portholes, he saw a sheet of fire carpet the weather deck. It blazed fiercely, but only for a moment. When the smoke cleared, the deck was a glaring white. An instant later, the crackle of high-voltage energy bathed the superstructure, rigging, and the hull itself with an aura akin to St. Elmo’s fire. When it too vanished in a cloud of mist, the ship was no longer a dingy gray, but a uniform, aching white.
And then the Texas began to move.
It moved without sound, as softly as a zephyr across a millpond. But it moved fast-faster than ever before in its eighty-four years. Powerful jets of water from nozzles below the water line made a witches’ cauldron of turbulence at the bow, and a rising white spume foamed about the stern as it parted the waters and the ship backed down into the channel. With the acceleration of an outboard racer, the Texas shot out into midstream. There the force of the port-bow and starboard-quarter thrusters slewed the battleship around in a quarter turn, her bow now headed upstream toward the Russian ships, still wallowing in the backwash of the wave nine miles away.
No escape now. For anybody.
“What’s the combination on this doodad, Ed?”
Ed Curry read it off.
Forte’s fingers groped for the buttons on the underside of the steel cover, punched them in the proper sequence on the second try, and dropped the cover into its slot. The console was alive and blinking, like some monster emerging from its cave, indicating the readiness of its weapons systems, performance of its power units, and quite a few other things that Gwillam Forte didn’t pretend to understand. From a recess, he drew out the helmet, already plugged in, and buckled the strap under his chin. He climbed into the padded chair and fastened the harness around his shoulders. From this elevation his eyes could sweep a front of more than two hundred degrees; the solid bulkhead to the rear kept him from seeing what was behind, but that he already knew: Hobe Caulkins with a pistol in his hand and a lust for Forte’s life in his heart-Unless Caulkins had been fried by the Texas’s new paint job.
Forte was as ready as he would ever be. Maybe, with a lot of luck, he might just manage to … Then he cursed himself for a fool, and switched off the dream machine. He thrust his feet into the metal stirrups beneath the console to brace himself against the thrust of the ship that would come momentarily.
He waited.
The great battleship began moving again, almost imperceptibly at first, then with increasing speed. He was pushed back into the padding of his chair by the acceleration as the Texas took off upstream, her stern settling into the water like that of a racing boat. Through the portholes, the hard hot wind whipped his shirt open in a shower of buttons. He felt alive, more alive than in years.
The digital speed indicator on the panel showed they were approaching critical speed. The Texas, with three nuclear power plants providing steam pressure for its water jets, had a revised flank speed of seventy-one knots, but his scientists had calculated 63.7 knots to be the critical speed at this moment. If they had calculated wrong, the Texas would be at the bottom of the channel in-he checked the estimated-time-to-run clock on the console-twenty-six seconds.
Suddenly the ship began to shake, like a rag doll in a dog’s mouth, then a split second later a stupendous explosion sounded as the second of the channel tunnel complexes blew. The noise and vibration were even greater than the first, and the tsunamis produced by the explosion would be correspondingly greater. Again, channel waters would rush from both sides to fill the emptiness, carrying everything along with them, including the Texas. It was essential that the Texas be pulled as close to the brink of the enormous ditch as possible, in order to catch the tsunami as it was being created. But the slightest miscalculation and it would plunge over the precipice and be crushed under millions of tons of water.
Five seconds after the blast, the Texas’s movement relative to the shoreline slowed, then stopped. The ship began to move backward. The engines strained, but the backward pull was inexorable. Now they were racing astern at nearly fifty knots. Ships aren’t built to back down at anything like such a speed, and it began to shudder and vibrate, threatening to throw Forte from his perch. Water was building up beneath the stern, lifting it ever higher.
But just as Forte feared it would be shaken apart, the ship slowed, stopped, and then again shot forward on its water jets. It steadied on sixty-eight knots precisely, and at that moment, suddenly the land on either side of the channel seemed to fall away before his eyes. The ship was borne higher and higher, until he could clearly see downtown Houston, with the banks of both shores now far beneath him. It felt like the Fubar when it hit a powerful thermal updraft. Yet the vertical ascent was inconsequential compared with the forward velocity that now slammed him back in his seat. It was as if he had been shot out of a cannon. The thirty-eight-degree bow-down tilt of the ship’s deck had him clinging to the arms of his chair for dear life. If tragedy is going to strike, he thought grimly, now is the moment.
If the ship’s forward propulsion, the speed and the height of the wave, the ship’s alignment with the wave crest, its displacement-if all these and other factors so carefully computed and coordinated weren’t absolutely on the mark, catastrophe was about to overtake them. If the ship’s forward momentum, for example, was a fraction too great, it would slide down the wall of water into the trough, and the following wave would spin it around like a top, capsizing and sending it to the bottom. If the ship lagged, the wave crest would ride under it and it would tumble into the following trough, breaking up like kindling under the enormous impact.
Neither of these unpleasant things happened. They had mounted the curl of the wave like an expert surf-boarder, and the jet-propulsion engines automatically throttled back, keeping them balanced precariously on top of the world.
Forte’s muscles uncoiled.
From the towering wave, he could now see the pinpoints of Russian ships in the distance. In a matter of minutes the Texas would descend upon them. The first tsunami, judging by the evidence that came to his eyes, had apparently done its work well, for he could discern only a handful of survivors.