The gap between the Texas and the enemy shrank. Very soon the range would be optimum for the Elbows, and still the enemy guns were silent. Could it be that previous tsunami had destroyed their offensive capability utterly? If not, he would, he thought grimly, as the wave carried him onward. He glanced down. A display told him that the nearest enemy ship, identified by the comparator as the aircraft carrier Dzerzhinsky, was only 2,800 meters away, and coming up fast.
His hand closed on the pickle.
But before he could fire, the first salvo of Russian missiles from ships down the line struck the tsunami that bore the Texas. He counted six as they streaked toward the ship. Miraculously, all missed, drilling straight through the wave on both sides of the ship and exploding far behind with a tremendous din.
But already it was too late for the Dzerzhinsky.
The carrier loomed so close Forte felt he could have hit it with a flung stone. Through the high-magnification lenses built into the helmet he could see the crew, some frozen to the spot, others running frantically away from the oncoming wave.
He pressed the firing pickle. A chorus of shrieks enveloped the ship, like a million bows across a million rusty saws, as the Elbows unleashed an electron barrage on the hapless carrier. Forte’s target was the enemy bridge, the brain and nerve center of the ship. Keeping his eyes focused on that point of maximum vulnerability, he poured it on. The fire of the thirty-six Elbows on the port side he could bring to bear on the enemy aircraft carrier in moments reduced the bridge to scrap metal. She was a ship whose captain would never give another order, whose crew would never obey one. The ship was dead.
But Gwillam Forte was alive, the fear that had clutched his stomach like a cold hand had disappeared, and his spirit was soaring near the realms of exaltation.
7 JULY 1998: 11:39 a.m.
From the eminence of his flag bridge, Admiral Grell watched the second wave sweeping toward them from afar. Unlike his staff officers, who goggled at it in open-mouthed disbelief, he had half expected it. A wave of such magnitude as the first could not be natural. Had it been produced by an earthquake, the only logical explanation in the absence of a mushroom cloud, then why had the buildings ashore been totally unaffected? And they hadn’t swayed by so much as a millimeter. True, a tsunami from some submarine convulsion in the Gulf of Mexico breaking on the shores of Galveston Bay could conceivably have sent a giant wave racing inland. But not to this particular stretch of channel, which dog-legged beyond the Texas basin. A wave from the gulf would have dissipated its force on the shore directly ahead. And then there was the flaming napalm. That was no natural phenomenon. The wave was man-made, and what man created once he could create again. In fact, he would: was not America the land of the assembly line?
These thoughts had passed in rapid review even as he battled a ship that bucked like a brahman bull. The diabolical mind behind the near-total destruction of the Soviet Seventeenth Fleet would send another wave, and another, until his fleet was wiped out. Grell didn’t pause to speculate on the source of that gigantic wave, but concentrated on the problem at hand: how to counter its appalling power.
In the brief interval before another wave crashed down upon them he must align the ships so that their bows were struck head-on by the wave. So deployed, they could survive any number of tsunamis. Had not six of them done so? They would slice the wave cleanly, pitch bow-up, then bow-down, in a matter of seconds, but they wouldn’t roll on their beam’s ends and capsize.
He gave the order on TBS-talk-between-ships-to get up steam, up anchor, and come to a heading downstream exactly parallel to both banks. All ships acknowledged except the Dzerzhinsky, whose communication equipment had apparently been knocked out.
“All missile batteries load!” was his next command. “Elevation four degrees, deflection zero degrees. All batteries report readiness and stand by to fire.”
One by one the batteries called in. Less than 10 percent were in operation. They might suffice, Admiral Grell thought, removing his drenched cap and wiping his sweating forehead with the back of his hand.
On the Russian ships, bruised and shaken officers were shouting orders to the damage-control parties, switching emergency power to cryogenic proton-gun accumulators, clearing passageways, juggling the depleted gun crews to man the missile batteries. A dozen things had to be done at once if the remaining ships of the once-glorious High Seas Fleet were to be saved.
Admiral Grell left them to it. To him, what mattered was the next wave. Putting dripping binoculars to his eyes, he peered down the channel.
Grell was tough and courageous, but the sight that greeted his eyes turned his knees to mush. The wave was coming! And poised below the lip of the wave like a surfboard was a vessel right out of a sailor’s fantasy. The ship’s lines and arrangement of guns told him instantly that it was the U.S.S. Texas, but a Texas transformed. For one thing, the old gray lady he had passed less than an hour before was now a gleaming white, from water line to foretop. All the painters in Texas couldn’t have done the job so fast, and yet … More astounding, how did the Texas mount that rampaging wave, manage to maintain its balance just below the lip without being overwhelmed? Admiral Grell was so unnerved that he automatically crossed himself.
“Did you raise the Dzerzhinsky?” he demanded of his young staff lieutenant.
“No, sir. We’re still trying.”
“Don’t bother. In thirty seconds the wave will be upon us. … Forward missile units: stand by!”
“All missile units ready, sir.”
Grell watched in fascination as the American ship roared down upon the hapless Dzerzhinsky, blasting away with its Elbows. The Russian ship did not return the fire, and as the Texas shot past the battered hulk, the rearing wave engulfed the Russian aircraft carrier, flung it on its beam, and passed on. The Dzerzhinsky rolled slowly over, belly up, like a dead whale.
By then the Texas was well upstream, its carousels pouring a deadly fire into the next ship in line, the helicopter carrier Yezhov. But the wave was now at last within range.
“Forward missile batteries: fire!” Admiral Grell bellowed.
A blinding flash rippled outward in flat trajectory from the forward missile tubes of the remaining ships.
In less than a second, a missile from the Yezhov blasted through the wave to one side of the Texas. Two from the Rykov, a thousand meters upstream, struck an instant later-and went through. From the other ships three other missiles pierced the wave’s wide front at the base and its very lip, barely missing the Texas mainmast.
And still the Texas came on.
“Aft batteries: fire!” Grell shouted.
This time there were only three missiles, and they missed the Texas by an even greater margin. But their fuses were correctly set. All three missiles exploded on impact with the advancing wave.
The tsunami collapsed.
It didn’t collapse all at once, or along the full breadth of the channel. That segment descending upon the Russian fleet was dispersed in a roiling cauldron of steaming water, whirling the Russian ships like macaroni in a cookpot.
The Beria broached, capsized, and sank.
In the magazines of the Litvinov, a missile was jarred loose from its hoist. It exploded. A chain of detonations erupted within the ship, and it was blown apart in a cloud of smoke and flames.
Only three Soviet ships-the helicopter carrier Yezhov, the missile cruiser Rykov, and the flagship Karl Marx-remained afloat.
The three survivors regained steerageway. As one, they turned broadside to the Texas, which had come careening down on their port sides only to be smothered beneath a mountain of water from the collapsing wave, which completely obliterated it.
For nearly a minute, nothing could be seen where the American battleship had been save a curtain of water that kept coming down like a mighty cloudburst, flailing the channel surface into a cloud of impenetrable froth. But as the seconds ticked by, the faint outlines of the Texas appeared.
A single lifeless body hung in the foremast rigging. The ship’s main deck was completely submerged, and the wreck appeared to be sinking. The stack was battered and its boats were swept away.
Then, shaking itself like a wet dog, it porpoised from the bow, with water cascading from its white decks, now a litter of snarled cables, mangled steel stanchions, and fittings flattened from the immense mass of water that had nearly sunk her.
Grell regarded the enemy ship with eyes of ice.
“All batteries-fire at will!” he commanded.
7 JULY 1998: 11:41 A.M.