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Authors: Steve Alten

BOOK: Goliath
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Captain Hatcher rushes into the Command Information Center, grabbing hold of a console as his ship lurches beneath him. “Report!”
Rocky Jackson stands. “It was a series of underwater munitions, four in all, very powerful. Totally blew out three of the four props and compromised
both layers of the hull’s torpedo-protection system. The engine room’s taking on water, with water already reported as high as deck four—”
“My God …” Hatcher feels the blood drain from his face.
An American supercarrier sinking? Impossible …
“Sir, it’s not just us, the entire fleet’s under attack, and I’ve lost contact with both subs.”
“Goddamn it.” Hatcher looks around. “Where the hell’s Strejcek?”
“I don’t know.”
“Commander, order everyone but the catapult and Pri-Fly crews on deck. Launch as many birds as you can while we still have electricity for the catapults—”
A groan of metal drowns out Hatcher’s last order. The ship’s steel plates wail in protest, straining to support the floundering carrier’s rising bow.
“Hatch—”
“I need to get to the SSES. You have your orders, Commander.” Hatcher grabs the watertight door of the CIC to keep from falling, then turns to face his wife. “Rocky, get your team out on deck—now!”
Two decks up in Pri-Fly (Primary Flight Control), Air-boss James “Big Jim” Kimball and his miniboss, Kevin Lynam, bark out commands to their LSOs (landing signal officers), who are frantically working on the flattop six stories below. The control tower is electric with activity. Kimball, the choreographer for the chaotic jet-fighter ballet taking place on the flight deck, is demanding his crew launch no less than twenty aircraft within the next six minutes, an impossibility from which he refuses to back down.
“Heads up on deck. Get ready to shoot Hornets five, six, and seven. Clear shoot lines. Clear catwalk—”
Beneath a turbulent atmosphere of noise and exhaust, four hundred men and women attired in team colors scramble across a lurching flight deck that has suddenly become more carnival ride than airport runway.
Twenty-year-old Ensign Rogelio Duron swears luridly in staccato Spanish as he tugs the parking blocks from the front tire of a Joint Strike Fighter—then screams as he is lifted off his feet and sucked headfirst into the engine inlet, blood and brain matter spraying the deck.
Kimball slams the control tower window with a futile fist. “Goddamn sonuva bitch!” The Air Boss looks up to see an air wing returning from the east. “Shit—Kevin, get those two CSAs in the air before our Tomcats start dropping out of the fucking sky.”
Belowdecks, frightened catapult technicians rush about in ankle-deep water as they hurriedly reset each cable, near panic with the horrible realization that they are involved in a high-stakes game of Russian roulette. Communication
between the flight-deck crews and the tower is coming in too fast; it is just a matter of minutes before another deadly mistake happens. Precise prelaunch pressure loads must be fine-tuned to each aircraft’s weight, but there is no time for the usual measurement—nominal values being hurriedly guessed and set manually. Settings too low will fling a pilot and his aircraft straight into the water, too high and its structure will fail.
Circling the melee is the E-2C Hawkeye Early Warning Aircraft, identifiable by the flat radar rotodome affixed horizontally atop its fuselage. Within the air-watcher, a team of operators use the APS-145 radar to organize the returning jet fighters’ midair refueling. From the Hawkeye’s cockpit, pilots and copilots stare in disbelief at the surreal disaster taking place below—warship after American warship sinking with inglorious rapidity beneath the lead gray waters of the Atlantic.
Back on the carrier, another Joint Strike Fighter races down the runway as the bow of the
Ronald Reagan
heaves upward from the sea like a breaching humpback. The JSF pilot veers off the rising deck, airborne, until the dark ocean rushes up at him and his jet smashes nose first into a ten-foot swell.
Jim Kimball sees the runway splinter as sections of the fractured prow fall back into the water. “That’s it, everyone out! Everyone on deck in life preservers on the double!”
Rocky Jackson grabs an orange flotation vest from an officer, then hurries out on deck. “Has anyone seen the skipper?” She turns to the officer directing the crew into the lifeboats. “O’Malley, have you seen—”
Shrapnel rains down upon her, a fragment of hot metal grazing her forehead as a helicopter blade shatters across the heaving deck, the rotor craft bursting in flames.
Men race to save the pilot.
Rocky is in a daze. “O’Malley, where’s the skipper?”
“You’re bleeding, Jackson, now get in the goddamn boat!”
Strong arms lift her into the life raft.
“Fuck this, I gotta find Hatch!” Rocky jumps out of the life raft, reenters the superstructure, and races down a listing gray corridor in search of her husband.
 
The water has reached Captain Hatcher’s waist by the time he enters the Ships Signals Exploitation Space, a top-secret chamber containing data links to all national and theater-level intelligence systems. The SSES anteroom is dark, the ship’s power out.
Hatcher stumbles across three bodies, two officers and an MP. All floating facedown. All dead.
“Admiral?” Hatcher rolls Brian Decker over, blood pouring from several bullet wounds. “Oh, Jesus …” He glances up at a flashlight’s beacon coming
from within the SSES operations room, his security reflexes taking over.
Hatcher removes the sidearm still holstered to the dead MP. He sloshes forward, peering into the high-level security chamber.
Commander Shane Strejcek lurks by a computer terminal. Images flash rapidly across the screen, a remote palm-sized device attached to the hard drive downloading the sensitive data.
“Strejcek? What the hell are you doing?”
The XO turns. An explosion of heat slams Hatcher back against the far wall, a warm wave of blood pouring down his shirt, quenching the fire burning in his chest as a numbing paralysis sends him slipping to his knees in the crimson water.
Strejcek approaches, Hatcher unable to raise the gun from the water. He has no strength to move, let alone speak.
Strejcek stares serenely at his dying commander. “I’m sorry, Skipper, but I serve a higher calling.”
 
Ignoring the cold water paralyzing her lower torso, and the warm blood oozing from her forehead, Rocky wades through the flooded corridor, the torrent rising fast, the fluorescent bulbs overhead flickering, threatening to plunge her into darkness. “Hatch?” She enters the open SSES chamber, then rushes forward, crying out as she sees him.
“Hatch!” Rocky clutches her husband’s lifeless form to her chest, his blood pouring out across her life jacket. She holds his head above water, her right hand brushing against the pistol he is clutching, even in death. “Oh God, Hatch—”
Looking up, she sees Strejcek. “Shane, help me—”
Strejcek is caught off guard. “Rocky, what are you doing here?”
“Help me, Goddamn it, someone shot—” She stares at the gun barrel pointed at her head. “You?” She feels for the weapon in her husband’s hand, now underwater.
“You should have abandoned ship.” Strejcek bends over and reaches for her with his free hand.
In one motion Rocky leaps to her feet and jams the muzzle of the MP’s gun into Strejcek’s open mouth. “Drop the gun!”
Strejcek complies.
Her teeth chatter against the cold, her hand shakes with emotion. She removes the muzzle from her superior’s mouth, mustering one adrenalinepacked syllable. “Why?”
Strejcek exhales. “You’re so beautiful, Rocky, but you’re so blind. The world has cancer, and you’re still in the denial stage.”
The ship lurches beneath them. Strejcek pushes her aside, diving for his weapon.
Unfazed, she fires.
A wad of blood and brain tissue splatters against the far wall as the boat’s traitorous second-in-command falls backward with a splash.
Before she can catch a breath, the supercarrier is wrenched to starboard beneath her, as if tugged by the hand of Poseidon. Rocky tumbles sideways, regains her footing, then leaps into the heaving corridor, head-on into a wave of rushing water.
Jesus … this isn’t happening …
The sea races through the inclined passageway like a raging creek, the torrent dragging her with it. Gasping and kicking, Rocky endeavors to grab a ceiling pipe, succeeds, then arm-walks the chasm like a mountain climber dangling from a rope bridge as she drags herself toward the diminishing light at the end of the tunnel.
Don’t stop …
The cold water saps her strength, yet her world-filling anger refuses to allow her any rest. The sea is rising at her from behind as the ship groans a final tocsin warning of her impending death. Her fingers numb, her hands too frozen to maintain a controlled grip, Rocky stubbornly continues to ascend, her feet slipping wildly on the slick steel walls.
Ducking through a knee-knocker, she fights to maintain equilibrium as an intersecting current sideswipes her from the galley.
Don’t stop, don’t think, just go faster …
The boat rolls again, its bow rising, sending a four-foot wall of water racing straight for her—
Rocky grabs the pipes, sucks in a desperate breath, and ducks, as the swell buries her, pounding her chest as it hurtles down the passage. She opens her eyes, shivering from the cold, then climbs faster, the daylight winking at her, teasing her from a dismaying thirty feet up.
A minute later she emerges from the open hatch, the gray sky rolling away as the deck heaves backward, threatening to send her spilling back into the corridor. She leaps sideways, then screams, dropping to her belly as an F/A-18E Super Hornet slides sideways across the tilting tarmac, its mangled bulk threatening to crush her. She covers her head, squeezing her eyes shut as the wreckage passes over her and crashes into the flight deck’s tower, now pitching backward as the carrier’s failing buoyancy yields its weight to the sea.
Rocky crawls out from under some trailing debris, her fingers creating indentations in the soft top layer of the torn deck as she moves toward the rising portside rail. Dodging yet another avalanche of debris, she grabs onto one of the carrier’s now-loose retractable antennas as the deck climbs to an angle too steep even to kneel upon.
Reaching up, she pulls herself to the rail and peers over the edge.
Oh, God
…
The pitching sea is eight stories below but nowhere to be seen, concealed beneath the carrier’s keel, which is rising from the sea like a glistening steel whale poised to swallow her.
Unable to jump, she holds on, praying for the ship to stop rolling. Shaking uncontrollably, she closes her eyes to shut out the vertigo and the wail of tortured metal, her trembling hand reflexively wiping the blood crusted on her half-frozen brow.
The carrier stops rotating—and suddenly drops like an elevator. Rocky holds on, as water splashes across her face and the sea rushes up from below.
Now!
She climbs upon the listing rail and leaps.
The cold wind rushes past her ears until she plunges feetfirst into the roaring ocean, sinking like an anchor. As she hits the water she inflates the vest, and its buoyancy halts her descent at twenty feet. Kicking and paddling, she fights her way back to the surface, the frothy layer appearing so close, yet always an arm’s distance away.
Finally, her head pops free, somehow slipping into a valley between swells. The rolling ocean lifts and drops her, the nausea overwhelming her stomach and head. A current tugs at her from behind. Turning, she is horrified to witness the
Ronald Reagan’s
superstructure slip beneath the waves, expelling its last dying belch as it disappears into the vortex created by its own descent into the unforgiving sea.
A steel-cold current of choking brine reaches out and grabs her. Panicking, she starts swimming, but the vortex is too strong, sucking her backward as it inhales her within its fury. Ocean swells become mountainous barriers, rising higher as she spins faster.
Too strong …
Rocky sucks in a last desperate breath as the cavitation of the displaced mass of the carrier snatches her about the waist and drags her below.
She kicks and paddles in protest, wasting precious air as she fights to swim upstream against the maelstrom, the unfathomable suction spinning above the now-submerged wreckage.
Forty feet
… her diving watch displays, unheeded.
Her pulse pounds in her ears.
Sixty feet .
. . sinister pressure assaults her eardrums as her limbs turn to lead.
Eighty feet, forty seconds, thirty-one years
… and still she is plummeting, ever downward.

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