CHAPTER 1

Several years later

Aircraft carrier

The Pacific Ocean

The admiral took a long draw from his cigarette as he scanned the horizon. The ships under his command consisted of an aircraft carrier, a heavy cruiser, and two destroyers. The small armada plowed through rolling blue-green seas, due east into the rising sun. Already steaming in battle formation, the ships' crews stood ready to launch their aircraft.

Based on intelligence being fed into their combat-information center on board the flagship, they had not been spotted yet.

Good. They were about to execute the most devastating attack by a naval force in all human history. Thousands in San Diego would die in the initial nuclear fireballs. Millions more would suffer and eventually die from radioactive fallout. Coming from the sea, this attack would take them all by surprise. A surprise that would never be forgotten.

The commander dropped his binoculars and considered his situation. At the moment, at least, the target was vulnerable and unsuspecting.

A squadron of attacking aircraft could be easily tracked by an opponent's radar long before approaching a nation's coastline, raising an alert. It was not so with ships coming from the sea. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, navies were often invisible to an enemy.

The Coast Guard used a radio-based system to follow ships from twelve to twenty miles out. Twelve nautical miles was only about one hour of traveling time. Thus, the Coast Guard wouldn't be able to track an enemy ship until it was too close to respond to the threat.

For all its military strength, America was unprepared for what was about to happen.

Even if the Coast Guard did have satellite technology, trying to use a satellite to spot any given ship on the world's vast oceans was the equivalent of looking for a particular spec in the sand on a beach. The satellite would have to be in the right place at the right time, and the ship would have to sail directly under its cameras. In other words, a satellite would have to be lucky.

Plus, if there were some sort of satellite system up there somewhere, it was unlikely it would spot them. The admiral's warships had gone silent from the beginning of this top-secret voyage. Celestial navigation using the compass, the stars, the charts, and the sun had brought them to the precipice of history. No radio contact was allowed between ships. Only signal lights between ships were used for communication. And there was no active sonar.

There was nothing to alert the target or anyone else of their presence.

His planes would take off, skim the water to avoid radar, and launch their missiles from far offshore. Then, as hundreds of thousands writhed in agony from the devastating fireballs that their missiles would deliver, the planes would return to the carrier for a safe landing.

The admiral checked his watch.

Two hours to launch.

Two hours to history.

The USS Chicago The Pacific Ocean

Steady as she goes, " the captain said. "Continue to maintain silence."

"Steady as she goes, aye, Captain."

The American sub commander flipped a switch overhead, opening the intercom with his sonar room.

"Sonar. Conn. Anything up there?"

"No, Captain. Still nothing."

"Let me know the first time even a blowfish snorts on that sonar. Is that clear?"

"Aye, Captain."

The skipper's lips touched his coffee. The jet-black brew had grown lukewarm and tasted like battery acid.

Fine.

Black, battery-acid coffee. It was the unofficial nonalcoholic brew of the Navy's submarine force. And the ability to drink it without flinching was part of a submariner's rite of passage.

It trickled down his esophagus, stinging a bit, igniting another well-needed caffeine jolt. Good stuff. He listened for any unusual noises that would signify the presence of the enemy.

Silence.

Dead air.

These were the sounds of a vast ocean whose underwater spaces were far too grand for the human mind ever to grasp.

Silence.

It was a submariner's best friend.

Hiding under the cover of it, the submariner could attack his prey, and then slip away into the dark waters of the deep before an enemy could drop explosives on him that would crush his skull.

And now, at this moment, the enemy was also silent. One last gulp and his white coffee mug – sporting the inscription "C.O." just over the official emblem of the USS Chicago and just under the name Miranda – was now empty.

The commander refilled his cup. He gazed up at the steel-grate ceiling of the control room. It was as if he could see through all the steel, through the hundreds of feet of dark water, and spot what may be approaching on the surface.

His sixth sense had taken over beyond the limitations of his eyesight.

They were up there.

Somewhere.

The enemy.

The commander knew it. He knew it from the gut feeling in the stomach. The same feeling he got when he'd hunted whitetail deer back on a friend's ranch in Texas all those years ago. The pit of his stomach twisted whenever a buck moved within firing range. His gut was twisting again.

The intercom in the control room crackled static, followed by the excited voice of the ship's sonar officer booming through it to every corner of the submarine.

"Conn! Sonar! We've got multiple contacts! Multiple ships! Bearing course zero-nine-zero degrees! Sir! Range… Five thousand yards! Designate contact one Vikrant class carrier with four support ships! Looks like an enemy task force! They're headed this way!"

"I knew it!" the commander said. "Diving officer! Take us to periscope depth."

"Aye, Captain! Making my depth zero-six-zero feet now, sir!"

The bulb nose of the Los Angeles – class submarine tilted upward. She began rising through the ocean depths to a targeted depth of sixty feet below the surface. There, her captain would deploy his periscope for a better look at whatever – or whomever – was out there.

Aircraft carrier The Pacific Ocean

This admiral would not make the mistake that Japanese Admiral Yama-moto made nearly a century ago in Hawaii. Yamamoto set out to smash the American aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbor. He destroyed America's battleships that fateful Sunday morning, but all three American aircraft carriers were out to sea, well beyond the range of the shallow-draft torpedoes of his Japanese Zeros.

A major intelligence snafu had cost Japan the war.

This time, real-time intelligence was better. Three of America's mightiest carriers, USS Ronald Reagan, USS Nimitz, and USS John C. Stennis – half the Pacific carrier fleet – were moored at this very moment like sitting ducks at San Diego's Coronado Naval Air Station, just a quarter mile across the sparkling waters of San Diego Bay and the bustling population of America's seventh largest city.

This powerful armada would strike with nuclear-tipped missiles launched from its planes over a hundred miles offshore.

They would fly in low over the water, the missiles, under radar, barely skimming the tops of the waves on their approach. Reaching the airspace just off Point Loma, their internal guidance system would turn them on a course directly into the heart of San Diego Bay. Seconds later, they would detonate, two hundred yards before reaching the Coronado Bay Bridge.

A nuclear fireball would vaporize the American carriers, then engulf the glistening high rises on Harbor Drive and Broadway. Forty thousand souls attending the Padres-Giants game at nearby PETCO Park would vanish in the air, as the atomic blast wave crumbled fragile buildings in nearby Tijuana, Mexico. Nuclear flashes brighter than the sun would blind onlookers in Los Angeles and points north.