The submarine had been oblivious to the activity over her head. She was an old Foxtrot. Too old and too noisy for front-line operations, she was there nonetheless, hoping to catch up with the convoy reported to her south. Her sonar operator had noted and reported a possible overhead splash, but the captain was busy plotting the position of the convoy he had been ordered to approach. The torpedo's homing sonar changed that. Instantly, the Foxtrot went to flank speed, turning hard to the left in a pre-planned evasion maneuver. The suddenly increased noise of her cavitating screws was discernible to several sonobuoys and Pharris's tactical sonar.

The torpedo was in ping-and-listen mode, using both active and passive sonar to find its target. As it completed its first circle, the passive receptors in the nose heard the cavitation noises of the submarine and homed in on them. Soon the active sonar pings were reflecting off the submarine's stem as it dodged left and right trying to get away. The torpedo automatically went to continuous pinging, increasing to maximum speed as it homed in on its target like the remorseless robot it was.

The sonar operators on the aircraft and the frigate had the best picture of what was happening. As they watched, the bearing lines of the submarine and torpedo began to converge. At fifteen knots, the Foxtrot was too slow to run away from the forty-knot torpedo. The submarine began a radical series of turns with the torpedo in pursuit. The Mk-46 missed its first attempt for a kill by twenty feet, and immediately turned for another try. Then the submarine's captain made a mistake. Instead of continuing his left turn, he reversed it, hoping to confuse the oncoming torpedo. He ran directly into its path...

Immediately overhead, the helicopter crew saw the water appear to leap, then froth, as the shock wave of the explosion reached the surface.

"We have warhead detonation," the pilot reported. A moment later his systems operator dropped a passive buoy. The sound came into them in less than a minute.

The Foxtrot was dying. They heard the sounds of air blowing into her ballast tanks and continued flank power from her electric motors, her propellers struggling to overcome the weight of water entering the hull and drive the wounded submarine to the surface. Suddenly the engine sounds stopped. Two minutes later, they heard the metallic scream of internal bulkheads being torn asunder by water pressure as the submarine fell below crush depth.

"This is Bluebird. We score that one as a kill. Can you confirm, over?"

"Roger, Bluebird," the ASW officer answered. "We copied blowing air and breakup noises. We confirm your kill." The crewmen cheered, forgetting the decorum that went with duty in CIC.

"All right! That's one less to worry about. We'll give you a big assist on that one, Pharris. Nice job from your sonar folks and the helo. Out." The Orion increased power and returned to her patrol station forward of the convoy.

"Assist, hell!" snorted the ASW officer. "That was our contact. We could have dropped the torp on him just as easy as he did." Morris punched him in the shoulder and went up the ladder to the pilothouse.

The bridge crew was all grins. Soon the bosun's mate would paint half of a red submarine silhouette next to the pilothouse door. It had not struck them yet that they had just helped in the killing of a hundred young men not at all unlike themselves, their lives cut short by the hammering pressure of the North Atlantic.

"What's that?" called a lookout. "Possible explosion on the starboard beam!"

Morris grabbed his binoculars and raced out the open door. The lookout pointed.

A column of black smoke was reaching into the sky from the direction of the convoy. Someone else had just gotten his first kill.

USS NIMITZ

Toland had never seen so many welding torches operating. Under the supervision of the executive officer and three damage-control experts, crewmen were using acetylene torches to cut away the damaged portions of Nimitz's flight deck and its supporting steel beams. What had been bad enough became worse on more thorough examination. Six of the enormous frames under the flight deck had been wrecked, and the damage extended two decks below that. A third of the hangar deck was burned out. Most of the plane-fueling network and all of the ordnance elevators had to be repaired. CIC was gone, and with it all of the computers and communications needed to fight the ship. The arrester wire systems would have to be fully replaced. The main search radar was gone. The list went on.

Tugs were pushing the wounded carrier into Southampton's Ocean Dock, a task made doubly hard because of the ship's induced ten-degree list. Water cascaded from the carrier's clifflike hull into the harbor while more entered the bilges below. Already a senior Royal Navy repair expert and the chief of the Vosper Ship Repair Yard were aboard, reviewing the damage below and cataloging the material needed to enable the ship to operate again. Captain Svenson watched the messenger lines being shot off to handlers who would secure the ship. He was an angry man, Toland noted. Five hundred of his men known dead, another three hundred wounded, and the count was nowhere near complete. The most grievous losses were in the flight deck crews, many of whose shelters had been immolated by the two Soviet missiles. They would also have to be replaced before Nimitz could sail and fight again.

"Toland, you'll be heading to Scotland."

"Excuse me, sir?''

"The air wing is being split. The fighters and Hawkeyes are going north. Ivan's been pounding on the Brits' northern radar line, and their fighters have taken a beating trying to help the Norwegians out. The Tomcats are already on the way, and we'll be loading their missiles onto the dock so the Brits can fly them north. I want you to operate with the fighter teams to evaluate what Ivan's up to with his Badgers, and maybe help our guys to cull off some of the bastards. The attack birds are joining the NATO tactical air reserve for the present."

"When do I leave?" Toland reflected that he had nothing to pack. The Kingfish had taken care of that, too. His first order of business was to cable his family that he was all right.

ICELAND

"Doghouse, this is Beagle, and what the hell just happened, over?"

"Beagle, I am authorized to tell you that an attack was just made against Keflavik."

"No kidding, guy. A B-52 just crashed right on our Goddamned hill. Didn't you tell anybody that I reported fighters?"

"Your information was evaluated as unconfirmed and was not passed on, Beagle. I did not concur in that. Continue your report."

"I saw four, repeat four, Soviet single-seat aircraft with a twin-rudder configuration. I can't be sure of the type, but they had double tails, you copy that?"

"Twin rudders, copy that. Confirm you saw four."

"One-two-three-four, Doghouse. I can't arrange them to parade over head. But if you send bombers in here unescorted again, mister, don' blame me."

"Any survivors from the crash you saw?"

"Negative. No 'chutes, and no way anyone would have survived the crash. Saw one fireball on the horizon, but I'm not sure what that was. How did the Weasels do?"

"Can't say, Beagle, but thanks for the word on the SAMs."

"You have instructions for me?"

"Your status is being reevaluated now. We'll be back on the hour."

"Make it two, fella. We have to move some before the bad guys send a patrol this way. Out." The Marines were around him, weapons ready, alert for the patrol or helicopter, or both, that had to be heading their way. Edwards tore off the headset and repacked the radio. "Great, just great," he muttered. "Let's move it, people."