Chapter 21 - Depth Charge
The red battle lanterns pulsed against the bulkheads of the destroyer like a hemorrhaging vein. Sirens shrieked in mechanical agony across the flight deck, tearing the chilly night air into jagged ribbons as mooring lines snapped taut against concrete bollards. Every trace of the gala—the champagne flutes, the white linen tables, the soft brass jazz—had vanished beneath the boots of sailors sprinting toward combat information centers.
"How deep was her last logged transit depth?" I shouted over the blare of the klaxon, clutching the railing of the bridge wing. The wind had whipped off the Atlantic, sharp and salted, cutting against the scar tissue on my jaw and neck.
Admiral Vance didn't blink. His jaw was set like forged titanium, though the knuckles grasping his encrypted satellite transceiver had gone deathly white. "She was running silent at eight hundred feet when the primary coolant line sheared. Test depth for a *Virginia*-class is officially eight hundred; crush depth is estimated around sixteen hundred. If her emergency ballast tanks didn't blow immediately before main electrical failure, she’s sliding backward down the continental shelf into the Greenland Basin."
Two miles of icy water, black as obsidian and cold enough to crystallize blood in seconds.
"The ballast valves," I said, cold dread pooling in my gut. "Arthur didn’t just supply the cooling manifold. Apex Industries won the sub-tier subcontract for the high-pressure pneumatic actuator housings during the last drydock overhaul in Groton."
Vance’s head snapped toward me. "Are you telling me the blow system was compromised too?"
"My father never cut corners on single-assembly runs," I said, the venom in my voice tasting like copper. "If he forged metallurgical certificates for cast-steel cooling flanges, he used the same porous, slag-heavy scrap pour for the pneumatic solenoids. Under eight hundred PSI of differential pressure, those valve stems don't just crack. They shatter. The air banks can't displace the water. The boat becomes an eight-thousand-ton anvil."
"Commander!" a voice barked from the hatchway. A young tactical action officer stumbled onto the bridge wing, clutching a printout still warm from the cryptographic teleprinter. "Flash message from COMSUBLANT. SOSUS hydrophone array off Jan Mayen picked up low-frequency hull groaning at zero-two-fourteen Zulu. Followed by three distinct metallic impacts."
"Three impacts," Vance muttered, his eyes narrowing. "Manual hull hammer. Someone is alive in the forward compartment. They’re signaling with a wrench against the torpedo room casing."
"Or whatever compartment hasn't flooded yet," I countered, my military training stripping the panic from my voice and replacing it with lethal, narrow focus. "Where is the nearest deep-submergence rescue vehicle?"
"The *Mystic* is undergoing scheduled battery recertification at North Island in San Diego," the officer said, his face pale under the crimson tactical lights. "Earliest fly-away time aboard a C-17 to Thule Air Base is fourteen hours. Flight time another six. By the time they mate the submersible to a mother sub, the *Viper*’s scrubbers will be dead, or the bulkhead seals will have collapsed under hydrostatic pressure."
"Fourteen hours is a death sentence," I said. "They have three hours of heat and breathable oxygen at best if the reactor scrammed and auxiliary diesel is drowned."
Vance turned his gaze fully upon me. The wind caught his service ribbons, pinned firmly above four silver stars. "You built the saturation diving rig for Arctic salvage trials two years ago before you left the service, Morgan. The deep-depth hyperbaric atmospheric suit—the *Exo-Vanguard* prototype."
"The Navy mothballed that project when Arthur told NAVSEA it was too expensive to maintain," I answered, memories flashing like phosphorus behind my eyelids—the white-hot flame, the scalding steam that had melted the skin off my shoulder when Arthur’s prototype failed during testing. "They parked the prototype in a pressurized storage cradle at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard."
"It’s not mothballed," Vance whispered. "I kept it funded off my black-budget discretionary ledger. It’s sitting loaded aboard a modified C-130 Hercules on the tarmac at Pease Air National Guard Base, fully fueled, crew on four-minute alert. We can be over the Denmark Strait in three hours."
"Admiral, that suit has never been certified below twelve hundred feet," the tactical officer stammered. "If the hull is resting on a ledge near crush depth, the joint seals on the exosuit will shear. No human being can survive that dive."
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I stared down at the deck, then looked the four-star admiral dead in the eyes. "One hundred and thirty-two men and women are trapped inside that steel tube because my father wanted a five-percent increase on his third-quarter profit margin. I poured the original schematics. I know every bolt, every weld, and every weak point of that hull."
"Get your gear," Admiral Vance commanded without hesitation. "We wheels-up in twenty."
