LZR-1143 (Book 4): Desolation (2 page)

Two hands turned clockwise at the same time and the green lights turned an angry red.

“Con, hard to starboard. Weapons, get me a solution on the Akula.”
 

The young officer turned to look at the Captain. “Sir, they’re not in range yet—they fired blind. They don’t have a lock yet either.”

The frantically pinging sonar was being piped into the small room through the PA and everyone listened as the torpedoes struggled to find a target.

“I’m aware. Work on that solution.” He turned to Sharp. “Commander, see that the launch is executed on schedule. By my mark we have tee minus…”
 

His next order would never issue. The small room exploded in confusion and fury as a sailor in workout clothes appeared suddenly from the hallway and ripped the jugular out of Commander Sharp’s neck, spraying blood over an array of terminals. The young ensign screamed, falling away from her chair as Sharp’s body fell over the controls. The rabid sailor didn’t hesitate, and fell on her next, following the sound of the terrified scream and tearing with his hands and teeth, finding purchase in the soft flesh of her smooth cheek.
 

As she fell to the floor, Sharp’s corpse angled into the lever that controlled the boat’s pitch, sending the submarine down by a sharp thirty degrees. The attacking sailor was thrown free of his second victim, careening past Marcus and into a bulkhead.
 

The lieutenant manning the con worked feverishly to correct the angle of descent as Marcus moved forward to try to help the stricken ensign. As he kneeled on the steep incline, the sonar officer called above the fray.

“Brace for impact!”

“Hard to port, Lieutenant!” Marcus yelled, but the young officer was intent on recovering from the steep decline—a dive that, at this depth, could quickly implode the external bulkheads of the large ship. It was the last thing he ever did.

“Lieutenant!” Marcus screamed, making an attempt at the controls, but falling short as the boat lurched again. A bloody hand was suddenly on his arm. As he stared at the young woman’s ruined face that appeared next to him, eyes vacant, mouth open, the world exploded.

He was thrown back, even as the ship tried desperately to level out. The first Russian torpedo had detonated near the hull, and a giant energy wave had slammed the narrow ship center mass, twisting it lengthwise, like a giant corkscrew. Marcus fell back, tumbling awkwardly into a wall, and back near the door to the bridge from the adjoining hallway. His vision clouded as the pain from the impact reached his consciousness. Blood poured from a gash in his scalp, and he looked down, shocked to see a perfectly formed human bite mark dimpling the skin of his forearm.
 

Another crewman appeared from the hallway behind him, eyes wide and gleaming with clumsy malevolence. Marcus cringed as the man thrust into the bridge and was met by three quick shots from the sonar operator’s sidearm. An errant round pinged against the bulkhead and snapped into a control panel.
 

The crewman fell briefly, but then rose again, three bullet holes in his torso dripping blood.
 

“Sir!” the sonar operator was yelling around the approaching form of the wounded man, who ignored the bullet wounds and struggled forward.

“Another torpedo in the water, sir! They have a solution on us!”

His gun spoke again, this time a bullet snapped the head back on the advancing crewman, who went down hard.

Marcus looked woozily toward the con. The young ensign was no where to be found, and the lieutenant lay on the floor, head partially caved in from the last impact. Marcus struggled to his feet, trying to make it to his chair, and closer to the controls. As he stumbled on the steep incline, his hand grasped the arm of his chair, closing around a photo he had stashed in the crack between the seat and the arm. A photo of his daughter, smiling up at him from a swing set.
 

Across the bridge, the countdown timer on the launch sequence caught his eye.
 

He understood now.
 

It was real. The reports were real.

Somehow it had found its way to his ship.
 

And right now, people out there were fighting these things, trying to survive.
 

He had to stop the launch. He couldn’t play a part in wiping out the remnants of the human race. He had to give the world a chance.
 

He had to give his daughter a chance. This … disease … this thing … it wasn’t enough. Not to warrant the death he could deal out. He had to stop it.
 

The world deserved a shot at making it right.

“Sir,” the sonar operator said softly, over the blaring of an impact alarm. “It’s been a pleasure serving with you.” He was staring down the hallway leading into the bridge, his eyes wild. He checked the magazine of his pistol carefully, and walked out of the bridge, his weapon already trained on targets downrange. The pistol spoke several times before the man’s screams echoed against the steel walls.

Outside the submarine, a large black shape was approaching, sonar locator active, its head packed with high explosives. With no one at the sonar station, Marcus had no warning. But it would have availed him little to know of the death that was being dealt to him.
 

He could do nothing to prevent it.
 

The impact of the Russian torpedo splintered several plates at the stern of the ship, and the cold Pacific water began to pour into the already doomed boat. As the dark liquid filled the stern quickly, driven by water pressure that was only increasing as the massive boat was pulled down by the ballooning weight of thousands of gallons of water, Marcus shook his head and rose from the cold deck. Blood spurted from his injured arm, and his vision was tunneling.
 

He heard the rush of water behind him. He groaned and pulled himself forward. The deck was now at a forty five degree angle, and he knew he didn’t have much time. The boat would implode in minutes—possibly seconds—at this depth.

Ahead of him, the fire controls were undamaged, levers and touch screens showing normal readouts, counting down to the launch of the boat’s full compliment of thermonuclear weapons. If he didn’t act now, twenty-four nuclear weapons with fourteen warheads packed into each missile would rain fire and death on millions of people, both alive and dead.
 

He couldn’t die like this. Even in the face of the world’s own disease, he couldn’t end it in murder.
 

The boat groaned beneath him as he reached a shaking hand for the controls and a sudden impact threw him to the floor as the unmistakeable sound of shattering metal and protesting steel echoed in the small space. The bow had ruptured, and the deck was pitching forward as water poured into the lower compartments. He had less than a minute to cancel the launch.

Nuclear missiles have two key components: the launch sequence, which actually pushes the projectiles from their tubes, and the detonation command, which detonates the nuclear warheads. Both sequences can be overridden, but on the newest version of command software, they had to be overridden separately.

But Marcus only had time to enter one sequence of commands.

Water was pouring into the bridge from the corridor outside, and a crewman was struggling to his feet directly in front of the fire control panel. Water began to push up from beneath the deck, and he glanced at the depth monitor and winced—they were well below their maximum rated depth, and still falling.

Marcus did the only thing that could sooth his conscience in the face of imminent death.
 

He cancelled the launch sequence, keeping the live missiles in their tubes.

As the depth gauge read nearly 1800 feet, Marcus fought the tide of frigid water to push himself back into his chair. The chair in which he had spent countless hours thinking about his family and the sun. He reached for the photo that was no longer there, and felt the water reach his waist and crawl toward his chest.

Beside him, a hand burst from the roiling saltwater, gripping his arm tightly with a cold, white hand.
 

At least he died with a clear conscious, he thought to himself. No one would perish because of his actions. The world would have a chance.

He allowed himself a smile, even as the frigid water reached his mouth and the pain of a new jagged bite wound in his stomach reached his brain.
 

The USS Kentucky met her end as the water overtook her Captain in his chair. The sleek, now ruined boat slammed into the ocean floor at a depth of nearly 1900 feet, the bow crashing into a layer of thick silt and volcanic rock. She came to rest with the lip of a wide, and very deep trench, directly to her port side. A trench that had yet to be mapped by the U.S. Navy due to its narrow mouth and recent birth. Seismic activity in the area had pushed this unusual formation into existence within the last four months, and the mouth of the narrow canyon was barely seventy feet wide—just large enough to swallow an Ohio-class nuclear submarine.

The Kentucky pitched onto her keel and swayed briefly in the dark water before the weight of the boat shifted as it filled completely with seawater, pushing it to its port side. As the boat rolled over slowly, like the last throes of a dying whale, it groaned once more before toppling into the deep canyon. The boat fell slowly and silently, twisting slowly and sinking into a dark abyss that was more than a mile deep.
 

The trench, had it been discovered, would have been unique in its attributes. It was deep, and it lay no more than seventy miles from the coast of the United States. Almost directly due west from the city of Seattle, Washington.
 

But what would have been truly significant, had this long, deep abyss been mapped, would have been its location directly upon the Cascadia subduction zone. This subduction zone, known to geologists as a megathrust fault line, stretches nearly 600 miles along the coast of Canada and the United States, and converges with two other major fault lines to the north (the Queen Charlotte Fault) and the south (the San Andreas Fault). This subduction zone—the area where a fault line in the earth separates two tectonic plates—was created as the floor of the Pacific Ocean slowly slips beneath the large North American plate, the mass of land upon which the United States of America is situated.

This large, deep canyon into which the Kentucky was now falling, led into the bowels of the earth merely a mile from where these two plates intersected. On a typical day, the stored energy of these two plates moving slowly past one another could erupt into a standard or devastating earthquake at a moment’s notice.
 

With these earthquakes, the massive string of volcanoes along this fault line, including Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens (which had already shown its dangerous potential in a small show of petulance in 1980), could be persuaded to erupt. Massive tsunamis could be pushed into the West Coast of Canada and the United States by the drastic shift in sea floors. The potential devastation from a natural release of this pent-up energy was mind boggling.
 

Combined with the potential to cause a ripple effect due to its connection to the San Andreas and Charlotte Fault lines, the Cascadia subduction zone has long been one of the most closely watched geological areas in the Northern hemisphere.

On any ordinary day, thousands of monitors across the world would be listening for disturbances along that line, mapping seismic ripples that might portend the next ‘big one’—which scientists knew was already far overdue.
 

But today was no ordinary day.

Today, a doomed nuclear submarine, carrying the undead bodies of one hundred and fifty-four sailors and twenty-four armed thermonuclear missiles was falling deep into the earth, directly adjacent to the fault line.
 

Today, the Cascadia subduction zone would have some help reaching a horrible, earth shattering destiny.
 

Only five minutes from when the launch order was issued, three hundred and thirty six high yield thermonuclear warheads detonated simultaneously from inside their tubes. The explosion occurred as the crushed, mangled wreckage of the Kentucky lodged itself near the bottom of the narrowing ravine, only three quarters of a mile from a particularly unstable stretch of the subduction zone.
 

In the history of the world, there has never been a larger explosion.
 

The cold, dark water around the site vaporized and churned, the rock walls of the canyon imploded. Beneath the ship, the vibrations rocked the very bedrock of the fault line, sending waves of energy through the fragile and unstable earth.
 

Had Captain Marcus lived, he would have wept. For it was by his hand that the entire west coast of the United States would now be unmade.
 

Our faithful companions…

Approximately 100 miles north of Seattle, Washington.

Approximately 15 miles east of the Pacific Ocean.

“You’re holding it wrong.”

“Shut up, I’m a grown-ass man. I’ve got this shit.”

“Fine. Just don’t blame me when you shoot that poor squirrel.”

“I’m not going to hit a squirrel.”

“Do you even see the squirrel?”

“There’s no squirrel.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, dammit, now let me do this…”

I held the crossbow up, sighting it with one eye closed.
 

“Don’t get your face that close—I told you, it could snap back at you.”

I sighed.

“I heard you. I’m not effing deaf, for God’s sake. Don’t you have some angst to work out or some boy bands to swoon over?”

My hand tightened on the grip.
 

I got this.

No problem.

Forty yards to the tin can, using a weapon that had been designed by men who only bathed once every four fortnights, millennia ago. A weapon designed to be passed out to illiterate conscripts so they could kill the horses of knights during battle from twenty feet away.