Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

SEA OF SHADOWS 139
machine gun bullet. The flight crew was cut to shreds even before the
secondary explosion hit the fuel tanks.
Bits of flaming wreckage fell out of the sky like meteors, and
Wolfhound Eight-Seven ceased to exist.
USS Kitty Hawk:
Commander Ortiz stared at the tactical display. Wolfhound Eight-
Seven’s tracking symbol flashed several times and then converted itself to
a last-known-position symbol. They were gone. They were really gone.
How in the hell could this happen?
He shook his head once and then blinked several times. “Get the
admiral up here! And get on the radio to Wolfhound Nine-Three. Tell
them to get a torpedo in the water now! I don’t give a damn if it hits
anything. We’ve got to put that sub on the defensive before it gets a bead
on them.”
Even as he spoke, he saw that his order had come too late. A hostilemissile
symbol popped up on the tactical display and began homing in on
Wolfhound Nine-Three’s position.
“Goddamn it!” Ortiz shouted. He grabbed a red radio-telephone
handset. “USS Wallingford, this is Strike Group Command. Lock on to
hostile missile track zero-zero-two and kill that son of a bitch!” Without
waiting for a reply, he said, “Break—Wolfhound Nine-Three, this is Strike
Group Command. Forget the torpedo! Get the hell out of there, over!”
A friendly-missile symbol appeared on the tactical display next to USS
Wallingford. It began to close rapidly on the hostile-missile symbol. The
hostile-missile symbol continued to race toward the helicopter.
“It’s too far away,” somebody behind Commander Ortiz said.
“Wallingford’s missile is never going to get there in time.”
Ortiz knew instantly that the speaker, whoever he was, was right.
Ten seconds later, the hostile-missile symbol merged with the
helicopter symbol, and Wolfhound Nine-Three was gone.
Ortiz was amazed at how clean it looked from the tactical display. No
blood. No fire. No screams of terror as burnt bodies fell from the sky.
Not even the imaginary canned violence of a video-game explosion. Just
two cryptic symbols touching on a video display, joining to create a new
symbol: a last-known-position marker for Wolfhound Nine-Three. An
electronic headstone to mark the death place of three men.
It took a second to hit him—the tactical display had more to show him
than the last positions of two downed helicopters. Something else was