Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

CHAPTER 33
USS TOWERS (DDG-103)
SOUTHERN STRAITS OF HORMUZ
FRIDAY; 18 MAY
2200 hours (10:00 PM)
TIME ZONE +4 ‘DELTA’
Chief McPherson ran her fingers down the back of one of the Mark-54
torpedoes. She’d been chasing submarines for nineteen and a half years,
first as an Ocean Systems Technician Analyst, then as a Sonar Technician,
but she had never fired a torpedo.
The weapon’s anodized metal skin was smooth and cold, perhaps as
cold as the bottom of the sea. As cold as the torn, lifeless bodies of the
German Sailors would be.
First would come the fire, the shaped charge blasting through the steel
hull, burning everything its white molten plasma jet passed close to. Then
the sea would burst in through the broken hull, flooding compartments
with the roar of a tidal wave, drowning the few men not already killed by
the explosion, or crushing them to a pulp. And then the cold would come,
the intense cold of the sea. Quenching the fierce heat of the man-made
volcano, leaching the warmth from the still-twitching bodies of the crew,
until everything—the twisted steel, the mangled flesh, the terrified screams
of dying men—were all the same temperature as the frigid water of the
ocean bottom.
Behind her, the air drive motor started up with its characteristic hiss.
The huge armored door to the torpedo magazine began to swing slowly
open.
Chief McPherson looked over her shoulder. Who would be coming
into the magazine at this time of night?
She popped to attention as soon as she recognized the figure standing in
the widening gap of the doorway. “Good evening, sir.”
Captain Bowie smiled and stepped into the magazine. “Carry on,
Chief.”
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