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Another, slower fighter, a late arrival, fired two AIM-120 AMRAAMs. Both missed, corkscrewing erratically, leaving useless trails of smoke — they must have suffered battle damage in some earlier dogfight. Flying on just vapors now, probably, that pilot pulled up and ejected. Good chute! The wingman called it in.

Another fighter rammed a missile, another harsh eruption, and the wingman was alone. He tried for one himself, using every ounce of thrust, his engine temps far in the red, happy to make the sacrifice for his 5,000 shipmates, surprised how easy it was to die. But his target was too fast. He watched the surviving missiles draw relentlessly ahead, arrayed in an arc in front of him. They left his Super Hornet to buffet in their jet wakes, spattering his windscreen with kicked-up spume.

With no other option the pilot gained altitude and throttled back and radioed in another warning. Ahead, hull down over the horizon, an Aegis guided missile cruiser opened fire. He guessed these were RUM-139B Updated ASROCs, in very short supply, antisubmarine rockets that dropped nuclear-tipped Mark 54 torpedoes, aimed to bracket the sub that launched the vampires.

Common sense told the wingman to turn north or south and flee, but loyalty kept him on course eastward. Running very low on fuel, running away from the ASROCs' impending nuclear detonations, heading almost certainly toward one more, he went for altitude again. Now he could see the whole battle group ahead, Ranger in the center, escorts spread around her in a circle foreshortened by perspective. They were well dispersed against atomic warheads, but at the cost of weakened interlocking antiaircraft fire. White spray began to shroud the vessels as high-pressure nozzles started the washdown that was a basic defense against the upcoming heat and fallout. The ships seemed so tiny against the surface of the water, their wakes curving in coordinated Vs as the formation altered course. To buy a little time? To show the smallest profile? Blue-gray fumes poured from Ranger's stack as her engineers squeezed every last knot from her aged oilfired boilers. Steam billowed from her flight deck as F-14s catapulted into the air against the crosswind, and her combat air patrol did what they could.

One missile went for an Arleigh Burke destroyer, attracted by the rippling thermal signature of her gas turbine exhausts. There was a brilliant flash. Conventional high explosive but she went dead in the water immediately, shrouded in flames and dirty smoke.

The wingman tried to spot the Shipwrecks, aptly named he told himself, but from his lofty, slower vantage point the supersonic projectiles were invisible to the human eye. They'd be mostly unseen to crewmen on the ships as well, he knew, though not to their pulse-Doppler and phased-array air-search radars. He watched the fluffy booster trails from RIM-7P Sea Sparrows, which made Mach 3.5 themselves, but whose range was only eight nautical miles. Some scored hits with their fragmentation warheads, and he prayed none picked up his fighter; he put his Identification-Friendor-Foe in squawk mode just in case.

Roiling black puffs belched from guns on every vessel now, throwing up a wall of steel, hoping for last-minute intercepts. Clouds of SRBOC chaff burst between the ships, and HIRAM decoy magnesium flares drifted on the wind — they showed up, too, amidst the chaos on the pilot's sea mode radar and on his forward-looking infrared. He pictured the ships' close-in-weapons systems slewing into action, firing 20mm nickel-cobalt-tungsten slugs at 3,000 rounds per minute. Some connected, and other missiles exploded or plunged into the sea.

But Ranger couldn't hide. Her thousand-foot-long bulk, her fifty-year-old most unstealthy lines, would draw the target seekers hungrily. The wingman altered course to northward, self-preservation taking hold at last. There was another blinding flash. Once more he looked back.

Off Ranger's starboard side a supernova flared. Her island superstructure blew apart, antennas first and then her stack and other chunks of twisted steel. The flag bridge and the main bridge vaporized, as the aviator tried not to think of the men and women who'd been inside. Ranger's remaining warplanes took off sideways, dissolving in midair, followed by her four big aircraft elevators, tumbling like leaves in an autumn breeze. The carrier's entire flight deck crew, traditional multicolored vests worn over rubberized jump suits and breather hoods, shriveled like ants under a magnifying glass and blew away in tiny puffs of soot. The carcass that was Ranger burned furiously from stem to stern.

The wingman felt the shock wave lift his fighter-bomber bodily, flung forward and yet almost in a stall. His moving map display, his head-up display, his helmet-mounted cueing system all went dead. Both artificial horizons failed, and he looked up to see the ocean, not the sky. He fought for control as more cautions and warnings lighted on his panels. From upside down he saw the Aegis cruiser take a tidal wave bows-on, pitching like a roller coaster, yawing frighteningly, white water thrown up higher than her masts, green water burying her weather decks.

Suddenly the wingman's port turbojet flamed out, from the negative static pressure pulse of the nuclear detonation. Fighting the torsion of unbalanced angular momentum on a single turbine, the twisting from uneven thrust, he went through the relighting sequence on pure instinct. Blessedly it worked. He leveled off.

The wingman blinked repeatedly, the dazzling spots before his eyes now mixed with angry tears. He glanced at the DI-60P/D dosimeter clipped to his flight harness, wondering if he'd gotten lethal rads, whole-body penetrating gamma rays and neutrons. You needed a computer to read the thing, but he'd find out soon enough if symptoms showed — nausea would be first. Off his left shoulder the horizon flickered lavender, violet, pink, then new suns rose in mockery of Sol. In the cockpit his upfront digital touchscreen died.

The aviator reviewed the little clipboard strapped to his right thigh, then did the calculation in his head. He came to zero five five true — his inertial nav and GPS were fried, his radars and his forward-looking infrared were useless, but at least his backup mechanical gyrocompass worked. Some sixty miles away an Australian Collins-class diesel sub patrolled on lifeguard duty for emergencies like this, courtesy of America's wartime British Commonwealth allies.

The wingman read his fuel gauge one more time: just four hundred pounds of JP-5. He throttled back yet further, to a mere three hundred knots. His hydraulic system automatically switched into low-pressure mode, 3,000 psi, but then began to drop. He numbly tried to focus on just staying in the air. He'd barely make it.

CHAPTER 1

A FEW DAYS LATER, AT DIEGO GARCIA, IN THE INDIAN OCEAN

Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Fuller looked up from his night-long labors at USS Challenger's weapons loading hatch, wiped his dripping brow, and watched in morbid fascination. The crewmen he'd been working with did too, and for once he didn't urge them back to it. They've more than earned a break, he told himself, so let them look. Let them see what this is all about, this tactical nuclear war at sea with the Berlin-Boer Axis.

"Jesus," the submarine's chief of the boat said, looking east from under the lead-lined awning with its propane jets, radar and thermal antisatellite masking.

"Yeah," Jeffrey said. What else was there to say? The young seamen just stared. The sun had breasted the horizon now, well past the first moment of nautical dawn, that special time of day that Jeffrey loved but rarely saw. The extra-yellow early light shone above the seventy-foot-high trees off in the distance, the long-abandoned coconut plantation on the other side of the lagoon. The light picked out the cloud-flecked sky, high scudding altocumulus over fluffy fractostratus blobs, and it illuminated the hideous procession in the foreground.

"Ranger," Jeffrey whispered.

The ATR(X) oceangoing salvage tug bore zero three five relative, crossing the line of bearing to the lighthouse on Leconte Point. Her charge's stem could just be seen, slowly making progress past the anchorage. Gradually, like some obscene burlesque, the hulk came into view, dragged by the tow cable whose catenary curved beneath the water and then up again. Slowly, almost teasingly, she moved out from behind the looming steel-gray side of the submarine tender, USS Frank Cable, against which Challenger lay moored.

Instinctively Jeffrey did the target-motion analysis in his head. Angle on the bow starboard zero four zero, mark. Speed five knots, course one six five. Distance to the track, call it 1,200 yards.

Jeffrey noticed there was comparative silence now. Work topside had ceased on all the other ships as well. Only the incessant roar of jets and turboprops and helicopters persisted, off past his right shoulder at the airfield. Overhead, birds soared, oblivious. Ranger's wake washed under Challenger, and she started pitching slightly as if in homage. The nylon mooring lines stretched, creaking softly. Thankfully the light breeze was from behind Jeffrey, from the west.

Ranger's island superstructure was gone, Jeffrey saw, except for a tangled mess of wreckage, a livid stump three meters high. Her flight deck, warped and twisted, was more or less still there, except for the aircraft elevators, which all were missing. Edgeon to the enemy cruise missile blast, Jeffrey figured, the flight deck was peeled upward as the atomic shock front's ground reflection diffracted over the vessel. Stress loadings of the incident wave, severe drag and compression forces, and explosive negative pressure gradients did the rest.