Crush Depth by Joe Buff Page A

foaming, boiling seawater. Spume and spray blew backward from its breaking crown, as a man-made wind was sucked in toward ground zero by the updraft of the mushroom cloud.
    “Lower all masts and antennas!” ter Horst ordered.
    All the imagery went blank. Van Gelder gripped his armrests, white-knuckled, waiting for what was to come.
    The ship rolled and corkscrewed madly, and Van Gelder’s stomach rose toward his throat. Voortrekker dipped and heaved as the tsunami passed right overhead with a terrifying watery roaring sound.
    “Raise all masts and antennas!” ter Horst shouted above the diminishing noise.
    The satellite imagery came back. On Van Gelder’s display of Diego Garcia, the screen showed nothing but snow for a moment, then a lurid hot-violet glow flickered beyond the horizon on the picture.
    “ That blast should be them, not us,” ter Horst said. “The island’s outer defenses have gone nuclear after all.” Probably a destroyer or cruiser, Van Gelder thought, trying to smack the inbound missiles down.
    A string of blinding lavender-violet fireballs bloomed, just over the southern horizon from the recon camera’s point of view.
    “Oh dear. A whole wall of them, across our missiles’ lineof approach. This I don’t like. I’m sure we lost some missiles there.”
    Ter Horst sounded worried; Van Gelder was torn between praying for failure or success. He felt pity for the people on the atoll. Then he looked at the local periscope picture, at the fresh mushroom cloud that smashed the incoming enemy jet, standing now like a beacon marking Voortrekker ’s location—he felt pity for himself and his crew.
    “There.” Ter Horst pointed at his screen. “Our weapons are still in the air, a few at least.”
    Conventional antiaircraft guns, shorter-range weapons, opened up from the atoll. Guns began to fire from ships stuck in the harbor too—some just couldn’t get up steam or warm their big diesel engines fast enough to leave. Van Gelder saw the gun flashes, vivid in the evening twilight. The shells invisibly flew away from Van Gelder, toward the south, and burst low over the ocean, leaving black puffs of smoke but showing no hits on incoming missiles. Van Gelder saw Allied fighters jinking to avoid the friendly fire, making less effective their own strafing runs against surviving hostile missiles. Van Gelder saw the surface of the lagoon roil from the firing concussions of heavy ack-ack guns. The surface of the sea splashed and rippled from the ack-ack’s falling shrapnel. Sometimes there were bigger splashes, when dud shells hit the water. There seemed to be a lot of duds. Ter Horst laughed.
    More antimissile missiles took to the sky, or leaped from the wings of fighter jets as afterburners strained. Van Gelder followed the moving glows of the exhausts against the dusk. A few defensive missiles connected with something, in stabbing secondary blasts, and sheets of liquid fire rained to the sea.
    “Shit,” ter Horst said. “Well, it’s out of our control. We may need another salvo after all.” Van Gelder’s gut tightened at the thought, with the Reagan ’s planes so near. Fire-controlmen reported more airborne search radars, closing on Voortrekker fast. The warning strobes and beeps of his console seemed to set the pace for Van Gelder’s rising heartbeat.
    Tracers, bright red and green, began to stitch the heavens over Diego Garcia—in the tropics, dark came quickly. The defenders still had targets, which meant Voortrekker ’s cruise missiles still flew.
    “You know, Number One,” ter Horst said, “it all makes a lovely light show.”
    Dutifully, Van Gelder watched his screens. The last rays of the sunset cast a pink pall on the island bastion. Detonations right at sundown were part of ter Horst’s plan: it made Voortrekker ’s egress easier, and medical care on the shattered atoll that much harder to provide.
    Ter Horst tapped his chronometer. “The real fireworks are about to begin… now.