The Seventh Angel Read online

  THE SEVENTH ANGEL

  Jeff Edwards

  Stealth Books

  THE SEVENTH ANGEL

  Copyright © 2010 by Jeff Edwards

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Stealth Books

  www.stealthbooks.com

  The tactics described in this book do not represent actual U.S. Navy or NATO tactics past or present. Also, many of the code words and some of the equipment have been altered to prevent unauthorized disclosure of classified material.

  This novel has been reviewed by the Department of Defense and the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (N09N2), Industrial and Technical Security Branch, and is cleared for publication in accordance with Chief of Naval Operations Notice 08-301.

  U.S. Navy images used in cover art and other illustrations appear by permission of the Navy Office of Information (OI-3), and Navy Visual News. No endorsement is expressed or implied.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9830085-2-1

  Published in the United States of America

  To Vailia Dennis

  For a lifetime of friendship, love, and shared wisdom

  — all squeezed into a few short years.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the following people for their assistance in making this book a reality:

  Rear Admiral John J. Waickwicz, USN (Retired), former Commander Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command—for his invaluable technical advice and sharp editorial eye; Lieutenant (junior grade) Bryan Wagonseller of the National/Naval Ice Center for his help in understanding ice formations in the Sea of Okhotsk; Bill St. Lawrence for sharing his extensive knowledge of ice-drilling technologies; Peter Bordokoff, Liza Pariser, and Ian Kharitonov for their exceptional Russian language skills; Captain Valery Grigoriev, Russian Navy (Retired), for his help with Russian naval language and Russian Navy procedures; novelist and former Trident submarine officer John Hindinger for giving me a basic unclassified understanding of ballistic missile trajectories; Master Gunnery Sergeant (EOD) Samuel A. Larter, USMC (Retired) and Sergeant Major R. A. “Skip” Paradine, Jr., USMC (Retired), for answering my questions about Explosive Ordnance Disposal as conducted by the U.S. Marine Corps; Master Modeler Richard Melillo of The Modeler’s Art (TheModelersArt.com) for building me an extraordinary model of the DMA-37 torpedo; Staff Sergeant Justin Schafer, U.S. Army, for help with small arms and the M-4 carbine; Brenda Collins for her diligent assistance in locating map resources and her excellent editorial advice; Robert MacDougall for his help with ballistic missile defense; OS2 Rob Andrews of the U.S. Coast Guard Navigation Center for refreshing my memory on matters of ship navigation; Kenneth R. Gerhart of the Defense Intelligence Agency for answering my questions about defense intelligence, and Maria Edwards, for her impeccable research, skilled editing, and tireless promotion of my novels.

  There were other contributors who are not named here, by their own request, or through oversight on my part. In every case, the information I received from these people was superb. Any inaccuracies found here are either the product of artistic license, or my own mistakes. Such errors are in no way the fault of my contributors.

  Finally, I would like to thank my editor and friend, Don Gerrard, for knowing when to encourage me, when to challenge me, when to kick me into shape, and when to get the hell out of the way and let me run.

  “…we witness today, in the power of nuclear weapons, a new and deadly dimension to the ancient horror of war. Humanity has now achieved, for the first time in its history, the power to end its history.”

  President Dwight D. Eisenhower

  September 19, 1956

  “And there came a seventh angel, his robe hemmed with fire and the sword of doom in his hand. Written upon his brow was the name of death.”

  Jashar 10:21

  (Sefer haYashar)

  Lost book of the Old Testament

  Translation circa 1552, from the private archives of Giovanni del Monte.

  Artist’s rendering of MOUSE, Mark I

  Used by permission of NORTON DEEPWATER SYSTEMS, Inc.

  PROLOGUE

  The deck gun fired again, sending another ninety-six pound naval artillery round thundering into the night. For an instant, the muzzle flash from the big gun stripped away the concealing darkness, revealing the low angular profile of a U.S. Navy destroyer.

  The vessel revealed in that microsecond of illumination was strange-looking. The squat pyramid shapes of her superstructure and the steep angle of her mast gave the destroyer very little resemblance to any previous generation of warships.

  The flare of light was as brief as a camera flash, gone almost the instant it appeared, and the ship was once again hidden against the dark waves of the Northern Arabian Gulf.

  The ship’s name was USS Towers, and she was the fourth (and last) of the Flight III Arleigh Burke Class destroyers. She was a blend of superb naval engineering and cutting-edge military stealth technology, a combination that had caused a great deal of hype and wild speculation.

  News magazines had taken to calling her a ‘ghost ship,’ and a growing body of Internet mythology credited the destroyer with capabilities that could only be managed by Hollywood special effects wizards. The reality was impressive enough, but it was considerably short of the myth, and well within the boundaries of known physics.

  The vessel’s radar cross-section, infrared profile, and acoustic and magnetic signatures were all severely minimized, and a layer of phototropic camouflage made the ship difficult to detect and track visually. Even so, the Towers was far from invisible, despite the ever-growing body of myth that surrounded her name.

  But hype didn’t matter now, and neither did speculation. USS Towers was wounded, and she was running for her life.

  Three-thousand yards aft of the ship, hidden beneath a dark blanket of seawater, a second torpedo was coming to finish the job that the first had begun. No amount of myth or hype could stop it, or even slow its approach.

  The deck gun fired again, and the strange-looking warship was again silhouetted against black water for an instant. The gun barrel was at maximum elevation, and the firing charge was reduced, making the trajectory very high and extremely short. The round crashed into the wave tops a few hundred yards ahead of the ship.

  To either side of the bow, the ship’s smaller guns followed with their own lesser furies, hammering .50-caliber machine gun bullets and 25mm chain-gun rounds into the waves just forward of the vessel. It was a tactic of purest desperation.

  The ship was surrounded by a field of naval mines, their numbers and locations hidden by black water. Any one of those mines could crack the hull of a warship like an eggshell. The guided-missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts had learned that lesson the hard way two decades earlier, in this very same body of water, just a few hundred nautical miles to the south. The Samuel B. Roberts had nearly been blown in half. Whether or not Towers was about to repeat that lesson was still yet to be seen.

  Under any other circumstances, the proper tactic would have been to maneuver at two or three knots, locating each mine with the ship’s Kingfisher sonar, and mapping a safe route to the edge of the minefield. But moving slowly was not an option now. The torpedo was getting closer by the second. It was locked on to the ship’s acoustic signature like a cybernetic bloodhound, and the deadly machine was following the trail with a ruthless precision that no living creature could equal.

  The Towers needed every ounce of speed that her engineers could sque
eze out of their wounded vessel. Every fifty yards of forward motion was another second of life. But it wasn’t going to be enough. The torpedo was faster, and—unlike its target—it was not slowed by damage. The weapon was rapidly overtaking the destroyer. The seconds were beginning to run out.

  Standing behind the Tactical Action Officer’s chair in the air-conditioned semi-darkness of Combat Information Center, Captain Bowie watched the chase rushing toward its conclusion on the giant Aegis display screens. The fingers of his left hand gripped a steel crossbeam in the overhead, steadying his body against the motion of the ship. His right hand rested casually on the back of the TAO’s chair. His posture was carefully-relaxed, and he concentrated on keeping the tension out of his facial expression.

  He knew without looking that the men and women of his CIC team were watching him out of the corners of their eyes. They were measuring his reactions, drawing confidence and hope from the calm assurance of his demeanor.

  His crew needed hope right now. They were scared, and they had every reason to be. They were exhausted, and their bodies were bruised and bloodied. More than a few of their shipmates were already dead. Their ship was grievously damaged, and the fight was not over yet.

  Bowie ran a hand through his short black hair, and relaxed the set of his shoulders. He looked more like an accountant than a naval officer, and he knew it. His long face and narrow cheekbones gave him an air of clean efficiency, and the slight downturn of his mouth tended to make him look pensive, even in the most relaxed of circumstances. The effect was usually offset by his quick brown eyes and his easy laugh, but there was nothing to laugh about tonight. Nothing at all.

  This was the craziest tactical situation Bowie had ever heard of. Even the worst-case everybody-dies training scenarios weren’t this bad. His plan for dealing with the situation was even crazier, if such a thing was possible.

  It was not a good plan; Bowie knew that. Maybe it wasn’t even an entirely sane plan, but what the hell else could he do? If there were other options, he hadn’t been able to think of them.

  There was no time to sniff out a safe path through the minefield. If they reduced speed enough for sonar to detect the mines, the torpedo would catch them and kill them. If they tried to run without seeing the mines, they were nearly certain to hit one. That would kill them just as quickly.

  On the big display screen, the Towers appeared as a small green cross, enclosed by a circle. A single green speed vector protruded from the center of the symbol, like the stick of a lollipop. The symbol was pointed southwest now, inching toward the irregular red boundary that represented the edge of the minefield. They were moving in the right direction—toward safe water—but the flashing red torpedo symbol was less than 2,500 yards behind now, and moving a lot faster as it continued to close the gap.

  The mines didn’t appear on the tactical display at all, except the general outline showing the boundaries of the minefield. That information had come from COM Fifth Fleet, via the Special Warfare unit attached to U.S. Navy Central Command. But there were no coordinates for the mines themselves: no clues to their locations, or even how many were there. It might be a hundred, or five hundred, or five thousand.

  The Towers couldn’t map a safe route through the minefield, and the ship could not survive without one. The only choice was to create their own path through the mines, clear a safe route where none existed.

  Out on the darkened forecastle, the deck gun continued to pound the water with naval artillery shells every two and a half seconds. The forward machine guns and the two chain-guns continued to hammer their own projectiles into the wave tops. The ship was pumping a tremendous amount of mechanical force and shrapnel into the sea. Theoretically, some of that brute kinetic force should penetrate far enough down to reach the mines. That was the plan: to pulverize the water hard enough to trigger the mines at a distance, clearing the way ahead of the ship.

  But it wasn’t working. Bowie’s crazy plan, which had seemed at least distantly feasible when he’d given the order, did not seem to be bearing fruit. There were no answering explosions to show that the guns were finding targets. For all of the racket and thunder, the guns had not yet triggered a single mine.

  Bowie felt a hand on his left shoulder. He turned to find his second in command, Lieutenant Commander Peter Tyler, standing behind him. Pete was a good man, and a damned fine executive officer. Just the kind of guy you’d want in your corner if things got ugly.

  He leaned in close, and spoke quietly into his captain’s ear. “Do you think this’ll work?”

  Bowie shrugged. “Frankly, I have no idea. I just know that it’s better than sitting around waiting to die.”

  His last word seemed to echo in the chilled air of CIC, and Bowie wished instantly that he hadn’t said it.

  He opened his mouth to add something else—anything—to wipe that dreadful word out of the air. Before he could speak, a thundering boom shook the entire ship.

  For a half-second, Bowie thought they’d been hit, but the Officer of the Deck’s voice came over the Tactical Action Officer’s communications net. “TAO—Bridge. Close-aboard explosion off the port bow!”

  The TAO keyed the microphone of his headset to acknowledge the report, but his voice was drowned out by a second explosion.

  “TAO—Bridge. Close-aboard explosion dead off the bow!”

  All around him, the members of Bowie’s CIC team began exchanging glances. He knew what they were thinking. Maybe the skipper’s crazy plan was going to work. Maybe … just maybe, they were not all going to die tonight.

  On the Aegis display screen, the symbol for Towers was moving toward the boundary of the minefield. The torpedo had closed within 2,000 yards and was gaining fast, but it looked like the ship might be clear of the minefield before the weapon struck. If the ship could make it that far, they could maneuver without fear of mines. They could crack the whip—run the tricky evasion maneuvers designed to throw pursuing torpedoes off the scent. They might have a chance.

  “I think this is working,” a voice behind him said. “Looks like you might still pull the fat out of the fire, sir.”

  Bowie turned, expecting to see his XO. Instead, he found himself staring into the eyes of Lieutenant Clinton Brody, the pilot of the USS Towers helicopter, Firewalker Two-Six.

  A prickle ran down the back of Bowie’s neck. Something wasn’t right here. He felt a stirring in his gut: an indefinable certainty that some crucial element of reality had suddenly veered off in an unexpected direction.

  The gun roared again. The sound had a different character to it—muted, with a sort of weirdly-metallic echo. A report blared from one of the overhead speakers, but the voice was tinny, and too garbled to understand.

  Bowie’s gaze was still locked on the young pilot’s face. Lieutenant Brody was not supposed to be here. No, that wasn’t right. He couldn’t be here. It wasn’t possible.

  The realization came instantly, and it brought another abrupt shift in the fabric of reality. The world seemed to stutter and then freeze in place, like a film break in an old-fashioned movie projector, the last frame of broken celluloid still trapped behind the lens. All action had stopped, but that last image persisted, Combat Information Center and its crew held motionless in an instance of frozen time.

  Lieutenant Clinton Brody could not here, because the man was dead. His body had been burned and cut to ribbons by the Siraji missile that had ripped his helicopter from the sky.

  He couldn’t be here. But here he was, staring back at Bowie.

  The world had gone eerily silent. The pounding of the guns, the murmur of the CIC crew, the whisper of cooling fans, the surge of the ship through the water, were all gone. The sound of Bowie’s own breathing suddenly seemed almost painfully loud.

  “You’re dead,” he said softly. It was somehow both a statement of fact, and an accusation.

  The dead helicopter pilot nodded, and a long slice opened in the flesh of his left cheek—skin parting almost magically—
blood spilling down the side of his face as the cut widened and the ivory-yellow of the man’s cheekbone was revealed. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I am.”

  He squared his shoulders and saluted, as though presenting himself for inspection. As he lowered his hand, it fell limply at his side, injuries manifesting instantly, leaving the pilot’s arm mangled and fractured in numerous places. “My crew are dead too. Both of them.”

  The other two members of the helicopter aircrew were suddenly standing behind the dead officer: his copilot, Lieutenant (junior grade) Julie Schramm, her brown hair singed and twisted, her once pretty face scorched and nearly black with bruising and blood; and the aircraft’s Sensor Operator, Petty Officer Second Class Daniel Gilford, his right leg missing from the hip, the side of his head a mass of ragged tissue and splintered bone.

  Bowie had only a second to register this hideous sight before more of the grisly figures began appearing. Commander Rachel Vargas. Lieutenant (junior grade) Alex Sherman. Seaman Terrence Archer. Petty Officer Gerald Blake. Fireman Apprentice Thomas James Keiler. Each of their bodies burned, or bleeding, or broken.

  The gathering of corpses continued to grow, and Bowie recognized every one of their faces.

  This was the accounting of souls. Every man and woman in that growing crowd had died under Bowie’s command.

  His chest tightened until he could barely breathe. He had tried to protect them. He had done his best to lead them well. He had tried to keep them safe from harm. But they were dead, despite his intentions.

  Every one of them was dead, and there was nothing Bowie could do about it.

  The thought seemed to break the spell. The transition from dream to wakefulness was instantaneous. Combat Information Center vanished, and the bodies of the dead Sailors were gone with the flicker of an eyelid.

  Bowie lay in the bunk of his at-sea cabin, staring up into the darkness and feeling the pounding of his heart and the gentle rolling of the ship. The sheets had gotten themselves twisted around his legs, the way they always did when he had the dream. He knew without checking that his cheeks were damp with tears.