Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [3]
“Sir, Captain Feklenko reports they did not fire. They did not fire on us.”
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is it? Is it American?”
“Doesn’t appear to be.”
“Then what? Is it French? Is it British? Albanian? Do the Africans have missiles? Whose is it?”
“Sir, there’s no log of this … I’m not even certain it’s a missile,” Vasska said, snapping his fingers to other manned positions in silent orders.
Reykov pressed up against Myakishev’s shoulder. “Billions of rubles for you geniuses and you can’t tell me what it is. I want to know whose it is. What is coming in?”
“It’s headed directly toward us!”
Reykov straightened, his eyes narrowing on the distant sky. For the first time in his life, he made the kind of decision he hoped never to have to make.
“Turn the E.M.P. on it. Fire when ready.”
The wide rectangular antenna swiveled like the head of some unlikely insect, and once again the terrible snap-flash came as the electromagnetic pulse pumped through the atmosphere with scientific coldness.
It should have worked. It should have scrambled the guidance controls on any kind of missile or aircraft, any kind at all.
Any kind at all.
“It’s homing in on the beam-accelerating now!” Myakishev’s voice clattered against his throat.
Vasska whispered, “Even the Americans don’t have anything like that … “
Reykov twisted around and plowed through the bridge crew to the chilly windowsill. He stared out over the Black Sea.
There was something there. It wasn’t a missile.
On the horizon, making child’s play of the distance between itself and Gorshkov, was a wall.
An electrical wall. It sizzled and crackled, made colors against the sky, shapeless and ugly-the phenomenon looked, more than anything, like an infrared false-color image. Colors inside colors. But there was no basic shape. It was crawling across the water, the size of a skyscraper.
Behind him, Myakishev choked, “Radar is out. Communications out now-we’re getting feedback-“
Reykov gasped twice before he could speak. “Full about! General quarters! General-“
His voice went away. Around him, every piece of instrumentation went dead. As though molasses had been poured over the bridge, all mechanisms failed. There wasn’t even the reassuring sound of malfunction. In fact, there was no sound at all.
Then a sound did come-an electrical scream cutting across the water and swallowing the whole ship as the false-color bogey roared up to the carrier’s starboard bow and sucked the ship into itself. It was three times the size of the ship itself. Three times.
Reykov’s last move as a human being was to turn toward the radar station. He looked at Timofei Vasska, who straightened up to stare at his captain, both hands clasped over his ears, and the two men were locked in a gaze, frozen, held. It felt as though all their blood were clotting at once.
Reykov’s last perception was of Vasska’s eyebrows drawing slightly together as the two men shared the wholeness of that final moment before obliteration.
Then Vasska’s face was covered with the false-color image, and Reykov’s mind, mercifully, stopped operating.
The false-color phenomenon drenched the aircraft carrier in its electrical wash. Within moments, there were no more lifeforms on board. The immense vessel had been wiped clean of organisms, from the horde of humans to the smallest cockroach hiding in the cook’s shoe. Even the leather on the seats in the captain’s stateroom was gone.
There was only steel and wire and aluminum and titanium and the various fabrics-tarps and uniforms-that were recognizable as inert. The Gorshkov sat on the open water, empty.
The hull and the airfield it supported began to rumble, to vibrate. Ripples shot out from the hull at the waterline, creating patterns on the sea, and with every passing second the intensity of these vibrations mounted until Gorshkov was actually creating waves on the Black Sea.
The ship shook like a toy, shuddered, and was ripped in half as though made of chocolate cake. The shriek of tearing metal blared across the entire sea. Each