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  The world fell out from under the team’s boots.

  Lyons took a deep breath.

  The Atlantic Ocean hit him like a fist to jaw.

  The sea closed over his head and didn’t stop. The platform was a huge mass of concrete and steel, and as it hit the water it made a hole. The ocean rushed in to reclaim its space and pulled the team down with it. Lyons’s ears pounded and lights pulsed behind his eyes as he was sucked down into the black.

  Unlike the million-ton mass of the platform, Lyons and his team were wearing life jackets. They were buoyant, and at a certain point the water equalized and they popped back up like corks. The surface was little better. It was as black as below but with driving wind, rain and waves slapping them forehand and back.

  “You all right!”

  “Yeah!” Bolan shouted back. “You?”

  “Yeah! T.J.?” Lyons bellowed over the wind. “T.J.!”

  Hawkins made a noise like a bear being impaled as he retched up the Atlantic. “Let’s do it again!”

  Bolan laughed. It was a strange sound in the howling, freezing dark, but in open ocean facing certain death, the sound was strangely infectious. The Ironman found himself laughing. He threw back his head and laughed so hard his ribs ached. Hawkins made strangled, barking noises of amusement between retching.

  The laughing soldiers pulled themselves into a circle and waited for death. They had cheated it so many times they had earned the right to laugh in its face. Lyons grabbed Hawkins by the hair. “Try to keep your head above water!”

  “No!” Hawkins heaved a bit more. “No, I hear something.”

  Lyons shoved his head under the water and his eyes flew wide despite the salt sting. A very distinctive tungtung-tung noise was hammering through the water below the surface.

  The bow sonar of the USS Virginia had gone active.

  Lyons pulled his head up and spat. “We’re being pinged!”

  Bolan’s voice shouted in the dark. “You still got a piece? I dumped mine!”

  Lyons unsnapped the Big Snake from its holster. He hadn’t reloaded, but he still had three rounds in the chamber. He drew the pistol and held it under water. Lyons methodically pulled the trigger once, twice and three times. They were five bodies bobbing on the surface in a storm. Not much for even active sonar to detect. But in the acoustic world of the Virginia’s main sonar array the hammer of the Magnum’s blast was like a triple flare in the darkness.

  Lyons and his team bobbed in the storm and waited for one hundred kilotons of released energy to blast them into the sky. “How’s Franka?”

  “Breathing!” Bolan shouted. “I can’t tell, but she’s got to be bleeding again. Akira, too!” Bolan paused. “T.J.’s unconscious!”

  That was bad with a concussion, but—

  “Carl!”

  Lyons didn’t need to be told. Out across the waves a searchlight was playing across the rolling surface.

  “You got any more ammo!”

  Lyons tried to break open his Python but his fingers were numb. “Try T.J.!”

  A second later the darkness flashed yellow as Hawkins’s 9 mm SIG went off in Bolan’s hand. The soldier began to squeeze off a shot in the air every three seconds. The searchlight swung in their direction and played over them as a waves lifted them up. Aching moments passed, but the light stayed fixed on their position. The waves churned and the dark mass of the USS Virginia plowed toward them. Sailors with a gaff leaned out and Lyons seized the hook.

  The team was pulled up against the hull and more men grabbed them and manhandled the scrum of humanity onto the sub. A midshipman shouted down the hatch as seamen cut apart their lashings. “We have them!”

  “Get them down and button up! Engines full!”

  Marx, Tokaido and Hawkins were lowered down. Lyons and Bolan slid down the ladder and the last sailor sealed the hatch behind them. The Virginia’s hull throbbed as her S9G nuclear reactor rods were pulled out to full and her turbines steamed to full emergency war power.

  Blankets were thrown over Lyons’s and Bolan’s shoulders, and hot coffee mugs shoved in their hands. The three wounded disappeared down a corridor toward the infirmary. Lyons and Bolan were ushered to the bridge. A tall, dark-haired man in a captain’s uniform regarded them. “Evening, gentleman. Worth a man’s life to go out swimming tonight.”

  Lyons shook his head. “Captain?”

  “Yes?”

  “All due respect, but you’re an idiot.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe.” Captain Laswell shrugged. “But I figure a man who called down a cruise missile strike and full spread of torpedoes on himself on the same day deserved a fighting chance.”

  “We’ll be blown sky-high.”

  Laswell stood proudly on his bridge. “Mister, this is the USS Virginia, lead ship of the Virginia-class line. Besides, you got me thinking when you compared the detonation to a one-hundred-kiloton depth charge. We’re doing over thirty knots out of the blast area and we’re on the surface.” The captain looked over at his XO. “We can take the hit, can’t we, Tom?”

  The commanding officer regarded his captain leerily. “Well…”

  “Of course we can.” The captain grinned winningly.

  Submarining was the most dangerous and stressful form of sailing known to man. It took a special form of sailor to navigate the dark depths playing hide-and-seek with the navies of the other superpowers, and a man didn’t rise to captain the flagship of the U.S. Navy’s new line of attack submarines without a bucketload of skill, balls and daring.

  Lyons held up the shreds of his cast. “Thanks.”

  Laswell wrapped one of his mitts gingerly around the Ironman’s broken hand. “Not a problem. I know you Special Forces types have a thing about no one left behind. Well, this is the Navy, and we have a policy about not leaving anybody bobbing.”

  Lyons well knew that in both services those policies were unofficial, particularly when it came to risking an attack submarine and her entire crew by sailing it into a nuclear blast zone to save five people. Laswell was going to have a lot of answering to do if they lived.

  The sonar operator’s speakers screamed feedback and blew out as the BQQ-10 bow sonar array received the loudest noise it had ever encountered. The hull rumbled like distant thunder. The XO grabbed a microphone and his voice boomed over the shipwide intercom. “All hands brace for impact! Repeat, all hands brace—”

  Lyons had been on subs under attack before and felt the Godlike slap of depth charges trying to crack a hull, but this was different.

  God snuck up behind the Virginia and tried to shove her off the planet.

  The Atlantic Ocean had swallowed Deyn’s platform down to the bottom, but it hurled up the Virginia as if it didn’t want it. The steersman’s hands were white on his controls. “Oh…my…God…”

  The depth gauge slammed at zero because it couldn’t go into negative numbers. The Virginia needed an altimeter as all 7,800 tons of her left the surface. The deck beneath their feet rolled sickeningly. The ocean might not have wanted the Virginia, but gravity did. She fell back to Earth like a four-hundred-foot leviathan. Lyons left his feet as the Virginia hit the unyielding surface, and everything not bolted down went flying. The lights went out and his face met something made of steel. Lyons saw stars and the air was smashed from his lungs as he landed on the deck and rolled. He came to a stop against the bulkhead.

  Red bathed the bridge as the emergency generators clicked on. Water sprayed from a broken main above. Numerous alarms were peeping and howling. Lyons took stock of his surroundings and realized that the floor was tilted at a seventy-five-degree angle.

  “Full stop!” The captain clung to a rail with his head split open. “Damage report!”

  The XO managed to climb to a console and get on the horn with the rest of the sub. “Captain, reactor rods are out of alignment. The chief engineer has ordered the evacuation of the engine room.”

  “Any radiation leakage?”

  “No, sir. Leakage i
s confined to the engine room and it’s being sealed off. We’ve lost the aft stabilizer. Numerous injuries reported on all decks. Mostly broken bones.”

  “Are we taking on water?”

  “No, sir.” The XO shook his head wonderingly. “The pressure hulls are intact.”

  “See?” The captain glanced over Lyons. His teeth flashed out of the blood masking his face. “Told you we could take the hit.”

  EPILOGUE

  Stony Man Farm, Virginia

  “Check it out!”Akira Tokaido popped a wheelie in his wheelchair. “Wait for it! Wait for it…” The young man rocked the chair from side to side and suddenly leaned and tipped. “One-wheel wheelie!” He held the position for several seconds, then let the chair slam back down. He grinned, and waved at Bolan and then turned back to his workstation.

  Bolan smiled. “They say he’ll be on crutches in a week, and walking again in about a month.”

  The smile on Lyons’s face died the moment the young man turned away. “Yeah, but I was supposed to take care of him. I got him captured instead. Hell, I had to shoot him to retrieve him.”

  “Yeah, and he won’t shut up about it, either. He’s going to wear that scar like a badge of honor.”

  “I’ve spoken to the doctors. What he isn’t talking about is the nightmares and the clinical depression. He’s been grinning and bearing it, and only because they have him on a severe regimen of antidepressants.”

  “The body heals. So does the mind. It just takes longer.” Bolan looked pointedly at Lyons. “That goes for you, too, Carl. The Bear’s already forgiven you. Akira sees nothing to forgive. He looks up to you like God on high. The person you’ve got to forgive here is yourself.”

  The Ironman locked eyes with the Executioner. “You try to hug me, I’ll snap your goddamn neck.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. But I know you, Carl. Known you for too long. You feel guilty and you want to make things right. Walking around with tombstone face and spending eight hours a day shooting left-handed at the range isn’t going to help.”

  Lyons slowly shook his head. “I’m not going to therapy.”

  “Okay, then let’s make something right.”

  Lyons glared suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

  “Captain Laswell’s been put behind a desk pending review of his actions during the crisis.”

  “I’ve already written my report. I recommended putting him up for a Navy Cross.”

  “Yeah, but that isn’t up to us.”

  “So what are you recommending?”

  “I’ve done some research on the good captain.”

  “And?”

  Bolan grinned. “He’s a single-malt man.”

  Lyons smiled despite himself. “Well, let’s go buy the man a drink.”

  ISBN: 978-1-4603-7310-1

  OCEANS OF FIRE

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to Chuck Rogers for his contribution to this work.

  Copyright © 2006 by Worldwide Library.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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