Following behind the Agent, Jack Toranssen studied the ship that formed such a key part in their plans. He knew that the ship was recently launched, and he knew it was the very latest in naval technology. But he was only academically impressed. Deep down he knew why he had joined the air force: he felt constricted and claustrophobic in this confined space and longed for the wide open feeling of flight. They came to an abrupt halt after another stretch of steel corridor, and John placed the large, heavy stack on the floor once more. Typing for the last time, he opened the final bulkhead and urged Jack through into the missile room that marked the end of the corridor. They had passed others to each side along the way back through the ship but they would start back here and work forward.

Stepping into the massive space, Jack was stunned once more. The two men now stood at the bottom of another space like the one they had lowered the crates into, but this one was a military man’s dream. Lining the walls on complex railings and movable brackets were a host of missiles of various lengths. Jack recognized a couple of Tomahawks and other cruise missiles, but those were just gravy; the meat of the room was an array of deadly ship-to-air missiles and finally the massive SLAMs.

These leviathans had chemical boosters and were capable of sustained supersonic flight and atmospheric egress. They were tipped with various warheads with technical names that went some small way to describing the havoc they were designed for: Tactical Electro-Magnetic Interruption Device and Explosive Deployed Cluster Kinetic Collision Warhead. But these were just names. In practice they were badasses. And each automated silo was designed to allow the rapid deployment of up to six of them a minute. At any time any one of them could be selected by the firing control computers and automatically lifted and braced into the bulky launch tubes at the top of the chamber, ready to be fired within a tenth of a second of the tube being sealed.

To be in this space during a missile deployment would be suicide, as the motors necessary to move this arsenal’s massive weight would mutilate anything as flexible as an arm or leg without compunction. But when the room was not action ready, a central shaft about a meter in diameter was kept free of missiles. Down this shaft the main clamp tube ran, a thick, well-greased steel tube like a giant firemen’s pole which the missiles were latched to for lifting to the tube launchers above. Jack stared at the vast array of firepower and considered how much more this one silo held than even his huge B-2 bomber’s large bays. Suddenly he had an appreciation for the role this powerful destroyer would be able to play in the coming attack, and a more profound appreciation for the navy as a whole.