The shots had missed! The tension in the tiny space eased just a bit. They would live for a few more minutes, at least.

Somehow, the Russian torpedoes had failed to sniff out Toledo where she sat, just above the bottom.

A second loud explosion rocked the sub. Everyone braced himself, then looked around, wondering what it had been. This time it came from the south.

“Loud explosion on the bearing of the first Grisha,” Zillich called out. There was a grin in his voice when he said, “Breaking-up noises on that bearing. Looks like we got one of them.”

“Detect! Detect! Acquisition!” Pat Durand yelled out. “Third fired weapon acquired on the Udaloy.”

Durand watched the computer screen on the weapon control panel as it graphically played out a dance of death from the wire-guided torpedo. The ADCAP torpedo that Toledo had sent toward the Russian destroyer at the mouth of the fjord unerringly homed in on the ship. Its sonar shifted from “search” to “attack” mode as the Otto-fueled rocker-plate engine came up to maximum speed. With the torpedo charging toward it at sixty-five knots, the Admiral Chabanenko was helpless to escape.

The deadly weapon nosed up until it was running just twenty-five feet below the waves. An upward-looking hydrophone began pinging, searching for a ship as it passed underneath. The magnetic influence exploder sensed a mass of steel overhead just as the upward-looking hydrophone received its sonar returns. The firing circuit was satisfied that the torpedo was under the Admiral Chabanenko. An electric jolt shot through the firing squib, detonating the small squib, which, in turn, detonated the warhead.

Six hundred and fifty pounds of PBNX high explosive created a huge superheated gas bubble beneath the helpless destroyer, brutally ramming the center of the ship skyward. Just as quickly as it formed, the gas bubble collapsed, dropping the center of the destroyer into a huge hole in the surface of the fjord.

Even the strongest steel and heaviest construction would have been helpless against the massive forces generated by the mighty explosion. The Admiral Chabanenko broke in half, torn apart by the heaving, twisting forces beneath it.

In less than a minute, the remnants of the warship slipped beneath the waves.

Chapter 44

Admiral Tom Donnegan stepped into the wood-paneled conference room, his hat in his hand. He had been in this place several times before, yet he was still struck with awe each time he entered—and Tom Donnegan was not easily awestruck.

If it had not been for the pair of Marine guards at the door, the room could have been some corporate boardroom in a high-rise on Wall Street. Instead, he was deep in the third basement under the West Wing of the White House.