Chapter 66 - Torpedo Spread
"Shut up," I whispered, but there was no anger left in my voice—only the terrifying, cold clarity of a warrior who finally understood the true battlefield.
"Captain!" Jackson yelled, pointing toward the tactical display. "Multiple torpedo launches! Three incoming from the *Blackfish*, two more from the unmarked command cruiser above the shelf. They've bracketed our escape vector!"
The Devil's Trench loomed directly ahead. The jagged basalt cliffs of the underwater canyon showed on the terrain mapping system as jagged red spires. To enter the canyon at fifty knots without active sonar was pure suicide; one wrong twitch of the rudder would smash our multi-billion-dollar steel tomb against solid rock.
"Jackson, seal the prisoners in the rear observation compartment," I ordered, my fingers dancing across the reactor coolant controls. "Then get into the co-pilot seat and manage the trim tabs."
"Captain, if we go into the trench at this speed, the hull will collapse from pressure fatigue!" Jackson protested.
"If we stay out here, we get blown into scrap metal," I countered, looking him dead in the eye. "Do you trust me, Chief?"
Jackson swallowed hard, looked at the five red triangles converging on our position on the radar screen, and nodded. "To the bottom of the sea and back, Ma'am."
He hauled Kevin and Martha toward the armored bulkhead door, shoving them inside and throwing the manual dogging wheel until the steel latches clicked shut. He leaped back into the copilot chair just as the first torpedo detonated fifty yards behind our stern.
The shockwave felt like a giant hammer striking the hull. The *Leviathan* shuddered violently, plunging nose-first into the black abyss of the trench. The sound of groaning, twisting steel echoed through every compartment as the pressure hull reached its absolute structural limit: thirty-eight hundred feet... four thousand feet... forty-two hundred feet.
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The torpedoes behind us struck the basalt walls of the canyon. The underwater detonations triggered a catastrophic submarine avalanche. Millions of tons of rock and sediment collapsed behind us, creating a dense, opaque underwater dust storm that completely swallowed the acoustic signatures of our pursuers.
We were blind. But so were they.
