Free The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) by Jon Land Page B

twenty percent larger than the last generation and at least that much faster. She could remain submerged indefinitely, and the transport of her deadly cargo of twenty-eight nuclear missiles was totally at the discretion of her commanding officer.
    At least it had been.
    Those missiles, with more than ten thousand times the explosive force of the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were deadly accurate, thanks to the wonders of microchip technology. The Rhode Island ’s Jupiter-class missiles alone made her the third-greatest nuclear power on Earth, capable of knocking out seventy-three percent of the Soviet populace on her own. But aside from her power and speed, the Rhode Island ’s greatest feature was that she couldn’t be tracked—not by Soviet forces, and not by her American counterparts. Even her routine messages were bounced off so many beacons that only a rough estimate of her position could be gained. In fact, one of the major purposes of the Rhode Island ’s maiden voyage was to see whether SOSUS (sonar surveillance system) could come close to tracking her. The system, composed of hundreds of powerful sensors lodged on the bottom of the sea, was designed to follow the paths of Soviet Victor and Charlie subs. It was the most sophisticated in the world, and if the Rhode Island ’s silent running could evade detection by it she could evade detection by anything.
    In actuality, no sub as fast as the Rhode Island could operate silently. Instead of trying to, she sent out contradictory signals that sensors normally read as schools of fish. Electric Boat had set out to build the perfect warship, and the feeling on the eve of the Rhode Island ’s maiden voyage was that they had come very close.
    Mac heard footsteps approaching, then a key being turned in his door. It wasn’t mealtime, so he must have miscounted the days. Today must be the eighteenth, not the seventeenth, time for his three-day signal pass to COMSUBLANT —Commander of the Submarine Force in the Adantic. No matter, for he’d already composed in his mind the masked message he intended to send to advise COMSUBLANT of what was really going on aboard the Rhode Island .
    At fifty-three he had considered himself too old for such a command and had let himself be talked into it against his better judgment. If the Jupiter class of super-Tridents was to be utilized to its utmost potential, he was told, it needed men of Mac’s savvy and stature at the helm.
    That stature might have been defined by many things, but size was not one of them. McKenzie Barlow stood barely five and a half feet tall. He had been christened “Mighty Mac” back in his early training days when he fought to join the SEALs, the navy’s elite commando company, against concerted antagonism from those who believed he didn’t fit the image. Mac had proved them wrong then and later in Vietnam, where his specialty was underwater demolitions. Though records weren’t kept, he had probably spent more time behind enemy lines than anyone else serving with Navy stripes.
    On one mission the Cong locked on to the gunboat transporting him and a team out of a fire zone, and Mac had risked capture and death by venturing back into the flames on four separate occasions to carry out the rest of the crew. The incident left him with multiple skin grafts on his arms and permanently damaged shoulder joints from the pressure of carrying two of the men for three miles through enemy jungle.
    That was the last combat Mac ever saw as a SEAL, but his subsequent rise though the Navy chain of command was swift, culminating in his holding the con of the Trident sub Florida for six years prior to his retirement. They had lured him back into the command chair to take the Rhode Island only after assuring him that this maiden voyage would be strictly window dressing: in other words, no nuclear armaments on board. The order of business was thirty days at sea just to check out the silent-running systems and give the