LZR-1143 (Book 4): Desolation Read Free Page A

allowed himself a smile, even as the frigid water reached his mouth and the pain of a new jagged bite wound in his stomach reached his brain.  
    The USS Kentucky met her end as the water overtook her Captain in his chair. The sleek, now ruined boat slammed into the ocean floor at a depth of nearly 1900 feet, the bow crashing into a layer of thick silt and volcanic rock. She came to rest with the lip of a wide, and very deep trench, directly to her port side. A trench that had yet to be mapped by the U.S. Navy due to its narrow mouth and recent birth. Seismic activity in the area had pushed this unusual formation into existence within the last four months, and the mouth of the narrow canyon was barely seventy feet wide—just large enough to swallow an Ohio-class nuclear submarine.
    The Kentucky pitched onto her keel and swayed briefly in the dark water before the weight of the boat shifted as it filled completely with seawater, pushing it to its port side. As the boat rolled over slowly, like the last throes of a dying whale, it groaned once more before toppling into the deep canyon. The boat fell slowly and silently, twisting slowly and sinking into a dark abyss that was more than a mile deep.  
    The trench, had it been discovered, would have been unique in its attributes. It was deep, and it lay no more than seventy miles from the coast of the United States. Almost directly due west from the city of Seattle, Washington.  
    But what would have been truly significant, had this long, deep abyss been mapped, would have been its location directly upon the Cascadia subduction zone. This subduction zone, known to geologists as a megathrust fault line, stretches nearly 600 miles along the coast of Canada and the United States, and converges with two other major fault lines to the north (the Queen Charlotte Fault) and the south (the San Andreas Fault). This subduction zone—the area where a fault line in the earth separates two tectonic plates—was created as the floor of the Pacific Ocean slowly slips beneath the large North American plate, the mass of land upon which the United States of America is situated.
    This large, deep canyon into which the Kentucky was now falling, led into the bowels of the earth merely a mile from where these two plates intersected. On a typical day, the stored energy of these two plates moving slowly past one another could erupt into a standard or devastating earthquake at a moment’s notice.  
    With these earthquakes, the massive string of volcanoes along this fault line, including Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens (which had already shown its dangerous potential in a small show of petulance in 1980), could be persuaded to erupt. Massive tsunamis could be pushed into the West Coast of Canada and the United States by the drastic shift in sea floors. The potential devastation from a natural release of this pent-up energy was mind boggling.  
    Combined with the potential to cause a ripple effect due to its connection to the San Andreas and Charlotte Fault lines, the Cascadia subduction zone has long been one of the most closely watched geological areas in the Northern hemisphere.
    On any ordinary day, thousands of monitors across the world would be listening for disturbances along that line, mapping seismic ripples that might portend the next ‘big one’—which scientists knew was already far overdue.  
    But today was no ordinary day.
    Today, a doomed nuclear submarine, carrying the undead bodies of one hundred and fifty-four sailors and twenty-four armed thermonuclear missiles was falling deep into the earth, directly adjacent to the fault line.  
    Today, the Cascadia subduction zone would have some help reaching a horrible, earth shattering destiny.  
    Only five minutes from when the launch order was issued, three hundred and thirty six high yield thermonuclear warheads detonated simultaneously from inside their tubes. The explosion occurred as the crushed, mangled wreckage of the