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according to the normal kinematics of submerged contacts.  The whole world paused as they began to merge with Rivero ’s symbol at the center of the display.
    “Bridge, TAO!  Turn!”
    USS Rivero tilted over toward the outside of her desperate course change to starboard.  The stern of the ship nearly skipped through the water as she came about at 34 knots with a hard rudder angle.  From the ASW Countermeasures compartment at her fantail, Torpedomen began to fire countertorp after countertorp down into the path of the Flying Fish.
    The first torpedo streaked past Rivero , detonating 100 yards off her port side, turning the water into a globe of pure white that imploded and then erupted in a column of spray hundreds of feet high.  The destroyer was rung like a bell, pushed laterally by over ten feet.  Loose gear rocketed through the air, along with anyone not secured in a seat.  Captain Jones, who was braced for shock but not strapped down, was thrown over a row of consoles and down to the deck.  Sparks exploded from some of the panels and the lights actually brightened as the normal, dim sources in CIC went out and the emergency supplies to all the lights came on.
    The second torpedo went far afield, detonating 500 yards away.  The third fell victim to the swarm of anti-torpedo torpedoes, with four of the miniscule devices detonating in its path.  The supercavitating torpedo’s gas bubble was ripped away and a combination of shaped charge jets and a water hammer moving at 240 knots ripped the torpedo apart.  It never detonated.
    The fourth torpedo slid beneath Rivero ’s violently maneuvering stern as if destiny had willed it there.  The underwater rocket detonated, blowing a spherical hollow in the water below the destroyer’s aft keel.  The screws sped up into a blur, freed from their watery prison, followed immediately by the buckling of both shafts.  Thousands of tons of mass, now unsupported by the buoyant ocean, sagged down amidships and snapped the ship’s spine.
    Then, even above the sound of screeching steel and screaming men, there came the roar of water rushing back into the void.  Hydrodynamics coalesced the collapsing sphere of liquid into a beautiful, terrible lance of pure, incompressible force.  The lance speared the already broken back of the ship and erupted upwards through deck upon deck, emerging in a fountain of destructive energy from the middle of Rivero ’s hangar.
    Rivero collapsed back into the water, her after third shorn away in a blast of twisted, torn, burning metal.  The stern of the ship sank in less than a minute, greedily claiming everyone stationed inside.  The bodies of the flight deck crew and wrecked hulk of the autonomous Firescout-II helo were launched several hundred yards.  None of them survived intact.
    The forward two thirds of the Rivero wallowed in relative peace.  The hangar crew and the engineers who had faced the blast directly were no longer even recognizable as bodies.  Water flooded into open spaces, past sprung doors and hatches and into the forward half of the ship, even as oil and sewage spilled back out into the sea.  Throughout the ship, the few survivors who remained conscious set about organizing themselves to make it out to the life rafts and to evacuate everyone they could.  They stopped any real attempt at damage control once they realized there was no way to stop the ship from going down, nor could they tell if it was going down in five minutes or fifty.
    Unseen by any aboard, either because they were unconscious, dead, or too busy to worry about being attacked again, there was a sequence of four more explosions a couple of miles away to the north and to the west.  These eruptions were followed by a pair of spreading oil slicks, some debris, and nothing more.  The dark, wind tossed sea returned to a state of calm without further attacks upon the doomed destroyer.
    Five minutes later, Chafee ’s helicopter hovered into view to face a