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The winch drew the unexploded World War II mine closer to the surface. Captain Barbara Larson was able to follow the progress on-screen thanks to Curly's camera making sure they had a clear glide path to the surface.

Suddenly, the screen caught something silhouetted in the upward glide path, something long and cylindrical like a giant bullet traversing the sea.

"Oh my God..."

Larson didn't need twenty years in the Navy to know what she was looking at, any more than she could fathom why neither the Salvor's radar nor sonar systems had picked up what was clearly a naval attack sub.

"Stop the winch!" she ordered.

"Winch stopped, Captain!"

"Release the tether."

The tech behind Curly's control worked the joystick. "Tether, released."

"Give me visual."

The momentum the mine had gained kept it propelling upward, straight on line with the submarine, which was taking evasive maneuvers that might not be enough to avoid an apparently inevitable collision.

"Get Curly to the mine. We've got to stop it!"

Larson knew the ROV was too far away, knew it could never get to the mine in time, but she had to try, had to do something. The tech controlling the ROV complied, his motions belying the fact he knew the task was hopeless.

"Brace for explosion!" Larson ordered.

* * *

The blast shook the Providence to its core. The first immediate effect of the damage sustained was a reactor SCRAM in which the engines ceased running, cutting off propulsion. The sub's lighting flickered, died, and caught again when the emergency generators kicked in. Fincic felt the sub seem to hang in the water briefly before beginning its descent to the bottom of the sea.

In that moment, it all became clear to Fincic. The ship on the surface could only be some sort of salvage vessel, a modern-day mine sweeper cleansing the seas of World War II relics.

From what the LED readouts monitoring the ship's multiple systems told him, there had been no catastrophic hull breach or anything that might place the Providence in further peril. Without power, though, the ship's atmospheric control equipment would be rendered inoperable, shutting down the oxygen generator and its accompanying carbon dioxide scrubbers. Breathable air would now be supplied by oxygen candles to supplement the oxygen already present in the air.

Fincic could feel the collective anxiety and fear of the crew around him. No matter how much elite training submariners aboard a ship like this received, it was never enough to prepare for a moment like this, a moment seldom experienced by a modern submarine crew, particularly a Virginia-class vessel.

"Depth two hundred meters... three hundred meters... four hundred meters..."

Just after that, Fincic felt the thud of the Providence rocking to a stop on the bottom of the sea, just over thirteen hundred feet down. The sub seemed to shift slightly before settling in the silt.

Fincic knew damage-control parties were already checking the area close to the ship's bow where the explosion had taken place. The damage at this point seemed limited to the propulsion system and the engine room itself, nothing that would imperil the crew so long as the oxygen candles kept functioning, which would be for four days. The nearest naval base capable of mounting a rescue with submersibles rigged for evacuation was outside of Seattle, twenty hours away. That meant the entire crew could be offloaded, and the process of raising the Providence begun, one day from now. There remained only one last thing for Fincic to do.

He grasped a standard mic from the console before him, pressed the proper keys and switches to activate the ship's emergency communication system. While running silent and deep, submarines maintained no contact whatsoever with the surface, either incoming or outgoing. A ship like the Providence existed in an entirely self-contained world, until an emergency like this occurred. Emergency procedure dictated that Fincic record a message onto a device that would then be dispatched to the surface, which was the only way communication was possible with the overwater world, and then only to transmit.

"Naval command, mayday, mayday! This is the Providence. We have suffered engine and propulsion damage from contact with a World War II mine lifted by a salvage ship and are currently resting on the bottom on emergency power. Request assistance and rescue. Coordinates follow."

Once Fincic had provided those coordinates, he launched the ship's SLOT buoy. SLOT was short for "Submarine-Launched One-Way Transmitter," and once the buoy reached the surface it would automatically transmit his message via a secure channel to naval command, at which point rescue ships would be scrambled out of Naval Base Kitsap. Meanwhile, following protocol, he would launch another buoy every hour until the rescue team arrived on-site.

Until then, all Fincic and the rest of the Providence crew could do was wait.