100 Fathoms Below

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Tim’s first thought was that the Victor that had tailed them before was back. During the time the crew lost control of Roanoke, it had strayed fifteen miles north along the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, which could have given the Victor plenty of time to find them again. The captain had changed their bearing as soon as he had control once more, setting course for the closest American territory—the Aleutian Islands to the east, 1,200 miles off the tip of the Alaskan peninsula. But for the moment, they were still in Soviet waters. If they wanted to get out in one piece, they were going to have to shake the Victor off their tail.

Captain Weber had already ordered Roanoke rigged for ultraquiet by the time Tim arrived in the control room. The screw was slowed, and their speed was reduced to two knots. The control room was still rigged for red, casting everything in a crimson tint. The bodies, both human and non, had been cleared out to make room for the captain’s skeleton crew: a quartermaster, one man in Fire Control, a diving officer, a planesman, and a helmsman. That was it. There was no officer of the deck or chief of the watch. The surviving crew of Roanoke was stretched thin, which left the watchstanding sailors to take their orders directly from Captain Weber himself.

“Spicer, I want your eyes and ears on the Victor,” the captain told him.

“Aye-aye, sir,” Tim said, bolting for the sonar shack.

He took a seat in front of his console and slipped the headphones on. The vampires had broken the lights in here too, but there was still plenty of illumination coming off the display screens, which apparently hadn’t bothered their eyes as much as the overheads. It was Aukerman who had first spotted the Victor. Seated at the next console over, the engineer turned emergency sonar tech pointed out the anomalies in the cascading waterfall display, although Tim had already spotted them as soon as he sat down.

There was surface traffic as well. Two ships floated 500 feet above them, to their north and east. Tim concentrated on the noises they made, identifying one of them as a destroyer, probably Kashin class, a guided-missile ship built in the 1960s. He pegged the other ship as even older: a Sverdlov-class cruiser, a gunboat from the 1950s. That was a stroke of luck. The Soviets could just as easily have had planes patrolling the skies and dropping sonobuoys that could pinpoint Roanoke’s location in seconds. They could have had ships dropping acoustic gear that actively pinged every cubic inch of ocean around them. Instead, the Soviets had sent two antiques to patrol these waters. Their outmoded technology was probably the only thing that had saved Roanoke from being spotted already—spotted and torpedoed. The ships were ancient by technological standards, but that didn’t make their weaponry any less lethal.

Still, as long as Roanoke stayed below the thermocline, he was confident the surface ships wouldn’t see them. The submarine on their tail was another matter. The Victor didn’t look as if she had spotted them yet. She wasn’t running on quiet, just patrolling as normal, but that could change in a matter of seconds.

Captain Weber came to the door of the sonar shack, silhouetted in the red light from the control room. He wore a somber, tense expression. “We’ve drifted right into Victor fucking Central, Spicer, and the timing could not be worse. Has she detected us yet?”

“There’s no indication she has, sir,” Tim said.

“Excellent. Keep an eye on her. If that submarine increases her speed so much as half a knot, I want to know about it.”

With only twenty-three men left aboard, the submarine was eerily quiet. Twenty-three living men, Jerry reminded himself. There were a whole lot more corpses being stored in the wardroom and the empty staterooms until they could be dealt with properly.

The berthing area wasn’t far from the mess, which normally would be so filled with boisterous conversation and sailors horsing around that Jerry wouldn’t expect to get a moment’s peace. Instead, it was deadly silent, which, he discovered, was worse. He strained his ears to hear anything, even the sound of Guidry in the galley, making cold sandwiches for the remaining crew, but there was nothing. Even the culinary specialist had probably been put to use somewhere. He got the feeling the whole middle level was empty except for him.

And then he heard them—footsteps in the corridor outside. They stopped right outside the berthing area.

“Back already, Spicer?” Jerry called. “I didn’t think the Soviets would give up that fast.”

In the murky red light, he saw something small appear at the side of the curtain. From a distance, it took him a moment to recognize fingers grasping the doorframe. A shape pushed through the curtain without bothering to move it aside. The red light fell across the man’s face, illuminating his features. Jerry stiffened.

Warren Stubic, the torpedoman who had frozen to death in Lieutenant Abrams’ freezer, walked into the berthing area.

Tim studied his sonar screen. Roanoke was a small target in a vast ocean, and a moving target at that. As long as they remained at ultraquiet, barely making a sound as they drifted out of the Victor’s sonar range, the Soviets didn’t have a prayer of finding them with their outdated equipment.

Still, the worst thing a sonar tech could do was get cocky, because that led to sloppiness, which led to mistakes. Tim forced himself to focus. His mind was still moving in a thousand different directions, trying to process everything that had happened—the horrible deaths, the sudden revelation that vampires were real—but he pushed himself to concentrate on the Soviet submarine instead. He couldn’t let anything distract him or they could wind up dead on the bottom of the ocean. He sure as hell hadn’t survived a horde of hungry vampires just to become fish food.

So he watched the screen and listened to the sounds the Victor made—and it didn’t sound right. She was traveling at nine or ten knots, not trying to be stealthy, her engine banging and clanging. But something was missing, something important that he couldn’t put his finger on. He had memorized all the common sound signatures that Soviet boats made—it came with being an experienced sonar tech. But this sounded so unusual, so off, that he reached for the console and hit a few buttons to record it. It was standard operating procedure. When sonar techs heard something they didn’t recognize, they recorded the sound and compared it to other audio recordings later, to identify it.

But as he listened, it came to him what was missing from the Victor’s sound, and he sat bolt upright in his seat.

As far as he knew, the US Navy was the only submarine service with quiet boats. Soviet subs ran loud. No other militarized nation with a navy even had nuclear-powered subs. They still had diesels, loud as trucks underwater. American subs ran quieter than the rest of them because their screws were specially designed and shaped to reduce cavitation—the formation of air bubbles—and therefore remain quiet enough not to be detected by sonar.

The Victor’s screw wasn’t causing cavitation. Tim could hear her engines, but her propeller was as silent as their own.

And that just wasn’t possible.

Too late, Jerry realized that they had been wrong. Jefferson wasn’t the last of the monsters. All this time, in the quarantined isolation of the torpedo room, in the same dark space where the vampires had hidden themselves before launching their attack, PO3 Warren Stubic had lain frozen in his body bag. But the cold hadn’t killed him, because cold didn’t kill vampires. It had only left him dormant, hibernating while he slowly thawed. Now he was back, the one who had brought this curse onto Roanoke in the first place, patient zero of the vampire outbreak. And Jerry was alone with him in the berthing area. Alone and incapacitated.

But something was wrong with Stubic’s eyes. No inhuman glow came from within them, and they didn’t appear to be focused on anything, not even on Jerry. Being frozen solid had damaged his eyes somehow. Stubic was blind.

Jerry’s rack was at the back of the berthing area, built into the farthest bulkhead from the doorway, but he couldn’t stay there. Confined to such a tight space, he was a sitting duck. He tried to slide out of his rack as quietly as he could, but the injured knee was too sore and too stiff for him to move silently. He squirmed his way to the edge of the rack, then dropped to the floor. He stifled a cry as his broken nose, fractured eye socket, and broken knee all felt the impact. But it didn’t matter—Stubic heard him anyway. The vampire’s head snapped in his direction, and the lips pulled back in a rictus grin to reveal long viperine fangs.

The berthing area was wide enough for two rows of freestanding bunks between the rows built into the bulkheads. If he could keep the bunks between himself and Stubic, he might be able to make it out. Jerry grabbed the corner of the nearest bunk in the middle and pulled, dragging himself along the floor.

Stubic groped his way into the berthing area. “Don’t bother trying to hide from me. I can hear you.”

Jerry pulled himself farther along the floor. Stubic moved through the bunks and sniffed the air, trying to catch Jerry’s scent.

“Who are you? Spicer? Goodrich? No.” Stubic inhaled voluptuously, like a kid smelling candy. Then he grinned, his fangs glistening in the red light. “White.”

Shit. Jerry glanced at the curtained doorway of the berthing area—too far away for him to make a break for in this condition. He thought about shouting for help, but that would just give Stubic his exact location, and he knew how fast these creatures could move.

“Aren’t you tired of always following orders, White? ‘Aye, sir. No, sir. Please, can I have some more, sir.’”

Stubic was inching closer. Jerry pulled himself forward, gritting his teeth against the pain in his injured arms. He slid from behind one bunk to behind another, but the doorway still seemed miles away. Stubic cocked his head, listening to the sound of Jerry’s coveralls sliding against the deck, and gave a wry smile.

“Instead of doing what you’re told, wouldn’t you rather take what you want instead? Answer only to yourself and your desires? Wouldn’t you rather be at the top of the food chain, instead of the bottom?”

Jerry’s arms hurt so much, he could barely move them, but he had to keep going. He grabbed the foot of the bunk and pulled, sliding himself around it. Stubic paused, tilting his head to listen. The smile remained on his face, sharp and malevolent.

“I can make that happen for you, White. I can give you the gift of the green-eyed queen. I can make you like me, and then you’ll never have to follow orders again.”

Green-eyed queen? What was he talking about? Keeping his eyes on his pursuer, Jerry continued pulling himself toward the doorway. Suddenly, Stubic moved, fast as a cat, from where he had been standing amid the bunks. Jerry turned, and there he was, standing right before him, blocking his way. Jerry’s heart sank. Stubic had known where he was all along, and had only been toying with him.

In a single arcing movement, Stubic picked Jerry up off the deck by his coveralls and slammed him into the side of a triple-decker bunk so hard that the curtain rod came loose and fell to the deck with a loud metallic clang. Jerry’s face and broken knee shrieked in agony.

He gritted his teeth against the pain. “We killed the others. We’ll kill you too. One blind vampire can’t take over an entire submarine.”

Still holding him by the coveralls, Stubic grinned, his lips pulling back from his fangs.

“Who said there would only be one of us?”

“Captain, sir, there’s no cavitation coming from the other sub,” Tim reported, moving one earphone of his headset aside so he could hear. “I don’t understand it. The engine sounds Soviet, but the screw isn’t making any noise at all.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Spicer,” Captain Weber said from the door of the sonar shack. “A bear’s screw is loud as a lawnmower. They’re reliable that way.”

“I know, sir. Is it possible she’s one of ours? We’re close enough to Alaska that they might have come looking for us.”

The captain shook his head. “The navy wouldn’t risk sending another boat into Soviet waters just to find us.”

“Then I really don’t understand what this is, sir,” Tim said.

The captain straightened, his eyes widening in realization. “This is it, Spicer. This is what they sent us to find! The prototype submarine. She’s real, and we’ve found her.”

Tim looked at the screen again, at the shapes the sonar vibrations were creating within the cascading colors. The next generation of Soviet submarine? Was it possible? He felt as if he were looking into the future. Ten years from now, twenty, thirty, would some other sonar tech be sitting where Tim was and looking at the same readings on their screen, listening to the same sounds? And if they were, would they have learned about this very moment during their training—the moment a US Navy submarine picked up the first of a brand-new class of Soviet submarine on sonar?

“Are you recording her?” the captain asked.

“Aye, sir,” Tim said. “She still hasn’t detected us. If she had, she wouldn’t be running this loud.”

“Keep an eye on her,” Captain Weber said. “And keep recording. I want to bring back as much information as we can.”

A loud metallic clang in Tim’s earphone startled him, reflected in the sonar display by a sudden bright flare. Aukerman winced in pain and threw his headphones off.

“What the hell was that?” Aukerman asked.

“Whatever it was, it came from inside Roanoke,” Tim replied.

“Shit,” Aukerman said. He slipped his headphones back on.

On the screen, the readings for the Soviet submarine shifted.

“Captain, sir, I think she heard us,” Tim announced. “She’s turning our way.”

“Has she engaged active sonar, Spicer?” Captain Weber asked.

“Not yet, sir.”

Then he heard something else on his headphones—something that made him go cold. The unmistakable sound of torpedo tube outer doors sliding open.

“This is how we survive,” Stubic said, pinning Jerry against the bunk. The vampire’s blind, unfocused eyes seemed to look through him, into his soul. “We feed and multiply and spread the gift of the green-eyed queen. And what better place for us to thrive than in the darkness of the ocean?”

“My friends will stop you,” Jerry said through gritted teeth. “Even if you kill me, they will take you down. It’s over. It ends here.”

Stubic laughed—a hideous sound that raised goose bumps on Jerry’s flesh.

“You’re missing the point, White. For my kind, there is no end.”

Stubic’s groping hands found Jerry’s head and pushed it to the side, exposing the neck. He bared his fangs and leaned in.

Captain Weber stood behind Tim’s chair and looked at the sonar screen. “If this bear detects us, we’re as good as dead. We broke into her house. If she shoots us, it’s a freebie. And we’d be fools to fire on her first with those ships on top of us.”

He was right. If Roanoke torpedoed the Soviet sub, the two ships on the surface would hear the explosion and drop their acoustic gear. Roanoke would be located, torpedoed, and its presence labeled an act of war. With both superpowers’ fingers on the button, Tim could imagine things escalating quickly.

He said, “Sir, my best guess is that she’s about ten miles out and closing. Her torpedo doors are open, but she’s still on passive sonar. She may not know for sure yet that we’re here.”

“We’re going to have to sneak out of here.” Weber ducked back into the control room and said, “Maintain current speed and depth. Slow and low, gentlemen—that’s how we’ll get out of this.”

On the sonar screen, the Soviet sub adjusted its bearing, diving to Roanoke’s depth until it was aligned behind them. Tim’s chest tightened. His throat went dry. Had they detected Roanoke, or was this just an unrelated change in their bearing? It was possible the bear was trying to lose itself in Roanoke’s baffles—the cone of water directly behind the sub, which the hull-mounted sonar couldn’t hear through. It was an unintentional blind spot caused by the need to insulate the sonar array from the noise of the submarine’s own engines, and one the Soviets had learned to exploit. It was also possible she was lining up to fire a torpedo at them. If only there were some way to know for sure whether they had been detected—some other way than being fired on.

The only way to get the bear out of Roanoke’s blind spot was to clear the baffles, but that would mean taking a sudden hard turn to look back into it. Not only would that take them off course, but changing their bearing that drastically would definitely alert the Soviets to their presence. And as the captain had said, considering how close Roanoke was to the Rybachiy sub base, the Soviets would have no qualms about firing on them.

The Soviet sub blinked in and out of sonar as she passed through the baffles. Tim’s whole body tensed. He glanced over at Aukerman, who looked as nervous as he felt, and was probably wishing he were back in the reactor room.

According to the sonar readings, Roanoke was passing right under the Sverdlov. The cruiser was thirty years old, and Tim hoped she was hard of hearing. If her listening equipment was as out of date as the rest of her, they would pass by undetected. If not, acoustic gear would rain down all around them.

He held his breath, and then they were past the Sverdlov. Tim sighed with relief. But the sub was still behind them, still searching for them. Tim strained his ears for any sound of torpedoes being readied, but so far the bear had taken no further aggressive action.

“Stay the course,” Captain Weber told the crew at the helm. “Slow and steady.”

Tim didn’t understand how he could sound so calm. With each passing second, he was more convinced the Soviets would spot them and that would be the end of it. Either they would be destroyed like the South Korean 747, or they would be forced to surface so they could be boarded, the crew taken prisoner and probably tortured for information while Soviet engineers took Roanoke apart.

The sub winked in and out of sonar. Tim wiped the sweat from his forehead. Next to him, Aukerman did the same. In his headphones, the Soviet sub sounded so loud, Tim felt as if he were sitting in its engine room.

He thought back to those long winters of his childhood, how he had stared into the seemingly unending darkness and prayed for daylight. It had come eventually, as it always did, but there were times when he felt its return as a personal triumph, as if the sun had deigned to come back only because he had prayed hard enough. It was a childish way to think, believing the strength of his wish had somehow affected the world around him. But now, after everything else that had happened, with their lives hanging in the balance once more, he found himself feeling that same yearning with the same intensity, as though he might get them out of this alive if he just prayed hard enough.

Stubic leaned closer, his sharp teeth inches from Jerry’s neck. Jerry winced. He couldn’t let this happen. He didn’t want to die, didn’t want to become one of these creatures. But he was pinned against the locker and too weak to fight.

His hand grasped for anything he could use as a weapon, anything to make Stubic let go of him, but what could he possibly bring to bear against the vampire’s unnatural strength? His hand brushed the gauze of the splint on his knee—and then one of the wooden stakes splinting his leg.

He slid the stake up and out of the gauze, doing his best to ignore the screaming pain in his knee. With all the strength he could muster, he drove the sharp end into Stubic’s chest.

The blind, glassy eyes widened in surprise. Stubic hissed and drew back, releasing him. Jerry fell to the deck. The pain in his broken knee was worse than anything he had ever known.

Stubic dropped to his knees, hands grasping the stake protruding from his chest. Then, to Jerry’s horror, he laughed and began to pull the stake out.

“You’re too weak to drive it in all the way, White. Why fight me? Think how strong you’ll be when you’re one of us. Not just the new strength in your transformed body, but strength in numbers. Our kind is connected in ways you can’t imagine. Our bodies. Our minds. I can hear the green-eyed queen in my head, urging me to grow our numbers, to fill the darkness of the ocean with our kind. When you rise, you’ll hear her too.”

“If I wanted to hear what a vampire was thinking,” Jerry said, “I wouldn’t be sitting here praying for you to shut the fuck up already.”

He threw himself on top of Stubic, taking him down to the deck, the weight of his body pushing the stake deeper into the vampire’s chest. Stubic screamed as it pierced his heart. Blood sluiced from his mouth. He convulsed, his limbs smacking against the deck, but this time there was no escape from the stake. Jerry leaned on it with all his strength until Stubic quit thrashing.

He looked down at the dying vampire. “If you really do share your thoughts with each other, tell your green-eyed queen you failed, and that she can kiss my still-living human ass.”

Stubic’s blood-slick lips stretched into a smile. He spoke his last words then—words that chilled Jerry to the core. And with a last wheezing, triumphant laugh, the vampire died.

“Captain, she’s slowing and turning around!” Tim shouted.

Captain Weber came into the sonar shack and looked past Tim to the screen. “We’re not out of the woods yet, Spicer. Let’s make sure she keeps going.”

They kept watching the screen for another fifteen minutes. Tim heard the torpedo doors close again, after which the bear continued sailing away and didn’t turn back. He couldn’t believe it. It was as though his prayers had been answered. The Soviet sub hadn’t detected them, and neither had the surface ships. No torpedo had been fired. No one had been captured and interrogated. Roanoke had the proof it had been sent to find: that the prototype submarine existed. And the Soviets were none the wiser that a US nuclear sub had violated their sovereign territory.

The captain clapped Tim on the shoulder and announced, “We’re clear.”

Tim let himself breathe again. Seated at the next console, Aukerman let out a spontaneous cheer and high-fived him.