Dive to Oblivion

20

“Torpedo has just broken the five-hundred-yard threshold. It’s got capture!” exclaimed Tim Lacey.

John Walden listened to these dreaded words from his perch behind the helm. His pulse quickened, and he scanned the gauges before him for any sign of redemption.

“Thirteen hundred and fifty feet, and continuing the dive, Captain,” tensely reported the COB on their current depth.

With the deck angled sharply downwards, and the hull plates moaning in response to the pressure at these depths, Walden glanced up at the speed indicator.

Somehow the engineering crew had managed to squeeze out another precious knot of forward speed.

But this effort would all be in vain, unless their pursuer could be countered.

“I’ve got a clear picture of the walls of the trench on the fathometer. Captain,” informed the navigator.

“At our present course and speed, we’ll impact the lower portion of the western ridge in another two minutes time.”

“Torpedo range is down to three hundred yards,” added Lacey, his somber voice scratchy from use.

“Thirteen hundred and seventy feet,” reported the Cob, who had chewed his unlit cigar down to a bare stub.

Walden allowed the depth meter to fall another ten feet before calling out forcefully.

“Take us up, helmsmen!

Full rise on the planes!”

Having anticipated this order, the helmsmen yanked back on their steering yokes, and the depth gauge fell yet another ten feet before it momentarily stopped, then began turning in the opposite direction. The deck was now angled sharply upwards, and as Walden regrasped the steel handhold, his glance returned to the speed indicator.

“Come on, Rickover. I know you’ve got it in you,” he softly urged.

Over at the sonar console, Tim Lacey tried his best to sort out the cacophony of sounds being conveyed through his headphones. With the torpedo due to strike them any second now, he bravely turned the volume gain to maximum amplification, and searched the roiling depths for any sign of the weapon. And it was then he heard the distinctive buzzing signature of the torpedo, that seemed to momentarily intensify, before steadily lessening. Yanking off his headphones, he excitedly cried out into his microphone.

“That sucker just passed right by us, Captain! It’s lost capture!” “Brace yourself, gentlemen,” warned Walden, after issuing a brief sigh.

“That baby’s gonna smack into the wall of the trench, and all hell’s gonna break out down here!”

Rocketing downwards through the same depths that its adversary had just penetrated, the Pantera was in the midst of its own desperate dive. The vessel’s attack center was unusually hushed, its assembled crew members were content to lose their anxieties in the glowing instruments of their individual consoles.

With his own gaze locked on the broad-band sonar screen, Alexander Litvinov monitored the weapon that relentlessly followed in their wake. His sense of hopelessness was only intensified by the somber reports of the senior sonarman.

“The Mk48 continues its pursuit. Impact will take place any moment now.”

With nothing left to do but pray for a miracle, Litvinov found his thoughts going back in time. He was a cadet once more, nervously anticipating his first full day at the Academy. That had been the day that he took an oath to surrender his life if necessary for the defense of the motherland. It had all seemed so unreal at the time. But now he knew differently. Life was the most precious gift of all, and to waste it in this manner was the ultimate tragedy.

Doing his best to contain his fears, Litvinov looked away from the flashing monitor screen, to take one last fond look at the men who awaited death beside him.

They were a brave, admirable lot, and before he could voice his pride, a deafening, gut-wrenching explosion diverted his attention back to sonar. The deck began to shake wildly beneath him, and he blindly grabbed onto the senior sonarman’s arm to keep from falling over.

“What in heaven’s name is happening, Misha?” he managed.

“Have we been hit?”

The bearded technician ignored his pain-racked ears and valiantly struggled to monitor his headphones.

“I don’t believe so. Captain. That detonation took place in the waters directly before us.”

“I bet it was our very own torpedo!” observed Litvinov, with a new sense of hope.

“And we shall continue to penetrate its shock-wave to the very floor of the trench, and lose our relentless pursuer along the way!”

In the adjoining waters, the occupants of the Avalon also heard this booming explosion. Wildly tossed from side to side by the agitated wall of water that accompanied the blast, the DSRV found itself spiraling downwards, completely out of control.

“It’s no use,” reported Ned Barnes as he ineffectively addressed the joystick.

“We’ve lost all thruster power and ballast control. Right now, there’s nothing that I can do to keep us from being sucked into the floor of the trench.”

“What do those readings on the monitor screen indicate?” asked Thomas Moore, who was not the type who easily gave up hope.

“That data is coming from our external sensor pod,” revealed the pilot.

“It must be malfunctioning, because it’s showing an extreme amount of magnetic resonance outside.”

“Could this be a result of that blast?” continued Moore.

“No way,” replied Barnes firmly.

“The only time I ever saw a reading that high was when Avalon was being degaussed, to counter its magnetic signature.”

This matter-of-fact revelation caused Thomas Moore to gasp.

“Damn, they’re activating the device!”

“What device?” asked the confused pilot.

“It has to do with the reason that I was sent down here,” explained Moore, who shuddered to think what would happen to them if Aver/on were to share the Lewis and Clark’s fate.

“Jesus, will you just look at that magnetometer reading,” instructed Barnes with utter disbelief.

“It’s goin’ off the damn scale!”

Moore didn’t have to look up at the monitor screen to recognize the extreme peril that surrounded them.

He knew that the magnetic field would continue to intensify, until the DSRV and its unfortunate occupants were torn apart by a cosmic implosion that would vaporize the very substance that matter was based upon.

Well aware that only two men had ever survived such an encounter and lived to tell about it, Moore could think of only one way they could save themselves.

“Ned, can the Avalon be internally flooded?”

Barnes looked at his associate like he didn’t hear him properly.

“What the hell are you asking’ that for?”

Moore didn’t flinch.

“You’re just going to have to trust me, Ned. Can this vessel be filled with water with us still safely in it, or not?”

The steely-eyed pilot seemed momentarily flustered.

“Jesus, Thomas. Sure, I can pull the plug on the Avalon.

But the only way we can keep breathin’ is through the EBA’s.”

“Then you’d better get on with it, Ned. Or I can guarantee you that you’ll never live to see those Cowboys of yours play in another Super Bowl.”

“The explosion has temporarily masked our hydrophones,” reported the Academician Petrovsky’s sensor operator.

“Then use your low-frequency filters and unmask them,” ordered Valerian from the adjoining firecontrol console.

Seated beside the flag officer. Dr. Andrei Petrov looked up from his computer keyboard.

“Perhaps that blast indicates that the 688 has been destroyed. Then this test is all for naught. And there’s always the chance that it could affect our own submarine that’s prowling these waters.”

Unable to respond to this remark. Valerian vented his frustration on the sensor operator.

“Well, Comrade.

Is it out there?”

The technician nervously addressed his console.

With his hands shaking so badly that he had trouble hitting the proper keys of the input panel, he turned up the volume gain and readjusted the graphic equalizer.

“There appears to be some kind of man-made signature down there,” he tentatively observed.

“But I still can’t be certain if it’s emanating from the 688.” “Let me listen,” said Valerian disgustedly.

With a sweeping motion, he yanked the headphones away from the startled technician, and cupped them to his ears. Barely thirty seconds passed before he came to a conclusion based more on hope than on firm evidence.

“It’s the 688 all right. For the glory of the motherland, reactivate the power grid to one-hundred-percent capacity, Andrei Sergeyevich!”

The physicist obediently addressed his keyboard, and as the reactor pile went critical, he visualized the series of events taking place on the sea floor below. Energized by the power of the interacting atoms that he had just released, the series of magnetic generators placed alongside the walls of the trench would begin throwing out intense resonating pulses of electromagnetic energy. Any solid object within range would be captured by this field, its own atoms pulled apart by the gravitational forces that ruled the universe.

“It’s started! The crystal capstone is activating!” exclaimed Dr. Elizabeth, who followed this news with a detailed description of the battle between good and evil that had taken place in the water directly beneath them.

Al remained skeptical of this entire story, yet he asked, “And just who won this battle, Doc?”

“Why the powers of good, of course,” answered the psychic.

“Now can we contact Peter?” asked Mimi, her patience all but exhausted.

“There’s just one more test to pass, hon. Then the door will be wide open.”

The Sunshine picked this inopportune moment to shudder to an abrupt stop. Al seemed to know just what caused this problem, and he left the open wheelhouse where he had been standing, passed by his two seated passengers, and peered over the square transom.

“Just like I thought, ladies. Gulf weed’s gone and wrapped up the prop.”

“Is there anything you can do about it?” asked Mimi.

“Maybe we can radio that white ship we passed for help.”

“No need for that, missy,” remarked Al as he pulled off his hat, shirt, and shoes.

“Just hang on and I can cut us free in no time.”

AI whipped out a pocket knife and began climbing overboard.

“Be careful down there,” warned Dr. Elizabeth.

“No need to be worried,” offered Al before disappearing completely.

“I needs to cool off anyway. See ya in a bit, ladies.”

As Al plopped into the water, Isis unexpectedly let out a shrill, high-pitched screech. Both Mimi and Dr. Elizabeth looked to the starboard gunwale, where the cat was perched with its back arched and its head pointed out to sea.

“What in the world do you see out there, Isis?” asked the psychic.

Only moments ago, the dusk sky had been clear, with hardly a cloud visible. But now they saw a meanlooking bank of quick-moving clouds that veiled the sky in a cloak of swirling green mist. “Looks like we got us a storm comin’,” observed Dr. Elizabeth.

Just as she pulled Isis off her perch and put the cat down at her feet, the deck began to vibrate. This was accompanied by a sudden drop in the air temperature, and the arrival of a howling, gusting wind.

A thunderous boom sounded overhead, prompting Mimi to turn towards the transom and call out.

“Al, you’d better get out of the water. We’ve got a storm on its way!” “Don’t bother, hon,” said the psychic.

“You see, this ain’t no ordinary storm. This is nature’s way of tellin’ us that it’s time to make the contact!”

Also watching this swirling green bank of clouds take form was John Walden. Yet he did so from a depth of sixty-five feet, with the amplified assistance of the Rickover’s periscope.

“Looks like a real nasty one’s brewing topside,” said Walden, as he rotated the scope and took another look at the wooden fishing trawler that he had been previously studying.

“I sure hope those folks up there have battened down the hatches.”

Any further comment on his part was cut short by the frantic voice of the chief of the watch.

“Engineering reports a partial electrical failure! The reactor is being automatically scrammed.”

As if to emphasize the seriousness of this report, the lights suddenly dimmed. The deck seemed to shudder, and then angle down slightly by the bow.

“I’ve just lost neutral buoyancy,” informed the chief of the watch.

“Blow emergency and get us on the surface!” ordered Walden, who was about to return to the periscope, when the chief of the watch replied to this directive.

“Can’t do. Captain. Ballast pumps are inoperable.”

“What the hell?” remarked Walden, genuinely puzzled by this entire sequence of events.

To get some kind of handle on the situation, he lowered the periscope and quickly turned for the helm.

The COB was standing over the diving console, with the current chief of the watch close beside him. Together they studied the various instruments, with the assistance of a hand-held flashlight.

“Sound general quarters!” ordered Walden.

“COB, I want you to get on the horn with engineering, and find out what the blazes is going on back there.”

As the electronic alarm sending the crew to their action stations sounded throughout the Rickover, the sub began sinking into the same depths that only minutes ago they had climbed out of. Unable to get the engines started and reverse this descent, Walden gripped an overhead handhold and watched as his men frantically tried to restore full power.

One of the few operational stations that remained online was sonar. Here, in the midst of his second consecutive watch, Tim Lacey found his attention locked on a hypnotic, humming sound that seemed to emanate from the floor of the trench itself. On a mere hunch, he informed the captain of this transient.

Much to his surprise, he was instructed to play this mysterious signature over the control room’s intercom speakers.

From his position beside the helm, John Walden carefully listened to the sounds that had gained Lacey’s attention. With the assistance of the navigator, he was able to determine that they indeed originated from the bottom of the trench, at a depth of approximately seventeen hundred feet.

Earlier, Commander Thomas Moore had shared with him details of an amazing man-made device, that the NIS feared could be anchored on the floor of this very trench. Unable to believe in the existence of a machine which could de materialize matter, Walden initially had been skeptical. But now he was beginning to wonder if he had been too hasty in his judgment.

With the slim hope that the device Moore spoke of was real, and that it was the cause of the Rickover’s current problems, Walden ordered the firecontrol team to ready a pair of Mk 48 wire-guided torpedoes.

The source of the unexplained humming noise was then precisely determined, and with this information keyed into the boat’s firecontrol system, the torpedoes were fired.

As they streaked from their tubes, the deck once more shuddered. And Walden found himself crossing his fingers, all the while praying that this dive to oblivion would soon be halted.