Splashdown

Chapter 19

Bones lifted the nuke and tucked it under his arm like a football. Dane scanned the room once, but Ivkin and his nuclear technicians were all preoccupied with multiple system alerts.

Without uttering a word, Bones dashed for the exit while Dane kept a few steps ahead of him, serving as his friend’s lead blocker. They reached the end of the room and jumped over the knee knocker into the corridor beyond. Thankfully the hall was clear and they accelerated down the empty stretch.

“To the moon pool!” Dane panted.

“Which way?”

Dane flashed on the spatial observations he’d committed to memory on the way over. “Downstairs at the end, halfway down next hall, turn right. It's not far.”

But when they reached the bottom of the stairs they were greeted by two crewmen tandem carrying a hefty length of pipe. Unfortunately for them, this meant their hands were occupied, and Dane had dispatched the one nearest to him with a well-placed chop to the neck. The other attempted to swipe a handheld radio from his belt but Dane head-butted him into the steel wall and knocked him out.

“They have weapons?” Bones said, breathing heavily.

Dane frisked them but his hands came away empty. “Keep going!”

As soon as they were underway they heard angry shouts behind them followed by the trammel of footfalls. “Go, go!” Dane encouraged. He could feel Bones’ hand on his back as the stout Cherokee pushed forward with the bomb.

They suddenly found themselves face-to-face with Bullet Man. The surprised Russian didn’t get his AK-47 raised before Dane barreled into him, batting the weapon to the side and bearing him to the ground. Bullet’s breath left him in a rush, and Dane struck the man twice on the temple. The Russian went limp.

Dane scrambled to his feet, snatched up the AK-47, and fired a warning burst toward the sound of pursuit. “That’ll make them think twice.”

They resumed their flight, reached the midway point of the tunnel-like corridor, and made the right turn Dane remembered into a short corridor that led to the airlock. Dane sprinted ahead here, for opening the airlock required two hands to turn a large valve wheel. He dropped the AK-47 and threw his body into the effort, thankful that the Russians maintained it well with a regular application of grease. It took some force but opened without so much as a squeak. He immediately went to work on the second airlock door — the one that opened to the moon pool itself.

“C’mon!” Bones said. They could hear the voices of their pursuers, not far behind now, down the passageway they had just left. Dane got the second airlock open and Bones high-stepped through into the moon pool. The cacophony of the systems alarms faded behind them.

“Go to the Russian submersible.” Dane grabbed theAK-47 and emptied it at the figures that appeared in the distance. The Russians fell back and Dane slammed shut the outer airlock door and sealed it closed again to slow their pursuers. Then he jumped out into the moon pool area and shut the inner airlock door in the same fashion.

Bones was now passing Deep Black as he lugged his hazardous payload toward the Russian submersible that had towed them into the submarine.

“Put the nuke in the Russian sub!” Dane shouted as he ran toward Bones. “Lower it to the pool!”

Bones moved lightning-fast to carry out these tasks while Dane sprinted across the concrete deck, skirting various pieces of equipment and coils of cable and rope. By the time he reached Deep Black he could hear the outer airlock door being twisted open.

Dane undid their mini-sub’s dome hatch and threw it open. He felt the cool rush of pure oxygen escaping. He snaked an arm inside the sub and found the compartment in which Bones had stashed his Beretta. He fumbled with the clasp for a second, got it, and pulled out the weapon. Comforted by its familiar weight, he spun on a heel, but then stopped. He jumped back into the sub, stooping to access a battery bank. He located the wiring harness and switched the position of two sets of wires, knowing it would cause sparks on ignition.

Dane heard the inner airlock opening. He leapt from the sub back onto the deck. He closed its hatch to leave it as it had been and contain the high oxygen levels inside. He raced over to Bones, who had just lowered the Russian submersible to the surface of the moon pool, where it rocked crazily from its hasty drop.

Dane spotted the nuke lying on the floor of the cockpit on the passenger side. He dropped into the pilot’s seat, quickly familiarizing himself with the controls.

“Can you drive this thing?” Bones asked.

“No choice. It’s learn or burn. Let’s go.” He focused his attention on the control panel. His sea gray eyes scowled at the Russian labels. Still, the most important components looked similar to those of the subs he’d just finished training with, and he quickly powered up the deep-sea craft as the angry mob of Russian submariners ran into the moon pool.

Bones jumped into the co-pilot’s seat. The agitated outbursts of the approaching Russians were muffled suddenly when Bones pulled the dome hatch down. Dane vented the air in the buoyancy tubes, and their appropriated sub began to sink.

“Wait. I can’t find the hatch latch!” Bones was used to the latch from Deep Black being on his right side, but it wasn’t there. They heard the ping of a bullet ricochet off something close by.

“Bones, no time. We’re going down. Just hold the hatch down hard and pretty soon the water pressure will seal it off.” Dane felt this was true in theory, although he wasn’t looking forward to testing it out.

Bones held onto the hatch’s grab handle and then he saw it. “It’s in the back. What kind of ass-backwards…” He didn’t bother completing the sentence as he reached behind his seat to snap the latch. “Done!”

“Down we go.” The last thing Dane saw before he activated the vertical thrusters was a harried crewmember opening the hatch to Deep Black. He and Bones watched the moon pool opening fade from view as they absconded into the black void with the Cold War relic.

“We made it, bro!” Bones cheered. “I can’t…”

“Not yet, Bones.” Dane turned the sub so that they pointed into open water. Then he put the horizontal thrusters on high to propel them out from under the massive submarine.

“What?”

“I want to be far enough away before…”

Suddenly they heard a dull boom and felt a concussive blast rock their little submersible.

“…Deep Black blows.” Dane finished, hands roaming the controls to wrangle the mini-sub back to an even keel.

Bones grinned in spite of looking a little pale. “Nice, man. Now they can’t follow us except in the mothership.”

“Yeah, and hopefully our little oxygen bomb started a nice fire in there that will keep them busy for a while.”

“Back to the trawler.”

“Hell yes. We’ve got what we need. Let’s go home.”

At that moment they heard an alarm sound in the tiny cabin. They’d never heard one before except in simulations and supervised training dives when they’d been triggered intentionally.

“What’s up?” Bones asked, looking over at his pilot.

“Uh-oh.”

“Maddock! ‘Uh-oh’ is not something you say in a sub with an alarm going off two miles underwater, man.”

“Okay, I take it back, then.

“So what is it?”

“We’re low on oxygen and battery power.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah. Makes sense though, since this thing just got back from the capsule dive to bring us into the submarine, and I don’t even think they had it charging at all. They were all focused on us and the nuke.”

“I didn’t have to unplug any charging cables.”

“Nor did they have a chance to swap out the oh-two tanks for fresh ones. Probably not the carbon dioxide scrubbers, either.”

Bones took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I guess we should have just high-tailed it outta there in our own sub. We had the go-juice and the breathing gas, and they wouldn’t have been able to follow us very far in this thing.”

“But then we wouldn’t have had the explosion, which is what’s keeping the Typhoon sub from just blowing us out of the water with a torpedo right now.”

“Hey, well that’s good news.” Bones alternated holding one hand higher than the other. “Air…not blown up…air…not blown up…”

“Speaking of air, maybe we should conserve what little we have left by not talking except when absolutely necessary. I’m going to drop the ballast and aim straight up with the thrusters.”

“Do it. The Typhoon’s holding position. They’re not coming after us. Yet.”

Dane dropped the weights the sub carried and put the submersible into a steep powered ascent. They began to rise rapidly toward the surface. Bones called out their depth at significant intervals.

“Two thousand meters…”

Minutes passed in silence where the SEAL duo monitored their equipment and displays. It soon became apparent that it was becoming harder to breathe.

“Fifteen hundred meters…Are we going to lose battery power first or air?”

Dane consulted his gauges, face lined with worry.

“Probably air.”