CHAPTER 23

SUNDAY, 19 DECEMBER, 0958 GREENWICH MEAN TIME
ARCTIC OCEAN
POLAR ICECAP SURFACE

The pressure ridge at the southwest edge of the polynya was 80 feet thick. The molecules that formed the crystalline structure of the ice had been motionless, frozen for centuries, last existing as liquid water a thousand years before. For those centuries the structure of the ice had been solid as concrete, one piece of a massive structure forming the polar icecap.

At 0945 Greenwich Mean Time a nuclear explosion had detonated under the ice pack five kilometers to the northwest. Its chief effect was a multitude of hairline cracks formed throughout the structure of the ice, but being hairline cracks, the tremendous cold and pressure from the weight of the ice raft was already rewelding the ice together into one piece.

At 0958 a 4500-ton nuclear submarine smashed into the ice’s underside. The submarine was travelling at 32 feet per second. The force of the impact was equivalent to that of a locomotive going 231 miles per hour, or twelve one-thousand-pound artillery shells fired at point-blank range. Or a small nuclear detonation.

The ice exploded upward as if slammed by the fist of God.

* * *

The Devilfish’s sonar sphere was crushed, flattened to a plate and slammed into the thick steel of the bow compartment, which was also crushed, rupturing and bursting. By the time the bow compartment had ruptured, the ice’s protest was over and a hole 50 feet in diameter formed. The displaced ice flew upward and outward, splintering into fragments and shards. The cylindrical hull of the Devilfish flew through the hole onto the ice, the first third of her smashed into a compressed lump, her sail sheared off at the hull. The rest continued up and forward through the hole, the entire length of her coming out of the ice like some giant whale, moving over the edge of a slight ridge and coming to rest two hundred feet from the hole on the downhill slope of the pressure ridge. At the bottom of the gentle slope, a thousand feet away, was the lake of thin ice that Devilfish had been aiming for.

* * *

The control room, already devastated by the shock of the Magnum, changed violently. Where before the room had retained its shape and symmetry, the collision with the ice fractured the steel hoop frames of the pressure hull. The energy of the sudden deceleration threw people and consoles and seats and chunks of steel forward, a rain of flesh and pieces of steel. Several of the men who had survived the first shock, including Lieutenant Rod Van Dyne, the sonar officer, were hurled forward and killed instantly. Pacino was thrown face-first into the ballast control panel, the wraparound console in the control room’s forward port corner, taking the force of the collision in the face. The emergency air-breathing mask Plexiglas faceplate caved in, the remainder of the impact-load transferred to Pacino’s face. The mask came off as he slid down the panel, his face hitting the Chief of the Watch’s seat, his arms limp. He hung there for a moment, then fell to the deck, his head facing the lower portion of the console, the deck slick with oil or blood or seawater — in the dim light of the lantern it was impossible to say.

And somewhere under the thin ice was a 90-ton titanium pod with four men inside, all losing consciousness from exposure to the extreme cold.

* * *

By 1001 GMT the eruption from the ice was over. The black submarine, its snout smashed, lay on the ice like some beached behemoth, tilted over into a 20-degree port-list and lying on the ice’s downslope. The strange metal beast from the deep lay there, motionless, inert.

Inside the vessel was like the outside. Nothing moved. For a long while Pacino had been staring at the underside of a seat and the face of a console. The light was very dim. His face was cold where it touched the tile of the deck. He tried to identify the console he was looking at but had never seen it from this angle before. He heard a voice in the distance.

“Captain? You okay?” The voice was muffled, choked. Pacino tried to roll over toward the noise. It took a long time, and it hurt.

“Manderson, the skipper lost his mask. Get it on him; I’ll try to open the bridge hatch.”

It got hard to breathe. Pacino couldn’t see. There was a cloud in front of him, he felt like his head was in a fish bowl. He tried to struggle against it, but as he brought in the dry coppery air to his lungs his mental fog seemed to dissipate. And he knew where he was. Slowly, fighting the pain, he struggled to his feet and found himself at the darkened ballast-control panel. Engineer Matt Delaney was trying to undog the hatch to the bridge trunk. It seemed stuck.

Pacino found his flashlight and searched the overhead that was used to open and shut the drain and vent valves of the snorkel mast and induction piping. The valves were too far up in the overhead to reach by hand and were nestled behind layers of piping and cables. The valve-extension handle was a steel rod four feet long. Pacino found it, pulled it out of its retaining cradle and limped forward to the hatch. Pacino could see well enough to make it to Delaney and jam the bar into the wheel of the hatch. The two men pushed on the bar, using it as a lever, and finally the wheel moved, undogging the hatch. While Pacino waited, he surveyed the control room in the dim light of Manderson’s hand-held flashlight. It was listing to port and pitched slightly forward. Emergency-breathing air hoses snaked through the room, ending in faces that were mostly unconscious. The worst was looking at the bodies that had no masks.

“Skipper, look!”

Delaney had opened the bridge-trunk hatch. Except that there was no bridge trunk. Bright white glaring light poured into the room from the hatch. And with it, a blast of frigid arctic air.

Pacino went to the hatch and looked up. He grabbed the rungs of the ladder to the hatch and raised his head into the light.

He pulled off the gas mask and gasped the outside air, so cold it burned his lungs. It was a spectacular scene. The sky was overcast, but any sky was welcome after what the Devilfish had been through. Pacino could see that what had once been the sail was ripped completely off, making this hatch lead onto the scarred outer deck of the ship. The hull aft seemed intact but the sonar sphere and the bow compartment were gone, crushed. The diesel would be useless now. The ship, amazingly, was lying on top of the ice, on some kind of hill, not afloat in a polynya. It took a moment for Pacino to comprehend this. They hadn’t just smashed a hole in the ice, they had gone through it, and come to rest on the surface of it.

By the time Pacino believed his eyes, the implications of reality hit him. Forty-five hundred tons of nuclear submarine on the ice surface. How long can the ice hold up that heavy a load, concentrated in one spot? Ice weak enough to let us through in the first place?

“Eng,” Pacino said, “we got to abandon ship, now.”

“Captain, it must be ten below out there. We can’t get the crew out until we unstow the arctic gear—”

“Get a crew together and get the damned gear. Most of it’s in the ship’s office and ESM. The shelter’s stowed in the fan room. Hurry up. God knows how long this ship will stay up here before it goes down through the ice. Get a couple men you can spare to go through the ship and help the survivors up here. We’ll exit out this hatch. Did you bring all the guys from back aft?”

“They’re here, still alive. For how long… with the reactor melted we probably got 800 or 900 rem. And you guys up here probably got almost half that much.” Both knew that at 1000 rem of radiation there would be virtually no survivors.

Delaney rounded up half a dozen men and headed aft to get the arctic gear. Petty Officer Manderson tried to slap awake the men in the space. Pacino walked to the passageway aft of the control room and stopped at the door to his stateroom. One last look. It had its own battle lantern, which he flipped on, knowing what he would see. A complete wreck. Nothing salvageable. As he was about to leave he saw the framed Jolly Roger flag, still in its frame and bolted to the wall. He pulled the frame open, ripped the flag off of the backing, rolled it into a ball and put it into his pocket. He took a final look around and left, then with a second thought went back in and turned off the battle lantern. Sort of a gesture of respect, like shutting the staring eyes of a corpse.

Pacino went back to the control room, got a fur parka from Delaney and shrugged into it. The crew passed the arctic gear out the bridge-trunk hatch, and then the gear and crew members were out of the ship. Pacino found himself alone in the control room with Delaney, who was at the foot of the ladder to the bridge-trunk hatch, ready to leave the ship.

“Come on,” Delaney urged. “Every second in here is another couple million neutrons in your tissues. And like you said, the ice under the ship could collapse any second.”

“I’ll be out in a minute. Just make sure the ice camp is far enough away from the boat. When the ice goes I don’t want it taking out the men we have left.”

Delaney nodded, lingered a moment and climbed the ladder. And now Michael Pacino was alone in the shattered, burning control room of his crippled submarine. He stood by the burned-out fire-control console and looked up at the periscope stand, at the Conn, and realized his command of the Devilfish was over. He looked back into the room lit only by the orange lights of the battle lanterns, and spotted the other Jolly Roger on the control room aft bulkhead, the skull and crossbones white against the black field, the ship’s motto sewn above and below the pirate emblem.

YOU AIN’T CHEATIN’, YOU AIN’T TRYIN’.

Well, goddamn it, he’d tried.

* * *

He was only dimly aware of Lieutenant Commander Matt Delaney returning and pulling him up by his arms and dragging him to the bridge-trunk hatch. Pacino sat on a sleeping bag near a wall of the shelter, sipping a mug of steaming coffee that Jon Rapier had handed him, staring at the leering ram’s head of the Devilfish emblem on the coffee mug. The arctic shelter was a semi-rigid polyethylene bubble with a rumbling emergency diesel generator for warmth and light. The shelter had food for several days for the number of men that had survived the emergency surfacing.

Besides Pacino, Rapier and Delaney, thirty others from the ship had escaped alive. Which meant that there were 33 potential survivors from a crew of 127. A lousy survival rate, Pacino thought, but just hours before the whole crew had seemed doomed by the Russian Magnum torpedo. Only a few men remained unconscious, some with head wounds, some with internal injuries. It was snowing outside, ten degrees below zero, but there was no wind. The sun would be low on the horizon, daytime here. And arctic days could last for months at this latitude.

Rapier had set up flares around the shelter in hopes of a satellite pass picking up the heat and vectoring in rescue aircraft. Pacino drained his cup and set it on the liner deck. Deepbone exhausted, he shut his eyes. He would sleep, just for a moment…

* * *

Pacino woke to the sound of a nearby explosion, a snapping violent cracking noise. From the direction of the Devilfish. The men in the shelter got to their feet and ran out the shelter door, some forgetting their parkas. Pacino looked over the ridge of ice toward the ship — another nightmare vision to etch itself onto his brain. As Pacino watched, in a steady, slow motion, the huge vessel broke free from her position on the ridge and began to slide down the hill, picking up speed, a 4500-ton radioactive sled finally going slightly sideways the last 100 feet. The ice beneath Pacino’s feet shook as the massive ship slid to the bottom of the slope and skidded out to the flats of the thin ice. The ice around her shattered into tiny slivers, and the ship settled into the black water that had appeared where there was once ice. The rudder and sternplanes vanished first. In a long loud agonizing slide, the vessel moved backward and resubmerged. As the ship sank, it took on an upangle, then slid more quickly into the water with a rushing sound of a zillion exploding bubbles.

Pacino watched as the bridge-access trunk, through which he had stuck his head only hours before, sank into the arctic water, the foam and bubbles filling his control room. The nose of the sub, hopelessly mangled by the collision with the ice, was all that remained. For a long moment, only the twisted steel of the sonar sphere was visible, and then it too vanished in a geyser of white foam and bubbles. All that was left of the USS Devilfish was the wash of bubbles and the hole in the ice, the water in the hole already skinning over in the arctic cold.

Pacino’s mouth was twisted downward. He wanted to scream, but knew he could not. All he could do was turn his face from the awful sight, and away from the eyes of his men.

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