Voyage of the Devilfish

CHAPTER 24

The world in front of Pacino was a jumble of white and gray, but he did not see the snow and the ice and the sky. They were only the blank screen for his mind to replay the scene of the Devilfish sinking into the arctic water.

As he turned and trudged up the snowy slope to the ice shelter near the ridge the wind began, slowly at first, then gathering momentum, the snowflakes stinging his face. Behind him he heard the excited shouts of his men, their voices running together in a blur that seemed to blend with the wind and the snow. After what seemed hours he reached the large bubble of the shelter, the snow flying almost horizontally in the biting arctic wind.

He shouldered aside the heavy curtains at the shelter’s entrance and walked to his sleeping bag. The shelter was deserted. Pacino sank down to his sleeping bag and leaned against the cold wall. The wind howled outside, blowing the snow against the shelter wall. The emergency diesel generator rumbled in the center of the shelter, its air coming from the inner pipe of the double-walled snorkel pipe to the roof of the bubble, the exhaust traveling in the outer pipe, preheating the diesel’s intake air.

For a long while Pacino just sat leaning against the wall and stared into space. The shelter stayed empty, the only sounds the wind and the diesel. Strange… but he was too tired to ask himself where the others were. Finally he slept.

Rapier watched the retreating figure of Pacino, called out but Pacino walked on, trudging up the ridge to the ice shelter. Let him go, he decided.

At the base of the ridge was the dark jagged hole in the ice where the Devilfish had consigned herself to the deep, the water nearly black and choppy in the wind. As the wind picked up, the far side of the hole in the ice was nearly invisible from the snow and the fog. The men, who had gathered on the side of the ridge toward the hole, began to turn to go back to the shelter when Rapier heard a shout from Stokes, standing down the slope of the ridge and pointing at the hole. Rapier couldn’t make out what Stokes was saying, and all he could see was the damned hole in the ice. As he walked down the slope, the fog receded and the far side of the hole in the ice was visible. Floating in the water was something gray and round. Too round for a chunk of ice. Rapier started hurrying, catching up to Stokes.

“What the hell is it?” Stokes asked.

Rapier shook his head. “I’m not sure, let’s go down and look.”

The object became clearer as they approached the base of the ridge… it was a sphere, a metal sphere with a round hatch set into one side, floating in the water. Stencilled red letters were around the hatch, the printing unmistakably Cyrillic.

Rapier stared hard at it. “Stokes, you remember the Comsomolets sinking a few years back? Some of them made it to the surface in an escape pod. They died later, I don’t remember details…”

“You think that thing’s from the OMEGA?” Stokes said.

“An escape pod…”

“Their subs have pods, that writing by the hatch looks like Russian…”

“XO, you think someone’s in there?” Rapier looked at the ice around the pod, trying to gauge its thickness.

“Maybe, maybe not. It could just have ejected from the hull. If anyone’s in there they’re probably dead from the cold or lack of oxygen by now.” On the other hand, he thought, if people were inside, if there were any survivors, they could be interrogated about the collision and why they fired the Magnum. There might be important documents onboard… “You men stay here. Stokes, come with me.” The two slowly made their way out over the ice, over the hundred feet to the far side of the hole and to the pod that floated about a foot from the edge of the ice. Rapier grabbed onto a handhold set into the gray surface and rotated the heavy pod so that the hatch faced him. On each side were small ridges formed in the surface of the sphere for footholds. Rapier took a handhold and pulled himself up to the hatch with his feet in the footholds.

“Stay there. Stokes, keep a grip on the handholds so I don’t float the hell away.” It took endless minutes of unscrewing the handwheel before the latches of the hatch retracted and Rapier could pull the hatch up. The air of the pod interior nearly made him sick. He held his breath, looked down into the blackness of the pod. After a moment he stood up and called to Stokes.

“Four men inside. Can’t tell their condition. Call the others over here and get some rope from the shelter.” Rapier looked again into the sphere and shook his head. Poor bastards, he thought, wondering how he could feel this way about people who had sunk his ship, killed his mates, but up here, in this freezing hellhole, well, they were all human.

The Navy DC-9 orbited at a point above the continental shelf of the United States. Admiral Caspar “Bobby” McGee peered out a window, watching the scene as the U.S. Navy destroyer, the P-3 Orion ASW turboprop airplane and the destroyer’s LAMPS helicopter danced around a point in the sea, a point that suddenly erupted with white foam, admitting to the surface a nuclear submarine. A Russian attack submarine, easily identified as a VICTOR III by its trademark teardrop-shaped sail, bulbous bow and ellipsoidal pod on top of its rudder aft. It immediately turned northeast, heading home. An aide appeared next to him, watching the scene from an adjacent window.

“This is happening all up and down the coast,” the commander said.

“What’s the tally?” McGee asked.

“This one makes one hundred and five Russian nuclear subs surfaced after President Yulenski gave the orders to come home. That’s out of a force of 120— wait, one was sunk by the Billfish, which leaves fourteen boats to go. Once on the surface they’re covered by at least one U.S. escort unit, either an attack submarine, surface ship. Viking jet, P-3 Turboprop, LAMPS chopper and in some cases Coast Guard cutters and choppers.”

“What about the fourteen left? What if they go sour and tell Yulenski to stick it?”

The aide shook his head. “SOSUS is showing all 119 contacts, including the fourteen not yet on the surface. We don’t know for sure if the fourteen are being trailed by our own attack subs. As soon as one of ours turns over a surfacing unit to a P-3 he goes deep to look for another one. The math is in our favor. Sixty-six American attack boats, fourteen of theirs, with ASW aircraft and helicopters and SOSUS sensors helping them search. We’ve got a curtain of interceptor aircraft airborne along the entire east coast to down any more cruise missiles launched from the sea. We’ve got a line of surface ships pinging active sonar in a sweep from the shallow coastline toward the east.”

McGee nodded and took the message from the communications technician at the forward communications console. He looked up at the commander.

“Four more units just surfaced. Ten to go.” McGee sat down and allowed himself the luxury of shutting his eyes for a moment. It had been a very long morning.

General Herman Xavier Tyler dismissed the staff members, civilian analysts and intelligence officers that had finished briefing him, shaking hands with them. After the last briefer had left he stared down at one of the summary sheets, the intent of the Russian submarines off the coast revealed by the one ship that had launched, apparently prematurely. Tyler took the sheets to his inner office, stared for a moment at the view outside, the best in the whole Pentagon.

He walked away from the window and sat down in his leather chair at his desk, the desktop adorned with memorabilia of a long Air Force career: F-104 fighter, F-4 Phantom, a Minuteman missile, a B-52 bomber. Tyler got out a pen and a calculator, scribbled, finished his calculation. With deceleration from the bone and tissue, with a subsonic muzzle velocity, the bullet would still pass from the bottom of his brain to the top in such a short time that no nerve would have time to register pain. He would feel nothing He put down the pencil and unlocked the bottom right-hand drawer. The Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum revolver felt heavy in his hand. He opened the box of heavy grain ammunition and loaded all six chambers. Five too many, but the pistol would feel more balanced with six rounds in it. He snapped the chambers into the body of the revolver and cocked the trigger.

The barrel, he noted, tasted metallic as he put it to his mouth. He took one mad look out the window, at the panoramic scene of a Washington, D.C, still intact, and pulled the trigger.

In surprise, he realized his calculations had been incorrect.

It seemed to hurt forever.

Dawn. But no sunlight made its way to Flag Plot of COMSUBLANT headquarters buried deep underground. Admiral Richard Donchez looked like he had been in a fifteen-round fight and lost. Deep dark bags surrounded his bloodshot eyes. His favorite Havana had gone out. He pulled a fresh one from his jacket and tried to light it but, of course, the Piranha lighter was out of fuel. So was he. Pooped, was the word. He stood in front of the Arctic Ocean plot that showed the ice cap in green. The graphics were being updated by the computer, and as he watched the red X and the black X were replaced by a black circle and a red circle about 400 miles south of the pole roughly north of Novaya Zemlya. Circles meant sinkings. As he stared in disbelief, the watch officer hurried up to him.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Sam Lockover said, “SOSUS reported two explosions at the positions indicated a few hours ago. They, well, apparently they failed to report the explosions due to the priority of reporting the Russian boats offshore…”

“Go on.”

“The first explosion was conventional. The second was… nuclear.” Lockover paused, Donchez’s looks could kill. “After the second explosion SOSUS heard the breakup of one hull — could have been our unit up north, the Devilfish, or the OMEGA class she was trailing. A few minutes later there was a sound like an emergency-blow or deballasting system. Within another few minutes there was a sound of a collision between one of the hulls and the ice.

The collision sound was so extreme that we don’t think there would be any way a hull could have survived.”

“Lot of god damned theories and hypotheses, you’ve got there,” Donchez said, feeling a shot of hot bile in his stomach. The Devilfish might be down, its crew and Michael Pacino could be dead. Or stranded, surfaced at a polynya with no radio. “Call COMAIRLANT and get a C-130 or a P-3 up there to look around, maybe one of the Keflavik units or one out of Norway or Alberta if they can vector one in quick. Call CIA PHOTOINT and on the next KH-17 satellite pass have the infrared and visuals trained on the SOSUS position of the sounds. Somebody could be up there on the ice…”

“Sir,” Lockover said, feeling damn uneasy to be the messenger of this news, “there’s a bad storm up there, I mean it’s from Greenland to Siberia, gale-force winds, heavy snow. We’re grounded. COMAIRLANT won’t fly anything up there and neither will the Marine Arctic Resupply units flying C-130’s. We could get a jet up for high altitude surveillance but doubtful we’d see through the storm clouds. And we just had a KH-17 pass. Kodiak’s on the phone to CIA now.”

Kodiak hung up and came over to them.

Donchez waited.

“The satellite didn’t see a damned thing, sir. Not even a polar bear. There’s a chance it’s just not seeing through the blizzard… more likely there’s nothing up there for it to see.”

It was 1973 all over again, Donchez thought. Another U.S. submarine sunk at the pole by a Russian. Another Pacino, on the bottom. Unbelievable.

“Was there a SUBSUNK transmission from our boat to the satellite?” Lockover shook his head.

“The Russians? Did one of theirs transmit a distress signal?”

“Sir, we’re trying to find out now through their embassy but things are pretty confused up there. And, sir, even if there was a distress signal I don’t think anybody is going to get up there for a while with this storm. It could last a week, maybe more.”

Donchez glanced at the Arctic plot, looking for the Allentown. Her X flashed, but her position was a guess, SOSUS being unable to hear her in spite of her damaged sail. For a moment he considered sending Allentown under the ice cap, then rejected the notion. One lost submarine was enough. The Los Angeles-class Allentown under the ice cap would never survive… no SHARKTOOTH underice sonar, no strength in the flimsy fiberglass sail. She’d get lost and never emerge. Goddamned L.A.-class, they were a giant step backward in submarine technology.

“Which Piranha is furthest north?” Donchez asked. “One that isn’t in trail?” Lockover turned to a computer console, typed into it, returned with a printout.

“Barracuda is off the coast of Maine, sir.”

“Vector her to the SOSUS position of the explosions, max speed. Get her up there fast.”

“Sir,” Lockover said, “she’s not loaded out for more than a few days. She was just about to head for overhaul at Portsmouth. She’ll run out of food by the time she gets to the GI-UK gap. And she has no arctic gear onboard—”

“We may well have men dying up there. Tell her to flank it. I want a report soon as she can get to a polynya close to the SOSUS position. And watch the weather. The minute it breaks, I want aircraft scouring that ice pack.”

Lockover left to get the messages out. Donchez looked up at the plot. He’d done what he could for now. He got on the NESTOR circuit to Admiral McGee in the airborne DC-9. Maybe the admiral could get an answer out of the Russians.

Pacino woke up with a start from the sound of the men entering the shelter, shouting and talking to each other in excitement. Rapier came first, followed by Stokes and the others, some of them huddled together carrying men into the shelter. The men being carried in had white frozen faces. Pacino found Rapier, who had started to boil snow for a pot of coffee.

“Jon, what’s all this? Who the hell are they?” Rapier’s face was crusted white with snow and ice, now starting to melt and drip down his face. If he was surprised by Pacino’s use of his first name instead of the usual “XO” he didn’t show it.

“We… we found” — Rapier shivered — “God, it’s cold out there. We found an escape pod, I’m guessing from the OMEGA. Had Russian writing on it. It was under the ice, freed up, for God’s sake, by the Devilfish when she went down.”

Pacino winced.

“We got four guys out of the pod,” Rapier went on. “One was already dead. We left him on the ice by the pod. The others were damned near gone from the cold.”

Stokes and Delaney were taking the Russian survivors’ wet half-frozen clothing off and wrapping them in wool blankets. All three were unconscious. Pacino looked at their gray faces. Two were older, probably warrant officers or chiefs or whatever the Russian equivalent was for senior enlisted men. He was anxious to hear their stories, what had happened to them, how they had survived in the pod, how the pod had gotten out onto the ice.

Pacino ordered them to be clothed in spare arctic parkas and watched for signs of coming to. For a long time he stood over the two Russians, wondering what their story was, if they had families. And for the first time in a long time allowed himself to think of his family, the last time he’d seen Tony, the weekend before the Allentown OP when the two of them had gone to Mount Trashmore Park. And Hillary, who became even more desirable through the cushioning of memory…

“Sir?” It was Rapier. “Wind’s picking up outside, starting to snow pretty hard. Visibility’s down to less than a hundred feet.”

Pacino stepped outside onto the ice and was shocked at how much the weather had changed. The horizon was gone, the ice and the fog melting together just a few feet ahead. A fierce wind blew quarter-size snowflakes horizontally, a wind that cut through Pacino’s fur parka like it wasn’t there. In seconds the wind was burning his cheeks and eyes. Pacino spit at the side of the shelter. As he expected, the spittle was frozen before it hit the wall of the shelter, shattering as it impacted. Which meant the temperature was somewhere around 30 below, with a 20-knot wind. He ducked back into the shelter, wondering how much wind the shelter could take. It was, after all, only a bubbleshaped, prefabricated structure, not a building, yet more than a tent. It was going to be a long night.