Voyage of the Devilfish

CHAPTER 25

Occasionally during the night Pacino had gone to the curtain and cracked it open to bring air into the shelter, and each time there had been a drift of heavy wet snow that had to be burrowed through. The shelter was probably invisible from outside with the snowdrifts piling up on it, but the snow also served as an insulator, keeping the heat in the polyethylene bubble, as well as muffling the outside noise. The only sounds inside the shelter were the rumbling of the diesel and the distorted conversations of the men.

“If this storm doesn’t break soon,” Rapier was saying to Pacino, “we’re going to be in trouble. Diesel’s only got another day of fuel, maybe less. It was all we could get out of the ship.”

“Maybe we should shut it down to conserve,” Pacino said, his voice slow, monotonic. “It’s warm enough in here to run it twenty minutes an hour.”

“I don’t know, the temperature’d drop too fast. The fuel would congeal. Plus, we’d waste fuel starting her up. Once we shut it down in this cold she’s down for good.”

“Keep it running, then,” Pacino said, faintly annoyed at what seemed a dialogue to nowhere.

“Also,” Rapier said, “the radio’s batteries are dead. We’ve been transmitting on it all night, no answer. It might not have been working in the first place… none of the radiomen made it. Even if it was working there’s no way anyone could get to us in this blizzard.”

“You been putting the flares out?” Pacino asked.

“Ran out yesterday, you know that.”

“Oh, right. How about rations?”

“Two days left, tops.”

“Great. No flares, no radio, food and fuel running out and a blizzard that won’t quit.”

Rapier looked down into his coffee. “We’re alive.”

“How are they doing?” Pacino nodded toward the Russians.

“Better,” Rapier said. “One regained consciousness for a moment, the older guy, then fainted away again. Doc thinks they’ve gotten frostbite over a lot of skin, hypothermia.” Pacino drained his coffee and tried not to look at the ship’s emblem on the mug. The coffee was cold.

Rapier had stopped with his recital. Pacino shut his eyes and tried to doze, let the buzz of the diesel carry him away, away from here, from the reality of an arctic prison…

Pacino awoke to a commotion at the diesel, where the Russians were. One, the middle-aged silver-gray-haired man, half sat up in Chief Corpsman Ingle’s arms and sipped water from a cup. When he looked up at Pacino and Rapier he seemed confused. Pacino spoke to him, starting slowly.

“Do you speak English?” The Russian nodded.

“I’m Commander Michael Pacino, commanding officer of the USS Devilfish. Correction, I was. My ship is on the bottom now. Who the hell are you?”

“Yuri Vlasenko, Captain 1st Rank, Northern Fleet.” The man’s English was only slightly accented. “I was captain of the submarine Kaliningrad.” Pacino eyed him, assaulted with mixed feelings. He was, after all, talking to the captain of the Russian OMEGA submarine. They were hardly buddies after what had happened. On the other hand, they were fellow professionals, survivors. He wondered about the admiral who had sunk Stingray. Where was he? Dead?

Vlasenko’s reaction was also guarded. With an appreciation of what the Americans had done.

“My compliments on your skill in surviving the arctic climate.” Pacino nodded, decided to tell Vlasenko that one of his officers was dead on the ice. “When we found your sphere or pod or whatever you call it, the other one inside was dead. Three of you survived!”

“What happened. Captain?” Vlasenko asked, “I was under arrest, I don’t know what happened, although I know what Admiral Novskoyy had in mind. When he found out he had me locked up.”

Novskoyy. The real enemy. Pacino looked at the older Russian, now regaining consciousness. His face was gray and lined, his breath wheezing in and out of blackened, badly chapped lips, his skin afflicted with frostbite. Blood had matted into a mess above one eyebrow, and his face was swollen and bruised.

It was Vlasenko who finally broke the silence, his voice tight with anger. “This is Admiral Alexi Novskoyy, Supreme Commander of the Northern Fleet—”

Pacino stopped hearing. Admiral Novskoyy, the man who had murdered his father, the man he had considered his nemesis. Instinctively, his right hand clenched into a fist, cocked itself at his shoulder. He had almost let it go, wanted to let it go, until he looked at the man’s face. Novskoyy was half-conscious, beaten up. It would be like beating a dumb animal. The fury that had been in him was gone, sunk to the bottom of the ocean with the hull of the Devilfish. Right now they were both seemingly condemned to this white bubble in the arctic, waiting for a rescue that grew less likely with every hour. Waiting for death. Pacino dropped his fist to his side as Novskoyy fell back into unconsciousness.

Admiral Donchez came into the blast door to Flag Plot, met by the grim face of Watch Officer Kodiak.

“No word from the polar icecap, sir. And no break in the storm.”

“Anything from the Russians? Indication of a distress call?”

“Sorry, sir.”

Donchez looked up at the Arctic Ocean plot. A blue X flashed in the Barents Sea, indicating the uncertain presence of a U.S. submarine. The legend next to it read USS ALLENTOWN SSN-764.

“Any word from Allentown?”

“No, sir. But we weren’t expecting any, were we?”

“No, guess not.” Donchez looked over at the Atlantic plot, now nearly empty. A single blue X flashed, the legend below reading USS BARRACUDA SSN-663.

“We’ve got other bad news, sir. The Barracuda, the unit you’re sending to the polar ice cap to investigate the explosions… she’s reported a casualty in the air-conditioning units. Total loss of the lithium bromide plant. And the R114 unit is leaking refrigerant all through the engine room, contaminating the atmosphere. They’ve had to shut down all electronics up forward — sonar, fire-control and navigation. Temperatures aft are 120 degrees. The crew are in gas masks. We have to call her back, sir. Without sonar she really shouldn’t even be submerged. Her captain wants an answer.”

Don’t we all, Donchez thought. “Tell the Barracuda to surface and come home. Anybody else still at sea? Any other Piranhas?”

“A few could be ready to go in a day, maybe even hours. But we’d want to load them out with food and arctic gear. And, sir, by the time they got to this explosion position two weeks will have gone by. Sir… there are no detects under the ice cap, no infrareds in the last half-dozen KH-17 passes, and this storm is severe enough that even if there were any survivors yesterday there’s little possibility any of them are living through today… I think we need to face the likelihood that the crew of the Devilfish are dead—”

“Send up a replacement for the Barracuda,” was Donchez’s angry reply. “I want a Piranha submarine headed north by tonight. Make it happen, dammit. Any problems with that, you let me know.”

Donchez left Flag Plot and headed back to his office, thinking that the Piranha class boats were getting too damn old. Maybe he was, too. In his office he cleared his desk and went to the window overlooking the expanse of grass up to the fenceline, to the Stingray monument across the street. Two cranes were hoisting the marble slab up into position, getting ready to put it down on its foundation. Donchez stood there, unmoving, watching. And wondering what he was going to tell Hillary Pacino and her son.

Novskoyy had not regained consciousness. Vlasenko, now sitting up, was telling the Americans around him about the Kaliningrad and her mission.

“What was the message he was transmitting? What did it mean?” Pacino said. Vlasenko told him, hesitantly, feeling almost personally responsible even though he had been imprisoned in the pod by Novskoyy. Pacino looked at Novskoyy, feeling not only outrage but frustration — here was his father’s killer, the object of his revenge… and yet what would be the satisfaction in doing what he badly wanted to do when the man was half-dead, his ship on the bottom too? Pacino looked over at Rapier, then back to Vlasenko.

“Did he transmit the go-message?” Vlasenko looked grim as he felt. Outside the wind howled, shaking the walls of the shelter.

“I can’t say. I told you, I was arrested and put into the escape pod. Was there any word from your headquarters?”

“Captain Vlasenko, we can’t very well receive radio signals under ice. We can only get an extremely low frequency signal, transmitting at a snail’s pace.”

“Snails?”

Pacino shook his head. “Point is, there was no word from our headquarters. But then,” Pacino added, not even wanting to consider the horror, “they might have been taken out by a cruise missile, maybe that’s why so far there’s been no rescue attempt.”

“Perhaps you collided with us in time to stop the transmission…”

“Maybe, maybe not…”

On the other wall of the shelter Lieutenant Commander Matt Delaney started coughing. Rapier, Pacino and Vlasenko rushed to Delaney’s side of the shelter. Delaney lay in his own blood which he had just retched to the plastic floor. The chief corpsman tried to clear his throat, and after a few minutes struggling, Delaney was quiet and able to lean back against the wall.

“He’s lost consciousness,” Chief Ingle said, wrapping Delaney in a blanket. Delaney’s forehead was starting to break out in sweat. “He got quite a radiation dose, didn’t he. Captain?”

“Afraid so.”

“Well, these may be the first symptoms,” Ingle said quietly. “I’d imagine Manderson and the other watchstanders aft will be showing them soon.”

Behind Pacino the diesel engine coughed and missed, finally stopping. The shelter seemed to crash into silence. Pacino’s ears rang from the engine’s previous noise. The engine was surrounded by the men in the shelter. Pacino pushed through to get to the diesel and found Rapier with the cap to the fuel tank in his hand.

“It’s out of fuel,” Rapier said. “The resupply cans are empty.” Now that the diesel was quiet, and the ringing in Pacino’s ears was fading, he could hear the howling of the wind outside the shelter, blowing the snow up against the shelter with the force of a sandblaster.

“Skipper,” Rapier said, “without the diesel there’s no heat, no light. This place will be the same temperature as the outside in an hour.”

Pacino looked at Vlasenko.

“Captain, you got anything in that pod that could help? A heater? Transmitter? Satellite locator? Flares?” Vlasenko shook his head. “All that equipment was in the main escape pod. This one was just an auxiliary.”

“All right, everyone, listen up,” Pacino said. “Gather all the blankets and sleeping bags and clothing around the diesel in the center of the shelter. Get your parkas on. Drink some water before it freezes. Come here by the engine. Its residual heat will keep us warm for a while. After that, only crowding together will save body heat. We’ll just have to wait out this storm.”

By the time Pacino’s orders were carried out. Matt Delaney and four of his engineroom watchstanders were dead. Their bodies were left by the wall of the shelter away from the group. Pacino sat down next to Rapier, thinking he should have stayed in the Devilfish. At least the end would have been fast.