Voyage of the Devilfish

CHAPTER 26

Pacino breathed slowly through cracked and frozen lips, the air wheezing in and out of his lungs, feeling like it was freezing him from the inside out. Inside, the air was a dense fog of condensation, temperature minus 40 degrees. The room was a glaring white, either that or he was snowblind. He tried to bring the room into focus, no use. He tried to move his right arm, his left. Couldn’t. No feeling or motion. His legs had been gone for what he guessed was an hour. His old Rolex Submariner watch, a gift from his father, had not been designed to run in these conditions. Its hands were frozen at 1107. He couldn’t remember whether it had been morning or night when it had quit, whether it had been set to GMT or Eastern Standard Time. The only muscles that seemed still under voluntary control were his eyelids, his chest muscles — he was still breathing — and his neck.

While he still had control of his neck and eyes he decided to look around at the shelter, the last vestige of his command. The fog in the room was too dense to see further than fifteen feet, but that was more than enough for him to see the men who had already died… Delaney and his nukes from back aft — Manderson, Patterson and Taglia. The living and the dead could only be distinguished by the plumes of vapor from the faces of the living. He heard a hacking cough and turned to see Stokes slump over, the vapor-breathing clouds no longer coming from the Kentuckian’s nose. Pacino waited for sleep. The wind outside howled at a fierce 40 knots, gusts blowing up to 50. With the crazed wind came tons of snow falling horizontally. The snow piled up on the windward side of the bubbleshaped shelter, nearly obscuring it, climbing easily up its sides, threatening to collapse it at any moment.

Three hundred yards east of the shelter, near the two foot-thick ice that two days before had admitted the doomed submarine back to the sea and had yielded the pod of the Kaliningrad, came a vibrating, trembling, crashing sound. At first it would not be heard even by someone standing directly on top of the thin ice, so strong was the blasting noise of the wind. But soon the roaring from the ice drowned out even the violence of the storm, and in a massive upheaval the ice that was once the Devilfish’s hole exploded upward. As ice blocks flew from the center of the hole, a huge, black finlike structure emerged, its surface cracked. It was the sail of a United States Navy attack submarine. The USS Allentown.

“Blow the hatch! C’mon, right now!” Commander Henry Duckett was furious. After tracking the noise of the ice camp’s diesel generator it had taken forever to find a polynya. The diesel sounds had died before they could get a decent fix on the noise. In arctic conditions it would do no good just to get close. Duckett had wanted to surface directly under the diesel. A rescue attempt was useless if near-frozen survivors had to walk a mile in the violent blizzard. Finally he had decided this polynya was close enough and smashed the unhardened sail through it, shattering the unprotected BIGMOUTH radio antenna. The plot had shown the estimated position of the diesel over 400 yards into thick ice, which made no sense. But then, it hardly mattered. With the diesel silent for a day there was little chance he’d pull anyone out alive. Still, he had to try.

Duckett and Corpsman Denny Halloway stood at the base of the bridge access tunnel hatch with four enlisted men. Duckett was sweating beneath the layers of heavy arctic clothing. Halloway opened the lower hatch and turned a radial switch, energizing the light in the long tunnel through the leading edge of the sail and up to the bridge twenty-five feet above. From the bridge they would lower themselves down, using the handholds in the side of the sail. Halloway started up. Duckett waiting while Halloway opened the upper hatch and crawled into the cramped bridge. Before they could go outside Halloway had to open the clamshells that faired in the bridge cockpit. Already the cold from outside was making Duckett shiver, the sweat from the wait below adding to the cold.

A white glare from the world above lit up the upper-access trunk as Halloway latched the clamshells open, and with it came the thunderous sound of the gale blowing the heavy snow. Halloway shouted down for the landing team to follow him, his shout mostly drowned out by the wind.

Duckett now climbed the final rungs of the ladder leading to the bridge, the frigid wind slipping past his fur parka and pants as if he were naked. As he climbed out of the access trunk into the weather, the storm was a total physical shock… the wind blew by at what must have been 50 knots, flew the gray snow as if shot from a machine gun. Duckett climbed over the coaming of the bridge cockpit, the subfreezing metal of the conning tower sticking to the crotch of his fur trousers as he felt for the foothold with his boot. It was a long trip to the ice below, and with visibility down, the sail seemed disembodied, floating in a gray mass of flying snow. When he finally got to the hull, which was even with the two-foot-thick ice of the polynya, he looked over at Halloway, who was standing on the ice lake and shouting something at him. Duckett signalled he could not hear him over the storm, and Halloway pointed to his own eyes, at the same time yelling, “Captain! Your goggles, put on your goggles!” Duckett nodded, pulled the yellow goggles over his eyes, climbed out onto the ice next to Halloway. The four seamen followed out of the sail and joined them. Duckett scanned the horizon with infrared binoculars.

“Sir, look!” one of the men shouted over the roar of the wind, pointing in the direction of the rudder, which had penetrated the ice far aft of the conning tower. On the other side of the rudder was a hump of ice and snow, a bubble, too perfect to be a chunk of ice. They hurried to the igloo-shaped snowmass and began to scrape the object with their knives. The bubble was made of metal, covered with a layer of ice and snow. Duckett tried to climb on its side, pulling himself up on the handhold.

“It’s some kind of escape pod,” he shouted. Its hatch was open. Duckett cleared the snow away, took a flashlight from one of the seamen and shined the light into the pod.

“No one here,” he said. He stood and again scanned the horizon with the goggles.

“Anything?” Halloway shouted to Duckett. Duckett shook his head.

“Captain, there’s a ridge up on the west side. If we climb it maybe we can see further.”

Duckett waved the team on up the ridge, and the six proceeded to climb for what seemed an eternity. At the top of the ridge, the team stopped and looked around. Duckett used the goggles, scanning the horizon for thermal detects. At one bearing he stopped, then continued. But then he scanned again at a bearing northwest of where they stood, looking toward the other side of the ridge.

“You got something?” Halloway asked.

“Not sure, doc. But something looks different over there,” and he pointed in the direction he’d been looking.

They walked behind Duckett, who paused every few steps to look through the goggles. Eventually he stopped at a base of a small rise and shook his head, about to turn around.

“Go a little further. Captain,” Halloway said, thinking he saw a clearing in the blizzard to the northwest. They turned around, and Duckett found himself walking into a deep drift rather than the rise of a high point. He was about to turn when his boot, by then deep under the snow of the drift, hit something hard, something that gave slightly with his weight. It felt strange. Not ice, not snow, but something… flexible.

When the snow was cleared Duckett found himself looking at a section of plastic. Something man-made.

“It’s for sure a shelter of some kind,” Halloway said.

“Find the damned entrance,” Duckett told him, excited now. It took a while to find the entrance, a double-curtain device.

Duckett led them into the entrance, pulled off his goggles and mask and shook his head out of his hood. The shelter was cold and smelled like a meathouse. He looked around and saw bodies scattered throughout, not one of them moving. They had been too late. Halloway had dumped his pack and gotten out his stethoscope. He bent over each body, checked for any signs of life. He looked up at Duckett and shook his head. Duckett and the others crouched down and began unbundling the faces of the men collapsed at the now quiet diesel. The first five were dead, in a frozen rigor mortis. He unbundled the sixth. It was Michael Pacino, swollen eyes black and blue, lips nearly black, lower face white but skin not yet frozen.

“Doc! Over here!” The corpsman put his stethoscope to Pacino’s chest.

“His heart’s stopped,” the corpsman said.

A moment of silence in the shelter. Duckett stood up and looked around again.

“Jesus.”

Admiral Richard Donchez’s staff car pulled up to the house, a redwood three-story structure on wood pile-stilts driven into the sand of the wide beach just north of the North Carolina border. The name on the carved wood sign read “Pacino.” Donchez got out of the car and went up the steps to the entrance deck, located twenty feet above the elevation of the sand. Hillary Pacino came to the door, and despite his mission Donchez could not help noting how attractive this woman was, even in a shapeless Annapolis sweatsuit, her pretty face without makeup.

“Dick,” she said, “come in.” When she saw the staff car waiting for him below she looked back at him, taking in his dress blue uniform.

“Mommy, who is it?” Tony’s voice behind her. She didn’t answer him.

“Hillary,” Donchez said, “it’s Michael. There’s been an accident. We think the Devilfish went down.”

“Oh, God,” was all Hillary could get out, collapsing in a chair. Finally she looked up at him. “What happened?”

“Hillary, we’re not positive, but it looks like Devilfish was returning early from the mission, trying to get back before Christmas. There was a flooding accident. Crew couldn’t stop it. The reactor shutdown and we think her battery exploded. We’re starting a search for the hull now… I’m sorry, Hillary. God, I’m so sorry.” He hated the lie, but it was what the White House and Pentagon had ordered him to say. Hillary put her face in her hands. Tony began to cry. Donchez crouched down and took the boy in his arms.

After a long while Donchez left, hating the Russians, himself, the whole damn world.