Voyage of the Devilfish

CHAPTER 27

Corpsman Denny Halloway sat at his small desk in the space he used as an “office” and locker for his medicines. Duckett tapped twice on the door frame.

“Doc?”

“C’mon in, Cap’n.”

“Well,” Duckett said, “they still alive?”

“Yes sir, Rapier and the Russians are sleeping. I think the Russians’ll pull through. Rapier… he could go either way. Captain Pacino, well, I’m not sure we did him a favor, resuscitating him. He’s in a deep coma. It wasn’t just the hypothermia. I checked his and Rapier’s dosimeters, you know, the little widget on your belt, measures radiation.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, Pacino and Rapier both got big doses of radiation. Pacino’s seems worse, though. They must have taken a nuke torpedo or melted down their reactor core. Maybe both.”

Duckett thought about the bad blood between him and Pacino, going back to his first-class year at Annapolis. Pacino’s plebe year. He remembered his resentment that Pacino seemed to have it made… athletic ability, academic success, street smarts, self-assurance… all things he had to struggle for. All that plus his stunts, his one-upmanship. He’d damn near hazed him out of the Academy. Until Pacino’s father died and he laid off the plebe’s case. But something of the old feeling had persisted, like after that exercise when Pacino again got the better of him and his boat. But now…

“Will Pacino live? Can you save him?”

“Cap’n, he’s got radiation sickness. Complicated by hypothermia. The cold restricted circulation to his arms and legs. He may need an amputation, a blood transfusion and a bone-marrow transplant — which is damned hard to do because finding a match for bone marrow ain’t like a bloodtype match. And the loss of oxygen to his brain, probably from partial cardiopulmonary failure in the cold, has put him in this coma. We don’t have the gear to test him here, but he doesn’t respond to light or touch or sound. You put all that together…” He didn’t need to spell it out further. Duckett grabbed the phone and dialed the Conn.

“Off sa’deck, increase speed to full… I know, I know, I’ll take the risk on collision with the ice. Keep me posted on our ETA to the MIZ. Soon as we’re in the marginal ice zone I want to pop up and radio for a chopper, then get down and flank it till the chopper meets us.”

“Doc, once we’re in open water, if we can fly these guys out, where will they go?”

“Navy Hospital in Faslane, Scotland. They’ve got a good hypothermia unit. Maybe we could ask for that miracleworker doctor who did all those bone-marrow transplants after Chernobyl blew up. And we’ll request a brain specialist, someone who knows his way around a coma.”

Duckett nodded and walked slowly to SES, the Sonar Equipment Space up forward. The makeshift sickbay consisted of a few cots set up in between the sonar electronic cabinets in SES. Michael Pacino lay on one of the cots, shrouded in blankets, an IV bottle snaking into his arm, twin-oxygen tubes penetrating both nostrils, a catheter tube coming out from under the blanket terminating in a urine-collection bottle. His frostbitten face was completely wrapped in a moist bandage. Only his eyelids and lips showed. For a long time Duckett stood and looked at Pacino.

“You son of a bitch,” he said quietly. “I ain’t done hazin’ your ass yet. Now goddammit, you get better and get back to your wife and kid and you and me’ll take up where we left off.” Pacino, for once, had no answer.