Voyage of the Devilfish mp-1

by Michael Dimercurio

  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.

  CHAPTER 24

  SUNDAY, 19 DECEMBER, 1230 GREENWICH MEAN TIME

  ARCTIC OCEAN

  POLAR ICECAP SURFACE

  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.

  WESTERN ATLANTIC OCEAN

  150 NAUTICAL MILES EAST NORTHEAST OF NORFOLK, VIRGINA

  ALTITUDE: 6,000 FEET

  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 f
rom 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.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  PENTAGON

  SUITE OF THE CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS FP STAFF

  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.