by James Axler
"Matter of opinion, Cawdor. I am the senior officer here, and I will decree when we disembark."
"I might have something to add to that," Ryan said. "We still headed for the commune?"
"We are. You think you are going to stop us?"
"No, I just wanted to make sure I packed the right clothes."
"I harbored all sorts of grandiose plans for the maiden voyage of the Raleigh, Cawdor. Once she was one hundred percent ready, there were continents to visit, feats to duplicate, lands to conquer. Now here we are, barely off the Georgia shore, and already we need to turn back."
"Fine by me," Ryan said.
"Well, we can't. Our mission, minus one detour to the mass of windmills and tents that has been laughingly called a commune, is to find a new home. A safe base. Your destination, on the other hand, is oblivion," Poseidon noted.
"Not if I send you there first," Ryan said, and slapped off the comm unit.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ryan sighed deeply and took a hard look at the circular rad detector on the wall directly above the comm panel. Some of the sub's detectors had indeed malfunctioned, their colors dead with age. Others showed a color shift from green to red, confirming what his deductions had already told him.
The Raleigh was a death ship. The great reactor that served as her heart was damaged.
Ryan decided to help it along. For his own safety, he exited the large reactor room and went into the next compartment, which housed the turbines. If he could get them to stop working, the submarine would be unable to function properly on either the generator or on fuel supplies.
But before he could begin the sabotage, the deteriorating condition of the submarine did the job for him. Ryan's timing was perfect. A moment more, and he would have been standing unprotected within the reactor room when the elderly system blew out, flooding the area with radiation and making the back of the Raleigh list uncontrollably.
"Fireblast!" he hissed as the explosion rocked the submarine. He hadn't expected it to blow so quickly. The rear ballast tanks between the inner and outer hull were already filled with water from the dive, but now were cracked open to the inside of the submarine, releasing a torrent of seawater. The reactor and engine-control rooms began to flood as the mighty power train of the vessel ground to a halt.
The extra strong steel alloys and elaborate welding techniques used in the sub's construction couldn't handle the age and wear, and this was the final insult.
All electrical power aboard the sub blinked out when the reactor died. Secondary systems and emergency power kicked in, but in a greatly diminished capacity, and as the Raleigh continued to sink, Ryan knew that if he didn't figure out a way to escape soon, he'd be trapped inside the sub on the ocean floor until the air ran out.
He exited the turbine room and glanced down the passageway.
"Turn and face me, Ryan Cawdor," a deep bass voice said from behind him.
Across the cramped aft compartment, in front of a thick watertight wall that had dropped down across the bulkhead to seal off the ruptured lower hull, stood Poseidon. His uniform was soaked dark with water, and his nautical cap with the tiny trident patch on the front above the brim was gone. There was grease on his face and hands. Part of his beard looked singed.
Ryan had to squint to see him clearly. The space was beginning to fill with wet, hot steam. The two men had ended up meeting in the auxiliary equipment room of the Raleigh, where the sub's heat exchanger was housed between the nuclear reactor and the main turbine.
Poseidon knew he was now held hostage behind the safety wall that was straining to keep the water out and the air inside the compartment. But the large man's posture remained ramrod straight, and his hair was slicked back neatly from his broad forehead.
The Admiral was holding the Glock, the same blaster he'd used to reprimand Coleman back at the docking pens.
The pistol was aimed right at Ryan's heart.
"I'm going to kill you," Poseidon grated.
"Wrong. That's my line," Ryan replied.
"I have the weapon."
"Sure, a bucket of slop like you always has to have a blaster to back himself up. Or a sec man," Ryan retorted. "Have you ever put yourself on the line, Admiral?"
"In my youth, always."
"Then face me now, man to man, like the so-called leader you claim to be," Ryan taunted. This was a calculated gamble. He didn't feel up to unscrewing the lid off a predark jar of peanut butter, but at least if Poseidon didn't chill him with the blaster, he still had a fighting chance. Maneuverability was one advantage the one-eyed man had over his larger opponent.
And unlike Poseidon, Ryan still had a life to go back to, a life to fight for.
Poseidon slid the ammo clip from the Glock and tossed blaster and bullets away.
They stood, facing each other, neither ready to make the first move.
Poseidon spoke first. "Our angle of descent keeps getting worse, Cawdor."
"I noticed."
"You've ruined everything."
"No, Admiral, this was your deal," Ryan retorted. "I don't go looking for confrontations, but if you get in my face, I bite right back at you."
"I know. That's what makes you a worthy adversary, Cawdor. Do you know how boring my life had become until you came along? In less than a day, you've made me feel alive again. Reinvigorated. I could have done without you wrecking my ship, though."
"I didn't have to. The reactor went without me ever touching it," Ryan shouted. "And I'm not here to be your fucking motivation, you pumped-up stupe bastard! I don't want to stand here in a debate! We're running out of time."
"Time? Don't speak to me of time, mister. I can deal with time. Aboard American subs, you adhere to a true Greenwich mean time. No matter what the hour is up there—" Poseidon gestured with a thumb at the hull overhead "—down here, we're on my time."
The Raleigh lurched, and a muffled explosion could be heard from behind the bulkhead as the entire inner hull vibrated.
Poseidon didn't hesitate. Like a maddened bull, the large man charged up the slightly inclined metal floor directly for Ryan, the slick steel grates underfoot shrieking in protest from every pounding step of his well-polished black shoes. Ryan braced himself, but still wasn't able to keep his footing when Poseidon bowled into his upper body with a single hardened shoulder.
The Admiral wasn't fat. What hit Ryan was solid muscle and bone, sending him skittering backward down the cramped access hall and into the steel of a bulkhead. He felt his upper left rib cage compress under the assault, and it became hard to breathe.
He threw a left and caught Poseidon in the jaw, but the blow didn't even seem to register. As the bearded face loomed before his own, Ryan head-butted his foe, breaking Poseidon's nose. Blood ran from the Admiral's nostrils and into his mustache and beard, but he still didn't stop as he wrapped his hands around his adversary's throat.
"I'll see you drown with me, Cawdor," Poseidon grated as he squeezed Ryan's neck even harder.
Ryan kept silent as he tried to ignore the black spots beginning to dot his vision, and instead made himself focus on the array of deep purple veins standing out across his foe's forehead. Poseidon seemed to have an obsession with the neck. That was how he'd killed Shauna, and now the submarine's master wanted to do the same to him.
"High blood pressure'll kill you, Admiral," Ryan gasped, pushing the heel of his hand under and against Poseidon's bearded chin.
"Killing you will be all the exercise I need for a long, long time," his opponent said, ignoring Ryan's relentless pressure on his chin.
Ryan abandoned the chin and shoved both hands upward, inserting his thumbs into Poseidon's eye sockets and locking them down with all his strength. The effort paid off as the man fell back with a roar, grabbing at both of Ryan's wrists and succeeding in seizing only one. The one-eyed warrior had no choice but to follow Poseidon's lead as the Admiral pulled him back and over.
Poseidon used the momentum of their
mutual fall to smash his adversary headfirst into the wheel lock of an open doorway. Ryan slid to the floor, momentarily knocked senseless. Flakes of rust dotted his dank black hair, adhering from where he had impacted with the metal. He shook his head, fighting to keep his thoughts and actions clear.
Then he saw the wrench.
The tool that had been left behind by a sloppy sailor and had slid under a mass of boxy equipment.
He reached for the weapon, ignoring the pain in his ribs as Poseidon lashed out with a hard kick. Ryan had seen the foot coming and dodged as best he could; otherwise he'd be experiencing the smothering sensation of a half a rack of broken ribs, but the blow still stung like a piledriver's kiss.
Ryan swung the wrench two-handed, catching the larger man in the solar plexus. That slowed the Admiral, and he fell to his knees spitting blood.
Ryan lifted the wrench over his own head and brought it down on top of Poseidon's unprotected skull. The Admiral fell on his face and was still. Ryan nearly stumbled into a bulkhead from the wrench's weight as he let it drop. He'd never been so tired in all his life, but he had to get off the Raleigh. Racking his mind, Ryan wished for a fleeting second that J.B. were here. The Armorer's near photographic memory would have instantly recorded all the information he'd passed when traversing the submarine earlier.
Ryan was already having some difficulty telling the difference between some passageways.
However, this one took no extra memory.
As he'd made his way down deeper into the body of the submarine earlier, Ryan had made mental notes, and he remembered the Admiral's quarters as being located forward to the galley, near the other officer accommodations. The walls in this section were painted in a faded blue, with white trim on the molding and pipes overhead.
Ryan stepped into Poseidon's room. A footlocker was still in front of the tidy bunk, although both had slid slightly back and were now flush with the bulkhead.
"If I was a man like Poseidon, I'd always have a contingency plan," Ryan whispered.
He delivered a series of kicks with the steel toe of his boot until the small lock on the hasp of the footlocker was knocked off. Ryan knelt and lifted the lid, revealing what he knew to be a tangle of scuba equipment inside. He had used such equipment once or twice in his youth, and as he pulled out a battered air tank, which was snugly wrapped in a mesh of nylon harnessing, he hoped that someone as precise as Poseidon had claimed to be would have regularly maintained the gear.
Ryan screwed the silver-and-black regulator to the valve on top of the tank and hoped the gods who had kept him alive this long were still keeping a watchful eye. He held his breath and turned the knob that opened the tank's air flow.
He was rewarded with a thipp as air rushed into the tiny regulator and air hose. Ryan raised the mouthpiece and placed it between his lips. He tried a sample intake of breath. The air was musty, but breathable, and that's all that mattered.
He pulled a heavy cloth-and-metal weight belt from the bottom of the chest and placed it around his waist, followed by two face masks, both yellowed with age. Ryan chose one, and pulled the elastic strap wide enough to strap the mask on his forehead, above his eye.
At the bottom of the locker was an object wrapped in an old towel. Ryan unfolded the cloth and revealed an ivory-handled knife with a four-inch blade. The handle of the weapon was an ornately carved head and torso of the mythical Lord Poseidon himself. He couldn't have cared less. The knife was a weapon, and he carried it in his right hand as such, honed edge out and ready.
He grabbed an underwater flashlight, then stood, the tank on his back heavy and cumbersome in the small passageway as he stepped from Poseidon's quarters into the hall. The sub was continuing to go down, now with the tail end plummeting first, since the blast came from the engine room. Ryan pulled the tank and harness tighter, checking the length of the straps and adjusting the buckles. The gear still felt looser than he would've liked, but he knew he was out of time.
Ryan clambered up, heading aft from the enlisted men's mess and searching for the way out. Torpedo tube? Waste-disposal chamber? Swim for the hull breech itself? What other ways could there be for a man to escape a sinking submarine? Ryan knew from the tiny digital gauge on top of the tank he could count on an hour of oxygen, but that was under normal circumstances, and there was nothing normal about what he was trying to do.
That's when he spotted Brosnan's frightened face peering out at him from the rounded corner of a bulkhead. Ryan almost didn't recognize the younger man—all he could see were Brosnan's eyes, looking back at his own, gazing from behind a clear three-inch slit in a protective hood that completely enveloped the man's head.
Brosnan glanced down at the blade clenched in Ryan's hand.
"Cawdor," he said in greeting, his voice muffled by the hood.
"Brosnan," Ryan replied levelly.
"I'm not armed," the hooded man said, raising up his open palms to show empty hands.
"I am," Ryan responded.
"I've no feud with you. There's still time for both of us to get out if we work together."
Brosnan was stripped down to a white T-shirt covered in grease. There were scorch marks on his clothing. Ryan could see evidence of a nasty burn beginning to fester on the man's left forearm. The blister was already quite large and red.
"What happened to you?"
"Fire in the control room. Everything up there went to hell when the reactor went out."
"Where's the rest of the crew?"
"We were on a skeleton watch. There were only three of us actually piloting the Raleigh. I was the only one who got out. There are more of the enlisted men scattered throughout the sub. Many of them are probably trapped in the lower half, where you were."
"If they weren't already chilled, they soon will be. I sealed the compartments as I came through," Ryan replied.
"So what do you say?" Brosnan asked. "You want to live?"
"I'm listening," Ryan said. "What's your idea?"
Brosnan took a deep breath. "The escape trunk. It's equipped with a two-man airlock and twin hatches, one high and one low. Either one is capable of withstanding as much pressure as the hull of the submarine. It would normally be used to load cargo and supplies, but in predark days, it was also a secret access for special-ops teams like Navy SEAL commando squads. Deep-dive teams could enter and exit without anyone becoming the wiser."
"I get you. In our case, we can go the emergency route."
"Right. What do you say?"
"I say lead the way," Ryan said, gesturing with the knife.
Brosnan squeezed past Ryan in the cramped passageway and made his way to a small access ladder. As the man climbed up, Ryan's curiosity got the better of him. He could see where the protective garb was strapped down tight to the front and back of the man's upper torso with a thick nylon belt.
"What's the deal with the hood? You expecting another fire?"
"It's a Steinke hood, a combination life jacket and breathing apparatus," Brosnan replied as he twisted open the first access hatch into the escape trunk. The wheel turned slowly, with a series of rusty squeaks. Brosnan raised his voice to be heard. "I can charge the air reservoir from an air port in the side of the escape trunk."
As the smaller man disappeared into the trunk, Ryan slid the blade into his belt. He would need both hands free to assist. The one-eyed man followed Brosnan up the ladder.
When Ryan pulled himself into the small room, he felt himself lose the slight stoop he'd been walking with since coming aboard the submarine. The escape trunk wasn't wide, but it was tall.
"There will be an air bubble created under the flanges in the corners where we can stand while the trunk floods," Brosnan said as he closed the hatch in the deck. "There should be extra hoods in the wall compartment over there if you want one, but with the rig you're wearing, I don't guess you'll need it."
Ryan eyed the hooded gear that Brosnan was hooking up to a valve in the wall.
"That thing can't hold much air."
"It's not supposed to. I'm not worried about running out of oxygen. My fear is getting one crippling case of the bends. These hoods are only good for four hundred feet. That's the maximum depth they can be used safely."
Ryan shot Brosnan a questioning look as he knelt to double-check the hatch the hooded man had closed.
"These babies are buoyant, see," Brosnan explained. "They'll jerk you up to the surface like you were tied to a string. Like a rocket to the sky."
"You said four hundred feet was the max. How far down are we?" Ryan asked.
"Last time I checked, before the systems started going out in the control room, roughly three hundred feet. I'd say with all of the fireworks, we've gone way past that now. I'm gambling that I don't go shooting out of here like a bullet from a gun only to have my head explode halfway there."
"Sounds triple dangerous to me."
"I'll take my chances. I don't want to die drowning in this metal coffin sitting on a Tomahawk missile."
"Makes two of us," Ryan agreed.
"We won't be able to talk once I've filled the hood," Brosnan said as he took out a package from a storage locker opposite Ryan. He handed the surprisingly heavy parcel to Ryan. "This will be your responsibility once I open the outer hatch."
Ryan glared at the package. "What's this?"
"Life raft. Once the pressure's stabilized, pull that cord and inflate it. Then we'll shove the raft through. It'll go straight up to the surface. Give us a place to rest once we're up there."
Both men were now wedged opposite from each other in the crowded confines of the trunk. Brosnan gave Ryan a thumbs-up signal, and flooded the compartment. Seawater poured in, fast and white, surrounding their bodies at a rapid rate.
Ryan put the mouthpiece of the scuba gear into his mouth and pulled down the face mask. Across from him, Brosnan's face was impassive from behind the hood as the water washed them with a wet chill. The commander nodded and unsealed the upper hatch. Ryan inflated the raft, and together they pushed it through, an underwater balloon floating upward.
