He ordered the local panel to open the vent valve to the interior of the command module, and when the valve indicated open, he ordered the flood valve opened, bringing seawater into the chamber. The chamber water level rose rapidly with warm Atlantic seawater, until it climbed to the level of the upper hatch. The control panel and Krivak’s head were in an alcove behind a steel curtain, with a bubble of air trapped
there. Krivak shut the vent valve and allowed the chamber to rise in pressure until it was equalized to the seawater. The pressure in the chamber rose slowly. When it was the same as the surrounding ocean, he would open the top hatch and get out of here.
The first-launched Tigershark woke later than the other units, in time to hear the carnage as the second-and third-launched units tore each other apart in mutual explosions. The Tiger shark started its engine and began a slow target-seeking circle, but there was nothing but the cloud of bubbles from the previous explosions. A second and third circle, with wider diameters, revealed nothing in the seas. The Tigershark rotated its fins and aimed shallow, hoping for a target above the layer.
The unit was amazed at how close the target was. and yet how invisible it had been from below-layer. The Tigershark armed the warhead, circled around to give itself some room, jettisoned the first stage, and lit off the rocket motor, the target growing in its seeker.
Krivak ducked under the steel curtain below the open upper hatch of the escape trunk of the Snare. He pushed with his flippers and rose until his head protruded out of the hatch. He put his hands on the upper surface, knowing that he had only twenty seconds before the Snare took control of the hatch and shut it on him, and the hydraulics were strong enough to cut him in half. So naturally, the tether of his equipment bag got hung up on a manual valve handle. Krivak debated leaving the equipment, but ducked back down, freed the tether, and pushed rapidly back up, his eye on the hatch. He swam out of the ring of the hatch, the equipment package following, and he pulled it all out of the hull. The hatch began to shut slowly behind him. He reached down to the hull and tapped it twice in farewell, then kicked to the surface.
Tigershark Unit One saw the target grow larger and larger until it blotted out all else, and just before it made contact with
the fat submerged hull it detonated the PlasticPak explosive. The stern section of the submarine target came open in a violent explosion that separated the forward half of the ship from what was left of the aft half. The shock wave of the explosion reached out for the swimmer leaving the target’s hull.
There was nothing left of the Tigershark when the orange flame ball of the explosion had collapsed and cooled and disintegrated into a mass of a quadrillion vapor bubbles. Just as the explosion calmed and the front half of the hull of the target began to sink, two more Tigersharks swooped down on it and blew it to molecules just before it reached its crush depth.
The bow section of the SSNX Devilfish rose slowly out of the surface as the stern section began to sink. Twenty miles astern of her, the two remaining Tigersharks were turning circles, searching for targets.
Captain Michael Pacino lay on the aft sloping deck of the control room with Vermeers screaming silently in his face. He opened his eyes and tried to sit up, but it felt as if every bone in his body were broken. The lights were out except for the emergency battery-operated battle lanterns, which were flickering dimly. Pacino opened his mouth to speak, when suddenly his hearing returned and Vermeers’ voice slammed into his eardrums, shrieking, “Have to abandon ship, sir!”
Pacino managed to stand, leaning heavily on Vermeers, and allowed himself to be dragged to the middle level, where men and equipment were being evacuated through the hatch. Pacino felt his legs give, and his body slammed into the bulkhead, the world spinning around him.
“.. . there are more Tigersharks out there! Hurry!” Vermeers shouted at the crew at the escape trunk. “By the time we hear their rocket engines, they’ll be here. Now, go!”
Pacino felt himself pulled and pushed up the ladder and into the escape trunk. He felt he was about to vomit, and tried to hold it. There was a circle of light above him, a searchlight so bright it hurt his eyes, slamming his eyes flat in his eye sockets, until he realized it was the sun—the ship was on the surface. He was pulled out of the hatch onto the tilted deck topside, and had a momentary impression of the sail ripped off the hull and the aft part of the ship in the water, the deck inclined in a severe aft pitch. He staggered on his feet as other crew members were pulled out of the hull. His stomach lurched and he threw up on himself. Then the world grew dim.
Michael Pacino fainted and fell off the hull and splashed in the water on the port side of the hull, the same side that the Tiger shark torpedo approached.
“Vickerson!” Vermeers called. “Get the captain to a life raft!” The young lieutenant dived into the water carrying a spare life jacket. She caught up to Pacino, strapped his limp form into it, and towed him around the stern of the sinking ship to one of the life rafts floating on the other side.
Pacino came to as the last of the men and emergency equipment were pulled from the hull. The smashed-in nose of the ship tilted toward the sky as the ship began to sink to the depths. Pacino saw the forward escape trunk hatch sink below the waves, the hull taking water forward, until only the place where the nose cone should have been poked slightly above the waves, until it too vanished in a ring of foam.
He saw it go and looked dejectedly down at the life raft. The mission had failed. Four cruise missiles had gotten by the Devilfish, and the Tigersharks had gotten them instead of the Snare.
“Give me some binoculars,” Pacino said to Vickerson.
As she handed them over, the sea where the Devilfish had been exploded in a volcano of foam. A second explosion came ten long seconds later. For the next two minutes the foam rained down on the life rafts.
“What the hell was that?” Pacino asked.
The sonar chief looked over at him, shaking his head. “Two more Tigersharks, Skipper. We got out just in time.”
“Did we lose anyone, Vickerson?” Pacino asked.
She looked at him sadly. “We only evacuated forward, sir.
Aft was flooded and had a major steam leak. We couldn’t get the hatch open. None of the nukes made it out.”
Pacino sighed.
“Binoculars, sir?”
“Which way is east? I want to find the bearing to the Snare. Is there any chance we hit it?”
“We couldn’t tell, sir,” the sonar chief said.
Victor Krivak floated in the sea, his face exposed, his mask half off, his regulator blown away from his face. For a half hour after the explosion of the Snare he floated there, breathing but unconscious, floating with the buoyancy of his wet suit, the buoyancy compensator filled with air before he left the escape trunk.
A booming roar sounded through the seas, from the east.
“What was that?” Pacino asked. He looked over at one of the other life rafts, where Vermeers scanned the sea with his binoculars. “Did you see anything?”
“No, Captain,” Vermeers called over, “but it was from the bearing of the Snare. I think we got her.”
Pacino nodded, looking over the horizon at the bearing. Fingers of foam from an underwater explosion reached for the sky. “Excellent.”
“Vickerson, did you pull the pin on the emergency beacon?”
“Half an hour ago, sir,” she said. “I thought we had aircraft orbiting to the west.”
“Maybe the beacon didn’t work,” Pacino said.
“Then this will be a long wait,” Vickerson said.
Slowly, painfully, Victor Krivak opened his eyes and blinked at the sea around him. He had no memory of what had happened. It seemed as if a second ago he had pushed off the hull of the Snare and now he floated here with his ears ringing, with blood on his face and in his mouth—it felt as if he’d bitten clear through his tongue. His ears were bleeding, and his back ached where the tanks were touching him. Something
had ha
ppened, perhaps a self-destruct charge the Snare had set off. Damned lucky thing he’d gotten out in time, he thought. He wondered for a moment if the ship had suffered an attack for the launching of the missiles, but it was impossible. He’d detected no one, the Snare had the acoustic advantage over every submarine on the planet, and there were no aircraft he could see or hear. It had to have been a self-destruct charge.
Krivak yawned to clear his aching ears and found the equipment pack on its tether. He hauled it up and found the life raft, and pulled the carbon dioxide pin on it. The yellow rubber raft inflated until its four-meter diameter floated on the meter-tall waves. Krivak threw the rest of his equipment in. took off his scuba gear and threw it in the raft, then vaulted in, his back and head aching. He opened his waterproof equipment container and pulled out the satellite phone and dialed Amorn. A do/entries, and nothing but a busy signal. This never happened to Amorn’s phone. Something had gone terribly wrong, he realized.
He listened to see if he could hear Amorn’s yacht’s diesels. He scanned the horizon, but there was no yacht visible. Krivak cursed that he had not thought of putting binoculars into the emergency kit, but it shouldn’t have mattered. It was doubly odd. since he had distinctly located the yacht before he fired the cruise missiles. He’d have to use the fall-back plan, and pull the pin on an emergency locator beacon, and concoct a story for whatever civilian authorities picked him up. Odds were, it would be the Americans who came for him. He chuckled at the thought as he pulled off the wet suit and donned cotton coveralls, pulling on the belt over them and stashing the silver-plated .45 in the belt after checking the clip—it wouldn’t do to be attacked by a shark without his Colt, he thought. He opened up some of the ration containers and chewed on a protein bar. After fifteen minutes, he leaned against the side of the raft to wait, and a few minutes later he fell asleep.
“Sir, over there!” Vickerson said, handing Pacino the binoculars. “There’s something yellow floating there.”
“Get out the oars,” Pacino said, looking in the binoculars. “Row all rafts toward that spot.”
For the next hour the four rafts from the Devilfish rowed toward the yellow object. When it was visible, Pacino stared in astonishment. “There’s someone alive,” he said.
It could only be one man, he thought. Victor Krivak. Alexi Novskoyy.
Pacino’s jaw clenched in anger. He rooted through the emergency bag and withdrew a diving knife in its scabbard and looped it onto his belt, hoping no one had seen him.
“Stop rowing.” he said. “Don’t get any closer.” Pacino looked over at Vermeers. “XO, this is a direct order. Don’t allow anyone to come after me. You’rein command.” Pacino dropped off the side of the raft and began swimming to the raft, ditching his life preserver ten feet from the raft so he could swim faster, his body aching, but the pain tolerable. Much more tolerable than the fact that Alexi Novskoyy still lived.
The orbiting P-5 Pegasus antisubmarine patrol plane got the radio orders to investigate an emergency locator beacon at the location of the explosions that the Mark 12 pod had detected. On the orders of Admiral McKee, they had stayed out of the area, out of range of the Snare’s Mark 80 antiair missiles. But after all the underwater detonations—the last one probably taking out the Mark 12 pod itself—McKee had judged the seas safe, and had vectored in the P-5.
Far to the west, fifty miles off the coast of Washington, New York, and Philadelphia, several squadrons of Air Force Scorpion interceptors orbited over the Atlantic, all of them in touch with the KC-10 AWACS radar plane orbiting at forty thousand feet and searching at peak alert for the incoming cruise missiles. Had the Snare managed to shoot the missiles in secret, they would have flown in stealthily, below the level of the air search radars, and finding them would have been a miracle, but with the warning from the Devilfish of the exact time and location of launch, the Air Force had been able to scramble
every asset with wings to search for the elusive plasma-tipped weapons.
Instead of frantically searching for the missiles, the crews had the luxury of arguing over who would get the privilege of shooting them down. In all cases, the squadron commanding officers took their shots. The Mongoose heat-seeking missiles ripped the Javelin IVs to shreds, the plasma warheads shattered and falling to the sea in fragments. As news of the destruction of the Javelins reached the presidential evacuation bunker, the President’s 888 was called in, and the President and staff returned to Andrews Air Force Base. Admiral Patton took a limo to the Pentagon to await news of the Devilfish.
Michael Pacino made his way slowly to the raft and swam to it, approaching it from underwater as he got close. He popped his head up, trying not to make noise with his breathing, and pulled the diver’s knife from its scabbard. He looked up at the bump of the raft occupant’s head, knowing it was Victor Krivak—although in his mind Pacino decided to remember him as Alexi Novskoyy. Pacino took a breath, and shot his arm out of the water and grabbed the man by the throat and pulled him into the water. Just before he fell in, Pacino had a glimpse of a man in his forties, a man as handsome as a movie star, but there was no surgery on earth that would change those ugly eyes, eyes that Pacino had looked into on the Arctic icepack so many years before. These eyes belonged to the man who had torpedoed and destroyed the first Devilfish, and who was now responsible for four cruise missiles being launched at Pacino’s home, who was responsible for the loss of the second Devilfish, and most of all, who had put Pacino’s son at death’s door. It was the last of these that earned him the thrust of the knife deep into the side of his throat as he fell in slow motion into the water, the red spurting blood spraying into Pacino’s eyes.
In the time it took to blink the blood out of his eyes, Novskoyy had knocked the knife from Pacino’s grip with his arm, and had wrenched toward Pacino. Novskoyy was much stronger, and he smashed his fist into Pacino’s face, breaking
his nose. Blood sprayed into the water. Pacino reached for Novskoyy just as the war criminal lunged for something in his belt. Pacino connected with Novskoyy’s face in a hard jab, the force of it sending him backward in the water away from the Russian. Pacino struggled to get close again, and suddenly found himself staring into the barrel of the pistol Novskoyy had pulled from his belt. Pacino froze for an instant, then dived into the water, wondering if a gun could fire when it was wet.
Victor Krivak had been napping pleasantly, awaiting rescue, when he was grabbed by the throat and pulled violently into the sea. He barely had a look at the man who had assaulted him, for a moment thinking it was Wang, the thought of the doctor coming back for vengeance filling him with adrenaline. He was trying to punch the man when the knife entered his throat and cut him hard. At first there was no pain, just a dizzying feeling of floating. His blood was everywhere, and it was probably not something he would survive, which made him fight all the harder. He managed to connect with a punch to the intruder’s nose, the man’s face covered in blood both from his broken nose and from the blood he’d drawn from Krivak’s neck. Oddly, the white-haired fiend seemed somehow familiar. Krivak reached down for his belt, hoping the silver plated Colt was there, as the world became dim around the edges. He pulled it out of his belt with his right hand and held it high out of the water. With his left hand he gripped the collar of his unknown attacker, and as he aimed the .45 at the man, he caught a glimpse of his nametag, which read paci no He knew that name was familiar, but he was getting cold and groggy, undoubtedly from the knife wound, and he couldn’t place the name.
He brought the Colt to the man’s face, but the man tried to dive below the waves. Krivak aimed lower and fired off four shots and waited for the man to return to the surface. As the seconds ticked off, the waves and the sky were no longer blue, but like something from an old black-and-white movie. The
sound of the waves and the wind was missing, and the sunlight began to fade into dusk, though it had to be much too early for sunset.
He waited for the body to float back to the surfa
ce, and finally it did, but the man’s hands clawed at Krivak’s chest, and clutched at the gun, and by this time Krivak was becoming too weak to resist. As the man named Pacino grabbed for the pistol, it went off one last time, and Krivak wondered if he had finally connected and made the kill. He realized slowly that he no longer cared. Oddly, in spite of the adrenaline of the fight, he suddenly felt cold and sleepy.
It must be the darkness, he thought, as he felt the pistol leave his grip.
Pacino dived deep, but not deep enough. A slicing pain shot through his left shoulder, another one hitting his right thigh. A third seemed to slice into his ear, and that was when he opened his eyes and tried to see Novskoyy in the water. All he could see was a dim shape thrashing in front of him, one of his hands above the surface, a glint of silver coming from above. Pacino swam in, needles of pain invading his mind from his leg, and he lunged for the pistol. He found it, but as he curled his fingers over it, the muzzle flashed and it seemed as if that last bit of light drew the rest of the world’s light away, and Pacino was plunged into darkness, and it was as if one moment he was alive and fighting and the next he was in a deep dungeon and his body was swimming away from him and he couldn’t seem to catch it.
He remembered thinking of Anthony Michael and trying to say his name, but it was as if he had forgotten how to talk, and he was floating and the words up and down no longer meant anything, and the world rotated slowly around him and he fell and spun away, gradually at first, and then rapidly, until he forgot his son’s name and Colleen’s name and his own name and he stopped existing and so did the world, and it was over.
Epilogue
It was like coming to periscope depth.
At first it was complete darkness, with only the awareness that soon there would be light, and a watchfulness for the brightness. Then there was a blackness that was just a shade lighter than black, the blackness giving way to a deep blue, and the blue lightened until a distant world came into view, with no structure to it, until finally the bottoms of the waves could be seen at a distance of what seemed miles, until they came more clearly into view, closer until the wave crests and troughs could be made out, and finally a trough came closer and another world peeked through for just an instant, and disappeared again as a wave crest splashed onto the view and there was the blue world again for a moment, until the view splashed with angry foam and the new world existed again, more solidly this time, and then there was focus and structure and the new conscious world became real.
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