Terminal Run

It took an instant to realize he had company in the trunk. Chief Keating floated in front of him, his head smashed horribly concave. His nostrils protruded grotesquely from where his mouth should have been. His eyes and his forehead had been smashed deep into his broken skull. He had probably been killed by the force of the explosion Shockwaves, throwing his face into the steel bulkhead. Pacino shut his eyes for a moment, then forced himself to continue.

Pacino had been required to demonstrate his knowledge of the escape trunk mechanisms weeks ago during his diving officer qualifications. He opened the vent valve to connect the top of the trunk with the air in the sub, then opened the drain valve at the bottom to allow the water in the trunk to drain to the forward compartment bilges. The water level dropped dramatically fast, the air in the space slamming Pacino’s eardrums. While he waited he pulled off his fins, noticing that the vent valve had admitted air black with dark smoke. The mist of it made the space hazy in the light of the battery-powered battle lantern. He could smell the acrid chemical stench of it, even though he was breathing bottled air.

When the water dropped to the deck of the trunk, he rotated the hatch ring furiously and grabbed the hatch to pull it upward so he could drop through the opening. He honestly thought he was ready for anything, but he was wrong.

17

Midshipman Patch Pacino pulled the lower hatch of the escape trunk open, expecting to slide down the ladder to the middle level of the forward compartment to the ladder step-off. The base of the ladder was nestled in an alcove set into a narrow passageway leading forward to the control room, with the captain’s stateroom to port and the radio room to starboard.

As the hatch came open, a rolling black cloud of toxic gas came boiling up into the escape trunk. The heat of it assaulted Pacino’s face and momentarily blinded him. His eyes teared up, the water pouring out of them — if he’d only had his mask, he thought. It occurred to him that when the scuba cylinders were gone, this was the air he would be breathing, but he clamped his mind shut, knowing that thoughts like that would lead him back out the hatch. He lowered his feet into the hatchway, ready to put his bare feet on the ladder, but he couldn’t find it. He climbed back into the escape trunk, wiped his eyes, and found the battle lantern — an overgrown flashlight the size of a car battery — and unfastened it. He lugged it to the bottom hatch, again dangling his feet over the edge and shining the lantern downward.

In the haze of the black smoke he could see that there was no ladder, and there was no longer a passageway beneath him, because the walls were gone. The missing walls were bad enough, but it was worse — the deck was also missing. The beam of the flashlight reached all the way into the lower level where the torpedo room had been, but which was now a space crowded with wreckage and lit by flickering flames of a fire. Water was pouring into the ship, the level rising visibly, perhaps coming up a foot in the brief second Pacino shined his light straight down. Pacino dangled twenty feet above the surface of the floodwaters of the lower level, and there was no place he could lower himself to. If he dropped straight down, he would break his legs on the shattered equipment protruding from the water. As he stared at the hellish remains of what had been the submarine, the thought entered his mind that everyone had to be dead. Pacino’s ears suddenly popped, hard, from the air pressure rising in the space. The ship was sinking, he thought, and the water rushing in was raising the pressure of the trapped air.

The next thought was that he had been a fool to come back inside the doomed vessel, and that the best he could do was shut the hatch and go back up. No one could have survived this. He still had time, he thought, he could still save himself. He began to pull his legs back into the escape trunk to evacuate when a dim sound made him hesitate. He had been deaf after the first explosion, but some low-level sounds were coming back. The sound he had heard was unmistakably a human scream from a female throat. Pacino froze, uncertain what to do. If he dropped into the water he would be unable to return to the escape trunk except by floating on the rising waters, but by that time the ship would have descended further, to the point that the trunk might no longer work. One word then made its way into his mind — Carrie.