Terminal Run

The vision went slower and slower, finally freezing at a moment when his father smiled at him over lunch, young Pacino’s peanut butter sandwich in the foreground, his father’s smile the last thing he could see as the scene began to get darker at the edges, the darkness growing until it swallowed up everything, even his father’s white teeth in his smiling mouth, and when there was nothing but black darkness a tiny white star of light appeared at the very end and began to grow.

Commander Peter Collingsworth reversed the thrusters and took the submersible away from the location of the plasma explosive torch. When he could no longer see the hump in the sand that was the broken remains of the Piranha, he called a countdown to the Explorer II high above his head. When the count reached zero, the control room detonated the ring plasma, and a circle twenty feet around and one inch wide ignited to the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within seconds the HY-100 high-tensile steel of the Piranha’?” hull beneath the plasma rig melted, then vaporized. The twenty foot-diameter curved plate separated from the remainder of the hull, and the four heavy lugs welded on kept the plate from collapsing on top of the DSV beneath.

The Berkshire drove cautiously up to the submarine wreck so that the pilot could see. The plate was still being supported by three structural steel hoops, the cross sections of the hoops two-inch-thick extruded I-beams rolled into circles. The plasma torch had only partially penetrated these last three. The submersible carried explosive charges for this eventuality, and Collingsworth set the charges and reeled out the wires. He would detonate these from the submersible. It took ten minutes to set them, ten seconds to prepare to detonate, and ten milliseconds for the explosions to separate the large circular plate from the surviving hoop frames.

“It’s free. Take it outside fifty yards and drop it, Control,” he said into his boom mike. He watched through the light of his high candlepower flood lamps as the plate was steadily raised by the four cables to the rocking Explorer If. Fortunately, the waves above hadn’t caused the plate to smash into the DSV. He could see the command module of the DSV nestled in the frame bay of the submarine’s compartment. The next chores were to sever the command module from its own airlock and to dislodge the module from the retaining mechanisms of the submarine. Collingsworth shined his spotlight down onto the hemispherical command bubble glass, hoping that it had not been fractured. It was whole. He rubbed sweat out of his eyes and turned to the task of setting up the ring plasma around the airlock to cut it and the cargo module away from the command module.

When the spotlight illuminated the hemisphere of the command window, the light from the submersible briefly shined into the command module. The lights had gone out, the interior had iced up, and the scrubbers and burners were no longer operating. The four people inside were barely making breath vapors into the polluted atmosphere of the frigid space. Astrid Schultz began to experience a heartbeat palpitation. The lack of oxygen and the buildup of carbon dioxide began to affect the regulatory mechanisms of her brain stem. The fluctuations grew worse. By the time the ring plasma explosive was detonated at the airlock, her heart was beating frantically and ineffectively, in complete fibrillation. By the time the restraining mechanism explosives were detonated, her heart had stopped. As the command module was hauled out of the coffin of the submarine wreck, Catardi’s and Alameda’s hearts began to fibrillate, and in the middle of the third minute of the emergency ascent, Pacino’s heart began to spasm.

As the cranes on the stern of the HMS Explorer II lifted the DSV command module from the sunken submarine Piranha onto the deck, the inhabitants inside could no longer be called “survivors.”

A four-man crew stood by with cutting torches in case the hatch from the cut-away airlock didn’t work. One of them spun the operating mechanism, and the hatch dogs retracted.

He pushed the hatch into the space and stood back. A second eight-man crew wearing Scott air packs blitzed into the command module, the breathing air required since the atmosphere inside was known to be polluted. Colleen Pacino could barely watch. When the first two came out, they carried out a young woman with dark hair. They hoisted her onto a gurney where a five-man emergency medical team went to work on her while they wheeled her into the interior of the ship. Next a man was brought out — Captain Catardi — and he was placed on a second gurney and wheeled away. The third victim was a slim blond woman. Colleen was about to shout at the men in the command module, but finally another two came out carrying the body of Anthony Michael.