Voyage of the Devilfish

Now there were ten centimeters of water covering the control console. Vlasenko pulled Chekechev over out of the water and checked to see if he was breathing. He was dead. Blood came out of his mouth. Vlasenko felt a rush of anger — at Novskoyy, at the attacking submarine. The water was lapping now at the pod’s hatch. If he took any more time the pod would be flooded, finishing them all. He waded back to Katmonov through the water that now submerged the long dead control console. Katmonov was still suspended by his safety harness to the control seat. The water had swallowed his arms and legs. His head hung into the black water but he was not conscious enough to raise up from it and sputtered while he tried to breathe, coughing the water out. Vlasenko took a deep breath, dived below the oily water and grabbed Katmonov’s seat harness, trying to release the kid’s harness before the water drowned him. But the water was too high, now submerging the back of the chair. Vlasenko’s fingers, numbed from the cold, fumbled at the harness release, jammed by the shock of the weapon or frozen by the cold. Lungs bursting, Vlasenko forced himself back to the surface and gasped for air, spitting up the dirty water. He realized his feet were no longer touching bottom— A rumbling explosion jarred the ship, then another. The weapons in the first compartment were exploding. Vlasenko dived into the water, pulled himself down by pulling on Katmonov’s shirt. As he made his way into the blackness of the water he felt Katmonov’s hand grab his arm. The kid was still alive. Vlasenko found the harness, pulled hard on it… the harness was still frozen. He gave the release lever one last jerk, and it finally yielded. He managed to pull Katmonov from the seat, then got to the surface. As he burst through, he saw Novskoyy, and felt a wave of fatigue that nearly destroyed his will to survive. He looked up at the flooding from the upper bulkhead of the compartment, then hauled Katmonov to the pod hatch, now half underwater, and floated him in. It was easier now, with the water in the compartment. He was about to slide into the pod hatch himself when the face of Alexi Novskoyy came floating into view in the semi-darkness. At first Vlasenko thought that the admiral must be dead, but as he turned to swim away Novskoyy’s eyes fluttered open and the admiral looked directly at him, grabbed his sleeve and collar. No time to gloat, no time even to push Novskoyy away, much as he was tempted. However mixed his feelings, he told himself it would take less time to pull Novskoyy into the pod than to fight him off. As he pulled the admiral to the ladder, the man lost consciousness and his head began to bump on the rungs of the ladder, now horizontal to the pod. By the time Vlasenko reached the pod hatch it was half gone, the water flooding the pod. He pulled Novskoyy in, saw that the admiral had collapsed and was floating face down, pulled him up away from the water and struggled to shut the hatch. It took all his strength to push the hatch against the water and turn the wheel. When he turned away from the hatch he saw that Novskoyy had fallen back into the murky water. He set him back up, out of reach of the icy water and draped his arm around a handhold. Ivanov and Katmonov had their eyes open now and were shivering. Ivanov, hands grasping his leg, rocked back and forth in pain. Vlasenko began to make his way to the pod controlpanel just as the lantern in the pod flickered and died, shorted by the water. He felt his way to the panel, maneuvering through the numbingly cold seawater, found the panel in the dark, reached to its upper right corner, shut his eyes and pulled up on the toggle switch, praying that the pod would release from the mortally wounded submarine. The switch clicked home into the RELEASE position. Nothing happened.

USS DEVILFISH

Two thousand lousy yards from survival and the reactor melts down. Pacino couldn’t blame Delaney, he couldn’t have done any better. He let go of the yoke of the control panel and climbed to the ballast panel as the lights went out. The ventilation fans wound down again and the room plunged into silence, illuminated by the single bulb of the battle lantern Pacino had turned on just moments before after the blast. He plugged his gas mask into the manifold of the ballast control panel, looking up into the overhead as if he could see through the dark water to the ice cover. The ice was probably 100 feet thick here, he thought, and ice that thick was equivalent to five feet of steel. Even if he could get the ship up to 20 knots on an emergency blow, wouldn’t the ice crush them? Try, damn it. Pacino got ready to blow all main ballast tanks under the thick ice cover. He reached up to the forward lever, pulled the plunger cap down and rotated the lever from straightdown to straight-up.