Voyage of the Devilfish

The gage needle unwound. 500 meters. 400. 300. Vlasenko tried to steady the men against the shock to come when the buoyant pod, rushing up from the deep, slammed into the ice. He grabbed lifejackets and plastic wrapped ration kits and tried to cushion the overhead of the pod. The pod was still rising sideways, with no stability. A final glance at the depth gage—50 meters and rising fast. He could only hope that the ice had been broken up by the explosion… The escape pod of the Kaliningrad hit the ice raft going five meters per second, causing a jarring impact in the pod. The depth gage read under 5 meters, by the look of the needle maybe only one meter. So they would float here, separated from the frigid world above, by a single meter of merciless, mocking, unforgiving ice. Vlasenko could no longer feel any sensation in his arms or legs. He lay there in the trapped pod with the wounded, waiting for sleep and an end to the cold.

USS DEVILFISH

The USS Devilfish rose toward the surface at a 45-degree angle, speeding up to 19 knots from the buoyant force. Pacino held onto the control panel, watching the face of the analog depth gage, the needle unwinding as the paralyzed ship rose from the air in her ballast tanks. Still 1800 yards southwest of the polynya, they were about to challenge thick ice. Pacino had a final command decision: to shut his eyes or watch the gage as the ship shot upward. He decided to keep his eyes open. The needle unwound. 400 feet, 300, 150… Pacino changed his mind. He shut his eyes tight.

CHAPTER 23

SUNDAY, 19 DECEMBER, 0958 GREENWICH MEAN TIME

ARCTIC OCEAN

POLAR ICECAP SURFACE

The pressure ridge at the southwest edge of the polynya was 80 feet thick. The molecules that formed the crystalline structure of the ice had been motionless, frozen for centuries, last existing as liquid water a thousand years before. For those centuries the structure of the ice had been solid as concrete, one piece of a massive structure forming the polar icecap. At 0945 Greenwich Mean Time a nuclear explosion had detonated under the ice pack five kilometers to the northwest. Its chief effect was a multitude of hairline cracks formed throughout the structure of the ice, but being hairline cracks, the tremendous cold and pressure from the weight of the ice raft was already rewelding the ice together into one piece.

At 0958 a 4500-ton nuclear submarine smashed into the ice’s underside. The submarine was travelling at 32 feet per second. The force of the impact was equivalent to that of a locomotive going 231 miles per hour, or twelve one-thousand-pound artillery shells fired at point-blank range. Or a small nuclear detonation.

The ice exploded upward as if slammed by the fist of God.