Voyage of the Devilfish

The Devilfish’s sonar sphere was crushed, flattened to a plate and slammed into the thick steel of the bow compartment, which was also crushed, rupturing and bursting. By the time the bow compartment had ruptured, the ice’s protest was over and a hole 50 feet in diameter formed. The displaced ice flew upward and outward, splintering into fragments and shards. The cylindrical hull of the Devilfish flew through the hole onto the ice, the first third of her smashed into a compressed lump, her sail sheared off at the hull. The rest continued up and forward through the hole, the entire length of her coming out of the ice like some giant whale, moving over the edge of a slight ridge and coming to rest two hundred feet from the hole on the downhill slope of the pressure ridge. At the bottom of the gentle slope, a thousand feet away, was the lake of thin ice that Devilfish had been aiming for. The control room, already devastated by the shock of the Magnum, changed violently. Where before the room had retained its shape and symmetry, the collision with the ice fractured the steel hoop frames of the pressure hull. The energy of the sudden deceleration threw people and consoles and seats and chunks of steel forward, a rain of flesh and pieces of steel. Several of the men who had survived the first shock, including Lieutenant Rod Van Dyne, the sonar officer, were hurled forward and killed instantly. Pacino was thrown face-first into the ballast control panel, the wraparound console in the control room’s forward port corner, taking the force of the collision in the face. The emergency air-breathing mask Plexiglas faceplate caved in, the remainder of the impact-load transferred to Pacino’s face. The mask came off as he slid down the panel, his face hitting the Chief of the Watch’s seat, his arms limp. He hung there for a moment, then fell to the deck, his head facing the lower portion of the console, the deck slick with oil or blood or seawater — in the dim light of the lantern it was impossible to say. And somewhere under the thin ice was a 90-ton titanium pod with four men inside, all losing consciousness from exposure to the extreme cold. By 1001 GMT the eruption from the ice was over. The black submarine, its snout smashed, lay on the ice like some beached behemoth, tilted over into a 20-degree port-list and lying on the ice’s downslope. The strange metal beast from the deep lay there, motionless, inert. Inside the vessel was like the outside. Nothing moved. For a long while Pacino had been staring at the underside of a seat and the face of a console. The light was very dim. His face was cold where it touched the tile of the deck. He tried to identify the console he was looking at but had never seen it from this angle before. He heard a voice in the distance.

“Captain? You okay?” The voice was muffled, choked. Pacino tried to roll over toward the noise. It took a long time, and it hurt.

“Manderson, the skipper lost his mask. Get it on him; I’ll try to open the bridge hatch.” It got hard to breathe. Pacino couldn’t see. There was a cloud in front of him, he felt like his head was in a fish bowl. He tried to struggle against it, but as he brought in the dry coppery air to his lungs his mental fog seemed to dissipate. And he knew where he was. Slowly, fighting the pain, he struggled to his feet and found himself at the darkened ballastcontrol panel. Engineer Matt Delaney was trying to undog the hatch to the bridge trunk. It seemed stuck. Pacino found his flashlight and searched the overhead that was used to open and shut the drain and vent valves of the snorkel mast and induction piping. The valves were too far up in the overhead to reach by hand and were nestled behind layers of piping and cables. The valve-extension handle was a steel rod four feet long. Pacino found it, pulled it out of its retaining cradle and limped forward to the hatch. Pacino could see well enough to make it to Delaney and jam the bar into the wheel of the hatch. The two men pushed on the bar, using it as a lever, and finally the wheel moved, undogging the hatch. While Pacino waited, he surveyed the control room in the dim light of Manderson’s hand-held flashlight. It was listing to port and pitched slightly forward. Emergency-breathing air hoses snaked through the room, ending in faces that were mostly unconscious. The worst was looking at the bodies that had no masks.

“Skipper, look!”

Delaney had opened the bridge-trunk hatch. Except that there was no bridge trunk. Bright white glaring light poured into the room from the hatch. And with it, a blast of frigid arctic air.

Pacino went to the hatch and looked up. He grabbed the rungs of the ladder to the hatch and raised his head into the light.