Voyage of the Devilfish

Well, goddamn it, he’d tried. He was only dimly aware of Lieutenant Commander Matt Delaney returning and pulling him up by his arms and dragging him to the bridge-trunk hatch. Pacino sat on a sleeping bag near a wall of the shelter, sipping a mug of steaming coffee that Jon Rapier had handed him, staring at the leering ram’s head of the Devilfish emblem on the coffee mug. The arctic shelter was a semirigid polyethylene bubble with a rumbling emergency diesel generator for warmth and light. The shelter had food for several days for the number of men that had survived the emergency surfacing. Besides Pacino, Rapier and Delaney, thirty others from the ship had escaped alive. Which meant that there were 33 potential survivors from a crew of 127. A lousy survival rate, Pacino thought, but just hours before the whole crew had seemed doomed by the Russian Magnum torpedo. Only a few men remained unconscious, some with head wounds, some with internal injuries. It was snowing outside, ten degrees below zero, but there was no wind. The sun would be low on the horizon, daytime here. And arctic days could last for months at this latitude. Rapier had set up flares around the shelter in hopes of a satellite pass picking up the heat and vectoring in rescue aircraft. Pacino drained his cup and set it on the liner deck. Deepbone exhausted, he shut his eyes. He would sleep, just for a moment… Pacino woke to the sound of a nearby explosion, a snapping violent cracking noise. From the direction of the Devilfish. The men in the shelter got to their feet and ran out the shelter door, some forgetting their parkas. Pacino looked over the ridge of ice toward the ship — another nightmare vision to etch itself onto his brain. As Pacino watched, in a steady, slow motion, the huge vessel broke free from her position on the ridge and began to slide down the hill, picking up speed, a 4500-ton radioactive sled finally going slightly sideways the last 100 feet. The ice beneath Pacino’s feet shook as the massive ship slid to the bottom of the slope and skidded out to the flats of the thin ice. The ice around her shattered into tiny slivers, and the ship settled into the black water that had appeared where there was once ice. The rudder and sternplanes vanished first. In a long loud agonizing slide, the vessel moved backward and resubmerged. As the ship sank, it took on an upangle, then slid more quickly into the water with a rushing sound of a zillion exploding bubbles.

Pacino watched as the bridge-access trunk, through which he had stuck his head only hours before, sank into the arctic water, the foam and bubbles filling his control room. The nose of the sub, hopelessly mangled by the collision with the ice, was all that remained. For a long moment, only the twisted steel of the sonar sphere was visible, and then it too vanished in a geyser of white foam and bubbles. All that was left of the USS Devilfish was the wash of bubbles and the hole in the ice, the water in the hole already skinning over in the arctic cold. Pacino’s mouth was twisted downward. He wanted to scream, but knew he could not. All he could do was turn his face from the awful sight, and away from the eyes of his men.

CHAPTER 24

SUNDAY, 19 DECEMBER, 1230 GREENWICH MEAN TIME

ARCTIC OCEAN

POLAR ICECAP SURFACE

The world in front of Pacino was a jumble of white and gray, but he did not see the snow and the ice and the sky. They were only the blank screen for his mind to replay the scene of the Devilfish sinking into the arctic water.

As he turned and trudged up the snowy slope to the ice shelter near the ridge the wind began, slowly at first, then gathering momentum, the snowflakes stinging his face. Behind him he heard the excited shouts of his men, their voices running together in a blur that seemed to blend with the wind and the snow. After what seemed hours he reached the large bubble of the shelter, the snow flying almost horizontally in the biting arctic wind.

He shouldered aside the heavy curtains at the shelter’s entrance and walked to his sleeping bag. The shelter was deserted. Pacino sank down to his sleeping bag and leaned against the cold wall. The wind howled outside, blowing the snow against the shelter wall. The emergency diesel generator rumbled in the center of the shelter, its air coming from the inner pipe of the double-walled snorkel pipe to the roof of the bubble, the exhaust traveling in the outer pipe, preheating the diesel’s intake air.