Voyage of the Devilfish

“Sir?” It was Rapier. “Wind’s picking up outside, starting to snow pretty hard. Visibility’s down to less than a hundred feet.” Pacino stepped outside onto the ice and was shocked at how much the weather had changed. The horizon was gone, the ice and the fog melting together just a few feet ahead. A fierce wind blew quarter-size snowflakes horizontally, a wind that cut through Pacino’s fur parka like it wasn’t there. In seconds the wind was burning his cheeks and eyes. Pacino spit at the side of the shelter. As he expected, the spittle was frozen before it hit the wall of the shelter, shattering as it impacted. Which meant the temperature was somewhere around 30 below, with a 20-knot wind. He ducked back into the shelter, wondering how much wind the shelter could take. It was, after all, only a bubbleshaped, prefabricated structure, not a building, yet more than a tent. It was going to be a long night.

CHAPTER 25

MONDAY, 20 DECEMBER

POLAR ICECAP SURFACE

Occasionally during the night Pacino had gone to the curtain and cracked it open to bring air into the shelter, and each time there had been a drift of heavy wet snow that had to be burrowed through. The shelter was probably invisible from outside with the snowdrifts piling up on it, but the snow also served as an insulator, keeping the heat in the polyethylene bubble, as well as muffling the outside noise. The only sounds inside the shelter were the rumbling of the diesel and the distorted conversations of the men.

“If this storm doesn’t break soon,” Rapier was saying to Pacino, “we’re going to be in trouble. Diesel’s only got another day of fuel, maybe less. It was all we could get out of the ship.”

“Maybe we should shut it down to conserve,” Pacino said, his voice slow, monotonic. “It’s warm enough in here to run it twenty minutes an hour.”

“I don’t know, the temperature’d drop too fast. The fuel would congeal. Plus, we’d waste fuel starting her up. Once we shut it down in this cold she’s down for good.”

“Keep it running, then,” Pacino said, faintly annoyed at what seemed a dialogue to nowhere.

“Also,” Rapier said, “the radio’s batteries are dead. We’ve been transmitting on it all night, no answer. It might not have been working in the first place… none of the radiomen made it. Even if it was working there’s no way anyone could get to us in this blizzard.”

“You been putting the flares out?” Pacino asked.

“Ran out yesterday, you know that.”

“Oh, right. How about rations?”

“Two days left, tops.”

“Great. No flares, no radio, food and fuel running out and a blizzard that won’t quit.” Rapier looked down into his coffee. “We’re alive.”

“How are they doing?” Pacino nodded toward the Russians.

“Better,” Rapier said. “One regained consciousness for a moment, the older guy, then fainted away again. Doc thinks they’ve gotten frostbite over a lot of skin, hypothermia.” Pacino drained his coffee and tried not to look at the ship’s emblem on the mug. The coffee was cold.

Rapier had stopped with his recital. Pacino shut his eyes and tried to doze, let the buzz of the diesel carry him away, away from here, from the reality of an arctic prison… Pacino awoke to a commotion at the diesel, where the Russians were. One, the middle-aged silver-gray-haired man, half sat up in Chief Corpsman Ingle’s arms and sipped water from a cup. When he looked up at Pacino and Rapier he seemed confused. Pacino spoke to him, starting slowly.

“Do you speak English?” The Russian nodded.

“I’m Commander Michael Pacino, commanding officer of the USS Devilfish. Correction, I was. My ship is on the bottom now. Who the hell are you?”

“Yuri Vlasenko, Captain 1st Rank, Northern Fleet.” The man’s English was only slightly accented. “I was captain of the submarine Kaliningrad.” Pacino eyed him, assaulted with mixed feelings. He was, after all, talking to the captain of the Russian OMEGA submarine. They were hardly buddies after what had happened. On the other hand, they were fellow professionals, survivors. He wondered about the admiral who had sunk Stingray. Where was he? Dead? Vlasenko’s reaction was also guarded. With an appreciation of what the Americans had done. “My compliments on your skill in surviving the arctic climate.” Pacino nodded, decided to tell Vlasenko that one of his officers was dead on the ice.

“When we found your sphere or pod or whatever you call it, the other one inside was dead. Three of you survived!”