Voyage of the Devilfish

Pacino breathed slowly through cracked and frozen lips, the air wheezing in and out of his lungs, feeling like it was freezing him from the inside out. Inside, the air was a dense fog of condensation, temperature minus 40 degrees. The room was a glaring white, either that or he was snowblind. He tried to bring the room into focus, no use. He tried to move his right arm, his left. Couldn’t. No feeling or motion. His legs had been gone for what he guessed was an hour. His old Rolex Submariner watch, a gift from his father, had not been designed to run in these conditions. Its hands were frozen at 1107. He couldn’t remember whether it had been morning or night when it had quit, whether it had been set to GMT or Eastern Standard Time. The only muscles that seemed still under voluntary control were his eyelids, his chest muscles — he was still breathing — and his neck. While he still had control of his neck and eyes he decided to look around at the shelter, the last vestige of his command. The fog in the room was too dense to see further than fifteen feet, but that was more than enough for him to see the men who had already died… Delaney and his nukes from back aft — Manderson, Patterson and Taglia. The living and the dead could only be distinguished by the plumes of vapor from the faces of the living. He heard a hacking cough and turned to see Stokes slump over, the vapor-breathing clouds no longer coming from the Kentuckian’s nose. Pacino waited for sleep. The wind outside howled at a fierce 40 knots, gusts blowing up to 50. With the crazed wind came tons of snow falling horizontally. The snow piled up on the windward side of the bubbleshaped shelter, nearly obscuring it, climbing easily up its sides, threatening to collapse it at any moment. Three hundred yards east of the shelter, near the two foot-thick ice that two days before had admitted the doomed submarine back to the sea and had yielded the pod of the Kaliningrad, came a vibrating, trembling, crashing sound. At first it would not be heard even by someone standing directly on top of the thin ice, so strong was the blasting noise of the wind. But soon the roaring from the ice drowned out even the violence of the storm, and in a massive upheaval the ice that was once the Devilfish’s hole exploded upward. As ice blocks flew from the center of the hole, a huge, black finlike structure emerged, its surface cracked. It was the sail of a United States Navy attack submarine. The USS Allentown.

“Blow the hatch! C’mon, right now!” Commander Henry Duckett was furious. After tracking the noise of the ice camp’s diesel generator it had taken forever to find a polynya. The diesel sounds had died before they could get a decent fix on the noise. In arctic conditions it would do no good just to get close. Duckett had wanted to surface directly under the diesel. A rescue attempt was useless if near-frozen survivors had to walk a mile in the violent blizzard. Finally he had decided this polynya was close enough and smashed the unhardened sail through it, shattering the unprotected BIGMOUTH radio antenna. The plot had shown the estimated position of the diesel over 400 yards into thick ice, which made no sense. But then, it hardly mattered. With the diesel silent for a day there was little chance he’d pull anyone out alive. Still, he had to try. Duckett and Corpsman Denny Halloway stood at the base of the bridge access tunnel hatch with four enlisted men. Duckett was sweating beneath the layers of heavy arctic clothing. Halloway opened the lower hatch and turned a radial switch, energizing the light in the long tunnel through the leading edge of the sail and up to the bridge twenty-five feet above. From the bridge they would lower themselves down, using the handholds in the side of the sail. Halloway started up. Duckett waiting while Halloway opened the upper hatch and crawled into the cramped bridge. Before they could go outside Halloway had to open the clamshells that faired in the bridge cockpit. Already the cold from outside was making Duckett shiver, the sweat from the wait below adding to the cold.

A white glare from the world above lit up the upper-access trunk as Halloway latched the clamshells open, and with it came the thunderous sound of the gale blowing the heavy snow. Halloway shouted down for the landing team to follow him, his shout mostly drowned out by the wind.