Voyage of the Devilfish

“It’s an exercise, you fool. You are destroying yourself over an exercise. I’m afraid, Vlasenko, that you have gone quite mad. I am sorry for you, and all the years I wasted trying to make a man of you. You are not worthy of your commission.”

“Admiral, your fleet doesn’t move without orders from you. That’s the reason for this surfacing. Your action begins in… five minutes? Is that when you send the message? Launch the missiles?” He was partly testing, but the look on Novskoyy’s face, his lack of any rebuttal, the sound of Novskoyy’s clicking off the safety on his pistol… it all added up to a horrible confirmation. It was the admiral, not Vlasenko, who seemed to have gone over the edge, to have gone from a threatening deployment to an actual attack mode… The security officer had arrived at the landing from the ladder to the second compartment upper level. He looked at the two men, momentarily hesitating at the remarkable scene of the admiral threatening the ship’s captain with a semiautomatic pistol.

“Warrant, place Captain Vlasenko under arrest.” Novskoyy looked around, noting the clock. It read 0856.

“Put him in the controlcompartment escape pod and shut the hatch. Stand guard at the ladder, when we go deep we will transfer him to a holding cell.”

“Sir, I can take the captain to the storage compartment now,” Warrant Danalov said.

“No. For the moment I want him where I can be sure of his actions. Take him up, shut the hatch and stand guard. And make sure you disable the pod-disconnect circuit. We don’t want the poor man blowing the bolts and rolling onto the ice. There is a better punishment for this man.” The ladder to the escape pod was three meters tall and led to a lower hatch. It was awkward for the warrant to push Vlasenko up the ladder and follow with his pistol drawn, and for a moment Vlasenko considered kicking Danalov and trying to disarm him. Except Novskoyy’s gun was still levelled at him, the admiral’s trigger finger in place. Just before he opened the pod hatch and left the control room Vlasenko glanced at Deck Officer Ivanov, hoping for some sort of action. Any action. Ivanov seemed immobilized. It had all happened too fast, Vlasenko realized. Now, when it was too late, he decided he should have shown Ivanov and others the plans in Novskoyy’s stateroom. It was completely dark inside the pod. Groping for the light switch, Vlasenko felt only the clammy frozen wall of the titanium spherical-pod bulkhead. When he did manage to find the switch, he looked for some way to change the scenario being written below. He saw none. The pod was round, about six meters in diameter, capable of holding two dozen men in an emergency. Wood benches were set against the bulkhead, but most of the occupants would stand or sit on the deck during an emergency ascent. The control station on the starboard side contained a depth gage, currently reading zero meters, and a release circuit tied into explosive bolts below. This was the circuit Novskoyy had ordered disconnected. Vlasenko would try it anyway. He pulled the cover off a switch marked ARM and put the switch in the ARM ENGAGE position. Below it was a lighted green button marked POD RELEASE. He pressed the button. No light came on. No explosive bolts fired. As he had expected. He returned the top switch to the NORMAL position and replaced the cover. Below the circuit was a manual release lever. He tried it, but it too was locked out from below. One last possibility — the upper escape hatch. The hatch was dogged shut with six heavy metal claws tied into a central ring. Vlasenko reached for the ring, startled by how cold it was, and tried to twist it. It wouldn’t budge. Not surprising, considering that the hatch opened up to the outside, above the ice from the leading edge of the teardrop-shaped sail. When the Kaliningrad’s sail popped through the ice cover to the air outside, the water clinging to the metal surface had apparently frozen solid over the hatch fairing.