Voyage of the Devilfish

“C’mon, damn it, wake up…” Rapier’s eyelids opened, then shut, then opened again. His eyes were out of focus, pupils dilated wide.

Pacino bit his lip, turned and hurried out of the control room and down the stairs to middle level, then up twenty feet forward nearly to the hatch to the bow compartment and down the stairs to operations lower level, to the torpedo room. Once in the forward door Pacino froze. It was worse than he had imagined.

FS KALININGRAD

Novskoyy looked through a dark tunnel with an odd pattern at the end. As the fuzzy edges of the tunnel faded and more of the pattern became clear, Novskoyy realized he was staring, close range, at the vinyl covering of the deck of the control compartment, his face on the cold deck. There was an electric, tingling sensation in his tongue, and when the tingling stopped, the taste of copper. Blood. He moved his tongue in his mouth, feeling the cut in his inner cheek where he had bit nearly through the flesh. The tunnel was gone but his vision was still out of focus. He tried to pull his head off the deck, but the deck came spinning back up again. A wave of nausea and dizziness took over. When the feelings receded he again lifted his head off the deck, slowly, and realized his face was in the periscope well and his feet up on the main-deck level.

He felt his head, pulled back a hand covered in crusty warm ooze and realized he must have opened his scalp. He tried to drag himself upright but soon saw that he already was upright just by pushing his body slightly away from the deck of the periscope well. Which meant the ship, what was left of it, was nearly vertical going downward into a dive. His greatest disappointment was not at losing the ship or even dying, but that he would be unable to transmit the molniya, that his grand plan to neutralize the U.S. was dying with him aboard the Kaliningrad. He had lived to be a man of history… instead, it seemed, he would go down with the most advanced technological underseas craft on earth, a footnote, not an architect of events. He turned to find the other officers in the compartment lying against what once was the forward bulkhead but with the dive was rapidly becoming the new deck. The eerily tipping room was illuminated only by the light of the battle lanterns, their beams uneven, leaving gaps of darkness. On the forward bulkhead below, still strapped into the seat in front of the control panel. Senior Lieutenant Vasily Katmonov stared unblinkingly into his lifeless control screen, his body hanging limply from the straps. If not for his moaning, Novskoyy would have thought him dead. To Katmonov’s left, at the corner of the room below the compartment’s escapepod ladder. Warrant Officer Danalov was collapsed in a heap, eyes shut, face white, a hole in his forehead. Under Katmonov’s seat, lying in the corner of what was once the deck and the forward bulkhead. Captain 3rd Rank Dmitri Ivanov watched his blood drip from his arm onto the deck. His face was a grimace of pain as he held his fractured leg with two hands. Ivanov’s pained breaths were the only sounds in the compartment other than the arcing of a stray electrical short circuit in the aft area now far overhead. To Katmonov’s right, on the forward bulkhead, now almost horizontal from the ship’s dive, Captain-Lieutenant Viktor Chekechev lay half in the shadows, his lower body obscured. What was visible gave little hope… face deathly white, breathing uneven, blood trickling from his mouth. Novskoyy moved to go to Chekechev but dizziness enveloped him and he fell, landing on Katmonov’s control seat. He ducked his head between his knees and hoped the blood would return, and finally the dizziness did ease and his senses returned. The pod, he thought. Get to the pod. He limped across the tilted room and found the pod-control panel. He hit the toggle switch that would open the massive motor-driven hatch. Nothing happened. Fighting dizziness, he looked for a pry bar, any piece of long metal. Nothing. The room was not designed to require pry bars or primitive valve-extension handles. If the deck wasn’t so tilted he might have gotten the wrench that Vlasenko had dropped, the wrench the captain had brought to kill him with. He climbed back to the hatch and started to bang on the lower hatch with a flashlight, hoping Vlasenko would hear and open the pod from inside. No response.

CHAPTER 21

SUNDAY, 19 DECEMBER, 0950 GREENWICH MEAN TIME

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

NORFOLK NAVAL AIR STATION