Stubic groped his way into the berthing area. “Don’t bother trying to hide from me. I can hear you.”
Jerry pulled himself farther along the floor. Stubic moved through the bunks and sniffed the air, trying to catch Jerry’s scent.
“Who are you? Spicer? Goodrich? No.” Stubic inhaled voluptuously, like a kid smelling candy. Then he grinned, his fangs glistening in the red light. “White.”
Shit. Jerry glanced at the curtained doorway of the berthing area—too far away for him to make a break for in this condition. He thought about shouting for help, but that would just give Stubic his exact location, and he knew how fast these creatures could move.
“Aren’t you tired of always following orders, White? ‘Aye, sir. No, sir. Please, can I have some more, sir.’”
Stubic was inching closer. Jerry pulled himself forward, gritting his teeth against the pain in his injured arms. He slid from behind one bunk to behind another, but the doorway still seemed miles away. Stubic cocked his head, listening to the sound of Jerry’s coveralls sliding against the deck, and gave a wry smile.
“Instead of doing what you’re told, wouldn’t you rather take what you want instead? Answer only to yourself and your desires? Wouldn’t you rather be at the top of the food chain, instead of the bottom?”
Jerry’s arms hurt so much, he could barely move them, but he had to keep going. He grabbed the foot of the bunk and pulled, sliding himself around it. Stubic paused, tilting his head to listen. The smile remained on his face, sharp and malevolent.
“I can make that happen for you, White. I can give you the gift of the green-eyed queen. I can make you like me, and then you’ll never have to follow orders again.”
Green-eyed queen? What was he talking about? Keeping his eyes on his pursuer, Jerry continued pulling himself toward the doorway. Suddenly, Stubic moved, fast as a cat, from where he had been standing amid the bunks. Jerry turned, and there he was, standing right before him, blocking his way. Jerry’s heart sank. Stubic had known where he was all along, and had only been toying with him.
In a single arcing movement, Stubic picked Jerry up off the deck by his coveralls and slammed him into the side of a triple-decker bunk so hard that the curtain rod came loose and fell to the deck with a loud metallic clang. Jerry’s face and broken knee shrieked in agony.
He gritted his teeth against the pain. “We killed the others. We’ll kill you too. One blind vampire can’t take over an entire submarine.”
Still holding him by the coveralls, Stubic grinned, his lips pulling back from his fangs.
“Who said there would only be one of us?”
***
“Captain, sir, there’s no cavitation coming from the other sub,” Tim reported, moving one earphone of his headset aside so he could hear. “I don’t understand it. The engine sounds Soviet, but the screw isn’t making any noise at all.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Spicer,” Captain Weber said from the door of the sonar shack. “A bear’s screw is loud as a lawnmower. They’re reliable that way.”
“I know, sir. Is it possible she’s one of ours? We’re close enough to Alaska that they might have come looking for us.”
The captain shook his head. “The navy wouldn’t risk sending another boat into Soviet waters just to find us.”
“Then I really don’t understand what this is, sir,” Tim said.
The captain straightened, his eyes widening in realization. “This is it, Spicer. This is what they sent us to find! The prototype submarine. She’s real, and we’ve found her.”
Tim looked at the screen again, at the shapes the sonar vibrations were creating within the cascading colors. The next generation of Soviet submarine? Was it possible? He felt as if he were looking into the future. Ten years from now, twenty, thirty, would some other sonar tech be sitting where Tim was and looking at the same readings on their screen, listening to the same sounds? And if they were, would they have learned about this very moment during their training—the moment a US Navy submarine picked up the first of a brand-new class of Soviet submarine on sonar?
“Are you recording her?” the captain asked.
“Aye, sir,” Tim said. “She still hasn’t detected us. If she had, she wouldn’t be running this loud.”
“Keep an eye on her,” Captain Weber said. “And keep recording. I want to bring back as much information as we can.”
A loud metallic clang in Tim’s earphone startled him, reflected in the sonar display by a sudden bright flare. Aukerman winced in pain and threw his headphones off.
“What the hell was that?” Aukerman asked.
“Whatever it was, it came from inside Roanoke,” Tim replied.
“Shit,” Aukerman said. He slipped his headphones back on.
On the screen, the readings for the Soviet submarine shifted.
“Captain, sir, I think she heard us,” Tim announced. “She’s turning our way.”
“Has she engaged active sonar, Spicer?” Captain Weber asked.
“Not yet, sir.”
Then he heard something else on his headphones—something that made him go cold. The unmistakable sound of torpedo tube outer doors sliding open.
***
“This is how we survive,” Stubic said, pinning Jerry against the bunk. The vampire’s blind, unfocused eyes seemed to look through him, into his soul. “We feed and multiply and spread the gift of the green-eyed queen. And what better place for us to thrive than in the darkness of the ocean?”
“My friends will stop you,” Jerry said through gritted teeth. “Even if you kill me, they will take you down. It’s over. It ends here.”
Stubic laughed—a hideous sound that raised goose bumps on Jerry’s flesh.
“You’re missing the point, White. For my kind, there is no end.”
Stubic’s groping hands found Jerry’s head and pushed it to the side, exposing the neck. He bared his fangs and leaned in.
***
Captain Weber stood behind Tim’s chair and looked at the sonar screen. “If this bear detects us, we’re as good as dead. We broke into her house. If she shoots us, it’s a freebie. And we’d be fools to fire on her first with those ships on top of us.”
He was right. If Roanoke torpedoed the Soviet sub, the two ships on the surface would hear the explosion and drop their acoustic gear. Roanoke would be located, torpedoed, and its presence labeled an act of war. With both superpowers’ fingers on the button, Tim could imagine things escalating quickly.
He said, “Sir, my best guess is that she’s about ten miles out and closing. Her torpedo doors are open, but she’s still on passive sonar. She may not know for sure yet that we’re here.”
“We’re going to have to sneak out of here.” Weber ducked back into the control room and said, “Maintain current speed and depth. Slow and low, gentlemen—that’s how we’ll get out of this.”
On the sonar screen, the Soviet sub adjusted its bearing, diving to Roanoke’s depth until it was aligned behind them. Tim’s chest tightened. His throat went dry. Had they detected Roanoke, or was this just an unrelated change in their bearing? It was possible the bear was trying to lose itself in Roanoke’s baffles—the cone of water directly behind the sub, which the hull-mounted sonar couldn’t hear through. It was an unintentional blind spot caused by the need to insulate the sonar array from the noise of the submarine’s own engines, and one the Soviets had learned to exploit. It was also possible she was lining up to fire a torpedo at them. If only there were some way to know for sure whether they had been detected—some other way than being fired on.
The only way to get the bear out of Roanoke’s blind spot was to clear the baffles, but that would mean taking a sudden hard turn to look back into it. Not only would that take them off course, but changing their bearing that drastically would definitely alert the Soviets to their presence. And as the captain had said, considering how close Roanoke was to the Rybachiy sub base, the Soviets would have no qualms about firing on them.
The Soviet sub blinked in and out of sonar as she passed through the baffles. Tim’s whole body tensed. He glanced over at Aukerman, who looked as nervous as he felt, and was probably wishing he were back in the reactor room.
According to the sonar readings, Roanoke was passing right under the Sverdlov. The cruiser was thirty years old, and Tim hoped she was hard of hearing. If her listening equipment was as out of date as the rest of her, they would pass by undetected. If not, acoustic gear would rain down all around them.
He held his breath, and then they were past the Sverdlov. Tim sighed with relief. But the sub was still behind them, still searching for them. Tim strained his ears for any sound of torpedoes being readied, but so far the bear had taken no further aggressive action.
“Stay the course,” Captain Weber told the crew at the helm. “Slow and steady.”
Tim didn’t understand how he could sound so calm. With each passing second, he was more convinced the Soviets would spot them and that would be the end of it. Either they would be destroyed like the South Korean 747, or they would be forced to surface so they could be boarded, the crew taken prisoner and probably tortured for information while Soviet engineers took Roanoke apart.
The sub winked in and out of sonar. Tim wiped the sweat from his forehead. Next to him, Aukerman did the same. In his headphones, the Soviet sub sounded so loud, Tim felt as if he were sitting in its engine room.
He thought back to those long winters of his childhood, how he had stared into the seemingly unending darkness and prayed for daylight. It had come eventually, as it always did, but there were times when he felt its return as a personal triumph, as if the sun had deigned to come back only because he had prayed hard enough. It was a childish way to think, believing the strength of his wish had somehow affected the world around him. But now, after everything else that had happened, with their lives hanging in the balance once more, he found himself feeling that same yearning with the same intensity, as though he might get them out of this alive if he just prayed hard enough.
***
Stubic leaned closer, his sharp teeth inches from Jerry’s neck. Jerry winced. He couldn’t let this happen. He didn’t want to die, didn’t want to become one of these creatures. But he was pinned against the locker and too weak to fight.
His hand grasped for anything he could use as a weapon, anything to make Stubic let go of him, but what could he possibly bring to bear against the vampire’s unnatural strength? His hand brushed the gauze of the splint on his knee—and then one of the wooden stakes splinting his leg.
He slid the stake up and out of the gauze, doing his best to ignore the screaming pain in his knee. With all the strength he could muster, he drove the sharp end into Stubic’s chest.
The blind, glassy eyes widened in surprise. Stubic hissed and drew back, releasing him. Jerry fell to the deck. The pain in his broken knee was worse than anything he had ever known.
Stubic dropped to his knees, hands grasping the stake protruding from his chest. Then, to Jerry’s horror, he laughed and began to pull the stake out.
“You’re too weak to drive it in all the way, White. Why fight me? Think how strong you’ll be when you’re one of us. Not just the new strength in your transformed body, but strength in numbers. Our kind is connected in ways you can’t imagine. Our bodies. Our minds. I can hear the green-eyed queen in my head, urging me to grow our numbers, to fill the darkness of the ocean with our kind. When you rise, you’ll hear her too.”
“If I wanted to hear what a vampire was thinking,” Jerry said, “I wouldn’t be sitting here praying for you to shut the fuck up already.”
He threw himself on top of Stubic, taking him down to the deck, the weight of his body pushing the stake deeper into the vampire’s chest. Stubic screamed as it pierced his heart. Blood sluiced from his mouth. He convulsed, his limbs smacking against the deck, but this time there was no escape from the stake. Jerry leaned on it with all his strength until Stubic quit thrashing.
He looked down at the dying vampire. “If you really do share your thoughts with each other, tell your green-eyed queen you failed, and that she can kiss my still-living human ass.”
Stubic’s blood-slick lips stretched into a smile. He spoke his last words then—words that chilled Jerry to the core. And with a last wheezing, triumphant laugh, the vampire died.
***
“Captain, she’s slowing and turning around!” Tim shouted.
Captain Weber came into the sonar shack and looked past Tim to the screen. “We’re not out of the woods yet, Spicer. Let’s make sure she keeps going.”
They kept watching the screen for another fifteen minutes. Tim heard the torpedo doors close again, after which the bear continued sailing away and didn’t turn back. He couldn’t believe it. It was as though his prayers had been answered. The Soviet sub hadn’t detected them, and neither had the surface ships. No torpedo had been fired. No one had been captured and interrogated. Roanoke had the proof it had been sent to find: that the prototype submarine existed. And the Soviets were none the wiser that a US nuclear sub had violated their sovereign territory.
The captain clapped Tim on the shoulder and announced, “We’re clear.”
Tim let himself breathe again. Seated at the next console, Aukerman let out a spontaneous cheer and high-fived him.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
They had to keep sailing slow and low, even through international waters, to avoid detection by the Soviet boats that patrolled nearby. It took 26 hours for Roanoke to reach a suitable place to surface in US waters—a spot 30 miles off Attu, the westernmost of the Aleutian Islands, and the westernmost point of land in the United States. By then, the battle lanterns mounted on the bulkheads had started to lose power. They were never intended to be the boat’s sole source of light for days on end. The crew used some of the Supply Department’s extra six-volt batteries to bring light back to the essential parts of the submarine—the control room on the top level; the galley, mess, and head on the middle level; and the torpedo room on the bottom level—and stockpiled all the remaining batteries they would need to keep the lights burning on the long trip home.
Before they surfaced, Captain Weber ordered Roanoke up to periscope depth. The instrument rose out of the floor, and he peered through the eyepiece, searching the surrounding waters. When he determined it was safe, he gave the order.
“Rig for surface.”
When Tim heard those three beautiful words from where he sat in the sonar shack, he had to fight back the tears. After being trapped in the dark, confined space of the sub with those creatures, the idea of breathing fresh air again, of seeing the sky again, was overwhelming. For a moment, he feared he might lose the fight and start weeping right there in front of his sonar screen. He supposed no one would fault him if he did.
The surviving crew had been dealing with their stress as best they could. Some spent what little rack time they had curled in a fetal ball behind the privacy curtain and crying softly to themselves. Others channeled their emotions into food, eating second and third helpings of the cold sandwiches, canned goods, and cereal Oran Guidry prepared for them.
The bodies of the dead had been stored with as much care as possible in available rooms on the middle and bottom levels. There were a lot of bodies, more than Tim wanted to think about, and their numbers included the eight crewmen who had become vampires. As much as Tim hated it, there was just no room to store the vampire bodies separately.
When they had a moment to spare, crewmen gathered outside those makeshift morgues, ignoring the stench that emanated from them. Some bent their heads in prayer. Others yelled curses at the vampires and banged their fists angrily on the bulkheads. It was another of the strange ways the crew dealt with what happened. But it wasn’t enough. Everyone’s nerves were on edge. Arguments broke out over nothing, and Tim had personally broken up two spats in the mess that were about to turn physical. The men needed to get back on land. They needed this underway to be over.
So did he.
Jerry was still confined to his rack in the berthing area. Whenever Tim could, he left Aukerman in charge of the sonar shack and went down to visit his friend. Jerry was in even worse shape than before. The fight with Stubic had aggravated his broken knee and briefly reopened the wounds in his arms. He slept a lot, which was helping him heal, but Tim figured he wouldn’t mind being woken up to hear the good news that they were back in US territory.
“Spicer,” the captain said, coming into the sonar shack after the submarine had breached, “join me on the bridge.”
“Aye, sir!” Tim said, springing out of his seat.
The two of them put on their parkas and climbed the ladder to the bridge. Tim could barely contain his excitement. His breath came quick and hard. His need to see the world outside the submarine was stronger than he had realized. Tim opened the hatch that led out to the sail, and the two of them stepped up. The freezing wind hit him like a cold slap in the face, but he didn’t care. It was fresh air, and he was outside. That was all that mattered.
The North Pacific was quiet, a blessing on a body of water known for its squalls. Tim looked around at the frigid stillness that surrounded them. In the distance, the dark snowcapped mountains of Attu Island rose against a sky clear and lit up with stars. The thin crescent moon hung so low it looked almost fake, like a stage prop in a high school play. Tim had hoped to see the sun, but when winter hit the Aleutians the sun didn’t cross the horizon for weeks at a time.
“I want to bury them here,” Captain Weber said, his breath steaming the air in front of him.
Tim nodded. “It’s a peaceful place for it, sir.”
The captain took a deep breath of cold air. “After what they’ve been through, these men deserve a peaceful place to rest. And a beautiful one. I can’t think of a more peaceful, more beautiful place than this.”
Tim looked out at the quiet, still waters and agreed.
There were 78 corpses aboard Roanoke. With 23 survivors, that meant the vampires had flushed 39 men out of the torpedo tubes. Many of them had been stuffed into those tubes alive, then drowned once Matson flooded them. Tim couldn’t imagine the extent of their terror at the end. Their deaths would have been mercifully quick, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t died in fear. None of them deserved that. If only there was a way to go back into Soviet waters, collect all those bodies, and give them a proper burial at sea like the others …
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