Voyage of the Devilfish mp-1

by Michael Dimercurio

  The barrel, he noted, tasted metallic as he put it to his mouth. He took one mad look out the window, at the panoramic scene of a Washington, D.C, still intact, and pulled the trigger.

  In surprise, he realized his calculations had been incorrect.

  It seemed to hurt forever.

  NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

  COMSUBLANT HEADQUARTERS

  Dawn. But no sunlight made its way to Flag Plot of COMSUBLANT headquarters buried deep underground. Admiral Richard Donchez looked like he had been in a fifteen-round fight and lost. Deep dark bags surrounded his bloodshot eyes. His favorite Havana had gone out. He pulled a fresh one from his jacket and tried to light it but, of course, the Piranha lighter was out of fuel. So was he. Pooped, was the word. He stood in front of the Arctic Ocean plot that showed the ice cap in green. The graphics were being updated by the computer, and as he watched the red X and the black X were replaced by a black circle and a red circle about 400 miles south of the pole roughly north of Novaya Zemlya. Circles meant sinkings. As he stared in disbelief, the watch officer hurried up to him.

  “Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Sam Lockover said, “SOSUS reported two explosions at the positions indicated a few hours ago. They, well, apparently they failed to report the explosions due to the priority of reporting the Russian boats offshore…”

  “Go on.”

  “The first explosion was conventional. The second was… nuclear.” Lockover paused, Donchez’s looks could kill. “After the second explosion SOSUS heard the breakup of one hull — could have been our unit up north, the Devilfish, or the OMEGA class she was trailing. A few minutes later there was a sound like an emergency-blow or deballasting system. Within another few minutes there was a sound of a collision between one of the hulls and the ice.

  The collision sound was so extreme that we don’t think there would be any way a hull could have survived.”

  “Lot of god damned theories and hypotheses, you’ve got there,” Donchez said, feeling a shot of hot bile in his stomach. The Devilfish might be down, its crew and Michael Pacino could be dead. Or stranded, surfaced at a polynya with no radio. “Call COMAIRLANT and get a C-130 or a P-3 up there to look around, maybe one of the Keflavik units or one out of Norway or Alberta if they can vector one in quick. Call CIA PHOTOINT and on the next KH-17 satellite pass have the infrared and visuals trained on the SOSUS position of the sounds. Somebody could be up there on the ice…”

  “Sir,” Lockover said, feeling damn uneasy to be the messenger of this news, “there’s a bad storm up there, I mean it’s from Greenland to Siberia, gale-force winds, heavy snow. We’re grounded. COMAIRLANT won’t fly anything up there and neither will the Marine Arctic Resupply units flying C-130’s. We could get a jet up for high altitude surveillance but doubtful we’d see through the storm clouds. And we just had a KH-17 pass. Kodiak’s on the phone to CIA now.”

  Kodiak hung up and came over to them.

  Donchez waited.

  “The satellite didn’t see a damned thing, sir. Not even a polar bear. There’s a chance it’s just not seeing through the blizzard… more likely there’s nothing up there for it to see.”

  It was 1973 all over again, Donchez thought. Another U.S. submarine sunk at the pole by a Russian. Another Pacino, on the bottom. Unbelievable.

  “Was there a SUBSUNK transmission from our boat to the satellite?” Lockover shook his head.

  “The Russians? Did one of theirs transmit a distress signal?”

  “Sir, we’re trying to find out now through their embassy but things are pretty confused up there. And, sir, even if there was a distress signal I don’t think anybody is going to get up there for a while with this storm. It could last a week, maybe more.”

  Donchez glanced at the Arctic plot, looking for the Allentown. Her X flashed, but her position was a guess, SOSUS being unable to hear her in spite of her damaged sail. For a moment he considered sending Allentown under the ice cap, then rejected the notion. One lost submarine was enough. The Los Angeles-class Allentown under the ice cap would never survive… no SHARKTOOTH underice sonar, no strength in the flimsy fiberglass sail. She’d get lost and never emerge. Goddamned L.A.-class, they were a giant step backward in submarine technology.

  “Which Piranha is furthest north?” Donchez asked. “One that isn’t in trail?” Lockover turned to a computer console, typed into it, returned with a printout.

  “Barracuda is off the coast of Maine, sir.”

  “Vector her to the SOSUS position of the explosions, max speed. Get her up there fast.”

  “Sir,” Lockover said, “she’s not loaded out for more than a few days. She was just about to head for overhaul at Portsmouth. She’ll run out of food by the time she gets to the GI-UK gap. And she has no arctic gear onboard—”

  “We may well have men dying up there. Tell her to flank it. I want a report soon as she can get to a polynya close to the SOSUS position. And watch the weather. The minute it breaks, I want aircraft scouring that ice pack.”

  Lockover left to get the messages out. Donchez looked up at the plot. He’d done what he could for now. He got on the NESTOR circuit to Admiral McGee in the airborne DC-9. Maybe the admiral could get an answer out of the Russians.

  ARCTIC OCEAN

  POLAR ICECAP SURFACE

  Pacino woke up with a start from the sound of the men entering the shelter, shouting and talking to each other in excitement. Rapier came first, followed by Stokes and the others, some of them huddled together carrying men into the shelter. The men being carried in had white frozen faces. Pacino found Rapier, who had started to boil snow for a pot of coffee.

  “Jon, what’s all this? Who the hell are they?” Rapier’s face was crusted white with snow and ice, now starting to melt and drip down his face. If he was surprised by Pacino’s use of his first name instead of the usual “XO” he didn’t show it.

  “We… we found” — Rapier shivered — “God, it’s cold out there. We found an escape pod, I’m guessing from the OMEGA. Had Russian writing on it. It was under the ice, freed up, for God’s sake, by the Devilfish when she went down.”

  Pacino winced.

  “We got four guys out of the pod,” Rapier went on. “One was already dead. We left him on the ice by the pod. The others were damned near gone from the cold.”

  Stokes and Delaney were taking the Russian survivors’ wet half-frozen clothing off and wrapping them in wool blankets. All three were unconscious. Pacino looked at their gray faces. Two were older, probably warrant officers or chiefs or whatever the Russian equivalent was for senior enlisted men. He was anxious to hear their stories, what had happened to them, how they had survived in the pod, how the pod had gotten out onto the ice.

  Pacino ordered them to be clothed in spare arctic parkas and watched for signs of coming to. For a long time he stood over the two Russians, wondering what their story was, if they had families. And for the first time in a long time allowed himself to think of his family, the last time he’d seen Tony, the weekend before the Allentown OP when the two of them had gone to Mount Trashmore Park. And Hillary, who became even more desirable through the cushioning of memory…

  “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 b
e 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!”

  “What happened. Captain?” Vlasenko asked, “I was under arrest, I don’t know what happened, although I know what Admiral Novskoyy had in mind. When he found out he had me locked up.”

  Novskoyy. The real enemy. Pacino looked at the older Russian, now regaining consciousness. His face was gray and lined, his breath wheezing in and out of blackened, badly chapped lips, his skin afflicted with frostbite. Blood had matted into a mess above one eyebrow, and his face was swollen and bruised.

  It was Vlasenko who finally broke the silence, his voice tight with anger. “This is Admiral Alexi Novskoyy, Supreme Commander of the Northern Fleet—”

  Pacino stopped hearing. Admiral Novskoyy, the man who had murdered his father, the man he had considered his nemesis. Instinctively, his right hand clenched into a fist, cocked itself at his shoulder. He had almost let it go, wanted to let it go, until he looked at the man’s face. Novskoyy was half-conscious, beaten up. It would be like beating a dumb animal. The fury that had been in him was gone, sunk to the bottom of the ocean with the hull of the Devilfish. Right now they were both seemingly condemned to this white bubble in the arctic, waiting for a rescue that grew less likely with every hour. Waiting for death. Pacino dropped his fist to his side as Novskoyy fell back into unconsciousness.

  NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

  COMSUBLANT HEADQUARTERS

  Admiral Donchez came into the blast door to Flag Plot, met by the grim face of Watch Officer Kodiak.

  “No word from the polar icecap, sir. And no break in the storm.”

  “Anything from the Russians? Indication of a distress call?”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  Donchez looked up at the Arctic Ocean plot. A blue X flashed in the Barents Sea, indicating the uncertain presence of a U.S. submarine. The legend next to it read USS ALLENTOWN SSN-764.

  “Any word from Allentown?”

  “No, sir. But we weren’t expecting any, were we?”

  “No, guess not.” Donchez looked over at the Atlantic plot, now nearly empty. A single blue X flashed, the legend below reading USS BARRACUDA SSN-663.

  “We’ve got other bad news, sir. The Barracuda, the unit you’re sending to the polar ice cap to investigate the explosions… she’s reported a casualty in the air-conditioning units. Total loss of the lithium bromide plant. And the R114 unit is leaking refrigerant all through the engine room, contaminating the atmosphere. They’ve had to shut down all electronics up forward — sonar, fire-control and navigation. Temperatures aft are 120 degrees. The crew are in gas masks. We have to call her back, sir. Without sonar she really shouldn’t even be submerged. Her captain wants an answer.”

  Don’t we all, Donchez thought. “Tell the Barracuda to surface and come home. Anybody else still at sea? Any other Piranhas?”

  “A few could be ready to go in a day, maybe even hours. But we’d want to load them out with food and arctic gear. And, sir, by the time they got to this explosion position two weeks will have gone by. Sir… there are no detects under the ice cap, no infrareds in the last half-dozen KH-17 passes, and this storm is severe enough that even if there were any survivors yesterday there’s little possibility any of them are living through today… I think we need to face the likelihood that the crew of the Devilfish are dead—”

  “Send up a replacement for the Barracuda,” was Donchez’s angry reply. “I want a Piranha submarine headed north by tonight. Make it happen, dammit. Any problems with that, you let me know.”

  Donchez left Flag Plot and headed back to his office, thinking that the Piranha class boats were getting too damn old. Maybe he was, too. In his office he cleared his desk and went to the window overlooking the expanse of grass up to the fenceline, to the Stingray monument across the street. Two cranes were hoisting the marble slab up into position, getting ready to put it down on its foundation. Donchez stood there, unmoving, watching. And wondering what he was going to tell Hillary Pacino and her son.

  POLAR ICE SURFACE

  Novskoyy had not regained consciousness. Vlasenko, now sitting up, was telling the Americans around him about the Kaliningrad and her mission.

  “What was the message he was transmitting? What did it mean?” Pacino said. Vlasenko told him, hesitantly, feeling almost personally responsible even though he had been imprisoned in the pod by Novskoyy. Pacino looked at Novsko
yy, feeling not only outrage but frustration — here was his father’s killer, the object of his revenge… and yet what would be the satisfaction in doing what he badly wanted to do when the man was half-dead, his ship on the bottom too? Pacino looked over at Rapier, then back to Vlasenko.

  “Did he transmit the go-message?” Vlasenko looked grim as he felt. Outside the wind howled, shaking the walls of the shelter.

  “I can’t say. I told you, I was arrested and put into the escape pod. Was there any word from your headquarters?”

  “Captain Vlasenko, we can’t very well receive radio signals under ice. We can only get an extremely low frequency signal, transmitting at a snail’s pace.”

  “Snails?”

  Pacino shook his head. “Point is, there was no word from our headquarters. But then,” Pacino added, not even wanting to consider the horror, “they might have been taken out by a cruise missile, maybe that’s why so far there’s been no rescue attempt.”

  “Perhaps you collided with us in time to stop the transmission…”

  “Maybe, maybe not…”

  On the other wall of the shelter Lieutenant Commander Matt Delaney started coughing. Rapier, Pacino and Vlasenko rushed to Delaney’s side of the shelter. Delaney lay in his own blood which he had just retched to the plastic floor. The chief corpsman tried to clear his throat, and after a few minutes struggling, Delaney was quiet and able to lean back against the wall.