Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

  neither had Midshipman Pacino, both suddenly thrust into a harsher, colder, harder world.

  With that, the images in front of him bifurcated into two images, two simultaneous films of his life taking shape on the other side of his present, on the other side of a decision he must make now. In one future life he left the sinking submarine behind, continuing his life as a sole survivor, but limping through the rest of a dark and meaningless existence. In that life, he wore the label of coward even though no one had ever said that word to him, even though the board of inquiry absolved him of all wrongdoing in the sinking of the Piranha. He walked slowly through that life, his mother a living I-told-you-so, his father even sadder and darker, bearing a burden of guilt for exposing his son to the danger that nearly killed him but succeeded in ruining his life. In this existence young Pacino left the naval service and worked a fifty-year string of short-term jobs, none of them having any meaning, his life absent a wife or children, a dreary gray existence that ended in a hospital bed, alone, after a half century of chain smoking ravaged his lungs.

  In the other image he turned downward and plunged back into the escape trunk, the hatch coming shut behind him, the operating mechanism rotating as he locked himself back into the sinking submarine. The visual part of the images ended then, as if what happened in the hull of the dying sub were too cruel to watch, but he could still feel his own emotions from the outside of the hull as it plunged vertically for the rocky bottom, finally hitting with a shudder and breaking apart, with Patch Pacino inside of it. In this shorter existence, he was reunited with Carrie Alameda, Rob Catardi, Wcs Crossfield, Duke Phelps, Toasty O’Neal, and the rest of the crew he’d grown to love, joining them in the final moments of the Piranha’s death, able to comfort them and help them through their own deaths, but the important thing was that he was with them, and that there was no corrosive guilt in this existence, even if this life did end minutes later at the bottom of the cold ca. He returned to the inside of a doomed ship, but he returned to the people he loved and who loved him, his real family. He died whole. He ended life as himself.

  The final image was himself, clinging desperately to the top hatch of the escape trunk, about to make the decision that would determine who he was. Who am I? he heard himself ask.

  The images darkened and vanished and when they were gone they took with them all memory of having been there. In the tenth of a second after experiencing this multidimensional lifetime review, Midshipman Anthony Michael Pacino remembered none of it. He shook his head, having returned to the moment after being confused for an instant, a mental discontinuity nagging at his consciousness, as if he had blacked out for a fraction of a second. Adrenaline flooded him, his tongue coppery, his heart jack hammering in his chest.

  He had to go, he had to pull the carbon dioxide cylinder trigger and head for the surface. He was reaching for it with one hand, the other on the hatch ring, when something seemed terribly wrong. He was not sure he could explain what was happening even to himself, but instead of pulling the pin on the emergency inflation bottle, he reached downward into the blackness of the escape trunk, to the inside of the hatch seating surface, and pulled himself back inside the escape trunk, then grasped the operating wheel and wrenched the hatch off its open latch and pulled it toward his body, ducking beneath it. The heavy steel of the hatch pushed him back into the flooded escape trunk. The hatch thumped metallically on the seating surface. He spun the operating mechanism and closed it.

  Lack of oxygen was making him dizzy, and he knew he was about to open his mouth and inhale water, and then he would die here, in the flooded escape trunk, alone. He reached over his head and found the top of the air bottle manifold, where the rubber hose of the regulator emerged, and followed it down until he reached the regulator. He plugged it into his mouth and punched the purge button. If nothing happened he was a dead man, and he would drown. What would it be like to die a death by drowning, he wondered. He wouldn’t have to

  wonder for long, he knew. But he could feel the regulator vibrate with the air bubbles pouring out of it. It was time to try to inhale. If he pulled in water instead of air, his conscious mind would shut down, leaving only a few miserable seconds of his reptilian brain to struggle against drowning.

  Pacino inhaled, his eyes clamped tightly shut, but instead of deadly seawater, wonderful life-giving air came into his lungs, and he puffed ten breaths as if he had sprinted a mile. With the air came mental clarity and the realization that he had done something incredibly stupid, diving into the crippled submarine instead of lunging for the surface. But it was too late now, he told himself. He had to get below, to see if he could help the crew.

  It took an instant to realize he had company in the trunk. Chief Keating floated in front of him, his head smashed horribly concave. His nostrils protruded grotesquely from where his mouth should have been. His eyes and his forehead had been smashed deep into his broken skull. He had probably been killed by the force of the explosion Shockwaves, throwing his face into the steel bulkhead. Pacino shut his eyes for a moment, then forced himself to continue.

  Pacino had been required to demonstrate his knowledge of the escape

  trunk mechanisms weeks ago during his diving officer qualifications. He opened the vent valve to connect the top of the trunk with the air in the sub, then opened the drain valve at the bottom to allow the water in the trunk to drain to the forward compartment bilges. The water level dropped dramatically fast, the air in the space slamming Pacino’s eardrums. While he waited he pulled off his fins, noticing that the vent valve had admitted air black with dark smoke. The mist of it made the space hazy in the light of the battery-powered battle lantern. He could smell the acrid chemical stench of it, even though he was breathing bottled air.

  When the water dropped to the deck of the trunk, he rotated the hatch ring furiously and grabbed the hatch to pull it upward so he could drop through the opening. He honestly thought he was ready for anything, but he was wrong.

  17.

  Midshipman Patch Pacino pulled the lower hatch of the escape trunk open, expecting to slide down the ladder to the middle level of the forward compartment to the ladder step-off. The base of the ladder was nestled in an alcove set into a narrow passageway leading forward to the control room, with the captain’s stateroom to port and the radio room to starboard.

  As the hatch came open, a rolling black cloud of toxic gas came boiling up into the escape trunk. The heat of it assaulted Pacino’s face and momentarily blinded him. His eyes teared up, the water pouring out of them—if he’d only had his mask, he thought. It occurred to him that when the scuba cylinders were gone, this was the air he would be breathing, but he clamped his mind shut, knowing that thoughts like that would lead him back out the hatch. He lowered his feet into the hatchway, ready to put his bare feet on the ladder, but he couldn’t find it. He climbed back into the escape trunk, wiped his eyes, and found the battle lantern—an overgrown flashlight the size of a car battery—and unfastened it. He lugged it to the bottom hatch, again dangling his feet over the edge and shining the lantern downward.

  In the haze of the black smoke he could see that there was no ladder, and there was no longer a passageway beneath him, because the walls were gone. The missing walls were bad enough, but it was worse—the deck was also missing. The beam of the flashlight reached all the way into the lower level

  where the torpedo room had been, but which was now a space crowded with wreckage and lit by flickering flames of a fire. Water was pouring into the ship, the level rising visibly, perhaps coming up a foot in the brief second Pacino shined his light straight down. Pacino dangled twenty feet above the surface of the floodwaters of the lower level, and there was no place he could lower himself to. If he dropped straight down, he would break his legs on the shattered equipment protruding from the water. As he stared at the hellish remains of what had been the submarine, the thought entered his mind that everyone had to be dead. Pacino’s ears suddenly popped, hard, from th
e air pressure rising in the space. The ship was sinking, he thought, and the water rushing in was raising the pressure of the trapped air.

  The next thought was that he had been a fool to come back inside the doomed vessel, and that the best he could do was shut the hatch and go back up. No one could have survived this. He still had time, he thought, he could still save himself. He began to pull his legs back into the escape trunk to evacuate when a dim sound made him hesitate. He had been deaf after the first explosion, but some low-level sounds were coming back. The sound he had heard was unmistakably a human scream from a female throat. Pacino froze, uncertain what to do. If he dropped into the water he would be unable to return to the escape trunk except by floating on the rising waters, but by that time the ship would have descended further, to the point that the trunk might no longer work. One word then made its way into his mind—Carrie.

  An uneven explosion suddenly shifted the ship beneath him. He found himself hitting the opposite side of the hatch opening. The escape trunk lurched away from him and slowly faded into the cloud of smoke. He caught his breath, panicking as he realized he was being hurtled into the hull. He felt himself falling and tipping backward, the open maw of the escape trunk invisible in the renewed violent cloud of smoke tinged in orange flames. The regulator dropped from his mouth, the smell of the toxic gas slamming into his senses. In his panic he

  felt his heart thud hard in his chest, and he actually feared for a moment that he was having a heart attack. In the middle of the half-formed thought he hit the water, smashing his back on something large and cylindrical. Pain flashed up and he took a breath to scream, but he was underwater, the flames of the compartment gone, the smoke gone and only the cold black water around him, with just a slight lightening over his head.

  He fought his way up to the brackish surface and took a huge breath, coughing out a lungful of water and vomiting the lunch he’d eaten before donning his wet suit. The air in the space was like putting his face in an old bus’s exhaust pipe-hot and foul and laced with toxic chemicals. Just the smell of it made his mind hazy. He floundered in the water, his vision tunneling to a single point. The dim sounds of a roaring fire in the background were punctuated by his coughs and a distant scream, and the scream reminded him of the escape trunk and his scuba gear, and with a last ounce of strength he found his regulator hose and put it into his mouth and took four deep breaths of the canned dry air.

  His head immediately cleared enough that he could make out the yellow body of the battle lantern that had fallen with him. He lunged for it and shined it out over the water around him, his breaths coming four times a second in his terror. The water had receded, leaving more of the compartment visible. Before the water had been halfway up the lower level, but now he could see the lower-level bilge frame bay. But that couldn’t be true, he thought, and then realized that the ship had taken a drastic down angle, making the waterline fall forward. The surface was at a thirty-degree angle to the snarled remains of the deckplates still fastened to the hoop frames in a few places. The aft bulkhead had a few feet of the middle-level and upper-level deck platforms hanging from it, but the explosion from the torpedo room had blown most of the upper levels into the overhead, crumpling the thick steel deckplates as if they’d been tin foil. The escape trunk was now invisible, obscured either by flames and smoke or by the rising water level. The hatch of the trunk was located at the midpoint of the forward

  compartment, and if it were underwater, not only had the water risen drastically but the down angle had grown catastrophic. It would not be long before the ship was plunging vertically downward. Pacino’s ears popped again, harder this time.

  Another explosion suddenly rocked the vessel, but this one came from aft. The angle suddenly eased slightly, then went back downward. Pacino heard a scream, this one a man’s. He couldn’t make out the words. His panic eased just enough to let in one rational thought—what the hell was he going to do now? The ship had been ravaged by weapons explosions after the torpedo hit. It was plunging to the bottom, and it was possible they could be too deep for the trunk to work. He had to try to swim to it anyway, he thought. He started to swim, and in the darkness of the smoke-filled space, he lost his bearings. The escape trunk had to be ten or fifteen feet underwater by this time. He had to find it before the ship sank any further.

  Pacino looked forlornly around him at the dark, explosion ravaged space. He had been wrong to come back inside, that much was obvious. The escape trunk was lost, and all that remained was less than half of the forward compartment. His ears slammed again as the pressure increased, the smoke so thick he could barely see. A small kernel of reason remained to him. He tried to listen to it. If he followed the surface of the water till it ended, he would either find a slanted frame bay from what had been the ship’s hoop steel sides or the flat bulkhead of the compartment wall. He picked a direction and swam, hitting the sloping side of the hull. He followed it in the dense smoke until he reached a corner, then followed the flat surface—the compartment bulkhead—past jagged pieces of metal and the wreckage of equipment until he found himself at the shut hatch to the next compartment.

  But the next compartment was the special operations compartment, which was no good to him, because it didn’t have an escape trunk. But it had a deep submergence vehicle inside. He could get into the DSV and seal the hatch against the pressure of the deep. It was not as good a solution as a complete

  escape, but it would keep him alive until he could get the attention of someone on the surface. The water was rising toward the hatch, and he had to open it. It occurred to him that if the spec-op compartment was at atmospheric pressure, opening the hatch would be like depressurizing an airplane. He would get blown through the opening and smashed against the opposite bulkhead. If the space were flooded, he would not be able to open the hatch at all. The weight of the water above it would make it weigh several tons. He had to try to find the equalization valve and open it, but though he knew there was such a valve, he couldn’t remember its exact location well enough to find it in the dark, in a half-submerged compartment filled with thick smoke and damaged by a severe explosion. He searched in the smoky vicinity of the hatch, feeling with one hand and holding the battle lantern with the other, perched on a small ledge of decking that remained near the hatch lip. He felt a valve handle, with the characteristic shape of a salvage valve, and was about to crack it open to equalize the pressure between compartments when he heard two screams, one male and one female.

  He turned and saw four heads floating in the black water. One was Catardi’s, one was Schultz’s, one face was turned away from him, and the last was Carrie Alameda’s. The faces he could see were all black, probably from the soot of the fires and explosions. They must have been standing aft of the escape trunk—waiting for Pacino to get out safely and for Chief Keating to return and report on the transfer—when the torpedo hit and the torpedo room warheads detonated, blowing them aft. The remaining crew in the control room had to be dead, since they were directly over the torpedo warheads. Pacino cranked the salvage valve handle, and a hissing noise came from the bulkhead. The spec-op compartment hadn’t been pressurized after all, which was the only good sign so far.

  While he waited for the pressure to equalize, Pacino pulled the bodies close to the deck ledge. The first, Catardi, was unconscious. The second was Lieutenant Commander Schultz, whose eyes were open but glazed over. Pacino tried to see if

  she was still breathing, but it was impossible with his hearing damaged. He had to swim out to the next body, Wcs Cross field, but when he tried to pull the navigator toward the hatch the man seemed much too light. His eyes were also open but unmoving. Pacino reached down into the water, flinching when he found that Crossfield’s body ended at the last ribs, his body ripped in half. Pacino set him adrift and swam to the last body, that of Carrie Alameda. Carrie was conscious and staring at him in terror. He reached for her and she screamed. He tried again and she fought him off. He ducked under the wa
ter and grabbed her belt and hauled her to the hatch. She screamed and kicked him, the blow landing in his crotch, but he kept swimming, fighting off the pain. At the hatch opening she grabbed Catardi, forcing his head underwater. Pacino pulled the captain back up, cursing the insanity surrounding him. Alameda found something on the bulkhead to hold, clutching it in a death grip still staring at Pacino as if he were a ghost.

  He couldn’t wait any longer, he decided, as the ship’s angle inclined further downward. He had to open the hatch and get the three suffocating wounded to the deep submergence vehicle. He couldn’t wait for the compartments to equalize completely, because with the down angle, the half-ton hatch would be too heavy to lift. He’d have to use the pressure difference to blow it open. The salvage connection still whistled, and the pressure gauge was smashed. Pacino decided it was better to risk being catapulted into the spec-op tunnel than have a hatch he could not open.

  He reached out for the latch, the salvage valve still whistling in his ears. The hatch dogging mechanism was not engaged. The latch alone was keeping the hatch shut as the reg for dive specified. Pacino pushed down hard on the latch lever, and the hatch exploded into the space and sucked him through the opening and threw him down the narrow passageway. He bounced off the bulkheads twenty times, the impacts slowing his trip but bruising and injuring him. He smashed into the hatch to the reactor compartment tunnel, far uphill from the

  forward compartment hatch, then rolled the ninety feet back downhill to the forward end of the tunnel, swearing in pain all the way down.

  The pressure of the forward compartment blew the hatch into the spec-op compartment tunnel, but the mechanism designed to latch it open failed as the hatch slammed into it. The hatch hinge springs ruptured and the upper hinge fractured. The other three people near the hatch were blown through it, along with a few thousand gallons of seawater. By that time the momentum of the flying half ton of steel of the hatch ripped the lower hinge reinforcement and sent the heavy three inch-thick lid flying upward into the tunnel. When it came to rest, about halfway between the hatch to the DSV and the forward compartment tunnel hatch opening, it was lying on Carolyn Alameda’s left leg. Alameda had hit her head on the steel deck plate and was mercifully unconscious. Captain Catardi was blown into Pacino, then slid past Alameda down the inclined tunnel deck back toward the hatch opening. Schultz had banged into a bulkhead and came to rest on top of the hatch on Alameda’s leg, her head bleeding from a gash in her forehead. The air in the spec-op tunnel had been fresh, but was immediately contaminated by the rush of pressurized air from the forward compartment.