“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.”