The sub, passing down the slipway between them and the defenders, was nearing the water.
“Stop those bastards!” yelled Aussie, swinging the Stinger to his left at the men working the winch and executing his own command before any of the other S/D men needed to. Two of the winchmen simply disappeared under the rocket’s impact; what was left of them splattered over the remaining submarine. Aussie reloaded, got a bead on the second sub in the tunnel, and heard Robert Brentwood shouting, “No! Let’s be sure of the first one before we—”
“Roger!” said Aussie and, turning right, fired the Stinger round into the hotel, a hundred yards front right, just to keep things moving. The next instant he heard a “thwack!” and one of the Delta men, a moment before spread-eagled atop the ice wall for a better shot, was tumbling backward, grabbing at his throat, but there was no hope. The jugular severed, he was spurting blood in jets, tumbling into the slipway, sliding all the way down, smashing into the midget sub’s keel. But by now the defenders, thoroughly demoralized, were retreating to the library as David Brentwood, attaching three “bread rolls”—balls of plastique — on the cable leading from the winch to the sub, pushed in a pencil-size detonator and flicked the fuse selector to “three minutes.”
“Off you go!” he told Robert and, without a look backward, Robert Brentwood and the two remaining submariners slithered down the gutter-shaped slipway, using their boots to brake themselves against the keel, one of them already with a hand on the right side vane to haul himself up to the six-foot, oil-drum-shaped conning tower.
“Not yet!” Robert Brentwood ordered the seaman. “Not till the charge goes. Get forward of midships. Otherwise when that cable blows it’ll—” It blew, the sudden release of tension recoiling one half of the wire back to the winch, making a high, singing noise, the other half whipping toward the sub but catching Lawson, one of the Delta men, and almost severing his right foot. For a second or so he felt absolutely no pain, only astonishment, realizing that in breaking the impact of the wire, he’d saved the life of one of the two submariners with Robert Brentwood. The cable smacked the keel, flopping to the icy slipway and finally lying still, like a dead snake.
The sub was now afloat with Robert Brentwood and the two submariners already down the conning tower. The powerful whiff of sweat assaulted Brentwood’s nose, and for a split second he thought one of the winchmen was hiding in the sub; but there was no one, the sub simply not having had enough time to be aerated by the cold pine smell of the taiga.
By now Choir and the remaining Delta man, Salvini, had the M-19 on its stand and were pouring a terrible fire into the library and hotel. Aussie rested the Stinger tube across the Arrow’s cockpit for a good shot at the second sub. There was a “swoosh” of back blast from the Stinger, a crimson explosion in the tunnel, and a ringing of scrap metal. That GST was gone.
Once inside the midget submarine it was easier than Robert Brentwood and his two crewmen thought it would be. They didn’t need to know anything about the Cyrillic alphabet, the dials self-explanatory to any submariner. The three men moved automatically to the stations they’d have to operate as a skeleton crew. For them, the sensation was very much like moving from a fully automatic automobile to a VW Beetle with standard shift. It was all more or less clear at a glance, the only real difference being the pipes that went round and round the toroidal hull, which allowed for the storage of recycled gaseous oxygen for them to breathe; it also ran the GST’s closed-circuit diesel engine.
The immediate concern was to submerge as quickly as possible. “Hatch closed!” said Johnson, one of the two remaining submariners. The other man, Lopez, stood by the diesel motor control and steerage levers that would allow him to work the relatively primitive yet effective horizontal hydroplanes that would govern their “up” and “down” angles, and the vertical rudder, half above, half below the horizontal plane, to control the yaw, or left-right movement.
“Very well,” Brentwood responded to Johnson. Turning to Lopez, he ordered, “Stand by to discharge.”
“Stand by to discharge, sir.”
Brentwood switched on the small sonar screen by the narrow twin day and nighttime periscopes column, no bigger than six inches in diameter, and checked there was no obstruction ahead or below registered by the “passive” radar sensors that were built into the GST’s hull.
“Dive! Dive! Dive! Open all vents!” he commanded.
“Opening all vents, aye, sir!” responded Johnson, and they could hear the water rushing and gurgling in, its noise transmitted through the pressure hull. Lopez immediately put her nose into a sharp dive, Brentwood wrapping an arm around the scope column as the GST went down on a twenty-degree incline.
“Twenty feet… thirty feet… forty feet…” announced Johnson unhurriedly, rhythmically, multiplying the readout in meters by three, already getting the feel of her.
“Level at one hundred,” ordered Brentwood.
“Level at one hundred, aye, sir… Forty feet… forty-five…” They could hear the icy growl above them as huge plates shifted. The slight movement was unnoticeable to the naked eye, but it was in part a response to the enormous struggle, the pulling apart of tectonic plates far below the five-thousand-foot lake which caused fissures that accounted for the temperature inversions throughout the lake and gave rise often to the fast, warm, upstreaming currents that created thin ice here and there.
“Seventy feet… eighty feet…”
“Stand by to declutch.”
“Stand by to—” began Lopez.
“Declutch!” ordered Brentwood, and within three seconds Lopez had levelled the tiny sub, though it was rocking slightly, and disengaged the generating power from the diesel that had been charging up the batteries, shifting the power to propulsion charge. All three of them were surprised by the lack of any forward sensation other than levelling out. It was an extraordinarily quiet vessel.
“Steer one one two,” ordered Brentwood.
“One one two, sir.”
“Half ahead,” ordered Brentwood.
“Half ahead, sir.” Within five seconds they were running at eight knots. Brentwood, for the first time in the mission, relaxed slightly, nodding his head in admiration at the other two, his mood taken up by Johnson, who, watching the pressure gauges, announced, “That old Italian, Santi, designed it good, eh, Captain?”
“The Siberians built it,” said Brentwood, “but you’re right. We have us a good craft, gentlemen. Even so, ‘fraid it’s going to be hard going with only three of us. At the most only one of us can catch a nap now and then.”
“No sweat, sir,” answered Johnson. Lopez gave a diplomatic smile.
“How deep’s this lake again, sir?” asked Johnson.
“Goes to six thousand,” answered Brentwood. “Eight thousand square miles of ice above us, gentlemen — eight thousand square miles of mud — accumulated silt — beneath us.” They could hear a popping and then a crackling sound — the battle, not abating, still going on at dockside. The noises of the odd grenade or round striking the ice-free entrance — the outflow of the Angara River — sped through the frigid water at over four times the speed they would in the air.