“Sir?” It was Johnson up forward.
“What is it?”
“I’ve just noticed there’s a second hatch here. We were in such a hurry getting down I just automatically—”
“That’s all right,” said Brentwood, but he was puzzled, even as he told Johnson to secure the second hatch. Before it closed, however, he spied a small pressure gauge, the size of an alarm clock, on the side of the five-foot-wide, six-foot-high conning tower and realized it was an airlock that could be flooded and pumped out, if need be.
“Well, good old Santi!” said Johnson. “Escape hatch and all, eh, Skipper?”
“Yes,” said Brentwood, about to bring up the painfully obvious fact that — in his opinion at least — building an escape hatch, taking up extra space in the already-crowded midget, had been a waste of good material. If a torpedo hit the midget submarine anywhere, he doubted there’d be enough time for anyone to make the airlock. Besides which it would take awhile, once the bottom hatch was secured, to bleed in water through the top hatch, allowing the escaping submariner to pop out and close the hatch so that it could then be pumped empty for the next man — providing you had at least one of the three pumps working after a torpedo attack. By that time the sub would be below its crush depth of around two thousand feet. The slightest hairline fracture then would create an aerosol inside the sub coming in at over a thousand pounds per square inch, such a force imploding the sub flatter than a sumo wrestler sitting on a paper cup.
The passive sonar sensors were operating at full strength, their nine green lights on without a flicker. It was the first moment of silence that they’d had in the mission; Johnson only now had time to look around for the toilet. After the sheer fright of the firelight on the shore, he felt like his bladder was going to burst. “Where’s the head?”
“Right under me,” said Lopez, pointing to the waste chamber. “They thought of everything, Captain. Guy on steerage doesn’t have to go far to take a leak.”
“No one has far to go in here,” said Johnson, looking about the instrument-cluttered sub, so jam-packed with equipment that it was virtually impossible for two men to pass at once. There were only two six-foot-long, two-foot-wide, fold-down plank bunks, whose mattresses were made up of two spread-out SCUBA “Arctic escape” diving suits, the two SCUBA helmets and relatively small, champagne-bottle-size oxygen tanks fixed to the bulkhead only four inches from the nose of whoever used the top bunk for a nap. “Everything in this damn thing’s so small,” complained Johnson, looking at the small 02 tanks.
“Well, don’t worry,” said Brentwood. “Hopefully we won’t have to use them.”
The temperature in the sub was sixty degrees Fahrenheit, but with each man wearing four layers of winter-battle uniform, it felt like a sauna bath. Brentwood set the lead by stripping down to his long Johns; the problem was where to stow even the tightly rolled, sleeping-bag-size bundles of uniform. Lopez sat on one, and they jury-rigged the other two forward and aft of the scope column, Brentwood inspecting the lashings to make sure there was no possibility that the six-inch-diameter day scope, or smaller three-inch night scope, would have any chance of being snagged. The first thing they found out was that while the heat exchange and scrubbing system above the GST took good care of the oxygen, it did what Johnson called “sweet FA” for human sweat. He only hoped it would deal better with the human waste tank under Lopez. They couldn’t risk venting it for fear the sound might give their position away as they began their search for the three other submarines, whose four cruise missile salvos had brought Freeman’s Second Army to a standstill.
One of the nine thimble-size sonar sensor lights was blinking amber, and on the screen they could see “a little dancing,” as Rogers would have called it. Johnson turned up the magnification, giving Brentwood the scale. But even on maximum enlarge, the “dancing” was too small to signify any threat, and Brentwood guessed they were getting tiny “flits” of sound from the gobmianka— “fish”—that were indigenous to the lake and whose eyes, taking up a third of their nine-inch body, could give off a signal. Each female gave birth to around seventeen hundred small ones each fall, and their schools were capable of giving off a boat-size “echo.” The “dancing” had disappeared.
“Wonder how the boys are doin’ up there?” asked Johnson.
“Hope they’re out by now,” said Lopez. “I sure as hell wouldn’t—” He stopped, in deference to Robert Brentwood. Brentwood looked at his watch. “If they can get back in the taiga around there, around Port Baikal, and wait it out till dark, which should be around three p.m. at this latitude, they’ll have a good chance, I think.”
“Yeah,” said Lopez, nodding in agreement, but it was more wishful thinking than conviction.
“They’ll be fine,” said Johnson.
“Yeah.” It was a small thing, Robert Brentwood hardly ever saying “yeah,” but in the close confines of the midget submarine such informality came much more naturally, and was almost necessary, in his view, if they were to work well as a team.
“One of us should take an hour’s nap at a time,” he told Johnson and Lopez, “so that—”
On the sonar screen there was a large blip that had appeared very suddenly, the magnification showing that it was moving at over thirty knots. It was heading straight for the GST.
“Bearing?” asked Brentwood.
“Zero three three, sir,” answered Johnson.
It was on their left quarter.
“Range,” added Johnson, “three thousand yards and closing.”
Lopez was tense at the steerage position, keeping an eye on the sonar screen which he couldn’t see clearly for Brentwood.
“Speed,” announced Johnson, “we got… Jesus! Thirty-two knots!”
Robert Brentwood glanced at the knot meter. The GST had a maximum of only sixteen knots submerged. It couldn’t be one of the three GSTs — had to be a torpedo. The sonar lights were blinking red.
“Two thousand yards and closing. Time to impact…” Johnson began.
“Bring the ship to zero zero niner,” ordered Brentwood, adding, “Firing point procedures. Master zero one four. Tube one.”
“Firing point procedures, master one four. Tube one,” came Johnson’s confirmation immediately, followed by, “Solution ready, sir. Weapon ready. Ship ready.”
There was no panic; this was their “line of country.”
Brentwood watched the bearing, corrected the heading, and announced, “Final bearing and shoot. Master one five.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The T-80 squeaking its way noisily on the narrow road that crossed the tracks leading to the dock couldn’t see the Americans firing from beneath the high ice bank that led up sharply from the shoreline. One second there was a burst of submachine gun fire far left at the tank, then at ten yards farther right the tank gunner saw the fiery tongue of the heavy American M-19 machine gun. It was the M-19 that the T-80 driver took a precise bead on: 203.1 meters, just over two hundred yards away, but the next moment the tank’s laser sight was knocked out by a burst of the bullet-grenades from the American M-19. The T-80 emitted a cantankerous, bearlike growl, its turret slewing as it backed up a few feet for a better defilade position, lowering its bulk for a slighter silhouette, the laser sighting gone. But at two hundred yards the Siberians in the tank, manning the 12.7-millimeter and 7.62-millimeter machine guns and the main 125-millimeter cannon, knew that if they couldn’t knock out the American weapon they ought to be sent back to Novosibirsk gunnery school. The tank belched, the shell’s explosion throwing earth-rooted ice blocks high into the air, creating a wide, jagged, U-shaped gap in the ice wall. But Aussie, Choir, and David Brentwood, knowing what would happen the moment the T-80’s turret had stopped and hearing the whine of the barrel depressing, had abandoned the heavy M-19 machine gun.