Seconds stretched… nothing came.
O’Kane opened his eyes. “Status update.”
“Negative on impact, sir. Bogey seems to have, uh, vanished.” The sonar operator spun dials, and hit keys, his face dripping sweat now. “It just… ” He shook his head. “Something’s wrong.”
“Impossible. It must have dived.” O’Kane felt his heart racing. “Let’s give it some space. Full speed astern.” He felt the thrum of the engines kick in and looked to the inside wall of the submarine, as if seeing through the inches of steel plating. His gut told him it was still there.
“Come about, ahead full.” The USS Sea Shadow jumped forward as the high-energy reactor gave the drives immediate power.
Go, go, go, O’Kane silently prayed.
The operator suddenly jammed one hand over his ear cup again. “It’s back — a hundred feet, fifty…” He balled his fists and spun, his face contorted.
“Where…” O’Kane almost yelled the words. “… where the hell is it?”
“It’s… on us.”
The crew and Captain Clint O’Kane were thrown forward as the submarine stopped dead in the water. He held on to an instrument panel and then started to slide, as unbelievably, the huge craft was tilted. The sound of metal under pressure immediately silenced the yells of the crew. There was nothing more terrifying to submariners than the sound of the ocean threatening to force its way in to the men living in the small steel-encased bubble of air below the surface.
O’Kane looked at the faces of his men, now all turned to him. There was confusion and fear, but no panic. They were the best men he had ever served with. For the first time in his long career he decided to break protocol.
“Blow all tanks, immediate surface.”
The order was given, and the sound of air rushing from a compressed state to normal atmosphere, as it filled the ballast tanks, was like a long sigh of relief throughout the underwater craft. O’Kane’s fingers dug into one of the seat backs as he waited for the sensation of lift. It never came.
“Negative on rise. We’re still going down.” The operator’s voice now sounded higher than usual.
The command deck tilted again — nose down, now leaning at an angle of 45 degrees.
“Full reverse thrust!” O’Kane yelled the command, and he immediately felt the engines kick up as the screws turned at maximum rotations. He leaned over the operator again and looked at his screen. He knew the result without having to see the numbers.
“Descending.” The officer now calmly read them out. “800 feet, 825, 850, 880…”
The USS Sea Shadow had been tested to a thousand feet, and could probably withstand another few hundred. But beyond that…
O’Kane exhaled as the sound of hardened steel compressing rose above the thrum of the engines.
“Something has us,” he said softly. It was every mariner’s nightmare — the unknown thing from the depths, reaching out and taking hold. He knew how deep the water was here, but it didn’t concern him. They would all be dead and pulverized long before they ever reached the bottom.
Anger suddenly burned in his gut. But not yet, he thought. O’Kane spun. “Get a Cyclops out there, now.”
Hands worked furiously to load and shoot the miniature wireless submersible that was a torpedo with a single large eye for a nose-cone. Inside the fast moving craft was a high resolution streaming video camera with remote operational capabilities.
“Cyc-1 away, sir; bringing her back around.” The seaman worked a small joystick, turning the six-foot camera craft back towards them.
O’Kane leaned closer to the small screen, waiting.
“Sea Shadow coming up on screen, should be… oh god.” The seaman’s mouth hung open.
O’Kane stared, feeling his stomach lurch. Nothing could ever prepare any man or woman of the sea for what confronted him on that tiny screen. O’Kane pushed himself upright, and slowly looked down at his right hand, spreading his fingers, then closing them into a fist. In the hand of a god, he thought.
Into his head jumped a few lines of a 200-year-old poem by Tennyson, and much as he wanted to cast it out, it sang loud in his mind: Below the thunders of the upper deep; Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea; His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep; The Kraken sleepeth.
No, not sleeping, thought O’Kane, now awake.
He raised his eyes back to the screen and continued to stare at the thing that engulfed his entire submarine. Rivets popped in the skin of the vessel, and then the super-hardened hull started to compress. The 33-foot diameter submarine began to buckle, and he saw that the automated distress beacon had been activated.
“We’re gonna breach.”
The shout came from behind him, and he spun, roaring his commands. “Sound general quarters, increase internal pressure, close all watertight doors, shut down everything nonessential, and watch for goddamn fires.”
The hull groaned again as they continued to descend into the darkness.
“What do we do?” The seaman at the screen looked up at him with a face the color of wax.
O’Kane could feel the crew’s eyes on him; he could feel the fear coming off them in waves. His hand went to the key around his neck. The high tech, prototype submarine had self-destruct capability. He alone could trigger it.
“What do we do, sir?” The man gulped dryly, his face twisted.
If there was one thing O’Kane was sure of; while there was life, there was hope. His hand fell away from the key.
“We pray.”
CHAPTER 1
The interrogation rooms deep beneath the Kremlin were reserved for the most important and high value type of guests. The rooms were a brilliant, surgical white, and insulated to contain the screams that frequently emanated from within. The shiny tiles also it made the individual rooms easy to hose out.
The man strapped to the gurney in Ward-5, Level-9, had a metal spike extending from one of his nostrils, with wires leading from it to a box that sent a mild electrical current into the area of his brain between the hippocampus and amygdala. Captain Robert Graham, former head of the US Military’s Alpha Soldier Research Unit of Fort Detrick’s Medical Command twitched and babbled nonstop. His lips were flaking, split, and parchment-dry.
Doctor Dimitry Liminov rolled back one of Graham’s eyelids to examine the bloodshot orb. Captain Graham showed no physical response to the touch. The prone man babbled on, a zombie husk, more dead than alive, disgorging secrets like a recording machine set on eternal playback as his life drained away.
Liminov wrote some more on a chart, threw it onto the nearby steel table, and then pushed out of the reinforced double doors. As they hissed closed, the single glass porthole in one of them showed two huge guards stationed outside. The final click sounded, leaving nothing but the soft fevered whispers of the man on the table.
Set into the concrete floor, behind the few items of furniture, there was a six-inch grate over a drain, and if anyone had looked closely they would have seen the tiny red electronic eye that extended on the end of a questing worm that rose up and then turned slowly to further investigate the room. After another second, it snapped back down and disappeared.
Just below the sound of the babbling man, there came another noise — a low grinding accompanied by a gentle vibration. It continued for another twenty minutes, before a circle appeared around the outside of the drain, this one nearly two feet wide. A wisp of smoke lifted from it as searing heat was exposed to the air for a moment and the noise was shut off. Once again the questing worm poked its head up to examine the white-tiled room, and judging all was in order, snapped back.