"Why?" Benson asked. "What's—"
Three detonations boomed out close by, just beyond the Pittsburgh's hull. The fourth explosion shattered fluorescent tubes in their overhead mountings, showering the deck with hot glass and plastic fragments. The hull shuddered, then groaned, as the shock wave slammed through the vessel from port to starboard.
O'Brien's grip was torn from the rack. He was knocked off his feet, slamming to the linoleum-tiled deck with a body-check thud and grunt. Benson landed on top of him, and the two men struggled in a tangle of thrashing arms and legs.
At the same instant, the torpedo room was plunged into absolute darkness, and with a shriek of ripping metal and hissing water, a thin, hard, cold spray blasted across the deck, drenching both men as they tried to rise.
O'Brien managed to get his feet under him. The deck was slippery, the air filled with spray and the shrill hiss and thunder of inflooding water. He was in complete darkness; damn it, the emergency lights should have kicked on!
He heard someone groaning, though it was hard to hear anything over the roar of the water. He heard Chief Allison screaming above the roar, "Conn! Torpedo room! Flooding in the torpedo room! Flooding in the torpedo room! … "
All O'Brien could think of were the training simulations at New London. Time after time he'd been through one variation or another of this exact scenario, locked in a cramped and tightly sealed compartment, plunged into darkness, drenched with icy water. Panic gibbered and bubbled just beneath the surface of his thoughts… but those thoughts were hard and determined. If that water was pouring in through a hole in the hull, he and the other men in the compartment were probably doomed. The watertight door out of the torpedo room was closed and dogged, the compartment flooding fast. They would drown, though the rest of the boat would probably stay dry.
Unless the flooding was so bad it dragged the Pittsburgh, crippled and helpless, to the bottom.
But… it was possible, even likely, that the flood was coming from one of the tangle of pipes forward or on the overhead. The torpedo tubes were wonderfully complex devices, each with a labyrinth of piping to fill, pressurize, and empty it, either with seawater or from onboard tanks. If one of those pipes had given way with the shock of the explosion, then they might be able to shut it off.
If they could find it.
He turned until he felt the spray blasting at his face, leaned into it, and started groping forward through the icy wet black….
"Captain! Sonar! The American may be hit!"
"What do you have, Krychkov?"
"Sounds of flooding, sir. There was another barrage of explosions, but I'm picking up sounds of flooding!"
Dubrynin glanced at the plot board, then looked at his Exec. "We may have him. We need to get past the Marshal Voroshilov, however."
"We're close now."
The Ivan Rogov had completed his turn and been racing to close in tight with the suspected American sub just as the Voroshilov opened fire. The American had apparently slipped directly beneath the ASW cruiser, then turned south, weaving this way and that in an attempt to avoid the Kresta's RBU bombardment.
The American captain's last maneuver, however, had been a clever one, placing the Kresta directly between the American sub and the Ivan Rogov. At that angle, Dubrynin couldn't fire his torpedoes. They were wire-guided, and the Voroshilov's wake might well break the controlling wires. If that happened, there was a chance that they would acquire a new target when they began circling and searching… the Voroshilov.
Dubrynin did not intend to fire, of course. The orders were to force the American to the surface and capture him. But the American couldn't know that.
Still, by putting the cruiser between the Rogov and himself, the American captain had confused the chase, and stopped the two hunters from triangulating his position. With all of the thunder in the water, it was difficult to hear anything, and the American was clever enough to use the noise and the confusion in order to slip away unharmed.
If he was damaged, though, that was the break the Russians were waiting for. If he was flooding, he might be forced to the surface in order to save his vessel. If the flooding were severe enough, the American submarine would sink.
But the Los Angeles class vessel would be raised. The water here was less than three hundred feet deep. Salvage would be difficult, but far from impossible.
There were rumors throughout the Soviet Navy that the American CIA had attempted some sort of recovery operation on a sunken Russian missile sub in the late 1960s. The stories were scarcely credible, almost certainly fictions, because they emphasized that the Russian submarine had gone down — victim of an explosion when she was recharging her batteries — in seventeen thousand feet of water.
Recovery from such depths was flatly impossible. The technology simply didn't exist.
But there would be no such problems lifting a Los Angeles class sub from a mere three hundred feet. The political coup would be impressive; the intelligence coup would be absolutely incalculable….
"Captain! Sonar! Impacts on the water, directly ahead!"
"Eh?"
" Our own ship is firing on us.!"
"Hard right! Hard right rudder!"
Damn the idiots! Either their own weapons-control people had become confused with two targets in the water, or they'd assumed that the Rogov was a second American submarine.
Explosions thundered directly ahead, rocking the Rogov back and forth violently. Several sailors on the bridge were hurled to the deck.
The Rogov had been heading almost directly toward the Voroshilov, intending to pass beneath her keel at a depth of 130 feet. By ordering a hard right rudder, Rogov was turning right, toward the south and parallel to the Voroshilov … but sluggishly, so sluggishly!..
"Surface!" Dubrynin shouted. "Blow all ballast! Surface!'
"Sir, we are close aboard the Voroshilov!"
"And unless those idiots see us, they will continue to assume that we are American! Get this vessel on the surface!"
"Yes, Comrade Captain! Blow all ballast!" With a bellowing, gurgling roar, pressurized air blasted the water out of the Rogov's ballast tanks, and the Russian submarine began to rise….
O'Brien leaned into the icy spray, struggling against the blast. It became more than mere spray. The water pounding against his chest and belly and legs felt like it was hurtling from a fire hose. His legs went out from under him, and he hit the deck, but was able to struggle back to his hands and knees and drag himself forward, using pipes and conduits on the bulkhead at his left side as handholds.
The water, he was pretty sure now, was coming in from the Number One Flood Feed Line, one of the heavier pipes used to fill Torpedo Tube One with seawater before firing. A joint must have split.
But he remembered the location of a valve cutoff, a large red wheel high up on the pipe, just beneath where it vanished into the overhead just to the left of Tubes One and Three, where they angled into the port bulkhead.