With no food and no heat and no oxygen.
Lieutenant Commander Alex Crossfield stuffed the tobacco into his cheek. Crossfield had been an all-state offensive lineman at Milton High in the Florida Panhandle. Milton had been more Alabama than Florida, but being in Greenland when he was from the Sunbelt had been hell on earth. Why he had ever taken the promotion to come to this ice hole evaded him. Now almost forty, Crossfield still looked like he could block half the line of scrimmage of the meanest team in the South. He weighed in at 285. His neck was bigger than most men’s heads, his upper arms the size of thighs. A quiet and gentle man — he only needed to glance at one of his men to enforce some discipline. He had risen through the enlisted ranks, promoted in a now defunct chief-to-ensign program, and was fond of disparaging the officer ranks, although he had proved to be one of the best unit commanders Navy Search and Rescue had ever had.
As an enlisted man he had crewed in choppers, then gone on to be a maintenance-crew chief, where he caught the eye of the officer recruiters, who packed him off, put him through a brief hell and thought they’d put some kind of stamp on him by pinning ensign bars on his lapels, like somehow being commissioned would keep the salt from his language and the chewing tobacco from his mouth. It had done neither, and secretly Crossfield was surprised, perhaps even disappointed, that the officer promotion seemed permanent. He was sent to the Coast Guard for three years of cross-training, then to the NATO force commander for search-and-rescue in the Bosnian crisis, avoiding the Somalia involvement. By then he was a junior grade lieutenant, earning what he had been sure would be his last promotion.
An assignment with the Canadian Defense Force had taken two years, and the Canadians had taken to him. Soon he was a full lieutenant and shipped off to the Pacific. After a tour that seemed all too short in Pearl Harbor, he was zipped through a few Air Force SAR training courses, invariably held in the driest, hottest deserts, then dropped off in Greenland.
Greenland. The arctic circle. Where it was dark most of the time and frigid-cold all the time. So far Crossfield had avoided long-term relationships with women. And now that he was thirty-nine, his hair thinning, his muscles slowly but inevitably turning to fat, he was stuck on this godforsaken rock, commanding an SAR unit second to none, with no one to rescue other than the occasional fishing boat with mechanical problems, and with all the tanned blue-eyed Florida blondes over 2,000 miles away.
Crossfield looked over at his operations officer, Dick Trill, the thin mustachioed youngster who still looked like a teenager but wore the uniform of a lieutenant, j.g.
“Let me get this straight,” Crossfield drawled. “We got the worst blizzard of the century blowing outside and we’re supposed to saddle up and go take care of not just one but two submarines in bad trouble. And we know one of them’s on the surface drifting, her position hardly certain. And the second one is sunk, with the position pinpointed. Except by ‘pinpointed’ you mean somewhere in an area the size of Connecticut. Have I got all that right, son?”
“Yes sir,” the ops boss said, a wary eye on Crossfield’s bulk.
“We’re out of business with the choppers, right?”
“Wind’s too high, sir. The V-22s can fly. That’s about it.”
The Osprey, half airplane, half helicopter. Except for one thing. When the winds aloft were too high for the choppers, the V-22s could only fly, not hover. Even if they found the surviving drifting sub, they couldn’t land until the storm eased.
“Well, get your brief ready. I want to take off in ten minutes. That’s one zero for you lieutenants. Oh, I forgot, you’re an Academy grad. For you, I want to take off when the big hand’s on the twelve and the little hand’s on the nine.”
“Yes sir.” He kept a straight face. “The men will be here in two minutes.”
The young man hurried out the door. Crossfield looked after him, then out the window and shook his head. The glass was rattling with the fury of the wind, the snow covering the bottom half, ice starting to form on the top half.
“Those bubblehead submariners sure can pick the day to need help,” he mumbled to himself.
Kane drummed his fingers on the chart table. It had been a half-hour since they had surfaced and sent the distress code.
Since then nothing had happened. The storm continued to blow outside. Inside it was extremely cold. Having nothing to do made matters even worse, the men could only focus on the cold.
Kane decided to take a look topside. Houser had rigged the bridge for surface, the hatches open. Kane climbed up the long ladder, the metal of it threatening to freeze his skin.
Houser lifted the grating for him.
The view was so bright it hurt Kane’s eyes. The skin of his face felt like he was being sandblasted by ice particles.
The fog had eased somewhat since they’d come up, and Kane thought he could make out the shape of the icebergs in the middle distance. Houser, in a leather face shield like a hockey-goalie mask, was looking through binoculars at a steady bearing toward the bow.
“What are you looking at?” Kane asked him.
“I’m not sure I believe it. Captain. I was waiting for it to be a mirage.”
“Let me look.” Kane took the binoculars. “I don’t believe it either.” Kane would have had an easier time explaining the sight of pink elephants.
“The sounds you heard on the UWT—”
“Yes, skipper. “Ho ho ho.’ Merry submarine escape.”
“Good God,” Kane said, staring into the binoculars, seeing the impossible, the dozen orange rafts floating in the whitecaps, all full of men. None of the men moving.
“XO to the bridge,” Mcdonne called from below. Kane stepped aside while Houser lifted the grating for him. The bridge seemed crowded with Mcdonne’s bulk.
“Jeez, it’s cold up here. And I thought it was bad below—”
“XO, check this out,” Kane said.
Mcdonne looked and whistled, then looked again.
“Life rafts? Where the hell did they come from?”
“Who knows? Maybe the Destiny?” Kane said.
“Those rafts look like USN issue.”
“They do?” Kane had never seen submarine rafts.
“Yes sir. Don’t forget, I worked damage control over at navsea during shore duty. We’ve got to do something for these guys.”
“XO, they’ve got to be a mile away. Maybe two. What are you going to do, swim?”
“I’ll get our own rafts out there, pull those guys back here,” Mcdonne said, already going for the grating to the access tunnel. “We’ve got a couple of those canned electric motors from the seal deployment exercise. I could use those attached to our rafts and go over there and get them.”
“Poor bastards are probably already dead,” Houser said, still looking through the binoculars that Mcdonne had given back to him.
“If they’re not, they will be by the time we pull them aboard,” Kane said. “And even if they’re alive then, getting them aboard doesn’t do them much good. It’s almost as cold below as it is up here. We might drift here for days or weeks before anyone finds us. By then the cold will probably take all of us.”
Houser looked over at him. “Hey, skipper. You’re the captain. You’re the one who’s supposed to be so god damned positive. Ditching’s my job, remember?”
Kane stared at the lieutenant. Nodded. Honesty was dumb policy right now.
“You think the XO is really going out there after those guys?”