The radio made a beeping sound, and the red light began to blink rapidly.
“We’re almost out of time. Do your duty, Pete. Do what you know is right. We’ll be waiting for you, we’ll know when you’ve disabled Polaris. But don’t wait much longer or it will be too late. We can, and will, proceed without you.”
The radio clicked off, and the light turned dim. Pete glanced around, and then placed the radio back in the alcove where he’d found it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
McCallister awoke from a quick, shallow sleep, never deep enough to escape his small prison even in a dream.
He looked over the small egg-shaped cell in which he found himself, and once again saw no possibility of escape. Ironic, inside a system that had been expressly designed to give the crew a chance to escape a doomed submarine.
The escape trunk consisted of three hatches. One below his feet, which was now covered by a steel grate and represented his only window into the ship he once commanded. The second was directly over his head, and was designed to mate up with a rescue vehicle. The third was at his knees, and represented the “swim out” hatch that would be used to escape the submarine with no rescue vehicle present. For either of the escape hatches to work, the trunk had to be flooded with seawater, until the pressure inside the cylinder was equal to the surrounding sea pressure. At that point, the outer hatches could swing open easily and allow egress. That’s why the trunk made such an ideal prison — if it could withstand thousands of pounds of sea pressure, it could withstand the worst that a recalcitrant prisoner could throw at it.
Even with sea pressure equalized, escape from a crippled submarine was fraught. In a locker below the trunk, in the same locker that held the wrench that had bolted him in, were exposure suits and hoods that filled with air and helped pull submariners to the top. As they ascended, the air in their lungs would expand with the decrease in pressure, requiring that they exhale forcefully the entire way. Generations of submariners had learned to shout HO! HO! HO! on the way up. In an earlier era, the skyline of every submarine base was dominated by a cylindrical dive tower in which submarine crews practiced the procedure to escape a submarine, which was usually the capstone of training, a rite of passage, the ultimate skill of a submariner. Doctrine stated that the procedure could work at depths up to six hundred feet. In the nuclear age, new submariners were often shocked to learn that they nearly always operated in water much, much deeper than that.
McCallister stared at the flood valve and contemplated opening it. Water would pour into the trunk, then into the ship through the grate at his feet. He’d be discovered immediately, of course, the roar of flooding at this depth would sound like a freight train. And sinking or crippling the ship wasn’t his goal anyway. He’d been accused of being a saboteur; he wasn’t about to become one. He assumed that’s why Frank had left the valve unlocked when he put him in there: he knew it wouldn’t do McCallister much good to open it up. Or, more likely, he just didn’t understand the ship well enough to worry about it. When McCallister had qualified on the Alabama, all those years ago, he had to draw every system on the ship from memory, know the location of every valve, breaker, and fire hose. Every man with dolphins on his chest, from the captain down to the cooks in the galley, was an expert on his boat. Gradually, as the technology on submarines became more complex, they required less and less of that, block diagrams and black boxes becoming acceptable substitutes for real physical knowledge. The introduction of nuclear missiles sealed it. The goal was to launch missiles, not to repair them. If a part was broken, swap it out. No one considered it possible, or desirable, for a sailor to know how to build or repair a nuclear weapon.
His first boat had a crew of 125 men. The Navy, understandably, had staffed submarines like ships, making them self-sufficient cities that could make their own air, water, and repairs to every system, keeping them at sea for as long as the food and spare parts held out. It was the dream of nuclear power: a “true” submarine that never needed to rise to the surface to take a breath. Steadily, however, automation took over, and crews got smaller. The Navy, in its wisdom, made them more like the crew of an airplane now than the crew of a battleship, a few specially trained men and women riding on a mass of high-priced technology. The Polaris required a crew of thirty men in the initial design phase, a crew that seemed revolutionarily small at the time for the United States, although the Soviets had for decades been sending out similarly sized crews in their small, rickety submarines. They pared this down to eighteen, which was what he first went to sea with. With attrition, however, and the losses the Alliance was taking, the number kept getting smaller and smaller. There was a joke in the fleet, before things got so serious, that the Navy was using the Polaris as part of an experiment to see how small a submarine crew could get before things fell apart. They seemed to have found the limit.
He sighed and looked at the green bucket sitting on the small bench across from him; Frank had thrown it in there with him when he locked him up, it was his toilet. He’d actually watched the asshole check it off the procedure that he held in his hands and studied with furrowed brow. There was a thin layer of urine in the bottom, which did nothing to improve the smell in the escape trunk. But there was more, too. McCallister had been on submarines a long time, long enough to recognize when the air was going bad. Almost all the things that could poison a sub’s atmosphere were odorless and tasteless: hydrogen from the battery, carbon monoxide from combustion, carbon dioxide from their own lungs. But while odorless, the combination of those things, along with the depletion of oxygen, created a palpable staleness that McCallister was familiar with, a burning in the throat, a headache right behind the eyes, an overpowering sense of fatigue.
“Wake up, McCallister.”
Moody had appeared beneath his feet.
“Moody,” he said, his throat dry. “What do you want?”
“Wanted to take a look at you. Make sure you’re OK. See if you’re ready to cooperate.”
“Ready to cooperate?” He laughed. “It seems you and Frank have already taken over the ship. What do you need me for?”
“Not just me and Frank,” she said. “Hamlin, too.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “I don’t believe you.”
“He killed Ramirez.”
McCallister hesitated at that, wincing at the dead man’s name. “I’m sure he had his reasons.”
She snorted. “And you believe that? I saw him. He was standing over his dead body, the smoking gun in his hand. The only difference between Hamlin and me is that he doesn’t have the balls to tell you where he stands. He wants me in charge, but he still wants you to think he’s a swell guy.”
“I don’t know what happened. Maybe Ramirez attacked him, maybe Pete got scared. That doesn’t make him one of your conspirators,” he said. But Hana could hear the doubt creeping into his voice.
“Then consider this: we were just in my stateroom, reviewing his orders. He showed me everything. Unlocked the patrol order and read it in front of me.”
“No,” he said, shock in his voice. “I don’t believe it. Pete’s a good man. He would never cooperate with you.”
“Oh really? Let me review the patrol order with you: we’re going to Eris Island. Now that we’ve degaussed, we can approach the island at periscope depth and go ashore. Our mission is to collect the cure and return it to the Alliance. Pete showed me the projections of the epidemic, everything.”