Vitaly didn’t answer as he re-directed power from the throbbing engines to the propellers. The transmission squealed as it struggled to redirect torque, blades biting into the frothing waters. The submarine leapt forward, bow planes painfully scraping along the concrete slipway as Vitaly fought to vector the powerful engine thrust.
“We may lose paint, captain!”
“Easy! Easy!” shouted Jonah. “Get her to starboard before you wreck the stabilizer!”
“Vitaly know! Egg do not teach hen!”
The Scorpion began to round the blind corner, more curving tunnel ahead as she gained speed, her massive bow wake washing over the concrete bulwarks on either side of the channel. The internal collapse of the facility was increasing exponentially, entire pillars splitting under the unending concussions of exploding shells as the tunnel ceiling crumbled above them.
“How are we going to explain this to the Japanese?” shouted Hassan, wincing as a massive rock tumbled from the cave’s ceiling and slammed against the conning tower before rolling off the deck and into the water.
“I don’t know just yet,” retorted Jonah. “We may have to figure that out on the way back. But they wouldn’t have sent us here if flattening the entire facility was an unacceptable risk.”
“You like backward King Midas!” exclaimed Vitaly from his station, fingers flying across the console as he struggled to keep the speeding submarine under control. “Everything you touch turn to shit!”
The last stretch of the curved horseshoe-shaped tunnel straightened over the last two hundred meters, revealing a set of massive steel hanger doors on the Scorpion’s grainy interior monitors. Everyone gasped. They were sealed in. Any escape to the ocean cut off.
“Captain! We must reverse engines!” shouted Vitaly.
“Full speed! We’ll punch through!”
“We crush bow, sink us!”
“If the ceiling comes down, we’re dead anyway!”
Alexis leapt to her feet, shoving Jonah aside as she grabbed the periscope, flicking through the lenses. Her feed was on the monitor, giving Jonah a close-up look. He unconsciously gulped — the steel was thicker than he expected, more than likely built to take a direct hit from a heavy navy battleship shell. They didn’t have a chance in hell of piercing the armor with the fragile hull of the Scorpion.
“Got it!” called Alexis. She leapt away from the periscope, almost knocking Jonah over again as she slammed herself down in front of the communications console. Jonah stole a look back up at the monitors — it was too late to reverse thrust. The chamber behind them had begun to completely collapse, with entire pillars exploding into concrete fragments and dust.
The space between the doors suddenly split, sunlight streaming through the gap as the steel barrier began to slowly open. Alexis whooped in excitement, but Vitaly just gritted his teeth, all the while inputting the final adjustments to their heading in the seconds before impact.
And then the bow of the Scorpion was free, leaping out of the underground submarine base, rake splitting the first of the stormy whitecaps. The still-opening hanger doors scraped against the hull, groaning and grinding as they birthed the submarine into the open sea.
Alexis slumped back off the communications chair and onto the deck. She lay on her back and stared up against the claustrophobic metal ceiling above with index finger on each temple. “That really shouldn’t have worked,” she mumbled.
“What did you do?” asked Hassan, leaning down over her.
“I figured the door control was a standard Siemens control unit,” she said, draping an arm over her eyes in relief. “They’re used for everything from airplane hangars to security gates. But everybody forgets to reset the remote control password from the default.”
“What’s the default?” asked Jonah, not sure if he really wanted to hear the answer.
“Zero-zero-zero… zero.”
“You just typed in a bunch of zeros and hoped for the best?” demanded Hassan, horrified.
“If it worked, it worked,” Jonah mumbled, resting a hand against a bulkhead to steady himself. “But let’s not do that again. We’re seriously going to run out of luck one of these days.”
Hassan kneaded Alexis’ shoulders. “Not too soon, one hopes.”
“Vitaly, bring us to four hundred fifty feet below, silent running.”
“Aye, Captain — I have detected signal again, da?”
“Our friend, the autonomous sonobuoy,” said Jonah, nodding. “Can we get down in the trench again, or are we still too banged up?”
“Is no problem, Captain—” Vitaly said as he began to plot the course below the now-familiar low-frequency sonar signal. Then he stopped dead, the color draining from his face. “The signal! It moves!”
“It’s not a sonobuoy?”
“No — is North Korea attack submarine! Dead ahead, seven hundred meter!”
“Alexis, engine room!” bellowed Jonah. He didn’t have to say it twice. She leapt to her feet and sprinted towards the stern. Hassan took her place at the communications console and yanked the hydrophone set roughly around his ears.
“It’s hard to hear anything over the blasts,” Hassan called out. “Wait — I just heard a distinct mechanical sound like a… like a big clunk!”
“Those would be torpedo doors opening,” spat Jonah through a clenched jaw. “But, they won’t have time to get a proper fix on us, not with all the artillery screwing up their sonar. They’re shooting from the hip. Vitaly, full power to the engines! Charge them!”
Vitaly increased power to the electric engines, the sound of their own churning propellers filling the Scorpion’s command compartment. Hassan again pressed the hydrophones against his ears, straining to listen for any external sounds amidst the din. “I hear buzzing props! Torpedo in the water!”
“Steady on!”
And then the high-pitched whine of the torpedo was all around them, the Scorpion jolted as the underwater missile slammed into the side of the conning tower, bounced off, and clanged down the entire length of the hurtling submarine. There was a brief pause before a muffled explosion well astern as it detonated, the retort of the sudden blast dissipating to the sound of the Scorpion’s propellers.
“Four hundred meters to North Korean attack submarine,” Vitaly said. “Torpedo warhead too close to prime, it bounce off! Please tell me you did not learn trick from Hunt for Red October!”
“What?” protested Jonah. “It’s a film classic!”
“My god — you didn’t even read the book, did you?” demanded Hassan.
“Vitaly — best guess on classification of incoming submarine,” Jonah shouted, ignoring the doctor.
“I think Romeo class? Like twin sister of Scorpion! Standard for North Korea.”
“We’re going to race her topside — full engine power, depth planes to full bubble ascent! Emergency blow!”
Vitaly grinned as he yanked back on the submarine’s yolk until the column smacked against its metal restrictor, and the Scorpion’s ballast tanks filled with a hissing woosh. The submarine lurched upwards, groaning as she thrust through the water column toward the distant surface.
“NK sub is matching ascent angle!” Vitaly shouted. “Moving to intercept! Two hundred meters!”
The twin submarines climbed toward each other in the water like jousting whales, rib joints resetting as the pressure of the ocean gave way. Jonah reached up to hold onto the ceiling, standing on his toes as the deck angled up beneath him.