It didn’t help that the only sound he could hear, the only noise in the world, it seemed, was a deep, rumbling groaning sound that never quite stopped. It was just the sound of the submarine settling around him, straining against its own weight as it must have been doing for twenty years. But it was distorted by the water around him and amplified by the otherwise ubiquitous silence until it sounded alien and wrong, a sustained symphony of grinding, roaring moans.
At least he didn’t have to worry about radiation. The Kurchatov, like all Kilo class submarines, ran on diesel fuel, not a nuclear reactor, and there had never been any nuclear missiles on board. There were plenty of nasty chemicals around him — the lead-based batteries that filled the lower third of the sub had probably been leaking poison into the water for twenty years — but his drysuit would protect him from the worst of that.
The biggest danger he faced was ripping his suit or hitting his head on the low ceiling. If he stunned himself down here or if he lost visibility, he could be in real trouble. But he doubted it would come to that. He’d done his homework. Chapel had trained for this mission for weeks before coming down to Miami. He’d studied every known schematic of a Kilo class sub, memorized where everything was inside, thought himself through each motion he needed to make, every inch of the submarine’s interior he would have to traverse.
Of course, the interior of the sunken boat looked nothing like the photographs he’d studied. The interior would have been painted a drab, uniform tan when the sub was operational. It had gone through a real sea change since. Every surface inside was coated in organic muck, drifts of marine snow mixed with mud and the skeletons of coral and other invertebrates. A colony of tiny white-shelled clams had taken over one of the engine housings, looking like shelf fungus on a fallen tree. Brain coral had wrapped itself around one of the big fuel pumps. He thought he saw an octopus slither underneath an oil trap as he approached, though it was gone before he could be sure.
At the fore of the engine compartment stood a massive pressure hatch with a wheel mounted on its front. It lay on its side now, and for the first time Chapel realized that the entire submarine was heeled over on its port side and that what he’d been thinking of up and down were actually port and starboard. Added to the virtual weightlessness he felt while diving he had to force himself to remember what direction was up — something he definitely needed to keep in mind if he wanted to get back out of the wreck.
The door was closed, but he searched around its edges with his fingers until he found that it had either been left open by the crew — the better to scuttle the sub — or had been knocked out of its frame by the impact with the coral spar. It swung open with just a little elbow grease and let him into the engineering decks.
The semiclosed hatch had kept most of the marine life out of the middle of the submarine, so it didn’t look quite as alien to his trained eyes. The engineering decks were just as he’d expected to find them, tight corridors where every wall was lined with electrical boxes and stowed equipment. All tilted ninety degrees from the schematics he’d pored over. Strange ropy growths hung from both walls — now the ceiling and the floor — and at first he tried to identify what animal had left them behind, but then he realized they weren’t growths at all. They were the remains of string hammocks. The VIP passengers on board must have found any space they could to bunk down in, even the hot, noisy engineering areas that would normally have been unlivable. Chapel imagined just how desperate they must have been to cram inside the submarine with the fifty men of the Kurchatov’s crew, living shoulder to shoulder for long weeks as the sub inched its way across the Atlantic. They must have been terrified, he thought — afraid to surface in case a vengeful Russian proletariat was looking for them, constantly worried about being detected by American antisubmarine patrols. And all for nothing. Though every one of the coup plotters had been arrested and sent to prison, from what Chapel had read there had been no serious retribution against the families that stayed behind. The people who made the desperate journey in the Kurchatov had suffered in the tin can in vain.
Who knew, though? Maybe they were happier now in Cuba. Winter in Havana had to have Moscow beat.
The boat was less damaged through the engineering decks, and Chapel made a little better time crawling along until he reached another pressure hatch, this one leading to the crew and command areas underneath the sail. The door opened as easily as the one in the engine room and Chapel slipped inside, letting his lights play over what had once been the Kurchatov’s bridge. There were more hammocks here, though most were stowed carefully out of the way of the sonar screens and computer stations. Chapel pulled himself over the long silver pipe of a periscope stalk and found the narrow stairway leading down to the bunkrooms and officers’ cabins below.
He was getting close. Ahead of him, in the submarine’s bows, lay the enormous torpedo tubes, but those were of no interest to him. What he needed would be in the captain’s cabin if it was there at all.
Chapel ignored the groaning roar of the submarine and pulled himself along the stair rail, resisting the urge to kick for speed. The crew deck was one of the tightest spots in the whole boat, with four tiny rooms crammed together in a space half the size of a school bus. He saw the wardroom first, little more than a closet where the crew could have taken their meals or what little leisure time they got. It comprised a single narrow table with a bench behind it and a twelve-inch television set mounted to what had been its ceiling. The crew’s bunks lay beyond, with room for maybe twenty men at a time if they were very friendly. The crew would have had to sleep in shifts, taking turns using the same bunks, catching what sleep they could under blankets that smelled like the men who’d had them before.
The captain’s cabin had its own pressure hatch, which was closed. It lay on what had become the floor of the submarine, originally its port side, so it was beneath him. Chapel expected the hatch to open like the others, but his fingers couldn’t seem to get any purchase around its seals. He tried the wheel and found that it turned freely, but when he tried to pull it open it was like attempting to lift the entire submarine with his bare hands.
Chapel tugged and pulled for a while but that made him breathe heavier, and he couldn’t afford that with the amount of breathing gas he was carrying. He forced himself to take shallower breaths and relax.
He closed his eyes. Tried to block out for a moment the sustained painful groan of the dead submarine. Tried to think about why the door wouldn’t open.
Was the damned thing jammed? Maybe the impact that tore open the engine compartment had warped the door in its seals. Chapel felt around the edges of the metal door, looking for any sign that it had crumpled or fused in place, but he found nothing. He tried the wheel again. Looked for any kind of mechanism that might have locked the door shut — nothing.