The six eight-inch ball valves in the high-pressure air lines were self-actuated by air pressure, the huge valves clunked open with a crash, then connected 4500 psi air in the air bottles with the seawater-filled forward ballast tanks. In an explosion of expanding air, the seawater was forced out of the tanks, making the Devilfish light forward. The room filled up with a vapor cloud as the blast of air noise slammed into Pacino’s eardrums. He pulled the aft emergency-blow lever up to the open position, the air noise got even louder. Now the aft ballast tanks, assaulted by the ultrahigh-pressure air, gave up their seawater. Seconds later the air bottles of the emergency blow system were empty of air, and all main ballast tanks of the Devilfish were empty of seawater.
Pacino looked expectantly at the depth gage, waiting for it to click their depth up a foot. It was silent. Of course, it was dead… no electricity, the reactor down, the battery flooded and excreting chlorine gas. Pacino found a flashlight by the blow switches and turned it onto one of the back-up analog pressure gages, the primitive bourdon-tube type that didn’t need electricity to sense pressure. It showed them deep—740 feet; it would take a while for the gage to sense the ship rising. Pacino saw the first sign in the ship’s liquid-filled inclinometer. It took on a degree-up angle — they were on the way up. The water in the forward and aft bilges must be rushing aft, he thought, the angle inclining upward much faster than during a normal emergency blow. He hoped the up-angle wouldn’t spill the air out of the ballast tanks and, God forbid, send them back to the bottom.
He shined the flashlight around the room, taking in the stunned faces behind the gas masks. Even if they made it through the hundred-foot-thick icecap, how in hell would he get them out of the ship? And if he did, what then? Concentrate on the control panel, he told himself. The depth gage read 690 feet. At last the ascent had started. Pacino sucked the stale dry air of the emergency system, waiting, waiting for…?
Vlasenko reached over for the release lever — gone, lost in the black water half-flooding the pod. He dived into the water, twice, and found it. He struggled back up to the control panel, took a long moment to find it again in the dark, pushed the lever into the retaining bolt and rotated the lever to release the pod. Again, nothing happened. Exhausted, frustrated, Vlasenko leaned back against the freezing bulkhead of the pod, then searched for the flashlight cradle. At least he could die with the lights on. It took a while but he found the flashlight bolted to a spot on the sphere skin, pulled it free and clicked on the switch. Its weak yellow light barely lit the pod.
The pod shuddered — the control compartment finally collapsing and imploding from the depth. Vlasenko aimed the lantern at the depth gage—2100 meters and still sinking. And the pod’s interior-orientation still showed the ship pointed straight down, the wooden benches crazily vertical, a hatch on one side, another opposite it. The air in the pod was not as cold as before, with the four of them breathing into it, but it was stuffier. The water was agonizingly cold.
Vlasenko decided there was no longer any hope. He felt like grabbing Novskoyy’s pistol and shooting himself. He glanced at the admiral. The pistol was gone, lost during the explosion. The pod hull creaked, starting to dimple, to give from the pressure, the titanium flowing. Undergoing creep deformation, the pressure outside too much. It wouldn’t be long now.
The depth gage read 2375 meters. The ship, what was left of it, shuddered again and a long loud rumbling propagated through the water and steel, the last of it a ripping, tearing sound. The shock and vibration slammed Ivanov’s head into the dimpling titanium bulkhead. Drifting in and out of consciousness, the last impact knocked him out. The last remaining compartment of the Kaliningrad, the second, had imploded from the seawater pressure.
Vlasenko shined his light at Ivanov and saw blood on his collar. He shook his head, and then a crazy curiosity, irrelevant under the circumstances, came over him… he wanted to know the crush depth of the pod. He directed the light at the depth gage again, expecting to see it read 2500 meters. Instead it read 1900. 1900. The pod was moving differently now, shaking and swaying — not the motion of the hull of the ship but of an escape pod on ascent. The last impact must have jarred the pod loose from the hull. He looked again at the gage. 1800 meters, then 1750 … they were rising quickly, even with the water they had shipped through the hatch. Vlasenko checked the gage. 1000 meters. They were rising like a bubble from the sea, soon they would be at the surface— The surface is thick ice cover.
The gage needle unwound. 500 meters. 400. 300. Vlasenko tried to steady the men against the shock to come when the buoyant pod, rushing up from the deep, slammed into the ice. He grabbed lifejackets and plastic wrapped ration kits and tried to cushion the overhead of the pod. The pod was still rising sideways, with no stability. A final glance at the depth gage—50 meters and rising fast. He could only hope that the ice had been broken up by the explosion…
The escape pod of the Kaliningrad hit the ice raft going five meters per second, causing a jarring impact in the pod. The depth gage read under 5 meters, by the look of the needle maybe only one meter. So they would float here, separated from the frigid world above, by a single meter of merciless, mocking, unforgiving ice. Vlasenko could no longer feel any sensation in his arms or legs. He lay there in the trapped pod with the wounded, waiting for sleep and an end to the cold.
The USS Devilfish rose toward the surface at a 45-degree angle, speeding up to 19 knots from the buoyant force. Pacino held onto the control panel, watching the face of the analog depth gage, the needle unwinding as the paralyzed ship rose from the air in her ballast tanks. Still 1800 yards southwest of the polynya, they were about to challenge thick ice.
Pacino had a final command decision: to shut his eyes or watch the gage as the ship shot upward. He decided to keep his eyes open. The needle unwound. 400 feet, 300, 150… Pacino changed his mind. He shut his eyes tight.
CHAPTER 23
The pressure ridge at the southwest edge of the polynya was 80 feet thick. The molecules that formed the crystalline structure of the ice had been motionless, frozen for centuries, last existing as liquid water a thousand years before. For those centuries the structure of the ice had been solid as concrete, one piece of a massive structure forming the polar icecap.
At 0945 Greenwich Mean Time a nuclear explosion had detonated under the ice pack five kilometers to the northwest. Its chief effect was a multitude of hairline cracks formed throughout the structure of the ice, but being hairline cracks, the tremendous cold and pressure from the weight of the ice raft was already rewelding the ice together into one piece.
At 0958 a 4500-ton nuclear submarine smashed into the ice’s underside. The submarine was travelling at 32 feet per second. The force of the impact was equivalent to that of a locomotive going 231 miles per hour, or twelve one-thousand-pound artillery shells fired at point-blank range. Or a small nuclear detonation.
The ice exploded upward as if slammed by the fist of God.
The Devilfish’s sonar sphere was crushed, flattened to a plate and slammed into the thick steel of the bow compartment, which was also crushed, rupturing and bursting. By the time the bow compartment had ruptured, the ice’s protest was over and a hole 50 feet in diameter formed. The displaced ice flew upward and outward, splintering into fragments and shards. The cylindrical hull of the Devilfish flew through the hole onto the ice, the first third of her smashed into a compressed lump, her sail sheared off at the hull. The rest continued up and forward through the hole, the entire length of her coming out of the ice like some giant whale, moving over the edge of a slight ridge and coming to rest two hundred feet from the hole on the downhill slope of the pressure ridge. At the bottom of the gentle slope, a thousand feet away, was the lake of thin ice that Devilfish had been aiming for.