The control room, already devastated by the shock of the Magnum, changed violently. Where before the room had retained its shape and symmetry, the collision with the ice fractured the steel hoop frames of the pressure hull. The energy of the sudden deceleration threw people and consoles and seats and chunks of steel forward, a rain of flesh and pieces of steel. Several of the men who had survived the first shock, including Lieutenant Rod Van Dyne, the sonar officer, were hurled forward and killed instantly. Pacino was thrown face-first into the ballast control panel, the wraparound console in the control room’s forward port corner, taking the force of the collision in the face. The emergency air-breathing mask Plexiglas faceplate caved in, the remainder of the impact-load transferred to Pacino’s face. The mask came off as he slid down the panel, his face hitting the Chief of the Watch’s seat, his arms limp. He hung there for a moment, then fell to the deck, his head facing the lower portion of the console, the deck slick with oil or blood or seawater — in the dim light of the lantern it was impossible to say.
And somewhere under the thin ice was a 90-ton titanium pod with four men inside, all losing consciousness from exposure to the extreme cold.
By 1001 GMT the eruption from the ice was over. The black submarine, its snout smashed, lay on the ice like some beached behemoth, tilted over into a 20-degree port-list and lying on the ice’s downslope. The strange metal beast from the deep lay there, motionless, inert.
Inside the vessel was like the outside. Nothing moved. For a long while Pacino had been staring at the underside of a seat and the face of a console. The light was very dim. His face was cold where it touched the tile of the deck. He tried to identify the console he was looking at but had never seen it from this angle before. He heard a voice in the distance.
“Captain? You okay?” The voice was muffled, choked. Pacino tried to roll over toward the noise. It took a long time, and it hurt.
“Manderson, the skipper lost his mask. Get it on him; I’ll try to open the bridge hatch.”
It got hard to breathe. Pacino couldn’t see. There was a cloud in front of him, he felt like his head was in a fish bowl. He tried to struggle against it, but as he brought in the dry coppery air to his lungs his mental fog seemed to dissipate. And he knew where he was. Slowly, fighting the pain, he struggled to his feet and found himself at the darkened ballast-control panel. Engineer Matt Delaney was trying to undog the hatch to the bridge trunk. It seemed stuck.
Pacino found his flashlight and searched the overhead that was used to open and shut the drain and vent valves of the snorkel mast and induction piping. The valves were too far up in the overhead to reach by hand and were nestled behind layers of piping and cables. The valve-extension handle was a steel rod four feet long. Pacino found it, pulled it out of its retaining cradle and limped forward to the hatch. Pacino could see well enough to make it to Delaney and jam the bar into the wheel of the hatch. The two men pushed on the bar, using it as a lever, and finally the wheel moved, undogging the hatch. While Pacino waited, he surveyed the control room in the dim light of Manderson’s hand-held flashlight. It was listing to port and pitched slightly forward. Emergency-breathing air hoses snaked through the room, ending in faces that were mostly unconscious. The worst was looking at the bodies that had no masks.
“Skipper, look!”
Delaney had opened the bridge-trunk hatch. Except that there was no bridge trunk. Bright white glaring light poured into the room from the hatch. And with it, a blast of frigid arctic air.
Pacino went to the hatch and looked up. He grabbed the rungs of the ladder to the hatch and raised his head into the light.
He pulled off the gas mask and gasped the outside air, so cold it burned his lungs. It was a spectacular scene. The sky was overcast, but any sky was welcome after what the Devilfish had been through. Pacino could see that what had once been the sail was ripped completely off, making this hatch lead onto the scarred outer deck of the ship. The hull aft seemed intact but the sonar sphere and the bow compartment were gone, crushed. The diesel would be useless now. The ship, amazingly, was lying on top of the ice, on some kind of hill, not afloat in a polynya. It took a moment for Pacino to comprehend this. They hadn’t just smashed a hole in the ice, they had gone through it, and come to rest on the surface of it.
By the time Pacino believed his eyes, the implications of reality hit him. Forty-five hundred tons of nuclear submarine on the ice surface. How long can the ice hold up that heavy a load, concentrated in one spot? Ice weak enough to let us through in the first place?
“Eng,” Pacino said, “we got to abandon ship, now.”
“Captain, it must be ten below out there. We can’t get the crew out until we unstow the arctic gear—”
“Get a crew together and get the damned gear. Most of it’s in the ship’s office and ESM. The shelter’s stowed in the fan room. Hurry up. God knows how long this ship will stay up here before it goes down through the ice. Get a couple men you can spare to go through the ship and help the survivors up here. We’ll exit out this hatch. Did you bring all the guys from back aft?”
“They’re here, still alive. For how long… with the reactor melted we probably got 800 or 900 rem. And you guys up here probably got almost half that much.” Both knew that at 1000 rem of radiation there would be virtually no survivors.
Delaney rounded up half a dozen men and headed aft to get the arctic gear. Petty Officer Manderson tried to slap awake the men in the space. Pacino walked to the passageway aft of the control room and stopped at the door to his stateroom. One last look. It had its own battle lantern, which he flipped on, knowing what he would see. A complete wreck. Nothing salvageable. As he was about to leave he saw the framed Jolly Roger flag, still in its frame and bolted to the wall. He pulled the frame open, ripped the flag off of the backing, rolled it into a ball and put it into his pocket. He took a final look around and left, then with a second thought went back in and turned off the battle lantern. Sort of a gesture of respect, like shutting the staring eyes of a corpse.
Pacino went back to the control room, got a fur parka from Delaney and shrugged into it. The crew passed the arctic gear out the bridge-trunk hatch, and then the gear and crew members were out of the ship. Pacino found himself alone in the control room with Delaney, who was at the foot of the ladder to the bridge-trunk hatch, ready to leave the ship.
“Come on,” Delaney urged. “Every second in here is another couple million neutrons in your tissues. And like you said, the ice under the ship could collapse any second.”
“I’ll be out in a minute. Just make sure the ice camp is far enough away from the boat. When the ice goes I don’t want it taking out the men we have left.”
Delaney nodded, lingered a moment and climbed the ladder. And now Michael Pacino was alone in the shattered, burning control room of his crippled submarine. He stood by the burned-out fire-control console and looked up at the periscope stand, at the Conn, and realized his command of the Devilfish was over. He looked back into the room lit only by the orange lights of the battle lanterns, and spotted the other Jolly Roger on the control room aft bulkhead, the skull and crossbones white against the black field, the ship’s motto sewn above and below the pirate emblem.