Donchez glanced at the Arctic plot, looking for the Allentown. Her X flashed, but her position was a guess, SOSUS being unable to hear her in spite of her damaged sail. For a moment he considered sending Allentown under the ice cap, then rejected the notion. One lost submarine was enough. The Los Angeles-class Allentown under the ice cap would never survive… no SHARKTOOTH underice sonar, no strength in the flimsy fiberglass sail. She’d get lost and never emerge. Goddamned L.A.-class, they were a giant step backward in submarine technology.
“Which Piranha is furthest north?” Donchez asked. “One that isn’t in trail?” Lockover turned to a computer console, typed into it, returned with a printout.
“Barracuda is off the coast of Maine, sir.”
“Vector her to the SOSUS position of the explosions, max speed. Get her up there fast.”
“Sir,” Lockover said, “she’s not loaded out for more than a few days. She was just about to head for overhaul at Portsmouth. She’ll run out of food by the time she gets to the GI-UK gap. And she has no arctic gear onboard—”
“We may well have men dying up there. Tell her to flank it. I want a report soon as she can get to a polynya close to the SOSUS position. And watch the weather. The minute it breaks, I want aircraft scouring that ice pack.”
Lockover left to get the messages out. Donchez looked up at the plot. He’d done what he could for now. He got on the NESTOR circuit to Admiral McGee in the airborne DC-9. Maybe the admiral could get an answer out of the Russians.
Pacino woke up with a start from the sound of the men entering the shelter, shouting and talking to each other in excitement. Rapier came first, followed by Stokes and the others, some of them huddled together carrying men into the shelter. The men being carried in had white frozen faces. Pacino found Rapier, who had started to boil snow for a pot of coffee.
“Jon, what’s all this? Who the hell are they?” Rapier’s face was crusted white with snow and ice, now starting to melt and drip down his face. If he was surprised by Pacino’s use of his first name instead of the usual “XO” he didn’t show it.
“We… we found” — Rapier shivered — “God, it’s cold out there. We found an escape pod, I’m guessing from the OMEGA. Had Russian writing on it. It was under the ice, freed up, for God’s sake, by the Devilfish when she went down.”
Pacino winced.
“We got four guys out of the pod,” Rapier went on. “One was already dead. We left him on the ice by the pod. The others were damned near gone from the cold.”
Stokes and Delaney were taking the Russian survivors’ wet half-frozen clothing off and wrapping them in wool blankets. All three were unconscious. Pacino looked at their gray faces. Two were older, probably warrant officers or chiefs or whatever the Russian equivalent was for senior enlisted men. He was anxious to hear their stories, what had happened to them, how they had survived in the pod, how the pod had gotten out onto the ice.
Pacino ordered them to be clothed in spare arctic parkas and watched for signs of coming to. For a long time he stood over the two Russians, wondering what their story was, if they had families. And for the first time in a long time allowed himself to think of his family, the last time he’d seen Tony, the weekend before the Allentown OP when the two of them had gone to Mount Trashmore Park. And Hillary, who became even more desirable through the cushioning of memory…
“Sir?” It was Rapier. “Wind’s picking up outside, starting to snow pretty hard. Visibility’s down to less than a hundred feet.”
Pacino stepped outside onto the ice and was shocked at how much the weather had changed. The horizon was gone, the ice and the fog melting together just a few feet ahead. A fierce wind blew quarter-size snowflakes horizontally, a wind that cut through Pacino’s fur parka like it wasn’t there. In seconds the wind was burning his cheeks and eyes. Pacino spit at the side of the shelter. As he expected, the spittle was frozen before it hit the wall of the shelter, shattering as it impacted. Which meant the temperature was somewhere around 30 below, with a 20-knot wind. He ducked back into the shelter, wondering how much wind the shelter could take. It was, after all, only a bubbleshaped, prefabricated structure, not a building, yet more than a tent. It was going to be a long night.
CHAPTER 25
Occasionally during the night Pacino had gone to the curtain and cracked it open to bring air into the shelter, and each time there had been a drift of heavy wet snow that had to be burrowed through. The shelter was probably invisible from outside with the snowdrifts piling up on it, but the snow also served as an insulator, keeping the heat in the polyethylene bubble, as well as muffling the outside noise. The only sounds inside the shelter were the rumbling of the diesel and the distorted conversations of the men.
“If this storm doesn’t break soon,” Rapier was saying to Pacino, “we’re going to be in trouble. Diesel’s only got another day of fuel, maybe less. It was all we could get out of the ship.”
“Maybe we should shut it down to conserve,” Pacino said, his voice slow, monotonic. “It’s warm enough in here to run it twenty minutes an hour.”
“I don’t know, the temperature’d drop too fast. The fuel would congeal. Plus, we’d waste fuel starting her up. Once we shut it down in this cold she’s down for good.”
“Keep it running, then,” Pacino said, faintly annoyed at what seemed a dialogue to nowhere.
“Also,” Rapier said, “the radio’s batteries are dead. We’ve been transmitting on it all night, no answer. It might not have been working in the first place… none of the radiomen made it. Even if it was working there’s no way anyone could get to us in this blizzard.”
“You been putting the flares out?” Pacino asked.
“Ran out yesterday, you know that.”
“Oh, right. How about rations?”
“Two days left, tops.”
“Great. No flares, no radio, food and fuel running out and a blizzard that won’t quit.”
Rapier looked down into his coffee. “We’re alive.”
“How are they doing?” Pacino nodded toward the Russians.
“Better,” Rapier said. “One regained consciousness for a moment, the older guy, then fainted away again. Doc thinks they’ve gotten frostbite over a lot of skin, hypothermia.” Pacino drained his coffee and tried not to look at the ship’s emblem on the mug. The coffee was cold.
Rapier had stopped with his recital. Pacino shut his eyes and tried to doze, let the buzz of the diesel carry him away, away from here, from the reality of an arctic prison…
Pacino awoke to a commotion at the diesel, where the Russians were. One, the middle-aged silver-gray-haired man, half sat up in Chief Corpsman Ingle’s arms and sipped water from a cup. When he looked up at Pacino and Rapier he seemed confused. Pacino spoke to him, starting slowly.
“Do you speak English?” The Russian nodded.
“I’m Commander Michael Pacino, commanding officer of the USS Devilfish. Correction, I was. My ship is on the bottom now. Who the hell are you?”
“Yuri Vlasenko, Captain 1st Rank, Northern Fleet.” The man’s English was only slightly accented. “I was captain of the submarine Kaliningrad.” Pacino eyed him, assaulted with mixed feelings. He was, after all, talking to the captain of the Russian OMEGA submarine. They were hardly buddies after what had happened. On the other hand, they were fellow professionals, survivors. He wondered about the admiral who had sunk Stingray. Where was he? Dead?