Ian Slater - Arctic Front

The temperature of the water swirling about his neck was only two degrees or so above freezing, shocking his system until the microslim water layer between the Arctic SCUBA suit and his skin could steady the heat exchange ratio. His body’s thermostat adjusted as he kept clenching and unclenching his fingers in the tight yet spongy rubber gloves. He told himself, forced himself, to be calm, feeling only an inch or so away from sheer terror as the water level reached the base of the SCUBA helmet and began creeping up, covering the visor. He counted slowly, as he had habitually done during the yearly prostate examination, the naval doctor impatiently ordering otherwise imperturbably calm officers not to stiffen up. “Relax the sphincter, man. Relax, damn it!”

Then the gauge, as well as the cessation of the rushing water, told him he could now open the top hatch. The moment he’d done so he felt his body rising effortlessly, the flippers grazing the hatch edge, his breathing still too fast — the visor, despite the spittle precaution, suddenly misting at the shock of seeing the other GST only sixty feet away. While stilled in neutral buoyancy, its bow had a slight up angle, its fat teardrop shape outlined in the blackness by beads of phosphorescent freshwater plankton, first cousins of the kind that gave sea waves their luminescence even on the darkest night. Unhesitatingly looping the basket he’d made from his T-shirt under the knife scabbard so as to prevent its sinking should he be buffeted by an upwelling, he swam, arms by his side, straight for the GST, struck by the irony that, though he would show up on the enemy’s sonar as a very discernible blip, his shape like the seal he’d fired upon, they would be as confused as he had been.

It was only then that he saw what could only be a raft, its outline, for some inexplicable reason, only partially delineated here and there by phytoplankton. It looked to be about thirty feet square, half as long as the GST itself, its neutral buoyancy assured by what must obviously be depth-sensitive floats.

Exhilarated by the discovery of how it was that the midget subs were in effect hauling their own torpedo and cruise missile resupply, the raft probably holding eight missiles at least — two salvos’ worth, in addition to the four already on the GST — it took him only a minute to swim to the raft.

About to place a lump of C-4 plastique from the T-shirt basket, he felt a U shackle, about five-eighths inch in diameter, he guessed, connecting the cables between the enemy GST and its raft. Using the handle spike on the end of his knife he unscrewed it and immediately felt the raft moving away from him. Now it could not act as a flotation platform for the GST. Next Brentwood turned his attention to the GST.

Within ten feet of the sub, he noticed the curved phosphorescent outline of the GST break, as if a string of pearls had been cut, most of the microscopic creatures disappearing as quickly as they must have alighted on the midget submarine. Without their guiding light he slowed, not wanting to bump into the hull but rather stand off it. Feeling the long, horizontal, stovepipe shape of one of the cruise missiles, he looped the T-shirt basket about its twenty-one-inch-diameter mouth, tying the basket tightly. Next, he pushed the basket’s “goodies,” as Johnson had referred to the centrex plastique, hard between the mouth of the cruise and the algae-slicked metal of the V-weld that connected the cruise tube to the pressure hull.

Making sure, purely by feel, that the six-inch-long detonator was firmly embedded in the plastique, he turned the timer knob sharply counterclockwise, feeling the soft click. Glancing back, he saw his own sub clearly outlined by the phosphorescent phytoplankton. He turned and, kicking hard, started back to the sub, then felt a vibration behind him to his right. He turned to see a spume of luminescent bubbles erupting behind him from the hatch of the enemy GST. The trail of bubbles then abruptly changed from the vertical to the horizontal as the attacker, his knife trailing a secondary stream of bubbles, came straight at him.

It was all confusion, but instinctively Brentwood’s left arm shot for the thinner trail to grab the knife arm. Somehow he missed and felt a warm sensation deep in his left shoulder where the blade had sliced open his SCUBA suit, cutting him deeply. Quickly he thrust his left hand forward again, felt something solid, and drove his knife forward, feeling it go into something soft then hard, the blade rebounding on bone. He gripped his knife’s handle harder, ripping hard left, opening the attacker’s stomach.

Brentwood felt himself being dragged down, the attacker’s body limp, jerking spasmodically now and then. The grasp on Brentwood’s left arm was like steel. With nine minutes left on the ten-minute detonator, his mind’s eye filled with a vision of being pulled down into the countless layers of diarrheA-1ike mud. He pulled his knife back and thrust forward again. But there was no need; as suddenly as it had taken hold, the Siberian’s grip relaxed, the life drained out of him.

Breaststroking and kicking with all his might, Brentwood made his way back to his GST’s hatch and three minutes later was inside the escape chamber, rapping the top of the bottom hatch with his right hand as he began turning the wheel of the top hatch with his left. But now his left hand cramped as he squatted there, his body crouched monkeylike. He switched to the right hand to close the top hatch, his left arm simply refusing to obey his brain, the nerves of the shoulder numb.

He heard and felt the quiet whirr of the GST’s battery going for “burst” speed of seventeen knots which, in the next five minutes, would have them just over a mile and a half away. Brentwood had to stay cramped in the water-filled cubbyhole of the conning tower, as any siphoning of power from the battery to pump out the water would be power taken from the prop. He would have to wait until Johnson figured they were far enough away from the impending explosion before he could start the pump to vent the water in the escape hatch. In severe pain now, Brentwood remained crouched, sincerely hoping that neither Lopez nor Johnson would accidentally bump the “up scope” switch.

As the GST slowed and the venting of the escape chamber began, the water level dropped rapidly, and Brentwood almost drowned, knocked unconscious for a moment, his head lolling dangerously as the midget sub itself trembled violently from he shock wave of the detonation over a mile away.

The explosion, as Brentwood hoped it would, had set off a cruise warhead on the enemy sub, the resulting “Varoomph!” heard for miles, sending an enormous spume of ice shards skyward above the broken surface of the lake, as well as shattering the Siberian GST into thousands of pieces, the noise reaching Brentwood’s GST two seconds later. It stunned the three men; Lopez, though he’d plugged his ears, was unable to hear Johnson’s order for him to disengage battery power and go to diesel, heading at 15.9 knots for the northern quadrant a hundred and ninety miles away, their ETA depending on the currents and the time taken to intercept the loose raft — the latter, clearly visible on the sonar screen, having deflected some of the explosion’s sound waves.

“Why do we need it, sir?” asked Johnson, who believed, correctly, that now his skipper was wounded he, Johnson, would have to be the one to go out through the hole and attach the raft to them.

“We can reload our empty torpedo tubes,” explained Brentwood, his voice heavy, slow — still groggy from his ordeal, now and men grimacing from Lopez’s inexpert dressing of his wound. “Easy enough to do with two of you,” continued Brentwood. Lopez looked alarmed. “Subsurface float buoy’s,” added Brentwood, “on the raft. Just push her over to our sub and shackle her to the ring bolt.”