Ian Slater - World in Flames

He never finished. Suddenly Roosevelt yawed violently, hard left, then right, and she was sliding, the control room crisscrossed with the hissing spraying of leaks that suddenly exploded into vapor jets under the pressure of 187,000 pounds per square foot.

“Flooding in the engine room, flooding in the engine room…”

“See to it, Chief!” called Brentwood. “Where’s the Alfa, Sonar?”

“Don’t know, sir…” called Emerson, his voice rising, scared.

“Keep it down,” Brentwood counseled him. “Watch him. Find him for me, son.”

“Yes — yes, sir.”

Behind him, Brentwood could hear the damage reports coming in on the intercom as Zeldman tried to steady the motion of the sub via trim and rudder control. Amid the chaos Emerson realized that the Roosevelt’s third torpedo hadn’t knocked out the last of the fish fired by the Alfa but must have been thrown off course, its thin control wire to Roosevelt inadvertently severed in the sub’s turn as they’d headed up. The result was that the Roosevelt’s third torpedo, away and running, its radar-homing head now uninhibited by wire control, had probably overshot the oncoming Russian torpedo and zeroed in on the Alfa instead. Either this, or the Russian torpedo homing in on Roosevelt had exploded against subsurface ice, creating the concussion now causing the leaks which were not only flooding the engine room but which were making it impossible to see in Control.

Emerson heard a tentative cracking sound, and in a sudden, gut-wrenching moment, was sure they were breaking up until the sensors, at least those that were still in operation, told him it was the ice above that was fracturing and breaking up from the thwacks of the explosions. But then he felt the sub sliding— backward down the slope.

For a split second Brentwood was tempted to order the engines near full power but resisted creating a giveaway vibration that would give the Alfa, if the explosions had not got her, the Roosevelt’s precise position on the shelf. Hopefully, though, the Alfa was well away by now, hunting for him somewhere in the deep of the Spitzbergen Trench.

Watching his men running fast but each man clearly knowing what he was doing, he took a momentary pride in how well they had been trained, as within minutes the fierce spray of water that had seemed like an ice-cold steam shower in Control was subsiding. But then he felt the sub still sliding, almost imperceptibly to start with, but gathering speed like a heavy trunk on an incline of gravel. It stopped, slid a little more, and halted again. It was difficult to tell exactly just how far they were from the edge of the slope where it plunged away in the sudden drop into Molloy Deep that was fifteen thousand feet straight down.

Emerson, switching to earphones because of the noise of the hissing water, tried to gauge how far they were from the edge by the sound of what seemed like rock debris tumbling down the slope, scraping the hull, then suddenly disappearing on the sound curve. He figured they were less than four hundred feet from the drop-off.

Brentwood was already getting the good news that the leaks had been stopped in the engine room and that now everything seemed secure — the reactor seemed fine — when a damage report told him that a number of hydraulic lines had been severed so that ballast tanks couldn’t be blown — to evict the water with air and thus make them lighter. It meant the sub couldn’t rise. “And the integrity of the safety hatches,” as the video display informed him, had been breached.

No one spoke for several minutes as the full implications of their situation sunk it. They had evaded the Hunter/Killer only to—

“Sir!” It was Emerson, excitement jolting him out of the sudden gloom.

“Who do you mean?” said Brentwood sharply, injecting a shot of discipline after the chaotic moments occasioned by the blast of the explosion. “Do you want me or the officer of the deck?”

“Sorry, sir. OOD.”

“Very well.”

“Mr. Zeldman, sir. She’s breaking up.”

“You sure?” said Brentwood.

“Yes, Captain — it’s—”

“Amplify,” ordered Brentwood. There was the most awful sound Brentwood had ever heard coming in from the hydrophones and filling the Roosevelt —a sound like a great whale groaning in agony.

“Her bulkheads,” said Zeldman. “They’re giving way.”

“We got her, sir,” said Emerson, exultant, looking around at the faces clustering anxiously around him.

“Or is it a feint?” asked Brentwood.

“Emerson?” Brentwood repeated. “What do you think?”

“I…” They could see the doubt taking over his face. “I–I’m not sure, sir.”

“Keep listening.”

“Don’t think it’s a feint, sir. That groan — I mean, the amplitude is too—”

Brentwood felt someone bump him and looked sharply at the men gathered around the sonar. “What the hell is this — the county fair? Everyone back to his post.”

“They’re going down, sir,” said Emerson, more confidently now. “Think they’re goners.”

“Like us,” said someone in Control. Brentwood looked about, ready to tear a strip off the sailor, but said nothing. Naval officers were supposed to be able to handle the truth with aplomb.

“Yes, sir, they’ve definitely had it,” said Emerson triumphantly. “I’ve got distance as well as speed, sir. It’s no feint this time.”

He seemed to be right, the groaning of the Alfa’s hull testimony to the brutal fact that, double titanium hull or not, every sub had its crush depth, and the Alfa was now well below hers — over six thousand feet below, the sound of crunching steel that would soon be squashed flat rising up from the deep like the death throes of some great leviathan dying the most horrible death a sailor could imagine.

“Go to screen,” ordered Brentwood. “Take it off amplify.”

“Yes, sir.” As Emerson reached for the knob, there was a last sound, a high-pitched scream, that, though obviously from some of the electronic equipment rather than the bone-crushing sound of metal being crushed, sounded eerily human, like a newborn, and for a moment Brentwood thought of Rosemary and the child she was carrying.

“Korea!” pronounced Lewis, upon looking down from the Hercules ramp at the moonlit snow blanketing the Scottish highlands that were flitting like white islands through churning cumulus over twenty-five thousand feet below. “I knew it. They’re sending us to bloody Korea.”

The red warning light came on and the SAS troopers stood up, lumbering slowly forward, weighed down by HALO packs, oxygen masks, infrared-goggled helmets, and the SAS weapon of choice — the U.S. Ingram MAC-11—Military Armament Corps — submachine gun, Lewis making it clear to anyone who could hear him above the Hercules’ sustained roar that he certainly hoped this would be the last “bloody night HALO” they’d have to practice.

“It is,” responded Cheek-Dawson, his face all but invisible in the green/black camouflage paste and helmet sprouting bracken as he checked that each man had spat in the infrared goggles to help prevent condensation and that they had all checked their wrist altimeters — in sync with that of the Hercules.

“Remember the drill,” the sar’major told them, his voice tinny through the hailer. “When you land, unhitch but never mind the chute. Won’t have time to drag in, fold, or bury it this time. You must expect patrols both inside and outside the drop zone.” Lowering the megaphone, the sergeant major looked about. “Aussie!”

“Sar’Major?”

“If a flare goes up?”

“Take off the IF glasses.”