Robert Williams - Ice Fortress

Jack shrugged, not caring one way or another. He’d blown the mission. “I guess so. Everything else seems to be in working order.”

“Except the ventilation.” Durand screwed up his nose. “Cigarette smoke, diesel fumes and hydrogen sulfide. Nice combination.”

Durand flipped a small lever and the hydraulics pumped to life, raising the periscope.

“How did you…”

Then Jack remembered that Peter Durand spoke and read German.

“I haven’t used one of these since training. It’s kind of cool. Makes you think of how they did things before we went all high tech and electronic,” he mused as he turned the periscope through a full rotation.

“See anything?” asked Jack.

“Yeah,” Durand laughed, “a bunch of guys trying to get that bell into the Barracuda. Bet they wish they hadn’t shot Krupsky, now.”

Jack looked down at Sam. He was pale but at least he was alive. “I bet he wished they hadn’t shot him, either.”

“I think they’re going to try to shoehorn that thing into the empty VPT,” Durand observed as he zeroed in on something that caught his attention.

“VPT?” quizzed Jack.

“Vertical Payload Tube. It’s a big module that holds 6 Tomahawk missiles for vertical launch. But ours is empty and full of sonar gear for the survey. They’ve cracked the hatch and are stripping it bare to hold that thing .”

Juan and Dave heard that their gear was being dumped, but neither man reacted. They were beyond caring. They’d given up.

“They can’t get away, can they? I can’t see Muller as a submarine school graduate, can you?”

“They have something better than that.” Jameson joined the conversation.

Jack and Durand both stared at him. Jack with a look of confusion. Durand with a look of total shock.

“Shit,” said Durand as he slammed his hand on the periscope.

“What?” Jack turned from one man to the other.

“They’ve got Leah. She’s been in the control room day in day out, watching every move.” Jameson explained.

“And now we know she’s a computer expert,” Durand added.

“How does that help?” Jack didn’t understand.

“Every system on that boat is computer controlled. It’s literally a fly by wire nuclear submarine. She could almost take the damn thing anywhere she wants single handed. Punch in the GPS coordinates and the boat practically sails itself,” Durand explained. “She’s got more than enough manpower onboard to get underway.”

“We can’t just sit here with our thumbs up our asses while they disappear with that bell thing. We have to come up with another plan!” Jack ran his fingers through his hair as he tried to come up with something.

“Scuttle—”

It was Sam. He was trying to tell them something. Jack knelt down alongside him.

“What do you mean scuttle? Scuttle them? How?”

Sam shook his head and coughed. Droplets of blood shone on his lips.

“Scuttle charges. They’ve set scuttle charges. You need the rat—”

Sam’s head fell back on the deck plating. He was unconscious again.

“Scuttle charges? What’s he talking about?” Juan squawked, his voice an octave higher with the stress.

Jack remembered Sam trying to tell him something earlier, but he shut him down. Now he wished he’d listened. And what was that about rats?

“Those Nazi bastards have set scuttle charges on this boat. They’re going to send us to a watery grave after they set sail out of the bunker.”

Jack didn’t think Juan or Dave could get any paler.

He was wrong.

“Instead of sitting there sucking up oxygen, why don’t you two start looking for these charges?”

Juan and Dave looked clueless. They were techno geeks, not bomb disposal experts.

“Now,” Jack bellowed at them. “Go!”

“Captain, what was Sam trying to tell us about the rats?”

“No idea, Coulson. Not a goddamn clue.”

“Durand?” Jack turned to the XO, their last shot at solving the puzzle.

“When I was doing nuke training at Goose Creek, I heard some of the old timers working there talking about how they used to kill rats aboard a submarine, but that’s all I can think of.”

“How?” asked Jack.

“How what?”

“How did they kill the rats?”

“Fire extinguishers. They’d freeze the little fuckers to death with a blast of a CO2. If one of them needed a fire extinguisher, he’d say ‘hand me that rat killer over there’ or something like that”

“That’s it!” Jack’s face lit up. “Okay, Durand, you’re with me. We’re going to round up as many extinguishers as we can get our hands on.”

“I’ll go help the nerd brigade find the explosives,” Jameson called over his shoulder as he ran after the two scientists.

Durand started unclipping the control room fire extinguishers from the bulkheads, piling them up below the periscope.

“Mind telling me what we’re doing exactly?” Durand asked.

But Jack had already run through the aft hatch on his way to find more extinguishers.

If this didn’t work, the world could be swallowed up by the darkness of another Reich.

But they wouldn’t live to see it.

Failure is not an option, Jack kept telling himself as he ran the length of the boat.

“We’ve found them,” Jameson reported entering the control room. “What now?”

“How many are there and can we move them?” asked Jack.

Jameson shook his head. “Half a dozen, small but well placed to sink us fast. I wouldn’t be trying to move them, though. They’re all wired to some pretty high tech looking touch screen timers. If they have inertial sensors, we’re screwed.”

Jack considered that for a moment. “Here’s the plan — Juan and Dave, grab as many of those extinguishers as you can and follow me. The rest of us,” he looked to Durand and Jameson, “will carry what these guys can’t and head to the first charge.”

“What happens then?” Durand looked perplexed.

“You’ll see. If it works, that is.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Durand already knew the answer. They all did.

Nellie was home.

Her battery packs had run down to their minimum safe operating levels, initiating a ‘limp home’ subroutine in her programming. Nellie had followed the homing signal continuously broadcast from the Barracuda and was preparing to be retrieved and recharged before resuming her survey mission.

The timer on the cell phone sized touch screen counted down to detonation. If they were all set to blow at the same time, and Jack was working on the assumption that they were, there wouldn’t be enough time to deal with all six charges. The timer showed 3 minutes until detonation.