Clive Cussler - White Death

It took awhile to round up the suits, which were scattered through- out the cabin in bags, and to get the injured men into them. They slipped on their gloves and pulled down the hoods. Then they rounded up spare blankets and clothes and wrapped themselves in several layers.

With the cold temporarily held at bay, Petersen turned his efforts to the air problem. One of the aluminum lockers held breathing de- vices to be used in case of fire or other emergency. These were passed around. They, too, would buy time. Petersen decided to use up their canned air first because it was purer than the air in the cabin, which was making the men sick.

Petersen formed tapping crews for the same reason POW officers allocate duties to maintain morale. The men took turns using a wrench to rap SOS on the hull. As one man after another tired of the job, Petersen continued to tap away, although he wasn't sure why. Bored with the SOS, he began tapping out messages describing their plight. Eventually, he tired and rapped the bulkhead whenever strength allowed, which wasn't often. Then he stopped altogether. His thoughts turned from rescue, he shut his eyes, and once more he began to think of death.

Using the marker buoy line as his guide, Austin sank into the depths feet-first and slightly angled forward, like an old hard-hat diver being lowered at the end of an invisible air hose. Dancing rainbow shafts lanced the water like sunlight streaming through stain-glass windows. As Austin plunged deeper, the water filtered out the col- ors and the twilight abruptly turned into a violet night.

The powerful halogen lights mounted on the front of the Hard- suit caught snowy motes of marine vegetation and nervous schools offish in their beams, but before long, Austin was dropping into the benthic levels, where only the hardiest offish lived. At two hundred feet, his lights pick out the cruiser's masts and antennas, then the ship's ghostly contours materialized.

Austin hit the vertical thrusters and slowed to a stop at deck level. Then the horizontal thrusters whirred, and he cruised along the hull, rounded the stern and came back to the bow. The ship lay as shown in the sonar picture, at a slight angle on the slope, with the bow higher than the stern. He studied the ship with the intensity of a medical examiner inspecting the autopsied body of a murder victim, paying particular attention to the triangular gash in the side. No vessel could have survived the giant bayonet wound.

Seeing only twisted metal beyond the jagged opening, he moved toward the bow again. He approached within inches of the hull, feel- ing as dwarfed as a fly on a wall, leaned his helmet against the steel plating and listened. The only sounds were the hollow noise of his breathing and the whirr of thrusters as they kept the suit at a hover. Austin pushed off several feet, came around, goosed the horizontal thrusters and let his metal knees slam into the ship.

On the other side of the hull, Petersen's half-closed eyes blinked fully open. He held his breath.

"What was that?" a hoarse voice said in the darkness. Lars had been huddled on the bunk next to the captain's.

"Thank God you heard it, too/' Petersen whispered. "I thought I was going mad. Listen."

They strained their ears and heard tapping on the outside of the hull. Morse code. Slow and measured, as if the sender were struggling with each letter. The captain's eyes widened like those of a cartoon character, as he translated the rough taps into letters.

P-E-T-E…

Austin was cursing the awkwardness of communicating. At his di- rection, one of the crew had attached a specially adapted ball-peen hammer to his right hand manipulator. The mechanical arm moved with agonizing slowness, but by concentrating all his resources, he finished tapping out one word in Morse code.

…ERSEN

He stopped and put his helmet against the hull. After a moment, he heard dots and dashes clunked out in reply.

YES

STATUS

AIR BAD COLD

HELP SOON

A pause. Then, HURRY

SOON

Petersen called out to his men that rescue was imminent. He felt guilty lying. Their time was about to run out. He was having a prob- lem focusing. It was getting harder to breathe, and soon it would be impossible. The temperature had plunged to below zero, and even the immersion suit couldn't keep out the cold. He had stopped shiv- ering, the first sign of hypothermia.

Lars interrupted Petersen's drifting thoughts. "Captain, can I ask you a question?"

Petersen grunted in the affirmative.

"Why the hell did you come back, sir? You could have saved your- self."

Petersen said, "I heard somewhere a captain is supposed to go down with his ship."

"This is about as far down as you can go, Captain." Petersen made a gargling sound that was as close to laughter as he could muster. Lars did the same, but their strength soon left them. They made themselves as comfortable as they could and waited.

THE BOAT CREW was watching for Austin to pop out of the

water, and they snagged him like a runaway calf. Within min- utes, he was back on the deck, where he spelled out the situation to Becker and Captain Larsen.

"Dear God," Becker said. "What a terrible way to die. My govern- ment will spare no expense to retrieve their bodies for the families."

Becker's pessimism was starting to annoy Austin. "Please stop playing the role of the melancholy Dane, Mr. Becker. Your govern- ment can hold on to its wallet. Those men aren't dead yet."

"But you said-"

"I fylow what I said. They're in tough shape, but that doesn't mean they're doomed. The Squalus submarine rescue took more than a day to accomplish, and thirty-three were saved." Austin paused as his sharp ears picked up a new sound. He stared at the sky and shaded his eyes against the glare of the overcast.

"Looks like the cavalry has arrived."

A gigantic helicopter was bearing down on the ship. Dangling below the helicopter in a sling was a blimp-shaped submarine with a blunt nose.

'That's the largest helicopter I've ever seen," Captain Larsen said. 'Actually, the Mi-26 is the biggest helicopter in the world,)) Austin said. "It's more than a hundred feet long. They call it the flying crane.

Becker smiled for the first time in hours. "Please tell me that strange-looking object hanging below the helicopter is your rescue vehicle."

"The Sea Lamprey isn't the prettiest craft in the sea," Zavala said with a shrug. "I sacrificed form for function in designing her."

"To the contrary," Becker said. "She's beautiful"

The captain shook his head in wonderment. "How on earth did you get this equipment here so quickly? You were twelve hundred miles away when the rescue call went out."

"We remembered that the Russians like to do things in a big way," Austin said. "They jumped at the chance to show the world they're still a first-rate nation."

"But that helicopter couldn't have carried it all that way in such a short time. You gentlemen must be magicians."

"It took a lot of work to pull this rabbit out of a hat," Austin said, as he watched the helicopter maneuver. "The Mi-26 picked up the submersible at sea and transferred it to a land base, where two Antonov N-124 heavy-duty transport planes were waiting. The Sea Lamprey went on one plane. The big chopper and the NUMA heli- copter were loaded on the other. It was a two-hour flight to the NATO base in the Faroes. While they unloaded the submersible and got it ready to fly, we came out here to prepare the way."

The powerful turboshaft engines drowned out the captain's reply as the aircraft moved closer and hovered. The eight rotor blades and five-bladed tail rotor threshed the air, and the downdraft they cre- ated scooped a vast watery crater out of the sea. The submersible was released a few feet above the roiling water, and the helicopter moved off. The Sea Lamprey had been fitted out with large air-filled pontoons. It sank beneath the waves, but quickly bobbed back to the surface.