Steven Kent - 100 Fathoms Below

The only way to get the bear out of Roanoke ’s blind spot was to clear the baffles, but that would mean taking a sudden hard turn to look back into it. Not only would that take them off course, but changing their bearing that drastically would definitely alert the Soviets to their presence. And as the captain had said, considering how close Roanoke was to the Rybachiy sub base, the Soviets would have no qualms about firing on them.

The Soviet sub blinked in and out of sonar as she passed through the baffles. Tim’s whole body tensed. He glanced over at Aukerman, who looked as nervous as he felt, and was probably wishing he were back in the reactor room.

According to the sonar readings, Roanoke was passing right under the Sverdlov. The cruiser was thirty years old, and Tim hoped she was hard of hearing. If her listening equipment was as out of date as the rest of her, they would pass by undetected. If not, acoustic gear would rain down all around them.

He held his breath, and then they were past the Sverdlov. Tim sighed with relief. But the sub was still behind them, still searching for them. Tim strained his ears for any sound of torpedoes being readied, but so far the bear had taken no further aggressive action.

“Stay the course,” Captain Weber told the crew at the helm. “Slow and steady.”

Tim didn’t understand how he could sound so calm. With each passing second, he was more convinced the Soviets would spot them and that would be the end of it. Either they would be destroyed like the South Korean 747, or they would be forced to surface so they could be boarded, the crew taken prisoner and probably tortured for information while Soviet engineers took Roanoke apart.

The sub winked in and out of sonar. Tim wiped the sweat from his forehead. Next to him, Aukerman did the same. In his headphones, the Soviet sub sounded so loud, Tim felt as if he were sitting in its engine room.

He thought back to those long winters of his childhood, how he had stared into the seemingly unending darkness and prayed for daylight. It had come eventually, as it always did, but there were times when he felt its return as a personal triumph, as if the sun had deigned to come back only because he had prayed hard enough. It was a childish way to think, believing the strength of his wish had somehow affected the world around him. But now, after everything else that had happened, with their lives hanging in the balance once more, he found himself feeling that same yearning with the same intensity, as though he might get them out of this alive if he just prayed hard enough.

Stubic leaned closer, his sharp teeth inches from Jerry’s neck. Jerry winced. He couldn’t let this happen. He didn’t want to die, didn’t want to become one of these creatures. But he was pinned against the locker and too weak to fight.

His hand grasped for anything he could use as a weapon, anything to make Stubic let go of him, but what could he possibly bring to bear against the vampire’s unnatural strength? His hand brushed the gauze of the splint on his knee—and then one of the wooden stakes splinting his leg.

He slid the stake up and out of the gauze, doing his best to ignore the screaming pain in his knee. With all the strength he could muster, he drove the sharp end into Stubic’s chest.

The blind, glassy eyes widened in surprise. Stubic hissed and drew back, releasing him. Jerry fell to the deck. The pain in his broken knee was worse than anything he had ever known.

Stubic dropped to his knees, hands grasping the stake protruding from his chest. Then, to Jerry’s horror, he laughed and began to pull the stake out.

“You’re too weak to drive it in all the way, White. Why fight me? Think how strong you’ll be when you’re one of us. Not just the new strength in your transformed body, but strength in numbers. Our kind is connected in ways you can’t imagine. Our bodies. Our minds. I can hear the green-eyed queen in my head, urging me to grow our numbers, to fill the darkness of the ocean with our kind. When you rise, you’ll hear her too.”

“If I wanted to hear what a vampire was thinking,” Jerry said, “I wouldn’t be sitting here praying for you to shut the fuck up already.”

He threw himself on top of Stubic, taking him down to the deck, the weight of his body pushing the stake deeper into the vampire’s chest. Stubic screamed as it pierced his heart. Blood sluiced from his mouth. He convulsed, his limbs smacking against the deck, but this time there was no escape from the stake. Jerry leaned on it with all his strength until Stubic quit thrashing.

He looked down at the dying vampire. “If you really do share your thoughts with each other, tell your green-eyed queen you failed, and that she can kiss my still-living human ass.”

Stubic’s blood-slick lips stretched into a smile. He spoke his last words then—words that chilled Jerry to the core. And with a last wheezing, triumphant laugh, the vampire died.

“Captain, she’s slowing and turning around!” Tim shouted.

Captain Weber came into the sonar shack and looked past Tim to the screen. “We’re not out of the woods yet, Spicer. Let’s make sure she keeps going.”

They kept watching the screen for another fifteen minutes. Tim heard the torpedo doors close again, after which the bear continued sailing away and didn’t turn back. He couldn’t believe it. It was as though his prayers had been answered. The Soviet sub hadn’t detected them, and neither had the surface ships. No torpedo had been fired. No one had been captured and interrogated. Roanoke had the proof it had been sent to find: that the prototype submarine existed. And the Soviets were none the wiser that a US nuclear sub had violated their sovereign territory.

The captain clapped Tim on the shoulder and announced, “We’re clear.”

Tim let himself breathe again. Seated at the next console, Aukerman let out a spontaneous cheer and high-fived him.

They had to keep sailing slow and low, even through international waters, to avoid detection by the Soviet boats that patrolled nearby. It took 26 hours for Roanoke to reach a suitable place to surface in US waters—a spot 30 miles off Attu, the westernmost of the Aleutian Islands, and the westernmost point of land in the United States. By then, the battle lanterns mounted on the bulkheads had started to lose power. They were never intended to be the boat’s sole source of light for days on end. The crew used some of the Supply Department’s extra six-volt batteries to bring light back to the essential parts of the submarine—the control room on the top level; the galley, mess, and head on the middle level; and the torpedo room on the bottom level—and stockpiled all the remaining batteries they would need to keep the lights burning on the long trip home.

Before they surfaced, Captain Weber ordered Roanoke up to periscope depth. The instrument rose out of the floor, and he peered through the eyepiece, searching the surrounding waters. When he determined it was safe, he gave the order.

“Rig for surface.”

When Tim heard those three beautiful words from where he sat in the sonar shack, he had to fight back the tears. After being trapped in the dark, confined space of the sub with those creatures, the idea of breathing fresh air again, of seeing the sky again, was overwhelming. For a moment, he feared he might lose the fight and start weeping right there in front of his sonar screen. He supposed no one would fault him if he did.

The surviving crew had been dealing with their stress as best they could. Some spent what little rack time they had curled in a fetal ball behind the privacy curtain and crying softly to themselves. Others channeled their emotions into food, eating second and third helpings of the cold sandwiches, canned goods, and cereal Oran Guidry prepared for them.