A second explosion sounded from forward and a blast of flames roared into the passageway. Orlov, Chernobrovin and his men barely made it into the hatch before the entire passageway was solid flames. Orlov and Vasilev pushed the hatch down and dogged it shut.
“Detach the chamber!” Orlov ordered. Naumov hit the emergency disconnect, and over a hundred explosive bolts fired, separating the chamber from the submarine.
“Did it work?” Trusov asked Chernobrovin. He looked at her, but it almost seemed that the light was going out of his eyes, but the answer came as Trusov could feel the chamber rocking in the waves on the surface. Someone high above was opening the upper hatch, and as fresh air poured into the ship, Chernobrovin suddenly vomited all over her.
30
The escape chamber tossed in the sea state, the windowless, airless capsule of steel seemingly made to induce seasickness.
Irina Trusov had climbed the ladder to the top hatch and climbed out, perching herself on the top surface, which would be perilous with higher waves, but even the prospect of falling off what used to be the top of the conning tower would be preferable to the interior of the chamber.
After Chernobrovin had vomited on her, his other three nuclear crewmen likewise collapsed, retching on the floor, and the stench of it caused others to lose it, and in the middle of the vomit-fest, a huge roaring explosion sounded below them, and the shock wave tossed the chamber in the sea for a minute. The detonation had been the last anyone would hear from the assembly of steel, cable and electronics that had once been the Novosibirsk. Trusov felt an intense moment of mourning. For the last three years, she had poured all she had into that submarine, and now it was gone. Thanks to the Americans.
She forced her mind to turn to the present moment. And to survival. The chamber had rations for more than a week for the entire crew, but it was foreseeable that they’d be out here on the godforsaken Arabian Sea longer. They were hundreds, perhaps thousands of kilometers from the shipping lanes. Since they had separated from the hull and surfaced, there had been no aircraft overhead.
And there was a more immediate problem. Radiation sickness. Chernobrovin and his band of nuclear technicians were falling apart below in the chamber, continuing to dry heave long after their stomachs were empty, their skin turning a sickening pale. And what radiation dose had the rest of them had? She, Orlov and Naumov had been all the way forward in the first compartment when the reactor had its power excursion and flashed neutron and gamma radiation at the entire crew.
Trusov breathed in the salty, fishy-smelling sea air, glad at least that she didn’t need to worry about carbon dioxide poisoning. Orlov poked his head out and climbed up to join her on top of the chamber hull. He handed her a bottle of water and a square meter of cloth. She took the bottle gratefully and nodded at the captain.
“Sorry that the bottled water is so hot. Drink it slow. And wrap that cloth around your head. You’re way too fair to withstand this sunshine.”
“Thanks, Captain.”
“Former captain,” Orlov said sadly.
“Yes,” Trusov said. They sat in silence for some time. “Did you light off the emergency beacon?”
“I tried,” Orlov said. “There’s no indication it worked. Apparently we lacked a preventive maintenance reminder to check its batteries. I suspect they died some time ago.”
“What about the sonar beacon?” The chamber had an active sonar pinger to allow being located by warships with sonar receivers. It could be used if the chamber were trapped under polar ice cover, but other than that, no one had seen its usefulness.
Orlov shouted down into the chamber. “Naumov! Get up here!”
Naumov arrived. “Yes, Captain.”
“See if you can engage the sonar emergency pinging device.”
“Yes, sir.” His head vanished back below.
“Bad news, Captain,” Trusov said. “With the radio beacon out, we may be out here longer than our rations allow. We only have eight days, give or take, of rations.”
“That assumes a full crew, Irina. I fear there will be many fatalities from whatever happened to the reactor. Chernobrovin looks bad. Dammit, Irina, I should have blown to the surface and evacuated the ship earlier.”
“You couldn’t know, Captain. If we’d been just twenty kilometers farther west, we might still be operating, still pursuing the target submarines.”
“Well, I guess we’ll never know. I think I’ll lie down for an hour.”
“You’ll get sunburned, sir.”
“Better than being in that stinking chamber. There’s no way to ventilate it. I think the atmosphere is worse inside than it was in the submarine before the sinking.”
Trusov said nothing, just looked out to sea while the captain started to snore quietly.
Director Margaret Allende joined Director of Operations Angel Menendez in the SCIF conference room adjoining her palatial office. On the wall opposite their seats, a large flatpanel screen displayed the view from the Predator drone orbiting the central Arabian Sea. In the view was a large rescue chamber, big enough to hold a hundred people crowded together. It bobbed gently in the swells. Two people could be made out on top of the structure, an older man and a younger woman. For several long minutes Allende watched the video, then called up the dark screen next to it to display the Arabian Sea. The position of the rescue chamber was marked in red on the chart. The nearest land was Mumbai, India, 290 nautical miles east-northeast. At least, she thought, Mumbai had competent hospitals.
“Is Mumbai within helicopter range of that escape pod?”
Menendez nodded. “Sure, but a chopper could only take on a few survivors at a time. If that chamber evacuated the entire crew, there’d be sixty-five or seventy people in it. You’d need a big procession of choppers to get them out. Plus, making the jet helicopters in the queue hover while you bring in three or four at a time, burning fuel? Sure, maybe the Indian Navy has two dozen jet choppers standing by in Mumbai, but that’s a losing bet. It’s a nice thought, ma’am, but a loser.”
“A rescue ship?”
“If one were equipped with medical facilities and supplies and departed right now? It would still be eleven hours away. But it would probably take twenty-four hours to get organized to get a ship like that mobilized. Odds are, those survivors are suffering from radiation sickness, dehydration, and soon starvation. Twenty-four or thirty-six hours from now? A third of them could be gone by then.”
“We could vector in the Vermont. She’s what, three, four hours away at maximum speed?”
“Are you high, boss? Vermont is an ultra-secret project boat. Those survivors all come from a ship that had orders to sink her. You can’t crowd them onto a project boat.”
“I suppose you’re right. Better get this in front of Admirals Rand and Catardi, and we should call in Pacino.”
“He’ll be glad to hear that Vermont and Panther survived all this. Nothing for our sailors to do now but sail home. Easy day.”
Lieutenant Anthony Pacino stared at Lieutenant Dieter Dankleff.