It’s me, Captain, the unmistakable voice of Chief Engineer Alesya Matveev said. The dead chief engineer.
“Chief,” he said, pulling the phone from his ear and staring at it as if it had turned into a toad. Slowly, he put the phone back to his ear. “How are you calling me?”
Look to the south, she said.
Alexeyev looked to his right, and a few tables over, Chief Engineer Matveev sat, a cup of coffee in front of her. As if in a dream, Alexeyev hung up the phone, placed it in his pocket, stood and walked slowly to her table. She was dressed exactly as she had been on the Kazan — in her powder blue coveralls with high-visibility yellow stripes running across the torso beneath her throat and on her sleeves. Her hair was shining and clean, pulled back into a ponytail. Her face shone with good health, but still bereft of any sort of makeup. In life, she’d seemed plain to Alexeyev, but in death, she had an inner beauty that was reflected in her face. Hesitantly, he sat down opposite her.
“I miss you,” he said, not intending to say it.
I miss you too, Captain, she said without speaking, her voice in his mind. She smiled slightly with that enigmatic unreadable expression. But you didn’t listen to me. She found her pack of rancid cigarettes, pulled one out and lit it with a lighter with the emblem of the sunken K-561 Kazan. The smoke was distinctive, but not entirely unpleasant, Alexeyev thought, because now it reminded him of his dead friend. You didn’t take my advice, her voice said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
I told you the one word to bear in mind. Distance. You got too close. Now your ship is dying. If it’s not already dead.
Alexeyev looked down forlornly at the table surface. He picked up her lighter and looked at the Kazan emblem, sad for days gone by. How good had he had it in the time before the South Atlantic run, he thought, when his crew were all alive? And his submarine was in one piece? He looked back up at Matveev, but she wasn’t finished talking.
I blame myself. Perhaps I was too cryptic. So today I shall try to be more… specific. So you can understand. Understand, and live.
“What happens now?”
She half-smiled at him with an air of mystery. You have a long walk ahead of you in your very near future. Bundle up. It will be very cold. Make sure you tell the crew to walk with you or else they’ll die.
“What?” he said. “A long walk? And the crew dies if they don’t come with me?”
Yes, she said. Walk east-northeast for eight kilometers. Remember, Captain. East-northeast. Eight kilometers.
“What do you mean by that?”
She just looked at him, that same half-smile on her face, but then her expression turned serious. She frowned and said suddenly, in a loud voice, You have to wake up.
“Wake up? From what?”
Matveev leaned forward, opened her mouth wider and shouted, Captain, you have to wake up!
He felt a stinging slap on his face and he blinked, and as he did, the Moscow bistro evaporated, and with it, Chief Engineer Matveev, and he was staring into the panicked face of his weapons officer, Katerina Sobol.
“What happened?” he asked weakly, coughing in the darkened room filled with a slight dark haze of smoke, Matveev’s words haunting him even as reality returned. A long walk, he thought. East-northeast. Eight kilometers. Bundle up. Bring the crew.
“I can’t say for sure, sir,” Sobol said in her ridiculously high-pitched voice, “but I think the Gigantskiy blew up too close. We didn’t have enough distance. Or it went off prematurely.”
Alexeyev rubbed his head. He had the worst headache of his life, worse even than during the fire onboard Kazan as that submarine died. He reached for his right eye, since it felt different. His eye patch was gone. Blown off in the shock, he thought.
“Do you know the status of the ship?” he asked.
“It’s bad, Captain. Sixth is flooded and the fifth started flooding, and it looked catastrophic, probably from a double-ended main seawater shear or loss of the hull valve. The aft battery is gone. The reactor is gone. And the explosion in the machinery room blew away our atmo control, and with the oxygen jettisoned, we’re slowly suffocating. I’m so sorry, Captain, but Belgorod is gone and it isn’t coming back. The mission is over. We need to abandon ship, sir, but we’re under thick ice.”
Alexeyev unbuckled from his seat. “We need to energize the Bolshoi-Feniks and call for Losharik,” he said. “Losharik will have to rescue us through the upper hatch of the escape chamber. Prepare the crew to abandon ship. And try to wake up the sonar officer, Palinkova. We’re going to need her, or her senior enlisted.”
“Sir,” Sobol said, “do you think the Losharik came through this okay?”
Alexeyev shook his head. “If it didn’t, this day will end very badly,” he said, wondering how Sergei Kovalov had taken the nuclear detonation.
Irina Trusov was playing in her room when her father came in after smoking his pipe and having his after-dinner drink with Mommy. He habitually spent an hour at the end of the day with Irina, talking, reading stories, teaching her to play chess, or working on the submarine model.
“Daddy, look,” Irina said, “I made a figure of you for when you are driving the boat on the surface.” She showed him the carving she’d made, the size of a fingernail, of a man in a heavy black coat with a fur cap on, the detail of the tiny character exquisite.
This is great work, Irina, he said, the pride in his voice filling her with pleasure. Carefully, he placed the figure in the conning tower of the large submarine model.
“I want to make one of you for the central command post,” she said. “Like you’re standing at the periscope. Show me how you’d stand at the periscope, Daddy.”
He stood from the bed and crouched slightly down, extending his hands out as if holding on to periscope grips. I’d be wearing my blue submarine coveralls, he said. Irina took a mental picture and smiled at him.
But then he stood erect, his smile vanishing, a serious expression crossing his face. Nizkiy uroven’ kisloroda, he said loudly, frowning. Daddy’s alarm clock started blaring from the other room. His face took on a look of fear. He said it again. Nizkiy uroven’ kisloroda… oxygen level… low.
“What?” she said, staring at him. “Why is your alarm clock going off?” The sound of the alarm clock’s blaring alarm got louder, as if it were being held against her head.
There was terror in Daddy’s expression. Oxygen level… LOW!
Captain Second Rank Iron Irina Trusov, the systems officer and pilot-in-command of the deep-diving submarine Losharik, blinked and coughed, realizing she was having trouble getting her breath, then tried to focus her eyes on the console in front of her. The master alarm was blaring and the Second Captain AI system kept repeating, OXYGEN LEVEL… LOW. Trusov silenced the alarm and coughed again, trying to make sense of her surroundings. Something was deeply wrong. Instead of the usual brightly lit panel, it was dark. And the space, the cockpit, usually so well lit, was also dark. Dark and cold. Trusov shivered, exhaling, her breath visible in the space lit only by dual emergency lamps placed aft in the cockpit compartment.
But perhaps the strangest thing was that she hung from her seatbelt. She turned her head, trying to ignore the dizziness. There was something very wrong, in addition to the space being ice cold and dark. The room was completely on its side. Tilted an entire ninety degrees to starboard.