“Well, if I must be shipwrecked in a polar storm with my enemy, I’d prefer it be you, Lieutenant.” Alexeyev looked at Kovalov. “Mr. Pacino not only rescued us, he was very kind to us. I suppose this is two favors I owe you, Lieutenant. Do you have food here?”
“I’m afraid the news is bad, Captain,” Pacino said. “We’re as out of food in this shelter as we were on the Panther. Most of it had gone bad. Half the crew is sick, the other half is starving.”
“This storm will die down soon,” Alexeyev said. “I expect airborne search-and-rescue will come for us soon enough. Both yours and ours. With all the explosions, Northern Fleet Command must have heard all the events.”
“Captain Alexeyev, did you have a radio to call for help?” Seagraves asked. “A distress call?”
Alexeyev shook his head. “Unfortunately no. Belgorod was immobilized by the Gigantskiy explosion. There were many deaths. We survivors were pulled out by Losharik, which we’d undocked before the battle. Also unfortunately, Northern Fleet sent Losharik here with almost no nuclear fuel left. She was barely able to glide to a halt under the polynya formed by the Gigantskiy detonation. By the time Losharik was able to surface, she had no power to use for the radios. That’s why we had to walk from where we surfaced to here.”
“How did you know we were here?” Quinnivan asked.
“We saw an explosion,” Kovalov said. “Your self-destruct charges?”
“Yes. They were improvised,” Seagraves said. “They turned out to be a bit bigger than I’d anticipated. But speaking of self-destruct, is that what that last nuclear explosion was? From the direction to Belgorod? Your self-destruct charge?”
Alexeyev shook his head, accepting a cup of tea from Doc Thornburg and cradling it in his hands. “We don’t know what that was,” he admitted.
“Maybe one of the Status-6 weapons going off?” Pacino asked. “In a partial yield?”
Alexeyev shook his head a second time. “No way. With a Status-6, it is all or nothing. The full ten megatons or zero. We thought that blast was from you.”
Seagraves glanced at Quinnivan, then back at Alexeyev. “We shot a 250 kiloton depth charge at you, but it went wide and long. Too far away from you. It blew up a few seconds after the Magnum. Or, Gigantskiy, as you would say.”
“You did?” Alexeyev said, genuinely surprised. “We didn’t know. The shock wave from it must have hit us about the same time as the Gigantskiy shock wave. The Gigantskiy detonated nearly five miles too close. Was that because of you?”
Seagraves nodded. “We hit it with half a dozen countermeasure torpedoes. They found your torpedo, but I suppose it had some programming to blow up if it thought it would be destroyed.”
“We call it a default detonation,” Alexeyev said. “But all it did was kill us.”
“It sank us as well,” Seagraves said. “It just took a while. We stayed operational long enough to surface here and get the survival gear out. Then the boat — with our dead inside it — went down.”
“I’m sorry, Captain Seagraves,” Alexeyev said. “How many did you lose?”
“We’re still tallying, but about twenty-four or twenty-five. What about you?”
“We lost fifty, Captain.”
“Bad day at sea, Captain Alexeyev. I assume your search-and-rescue planes and ours will be buzzing around here soon. We had three emergency locator beacons. I hope they worked.”
“Everything depends on this storm easing up,” Alexeyev said.
There was silence for a moment, and then Navigator Lewinsky pulled Captain Seagraves aside.
“What is it, Nav?” Seagraves asked.
“I think I figured out your riddle, sir, about what the Panther op and the Devilfish mission had in common.”
“Go ahead, then, Nav,” Seagraves said, an expression of amusement crossing his face.
“In both operations,” Lewinsky said, “the good guys rescued the bad guys. And now a third mission is ending the same way.”
“Let’s hope this doesn’t end up like the Devilfish scenario,” Seagraves said, serious again. “Everyone died. Except for the Russian admiral and Pacino’s dad.”
“Yeah,” Lewinsky said, looking down at the deck.
Anthony Pacino warmed his hands near the diesel heater and looked up to see that Irina Trusov had gotten to her feet and limped to the far end of the shelter, dropping down and leaning against the insulated shelter wall. He left the heater and knelt in front of Trusov.
“Irina. Why did you hit me?”
She looked up at him, her big blue liquid eyes drilling into him, tears suddenly leaking out of them. “You just had to ruin another Russian mission. You just had to sink another Russian submarine.”
“Not my choice, Irina. It wasn’t personal. It was just business. You had your orders. We had ours. We were just following them.”
She shut her eyes and the tears ran down her face. “Two failed missions for me now, Lieutenant Pacino. My career is obviously over. The stink of this won’t leave me, not ever. My poor father is probably rolling in his grave.”
“I’m sorry,” Pacino said. “Do you mind if I sit next to you?” He didn’t wait for her to answer, but sat next to her, leaning against the insulated wall, the dull hum of the diesel heater just slightly louder than the blowing, howling wind outside. He thought Trusov would slide away from him, but she moved closer, until he could feel the warmth of her body touching his arm and thigh, and her touch seemed electric. He shook off the feelings, reminding himself that he hadn’t seen an eligible female in weeks, and that comatose Rachel Romanov waited for him in a hospital bed in Norfolk.
“Coffee, Mr. Pacino?” Short Hull Cooper asked, holding out a fresh cup of coffee. Pacino nodded and took the cup. “For you, ma’am?” Cooper handed a cup to Trusov and took her cold cup, then went back to the coffee pot.
“Have you ever had coffee?” Pacino asked.
She nodded, sipping the broiling hot brew. “In Havana a few years ago. This is weaker, but I think I like it better, Patch. Do you mind if I call you Patch?”
“Yes, please call me Patch.” Pacino said.
She looked at him closely for a moment, and she put her hand on his forehead. “What happened here?” She gently touched the bandage on his forehead and the top of his skull.
“I cut my scalp. I got tossed pretty hard into a bulkhead after the first Gigantskiy explosion.”
“Let me look,” she said, pulling the bandage aside. “Oh, it’s deep. That will leave a red scar on your forehead.”
“Our corpsman says I can have plastic surgery to make it go away.” Pacino shrugged. “I’ll see how it looks after we get home.”
“Patch, what was that sonar signal you pinged at us? It was music. From the 1812 Overture. Why did you do that? Were you trying to say you knew we were Russian? I mean, that was obvious. Or were you trying to say you were friendly?”
Pacino laughed. “That sonar ping was trying to send a detonation command to two mines we’d placed on Belgorod’s hull when it was surfaced at the polynya before you launched the first Gigantskiy. Later, we got orders to fire upon you but I think you got the same orders first. We pinged the command detonate signal, but obviously the mines either failed or were blown off by shock waves and nothing happened. The signal itself was just a happy coincidence — the cannon fire and trumpets make for a lot of acoustic contrast and the sound is unmistakable. No way the mines would hear that particular twelve or fifteen seconds of sound from nature or your own pings. No sense having mines detonating due to some random noise source.”