“Navigator,” Pacino ordered, “get the fuck to the scene and see what the hell is going on.” She waved at him as she unplugged her air hose and dashed forward to the door leading to the combat equipment room and the ladderway to the lower level torpedo room. She’d have to make her way aft through the lower level, link up with the casualty assistance team and help fight the fire. Odds were, the fire was happening in the galley. If they were lucky, it was just a grease fire and would be out in a few minutes, but if it were more serious, fighting the fire could make tremendous noise and alert the Russians.
He glanced at the chart, realizing he’d have to break contact with the Omega and escape the fjord undetected, all the while having to fight a goddamned fire.
“Pilot, all stop! Make your depth one five zero feet and hover!”
As Dankleff acknowledged, Pacino lowered the periscope and stepped to the chart table. As the Vermont slowed to a stop, the noise of the huge screws of the Omega came closer, thrashing the water directly over them now. The channel turned northward here, so that the outbound course would change to 015. If Pacino hovered while they put out the fire, the Omega would sail on away from them, but it would still be a disaster if they had to put up the snorkel mast and ventilate the smoke out of the ship. They were far inside the twelve-mile territorial limit of Russian waters, which was a violation of international law, and if detected, the Russians would be justified in taking them all prisoner or even firing upon them. This miserable situation could come down to the agonizing decision between being captured or suffocating. Or even worse, being burned alive.
Romanov’s voice came over his headset, her voice iron hard, but he knew her well enough to know when she was afraid.
“Conn, Torpedo Room, Navigator, the fire is in the wardroom and is extremely severe and spreading forward to officers country.”
“Nav, did you say the wardroom?” Pacino asked, not believing his ears. Why would a fire break out in the officers’ mess and conference room?
“Conn, it’s an oxygen fire. There is an O2 line running into the wardroom for when it doubles as a surgical suite and it — it must be a double-ended shear and oxygen is blowing into the room and the room is engulfed in flames. We can’t get anywhere close to it!”
“Can you isolate it upstream? Cut off the O2 flow?”
“We’re working on it now but the fire has spread to the crews’ mess where the forward isolation valve is. I’ve got Chief Nygard getting into a steam suit now. He’s going to attempt to get to the valve.”
It was then that the casualty grew far worse. The air feeding Pacino’s mask suddenly cut off, and as he tried to inhale, he just drew a vacuum on the mask. He pulled it off, thinking something must have happened to the EAB manifold. He looked up to find the other control room watchstanders dumping their masks. The air of the control room smelled awful, like burning insulation. And now black smoke was pouring into the room from the aft door, the foul-smelling smoke in mere seconds filling the room.
“Navigator, Control, we’ve lost emergency breathing air up here. What’s your status?”
“Conn, Navigator, Chief Nygard is in the middle level crews’ mess trying to get to the O2 valve now, but we’ve lost emergency breathing air throughout the compartment. We’ve got a few OBAs and a few air-packs, but not enough to go around. OOD, you know what this means.”
The smoke continued filling the room, making it even hotter, while visibility was shrinking. Pacino could barely make out the sonar console from the command console. He stepped aft and shut the aft control room door, but the smoke was still getting worse, pouring in from the aft bulkhead despite the shut door. Vevera stood up from his panel as it went dark. “Loss of battlecontrol,” he said to Pacino.
The sonar consoles on the port side blacked out. “Loss of sonar,” Albanese said.
The smoke had completely filled the room. Visibility was near zero. Pacino coughed desperately, sinking down to his knees, hoping that the air would be breathable near the deck, but it seemed no improvement. He could feel dizziness start to overtake him as the overhead red lights clicked off, leaving the room in the darkness of a coal mine.
And now the decision he’d feared was here. There were only two options — surfacing the boat and abandoning ship, or scuttling the vessel in the deep water of the fjord to avoid capture by the Russians. In the first case, they’d be taken captive, held as criminals, interrogated, and tortured, and certainly used as a propaganda win for the Russians, with the top-secret project submarine Vermont in their hands. In the second, every crewman aboard would die and the USS Vermont would sink below crush depth in the deep fjord and scatter wreckage on the sea bottom, all to be harvested by the Russian deep-diving machinery. If the boat still had propulsion, and it were clear that all was truly lost, Pacino could order full speed and a steep angle to crush depth and get all this over with fast, and maybe that way the hull breakup would be violent enough that it would spoil any Russian salvage attempts.
“Maneuvering, Conn, report your status,” Pacino ordered over the tactical circuit.
But there was no reply. The circuit was silent.
“Navigator, Control, report.” No reply. “Navigator, Officer of the Deck, report!” But there was nothing.
By then, the room was so filled with smoke that there seemed no way to breathe. Without remembering how he got there, he found himself lying prone on the deck, coughing so hard it felt like he’d toss up a lung, and it was then that the strangeness began.
He saw a beam of light attempting to shine through dark smoke, rotating around to shine on the other crewmembers.
A second light beam came into view and then a third, a fourth, and more. One of the lamps shone in his face, blinding him, and when it moved from his face, he could see the dim outline of a masked figure oddly wearing a fireman’s helmet.
Everything went black then, but while he couldn’t see or hear anything, he felt a sense of time.
Then he could see and hear again, but only for a brief moment, and while he could see, he couldn’t move. He saw a circle of bright light, half obscured by smoke, and if he didn’t know better, he could swear it was an open hatch, and he felt himself incline from lying flat to being vertical, but he wasn’t standing, he was just… floating.
The world went black again, and again he had that strange sense of time passing.
And like a cosmic strobe light, the world returned once more, this time the light around him so bright he became convinced he’d passed on to the other side like he had in his near death experience aboard the Piranha, but then he saw a flash of something. His head was turned to the side and he could see the outside of the hull of the Vermont, but she wasn’t in a Russian fjord, she was lying in a drydock, drenched with the afternoon Virginia sunshine. A short trailer or container box was placed on the top of her deck aft of the plug trunk hatch, block letters on the trailer reading TRACON, with the emblem of Submarine Development Group 12 next to the letters.
Pacino couldn’t move his head, or anything else, with the exception of his eyes. He looked up and saw a hovering helicopter overhead, its blades rotating in slow motion. He scanned the chopper to see if it had markings of the Russian Navy, but it was painted red with a large white cross painted on it. He could make out the word MEDEVAC on its side just before the blackness came again.