'Don't shoot us!'
'If you people have matches,' Jake said conversationally, trying to calm them down, 'now would be an excellent time to strike one. Your flashlights are probably fried. Any light at all would be a help.'
He heard someone fumbling. After about a half minute someone struck a match.
Sonny Killbuck walked forward down the starboard aisle.
'The reactor? Has it shut down?'
'Oh, yes,' Sonny said. 'The rods are held out by electrical power. In the event of a total electrical failure, springs pull the rods in, SCRAMing the reactor.' He spoke to the man on the floor near him, who was Eck. 'Give me those matches.'
He struck one. The depth gauge showed sixty feet.
'Okay,' Sonny said, trying to calm himself down. 'Okay. We're dead in the water at sixty feet. What do you want to do, sir?'
'I want you to get this pigboat to the surface so we can get everyone off.'
'The nearest hatch is in the next deck up, right above this compartment. I suggest we get everyone up there. When I do an emergency blow, we'll go up pretty quick. Maybe thirty seconds. Call it forty. Open the hatch and get everyone out.'
'Okay,' Jake said.
He turned to Toad and Carmellini and started to speak when the match burned out. The darkness was so thick it was hard to breathe. If they weren't careful, someone could start shooting. 'You heard him. Toad, you and Carmellini get Zelda up to the hatch. There should be life vests by the hatch. After the blow, open it up and go out. Sonny and I will be right behind. And these two here. Then anyone else who wants out can swim for it with us.'
'Okay, boss,' Toad said. He and Carmellini went down the ladder and brought Zelda up. They kept climbing.
When the three of them had life vests on, Toad shouted.
'You two, go on up.' Eck and Boldt scurried up the ladder.
'Anyone else?' Sonny asked.
They might be armed. Jake went to the tunnel and shouted aft, 'Abandon ship.' How far aft they could hear him, he didn't know.
'Do it, Sonny.'
Killbuck struck another match. He was at a panel on the left. He began squeezing handles and lifting levers. Nothing electrical here— these handles pulled cables that opened valves which released compressed air into the ballast tanks, forcing the water out.
In that huge silence he heard the hissing as the valves opened. One by one, on both sides of the boat.
'Let's go,' Sonny said as he came rushing toward Jake. 'I couldn't get one of the valves open. She's going to be out of trim.'
'What does that mean?'
'I don't know if she'll get to the surface. Or if she'll float. The shooting in the control room may have damaged something.'
Trying to get life jackets on people, the hatch open, all in absolute Stygian darkness, was an exercise in terror. They handled it different ways. Tommy Carmellini was cool and deliberate; Toad kept muttering, 'Come on, people'; one of the Germans was sobbing; and Zelda Hudson said nothing, tried to help but was too badly wounded. 'I'm sorry,' she said under her breath at one point. Grafton heard it, though no one else did.
He knew the submarine was on the surface when it rolled drunk-enly as the first of the swells slammed into the sail.
Killbuck cranked madly on the hatch dogs. After a lifetime the thing opened… and they got their first whiff of salt spray and sea wind. And their first gleam of light. The early light of dawn was turning the sky pink — a gleam enlivened the compartment where they were.
'Out, out, out,' Jake Grafton roared, unable to contain himself. He hated the darkness, he was scared, and there were still people trapped aboard.
Carmellini scampered up the ladder, then turned and jerked Zelda Hudson up and out.
A swell broke over the hatch. Cold seawater cascaded in.
Carmellini was no longer topside.
'Up you go, Toad. You and Killbuck. Out!'
Those two and the Germans from the control room were out when the next wave turned the open hatch into a drain pipe. A river of cold seawater poured in while Jake waited.
Another man was climbing the ladder, keening, desperate. He went by Jake without seeing him, ignored the life vests, and was almost washed off the ladder by the next wave.
Jake grabbed his arm. 'Is there anyone back aft?'
'Oh, God! Heydrich is back there killing people. He is shooting everyone he can find.'
'Out! Up the ladder and into the water. Swim away from the boat.'
The man went.
Should he go aft, look for people still alive?
The deck was tilting. Staying in the boat was suicide. Jake Grafton started up the ladder, but he had waited too long. The open hatch went under and became a waterfall.
He was washed to the deck. For several seconds he waited for the deluge to stop, then he realized it wasn't going to.
The water in the compartment was going down the ladder well. Jake let go and was swept that way.
He got a grip on something, then lost it and was washed down the ladder well, fell with tons of water pushing on his shoulders and arms.
The total darkness, the cold water, the list of the boat. Raw terror grabbed him as he tried to think.
Automatically he held on to the ladder, unwilling to give up on the open hatch he knew was waiting above. He could wait in an air pocket, and when the inflow slowed, climb up and out! Yes, that was it! His one chance!
How long he clung to the ladder as water poured onto his head he didn't know. It was only when the realization sank in that the volume of water was increasing that reason prevailed.
He pushed away, tried to think, felt his way aft in the pure wet blackness, grabbing this and that as the cold water swirled about him and the air pressure pushed at his eardrums and the deck tilted.
Oh yes, my God yes! The bow is going down. She's lost buoyancy. She's going under!
The airlock aft, where the minisub docked.
The Russians and Germans hadn't closed the watertight hatches, so the boat was flooding throughout its length. Through some kink of fate, some twist in the cosmic fabric, the bow dropped, so the water ran forward, forcing the bow down even more but not drowning him.
He dimly remembered the compartments, remembered the virtual simulator, remembered the engineering drawings he had studied weeks ago in his office in Crystal City.
He fought his way up the tilting deck. The boat was perhaps twenty degrees nose-down. The weight would be carrying her down, down into the infinite depths. The steadily increasing air pressure reminded him that was so.
Then he saw a light. Dim. A battle lantern. Battery-operated. Not fried by the E-grenades. It was at the bottom of the ladder up to the airlock.
He took it from its bracket, scrambled up the tilted ladder toward the lock.
Blood. In the light he saw a vision of blood, flecked with the gleam of white bone.
Heydrich!
'Aaieee!' Heydrich screamed and swung a damage-control ax.
There wasn't room to swing it properly, and Heydrich was almost blind. He swung at what he saw, which was the gleam of light from the lantern.
The gun, Jake thought. Where?
He had lost it somewhere.
Heydrich drew the ax back and swung again.
