Voyage of the Devilfish

He pulled off the gas mask and gasped the outside air, so cold it burned his lungs. It was a spectacular scene. The sky was overcast, but any sky was welcome after what the Devilfish had been through. Pacino could see that what had once been the sail was ripped completely off, making this hatch lead onto the scarred outer deck of the ship. The hull aft seemed intact but the sonar sphere and the bow compartment were gone, crushed. The diesel would be useless now. The ship, amazingly, was lying on top of the ice, on some kind of hill, not afloat in a polynya. It took a moment for Pacino to comprehend this. They hadn’t just smashed a hole in the ice, they had gone through it, and come to rest on the surface of it. By the time Pacino believed his eyes, the implications of reality hit him. Forty-five hundred tons of nuclear submarine on the ice surface. How long can the ice hold up that heavy a load, concentrated in one spot? Ice weak enough to let us through in the first place?

“Eng,” Pacino said, “we got to abandon ship, now.”

“Captain, it must be ten below out there. We can’t get the crew out until we unstow the arctic gear—”

“Get a crew together and get the damned gear. Most of it’s in the ship’s office and ESM. The shelter’s stowed in the fan room. Hurry up. God knows how long this ship will stay up here before it goes down through the ice. Get a couple men you can spare to go through the ship and help the survivors up here. We’ll exit out this hatch. Did you bring all the guys from back aft?” ‘They’re here, still alive. For how long… with the reactor melted we probably got 800 or 900 rem. And you guys up here probably got almost half that much.” Both knew that at 1000 rem of radiation there would be virtually no survivors. Delaney rounded up half a dozen men and headed aft to get the arctic gear. Petty Officer Manderson tried to slap awake the men in the space. Pacino walked to the passageway aft of the control room and stopped at the door to his stateroom. One last look. It had its own battle lantern, which he flipped on, knowing what he would see. A complete wreck. Nothing salvageable. As he was about to leave he saw the framed Jolly Roger flag, still in its frame and bolted to the wall. He pulled the frame open, ripped the flag off of the backing, rolled it into a ball and put it into his pocket. He took a final look around and left, then with a second thought went back in and turned off the battle lantern. Sort of a gesture of respect, like shutting the staring eyes of a corpse. Pacino went back to the control room, got a fur parka from Delaney and shrugged into it. The crew passed the arctic gear out the bridge-trunk hatch, and then the gear and crew members were out of the ship. Pacino found himself alone in the control room with Delaney, who was at the foot of the ladder to the bridge-trunk hatch, ready to leave the ship.

“Come on,” Delaney urged. “Every second in here is another couple million neutrons in your tissues. And like you said, the ice under the ship could collapse any second.”

“I’ll be out in a minute. Just make sure the ice camp is far enough away from the boat. When the ice goes I don’t want it taking out the men we have left.” Delaney nodded, lingered a moment and climbed the ladder. And now Michael Pacino was alone in the shattered, burning control room of his crippled submarine. He stood by the burned-out firecontrol console and looked up at the periscope stand, at the Conn, and realized his command of the Devilfish was over. He looked back into the room lit only by the orange lights of the battle lanterns, and spotted the other Jolly Roger on the controlroom aft bulkhead, the skull and crossbones white against the black field, the ship’s motto sewn above and below the pirate emblem.

YOU AIN’T CHEATIN’, YOU AIN’T TRYIN’.