Panic Switch полностью

“Sir, the Hyman G. Rickover and the Montana left a week ago per your orders. They’ve departed the marginal ice zone north of the Kola Peninsula and have proceeded under total ice cover, but as you know, it’s a slow slog once under ice, and our ability to communicate with them is limited.”

Pacino stood. “Send them the location of the ELB, and tell them to hurry,” he said. He looked at Allende. “I want to see the CIA director and the CNO in my study.”

Allende glanced at Catardi. She’d never seen Pacino this furious before.

Captain Seagraves paused outside the plug trunk hatch. “What was that?”

A bright flash suddenly lit the landscape from the west. He climbed out of the hatch to the deck above. On the ice on the ship’s port side, what looked like a thousand packages, parcels and equipment containers were piled, with the crewmen opening them and carrying them up the slight incline to a flat spot a ship length away from the rapidly freezing spot of open water. They’d nailed together half a dozen wood crate lids to form a makeshift gangway between the hull and the thick ice.

A few seconds after the flash, the shock wave hit, knocking Seagraves and the other crewman to the deck or the ice. Far to the west, a bright orange mushroom cloud appeared and rose slowly, angrily toward the sky. The roaring blast was so loud that Seagraves lost all hearing for a moment. He forced himself to look away from the blast.

“Don’t look at the mushroom cloud!” he screamed out, his own voice sounding muted in his ears. He pulled himself to his feet, the ringing loud in his ears. When the flash had darkened, he turned around to glance at the explosion, then back away. His eyes met Quinnivan’s.

“What the hell did that, Captain?” XO Quinnivan said, lifting his goggles up to his forehead. The fur-lined hood of his arctic parka blew in the slight breeze. Seagraves looked over to the west, where the mushroom cloud had bloomed.

“I wonder if that was the position of the Belgorod,” Seagraves wondered aloud.

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino emerged from the hatch after pushing a parcel up to the deck. He stood on the deck and shaded his eyes and looked west. “Maybe a nuclear self-destruct charge, XO,” he said. “That couldn’t be Belgorod’s torpedo room going up. We’re fairly sure they jettisoned all their conventional torpedoes. And that detonation was way more explosive power than a conventional charge.”

“It was too small for a Magnum warhead detonation,” Seagraves said, steadfast in his practice not to call the Russian nuclear-tipped torpedo a Gigantskiy. “A one megaton blast would have knocked us a hundred feet from the boat and likely burned our exposed skin off.”

“Why would they need a demolition charge?” Lieutenant Vevera asked, joining the group.

Lieutenant Commander Lewinsky stepped over. “Maybe trying to create open water,” he said. “When the first Omega went down, their escape chamber detached and got trapped under the ice canopy. Maybe this Omega decided to blow a nice hole of open water overhead before ejecting the escape chamber.”

“How do we even know what happened to the first Omega, if the chamber got trapped under ice?” Pacino asked.

“Because the U.S. sub trailing that Omega — your dad’s boat — emergency blew through the ice and the impact opened up a polynya,” Lewinsky said. “And as it turned out, our guys rescued their guys.”

“Jaysus,” Quinnivan said. “Still, an explosive to open up a polynya wouldn’t be nuclear, or if it were, it wouldn’t be that big. That blast had to be the size of the Hiroshima bomb.”

“We should investigate,” Pacino said. “If that was an attempt to make open water for an escape chamber, the Russians could have survived. They’d be there, on the ice.”

“I doubt an escape chamber would have survived that blast,” Quinnivan said. “The wind’s picking up. The broadcast called for a massive arctic storm, Mr. Pacino. No one’s going out in that.”

“When does it get here?” Pacino asked.

“The storm is two to four hours out, Mr. Pacino,” Quinnivan said. “Even if you started now, you’d get caught in it by the time you got to the detonation location, which, I’d remind you, is a high radiation zone.”

“Maybe it was closer, Captain, XO,” Pacino said. “We could set off that way and turn back when the wind picks up.”

“Absolutely not,” Quinnivan said. “You’d be in a whiteout. Hell, I don’t even know if we have a compass in our survival gear capable of functioning this close to the north pole. Be thankful you just survived the universe’s latest attempt to kill you, young Pacino. So stay put. Help putting up the shelter. We need it urgently, before the storm gets here.”

“Aye, sir,” Pacino said, grimacing and setting off with Vevera, Dankleff, and Lewinsky to lug gear up the hill to the shelter taking shape.

When they’d walked away, Seagraves looked at Quinnivan. “You know, XO, I would have let them go.”