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“Now, that wasn’t so difficult, was it?” the man holding the gun said.
Maddock cursed the fact that the Spetsnaz agents, for that’s who they had to be, were able to get on board in virtual silence. He’d heard they were good, but this good? He’d underestimated them. They must have been out on the ice at the same time, and yet he’d missed them in their white arctic camouflage gear. Maddock and Bones might have won the race to the sub, but the odds of them getting out with the prize were slim.
“Do the smart thing, gentlemen, drop your weapons on the floor and kick them under the captain’s bunk.” The Spetsnaz man’s English was flawless. Better than flawless, it carried the faintest trace of a Boston accent. He’d heard about these spy schools the Russians had where they trained their men endlessly, churning out faux-Americans, sleeper agents capable of blending in perfectly until it was time for them to wake up. The Russian pressed the muzzle harder against Professor’s head to reinforce the point.
Bones put his gun on the ground as another of the Spetsnaz operatives eased inside the now cramped chamber to pat each of them down. Maddock kicked his automatic under the bunk as instructed. He didn’t relinquish his hold on the egg. It wasn’t as if he could palm it though. He wasn’t exactly David Copperfield. The Russian pushed Professor inside with a savage shove that sent him stumbling against Bones. Professor’s hands were tied behind his back. He saw Willis, grim-faced, in the corridor behind Professor.
“Sorry.” Professor could have been apologizing for his clumsiness, for leading the Russians to the submarine or for telling them something under duress that the rest of the team wouldn’t have the luxury of living to regret. It didn’t matter now.
When the familiar face of the wild Russian they’d found on the ice appeared behind them in the doorway Maddock knew exactly how the Spetsnaz team had learned about their presence on the ice.
“I’ll take that,” he said, wrestling the egg from Maddock’s hands.
Maddock didn’t give it up easily, making the man struggle until the Spetsnaz operative cuffed him around the temple with the butt of his pistol. His fingers sprang open as if unlocked. And with that, any illusion of control passed completely to the Russians. He saw another one of them in the doorway, keeping Nate Shaw upright. The man looked like he was in a bad way. The sabertooth must have done more damage than he’d feared. It was obvious he needed proper medical attention and he wasn’t likely to get it here. This was a place of death. Right now it reeked of it.
There was no doubting what the Russians intended. Maddock and his team were facing execution, yet he felt strangely calm.
The Spetsnaz team leader stepped back into the incline of the corridor and motioned with his gun for them to follow him out into the passage. There were too many of them to fight and no room in which to fight them. Maddock scanned the faces looking for Leopov, either as a prisoner or traitor. There was no sign of her. She’d been cozy with the mad Russian. Was she the one who’d betrayed them or was she lying dead on the ice somewhere?
With at least two weapons trained on each of them, they had little choice but to do as they were told. They made their way back through the body of the submarine, but instead of stopping and being herded back up the ladder, they were taken further along, crossing a narrow gantry beneath which the reactor itself was slowly leaking. One of the Spetsnaz operatives waited for them on the other side of the bridge that traversed the reactor. Maddock could still hear the dull hum of it beneath them, very much alive. He felt his skin crawl and knew it was purely psychological, but that didn’t change just how creepy it was to be so close to so much raw power, like walking over a very small sun. The Russian swung open a door and stepped aside.
Maddock had to duck down to enter. He helped Shaw who collapsed against him as they stepped through. The man was unable to support his own weight. Willis had obviously worn himself out being Shaw’s pillar of strength, but he was clearly close to exhaustion himself.
It was dark inside, but not fully black because of the dim glow from the emergency lighting that lined the bulkhead.
They were in the engine room. Where it should have been up over the hundred-degrees mark in the biggest room on the sub, the temperature was even colder because they were below the water line and no amount of insulation was enough to keep this part of the boat warm now the engine wasn’t running. By rights, it should have been deafening too, but instead was eerily quiet.
Maddock scanned the engine room looking for anything that might help them.
There was no other way out, but that wasn’t the biggest problem facing them. He saw a row of explosive charges had been fixed on the bulkhead, the Russians intending to scupper it themselves so nothing on here could fall into enemy hands.
“Feel free to try and disarm the explosives, obviously. It’ll give you something to do while you wait to die. It won’t help, but it is always good to at least feel like you have a chance, isn’t it?” the Spetsnaz officer said. He almost sounded friendly, like a guy in a bar discussing the Red Sox. “But don’t feel like you are missing out. Once that western lackey Gorbachev has opened his gift, things will be very different in the world. You wouldn’t want to be around for it, believe me.”
The door slammed closed behind them and the loss of the limited light from the corridor seemed to throw the engine room into absolute darkness even though the glow of the emergency lighting should have been enough for them to see by.
“Not exactly going according to plan,” Bones observed.
“You think?” Maddock said.
“Unless the plan was to have defeat snatched from the jaws of victory?”
Maddock knew what he was doing—gallows humor. It was important in their way of life, laughing in the face of death.
“If those blow, this place is going to fill with water faster than you can say, ‘We’re screwed.’ The extra weight ought to free us from the ice and suck the sub under, but we won’t be around to swim for freedom.”
“Thanks for the motivational pep talk, Professor,” said Bones. “You want to take a look, see if you can figure out how long we’ve got before it blows? Or, you know, if there’s any way of stopping it?”
“What happened to Leopov?” Maddock asked.
“She must have slipped away not long after you left,” Willis said. “We didn’t notice until we started to break camp an hour or so after you’d gone. She’d already given us the slip by then.”
“You think she went straight to the Russians?”
Professor shrugged. “I don’t know. She wasn’t with them when they picked us up.”
There had to be another reason for her setting out on her own. He didn’t want to believe he’d been suckered by a traitor. So until there was no other choice he was going to give her the benefit of the doubt. That meant she was out there, an unknown variable. They needed all the help they could get.
“There’s a fifteen-minute delay on those charges. You want me to pull them?” Professor told him.
“Not yet,” said Maddock. “Keep an eye on the clock. One question: if that bulkhead blows do you think we’d have any chance of getting out that way?”
“Nope. Even if we did survive the blast, we’d never be able to fight our way through the water coming in. We’d have to wait until the engine room is almost full of seawater before we could strike out, and we’d have frozen to death by then.”
“Right,” Maddock said. “Why fifteen minutes?”
“Distance. If the entire ice shelf collapses when the sub blows, they’re giving themselves a fighting chance to get away,” said Bones.
“They’ve got Ski-Doos,” said Willis. “That’s how they managed to get us here. I doubt Shaw would have made it here without them.” Shaw sat on the floor, propped up against a control unit. He didn’t look good. His face was white, leached of all color. His lips were tinged with blue and his eyes looked murky. He needed help faster than they could get it for him. Then again, none of them had a life expectancy beyond quarter of an hour, so he’d live as long as any of them.
“Professor, do you think you could blow the door with one of those charges without setting the rest off?” Maddock asked.
“Doable.” Professor gave the door no more than a cursory glance before answering.
“OK. Let’s do it. Like our Russian friend said, why not go out fighting? I think he’d be disappointed if we didn’t at least try.”
Even as he said it his words were interrupted by a dulcet clang that echoed through the boat.
Maddock knew that sound: The hatch was being closed.
The Russians had left.
They wouldn’t be coming back even if they heard the sound of all hell breaking loose inside the submarine. They only had fourteen minutes to clear the ice.