Someone touched Rita, and she cried out in horror, but at least the scream drove the Audi and avalanche into the past where they belonged.
Pete was on one side of her, Franz on the other. Evidently, she had stopped moving, and they were holding her by the arms and bringing her down the final few fathoms between them. The submarine was directly ahead. She saw Harry holding on to the radar mast above the sail.
11:50
Harry shuddered with relief at the sight of Rita between Pete and Franz, and a thrill of hope coursed through him.
When the other six joined him, he half crawled and half swam along the sail, climbed down the short ladder to the bridge, and pulled himself along the line of cleats on the forward superstructure deck. If he floated off the boat, he would not be able to catch up with it easily, for the nine-knot current would not affect him in precisely the same way that it did the three-hundred-foot-long boat.
His relationship to the submarine was much like that of an astronaut to his craft during a spacewalk: There was an illusion of stillness, though they were both moving at considerable speeds.
Cautious, but conscious of the need for haste, he continued to pull himself hand over hand along the cleat line, searching for the air-lock hatch that Timoshenko had described over the radio.
11:51
A warning siren shrieked.
The green numerals and dimensional diagrams disappeared from the central video display directly above the command pad. Red letters replaced them: EMERGENCY.
Gorov punched a consol key labeled DISPLAY. The screen cleared immediately, and the siren shut off. A new message appeared in the usual green letters: MUZZLE DOOR COLLAPSED ON FORWARD TORPEDO NUMBER FIVE. TUBE FILLED WITH WATER TO BREECH DOOR.
“It’s happening,” Zhukov said.
Number five tube must have torqued when they had collided with thte ice floe earlier in the night. Now the muzzle door at the outer hull had given way.
Gorov said quickly, “Only the outer door collapsed. Just the muzzle door. Not the breech door. There’s no water in the boat. Not yet—and there won’t be.”
A seaman monitoring on of the safety boards said, “Captain, our visitors have opened the topside hatch to the air lock.”
“We’re going to make it,” Gorov told the control-room crew. “We’re damned well going to make it.”
11:52
The air-lock hatch on the forward escape trunk was unlocked by someone at a control panel in the submarine. Harry gazed down into a tiny, brightly lighted, water-filled compartment. As Lieutenant Timoshenko had warned them, it was large enough to accommodate only four divers at a time—and even at that size, it was twice as large as the escape trunks on many submarines.
One by one, Brian, Claude, Rita, and George went down into the round room and sat on the floor with their backs pressed to the walls.
From outside, Harry closed the hatch, which was faster than waiting for someone inside to use a lanyard to pull it down and then spin the sealing wheel.
He looked at his luminous watch.
11:53
Gorov anxiously watched the bank of VDTs.
“Escape trunk ready,” Zhukov said, repeating the message that he received on his headset, and simultaneously the same information appeared on one of the VDTs.
“Process the divers,” Gorov said.
11:54
In the air lock, Rita held on to wall grips as powerful pumps extracted the water from the chamber in thirty seconds. She didn’t remove her mask, but continued to breather the mixture of gases in her scuba tank, as they had been instructed to do.
A hatch opened in the center of the floor. A young Russian seaman appeared, smiled almost shyly, and beckoned with one finger.
They moved quickly from the air lock, down a ladder into the escape-chamber control room. The seaman climbed the ladder again behind them, pulled the inner hatch shut, sealed it, and descended quickly to the control room. With a roar, water flooded into the upper chamber again.
Acutely aware that a huge island of ice, mined with explosives, loomed directly above the boat, Rita went with the others into an adjoining decompression chamber.