The captain yanked the controls to force the screw to answer an emergency “ahead” bell. He watched in disbelief as nothing happened. It didn’t respond at all.

Gepard was no longer moving forward.

Instead, she was sliding backward into the cold black depths of the Barents Sea.

Every indication told Andropoyov that something was terribly wrong. The explosion, whatever had caused it, had resulted in flooding somewhere in the after part of his boat. If this happened in open water, the procedure would be obvious: He would blow the water out of the ballast tanks and bob to the surface as quickly as they could.

That wouldn’t work beneath ten meters or more of granite-hard ice. The Gepard would be smashed like an egg against the ice pack if he tried to surface here, and that was if he could even get air into the tanks with this much angle on the boat.

Andropoyov was stymied. The depth gauge ticked away as the boat sank backward.

The depth gauge read three hundred and thirty meters when the stern of Gepard slammed into the muddy bottom of the sea. The tail of the sub plowed out a trench over fifteen meters long as she ground to an abrupt halt. The force of the bottoming tore Andropoyov loose from the grip he had on a pipe and flung him hard against the deck. He was fighting for breath once again, even as the desperation of their plight hit him full force.

The men trapped inside the Gepard were alone on the bottom of one of the most isolated and inhospitable seas in the world.

Chapter 5

“Damn! What the…”

Aaron Miller tore his headphones off, shook his head hard and tossed his headphones on the deck, wiggling a finger in each ear. They rang from the blast, amplified by the BQQ-10 sonar receiver. The sonar screen blossomed into a white blob as the intense noise blotted out everything else in the sea.

Miller shook his head again. He reached above him to grab the microphone that was hanging there. Still deafened, he yelled when he spoke. “Conn, sonar! Loud transient on bearing three-four-seven. Sounded like an explosion.”

Andy Gerson glanced at the fire control computer’s solution for the mysterious Akula-class sub they had been shadowing for the last day. Sure enough, it was on bearing three-four-seven.

Bill Wittstrom was the first one to see the signal light blink out on the narrow-band tracker.

“Hey, we’ve lost the tracker on the Akula!” he yelled.

Commander Brad Crawford jumped up from the stool where he had been resting and stared wide-eyed at the sonar repeater. Sure enough, the noise signal from the mystery sub was abruptly gone. He punched the buttons, leafing through the displays in a vain attempt to find her again.

The clamor from the Russian sub had not faded away. It disappeared.