No doubt about it. His beautiful new submarine was resting on the bottom of the sea.

The control room was deathly quiet. The humming noise of an underway sub was gone.

The lights were still on, though. They still had power.

Andropoyov looked around the control room. Dimitriy Pishkovski sat in the corner, holding a bloody cloth to his head wound and moaning. Some of the other watchstanders around the control room were picking themselves up, staring around in dazed disbelief, trying to assimilate what had happened.

Andropoyov walked around the control room, trying to assess what was working and what wasn’t. Reports were starting to come in from the other compartments in the boat. He listened to them as he continued his visual check.

All over the sub, crewmen reported in. Except for the after compartment. There was nothing from there.

The captain checked the pressurization meters and was not surprised to find the after compartment was at sea pressure. After all, they had sunk backward to the bottom. There had to be a rupture to the outside sea somewhere in the after compartment.

Someone had managed to shut the hatch and seal off the inflow of water. Otherwise, the next compartment forward, the one that housed the steam-driven engines and turbines, would be flooded, too.

The reactor was shut down. That wasn’t surprising, considering the shock of the explosion. The battery appeared to be working all right. Fully charged, too. That should last awhile. Several days if they were careful.

So there was hope. They should have enough time for Igor Serebnitskiv and the K-461 to show up for the rendezvous, learn of their distress, and summon help.

The Volk might even be close enough by now to hear them. It would have heard the explosion, too. They needed to be signaling already so the old boat would know where they were and what had happened.

“First Officer, get up. I need you,” Andropoyov barked at Pishkovski. “Station a watch at the underwater telephone. Signal Volk so she will know we are down here and so she can find us.”

Pishkovski pulled himself erect. He still held the blood-soaked rag to the jagged gash on his forehead. He nodded and stepped unsteadily over to the underwater telephone. After flipping the toggle switch to turn it on, he picked up the microphone to talk. Before he could key the microphone, though, Andropoyov reached over and flipped another switch.

“Dimitriy, better use the topside hydrophone. The keel one is buried in the mud.”

Pishkovski nodded and sat down hard, still holding the microphone. He began to speak weakly into its mouthpiece. “Volk, Volk, this is Gepard. Help us. We are sunk.”

He repeated the plea over and over again.