“I don’t know. I don’t have all the pieces yet. Now we have more pressing concerns. Help me here. We need to get power back to the reactor before the battery is too depleted. If we can start it, we can last until we are rescued.” He leaned over the reactor control panel and pulled the handle for a switch marked LATCH CONTROL RODS.

Nothing happened. Andropoyov tried again. Still nothing.

He looked at Pishkovski and said, “I don’t understand it. Even when I’ve bypassed all the safety circuits, I can’t get the control rods latched. I’ve checked every inch of the circuits. There must be a fault in the reactor compartment.” He stared at the pages of the manual a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think we will have the reactor, Dimitriy. How much time do we have left on the battery?”

Pishkovski checked the meters on the electrical panel and did some rapid calculations. “Captain, if we turn off everything but the heaters and lights here in the control room, we have three more days.” He checked his figures once again. He looked up at his captain with a desperate expression frozen on his face. “And then, it will get very dark and very, very cold.”

Chapter 7

Joe Glass eased down into his chair at the head of the wardroom table. He would be able to devour a quick bite of lunch. The exercises they were conducting with HMS Turbulent were still going on, even as the Toledo’s captain paused for his first real meal in over eight hours. Glass was in much better spirits now than he was earlier, after the Brits had “sunk” his submarine in the drills.

They had just finished an approach on Turbulent and successfully “shot” her with an ADCAP torpedo. The retriever boat was up there now, picking up the exercise fish while the two subs repositioned for the next go-around. It was a good time to grab a hurried lunch with half his officers. They would wolf down their sandwiches and rush to relieve the other half so they could eat before the excitement started up all over again.

Brian Edwards was up in the control room, supervising the operation, so things aboard Toledo were in good hands while her captain took his dinner break.

Joe Glass was more than happy to be down here at six hundred feet and not up there on the surface. He could feel sympathy for the sailors working on the retriever boats, trying to wrestle four thousand pounds of wet, slippery torpedo onto a hundred-foot-long boat while being tossed around all the time by the angry wintertime North Atlantic Ocean.