He motioned for his first officer to join him beneath his blanket. He kept his voice low when he spoke. “Dimitriy, we must do something. We will all freeze here, even if the air lasts,” he whispered. It wouldn’t be good if any of the huddled, shivering crew members overheard their captain, even though they knew what was happening as well as he. Still, until their leader gave up, there was hope. “There must be something we can do. Do you have any ideas?”

Pishkovski shivered. He pulled the edges of the blanket closer around him and answered through chattering teeth, “Captain, it is still warm in the reactor compartment. A little radiation is better than freezing.”

Andropoyov rose from the bunk. The air was fouled to the point that any quick movement left him breathless. He wondered how much longer they could hold out in the forlorn hope that help would arrive. The calcium hydroxide would be depleted by now and there was little more to scatter about. He figured another day or two and the carbon dioxide would kill them if the cold hadn’t done so.

He pondered his choices for a moment. A morbid thought tried to capture him.

Maybe it was better to wait here and freeze. Andropoyov had read somewhere…maybe in one of Pushkin’s books…that freezing was a quiet, peaceful, painless way to die.

He shook himself and cleared the idea as best he could. He must keep fighting, use every trick he could think of to bring his crew through this if he had any chance of getting them home alive.

There was still the matter of what might have sunk them in the first place. If there were some fault in his boat that had caused this catastrophe, they would need to make certain it didn’t happen again to some other crew. That was something they could never hope to do if they lay dead and silent at the bottom of the Barents.

“Come, Dimitriy,” he growled as he turned. “Let’s move everyone to the reactor compartment.”

The remnants of the crew stumbled as best they could through the hatch and into the relative warmth.

Marina Nosovitskaya glanced up from her desk when the dark shadow fell across it. Sure enough, Dmitri Ustinov stood there above her, smiling wickedly as he stared down the opening at the front of her blouse. The lovely young programmer abruptly sat erect, pulling her blouse pointedly taut.

“What are you staring at?” she snarled in Russian.

Ustinov leered right back. “Now, is that any way to treat your boss? I was just admiring the lovely view and here you are, getting all indignant with me.” His smirk grew even more pronounced. “You should be nicer to me. You never can tell what I might be able to do for a new immigrant to America like you. I have connections in this country, you know.”