“Dimitriy, will we make it?” he whispered to his first officer. “Is there any hope left?”

Dimitriy Pishkovski remained silent for a very long time. Andropoyov had concluded that his friend and second in command might have given up and passed on. Then he heard a barely audible reply, a soft scratch of a whisper.

“Sergeiovich, it is in God’s hands now. He will decide.”

Andropoyov laid his head back on the rolled-up rag that was serving as his pillow. He had never known Pishkovski to be a religious man. In fact, in all the years they had sailed together, the subject had never come up. Now here they were, very near death, and his friend had found peace there.

Maybe it was best to accept the inevitable, to find tranquility wherever he could. He remembered the day before, when they were freezing and so near to surrendering to death. There had been an answer then. They had moved to the reactor compartment and prolonged their existence for another day.

There had to be another solution now, some way to allow them to hang on until Serebnitskiv and the Volk showed up and rescued them. Surely they would find them soon. Surely Pishkovski’s God was not malicious enough to make them suffer so much, only to crush them when help was so near.

A sudden thought entered his head, a thought so obvious that his eyes opened wide and he gasped out loud.

“Dimitriy,” he whispered.

“Yes, Captain?”

“The air masks! We can breathe the air from the flasks. It should last us for another day or so. They’ll be here by then. I know it.”

He could hear Pishkovski’s slight laugh in the close darkness.

“See? I told you God would decide.”

Admiral Alexander Durov paced back and forth in front of what was left of the fire in the fireplace, lost in thought. He was so preoccupied that he hardly noticed that the flames had waned, almost gone out. He stopped, snorted, and spat into the fireplace, but there were hardly enough embers left there to sizzle.

President Gregor Smitrov and his weak-kneed government were at it again. The Chechens were demanding concessions before they would participate in peace talks and that coward, Smitrov, was on the verge of giving in to the traitorous bastards. It seemed all they had to say was, “No more air strikes,” and the Russian Air Force was grounded. They said, “Free our prisoners,” and the criminals were back on the streets at once.

That was no way to crush a revolt!