Wallich nodded and turned to his helmsman and his planesman. “Okay, guys. It’s up to us. Keep the forty-down angle until I tell you. Then pull out with everything you got.”

Wallich stared hard at the depth meter as it reeled off the numbers. It was too late to pray that the gauge was calibrated, that the chart was accurate, but he did anyway.

Hitting the bottom at this speed would be like driving a 747 into a granite mountain. There wouldn’t be much left of a fine American submarine and its crew.

It seemed they had been diving forever before Wallich screamed, “Pull up now!”

Somehow, the Toledo managed to stop her sharp descent and pull out of the dive a few precious feet before her nose would have burrowed into the muddy bottom of the Barents Sea. With her momentum still at a maximum, she raced blindly across the seafloor, the screw kicking up a thick cloud of mud in its wake. No one wanted to ponder the possibility of a rocky crag or sudden undersea hillock popping up in their path.

Edwards could hold it no longer. “Skipper, suggest we come up to—”

“Hold her where she is! Stay on the bottom!” Glass ordered.

The two torpedoes that were chasing them dove down to follow the Toledo. It appeared that not even Toledo’s mad dive to the seafloor had been enough to shake the damned things.

The torpedos’ sonars became confused, dizzied by the returns from the bottom of the ocean and the mud cloud spouting up from the sub’s screws.

All at once, as if a string had jerked their noses downward, they dove and were gobbled up by the mud.

Their explosions erupted a hundred yards astern of where the Toledo raced away from them. That was more than close enough to shake the sub violently.

Edwards held on and waited for the boat to stabilize, for Glass to give the command to stop their hazardous, mad flight along the sea bottom. He looked over at his commander.

Glass stood there, calmly leaning against a stanchion, as if they had just scored particularly well on some contrived test.

“Damn, Skipper!” the executive officer said breathlessly. “That was a little too close for comfort.”

Glass nodded. He hoped his men couldn’t hear the pounding of his heart as it tried its best to escape from his chest.

Chapter 12

The awesome series of explosions rocked Gepard where she sat wounded in the sand and silt on the seafloor less than a mile away. Sergei Andropoyov came awake from his latest ragged dream with the first round.

Someone was out there! Someone might be looking for them after all. What were the explosions? Why would they use them? Maybe they were blasting through the ice. Or maybe there was some kind of fighting going on out there.

Whatever was causing all the ruckus, it was their last hope. At least someone was nearby.