“Sergeiovich, did you hear that? Someone is out there!” Pishkovski whispered, his voice muffled by the air-fed mask. “They have come at last! We will be home soon!”

“Perhaps, Dimitriy, perhaps,” Andropoyov said, his words full of doubt and dry as the winter wind across the steppes. “We shall see. Start someone using the signal hammer. If we have a rescuer, they will need to find us. If they mean to blow us out of the water, it will end our suffering more quickly if we guide them to us.”

He knew that the sound of the hammer pounding on the hull would not carry as far as the underwater telephone, but now there was no longer any power for it. The hammer would have to do.

One of the seamen, so tired and breathless he could hardly lift the hammer, began banging as hard as he could manage on the interior hull of the sub, a rhythmic bell-ringing that could have passed for some underwater death knell. The clang of it reverberated painfully through the tight confines of the reactor chamber, but it still brought hope to the men assembled there. At least it was something they could do to help ensure their rescue.

Andropoyov hoped whoever it was out there making all that noise would stick around long enough, would ride close enough to hear them. That they would be equipped to rescue them.

Otherwise, he knew, their time on earth was short, measured in mere hours.

He tapped his foot in time to the constant, eerie ringing of the hammer.

“Skipper, I heard breaking-up noises,” Master Chief Zillich declared. Even in the intensity and terror of evading the Russian torpedoes, the old sonar man had listened to everything happening around Toledo. Nothing had escaped his notice.

“I believe you, Tommy,” Joe Glass said with a grin. He would bet anyone that if he asked Zillich how many cod they had passed, he would be able to tell him, and probably the sex of each. The two stood there in Toledo’s sonar room, still analyzing what had just happened to them.

She was safely back up at six hundred feet now, but the crew was still working on slowing their pulses, still giving thanks that they remained among the living after the harrowing near miss. Brian Edwards was already busy, getting everything back in fighting order, loading another ADCAP, and finding out what damage might have been done. Other than plenty of jangled nerves and a few bruises from being thrown about during the turn and dive, it appeared they were unscathed.