Phoenix Sub Zero

Even though we can fly, we may not see anything. And if we do see something, with the winds aloft, it’ll be a damned miracle if we can get down to it.”

“What options do we have?”

“Fly search-and-rescue or quit.”

“There you go. Well, this old man ain’t about to quit. Get on it, Fred.”

Donchez watched Rummel go. They had a partial location of the Phoenix, but what the hell would become of the Seawolf. Just what did “Seawolf down, this position” mean, anyway? Were the crew members trapped in a submerged hull? Or had they made it to the surface and abandoned ship? It would take twenty hours to get a deep-submergence rescue vehicle to the Davis Strait if the weather were perfect, but the DSRV’s ungainly transport plane would not be able to get anywhere close until the storm eased. If Pacino and his men were in a sunken hull they’d have a long wait.

With no food and no heat and no oxygen.

KANGAMIU AIRFIELD, WESTERN GREENLAND

Lieutenant Commander Alex Crossfield stuffed the tobacco into his cheek. Crossfield had been an all-state offensive lineman at Milton High in the Florida Panhandle. Milton had been more Alabama than Florida, but being in Greenland when he was from the Sunbelt had been hell on earth. Why he had ever taken the promotion to come to this ice hole evaded him. Now almost forty, Crossfield still looked like he could block half the line of scrimmage of the meanest team in the South. He weighed in at 285. His neck was bigger than most men’s heads, his upper arms the size of thighs. A quiet and gentle man — he only needed to glance at one of his men to enforce some discipline. He had risen through the enlisted ranks, promoted in a now defunct chief-to-ensign program, and was fond of disparaging the officer ranks, although he had proved to be one of the best unit commanders Navy Search and Rescue had ever had.

As an enlisted man he had crewed in choppers, then gone on to be a maintenance-crew chief, where he caught the eye of the officer recruiters, who packed him off, put him through a brief hell and thought they’d put some kind of stamp on him by pinning ensign bars on his lapels, like somehow being commissioned would keep the salt from his language and the chewing tobacco from his mouth. It had done neither, and secretly Crossfield was surprised, perhaps even disappointed, that the officer promotion seemed permanent. He was sent to the Coast Guard for three years of cross-training, then to the NATO force commander for search-and-rescue in the Bosnian crisis, avoiding the Somalia involvement. By then he was a junior grade lieutenant, earning what he had been sure would be his last promotion.

An assignment with the Canadian Defense Force had taken two years, and the Canadians had taken to him. Soon he was a full lieutenant and shipped off to the Pacific. After a tour that seemed all too short in Pearl Harbor, he was zipped through a few Air Force SAR training courses, invariably held in the driest, hottest deserts, then dropped off in Greenland.

Greenland. The arctic circle. Where it was dark most of the time and frigid-cold all the time. So far Crossfield had avoided long-term relationships with women. And now that he was thirty-nine, his hair thinning, his muscles slowly but inevitably turning to fat, he was stuck on this godforsaken rock, commanding an SAR unit second to none, with no one to rescue other than the occasional fishing boat with mechanical problems, and with all the tanned blue-eyed Florida blondes over 2,000 miles away.

Crossfield looked over at his operations officer, Dick Trill, the thin mustachioed youngster who still looked like a teenager but wore the uniform of a lieutenant, j.g.

“Let me get this straight,” Crossfield drawled. “We got the worst blizzard of the century blowing outside and we’re supposed to saddle up and go take care of not just one but two submarines in bad trouble. And we know one of them’s on the surface drifting, her position hardly certain. And the second one is sunk, with the position pinpointed. Except by ‘pinpointed’ you mean somewhere in an area the size of

Connecticut. Have I got all that right, son?” “Yes sir,” the ops boss said, a wary eye on Crossfield’s bulk.

“We’re out of business with the choppers, right?”

“Wind’s too high, sir. The V-22s can fly. That’s about it.”

The Osprey, half airplane, half helicopter. Except for one thing. When the winds aloft were too high for the choppers, the V-22s could only fly, not hover. Even if they found the surviving drifting sub, they couldn’t land until the storm eased.

“Well, get your brief ready. I want to take off in ten minutes.

That’s one zero for you lieutenants. Oh, I forgot, you’re an Academy grad. For you, I want to take off when the big hand’s on the twelve and the little hand’s on the nine.”

“Yes sir.” He kept a straight face. “The men will be here in two minutes.”