The hatch began to bow inward.
The pounding abruptly gave way to a few brief moments of unnerving silence. The men watched the hatch with dread.
Then came another horrible sound of tearing metal like the first that had lost the Novgorod her outer hatch.
With a pop that hurt Zhilnikov's eardrums, the inner hatch seal broke. Water sprayed down on the shocked, upturned face of Captain Zhilnikov.
Jumping from the flood, Zhilnikov wiped stinging salt water from his eyes. When he looked back up, the hatch was tearing upward.
"Have we cleared the scows!" Zhilnikov bellowed.
The answer couldn't come quickly enough. Another, final tear of metal and the hatch ripped free. A high-pressure waterfall began surging through the tower. The deck around his ankles flooded with frothing seawater.
Zhilnikov was thrown back by the surge. "Surface, surface!" Captain Zhilnikov screamed over the roar of the rushing water. Veins in his neck bulged. His eyes were wild as he stumbled in ankle-deep water.
"Weapons ready!" he shouted to the nearby men. "Whatever comes through that hatch, shoot it on sight!"
And through the flood and the fear, Gennady Zhilnikov watched the water for the first slithering tentacle of the unholy beast that had torn his mighty Russian ship to pieces.
PETROVINA BULGANIN'S fishing boat had tracked the fleeing renegade submarine as far as the first line of moored garbage scows. Petrovina was watching on the bridge when the big sonar blob sped beneath the scows and was gone.
She slammed a hand on a console.
"Dammit," she snapped. "Can you follow them in?"
The fishing boat had already been forced to cut speed.
A fire raged on a half-submerged scow directly in front of them. The water was thick with floating trash, the air with acrid smoke. Someone was shouting something unintelligible through a bullhorn from one of the Mayanan fireboats.
"No,'' Vlad Korkusku replied. "The scows are too tightly packed. And according to the radio, some in the middle are panicking and trying to force their way out. We would be crushed if we tried to maneuver between them."
The fishing boat was coasting into a slow, wide turn. There was nothing Petrovina could do. She left Korkusku and his men on the bridge and went back out on deck.
Orange flames brightened the dark sea. She saw nothing but more spreading garbage and an oil slick that shone like silver in the flickering light. No sign of Remo or Chiun.
Petrovina was certain they were dead. She had no idea what they thought they were doing when they jumped into the sea, but if they thought they could force the Novgorod to stop or surface, they were out of their minds.
The American might have demonstrated amazing abilities before, but they were mere tricks compared to stopping a Soviet-era nuclear submarine. And the old man? Well, it was all simply ludicrous.
Her slender fingers gripped the rail. Jaw clenching, she dropped an angry fist against the wood.
It was infuriating! To think she had come so close to the thing she had been sent to stop, only to lose it. It was ridiculous that she'd allowed Remo to force her out here. Ridiculous that Vlad Korkusku and his men had been so easily cowed by the American. This wasn't Petrovina's fault. Her record in her short professional career had been without a blemish until now. It would have remained so if she had been given Institute personnel to work with. Every woman who worked for the secret agency was a professional. Not like men. They were like Remo-always out to prove their masculinity. Or like Korkusku, always demonstrating his lack of the same. She was beginning to understand the wisdom of Director Chutesov.
Petrovina was growling at the sea when her angry eyes spotted sonmthing strange.
She was looking back toward the scows. The fishing boat had turned completely about and was puttering slowly in the direction from which it had come. As her gaze drifted across the waves a dozen yards behind the small boat, the reflection of fire began to rise into the air.
That was impossible, of course. The water was bulging, swelling up from below. That could only happen if...
Her eyes widened.
"Faster!" Petrovina screamed.
The SVR man at the throttle dutifully followed her command even as another agent monitoring the sonar began to shout excitedly.
"It is back! Directly behind us!"
The fishing boat raced ahead, barely avoiding the leviathan that was the surfacing Novgorod.
The conning tower was first to appear. It sliced slowly through the water, like the dorsal fin of a dying shark.
Water poured from the tower, churning the sea a frothy white. Almost as fast the main deck broke the surface.
The fishing boat had sped ahead and came quickly back around. The small craft bounced against the waves rolling off the sub. Excitement gripping her belly, Petrovina held tight the railing of the fishing boat.
"Korkusku! Get down here with weapons!" They were parallel to the Novgorod. The sub was nearly at a full stop.
Vlad Korkusku and his fellow SVR agents ran to join Petrovina on the deck. When she saw the wrenches and hammers they'd plundered from the boat's tool chest, she fixed the men with a gimlet eye.
"The American threw our guns away," Korkusku explained sheepishly. "He said trusting Russians to know how to use guns properly is like trusting Russians to know how to use democracy properly." Petrovina spun back to the sub. The Novgorod just sat there.
There was a short, tense moment during which all Petrovina could do was stare helplessly.
There it was, as big as life. And what could she do about it? Throw a net over it? Drag it back to shore?
As she pondered impossible options, something suddenly launched from the submarine.
Petrovina gasped.
For a terrible instant she thought the stolen submarine might have been stocked with more than just torpedoes. But as quickly as the thought came, she dismissed it.
A nuclear missile would not be launched from the conning tower of the submarine. Nor, she realized, would it scream in blind terror as it flew into the air.
The flying thing, which Petrovina now realized was a Russian sailor, was quickly joined by a second and a third. The sailors continued to pop from the tower like champagne corks. They made distant little splashes amid the garbage.
When the supply of rocket-charged men stopped shooting skyward, a head popped into view above the tower. When Petrovina saw who it was, her jaw dropped.
Standing on the conning tower of the submarine Novgorod, Remo Williams offered a friendly little wave.
"Hey, Natasha," he called. "How okay are Russians with the high-seas concept of finders keepers?"
"Do not let him have another toy,'" called Chiun's disembodied voice from down below. "He already has an airplane he hardly ever plays with."
Chapter 21
The breaking dawn over Long Island Sound found Dr. Harold W. Smith hard at work behind his desk. The first report had come in after midnight. Thanks to the increased media presence in Mayana, it had turned into an all-night news explosion.