The Charlemagne Pursuit [antikvár]

PROROGUE NOVEMBER 1971 The alarm sounded and Forrest Malone came alert. "Depth?" he called out. "Six hundred feet." "What's beneath us?" "Another two thousand feet of cold water." His gaze raked the active dials, gauges, and thermometers. In the tiny conn the helmsman sat to his right, the planesman squeezed in on the left. Both men kept their hands locked on control sticks. Power flickered on and off "Slow to two knots." The submarine lurched in the water. The alarm stopped. The conn went dark. "Captain, report from reactor room. Circuit breaker has blown on one of the control rods." He knew what had happened. The safety mechanisms built into the temperamental thing had automatically dropped the other rods—the reactor had scrammed, shut itself down. Only one possible course of action. "Switch to batteries." Dim emergency lights came on. His engineering officer, Flanders, a neat and deliberate professional on whom he'd come to depend, stepped into the conn. Malone said, "Talk to me, Tom." "I don't know how bad it is or how long it's going to take to fix, but we need to lighten the electrical load."