To Kill the Potemkin

by Mark Joseph

  "Engineering, how go the stern planes?"

  "This is engineering. We can move them."

  "All right. Prepare for maneuvering. Slow speed. Let's be quiet."

  * * *

  On Sorensen's screen the Alpha decreased speed and became quieter.

  "Sonar to control, range now four thousand yards and holding. He's looking for us. Depth three eight zero zero feet."

  "Control to sonar, activate target-seeking sonar." And pray he comes to his senses and backs off...

  Sorensen looked at Fogarty, punched the button and a wave of high-pitched sound pulsed out of Barracuda's bow in a narrow sound ray aimed directly at Potemkin.

  * * *

  Popov screamed in pain, his eardrums ruptured by Barracuda's target-seeking sonar. Federov rushed to the sonar console. The pulse of sound that appeared as a bright streak on the screen was like a sharp jab in his guts. Their sonar had found him.

  "All ahead full. Right full rudder."

  For thirty seconds Potemkin's engines pushed her through a sharp turn. "All stop," commanded Federov. "Level the planes."

  The American target-seeking sonar gave him an exact fix on Barracuda. Potemkin was gliding on her planes back toward the American's position. If a torpedo was coming right at him, he had a chance to evade by diving. The question rattling through his mind was whether or not the American torpedoes had an enhanced capability like their sonars. His choices were back off and run, or fight. If he ran, Dherzinski would never escape, the Potemkin would be fatally compromised by film and Barracuda would surface and report that Potemkin already had fired one torpedo. Which would bring out the whole damn United States Navy to hunt him down... He looked at Alexis, who had taken his position at the firing console. His friend was reading his mind, sharing his thoughts. He waited.

  "Activate targeting sonar."

  The waiting was over. "Targeting sonar activated. I'm getting one signal, Captain, from Barracuda. He hasn't fired."

  Federov moved to the weapons station. This was his to do. "Alexis, take the helm."

  "Yes, sir..."

  Federov pushed the button. "Torpedo away."

  He steered the torpedo toward Barracuda at forty knots, trailing its guidewire behind.

  * * *

  Barracuda's sonar screens blazed with red blips. "Sonar to control, he's fired a torpedo, wire-guided, speed forty knots. Torpedo range three seven zero zero yards and closing."

  No more hesitation. No more options. The Russian had not backed off. "All stop. Prepare to fire Mark forty-five. Set detonation for maximum depth."

  Hoek watched on his screen as the single red blip that was Potemkin began to blink. His hand trembled over the keys, then a spike of pain shot down his left arm. He could barely whisper, "Set detonation for maximum depth, aye."

  "Fire one."

  Hoek reached for the button, but his hand never made it. Clutching his chest, gasping for breath, he fell to the deck.

  "Good God, I think he's had a heart attack," Springfield shouted, and ran toward the weapons console.

  Springfield punched the buttons. "Chief, fire one."

  Lopez muttered a prayer and pushed the button. The Mark forty-five leaped out of the tube and immediately nosed over for a fast run to maximum depth.

  "Evasive maneuvers. All ahead flank. Left full rudder."

  The warhead would explode in two minutes. By then Barracuda should be three miles away, and at that distance she should withstand the Shockwave that would pass through the water like a nuclear-powered tidal wave—except the Russian torpedo was still coming at them at forty knots.

  Springfield looked at Hoek lying behind the weapons station. Luther bent over the weapons officer, pumping his chest. Barracuda was coming around a tight turn at speed and they were leaning into the deck. Torpedo alarms were sounding, but to Springfield it was almost as if they were echoes from another ship in another ocean on another planet. Suddenly the door to the sonar room opened and Sorensen stood there, looking around the control room, eyes blazing. The torpedo was gaining on them, he said.

  * * *

  Popov had fainted from the acute pain of his ruptured eardrums. Federov snatched away his earphones and pressed them to his ears. On the screen he saw Barracuda fire a torpedo, turn one hundred eighty degrees, then begin to accelerate away. Could Barracuda outrun his torpedo? For a brief moment he continued to guide the missile, but then heard the active sonar in the Mark forty-five—it was unlike any sonar he had ever heard. And then he knew. The American torpedo was diving, was already below two thousand feet.

  "Evasive action," he ordered. "Left full rudder. Dive! Dive! Flank speed! It's nuclear!"

  Potemkin turned and accelerated, and though the stern planes failed to respond quickly, the forward motion was enough to snap the torpedo's guide wire. The fish was now on its own, he no longer had control of it.

  * * *

  "The wire's cut," shouted Pisaro. "It's running wild." On the sonar screens the Russian torpedo went awry.

  Barracuda's control room dared to hope.

  Sorensen, standing in the control room door, turned back to Fogarty. His face said he was not ready to celebrate.

  "Quiet on the boat," Springfield ordered. "Right full rudder. Engineering, give it all you've got."

  * * *

  The echo ranger in the Mark forty-five torpedo immediately recognized Potemkin, ignoring the frequencies of Barracuda and the Russian torpedo.

  The two torpedoes sped past each other, missing a collision by fifty yards. The Mark forty-five closed on Potemkin.

  * * *

  Inside the Russian torpedo a relay snapped and the guidance switched to an active sonar homing system. The transducer heard and recognized the surge of sound from Barracuda's pumps, and the onboard computer smoothly turned the rudder to the left. The torpedo homed in on Barracuda's engine room compartment.

  * * *

  Sorensen heard the torpedo's high-pitched homing sonar as it bounced off Barracuda's hull. Barracuda's speed was now up to twenty knots, but the torpedo was rapidly closing the gap. Three minutes, four?... He stood up, took off his earphones and turned off the overhead speakers.

  "I guess I'll be going to the beach. What say, kid, join me in a few rays?"

  Fogarty was unable to speak. Found himself rising like a zombie to follow Sorensen. He felt nothing as he and Sorensen moved through the control room, barely heard Springfield order in a curiously bland voice, "Flank speed, stern planes down twenty degrees, sail planes down twenty degrees."

  The planesman was staring at the sonar repeater, not able to accept what he saw. The helmsman wet his pants. Springfield stepped quickly across the control room to the helmsman's station, and pushed over the joystick himself.

  The radiomen were trying to send up a communications buoy. Pisaro looked as though he had swallowed his tongue. Cakes was frozen in a hatchway, a tray of coffee in his hands. The tray slipped out of his grasp and crashed to the deck. He stayed immobile.

  Sorensen and Fogarty proceeded aft.

  In the maneuvering room there was silence. The nucs monitored their instruments with undistracted attention. After all, the system had never been pushed to the limit. A technician's dream come true.

  In the engine room Sorensen peeled off his jumpsuit and entered Sorensen's Beach in his red Bermuda shorts. He snapped on the sunlamps and put on his sunglasses.

  Fogarty came in. They pulled out the mat and sat there. Zapata crawled out of the shadows and looked at them.

  * * *

  The Mark forty-five reached its maximum depth six hundred feet above Potemkin. A spherical shell of high explosive ignited, imploding a perfect sphere of plutonium that instantly reached critical mass.

  The warhead exploded.

  In a millionth of a second a fireball thirty yards in diameter erupted into a mass of superheated steam. The sudden impulse of energy pushed out a shock wave that slammed into Potemkin with the force of a freight train. Her titanium hull w
as not designed to withstand that much asymmetric overpressure and ruptured in a dozen places. At four thousand feet the pressure of one hundred twenty-two atmospheres killed Potemkin in eight seconds.

  Federov's last thought was of the hand of God grabbing his ship and crushing it in His fist.

  The giant bubble of highly radioactive water vapor continued to expand, pushing above it a waterspout that rose one hundred feet into the air. The bubble rose swiftly to the surface, where it erupted over an area the size of a football field. A large wave radiated over the surface, and the steam was slowly diluted and dispersed in the atmosphere. When the waterspout fell back into the sea after a few seconds, all visible traces of a nuclear explosion vanished. All that remained was the sonic record heard by SOSUS and the sonar operators on Dherzinski twenty miles away.

  * * *

  Sorensen and Fogarty heard the explosion at the same time that the shock wave rolled through Barracuda.

  Sorensen said only, "He didn't move after he shot his wad. He thought he was too deep to get hurt."

  Fogarty sat perfectly still, his mind numbed, seeing only a picture of his toy submarine diving into Lake Minnetonka.

  The Russian torpedo did not function perfectly. It struck Barracuda twenty feet forward of the reactor.

  Exploding on impact, the warhead punched a hole six feet in diameter in the pressure hull, directly into the control room. The full, lethal force of the explosion struck Springfield, Pisaro, Hoek, Cakes and the others in the control room. Cracks radiating from the rupture opened around the circumference of the hull.

  Barracuda broke in half.

  The blast expended itself against the, forward bulkhead, which caved into the officers' quarters and galley. The aft bulkhead resisted the blast, and the stern broke away and began to sink.

  Eight thousandths of a second after the explosion ripped Barracuda in two, the sea and the laws of physics finished her.

  In the bow, only the new steel installed at Rota failed to shatter in the succession of implosions. Lopez, the torpedo gang and the damage-control team of Davic and Willie Joe died in the last implosion.

  In the stern, water poured into the reactor compartment, instantly cooling the reactor vessel, which became brittle and split open. The primary coolant water, saturated with radioactive isotopes and pressurized to sixteen hundred pounds per square inch, exploded into the flooding compartment and became mingled with the sea.

  Water poured into the engineering spaces, squeezing the atmosphere in the compartment into a smaller and smaller pocket until the air itself exploded, destroying the turbines and reduction gears.

  An electrical fire ignited a tank of light lubrication oil that exploded and destroyed Sorensen's Beach. Fogarty burned up.

  As Barracuda sank to the bottom, twelve thousand feet below, Sorensen lived long enough to drown.

  30

  Gorshkov

  A plain, unmarked Mercedes was waiting for Netts when he stepped off the plane at the airstrip near Hamburg. Three days had passed since Barracuda and Potemkin had destroyed one another.

  A young lieutenant stood on the tarmac, holding open the rear door. The admiral waved the lieutenant aside, slid into the driver's seat and drove south along the west bank of the Elbe.

  It was a fine spring morning and the river was wide and beautiful. In that part of central Germany the Elbe is the border between East and West. Thirty miles east of Hamburg fields of rye stretched ripe and green, and on both sides of the river farmers on their tractors looked busy, but there was one difference. In the East, a hundred yards from the river, a chain of high guardtowers marched along the Elbe, guns trained on the open fields.

  Netts drove through Lauenberg an der Elbe, an ancient town of long slate roofs, and stopped when he reached a single-lane bridge that crossed the river. Two West German border patrolmen, whose usual station was at the foot of the bridge, sat in a jeep a discreet distance away.

  On the other side of the river another Mercedes was parked behind a lowered crossing gate. In the middle of the bridge, alone, stood Sergei Gorshkov, admiral of the fleet of the Soviet Union.

  They had never met before. Netts looked at him, not trusting himself to speak. He waited for the Russian to start it.

  Gorshkov was a tall, heavy man dressed in a dark well-made suit. His face was bland. He watched the river barges for several minutes, as though admiring the hard-working rivermen. Finally he spoke in heavily accented but otherwise good English. "I am pleased you agreed to meet."

  "I thought it prudent. Tell me what you have to say."

  "You will not inform your press agencies of what has happened?"

  "Of course not." No need to get such an assurance in return. Everything Potemkin had done was to keep the secret of its existence and of Dherzinski's presence in the Caribbean.

  "Dherzinski is returning to Murmansk. She is no longer in position to—"

  "We know. She passed through the Iceland gap this morning... Admiral, your captain sank my ship."

  "He died for it."

  "He committed an unprovoked act of war. You are responsible—"

  "It was not unprovoked. Your ship came within a kilometer of Dherzinski—"

  "Dherzinski was in our waters." Like medieval popes, the two admirals were dividing up the world... "Admiral, I don't think you were so concerned about Dherzinski. In any case, you now know your attempt to violate our Cuban agreement is ended. Your patrols in the Caribbean have been terminated. But you were trying to protect your new class of attack submarines. What was the name of the ship that sank Barracuda?"

  "Potemkin."

  "How apt. Named for a czarist prince. You Russians never forget who you are. Why are you so anxious to protect Potemkin?"

  Gorshkov smiled. "Admiral Netts, I am sure you would not ask such a question unless you knew the answer. Your technicians have spectroscopes. By now they will have examined the sections of the bow removed from Barracuda in Rota after the collision and found traces of titanium." Gorshkov added, "We do not want to sink your ships. We want to put a stop to this before it gets out of control."

  "You're buying time, Admiral. You want to delay until you have a fleet of deep-diving titanium subs."

  Gorshkov's face was still bland, almost affable. "You're a gambler, Admiral Netts. I would enjoy playing poker with you. But, as it is, we have each lost a submarine, and neither of us wishes to lose another. Or be provoked into a war."

  They both turned to the river. Gorshkov said, "And so, once again, it is agreed neither of us will speak of what has happened, or of this meeting."

  Netts nodded curtly. "I have already said so. Barracuda disappeared, causes unknown."

  "For us, it is simple. Potemkin never existed."

  They did not shake hands on the bargain. Self-interest sealed it. For now. They would have no war today.

  Below them a barge whistle shrilled. They faced each other for a moment, then turned and walked off in opposite directions.

  * * *

  The game was over.

  The game had just begun.

  31

  About the Author

  MARK JOSEPH attributes his lifelong interest in nuclear submarines to a childhood spent wandering the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, California. Currently, he makes his home in San Francisco. This is his first novel.