Ping!..
Louder this time, loud enough to hurt sensitive hearing. Kislovodsk’s sonar officer, Valery Sofinsky, had already pulled off his headset and was ruefully rubbing his ear. Even at a depth of four hundred feet, it sounded as though the American helicopter-mounted sonars were right on top of them, scant meters from the outer hull.
It hadn’t taken the bastards long to find them, either. Another Russian sub, the Krimsky Komsomolets, had been shadowing the American battle group up the Aegean; orders had come through from Balaklava just hours ago for the Kislovodsk to pick up the group and continue shadowing it inside the Black Sea. Their orders were to remain unobserved, but to get as close to the major ships of the CBG as possible ― especially either their Aegis cruiser command ship or the carrier itself.
Ping!..
“They have us bracketed, Comrade Kapitan,” Captain-Lieutenant Yuri Aleksanyan, the boat’s first officer, said. “I think they must have known we were here all along.”
“The bastards have the devil’s own ears,” Vyatkin spat. But it was more than the vaunted American technology. He knew that.
In the old days, in the Soviet days, Russian crews had not quite been the match of their American counterparts. Now, with morale at rock bottom, with machinery falling apart and no spares to be had anywhere save, just possibly, on the black market, things were much worse. His crew was sullen to the point of mutiny, and as likely to drop a heavy metal tool in protest to some unwanted order as out of stupidity or neglect. Equipment designed to run quietly didn’t. Sensors designed to monitor sound aboard the submarine didn’t. Officers supposedly trained in the skills necessary to navigate efficiently and silently while submerged weren’t. Service aboard a Russian submarine, always both dangerous and uncomfortable, was fast becoming a nightmare.
Ping!..
“That was from directly ahead, Comrade Captain,” the sonar officer said.
He didn’t even need his headset, so loud and bell-tone clear was the American transmission.
“They are warning us, Captain,” the first officer added.
“They are telling us they want us to come no closer to their precious nuclear carrier,” Vyatkin said.
PING!..
“Comrade Captain-“
“We will fox them, Yuri Aleksanyan,” Vyatkin said. “Ready Kukla.”
“At once, Comrade Captain.”
The submarine known to the West as a Victor III was the oldest class of SSN still in service with the Russian navy. The first Soviet undersea vessel to be a match for the sophisticated submarine technologies of England and the United States, it was nonetheless the result of a number of compromises… not the least of which was the fact that the same power plant used to drive the smaller, lighter Victor II was used on this larger submarine, which translated to a slower top speed and more sluggish handling.
Worse, Kislovodsk had been one of the last of the Victor IIIS to come off the ways at Komsomolsk in 1985, and he ― Russians always thought of their ships as he ― was decidedly showing his age. There were few alternatives, but Vyatkin found the obvious one of flight to be distasteful in the extreme. To allow the hunter wolf to be chivied away from its prey by the squawking of crows… no. There was another way. A better way, one that might help unite this crew that had been beaten on the day it had set out to sea, and perhaps instill in these men confidence in their commanding officer.
“Torpedo room reports Kukla loaded, Comrade Captain.”
“Open outer torpedo doors, and prepare to fire.”
“At once, Comrade Captain.”
He might be old and slow, Vyatkin thought, but the creaking dedushka Kislovodsk had a few tricks left in him Yet.
1758 hours (Zulu +3)
Control room, U.S.S. Orlando
“Captain! Sonar! He’s opening his outer doors!”
“Damn!” Lang slapped the intercom switch on the console just above his head. “Torpedo room! Stand by tubes one and three!”
“Tubes one and three ready, Captain,” a seaman’s voice came back. He sounded young… and scared. “ADCAP, standard war shot.”
“Sonar! What’s he doing?”
“Hard to tell, Captain,” Davies replied. “It’s hard to hear through the pinging.”
Lang cursed. This was bad, damned bad. Range to the Jefferson was still over twenty nautical miles, too far for a standard 533mm torpedo, but easily within the range of the big Russian 650mm monsters. Those babies could travel over fifty miles at thirty knots… or twenty-seven miles at fifty, and they packed one-ton warheads, powerful enough to do serious damage to the Jeff if one connected.
Fire only if fired upon.
But that particular Rule of Engagement couldn’t apply here, not to submarine combat. To wait for the other guy to get the first shot in was suicide. Orlando was here, astern of the Victor, precisely to keep the son of a bitch from firing the shot that might sink or cripple the Jefferson.
And all Lang had to go on was what his sonar operator was hearing amid the churning, ping-echoing water ahead.
Naval careers were made and broken by decision points like this one. He was in a perfect firing position. Moments before, when the helicopters had started their deafening pinging of the contact ahead, he’d ordered Orlando to drop back a ways, partly to stay out of the sonar barrage, partly to set the Orlando up with a good shot if the need arose.
The need, apparently, had arisen; if he guessed wrong, though, firing recklessly before he was sure, he could start a war.
The hell with that. If he guessed wrong, erring on the side of caution, he would be responsible for the deaths of hundreds aboard the Jefferson. “Weapons Officer!” he snapped.
“Tubes one and three, loaded and ready, sir.”
“Fire one!”
Orlando’s weapons officer slapped the topmost of four red switches on the bulkhead console. The deck lurched slightly, and a light on the console winked red.
“One away, sir. Running hot and true.”
“Fire three!”
Again, the lurch transmitted through the deck.
“Three away. Running time for number one is twelve seconds.”
He found himself counting off the seconds in melodramatic anticipation.
CHAPTER 5
Friday, 30 October
1758 hours (Zulu +3)
Control room, Russian Submarine Kislovodsk
Kukla ― the Russian word meant puppet ― was a decoy, a standard 533mm torpedo with the warhead removed and a sophisticated packet of microelectronics tucked away in its place that broadcast a convincing facsimile of the submarine’s sound signature. The ploy would not be successful with active sonar, of course ― the Americans would be able to tell from the echoes whether a target was 6.4 meters long or 104. Still, Captain First Rank Vyatkin had enormous faith in the effectiveness of confusion as both weapon and tactic in combat. If Kislovodsk cut his engines at the same moment he launched the Kukla, there would be several moments of confusion. When their passive sonar receivers picked up the sound of the SSN moving off at top speed, they would almost certainly stop pinging and listen, trying to get what information they could about the sub’s new course and speed.
And in those critical few moments, before they realized that they were tracking an electronic decoy, he would bring Kislovodsk onto a new heading and slip out from beneath the very noses of the American ASW forces. A simple maneuver, but an effective one. He’d seen it used successfully more than once, on boats he’d served aboard as a junior officer during the Cold War.
“Fire Kukla!” he ordered. There was a hiss as the torpedo slid clear of the tube on a blast of compressed air.
Aleksei Vyatkin and the men with him on the Kislovodsk’s control room deck never heard the approach of the two American torpedoes. They were coming straight out of the sub’s baffles, for one thing, and for another the water around the submerged vessel was filled with the echoing pings from the helicopters’ dipping sonars, and the Victor III’s ag
ing electronics suite was hard-pressed to separate the cascading signals from one another in any kind of order that made sense to the human listeners.
The first ADCAP torpedo, wire-guided by an operator aboard the Orlando, passed just beneath the Kislovodsk’s starboard stern plane and slammed into the aft trim tank about ten meters forward of the screw. Three hundred kilograms of high explosive detonated with a roar of white noise detected by every sonar within hundreds of miles.
The second Advanced Capabilities torpedo struck the Victor III’s vertical stabilizer, vaporizing the teardrop-shaped towed-array sonar housing, smashing the steering mechanism and tearing away the eight-bladed screw.
Normally, one submarine firing at another from the target vessel’s baffles would have sent the wire-guided ship-killers on long, looping courses that would bring them in on the target’s port or starboard side. This increased the likelihood of a kill, both by presenting the incoming torpedoes with a larger target, and by exposing the most vulnerable sections of the target sub, the large compartments forward and amidships, to attack. This time, however, the attacker had gone for a straight-in shot; steering the ADCAP torpedoes in by wire across a roundabout attack path would use up precious minutes during which the Victor III could launch his own torpedoes at the Jefferson.
That single small note of urgency saved the Victor’s crew ― some of them, at least. As the after trim tank and three after bulkheads collapsed, a wall of water smashed its way forward through the main engine room, the switchboard room, and the reactor compartment. Twelve of the eighty-five men aboard were killed as the after compartments flooded, but watertight hatches were dogged shut and the sea’s invasion of the Victor was halted just abaft the auxiliary machine room, stores hatch, and aft escape trunk. The lights failed, plunging everyone aboard into a screaming, panicking darkness, then returned as emergency batteries came on-line.
Vyatkin’s palm came down on the alarm Klaxon, and he scooped up a microphone. “Emergency surface!” he yelled, as the Victor lurched heavily to port, trembling with the inrush of hundreds of tons of seawater. “Blow all ballast!”
Kislovodsk shuddered again, harder, and the deck canted sharply as the stricken attack sub rolled back to starboard, flinging crewmen and anything else not tied down across the deck. With a shrill scream of escaping air under high pressure, the water in the sub’s ballast tanks was blasted into the surrounding sea.
“Pressurize the aft compartments!”
“Sir, the pressurization feed pipelines-“
“Force air into every compartment you can, damn it! We’ve got to fight the flooding!”
Vyatkin clung to the railing circling the periscope well as the vessel’s bow came up. Everything, everything depended on how much of Kislovodsk’s stern was flooded, on how many compartments might yet be sealed off and still contain air, on whether or not the flooding could be contained by forcing at least some of the seawater out of compartments already flooded. He became aware of Yuri Aleksanyan clinging to a stanchion a meter away, his eyes bugging from his paste-white face as he stared at the overhead. “Easy, my friend,” Vyatkin said softly, and the first officer flinched as though he’d been struck. “Easy. We live or die on the laws of physics. It’s out of our hands, now.”
“We are rising!” the rating manning the sub’s blow planes yelled. “One hundred twenty meters… and rising!”
The angle of the deck increased as the bow came up higher. The stern, smashed, and waterlogged, was dragging at the Kislovodsk, trying to pull him back into the black depths tail-first. The vessel lurched sharply, flinging Vyatkin away from the periscope, smashing him painfully against the main ballast control console as the lights flickered and dimmed once again until the only illumination was from small, self-contained emergency lighting units near the deck. A terrible grating, shrilling noise filled the near-darkness, coming from beyond the aft bulkhead. At first he thought someone was screaming back there, but the scream grew louder, and still louder, reaching a pitch and a volume that no human throat could possibly manage. The scream gave way to thunder… and the sub jolted hard, whip-snapping from starboard to port to starboard again, as though it were a bone being worried by a particularly large and playful dog.
The scream, Vyatkin realized with something like sickness in his soul, was Kislovodsk’s death cry, the shrilling of steel tearing like cloth.
1759 hours (Zulu +3)
Control room, U.S.S. Orlando
“I’m getting break-up noises, Captain!” Davies reported. He had to listen hard, pressing the headphones against his ears to shut out the cheering of the crew.
“All right people!” Captain Lang shouted. “Quiet down!”
“As you were, there!” Callahan, the Chief of the Boat, added. “Stand to!” The noise subsided.
Lang was standing just behind Davies’s chair. “A kill?”
“Captain…” He shook his head. “Damn.”
“What is it?”
“Okay… it’s a bit confused out there. The blasts scrambled the water, y’know? For a minute, I thought I heard two subs, though.”
Lang’s eyes widened. “Two-“
“No, it’s okay. I think the torp launch we heard was a decoy. I can still hear it… running at zero-nine-eight, at about thirty knots. Making noises like our contact, but I’m also getting definite break-up noises. I think the contact launched a decoy just before our ADCAPS took him down.”
“Oh, shit!”
“Sir?”
“We may have jumped the gun a bit on that one. Okay, Davies. Is he going down?”
“Up, I think.” The sonarman listed a moment longer. “Yes, sir. I’m not getting any engine noise, but there’s lots of bubbling, hull stress and structural flexing sounds. And it’s headed toward the roof.”
“Diving Officer! Bring us up… slow. Follow the contact UP.”
“Coming up slow, Captain,” the diving officer of the watch repeated.
Lang felt the deck tilting up beneath his feet. He felt sick inside, a mingling of combat eagerness and shock at what had just happened. “If that poor bastard didn’t launch on us,” he said softly, “we’d better be on hand to render assistance.”
1804 hours (Zulu +3)
Russian Submarine Kislovodsk
For a time, the Kislovodsk hung suspended between the surface and the black depths below… caught in a very temporary balance between buoyancy and flooding. Then, with a final grinding shudder, the keel parted just beneath the sub’s reactor compartment; hull plates and ribbing shredded like paper as the aft third of the Russian submarine tore free and plunged into unrelieved night, trailing bubbles, oil, and a thin, spreading plume of radioactivity from the ruptured reactor containment vessel.
The forward part of the sub leaped toward the surface with an explosive jolt. Moments later, the crippled vessel’s prow burst up through the surface and into the air above in a vast explosion of spray. It was already well past sunset and the sky was overcast, but enough twilight remained to gleam from the white foam breaking across the bow and past the low, rounded sweep of the sail. In seconds, the aft, forward, and sail hatches had been cracked, and crewmen were scrambling out into the cold, wet, and windswept near-darkness, battling the black waves breaking over the submarine from bow to shattered stern as they ripped open deck panels and broke out the life rafts. Their task was made more difficult by panic, and by the fact that the deck was canted sharply aft and to port; the sail was listing at a forty-five-degree angle, and each swell of the sea breaking over and past it sent torrents of water cascading down the after escape trunk hatch.
Vyatkin clung to the railing at the side of the bridge, high atop the sail, and watched miserably as his crew fought to save themselves. For a time, he’d thought, possibly, that Kislovodsk might be saved. He’d known the damage to the engineering spaces and propeller shaft must be grave, but if the sub could be kept on the surface, a tug out of Sevastopol could have them back in port by morning.
But t
hat final shock that had catapulted them to the surface ― that had been the final blow. He could tell by the wallowing feel of the vessel that he would remain at the surface only a few more moments before making his final dive.
Vyatkin only hoped that all of the crew could get out first.
He heard the thuttering roar of helicopters… probably the Americans who’d been pinging them. The nearest Russian ships must be a hundred miles away. If only-Light exploded from starboard, a dazzling whiteness that, at first, he thought was a flare. Then the beam swept across Kislovodsk’s hull, illuminating dozens of life-jacketed sailors already afloat in the water, the soft orange shape of a raft already smothered by desperate men, and the black sheen of oil. It took Vyatkin a mind-numbing moment to realize that another submarine had surfaced a hundred meters abeam, that it was playing a searchlight across his dying command. By the back-scatter of that light, he could see one of the helicopters approaching, its rotor noise growing louder as it gentled toward the stricken Kislovodsk. A second light winked on, gleaming from the helo’s side. Something spilled from the open door, expanding as it fell.
A life raft. The Americans were dropping life rafts.
“Comrade Captain!” Aleksanyan called, shouting into his ear to be heard above the wind and the growing thunder of the helicopters. “We must leave! Now!”
Grimly, Vyatkin nodded. For a moment, he’d entertained romantic notions of going down with his command… but he found that, after all, he wasn’t quite ready to die.
Aleksanyan handed him a life jacket and he began to strap it on.
1840 hours (Zulu +3)
Flight deck, U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Commander Willis E. “Coyote” Grant strapped on the safety helmet, known aboard ship as a “cranial,” before stepping out of the Mangler’s 0–4 compartment and onto the carrier’s flight deck. The air inside the compartment was crackling with radio calls; the Deck Handler ― more familiarly called the “Mangler” ― and his crew were frantically repositioning aircraft silhouettes on the big Plexiglas diagram of Jefferson’s flight deck, updating the model to reflect the realities of aircraft positions outside.
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