Threat vector

by Michael Dimercurio

  back to the tunnel. He made his way back to the control compartment.

  Svyatoslov was standing behind the commander's console, where he'd tuned the flat-panel display on the console center to a video camera mounted on the observation deck they'd abandoned. The video display showed the ship being held at the normal surface waterline. All that was needed now was Grachev's report that the ship was ready to be submerged.

  Alexi Novskoyy stepped onto the spongy-tiled deck of the submarine. He glanced at the surface of it, curving dangerously downward to the black water far below. A pungent, familiar smell came from inside the hull, bringing back memories of the past. Novskoyy stepped to the first rung of the ladder to the interior of the airlock, moved his feet to the outside of the rungs, and slid smoothly down to the bottom step-off. It had been too long, he thought, as the old feeling of being at sea returned to him. It would be a good mission.

  Novskoyy walked to the stateroom he would be using on the run. It had the same light gray paneling that the entrance passageway had, the seams of the doors and cabinets done in stainless steel. The room was little more than a box three meters square and less than three meters tall. The door led to the central passageway of the lower level. On the bulkhead with the door, there was a small sink and mirror, with hooks to hang uniforms and hanging mesh bags for laundry. The forward bulkhead had two fold-out desks with two steel chairs,

  neither of them appearing comfortable. The aft bulkhead was filled with cabinets and cubbyholes, all of them flush with the surface of the bulkhead. The bulkhead opposite the door had two railroad-compartment-style bunks, both of them behind individual heavy curtains, with interior cubbyholes and reading lights. A display by the bunks showed the ship's course, speed, and depth. The course read 220 degrees; the speed read 0, as did the depth.

  Someone rapped suddenly on the door. Nov-skoyy opened it. Lieutenant Tenukha stood there.

  "Yes, sir. The captain sends his regards and respectfully invites you to the control compartment to see the submergence evolution. I'll take you if you wish."

  Novskoyy smiled at the youngster. "I will get unpacked first, Mr. Tenukha. Please thank the captain for me and tell him, if the invitation stands, I will find my way there myself."

  Tenukha handed over a data disk. "This is a visitor briefing file. It has maps of the ship. You need to wear this," he said, handing over a small black object. "Radiation dosimetry, worn on the belt. And please mind the warning signs. At frame 107, the third compartment, no visitors are allowed. That's the reactor and engineering areas. The computer cleanroom is locked out, as is the battery compartment, and the captain prefers you enter the torpedo room only with an escort. Other than that, the ship is yours. We hope you enjoy the trip." The young officer withdrew.

  "I feel as if I were on a Black Sea cruise," Nov-

  skoyy muttered to himself. "Let's see what's in these cubbyholes."

  Grachev cradled the handset against his shoulder. The circuit was an internal sub pen communication intercom plugged into a dataport connection umbilical on the ship's flank near one of the steel support saddles of the platform. Once they were outside the egress tunnel at the mouth of the cave, the dataport would be disconnected and the ship would divorce from the platform. Until then they had data, voice, and video to and from the control room of the sub pens.

  "Vepr is rigged for sea. Ballast tank vents are open, all hatches shut, divorce from external power complete, battery supplying all ship's loads."

  The voice in his ear acknowledged, and the connection clicked off. Grachev hung up the handset in the overhead above the commander's console and stood with his hands on the handrails of the periscope well.

  The display showed the ship beginning to vanish into the oily blackness of the sub pen water. He watched as the top of the hull slipped under the water. Foam bubbled up in the slip water from the air that remained in their ballast tanks. Then the fin started to go, until only the top half of it was left, and then it too came down to the level of the water. The intercom buzzed. Grachev picked it up.

  "All systems nominal," he said. The ship was not flooding, and the tunnel egress could proceed.

  The ship continued to sink deeper, until the top of the fin vanished into the water, only a foamy

  ring of small waves marking where she'd been. Svy-atoslov clicked the display to show the view from the fin camera, a viewing port designed for maximum operating depth, but usually used only at shallow depths. The tunnel would be illuminated with floodlights while they exited, so that they could see their progress.

  Grachev waited, hearing the deep bass whirring of the egress tunnel's platform as it lowered the ship farther into the two-hundred-meter depth of the egress tunnel. The ship's hull vanished far beneath the surface of the bay where they had been. It took some fifteen minutes for the ship to reach the bottom of the pit. When it did, the deck vibrated just slightly, then was jarred again as the saddled platform began to carry Vepr out the half-kilometer-long submerged tunnel to the Black Sea. The velocity out the tunnel was much faster than the vertical trip, taking no more than ten minutes. At the end of the platform's track the ship would come to a halt, which they would know from the sudden deceleration. While Grachev waited for it, Svyatoslov ordered the ship's electronic battle suite started up, then got on the phone to the nuclear control room aft to tell them to prepare to start the reactor. The next ten minutes seemed to take an hour. Grachev checked his watch frequently, knowing that the battery endurance during an amp-hour-eating reactor startup would be minimal.

  Finally the ship jumped as the saddle platform stopped.

  "Urgent message marked for commanding officer's eyes only in on the cable datalink, sir," Svya-

  toslov said, standing aft of the communication panel, to the right of Grachev's commander's console. They were still connected by the datalink to the saddle platform, and from there to the sub pens' communication center.

  "I'll get it here," Grachev said, signing into his radio account system. He scanned it, beginning to frown. It was from Kolov, telling him that any direction from the consultant should be regarded as if coming from Kolov himself.

  "Trouble, sir?" Svyatoslov asked.

  "I think so. Kolov says the consultant has a blank check. We have to follow his orders."

  "This guy know anything about submarines?"

  Grachev looked up when he heard bootsteps on the ladderway to the control compartment, which emerged on the forward starboard corner.

  "Permission to lay to control?" a deep-timbered voice asked. The consultant named Novskoyy.

  "Enter control," Grachev said, looking up at Novskoyy.

  "Hello, Captain Grachev. Thank you for having me aboard your fine ship," Novskoyy said. To Grachev the speech sounded rehearsed. "It seems shipshape and clean. My compliments."

  Grachev was not sure how to proceed. He would be damned if he'd let this civilian think he was in control of the ship, yet any failure of hospitality would not be well received by Kolov or the President.

  "Thanks," he said. "My first officer, Captain Second Rank Mykhailo Svyatoslov. You've already

  met Navigator Tenukha, who will be in the ship-control cubicle when we are ready to make way."

  "What is the status of divorcing from the egress platform?"

  "We're two minutes from the end of the tunnel. We'll divorce from the dataport, blow variable ballast, then hover while we start the reactor from the battery."

  "No," Novskoyy said. "First we use the Shchuka system to see if there is anyone here. We don't want to be followed out."

  "If that's the case, the Shchuka system will need to wait while we start the reactor."

  "No. It must be listening while we are dead quiet—no reactor power until Shchuka indicates we are alone on the seafloor."

  "That puts additional amp-hours on my battery, Mr. Novskoyy. You have any justification for this request?" Grachev made sure his tone was stern, and he labeled Novskoyy's command a "request." To blindly follow
this man would lead to trouble. Odd that something about him seemed familiar, and that his English seemed to have shadows of a Moscow accent.

  But Novskoyy seemed unsurprised. "To an outside observer, we might be indistinguishable from the egress platform. This could be a mere test of the system. But before you lift off the platform, it is vital that you self-delouse. It is possible a Royal Navy, American, or French unit could be bottomed out and observing the cave mouth. If you are cranking up pumps and blowing down steam head-

  ers, you will make noise. A covert shadowing submarine would hear that."

  "At ten minutes of Shchuka processing time on the acoustic daylight frequencies, this will cost me thirty minutes," Grachev said, his voice intentionally gravelly. He punched some variable software keys on the display of his central console. "At our battery discharge rate, that will make it impossible to start up the reactor. Any other ideas, Novskoyy?"

  The consultant frowned. "Deploy it for five minutes instead of ten. Then jettison it."

  Grachev's face grew hot. He wondered if it had turned red. "We have only four Shchuka pods. We cut one loose, we're down to three."

  "You will only need three. One here, one at Gibraltar, one in Norfolk Harbor. That leaves you with one in reserve."

  So Novskoyy did know the mission. And on the face of it, what he said did make some sense. Yet Grachev perceived that he was in a power struggle for the ship, and damned if he'd let this consultant take the ship from him.

  "It's unusual. I'll confer with my fleet commander," Grachev said, standing. "Mr. First, get me Kolov, and patch him through to my stateroom." Grachev stepped past Novskoyy, keeping his face neutral as if the man were not there, and walked down the ladderway to his stateroom.

  The stateroom was a combination sea cabin and office, the entrance opening into a conference room, a long oak table going diagonally through the space, ending in a large oak desk. The six

  chairs around the table were ergonomic and elegant leather Swedish-design swivel chairs. The walls were paneled in walnut, the wood taken from an ancient Ukrainian three-masted schooner's captain's cabin. The forward bulkhead had a curtained opening leading to the stateroom, a simple bed set into the corner with a reading lamp and a computer display able to show the view of any of the ship-wide monitoring cameras and any data the captain would demand on the ship's location or speed, depth, and course. Grachev tapped on the computer display at the small desk, ordering the software to video him into Kolov's office.

  Karina put him right through. Kolov smiled warmly.

  "Pavel. You should be almost ready to disconnect from the egress tunnel. I'm glad you called. I was having a message sent to you about the consultant."

  "That's why I'm calling," Grachev said, frowning. "This civilian Novskoyy is trying to give me rudder orders. He just told me to do a Shchuka system delouse while on the battery when my main priority is getting the reactor started up. By the time I'm done playing with the goddamn Shchuka toy these bastards designed, I'll be cold dead iron on the bottom of the Black Sea, blocking your ten-billion-ruble egress tunnel. Request permission to tell him to fuck himself."

  Kolov laughed. "Permission granted, Pavel, except when you're done, you'll have to apologize and do as he says. He's a vendor of intelligence information, not all of it at our disposal."

  "How can that be? He's under contract to Dolo-vietz to provide intelligence. I'll tell him to goddamn well provide it."

  "There's a reason we're conducting the operation this way, Pavel. Number one, no one ashore, not even me, is to know what's in Novskoyy's detailed plan. That protects you from our being compromised or penetrated. Up to a certain point, you have to trust Novskoyy. Do as he says. If he imperils ship safety or mission effectiveness, you are the captain. It's your call and your responsibility. But as to the nuts and bolts, if you accommodate Novskoyy without getting killed, that's also your mission. It's not an easy thing, Captain Grachev." Kolov glared at the screen. "If it were we wouldn't need men of your talent to do this."

  Grachev sighed to himself. "Very good, sir. Sorry to bother you."

  "Good luck, Pavel. Come home safe."

  The video winked out, the image of Svyatoslov replacing Kolov, the first officer phoning him from control.

  "Sir, the ship is stopped at the departure plane of the egress system."

  "I'm on my way."

  the sea, the waves rolling toward the view. The low-light enhancer made the surface, flooded with bright moonlight, look as if it were noon. The mast had binocular lenses, allowing Grachev to peer out of it much as out of a conventional periscope. The eyepieces restricted the amount of data displayed to the human observer, but the Second Captain— the shipwide computer control system—had access to all the data available from the surface. If there were an approaching surface ship that the watch officer failed to notice, the Second Captain's annunciator alarms would jar the man's attention.

  "Mr. Zakharov, take the scope and patch the satellite UHF video frequencies to the captain's stateroom's video. Lock it out of the crew mess, though."

  If Zakharov thought the order odd, he didn't show it.

  "Yes, sir. Right away."

  "Low power on the horizon, optic module trained to the bow."

  "I have the scope, sir."

  Grachev glanced at Svyatoslov, motioning toward the stairs down to the first compartment. Svyatoslov blinked, nodding almost imperceptibly, and followed the captain down the steep stairs. The two men said nothing until Grachev's stateroom suite door was shut and bolted.

  "Bring it up on BBC," Grachev ordered. The first officer flicked the channel to the news block, ignored SNN, and tuned to BBC One. The scene was Sevastopol, depicting people emerging from the admiralty building, most of them crying or hid-

  ing their faces, a few officials dodging the cameras and microphones of the press. It was surreal to see the building he worked in twice a week on an international news program, particularly one with breaking news.

  ". . . sinking of the Navy of the Ukraine's nuclear submarine Vepr in what admiralty officials have admitted to be the worst maritime disaster in modern naval history. Admiral Yuri Kolov, when asked to comment, promised to issue a statement later in the day. We go live now to the press room of the Ukrainian Navy's admiralty ..."

  "We're dead, man," Svyatoslov smirked, shaking his head.

  The scene shifted to the press room of the admiralty, the background cream-colored curtains, the emblem of the Navy of the Ukraine behind the podium, the omnipresent shield with the missile and the leaping dolphin, the crossed sabers, and at the podium Yuri Kolov, eyes swollen and bloodshot, his face frozen in a frown.

  A knock came at the door while Kolov was fooling with his notes.

  Svyatoslov cracked the door open. Al Novskoyy stood outside. "May I come in? I heard the video is on."

  Grachev glared at Novskoyy. At the crew briefing, Novskoyy hadn't said a word. It had been left to Grachev what to tell the men, whether to let them in on the "security plan" of sinking the Vepr decoy. Grachev had made the decision that the crew should know as little as possible. Not that they were incapable of handling the information,

  but it would lower their performance. In the end, Grachev had frowned sternly at the men, told them that their sortie was an emergency, and that their orders would be coming in later, when they were in position.

  "When will we know what this mission is all about?" Grachev asked.

  "I am authorized to give you navigation way-points once we transit Gibraltar and enter the Atlantic," Novskoyy said, propping one boot on the bulkhead. "Even then, they will be an indirect way to reach our operational area. Believe me, Captain Grachev, I am maintaining your philosophy—the more you know, the more you worry. When the time comes, I will tell all. Until then, enjoy the trip."

  Grachev grimaced, annoyed that he didn't know his own mission, but able to keep his peace. His eyes returned to the screen as Kolov opened his mouth.

  "This afternoon," Kolov's
gravelly voice said, so low Svyatoslov had to crank the volume, "the Navy of the Ukraine's front-line submarine Vepr went down in the deep water of the Black Sea. Shortly before she passed through her crush depth, the hull ejected what we call a 'black box buoy,' which contained a data log of her last hour submerged. The buoy was recovered this evening and replayed aboard the salvage ship Tucha. The buoy's transcript has not been fully analyzed, but in the few hours we have had it available to us, we have made the preliminary determination—"

  "Come on, Uncle Yuri, get to the point," Svya-toslov muttered.

  "Shut up," Grachev said, annoyed.

  "—ship suffered a brittle fracture of the monel seawater piping going to the ship's port condenser. This pipe is subject to full sea pressure and is sixty centimeters in diameter, so flooding through this piping would be catastrophic even if not stopped within seconds. The ship normally has a hull closure valve able to isolate the piping system from sea pressure and stop the flooding. We believe the valve shut and stopped the flooding but then drifted back open. The flooding had shorted out the control circuits to the hydraulic systems that operated the hull closure valves, allowing the hull valve to reopen and restart the flooding, and also caused the stern of the vessel to be heavy, angling the ship upward. The condenser seawater piping rupture, the massive flooding, and the shorting of several major electrical systems resulted in the loss of the nuclear reactor, and with it, all propulsion capabilities. At a time when the ship was extremely heavy aft, with no power, and with the flooding restarting, the crew activated explosive charges in the ballast tanks, which we call the emergency deballasting system. The purpose of this system was to—"