Threat vector

by Michael Dimercurio

  "God, even describing our premature deaths, Uncle Yuri is boring."

  "Knock it off, Mr. First. This is serious."

  "—as much weight as possible, allowing the submarine to ascend to the surface in spite of the increased weight of the water in the fourth compartment. We believe there was a third failure

  in this accident, after the pipe shear and the closure valve coming back open. The deballasting charges in the aft ballast tanks, instead of detonating and generating high-pressure gas forcing out ballast water in the tanks to lighten the ship, caused a structural failure in the metal of the hull of the ballast tank itself. The explosive charge's gas generation went to waste as the gas leaked out the ruptured ballast tank. The Vepr, now heavy aft with continued flooding, lost her forward momentum and began traveling backward toward her maximum operating depth. We believe that she was traveling at a speed of approximately sixty clicks as she penetrated the plane of her crush depth. The fourth compartment, the turbine room, was already equalized to sea pressure from the flood, but the third, second, and first compartments imploded cat-astrophically from the pressure. The hull of the Vepr hit the rocky bottom and broke apart."

  Kolov's voice croaked at the last word. He struggled visibly for control, wiping his eyes. Finally he looked up from his statement.

  "I am sorry, ladies and gentlemen. The crew of the Vepr were all friends of mine, old comrades, handpicked and trained over decades. I will continue with the statement."

  "Please," Svyatoslov said. Grachev just glared at him. Novskoyy's face was blank.

  "The Severodvinsk class of attack submarine, the modified flight, is designed with a detachable control compartment which may function as an escape pod. The fourth and final failure of the ship came at this point as the explosive bolts of the sail

  blew off over the control compartment, as they were supposed to. The structural connections all properly disengaged or blew off as required. However, one set of cable connectors did not sever on the escape signal but remained connected. The twelve three-centimeter-wide cables were enough to keep the control compartment from separating from the main hull in time, and the ending of the data log is marked by the impiosion of the control compartment."

  Kolov sniffed. The press room was dead silent except for the clicking of digital still cameras.

  "We have a disk of the final moments of the submarine's loss, which was recorded into the black box buoy. I requested that this record be sealed in consideration of the families. I was met by a representative of the Vepr's next of kin, the commanding officer's wife, Martinique Grachev, who requested the control compartment recording be played so that the families might know the whole truth, however unpleasant, and the request was specific that it be played for the members of the press. I have the permission of President Dolovietz to show this disk. Members of the press corps, please forgive me if I step out of the room while it is played. I have seen it once. Once is enough."

  Kolov stepped away from the platform, and Kar-ina, dressed in a long black dress, her flashy makeup gone, her eyes puffy and pink, her face swollen, took Kolov's place and activated the controls to the flat-screen video display.

  'This should be interesting," Svyatoslov said, his voice acid. "Hard to see how this will be faked.

  THREAT VECTOR 239

  Martinique and Irina will know. There's no way actors will be able to carry the day with our wives. Or with our families, or even with our friends."

  "No?" Novskoyy asked. "You remember the Severodvinsk training simulator back in April? When the battlestations crew was asked to fight a simulated flooding of the control compartment? We taped it."

  Grachev was turning to stare at Novskoyy when he saw himself and Svyatoslov in the control compartment mockup last April, struggling desperately to fight the flooding, their grins of exasperation— some of the drill actually making them laugh at the absurdity of trying to survive—looking like desperate grimaces on screen, the disk taken out of context, changing the picture from what it was, a lighthearted drill in a "Disney World" simulator machine where the crews all failed to beat the flooding computer but at least improved their ability to think in a half-flooded compartment, to what it appeared to be, twelve men in the final moments of struggling for their lives.

  They watched the video until a wall of water washed across the lens, knocking the view half sideways, and all that could be heard was muffled screams. Most disturbing was the scream in his own voice, shouting "Oh, God!" And in the stateroom, the color came to his face. The voice was truly his, but the words had been taken from an evening of passion he'd had with his wife, the night that his house had been bugged by the da Vinci consultants. They'd obviously lied to Kolov when they'd said they hadn't listened other than to see if he had

  discussed the sub's mission. The other screams were taken the same way. Svyatoslov's dying words seemed to be "Goddamn Vepr" which had actually probably been said to his own wife in frustration with the ship.

  There was a final rushing noise of water and the disk went to static.

  "Turn it off," Grachev ordered. He could stand no more.

  The video scene winked out. Grachev reached for the intercom phone. "Deck Officer, depart mast broach depth for one hundre d meters, forty clicks, advise of shipping at the channel approach." He waited for Zakharov's acknowledgment, then put the phone down, blinking hard, his eyes scratchy.

  "You were correct not to share this with the crew," Novskoyy said, his own eyes haunted as he stood. "Excuse me, Captain." He shut the door behind himself.

  Grachev looked at Svyatoslov. "You okay, Mykhailo?"

  "I don't think so, Captain." He sniffed, staring at the deck. "Why would Kolov do this? What could be so goddamn important that they want to torture our families like this? And us?"

  "I don't know, Mykhailo, I don't know. I'm not sure I want to know. It could only get worse. Go on, Mr. First. Take a shower. A long, hot hotel shower. Then get to control. We've got about five hundred surface ships to avoid hitting on the way out of the strait. We've got to have our war faces on for the men. We owe them that."

  Mykhailo Svyatoslov, deflated, seeming half his

  normal size, nodded silently and shuffled out of the room. Grachev glanced at the dark video display, remembering. He sat at his desk and began dictating to his handheld computer, starting a letter to Martinique. Before they got to their operation area, he would upload it to the black box buoy, so that she would know what had happened, and more importantly, how he felt about her, in case Me were to imitate art.

  Ten o'clock Eastern European time was three in the afternoon in Alexandria, Virginia, where Admiral Michael Pacino sat on the front three inches of the leather couch facing the display screen, where the control-room video of the Ukrainian submarine Vepr had just played.

  "Mute the sound, Paully," Pacino said to Paul White, sitting on the chair beside the couch.

  "I can barely believe it," White said. "An escape pod control room, shipwide computer control, constantly monitoring video systems, and they still sink and die from a pipe rupture."

  "The greatest design in the world goes nowhere without even greater maintenance," Pacino said absently. "They didn't die from a pipe rupture, or from the deballast system problem, or from the cable connectors not disconnecting. They died from bad maintenance. Any one or even two failures at the same time, and Vepr would have sailed on."

  White was silent for a moment, watching the families mourning the crew of the ill-fated submarine. "Any chance this isn't real? A cover-up for Vepr so that she can sneak into the Atlantic?"

  "Hard to imagine why they'd do that, Paully," Pacino pronounced. "It looked pretty real to me."

  "A little too convincing."

  "Come on, Paully. If you want, ask Number Four at NSA to analyze the video. Look for a chart with the wrong ocean, chronometer with the wrong time—or a watch that isn't synchronized with the bulkhead clock, or discontinuities with the soundtrack. If the Ukrainians altered the video, the
y must have left fingerprints."

  "I'll get on it, sir."

  "Meanwhile, I don't think we need to trouble the Piranha anymore. You can tell Bruce Phillips to bring her home."

  White nodded and left. The last remaining Sea-wolf-class submarine, Piranha, had been lurking in the Atlantic west of Gibraltar waiting for the Vepr to outchop the Mediterranean, on her way to join up with the Black Sea Fleet in the Atlantic, but Bruce Phillips' Piranha had been on station for months, her crew were exhausted, the boat was overdue for a dry-dock overhaul, and keeping her on patrol no longer seemed to make sense.

  tude — not quite superior, just as if when he issues commands, it never would cross his mind that anyone would disagree with them. And he is as technically expert as I or even Mykhailo, although there were details about the ship — the active quieting system for one — that he knew nothing of but caught up on quickly. Almost as if he were the ship's original designer, coming back for a cruise after many of the new systems were added on. Yet he does not carry himself as an engineer or a scientist, but as a military man. I have asked him if he is ex-navy, but he never answers or even seems to hear the question. He insists upon remaining a mystery.

  And yet he spends most of his time with me and Mykhailo, as if we were birds of a feather. It is all I can do to break away from him long enough to write you these words. Since he first stepped aboard, he has mellowed toward us, or perhaps we have become more understanding of him. Either way, we get along, play chess, discuss the submarine and her capabilities, lean over the Second Captain navigation display plot and look at our past course. Nov-skoyy — Al, as he prefers to be called — will not divulge our orders, or even navigation waypoints beyond the next one. We approach chart coordinate M, and Novskoyy hands me a slip of paper with the latitude and longitude of the next waypoint, coordinate N, and the speed of advance he wants to make good. He insists that the navigation chart be displayed only to the three of us, that none of the officers know. So far I have obliged him.

  I do not know how much of this record will be censored, how much will make its way to you. If all

  goes well y this file will be deleted, never to be read by anyone. But if the censors pass this, and if you find a map file that shows where these strange-sounding places are, I will tell you that the course Novskoyy has laid in has taken us northward to the coastline of Labrador, Canada, and then down just deeper than the North American continental shelf past Nova Scotia, past the coastlines of the American states of Maine and Massachusetts, along New York's Long Island, bisecting the shipping lanes to New York, and southward past the New Jersey shore, and the Delaware-Maryland-Virginia peninsula to the entrance to the great bay, the Chesapeake. The entrance to the Chesapeake is called Hampton Roads, and the city to the south of the opening is called Virginia Beach, which changes to the city of Norfolk just inside the bay. You have heard me mention Norfolk before, my love, as the home of the world's most powerful navy. And even though the Americans lost over half of their battle fleets in the war of the East China Sea and the Japanese blockade, what remains is frightening in the number and in the individual capability of each ship.

  Last night, Sunday, Novskoyy ordered me to enter the Hampton Roads traffic separation scheme, which was to the west by some 150 kilometers. I do not know if you realize how significant that is. First, he has ordered me to penetrate the sovereign waters of another country, inside their twelve-nautical-mile limit Second, the entrance to Hampton Roads is overrun with shipping traffic. Worse, if possible, than Gibraltar. Perhaps that was his intention, to have the closely spaced ships — like trucks on a high-

  way — mask our acoustic signature. Although with the Second Captain engaged in active quieting mode, for every pure tone we put into the sea from rotating machinery, the ship's hull hydrophones put out an identical tone exactly phase-shifted by one-half wavelength, which cancels out the noise completely. Vepr would be quieter than a hole in the ocean if not for the flow noise around the skin of the ship — minimized by going slow — and transient noises, like dropping a pan on the floor of the galley, which are minimized by crew discipline, since whoever makes a noise detected by the Second Captain scrubs the bathrooms that day. It seems to work. But my mind is wandering. Entering Norfolk Harbor, with a water depth of scarcely fifteen meters, is a dangerous thing, amounting to breaking and entering a house. If the Americans, with all their naval might, with their antisubmarine systems, detect us, they will be entirely justified in shooting us with intent to kill. Just another reason to write you this letter. Never before have I put this ship in such a magnitude of danger.

  Our three-dimensional high-frequency secure littoral bottom-sounding sonar mapped out the bottom contours of the approach to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, where water depth is barely enough to keep the top of the fin submerged. There on the partly sandy, partly rocky bay floor I bottomed the submarine, using the thrusters for maneuvering, and using the seawater cooling water suction valves mounted on the top of the hull to avoid fouling the seawater systems with sediment. I shut down the propulsion turbines, further quieting the ship,

  THREAT VECTOR 249

  and then the port electrical turbine and rigged the ship for hostile sea quieting. The vessel is a ghost ship now, bottomed out not far from the Bay Bridge-Tunnel, the Antay sensor periscope raised beside several abandoned wood pilings. No one would suspect a hostile submarine to be hiding here, but if they came looking for it and found us, it would be over.

  God knows — or I should say only Novskoyy knows — what we are doing here. Every few minutes I feel a need to peer out the Antay sensor and make sure no one has discovered us. The sensor view is constantly playing on my stateroom video displays. The reality is that if we are caught, there will be no way to escape stealthily or quickly. I am hoping that soon, perhaps by sunrise this morning, Monday the 23rd, Novskoyy will tell me what my ship is doing here.

  I am anxious to do whatever it is I am supposed to do and get out of here, whether it is spying, taking soil samples, or perhaps even letting Novskoyy out the forward airlock so he can go on some odd mission of sabotage. Until then, all I can do is wait, and by writing you, have you waiting here next to me.

  I send good thoughts to you and to young Pavely-vich. Give him a kiss for me, and tell him his daddy loves him.

  And I love you, dearest Martinique. Please, never forget me, never forget us. Pavel

  Michael Pacino threw his arm across the bed, feeling the warmth of Colleen's body on the deep

  mattress in the darkness well before dawn. He pulled her closer, feeling her against his chest. He found her mouth and kissed her, his mouth reaching past her teeth, and finding her tongue, her tongue rough, rougher than before, and there was hair on her lip, and he opened an eye and stared into the smiling face of his black lab, Jackson.

  "Bleah!" he spat, sitting up in the king-size bed in the top loft of the Annapolis timber-frame house overlooking the water of the Severn River and the breathtaking view of the Naval Academy. The property, surrounded by water on three sides, was accordingly nicknamed Pacino Peninsula by the Pentagon admirals and generals who gathered here every second weekend for keggers and football parties and barbecues. He looked over at the bed, realizing that only he and Jackson were there, then remembered with disappointment that Colleen was gone, in D.C. to testify before the Armed Services Committee about the Cyclops battlecontrol system. He yawned and looked at the clock, the digits reading 3:15, a few minutes before the alarm he had set. He stood as Jackson jumped off the bed and wagged his tail, ready to go on their usual six-mile jog through Annapolis and the grounds of the Academy.

  "Not today, buddy," Pacino said. "You're staying with Lucille. I'm gone for a week." He rubbed the dog's head. "Yes, Daddy's going to sea for a week."

  He took a shower, donned his tropical white uniform, and grabbed his bag and his briefcase. His driver, Maria, drank coffee in the kitchen with a

  bleary-eyed Lucille, the young housekeeper hired by Collee
n. He greeted them both, grabbed his coffee, and walked with Maria to the Lincoln truck. Security prevented him from using one of the new drive-by-wire software-controlled limousines, so Maria drove the updated shiny black utility vehicle, with bumper flags flying four gold stars in a blue field, the new emblem of the Department of the Navy on the doors. He stared at it for a moment, thinking it seemed like just yesterday his doors had read "Unified Submarine Command." He shrugged at the absurd speed of the passage of time and ducked into the truck.

  Once they had pulled onto Route 50, cruising toward the Beltway at a leisurely 140 mph, he clicked on his WritePad computer. The print was blurry, and he pulled out half-frame reading glasses from his briefcase to scan through his messages. A video e-mail from Colleen taken from her hotel room came on. His pretty wife was dark Irish, a female version of her father, Fleet Admiral Dick O'Shaughnessy. She smiled at him from the suite, saying she wished she'd stayed at the Annapolis house and commuted in, but her staff was holed up in the Watergate, working late into the night during the testimony. There was no hope of an early wrap, she said, but she was hoping to join him in the Caribbean if the schedule held. In the meantime, she cautioned, he was to keep away from the hostesses. A kiss blown to the camera, and her image winked out.