by Peter Sasgen
“Kapitan, I hear something, a decoy…. Ah!”
Another clap of thunder shook the boat.
Alex huddled with Scott and asked, “Did we get him?”
The sonar display still had not cleared sufficiently to provide a picture Scott could evaluate.
“I can’t tell for sure. Our decoys may have seduced his fish like his seduced ours.”
Overloaded with data, the computer running the K-480’s sonar system paused, then recycled and began reprocessing information. On the monitors, squiggles and blips that had represented torpedoes and targets turned into rows of straight lines and dots.
“Where the hell is she?” Scott queried the sonarman.
He shook his head. “I don’t hear anything, sir. Only a single decoy, one of ours, I think, very faint.”
“All engines stop,” Scott ordered. “Rig for ultraquiet. Secure main circulating pumps. Right full rudder.”
“Why are we laying to?” Alex said in a small voice as the boat wound down and began to coast. She watched the compass repeater unwind. “And why are we turning around?”
Scott preoccupied, snapped at her over his shoulder. “Litvanov leaves nothing to chance. I’m betting that he’s as confused as we are and will want to know whether or not he got us.”
“But won’t he assume, as you did, that both torpedoes were seduced by decoys?”
“There’s always that shade of doubt.”
The computer system came back on line with a confusing array of targets, any one of which could be the K-363.
“And what if Litvanov does come back?”
Scott tore his gaze from the monitors and gave Alex a vexed look. But she had put steepled fingers to her lips and closed her eyes. Scott wondered if she was praying. He decided he’d take whatever help he could get.
Litvanov looked at the sonar monitor and saw no sign of another submarine nearby or any traces of one crashing to the seabed in pieces after being torpedoed. The water falls simply cascaded down the sonar monitors undisturbed. It could be a trick by the Amerikanski, some tactic he wasn’t aware of. Litvanov blew through his teeth. An American skipper in a Russian sub. Unbelievable. What he knew about U.S.
submarine doctrine dictated that the American skipper would have tried to outrun the torpedo, not go silent and rely on a decoy. But this skipper was not your typical American skipper, which made him very dangerous. Not only that, but the two torpedoes that had detonated less than three kilometers away from the K-363’s current position would draw Russian planes and patrol craft. Litvanov felt the box around him getting smaller. Still, he had to know.
“Both engines ahead slow,” he commanded. “Helmsman, put us on a reciprocal course.”
“Aye, Kapitan.”
“Fire Control, shift to constant data upload and stand by.”
Litvanov’s eyes roamed the control panels: They still had four tubes loaded and green-lighted. Torpedo gyros and turbines spun to prelaunch.
“Ready to fire, sir.”
Then something flashed at the periphery of Litvanov’s vision. Zakayev on his feet, armed with the tool Veroshilov had brandished, dodged around equipment as he sprinted for the dogged watertight door in the after bulkhead of the CCP.
Litvanov hurled after him, but Zakayev was too fast. He wrenched open the door and dove through the opening. Litvanov, pistol in his fist, arrived in time to have the heavy door slam shut in his face and hear the dogs crash home.
The charges, Litvanov thought. The demolition charges.
“Ali! Ali! Ali!” screamed Litvanov after he, too, had yanked open the door and dived through the opening. He thundered down the narrow passageway and collided with the corner of a partition where the passageway jogged right and opened on the deserted after machinery space.
It was a part of the ship he rarely visited and smelled of oil, diesel, and hot metal, a place where off-duty sailors congregated to smoke dope and drink vodka when the captain wasn’t aboard. The passageway continued on past the machinery space and ended at the sealed door that gave access to the reactor control compartment. On the other side of the reactor control compartment was the shielded tunnel with its airlock to the reactor compartment itself, and the set charges.
Zakayev suddenly darted into the passageway from his hide near the watertight door and hurled the heavy tool at Litvanov. It missed and caromed off the partition with a loud clang but struck Litvanov’s right forearm raised to fend it off. Pain seared through his arm like a bolt of electricity, which brought him to his knees in agony. He staggered like a drunk and fell against the thin metal partition and felt it give under his weight. The pistol had skittered away and, fogged by pain, he couldn’t find it.
“Ali! Ali! Ali!” he cried.
“A dropped hatch lid, Kapitan?”
“I don’t think so. Play it back.”
The sonarman flipped switches, adjusted gain, and punched Replay.
The clear sound of steel ringing on steel came from the speaker over the sonar monitoring station.
“Sounds like the same noise we heard before, metal on metal, like a bell,” Scott said. “Not a hatch lid, something else, something lighter.”
“A dropped tool?” Abakov said.
“That’s what I think,” Scott said. He tapped the sonarman’s shoulder. “Input it to fire control.”
“Aye, Kapitan.”
Scott swung toward the fire control station, where data began to flow between sonar, fire control, and the torpedo room.
“You were right,” Alex said. “Litvanov came back.”
Scott, intent on the plot he’d scribbled on paper with the automated system down for ultraquiet, ignored her.
A moment later a barely audible sonar contact appeared as a trace on the sonar monitor.
“If it’s him, Kapitan,” said the sonarman, “he’s maneuvering on a very low power setting. Convection cooling, no pumps.”
“Yes, he’s barely making steerage.”
Scott saw the range to the target click down but asked anyway.
“Three kilometers, sir.”
“And dead ahead,” said Abakov to himself.
“At that rate it’ll take him all day to get here.” Scott stood back from the monitors and stretched a kink from his back. “Let’s try something.”
The men heard this and tensed, ready to carry out Scott’s commands.
“We’re going to fire a fish at him with a wide initial gyro angle and also with a sharp cutback to get the fish in behind him. There’s no way he can ignore a fish in the water, even if it’s not aimed directly at him initially. He’ll hear it coming and haul out—fast. And that’ll give the fish a target to home in on.”
Alex started to say something but Scott silenced her. “By the time he gets a bearing on our torpedo and figures out where we are, we’ll have moved off the firing point and put another fish in the water.
Maybe up his ass.”
Litvanov sagged against the knob and switch-studded control panel connected to the auxiliary diesel generator set. He gripped the tool Zakayev had thrown, too weak to lift it. Points of light danced before his eyes. He felt slightly nauseous and wondered if he had a concussion, or worse.
Litvanov peeked around the corner of the control panel at the sealed watertight door to the reactor control compartment. He knew exactly where Zakayev was hiding, in a small storage locker used for stowing lubricants and clean cotton waste. Because he was small in stature, Zakayev could easily fit inside the locker. But he had trapped himself. And if he tried to open the water tight door, Litvanov had only to throw the tool a short distance to brain him or at least smash his backbone. Litvanov knew his arm was broken and couldn’t possibly go hand-to-hand with Zakayev.
Litvanov, sitting on deck, looked up and saw an SC1 mike clipped to the edge of the auxiliary control panel. He reached up and unclipped it and, with the cable stretched out full, toggled the Talk button and called the CCP, his voice echoing throughout the ship from speakers mount
ed in every compartment.
He knew Zakayev would hear every word he said.
“Kapitan, are you hurt? What is happening?”
He recognized the voice: the senior michman, Arkady.
“Who has the conn?”
“I do, Kapitan. And I’ve broken out small arms from the weapons locker. I’ll bring them.”
“No. Stay in the CCP.” He took a breath. “Chief Engineer, if you are listening, this is the Kapitan. Do not trigger the charges unless I order you to. General Zakayev is no longer in charge of the mission and you will not follow any orders he issues. Arm yourself in case General Zakayev tries to enter the compartment and blow the charges himself.” He toggled off. He knew that if Zakayev somehow escaped into the reactor control compartment, there was no way the chief engineer would survive a battle with the little general.
After a beat, Litvanov retoggled the mike.
“Arkady.”
“Yes, Kapitan?”
“Where is the Amerikanski?”
“We’re trying to locate him.”
“And the Russian patrol boats?”
“Closing in from the north at high speed.”
“They know we’re here. Arkady?”
“Kapitan?”
“On contact with the Amerikanski, open fire.”
“Aye, Kapitan.”
Litvanov almost blacked out from the pain when he lifted his arm by the shirtsleeve and lowered it into his lap. He forced his head to clear and tried to think. He and Zakayev weren’t enemies, they were friends. No, more than friends: soldiers fighting a brutal war. The Americans and the Russians were their enemies. Instead, here they were with time running out and the mission a shambles, fighting each other.
He blamed Zakayev, the little general who thought it would be so simple. The little general who understood nothing about maneuver at sea and about tactics, only how to ambush and kill Russian Spetsnaz. So simple, he had lectured, to drive into St. Petersburg and martyr yourself. If it had been left up to Zakayev, they’d have been sunk by now and the Russians, to celebrate, would be grinding Chechnya into dust.
“General, perhaps now you see my point!” Litvanov shouted.
Silence.
“The American is determined to kill us.”
Again, silence.
“Now that he knows, he won’t rest until he’s finished us off. You see that, don’t you?”
A voice returned from the darkness. “I see only what I saw before, that you are obsessed with the American. It’s your private war we’re fighting, not the war we agreed to fight. For that, I should have killed you when I had the chance.”
Litvanov mopped his face with a blood and sweat blackened shirtsleeve. He heard his dead wife and children calling him. But there was nothing he could do for them. He heard their screams echoing in his fatigued brain. But it wasn’t their screams at all, it was a voice coming from the SC1 shouting,
“Torpedo inbound!”
“He hears it,” Scott said. “He’s turning away, fast.”
Now they had a bearing and range on the K-363. The fire control computer gobbled up the data and sent it to each of the torpedoes waiting in their tubes.
A new blip, then a thick red line emanating from the K-363, appeared on the sonar screen.
“He’s fired a torpedo down the bearing of our incoming fish,” Scott said, aware of Alex and Abakov watching over his shoulder.
The sonarman pointed to a curving green line. “Just as you said, Kapitan, it’s cutting back abaft the K-363’s starboard quarter.”
“Look: He’s fired another one down the same bearing,” Abakov said.
“Stand by to fire decoys,” Scott commanded. He saw that his plan might work, that turning off their firing point would likely take them out of the K-363’s torpedoes’ sonar range. Even so, he wanted the decoys ready if needed.
Four blips looking like red-hot sparks flying up a chimney flue shot from the K-363, their red-lined sonar traces splayed like fingers into the wakes of the K-363’s outbound torpedoes. But as they watched, the torpedoes began to veer off course and curve back toward the decoys. A moment later they started wigwagging as if sniffing for a target.
“Jesus Christ,” Scott said. “They fired their decoys too soon. Their own torpedoes picked them up and are on a circular run. If they don’t intercept the decoys, they’ll lock on the K-363 instead.”
Something nagged at Scott, something he remembered from an intelligence briefing about Russian
torpedoes and their propensity for running afoul of their own decoys. Something about a faulty range tracking pinger and the lack of anti–self-homing interlocks…
They watched, amazed, as the two thick red lines curved around and started inching back toward the four thin red lines fanning out from the K-363. One of the torpedoes appeared to overrun one of the thin lines and, a split second later, exploded, the force of the underwater detonation hammering the K-480.
“Look! His other torpedo. What’s it doing?” Alex said, shaken up and showing it.
“It got through a gap in the decoy coverage and it’s looking for a target,” Scott said. “It’s a race now, between their fish and ours, to the K-363.”
The red line, like the green line emanating from the K-480, was only inches from the K-363’s marker on the sonar screen. The red line was gaining.
“Can’t they do anything?” Alex said, with what almost sounded to Scott like a touch of sadness in her voice.
“Too late,” Scott said.
Litvanov heard sonar waves bouncing off the hull. Then a shrieking turbine and the high, rising Doppler pitch of contrarotating torpedo screws. He knew instinctively that it was their own torpedo coming in on a circular run.
He ignored Zakayev, forced himself to his feet, and burst from the machinery space where he’d lain, into the CCP. He blocked the pain from his broken arm shooting into his brain and heard himself screaming orders: “Full dive on the planes! Hard right rudder!” But the image of converging lines painted on the sonar monitor mocked Litvanov’s frantic attempt to avert disaster. A cry, a mixture of despair and anger, rose from his throat.
Zakayev clawed for a moment at the door to the reactor control compartment, barred from the other side by the chief engineer. Defeated, he slumped to the deck and thought about the girl named Irina. He saw her lovely face and saw her shedding tears for her dead family. He saw Drummond and the quizzical look on his face in the hotel room in Murmansk. A joke, Drummond had thought. The sailor too. They were all dead, the bull, Serov and his men. Now it was his turn to die.
Zakayev heard the torpedo warhead punch through the hull and detonate. For an instant he felt the crushing rise in air pressure and the searing heat. And then he felt nothing.
The blast ripped through the CCP, killing everyone. Plasma roared through the ship fore and aft crushing compartments, tearing apart machinery, igniting fuel, and detonating torpedo warheads. The nuclear reactor, ripped from its moorings in one piece and thrown from the wreckage, plunged to the bottom of the Baltic Sea, trailing debris.
It was over in an instant, the fury unleashed in a gigantic bouquet of filthy water that shot more than a hundred feet in the air and, as if eager to have it finished, collapsed, leaving behind only a dome of swirling bubbles to mark the K-363’s grave.
The cocktail reception at the Hermitage had been under way for over an hour. Both presidents laughed and drank champagne. The Russian foreign minister drank vodka, as did the defense minister. Admiral Stashinsky, in navy mess jacket, red sash, and medals, preferred American bourbon. He listened in as the first lady of the United States, her satin-black skin set off dramatically by the white silk of her
Lagerfeld mini dress, kept the bearded Russian president hanging on her every word.
The mood was upbeat because the reports that had arrived earlier from Russian naval units in the Baltic Sea had also been upbeat. Search teams on the scene had found wreckage from the K-363 and there was no indication that
radioactive materials had escaped from the submarine’s reactor.
Cigar smoke hanging across the room in thick tattered layers parted like the sea when Paul Friedman strode up to the president of the United States and, after waiting for him to finish telling a dirty joke, asked for a moment of his time.
“Sure, Paul,” said the president, wiping an eye and looking around. “How about in there.”
They stepped into a small anteroom off the main gallery where the party buzzed. Friedman handed the president a message from Karl Radford. At first the president just looked at it, fearing the worst, that Scott’s report of the destruction of the K-363 before the terrorists could melt down the reactor had been wrong. On his orders the Russians hadn’t been told about how close they’d come to disaster, only that Zakayev and the others were dead.
“It’s okay, sir,” Friedman said. “I think you’ll like this.” The president read the message and the look of concern on his face changed to one of sheer delight. “Do the Russians know?”
“No, sir. We just found out ourselves.”
“Shall we tell them?”
“Why not?” Friedman lifted then dropped his shoulders. “The local naval commander had a fit when he found out, but what could he do? He had to provide an escort. Stashinsky may shit his pants when he hears, but it’s too late now. Besides, we’re friends again with the Russians.”
The president returned to the reception and, after asking for quiet, said that he had an announcement to make. The rock band stopped playing and everyone gave their attention to the tall black American chief executive standing in the center of the room.
“As you all know,” he said, “the historic cruiser Aurora is moored at the Nakhimov Naval Academy. A shot fired from one of her guns signaled the storming of the Winter Palace and the start of the Revolution of October 1917. She symbolizes, among other things, the importance the citizens of St.