by Jeff Edwards
The Research Vessel Otis Barton rode easily on the waves, the white paint of her hull and superstructure gleaming in the midday sun. Originally constructed as a Victorious Class acoustic surveillance ship for the United States Navy, the squat little vessel had been retired from military service and reconfigured for marine research by NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
On the ship’s fantail, a large hydraulic winch turned steadily, reeling in a long cable of braided steel at the painfully slow rate of fifty feet per minute. The winch had been designed to launch and retrieve a towed acoustic sensor array known as SURTASS. But the object hanging from the end of the submerged cable was not an underwater listening device. It was the deep water submersible Nereus, and within its pressure hull were three human beings.
No one knew the nature of the accident that had trapped the submersible on the slope of the Aleutian trench, under three thousand feet of water. There had been no communication with the Nereus since the little submarine had declared a mission abort more than twenty-four hours earlier. No one knew whether the crew of the Nereus were alive, or dead. This might be a rescue operation, or it might be nothing more than the recovery of three bodies.
The retrieval crew was composed of five workers: a winch operator, two riggers to attach tag-lines to the miniature submarine and guide it onto the deck of the ship, and a pair of divers in insulated wetsuits — standing by to go into the water if anything went wrong. In warm weather, there would sometimes be a few spectators, out on deck to enjoy the sunshine and watch the mini-sub come out of the water. When the weather was cold or the seas were rough, the spectators tended to stay inside the ship, where they could keep warm and dry.
This close to Alaska, the weather was much too cold for casual onlookers. If this had been a routine operation, no one but the retrieval crew would have turned out to watch. But this was not a routine retrieval operation, and there were nearly twenty people on the fantail. Two of them were medical personnel, ready to render emergency treatment if required. The rest of the crowd was there to watch, and to add their silent moral support.
Every man and woman not actively engaged in the safety and navigation of the ship was present. No one had called for them. There had been no announcement over the ship’s public address system. They had been drawn to the fantail by instinct, and by unspoken common consent.
At fifty feet per minute, the slowly-turning winch had taken almost exactly an hour to haul in three-thousand feet of cable. The onlookers had stood the entire time, braving the cutting cold of the Aleutian wind as foot-after-foot of dripping steel cable was reeled in.
They were coming to the end now. The damaged submersible was nearing the surface. In a minute or so, the Nereus would break through the wave tops — hauled unceremoniously back from the dark ocean depths.
The winch operator watched the cable meter on his control console scroll slowly, like the odometer of a car. “One hundred feet!” His words seemed to hang in the cold bright air. No one else made a sound.
“Fifty feet.” His voice was softer this time, as if he were a little unnerved by the oddly persistent ring of his own words.
“Twenty feet.” It was the last depth report he gave.
The water surrounding the cable was beginning to bubble and churn. The crowd held its collective breath as the water heaved and frothed. Almost without warning, the Nereus broke the surface.
The winch continued to turn, lifting the little submarine free of the water. The hull of the submersible was streaked with the sticky dark silt of the sea bottom. The orange and blue paint scheme of her hull looked almost toy-like, as if this were the plaything of some spoiled child. It suddenly seemed ludicrous to entrust human lives to such a frail and silly machine.
The riggers moved forward, attaching their tag-lines, and swinging the submersible into her cradle. The divers were moving almost before the sub was firmly seated, scrambling up the curved silt-covered sides of the hull to the hatch at the top. They spun the handle furiously, and the pressure seal relaxed with an audible hiss.
The hatch swung up and open, and one of the black-suited divers lowered himself through the opening immediately. His head and shoulders reappeared through the hatch a few seconds later. He raised his hands into the air, and pointed both of his thumbs toward the sky. “They’re alive!”
He said something else, but his words were lost in a roar of shouts and laughter.
They were alive!
CHAPTER 11
21ST SPACE OPERATIONS CENTER
ONIZUKA AIR FORCE STATION
SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA
TUESDAY; 26 FEBRUARY
1238 hours (12:38 PM)
TIME ZONE -8 ‘UNIFORM’
Technical Sergeant George Kaulana looked at the two oblong smears of video on the display screen of his SAWS console and raised his eyebrows. “Where are you guys going?” The SAWS console—short for Satellite Analyst Workstation—was receiving an imagery download from Forager 715, a U.S. Air Force Oracle III series surveillance satellite currently passing over southeastern Russia. Forager’s primary surveillance mission was the nuclear reactor facility in Brushehr, Iran, so the perigee of the satellite’s elliptical orbit was designed to bring it to an altitude of only about 280 kilometers during passes over the Middle East. The digital cameras built into the satellite’s 2.4 meter mirror telescope were designed to take their best pictures from that altitude.
At the moment, Forager was on the outbound leg of its transit, heading toward apogee, the farthest reach of its orbit, 1,005 kilometers above the earth. The altitude of the satellite as it passed over southeastern Russia was about 500 kilometers and increasing steadily. Its cameras were still functional at that altitude, but they were operating well outside of their optimum focal length. The images scrolling across the screen of Technical Sergeant Kaulana’s console were of significantly lower resolution than images shot from Forager’s preferred altitude, but the satellite analyst had no trouble identifying the two blurred oblongs as ships.
Kaulana’s job for this particular satellite pass was to count the number of submarines tied to the pier at the Russian naval base at Petropavlosk, Kamchatka. The ballistic missile submarines based in Petropavlosk represented a sizeable fraction of Russia’s nuclear strike capability. The movement of those subs was an ongoing concern. The United States and Russia might not be enemies anymore, but it wasn’t smart to lose track of another country’s nuclear arsenal if you could avoid it.
The two blurry shapes on Kaulana’s screen were obviously not submarines and the Russian Navy didn’t maintain surface warships in Kamchatka, so the two unidentified ships were probably nothing to worry about. If they’d been following the shipping lanes toward the West Coast of the U.S., he wouldn’t have given them a second look. But both of the unidentified ships were well north of the shipping lanes, and based on the orientation of their hulls, it looked like they were heading toward Petropavlosk. There wasn’t necessarily anything unusual about that. Avacha Bay, the harbor at Petropavlosk, got quite a bit of merchant shipping. But the destination of the ships was cause enough to give them a closer inspection, just to verify that they weren’t military vessels. If Kaulana let a couple of warships slip unnoticed into Petro on his watch, the Lieutenant would skin him alive. Better to check them out.
He used his trackball to pull a wireframe cursor around one of the shapes and keyed the SAWS console for image enlargement and digital enhancement. The video display flickered briefly as it reacted to the increased demand for processing power. A few seconds later, the enhanced image appeared on Kaulana’s screen.
He looked at the blocky white superstructure that ran most of the length of the ship. It wasn’t a tanker or a container ship, but it was definitely some kind of merchant vessel.
He shifted his cursor to the other shape on his screen and repeated the enlarge and enhance process. A few seconds later he was looking at another merchant vessel with the same sort of blocky white supers
tructure, an apparent duplicate of the first ship.
He increased the image contrast to make the details of the ship’s structure stand out more clearly, and then spent nearly a minute using his cursor to carefully tag points along the outline of the hull and the corners of all visible topside features. When he thought he had given his console’s computer enough clues about the shape of the vessel, he pressed a key to activate a silhouette recognition module in the system’s software.
He got a match in seconds. His unknown ships were 20,000-ton Ro-Ro vessels, built by HuangHai Shipyard in China.
Kaulana drummed his fingers on the gray steel shelf that housed the SAWS console’s keyboard. He could identify nearly every class of warship in the world by sight, but he wasn’t very well versed when it came to merchant ships. What in the heck was a Ro-Ro?
He punched a few keys to query the computer, and was rewarded with a brief explanation. Ro-Ro was the common abbreviation for Roll-on/Roll-off. Ro-Ro ships were vehicle carriers, designed to transport cars or other vehicles from one seaport to another. The Roll-on/Roll-off designation referred to built-in hydraulic ramps that could be lowered to allow a vessel’s cargo of vehicles to drive onto the ship at loading, and drive off when the ship reached its destination. According to the computer summary, the two Ro-Ros on Kaulana’s screen were capable of carrying about 2,000 cars each.
He whistled. That was a lot of cars. He shrugged and released the images from his console’s processing queue. As long as the ships weren’t military, it didn’t really matter where they were going. The destinations of a couple of Chinese car carriers could hardly be considered a matter of national security.
* * *
Kaulana would repeat that line of reasoning at his court martial a little over a year later. The officers of the court would ultimately give him the benefit of the doubt and find that—based upon the information available to him at the time— Technical Sergeant George Kaulana had not been derelict in the execution of his duties when he’d declined to investigate the Ro-Ro vessels further. But the military court would also remind Kaulana that all of the death and destruction that came after might have been averted if he’d paid more attention to that harmless looking pair of Chinese merchant ships.
CHAPTER 12
KUZBASS (K-419)
NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE KURIL ISLAND CHAIN)
WEDNESDAY; 27 FEBRUARY
1402 hours (2:02 PM)
TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’
Kapitan Igor Albinovich Kharitonov of the Russian Navy stood to the left of #1 periscope and glanced at the spot above the ballast control panel where the master dive clock should have been. He felt a familiar stab of annoyance as his eyes found the gaping rectangular hole where the oversized digital clock had been pried from its mounting.
They had stolen the master dive clock. His fists tightened unconsciously. The Kuzbass was a front-line nuclear attack submarine, and some svoloch had stolen the master dive clock. The very thought made Kharitonov want to punch someone repeatedly in the head. He was kapitan of the boat, and such behavior was not permitted in senior naval officers. But regulations wouldn’t keep him from beating the thieving bastard to death if they ever caught him.
The theft had occurred at Pavlovskoye submarine base, the submarine’s home port near Vladivostok. The Kuzbass had been moored to a guarded pier in the naval station’s security area, and still someone had managed to get into the control room and make off with the damned dive clock. How was such a thing even possible?
The base militia was investigating the theft, which meant precisely nothing. It had probably been one of their guards who had let the thief on board to begin with, no doubt in exchange for a couple of hundred rubles, or a few American dollars. Unless, of course, the thief was a member of Kharitonov’s own crew. He couldn’t rule that out. A man could barely feed himself on what the junior Sailors got paid. It was impossible to provide for a family on wages that low, and some of the junior men did have families.
Kharitonov sighed and shifted his gaze to the clunky analog clock that had been borrowed from the Officer’s Mess and strapped to a pipe as a temporary replacement for the missing dive clock.
Temporary, of course, was a relative term. The Supply Officer had requisitioned a replacement part. But there were no master dive clocks to be had in the navy warehouses. The inventory records showed eleven clocks available for requisition, but none could actually be located. Officially, the missing clocks had been misplaced, which likely meant that they were sitting alongside the clock from Kuzbass in the back room of some dealer in stolen property.
The temporary clock said fourteen-oh-three. It was nearly time.
Kharitonov checked his wristwatch a half-second later: a habit born out of a career’s worth of training and personal experience. A nuclear submarine Sailor could afford to take nothing for granted. Every cross-check was an opportunity to catch a mistake or malfunction before it killed you.
The watch was a relic of the Cold War: a stainless steel Vostok Komandirskie, with brushed steel hands, and a featureless black dial with large white machine-stamped numerals. The only ornamentation on the watch was the red star of the Soviet Union, embossed above the 6 o’clock position near the bottom of the dial.
Kharitonov noted with satisfaction that his watch matched the time on the temporary master clock to the second. Not that he’d expected otherwise, but expectations and certainties were not quite the same things.
He gave the stem three twists to keep the mainspring taut. The steel gears clicked solidly, oddly loud sounds that spoke of both mechanical precision and overkill craftsmanship. According to popular rumor, the old Komandirskie models were supposed to be bulletproof: an assertion which Kharitonov had never felt the slightest desire to test. But the watch’s rugged construction did seem to lend credence to the idea.
He lowered his wrist and scanned the control room, his eyes carefully avoiding the empty spot that marked the theft—instead taking in the oversized gauges, clumsy electrical switches, and heavy-duty pipes and valves that formed the submarine’s control systems. Like the heavy old watch, his submarine, the Kuzbass, was a masterpiece of Soviet brute force engineering. And, like his watch, the Kuzbass had out-lasted the old Soviet Union, and now lived on in the service of Rossiyskaya Federatsiya, the Russian Federation.
The Americans called this class of submarines the Akulas, akula being the Russian word for shark. The official Russian Navy designation was Schuka-B, after a highly aggressive breed of freshwater pike. Kharitonov preferred the American term. The image of a shark was more dangerous and glamorous than that of any fish, but—far more significantly—the term conveyed a compliment of the highest order. The Americans were the most lethal nuclear submarine Sailors on the planet, and the Schuka/Akula class were the first Russian-built attack subs that scared the hell out of them.
Although they bore many of the unwieldy earmarks of Soviet Cold War engineering, the Akula subs were extremely fast, and exceptionally quiet. Not as silent as the new American Virginia or Seawolf class boats, but quieter than the vaunted Los Angeles class nuclear attack subs that were the backbone of the US Navy’s submarine fleet. In any case, the Akulas were nearly undetectable to most types of sonar.
Armed with a combination of 65 centimeter and 53 centimeter torpedoes, RPK-255 Granat strategic cruise missiles, and an impressive array of mines and antisubmarine missiles, Akula class submarines were far more deadly than any shark that had ever prowled the ocean depths.
Kapitan Kharitonov was proud of his boat. Despite the heavy hands of her designers and the light fingers of the unidentified asshole who had stolen the dive clock, Kuzbass was 110 meters of lethal black steel.
Kharitonov himself looked like he might have been designed by the same brute force engineers who had laid the plans for his submarine. Exactly two meters tall, he was within centimeters of the maximum allowable height for Russian submarine Sailors. His shoulders were broad enough to force him to go thro
ugh hatches at an angle, and his arms were so thick that even the heavy steel Komandirskie looked like a child’s watch against the wide bones of his wrist.
His dark hair and eyebrows were a near perfect match for the black serge of his winter uniform. Thanks to some skillful needlework on the part of his wife, the uniform did a bit to disguise his oversized frame, as did the speed and agility of his movements. In his youth, Kharitonov had been a fencer. Although he hadn’t touched a saber or a foil in nearly a decade, he’d never lost the quickness and balance he had learned on the fencing floor at Pogosov.
What had happened to the Russia of his youth? A few short years before, the formidable Soviet military had been undefeatable. The vision of worldwide communism had been a foregone conclusion. Now the great Russian military couldn’t even keep the riff-raff from stealing its submarines a piece at a time. How had the mighty Soviet empire fallen so far and so quickly?
Kharitonov checked the temporary dive clock again. Fourteen-oh-five. It was time. He tapped the Watch Officer on the shoulder. “Take the boat to periscope depth.”
The Kuzbass had been ordered to rendezvous with a Tupolev TU-142 anti-submarine warfare aircraft based out of Yelizovo air station on Kamchatka. Upon establishing contact, the submarine and aircraft were to conduct a detect and evade exercise. For three hours, the big lumbering bomber-turned-submarine-hunter would pepper the ocean with sonobuoys and crisscross the waves with its magnetic detection equipment in an attempt to locate and track Kuzbass. All the while, the submarine would be doing its best to avoid detection by the sensors of the searching aircraft.
The Watch Officer glanced back at Kharitonov and nodded. “Sir, take the boat to periscope depth, aye!” He turned toward the Diving Officer. “Make your depth forty meters.”
The Diving Officer acknowledged the order and repeated it back. Not more than two seconds later, he issued his own order to the Stern Planesman. “Five degree up bubble. Make your new depth four-zero meters.”