Afterburn

CHAPTER 5

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 aging 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.

“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.”

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 that 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.

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.

He stepped through the doorway and onto the flight deck; the gathering night was held at bay here by the glare of spotlights, both from Jefferson’s island and from the helicopters overhead. Most deck operations had been suspended half an hour earlier when the word had come down that a Russian sub was in trouble twenty miles to the northwest. SH-3 Sea Kings were shuttling back and forth between the Jefferson and the sub now, bringing in another handful of wet, oil-smeared survivors with each trip.

It was a painstakingly slow process. The Sea Kings of HS-19 were ASW aircraft, their cargo compartments crammed with so much electronics gear that there was precious little room for passengers above and beyond the usual four-man crew.

Still, there was a little space aft of the sensor suite, and each aircraft was fitted with a winch and sling to haul people out of the water. They were ferrying survivors back to Jefferson’s flight deck just as quickly as they could harvest them from the oil-slicked waters of the Black Sea.

With a thunderous roar, a Sea King gentled itself toward the deck just ahead, guided down by a deck handler waving a pair of glowing, yellow Chemlite wands. The SH-3 touched down, bouncing slightly against its hydraulics as a dozen men hurried across the deck, heads bent low to avoid the descent of the slowing rotors. The side door was already open, and a crewman was helping the first of several black-coated men stumble off the aircraft and onto Jefferson’s flight deck. Helmeted American sailors reached him at the same moment, helping him walk clear of the helicopter. Others moved in with wire-frame Stokes stretchers to take off the men unable to walk. It took only a few minutes to off-load the survivors. Then, as deck personnel scattered and the handler raised his lighted wands, rotating them rapidly, the Sea King lifted off once more, making room on the deck for the next incoming flight.

Thirty or forty Russian submarine crew members were gathered already on the deck in the lee of the island, some lying sprawled on oil-smeared blankets, others, unhurt but clearly in shock, sitting slumped with their backs against steel, heads cradled in their arms. Jefferson’s complement of hospital corpsmen moved among them, making those that appeared to be in shock lie down, handing out blankets, talking reassuringly to others, even though few spoke English. The more seriously injured men had already been moved below to Jefferson’s sick bay.

Coyote spotted a familiar figure squatting next to one of the survivors and walked over. “Stoney!” he called.

Tombstone looked up, then stood. “Hey, Coyote. How’s things in the Deputy CAG department?”

“They were quiet until a few minutes ago. I was just getting ready to go to chow when I heard the incoming helo call.”

Tombstone grinned. “Me, too. No rest for the wicked, I guess. When’s your watch?”

“Twenty-hundred hours. What the hell happened?”

“We’re still sorting it all out. As far as I can tell, though, we were playing tag with a Russki sub, pinging him hard to make him unwelcome.”

“A concert, huh?”

“That’s right. He popped a decoy, hoping to confuse things enough to make a getaway. Orlando was in his baffles and thought he was loosing a war shot.”

“Oh, God.”

“Orlando’s on the surface now, taking survivors aboard. The Russian sub’s gone. It only stayed on the surface for a few minutes before taking the big dive.”

“How many survivors?” Coyote asked.

Tombstone shook his head. “Hell, they’re still fishing them out of the drink. A Victor III has a complement of about eighty-five. We’ve got maybe a quarter of them on board so far. But the evening’s still young.”

Coyote nodded, then dropped to a crouch next to a Russian officer. His face, hands, and uniform tunic were coated slick-black with oil, and the stuff was thickly matted in his hair and beard, contrasting startlingly with the whites of his eyes. He scarcely looked human. “Hey, tovarisch,” Coyote said. “You understand what I’m saying?”

“Shtoh?” the man asked. His eyes looked tired, and very, very old. “Ya nee paneemayu.”

“You speak English?”

“Meenyq zavoot Kapitahn pervogo ranga Aleksei Aleksandrovich Vyatkin,” the man said with quiet, exhausted dignity. “Podvodnaya lodka Kislovodsk.”

“Did he say “Captain’?” Coyote asked.

“Captain first rank,” Tombstone replied. “See the shoulder boards? He must’ve been that boat’s skipper.” He squatted next to the man. “Ya plane mayu.”

“Damn, you speak Russian, Stoney? You never cease to amaze me!”

Tombstone shook his head. “Not more than a few words, I’m afraid. I just told him I don’t speak it very well. What did you want to ask him, Coyote?”

Coyote stood up, hands on hips. “Well, this’ll sound crazy.”

“Yeah?”

“I was just wondering if we were at war with them. With Russia, I mean.”

“I doubt that these guys know any more about it than we do, actually. My guess is that we’re both waiting to hear from the big boys up our respective chains of command.”

“Anybody been talking to them yet? Their fleet, I mean. About this…

incident.”

“I really don’t know,” Tombstone replied. “I think Tarrant’s been on the horn, but I haven’t heard the word yet.”

“Damn,” Coyote said. “So here we don’t even know if these guys are guests or POWS.”

“I imagine we’ll find out soon enough,” Tombstone said. He shouted, to make himself heard above the clatter of the next incoming helicopter. “Maybe sooner than we really want to know.”

And Coyote knew he was right.

“Come in, Nikolai Sergeivich.”

Vice-Admiral Dmitriev entered the ornate, luxurious office. The place was richly furnished, paneled in dark red wood, and with an elaborate and expensive parquet wood floor. General Sergei Andreevich Boychenko was not known for his abstemious or purse-pinching habits.

“You sent for me, Admiral?”

“I did. I did. Sit and be comfortable.” Boychenko, a lean, hawk-like man with silver hair and a vast array of medals on his uniform coat, was sitting behind the expanse of his desk. An elaborate silver samovar rose from a wheeled cart beside the desk. The commanding officer of the entire Crimean Military District gestured at a glass. “Tea?”

“Thank you, sir.” As he helped himself to the tea service, Dmitriev wondered why he’d been summoned here. He assumed it had to do with the sudden loss of contact with the Kislovodsk… and the subsequent loss of contact with the American carrier group. He tried to read Boychenko’s manner but failed utterly. The man betrayed no emotion ― if, indeed, he possessed any at all in the furst place. Boychenko had always struck Dmitriev as something of a cold fish.

With the dark Russian tea steaming in his glass, he took a seat opposite the desk. Boychenko’s corner office overlooked the port of Sevastopol, as his did, but had larger windows and a more expansive view. The harbor was spread out practically at his feet; normally, city and waterfront together made a splendid sight, colored lights agleam on still, black water, but a blackout was in force and there was little to see now. The entire district was on full alert, of course, with the threat from Ukraine hanging over the Crimea. Too, the Crimea was suffering from a general power shortage, and the blackout helped save electricity. Dmitriev thought it a singular mark of disgrace that so great a city as Sevastopol, or the fleet anchored there, could no longer afford to keep its lights on at night.

A third wall of the wood-paneled office was taken up by a large framed map of southern European Russia and Ukraine. Unit positions were plotted by pins bearing tiny colored flags, red or blue for Russian forces, gray for Ukrainian. The gray flags were heavily clustered along the northern Black Sea coast, from Odessa in the west to the shores of the Sea of Azov in the east. Dmitriev noted, with a cold, sinking sensation, the number of Ukrainian flags clustered north of the Crimean isthmus… and how few red flags opposed them.

“We have had word from the Kislovodsk,” Boychenko said without further preamble.

“What!” Dmitriev sat up straighter in his chair, nearly spilling his tea. “How? When?” As commander of the Black Sea Fleet, he should have been the one to hear, not Boychenko, his immediate superior.

“About an hour ago. Ah, do not worry, my friend. You were not cut out of the chain of communications. It was not the Kislovodsk, precisely, that contacted us.”

“Not the Kislovodsk. What do you mean, Comrade General?”

“My office received a radio communique, in the open, from an Admiral Tarrant, aboard the American cruiser Shiloh. The Kislovodsk was sunk ― by accident ― at about eighteen hundred hours this evening.”

“Sunk!” Dmitriev’s eyes narrowed. “An accident, you say?”

“That is what we were told, and I am inclined to believe the story.

Captain Vyatkin, apparently, was being urged to leave the area by antisubmarine warfare forces. He chose to fire a noisemaker torpedo in order to deceive the Americans and was torpedoed when they assumed he was firing on their carrier.”

“Were there… were there survivors?”

“Surprisingly, yes. Apparently the Americans initiated rescue operations as soon as they realized that a mistake had been made. At last report, sixty-eight officers and men had been pulled from the sea. Fifteen were seriously injured and are receiving treatment in the carrier’s onboard medical facility.”

“Has this been reported to Novgorod?” The headquarters of Krasilnikov’s neo-Soviet government was currently in Novgorod, about four hundred kilometers east of embattled Moscow.

Boychenko did not answer immediately. Though something, in his normally impassive expression put Dmitriev on his guard.

“General?”

“It has not been reported, Nikolai Sergeivich. Not yet. I need… I need to discuss something with you first.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Just where is it you stand in the current difficulties?”

Dmitriev thought carefully before answering. “Current difficulties” had become the catchword recently for all that was wrong with Russia… and most especially for the civil war of Red versus Blue.

“I would like to see them ended.”

“A diplomatic answer. And a safe one.” Boychenko sighed. “Perhaps it doesn’t really matter. What I am about to do could not seriously be considered to be treason, no matter which side we stand on. In a way, I will be acting to save the Crimea. For Russia.”

“What is it you intend to do, Comrade General?”

“Nikolai Sergeivich, the Crimea is doomed. A blind man could see that.

Novgorod has been sending us supplies and men, but not enough. Not enough by far.”

“The Ukrainians may not attack us here, sir. Not if they see we are dug in and willing to defend ourselves.”

“They will attack. Intelligence is convinced of that. And so am I.

They have no option, really, if they intend to intervene in our war.” Turning in his padded chair, he gestured at the wall map with its pins and colored flags. “They could invade Russia proper, of course, but Would soon find themselves heavily outnumbered, either by our forces, or by the Blues. With luck, they might make it as far as Volgograd. And what would it profit them? Hitler made the same mistake, you may recall.” Volgograd had once carried another name, before the name had fallen out of favor ― Stalingrad.

“They would be foolish to attack us in any case, with or without Hitler’s example.”

“Perhaps. They would also be foolish to extend themselves too far to the east, leaving the Crimean bastion here, in their rear.” Standing, Boychenko walked to the map. He pointed to the forces near Odessa and the mouth of the Dnieper River. “You’ve been reading the intelligence reports, I’m sure. Two army groups stand ready to attack the Crimea, Nikolai Sergeivich. They have assembled over one hundred landing craft, and a large number of naval vessels … mostly small combatants, true, but enough to cover an amphibious operation on the Crimean west coast, north of Sevastopol. Intelligence believes they will move within a week.”

“A spoiling raid, perhaps,” Dmitriev began. His fleet might be in tatters, but he could still put together a hard-hitting strike force, one that might splinter the Ukrainian invasion fleet before it was loaded and ready to move.

“No. There is another way. A better way.”

“Sir?”

Boychenko hesitated. Dmitriev had the feeling that the general was studying him closely, measuring him.

“I intend,” Boychenko said after a moment, “to surrender the Crimea to the United Nations. And you, Nikolai Sergeivich, must help me.”

The glass slipped from Dmitriev’s fingers and shattered on the general’s parquet wood floor.