Commander-in-Chief

21

There was no fanfare to the scene this day at Zapadnaya Litsa Naval Base, only a persistent sleet under overcast skies. Valeri Volodin was not present for the passage of this submarine out of Sayda Inlet and into the deeper waters of Kola Bay, although the Severodvinsk-class sub was, like the Borei that left a week earlier, departing on its maiden mission in the service of the Russian Federation.

The Kazan was also similar to the Knyaz Oleg in that it was the best, most modern vessel of its class, and the Americans and other Western powers thought this Kazan, like the big Borei on its way across the Atlantic, was still undergoing sea trials. They had no idea it was operational.

At 111 meters long and 12 meters wide, the Kazan wasn’t as impressive as the Borei ballistic missile sub in sheer size, but it had a different role, and this role required it to be smaller and sleeker. The Kazan was a nuclear attack submarine, SSGN in the parlance of the U.S. Navy. To call it the most advanced submarine in the world was no stretch. Like the Borei to its U.S. counterpart Ohio, the Severodvinsk class was more sophisticated and cutting-edge than the comparable U.S. version, the Seawolf.

Powered by a pressurized water reactor, its steam turbine could generate thirty-five knots below the waves and twenty on the surface. It also had a silent speed of twenty knots, and though it wasn’t quite as quiet as the Seawolf, it was far quieter than any nuclear attack sub any Western power had ever come up against.

And far more powerful.

The most potent weapon on the Kazan was the P-800 Oniks, a long-range antiship missile that could do Mach 3—a mile every two seconds — and deliver a conventional or nuclear payload out to a range of 327 miles, using an awesome assortment of computerized offensive and defensive measures to do so. There were thirty-two Oniks missiles on board at present, along with two dozen Type 53–65 torpedoes.

With a hull made from low-magnetic steel, the 13,800-ton warship itself was incredibly difficult to detect, but with a bow array, flank arrays, and towed arrays, its own spherical sonar could “see” the water in all directions. This made the vessel a lethal hunter as well as a particularly difficult quarry.

It was a big muscular fighter, a great white shark in the water, and the water it was heading to was rich with prey.

Today marked the beginning of what was expected to be a long patrol for the Kazan. Most of its eighty-eight crew members knew little about their mission other than the fact it could last up to three months.

But the captain had his orders. The Kazan would sail submerged into the Barents Sea, and from there through the Norwegian Sea and into the North Sea. After that things would get interesting. The Øresund Strait separating Denmark from Sweden is only two and a half miles wide at its narrowest. The Russian nuclear attack sub would need to negotiate these heavily trafficked and more heavily monitored waters without being detected, using intelligence and supreme stealth to do so.

After the stress of the Øresund Strait, the Baltic Sea would seem as vast as the Atlantic to the sailors of the Kazan, but the captain and a select few of the boat’s thirty-two officers knew what they would be doing when they got there. They also knew that, unlike the Knyaz Oleg on its way into the two-hundred-mile exclusion zone around America, the Kazan’s mission was not merely about the threat of action.

No, the captain of the sub fully expected to engage his enemy in battle.

Russia’s Baltic Fleet, based in Kaliningrad, currently had only two operational attack submarines, older but capable Varshavyankas, called “Kilo class” by NATO forces. But with the arrival of the Kazan to the Baltic, the Varshavyankas would have a capable ally.

As soon as the Kazan made it to its patrolling zone north of Poland, the Varshavyankas would begin seeking targets and destroying them with torpedoes, following a checklist that came from the Kremlin itself. The Kazan would join them with cruise missiles and torpedoes, and together they would intimidate all ships traveling in the waters around Kaliningrad.

After standing for a while in the conning tower, enjoying the stinging impacts of sharp sleet on his face, the captain finally gave the order for his warship to submerge as soon as it was safe for it to do so. Western satellites might have identified the boat in the thirty-five minutes it was out of its hangar this morning, and they might even have been able to deduce it was putting out to sea. But the experts would only think it was off on sea trials, like the Knyaz Oleg before it.

They would learn the truth soon enough, and if the captain did his job correctly, they would know the Kazan was in play only when wolf packs of Oniks missiles began screaming toward their targets.