Dark Transit

32

The big limousine glided to a halt outside the brightly colored portico of the Detskiy Mir school, the elite private pre-school for children of the Council of Ministers. The Council was headed by President Dmitri Vostov for the last twelve years. Vostov was unfathomable to the West’s academics and intelligence analysts, since he was both a hardliner and a reformer. But at this moment, he was just a father of a four-year-old adorable daughter, Anya, who bounced out of her side of the limo, grabbing her backpack with the colorful illustration of a ferocious tiger being stared down by a brave cartoon little girl.

Vostov got out on his side and crossed over to the door Anya had exited. She reached up for his hand as he walked her to the door, her small hand warm and soft in his. He stooped down to receive her enthusiastic hug and kiss on his cheek. He smiled at her, thinking how wonderful children were at this age. He had older children from his first marriage, one now an Air Force fighter pilot stationed in the western Arctic, the other a Navy destroyer enlistee in the Pacific fleet, and both had been absolute terrors as teenagers, and as adults they were still somewhat distant, only talking to their father when they thought they had to. But a four-year-old, Vostov thought, represented the absolute perfection of humanity. He loved her so much it could bring tears to his eyes. So innocent, and so full of trust and love for him — he, a man who had sent hundreds of souls to their deaths back when he’d been an officer of the KGB, before the sad day marking the striking of the flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

“Daddy,” Anya said in her musical little girl’s voice, “after school, Mommy wants to go shopping. She said your driver could pick me up and take me to your office. Can I keep you company while you work, Daddy?”

Vostov smiled at her. “I would love that, baby girl. I will wait for you with great anticipation.”

“Yay!” she said, smiling and hugging him again. “I will see you after school, Daddy.”

She turned and skipped into the door of the school, the headmaster holding the door open for her and standing at rigid attention, acknowledging that the president himself had visited. Vostov smiled and waved at the headmaster and ducked back into his limousine for the two-minute ride to the Kremlin. The ride was short, but enough to get his mind shifted into a different gear. The eight o’clock meeting this morning would be brutal — not for him, but for his subordinates.

When the car stopped at the entrance to the Kremlin’s Dom Pravitelstva Rossiiskoi Federatsii, the White House, where Vostov had built a cavernous office adjoining the prime minister’s suite, Vostov grabbed his large briefcase and exited the limo. He stopped to look at the sky and the weather. It was mid-June, and Moscow was breathtakingly beautiful. He smirked — give it six months, and it would be a frigid frozen hell on earth. When he entered the ornate brass door, then a second wood double door, then a third steel blast door, the military guards came to attention and saluted. He saluted them back, his posture and hand rigid. Beyond the guards, his aide waited for him. Tonya Pasternak was a tall, slender brunette with a large chest, narrow waist and mile-long legs. For the last year, Vostov had considered replacing her with a male aide de camp, but Pasternak was icily competent. Competent, but a temptation. Vostov’s second wife, Larisa, virulently objected to his having an aide as beautiful and sexy as Pasternak, but there was an enduring principle of politics involved here, Vostov thought. The more power a man had in a hierarchy, the more desirable his female lackies were. He smirked at Pasternak, glad that she couldn’t hear his thoughts.

“Good morning, sir,” Pasternak said, sweeping her long dark hair off her shoulder. “The eight o’clock meeting is convened and waiting for you. And I know you have important business to discuss with the ministers, but, sir, I recommend you interrupt the agenda and instead start the meeting by bringing in Executive Director Vinogradov of the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications, the Mininformsvyazi.”

Vostov stopped in the hallway, halfway to the elevator. “Why?” he asked simply.

Pasternak smiled. “Sir, have you ever owned a dog? In particular, a retriever?”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “My uncle had a golden retriever. When I was a boy, I’d play with him in the summers. How, exactly, is that relevant?”

“Sir, if you hold a tennis ball up, a retriever will look at you with a big smile on his face while he bounces up and down on his front paws. The moment you throw the ball, that retriever becomes a streaking bullet to get the ball. He’ll drop the ball at your feet, smile at you and keep bouncing on his front paws.”

Vostov smiled, remembering the dog he’d played with as a youth. “Go on,” he encouraged Pasternak.

Pasternak smiled sweetly. “Sir, the executive director of cyberwarfare of Mininformsvyazi s is waiting in your outer office. And he’s bouncing up and down on his front paws.”

Vostov laughed. “My, my, Tonya, you do have a way with words.”

She gave him an arch look. “I have a way with a lot of things, Mr. President, which you’d find out if you’d just ask.”

Still smiling, Vostov began walking to the elevator. “I shall bear that in mind, Tonya.” In the elevator, he felt aware of the young woman, sensing her faint perfume. He realized he was no longer anything to look at. In his mid-sixties and shorter than medium height, his hair long gone for two decades, Vostov wouldn’t gather a second glance on sidewalk on a sunny day in Moscow. It wasn’t he himself Pasternak was throwing herself at, he reminded himself, it was his power. His station. He indulged himself with a brief thought of what it must feel like to get female attention like this if there were no element of power involved.

At the conference table, a luxurious tigerwood brought in from Indonesia, the ministers were already seated, standing as Vostov entered. He waved them back to their seats. “Morning, gentlemen.” Pasternak brought in his Turkish coffee, for which he’d gained a taste on a long-forgotten mission in Turkey in the first decade of the century. He took a long pull of the scalding brew, the aroma of it making him feel more alert already. “Well, I’m of the understanding that we have a senior visitor from the Ministry of Information Technologies. Shall we hear him out?”

Pasternak ushered in the executive director, a rumpled short and portly older man in a brown suit, with long, disheveled white hair, wearing thick black-rimmed glasses, holding a laptop and a folder of papers. He bowed slightly to Vostov, then to the ministers. Pasternak introduced him, then withdrew to the outer office. Vostov smiled to welcome the man and set him at ease. He knew the director had a presentation for him, but Vostov wanted to cut to the bottom line, without making the director feel slighted.

“You have a presentation for us, Director Vinogradov?”

“Sir, yes, I do. Did you want me to project it or look at paper copies?”

Vostov smiled. “Sit down there, Vitalik.” He pointed to the empty chair directly opposite his on the long side of the table. “Let us pretend it is Christmas dinner, and you are telling the family about the juicy secret that is in your dry presentation.”

Vinogradov nodded and hurried to the seat. “Well, Mr. President, ministers, Mininformsvyazi has generated a worm to counter the Medved’ Grizli worm that was inserted, presumably, by the Americans, and which still has much of our forces grounded.”

“Go on,” Vostov encouraged the director.

“We call it chernaya vdova pauk, Mr. President. Black widow spider. It will do the same thing to the American military that their Medved’ Grizli did to our forces. Their aircraft avionics and engine control computers will brick. Their military air traffic control computers and radars will all refuse to switch on. Their radios will simply stop working. Their ships’ navigation, communications and propulsion plant controls will all fail in the powered-off mode. And if you direct, we can make their cell communications towers fail near the military bases, as a little extra instead of responding exactly in kind to their worm.”

“This is brilliant, Director Vinogradov,” Vostov said, smiling. “But don’t execute the cell tower part of the plan. I just want their air forces and ships to stop working and be unable to talk to each other.”

“It will be done as soon as you order it, Mr. President.” He gave Vostov an eager look. Pasternak was right, Vostov thought. The man was bouncing on his front paws.

“But only their surface ships. You have to engineer this worm to leave their submarines unaffected.”

“Yes, Mr. President. The submarine tenders and torpedo retrievers will be shut down hard, but their submarines themselves will be untouched.”

“Good. So, how will you get this black widow spider into the American systems?”

Vinogradov smiled. “The American Secretary of State, Seymour Klugendorf, keeps a secure server rack in the basement of his Annapolis house. He had it installed so he could work from home more, he claimed. The commute to the State Department in Washington makes the man carsick. In our explorations of the American networks, this server was found to be lacking certain defenses the rest of the State Department has routinely installed. Either he missed an upgrade or a cyber patch, or they installed an obsolete system. In any case, it is vulnerable. We’ve been extracting emails and diplomatic cables from it for three months.”

Vostov frowned. “This could be another Pueblo Pipeline,” he said. “Or an Aldrich Ames Corrupted Conduit operation.” American intelligence agencies over the last hundred years had realized that the Russians never believed anything printed in the mainstream media, considering it all propaganda. Russians only believed what they spied for, the harder won the information, the more trust it was given. But that had become a vulnerability in the First Cold War, when several so-called intelligence victories by the KGB just turned out to be methods of the Americans to plant fictional and false information into the Kremlin, information that was trusted without verification.

Like in the 1980s, when stolen communications revealed that the American “Star Wars” missile defense shield worked perfectly and that the USA was immune to any Russian nuclear attack, and that plans had been initiated for an American surprise nuclear first strike of the Soviet Union. The back-and-forth about the timing and content of the American nuclear attack had gone from the mundane to the terrifying. The messages about the exact tactics involved even mentioned then-President Gorbachev by name, targeting a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb for the exact location of his dacha. The intelligence harvest had prompted Gorbachev to come to the bargaining table and agreeing to haul down the Soviet flag and to effectively surrender to the Americans. So it was, when the Mininformsvyazi stated they’d won an intelligence victory, Vostov remained deeply skeptical.

“Director Vinogradov,” Vostov said, “let me remind you of how, twenty years after the ending of the Soviet Union, we found out that all the information magnificently harvested from Pueblo and Ames had been completely false. The so-called Strategic Defense Initiative—Star Wars—had never worked and it still doesn’t. All those messages about test results had been fabrications. And there had never been any plans for a nuclear first strike against Russia. It had been an elaborate hoax, planted in Soviet planners’ minds by evil American intelligence agencies. Our recovery took decades and is still ongoing.”

“We considered that, Mr. President. After Pueblo and Ames, we have a protocol for testing and retesting information harvests. We place false information into one of our own compromised networks and wait to see if the message traffic from the State Department mentions that data. A pipeline would never reveal a captured Russian system. But Klugendorf’s servers did. In addition, every item of information on that server was examined and verified. So far, all the data has proved accurate. Not one thing has been fictional.”

“So, when will you insert the worm?”

“On your order, Mr. President, and when the Secretary of State himself opens up a portal we’ve been using, when his laptop shakes hands with his server. We will slip in unnoticed at that point.”

“How long will it take to work?”

“It spreads through their networks slowly to avoid detection. In about six days, Mr. President, it will activate at what we call ‘time zero’ and their networks all shut down simultaneously.”

“What happens if one of their aircraft is in the air when this happens?”

“It falls out of the sky, sir. It crashes.”

“Regrettable, it would cause loss of life,” Vostov said. “Is there any way to let airborne craft land before the worm affects them?”

“I suppose, sir, but it would make the worm less reliable and possibly expose it to detection and defenses. Functionally, doing that could compromise the entire program. If you’ll recall, sir, we ourselves lost three Il-114 aircraft from the American worm coming back to life when we thought we’d killed it. And your orders explicitly stated to design this worm to respond in kind.”

Vostov waved off the director. “It was a passing thought, Vitalik. And does it have a kill switch? It will destroy itself if so ordered?”

“Yes, Mr. President, if you order the worm to self-destruct, we can shut it down. Inside twenty minutes, the American systems will be restored as if chernaya vdova pauk had never been there.”

“Excellent, Vitalik.”

“So, Mr. President, do we have your permission to insert the worm?”

Vostov looked at the gathered ministers. “Any of you have any questions for Director Vinogradov?” The all shook their heads, most of them seeming distracted by other matters. “Insert the worm, Director Vinogradov,” Vostov ordered formally. “Report back to this office when the worm reaches its time zero.”

Vinogradov stood so fast he almost toppled his chair, nodding and bowing to the ministers and Vostov and half running out of the room. When the door shut behind the director, Vostov faced his ministers and frowned. Now, the difficult part of the meeting was about to start.

Four thousand four hundred nautical miles from Vostov’s conference room, in a secure conference room adjoining the CIA director’s office, the transcript of the meeting was pored over by Director Margo Allende. When she got to the line about the Strategic Defense Initiative not working, she called in Angel Menendez, the deputy director of operations, whom she knew was similarly burning the midnight oil.

“Yes, Madam Director,” Menendez said at the door of the conference room.

“Come in, shut the door and take a look at this, Angel,” Allende said.

Menendez scanned the text on her pad computer. “I read it.”

“What’s this about our missile shield not working? I thought we’d gotten Star Wars up and running, finally. It’s just that now it’s top secret. What is Vostov talking about?”

“Oh, it works, all right. But think of nuclear war as a monsoon rain and the missile shield as an umbrella, Madam Director. An umbrella with a lot of holes in it, and a few outright rips. You’d still be well advised to use the umbrella if you absolutely, positively have to go out into the storm, but you’re still going to get wet.”

Allende nodded. “I’d just as soon stay nice and dry inside here,” she said. “I’m heading home. Do you want a ride?”

“Nah, you go ahead, Margo. I drove myself today.”

“Good night, Angel.”

“You too, Madam Director.”

Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev had gotten off watch two hours before and ever since having gone to the bathroom after watch, had been pacing his small sea cabin, absolutely furious. He had caught something, and it burned and it hurt to urinate. Goddamn it, he thought, could Natalia be responsible for this? And if she were, what did that mean? He knew he’d been absolutely faithful to her, but this, this reminded him of the venereal disease he’d caught when he’d been partying a bit too hard when his submarine K-154 Tigr had pulled into Havana fifteen years ago. Back then, getting a venereal disease while ashore was practically a badge of honor, but now? Now he was senior leadership, the captain of the submarine. And now he had to go to the ship’s medic and get an examination, a diagnosis and a treatment.

Despite all the claims of medical confidentiality, the idea that the captain had gotten a sexually transmitted disease from his partner would be far too juicy to keep a secret. And how would the crew treat him when they knew? It was humiliating. Alexeyev considered keeping this to himself and waiting to see a private doctor once they arrived back home, but that could be a month from now, and the pain was insistent.

Almost worse was that somehow it had spread to his right eye, which was bloodshot solid red, oozing pus and horribly itching. Was it the same disease or something different, and was this also a gift from Natalia? It had gotten so bad that Alexeyev wanted to tear his own eye out. Finally, after another agonizing minute, he picked up the phone to the central command post.

“Yes, Captain?” First Officer Ania Lebedev answered.

“Send the doctor to my sea cabin,” Alexeyev said. “Immediately.”

“Right away, Captain.”

It took only three minutes for the knock to come at his door. Alexeyev opened it and Chief Ship Petty Officer Arkady Chaykovsky appeared, a worried look on his grizzled face. Chaykovsky’s salt-and-pepper hair was done in a brush cut, a flat-top, over his leathery and sun-damaged face. He was short and slight, but built from his habit of off-watch time spent lifting weights. “Yes, Captain?”

After Chaykovsky examined Alexeyev, the medic had an unconfirmed diagnosis. “It’s most likely syphilis,” he said, opening his bag and withdrawing a syringe, wiping Alexeyev’s arm with a moist antiseptic-smelling gauze square and jabbing him with the needle. “There’s no harm in administering this, and a few days of these injections, and it should clear up. The eye, though, that worries me.”

“What is it, Doc?”

“Could be pink eye, sir. Conjunctivitis. It’s caused by a viral or bacterial infection. But taken together with your urinary symptoms, I suspect it’s caused by the herpes simplex virus.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Alexeyev said. “Herpes?”

“Possibly, sir. It could be caused by the varicella-zoster virus or various other viruses, or allergies or a blocked tear duct. But herpes simplex virus infection is more likely when co-presented with the urinary disease.”

“You’re all good news, today, Doc. Will that injection clear it up?”

“Maybe, sir. I’ll bring some drops for your eyes, for use no less than every hour, two drops, and more if the itching gets more intense. And until this clears up, I want to bandage your eye, to make sure you’re not touching it and possibly spreading this to your other eye.”

“Doc, that would mean re-bandaging my eye every hour. I’ll just wear an eye-patch. I used to wear one as watch officer instead of red goggles for night adaptation of my periscope eye. That’ll keep me from scratching it and I can get drops into it easier than all that bandaging and re-bandaging.”

“Fine, Captain, but if you reconsider, let me know. I don’t mind coming up to redo the bandages.”

Alexeyev nodded. “Thanks, Doc. And listen, I know I don’t need to say this, but this diagnosis—” Alexeyev’s voice trailed off.

“Don’t worry, Captain. This is absolutely confidential. And I won’t keep record of it, in case of a squadron audit, sir.”

“Thanks, Doc.” The medic left and Alexeyev rooted around in his desk drawers for his black eye patch. He hadn’t worn it since he’d been a senior lieutenant. Back then, it made him feel like a swashbuckling pirate, but when he’d gotten more senior, it seemed an immature affectation. But now he had little choice. He’d just found it when the knock came to his door. He opened it. Doc handed him several small bottles.

“Drops for the eyes, Captain. Two drops, once an hour, and two more if irritation and itching get worse. Please let me know if you need more.”

Alexeyev nodded and leaned his head back and put in two drops.

Dammit, he thought, they didn’t offer any immediate relief. He put on the eye patch with some absorbent gauze under it and picked up the phone to call the mess cook to bring him breakfast. When it arrived, the mess cook saw him in his eye patch and gave him a strange look. Alexeyev wondered if Chaykovsky had kept his promise to keep the diagnosis secret.

The radio crackled in the headset of Lieutenant Commander Mark Macallan.

“Dark Rider, taxi into position and hold, runway zero eight.”

“Taxi into position and hold,” Macallan replied, ending with his callsign. “Dark Rider.” Macallan reached for the throttles and gave the plane enough power to move onto the runway, turned to line it up with the centerline, then throttled back down and tapped the brakes.

Suddenly his copilot and golf buddy, Lieutenant Wayne Holder, pointed to the runway ahead. “What the hell? Commander, you seeing this?”

Ahead of them on the runway, three Navy utility trucks with flashing beacons on their roofs pulled onto the tarmac of the runway, one of them putting its rear toward the P-8A’s cockpit. That truck had a large light bar mounted on it, and the lights of that sign read, “DISREGARD TOWER. MAKE NO RADIO TRANSMISSIONS. FOLLOW ME.”

Macallan looked at Holder and was about to call the tower when the tower called him.

“Dark Rider, cleared for takeoff, runway zero eight. Contact departure control at one-twenty-one point zero seven.” When the radio transmission ended, the circuit clicked four times, a secret indicator that something was very wrong.

“Commander, there is no departure control, and there’s no frequency one two one point zero seven.”

Macallan pointed to the utility trucks, which were rolling slowly toward the taxiway off the main runway. The lights of the rear truck’s light bar flashed, reading, “FOLLOW ME.”

Macallan taxied the heavy twin engine jet off the runway and followed the utility trucks, the trucks leading him to his original parking spot. Then the light bar read something very strange: “YOUR POWER WILL GO OUT IN 3, 2, 1…”

Macallan was reaching for the engine shutdown switches when the cockpit suddenly went dark. There was a whining noise that started with a high pitch and slowly came lower until it was a bass growl, then went out.

“Commander, what the fuck is going on?” Holder asked, his voice rising in anxiety.

“Maybe we got hit with an EMP,” Macallan said. “But those trucks sure seemed to know the exact timing of it. Come on, let’s get out of here. Line up the breakers and switch positions to shut-down first.”

Holder complied, then followed Macallan out of the cockpit. The antisubmarine warfare officers, chiefs and enlisted were standing at their consoles. The most senior, the lieutenant, looked at Macallan.

“What’s wrong, sir?”

“Just follow us off the plane,” Macallan said, frustrated that he was in the dark.

At the bottom of the steps a Navy captain stood, wearing tropical whites. Macallan and Holder saluted him.

“Sir, what the hell is going on?”

“A cyberattack, Commander,” the captain said.

“If it’s a cyberattack, how did you guys know about it?”

The captain shook his head. “A tower operator was off watch in the lounge playing a video game. A message came in on it from another user laying out the cyberattack and the timing. The sender said it was serious and to alert the command. The other user mentioned me by name. The operator could have ignored it, but he brought it to my attention. Good thing, too. If we hadn’t waved you off, you’d be in the deep Atlantic right now.”

“Jesus, a video game?”

“Come with me and I’ll brief you and your crew.”

Macallan led his crew toward the door of the operations building, sharing an incredulous glance at Holder.

Lieutenant junior grade Everest Montgomery was standing his first watch as officer of the deck after recently becoming qualified. He was constantly reminding himself of the captain’s advice: you have the deck and the conn, not because of your experience, but because of the trust placed in you, and the trust that when you need help, you won’t be afraid to call the captain. Still, standing officer of the deck watch by himself, after almost a year of standing it “under instruction,” was terrifying. All this ship’s power, entrusted to him. He took a deep breath to calm himself, and then it happened.

Every instrument on the bridge went suddenly black. The constant whining hum always present in the room whined lower and lower in both pitch and intensity while the ventilation ducts with their constant blasting of air into the space died down. Within seconds, the room was pin-drop silent and stuffy.

“What the hell is going on?” Montgomery heard the captain say from behind him. The skipper had been in a videoconference with squadron at the time, and certainly would be frustrated at what seemed a total loss of power.

Montgomery looked out the bridge windows. The ship was slowing in the water, eventually coming to a complete stop in the sea, starting to roll in the gentle swells.

“Captain,” he said, “I’m damned if I know.”

The captain pulled a phone off the aft bulkhead and tried to call maneuvering, but the line must have been dead. He tossed the phone to the deck and disappeared aft. The messenger of the watch, Petty Officer Third Class Philip “Skip” Cresante, came in from the port door.

“Cresante, what do you know about all this?” Montgomery asked.

The messenger looked terrified. “I just came from the engineroom. Total loss of power. Other than battle lanterns, everything is completely black. No power, no displays, no phones.”

“Go to radio,” Montgomery ordered. “See if their equipment is okay.”

It only took the messenger two minutes to go to the radio room and return, and he looked even more frightened. “Nothing, Mr. Monty. It’s all shut down. Bricked.”

“Don’t worry, Cresante. We’ll figure something out. I imagine right now the captain and engineer already have a plan.”

But eight hours later, nothing had been figured out. The Zumwalt continued to roll gently in the waves, completely stricken, and completely helpless.

Deputy Director of Operations Angel Menendez looked at Director Margo Allende. “Worm is two days late.”

She nodded. “But it’s here now, and in force.”

“Did it affect anything other than the Navy’s air fleet or surface ships?”

“As advertised, the Russian worm is playing nice. Not just a proportionate response, a duplicate response. A mirror image. Just to show that what we can do, they can do.”

“I’m still surprised Vostov didn’t try to do us one better, maybe infect the White House or the Pentagon itself.”

“You know, I met him once,” Allende said.

“Yeah? What did you think?”

She shook her head. “Angel, it was strange. Dmitri Vostov is the nicest guy you could ever hope to meet. And I don’t mean in a diplomatic, snake oil salesman way. He was warm. He was human.”

“Wow, don’t let anyone else know you said that, Madam Director.”

She smiled at him. “That’s just one reason I appreciate you, Angel. You’ve always kept my secrets, Mr. Deputy Director.”

33

Captain Second Rank Ania Lebedev hurried the mess cooks out of the wardroom, making sure the noon meal dishes were cleared. Captain Alexeyev had been taking his meals in his sea cabin since they’d arrived at the Cape Town barrier search point, almost three weeks ago. That was the same time he’d taken to wearing a black eye patch over his right eye, that and his constant scowl making him look sinister. The supply officer, Yakovlev, had tried to inject some humor into the odd situation, saying to the captain that perhaps he needed a parrot on his shoulder to complete his pirate ensemble. Alexeyev had said nothing, just stared him down with his good eye as if he could burn a hole into the young officer.

Since that day, Alexeyev had only been visible to the crew at the daily one o’clock operational briefing for the officers and during his midnight watch senior supervisory shift in the central command post, preferring the peace of the graveyard quiet of the midwatch over the busier daytime watches. This morning, when Lebedev had relieved the captain at 6:00 am, Alexeyev had said something about “noise in his head,” as if she were supposed to understand what the hell he meant.

It was just another data point asserting that the captain was borderline autistic, she thought, living deep within whatever world existed in his mind, withdrawing from the crew completely for the better part of a month. Lebedev pondered the possible reasons. Perhaps loneliness from being away from that slutty blonde bombshell girlfriend of his, who scandalously insisted on keeping the name of the captain of the Novosibirsk and had emerged into Alexeyev’s life still sweating from the bed of the commanding officer of the Voronezh. Or perhaps something the girlfriend had written him had put him in a funk, likely that woman finding yet another submarine captain to play with. Lebedev watched the captain’s face closely when he read the intelligence summaries after every periscope depth excursion, trying to see if one of the personal emails included in their daily feed included anything that would be a cause of pain for the man, but Alexeyev seemed steady in his depressed mood.

Until today at 11:45 of this morning’s watch. When Kazan had proceeded deep from the periscope depth trip, there was something in the feed that had been marked most secret and personal for commanding officer. Usually, a message like that would be cause for celebration, Lebedev thought, because that was how orders arrived that had an exact location of their target, gleaned from various intelligence sources. Sometimes the intel came from another submarine, other times from an maritime patrol antisubmarine aircraft, an Il-114 flyover that detected the target submarine using sonobuoys or magnetic anomaly detection, and rarely from a destroyer streaming a variable depth towed array sonar that could search deep in the thermal layer. Other times the intel was scrubbed of sources, like that time Kazan had been tipped off to a submarine leaving its base in Faslane, Scotland by virtue of what could only be a pierside prostitute, one of the dozens who worked for the GRU military intelligence organization. When today’s message had been received, according to the radioman of the watch, Captain Alexeyev had cursed and thrown the pad computer onto his bed, furious.

Which meant that this afternoon’s daily briefing would be difficult for the crew. Lebedev chided herself for fretting so much over the moodiness of her captain, but the man could be brutal, screaming epithets at officers who made mistakes, in front of the crew, a mortal sin in the mind of Lebedev, who strictly believed in commendations in public and reprimands in private. She had mostly avoided Alexeyev’s screaming fits, but somehow they were still something to be feared. She looked around the room, making sure everyone was there.

“Where’s the sonar officer?” Lebedev harshly asked Navigator Svetka Maksimov, who sat in the chair to Lebedev’s right. Maksimov was yet another source of annoyance for Lebedev. Women as pretty as Maksimov would do better to go into the fashion industry, Lebedev thought, or marrying well. If she absolutely insisted on being in the military, she needed to tone down her looks — put her damned flowing black locks in a ponytail, wear less makeup, look professional. Instead, she looked like a stripper sent in as a joke, a made-up, coiffed sex-pot just temporarily stuffed into submarine coveralls. Lebedev tried to hide her dislike, but it proved a monumental task.

Maksimov lunged for the corner table phone and made a call, saying a few quiet words. “He’s on his way,” Maksimov said, nodding at the first officer.

The wardroom door opened and Sonar Officer Ilia Kovalev stepped quickly in, looking embarrassed.

“Sorry, Madam First,” he said to Lebedev, “the turnover in central took too long.”

“Why? What’s on the screens?”

“A haystack of merchant shipping, Madam First. No sign of our needle.”

“Two needles,” Lebedev reminded Kovalev. “The Panther and the escort sub, most likely a Virginia-class unit.” Lebedev grabbed the phone under the table near the captain’s station and dialed his stateroom using the buttons set into the handset.

“Captain,” Alexeyev said, sounding far away.

“Sir, the officers are gathered for the one o’clock,” Lebedev said.

“I’m on the way,” he said and hung up.

Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev entered the wardroom from the forward door, slid the door shut and took his seat at the end of the table, with Lebedev to his right and Engineer Alesya Matveev to his left. Lebedev glanced at him. He was still wearing that black eye patch. And was it Lebedev’s imagination, or was he developing streaks of gray in his once jet-black hair? He was freshly showered, wearing clean coveralls, but he hadn’t shaved in at least three days. The male officers had started their at-sea beards when Kazan first shoved off 29 days ago, Navy regulations allowing the relaxation of grooming standards when at sea for submariners, but still requiring beards be closely trimmed, not growing all over the place like a terrorist. Several times this run, Lebedev had scolded the electrical officer, Senior Lieutenant Anatoly Pavlovsky, for overgrowing his thick black beard, but the man was too proud of it, the beard even earning him his pirate nickname, Blackbeard. But all those relaxed grooming standards assumed the male crewmen would commit to growing and maintaining the beard, not skipping shaving for four or five days, looking constantly scruffy, like a homeless person. There was no doubt, the state of the commanding officer’s mental health was starting to become a real concern, Lebedev thought.

“We have everyone?” Alexeyev asked Lebedev.

“Yes, Captain. We’re ready.”

Alexeyev got right to the point. “I’m projecting my screen,” he said, flashing up the message he’d received from Northern Fleet headquarters. He allowed a moment for the officers to scan and reread the message.

“So,” Alexeyev said, his voice low-pitched and slow. “Here’s what we know. Both submarines Voronezh and Novosibirsk were destroyed by an American nuclear strike.” He looked at the gathered officers, who were all staring at the message, as shocked as he’d been when he first went through the intelligence digest and op-order update, all of them thinking the same thing — who did they know from the crews of the downed submarines? “The American boat escorting the Panther out of the Arabian Sea found out the positions of Voronezh and Novosibirsk from detecting them at periscope depth, then fired two cruise missile-mounted nuclear depth charges at a target location probability circle. And apparently, they got lucky and hit both submarines. How did the Americans find out our positions? The GRU reports that American agents have managed to install transmitters on all our periscopes that tattletale our locations to their satellites every time we are on the surface or at periscope depth. For that reason, assuming the American agents somehow got a transponder installed on this ship, we have made our last excursion to periscope depth, until the mission concludes.”

Navigator Maksimov spoke first. “Captain, the bottom contours here are poor for use for navigation. Without the navigation satellite, our position error will grow. The fix error circle could be fifty kilometers in diameter in two days. In a week, we’ll barely know what ocean we’re in.”

“I know,” Alexeyev said. “So be it. Better to be guessing at our navigation than give away our position to the Americans. For that reason, I’ve ordered us to withdraw from the Cape Town barrier search point and move the center of the search to a position farther northwest of where we initially set up. It’s less optimal for catching the Panther, but it is outside of the nuclear weapon blast circle damage radius from where we were at the last periscope depth.”

Engineer Alesya Matveev spoke up. “Captain, we have housekeeping to do at periscope depth. In four days, I’m going to need to blow down our steam generators or else the level controls will go so crazy that we’ll trip the reactor. And we have to be shallow to blow down the boilers, sir, or the pressure of the deep won’t allow flow.”

“And we need to eject trash,” Supply Officer Vladik Yakovlev said. “Otherwise we’ll be up to our eyeballs in trash, and the boat will start to stink.”

Alexeyev waved at the objections. “We can still come shallow to eject trash or blowdown the steam generators, we’ll just do it without putting up the periscope.”

“Captain, that’s dangerous,” Maksimov said. “We risk collision. The shipping lanes here are busy, sir, and they’re directly overhead.” She glanced up at the overhead as she said it.

“Can’t be helped, Navigator,” Alexeyev said. “It’s just another risk we take when we go into a combat situation.” Alexeyev continued. “Also of note, more bad news, is that our recovery from the Medved’ Grizli worm has been problematic. The air assets of the Northern and Pacific Fleets are still grounded, and the surface vessels remain down hard. The destroyer fleet can’t even start their engines. Even their interior communication telephones won’t work. Somehow our submarines managed to escape the effects of the worm, but the air fleet grounding means no MPA aircraft will arrive to help us search for the target submarines. In attempting to recover from the cyberattack, we lost two Il-114s in the Pacific fleet and one from the Northern Fleet. So we are to expect no help from antisubmarine aircraft.”

Weapons Officer Katerina Sobol put out her hand to be recognized. “Go ahead, Sobol,” Lebedev said.

“Captain, that is going to make detecting these submarines nearly impossible,” Sobol said in her high-pitched cartoon character voice. “This barrier search at the Cape of Good Hope, it’s not much of a so-called choke point. There’s thousands of miles from the South Africa coast to the shores of Antarctica. The target submarines could be going through any of that.”

“Weps is right, Captain,” Maksimov said. “From Cape Town to the Antarctic coast is over four thousand kilometers. Perfect for hiding the transit of two submarines, one of them a diesel boat running on batteries, the other a front-line nuclear attack submarine.”

Alexeyev took a deep breath, which Lebedev knew meant he had the same doubts, but needed to put a presentable face on the bad news. “Navigator, let us not forget what we know. The Panther may be a diesel submarine, and perhaps he is running on his batteries with a rig for silent running, but somehow I doubt it. I believe he is blasting through the sea using his nuclear reactor, and that he will be loud. We will detect him from his reactor noises. The nuclear plant of the Panther is not built for stealth, just raw power. He’s fast now, I’ll give him that, but he’s loud enough to be heard out to a hundred kilometers, maybe even three times that.”

“But sir,” Maksimov continued, “why do you think he’s going maximum speed using his reactor? Wouldn’t he want to be dead quiet when transiting the Cape of Good Hope? Afraid we might be lying in wait? Particularly if the Americans got our position from our last periscope depth excursion?”

“I’ll tell you why, Madam Navigator,” Alexeyev said, his voice flat, level and dead. He turned off the projector and walked up to the projection screen, which doubled as a whiteboard, grabbing a dry-erase marker from the credenza top drawer. He wrote PANTHER and under it a date—3 JUNE. Under that, another date, today’s date, 3 JULY. Then a vertical arrow connecting the dates together and beside that, the notation, 30 DAYS. He wrote next to that, KAZAN and beneath that, the dates 4 JUNE and 3 JULY, annotating an arrow between them as 29 DAYS. He looked at the supply officer. “Since Panther was taken, they’ve been at sea for thirty days. Kazan emergency sortied the day after the Americans took Panther, so we’ve been unsupported and deployed for twenty-nine days. Mr. Supply Officer, when did you do your last supply inventory?”

“Yesterday afternoon’s watch, Captain,” Yakovlev said.

“And at normal rations, how many days do we have left?”

“With the present rate of consumption, Captain, we have twenty-one days left of food. Three weeks. At the twenty day to-go point, we’d discussed cutting rations in half to stretch us to forty days.”

“Navigator, if we left tomorrow morning for home, how long to get there, assuming a speed of advance at maximum with intermittent shallow and slow excursions for housekeeping, say thirty-four knots?”

Maksimov calculated on her pad computer, then looked up. “Ten days, Captain.”

“So, if we cut rations now and have forty days left, with ten days to get home and no contingency, we have thirty days left here on-station. But we are a Yasen-M-class submarine, and a fifty-day loadout fills our boat. The American Virginia-class is half our size, people, with double the crew. How many days of food do you think they have left? Like us, they can’t exactly pull into Cape Town and go grocery shopping. And if it’s bad for the Virginia-class, what can it be for the Panther? Her test mission was set for a week. They maybe had ten days of food for the whole crew. Now there’s probably a third of that number aboard now with the commandos who took her and presumably some officers from the Virginia-class to sail her. That would stretch her food from ten days to thirty. Which means, officers, the Panther just ran out of food. So you tell me, Mr. Supply Officer, in that situation, would you be poking along at six knots, extending your ex-filtration for two months, or would you increase speed to maximum and be on starvation rations for only two weeks?”

Yakovlev looked down at the table and mumbled something.

“Speak up when the commanding officer asks you a question, Yakovlev!” Lebedev said sternly.

“Yes, ma’am. Captain, I’d increase speed to maximum,” he said.

“So, people,” Alexeyev said, looking at the room’s officers, “we revise our sonar search plan for the Panther at maximum speed on her reactor and the Virginia-class running forced circulation and fast speed reactor recirculation pumps.”

“What if they just slow down for the five hundred or so kilometer passage through the Cape of Good Hope, Captain?” Weapons Officer Sobol asked. “If they’re creepy-crawling when they go around the horn, we might never detect them.”

“Doing that would add weeks to their trip,” Alexeyev said. “They’re starving now. I think they’ll risk it. I also think that means they won’t be taking the Cape wide, going down by Antarctica. I think they’ll come right down the center of the shipping lanes, going on a great circle route back to the American east coast. I’ve positioned the barrier search center point along that route, north and west of Cape Town. Let’s see if our calculus proves out. Meanwhile, Mr. Supply Officer, cut all rations in half, starting after the evening meal.”

“Perhaps one good meal before we cut rations, Captain?” Yakovlev asked.

“No. That would seem like a celebration, Supply Officer,” Alexeyev said, his voice somehow disconnected and distracted. “We will not be celebrating on this ship until the targets are on the bottom and we are on our way home. Anything else?” No one spoke. Alexeyev looked at the chief engineer, Captain Third Rank Matveev. “Fine. Engineer? I want to see you in my sea cabin.” Without another word, he stood and made his way back to his sea cabin, his gaze staring at something miles away.

The officers hastily gathered up their pad computers and cleaned off their cups and hurried to the passageway. Lebedev was somewhat annoyed that Captain Alexeyev hadn’t asked her along to his sea cabin to talk to Engineer Matveev about whatever was on his mind. The first officer looked at the navigator, who was almost at the wardroom door.

“Madam Navigator, stay a moment, if you don’t mind,” Lebedev said, forcing her expression to depart from its usual harshness. Maksimov nodded, inhaling. Lebedev could tell the navigator was bracing for a reprimand, but it was occurring to Lebedev that while Maksimov was usually about as far from an ally as Lebedev could imagine, today, Maksimov’s questioning attitude to the captain was in complete synchronization with Lebedev’s own thoughts. And Maksimov had demonstrated integrity and grit confronting the captain on his possibly faulty assumptions, as well as showing a penetrating intelligence, heretofore masked by her weaponized femininity. Lebedev began to think her initial impressions of the youthful navigator might have been too hasty. She could have been judging the too-pretty officer by her physical appearance, and doing that violated everything Lebedev stood for. Maksimov sat back down, crossing the table to be able to sit opposite the second-in-command rather than at her usual seat to the first officer’s immediate right.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“What do you think, Navigator?” Lebedev asked, looking at Maksimov, turning to find the teapot and refilling her cup, handing Maksimov a fresh cup, hoping her own facial expression had softened from her usual frown as she extended the teapot.

“Captain’s making a pretty big gamble, Madam First,” Maksimov said, accepting the cup from the first officer and holding it so Lebedev could pour tea into it.

Lebedev agreed, but decided to try to frame an argument that would express loyalty to the captain, however lame such an argument might be. Theatrically, she shrugged. “He has to do something. He made a tactical decision. Let’s see if it plays out.”

“Madam First, if those target subs get past us, there will be hell to pay with the Admiralty.”

“We all need to quit thinking that way,” Lebedev said gently. “Think positive. We will nail these damned targets and prevail. Before we pull into port, we will paint two small American flags on our conning tower to commemorate the kills. Shut your eyes, Nav. Can you see it in your mind?”

Maksimov smiled at her. Lebedev realized that in all her association with the young navigator, this was the first time Maksimov had smiled in Lebedev’s presence.

“Don’t worry, Nav,” Lebedev continued gently. “We’ll win this thing. I believe it in every cell of my body. And you should too. This is the Kazan. We are the supreme nuclear attack submarine on the planet.”

Maksimov nodded. “I like that, Madam First.” She stood up. “By your leave, ma’am?”

“Dismissed, Navigator,” Lebedev said, smiling back at Maksimov.

The navigator left, and Lebedev was alone in the wardroom, staring at the whiteboard. Maksimov had hit the nail on the head, Lebedev thought. Alexeyev’s gamble was extreme. And possibly stupid. But without antisubmarine aircraft to help them get a position of the targets, the oceans were simply too big. The chances of detecting the American and rogue Iranian subs were so low that she would have to think ahead to what would happen to her career if the submarines made it all the way to American shores.

In Captain Georgy Alexeyev’s sea cabin, Chief Engineer Alesya Matveev entered, finding a seat at the small table opposite Alexeyev’s command chair.

“You wanted to see me, Captain?” Matveev prompted.

“There is an urgent communication from the engineering directorate that evaluated the casualties on Voronezh and Novosibirsk.”

“But Captain,” Matveev said, “Our boats sank from getting hit with a nuclear strike.”

“A debrief of the surviving crewmembers of the Novosibirsk revealed that under the shock impact of the nuclear weapon, the atmospheric control equipment in auxiliary machinery room number two disassembled and caused complete chaos. You can imagine. Hydrogen. Oxygen. The oxygen storage banks. Complete loss of emergency breathing air. An explosion in machinery two would doom the ship. And apparently, it did. The explosion from machinery two was strong enough to cause the reactor vessel to jump on its mountings, resulting in a dual rod ejection accident. The fuel overpowered and caused a steam explosion and blew the lid off the vessel and blew melted nuclear fuel all over the third compartment and irradiated the entire crew. So. Machinery two is essentially one big design flaw.”

“Did the engineering directorate have recommendations to harden the equipment in the room?” Matveev asked.

Alexeyev looked at her and shook his head. “No. As usual, the engineering directorate can only point out flaws, not fixes. I mention it in passing, Engineer. Be ready in case we take a close-aboard torpedo detonation. The torpedo might not kill us, but auxiliary machinery room number two might. We’ll need to brief all watchsections and have them ready to shut down ventilation and flood machinery two in the event of trouble. And if we’re heading into a shooting situation, we’ll need to cut the oxygen feed and shut down and purge out the oxygen generators. And to be safe, cut off the carbon dioxide scrubbers and shut down the monoxide burners.”

Matveev shook her head. “We’d better hope any weapon exchange happens fast, Captain, because with no oxygen bleed or generation and no carbon dioxide removal, we’ll all be suffocating slowly.”

Alexeyev nodded. “The choice, Madam Engineer, seems to be between dying slowly or going out in a blaze of glory, a literal one, because we’ll be on fire. I think my choice is I’ll suffer the breathing discomfort until our weapons have done their duty.”

Matveev nodded. “Understood, Captain. Meanwhile, I will take a tour of the room and see if there is anything we can do to harden it against attack. But, we’ve been saying for years that the design is defective.”

Alexeyev waved his hand. “I know. Do what you can, Alesya. If we take a hit from a torpedo, I’d rather it be the hull breach that kills us, not our own atmo-control equipment.”

“Yes, sir,” Matveev said. “By your leave, sir.”

“Dismissed,” Alexeyev said.

Ten seconds later, Georgy Alexeyev was alone in his sea cabin. And alone in his life. Natalia’s last email, downloaded in their late morning periscope depth excursion, confirmed that there was another man, a new man, and she confessed she was interested in sexually, and would Alexeyev kindly and gracefully agree to the idea of her having sex with another man in his apartment, in his bed? Because Alexeyev had essentially abandoned her, sneaking out to sea in the middle of the night with no good-bye, no idea when he’d be back, on an operation so shrouded in secrecy the entire base had no idea they’d deployed. And besides which, he hadn’t emailed her in almost three weeks, and his silence had distressed her.

Natalia could not tolerate abandonment, not since her father had put a pistol barrel in his mouth and departed life when Natalia was only eight, the word of his suicide taking two years to reach Natalia’s mother and eventually Natalia herself. Why, Alexeyev wondered, did she bother with ship captains? They disappeared for weeks, months on end. It was by definition the nature of their jobs.

And there was no doubt that Alexeyev had been deeply and desperately in love with Natalia, until his venereal disease diagnosis, and made worse now by her blatant betrayal, all this so unexpected and so fatal to his spirit. The last message from Natalia hammered the last nail in the coffin of the relationship, as suddenly as Natalia’s father’s bullet had ended him.

The crime of the situation is that she could have just sat him down, one adult to another, and told him she was unhappy in the relationship and that she was leaving him. He would have politely let her go and wished her Godspeed. But instead, she had exploited her intimate knowledge of him to know exactly what his vulnerabilities were, where his insecurities were seated, the exact placement of a kill switch that would cause his great love for her to self-destruct. When he thought about it, it was a cowardly act. And the more he thought about it, the more rage he felt.

Alexeyev had written her back, the email leaving the ship before the edict to stop coming to periscope depth. His message had read, Natalia, you are a whore and a degenerate slut. You and your cheating ways have led to me having a venereal disease and perhaps herpes in my eye. I strongly advise you to get your things and move out. If I find out that you brought another man into my apartment and into my bed, I swear by my mother’s hallowed grave that I will find you and I will drain the lifeblood out of you with a thirty-centimeter rusty knife that I will use to cut your carotid arteries.

Now that the message was sent, Natalia was no longer one of the centers of his life, the other being his beloved Kazan. But everywhere he went, he was damned by flashing memories of Natalia, even here in his sea cabin, as he remembered the Saturday last summer when he’d first taken her on a tour of the boat and shown her his sea cabin. With a mischievous smile, Natalia had double-locked both doors and pulled her shirt off and started to kiss him, and before he could respond she was naked and spread out on his conference table, and he’d taken her, gently at first, and then with the energy of a rocket booster, until they’d both collapsed drenched in sweat. Then came the knock on the door, the Inport Duty Officer Pavlovsky’s voice on the other side of the door, Sir, are you okay? We heard noises. He could still see Natalia, naked and gorgeous, covering her mouth to suppress her musical laugh.

Natalia, he thought. How had his life brought him to this? He tried to concentrate on the mission, hoping it would take his mind out of this swirling emotional cesspool, but somehow this mission, this fool’s errand to find an invisible and silent needle in a vast haystack, was not enough of a distraction. He wondered if there were any alcohol onboard. If they were back in port, he would have called up his closest friend, Sergei Kovalov, captain of the K-564 Arkhangelsk, and together they’d find the answers to life’s questions at the bottom of a bottle of Ruskova vodka. That, of course, assumed that Natalia wasn’t in Kovalov’s life by that time.

AOIC Anthony Pacino had the morning watch in the central command post. He’d brought the Cape of Good Hope chart to central command and taped it to the horizontal section of the pos one console, frequently updating it from the inertial navigation repeater. His impatience to get north into the North Atlantic made their slow crawl miserable. Every time he went to update the chart, their position was right on top of the one from the last update. This was just intolerably slow.

The phone buzzed and he answered it at pos one. “Central command, Pacino,” he said.

“It’s Varney and Ahmadi in the first compartment. Weapons in tubes one and two have been powered up for almost an hour. Request to spin up the UGST weapons in tubes three and four and open their outer doors and shut the doors to one and two and depressurize and shut down one and two.”

“Wait one. I’ll call you back.” He clicked off and dialed up the sonar room.

“Sonar, Albanese.”

“You got anything? Varney wants to rotate tubes and shut and open doors.” The operation was loud, Pacino thought.

“Yeah, I’ve got about sixty merchant ships overhead in the exit from the Indian Ocean into the South Atlantic. The ambient noise is so loud it hurts to put on the headset.”

Pacino had thought about making the transit shallow, using the thunderous noise of the merchant ships to mask their own noise, but some of those vessels were so huge with such deep drafts that collision was practically guaranteed. The only way to get that done was to continuously ping with the under ice and mine detection sonar, and doing that would broadcast their position. Pacino inhaled.

“But no submerged warships?” Pacino asked.

“Nope. Vermont is invisible. Presumably, so is the Yasen-M.”

“Well, yell if you do pick something up.”

“Our first sign will probably be Vermont firing torpedoes,” Albanese said.

“Yeah. You doing okay otherwise, Chief?”

“L-T, I’ve run out of cigarettes. I’m miserable.”

Pacino laughed. “Think how healthy you’ll be when we finally make it to AUTEC.”

“Between not smoking and our starvation rations, I’ll be a shadow of myself, L-T.”

“Just keep listening and try not to think about smokes or food,” Pacino said, smiling to himself as he hung up. He dialed the first compartment.

“Torpedo room, Varney.”

“Mr. Varney, you have permission to spin up three and four, shut down one and two, and open and shut outer doors as necessary.”

“Thank you, AOIC. I’ll call up when it’s done.”

Pacino hung up and felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Alexie Abakumov, the Russian reactor engineer. Pacino looked at him.

“You wanted to start the reactor, yes?” he said to Pacino.

Pacino nodded. “Let’s see how the batteries are doing.” Pacino scanned four gauges. They had perhaps 20 percent capacity. It was time to start up the plant to recharge. He looked at his watch. “I’ll get OIC up here to take the watch.” He dialed Dankleff’s sea cabin.

A sleepy U-Boat Dankleff answered. “OIC.”

“It’s Patch. Abakumov needs to start the reactor and I want to perform the startup under instruction.” He and Dankleff had discussed that they needed to know how to operate the nuclear reactor in case something happened to Abakumov.

“I’ll be up. I want to walk under the water and put on fresh coveralls. Give me ten.”

Pacino looked at the Russian. “I’ll be aft in ten. Don’t commence without me.”

Abakumov nodded. He had dark circles under his eyes and his cheeks looked more hollow than usual. He, too, had run out of cigarettes. And vodka. And the cut in rations was hitting him as hard as the rest of the crew. No doubt, Pacino thought, they had to speed up to maximum as soon as they could get past the Cape’s choke point.

Dankleff arrived, holding a steaming coffee cup, his eyes puffy from sleep. “There’s only days of coffee left, Lipstick. This trip sucks.”

“I know, U-Boat. Another nine days and we’ll be done. And tomorrow morning when I come on watch, we’ll crank it back up to flank. At least that will feel better than this tiptoeing. And we can reopen the galley for hot food.” They’d shut down cooking during the Cape of Good Hope transit to minimize noise.

“So, anything I should know?”

“Albanese has nothing but merchant ships. But that’s no surprise. Varney is rotating three and four into readiness and shutting down one and two, operating outer doors. Otherwise, nothing is going on.”

“I relieve you, sir,” Dankleff said formally.

“I stand relieved. I’ll call from nuclear control when we’re ready for your permission.”

Dankleff nodded, yawned and took a pull of his coffee.

Pacino hurried aft, through the hatch to the shielded tunnel that traversed the third compartment where the reactor was housed, out the aft tunnel hatch into the motor-generator room, turning left into the nuclear control room, a cubbyhole created from what had once been a spare parts closet, but now had three walls of flatpanel displays, all of them busy with instrument indications, temperature and pressure graphs, a mimic depiction of the piping, valves and pumps of the primary loop, with the secondary system depicted on a neighboring screen, showing the piping, turbines, condensers and pumps of its systems. On the horizontal portion of the single seat’s console was a section with four large rotary switches and a pistol grip switch that operated the nuclear control rods.

“You should call for permission,” Abakumov said. “We must hurry.”

Pacino hoisted the handset of the aft wall phone to his ear and dialed central command.

“Central, OIC.”

“Nuclear control, AOIC, request permission to start the reactor and place the propulsion turbine on the main motor and the ship’s service turbine on the ship’s load generator.”

“AOIC, you have permission to start the reactor and place turbines on line. Call when we’re on nuclear power.”

“AOIC, aye,” Pacino said, hanging up. He looked at Abakumov. “So. Operating procedure twenty-seven is displayed on the far-left upper display. Initial conditions are set, running one slow speed main coolant pump in each loop. Step one, energize inverters?”

Abakumov nodded.

“Energizing inverters alpha, bravo and charlie.” Pacino pressed the touch screen that depicted the inverters that controlled the rod drive mechanisms. All their lights changed from red to green. “Inverters are on line. So now, step two, latch rods?”

“Yes, Mr. Patch.”

Pacino reached for the pistol grip on the console and pulled it vertically out of the panel, and it came up a few inches. “Latch voltage applied,” he said, then rotated the pistol grip counterclockwise to the nine o’clock position. “Driving control rod drive mechanisms inward.” Three green lights lit above the mimic picture of the reactor vessel. “CRDMs indicate latched,” he said, glancing at the procedure, then putting the pistol grip switch back to its neutral twelve o’clock position and letting it drop back into the console. “Step three, select rod one and pull it to one hundred centimeters while monitoring startup rate?”

“Yes, but pause at eighty centimeters.”

“Pulling rod one to eighty,” Pacino said, selecting the pistol grip so that it was selected to only control rod one, and rotated the pistol grip to pull the rod out.

Ten minutes later, rods one and two were all the way out of the core at 100 centimeters height with rod three at 33 centimeters. The reactor had climbed steadily out of the nonvisible range into the intermediate range and then into the power range. Pacino had opened the valves to pull steam out of the steam generators, boiling them down while warming up the massive steam headers. As the condensed water was forced out of the large bore steam piping system, the venting in the space was incredibly loud.

“Too bad you guys didn’t find a way to muffle that,” Pacino said, his fingers in his ears.

Abakumov shrugged. “Is not combat system,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“I’m losing boiler level. I may have to start a feed pump on the batteries.”

“If you do that, you risk tripping out many systems. Feed pump pulls too many amps. Must make it on boiler steam. This is where men are separated from boys.”

Pacino’s jaw clenched. “Main steam header is clear. Admitting steam to ship’s service steam turbine.” Pacino pressed the touch screen to open the throttle valve to the SSTG. A low-pitched but loud hum came from ahead of them, then the pitch rose from bass to tenor. The turbine was spinning up, sounding like a jet engine on startup. Soon the pitch had risen to a screaming, ear-piercing squeal. “It’s almost like you guys went out of your way to make it loud,” he shouted over the noise.

“SSTG is at three thousand RPM, on the governor and ready for loading. Quick, shut the breaker to the ship’s service generator and open the battery breaker to the ship’s service generator.”

Pacino did as he was told, bringing the ship’s service turbine on line and taking the battery out of the circuit. He glanced at the boiler levels, and they were perilously low. If he didn’t start a feed pump immediately, they’d boil dry and they’d lose the entire plant.

“Ten centimeters of level in the boilers,” Abakumov prompted.

“SSTG has all ship’s loads, battery breaker open, ready to start a feed pump.”

“Do it.”

Pacino punched the flatpanel at the indication of the main feed pump, one eye on the boiler level, now at 4 centimeters. The pump had better start on the first try, he thought. The pump was the size of a refrigerator and drew more current than anything on board. As it started, all the lights throughout the ship dimmed and blinked, the electrical transient causing alarms to go off in central command. Pacino watched. The pump indicated at max RPM and boiler levels were climbing from 2 centimeters, back on their way to 80. He breathed a sigh of relief. It had worked.

“You are obviously man, not boy,” Abakumov said, slapping Pacino on the back and smiling.

“Good to know,” Pacino said. “I suspected, but confirmation is important. Now, for the propulsion turbine.”

This was easier, similar to starting the ship’s service turbine, but this unit was five times the size of the SSTG, its screaming to full revolutions ear-piercing. Hard to imagine that this much noise wouldn’t blast out into the sea and be detected by someone out there, but there was nothing they could do about it.

Finally, the battery breaker to the main motor was open and the propulsion turbine was powering the main motor. The ship was underway on nuclear power.

“Start the battery charge,” Abakumov said.

Pacino lined up the breakers to put the SSTG onto the battery and push current into it to restore its state of charge. As the amp-hour meter began to climb, he stepped back from the panel and looked at the status of the equipment. It was all nominal. No alarms, no red flashing annunciators. He’d done it. He found the phone.

“Central, OIC.”

“Nuclear control, AOIC. Propulsion shifted to nuclear power, battery charge in progress.”

“Very well. Now get up here and take back over your watch, ya non-qual slacker.”

Pacino smiled, turned over the propulsion plant watch to Abakumov and walked forward.

34

Captain Third Rank Svetka Maksimov had the senior supervisory watch in the central command post, sitting at the command console’s far portside position one, her display showing the broadband sonar screen to the left and the transient detector to the right. The broadband display was a mess, with dozens of strong traces from the merchant shipping in the shipping lane directly overhead.

The transient detector would be somewhat more revealing, she thought, the display a three-dimensional graph of time on the bottom axis extending right along the screen. The vertical axis was frequency, although most useful transients were low frequency, but not all. A dropped wrench made a low frequency transient, as would a slammed hatch or a torpedo tube door closing, but steam at a high flowrate through a steam pipe would make a high frequency noise, as would a steam turbine startup. High frequencies were somewhat useless, Maksimov thought, since they attenuated and disappeared quickly with distance through the ocean. So they’d only detect a high frequency if it were extremely close. The third axis was intensity, this axis pointing into the screen. A faint sound would hug the axis, but a louder one would zoom out into what looked like the depth of the screen’s depiction.

The transient noises were filtered by the MGK-600’s signal processor, in an effort to exclude displaying biologics such as the moaning of whales and the clicking of shrimp. Biologics usually made the ocean loud with useless noise. With the biologics screened out, the system could strain for detections of dropped wrenches, missile doors opening or shutting, or a launched torpedo. Even footsteps or loud voices. Although, the problem with the biologics filter was that it would screen out music, which meant a target could be blasting rock ’n roll on a stereo but avoid detection. For that, the only remedy was the use of the human ear. But so far, the transient plot was quiet and all that came over the headset were clicking shrimp, wave noise, and the propellers of dozens of merchant ships up above. Maksimov bit her lip and looked around the room.

On position three of the command console to her right was Senior Lieutenant Anatoly Blackbeard Pavlovsky, the electrical officer, standing duty as watch officer. His concentration was momentarily on the chart, zooming in, then back out, shaking his head at the enormous size of the fix error circle. Maksimov, as navigator, had even contemplated donning a wetsuit, locking out of the forward airlock and swimming to the surface taking a sextant and a chronometer with her and shooting the sun at noon to get a navigation fix. Anything was better than relying on ship’s inertial nav, which was getting buggier every minute without a navsat fix. Pavlovsky rotated his display back to the same sonar screen that Maksimov herself was seeing.

Maksimov got up and paced the room, checking that the ship control petty officers, the boatswains, were taking care of ship’s depth, speed and buoyancy, then walking to the port side to the sonar-and-sensor console, where Sonar Officer Ilia Kovalev stood his watch, his headset on, concentrating on a large display of the transient detector.

“What bearing are you checking?” Maksimov asked Kovalev.

“Southeast for eighty percent of the time,” he said. “Northwest for twenty percent. Just in case the target subs somehow slipped past us and are heading up the great circle route to North America. Right now, it’s southeast.”

As he was speaking, a bright red transient lit up at high frequency, a blotch at medium intensity, covering several of the higher frequency buckets, and climbing in intensity.

“I’ll be damned, ma’am,” Kovalev breathed. “High freq contact.”

Maksimov picked up a headset at the console beside Kovalev, pulled up the transient display and tuned the cursor to the sound. It was a rushing, blasting noise. She turned to Pavlovsky. “Call the captain,” she barked. “We’ve got something.” She sat at the console and brought up the transient monitor on the lower screen and the broadband display on the upper display. On the console to her left, she brought up the narrowband graphics from the towed array, but so far, they were just full of noise.

It only took half a minute for Captain Alexeyev to step into the central command post. He stood behind Maksimov and took a third headset from the console and listened to the transient, which was now fading, but a new transient was growing on the screen, coming out of the low frequencies and rolling into the high frequencies.

Kovalev looked back at the navigator and the captain. “Steam turbine startup, for sure.”

“Any correlation on broadband?” Alexeyev asked. They couldn’t get a track on transients, just a momentary general bearing. But a loud, sustained transient should show up as a broadband sonar trace with a sustained, precise bearing. And that they could get a parallax range on. If it kept up for a few minutes, they could get a firing data package. In a hard spot, they could hit it with an active sonar pulse and get a firecontrol data package in a heartbeat, at the expensive cost of losing their stealth, which was vital given that this loud contact was being escorted by a quiet attack submarine.

Maksimov stood back up and stepped over to the navigation chart, manipulating the keyboard to punch in the suspected position of the transient. Pavlovsky joined her at the table, stroking his too-long scraggly beard. “That’s got to be the Panther,” he said.

“Transient frequency stable and intensity fading,” Kovalev reported. “But I have another transient, this one much higher in intensity, low frequency and becoming higher pitched. This is another steam turbine startup, and this one is much bigger.”

Alexeyev had his chin in his hand, deep in thought. First Officer Lebedev showed up, tapping Pavlovsky on the shoulder, saying something quietly to him. Pavlovsky pointed to the captain. Lebedev took a step closer to the captain.

“Captain, I recommend stationing action stations,” she said.

Alexeyev looked at her with his uncovered eye unfocused. For a moment Lebedev could swear he was trying to remember who she was, until finally he nodded. “Fine,” he said, “but no general announcing circuit orders. Use the phone circuits and messengers.”

Lebedev went off to get action stations manned. Maksimov took her action station at the middle position of the command console as the officers and senior enlisted hurried into the room and donned headsets. Maksimov smiled. It was possible this mission would be over soon. Perhaps even today, she thought. The thought made her suddenly feel hungry. The reduced rations order was only hours old but already had the entire crew depressed.

Alexeyev picked up the phone to nuclear control. “Engineer, be ready to rig the atmospheric controls in machinery two for battle.” The captain turned to Pavlovsky and Lebedev. “Watch Officer, when I give you the word, call back to nuclear control and order them to rig machinery two for battle. That means they will depressurize and nitrogen purge the oxygen generators, shut down the scrubbers and burners and stop the oxygen bleed, then stop the ventilation fans.”

“But Captain, if we do that, we’ll start to suffocate inside twenty minutes.”

Alexeyev nodded. “If it gets bad, we will put on our emergency breathing air masks.”

“Captain,” Lebedev reported to Alexeyev. “Action stations are manned. Do you want to address the room?”

Alexeyev seemed confused for a moment, then blinked. He cleared his throat, and the murmuring in the room died down to pin-drop quiet, only the high-pitched whine of the computers audible in the room.

“Attention in the tactical team,” he said. “We have a loud transient from bearing one-two-two which showed steam flow, then a small steam turbine startup, and then a larger one. I am presuming the sounds are coming from the Panther as she lights off her reactor. We must be prepared for Panther to roar off into the sea at maximum speed. I doubt she will stay at slow speed once her reactor is live.” Alexeyev stopped, and Lebedev stared at him, coming close to him and whispering urgently in his ear. Alexeyev nodded, then continued. “Intentions. Yes. My intentions. Our intentions. I intend to monitor the Panther and first determine what speed he will choose. Once he settles on a speed, we will obtain a parallax range by stealthily driving across the line-of-sight to the Panther. We will obtain a firecontrol data package and feed it to the battlecontrol system. However, we will not be shooting.”

Lebedev stared at the captain. “I’m sorry, Captain, but once we get a data package, shouldn’t we fire immediately?”

Alexeyev seemed briefly confused by the question. Maksimov looked to her right, at the third position console, where Pavlovsky returned her glance, as if it to say, what the hell is wrong with the captain? Maksimov looked over at the battlecontrol console’s middle position, where Weapons Officer Katerina Sobol manned her watchstation, and Sobol seemingly shared that same sentiment.

Alexeyev cleared his throat. “We can’t fire at Panther, no matter how good the firecontrol data package is,” he said, his voice too loud. “We might well sink Panther, as our operational orders dictate, but our orders prioritize sinking the American escort ship, and a torpedo launch against Panther gives away our position to the American submarine. We will wait until we have a detection against the American.”

Lebedev had opened her mouth, about to protest, when suddenly Sonar Officer Kovalev frantically raised his hand in the air. “In central command, new sonar contact, possible submerged warship!” he announced. Lebedev and Alexeyev rushed to the port side, standing behind the sonar-and-sensor console. “I have towed array narrowband detect on frequencies at one hundred twenty kilohertz — from a sixty-cycle generator or generators — and a heterodyned frequency at five kilohertz, probably from the same generators. The bearings are either southwest or due south. Captain, we need to maneuver to resolve the bearing ambiguity.”

Lebedev and Alexeyev traded a look. They’d just detected the American Virginia-class. Alexeyev shouted an order at the ship control console. “Boatswain, left full rudder, steady course zero-two-zero, turns for ten knots!”

The boatswain of the watch acknowledged, and the deck tilted slightly as the Kazan made the turn and increased speed.

“Steady course zero-two-zero, Captain,” the boatswain of the watch reported.

“Boatswain, turns for four knots,” Alexeyev ordered.

Kovalev at the sonar-and-sensor console looked triumphant. “Captain, I have additional tonals, growing stronger now. Bearing ambiguity being resolved, but correlates to a new very faint broadband detection at one-five-one. Sir, we have the American escort submarine, bearing one-five-one.”

“Do we have a target data package from the maneuvers?” Alexeyev asked Weapons Officer Sobol at the battlecontrol console.

“No, Captain,” she said, showing that she knew she was disappointing the captain. “The first detect didn’t form a complete leg. We have one leg of a parallax range. We need another leg.”

“Captain,” Lebedev said, standing close to Alexeyev. “Now that we have a partial data package on the American escort submarine, we could go active, both on him and the Panther, nail down their positions, and fire torpedo salvos and take them out right now.”

“No,” Alexeyev said. “Absolutely not. We have the acoustic advantage over the American. I intend to use that to our advantage. We will let him sail by, ignorant of us. Once he and the Panther are north and west of us, we will fire one torpedo in stealth mode at each and sink them both.”

“Why not a horizontal salvo, Captain? We could put five units on the Panther and another five on the American. No way they would survive that.”

“A salvo makes more noise from the tubes and the launching and triples the emitted noise of the weapons. And it causes sonar confusion if they run and we lose them and need to reacquire them. With just one unit sneaking up on the targets, they might not even detect them until it is much too late for them. This will be a surgical strike, First.”

Lebedev looked disappointed, but she nodded in obedience. “Yes, sir,” she said, leaning over Kovalev’s seat back and staring at his console. She muttered something to him, but Maksimov could pick it up: “Don’t fucking lose them, Kovalev.”

Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov stood aft of the command console and stared at the chart, then flipped to the narrowband display. They had the tonals emitted by Panther, but nothing from the anticipated frequency buckets of the Yasen-M-class submarine. She paged her display to the broadband sonar display, but it was useless with all the merchant traffic in the shipping lanes above. But as far as below-the-layer was concerned, the sea was empty but for Panther and Virginia. She shifted to the acoustic daylight signal processor, but it displayed nothing but noise.

Romanov leaned back and contemplated calling for coffee, but in a few minutes the watch relief would go down. Her relief was late, the engineer, Lewinsky, who should have been here twenty minutes ago, but lately he’d taken to standing double duty, with a watch aft in maneuvering controlling the reactor, then a watch in the control room conning the submarine. Such a schedule would make Romanov’s eyes cross, she thought. There was no doubt, Lewinsky was motivated and energetic. But his getting relieved in maneuvering was taking too long, delaying her getting off watch so she could go grab noon meal before they shut down the galley and cleared the dishes. Not that the food was anything worth showing up to the table for, she thought, the reduced rations and rig for ultra-quiet making the noon meal little more than white bread and peanut butter. Soon, the flour would get scarce, and the mess cooks would cut the flour with raisins, and the order of the day would be raisin bread for every occasion. And raisin bread was disgusting, she thought. At that point, she’d switch to crackers, but then, they’d run out of crackers.

She went to the Q-10 stack console and leaned over Petty Officer Sanders, who had the morning watch and was concentrating hard on the narrowband frequency buckets.

“Anything?” Romanov asked.

“Nothing, Nav,” Sanders said. “It’s all noise. If there’s a bad guy out there, he’s quiet as a mouse.”

“Well, I suppose that’s good news, Sanders, but keep a weather eye out. Damned if I want to limp home with a hole in the hull from a Russian torpedo.”

“You’d be lucky to limp home, Nav. You’d be on the bottom in Davey Jones’ locker.”

Romanov smiled. “Davy Jones was a fucking skimmer puke,” she said in jest, their customary insult to the surface navy, since they only skimmed the surface of the seas. She looked up and Elvis Lewinsky had walked in and was paging through displays at the command console.

“Nice of you to show up for watch,” Romanov said, making an exaggerated motion to check her watch, shaking it at her ear as if trying to see if it had malfunctioned.

“Come on, Silky, you know I have to get relieved back aft before I can come here, and I have to do a pre-watch tour first. See if the torpedo room is ready for action. And if I make you late for lunch, well, it ain’t like lunch is anything to write home about since they cut rations.”

“Yeah, all true, Elvis, which is why I have graciously chosen to forgive you.” Romanov smiled sweetly at the engineer.

“Fuck you, Silky. So, what do you have for me?”

“A million surface ship contacts, all merchants. One submerged contact, the Panther. And otherwise, below the layer, we are all alone. Looks like the Yasen-M didn’t show up for work.”

“So we get a break for once in our lives,” Lewinsky said. “I relieve you, ma’am.”

“I stand relieved. In control,” Lewinsky announced loudly, “Lieutenant Commander Lewinsky has the deck and the conn!” She looked at the engineer. “Have a good watch, Feng.”

He threw her a sloppy salute and turned back to the command console, flipping between the sonar narrowband screen, the broadband display and the acoustic daylight screen. Romanov left the control room and made her way to the wardroom, checking her thigh pocket for her pad computer, then stopped the mess cook of the watch just before he shut down service.

“What do we have?” she asked.

“Chili with crackers,” he said. “Piping hot and guaranteed to melt through your stomach lining.”

Romanov smiled at him. “You know, that’s exactly what the doctor ordered.”

She was two bites into the chili when the 1MC shipwide announcing circuit clicked — which should never happen when the ship was rigged for ultra-quiet. A rush of stomach acid flooded her, and not from the chili. Lewinsky’s voice boomed over the circuit, and she could hear the fear — no, the near-panic — in the engineer’s voice.

“Torpedo in the water! Captain to control! Man battlestations!”

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino was on his way from nuclear control to the central command post, pausing to duck into the sonar room to see how Chief Albanese was doing, but as he entered the room, Albanese tossed his headset off to the port console and stared at Pacino with his mouth open his eyes wide in panic.

“Torpedoes in the water! Multiple torpedoes!”

“What bearing?” Pacino asked, a cold calmness inexplicably flowing into his soul. This moment felt like something he’d seen in his dreams a hundred times, so that when it eventually became real, he was ready for it.

“Southeast,” Albanese choked out. “One-five-one.”

Pacino vaulted out of the sonar room and ran into the central command post, where he found Dankleff standing, half-paralyzed. Pacino lunged for the shipwide announcing circuit microphone at position two.

“Torpedoes in the water, incoming from the southeast. Prepare for torpedo launch, tubes three and four. Torpedo room, prepare all tubes and all weapons for immediate launch and report to central command when ready to fire!”

He looked at Dankleff, who seemed to be coming out of his trance. “OIC, change course to due north, and flank it!”

Dankleff yelled at Grip Aquatong at the ship control station. “Grip, steer zero-zero-zero, all ahead flank! Maximum revolutions!”

Aquatong turned the wheel, hard, and the deck tilted dramatically, the deck beginning to vibrate from the power of the reactor coming up to full output.

“Central command, torpedo room,” Varney’s voice came over the overhead speaker, “UGST torpedoes in tubes three and four ready in all respects, recommend launch.”

“It’d be nice to have a solution,” Pacino grumbled, glancing over at Dankleff, who had joined him at position two.

“Just fucking fire them southeast,” Dankleff said. “At this point, they’re just dumb evasion devices.”

Pacino looked over the console, realizing Captain Ahmadi had joined him. “Am I doing this right?” he asked. Ahmadi nodded.

“Bearing here, assumed range dialed in here, search speed here,” Ahmadi said, pointing.

“Just put in southeast,” Pacino said, “assume a range at, I don’t know, ten kilometers, and fast speed search. What happens if the target is closer, say five clicks?”

“You’ll miss, Mr. Patch. It’ll sail right by.”

“Dial it in at five kilometers, then.”

Ahmadi dialed it in. “Ready, Mr. Patch.”

Pacino looked at Dankleff, who nodded.

“Shooting tube three!” Pacino pulled the large trigger and the ship jumped for an instant, but the launch was gentler than what he’d experienced on American submarines. He dialed the rotary tube selector switch to tube number four. “Shooting tube four!” He pulled the trigger again, and again the deck jumped.

“Central command, torpedo room,” the intercom clicked with Varney’s voice, “tubes one and two are ready in all respects. Recommend firing.”

Pacino selected tube one on the rotary dial switch, checked the indicator lights and pulled the trigger, then lined up tube two, scanned the settings and readiness indicators, then pulled the trigger again. The deck had jumped again, once for the tube one weapon, then a second time for tube two. Pacino narrowed his eyes at the settings. Was it possible that even five kilometers was too distant? That the firing submarine might be even closer? And that his five-thousand-meter setting would cause his torpedoes to sail past the target, blind? He reset the range to the next unit for one kilometer, hoping the UGST torpedoes couldn’t home in on the firing ship.

“Central command, sonar,” Albanese’s voice said from the overhead speaker. “Vermont is shooting. Double torpedo shot, looks like from a bearing east-southeast of us. I have broadband contact on Vermont from her main coolant pumps going to fast speed. She’s increasing speed.”

“Sonar, any more incoming torpedoes from the Yasen?”

“Central, Sonar, no.”

“Maybe we scared him,” Dankleff said.

“Torpedo room, central,” Pacino ordered on his microphone, “report status of the next two tubes.” He dialed in the speaker to sonar. “Sonar, central, do you have a bearing to the firing submarine?”

“Central, sonar, no, just the original firing point.”

Pacino looked at Dankleff. “U-Boat, the minute we get a hint of where the firing submarine is, we’re going to hit him with both Shkval supercavitating torpedoes.”

“You could launch them now, Patch.”

“All that would do is make more noise — Ahmadi says we need at least a hint of a solution — or at least a rough position, before we launch. They don’t do much course-correcting on their way out, they’re going too fast for that. They would just sail out past the guy.”

Dankleff nodded. “Still, even if it looks like we need more evasive effects, be ready to hit the trigger.”

Pacino nodded, hitting the intercom mike’s button. “Whale, status of incoming torpedo?”

“Still inbound,” Albanese said. “It’s getting closer.”

Pacino looked at Dankleff and pointed to the surface. Dankleff nodded. Pacino grabbed Ahmadi. “We need to emergency blow to the surface,” Pacino said. “It’s possible the torpedo has a ceiling setting.”

Ahmadi shook his head sadly. “That would do you no good. A Futlyar torpedo will follow you to the end of the earth, Mr. Patch. I’m afraid it’s over. Your mission. The voyage of the Panther. And our time on this earth.”

Lieutenant Commander Mario Elvis Lewinsky’s grip on the handhold of the command console was so intense that his knuckles had gone white, as had the color of his face.

Captain Timothy Seagraves looked over at Executive Officer Jeremiah Quinnivan at the attack center. The deck trembled from the vibrations of the flank speed run, the submarine having dived to test depth in the seconds after the detection of the incoming torpedo. Within thirty seconds, Lewinsky had prepared a “snapshot” torpedo for firing, a lined-up weapon with little to no data on the target other than the bearing, the launch to be used more for effect than for success. Only in ten percent of snapshots did a weapon home in and hit something, but to fail to fire would be a tactical disaster. The enemy out there shooting at them had to be notified in the strongest possible terms that the Vermont was fighting back. Even if that meant she’d be firing blind.

Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov arrived at the command console to relieve Lewinsky so he could go to his battlestation aft, in maneuvering. “I relieve you, Eng,” she said, still breathing heavily from her sprint to the control room. Lewinsky muttered that he stood relieved and took off aft. Romanov looked at the display on the attack center.

“Captain, Coordinator, if we snapshot two Mark 48s in CMT mode at the bearing to the launch, we can slow down and nail the shooter with active sonar. The countermeasure mode of the Mark 48s will take down the incoming torpedoes, we’ll have a solution to — let’s call him Master One — and we can hit him with a horizontal salvo.”

“Good work, Nav,” Seagraves said. “Attention in the firecontrol party,” he said in the pin-drop quiet room, “snapshot tubes one and two, CMT mode, at the bearing of the incoming torpedoes.”

With a snapshot, there was no long, involved checklist or detailed pre-firing reports. There was just the officer of the deck announcing “set” when the presets were correct, and “fire” as the trigger button was pushed. Romanov checked the two displays, both now set up in snapshot mode. The screen showed a dumb display of what looked like two rowboats, one at the bottom representing Vermont herself, the rowboat pointing to the seven o’clock direction. A vertical line extended upward from Vermont’s rowboat to the other rowboat, the line labeled “151” for the bearing to the target. The upper rowboat, representing the incoming torpedo, was also pointed to the seven o’clock position, it’s motion intending to catch up to and impact Vermont.

Romanov looked at Quinnivan and Seagraves. “I have to assume a range,” she said. “Even though we’re using immediate enable.”

Quinnivan spoke. “Put in six thousand yards, lassie. No way those bastards were distant. They had to get a sniff of us as we went by close.”

Romanov looked at Seagraves, who nodded solemnly. Romanov put in three nautical miles, six thousand yards, on both displays.

“Snapshot, tubes one and two, Master One, countermeasure torpedo mode, medium speed, immediate enable,” Romanov announced, looking over the back side of the seat of pos two, where Lomax sat, and pos one, where Eisenhart sat, then to the weapons control console, where Spichovich was seated. “Set,” Romanov said, leaning over Lomax and pressing his fixed function key, then doing the same to Eisenhart’s panel, then saying to Spichovich, “shoot!”

“Tube one, fire,” Spichovich said, hitting a central, larger fixed function key — the trigger — with a lit up bright green color. “Tube two, fire,” he said, jamming the trigger function key a second time.

The deck jumped violently, and Romanov’s ears were slammed by the power of the inboard venting of the water-round-torpedo tank, then jumping again, her eardrums slammed a second time, a headache blooming behind her ears with the torpedo launches.

She looked across the room to Petty Officer Mercer at the BQQ-10 stack. “Sonar,” Romanov called, “own ship’s units fired electrically.” Mercer turned in his seat to look back at her.

“Officer of the Deck, own ship’s units, normal launch,” Mercer said.

“Now, Captain?” Romanov said. “Can we go active?” If Seagraves agreed, Mercer could blast the sea with an active sonar pulse that would nail down the position and movement of Master One, allowing an offensive torpedo shot. They would risk nothing — Master One already knew they were present and an idea of their position and had fired at them. Stealth was long gone.

Pacino’s instincts were screaming in his mind despite Captain Ahmadi’s warning. “Help me emergency blow anyway,” he said. “Let’s get the ballast tank vents shut.” Pacino and Ahmadi reached into The Million Valve Manifold to find the valves that would shut the corroded and sticking ballast tank vents.

“Central, torpedo room, tubes three and four are reloaded with UGST torpedoes and are ready in all respects.”

“U-Boat, launch three and four,” Pacino shouted from The Million Man Manifold. He grabbed the forward valve handles for the ballast tank blow. It was then they could hear the torpedo sonar blasting into the ship from the sea.

Dankleff shouted back from central command. “Lipstick, hurry up! Emergency blow!”

Pacino rotated the two valve handles for the forward blow. He waited five seconds, but with his heart pounding and the adrenaline pouring through his system, it may have only been one second, and then he operated the after main ballast tank blow valves. The room roared with the flow noise and a dense cloud of condensation filled the space, reducing visibility to half a foot. Pacino listened for the sound of the air flow decreasing as the deck began to tilt up dramatically. He could hear Dankleff shouting at Grip Aquatong to take the boat up to the surface with a steep angle. Pacino reached for the piping nestled in the rats’ nest of The Million Valve Manifold to keep his footing. He made his way back into the central command post as the angle abruptly came off the ship, the deck suddenly settling flat.

“All stop!” Dankleff ordered.

The deck began rocking in the swells of the sea state.

“U-Boat, get the scope up! We might be about to get run over by a merchant!”

Dankleff raised the number one scope, twisted it in a fast circle and gasped, “Oh shit! Grip, right full rudder! All ahead flank!”

On the bridge of the very large crude carrier Eva Maru, an off-watch officer looking out the forward windows and recording a video for his video blog about life at sea suddenly saw a huge burst of foam almost immediately forward of them, just a few hundred yards off the port bow, his phone recording as the bow of a submarine burst out of the sea, then came level in an explosion of waves and bubbles, the sub turning just before it hit them in a glancing blow, the flank of the submarine grinding and scraping against the tanker’s port side. After the collision, the submarine continued moving southward on the surface, picking up speed, apparently not caring that there had just been a maritime collision. While the officer tried to come to grips with the sight of a submarine suddenly emergency surfacing right beside them in the middle of the ocean, then hitting them and scraping against them, then running away from the scene of the accident, the next thing that happened was much, much stranger.

The explosion at the bow of the tanker blew everyone in the bridge to the aft wall. The eruption of water and spray ignited an orange fireball half a shiplength wide as the bow of the tanker exploded from the impact of what much later would be reported to be a Russian Futlyar torpedo.

35

Commander Timothy Seagraves narrowed his eyes at Commander Quinnivan and Lieutenant Commander Romanov. “Wait on going active until we know the status of our countermeasure torpedoes and what’s going on with the six we heard launched from Panther.”

Petty Officer Mercer turned from his seat at the BQQ-10 sonar console. “I have a detonation of one of our units, edge of the starboard baffles, and there’s one less torpedo in the water. I have the second torpedo at fast speed and pinging. I think it’s homing.”

Romanov looked at Mercer. “Do you have bearing separation between Panther and that second torpedo?”

“I only hold both on the rudder rear-facing hydrophone and the onion array, so bearings are sloppy and merged.”

Two seconds later, from aft, an explosion could be heard, then a secondary explosion, this one much louder than the first.

“Explosions were from the last bearing to the Panther,” Mercer reported, his voice flat.

Romanov took a breath, about to say something to the captain, when the second explosion rocked the ship, this one ten times the power of the first explosion. “What the hell was that, Mercer?” she asked.

“Ma’am, no way to tell without turning around to put it in the spherical array’s field of view. Or we could pop up to periscope depth and take a look.”

“All you’ll see is smoke and flames,” Quinnivan said. “Plus, we’d have to slow down.”

“Mercer, at the last bearing of Panther, do we have steam flow noise, steam turbines? Tonals?” Romanov leaned over Mercer’s seatback. “Anything?”

Mercer turned to look at the navigator. “Nothing held on the towed array or rudder array, but it would help if we slowed down and turned south.”

“We don’t need to be running anymore,” Romanov said to Seagraves. “The torpedoes fired at us are gone and we need to see what’s going on with the Panther.”

“What we need to do is fire at Master One,” Quinnivan said. “And to do that, we have to get his position. Captain, recommend we employ active sonar.”

“Captain, OOD,” Mercer said, his hand on his right headset’s earphone, “I have torpedoes in the water, multiple torpedoes, edge of the starboard baffles.”

“Just what we need,” Quinnivan said.

Romanov looked at the executive officer. “We don’t know that they came from Master One. Maybe they’re from Panther.”

“No way,” Quinnivan said. “Those lads could never figure out how to launch their weapons on a strange foreign submarine, much less multiple torpedo shots.”

“Dammit,” Seagraves said to the XO and navigator. “There’s nothing but confusion.”

“Fog o’ war, Captain,” Quinnivan said.

“We can’t just keep running from goddamned torpedoes. We can’t fire blind because we might hit Panther if she’s still alive,” Seagraves said. “We need to know what the hell is going on. Nav, slow to five knots and turn south. Once you’re on course, go active.”

“Pilot,” Romanov shouted, “all stop! Left full rudder, steady course south, mark speed five knots!”

The lights went out throughout the ship the moment the explosion’s shock wave hit them and bounced them in the sea. The hum of ventilation stopped, making the upper level immediately stuffy and hot. Pacino felt his way forward from The Million Valve Manifold to the central command post, where OIC Dankleff had found a battle lantern and illuminated the forward bulkhead of central command, shining it on the gauges of the first position and the ship control station. The engine order telegraph on the ship control console make a jangling, ringing noise as the arrow from the engineroom went from “flank” to “stop.” The intercom began barking immediately over the still-loud sound of the explosion outside the hull.

“Central command, this is nuclear control, the reactor has tripped!” Abakumov called. “Switching ship’s loads to the battery. Switching propulsion to the battery.”

Pacino lunged for the microphone. “Nuclear control, central, is the reactor okay? Can you restart?” The lights in the control room flickered, then came on. Farther aft, the lights switched back on.

“All control systems went black, Mr. Patch. I have to restart the distributed control system. I do not know how long that will take.”

“Start it now, and call if you need help.”

Abakumov clicked his intercom twice by way of acknowledgement. The ventilation fans restarted, blowing air throughout the submarine.

“Central command, torpedo room,” Varney said, an undertone of barely controlled fear in his voice, “torpedo tube six on the port side is glowing red hot and we have—”

“Get down there, Patch!” Dankleff yelled, but Pacino was already vaulting aft to get to the ladderway to the middle level so he could get forward to the middle level hatch to the first compartment.

Pacino could hear coughing over the intercom, then Varney’s excited voice calling out, “We have smoke in the torpedo room! Fire in the torpedo room!”

Dankleff’s deep voice boomed overhead from the loudspeakers, “Fire in the torpedo room, fire in the torpedo room, all hands don emergency air masks, all personnel off watch, lay to the second compartment forward hatch and await instructions from the first compartment.”

Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov leaned over Mercer’s seatback at the BQQ-10 stack.

The display resembled a radar scope, the center representing Vermont herself, with concentric circular markings at regular distances going outward, each ring a mile from the one inside it, the outer ring at the eighty-mile point, forty thousand yards, the supposed limit of active sonar detection.

“Hit it,” Romanov said. Mercer uncovered a protective cover over a fixed function key and mashed it. An earsplitting booming shriek sounded from forward, going from a bass growl and howling to a high-pitched scream, the noise sounding for endless seconds until it stopped.

On the display, a bright green ring moved outward from the center, illuminating dull green splotches as it grew, the dull green considered to be noise with zero Doppler — the Doppler effect that of changing the frequency of a transmitted pulse by virtue of the speed of the target’s pulse reflection. If Mercer chose, he could filter out anything slower than a desired speed setpoint, but Romanov had told him to keep the filter off, to catch Panther or Master One if either of them hovered with no motion.

To the south, the six o’clock position on the display, a bright orange blotch lit up, an arrow superimposed on it, denoting speed, the system labeling it with 10 knots. Then to the southwest, multiple small orange blotches, all of them labeled with longer arrows pointing southwest, all reading 40 knots.

And then the money shot. South-southwest, bearing 205, a large orange spot with no arrow, the system labeling it, 0 knots. Romanov pointed to it, smiling to herself that she’d ordered the Doppler filter taken off. God, she thought, active sonar was wonderful. Damned shame they could only use it when their position was already known to the enemy.

“That’s him, Captain. Master One, in all his glory. Range thirty-seven miles.”

“Seventy-four thousand yards?” Quinnivan said, stunned. “That fooker can hear us from nearly forty miles away? What goddamned sonar set is he using, and can we fookin’ buy one?”

“Maybe he picked us up on a transient,” Seagraves said. “Pump seal going bad putting out a noise, or a failed sound mount.”

“We were scanned just after we left Norfolk by the Colorado, Skipper,” Quinnivan said. “We were quiet as a mouse.”

“Or maybe the Yasen-M is just a better submarine,” Romanov said.

“You’d better hope not, Nav,” Seagraves said.

“Those small contacts at forty knots, torpedoes, presumably fired by Panther?” Seagraves said, staring at the display on the command console. “And Panther is the contact due south at ten knots?”

Mercer nodded. “That’s my read, Captain.”

Romanov smiled. Panther had lived.

“Ping again,” Seagraves said to Romanov. “See if Master One truly has zero speed with incoming torpedoes heading for him, of if he’s just running at a right angle to our line-of-sight.”

“Aye, Captain. Mercer, hit it again.”

A second time the blasting sound rang out from forward. On the display screen, another green circle grew outward from the center point, this time hitting the southern contact—Panther—showing it closer, then the torpedoes farther from them, but closer to the large contact to the southwest, which had moved quite a bit, the contact headed due west. But he was at the far range of detection unless Mercer adjusted the scale.

“Coordinator, we have a firing solution,” Lomax called from pos one, “based on the two ping returns. He’s moving west at thirty-five knots, present range, thirty-eight thousand five hundred yards, recommend horizontal salvo.”

“Damned shame we’re out of SubRoc nukes,” Romanov said to Quinnivan. “They’d sure come in handy right about now.” The XO nodded, then looked at the captain.

“Sir, recommend firing point procedures,” Quinnivan prompted.

“Firing point procedures,” Seagraves called to the watchstanders in the room, “tubes one through four, Master One, horizontal salvo, ten second firing interval, high-to-medium active snake, run-to-enable twenty thousand yards! Tube one!”

“Set,” Lomax reported from the attack center’s pos one.

“Stand by,” Spichovich said from the weapon control console.

“Shoot!” Seagraves ordered.

“Fire!” Spichovich called, hitting the trigger fixed function key. “Own ship’s unit fired electrically!” The deck jumped violently and Romanov’s ears were slammed by the water-round-torpedo tank’s high pressure air venting into the ship.

Romanov looked at Mercer, who listened and then called, “Own ship’s unit, normal launch!”

The litany of reports continued three more times, and three more times Romanov’s ears slammed.

“Go active again,” Seagraves ordered Romanov. “If he zigs, we’ll need to steer the weapons.”

But before Romanov could make the order to Mercer, he yelled from his console, “torpedo in the water, bearing to Master One, now multiple torpedoes!”

The ventilation ducts had stopped blowing air. Either Dankleff or Abakumov stopped ventilation to stop feeding the fire and to keep it from spreading.

Pacino slid down the ladder’s smooth stainless steel rails, his boots thumping on the middle level deck as he exited the alcove for the ladderway and ran forward, pausing only to grab an emergency breathing mask, pulling it on over his head, this mask a fireproof covering that protected his entire head, with a large opening for vision, the hose feeding the mask at the front leading down to a regulator meant to be strapped to a person’s belt. Pacino adjusted the mask on his face, immediately choking from lack of air. He plugged the high-pressure hose fitting at the end into a recessed manifold in the overhead and took a breath. The regulator was working, the hose feeding canned, dry air into the mask, but it was life-giving air nonetheless. He clipped the regulator to his belt, took a deep breath, unplugged from the air manifold and ran down the passageway to the hatch to the first compartment, which Varney or Ahmadi had shut to contain the smoke.

Pacino rotated the hatch latch to the open position and forced the hatch open. He stepped inside, the temperature inside at least ten degrees hotter than the second compartment, which was a bad sign. He reached up to find the air manifold by feel, and realized that his wandering the ship and memorizing the air manifold locations had been a good investment. He could barely see in the dense smoke as he unplugged from the aft manifold and walked forward, the dense smoke forcing him to feel his way past the rack-stowed weapons to the forward portside console. The console was lit by a dull red glow from the lower port torpedo tube, tube six. Which had a tube-loaded Shkval supercavitating torpedo. The same volatile weapon that had exploded in a torpedo tube of the Russian submarine Kursk, causing every weapon aboard to detonate, taking the sub to the bottom and leading to the deaths of all hands. Pacino plugged in his hose at the manifold above the torpedo control console.

“We need to jettison that Shkval!” Pacino shouted to Varney and Ahmadi, his voice muffled by the air mask.

“Tube six’s outer door is jammed,” Varney shouted back, his voice strained and difficult to understand from behind his gas mask. “Probably from whatever we hit when we surfaced.”

“Did you flood the tube?”

“Internal tube pressure is too high, Patch! We had to vent the tube to the compartment atmosphere to lower pressure, but the torpedo must be on fire inside and it’s boiling what water is in the tube with a higher pressure than the seawater side.”

“Let’s get a firehose and hook it up to the outlet of the tube drain valve and flush the tube that way. That could cool it down.”

“Patch,” Varney said, exasperated, “there’s no way to flange a firehose into the drain piping!”

“You got duct tape?” Pacino asked. Varney nodded. “Then you got a way. Meanwhile, I’m going to central — I’ll get the boat down to test depth. The pressure will help flood the tube. Just watch the depth gauge and be ready to shut the drain valve, vent valve and turn off the hose when we get to thirty meters. If we get lucky, the outer door might be able to be opened when we’re deep.”

Pacino ran aft to the compartment hatch, and opened it and ducked into the second compartment. Chiefs Goreliki, Albanese and Kim were standing by, all in gas masks, their eyes wide and questioning. “Chiefs,” Pacino ordered, “get in there and get a firehose nozzle duct taped to the tube six drain piping, use an entire goddamned roll of duct tape, I don’t care, and get that hose pressurized and flood that tube! Lieutenant Varney is in charge at the scene.”

The chiefs ducked through the circular hatchway while Pacino ran aft to the ladderway, up the stairs to the upper level, past The Million Valve Manifold into central control. He was puffing hard from the exertion as he plugged his hose into a manifold over pos two.

“OIC, submerge the boat to test depth. We need the pressure to help us flood tube six.”

“Grip, all ahead full, turns for twelve,” Dankleff barked at Aquatong at the ship control station, “right full rudder, steady course three-three-zero, and ten-degree dive on the bowplanes. Patch, open the ballast tank vents.”

Pacino ran to The Million Valve Manifold and operated the valves controlling the ballast tank vents, getting the forward vents open. Pacino could hear the blasting noise of the venting, louder than the dull roar of what had to be the burning of the supertanker. He operated the valves to open the aft vents.

The deck had started to tilt downward, more every second. The deck was inclined downward twenty degrees and getting steeper. He could hear the hull above him and around him groan as the pressure of the deep sea squeezed it. In the central command post, Dankleff stood overlooking Grip Aquatong at the ship control station while holding a phone up to his fireproof hood. He saw Pacino and hung up the phone.

“They’re flooding tube six, or trying to, and that bitch of a Shkval is boiling every ounce of water they’re putting in there. It’s filling the compartment with steam and the pressure is rising. I doubt you could open the hatch to get in there now.”

“We can vent it to the second compartment if we have to. Is there still smoke?”

Dankleff picked up the phone again and dialed the torpedo room. “Varney, do you still have smoke?” Dankleff nodded. “Okay, good.” He looked at Pacino. “No more smoke and the tube’s not red-hot anymore. I think we’re safe to ditch the breathing air. Better save it for some future casualty.”

“God forbid,” Pacino said, removing his hood. The air in central control was hot and stuffy and smelled of smoke.

“Three hundred meters,” Aquatong said, pulling up on the control yoke and flattening the ship’s angle.

Dankleff picked up the shipwide announcing microphone. “All hands, discontinue use of emergency air breathing apparatus with the exception of the torpedo room.”

Pacino grabbed the phone and dialed up the torpedo room.

“Torpedo room, Varney.” His voice was still distorted by the air mask.

“We’re deep, try to open tube six and report,” Pacino said. He waited and found Dankleff looking at him, holding up his hands with his fingers crossed. Pacino nodded and listened to the background noise of the torpedo room, suddenly hearing a cheer in the room.

“Tube six door is open!” Varney yelled. “Trying to eject the Shkval now.”

“Tube door’s open,” Pacino said to Dankleff. Dankleff shot him back a thumbs-up.

The deck jumped as the tube was fired from forward.

“Tube six fired,” Varney said over the phone. As Pacino opened his mouth to congratulate Varney, an explosion sounded from forward and tossed him to the deck. On the way down, Pacino hit his face on the pos two console’s horizontal section and the room went black.

Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev’s eye had gotten so bad that pus was starting to leak out from behind the eye patch. First, it caught the attention of First Officer Lebedev, then Navigator Maksimov, both who turned from their consoles to fuss about him, but he’d waved them off, absorbing the stream of foul-smelling liquid with a wadded-up amount of tissue paper from a roll that hung on a special holder in between his console and the center console. But Lebedev had evidently called the medic, because Chief Ship Petty Officer Chaykovsky hurried up to Alexeyev’s station and bent to talk to him.

“Let me see, Captain,” he said quietly, holding up a flashlight. Alexeyev nodded and the doc pulled up the eye patch and shone his light into Alexeyev’s eye. Alexeyev didn’t see the light. “Captain, it’s totally infected. You could lose your eye. You need an immediate medical evacuation.”

“Doc, are you even aware of what’s going on here?” Alexeyev pulled out the soaked gauze under his patch and tossed it into a small garbage kit at his knee under the console, and wadded up more of the tissue paper to stuff under the eye patch. “In case you haven’t noticed, I have ten torpedoes inbound, any one of which ends our day in a very nasty fashion.”

The medic stood erect. “Yes, Captain. Sorry, Captain.” Chaykovsky sniffed the air. “Captain, with you turning off all atmospheric control equipment, we only have hours before the carbon dioxide levels got completely toxic, and not to mention our oxygen levels are down. Do you feel the drowsiness? Drowsiness, in the middle of a fight?”

“Look at the bright side, Doc. If the oxygen level is low, it won’t sustain a fire. And the drowsiness is actually helping us. Otherwise the crew’s level of adrenaline would be causing near-panic right now. Even in me.”

“If you say so, sir. Good luck to you.”

“May God look kindly on us all today, Doc,” Alexeyev said as the medic left. He looked at his console, which showed the output of the high frequency under ice and mine detection sonar, which was showing — or trying to show — what was happening with the incoming torpedoes, but the unit was good at short range, not far distant, and if a torpedo got close, it would be all over anyway.

So far the day had not gone his way. He’d fired two torpedoes in slow transit stealth mode, one targeted at the American escort Virginia-class submarine, the second at the Panther. Neither submarine should have detected them until their hulls were opened. But the damned Virginia had almost immediately fired countermeasure torpedoes that destroyed the one headed for her, and at first it had seemed the second unit had homed in on the Panther, and the huge double explosion from the north had the crew in the central command post cheering until he’d quieted them with a brutal reprimand and a murderous stare from his good eye. But, inexplicably, not long after the explosions, they detected steam flow, steam turbine startups and then the incoming UGST Russian torpedoes, these much quieter than the torpedoes the Americans had employed, and these worried Alexeyev. In the minutes after their launch, two loud active sonar pulses were emitted by the American submarine, and soon after that it launched four weapons, presumably Mark 48 ADCAP versions. That made ten torpedoes coming for Kazan.

In response, Alexeyev had ordered twelve Futlyar Fizik-2 torpedoes launched in countermeasure mode to go up against the incoming ten, but now he shook his head. All these torpedoes targeting each other just wasted weapons, and soon the torpedo room would run out. And then what the hell would he do, run like a woman chased by pillagers? His torpedo room loadout had been 24 Futlyar Fizik-2 torpedoes, of which twelve were gone. He could get out another twelve in two minutes, he thought, saving two weapons for the trip home in case someone unfriendly awaited them during their transit.

The good news was that explosions were happening in the sea between Kazan and the two target submarines. Their offensive weapons were falling to Alexeyev’s defensive ones. But no warrior, he thought, ever won a battle with a shield. It took a sword. However, up to now, it had been as his mentors had taught him—“Georgy, you must fight the alligator that is closest to your boat.” Now that that alligator was soon to be gone, it was time to launch an offensive.

Alexeyev deeply regretted he didn’t have the weapon loadout of Novosibirsk or Voronezh, since both had been loaded with two Kalibr nuclear-tipped antisubmarine cruise missiles, and the only units Kazan had taken to sea were conventional missiles, for use against hostile surface ships. There had been no time on this emergency sortie to sea to load better antisubmarine weapons. His only antisubmarine weapons were the Futlyar torpedoes, but heaven help them, they had to be enough.

Heaven indeed. Alexeyev had never been a religious man, but what was the saying, there are no atheists in foxholes? He hadn’t prayed once in his adult life, but had watched as Natalia had sank to her knees and prayed devotedly to God every night before they went to bed, which he’d always thought was bizarre, because when her prayers were over, she did things that no churchgoer would want to know about. Still, when he’d watched her, he’d wondered if he were missing something. Maybe, he thought, this would be a good time to pray.

“Captain? Captain!”

Alexeyev realized he’d shut his eyes in concentration and First Officer Lebedev thought he’d fallen asleep. As if he’d sleep during a damned battle, he thought in irritation.

“What?”

“We should launch, sir, Futlyar torpedoes in offensive mode, recommend six at high-speed-of-approach, full active and wake homing enabled.”

“Madam First, we will fire twelve. Maximum firing rate. Start now.” For a moment he’d actually forgotten that what he’d decided in his mind hadn’t been communicated to Lebedev. Maybe Natalia’s complaints about him living inside his own head had some merit. But a thought for another day. Today, there were two enemy submarines to kill.

He smiled to himself. Kill them he would, and then, finally, it would be time to go home. Ten days. Just ten days from home. Home.

But then it occurred to him that nothing waited for him at home but a lonely, empty apartment. And a lonely, empty life. Damn that Natalia, damn her to Hell.

Mercer sounded worried. “Torpedoes in the water from Master One. I’m getting them every ten seconds. Recommend another active pulse.”

There was an audible bang from the south.

“What the hell was that?” Romanov asked.

Mercer shook his head. “Smaller detonation than a torpedo, but it’s from the bearing to the Panther.”

Seagraves frowned at Romanov. “That’s not good,” he said. “Put out another ping, Nav.”

“Mercer, ping active,” Romanov ordered.

After the roaring, screeching noise of the active sonar pulse, the circular display’s expanding green circle hit the Panther south of them, then Master One and what had to be a dozen or more torpedoes in between Panther and Master One, with at least six or eight blips that seemed less solid, somewhat blurry, and larger than the torpedo return blips but smaller than Panther.

“What’re those?” Romanov asked Mercer, pointing.

“Probably torpedo explosions, Nav. Bubbles, foam, turbulence from a countermeasure mode torpedo’s warhead going off.”

Romanov stood back a few feet to see the display and think. She looked at Seagraves and Quinnivan. “We need to see if those torpedo launches are defensive or an attack on us and Panther.”

“Ping again,” Seagraves ordered.

“Mercer, ping active,” Romanov ordered the sonarman.

Another blasting sonar ping was broadcast out into the sea. In the confusion of all the torpedoes in between the combatants, one group of torpedoes had advanced much faster than the previous weapons. They were headed northward. Toward Vermont. And Panther.

“Whoa,” Romanov said. She looked at Seagraves. “Recommend we run north at flank while loading more Mark 48s in CMT mode.”

“Clear datum north at flank,” Seagraves ordered.

“Pilot, right full rudder, steady course north, all ahead flank!” Romanov ordered. The deck began to shake as the ship’s velocity rose to maximum speed.

“In the firecontrol party,” Seagraves said, “intentions are to launch eight Mark 48s in CMT mode, aim point five thousand yards south of us, passive circlers. Firing point procedures, tubes one through four.”

“What’s going on with Panther?” Romanov asked, looking at the active display on the command console.

“Ping again,” Seagraves said as the attack center and the weapons control console set up to launch the four Mark 48s in countermeasure mode.

The BQQ-10 sonar set barked out another loud pulse.

Quinnivan stared hard at the display. “Panther looks dead in the water.”

Romanov bit her lower lip. “Is it possible he’s hovering, trying to prevent presenting an up or down Doppler effect on a torpedo sonar pulse?”

“Playing possum? We’ve always wondered if that would work,” Quinnivan said.

“It would work on a Mark 48,” Romanov said. “Plus, if they’re dead in the water, there’s no wake for the torpedo’s wake homing sensor to zero in on.”

“Still a big iron hull, though,” Seagraves said. “It still disturbs the magnetic field. If the torpedo is good, it could still home in on a hovering submarine.”

“What if Panther’s not playing possum?” Romanov asked, frowning. “What if it got knocked out by that last smaller explosion? We don’t know what that explosion was. There were no torpedoes near her. Maybe something went wrong.”

Anthony Pacino could feel his face on the cold wood floor, blood flowing from a deep gash on his cheek, his face throbbing in pain.

He opened one eye, the pooled blood partially congealed, sticking his face to the floor of his bedroom.

He was six years old.

He was wearing his favorite pajamas with the pattern of dolphins swimming together.

Downstairs, his mother was screaming at his father.

It was December.

Almost Christmas.

And his mother was furious at his father for leaving on his submarine Devilfish to go on a secret mission. It was hard to tell what made her more mad, that Daddy was leaving, or that he couldn’t tell her why it was so urgent to go now, just before the holiday that they’d all been planning for months.

His bedroom door opened and his father came in, dropping a large duffel bag on the floor. Anthony Pacino pulled his face out of the blood, the skin of his face trying to stick to the messy puddle. His father didn’t seem to notice. He stooped down and stroked Anthony’s hair, ignoring the remnants of the blood.

“I have to go, little man,” the older Pacino said gently. He was wearing his service dress blue uniform. There was a gold dolphin emblem and ribbons over his left pocket, a gleaming gold capital ship command pin below his ribbons. He wore his officer’s cap, with the gold laurel leaves on the brim. On his father’s sleeves were three gold stripes. “We have a very important mission, Anthony. I hate to leave you, but I have to go.”

“Where are you going, Daddy? Are you going to the North Pole again?”

A look crossed his father’s face, and Anthony could tell his father was trying to decide whether to speak the truth or not. Finally he nodded.

“Are you going there to help Santa? Is he in trouble?”

Again the older Pacino debated telling the truth, and again he nodded slowly. “It’s a very bad situation, Anthony,” he said gravely.

Anthony Pacino nodded at his father. “I understand, Daddy. Be careful.”

His father hugged him and kissed his forehead despite the blood, stood up, grabbed the duffel bag and turned at the door to look down at him. There were tears in his father’s eyes. It was the first time the younger Pacino had ever seen his father cry. The heavy footfalls receded as his father went down the hall and down the stairs to the middle level, then continued to the lower level. Anthony could hear a car door slam, then the sound of a powerful engine starting. The wheels shrieked at his father roared off down the beachfront road in Sandbridge, Virginia.

Anthony pulled himself upright and tried to walk to his bedroom door. He stood, wobbling a bit as he stepped to the door and opened it. A dim light came into his room. He stepped through the door into the softly lit restaurant and bar of the Grafton Street Pub and Grill on Massachusetts Avenue across from Harvard’s campus. The sepia-colored hanging lamps lent the establishment a beautiful glow, the dark pub quiet in the Sunday summer evening, most of the Harvard and MIT undergrads and graduate students gone for the summer, the ones remaining hungover and back in their dorms, apartments or libraries preparing for a summer session Monday, leaving only the usual patrons, like Pacino himself and Carolyn Alameda.

He felt a soft, warm female hand in his. He looked up at Carrie Alameda, the love of his life, who was sweeping her glorious dark hair off her shoulder and smiling down at him. He looked down and saw he was still wearing his dolphin pajamas. His feet were still bare. And his face was still bloody. A server smiled at Carrie and led them to their favorite booth beneath an hourglass-shaped lamp, where the light was mostly soft except directly under the lamp, the small circle of brightness allowing menu reading.

Pacino looked across the table at Alameda. Their waitress, gorgeous Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov, resplendent in starched service dress whites, with full medals and a ceremonial sword, brought over a round of drinks without asking. A Merlot for Carolyn, an eighteen-year-old Macallan scotch for Pacino. Rachel Romanov walked away, back toward the bar. Pacino looked over at Carrie, hoping the blood on his face wouldn’t disgust her, or his dolphin pajamas give her pause, but she just smiled at him.

“Are you having your usual?” he asked. “That blackened chicken wreck?”

“I love that blackened chicken. It reminds me of being here with you. And that, in turn, makes me feel very romantic, Anthony.”

For a moment, he wasn’t sure what she meant. He looked at the menu. “I think I’ll have the usual.”

“Grafton burger again?” she asked, smiling at him and holding his hand.

Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov came back to the table to take their orders. Carolyn asked her what tonight’s specials were.

Rachel Romanov smiled. “We have a succulent Shkval torpedo that has been carefully sautéed in onions and tube-loaded in tube five. It’s completely functional. If you get the tube door open, it will take care of things quite nicely.”

Alameda looked at Romanov. “What if the tube door is jammed?”

“Oh, it’s no problem at all,” Romanov said, smiling at Carolyn Alameda. “Anthony here just has to take his boat shallow, then back to test depth, then shallow again — lather, rinse, repeat — and that tube door will open right up.”

“Anthony,” Carolyn said, her expression serious. “I think you should order the Shkval. Shoot it at the position of the firing submarine. Hit it with active sonar first, get its position, and launch that Shkval at it. It will end the battle.”

“End the battle?” he said, raising a blood-encrusted eyebrow at her. “You said ‘end the battle,’ not ‘win the battle.’ What does that mean?”

She looked at him with fondness. “There’s no winning this battle, Anthony. You’re up against — what did the Russians call it?”

Romanov interjected to help Carolyn Alameda. “They called it the supreme attack submarine on the planet.”

“Exactly,” Carrie said. “The best you can hope for is making the battle stop.”

He nodded at her, and looked at Rachel Romanov. “I think I’ll take the Shkval torpedo,” he said, taking a sip of his scotch, hoping no one in the bar would object to a six-year-old in dolphin pajamas — with a face covered in blood — drinking eighteen-year-old scotch.

Surprising him, Rachel Romanov sank down to her knees and looked at Carolyn Alameda. The two women locked eyes. Carolyn spoke first.

“Rachel, will you take good care of him?” she asked, glancing toward Pacino.

Romanov nodded solemnly and said to Carolyn, “I’ll take great care of him. He’ll want for nothing.”

Carrie Alameda wiped a tear from her eye, and looked over at Romanov and held out her hand.

“Thank you, Rachel. God bless you.”

And Rachel Romanov replied, “May God look kindly on us all today.” With that, she rose from her knees and disappeared toward the kitchen.

“Anthony?” Alameda asked, but Pacino was still stunned from watching the exchange between the two beautiful women, one of them dead, the other seven thousand miles away.

“Yes, Carrie?”

“Why didn’t your step-mother come to my funeral?”

Pacino stared at her. He’d never considered the question. He’d been too absorbed in Alameda’s death to realize he’d been at Carrie’s funeral with only his father and mother, not his stepmother Colleen, the woman who had been there on the Explorer II when he had been revived after his near death experience.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she and my father were having problems.”

Carrie nodded. “So it goes,” she said. “If I hadn’t died, eventually we’d have gotten married, and we’d have fought over money, and years later, there would have been a bitter divorce. I would have hated you. You would have hated me.”

He nodded, sensing she told the truth. “But we’ll always have the Grafton,” he said, as if he were Humphrey Bogart saying, we’ll always have Paris.

She smiled sweetly and held both his hands in hers. “Yes, Anthony. We’ll always have the Grafton.”

He downed the rest of the scotch, then looked at her. “The Shkval in tube five?” he asked.

Carolyn Alameda nodded seriously. “The Shkval in tube five. But go active first. Nail his position down, solid. Do it for me, Anthony.”

He nodded at her. “I will, Carrie. And Carrie?”

“Yes, Anthony?”

“I miss you. I miss you so much. You left my life so suddenly.”

“I had to go, Anthony. Just like you do now.”

She waved her hand at him and the Grafton Street Pub and Grill evaporated and the central command post of the Russian-built Iranian submarine Panther appeared to take its place.

36

AOIC Anthony Pacino pulled his face off the deck, the bloody puddle sticking to his cheek. He felt his face, his hand coming back bloody. He wiped his hand on his coveralls and looked up at OIC Dieter Dankleff.

“What the hell happened?”

“Oh, Lipstick, nice of you to show up to the party,” Dankleff said sarcastically. “While you were out, the Shkval we jettisoned exploded and the shock caused another reactor scram. We did a fast recovery startup, and for your information, there’s a Russian torpedo out there chasing us. While it’s true, our good friends on the Vermont launched Mark 48s in countermeasure mode against the Russian fish, there’s no guarantee they’ll work. So, you know, the odds say it’s a long shot for us to last long enough to see another sunrise.”

“Tube five,” Pacino said, rubbing his head.

“What about it? All our tube doors are stuck shut after we ejected tube six’s Shkval after the motherfucker decided to explode about a foot away from the bow.”

“What’s our depth?”

“A hundred meters,” Aquatong said from the ship control station.

“U-Boat, take her to four hundred meters, then back to twenty, then back down to four hundred, back to twenty. Cycle it five times, maybe six. It’ll unstick the torpedo tube door to tube five.”

“What makes you so sure? And why tube five?”

“The Dominatrix Navigatrix at the Grafton Pub told me,” Pacino said, holding up his palm. “Don’t ask. Just do it.” He left control and hurried to the sonar room, where Albanese stared glumly at his display. The deck inclined steeply downward and the hull steel groaned as it adjusted to the pressure of the deep.

“We need to ping active,” Pacino said. “Wait for my word from central command.”

The deck inclined steeply upward as central command pulled the boat back shallow, and an eerie stomach-sinking feeling came to Pacino as the deck once again tilted downward, the submarine plunging back deep.

“These angles and dangles — we’re trying to unstick the torpedo tube doors.”

Pacino hurried to the ladderway and slid down to the middle level, then forward in the steeply inclined passageway to the hatch to the torpedo room. The deck was level again as Pacino opened the hatch, then inclined steeply upward, the angle helping the heavy steel of the hatch clang into the latch. Pacino stepped through the hatchway into the compartment, half jogging up the steep slope of the central catwalk to the port console, where Lieutenant Varney stood, frowning at the array of lights and controls, Captain Ahmadi beside him.

“Tube five,” Pacino breathed, winded from the run from central command.

“What about it?”

“I want it ready in all respects. Power up the Shkval, pressurize the tube and prepare to open the outer door.”

“Didn’t anyone tell you,” Varney said. “All our tube doors are stuck.”

The deck tilted steeply downward again, the hull screaming and shrieking above them, five fast pops coming from forward to aft.

“Trust me,” Pacino said. “Flood and pressurize five.”

Varney opened the flood valve to tube five with the vent open. When the tube vent could be heard spilling seawater, he shut the vent valve. The deck flattened out at what must be test depth.

Pacino reached for a phone. “Central command, torpedo room. Steady on depth twenty meters.”

The deck tilted upward and Pacino fell into the port tube rack, having to steady himself with a rack-mounted hand-hold. After a few minutes, the deck leveled off again.

“Try tube five’s outer door now,” he ordered Varney. Varney punched a fixed function key. A green bar-shaped light went out and a red light shaped like a doughnut lit up.

“Goddamn, Lipstick, you’re a genius,” Varney said. “Tube door’s open!”

“Power it up, Boozy,” Pacino said. “We’re going to send it as a nice present to that Yasen-M that’s shooting at us.”

“You got it, AOIC. Good luck to us.”

Pacino turned and looked at Varney. The next words out of his mouth surprised him. “May God look kindly on us all today.” He spun and ran out the hatch to the second compartment passageway.

Lieutenant Commander Al Spichovich spoke up from the weapons control console. “Captain, Coordinator, OOD, that’s it.” He took off his headset and stood up from his console. “That’s the last torpedo. If Master One shoots again, we’re helpless.”

Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov looked at him and nodded, then turned back to her command console display. If the last active sonar pulse’s display were to be believed, all of the offensive torpedoes launched at Vermont and Panther had been neutralized by Vermont’s Mark 48s. She looked up at Seagraves and Quinnivan. “Master One’s quiet,” she said. “Maybe he’s out of weapons as well.”

Petty Officer Mercer turned from his BQQ-10 stack. “OOD, I’ve got strange transients from Panther.”

“Describe them, Sonar,” Romanov said to him, leaning over his seatback.

“For one thing, he’s on reactor power and running north at flank, but his hull is popping like crazy. Bang, bang, bang, Nav.”

Romanov looked at Quinnivan and shrugged. “I’ve got nothing,” she said.

It was then they all heard the sound, audible with the naked ear.

AOIC Anthony Pacino arrived in the central command post, Captain Ahmadi immediately behind him.

“Do you know how to program this thing?” Pacino asked. Ahmadi nodded. “U-Boat, order all stop, turn to the southwest and hover at this depth.”

Dankleff made the orders to Grip Aquatong at the ship control station, and the vibrations of the deck stopped, the ride becoming quiet again. Pacino stepped aft past The Million Valve Manifold to the sonar room.

“You ready, Whale?”

Chief Petty Officer Tom Albanese looked up at Pacino. “Goddamn, L-T, I sure could use a cigarette right now.”

“And I could use a couple of shots of Pappy Van Winkle,” Pacino said. “But regardless, are you set to go active?”

Albanese nodded, his face hardening. “Let’s do it, L-T.”

“Whale, ping active,” Pacino ordered.

Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev’s weapons status console told the bad news. They were down to their last two torpedoes, the reserve he’d promised the crew for the return trip to the Zapadnaya Litsa Naval Base. But after all the launches in defensive mode to keep Kazan alive, the battle had taken his entire weapon load. It was ridiculous. A single nuclear depth charge in a Kalibr cruise missile would have ended all this an hour ago. He could see now why the Americans had fired their nuclear cruise missiles at the Novosibirsk and Voronezh—there was no evading a cruise missile. One either found himself inside the blast damage radius or outside it, there was no middle ground.

He took a moment to wonder whether the Americans were similarly out of torpedoes. They’d been quiet for a few minutes. He looked up from his console to see First Officer Ania Lebedev leaning over to look at him.

“We have to make a choice, Captain,” she said. “Either fire the last two torpedoes or clear the area and break contact.”

“If we break contact, we’re admitting we lost,” Alexeyev said.

“Yes, Captain,” Lebedev said quietly.

“You know, Madam First, those Futlyar torpedoes are useless. I’d just as soon not carry them home and have to explain why we didn’t use them.”

Lebedev nodded, looking at him with sympathy. It must be his wrecked eye, he thought. She’d seen how bad it was the last time he’d replaced the wadding under the patch. Or, he thought, maybe she sensed something, something darker. He’d heard of people having premonitions about their own deaths. Could she be feeling something, their dark fate lumbering toward them, inescapable?

“Sonar Officer,” Alexeyev called to Senior Lieutenant Ilia Kovalev. “Do you still have contact with Panther and the Virginia-class?”

“Yes, Captain, but they are getting more distant. We should turn toward and head northward. And Captain, I have transients from Panther for the last few minutes. His hull is groaning and creaking, then popping. I think he’s changing depth, maximum to mast-broach depth, then back again.”

“Why the hell would he do that?” Lebedev said to Alexeyev.

“He’s trying to unstick a torpedo tube door. That explosion at his bearing, it must have been his own weapon he was trying to jettison. Probably jammed up his doors.”

“There’s no coming back from that, Captain,” Lebedev said. “He’s as good as dead.”

“Agreed. Boatswain, right ten degrees rudder, steady course north. Weapons Officer, tube load the last two torpedoes and make them ready for launch.”

Alexeyev re-buckled his seat belt at the console, his insistence during action stations that everyone be strapped in, but he’d unbuckled it when they had gotten down to two torpedoes, and he had been about to stretch his legs and walk to the navigation chart table when the sonar ping came from the north, the ping long and sustained. “Who pinged that?” he asked the sonar officer.

Kovalev answered from the sonar-and-sensor console. “Captain, it was the Panther.”

“Why would he ping active if his torpedo tube doors are stuck?” Alexeyev asked Lebedev. Her eyes grew wide with alarm. “Because they aren’t stuck anymore. Captain, turn south and put on maximum turns!”

“Boatswain, right full rudder, all ahead full, to nuclear control, fast speed pumps and one hundred percent reactor power!”

The deck tilted dramatically as the Kazan executed a snap-roll in her turn to the south.

AOIC Anthony Pacino mashed the trigger fixed function key on the vertical section of pos two and tube five fired, the deck vibrating and jumping just slightly, the weapon launch much smoother than from a U.S. submarine.

Almost immediately the torpedo’s propellant ignited, the sound of it deafening, and the underwater rocket sailed off into sea toward its designated target, the Russian Yasen-M.

“Dear Yasen-M,” Pacino said. “This evening’s special is a Shkval torpedo, sautéed in onions. Eat it all, you Russian bastard.”

Petty Officer First Class Jay Mercer was the first to hear it. “Captain, Coordinator, OOD, I have a rocket launch from the bearing to the Panther.”

“The hell do you mean, a rocket launch?” Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov asked.

“It’s definitely a supercavitating torpedo, Nav. Look at the broadband trace.”

The broadband waterfall display grew a sound that was so loud and so fast that it was ten degrees wide.

“Jesus, Captain, that’s a Shkval torpedo and we’re between it and Master One. Pilot, all ahead flank, left ten degrees rudder, steady course west!”

The Shkval from tube five had ignited its self-oxidizing fuel less than two minutes before and was now flying through the sea on a one-way trip to the target.

The torpedo looked like an old-fashioned air-to-air missile, extremely pointy at the nose, more of a rocket than a torpedo. At its aft end, it had a bell-opening gimbal-mounted nozzle, the flanks of the torpedo featuring thrusters every forty-five degrees around the circumference. As the torpedo had accelerated, the pointed nose caused the water to boil to steam and the steam bubble grew to encompass the entire weapon, the steam vapor coating eliminating the skin friction of the water and allowing the unit to speed up beyond 300 knots as it flew toward the target.

Time of flight was minimal. Most of the torpedo was just a fuel tank. The warhead was relatively small, and truth be told, it was redundant to the kinetic energy of the torpedo hitting a submarine hull.

At 1252:25.580 UTC time, the target grew in the seeker blue laser window from a speck to a form so big it blocked out all else.

At 1252:25.757 UTC, the torpedo hit the hull and the warhead exploded.

By 1252:25.905 UTC, the torpedo no longer existed but for a high temperature plasma from the warhead explosion.

At 1252:26.005 UTC, the jagged rip in the submarine’s hull in the third compartment opened up, the energy from the detonation blasting into the compartment.

1252:26:127 UTC: The explosion’s fireball was extinguished by the massive flooding into the compartment.

1252:26:232 UTC: Three control rods in the central control group of the reactor jumped as their control rod drive mechanisms shattered from the shock, the explosion and the violent water flow. The pressure inside the reactor blew the control rods out to the top of the core.

1252:26:345 UTC: The reactor power went past 3000 % in the overpowering from the control rod ejections and the primary water loop could no longer accept the energy of the core, and the pressure inside the reactor vessel grew to five times the design pressure.

1252:26:398 UTC: The pressure build-up inside the reactor vessel ruptured all the hold-down bolts at once and the heavy pressure vessel lid blew off into the overhead and smashed into the insulation covering the hoop steel of the compartment, rupturing a steam line coming from a steam generator before the lid started to fall back on the reactor core.

1252:26:436 UTC: The power increase in the core blew the nuclear fuel all through the compartment, the pressure in the compartment rising past its design pressure, the pressure rise stopping the flooding but collapsing the shielded tunnel that allowed human access from compartment two to compartment four.

1252:26.598 UTC: The pressure fell as melted fuel pooled below in the compartment bilges, and with the lower pressure, the flooding began again. A small rupture in the forward water-tight bulkhead to the second compartment opened, and seawater began to flood the second compartment.

1252:26.866 UTC: All personnel throughout the ship had been thrown into their consoles or across the spaces they occupied. The deck had tilted so far to port that the deck would seem more like a wall.

1252:26.943 UTC: Water from the third compartment flowed swiftly into the second compartment, the water running along the deck of the lower level and splashing into the space below the deckplates, into the battery well.

1252:27.096 UTC: All personnel aft of frame 208 stopped breathing as the massive shock, steam leak from the secondary loop and the radiation level at ten thousand times the normal dose irradiated the fourth compartment. The high radiation level was somewhat attenuated by the shielding of the forward bulkhead of the third compartment, yet still invaded the second compartment and mercilessly irradiated the crew in the central command post.

1252:28.304 UTC: The deck rolled back to normal but the bow had begun to point downward and the ship took on a five degree down angle, the depth rapidly increasing from the speed they’d been going before the explosion.

The roaring of the supercavitating torpedo was deafening as it roared past, the noise going deeper in pitch as it sped past, and not long after a series of loud explosions came from the bearing of Master One.

Romanov looked at Quinnivan.

“Raise a glass to our lads on the Panther,” Quinnivan said.

“Thank God for them,” Romanov breathed. “Pilot, all stop, left ten degrees rudder, steady course two-one-zero, mark speed ten knots.”

“What are you doing, Nav?” Seagraves asked.

“No sense running north now, Captain. We should go to the site of the sinking and see if anyone survived that. Or at least confirm the kill.”

Seagraves nodded. “When you get close, take her up.”

Romanov nodded. Maybe, like that submarine Novosibirsk, there would be an escape chamber.

Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev pushed himself off his console in the dark, his head pounding. He reached under his console for the battle lantern, clicked it on, and unbuckled his five-point harness. He shined the lantern in the room and shouted, “who is awake?” It was then he realized he was deaf. Whatever it was that had caused the noise, probably a Shkval from the Panther, had hit them, and the explosions had deafened him.

There were a few people moving. He realized shouting was futile. Everyone else would be as deaf as he was. A second battle lantern came on. He waved the beam of his battle lantern to the aft door, to the direction of the ladder to the escape chamber. He couldn’t say exactly why his instincts were screaming at him to get the crew to the chamber, but he’d lived with this ship since its first hoop of steel was laid down in the drydock. He’d served as its weapons officer, first officer, and finally as captain. He knew her as well as a long-time husband knows his wife’s body. And Kazan was dying. If she were not already dead. As were all of them if they didn’t abandon ship.

He hated the sounds of those words: abandon ship. He shook his head and vaulted out of his seat, his head spinning so hard with dizziness that he had to grab a handhold, hard, to keep from falling. And it was either his own vertigo or the deck had done another list. He waved his light to the aft door again. Three people started toward him. Alexeyev opened the door and the massive smoke came into the room. The passageway was solid smoke. He decided against returning to his console for an air mask, but instead pushed the half dozen central command survivors aft down the passageway. He knew the exact number of steps to the ladder.

Gathered at the ladder bottom were several other crewmen who had had the same idea as Alexeyev, several of them with battle lanterns. As Alexeyev grabbed for the ladder, an explosion from directly beneath them rocked the ship, flipping the deck to a twenty-degree roll.

“What was that?” It was Svetka Maksimov’s voice, the navigator. Alexeyev could hear, just barely, he realized.

Alexeyev sniffed the smoky air, the unmistakable smell of chlorine detectable. “Dammit, battery explosion! Everybody to the chamber!”

One of the crewmen under the hatch had opened the mechanism, the hydraulics self-contained and local. God help them all if the explosive bolts failed, Alexeyev thought.

In two more minutes, the air was completely contaminated. Alexeyev was the last man standing in the passageway, shining his light fore and aft, to see if there were any more survivors, and he could see Pavlovsky come out of the door of the central command post and fall to the deck, gasping and coughing. Alexeyev dropped the battle lantern and lunged for the young electrical officer and pushed him to the ladder to the escape chamber.

“Help him up!” Alexeyev yelled, the crew pulling Pavlovsky into the chamber. Alexeyev took one last look at the smoke-filled passageway of his command, the supreme attack submarine on the planet, and tapped his ring on the ladder rung as a farewell, just before climbing the ten steps up into the escape chamber. As soon as he got in, Maksimov shut the hatch and pulled the lever to disconnect the chamber from the sinking submarine.

One last prayer, Alexeyev thought, realizing he’d prayed more today than in his entire life. Oh God, please let the explosive bolts fire and disconnect us from the ship.

Surfacing the Panther without air in the high-pressure banks had turned out to be more of a challenge than originally thought. Dankleff had had to have Aquatong use the ship’s speed and bowplanes and sternplanes to fly the ship to the surface, then raise the induction mast and start the air compressors to try to fill the air banks. It had taken a half hour to get enough air in the banks that they could blow main ballast, the air compressors still clanking away to refill the tanks after the blow. By the time Panther heaved to at the escape chamber, the USS Vermont was already there.

Pacino stood in the bridge cockpit on top of the conning tower and put a bullhorn to his lips.

“Ahoy, there, Vermont!”

Eisenhart was on the bridge of Vermont and shouted back. “About time you slackers got here. We’re loading them on your boat. Same idea as last time.”

“Did you radio for a chopper?”

“Yeah,” Eisenhart said. “Could be an hour or two to get it out here. Meanwhile, take these guys below and watch them.”

“We know the drill,” Pacino said. “You sending guys over to help?”

“We know the drill as well,” Eisenhart said. “We’re bringing two dozen guys over to help you watch the Russians.”

A half hour later, Pacino walked into the wardroom, looking mournfully over at the credenza. The coffee had finally run out and he felt drowsy already. The Russian crew sat shivering, their clothes wet from the swim over.

“I’m Lieutenant Anthony Pacino, United States Navy. Anyone here speak English?” Pacino asked.

“I do,” an older man said. He was the oldest of the survivors. He wore a black eye patch and had streaks of gray in his hair. His voice was oddly flat and disconnected. He must be in shock, Pacino thought. “Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev. I was captain of the Kazan. The submarine you sank. With a torpedo invented by us.”

Pacino sat down across from the Russian. “Sorry about that, Captain. It was nothing personal. Just business.”

Alexeyev looked over at Pacino with his good eye. “You know, we were down to only two torpedoes. I thought very seriously about breaking off contact and going home. Perhaps if I had, I wouldn’t be sitting here now.”

“Anything could have happened today,” Pacino said. “I almost couldn’t get the torpedo tube door opened.”

“If you hadn’t, I would have shot you with one of my last torpedoes. I believe the Virginia submarine — what did you call it, Vermont? — was out of weapons, so no countermeasures would have stopped my two. One for you.” Alexeyev pointed in the direction of the Vermont. “One for them. And then today would have ended very differently. I’d have been a hero. You’d be dead.”

Pacino nodded. “I wonder sometimes,” he said, “how much of this is destiny. Hell, Captain Alexeyev, I wonder if this, all of this, is truly real. One of my friends on this mission says that we’re all just living in a simulation, one of hundreds imagined by ourselves from the afterlife. If he’s correct, there’s probably scenarios where you did sink me today and went home the hero.”

“No offense, Lieutenant — what is it — Pacino? But I have to say, I wish I’d been living inside that scenario.”

“Do you mind if I ask you something tactical, Captain? No obligation to answer.”

“Go ahead Lieutenant.”

“Well, sir, how did you know we’d hug the coast at the Cape of Good Hope rather than going wide by, say, the Antarctic coastline and enter the Atlantic that way?”

Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev looked at Pacino with his good eye. “You’re out of food. Am I right?”

Pacino returned the Russian’s look. “Do I look well-fed to you, Captain?”

Alexeyev laughed. “No. You look like you’re starving. I figured your lack of rations would speak to you and you’d take the great circle route.”

“If I could, Captain, I’d offer you and your crew food. But we’re out of everything but peanut butter. The last of the crackers ran out this morning.”

“It is no matter, Lieutenant.”

The door of the wardroom rolled open. It was Dankleff.

“Chopper’s here,” he said. “Everybody to the forward hatch.”

Alexeyev stopped at the wardroom door and looked at Pacino and Dankleff. “You fought a hard battle, gentlemen,” he said. “You have my congratulations. And my respect. And despite what must be a severe punishment awaiting me for losing to you, I’m glad I didn’t kill you.”

Pacino smiled and shook the Russian’s hand. “Safe travels, Captain.”

Ten minutes later, Pacino stood next to Dankleff on the deck of the submarine Panther, watching the colossal helicopter accelerating and climbing toward its destination, Cape Town, the Russian survivors all aboard.

“Damn shame,” Pacino said. “You ever wonder what it would be like to take those guys out drinking? See what stories they have to tell?”

“Hell, Lipstick, I doubt any of their stories could compare to ours on this run.” Dankleff clapped Pacino twice on the shoulder. “Resupply helicopters will get here in twenty minutes. Tonight, Patch, it’s steak and lobster.”

“Sounds great, U-Boat. We damned well deserve it.”

“I asked if they could sneak some scotch into the rations. And some good vodka for Abakumov.”

“Damn, U-Boat, as always, you demonstrate a command ability equal to that of Seagraves.”

“Equal, hell. Exceeding. Just don’t tell Seagraves I said that. And after that resupply? We’ll see if this tub can submerge one more time and take us to the Bahamas.”

“Ah, the Bahamas,” Pacino said. “I like the sound of that. Funny drinks with little umbrellas.”

“And a funny female lieutenant commander and admiral’s aide, waiting for you?”

“U-Boat, I doubt she even remembers me.”