Dark Transit

23

Captain Second Rank Anastasia Isakova blinked hard, trying to become more alert. She’d had the first watch for almost four hours and was trying to make the adjustment from having had the afternoon watch.

She sat in the captain’s console seat, the far-left seat of the three seats of the command console, in the central command post. In front of her was a large flat panel display that could show anything from any of the other displays, whether ship control, sonar, battlecontrol, weapons control, communications or navigation. The console could be set to rotate through all available displays if desired, or it could be turned over to the AI system, the Second Captain, and left to have the Second Captain decide what was display-worthy. The number two and three screens in front of the seats to her right were selected to Second-Captain-discretion display modes, but Isakova insisted that her own screen show only what she herself selected. In her opinion, the Second Captain was a bit of a moron, or as she was fond of saying, AI — artificial intelligence — would be better named artificial idiocy.

Isakova was standing command duty officer watch for the midnight to 0600 watch run by Captain Lieutenant Maksimilian Kovalyov, who was the communications officer. Kovalyov was seated at the middle seat of the starboard side battlecontrol attack center console, where he liked to spend most of his watch, but he rotated through the sonar-and-sensor consoles on the port side or stood at the aft port navigation display as well.

The central command post of the Voronezh was startlingly large. The center of the room was occupied by the three-seat command console, with three large displays, with annunciators and phones set into the console between displays. Behind the command console, directly behind Isakova, was the number two periscope, the number one periscope beside it, behind the far-right seat of the command console. Behind the periscopes, the bulkhead was crowded with navigation equipment and electrical junction boxes, communication panels and bookshelves. The far aft starboard corner had a door that opened into the aft passageway. The starboard side of the room, on the aft end, was filled with the battlecontrol’s attack center, a long console with three seats in front of it, with eight large displays, arranged in two rows of four, an extended gauge panel above the top row. This console was manned only with the middle seat during normal steaming, a battlecontrol petty officer of the watch normally studying the displays, but the watch officer sometimes liked to station himself at the console so he could see all eight displays at once, rather than one at a time at the command console. With Kovalyov taking his normal seat, the displaced battlecontrol petty officer of the watch had taken the forward-most of the three seats.

Forward of battlecontrol, on the starboard side of the forward bulkhead, was a three-display console with two seats facing the displays, both seats occupied by the boatswains of the watch, controlling the ship’s bowplanes, sternplanes, rudder, auxiliary ship’s systems, complex ballast systems and the masts and antennae in the conning tower. To the left of the ship control console was a long slender credenza with the stand-behind under-ice sonar console, several navigation displays showing the health of the inertial navigation system and the status of navigation satellite downlinks when at periscope depth, with the upper center section occupied by two large flat panel screens, the left displaying the output of the number two periscope, the right tied into the number one scope. Farther to port, the credenza ended at the door leading forward. To the left of the door, on the forward port corner of the room, was the sonar-and-sensor console, the longest console in the central command post, with four seats placed facing the port side to attend to twelve large displays arranged in two rows of six, the horizontal section of the console jammed tight with keyboards, fixed function keys, trackballs and annunciator lights.

Aft of the sonar-and-sensor console was the navigation electronic chart table, a meter wide and two meters long, with navigation cabinets behind it on the port bulkhead, interrupted by the port aft door. Both aft doors led to a wide spot in the central passageway that led aft to the officer’s berthing and several equipment spaces, one for radio, one for sonar, another for battlecontrol. Isakova would usually spend much of the watch at the navigation chart, trying to imagine where the target submarines were in the Arabian Sea, but at this moment, she had just selected the navigation chart to display on her command console display. This ocean was vast, extending from the farthest south point of India to the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula and northward all the way to Pakistan and the Gulf of Oman.

At the battlecontrol console, Kovalyov’s tablet computer beeped. He looked away from the display screens to check it, then turned to Isakova.

“Madam First,” he said, “messages are in from our excursion to periscope depth. There’s one marked ‘personal for first officer.’”

They’d spent a half hour at periscope depth, only going deep ten minutes before, the surface rotten with shipping this close to the Indian coastline, Isakova’s time at the scope exhausting and sickening, the sea state high, the boat rocking hard in the heavy waves, while she took laser ranges to various surface contacts and fed them to the battlecontrol system, tracking them over time to make sure none of them got within a thousand meters, requiring two maneuvers to avoid the closest ones, Isakova finally lowering the scope and taking Voronezh deep as the third appeared inside the kilometer safety range.

Once they’d gone deep, she’d hoped there would be an intelligence update — perhaps a satellite sighting of the Panther or the American target submarine, unwisely surfacing. Without aircraft or surface ships thanks to the worm, there would be no eye-in-the sky of an antisubmarine warfare patrol plane or a surveillance drone. They’d have to hope for other intel, such as an intercepted message with some inkling of where they were and their course and speed. Or some human intelligence, perhaps one of the Americans consorting with a well-placed prostitute working the town of the submarine’s home base. But there was absolutely nothing. All that time at periscope depth, fighting the surface traffic, tossing in the damned waves, gone to waste.

“Send it to my tablet,” Isakova ordered. The message was switched to her pad computer, which beeped with a notification. She opened the message and read it, and no sooner had she closed out the message than her eyes filled with water. She blinked it back as hard as she could, finding a roll of tissue paper and wiping her eyes, suddenly aware that Kovalyov was staring at her.

The message had been from her mother, with whom she had been in a running cold war for over a decade over her supposedly “unwomanly insistence on joining the Navy.” But this message wasn’t cold at all, it was tender and full of empathy for her, because Mother knew full well that Isakova was close to her beloved father, and the message was sent to report that Father was lying on his deathbed, finally succumbing to the lung disease from the mineral insulation he’d worked with for fifty hard years at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and that at this point he wasn’t expected to live for more than a few days. He had hidden his illness from Isakova on her last visit, but she’d suspected he wasn’t himself. But now, here she was at sea, unable to rush to his bedside, and the knowledge settled into her soul that she’d seen her father alive for the last time.

She put her head in her hands, the unwelcome tears flooding into her palms. Daddy, she thought desperately, please don’t leave me. She was sobbing too hard to notice Kovalyov pick up the phone at the station between battlecontrol display two and display three and dial the commanding officer’s stateroom.

“Captain,” a sleepy Captain First Rank Boris Novikov answered, his voice laced with anxiety. After all, why would the watch officer call him when the command duty officer — Isakova — was stationed right there with him in the central command post?

“Sir,” Kovalyov whispered, “I think you need to come to central.”

“On my way.” Novikov clicked off.

Lieutenant Dieter Dankleff leaned over the chart table in the navigation chart room, walking dividers down a line drawn south from where they’d started the reactor and increased speed to thirty-one knots a half hour ago. The deck shook and trembled violently from the speed of their transit.

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino walked in and handed Dankleff a cup of coffee. “Something’s bothering me.”

“Dammit, again? And shouldn’t you be in the control room if we’re going flank?”

“Central command post, you mean? I’m not the one who laid out this submarine. Who puts the navigation chart in a closet outside the central command post? How can the officer of the deck figure out where the hell he is?”

“Who’s got the wheel?”

“Grip Aquatong. He’s good. He’s alert. Maybe a little scared.”

Dankleff laughed. “What, a big tough-guy armed-to-the-teeth SEAL commando is scared?”

“I told him all the things that can go wrong on a maximum speed run. A jam dive, for instance, that takes us below crush depth before he could recover.”

“That poor kid. You’re going to give him nightmares.”

“Better scared and alert than complacent and sleepy.”

“You said something was bothering you, Lipstick.”

Pacino half sat on a stool with a red leather cushion. “We have to slow back down.”

“What? You’re the one who wanted to get the hell out of Dodge and flank it out of here.”

“It’s not right,” Pacino said. “It’s not smart. We’re probably making more noise than a freight train on loose rails. This reactor system wasn’t sound-mounted. It wasn’t designed for stealth, it’s just a big test rig. We proved what we had to prove, that the Panther can haul ass if it absolutely has to. Now it’s time to get quiet again.”

“What happened to the Russians bragging that their Kilo-class was a quote, black hole in the ocean, unquote?”

“Yeah, a new one, the improved class. This thing is old. Hell, we were in grade school when this hull was laid down. And Kilos are quiet on the batteries, even this one. But blasting through the sea at thirty-one knots with a gigantic feed pump and a steam turbine bigger than a moving truck? We’re probably waking people up on either coastline of the entire damned Arabian Sea. Not to mention, Vermont’s top speed is just a little over the same speed we’re going right now. Which means all she can do is trail us with fast speed main coolant pumps, so even she’s not stealthy. The original plan had Vermont out in front of us, so any weapon she’d shoot wouldn’t home in on us. Now she’s behind us after we left her in the dust a half hour ago, in a tail chase.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“Shut down the plant and cruise deep on batteries, six knots. Vermont can get back out ahead of us. We can use our rudimentary sonar to search, but it won’t see much, and we don’t know how to use it even if it did. The Q-10 on the Vermont can scout the sea around us. When we get to the point the battery bank is depleted, instead of snorkeling, we restart the fast reactor, speed up to say, fifteen knots and charge the batteries. Once the batteries are back at a hundred percent, we shut down and cruise on the batteries again.”

“Now we’re back on the hundred-day transit. Maybe a little less. But still. And although we won’t run out of diesel, we will still need a rendezvous with one of those CIA tramp steamers or else we run out of food.”

“We’ll figure out the food situation later.”

“Got it. Understood. Shut down the reactor plant and take her to six knots, then. Hurry up.”

Pacino vanished back into the central command post, and soon the buzzing, rattling, trembling deck at their maximum speed run settled back down. Somehow, Dankleff had felt safer at thirty-one knots than he did at six, even if this speed on batteries were much quieter.

“OIC?” Chief Goreliki said from the door to the navigation room.

“Yeah?” Dankleff said, sipping his broiling hot coffee. “What is it, Chief?”

“With the radio passing self-checks, I’m thinking we should take it up to periscope depth and put up an antenna. Now that we’ve slowed, we won’t lose time by going to PD. We need to get a precise NavSat fix. And if I can grab the CommStar broadcast, anything from Vermont or ComSubFor will be in our messages. There might be intelligence we need to read. And if you feel like you can risk transmitting, you can tell Vermont about the two inbound Yasen-M submarines that Abakumov reported.”

Dankleff nodded. “Go tell Pacino that. See what he thinks.”

Dankleff recalculated their average speed. Sixteen hours at six knots, then eight hours at fifteen. Dammit, he thought, a speed-of-advance of only nine knots. He sighed, realizing he’d be losing his entire summer.

After twenty minutes on the batteries, Pacino came back in and plopped a notepad on the table. “Assuming we can transmit, I recommend we transmit that.” Chief Goreliki stood outside the room, waiting for Dankleff’s decision.

Dankleff read the draft message and nodded, adding a sentence at the end.

“Let’s take her to PD. First let’s try to receive the broadcast and get a NavSat fix. Then we’ll go through any messages for us. Scout the intelligence updates. Then if there’s nothing new, we’ll transmit this.”

“Periscope depth, aye, and grab the broadcast and a fix.”

Dankleff shook his head at the chart again as the deck inclined upward, the slight swaying of the deck a sign of rough seas topside. There was a thump as hydraulics raised the radio antenna. He walked into the central command post, where Pacino was doing slow circles on the aft periscope.

“Any contacts?”

“Two. Distant merchant ships by the look of their lights. Want to look?”

“Sure.”

“Low power, on the horizon, relative zero zero zero,” Pacino said, turning over the periscope.

Dankleff put his eye to the warm rubber of the eyepiece and scanned the dark horizon, lit weakly by moonlight that came down through an overcast sky. To the right, there was a surface ship, a supertanker, showing a green, starboard running light, with white lights aft. He was distant. Dankleff found the control to magnify the view, the magnification done with the left periscope grip. He clicked it up twice, and the merchant ship became larger, jumping in the view. He went back to low power and scanned the horizon again, seeing another merchant, this one far distant, barely showing up even in maximum magnification. He returned the periscope to point forward and handed it back to Pacino. “Low power, on the horizon, relative triple zero.”

Pacino took back the scope and continued slow sweeps of the horizon. Dankleff walked aft to the radio room, a small enclosure opposite the navigation room.

“Anything?” he asked Goreliki.

“Nothing for us.”

“We get a fix?”

Goreliki handed Dankleff a printout. He stepped across the passageway to the navigation alcove and plotted the fix, making a dot with a small circle around it and the time of the fix, then plotted their course leading from the dot. His dead reckoning had been off by over thirty miles. He went back to the radio room.

“Can you transmit?”

“We won’t really know until we get a reply,” Goreliki said. “But your message is coded in and ready to send.”

“Send it.”

Goreliki operated her screen, a modified, hardened laptop connected by cables to a temporary panel she’d duct-taped to the submarine’s radio equipment rack in a space once occupied by Iranian equipment that now lay on the deck.

“Okay, it’s transmitted, OIC.”

“Great,” Dankleff said, returning to the central command post.

“Message is out. Lower the antenna. Let’s take her back down, Patch.”

“Helm,” Pacino called to Grip Aquatong as he operated the hydraulic lever to lower the radio antenna, “make your depth one five zero meters.”

“One five zero meters, Helm, aye,” Grip answered, pushing his control yoke forward. The deck inclined down.

“Scope’s awash,” Pacino said. “Lowering number two scope.” He hit the hydraulic control lever to lower the periscope.

At a hundred meters, the hull popped from the pressure, a booming roar overhead in control.

“Is it just me, Lipstick, or are those sounds louder on this boat than on the Vermont?”

“Seems that way to me, too,” Pacino said.

“Leveling out at one five zero meters,” Grip called.

“Very well, Helm,” Pacino said.

“You know, he’s more like the diving officer than the helmsman.”

“I feel strange calling him ‘diving officer’ if he’s got the rudder and planes. And ‘pilot’ isn’t right, not on an ancient setup like this.”

“Yeah. Well. I’m going to try to catch a few hours. I’ll be back at zero six.”

“I’ve got the bubble, OIC. Get some rack,” Pacino said, taking a seat at the pos two console.

“Got a curve on this leg, Officer of the Deck,” Firecontrolman First Class Ralston, the firecontrolman of the watch, reported, only turning his head enough from the attack center to allow the engineer to hear his voice.

“Pilot, right fifteen degrees rudder, steady course west,” Lieutenant Commander Lewinsky ordered from the command console.

“Right fifteen degrees rudder, steady course west, Pilot, aye,” Senior Chief Nygard acknowledged from the ship control station.

“What are they doing?” Lewinsky wondered to himself. Forty minutes before, after the transients were detected coming from the Panther, she’d sped up and screeched southward, and had ended up going so fast that Lewinsky had to order fast speed main coolant pumps started and kick the reactor plant up to a hundred percent power to follow her, keeping up, but in a blind tail chase, the clanking and loud Kilo submarine a dark streak of broadband noise on the Q-10’s spherical array. And then, ten minutes ago, just as suddenly as she’d sped up, Panther shut down her reactor and went dead quiet again, going slow on her batteries.

“Steady course west, sir,” Nygard called.

“FTOW, get a leg.” Lewinsky dialed his display to the same output that Ralston was looking at, a vertical dot stack of fixed interval data units sent from sonar to the battlecontrol system, each data package combining twenty seconds of passive sonar data into a smoothed out best bearing to the target. Lewinsky checked his watch for the third time in two minutes, waiting impatiently to see what the target solution came out to be. As the new sonar data came in, it skewed off to the right. He could see what Ralston was doing to the dot stack. By dialing in assumed ranges and speeds of the contact, the dot stack after two “legs” of data — one bearing rate from driving Vermont east, the second from driving her west — could generate only one target range, course and speed based on how the bearings to the target changed with the parallax maneuver.

“Petty Officer Mercer, what’s your best guess on speed?”

The sonarman of the watch, Mercer, turned to look over at Lewinsky. “She’s back on batteries, Eng. Most probable is six knots. But you’d better close on her, I’m losing SNR.” If the signal-to-noise ratio sank too low, the target would vanish into the loud background noise of the sea.

“What speed are you using, FTOW?”

“Speed six, OOD,” Ralston said. “This is about as good as we’re going to get without a third leg, sir. Panther’s solution — range, six thousand one hundred yards, speed six, course one nine five.”

“Pilot, left ten degrees rudder, steady course one nine five, make turns for twelve knots.” Slowing down three knots was not what Lewinsky wanted, because at the fifteen knots he’d been going, he’d catch up to Panther faster, but twelve gave him less own-ship generated noise, which would help sonar with its struggling signal-to-noise ratio. Anything he could do to improve the sonar equation, he’d do it.

“Pilot, aye, my rudder’s left ten, passing one zero zero to the left, and Maneuvering answers, all ahead two thirds, turns for twelve knots. Passing one two zero to the left.”

“Belay headings, Pilot.”

The dot stack on the display diverged again and became meaningless, the previous data no longer useful. Lewinsky dialed his display back to the navigation chart, zooming out to show the entire Arabian Sea, then zooming in to show own-ship’s position, then the position of the Panther. For the fourth time in ten minutes, he muttered to himself, what is that boat doing?

“Officer of the Deck, steady course one nine five.”

“How’s your signal now, Mercer?”

“Better,” Mercer replied from the number one sonar stack. “No, wait, I lied. He’s fading, with a high D-E.” D/E was deflection/elevation, or the sonar’s way of saying the angle to the target had changed so that the Q-10 sphere was now looking upward. “I’ve got transients too, sounds like hull pops.”

“He’s going shallow,” Lewinsky said. “Maybe going to periscope depth to grab a fix, or maybe he got his radio working. Pilot, all stop, make your depth one five zero feet, report speed seven.” Lewinsky picked up the phone and buzzed the XO’s stateroom as the deck started tilting dramatically upward, Lewinsky grabbing the handhold bar on the command console. A loud groaning sound came from the overhead, quiet at first, then louder, as the hull expanded from the lower pressure as they came shallow.

“Command Duty Officer,” Quinnivan said on the phone.

“He’s popping up to PD, XO. I’ve closed range from six thousand to maybe four. Request permission to proceed to periscope depth, no baffle clear.”

“Take her up to PD, OOD, no baffle clear,” Quinnivan said. “I’m coming to control.”

“Aye sir, PD, no baffle clear.” Lewinsky put the phone down. He hated the idea of going shallow above the thermal layer without looking around to see what was going on in the radically different sonar environment near the surface, where the water was stirred by the waves and wind, the tremendous thermal power of the sun heating this upper layer of a hundred or so feet of water to bathtub warmth, where back deep, it was barely above freezing temperature, and the interface between warm and cold was often stark, almost like the surface of a mirror. A submariner could think he had the whole tactical picture when deep, then when ascending through the layer, there could be a dozen ships up there, some of them close enough to risk being rammed. And a submarine hull was built to take the even pressure of the deep, not a puncture force of a supertanker hull collision. There were dozens of incident reports of submarines being run into up above the layer. Photos of destroyed sails and huge dents in hulls came to mind. Submarines had even caused surface ships to sink after a collision. The classified after-action report from the Bo Hai Bay rescue mission came to mind, when the Seawolf, under the command of Lipstick’s dad, had run out of torpedoes and decided to use her sail to ram a Chinese destroyer. She’d cut the destroyer cleanly in half, and both halves sank. The force of the ramming had mostly sheared off Seawolf’s sail, but she’d bought herself a few hours’ time.

But worrying about collision was a waste of time, Lewinsky thought, and yet another worry for him to consciously leave behind.

Commander Jeremiah Quinnivan appeared to Lewinsky’s right at the command console. “How you doin, lad?”

Lewinsky nodded at the XO. “I’m runnin’ hot, straight and normal, XO. You?”

“Most groovy,” Quinnivan said, turning to peer over Ralston’s shoulder at the attack center console.

“Speed seven knots, sir,” Nygard called.

“Very well, Pilot, make your depth six five feet, smartly, all ahead one third, turns for six knots.”

Nygard acknowledged the string of orders and the deck tilted upward again. Lewinsky changed his command console display to the output of the number two scope, which was black. He opened the panel to reveal the hydraulic control switches for the periscope and actuated the number one scope’s raising hydraulics.

“Raising number one scope.” The large flatscreen in the starboard forward corner of the room came on, and it and the command console display showed a blurry black that gradually got lighter.

“One hundred feet, sir,” Nygard reported, the deck becoming more level. “Nine zero feet.”

“Very well,” Lewinsky said, his screen starting to get lighter still until he could see a shimmer from high above, the moonlight shining down from the waves. Lewinsky maneuvered the scope in a circle, making a full revolution in a few seconds.

“Eight zero feet.”

“No shapes or shadows,” Lewinsky called, holding his breath, and hoping there was nothing up there. No doubt, a close, fully-loaded supertanker barreling in at twelve knots could ruin the whole day. Lewinsky continued rotating the scope through full revolutions, looking upward at first, then leveling the view to see farther away, looking for the shadow formed by an incoming surface ship hull, but there was nothing. They were safe, at least so far.

“Seven five.”

The undersides of the waves came into focus, the sea state above heavy. The deck had taken on a roll to port, holding there tilted for a moment, then rolling back to starboard and hanging up there, then returning to port.

“Seven zero.”

“Scope’s breaking.” A frothy blast obscured the view, the clear focus lost as there was nothing but bubbles and foam in the viewscreen. The foaming continued. “Scope’s breaking. Get us up, Pilot.”

“Six nine feet.”

“Scope’s clear,” Lewinsky called, making three fast circles in the periscope, the features of the surface above blurred by the motion. There was nothing to see but the tall waves of the sea, the horizon and the crescent moon. “No close contacts.” Lewinsky slowed the periscope revolutions to make a slow search around them, the magnification set to low power. The sea was empty. He increased the magnification to 4x and started a slow surface search, taking a full thirty seconds for each twenty degrees of arc. Still no lights or shapes out there, just the waves and the moon above.

“Report bearing to the Panther,” he called.

“Panther bears one-two-seven,” Ralston said.

Lewinsky trained the scope to 127 degrees and zoomed the magnification to 8x, but didn’t see anything in the view. He hit the infrared, but still nothing. The periscope of Panther, and her radio antenna, if she were using it, were the same temperature as the sea, or colder from having been freezing in the deep.

“What’s your range?”

“Thirty-five hundred, but it’s rough. If you’ll drive us across the line-of-sight, I can do better.”

“Pilot, left fifteen degrees rudder, steady course zero five zero, all ahead two thirds, turns for nine knots.”

Vermont turned toward the Panther, swinging around to the northeast, attempting to drive the bearing to the target right and improve the range calculation.

“Sir,” the radioman of the watch said to Lewinsky, showing up from behind him on his right. “We have flash traffic aboard.” Radio messages were classified by their urgency, ranging from routine, priority, immediate and flash. A flash message had to be read within seconds, as it would contain information crucial to the survival of the addressee. Lewinsky had never before seen a flash message. What in holy hell was it?

“I’ll take it,” Quinnivan said. “Send it to my machine.” Quinnivan scanned the message, then reread it, stroking his beard. It was a mix of good news and bad, but the bad news was very bad indeed.

Captain First Rank Boris Novikov took his seat at the far portside command console. He’d sent Isakova to her stateroom to try to recover from her personal issue. He felt sorry for her. A woman like her, hard as steel and cold as ice, but tell her that her father is dying and she dissolves into a six-year-old daddy’s girl, he thought. But he couldn’t allow her grief to interfere with the ship’s mission. But God also knew, he couldn’t let his sleep deprivation interfere either. He wondered if Isakova would pull herself together before the start of the next midnight watch.

He selected his display to the Second-Captain-discretion display, and the Second Captain put the screen immediately to the notifications section. There was only one notification, but it was flashing red.

He clicked the notification. The voice of the Second Captain came up, an emotionless, sterile, uncaring female voice, that the crew delighted in, because it so visibly irritated Isakova. The navigator, that prankster Leonid “Luke” Lukashenko, could do an amazing impersonation of the Second Captain’s voice, and loved to use it on Isakova if they were off the ship just to see her face get red.

“Zero three twenty Moscow time,” the Second Captain said. “Sonar history module irregularity. Detected signal-to-noise ratio below the thermal layer, bearing two-nine-five. Noise signature is high sound-power-level of sustained transient noises correlating with high mass-flow-rate steam flow, with high frequencies associated with a fifty cycle large generator. There is an unknown loud steady-state noise, also flow-related, correlated with a medium probability of being a boiler feed pump. Sonar history module irregularity began at zero three twenty Moscow time.”

“Is it still present?” Novikov asked.

“The irregularity lasted until zero three forty-five Moscow time. At that time, all sound-related irregularities ceased.”

Novikov stood up from his seat and hurried to the chart table. “Second Captain, display own-ship’s position at zero three forty-five.”

The chart responded with a pulsing blue light from the track behind them, perhaps six kilometers aft.

“Generate a bearing line from that point to two-nine-five.” A red line grew from their past position, extending to the northwest, pointing just south of a line entering the Gulf of Oman.

“Watch Officer, are you seeing this?” Novikov asked in irritation.

“Yes, Captain. It must have come in while we were at periscope depth.”

“No, it was noticed when you were still deep.” Then to himself, “goddammit.”

He studied the chart. If this were the Panther, going almost 300 RPM meant she’d figured out how to start her reactor and had sped up to an ungodly velocity. But he shouldn’t jump to a conclusion, he cautioned himself.

“Second Captain, calculate probability that this sound irregularity is a Virginia-class submarine.”

“Calculating. Probability of a correlation with this sound irregularity and a Virginia-class submarine is zero point two percent.”

So, that wasn’t the answer. “Second Captain, calculate the probability of this detection being a Kilo-class submarine.”

“Calculating. Probability of a correlation with this sound irregularity and a Kilo-class submarine is eight percent.”

Novikov considered. That seemed way too low. What did that mean? Was it something else?

“Second Captain, slow the noise history down by a factor of five. That is, replay it for analysis at twenty percent speed. With the slowed-down history, is there a correlation between the sound irregularity and a Kilo-class?”

“Calculating. Probability of a correlation with this sound irregularity, slowed down to twenty percent speed, and a Kilo-class submarine is forty-six percent.”

Dramatic improvement, Novikov thought. “Second Captain, are you able to analyze a signal correlation if you remove the feed pump, the steam flow noise, the steam turbine and the large electrical generator? Then account for the slowing of the fifty-cycle generator?”

“Yes. It will be somewhat degraded, but it could be analyzed.”

“Second Captain, calculate the probability of a correlation of the sound irregularity with a Kilo-submarine, with the elements I mentioned subtracted out.”

“Calculating. Probability of a correlation of this sound irregularity, slowed down with elements subtracted, with a Kilo-submarine is eighty-four percent, however, the confidence interval is low-to-medium at fifty-eight percent.”

Eighty-four percent chance the noise was from the stolen Kilo. That was good enough for Novikov.

“Watch Officer, man battlestations,” Novikov ordered. “That’s him. And open up the Bolshoi-Feniks function of the MGK-600 and prepare to establish secure sonar telegraphy with K-573 Novosibirsk. Warm up the Fizik-2 torpedoes in tubes one through six. Then spin up the Kalibr antisubmarine cruise missiles in vertical launch silo tubes one and two. Settings to full yield, thirty kilotons.”

Kovalyov stared at him, dumbfounded. Finally he found his voice. “The Kalibrs are nuclear weapons, Captain. We’ll need the first officer’s concurrence.”

“Have her awakened and tell her to open my outer safe, then get the navigator to open the inner safe and instruct them to withdraw nuclear launch codes for cruise missiles one and two, and to keep the codes in two-person control at all times and bring them to the central command post.”

“Yes, Captain, right away sir.” He pulled a microphone to his lips. “This is the central command watch officer,” Kovalyov’s voice projected throughout the ship. “All hands, action stations for tactical launch. This is not a drill. I repeat, all hands, action stations.”

24

First Officer Captain Second Rank Anastasia Isakova rushed into the central command post, holding two sealed packages over her head, the navigator, Captain Third Rank Leonid Lukashenko following her, his hand gripped on the wrist of her arm holding up the packages. She stopped at the far portside station of the command console, where Captain Novikov waited impatiently.

The room was filling up rapidly with watchstanders, four taking seats at the portside sonar-and-sensor console, one at the under-ice console and Bolshoi-Feniks control station of the MGK-600 sonar. To Novikov’s right, at the battlecontrol consoles, the communications officer, Maksimilian Kovalyov, occupied the center seat, the forward seat taken by the torpedo and missile officer, Captain Lieutenant Seva Laska, the aft seat a combined firecontrol console and weapons control console, reserved for the weapons officer, Captain Lieutenant Pyotr Alexandrov. The empty center seat of the command console was where Isakova took her battlestation, the navigator taking the far starboard side seat.

Isakova looked at Novikov through eyes made bleary by hours of crying. With her free hand, she wiped her running nose with a handkerchief, stuffing it back in her coveralls pocket.

“Sir, what’s going on,” she whispered urgently to Novikov, who took the sealed packets from Isakova. He looked at them, each one a sealed set of codes that would unlock the nuclear-tipped Kalibr cruise missiles and allow them to dial in the yield settings.

“We’ve detected the target, the stolen Kilo submarine. Actually, you detected it. There was a notification from your watch, before you went to periscope depth. You should have been more alert.”

Novikov looked up at Isakova, who was in sad shape. Her entire face looked swollen. Her nose was running and her eyes were so bloodshot it looked like she’d lost a back alley fight. Under normal circumstances, Novikov would have sent her to her cabin to sleep off her grief, but firing nuclear weapons required her concurrence, and he had no choice but to plug her into the tactical situation.

Navigator Leonid Lukashenko was charged with monitoring that the captain and the first officer fully agreed on nuclear weapon release, able to veto a weapon release if there were any suspicion of duress or the unfitness of one of the officers. Should one of them become incapacitated, he himself would function as one of the authorizers of weapon release, the duty of being the referee of rectitude passing to the next most senior department head, the weapons officer, Alexandrov. Novikov glanced quickly at Lukashenko, wondering if he should have Isakova relieved, but as if understanding what was happening, she seemed to snap out of her fugue state.

“The Kilo is northwest of us, range unknown, but it lit off its fast reactor and bolted southward out of the Gulf of Oman,” Novikov said. “I’ve turned toward the target, increased speed to twenty-five knots and I’m preparing to conduct an active sonar search of the probable location of the target.”

“No, sir,” Isakova said, louder now, her voice settling into its usual cadence and tone. “For one thing, that Kilo is escorted by a Virginia-class. If we go pinging at the Kilo, the Virginia submarine will counterdetect us and put weapons in the water. And have you forgotten we are operating with the Novosibirsk? And neither you nor Captain Orlov of Novosibirsk is in tactical command. You both have to agree on tactics and weapons employment.”

On some ships, Isakova’s strident assertion of something contrary to the captain’s intention could be considered borderline mutiny, but after the loss of several nuclear submarines over the years, the Admiralty had borrowed the concept of “crew resource management” from the aviation sphere, where officers had significant input and captains were strongly cautioned to listen to the advice of their officers. The Navy called it “command post resource management” and all the fleet’s officers had been forced into training simulators. Novikov thought it was more harmful modern management and coddling of the sensitive feelings of the younger generation of sailors, but with Isakova he tolerated it. What made it easier was that she was so often right. He wondered if Orlov’s first officer were as talented.

That pud-thumper Orlov again, Novikov thought, his blood pressure rising at the thought of having to get that idiot’s agreement on weapons release and approach to the Kilo, but Isakova was right. And he’d been right not to have her relieved. With a feeling of relief, he nodded at her middle console seat.

“Fine,” he said. “I’d intended to toss a Kalibr missile at the contact the minute I got a return ping. I figured the detonation would neutralize the Virginia-class escort, since he’s probably following the Kilo close enough that a nuclear explosion would sink him or incapacitate him.”

“A sound tactic, Captain, but we need a range first, and if we approach the probable location of the Kilo, we can reacquire him on passive sonar, and we can put a salvo of torpedoes into him. Much more surgical, and remember, Captain, a nuclear detonation will make miles and miles of ocean water impenetrable to active or passive sonar — a blue-out from all the bubbles created by the detonation. If our shot goes wide, the target — or targets — could hide from us on the other side of the massive blue-out. Did the second captain even have a bearing rate to the target? If it were going fast enough to make that noise, what, twenty knots? More? He’d have a significant bearing drift. If he were going southward, the bearing to the target must have changed from the original value of two-nine-five to something lower. Two-nine-four?”

“Second Captain,” Novikov said into a microphone mounted on a small pedestal and plugged into his console, “report the bearing rate of the sonar anomaly detected at zero three twenty. Did you detect a bearing drift over the time you had the target?”

“Captain, there was no bearing drift detected for the time of acquisition of the irregularity. It remained at two-nine-five for the duration of the detection, within the accuracy of that beam of the sonar sphere.”

Novikov looked at Isakova. “Dammit, that means he was extremely distant.”

“Once we establish communications with Novosibirsk, we need to proceed on a southwest course at high speed to intercept, even though that will cause our own emitted noise to rise and lower our ability to hear the target. He could be a hundred or even two hundred kilometers away. Or more.”

Novikov cursed to himself. This mission might already be a failure. If the target never sped up again, and were two hundred kilometers away, he’d escape. And they had the devil’s choice — chase him at high speed to close range with his own submarine, and Orlov’s, making tremendous noise of their own while their sonars were deaf, or keep the approach at slow speed where they could hear, but the target disappeared.

“Perhaps the Novosibirsk has a better fix on the target,” Novikov said reluctantly. That goddamned Orlov again. “But we’re not in communication with him yet. Nor do we hold him on sonar. The boat is either out of position or too far away for secure sonar telegraphy.”

Isakova took a deep breath. “You know the standard procedure calls for sending out a pulse to get him to respond with a return ping.”

“But you just scolded me for active sonar employment. It’s not stealthy. That Virginia-class might hear us pinging at each other.”

“It would just be one pulse. It sounds like a biologic and it’s short duration. It’s not ideal, but truly, Captain, what tactical situation against a worthy opponent is ever ideal?”

“Fine.” Novikov turned to the sonar-and-sensor console. “Sonar Officer,” he called. Senior Lieutenant Svetomir Albescu turned from the forward-most seat of the sonar-and-sensor console. Albescu was a scrawny pimple-faced youth with wireless glasses, whom one would think wouldn’t garner a second look in a bar, but every liberty port visited, he always seemed to find a beautiful woman who would drape herself across him. There was no accounting for feminine attraction, Novikov thought.

“Yes, sir,” he said, blinking behind his glasses.

“Line up a secure active pulse on the MGK, wide azimuth pulse, medium frequency, short duration.”

“Power level, Captain?”

Novikov looked at Isakova. “If I dial it up to maximum, perhaps we only have to do this once,” he said. She nodded.

“One hundred percent, Lieutenant.”

“One hundred percent, aye, Captain.” Albescu lined up his panel, leaning over to consult with his glavny starshina, who was the technical expert on the equipment. After a moment, Albescu turned to Novikov. “Ready, sir.”

“Transmit, Sonar Officer.”

“Transmit, aye.” Albescu hit a variable function key backlit with a red light.

A booming, roaring, groaning sound like an angry whale suddenly slammed Novikov’s eardrums, the sonar sphere’s transducers projecting a hundred percent sonar power into the water. The reverberations from the pulse took some seconds to die down.

Novikov’s screen was selected to the sonar active display, the output looking like a conventional radar screen, but it was filled with blotchy colored stains from all the ocean noise. A small dot pulsed brightly for just a half second, then faded.

“I have a return echo, Captain,” Albescu reported. “Bearing zero-four-five, range, ten point five kilometers.” The screen pulsed again, three times from the same position. “We’re receiving a three-ping secure pulse in response, Captain.”

“Watch Officer,” Novikov said to Navigator Lukashenko at the far-right console, “take us toward the Novosibirsk, heading zero four five, speed ten knots.”

“He was farther away from the Kilo than we were,” Isakova said, pursing her lips. “Most likely, he did not hear it.”

“Once we establish communications with Novosibirsk, we can report our findings and see if he had a detect. Then we can coordinate the approach to this damned target,” Novikov said, shaking his head. This operation was already getting messy. It would have been better if that pud-thumper Orlov and his incompetent submarine Novosibirsk had stayed behind in Petropavlovsk. Let them play in the Pacific Ocean and leave the Arabian Sea to the professionals.

Navigator Captain Third Rank Misha Dobryvnik yawned as he took the teacup from the tea service brought from the galley. He yawned as he spooned sugar into the cup and looked over from the far port side seat of the command console at the command duty officer, Captain Second Rank Ivan Vlasenko, who was already halfway through his tea.

“First watch starts getting wearing about this hour,” he said to Vlasenko. Vlasenko nodded, not saying anything. When the first officer was tired, Dobryvnik thought, he seemingly lost all the upper functions of his brain, operating on the lizard brain alone. He could walk, breathe, blink and swallow, but otherwise he was somewhere else. Which was fine, Dobryvnik thought, since he himself was senior enough that he could run the central command post watchsection by himself during the tense search for the escaped Kilo submarine.

Dobryvnik checked his pad computer, selecting it to the calendar. It was the wee hours of Tuesday June 7. They’d been given orders to make haste to the west coast of India at mid-day Friday June 3, arriving at Point Marmagao after a maximum-speed run, arriving the morning of June 5, Sunday. Since then, they’d crawled north-northwest at walking speed, barely enough velocity to keep the towed array close to being level, searching for the stolen Kilo submarine and the rumored American escort submarine. Dobryvnik had theorized, during an operational briefing in the wardroom, that there was no American escort submarine, that the Kilo was operating alone.

“Where did the commandos raiding the Kilo come from, then?” Iron Irina Trusov, the weapons officer had asked.

“Madam Weapons Officer,” Dobryvnik replied. “They may have been dropped by a helicopter from a distance with a swimmer delivery vehicle, the vehicle either parachuted with them or dropped there, waiting for them. They could have come in a swimmer delivery vehicle dropped by one of the hundreds of merchant ships in the gulf. There’s a hundred ways to deliver commandos.”

“How would you know?” Trusov had said coldly, tossing a lock of platinum blonde hair off her shoulder.

“My roommate is a senior lieutenant in the Spetsnaz GRU,” Dobryvnik said. “He should keep his mouth shut about what he does for exercises, but his stories of insertion and extraction are epic.”

That was all the opening the communications officer had needed. Captain Lieutenant Mikhail “TK” Sukolov, hearing ‘insertion’ and ‘extraction,’ had made an obscene gesture with his hands simulating copulation.

“Oh shut up, TK. Why don’t you go to the radio room and lock yourself in for a couple of watches?” Dobryvnik had said, smirking. “The point is, we have no confirmation of an American submarine escort ship. There’s zero intelligence that one was present.”

His was definitely the minority opinion. The rest all believed that the only way the Kilo could have been taken was with a front-line American attack submarine. A Virginia-class.

Dobryvnik lazily selected the console to do a rotation through all screens, selecting the hold time on each screen to seven seconds. Long enough he could absorb information, not so long that he’d get bored or distracted, the screen rotation time discovered from long first watches, trying to stay plugged into the tactical situation, more often just trying to stay awake.

They said anything important always happened on the midnight watch, but Dobryvnik didn’t believe it. His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of Chernobyl Chernobrovin, the engineer, who grabbed Dobryvnik by both shoulders and shook him, as if to wake him up.

“Wake up, Watch Officer! Vigilance is our creed!” Chernobrovin said, grinning.

“Who let you forward of frame two-oh-seven?” Dobryvnik asked in jest.

The engineer had freshly showered and had donned fresh coveralls, the straight creases still in them from being pressed at the base’s dry cleaners.

“Special occasion, Chernobyl? For some reason you’re not covered in lube oil and soaked in sweat. Hot date tonight?”

The engineer smiled. He and the navigator had been junior officers on the Pacific Fleet’s Project 971 Shchuka-B submarine K-157 Vepr. Dobryvnik had started as sonar officer, then had become the weapons officer, while Chernobrovin had maintained core engineering duties, starting as the reactor controls officer, then after a year, taking over the mechanical and auxiliary mechanical battle sections. They had requested to take department head tours on the same submarine, and getting assigned to a freshly commissioned Yasen-M submarine was like a lottery win. They’d contemplated renting an apartment and being roommates, but Chernobrovin maintained that they saw enough of each other as it was, and Dobryvnik would cramp his bachelor lifestyle. Dobryvnik had snorted at that, as if Chernobrovin had been with a woman alone in all the years he’d known him, since graduation from the Marshal Grechko School of Underwater Navigation.

“The special occasion is this, that this is the watch when something happens, I can feel it in my bones, my navigator friend — which, by the way, as the ship’s navigator, do you have the slightest idea where we are?”

Dobryvnik smiled and vaulted out of his seat at command console three and stepped to the portside navigation chart table. The chart showed the upper Arabian Sea, the coastline of India forming the east side, the far distant Arabian peninsula on the west side, the top of the triangle formed by the coastline of Pakistan to the northeast and Iran to the northwest.

“We’re here,” Dobryvnik stabbed his finger at the pulsing blue dot off the Indian town of Veraval, perhaps 180 kilometers northwest of Mumbai, a dark blue line extending behind it, marking the history of their recent motion.

“Yeah? So where’s the Northern Fleet sub, Voronezh?”

“Wow, you do pay attention to tactical briefings, don’t you? I didn’t think you could get your head out of the crankcase of the emergency diesel long enough.”

“Hey, it takes real intelligence to comprehend both engineering and tactics,” Chernobrovin said. “Anybody can navigate. Hell, my grandmother can navigate better than you, and she’s been dead for two years.”

“Fuck you, Chernobyl,” Dobryvnik said, smiling.

“The hell is wrong with you guys?” Vlasenko said in irritation from command console position one. “Why don’t you two get a room?”

“Oh, the first officer awakens,” Chernobrovin said.

“Listen, Engineer,” Vlasenko said, his blood rising.

“Mr. First! Mr. Navigator! We have a sonar pulse!” Senior Lieutenant Arisha Vasilev yelled from the port forward sonar-and-sensor console. Vasilev was the new sonar officer, arriving just before Novosibirsk sailed from Petropavlovsk. Dobryvnik and Chernobrovin had shared private comments about her, that with her long, gleaming black hair, perfect petite ballerina body and pretty face, she was much too hot to be a submarine officer, and would do better to be the wife of a submarine officer, and then they’d argued for hours about which officer she should become the wife of.

“Is it ours or foreign?” Dobryvnik yelled back.

“It’s Russian, sir,” Vasilev said.

Dobryvnik rushed to the sonar-and-sensor console to look over Vasilev’s display. He looked back at Vlasenko. “It’s Voronezh, Mr. First. We should respond. With a three-pulse narrow aperture high frequency active pulse, centered on the bearing to the Voronezh’s pulse.”

“Very well, respond with a three-pulse narrow aperture high freq active,” Vlasenko ordered. “And maintain your course and speed. Let Voronezh close the distance to us with our track staying predictable.” The last time two submarines tried to rendezvous together using active sonar, they’d collided, ruining careers. He pulled the console’s phone to his ear while dialing the captain’s cabin.

“Captain,” Captain First Rank Yuri Orlov answered. “I heard the pulse and your return pings. I’ll be right there.”

The town car pulled to a halt at the lobby entrance to the West Wing. National Security Advisor Michael Pacino had already had his biometric identification checked at the entrance and his briefcase scanned. At the lobby door he relinquished his cell phone to a Secret Service agent and walked through a whole-body scanner, his briefcase scanned a second time. CIA Director Margo Allende was waiting for him, her sleek auburn hair pulled back into a ponytail, dressed for business, as was Pacino himself, having donned a black suit and tie for the meeting with the president.

“I got here as fast as I could.” He glanced at his scratched, ancient Rolex Submariner watch. They’d wanted him here at 2230 and he was ten minutes late.

“You’re fine, Patch. The president decided to postpone the meeting until morning. Joint chiefs will be here at zero six hundred for breakfast and the president will be down at seven. The VP and Admiral Catardi will join by secure video conference. But I’m glad you’re here. I need to brief you on a late-breaking development.”

As they took the steps to the lower level and the entrance to the Situation Room, he had the thought that he missed Camp David and its rustic informality.

“You probably haven’t seen the message, I take it.”

“I haven’t. My pad computer said it wouldn’t load until I was in the Situation Room.”

“Well, you’re not gonna like it,” she said. “But I’ve got something for you that might ease the pain.”

“What am I not going to like?”

Margo Allende opened the door of the Situation Room — it was empty, unlike Pacino had expected. Even though the meeting with the president was postponed, the Situation Room was almost always partially occupied, but not tonight. “You want coffee? I’ll fetch you one from the wardroom while you read the message.”

“Yeah, that would be great. Black-and-bitter, please.” Pacino found the seat he’d taken the last time there was a Situation Room meeting, on the right side of the president’s end seat, three seats down, the other two seats between him and Carlucci taken by the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy. Pacino pulled his pad computer out and put it on the table next to a notebook and his pen, then opened the software, submitted to the retinal scan and read the message Allende had told him about.

At the line reading, ‘Panther change-of-command ceremony successful,’ he smiled to himself. That was excellent news, and a great way to summarize the op. But then paragraph three caught his eye.

Pacino’s mouth dropped open — holy shit, he thought. Seagraves had actually assigned Anthony to the boarding party. How the hell could that make any sense at all? After all the kid had been through on Piranha, they were sending him out an airlock in scuba gear? On one of the most dangerous missions since the search-and-destroy mission for the renegade nuclear-powered drone sub? Pacino’s jaw tightened. When Vermont got back from this mission, he’d have a strong word with Commander Seagraves. If Vermont got back from this mission, he thought.

He’d reached the end of the message by the time Allende brought him a mug with the seal of the president on it, the hot steaming coffee’s aroma the only good thing about the evening. She looked at him, sat next to him and put her hand on his forearm.

“I know you’re upset about Little Patch, but he’s going to be okay.”

“Jesus, Margo, the most dangerous mission since we went after the drone submarine and my son’s on it. He’s not even qualified in submarines yet!”

“I know, but apparently his superior officers were impressed with his tactical ability. You have to imagine that with him being the son of the most storied fighting admiral since Halsey and Nimitz and fucking Horatio Nelson, some of your DNA would rub off on him and make him a tactical genius too. And I doubt anyone on that boarding party is a conscript, Patch, they’re all volunteers.”

Pacino smiled at that. He had to admit, he liked that expression—‘fighting admiral.’ “Well, then dammit, I’m going to have a strong word with my son when this is over.” He took a pull of the coffee. “You said you had something that might make this miserable situation better?”

“Yeah, there’s an update on Operation Blue Hardhat,” Allende said. “We have a small transmitter — more of a transponder, actually — placed on submarine periscopes. We managed to steal power for it from inside the periscope’s systems without being detected. If the periscope is dry, the transmitter radios us the submarine’s position. It’s useless, of course, if the sub is deep, but most submarines come up for navigation purposes and to get radio traffic passively every day or two, and when the subs with this transponder come up, they tell us who they are and where they are.”

“You have these on seven Yasen-M-class submarines?”

“We have them on the two Yasen-M boats that the Russian engineer said were inbound the Arabian Sea.”

Pacino’s face lit up. “Where?”

Allende projected her pad computer to a large display monitor opposite where they sat at the table. A projection of the Arabian Sea came up with the Saudi peninsula on the west side and the India coast on the right.

“One unit, Yasen Four, showed up in Port Aden in Oman. We believe he had maintenance trouble after traveling in from the Pacific fleet. The other unit, Yasen Six, was in the Med, at anchor waiting for the Suez Canal fiasco to get cleared up. Both units, by our analysts’ reckoning, were inbound the Gulf of Oman to escort out the Panther, but when they were both delayed, the Iranians decided to send the Panther to sea early.”

Pacino looked at Allende. “Did you put one of these transponders onto the periscope of the Panther?”

Allende looked back at him. Pacino could tell she was trying hard to control her facial expression.

“I can neither confirm nor deny, Patch. That’s a different program.”

Pacino considered — if there were a separate special compartmented information program on the Panther, maybe the CIA did know where it was. And what about Vermont? Would the Pentagon have outfitted it with a stealth-breaking transponder?

Suddenly the weight of this mission seemed to fall down on Pacino’s head. Was it survivable? For the Panther? For Anthony? For Vermont? For the Russians?

Allende touched his forearm again and looked into his eyes. “It’ll be okay, Patch. Your son will be fine. I promise.”

Pacino nodded, hoping she would prove to be right.

25

Three days ago, the phone call had come in at three in the morning. One moment, he had been snuggled happily in bed with Natalia Orlov, the woman who had bewitched him, with whom he was desperately in love.

Even before answering the jangling phone, he stroked his finger down Natalia’s long naked thigh, wondering at the amazing luck he’d had in winning her affection. Two weeks after he’d been sleeping with her, she confessed to her double sins of having been married to Captain First Rank Yuri Orlov and leaving him for Captain Second Rank Boris Novikov, and then leaving Novikov for him. He remembered that moment, when the world seemed to stand still, and she looked up at him with moisture in her big blue eyes, seemingly waiting for him to dismiss her, to reject her, but he had taken her face in his hands and kissed her, and told her that he didn’t care, that all he saw when he looked at her was the love of his life. He had felt stupid saying that so early, but she had cried happy tears and thrown her arms around him, and they had only left his bed that weekend for food.

He glanced at her face in the dimness of the room, illuminated only by the lit up display of the phone, hoping the buzzing phone hadn’t awakened her, but she slept on. For a moment, he regretted that she hadn’t awakened, since phone calls arriving at three in morning usually meant there was a car waiting for him downstairs and an angry admiral on the other end of the connection.

“Go for Alexeyev,” he said into the phone, trying to sound as if he’d been awake.

“This is Zhigunov,” the deep gravelly voice of the admiral in command of the Northern Fleet said. Alexeyev sat straighter in the bed.

“Yes, Admiral,” Alexeyev had said. “What is it?”

“Get your crew and report to the Kazan. Phone ahead and have the reactor started and prepare to get underway. I shall meet you on the pier in twenty minutes.”

So had this oddball mission begun, unlike anything Alexeyev had ever seen. K-561 Kazan, the first Yasen-M-class submarine built, lay at her mooring on the dark moonless night, lit only by the sodium lamps of the pier, being hastily loaded out by a pier crew, trucks and pallets of food arriving and being offloaded. On the hull, two men were working beside a small handhole in the flank of the conning tower, taking off the shorepower cables. At the gangway, his first officer and department heads waited for him.

He stepped up to them and returned their salutes. It still felt strange, he thought, that the four highest ranking officers under his command were all women. Doubtless the idea of Zhigunov’s deputy, Olga Vova, the first female admiral in the submarine force, a square-jawed bruiser of a woman, who must have outweighed Alexeyev by at least ten kilograms and could probably easily take him in a fight. The famous “Admiral OV” had wanted an all-female officer ship, but Admiral Zhigunov had made her settle for just the department heads and the first officer being female, under an experienced and trusted male captain.

“Madam First, what do we have?” he asked Captain Second Rank Ania Lebedev, a plain-looking woman with short chestnut hair, brown eyes and thin downturned lips, her normal expression one of constant disapproval. He was reminded of when he was a child and his mother informed him that if he made a face, it would freeze like that.

Lebedev frowned and looked at the hull of Kazan. “Well, Captain, the Admiral wants us in the channel before dawn. Perhaps worried about an overhead satellite observation. But we’re held up by the stores load. The boat was almost completely empty of food.”

The ship had been offloaded deliberately last week as a preparation for entering the drydock for a refit. Today, the boat had been scheduled to offload all weapons. Obviously that wasn’t going to happen. Oddly, despite a refit period making the crew work much harder than at sea, the crew enjoyed being in port and with their families for weeks on end, rather than disappearing to sea for months, sometimes being called on for surprise mobilizations, like tonight’s.

“Navigator?” Alexeyev looked at the female navigator and operations officer, Captain Third Rank Svetka Maksimov, who was as lovely as Lebedev was plain, with long shiny black hair, beautiful features, straight white teeth and deep brown eyes. Even gorgeous Natalia had gotten a little jealous at the last ship’s party. There was no doubt, Natalia was still the traffic-stopping beauty of the crew’s families, but Svetka Maksimov was a decade younger and had a way about her that endeared her to the crew. Alexeyev was convinced that even had Maksimov been homely, her outgoing and friendly personality would win over the crew.

“I’ve got the tides and current for the time period from now to dawn, Captain, but once clear of restricted waters in the Barents Sea, I have no idea where we’re going. I can’t lay in a track if the destination is so secret even I don’t know it.”

“Understood, Nav. Engineer?”

Captain Third Rank Alesya Matveev nodded at him. Matveev could have been an Amazon, the crew all thought. She was over 180 centimeters tall and solid. Her hobby was mixed martial arts, and it was said that no man aboard could win a cage fight with her. Her combative nature had made its way to her dour frowning face. Alexeyev suspected if she let her hair down and put on some makeup, she might be pretty, or at least less plain, but that wasn’t Matveev’s personality. Alexeyev suspected, if given the choice to transition her gender to being male, Matveev would jump at the chance.

“Captain, the reactor is in the power range and self-sustaining in natural circulation,” Matveev said in a voice almost deeper than Alexeyev’s, “with the propulsion turbines warm and connected to the load bank. The main motor is likewise warm. Removing shorepower cables now. There are no class one deficiencies. We are troubleshooting a problem with the redundant electrical evaporator. The air banks are full. Oxygen banks are at fifty percent, since we were bleeding them off slowly for the refit, but the bleed is stopped. We’ll make oxygen and recharge once we’re in open sea. The battery charge is at eighty percent. I’d feel better with a battery charge before we submerge but we may have to leave it as-is for now, sir.”

“Very well, Engineer. Weapons Officer?”

“Sir,” Captain Lieutenant Katerina Sobol said in a startlingly high-pitched cartoon character voice, standing straighter, “vertical launch system is loaded with thirty-two Oniks antiship cruise missiles, all conventional warheads. The torpedo room is loaded with twenty-four Futlyar Fizik-2 torpedoes, ten of them tube-loaded.” Sobol was a small woman with a ballerina’s body and looked way too young to be an officer, Alexeyev thought. She still had pimples on her face and tried to cover them up with makeup. She couldn’t weigh a gram over 45 kilograms and barely stood over 150 centimeters. Her best friend aboard was the Amazon engineer. When the two of them went out drinking, people around them insisted on taking pictures of the giant female next to the tiny one.

“Do the Futlyar units have the latest software update for torpedo countermeasure employment?” Alexeyev frowned. Could his torpedoes stop an incoming American torpedo? When Alexeyev had nightmares, they were always of him in the central command post, helpless as the sound of an incoming torpedo sonar got louder and louder.

“Sir, yes, sir. I supervised the software load personally, a month ago, before the refit had been scheduled.”

“Don’t we also have two Shkvals?”

“Yes, Captain, sorry, I failed to mention the Shkvals.”

“I want them tube loaded. We’ll move weapons when we’re submerged. Once they are in the torpedo tubes, I want them checked hourly for high temperatures.”

“Yes, Captain, I’ll put a weapon move plan together and present it to you once we clear restricted waters.”

“Well, people, you’d better get your departments ready to put to sea,” Alexeyev said, trying to make his voice sound forceful, while looking toward the end of the pier, awaiting Admiral Zhigunov, who was now ten minutes late. Just then the admiral’s black limo drove up and Zhigunov got out and waved Alexeyev over. Alexeyev half ran to the end of the pier.

As he left the group of women officers, the navigator looked appreciatively at the retreating form of Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev. He was tall, slender, in good shape and had a thick head of amazingly shining dark black hair that swooped over his forehead to his ears, his hair just slightly longer than regulations allowed. Matveev called his hair “politician hair,” the kind of looks only Kremlin elected officials sported. He had blue eyes that could freeze water when he was angry or boil a woman’s blood when he smiled. He had rugged features, thin cheeks below strong cheekbones and a ruler-straight jawline, and he was one of those men who seemed to have a perpetual five o’clock shadow, and it made him look tough, masculine and strong. For the part of a front-line nuclear submarine commander, Maksimov thought, he looked like he had been cast by Moscow’s movie industry.

His personality was hard to crack, though, she thought, the captain seeming somewhat remote, lost in thought, sometimes having to be prompted to concentrate on a briefing or a conversation. All too often, he seemed mentally somewhere else. The first officer, in a moment of being angry at him, once called him autistic, but that certainly wasn’t the case. Of course Alexeyev had people skills — after all, look at that gorgeous beauty he was living with — but his remoteness and mentally distracted nature were a weakness, and he needed a good first officer to help him. It was a shame, Maksimov thought, that she couldn’t be his first officer. That bitch Lebedev was one of those officers who was in the Navy just to advance her own career and become the fleet’s first female commanding officer. With her, there was no thought of patriotism or spirit for the ship. Or to help her captain. As if reading her thoughts, the first officer looked at her and frowned.

“Navigator,” Lebedev said coldly, “I suggest you get aboard and make sure you are ready to lay in a course once the captain has his orders.”

Maksimov saluted her. “Yes, ma’am. By your leave.”

“Dismissed,” Lebedev said. “That goes for you too, Weapons Officer and Engineer. Let’s get this mission going.”

“Won’t the captain be briefing us in the wardroom before we sail?” the engineer asked.

“If he does, you’ll be the first to know. Come on, let’s get aboard. Weapons Officer, you’re driving us out. May I suggest you get yourself to the bridge and study the current and charts? And make contact with the tugs and pilot, make sure they’re ready.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sobol said, seeming glad to get away from the overbearing first officer, stepping quickly across the gangway to the hull.

At the end of the pier, Alexeyev walked up to Zhigunov and rigidly saluted the older man, who waved a salute back.

“What’s going on, Admiral? What’s the mission?”

“It’s very bolloxed up, Georgy,” Zhigunov said, his deep voice even more gravelly than usual. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Alexeyev, who nodded and accepted the admiral’s lighter flame, inhaling the smoke of some foreign brand the admiral had managed to get his hands on. “We were sending Novosibirsk and Voronezh to the Gulf of Oman to provide a routine escort for the Iranian Navy’s testing of our new fast reactor on the Kilo-class submarine Panther. But the Medved’ Grizli worm uploaded into the Iranian computer systems — presumably by the Americans — destroyed the Iranian Navy’s ability to send destroyers and frigates to sea with the Panther and completely grounded their air force, and so the Iranians sent Panther to sea early before the worm could affect submarine computer systems. And you know the rest of the story, Georgy, the Medved’ Grizli cyberattack crossed over and infected our systems, and our surface fleet is still down hard, as are the naval air assets. Somehow we submariners were fortunate and the submarines’ systems remained intact, but we have further firewalled them off from the rest of the Navy’s systems. All the more reason to get Kazan submerged as soon as possible, to avoid this damned cyberattack infecting your boat.”

“Yes, Admiral, I’m with you so far. But something worse happened, right, Admiral?”

Zhigunov sighed. “Yes, Georgy. Somewhere in the Gulf of Oman, the Americans managed to steal the Panther.”

“What?”

“I know. Serious shit, Georgy. We still don’t know exactly how or where it happened, but we think an American submarine brought in commandos who took the Panther while she was submerged at periscope depth at slow speed. So the operation orders for Voronezh and Novosibirsk changed from simply escorting Panther to test her reactor into a search-and-destroy mission to sink the Panther. And there must be an American submarine that is escorting her out of the Arabian Sea and into the Western Hemisphere. That’s where you and Kazan come in. If Voronezh or Novosibirsk fail, you are the insurance policy. You’ll establish a barrier search at Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and lie in wait for the Panther and her escort submarine to exit the Indian Ocean and enter the South Atlantic. And when they do, put them both on the ocean bottom.”

What had followed were three straight days of steaming at 100 % reactor power, reactor recirculation pumps in fast speed, making good 35 knots speed-over-ground, from the Kola Peninsula through the GI-UK gap between Greenland, Iceland and the U.K. and into the North Atlantic, their loud transit unavoidably alerting the Americans’ sonar web laid at the bottom of the sea, acting as a trip wire and notifying them of when a loud submarine left the northern waters for the Atlantic. Down past the United Kingdom, past France and now at the latitude of the northern shores of Spain. From here, their track took them around western Africa and south to the South Atlantic, to Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, where Kazan would establish her barrier search.

If Voronezh and Novosibirsk succeeded, there was nothing for Kazan to do but cruise home, the whole mission a fool’s errand. But if they failed, it meant the operation would become real for Kazan. Very real indeed, Alexeyev thought. Certainly, as a patriot, he wanted his competitor submarines to succeed. But as the captain of Kazan, he wouldn’t mind if they failed. It could put Alexeyev and his crew into a position of glory. And really, what military commander didn’t relish the idea of glory?

Captain First Rank Boris Novikov put his ten fingers on the keyboard of command console position one. Voronezh had driven up to the Novosibirsk, both of them deep at two hundred meters keel depth to avoid the noise of the shallow layer with all its merchant shipping this close to the Indian Coast. The MGK-600 sonar’s Bolshoi-Feniks submarine-to-submarine telegraphy system was lined up, with the bow sphere preparing to transmit an active focused high-frequency series of pulses in the direction of the Novosibirsk, the system’s pulses reminding Novikov of a barcode, each letter taking up a half second of rapid pulses. It was so high-frequency and transmitted with such low power levels that outside of five shiplengths, it was virtually undetectable, the system half a century in the making.

Novikov typed:

It took a moment for Novosibirsk to respond.

“Watch Officer,” Novikov ordered the navigator, Captain Third Rank Leonid Lukashenko, “take us to periscope depth.”

“No stern clearance?”

“No stern clearance. If you maneuver, you could hit the Novosibirsk. Just be vigilant for shapes or shadows near the surface.”

“Madam First,” Lukashenko said to First Officer Anastasia Isakova, “Please darken the command post.” Lukashenko was wearing red wrap-around glasses to keep his eyes night-adjusted. By local time, it was still early in the morning. The lights in the room clicked off, the room illuminated only by the wash of light from the control consoles. Lukashenko pulled off his red glasses and pocketed them. “Boatswain! Make your depth twenty-one meters, ten-degree angle maximum, engine stop, report speed seven knots.”

The boatswain at the starboard forward console responded, acknowledging the orders. The deck inclined in what seemed a steep angle despite keeping it to only ten degrees, the captain grabbing his teacup.

“Seven knots, depth two hundred and fifty meters, sir.”

“Engine ahead slow, turns for four knots.” Lukashenko stepped to the portside number two periscope pole and reached into the overhead for a circular ring set into the overhead, the hydraulic controls for raising the periscope. He rotated it counterclockwise and the unit thumped with hydraulics. “Raising number two scope,” he called to the silent room. The optics module came slowly out of the deck. Lukashenko stooped and put his eye to the cold rubber eyepiece and pulled the control grips down to their horizontal unstowed position.

“Two hundred meters, sir, angle at up ten.”

“Very well.” Lukashenko clicked the right grip control for rotation assist, and the scope turned slowly clockwise, the optics on low power. With the right grip he dialed the angle of view upward, but so far it was dark. He continued his slow circles.

“One fifty meters, sir.”

“Very well,” Lukashenko said. Above, on the surface, it would be dark, but there should be some moonlight, he thought, and just there, to the right, there was a shimmering faint beam of light penetrating down to the deep.

“Fifty meters.”

They were hanging up, the boat coming up too slowly. “Boatswain, engine ahead two thirds, turns for seven knots, increase your angle to up fifteen.”

“Two thirds, seven knots, up ten. Forty meters. Up twelve.”

Lukashenko made several quick sweeps looking upward. With no stern clearance maneuver, they were tempting fate, especially in the crowded seaways here, but there was apparently nothing overhead.

“Thirty-five meters, thirty. Twenty-eight meters. Twenty-seven.”

“Ease your angle,” Lukashenko ordered, his voice muffled by the periscope optic module. The front of his coveralls were starting to soak through with sweat, the large optics module almost too warm to touch from all the electronics coursing through it. Up above, through the inky blackness of the water, the moonlight’s shimmer grew stronger and the undersides of the waves came into view, looking wrinkled and silvery from below, a mirrored surface from a fever dream.

“Twenty-five.”

The view approached the waves and then dissolved into foam and a million bubbles.

“Periscope is broaching.”

“Twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two. Twenty-one meters, sir.”

Finally the foam cleared and Lukashenko found himself in a different universe, here where there was the sky above, puffy clouds surrounding the first quarter moon, waves below. To the right of the ship’s travel, were the running lights of a large container ship. “Periscope is dry.” Lukashenko rotated the periscope through four complete circles, making sure no one other than the container ship was close, but they were alone in the sea. “No close contacts, one distant at three kilometers, container ship.”

“Watch Officer,” Novikov ordered the navigator, “turn your watch over to Engineer Montorov and get the communications officer to the wardroom to set up the videolink. Assemble the first officer and weapons officer in the wardroom for the link. I’ll be down in a moment.”

Lukashenko felt a tap on his shoulder and a voice at his ear. “Morning, Luke.” It was his friend, the chief engineer, Yevgeny Montorov, who must have been called to the central command post by the captain. Lukashenko turned the periscope straight ahead.

“Low power, on the horizon,” he said to Montorov.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Montorov whispered, taking the periscope.

“Videolink with the Novosibirsk,” Lukashenko said. “Maybe they have news — a detect, maybe.”

“I relieve you, sir,” Montorov said.

“I stand relieved,” Lukashenko replied. “In the command post,” he announced loudly, “Captain Second Rank Montorov has the conn.”

Lukashenko hurried to the wardroom, where Captain Lieutenant Maksimilian Kovalyov was establishing the secure link, but the screen was filled with snow. Kovalyov reached for the phone in the corner and made a call. “Central, wardroom, I need the multifrequency high-gain antenna. Periscope feed is not sufficient.” A distant thump sounded in the room. Hydraulics, Lukashenko thought, raising the MFHG antenna.

The weapons officer, Captain Lieutenant Pyotr Alexandrov, stepped into the room, yawning behind his fist, putting his cup on the table and pulling out his pad computer. Then First Officer Anastasia Isakova entered, finding the tea service and pouring for herself, taking a seat on the long edge of the table opposite the screen mounted on the outboard side. Captain Novikov came in and sat in the center seat directly opposite the screen. Isakova sat to his right. Lukashenko took the seat on the captain’s left, with Alexandrov seated to Isakova’s right. Lukashenko took out his pad computer and flipped through several screens, waiting for it to be updated by any incoming intelligence being fed from the high gain multifrequency antenna.

The screen’s snow cleared and a sharp, high-definition image appeared. On the screen were the senior officers of the Novosibirsk. Lukashenko had never met them before, but he knew Captain Novikov and the Novosibirsk commander, Orlov, had a long history together, none of it positive.

“Hello again, Captain Orlov,” Novikov said, his voice controlled, almost a monotone.

“Captain Novikov,” Orlov replied formally, perhaps coldly. “These are my senior officers,” he continued. “First Officer Ivan Vlasenko.” Vlasenko nodded at the camera. “Navigator Misha Dobryvnik. And Weapons Officer Irina Trusov.”

Lukashenko stared at the weapons officer of the Novosibirsk. Irina Trusov was a stunning platinum blonde, her coveralls trying but failing to conceal her expansive breasts. Lukashenko suddenly felt reminded of how long it had been since he was with a beautiful woman. Or any woman, for that matter.

“This is First Officer Anastasia Isakova,” Novikov said, “and Navigator Leonid Lukashenko. And Captain Lieutenant Pyotr Alexandrov is our weapons officer. So Boris, why have you called us here? You have news?”

“Good news and bad news, Yuri,” Novikov said. “At zero three twenty Moscow time, our MGK detected a very loud submerged contact at bearing two-nine-five. The signal continued for twenty-five minutes, then faded. We believe it to be the Panther.”

“For God’s sake,” Orlov said, his voice loud, “that was two hours ago! What have you been doing since?”

Novikov bit his lip in frustration. “The AI system didn’t alert us to it until well after the contact’s noise shut down. By then, the contact was gone. There was zero bearing rate on the contact — he was far distant. We did a full spectrum sonar scan, but there was nothing. The contact, we believe, was doing thirty knots.”

“Wait,” Orlov said. “For Panther to be going that fast and that loud, he would have had to light off his fast reactor.”

“Yes, we believe Panther was under nuclear power. The captured and analyzed signal showed steam flow transients and turbine noises. But when we slowed it down, the AI believed it to be a Kilo-class.”

“Well, where is he now? What’s the data package?”

By data package, Orlov meant the combination of the contact’s distance, his speed and the direction of his travel — data that would allow a torpedo hit, since torpedo combat required precision. For a torpedo to inflict damage, it had to get close, and to do that, one would have to put it in the same exact spot in the sea that the enemy would be at a precise moment in the future. It was like trying to hit a flying soccer ball with a tennis ball. You couldn’t just throw the ball the at the bearing of the moving soccer ball or you’d miss; you’d have to aim to put the tennis ball at a point in space where the soccer ball would be in the future after the tennis ball had time to travel there. And the only way to know where the soccer ball would be in that future moment was to know its data package. There had been much leaked to the media that the new Futlyar torpedoes were so smart that they didn’t need a data package, and that they could be launched only knowing the target bearing, yet would still hit the target, but that was disinformation, intentionally injected into the world’s open-source information sphere to frighten and deter the Americans. The cold, hard reality was, without a data package, even an advanced Futlyar torpedo would miss.

“We have no data package,” Novikov said, his jaw tightening. “Only the bearing and the sound signature. And the sound pressure level.”

“No bearing rate?” Orlov frowned. This made no sense. A submarine blasting through the sea, loud and clanking, at thirty knots, would move across the compass bearings as it soared by.

“Constant bearing and very, very distant. Perhaps hundreds of kilometers,” Novikov confessed. “And no way to understand where he’ll be in the future.”

“You’re wrong, Boris.” Orlov bit his lip, as if he’d wanted to say more, but had stopped himself. “You have a wealth of data to calculate the future position of the Panther.”

“No we don’t,” Novikov said, sadly. “It could have been hundreds of kilometers away. Who knows where it is now? All we know is it didn’t come down the Indian coastline as we expected. So, we have no idea where it is now.”

“Yes you do.” Orlov shook his head as if in frustration that he had to deal with fools. “Send us all your second captain’s data from the half hour before the detection to a half hour after. I want it all.”

“Fine,” Novikov said, grabbing the phone handset from under the table surface to call the communications officer. He said a few terse words into the phone, no doubt ordering Communications Officer Kovalyov to order the AI system’s history module data packaged up for uplink to the satellite and retransmission back to the Novosibirsk so that Orlov’s crew could further analyze it. “While we wait, you tell me why you think you can come up with a probable data package.”

“Listen, Boris, I’m only going to say this once.” Orlov’s voice was biting, as if having to explain something simple to a hated and slow-witted ex-wife. “You know the location of Panther when it left its base at Bandar Abbas and the time it departed. You know its speed as it sailed east-southeast to the mouth of the Gulf of Oman. You know approximately where it was when it got hijacked. From that point, you need to get into the minds of the adversary. The Americans were stealing the Kilo submarine.” At the mention of the Americans, the Novosibirsk’s pretty blonde weapons officer’s face grew dark with some hidden fury. Somehow, for her, Lukashenko thought, this was personal. “They mean to escape the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean and sail it back to the Western Hemisphere.”

Orlov looked up as the communications officer, TK Sukolov came into the room and whispered in Orlov’s ear. Orlov nodded and Sukolov withdrew.

“The data stream is aboard for us to analyze now,” Orlov said. “As I was saying, the Americans mean to get back to the United States. They may not follow exactly a great-circle route around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, but their approximate path will get them there. Even if they steam slightly eastward, their predominant vector is southward.”

Novikov frowned. “They might be going to the Pacific, Yuri, to bring the Panther to their Pearl Harbor base in Hawaii. Or their base on Guam.”

“No, Boris,” Orlov said, shaking his head. “The only way out of the Arabian Sea for someone headed to the Pacific is southeast down the India coastline. We’ve already proved that incorrect. And even if they were headed to the Pacific and decided to avoid breaking eastward until they reached the equator in order to confuse us, their vector would still be predominantly southward.”

Novikov pursed his lips in thought. “Fine. If they are headed to Africa’s southern tip, we should steam at maximum speed to the Cape of Good Hope and catch them there when they transit from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.”

“Forget that, Boris,” Orlov said, still in a tone of lecturing a dullard pupil. “The South Atlantic between the Cape of Good Hope and the Antarctic coast is bigger than the Arabian Sea by five hundred percent. It’s just another haystack for you to cry about losing your needle in. No, we must catch these thieves now, here, here in the Arabian Sea.” Orlov looked at his navigator, Dobryvnik. “Misha, pair your screen to the videolink and bring up the second captain’s command screen.”

Onboard the Novosibirsk, Navigator Misha Dobryvnik operated his pad computer, seeing the data that had come in from Voronezh, the second captain standing by for Orlov to give it commands. The flatpanel video screen split into two displays, the main one the text-entry commands for the onboard AI system, the second a small window showing the videolink and the crew of the Novosibirsk. Dobryvnik slid his pad computer over to Orlov. Orlov began typing.

Orlov continued typing in his assumptions, that the Panther had continued east-southeast after being captured for some time, then turned to escape the Arabian Sea with a bias toward sailing in the general direction of the Cape of Good Hope and the Atlantic Ocean, then inserted the high-speed run for half an hour, starting 0315 Moscow time until 0345, then slowing back down to a six-knot battery-conserving crawl. Finally he finished by typing:

A view of the Arabian Sea flashed on the main screen, looking down from high overhead, the image from a satellite composite with cloudcover removed. The sea was a glistening deep blue, almost black, the Arabian peninsula a bright sand-color, the coast of India light green in the north and a more lush green farther south.

A red dot flashed at their present location, off India’s Gulf of Khambht, a few hundred kilometers west of the city of Surat. Soon the second captain started sprinkling white spots into the Arabian Sea, each dot representing a probability calculation. As the dots filled the sea, they formed a narrow, oblong oval running north-to-south, the oval perhaps three hundred kilometers long and perhaps thirty wide. Oddly, as the probability dots littered the sea, a smallish triangle formed north of the oval, the point of it pointing southward, the overall impression of the white probability dots forming what looked like a fish sailing due south. The probability distribution was heaviest in the center of the oval, the probabilities becoming lower as the dots grew less dense toward the fuzzy edges of both shapes. The center of the oval was due west of their present position by about five hundred kilometers.

Orlov typed into the screen, a third window flashing up on the screen showing what he was typing.

The typing screen vanished and the view of the Arabian Sea took up the display again, but now there were dimensions noted in slender yellow lines. North-to-south, the probability oval was 286 kilometers long and 36 kilometers wide, not counting the fish tail. The display showed the oval’s center to be at bearing 274 from their present position, at a distance of 487 kilometers. Orlov typed again.

The display at the center of the oval formed by the white dots flashed in bold red:

Novikov considered for a moment. A transit speed of six knots meant they were running on batteries to keep silent and conserve battery amp-hours. And instead of having to come to periscope depth and snorkel on the diesels to charge the battery bank, they could restart the fast reactor and charge the batteries with the nuclear turbine-generator. Odds were, the reactor at low power levels was quieter than the loud clanking, banging and rumbling of the diesel.

“So we should calculate an interception course from here to the southwest,” Novikov said. “We’ll position ourselves farther south of the probability oval, and Panther—and his escort, if he has one — will drive right into our trap. Then we take him down, and whatever is escorting him. We could be home in three weeks.”

“You’re half right, Boris,” Orlov replied. “One of us is going southwest to lie in wait for the probability oval to drive into a barrier search, but a barrier search formed by one of us, not two. Whoever doesn’t go to the southern intercept hold point will be pursuing a course to arrive at a point north of the probability oval, then turn south to overrun the oval from the north. Submarine one catches Panther from the south while submarine two attacks him from the north. A rundown, if you are a fan of American baseball.”

“I don’t know American baseball, Yuri, but this sounds like a circular firing squad. Any torpedo fired by the northern attack submarine at the Panther to the south could home in on and destroy the southern submarine. One of us could perish by friendly fire.”

“That won’t happen, Boris,” Orlov said confidently. “And even if it does, the Futlyar torpedoes have a TCM feature.”

TCM stood for torpedo countermeasure. On the video screen, Novikov made a sour face. Dobryvnik knew what he had to be thinking, that the TCM mode had never worked in submarine vs. submarine testing, never, but the bureaucrats in the weapons testing labs swore with the new software upload, it would magically gain the capability to intercept and destroying incoming American, Chinese and French torpedoes — assuming that software upload wasn’t as hacked as the compromised surface and air force computer systems. And on this mission, they might well be facing an attack from Russian torpedoes, the older UGST units loaded onto the Panther. Well, Dobryvnik thought, this mission might well bring those lab-jacketed idiots the evidence they lacked. Of success or failure, although if the TCM subroutines failed, who would live to tell the tale?

“So who goes north and who goes south?” Novikov asked. Obviously the plum combat position was lying in wait to the south, waiting for the Panther and her escort to drive up on them. The boat to the north would be in a tail-chase. Odds are, detecting Panther on her stealthy transit on her batteries would be insanely difficult, and if she were escorted by a Virginia-class U.S submarine, that ship would be even more quiet — although the nuclear-powered escort would emit tonals detectable by the MGK-600’s narrowband processors. In a world of loud ocean noise, detecting a diesel boat on her batteries and a stealthy nuclear attack submarine would be an impossible mission. Unless, Novikov thought, the Panther lit off his fast reactor, in which case he’d blast out transients and narrowband tonals — the Kilo’s fast reactor module was not sound-mounted for stealth. It was just a test platform. Detection might be aided if Panther fired torpedoes — or God help them, the Americans fired torpedoes. Submarines might well be stealthy, but torpedoes were loud. The technicians had worked on quieting them for decades and come up with nothing. If one wanted a weapon to travel fast, one gave up on stealth. There was a ‘stealth mode’ for the new Futlyar torpedo, but all it had turned out to be was making the weapon crawl at fifteen knots instead of screaming in at fifty. But an ultra-slow torpedo had a higher chance of missing, giving the target too much time to randomly maneuver or counterdetect the incoming torpedo.

Still, there were ways around the impossible problem. A cruise missile dropping a depth charge from overhead was one way. A supercavitating torpedo was another — it was indeed much louder than a conventional torpedo, being an underwater rocket, but it traveled so fast that transit time was minimal, meaning that evasion time was also reduced.

There was no doubt, though, the northern position would go to the lesser of the submarine captains.

“We should go to the south,” Novikov asserted, clenching his jaw. “We made the initial detection.”

Orlov made a dismissive noise and rolled his eyes. “You also failed to realize it until, what, an hour later, and then you failed to analyze it properly — that all fell on us. No, Boris, you’ll go to the north and we’ll go south. And for God’s sake, don’t launch torpedoes at ghosts or shadows. You make damned sure you’re shooting at the Panther or the American and not at us. You got that?”

Not wanting to be further humiliated in front of his crew, Novikov decided to accept Orlov’s insistent proposal with grace.

“Fine, Yuri, but the same goes for you. Don’t you shoot northward unless you have a damned good data package on the targets. Preferably, hit them with active sonar before you shoot — or after, and wire-guide steer the weapons to the targets.”

“Leave the tactics to me, Boris. After I and my crew destroy these targets, we’ll allow you to claim victory with us.”

Novikov frowned. Orlov was being even more of an asshole than he was face-to-face. He supposed Orlov blamed Novikov for Natalia leaving and eventually forming a relationship with Novikov, but there had been almost a year between the ending of one relationship and the beginning of another. Novikov had not stolen the woman, only accepted her affection much later when offered it. Was that morally wrong? Perhaps it would have been if the other man had been a friend, but Orlov had hated Novikov ever since the torpedo incident of their youth. Besides, it was moot point now, because Natalia had left Novikov and moved on. Novikov shook his head. The sooner they ended this call, the better. Then the rest of the mission he could forget about Orlov.

“So, Boris, I’ve calculated my intercept course, speed and waiting time for the probability oval to reach me. I’ve bracketed the speed of the target, using an initial assumption of a six knot transit, but I also laid in a nine knot transit in case Panther decides to speed up when he’s underway on nuclear power. If Panther transits at six knots for eighteen hours on his batteries, then speeds up to eighteen knots for six hours while charging his batteries, his overall speed-of-advance is nine knots, so we accounted for that. I plan on using a speed of twenty-eight knots, enough to be swift while still remaining silent in natural circulation reactor loops. That gives me a course of three-zero-nine and a transit time of eleven hours and a waiting time-on-station of seven hours if the target is transiting at six knots, and a wait of one hour if he’s going an average of nine knots with a sprint-and-drift tactic. That means contact time is somewhere between twelve hours and eighteen hours from now. Moscow time, that’s somewhere between eighteen hundred and midnight tonight. By the early hours of tomorrow, Boris, we will be writing the after-action reports to the Admiralty.”

Novikov nodded. Orlov continued.

“Now, Boris, you should do the same kind of calculations to place yourselves sufficiently close to the tail of the probability oval so that you cross the oval’s north end at eighteen hundred hours today. You have the shorter distance to travel, so you can approach slower than twenty-eight knots. You will be more stealthy than we will be. When you get to the northern envelope of the probability oval, you should transit into it heading south at a speed of nineteen knots — this will be faster than a possible Panther sprint speed, and is still stealthy with natural circulation. You should have your AI calculate contact time based on that — if it is earlier than midnight, trail in stealth until then, and at midnight, open fire. That will give Panther time to drive into our barrier search, and we can attack in coordination. Is all that understood? Are we in agreement?”

“No, we are not in agreement,” Novikov said, “If I have a solid detect on Panther at a time before you’re on-station, I’m taking my shot. I’m firing at him. You’re the one who wanted to go south for the glory position and left me with the low-probability tail-chase of the northern approach zone. It’s entirely possible, Yuri, that your entry into this battle will start with you detecting the sound of my torpedoes exploding and the target sinking. So, is all that understood?”

Orlov pursed his lips. “Fine. Then good luck to us both.”

“Wait,” Novikov said. “We need an emergency distress signal.”

“Use four loud, three-second low-frequency pulses from the MGK’s spherical array active. It’s not stealthy, but I assume such a situation of distress would dispense with stealth. If possible, launch a coded radio buoy out the countermeasure ejector.”

“Agreed,” Novikov replied. “And I also agree — good luck to us both. Anything else from you or your crew, Captain Orlov?”

“Nothing from our side, Captain Novikov. Good hunting.”

The screen winked out. Novikov smirked at Lukashenko, relieved that the confrontational meeting with Orlov was finally over. He picked up the phone handset from its cradle bolted to the underside of the table and punched the button for central control on the handset.

“Watch Officer,” Novikov said, “depart periscope depth and proceed to three hundred meters, course west, speed twenty. You’ll get new sailing orders from the navigator in a few minutes.”

Novikov replaced the phone handset and looked at Lukashenko. “Luke, calculate the approach vector to get us in position on the north.”

Lukashenko input the geometry problem into the second captain. “Sir, it comes out that we need to decide which speed the target is traveling. If he’s going six knots, we would steer course two-eight-nine with a speed of twenty-four knots. If he’s making an average of nine knots, we’d steer course two-nine-six. With oval-entry at eighteen hundred, turning south at nineteen knots, we have three different scenarios, Captain.” Lukashenko frowned. “If Panther is going six knots, time-on-contact for the center of the oval is midnight. If he’s going nine knots, contact time is zero two hundred hours. But if he’s going eighteen knots on a sprint, it would take us four days to catch up with the center of the oval at nineteen knots approach speed.” Lukashenko tapped his pen. “This is bad, Captain. We’ll be much later to the battle than Novosibirsk. They’ll take down Panther before we’re even anywhere near being on-station.”

“Tail-chases are almost always futile, Luke,” Novikov said, leaning over Lukashenko’s pad computer. “That’s why the northern position is a loser. So, recalculate with new assumptions. Absolute maximum speed run to the oval north boundary, thirty-five knots.”

“But, Captain, that will mean departing natural circulation and shifting reactor circulation pumps to fast speed.”

“So be it, Luke. We speed to the oval, then turn south, and slow down to twenty knots to get closer to the oval’s center. We’ll drift five minutes out of every fifteen at four knots as we approach the oval’s center. Now, with that set of assumptions, recalculate time-on-target.”

Lukashenko went back to work with the second captain. “So, Captain, assuming a maximum speed run at thirty-five knots, that gets us to the northern boundary of the oval a bit under eight hours from now, slightly before fourteen hundred hours — four hours before the earliest time the Novosibirsk could start detecting the Panther. Then we’d commence our sprint-and-drift search. There’s a good chance that in those four hours, we’d detect Panther first.” He slid his pad computer over, showing the calculation and the resulting course to the probability circle’s northern boundary.

“Excellent,” Novikov said, finding the phone under the table and calling central again. Into the phone, he said, “Watch Officer, change course to two-eight-eight and increase speed to thirty-five knots, and yes, I realize that means fast speed reactor circulation pumps. After seven hours and thirty-six minutes, slow to four knots and turn due south.”

The phone crackled with the watch officer’s response, and the deck tilted as the Voronezh sped up. The deck began to tremble violently as the speed increased, and four loud booming noises sounded in the sea as her reactor coolant pumps sped up to fast speed, the check valves in the piping loops slamming thunderous noises into the sea. Novikov turned and reached for the tea service and poured himself another cup, smiling. This would be a good watch, he thought. And the afternoon watch promised to be even better. Perhaps they should roll out a gourmet meal for lunch to celebrate, but then he thought it would be bad luck to celebrate before the kill.

But kill there would be. By the evening watch, two submarines would lie broken and bleeding on the bottom of the Arabian Sea, and Novikov was absolutely certain that his submarine would not be one of those two.

26

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino found Lieutenant Dieter Dankleff in the central command post, reclining in the command seat outboard of the forward part of control, nestled securely aft of the number two periscope

“What’s up, Patch?” Dankleff asked, yawning. “You’re up early. Someone swim over your watery grave again?”

Pacino shook his head. “Just making sure you’re awake, U-Boat. I’m going to do a tour, see how everyone’s doing. But one thing is on my mind.”

“Let me guess, the state of the battery charge? We’re at sixty percent, with the reactor cooking away. Although that bitch has to be noisy. I looked at raising charging voltage to charge the battery bank faster, but it would generate a lot more hydrogen, and hydrogen is not healthy for children and other living things. Think Hindenburg. Think Challenger. Not a good thing in a confined space filled with electrical equipment and sparks.”

“And with Alexie chain-smoking. He must have brought enough cartons of cigarettes to burn through three packs a day for a month.” Abakumov would be standing watch aft in the nuclear control room, hopefully sober.

“And enough vodka as well.”

“That won’t last as long, since now he has to share.”

“Damned shame,” Dankleff grinned.

“So, U-Boat. All okay here?”

“Hey. Officer-in-Charge U-Boat has the bubble. You’re as safe as in Mommy’s arms.”

“Good to know,” Pacino said, knocking his academy ring twice on the periscope pole. “I’ll relieve you at oh-six,” he said, turning and walking aft.

He stepped into the navigation alcove and turned on the desk lamp above the chart, which was taped down to the table surface, a drafting machine arm laid pointing north-south. Pacino glanced at the readout of the Panther’s inertial navigation display, the primitive system the equivalent of what the U.S. Navy had used in the 1970s. Crude, but effective enough to pinpoint their distance within a few thousand meters. If corrected daily with a navigation fix from the Russian GPS satellite constellation, it could collapse the fix error circle down to perhaps a hundred meters. Good enough to avoid submerged sea mountains, but not good enough to approach a port submerged. Pacino plotted the inertial nav’s position on the chart, then laid a pencil line down on it pointing south, dialing their present course in the drafting machine’s protractor to course 177, almost due south, their latitude roughly twenty degrees, thirty minutes north, 350 nautical miles west of India’s Gulf of Khambht and the city of Surat, their longitude almost in the middle of the triangle of the Arabian Sea, due south of Karachi, Pakistan, which was 280 nautical miles west of their previously planned track down the west coastline of India.

They were making excellent time now, what with kicking up their speed to eighteen knots during the midwatch battery charge. Pacino, the unofficial navigator of the journey, had been considering executing a zig to drive farther east, to confuse any opponent of their intent to drive to the Cape of Good Hope and into the Atlantic, but instinct was whispering in his ear to keep driving south and escape the Arabian Sea. Leaving the scene of the crime was definitely the best course for the moment. He looked down at the chart’s depiction of the Arabian Sea, thinking, where are you, Vermont? It was the midwatch, and on the Vermont, his friend the chief engineer, Elvis Lewinsky, would be on the conn, hopefully tracking Panther, keeping her safe. It bothered Pacino that there was no easy way to communicate with her, but submarines were designed to prowl alone, not in wolfpacks. World War II tactics hadn’t survived into the nuclear age.

Although, the Iranian captain, Resa Ahmadi, had shown Pacino and sonar chief Albanese a feature of the ship’s MGK-400 sonar system, which could be tied into the MG-519 Arfa mine-detection and under-ice sonar to broadcast rapid high frequency pulses. But the system was essentially useless, as the language was encrypted. It would be like trying to communicate by generating a note consisting of a barcode. The receiver would have no idea what had been sent, just a string of long and short pulses. Useless.

With that thought, Pacino wandered into the doorway of the sonar enclosure and found Chief Albanese deep in thought, rotating a circular knob, his other hand on one of the ears of his headset. The console’s buttons, knobs and the single large hand-crank in the center had all been recently labeled by Albanese with masking tape and permanent marker in English.

“Hey, Chief,” Pacino said. “Any progress figuring this thing out?”

Albanese removed his headset and tossed it to the side in frustration. “It’s from the stone age, Mr. Patch. No towed array, just a hull flank array for high frequency narrowband, which is rendered fucking useless when we operate the reactor. Steaming on batteries, it’s a bit improved, but not good enough to detect Vermont, even though I know all her emitted tonal frequencies.”

“Vermont is still a needle in a haystack, no matter how much you know about the shape and color of the needle,” Pacino offered. “Was Captain Ahmadi any help getting you into the sonar system?”

“He knows squat about it, sir. I had him translate some of the tech manual, but it’s all knobology, not tactical employment. Apparently the Iranian Navy trains their sonar techs with tribal knowledge, passed down from one generation to the next. Nothing written down.”

Pacino nodded. “Not all that different from us. I never could find anything on the Q-10’s tactical employment. I had to suffer through checkouts from you with miserable dozens of lookups every time it came to tactics.”

Albanese smiled mischievously. “But you learned it all the better that way, didn’t you, sir?”

“That I did, Chief. That I did. Well, the only comfort I can give you is to keep plugging away at it. If anyone can figure this bitch out, it’s you, Whale.”

“Thanks, Mr. Patch. You taking the zero six hundred watch?”

“Yeah, I thought I’d do an extended pre-watch tour and grab a bucket of that Iranian coffee first.”

“Oh yeah, rocket fuel. Do me a favor, L-T, bring me up a cup when you brew the pot.”

“Sure thing, Chief.” Pacino knocked his ring on the doorjamb twice and walked aft to the ladderway to the middle level, turning forward along the passageway leading to the forward compartment, passing the wardroom. He went in and found it empty. Not surprising, he thought, with it being the midwatch. He decided to continue forward to the torpedo room, along the passageway until he reached the round hatch, ducked through it and stepped up the short ladderway to the upper level, which was absolutely crammed with shiny green torpedoes, a small catwalk running down the center between rack-stored weapons and the six torpedo tubes. At the forward end, at a port-side console, he found Lieutenant Muhammad Varney deep in conversation with the Iranian captain, Ahmadi.

“What is this, a conspiracy?” Pacino joked. “You two planning a mutiny?”

Boozy Varney smiled, as did Resa Ahmadi.

“Mr. Patch,” Ahmadi said. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

Pacino shook his head. “Who can sleep when things are this exciting?”

“Yeah, exciting,” Varney said dismissively.

“So, Boozy, where do we stand with getting the torpedoes operational?”

“They’re ready to go. Firing panel function checks are sat. We checked the weapons we could access. All good.”

“What’s the loadout?”

“We have sixteen UGST Fizik-1 units. Interesting, they have Mark 48 similarities but seem to have features the Mark 48 sadly doesn’t. Tubes one to five are tube-loaded UGST Fizik-1 torpedoes. Captain Ahmadi says they’re fire-and-forget weapons. They’ve got wake-homing, infrared, passive and active sonar. Or at least, I hope so.”

“How fast can you shoot and recycle? Are there common firing mechanisms that limit how fast you can shoot the tubes?”

“No,” Ahmadi said. “Each tube firing mechanism is independent. You could actually fire the entire bank of six at the same moment, although that’s not recommended. The wake from one would tumble another, or the Venturi effect could suck one weapon into another, making them both tumble. But firing at two-second intervals seems to work well.”

“How long to reload and recycle the firing mechanisms?”

“There is no mechanism recycling needed. For the next weapon bank fire, we’re just limited by time to shut the outer door, depressurize, vent and drain the tube, open the inner door and push in a new weapon. Then shut the breach door, flood, pressurize and open the muzzle door.”

“Time to do all that?”

“Our record is ninety seconds,” Ahmadi said, “but that’s with a full crew in the torpedo room. A highly trained crew. With us? Better count on at least three or four minutes.”

Pacino bit his lip. That wouldn’t be good enough. “We may have to shoot one at a time while draining and reloading, and that would continuously dump the room in the minimum amount of time.”

“You planning on a big battle, Lipstick?” Varney said, his eyebrow raised.

“Let’s put it this way, Boozy. If we find ourselves under fire from an opposition force, we’re going to shoot everything we have at it. We may hit nothing, but it will add to the confusion. The fog of war. And who knows. We could get lucky and take down an attacker by dumb luck. Or by the Russian designs of these UGSTs. But one thing’s for certain. If I have to die on this mission, I intend to die with an empty torpedo room.”

Varney laughed. “Wow, that’s like a famous naval saying, something John Paul Jones or Horatio Nelson would say. Or like your father with his famous quote, I still have one torpedo and two main engines. Easy Eisenhart told me there’s a big brass plaque with that quote mounted on the wall of Memorial Hall at the Naval Academy. Are you trying to outdo Pacino Senior?”

Pacino smiled. “Boozy, no one, and I mean no one, will ever outdo Admiral Michael Pacino.”

“Are you worried that if you ‘shoot the room,’ as you say, you might hit the Vermont with one of your UGSTs?”

“Vermont knows enough to stay out of the way of a volley of our warshots,” Pacino said, “and in the worst case, they could activate the Mark 48 Mod Nine’s torpedo countermeasure mode.” Pacino put his hand on one of the shiny green torpedoes. “These UGST torpedoes — do they have an anti-torpedo countermeasure mode?” Pacino asked. Were they good enough to shoot down an incoming torpedo?

“Sadly, no, Mr. Patch,” Ahmadi said. “We have an older version of the attack software. But for that we’ve tried using the VA-111 Shkval torpedo. It’s loaded in tube six.”

“Shkval,” Pacino said. “That’s the peroxide-fueled supercavitating torpedo, right?”

“Yes, Mr. Patch.”

“Yeah,” Varney said, wiping sweat off his greasy forehead. “The torpedo that killed the Kursk.”

Ahmadi looked at Varney, startled. “They told us the Americans sank the Kursk.”

Varney moved his hand as if batting away an annoying fly from his face. “The hell we did. We had nothing to do with that. Kursk’s torpedo room blew up right after her Shkval unit exploded after a peroxide leak. She went down from her own friendly fire.”

Ahmadi shook his head, frowning. “The Russians insisted that American SEAL commandos planted a smart mine on Kursk’s bow before she sailed, programmed with an algorithm that measured time from port departure, time from submergence, depth, and transients like a torpedo door opening, then blew up the bow when the algorithm was satisfied. The torpedo room exploding eliminated all forensic evidence of the American mine.”

Varney looked at Pacino, pursing his lips and shaking his head. “That’s a dumb-ass tall tale designed by the Russians to keep the blame off themselves,” he said. “Besides, why the hell would we do that? It was peacetime. And how the hell could anyone believe that nonsense with zero proof?”

“According to the Russians,” Ahmadi said, “when things warmed up under Yeltsin and Clinton, during a Russia-America general officer party, a Russian admiral tanked up on vodka and cocaine walked up to his opposite number in the American Navy and admitted they sank your submarine Stingray under the polar icecap, out of revenge for the supposed American sinking of the Soviet submarine K-129, and he apologized. Seven years later, the U.S. Navy extracted their revenge.”

Pacino stared at the Iranian officer, stunned. The submarine Stingray had been commanded by his father’s father, and the sinking’s board of inquiry insisted she’d gone down in the Atlantic near the Azores from a defect in her own torpedo, which experienced a hot-run in her torpedo room and exploded, blowing up all the weapons in the bow and violently sinking her. Other competing theories, still hotly debated decades later, imagined the ship had suffered a battery explosion, another theory stating that her screw and its drive shaft fell out of the hull, opening up a huge hole in the engineroom. But being intentionally targeted by the Russians? Under the secret reaches of the Arctic Ocean’s ice canopy? No wonder Ahmadi thought the Americans had a motive to sink the Kursk.

“Wow. Apology not accepted,” Varney said. “But still, no evidence the U.S. Navy took down the Kursk. It’s still a big-assed excuse.”

“The evidence the Russians quoted was that after the wreck of the Kursk was pulled out of the Barents Sea and lay blown to pieces in a Russian drydock, the Russian admiral who apologized for the Stingray sinking received a handwritten note accompanying an expensive bottle of American Pappy Van Winkle Kentucky bourbon, from the American admiral to whom he made the confession. The note reportedly read, ‘Thank you for your candid admission. Now we’re even.’”

Varney stared at Ahmadi, his mouth half open.

“Anyway,” Pacino said, trying to shake off the shock of Ahmadi’s story, “if we can return to today’s mission, gentlemen? Captain Ahmadi, you said you employed the Shkval torpedo against attacking torpedoes. How did it perform?”

“It was mixed news, Mr. Patch. One time out of six it destroyed an incoming torpedo, but we think that was a coincidence. We’ve taken to calling the Shkval ‘the 53-centimeter evasion device.’ It’s so loud and so fast that anyone hearing it would be well advised to get out of its search cone fast and run away. Meanwhile, we get out of the area going the other direction.”

Pacino thought. “How many Shkvals do we have?”

“Only two,” Ahmadi said.

“Boozy, take the UGST out of tube five and load five with the second Shkval,” Pacino ordered.

“You sure, boss?”

“Yeah. Worst case, if things get hot, we can use the Shkvals to make off-hull noise, a mini-blue-out diversion, and get the hell out of town.”

“Sure. It’ll take a while and make some noise,” Varney said. “We have to move the entire room’s load-out. The second one is buried deep on the bottom of the starboard side. I need to get Dankleff’s permission.”

“Check out the second Shkval before you load it. If that sonofabitch is leaking peroxide, I want to jettison it. And check out the tube six Shkval also. A single drop of leaking peroxide, I want that damned thing on the sea bottom, not us.”

“I’ll have a report up to you on the conn when you get on watch.”

“Thanks, Boozy. Captain Ahmadi, can you come with me for a minute?”

Pacino took Ahmadi aside. “I’m worried about the air banks,” Pacino said. “Do you use high pressure air for torpedo-firing?”

“No, Mr. Patch. The firing mechanisms are electrical with pumps and a seawater tank that auto-compensates.”

“But emergency blowing to surface the boat requires a full air bank. How much air do we have in the banks after the emergency surface we did?”

“Let’s go see,” Ahmadi said.

“Let’s stop for coffee,” Pacino said. “I’m exhausted.”

“As am I.” They paused in the wardroom and Pacino brewed the pot under instruction from Ahmadi. The Iranian was not allowed to touch cooking paraphernalia for fear of poisoning the invading boarding party, despite his cooperation with the mission so far. When the pot was full, Pacino poured for himself and Ahmadi, then a third cup for Albanese.

They climbed the ladder to the upper level, Pacino handing the coffee to the grateful sonarman, then walked forward to The Million Valve Manifold. Pacino glanced up at the yellow masking tape he’d put on the valves for the blow system, one marked FWD EMBT BLOW, the other AFT EMBT BLOW, the EMBT for emergency main ballast tank, the term used in the U.S. Navy.

He and Ahmadi walked forward into the command post, waving at Dankleff. Ahmadi stopped at the starboard side pos two console. The panel’s gauges and switches had all been relabeled in English with masking tape and black marker. Ahmadi pointed up at four large air pressure gauges, the two on the left labeled FWD AIR BANK, one adding the word PORT, the other adding the word STBD. The two on the right had been labeled AFT AIR BANK, port and starboard. And they all read close to zero.

“They’re all depleted,” Ahmadi said. “Empty.”

Pacino turned to Dankleff, who had risen out of the command seat and stretched, yawning.

“U-Boat, we have to charge the air banks.”

“You’re worried about being able to emergency surface,” Dankleff said. “But using the air compressor’s going to make some major noise.”

“We’re noisy already going eighteen knots on the reactor,” Pacino said. “We’re going to have to go up to periscope depth and put up the induction mast and light off the air compressors until the banks are full. Captain Ahmadi, how long to charge all four banks?”

Ahmadi considered. “Twenty to thirty minutes. Maybe less depending on atmospheric conditions on the surface.”

“I hate to make that much noise for that long,” Dankleff said, frowning. “That, along with all the noise you and Boozy are making moving weapons around, for fuck’s sake. And if you rise above the thermal layer, you’re bringing the reactor into the narrow sound channel topside. Along with the banging and clanking air compressors. We could easily be detected by aircraft or surface warships. It’s a hell of a risk, Patch.”

Pacino shook his head. “It has to be done, U-Boat. We have to prepare for the worst. That’s why I’m getting the torpedo room ready.”

“Yeah, Boozy phoned me for permission to move weapons and tube-load a second Shkval. He told me your famous naval saying.” U-Boat stood at mock attention and unzipped the top of his coveralls, put his hand inside the opening, raising his chin in an imitation of Napoleon and said in a pretentious and melodramatic British accent, ‘If die I must on this mission, die I shall with an empty torpedo room.’”

“You know what, U-Boat?” Pacino said, trying to keep a straight face.

“What, Lipstick?”

“Go fuck yourself. And when you’re done with that, get this bucket of bolts the hell up to periscope depth and raise and drain the goddamned induction mast.”

Dankleff saluted sloppily. “Yes, sir, Mr. Assistant Officer-in-Charge, sir!”

CIA Director Margo Allende put two cups of strong black coffee on the table and sat down next to National Security Advisor Michael Pacino. Pacino looked up at her gratefully.

“How long has it been since you slept?” Allende asked softly.

“Not much since Camp David. And then none since the message came in from Panther.”

Allende nodded sympathetically. “Listen. My house is way out near Langley, but I own a crash pad, a little stone townhouse not far from here, for nights like this. You say the word, I’ll whisk you to my guest room and you can get a few hours of sleep, just ten minutes away from the White House and fifteen from the Pentagon. Crisp, clean sheets and a nice fluffy comforter. You’ll sleep like a baby.”

“No, but thank you, Margo.” Pacino said, rubbing the stubble on his chin. His tie was at half-mast and his once-upon-a-time starched white shirt’s sleeves were rolled up, his suit jacket across the room, draped across an empty chair. “I want to be here in case there’s any update.” He looked at Allende, a bit startled to find her big blue eyes fixed on him. She quickly looked down to her pad computer, but there had been something in her eyes. She knew something she wasn’t telling him, he thought. “So. Is there an update?”

Allende clicked on the large flatpanel screen opposite their chairs. A view of the globe from space appeared, driven by Allende’s pad computer. She zoomed in so that the Arabian Sea was shown in screen center. She tapped her screen, and two closely-spaced red dots began flashing, close to the Indian coastline, near Surat and the Indian Gulf of Khambht, the latitude line showing them at north twenty degrees, thirty minutes.

“These are the periscopes of the two Russian Yasen-M-class submarines that were dispatched to chase after Panther,” she said. “We’re fortunate that both transponders are still working. They tend to go offline after a few weeks. I guess we haven’t designed them with sufficient robustness to withstand the seawater and the pressure changes. And the temperature swings from the icy cold Barents Sea to the near boiling Arabian Sea. But both are still online.”

Pacino looked at Allende. “You know where the Panther is. Margo, you have to tell me. Read me into the program, whatever Operation Blue Hardhat’s equivalent is for the Iranian Navy that could allow you to know where Panther is now. For God’s sake, I think I have a need to know.”

“I can’t do that without Carlucci’s signoff, and he’s sleeping until zero seven hundred, with strict instructions not to wake him unless there are weapons released.”

“Margo, please.” Pacino looked at the CIA director. She usually kept her hair back in a stern bun and wore oversized eighties glasses, as if she intended to make herself look homely, but tonight she’d let her auburn hair down to her shoulders, and it gleamed in the lights of the room, making her look like she could be a model for a conditioner ad. And she’d put on eye makeup and lip gloss and lost the glasses. And unlike her usual frumpy frock, tonight she was wearing a tight pencil dress, gray cashmere, with a thin black belt at her waist, with black tall pumps, the ensemble revealing a slender but beautifully curving feminine form. For the first time Pacino saw her as a woman, and realized she was a stunning beauty. He’d never seen her as anything other than the chief spook before this moment. He must be suffering from too long without sleep, he thought. He was getting punch drunk. That, or what was happening with his soon-to-be-ex-wife Colleen was being processed in his subconscious as time went on.

Allende got up and went to the credenza behind them and found an old-fashioned laser pointer. She resumed her seat, the stirring of the air near her wafting her scent into Pacino’s nostrils, a faint trace of perfume, something French, something that had to be wickedly expensive, he thought. No doubt, he’d been awake far too long, or he was losing his sanity.

Allende pointed the laser pointer at the screen and hit the button, and a bright yellow point of light appeared due south of Karachi, Pakistan, some three hundred nautical miles due west of the red dots. As quickly as the yellow dot appeared, it went out, but it had engraved itself onto Pacino’s mind.

“Jesus, Margo, they’re at the same goddammed latitude!” Pacino breathed.

“Relax, Patch. There’s two hundred eighty miles between them. Even if the Russians had Panther’s exact position and speed and raced at flank speed to where Panther would be at the exact time of the Russian’s arrival, they’re twelve hours out. Maybe more. They couldn’t be within weapons range before lunch. And it’s just after midnight now. Nothing is happening for hours, Patch. And good news — the Russians were at periscope depth for over half an hour, and all during that time they were headed northwest. The wrong direction. When we look at possible outcomes, we deal in probabilities, Patch, and the probabilities here favor Panther escaping with the Russians being none the wiser.”

“Unless Panther does something loud and the Russians get a transient noise detection,” Pacino said. “With a detection of the Russians this accurate, can’t we vector in a Pegasus P-8 patrol aircraft? Two Mark 50 torpedoes dropped out of a Pegasus, those Yasen-M-class submarines are history.”

“You know those aren’t the rules of engagement, Patch. We can’t attack Russian submarines for just existing in the general area. We can only fire on them if they’re actively trying to stop the Panther. You’re cheating.”

You ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’, Pacino thought, the motto of the first Devilfish before she perished in the Arctic Ocean.

“Can’t we inform the Vermont of the Yasen positions?”

“Already done. Vermont knows.” Allende placed her hand on Pacino’s bare forearm. Her hands were cool and soft, her nails done in a French manicure. “I still think you should come with me and get a few hours’ sleep.”

Pacino shook his head. “Something is bothering me. Something doesn’t add up,” he said. He looked up at the display. “If the Russians are serious about finding and stopping the Panther, why haven’t they overflown the Arabian Sea with maritime patrol aircraft, their equivalent to our antisubmarine warfare P-8 Pegasus planes? Why no dropping of sonobuoys from aircraft or helicopters? And where are the antisubmarine destroyers and frigates? For both the Russians and Iranians? Margo, the Arabian Sea should be so full of sonobuoys you should be able to walk from India to Oman without getting your feet wet. There should be more warships in the sea than merchant ships. It doesn’t make sense. I know you made that vague promise that the only opposition force would be Russians submarines, but I find that hard to believe.”

Allende smiled mysteriously at him.

“Oh, no, not another classified program I’m not read into yet,” he groaned.

“I can neither confirm nor deny, Patch, but there is something you should have noticed in the NewsFiles.” Allende clicked through her pad computer, finally finding what she was seeking. She paired her unit to the flatpanel display next to the Arabian Sea orbital display. “We leaked this juicy info at four o’clock yesterday, in time for it to make the national evening news.”

It was a news segment filmed by Satellite News Network. SNN newscaster Brett Wolverine sat at a news desk, a graphic of a huge naval base taken from a helicopter or a drone shown behind him. Wolverine, as always, was clad in an expensive suit with a wide tie cinched neatly up to his throat, clean-shaven, his hair coiffed in a hundred-dollar haircut, his deep voice characteristic and sometimes satirized on variety comedy shows, or even featured in fake news bulletins in movie thrillers.

“We have reports in,” he began, “of a major cyberattack conducted against the Russian Federation Navy, an attack so severe that it took down fleet computers in every segment of their operation, including supply chain and logistics, communications, command and control and even the operating systems within their ships allowing them to navigate and maneuver. Also paralyzed, reportedly, are Russian naval air force units, including fighter jets, transport jets, tankers and antisubmarine patrol aircraft, including Russian military air traffic control systems. Russian Defense Minister Radoslav Konstantinov commented Tuesday that the cyberattack was definitely caused by a nation-state, not the work of cyber criminals, hackers or so-called ‘hacktivists.’ When asked if he suspected the American CIA or NSA, Konstantinov stated that it was a crime committed by the Israeli Mossad, and that Russia would retaliate. More on this story from our Moscow correspondent Monica Eddlestien—”

Allende clicked off the display. “It’s just more of the same. Wild speculation as to who caused it and why.”

Pacino looked at her. “Did we put the Israelis up to doing this?”

“The worm didn’t hit Russia directly. The Mossad inserted it into Iranian systems, the first priority being to paralyze the Iranian Navy’s frigates and destroyers and their naval air assets, which would allow the Vermont to escape with the Panther. Israel and the Mossad have a long-running beef with the Iranians. Anything Israel can do to mess with Iran, they’re going to do. Apparently Mossad saw the Iranians putting a nuclear reactor into the Kilo submarine — and no, we didn’t tip them off, they flew their own drone overhead and figured it all out, with the help of what we suspect are on-the-ground human assets. An Iranian nuclear submarine is a direct threat to Israel, and they were willing and able to help sabotage the Iranian Navy.

“So we gave the Mossad the virus software. The Iranians had ordered a batch of new printers for their navy administration building. And as usual, printers are useless without downloading the drivers from the vendor. And when they downloaded the drivers, the worm came in with them. The worm spread from administrative networks to the military command-and-control networks and boom, airplanes are grounded and surface ships become little more than paperweights while sparing their submarines’ networks, as intended. Then the fun really started. The Russians are too cozy with the Iranians, and their networks tie together in the administrative sphere, and the worm found the interlink and jumped into the Russian network. Then, bang, the Russian surface navy is dead, as is anything the Russian Navy flies. So no Russian MPA aircraft will be coming our way. See, Patch, your good friend Margo is taking very good care of you.” She put her hand on his forearm as she said that, and he felt a spark from the touch.

He looked at her. “That changes everything. Well done.”

“Plus,” Allende said, “it was perfectly timed. When the Iranians saw the hack taking down their surface ships and naval aircraft, they immediately sent the Panther to sea early, hoping it would escape any second wave of the cyberattack. That’s why it jumped early before the Russian escort submarines arrived in-theater.”

Pacino nodded. “This operation has a lot more moving parts than I thought.” He covered his mouth and yawned. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re not boring me, I’m just running on fumes.”

“Come on, Patch. You’re out of gas. Come with me. I’ll have one of our guys go to your Annapolis house and bring fresh clothes. They’ll be ready for you by dawn’s early light.”

Pacino looked at her, her ocean blue eyes imploring him. “Those clean, crisp sheets and fluffy comforter are sounding pretty good right now,” he admitted.

He fell asleep in Allende’s car, waking when she rolled up to her townhouse. He walked in with her, the exhaustion overcoming him. He’d barely made it into the guest bedroom before everything seemed to go black.

In his dreams, there was that high overhead view of the Arabian Sea, and the Russian red dots had turned westward and sped up to chase the yellow laser pointer’s dot. Pacino tossed in the bed, coming slowly to consciousness, finding his phone to see what time it was and wondering where he was, until he remembered that Margo Allende had taken him to her townhouse. It was shortly after three in the morning. He realized he was wearing only his boxers. His memory stopped at the door of the guest room. Allende must have undressed him and manhandled him into the big bed. He’d deal with that in the morning, he thought, setting his phone’s alarm for 0500, then sinking back into sleep. This time, his sleep was mercifully dreamless.

Navigator Captain Third Rank Leonid Lukashenko had the senior supervisory watch in the central command post for the morning watch, the torpedo and missile officer, Captain Lieutenant Seva Laska standing watch officer duty, taking his watch at the command console’s starboard pos three console, occasionally going to the battlecontrol console or wandering to the navigation chart or looking over the sonar console — despite the fact that his command console could display anything from the other stations. Laska was a tall athletic youth, impatient, jittery, always having to be pacing central command or moving from one station to the next, which frankly irritated the hell out of Lukashenko, who could stand an entire six-hour watch without leaving his command chair at pos one of the command console. But Laska just seemed like he was constantly hopped up on caffeine.

Lukashenko scrolled though his displays. During this watch, two hours into their maximum speed run to the west to intercept the north part of the probability oval of the target submarine, his notifications screen had been beeping and blooping every thirty seconds, each notification seeming more stupid and mundane than the one before it. Somehow, there had been no threshold setting dreamed up so that notifications could be divided into emergencies, urgent matters and routine ones. He knew First Officer Anastasia Isakova’s habit was to silence the notification alarms so she could concentrate on what was important — sonar traces, the navigation situation and the health of the reactor plant. But that seemed somewhat reckless to Lukashenko. That was how she’d missed the initial sonar detection of the Panther, the detect only being found by the captain an hour later. Lukashenko could only imagine the reprimand she’d received from Captain Novikov for that mistake. Novikov was an even-handed, fair officer, and a damned fine human being, Lukashenko thought. But still, even Novikov could get angry, and when the captain was angry, life became miserable.

For the five minutes Lukashenko was thinking that, the notifications screen had beeped twelve times. Lukashenko checked his watch. Four more hours until relief and the noon meal. He hadn’t eaten breakfast and he was hungry. He contemplated calling up for something from the galley, but decided to wait. Three more notifications. Port main motor forward bearing temperature was trending up, then down, then up again, probably from some imbalance in engineroom fresh water flow. He’d sent that notification to the engineer, his old friend Yevgeny Montorov. But there were twelve more notifications, many of them coming from auxiliary machinery room number two, mostly temperatures higher than normal, but still within specifications. He sent these to mechanical officer, Michman Danko Filiopovik. Another five minutes, another twelve notifications. He decided to mute the notification alarms, just long enough that he could check their position in the sea and the tactical situation. He stood and stretched and walked across the violently trembling deck to the navigation chart table, the entire submarine buzzing from their maximum speed run. A reminder that they were headed in a hurry into combat.

Lukashenko yawned as he leaned over the chart table, checking their progress since they had started the westward sprint over the last two hours, making 130 kilometers since they’d broken off the periscope depth secure videolink to the Novosibirsk. Lukashenko took out his pen from his coveralls pocket and tapped the display glass, deep in thought. There were still 390 kilometers to travel to reach the probability oval. Four hours from now, at watch relief, they would have covered another 260 kilometers. Lukashenko pursed his lips, disappointed. He had wanted to be on watch when they turned south and penetrated the probability oval. He wanted to catch the target submarine. He wanted to put a salvo of Futlyar Fizik-2 torpedoes into it, claim victory, then get back to the Kola Peninsula homeport. A medal award ceremony, then some well-deserved leave in Murmansk. No, even better, Moscow. It was June — and June in Moscow? The women would be wearing miniskirts and shorts and tank-tops, he thought. He shut his eyes, thinking about how wonderful it would be to go to a club in Moscow and meet someone, someone exciting and special. He debated with himself — did he want to meet a woman just for the night, or a woman for the rest of his life? Both ideas had merit, he thought.

Behind him, the muted notifications screen scrolled through multiple notifications, the list of them coming faster and faster, until the display was blurred with more notification lines than the display could keep up with, the screen finally starting to flash a dull red on and off.

A deck below Lukashenko and fifty meters aft, in the auxiliary machinery room number two, the hydrogen leak from the stainless-steel high-pressure hydrogen receiver from the number two oxygen generator grew much worse, the O-ring seal rupturing at the top flange, high pressure hydrogen spewing out into the room. The oxygen generators took deionized water from the evaporator and fed it into a large cube two meters on a side, the box containing large electrical anodes and cathodes in a high-pressure tank of the pure water, the direct current electricity making the water disassociate into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen was saved, dried and compressed, the machines transferring it into high pressure oxygen banks and simultaneously bleeding it into the ship, the oxygen bleed centered in this room where the fan suction housing distributed air throughout the ship, the oxygen added to the ship’s ventilation systems to make up for the oxygen consumed by the crew. The hydrogen, also collected at high pressure, was vented into the auxiliary seawater system and discharged overboard. There was the worry that advanced submarine detection systems could hunt for this trace of hydrogen in the wake of a nuclear submarine, but so far their own scientists had been unable to detect other submarines from the hydrogen exhaust, so its disposal method hadn’t changed in decades.

Next to the oxygen generators were the carbon dioxide scrubbers, two units even larger than the oxygen generators, which blew ship’s air over an amine system that absorbed the carbon dioxide, an absolute poison to human beings. The amine was able to discharge the carbon dioxide overboard with the oxygen generator’s hydrogen, the stream refreshed to absorb more carbon dioxide. And next to the scrubbers were the number one and number two carbon monoxide burners, which were simple units with hot wires where the even more poisonous carbon monoxide would oxidize in the presence of the oxygen in the air and become more mundane carbon dioxide, the discharge of the two machines fed to their respective carbon dioxide scrubbers.

Redundancy demanded that each machine be doubled, in case one of them experienced trouble. Engineer Captain Second Rank Yevgeny Montorov was harshly critical of the design, insisting that all the ship’s eggs were in one basket, and that any sane designer would have split each machine into two different rooms with the rooms spread far apart, in case one room had a casualty. After all, the crew’s nickname for the oxygen generator was “the bomb,” because it made hydrogen and oxygen in the exact chemical proportions for a perfect explosion. Of course, Montorov would scold anyone who used the term “bomb” or “explosion.”

It’s an unplanned energy release,” he’d say. “Or an unintended rapid disassembly.” Lukashenko would laugh at him, sometimes taunting his friend the engineer by asking him if, on his watch, could he please keep the bomb from exploding? That never seemed to get old, with Montorov always reacting with deep annoyance.

But even though the room contained all the ship’s atmospheric control equipment, other compartments had emergency oxygen generators and carbon dioxide removal means. A small can the size of cooking pot could be lit off to make oxygen, enough to fill a room and keep a dozen men alive for several hours, with lockers full of the emergency generators. There were curtains that could be hung to absorb carbon dioxide, the curtains eventually becoming thick and heavy as they absorbed the harmful gas.

The room had automatic firefighting equipment. There were automatic sprinklers fed by the auxiliary seawater system, actuated automatically by high temperature sensors, and a hydrogen concentration sensor would kick off a deluge of halon gas, which could be dangerous to an occupant, but obviously a hydrogen fire would be a much worse consequence. Hydrogen was so dangerous because it was odorless, colorless and needed no ignition source to detonate in the presence of oxygen. Just stray static electricity would set off a hydrogen fire. A space filled with hydrogen and oxygen, in the presence of energized electrical equipment like the scrubbers and burners, would threaten the continued survival of the ship, so the high-pressure halon system had been installed, and set up to actuate automatically from a high hydrogen concentration.

At 0815 Moscow time, the hydrogen leak in the upper flange of the hydrogen receiver exploded into flames and blew the number two oxygen generator’s oxygen receiver into atoms. The explosion growing at the detonation carried away the number one oxygen generator’s oxygen and hydrogen tanks, which in turn blew open the high-pressure oxygen manifold, which then dumped the high pressure oxygen from the oxygen banks into the room. By the time the halon system started to actuate to open the halon valves, the explosions in the room blew the firefighting rig into fragments, the halon insufficient to come anywhere close to putting out the raging inferno in the room fed by the blasting oxygen flow. The main manifold for the emergency air system ran through the room, fed from air banks stored farther aft, but the conflagration melted the check valve in the system, and both the aft and forward emergency air banks depressurized and blew air into the burning room, further feeding the fire, and making the system unavailable for crew survival, their only source of air when there was a severe fire. The scrubbers and burners burst into flames next, generating roiling black toxic smoke, the other equipment in the room adding to the conflagration, the pipe insulation going up next, then the vaporized electrical cables adding toxic fumes to the black smoke.

The only equipment in the room that still functioned, at least partially, was the suction air box to the ventilation fan, which normally sucked air from the room with such force that it could pin a man to the suction grating. The high horsepower fan continued pulling in the flames, smoke and toxic fumes and pushed it with tremendous force into the ventilation system.

Within seconds, every space of the submarine Voronezh filled with toxic black smoke, smoke so thick that visibility shrank to less than ten centimeters in any direction. The high temperature smoke poured into the central command post from every ventilation diffuser, the room almost immediately so smoke-filled, the light from the overhead couldn’t be seen, much less the light from the consoles and navigation chart.

Lukashenko coughed violently, clamping his eyes together as tears flew down his cheeks from whatever was in the atmosphere. He lunged to the command console seat, opening his mouth to bark orders at the second captain.

“Second Captain,” he bellowed. “Emergency blow forward and aft ballast! Shut down all ventilation!”

The second captain’s calm, slow female voice answered him. “Please repeat. Your voice was distorted.”

“Jesus! Second Captain, emergency blow all groups! Shut down all ventilation!”

The AI was infuriatingly repeating that it couldn’t understand his panic-stricken voice. He would have to get into his emergency air mask and go to the software screens manually to emergency blow and shut down the ventilation systems. He had to get his emergency air breathing system mask on. He made it three steps from the navigation display before he fell to the deck, gasping for breath, his hand reaching furiously up to the command seat to pull himself to the console. He found his air mask and hastily strapped it on and took a breath, but no air came into the mask. He checked that it was plugged in and that the regulator looked okay. He was barely able to see through the smoke, but finally felt the hose and it was definitely plugged into the emergency breathing air manifold and the regulator seemed fine. But there was still no air. He pulled off the mask and dumped it and lunged for the mask at the middle console seat. A coughing fit hit him then, and his head spun in dizziness and his hand seemed to have a mind of its own. He found the second mask and strapped it on, and there was no air from it either. Lukashenko’s hand flopped to the deck as he coughed, and he thought frantically that he had to save the ship, but then the entire idea seemed strange to him.

Ship? What ship? Where the hell was he?

Lukashenko’s breathing stopped fifteen seconds later. Forty-five seconds after that, his heart stopped beating.

The other command post watchstanders had collapsed before Lukashenko, even Laska, who had been at the sonar-and-sensor console, and had convulsed violently as he’d reached for and put on his useless air mask, and he died in his seat. Captain Novikov coughed in his sea cabin, trying to reach for the phone before falling to the deck and losing consciousness. First Officer Anastasia Isakova had been in the shower, trying to feel better about her father by using warm water and shampoo, knowing it would only make things a little better, when the toxic smoke filled the bathroom and she dropped limply to the deck, the warm water still cascading over her dying body.

Engineer Yevgeny Montorov had been in the nuclear control room, where alarms started blaring as broiling hot black smoke and flames suddenly filled the room. He’d lunged for the phone and fell off his elevated seat behind the reactor control panel as he did. He never made it off the deck.

In the sonar equipment space, off-watch Senior Lieutenant Svetomir Albescu had been looking into a panel and checking on a malfunctioning control board when there was a faint thump from aft and the ventilation duct suddenly spilled freakishly hot black smoke into the room, filling it in seconds. He coughed and fell to the deck and died within a minute of the explosion.

In the central command post, the second captain system’s displays flashed red on the notification screens, but no one was reacting.

Within minutes of the hydrogen leak, the entire crew of the Russian Republic Northern Fleet’s submarine Voronezh was dead, leaving only one sentient entity alive.

The onboard AI. The second captain.

27

CIA Director Margo Allende switched on the bedside lamp and sat on the guest bedroom’s bed. National Security Director Michael Pacino opened his eyes and blinked.

Allende was wearing a filmy black negligee. Pacino became aware that he was only wearing underwear. He sat up straighter in bed and looked at his phone to find out the time, but he couldn’t find it. He found his old, scratched Rolex Submariner and put it on. It read 3:40, barely more than a half hour since he’d awakened in the room in the middle of a dream. He shook the Rolex. The watch had been stopping during the night lately. He needed to have it sent out to be cleaned and overhauled, but it seemed he never had time to visit the jewelers and get that taken care of. Plus, he thought, he hated relinquishing control of the watch. It had belonged to his father before the old man had gone down with Stingray under the polar icecap, the unwitting target of a rogue Soviet submarine captain. Before that run, his father had turned the watch in for its month-long overhaul. Two months later, the jeweler had called the house, wondering why Commander Anthony Pacino hadn’t picked up his Rolex. Time was funny, Pacino thought. The day he was told about his father dying seemed more recent than the day he himself sank in the same ocean, two decades later.

“It’s three-forty in the morning, Patch,” Allende said, her voice soft and gentle.

“Is there news?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

She nodded. “I won’t know what the news is until we’re in a secure room. Let’s head back to the Situation Room.”

Pacino rubbed his head. It felt like an anvil had fallen on it.

“My guys got you some fresh suits and shirts,” Allende said, “and, of course, underthings. We’ll keep them here until this crisis is over. Just leave yesterday’s clothes here, I’ll have them dry-cleaned and laundered for you. Why don’t you take a quick shower before we go in? There’s a robe on the back of your bathroom door.”

Pacino shook his head, but that made the headache worse. He opened the bathroom door of the room and walked under the water long enough to get clean, toweled off, shaved, brushed his teeth with a new toothbrush Allende left for him, combed his hair and left it wet, then went back to the guestroom, found the clothes hanging for him, also provided by Allende, and got dressed. Downstairs, in the kitchen, Allende was dressed in a different outfit, this one a business suit, but she looked as alluring as she had several hours ago. Either that, or he was just seeing her through a different lens. She swept her shining auburn hair off her shoulder and looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read. It occurred to him that there was something on her mind.

He climbed into her long, low-slung black Jaguar for the drive to the White House.

“So,” she said. “I couldn’t help but notice.”

“What’s that?” Pacino asked.

“You’re not wearing your wedding ring. I don’t mean to intrude, Patch, if you want to keep that private.”

“It’s okay,” Pacino sighed. “It’s about Anthony, my son. His stepmother, my wife, Colleen, was there on the rescue ship when they pulled him out of the deep submergence rig of the Piranha. I couldn’t be the one to be there — I was at sea trying to hunt down the drone that sank Piranha. Colleen was there when they pronounced Anthony clinically dead. And she was there when he came back. Seeing all that changed her. It made her crack somehow, made her fragile. She just couldn’t tolerate the idea of him being in harm’s way again after all that. They always had a strong bond until, just before his Annapolis graduation, he announced he would be joining the submarine force. Then things went to hell fast. Colleen, like Anthony’s biological mother, lost her mind at the idea that Anthony would be back aboard a nuclear fast attack sub. It was her worst nightmare. Colleen wouldn’t even go to Anthony’s girlfriend’s funeral, she was so furious.”

“Wait a minute,” Allende said, stopping at a nonsensical red traffic light, since they were the only car on the road and it was before four in the morning. “Didn’t you and Colleen, quote, meet cute, unquote? Didn’t you rush into a burning torpedo room to rescue her? Saved her skin, quite literally?”

Pacino pursed his lips. “We met in the shipyard months before that happened, and it may as well have happened a thousand years ago, at least to Colleen. Anyway, she blamed me that Anthony made his choice. She and Anthony’s mother both. They insist that he’s trying to get my approval somehow. Like he doesn’t already have it, for God’s sake. The day Anthony made his career announcement, Colleen moved out of our bedroom into the spare room. She stopped speaking to me that day. She still spoke to him, trying to get him to change his mind, but Anthony was set on being a submariner. Then, the day he set foot on the hull of the USS Vermont, Colleen moved out of the house. I haven’t seen or heard from her since then, but for the divorce papers her attorney served me with.”

“Oh my God, Patch, I’m so sorry that happened to you,” Allende said, shooting him a quick empathetic look, taking her hand and briefly touching his forearm. “If it’s any comfort, I think she’s wrong. I think your son has enough character to choose his own path. I mean, I don’t know him, but I watched him volunteer for the Panther boarding party. You just don’t get any gutsier than that. There’s no force on earth that would keep that kid out of a submarine. Colleen’s being an unfair bitch. You deserve so much more from your woman.”

“Thanks, Margo. But this will be my second divorce. I figure you’re only allowed to have one of those in your life. One is forgivable. Two? If that’s not an indication of a major character flaw, I don’t know what is.”

“Oh hell, Patch, I’ve been divorced twice. So has Carlucci. So has Admiral Rand. So has my operations director, Angel Menendez. All it means is that life is long, people grow and change, and compatibility changes with them. The man who was perfect for me when I was twenty-five was the opposite of what I wanted and needed five years later. Ditto the man I fell in love with when I was thirty, who made no sense at all when I was forty. Both were good guys. Both still are. But neither one rang my bell after a few years. But I’ll tell you this — you talk to my exes. Both will testify on a stack of bibles that Margaret Isabelle Allende knows how to take care of her man. They were both crushed that I wanted out.”

“Ten years,” Pacino mused. “Maybe that’s all we can expect from a modern relationship. All the wear and tear of adult life — adults like us, anyway — what romance can stand up to that?”

“Maybe you’re right, Patch. But still, that’s no reason we can’t seek the companionship of the opposite sex. Romance and love — and sexual attraction — are real, even if they don’t last forever.”

“We could debate that all night,” Pacino said.

Allende laughed and glanced at him with an arch look. “Maybe we should.”

Interesting, Pacino thought, how her voice had sounded on that last sentence. An invitation, perhaps. Not that he felt up to taking advantage of it. Between the anxiety over Anthony being on Panther and the devastation of losing Colleen, for whom he still had feelings, there wasn’t much left of his energy to see anyone new. He wasn’t even sure young forty-six-year-old Allende, a woman almost two decades younger, was even his type. Certainly she was gorgeous — when she wanted to be, with that beautiful figure, those big blue eyes, those apple-red lips, that alabaster complexion of hers with a sprinkling of freckles on her nose and that gleaming auburn head of hair — but still, he didn’t know whether at his age, he’d be able to keep a woman like Allende happy. And with their careers, they’d seemingly only have time to see each other during times of crisis. It would be the equivalent of a wartime romance, he thought. Eventually, he’d leave the Carlucci administration and go back to being a private citizen — a retired private citizen. And by that time, Allende would still be in the peak of her career.

They’d arrived at the biometric check-in at the White House West Wing. Ten minutes after they’d been admitted, they were in the Situation Room. They grabbed their customary seats. Allende clicked into her pad computer, which was designed to only receive classified information when it was securely within a special compartmented information facility. She paired it the central flatpanel screen on the wall and brought up the view of the globe with the Arabian Sea in the center of the screen. Two dull red dots flashed to indicate the previous positions of the Russian submarine periscopes from earlier in the night. A new bright red dot had started flashing, this one perhaps seventy nautical miles farther west of the old position of the dots. Allende toggled the past and present. Dots traveling up the Indian coast slowly, then bang, one of them suddenly was a third of the way to the Panther. And the Vermont.

“Dammit, that’s not good,” Pacino said. “The Russian’s headed due west now. And look how far he’s gotten from where he was. He must be going flank with fast speed main coolant pumps. He’s making a beeline for the exact position of the Panther. Dammit, Margo, the Russians must have gotten a detect on a transient noise of the Panther or they just picked up her tonals when she was on reactor power. Or they intercepted Panther’s situation report radio transmission. This could be over in hours. We could lose this thing. Is this enough aggression to allow us to counterattack?”

Allende shook her head. “Carlucci’s rules of engagement state we can only attack at the distance of Vermont’s weapons range.”

“Weapons range is about the far limit of the ability to detect another submarine,” Pacino said, “for torpedoes, that is. Vermont could put a nuclear depth charge close enough to this Yasen-M to put it out of business. That’s inside weapons range.”

Allende shook her head. “You’d miss. This intel is an hour old. The Yasen-M could have turned since this was shot, or slowed down. Plus, it still doesn’t meet Carlucci’s rules of engagement.”

“Maybe we should wake the president and get special dispensation.”

Allende shook her head. “He won’t go for it.”

Pacino clenched his fist on the table. “If we give Vermont this intel, they could calculate the approximate time of the incoming sub to be inside their torpedo weapons range.”

“Vermont got the word. I don’t know what Seagraves and his crew are doing with the intel, but they know.”

Pacino exhaled, then had a thought. “What about the other submarine? No periscope detect on it?”

Allende shook her head. “Either he’s still submerged, or his transponder failed.”

Pacino found himself feeling something he hadn’t felt in years — the desire to be submerged and back in command. If he were the one in command of Vermont, he thought, he’d throw enough high explosives at that goddamned Yasen-M to cut it to ribbons. High explosives, hell, he scoffed to himself. They had nuclear release authority. Pacino would toss enough bomb-grade plutonium at that bastard to vaporize him.

Engineer Mario Elvis Lewinsky had been on the conn when their daily designated call sign had been received by the VLF loop antenna, receiving the two-letter sign transmitted from the ELF radio station in Al-Kharj in southern Saudi Arabia, outside of Riyadh. ELF, extremely low frequency, was the only radio frequency strong enough to penetrate the ocean depths, but it required massive transmitter power and gigantic antennae, and the data rate was slow, the two-letter call sign taking a full twelve minutes to be received. Lewinsky had picked up the command console phone to call the captain the moment the first letter was received, and at Seagraves’ concurrence, had brought Vermont to periscope depth.

Once the periscope dried, the intel update and radio broadcast were received into the buffer, and Lewinsky had taken the boat deep again, back on the southeast course she’d be pursuing for the next few minutes until a roll of the dice predicted a random turn time. Vermont had been zigzagging north of Panther, at a range of between four thousand and ten thousand yards, keeping a weather eye out for the Iranian Kilo submarine, shepherding her out of the Arabian Sea, and taking their navigation cue from Panther, staying on her base course, since there was no communication between the two submarines. So far, the seaway had been clear, only very few merchant ships detected here in the middle of the Arabian Sea, far from shipping lanes and great circle routes to the other continents. But obviously something was up, and the brass wanted them to know something new.

He felt his shoulder tapped by a yawning Lieutenant Don “Easy” Eisenhart, the communications officer. “I’m here to relieve you, Feng,” Eisenhart said. “Skipper and XO want you in the wardroom for an emergency op brief.”

“I figured,” Lewinsky said. “Own ship is on course one two zero, all ahead two thirds, rigged for natural circulation, rigged for ultra-quiet, turns for ten. No surface contacts. Panther bears two-zero-three, range forty-five hundred yards. Panther course is one-seven-seven, speed six knots, since she came down from her eighteen-knot sprint at zero five thirty. And obviously, no other submerged contacts. Snowman Mercer has the Q-10 stack, and if he says there’s no hostile submerged contacts, you’re safe in the sea.”

“I got the bubble, Feng,” Eisenhart said. “I relieve you, sir.”

“I stand relieved,” Lewinsky said to Eisenhart. “In control,” he said, his voice loud, crisp and formal, “Lieutenant Eisenhart has the deck and the conn!”

Lewinsky hurried to the wardroom, checking his thigh pocket for his pad computer. He was the last officer to join the crowd in the room. He found himself momentarily stunned at how empty the room looked, with the empty chairs a reminder that Dankleff, Varney and Pacino were no longer with them, and neither were the two SEAL officers. He took his seat opposite Commander Quinnivan. Romanov stepped over to lean across the table and handed Lewinsky a steaming cup of black coffee. He looked up at her gratefully, and she smiled at him, her perfect white teeth lit up like a movie star’s. Perhaps she was getting more human, he thought. Her cold war with Sprocket Spichovich had seemed to include him, since he and Sprocket were best friends. Perhaps she and Sprocket were slowly, finally, burying the hatchet. Or, worse, maybe Pacino’s departure had made the predatory navigatrix fix her sights back on Sprocket. Or worse than that, on him. But there would never be another woman for Mario Elvis Lewinsky, not after Bamanda the Redhead, he thought. Redhead had truly been the love of his life. He wondered, idly, if there would ever be any chance to win her back, his mind returning to his habitual and endless fantasies of running into her in a cozy pub where he could make a case to her to be his woman again.

“Nav, we have everyone?” Seagraves asked, jarring Lewinsky from his daydream.

“Sir, yes, sir,” Romanov said. She stood behind Quinnivan near the credenza’s coffee machines and hit the remote control to bring up the room’s large flatpanel display. A view from high earth orbit appeared, scrubbed of clouds, the Arabian Sea in the middle of the screen. “We got this intel some time ago.” Two red dots appeared on the screen. “These are periscope detects of the two Yasen-M-class Russian attack subs at approximately our own latitude, but three hundred nautical miles due east, hugging the Indian coastline. That was then. This is now.” Romanov clicked her computer display, and the red dots disappeared, replaced with one red dot, flashing at a spot much closer to them. “This submarine came to periscope depth at zero seven thirty-five Zulu time. Before that, he made a speed over ground of over thirty-five knots and covered eighty nautical miles, directly for our future position.” Romanov toggled the display — the past from eight hours ago, then the past from ninety minutes ago. Far away. Closer. Far away. Closer.

“Jesus Christ,” Quinnivan said. “They’re headed straight for us. Dammit, Skipper, they have our solution.”

Seagraves rubbed his chin. “If they had us nailed that accurately,” he said, “why didn’t they toss a rocket-propelled depth charge at us?”

The room grew silent, the officers in deep thought. “Maybe they’re guessing,” Lewinsky offered. “Maybe their AI analyzed a probability distribution. It doesn’t take a genius to guess that we intend to take the stolen Panther to the western hemisphere. We may not be following the great circle route, but we’re meandering southward nonetheless. A good AI system could nuke that out.”

“If that were true,” Quinnivan said, “they’d be going farther south of our future position and lie in wait for us. Or they’d head for the waters off Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, and execute a barrier search for us there.”

Seagraves spoke up. “Officers, we have to assume the Yasen-M-class boats have similar orders to our own. Weapons release permission granted. Nuclear release authority. Here in the big, wide Arabian Sea, far off the shipping lanes, who is going to notice a small tactical nuclear warhead detonation? Never mind that the Indian Ocean is ten times the size of the vast Arabian Sea. And if the Russians haven’t fired at us, they don’t have our solution nailed down. Mr. Lewinsky makes a point. Fine job, Engineer. Their artificial intelligence is playing the probabilities.”

“But, sir, we don’t know where the second Russian is,” Romanov said, frowning. “It’s entirely possible he went somewhat south of our track, and is setting us up into a pincher maneuver. One Yasen to the south, another to the north, and Captain, we’re fucked. ‘Fucked,’ as in the military term, not the legal term.”

Seagraves nodded. “A hell of a lot of unknowns here, people.”

“Sir,” Romanov said, “If I could make a recommendation?”

“Please,” Seagraves said.

“Sir, tubes eight and nine are loaded with encapsulated Tomahawk SubRocs. We could spin them up and toss them to the calculated position of this speeding submarine. One on the east side of his track, the other on the west side. It might kill him. At worst, it would send one hell of a message. For all we know, the Yasen-M submarines might clear datum and go home after that.”

“Navigator,” Seagraves said, “recite to me our rules of engagement. Read it to me verbatim. No paraphrasing.”

Romanov blushed as she pulled up her pad computer, finding the text she sought, then reading aloud. “Operation Panther rules of engagement. USS Vermont is hereby authorized conventional and nuclear weapon release authority against any aggressor force countering the extraction operation of the Panther. For the purpose of these rules, onboard sensors will be the primary detection method, but intelligence from offboard sensors may be used provided said use is sufficient to cause target destruction within a high probability with a high confidence interval. ‘Firing for effect’ is expressly prohibited. Use of nuclear weapons to cause a sonar blue-out or enhance the fog-of-war is also expressly prohibited. The intent of these ROE is that weapons, prior to being released, are targeted at real targets, not estimated positions of possible targets.”

“Well, officers,” Seagraves said, “I think the president said it best. Until we have a real target and not a ghost, we check fire and wait for a better solution to the target. Any comments?”

To a man — and a woman — the officers in the wardroom looked dejectedly at the table.

“There’s another issue,” Spichovich said. “Captain, we were only loaded with two Tomahawk SubRocs. Once we shoot those, we’re running with our pants around our ankles.”

“Good point, Weps. If we use these weapons, we damned well have to make them count. Anyone else? No? Okay, officers, dismissed. XO, I’d like to see you in my stateroom.”

“Come in and shut the door, XO,” Seagraves said, frowning. “And take a seat.”

“Aye, Captain,” Quinnivan said formally, his eyebrow raised, as if wondering if he were about to undergo a reprimand.

“XO, do you have any idea how fucked up it is to be in my position right now?”

“How so, Captain, I mean, the weight of command, yeah? But like any other day, ya know?” Quinnivan’s accent thickened when he was nervous, Seagraves noticed, and the man seemed to be playing dumb, perhaps an attempt to get Seagraves to open up. Maybe Seagraves’ ex-wife was right, he thought, when she’d accused him of living in silence, deep inside his own head. Funny, she’d loved the strong-silent-type when she’d married him, and five years later, she wanted a social butterfly, like the fruit loop she’d left him for.

“What I mean, XO, is that I’m sitting here in my command chair and facing a no-win situation. If I fire a Tomahawk nuke at the Russian, I could start a global conflict and ruin the reputation of the entire U.S. Navy. And that’s if I hit the bastard. If I miss? And then he comes furiously out of the billions of bubbles of the sonar blue-out and takes down Panther? And us? Then I’m double screwed. But if I don’t fire, and we miss an opportunity to make the kill, and he sneaks in here without being detected, and takes down Panther and us? Mission failure and massive loss of life. I should just turn in my dolphins right now. So that’s all, XO. Other than that, it’s like you said, it’s just another day.”

Quinnivan smiled, a strange confidence seeming to radiate from the Irishman.

“Captain, you remember when we were at AUTEC, drinking Admiral Catardi under the table and watching his aide make eyes at young Pacino?”

Seagraves smiled in spite of himself. That had been a good night, he thought.

“Well, that evening, I spent some time talking to Rob Catardi, and he downloaded some deep philosophical shit on me, sir. I thought, by your leave, I’d share it with you.”

“By all means,” Seagraves said, glancing quickly at the chronometer, its ticking second hand reminding him that the detect on the incoming Yasen-M submarine was growing stale. More stale by the minute.

“Catardi spoke of this new idea to him, almost as if he were a recruit to a new religion, a true believer, if you will. He called it ‘decision theory.’ Something passed on from the inner circles of business into the minds of the military. I guess there’s a reason it’s called the military-industrial complex. Anyway, decision theory starts by stating the obvious. That in life, in business, in combat, there are major critical decisions, and every damned one of them is fraught with unknowns. All flavors of them. The known unknowns. The nightmares of the unknown unknowns. And the devil himself, the quote, failure of imagination, unquote, unknowns. Some fragment of reality lurking out there that no one in his wildest imagination would think of. You know, after the terror attacks of six-sixteen, the Pentagon actually hired a group of fiction novelists, thriller writers, to come to work for them, to dream up scenarios the buttoned-down generals would have dismissed as being stupidly wild, yeah? Those generals started believing when some of the dreamed-up disasters actually happened. One novelist was actually detained, the intel community thinking that he must have known about it in advance to write about it so accurately. Hell, maybe he was just clairvoyant or plugged into some ethereal network of the universe, no one knows.

“But the point is, the unknowns can overwhelm us, and the ferocious consequences of a major critical decision, if the result goes wrong, can paralyze the decision-maker. That’s where decision theory comes in. It starts with the exact description of the decision to be made — we already know that in this case. It goes on to describe all the foreseeable possible outcomes — and you just recited those quite nicely. It then goes on to list the unknowns by category. The known unknowns — where is this Yasen-M? What’s he armed with? And the unknown unknowns — what is his intent? What will his tactics be? What do his bosses want? And after all the dust settles from exploring the universe of unknowns, we list out the goals surrounding the decision. In our case, it’s simple. Mission first — steal the Panther and get her safely to AUTEC. If need be, take down an opposition force trying to interfere with that mission. Then the secondary goals — such as protecting the Vermont.

“So we’ve started, Captain. Now, conventional wisdom would say to map possible decisions with probabilities of outcomes and the consequences — sometimes the unintended consequences — of those outcomes, but doing that causes paralysis. In other words, the decision is just too scary to make, and people end up delaying making a decision, and you know what they say, the absence of a decision is a decision, yeah?”

“I’m with you, XO. That seems to be a good description of where we stand right now. So what’s the answer? Roll dice?”

“You’d be surprised, sir, how much better doing that is than stewing over a decision, but no, that’s not the remedy. The cure, Captain, is bias.”

“Bias, XO?”

“Bias, Captain. There are several distinct biases you could have right now. One of them is the fear of doing something wrong and getting yelled at. That seems to be your bias, if you don’t mind my criticizing you, sir.”

Seagraves crossed his arms over his chest. “Go on, XO.”

“Look at history, sir. General Patton — he used to get his ass chewed weekly, yeah? And Lord Admiral Nelson? He got reprimands that were epic. Your Admirals Chester Nimitz and Bull Halsey, and Captain John Paul Jones — you honestly think that they didn’t regularly get ear-piercing ass-chewings? But did that stop them? Do you think Patton gave one single shit about getting in trouble with the bosses when he was getting ready to tear across Nazi Germany?”

Seagraves stroked his chin, thinking.

“So let’s look at another possible bias. For lack of a better word, let’s call it bloodthirstiness. Imagine being furious at the Russians, like you would be if you were out for revenge. As if this were personal. As if that Yasen-M had killed the dearest thing in your life. How would you approach this then? Would you care about an ass-chewing then? No, Captain, you’d be spinning up the Tomahawk SubRocs in tubes eight and nine and calling for battlestations right now. Another way to examine bias is to imagine that someone else, someone with a different personality, is making the decision. What would he do? Think of young Lipstick Pacino. What would that fooker do right now? I’ll tell you what he’d be doing at this very moment, Captain. He’d be launching not one but two SubRocs at that Russian, gift wrapped with a nice note. Does any of this make sense to you, sir?”

Seagraves frowned and reached for the phone and buzzed the conn. The engineer answered. “Officer of the Deck.” Seagraves said, “Man silent battlestations and spin up the SubRocs in tubes eight and nine and make vertical launch system two ready in all respects for tactical launch.”

Lewinsky’s answer came back loud enough for Quinnivan to hear. “Yes, sir!”

28

The Arabian Sea was quiet this far from the shipping lanes. The sky was an uninterrupted cloudless blue, the intense sunlight blazing down on the seascape, the slight calm waves barely half a foot tall in the windless calm. There were no ships in sight, only a ruler-straight line marking where the sea ended and the sky began. Overall, there was the silence — not even the cry of a seagull could be heard, making this corner of the world one of the quietest places on the planet.

Pin-drop quiet, that is, until the sea suddenly erupted in an explosion of foam and spray, and a cylindrical white canister twenty-one inches in diameter suddenly burst out of the sea, rising four feet, then sinking back down again, bobbing in the sea, only the top eighteen inches of it protruding from the ocean’s surface, and then the scene calmed down once again. And as before the canister appeared, the silence returned, and the sea was as it was, quiet and calm.

Time passed. It could have been five minutes, or it could have been an hour. Time had little meaning here, except perhaps for the elevation of the sun in the sky. But after that uncertain interval of time, something happened. The top of the canister made an earsplitting BANG like a gunshot, and the lid of the canister blew high up into the atmosphere, the lid slowly and gracefully tumbling end-over-end back toward the sea, each of the twenty-four explosive bolts that had blown it clear of the canister still smoking. Then, from the maw of the canister, a green rocket suddenly flew vertically out into the sky, the canister sinking below, a solid rocket stage igniting into an orange and white fury, the sound more ear-splitting than the canister lid blowing off. Faster than a human eye could track it, the shape rocketed to the sky, leaving behind it a gray and white flame trail as it climbed to an altitude of 1300 feet, where the rocket motor stage separated under the action of its own explosive bolts, the used-up cylinder of aluminum tumbling back to the sea.

The missile had extended a ram-air suction scoop into the airflow on the underbelly, and extended small winglets forward on the mid-body. The airflow had windmilled a vaned axial compressor, until the compressor’s discharge into the six combustion chambers caused the air there to reach ten atmospheres of pressure, and at that moment the six fuel injectors actuated and blew atomized JP-5 fuel into the chambers and six spark plugs lit the mixture. The air in the chambers skyrocketed in pressure and temperature, its only escape to the suction box of the small turbine, through its vanes and out into the exhaust nozzle, which constricted the high-pressure flow and changed it into an ultra-high velocity flow. The missile had successfully morphed from a rocket to a jet.

The missile, at its highest point, rotated the winglets to guide it into a steep dive to the surface of the sea below. By the time it reached an altitude a hundred feet over the waves, the jet engine had reached full thrust and the missile sped up to near sonic velocity. The winglets rotated and the missile pulled out of its dive and roared eastward at an altitude of thirty feet over the waves.

In the first two minutes of its 480-knot travel, it flew over a second white canister that had also floated on the surface. As the missile continued onward on its journey, far behind it, a second missile blew out of the sea from the second canister, flew to its peak height and dived for the sea, starting its jet engine. The two missiles, several miles apart, flew on eastward, the seascape roaring past them in a mad blue blur. Their flight continued on for nineteen minutes, until it was time.

The first missile rotated its winglets and climbed vertically skyward. At an altitude of 2500 feet, it shut off the jet engine and coasted, arcing over gently until it was falling toward the sea. Twenty-four more explosive bolts fired and separated the now unused jet engine from the nosecone. Ten seconds later, the nosecone blew apart, exposing a cylinder that was a little over three feet long. Out of the aft end of the cylinder, pyrotechnics ejected a streamer, which pulled out a drogue parachute, which in turn pulled out the main parachute, a digital camo blue pattern of silk, under which the cylinder glided gently toward the waves. As it was halfway down from the peak altitude of the missile, the second missile streaked by, and soon after, it too flew for the sun and climbed half a mile into the sky, then shut down its jet engine and ejected a second cylinder, that cylinder farther east by ten miles. As the second missile’s cylinder began floating downward toward the sea, the first missile hit the waves. The parachute blew off and the cylinder began sinking.

The cylinder’s instrumentation included a pressure sensor that detected depth. It counted off the numerals. Thirty feet. Fifty feet. One hundred feet. Two hundred feet. As it reached a depth of 300 feet, ten miles farther east, the second cylinder hit the water’s surface and blew off its parachute. 400 feet, then 450. The cylinders had been programmed for what the designers called a ‘time-on-target’ assault, in which both cylinders would act at the exact same moment in time, despite there being a significant time between their launches. Unavoidably, this would cause unit one to act at a deeper depth than unit two, but that had been eventually considered a good thing, that the entire sea’s depth spectrum would be covered.

So it was that unit one was at a depth of 1800 feet at zero hour while unit two was at 900. And at time zero, both units did the exact same thing. Within the guts of unit one’s cylinder, a thick metal safety plate rotated to line up four large holes, which were blocked previously. Those holes formed a channel leading from the lower end of the cylinder upward toward the top. At the top end were high voltage actuators, which would be impacted by projectiles with bullets that resembled blasting caps. Time zero came, and the actuation projectiles were all fired by the pyrotechnic charges, blew upward through the channels of the safety plate, and hit their targets, the high voltage actuators, which all fired behind a ping-pong ball-sized plug of plutonium, blowing it like a bullet toward a hollowed-out sphere of plutonium, until the plug hit the sphere like putting the lid on a jack-o’-lantern. Even before the plutonium plug could make full contact with the hollowed-out sphere, the fission reactions immediately intensified in the first ten microseconds to be a thousand times higher than before. The neutrons formed by nuclear fission had previously been leaked to the environment, and there had been no chain reaction. But once the plug hit the sphere, the shape became perfect, and more neutrons stayed within the envelope of the sphere than leaked to the universe, and when that happened, the chain reaction started, each fission putting out heat energy while blowing out two or three neutrons, each of which caused another fission with more energy release and another two or three neutrons, until the chain reactions released so much energy that the sphere became the temperature of the surface of the sun, and when it did, it expanded and blew up the small canisters of heavy water lining the outside of what had been the cylinder, which then underwent fusion reactions, the hydrogen of the heavy water atoms combining to form helium, the helium product having a lower mass than the reactants, and that “mass defect” was all converted to heat energy by Einstein’s famous equation linking matter to energy, and with a few more microseconds, the fireball grew outside the cylinder and extended into the sea beyond.

At the same time unit one’s hydrogen bomb was exploding, unit two, ten miles east, exploded in sympathy, the two explosions extending into the depths of the sea, the shock wave from their blasts hitting the seafloor two miles below and forming a gigantic wall of a pressure wave, both of them blowing huge mushroom clouds of steam and water into the atmosphere, the twin mushroom clouds fully two miles high.

The shock wave, a massive wall of high pressure, traveled through the sea, hammering everything in its path, killing fish, whales, dolphins, microscopic organisms, until it reached the high yield steel of a submarine constructed by the Russian Republic. And one belonging to the Islamic Republic of Iran. And another belonging to the United States.

“Excuse me, ma’am, sir,” the Marine corporal said at the door to the room. “There’s an incoming for you from Langley.”

CIA Director Margo Allende paged through her pad computer and looked at it, then projected it onto the screen beside the chart display. It was a view of the sea looking down from above. Allende read the email text to herself while National Security Advisor Michael Pacino stared at the video.

On the screen was a periscope, a slight wake extending behind it. To the right side of the small wake was another mast, this one shorter and stubbier, with a larger cylinder on top of it. Farther behind the two masts, a plume of heavy black smoke rose from the sea.

“This is a drone shot from a Predator, two damned hours old. What are we looking at, Patch?” Allende asked.

“Periscope and snorkel mast,” Pacino said. “Not one of ours, that’s an optical periscope. We use optronics now. The snorkel mast is designed to bring air into the ship for an emergency diesel engine to provide power and emergency propulsion, or to ventilate the ship. And that plume of smoke — the sub is ventilating the ship and blowing out that smoke. That’s not diesel exhaust. That’s way too dense for diesel exhaust. Modern diesel fuel leaves almost no smoke.”

“Smoke from what?”

“A fire. By the looks of it, a goddamned bad fire.”

“There’s a spectrographic analysis of the smoke.” Allende pushed her pad computer to Pacino, who looked down at the display.

“It’s toxic. Burned insulation and high voltage cables. Oxidized atmo-control chemicals. Burned plastic and rubber.” Pacino looked at Allende. “This is bad. As in, not-survivable bad.”

“So,” Allende said, “who’s driving this boat?”

“We’ve always thought the Russians’ AI systems were far more advanced than our own. Frankly, we American submariners don’t trust AI. Who knows if it will glitch and screw up the atmosphere, or send us into a jam dive below crush depth one Tuesday? But the Russians see it as a way to lower the crew count. A Yasen-M has twice the tonnage of a Virginia-class submarine and half the crew. You can only do that if you rely heavily on automation. On artificial intelligence. The Russian’s AI is operating that ship. It’s continuing the mission. And there’s no telling how well it will carry out that mission. How ruthless is an AI system programmed to kill another submarine?”

“I think you know the answer to that question, Patch, if I know your history.”

“That drone sub was nothing compared to this, Margo. The drone sub that took down Piranha only had a bellyful of conventional Mark 50 torpedoes. This thing? Loaded to the gills with nukes, all of them with Panther’s name on them. And Vermont’s. Margo, we have to shoot at this sonofabitch. We have to direct Vermont to lob a nuke at him now.”

The Marine ran in again, winded and sweating. “Ma’am, sir, you have an urgent videolink request with the Pentagon, and the president is on his way down.”

Pacino looked at Allende. “What now?”

The videolink screen lit up to the left of the chart flatpanel. The screen showed a calm view of the sea, another overhead shot from the Predator. Suddenly two gigantic mushroom clouds exploded from the formerly placid sea at exactly the same time. The detonations looked like they were many miles apart, perhaps ten nautical miles. Admirals Rand and Catardi came up on either side of the video clip, the clip looped to keep repeating.

Rand spoke first. “Madam Director, Admiral Pacino, we think the Vermont just lobbed two nukes into a position east of them in the Arabian Sea.”

About fucking time, Pacino thought.

Weapons Officer Captain Lieutenant Irina Trusov had the morning watch, and her stomach was growling. She’d only had tea and a piece of toast for breakfast, and the thing about a submarine was that the aroma from whatever the cooks were making for the next meal in the galley wafted throughout the entire boat, making the sixty-five members of the crew suddenly hungry. Especially if the meal happened to be a favorite. Trusov took in the air in the room through her nostrils with her eyes shut. It had to be pelmeni, the thin and crusty pastry shell covering a delicious minced beef with spices, with sour cream on the side. But there was more, perhaps the companion dish made for those who didn’t like pelmeni — a beef stroganoff with homemade noodles. Trusov shook her head. She’d gain ten pounds on this damned voyage, she thought, promising herself that after she finished digesting this feast she’d work out extra hard down in the crew recreation area.

Trusov sat at the position three command console, the farthest starboard position. The position one station was occupied by Captain Orlov, who wasn’t really needed as senior supervisory watch, but he’d sent Navigator Dobryvnik on his way and volunteered to take the morning watch instead. She glanced over at Orlov, the captain’s jaw clenched, his blonde hair shorter than yesterday — one of the ship’s barbers must have had a go at his previously overgrown hair. She smiled just slightly — he looked good, she thought. He was in shape, and sometimes in the crew recreation room he’d lift weights while she ran on the treadmill, and she’d been sneaking glances at him then too, his muscles rippling under his sleeveless T-shirt. He looked great for an older man, she thought, and she’d never been interested in men near her age. For instance, that pig TK Sukolov, the drunkard communications officer. Or even the older engineer, Chernobrovin or the navigator, Dobryvnik. They may be older than Sukolov, but maturity seemed to elude both of them, those two always snickering over something they thought funny, or slobbering over one of the female members of the crew like the sonar officer, Arisha Vasilev. There was no doubt, being a woman in the heavily dominated male submarine force was not for the faint of heart.

Trusov forced her mind back from thinking about what Orlov would look like naked, and what the noon meal would taste like, back to her duties. She rotated her screens through the notifications, which were mostly clear, to the navigation plot. They still had 275 kilometers to go before they’d be in position. That was five-and-a-half hours from now, so they’d be on station during the afternoon watch, a little after 1700 Moscow time. The original time-on-station time had been 1800, so the current must be helping them, or they were doing better than their calculated 28 knots. She checked the electromagnetic log, the speed-through-water indicator, and it read 28.4 knots. So they were making good time, with a slight boost from the current.

All that meant Orlov would call for battlestations at 1700, which would postpone the evening meal. Trusov smiled. That gave her all the more excuse to fill up on the noon meal — and perhaps that was why the cooks were going all-out to make the noon meal special, because the only thing to eat between when they reached the search point and combat would be biscuits and some passed-around caviar. Trusov crinkled her nose. She hated caviar.

Suddenly her screen flashed red and rotated to the notifications screen just as Sonar Officer Arisha Vasilev turned.

“Watch Officer, Captain! I have a detect on an aircraft engine! Bearing two-eight-two, bearing rate is starting to increase. It’s getting closer.”

Trusov grabbed her larger headphones and put them on, Orlov doing the same at his position. She brought up the sonar display and moved her cursor to the broadband trace of the aircraft engine, now at 302 degrees true, then changing rapidly to bearing north, then to 040 when its bearing became steady.

“Captain! That’s a cruise missile!” Trusov said, her voice loud. “The only way bearing on a jet engine freezes is if it is doing a pop-up maneuver! We’ve got to go to maximum speed and a direction away from bearing zero-four-zero!”

“Boatswain!” Orlov shouted, “Engine ahead maximum! Thirty-five knots! Make your depth six hundred meters, steep angle! Left five degrees rudder, steady course two-two-zero!”

The boatswain on the forward starboard ship control console jammed his joystick to the forward bulkhead and the ship dived, the deck beginning to tremble with the power of the main motor speeding up to maximum velocity at one hundred percent reactor power.

“Three-fifty meters, sir. Four hundred!”

“Everybody grab a handhold and make sure you’re strapped in,” Trusov shouted, “And don emergency breathing masks and fireproof hoods!” She picked up the shipwide announcing circuit microphone. Her voice boomed throughout the previously rigged-for-silent submarine. “Attention all hands, this is the Watch Officer. All personnel don emergency breathing masks and fireproof hoods. Set material condition X for imminent weapon impact.”

Orlov glanced over at Trusov, his eyes shaded behind his gas mask. He nodded at her while he reached for his seat belt to strap himself into the position one command seat. Trusov did the same, putting the five-point harness over her chest and snapping it into position at her beltline.

Lieutenant Vasilev shouted again from the sonar-and-sensor console. “I have a splash, very faint. Wait, I have a second splash, this one heavier, bearing in our stern sector, detected on the rudder rear-facing hydrophones.”

The deck flattened from its steep down-angle of twenty degrees.

“Captain, steady on depth six hundred,” the boatswain announced from the ship control center, “steady on course two-two-zero, engines answering ahead one hundred percent, sir.”

“Very well,” Orlov acknowledged.

Trusov glanced over at Captain Orlov, and just as he seemed to be about to say something to her, her memory and her thoughts stopped as if switched off like a light.

The two nuclear energy releases, ten nautical miles apart, grew identically outward from their start at the center of their depth charges, only differentiated slightly by their explosions at different depths. The western plasma fireball was subjected to a higher sea pressure than the eastern explosion, but that mattered only in that the plasma ovoid formed by the deeper weapon was just slightly smaller than the dimensions of the plasma to the east at the plasma’s biggest point. Despite the ultra-high temperature and pressure of the plasmas, the sea overcame them, cooling and dispersing the hot gases, much of their energy directed upward to escape the higher pressure of the deep. The steam from the sea cooling the plasma rose furiously rapidly to the surface above and blew upward into the atmosphere, until there were dual mushroom clouds rising over the seascape.

The western plasma had encountered nothing but seawater, but the eastern plasma had engulfed a large steel shape, first liquefying the metals and composites inside this odd envelope of steel, then vaporizing the liquids, then making the matter turn into a plasma, a state of matter where the energy levels were so high that the electrons boiled off the molecules. There remained no trace of what had once been that object — no wreckage, no floating mattresses, no oil slick. All of what had been the Russian Republic submarine Voronezh became atoms stripped of electrons and simply flew upward in the eastern mushroom cloud, what molecules that remained the same elements — iron and carbon — raining down on the sea as little more than contaminants.

The two nuclear fireballs sent out shock waves in all directions, hammering down on the sea floor two miles below, upward to the surface, and outward. The twin shock waves combined to form an even stronger shock wave traveling outward in all directions, the wave weakening as it traveled.

The shock wave soon encountered the hull of the Russian Republic submarine Novosibirsk, located 49 nautical miles west-southwest of the westernmost detonation. The shock wave had sufficient strength to slam into the submarine, roll it far over, and shake the ship so hard that every living soul aboard lost consciousness from hitting something, even the officers strapped into their seats in the central command post. The shock tripped the submarine’s reactor and took all propulsion systems offline and opened every electrical breaker aboard, but perhaps the worst effect happened in compartment three’s lower level, the location of auxiliary machinery room number two, where the twin oxygen generators came off their foundation mountings, the piping to the high pressure oxygen and hydrogen receivers rupturing, and the mixture of oxygen and hydrogen exploding, the intense fires overcoming the halon firefighting system and the smoke of the flames melting through the emergency breathing air manifold and dumping the pressure of the emergency air breathing system into the room, further feeding the fire. A check valve in the system had been designed to prevent this loss of emergency breathing air, but in the hellish conflagration, it melted and ceased to exist other than a liquid metal puddle on the deck of the room.

The opening of all electrical breakers shut down the ventilation fan that took a suction on the room and distributed it to the ship, so the outgoing air flow stopped as well as the incoming flow from the ship’s spaces, starving the fire of oxygen, although the flames licked up against the metal piping of the high-pressure oxygen that fed the oxygen banks. Had the oxygen level in the room continued to sustain the fire, the flames would have melted the oxygen manifold and become unstoppable, which would have led to the atmosphere of the submarine becoming toxic enough to kill all life aboard, but as the flames blasted against the oxygen piping, the smoke and carbon monoxide in the room choked the flames and fire went out, leaving the room a smoldering wreck of burned valves, cables, piping, tanks and electronics, the smoke so dense that no amount of visible spectrum candlepower would penetrate it.

In the first and second compartments, the crew, all of them wearing emergency air masks, and all of them unconscious from the battering the ship took in the shock wave, began to suffocate from the lack of emergency breathing air system pressure, and as the habitable spaces of the submarine filled with smoke, the crew all began to die at the same moment in time.

By the time the shock wave had traveled at the speed of sound underwater, to the locations of the United States submarine Vermont and the United States’ pirated submarine Panther, 149 nautical miles west of the western-most explosion, the shock wave was little more than a loud sound wave, but still blasted the ears of the inhabitants of those two submarines, rattling the dishes in the pantries, and causing enough of a sudden roll on the Panther to knock books off the shelf in the navigation room.

Weapons Officer Irina Trusov coughed into her gas mask and tried to inhale, but there was nothing there. She instinctively pulled the mask off and tried desperately to breathe, gasping in huge lungfuls of smoky air. She blinked hard, not sure if she had gone blind or if the space were so smoke-filled that there was no visibility. She tried to reach under the console for the battle lantern, but the five-point restraint restricted her motion. She unlatched the seat belt and vaulted out of the seat, still gasping as she found the large flashlight and switched it on.

The room was dark, with smoke, but there was enough visibility in the room to see the forward bulkhead. She could sense the deck was tilting downward a few degrees. She shone the light on the captain, who was collapsed in his harness. Quickly Trusov pulled off his mask, then circled the room, pulling off the masks of the other crewmembers. She returned to Orlov to see if he were breathing, although if he weren’t, she wouldn’t be able to try to resuscitate him. The rules of their training were specific for times like these: save the mission, save the ship, save the reactor, then save the crew. As for the mission, it wasn’t able to be salvaged with the ship in this condition. The hated Americans had won, with one swift stroke, once again humiliating Russia. But there was no time for that, she thought, forcing herself to try to understand how to save the ship.

The first thing she needed was the second captain, but the display was dark. Praying it was just in some kind of power-saving mode, she jabbed the display touch screen, but it remained dark.

“Second Captain, respond!” she shouted at it.

“Second Captain, ready,” the disembodied, cool, unworried voice replied. God, how Trusov hated that system. The ship was dying and the fucking AI system’s voice sounded like it was just another Tuesday.

“Turn on the position three display,” she shouted at it. The display lit up, but it would take too long to get the answers she needed. She’d have to deal with the AI verbally.

“Second Captain, report status of propulsion plant.”

“The reactor has undergone a group scram resulting from a shock impact. All electrical breakers have opened as a result of the same shock. All systems are offline with the exception of the second captain uninterruptible power supply batteries, but that system is at ninety-five percent and will cease to function in six hours.”

Leave it to the AI to worry about itself above all, Trusov thought.

“Second Captain, shut the battery breaker.”

“The battery breaker is shut. Battery charge indicates nine-five percent. There are no loads on the battery at this moment.”

“Shut the breaker feeding the lighting panels,” Trusov ordered. It took a moment, but the lights flashed, then held in the room. Trusov turned off her battle lantern. The smoke in the room was worse. She looked over at the captain, who was coughing and breathing. She slapped his face gently, but he was still out. She was the only one conscious in the room. The angle of the deck had become worse. They might be sinking, she thought, and with no propulsion, that situation could get worse.

“Second Captain, shift propulsion to the emergency propulsion motor.”

“Shifting propulsion to the emergency propulsion motor.”

“Report depth.”

“Watch Officer, depth indicates six-seven-nine meters.”

God, the depth of 679 meters was deeper than design crush depth, and they were still going down.

“Propulsion shifted to the emergency propulsion motor,” the AI said, calmly, as if it were just another Tuesday.

“Second Captain, engine ahead one third, twenty degrees rise on the bowplanes, make your angle up twenty degrees.”

“Engine is ahead one third, twenty degrees rise on the bowplanes, increasing ship’s angle to twenty degrees up. No depth order given. No compass course given.”

Trusov frowned. “Make your depth one hundred meters. Steer course three-zero-nine.” They’d been heading southwest to get in position to intercept the Panther before the explosion, and it occurred to Trusov that she should plot a course back to the Pacific rather than try to chase the Americans with a broken submarine, but she didn’t have time for tactical or strategic thought. She was still just trying to keep Novosibirsk alive.

“Depth order one hundred meters received.”

“Status of the reactor plant.”

“All channels of reactor protection tripped the unit on detected shock.”

“Clear the reactor protection trips, shut all inverter breakers and conduct a fast-recovery startup,” Trusov ordered.

“Reactor protection trips cleared. All inverter breakers indicate shut. Latching all control rods and commencing fast-recovery startup.”

The deck’s downward tilt flattened, then inclined upward as they rose out of the depths.

“Four hundred meters,” the AI reported. “Watch Officer, all sensors in auxiliary machinery room number two are offline. Three hundred fifty meters.”

“What do you mean they’re offline?” That was an ominous report.

“All systems in the auxiliary machinery room two show open circuits, all instrument systems off.”

That room was the heart of the ship’s atmospheric control equipment. Any problems with that room would have far-reaching implications.

“Do you have instrumentation outside the room in third compartment lower level?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a camera on the hatch to the room?”

“Yes. Displaying it now.”

The camera view came up. The porthole in the high-pressure bulkhead hatch to the room was black. The hatch seemed to be glowing a dim red.

“What’s the temperature in third compartment lower level forward?”

“Seventy degrees Celsius.”

That was broiling. There had to have been a fire in machinery two.

“Second Captain, seal auxiliary machinery room two.” The hatches needed to be shut and the pressure damper to the ventilation system locked shut to do what Trusov wanted to do.

“Auxiliary machinery room two is sealed.”

“Open the upper room vent to the third compartment. Display the camera in the space where the vent exhausts.”

The display came up on Trusov’s display, a catwalk in the reactor room. Thick black smoke was pouring into the space, presumably from the machinery room’s vent.

“Second Captain, reposition the three-way valve to machinery two’s vent to direct flow from the vent to compartment three’s bilge.”

“Vent three-way valve repositioned to exhaust to the bilge.”

“Second Captain, open the hull and backup emergency flood valves to auxiliary machinery room two.”

“Commencing emergency flood of auxiliary machinery room two.”

This was a casualty procedure memorized by every watch officer, Trusov thought, but to her knowledge, no one had ever actually had to do it.

The angle of the deck flattened again. “Ship’s depth, one hundred meters,” the second captain announced. “Bilge levels in compartment three are rising.”

“Stop the emergency flood operation.”

“Shutting hull and backup emergency flood valves,” the second captain replied. “Vent valve shut.”

“Line up to take a suction on auxiliary machinery room two with the drain pump.” Trusov brushed a lock of sweaty hair out of her eyes, thinking that she craved a shower.

“Drain pump is lined up with suction on auxiliary machinery room two. Do you want to open the vent valve?”

“Open the vent valve and start the drain pump,” Trusov ordered.

“Drain pump on.” It would only take seconds to dewater the room. “Drain pump off.”

“Very well.” Someone would have to go into the room physically, Trusov thought, to see how bad the damage was. She’d have to ventilate the ship from the surface soon, but first she needed the reactor.

“Status of the reactor?”

“Reactor is in the power range and warming up now using normal rates.”

“Increase heat-up using maximum emergency rate,” Trusov ordered. It wasn’t safe for the reactor to do that, and could blow the lid off the reactor pressure vessel, but this wasn’t a normal day at sea.

“Reactor expected to be at normal operating temperature and pressure in two minutes.”

Orlov made a sound. Lifting his head off the surface of his console, then dropping it back down. Trusov touched his forehead, lifting his face off the console, but he was still out of it. She looked around at the smoky room, and the other watchstanders were still out.

“Reactor is at normal operating temperature and pressure,” the second captain said. “Commencing steam plant startup.”

“Second Captain, make your depth two-one meters, fifteen-degree up angle, no stern clearance.” If there were a ship above them, it would just have to take 13,800 metric tons of Yasen-M-class submarine ramming it. With all that had gone wrong this watch, Trusov thought, there couldn’t be anything that could make it worse. She rose from the console and grabbed the periscope pole behind her seat.

“Raising number one scope,” she announced, as if there were anyone awake to hear her. She grabbed the hydraulic control ring and rotated it counterclockwise, and the periscope began to rise out of the well.

“Steam plant is online,” the second captain said. “Fifty meters.”

“Second Captain, engine stop, shift propulsion to the main motor.”

“Engine stop, shifting propulsion to the main motor.”

Trusov grabbed the periscope grips as the optics module emerged from the periscope well and snapped them down, putting her eye on the cold rubber of the eyepiece. The view out the scope was only an inky black this deep. She trained the view upwards and began to rotate the periscope in circles, making a complete circle in thirty seconds.

“Propulsion shifted to the main motor,” the second captain said.

“Engine ahead one third, turns for six knots,” Trusov ordered. The view above was getting lighter steadily, but there was still nothing visible.

“Thirty-five meters.”

Trusov could see light from above, shimmering downward. She kept up her circles, looking for the hull of a surface ship above, prepared to order the second captain to dive the ship deep in the emergency of encountering a shape or shadow directly above them.

“Thirty meters.”

Trusov could see the undersides of the waves now, looking silvery, the sunlight from above stronger now as it penetrated the upper layer of ocean.

“Twenty-seven meters.”

The waves farther out were visible now. There were no shapes or shadows. They were apparently alone in the sea.

“Twenty-three meters.”

The periscope view climbed into the waves until a crest was above the view, but the view broke out of a trough, then immediately went back into a crest. The scope foamed up, nothing to see but a thousand bubbles.

“Scope’s awash.”

“Twenty-two meters.”

“Scope’s clear,” Trusov called, doing her collision avoidance circles faster now. “No close contacts,” she called, training the periscope to what she’d seen only briefly as she made a circle. There, at bearing 044, two enormous mushroom clouds were rising from the sea, the tops of them perhaps five kilometers high. “Holy mother of God,” Trusov breathed to herself. If they’d been any closer to the detonation point, they’d have all died instantly. “Goddamned Americans,” she sneered. “Villains. You are all villains and you are all damned to the fires of Hell.” She wished she could get her hands on whoever had launched those cruise missiles. She would enjoy strangling the man and seeing the light in his eyes cloud over as death took him.

“Twenty-one meters.”

“Second Captain, raise the induction mast.”

Hydraulics thumped as the mast came out of the conning tower and reached skyward.

“Induction mast is up.”

“Drain the induction mast.”

“Draining the induction mast,” the AI replied. “Induction mast indicates dry.”

“Very well. Line up to emergency ventilate the first and second compartments with the low-pressure blower.”

“Lining up to emergency ventilate. Ready to emergency ventilate compartments one and two.”

“Start the blower.”

The sound of the low-pressure blower was loud throughout the ship, and would be loud outside it as well. If the Americans were close, they’d hear, Trusov thought. She’d have to recover the battlecontrol and sonar systems next.

“Atmosphere reads nominal in compartments one and two.”

“Shift emergency ventilation to compartments four and five.”

“Emergency ventilating compartments four and five.”

Captain Orlov groaned. Trusov took her face off the periscope just long enough to look at him, then returned to her surface search.

“Atmosphere reads nominal in compartments four and five.”

“Second Captain, line up to emergency ventilate auxiliary machinery room two.”

Out the periscope, Trusov could see sooty smoke emerge from the sea aft of her view. She bit her lip. The auxiliary machinery room had to have been totaled. Hopefully the oxygen banks hadn’t been affected, but there would no longer be any new oxygen generated aboard. Nor would the carbon dioxide be eliminated. The boat was just one big confined space, Trusov thought. Not easy to fight a war in a boat with no atmospheric control. It would be like being in a World War II U-Boat.

“Second Captain, line up to emergency ventilate compartment three.”

It took longer for the atmosphere in compartment three to clear up, but eventually the air in the boat was nominal.

“Second Captain, stop the low-pressure blower and lower the induction mast.”

The loud blower sound stopped. Trusov took a breath. The smoke was gone from the room, but it still didn’t smell right. It probably would only get worse, she thought. They needed to return to base, assuming they could limp there with nothing further breaking, though, the thought of staying in the fight and launching weapons against the Americans would be more to her liking.

She felt a tap at her shoulder. She looked over and stared into Captain Orlov’s eyes. “Nice recovery, Madam Weapons Officer. I heard you from somewhere far away. You saved the ship. You saved me. You have my lifelong gratitude.”

Trusov blushed. “Just doing my duty, Captain. Do you want to look?”

Orlov took the scope and whistled at the size of the dual mushroom clouds. “Damned Americans nuked us,” he said. “How the hell did they detect us?”

“They must have fired blind, sir,” Trusov said. “It’s the only thing that explains why we’re still alive.”

“Take the scope. I’ll write a message to the Admiralty. I take it we have no atmo-control.”

“None whatsoever, Captain. We’ll have to ventilate at periscope depth, probably twice a day or risk collapsing from carbon dioxide poisoning.”

“Odds are, we’ll get orders to get back to base.”

The other watchstanders in the room were awake, but none had the energy of Orlov, all of them seated and holding their heads. Navigator Misha Dobryvnik came into the room from the aft door.

“What the hell happened?” he said, rubbing his eyes.

“Navigator,” Orlov said, “plot a course back to Petropavlovsk. Odds are we’ll be ordered home.”

29

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino had been standing watch in the central command post when the detonation rocked the boat. The shock rolled cups off consoles, the sound of glass breaking sounding in the room, the more distant sound of dishes breaking in the pantry coming from below.

“What the hell was that?” Dankleff half-shouted, skidding to a halt in front of the position one starboard console.

“That was either conventional and close or it was nuclear and distant,” Pacino said. “I have an idea. Come with me.” He led Dankleff to the sonar room, where Chief Albanese was training Chief Kim on standing sonar watch. Kim was doubled over, her hands clasped to her ears, tears running down her cheeks.

“She had on the headset when the explosion hit,” Albanese said. “It broke the headset and I imagine she’ll be functionally deaf for a day or two. Assuming the best.”

Pacino motioned in Chief Goreliki to take care of Kim, who stood her up to take her to her bunk.

“What do you think, Chief?” Pacino asked Albanese.

“I think somebody dropped a nuke. We should put in a couple of legs to get the range. If it’s distant, it was friendly fire from Vermont. If it’s close, probably one of the bad guys.”

“You can’t do TMA on a blue-out,” Pacino said. Doing target-motion-analysis on a cloud of bubbles that took up a quarter of the azimuth was a waste of time. “What do you think about hitting it with an active sonar ping?” Pacino asked.

“That pretty much goes against everything we’ve been doing on this mission. You know, stealth and all,” Dankleff said, frowning. “And going against every order we have on this mission.”

“True. But if this is the result of Vermont firing a nuke, we’ll get an immediate range on the detonation radius, and maybe a surviving Russian submarine, assuming Whale here can interpret the return ping—”

“I can interpret it,” Albanese said, matter-of-factly.

“You sure?”

“No. I was trying to give myself confidence. And change my universe’s reality.”

“You’ve been talking to Fishman again, right?” Pacino continued. “If there were submarines that survived the blast, we need to know where they are.”

“Say there are?” Dankleff asked. “What’s our next move?”

“Obvious,” Pacino said. “We drive out that way and sink them.”

“Dammit, Patch, that’s not our directive!” Dankleff’s face had turned red as he shouted. “We’re supposed to hide and sneak out of the Arabian Sea, not turn our guns on some opposing force, spoiling for a fight. Is this your version of, ‘the best defense is a good offense,’ for fuck’s sake?”

“I wish I’d thought of that to say, actually, U-Boat,” Pacino said. “Look at it this way. Any submerged contact out that way has a room full of torpedoes. If he’s damaged and recovers, those torpedoes will be in the mail to our position. And to Vermont’s position. How big is your catcher’s mitt, U-Boat? Big enough to catch an inbound Futlyar torpedo? Or a baker’s dozen of them?”

Dankleff sighed, rubbing his eyes. “Why, oh why, didn’t I select Lobabes for AOIC?”

Pacino clapped Dankleff on the shoulder. “Good man. So, Chief Albanese, you ready to line up and try this?”

“Let’s turn to face the bearing to the detonation, zero-four-five, and hover. That’ll remove any own-ship noise from the sonar equation.”

Pacino stepped back to the command post. “Grip, left twenty degrees rudder, steady zero-four-five.”

“Northeast? Are you high?”

“Just do it, ya damned non-qual SEAL.”

“Fine, my rudder is left twenty, coming around to course zero-four-five.”

Pacino reached for a phone and called the wardroom. “Get Captain Ahmadi up to central command,” he said to Fishman. While he waited, he watched the dinner-plate sized compass spin slowly in the center of Aquatong’s console. Finally he steadied up on course 045.

“Grip, all stop. I’ll set up to hover.”

Ahmadi showed up, Fishman behind him. “Yes, Mr. Patch. Can I help?”

“Help me hover the boat,” Pacino said. Ahmadi took the position two console seat and stared at the displays, then pumped water from aft to forward and from the depth control tank to sea, waiting to see how the boat responded, then flooding depth control slightly. Sweat broke out on his forehead as he concentrated. After several minutes of operating the trim system, Ahmadi looked up at Pacino. “We’re hovering at one hundred meters, Mr. Patch.”

“Keep watching it, Captain,” Pacino said. He hurried back to sonar.

“We’re steady on zero-four-five and hovering. You ready?”

“Yes, sir,” Albanese said. “The MGK-400 is lined up.” He looked up at Dankleff. “OIC, permission to ping active?”

Pacino looked at Dankleff, who bit his lip, then said, “I’m gonna regret this, but, Chief, ping active.”

The loud active sonar ping could be heard with the naked ear in the hull of Vermont, the sound loud and long. It seemed to be coming from the south. And it seemed close.

Captain Seagraves looked at Officer of the Deck Romanov, his face startled. “What the hell is going on?”

“That was from Panther,” Petty Officer Mercer said from the Q-10 stack seat. “Bearing one-seven-eight.”

“Can you tell if there’s a return ping?” Romanov asked.

“We’re not set up for that,” Mercer said. “We’d have to ping out with the Q-10 ourselves to interpret actual distance to the blueout and see if there are any surviving submerged contacts.”

Seagraves, Romanov and Quinnivan gathered at the command console. “What the hell are they doing?” Seagraves said, his frown deepening.

“Approach Officer, we have a zig on the Panther,” Mercer announced. “Aspect change. He’s turning to his left. Northwest.”

“Goddammit,” Seagraves cursed. “Dankleff is supposed to get Panther out of here, no matter what happens.”

“Transients from Panther,” Mercer said. “Sounds are consistent with him starting up his fast reactor.”

“I’m going to kill those guys,” Seagraves muttered to himself.

“Panther is speeding up, sir. Sounds like he’s putting on maximum turns.”

“He’s heading toward the blueout, Captain,” Romanov said, flipping the command console to the chart. She’d drawn blood red circles around the impact points of the SubRocs. The bearing to the point in between the circles was 049. Before Panther started acting up, they’d done three legs of target motion analysis, TMA, to determine the range to the blueout, and it was sloppy, but generally correlated with the range they’d set into the SubRocs, 180 and 190 miles from the Vermont. “I think. Let’s get some TMA done on Panther to get his solution. Maybe he detected something.”

“We don’t have time for that, Nav,” Quinnivan said, cupping his hand over his boom microphone, giving an illusion of the three of them having privacy in the crowded battlestations-manned control room. “Panther pinged active, so if there is someone out there, now they know we’re here, and they know Panther didn’t steal herself. Our presence as an escort sub has to have been guessed by an opposition force. And all I can say is, ‘duh.’ It’s fookin’ obvious. So let’s see what Panther detected. We need to line up active sonar and ping the hell out of that blueout. See what Panther’s got her nose into.”

“XO makes a good point, Captain,” Romanov said, as if she sensed Seagraves’ doubts.

Seagraves looked at Quinnivan, then Romanov. “Any downside to going active?”

Quinnivan made a sour face. “Sure, Skipper. Whoever’s out there would have our exact bearing. If he’s good, he could do a couple passive TMA legs on us and nail down our exact solution.”

“But he can’t put a warhead on us,” Romanov said, “we’re way outside torpedo range, if a contact is near the blueout.”

“Pilot,” Seagraves ordered, “left twenty degrees rudder, steady zero-four-nine. All ahead flank.” He looked at Romanov. “We should at least get going in that direction.”

“The blueout is five or six hours out, Captain,” Romanov said. “And we’re definitely outside torpedo range of an opponent, but not if he has anything equivalent to the SubRoc. Like a Kalibr missile.”

“Most of the Kalibr cruise missiles,” Quinnivan said, “are set up for surface ship assault. All it could do to us is make a big bang overhead.”

“Unless it’s a nuke,” Seagraves said. “Or one of the Kalibr variants designed for antisubmarine warfare.”

“We’re worrying about ghosts, Skipper,” Quinnivan said. “Let’s get a few active pulses out there and nail down whatever object or contact is out there, and then let’s drive towards that.”

“Sonar, line up to ping active,” Seagraves ordered. “Three pulses. Low freq, long range detection parameters. Center of pulses at bearing zero-four-nine.”

“Aye, sir, lining up Q-10 sphere for active,” Mercer reported. “Ready, Captain.”

“Sonar, ping active, three pulses.”

An earsplitting roaring shriek sounded in the room, coming from forward, the pulse rising like a siren from a deep bass roar, rising in pitch until it ended in a tenor hum. The comparative quiet after the pulse seemed surreal. Seagraves’ ears ached from the noise that seemed to drill into his skull. After ten seconds, a second pulse went out, and a second time Seagraves’ eardrums were hammered. Finally, ten seconds after that, the third pulse went out.

Romanov had selected the active sonar screen on the command console display, but Seagraves stepped over to Snowman Mercer’s Q-10 stack, not just to see the results on the screen, but Mercer’s expression as he analyzed any return pings.

“Anything?”

Mercer nodded, his reply loud in the room. “Captain, Officer of the Deck, I hold a new sonar contact, Sierra Seventeen, bearing zero-three-eight, range, two hundred sixty thousand yards.”

“Sweet jumpin’ Jaysus,” Quinnivan said. “Are ya sure, lad? A hundred and thirty fookin’ nautical miles? That’s awfully far out to be a strong detect.”

“Sir,” Mercer said, turning in his seat, “It’s strong enough. Whatever it is, it’s big and solid and submerged. The nuclear detonations must have blown off his anechoic tiles and exposed his steel to our ping.”

“Okay, then,” Seagraves said, inhaling deeply, wishing he could smoke a cigarette, or better, one of Quinnivan’s Cuban cigars. “Sonar and firecontrol party, designate Sierra Seventeen as Master One. Pilot, steer course zero-three-eight and make your depth twelve hundred feet.”

The deck inclined downward as Vermont made for the northeast at flank speed, her deck trembling from the power of the flank bell.

“I hope to hell we’ll still have Panther on passive sonar at this speed,” Romanov said.

“No need to worry about that,” Mercer said. “Panther is as loud as a proverbial train wreck.”

“Great,” Seagraves said, shaking his head. “Navigator, prepare a situation report for a slot buoy transmission. Tell the brass we’re chasing after whatever contact is near the blueout.”

“Should I mention that Panther forced our hand, sir?”

Seagraves drilled his gaze into Romanov’s eyes. “Captain John Paul Jones once said, ‘discretion is the better part of valor,’ Navigator. Let’s just leave that detail out.”

Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev read the radio dispatch from Voronezh with dismay. The submarine’s fire had killed the entire crew. And now the AI system, the second captain, was attempting to continue the mission? It was lunacy. The AI onboard the Yasen-M-class was primitive. There was no way it could out-think a motivated enemy. Alexeyev and his battlestations crew had tangled with the AI version in battle simulators, and ten times out of ten he’d defeated them. Admiral Zhigunov insisted that was just because Alexeyev and his crew were exemplary, but Alexeyev doubted that. It wasn’t that he was a superstar at submarine vs. submarine combat. It was that the AI was dumb.

Alexeyev left his sea cabin and stepped into the central command post. The on-watch crew greeted him, coming to attention. He waved at them to relax. At the port aft navigation chart console, he leaned over the display and calculated how long it would be before the Kazan would be on-station, then cursed. This was taking entirely too long.

Odds were, if the Panther and her escort submarine were making for the western hemisphere, they’d be there long before Kazan got into position. Zhigunov had called him too late.

Weapons Officer Irina Trusov stood up from her position three console at the captain’s order. He was on the phone to nuclear control.

“Engineer, get a watch relief so you can walk down the ship with us. This damage inspection will determine whether we continue the mission or head home, and for that matter, whether we will even be able to continue on submerged.” Captain First Rank Yuri Orlov listened for a moment. “We can discuss that when we arrive at nuclear control,” he said sternly, cutting off what sounded like a panic-stricken chief engineer. “The weapons officer, navigator and I are walking the ship down for a damage inspection, and you’re coming with us. Be ready when we get there.” Orlov hung up despite Chernobrovin still speaking on the other end.

“Well, something’s very wrong back aft,” Orlov commented to Trusov. She nodded, not knowing what else to say. First Officer Vlasenko showed up in central command with Communicator Sukolov with him, to take over senior supervisory central command watch and the watch officer duty. Trusov spent a moment whispering to Sukolov to tell him the status of things so he could take on the duty.

“Have you tried to raise the radio mast?” he asked.

“No,” Trusov said. “I verified the induction mast and number two periscope work. Presumably the MFHG antenna works as well. You can test it next periscope depth.”

“We need to get a situation report out to Pac Fleet,” Sukolov said, his eyes wide, his cheeks hollow. He was badly frightened, Trusov thought.

“Write up a draft for the captain to look at for when we return from touring the ship,” she said. Sukolov nodded.

“Weapons Officer, are you ready?” Orlov said impatiently. Navigator Misha Dobryvnik stood by the captain, a frown on his worried face. Trusov found herself thinking that it was a good thing that she wasn’t the only one who was frightened and worried. Goddamned Americans, she thought for the dozenth time since the explosion.

“Ready now, sir.”

“Let’s go. We’ll start aft. The engineer was complaining.”

Orlov walked so fast on the way to nuclear control that Trusov broke into a jog to keep up with him. Out the aft door, he flew, down the passageway past the officers’ staterooms to the steep stairs to the middle level, emerging into the crew’s messroom, and aft of that, to an alcove housing the large round hatch that led through the shielded tunnel through the third compartment that housed the 200 megawatt nuclear reactor, the shielding designed to minimize exposure to the neutron and gamma radiation from the reactor. Trusov couldn’t help notice the sign flashing in the space, the yellow and magenta sign lit from behind:

Great, Trusov thought. All the wicked casualties happening to the submarine, now it had to have a radiation casualty?

The tunnel led aft to the fourth compartment where the turbines, generators and motors were housed, with the nuclear control room placed just aft of the bulkhead to the third compartment. Farther aft of the door to nuclear control, Trusov could see a steam leak — no, several steam leaks. The compartment was hot and humid, and she felt herself sweat through her coveralls, the choking steam filling the air in the crowded machinery space. Now she was beginning to think the ship couldn’t be saved.

“Status of the reactor?” Orlov said through the doorway to nuclear control.

Inside, Captain Third Rank Kiril Chernobrovin stood behind the reactor control panel and steam plant control panel, his coveralls soaked in sweat, a cut to his scalp having bled down his face, the streak of blood making Trusov’s suppressed fear somehow bloom stronger.

“The rod we dropped when we entered the Arabian Sea, Captain? We’ve dropped it again. I’ve maintained the reactor critical, but the neighboring fuel modules have had to pick up the load from the rod drop and they are overpowered, and their fuel elements are melting, and the third compartment is now a high radiation area. Add to that, we now have a primary-to-secondary leak, and the fourth compartment’s radiation levels are skyrocketing. The occupancy time — the safe occupancy time — for this room is shrinking down to less than an hour, Captain. Beyond that, we’re all getting far more than our allowable lifetime doses. If we have to sail all the way back to base, we’ll have enough radiation dosage that, well, sir, we’d be lucky to live for another year, and that will be one miserable year.”

Orlov cursed. “Dammit, Engineer, you keep this beast critical and maintain propulsion, I don’t care if the damned thing fucking explodes. Now come with us for this inspection.”

Trusov caught a glance from the engineer and there was no mistaking his thoughts. We have to abandon ship. But Yuri Orlov would die before he’d abandon a mission, much less his beloved submarine.

They walked quickly forward to the shielded tunnel.

“You ran the blower, right, Weapons Officer? It wasn’t my imagination?”

“You were still pretty out of it, Captain,” Trusov said. “But yes.”

Orlov hurried to the lower level, where the emergency diesel lived.

“The diesel could go either way, I suppose,” Orlov said, touching the side of the massive diesel engine. “I hope to hell it’s okay. It may need to get us home.” Orlov glanced quickly at Chernobrovin, then led them back up the stairway to the middle level, then forward through the crew’s messroom. Dobryvnik paused near the large door to refrigerated storage, noticing the breaker providing power to the room had tripped. Without thinking about it, Dobryvnik reached for the red handle to the breaker, which was indeed in the tripped position, took it to the “open” position, then pulled it up to the “shut” position. It immediately exploded in a breadbox-sized ball of flames, Dobryvnik falling to the deck, grasping his hand.

“You okay?” Trusov said, bending over him and pulling him up by his good hand. He looked at the burn, wincing.

“Navigator, get up to the wardroom and get the first aid kit out and see to that burn,” Orlov said, his jaw clenching.

“Yessir,” Dobryvnik said, cradling his burned hand as he made his way forward.

“So much for our food supply,” Orlov said.

“This mission just keeps getting better,” Chernobrovin muttered.

The three of them left the crew’s messroom and hurried past the crew recreation room, farther forward past crew berthing, to the radio room. “Weapons Officer? Do you know the combination?”

“Hull number twice, Captain,” Trusov said. “Unless the navigator changed it since the last time I used it.”

Orlov punched in the code, “5-7-3-5-7-3” and tried the knob, but it was frozen. “You try,” he said to Trusov, who entered the code on the button pad, but nothing helped.

“Engineer, go fetch a goddamned pry bar from machinery one.”

“Right away, Captain,” Chernobrovin said, glad to have an errand to take his mind off their situation. While they waited, Orlov pounded on the radio room door, but the radiomen weren’t answering. Trusov realized she was breathing heavily, perhaps the effect of the exertion in the contaminated atmosphere. She should have checked the atmospheric readings in machinery one, she thought. They needed to know when they’d have to come up to periscope depth and ventilate.

Chernobrovin appeared, winded, with a crowbar. He took it to the radio room door, and he and Orlov pushed until the lock broke and the radio room door burst open. The scene was one from Hell itself, complete devastation. Scorched and burned equipment. Smoke pouring out of the room into the passageway. The horrible stench of burned human flesh. The smoke cleared, revealing the black wreckage of the radio equipment and the two radiomen who had been unfortunate enough to be in the space when the fire broke out. Orlov’s eyes narrowed and he cursed under his breath.

“There goes any chance of communicating to Pac Fleet or the Admiralty,” he said.

“What about a radio buoy launched from the countermeasure ejection tube, sir?” Chernobrovin asked.

“They were all stored in here,” Orlov said. “Along with the computer to load a message into them.”

“No other emergency transmitters?”

Orlov shook his head. “The escape chamber has an emergency beacon, but it’s just a dumb attention-getter.”

Trusov traded another glance with Chernobrovin. This was getting untenable. “I guess it no longer matters if the MFHG antenna is functional,” she said.

“Captain,” Chernobrovin said to Orlov, “I should get back to nuclear control. Make sure we’re staying critical and in the power range. Maybe minimize the fuel melting.”

“Go,” Orlov said, waving the engineer aft. “Trusov, let’s get to the torpedo room,” Orlov said, walking rapidly forward to the large hatch to the first compartment.

Torpedo Officer Vasiliy Naumov looked up as Captain Orlov and Weapons Officer Trusov came into the first compartment and stood looking at the wreckage of what had once been an orderly torpedo room.

“What’s your status, Naumov?” Orlov asked.

Senior Lieutenant Naumov wiped his forehead. Trusov stared at him, realizing he was barely more than a child, lanky and pimply, his hair a mess, his coveralls torn, his hand trembling.

“Three weapons came off their racks, Captain. I called it up to central, to Mr. First. I can’t get them back on their racks alone, sir, the rigging gear is trapped under one of the loose weapons.”

Orlov took a deep breath. “What is that smell, Naumov?”

“I can’t smell anything, Captain. I guess I’ve been in the compartment too long—”

“Dammit, that’s self-oxidizing weapon fuel,” Orlov said harshly. “One of your torpedoes is leaking.”

“If we can find which one is leaking, we can put an emergency patch on it,” Naumov offered.

“Trusov, help your torpedo officer get this space squared away,” Orlov ordered, his expression turning even more dark than before.

Trusov, though, had wandered a few meters farther forward to the torpedo tube doors, her gaze fixed on tube 5, which had been loaded with a Shkval supercavitating torpedo. She sniffed the air close to the door and put her fingers under a pet-cock, a few drops emerging. She rubbed her fingers together under her nose as she turned back to the captain. The hydrogen peroxide fuel had an ingredient added to it to make a distinctive odor, allowing leaks to be more easily detected.

“Sir, we have a bigger problem. I’ve got a peroxide leak in tube five, the tube-loaded Shkval tube. We’ve got to jettison it before it goes off.”

Orlov hurried to the forward port torpedo control console, finding the local operating station for the tube doors. Trusov joined him at the console.

“At least we have power here,” Orlov said. “That’s a good sign, right?”

Orlov rotated the master selector switch from “CENTRAL COMMAND” to “LOCAL CONTROL” and selected tube 5. He hit the fixed function buttons for the “VENT” and “FLOOD” valves, each one lighting up a red annunciator indicator light. A new annunciator lit up, this one reading “TUBE FLOODED.” He shut the vent valve and found the fixed function button for the valve marked “EQUALIZE.” This valve should open tube 5 to seawater pressure and allow the muzzle door to be opened. He glanced at Trusov.

“Let’s hope the hydraulics for this work.” He punched the fixed function button marked “OUTER DOOR — OPEN” and it flashed white. “So much for hoping.” The status panel of hull openings still showed a green bar over the label marked “TUBE 5 OUTER DOOR.” The muzzle door remained shut. The Shkval torpedo was trapped in the tube.

“Can we do a manual hand-crank to try to open the muzzle door, Trusov?”

Trusov nodded. “The emergency hydraulic system pressurization hand crank is centerline forward. Naumov, follow me.”

As Trusov turned from Orlov to find the hydraulic hand crank station, the Shkval torpedo in tube number five exploded into fiery incandescence, its pressurized fuel fire causing the three-hundred-kilogram high explosives to detonate inside the tube. The white-hot fireball blew Trusov and Naumov backwards into Orlov, and all three collapsed on the deck.

Orlov had been knocked unconscious by the blast and Naumov was stunned, looking like he barely knew where he was. Trusov sat half up and saw her worst twin nightmares — a huge blowtorch fire blowing into the room from forward at the same time as a tremendous roaring, pressurized jet of water was screaming into the room.

In a quiet part of her mind, where time had slowed down to a crawl, she was reminded of the old Russian submariner’s joke—Good news, Captain, the flooding put out the fire. A weak joke, since both fire and flooding were two of the gods of the sea’s evil henchmen, intent on killing any sailor bold enough or foolish enough to attempt to sail beneath the waves.

She could feel the deck incline downward as the mighty stream of floodwater filled the bilges, what must be double digit tons of water filling the first compartment. And unlike the submariner’s joke, no amount of water would put out a self-oxidizing weapon fuel fire. It would burn underwater.

There was no fighting this, Trusov thought. It was over. The mission of Novosibirsk had come to this moment. Either the remaining surviving crew went down with the crippled submarine, or she got the order out to abandon ship. With a struggle, she grabbed Orlov, who was still unconscious.

“Naumov! Help me get the captain out of the compartment!”

“We have to fight the fire! And the flooding!”

“It’s over, Naumov, now get the captain’s arm,” she hissed at the young torpedo officer.

Trusov and Naumov muscled Orlov through the latched-open hatch to the second compartment and pulled the hatch off the latch. With the angle of the ship downward, the hatch slammed shut hard against the seating surface. Trusov threw the lever to latch the hatch and stepped forward five meters to the communication station. She found a phone and punched the button for the central command post.

“First Officer,” Vlasenko’s voice said, over some severe background noise. There was shouting in the room.

Trusov looked at Naumov. “Mr. First, from the captain, emergency blow to the surface and prepare to abandon ship.”

“What? What’s happening?”

“We have massive flooding and a fire in the torpedo room and a weapon fuel fire. The first compartment is going to explode any minute. Unless you want Novosibirsk to be a second Kursk, you’ll follow the captain’s orders!” It would have been better if Orlov himself could have barked into the phone to Vlasenko, but it couldn’t be helped. There was no other choice, Trusov thought. If Orlov were awake, he’d give the same order.

The shipwide announcing circuit blasted through the ship with Vlasenko’s trembling voice. “This is central command. All personnel, prepare to abandon ship. I repeat, all personnel, prepare to abandon ship.”

As the speakers clicked off, Trusov could hear the sound of roaring coming from overhead. Hopefully that was high pressure air blowing the water out of the ballast tanks, she thought, and not more flooding. She struggled again to get Orlov to the stairs to the upper level, fighting against the down angle of the ship. Was it her imagination, or had the down angle eased?

It seemed to take endless minutes to get Orlov to the top of the stairs, and Trusov was soaked in sweat and hyperventilating at the top of the stairs. She looked at her coveralls and hoped the wetness represented sweat and not torpedo fuel. The coveralls were fire-resistant, but nothing could stop a fire from torpedo fuel. She and Naumov muscled Orlov aft into the forward door of the central command post, which was empty of crew but for Vlasenko. Fortunately, Orlov was returning to consciousness, his hand rising to his face as he looked up at the first officer. Trusov breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that now Vlasenko wouldn’t see that she’d lied about the orders to emergency blow and abandon ship coming from the captain.

“Status, Ivan?” Orlov croaked.

“We’ve emergency blown to the surface, Captain, but we still have a down angle and we must be taking on water in the first compartment. The escape chamber is ready and the crew — what’s left of them — are mustering at the lower hatch.”

“Come on, let’s go,” Orlov croaked. Trusov helped him get to the aft door of the room and into the passageway that led aft past the officers’ berthing rooms and the sonar equipment room to the ladder and lower hatch to the escape chamber, a large sphere faired into the conning tower, one of the reasons the conning tower was so long compared to the conning towers of other navy’s submarines. The chamber was designed to allow the entire crew of 60 to survive a submarine sinking. Vlasenko hit the hydraulic control lever to open the bottom hatch, which opened into the chamber. Trusov looked around, the crew numbering perhaps two dozen.

“Where’s Chernobrovin and the engineering crew?” she asked no one. Vlasenko and Orlov were pushing crewmen up the ladder into the hatch. As the overhead lights flickered, a massive explosion rocked the ship, from forward. The crew in the passageway were all thrown to the deck, a pile of bodies scattered around the lower hatch of the escape chamber. The lights went out, leaving them all in a coal mine blackness, just as the smoke came into the space.

“Trusov! Get into the chamber!” Orlov yelled.

“I can’t sir, I have to find the engineer and his men,” Trusov said, grabbing a battle lantern. She hadn’t anticipated Orlov physically picking her up and half tossing her upward into the chamber, Naumov assisting from below and Sonar Officer Vasilev pulling her up from inside.

But the gods of the sea had taken pity, because Engineer Chernobrovin and three of his men arrived in the smoke-filled passageway, emerging from aft, with visibility shrinking to less than three meters in the smoke. “I had to shut down the reactor, Captain, the control rods drives were shorting out, two were pulling themselves out of the core. We could have gone prompt critical.”

“It’s too late to worry about now, Kiril,” Orlov said, clapping the engineer on his shoulder. “We just need it to hold together long enough to detach the chamber.”

A second explosion sounded from forward and a blast of flames roared into the passageway. Orlov, Chernobrovin and his men barely made it into the hatch before the entire passageway was solid flames. Orlov and Vasilev pushed the hatch down and dogged it shut.

“Detach the chamber!” Orlov ordered. Naumov hit the emergency disconnect, and over a hundred explosive bolts fired, separating the chamber from the submarine.

“Did it work?” Trusov asked Chernobrovin. He looked at her, but it almost seemed that the light was going out of his eyes, but the answer came as Trusov could feel the chamber rocking in the waves on the surface. Someone high above was opening the upper hatch, and as fresh air poured into the ship, Chernobrovin suddenly vomited all over her.

30

The escape chamber tossed in the sea state, the windowless, airless capsule of steel seemingly made to induce seasickness.

Irina Trusov had climbed the ladder to the top hatch and climbed out, perching herself on the top surface, which would be perilous with higher waves, but even the prospect of falling off what used to be the top of the conning tower would be preferable to the interior of the chamber.

After Chernobrovin had vomited on her, his other three nuclear crewmen likewise collapsed, retching on the floor, and the stench of it caused others to lose it, and in the middle of the vomit-fest, a huge roaring explosion sounded below them, and the shock wave tossed the chamber in the sea for a minute. The detonation had been the last anyone would hear from the assembly of steel, cable and electronics that had once been the Novosibirsk. Trusov felt an intense moment of mourning. For the last three years, she had poured all she had into that submarine, and now it was gone. Thanks to the Americans.

She forced her mind to turn to the present moment. And to survival. The chamber had rations for more than a week for the entire crew, but it was foreseeable that they’d be out here on the godforsaken Arabian Sea longer. They were hundreds, perhaps thousands of kilometers from the shipping lanes. Since they had separated from the hull and surfaced, there had been no aircraft overhead.

And there was a more immediate problem. Radiation sickness. Chernobrovin and his band of nuclear technicians were falling apart below in the chamber, continuing to dry heave long after their stomachs were empty, their skin turning a sickening pale. And what radiation dose had the rest of them had? She, Orlov and Naumov had been all the way forward in the first compartment when the reactor had its power excursion and flashed neutron and gamma radiation at the entire crew.

Trusov breathed in the salty, fishy-smelling sea air, glad at least that she didn’t need to worry about carbon dioxide poisoning. Orlov poked his head out and climbed up to join her on top of the chamber hull. He handed her a bottle of water and a square meter of cloth. She took the bottle gratefully and nodded at the captain.

“Sorry that the bottled water is so hot. Drink it slow. And wrap that cloth around your head. You’re way too fair to withstand this sunshine.”

“Thanks, Captain.”

“Former captain,” Orlov said sadly.

“Yes,” Trusov said. They sat in silence for some time. “Did you light off the emergency beacon?”

“I tried,” Orlov said. “There’s no indication it worked. Apparently we lacked a preventive maintenance reminder to check its batteries. I suspect they died some time ago.”

“What about the sonar beacon?” The chamber had an active sonar pinger to allow being located by warships with sonar receivers. It could be used if the chamber were trapped under polar ice cover, but other than that, no one had seen its usefulness.

Orlov shouted down into the chamber. “Naumov! Get up here!”

Naumov arrived. “Yes, Captain.”

“See if you can engage the sonar emergency pinging device.”

“Yes, sir.” His head vanished back below.

“Bad news, Captain,” Trusov said. “With the radio beacon out, we may be out here longer than our rations allow. We only have eight days, give or take, of rations.”

“That assumes a full crew, Irina. I fear there will be many fatalities from whatever happened to the reactor. Chernobrovin looks bad. Dammit, Irina, I should have blown to the surface and evacuated the ship earlier.”

“You couldn’t know, Captain. If we’d been just twenty kilometers farther west, we might still be operating, still pursuing the target submarines.”

“Well, I guess we’ll never know. I think I’ll lie down for an hour.”

“You’ll get sunburned, sir.”

“Better than being in that stinking chamber. There’s no way to ventilate it. I think the atmosphere is worse inside than it was in the submarine before the sinking.”

Trusov said nothing, just looked out to sea while the captain started to snore quietly.

Director Margaret Allende joined Director of Operations Angel Menendez in the SCIF conference room adjoining her palatial office. On the wall opposite their seats, a large flatpanel screen displayed the view from the Predator drone orbiting the central Arabian Sea. In the view was a large rescue chamber, big enough to hold a hundred people crowded together. It bobbed gently in the swells. Two people could be made out on top of the structure, an older man and a younger woman. For several long minutes Allende watched the video, then called up the dark screen next to it to display the Arabian Sea. The position of the rescue chamber was marked in red on the chart. The nearest land was Mumbai, India, 290 nautical miles east-northeast. At least, she thought, Mumbai had competent hospitals.

“Is Mumbai within helicopter range of that escape pod?”

Menendez nodded. “Sure, but a chopper could only take on a few survivors at a time. If that chamber evacuated the entire crew, there’d be sixty-five or seventy people in it. You’d need a big procession of choppers to get them out. Plus, making the jet helicopters in the queue hover while you bring in three or four at a time, burning fuel? Sure, maybe the Indian Navy has two dozen jet choppers standing by in Mumbai, but that’s a losing bet. It’s a nice thought, ma’am, but a loser.”

“A rescue ship?”

“If one were equipped with medical facilities and supplies and departed right now? It would still be eleven hours away. But it would probably take twenty-four hours to get organized to get a ship like that mobilized. Odds are, those survivors are suffering from radiation sickness, dehydration, and soon starvation. Twenty-four or thirty-six hours from now? A third of them could be gone by then.”

“We could vector in the Vermont. She’s what, three, four hours away at maximum speed?”

“Are you high, boss? Vermont is an ultra-secret project boat. Those survivors all come from a ship that had orders to sink her. You can’t crowd them onto a project boat.”

“I suppose you’re right. Better get this in front of Admirals Rand and Catardi, and we should call in Pacino.”

“He’ll be glad to hear that Vermont and Panther survived all this. Nothing for our sailors to do now but sail home. Easy day.”

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino stared at Lieutenant Dieter Dankleff.

“Those explosions can only mean one thing,” Pacino said.

“Yeah. The Yasen-M chasing us just exploded and sank.”

“You know what that means, right?” Pacino asked.

“Yeah, time to turn south and head home.”

“No,” Pacino said. “It means this just changed from a search-and-destroy mission to a search-and-rescue mission.”

“What? No, Patch.”

“There could be survivors, U-Boat. We’ve got to help them. Under international law, we’re obligated to render aid.”

“Leave that to other ships,” Dankleff said. “Someone will rescue them, if there are survivors.”

“We’re so far from the shipping lanes, a raft could be out here for weeks. We have to at least check, U-Boat. We see no one out the periscope, then and only then do we turn south and go home.”

Dankleff sighed. “Lieutenant Lomax — Lobabes — would have been a great AOIC. Did I ever mention that?”

Pacino laughed. “Let’s go to the chart and see how long it’ll take to get to the sinking site.” In the navigation room, Pacino plotted a course from the inertial navigation position to the estimated sinking site. “Three point five hours. A short detour. Then home.”

Dankleff nodded. The very word home seemed to fill his soul with warmth.

AOIC Anthony Pacino snapped down the grips of the number two periscope’s optic module as it rose out of the periscope well. Panther rose swiftly out of the inky blackness and sailed for the warm thermal layer at fifty meters. Pacino trained his view upward and made two complete circles making sure there was nothing above them. The blackness yielded to the bright afternoon sunshine from up above.

“I have a shadow, small, close, but we’re heading away from it.” Pacino looked at the underside of whatever this boxy shape was, only worried about avoiding colliding with it. “Keep taking us to twenty-one meters.”

“Forty meters,” Grip Aquatong said. “Thirty-five.”

OIC Dieter Dankleff stood behind Pacino, frowning in frustration. He’d just plotted their position. They’d lose precious transit time doing this, he thought, and that presumed no one would come to chase them or drop munitions on their head. Which reminded him, if they were being chased by Russia’s finest attack submarine, why didn’t the Russians just send in maritime patrol aircraft? Or destroyers with helicopters? God knows, they could cover the entire Arabian Sea with twenty MPA aircraft and half a dozen destroyers. A dipping sonar detection and a torpedo dropped from an aircraft, and all this would have been over. Which meant this was urgent. They needed to check off this box, that they did what they could to make sure there were no survivors, and only then had cleared datum and run home.

“Thirty meters.”

“Get us up, Grip,” Pacino said, his voice muffled by the periscope’s optic module.

“Twenty-eight. Twenty-five. Twenty-three.”

“Scope’s awash,” Pacino said, still making search circles. “Scope’s awash, you’re hanging up, Grip. More bowplanes.”

“I’m at full rise.”

“You’re heavy,” Dankleff said, stepping over to the forward starboard ship control station, pos two. “I’ll pump from central depth control. Lipstick, suggest you order up all ahead two thirds.” Dankleff found a fixed function button and mashed it, watching a gauge indicating the tank level in the central depth control tank.

“Grip, all ahead two thirds!” Pacino ordered.

Grip spun the engine order telegraph.

“Scope’s still hung up,” Pacino said. “Dammit.”

Finally the submarine seemed to come shallow and the scope broke through a wave trough, then foamed up as the crest hit the view, then cleared again.

“Scope’s clear,” Pacino announced. He spun the scope in three rapid circles, then stopped with the scope facing forward. “One close contact, bearing mark! Grip, all stop! Hover at present depth.”

“All stop and hover, aye.”

Dankleff looked up at his console’s vertical section. “Your contact bearing is zero-nine-one. What is it? What’s its range?”

“Hitting it with the laser. Range mark.”

“One-fifty meters,” Dankleff said. “What is it?”

“Looks like a large chunk of a submarine conning tower. It’s a, wait.” Pacino snapped his left grip to increase magnification. “It’s some kind of escape pod, originally faired into the sail, but now it’s floating on the sea. I show survivors on its upper surface. They’re moving. One of them is standing. Now he’s pointing at the periscope. He’s waving his hands over his arms. Now both people topside are waving at us.”

“Let me see,” Dankleff said.

“Low power, bearing zero-nine-one, on the contact,” Pacino said, turning the scope over to Dankleff. Dankleff increased the magnification, then increased it again.

“I’ll be dipped in shit,” Dankleff said. “Survivors.”

“Let’s get them aboard.” Pacino grabbed the phone on pos two and pushed the button for the wardroom. Fishman answered.

“Wait a minute,” Dankleff said. “Not so fast.”

“Send Captain Ahmadi to central command,” Pacino said into the phone.

Ahmadi appeared with Fishman in tow. Pacino looked at the Iranian. “Prepare to surface.”

“No, Ahmadi, wait,” Dankleff ordered. He abandoned the periscope and turned to face Pacino. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Pacino looked at him. “Rescuing survivors, U-Boat. Just like they’d do for us.”

“Goddammit, Patch, they’re Russian military. On a mission to kill us.”

“Not anymore they aren’t. As of now, they’re shipwrecked submariners. Submariners, U-Boat, just like we are. We have to save them.”

“You can’t just bring dozens of Russian military onboard. There could be sixty or seventy of them, maybe more. They can’t come aboard.”

“Why not?” Pacino asked. “We have the room. We can’t load them on Vermont—she doesn’t have the room. Plus, Vermont’s a classified project boat. We can’t put Russian sailors on her. So, by default, we load them up here and hope the good doctor Scooter Tucker-Santos has enough medical supplies to treat them. Nothing particularly classified here. They already know about our mission and the fast reactor is theirs anyway. And they built this boat, so it has no secrets for them, except the crypto and radio junk we lugged onboard, but that’s behind a sturdy lock and they couldn’t make sense of it anyway.”

Dankleff checked his watch and shook his head. “Say we did take survivors aboard. Who’s to say they won’t try to take over the ship? And return it to Iran? And kill us all in the process?”

“That’s why we have SEALs. And us. We’ll all arm back up before we take on the survivors. Anyone becomes a threat, Scooter injects them with Propofol, lights out, zip ties and duct tape.”

“Oh, my God,” Dankleff groaned. “What about Russian satellites? Or drones? Aren’t you worried that if we surface, we’ll attract attention? What’s to stop the Iranians from vectoring in an Ilyushin Il-38 ASW plane, or a few destroyers, or the Russians from flying in a couple Il-114 maritime patrol planes full up with torpedoes?

“That won’t happen,” Pacino said. “Two nuclear explosions, an exploding nuclear submarine, a gigantic escape pod surfaces, and not a trace of a Russian surface or air asset. And besides, what if Russian surveillance does see us? We’ll have their guys. Once the Russians are aboard, the Russian Navy would be crazy to sink us. In their minds, we have hostages. Prisoners of war, so to speak.”

Dankleff considered. After a long time, he said, “What are we going to do once they’re aboard? We can’t steam all the way to AUTEC with them.”

“Mumbai is less than three hundred nautical miles from here. Bearing zero-eight-five. We can make it in ten hours. They have good hospitals. And choppers. Who knows? Maybe they could dispatch a rescue ship and rendezvous with us before we reach Mumbai.”

“You thought this out, didn’t you, before we knew there were survivors.” Dankleff frowned.

“I may have run a few whiteboard scenarios,” Pacino admitted.

“Goddammit, Lipstick, this is going to get us court-martialed or killed. Or both.”

“U-Boat. Shut your eyes and pretend. You’re adrift at sea on a raft. The guys who sank you heave to and pop up a periscope. How would you feel if they just took a couple of periscope pictures and then sailed off?”

“Pretty shitty, I guess.”

“Exactly,” Pacino said. “Captain Ahmadi, prepare to surface!” Pacino looked at Dankleff, as if daring him to countermand Pacino’s order.

Dankleff took a deep breath. “Okay, Lipstick. But if I get killed doing this, you’re the one who’s going to have to break the news to my mom.”

Pacino punched Dankleff in the shoulder and grinned. “Captain Ahmadi, blow forward and aft ballast tanks!”

Captain Lieutenant Irina Trusov adjusted the shawl she’d improvised to cover her face from the intense sunlight. Being a natural blonde had disadvantages, she thought. She looked up and saw something startling. “Captain, look!” Trusov waved frantically at the periscope, which had moved closer, now swimming distance from the escape chamber.

Captain First Rank Yuri Orlov opened his eyes and removed the coat from his face, that he’d been using to keep off the blistering sun. He sat up and looked where Trusov was waving and pointing. It was a periscope.

A Russian periscope.

“Thank God,” he said. “We’re saved. Pass the word down to the crew.”

A half dozen crewmen crowded up on the upper surface, several more popping their heads out the open hatch.

“They certainly seem to be taking their time,” Trusov observed. “Why would they just hover there and look at us?”

The answer seemed to land in Trusov’s mind like a cold, dead fish hitting the floor. “That’s not a friendly Russian,” she said. “That’s the goddamned Panther.” Dismay blew into her soul. All was lost. “Oh, no, please God, no. Not the Americans. Please.”

“They’re surfacing,” Orlov said.

The periscope started rising vertically from the water, then the top of a conning tower, the water splashing and foaming around it, then more of the conning tower rose from the waves. There was a painted logo on the side of the conning tower — a prowling black panther. Finally the submarine’s deck rose out of the sea, the long black form right next to them. It was a Kilo submarine. But elongated.

It was the Panther. Unconsciously, Trusov covered her mouth with her hand.

A head popped up from the conning tower, then two, then three, one of them holding an unholstered large pistol.

“Ahoy!” one of the men called. “Does anyone speak English?”

“You do, Irina,” Orlov said to Trusov. “Ask them if they are here to rescue us.”

Trusov glared at the Americans, wishing she could thrash them with her bare hands.

“We are in need of rescue,” she shouted, hating the task, but finding no logical argument against it. “There are sixty-two of us! Will you help us? Perhaps radio for help?”

“Yes,” the first American called. “There’s no easy way to get you from your escape pod to our boat. You’ll have to jump off and swim over. We’ll get you up on deck from aft and bring you inside.”

The hatch opened forward of the conning tower and men emerged, two of them wearing wetsuits and scuba gear. Then more men climbed out, half a dozen of them armed.

“They’re going to take us prisoner,” Trusov said. “They’re going to interrogate and torture us, Captain. When they find it was us hunting them, they will kill us.”

“Nonsense, Irina,” Orlov said, looking at her like she’d gone mad. “They’re just fellow submariners here to rescue us.”

“They are armed, Captain.”

“Probably to keep us from getting any ideas about taking over their ship, which they stole. Wouldn’t you do the same?”

Trusov bit her lip, wondering if she would survive to see another sunrise. From the dark water between their escape chamber and the Panther, several divers surfaced, and more of them, until there were what looked like two dozen people floating in the water.

“Hey up there!” one of divers shouted up at the conning tower. “Lipstick!”

“Who goes there?” the first American shouted.

“It’s Easy Eisenhart! Is that you, Patch?”

“It is indeed. Good to see you again, Easy. What are you and your guys doing?”

“We’re supplementing your crew. If you’re taking aboard five dozen Russian sailors, you’ll need more security to guard these guys.”

“Jesus, you must have just put everyone on Vermont on port-and-starboard watches.”

“Oh yeah, but no matter, Patch,” Eisenhart called as he was helped up on the hull by one of the SEALs. “Captain called ahead to Mumbai. There’s a rescue ship there with a helicopter and medical facilities. Royal Navy ship. I think it’s the HMS Explorer II.”

Anthony Pacino’s face went white. It had been the HMS Explorer II that had rescued him, Catardi and Carrie Alameda from the wreckage of the Piranha. He wondered for a moment if Fishman’s simulation theory could have any truth to it. This was like the universe winking at him, he thought.

National Security Advisor Michael Pacino looked up at the screen shot from the Predator drone, orbiting high above the escape chamber of one of the Russian Yasen-M-class submarines. Heaved to on one side of it was the surfaced submarine Panther. Discernible on the top of the conning tower was his son, Anthony Pacino, leaning over the coaming of the bridge and shouting down to several swimmers in the water. The elder Pacino reached for a tissue from the box on the table and blew his nose to cover up the fact that he needed the tissue for his suddenly running eyes, wet with hot tears of relief.

He felt Margo Allende’s hand on his shoulder. “See, Patch, Anthony’s fine. He did great.”

“Are they doing what I think they’re doing?”

“Your boy is rescuing the very sailors that tried to kill him.”

Pacino shook his head. “That boy’s a maniac.”

Allende smiled. “Like his father before him, if the stories I heard are true.”

“What is Panther doing now?”

“She’ll head due east toward Mumbai, ten hours out, but we’ve scrambled a rescue vessel that was docked in Mumbai — the Brits had a submarine rescue ship there for training. What are the odds?”

“What was the ship?”

Allende paged through her pad computer. “Let’s see. HMS Explorer II. Panther will rendezvous a hundred and fifty miles out of Mumbai with the Explorer II, offload the Russians, then get back to their escape from the Arabian Sea.”

Pacino stared at the display as the view slowly orbited the hull of the Panther, the topside sailors bringing in the survivors and packing them down the hatch. Explorer II, he thought. Hell of a coincidence, since that was the ship that had saved Anthony three years ago, but certainly a happy one. The older Pacino had visited the ship and brought the captain and submersible commander bottles of thousand-dollar Kentucky bourbon in gratitude.

“Looks like they’re almost all aboard. Let’s get ready. Carlucci wants a briefing. He’ll be down any minute.”

This mission was almost over, Pacino thought. Just a milk run from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific and into AUTEC, and his son would be out of danger.

“Boss, I think you’re going to want to see this.” Angel Menendez’s voice always went up half an octave when he was alarmed, Director Allende thought.

“What is it Angel?” she asked, bringing her pad computer to her office’s SCIF conference room. On the display screen was a worried looking Vice Admiral Rob Catardi.

Allende took her seat. “Hello, Rob. News?”

“We’re late getting the intelligence digested, Madam Director, but here it is,” Catardi said. “A third Russian Yasen-M-class submarine sortied from Zapadnaya Litsa Naval Base on the Kola Peninsula the day after Panther was taken. She slipped to sea by dark of night, which the Russians never do. We detected multiple tugboats on the tripwire sound surveillance hydrophones at the exit of the base. I ordered an Orion spy satellite, the NROL-44, retasked to look down on the base and the Barents Sea, and this is what we saw. This is an infrared image, so it may look funky.”

A satellite photo came up on the screen. Allende leaned forward. Despite the varying heat signatures in the shape on the screen, the shape was unmistakably a Yasen-M-class submarine.

“Where’s he going, Rob?” she asked, afraid she already knew the answer.

“We don’t know for sure. Our Virginia-class submarine Texas was orbiting at the entrance to the GI-UK Gap, but sniffed exactly nothing.” The GI-UK Gap was the narrowing waters between Greenland, Iceland and the islands of the United Kingdom, which a ship would have to transit to pass from the Barents Sea into the North Atlantic. The gap was rotten with SOSUS network sound surveillance hydrophones.

“What about SOSUS?”

“Nothing. Madam Director, the Yasen-M is a goddamned invisible ghost.”

“You’re telling me a Virginia-class submarine was there and didn’t hear this guy?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you, Margo. The Yasen-Ms have us outmatched.”

“I guess we’re lucky Vermont tossed those nukes at a probability circle,” Allende said, “or else she and Panther would be on the bottom right now.”

“But we’re unlucky now, because that third Yasen-M is on his way south.”

“You don’t know that, Rob.”

“Margo, what the hell else would he be doing? The Russians don’t like going into the Atlantic. They consider it a USA-UK-EU lake. They operate in the Barents, the Arctic Ocean and the far north Pacific, well within comfortable missile range of the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

“Rob, when this Yasen-M was on the surface, did we get a hit on his periscope transponder?”

Catardi shook his head. The dark circles under his eyes seemed darker today, Allende thought. “It didn’t transmit.”

“Was this one of the subs we didn’t get transponders installed on?”

“No, he had one. It just failed.”

Allende sighed. Now what, she thought.

“Margo, this is just my brainstorming here, but I think you should find a way to leak the Operation Blue Hardhat program. Let the Russian spies find out that we wired up their subs and that every time they go to periscope depth, we have them dead to rights.”

“Why, Rob?”

“Because then fleet command would tell the third Yasen-M to back off, because the Americans know where he is.”

“So, you want to bluff this guy.”

“We’re metaphorically out of torpedoes, Margo. All we have left are main engines. We have to ram the Russians, from an intelligence point of view.”

“Admiral Catardi, I promise you I will think about it, but you’re talking about disassembling a hundred-million-dollar program and endangering the lives of at least forty field assets. And it would mean giving up our ability to monitor Russian ballistic missile submarines.”

Catardi looked down at his table, his expression falling. “It was just a thought, Margo.”

“Don’t worry, Rob,” she said. “We’ll think of something.”

“I have to go,” Catardi said. Allende could tell he wanted to hang up because he was upset and needed to throw his pad computer across the room or break a drinking glass.

“Later, and thanks for the update,” Allende said, and quickly broke the connection.

“Whoa,” Menendez said.

“Yeah,” Allende replied, trying to process the bad news. “Angel, how fast can you blow up Operation Blue Hardhat? Get our assets out and safe, then leak the operation’s activities — how long?”

“But don’t you need presidential authorization to crater an operation like this?”

“I already have it, Angel. So how much time?”

“On a good day? A month.”

“This isn’t a good day, Angel. You’ve got twenty-four hours,” Allende said.

“Then I’d better get going,” Menendez said, grabbing his fedora and tablet computer and lunging for the door.

“Sir, we think we’ve recovered from the Medved’ Grizli worm. The techs in Flag Plot say they’re ready to reboot. All the intelligence that was gained in the last nine days will arrive in a cascade.”

Vice Admiral Olga Vova, the Northern Fleet deputy commander, had knocked on Admiral Gennady Zhigunov’s office door, where he was catching up with the 200 email-a-day workflow, at a time early in the evening when he could get away with smoking a cigar and pouring a double vodka. When he thought about it, he worked better with a couple vodkas under his belt. Too bad it was frowned on during the workday, but no matter. In three years he’d be retired and would be able to pour vodka for himself all day and smoke cigars wherever he wanted to. The thought reminded him that he was widowed, that his beloved wife Nina would never have approved. Of the cigars or the alcohol. Yet, every day he missed her all the more, he thought. His adopted son, Boris Novikov, had urged him to find a new wife, but Zhigunov was 63 years old now, and losing the battle against getting fleshy and sagging everywhere. There was little chance of a man like him attracting a wife now.

“Sir? Do you want to come with me to Flag Plot?”

Zhigunov stared up at Olga Vova, “OV,” who had to outweigh him by many kilograms, her head alone the size of a bucket. In all his life, Zhigunov thought, he’d never seen a woman less feminine. He waved at her.

“I’ll be right down. You go on without me. I’ll join you there.” Vova might be his deputy, but he’d prefer not to ride the same elevator as the woman.

When he got to Flag Plot, the screens that formed the forward wall were all dark, as were the hundreds of monitors at the eleven long rows of tables facing the front wall, each station manned by an officer or warrant officer. Olga Vova was standing near the front row, bossing around the captain lieutenant heading the artificial intelligence division. Vova saw him and hurried up to him, her bulk overwhelming as she approached.

“Yes, OV?” he asked.

“They’re ready to reboot, Admiral. The intel from the Kosmos satellites will be downloading all at the same time. It may take some time to display all the data.”

“Proceed, then,” Zhigunov said.

“Reboot, Arkady,” Vova ordered the artificial intelligence chief.

In the next fifteen minutes, Zhigunov learned that the Americans had launched a nuclear strike that had caused both Voronezh and Novosibirsk to stop communicating, and that soon after, Novosibirsk’s escape chamber had surfaced. And that not long after that, the goddamned Panther surfaced next to the escape chamber and took the surviving crew members of the Novosibirsk hostage as prisoners of war, loading them into the Panther. And soon after that, the Panther had submerged and vanished.

“What is the status of the Voronezh?” Zhigunov asked the AI chief.

“No word from Voronezh, sir.”

“That’s not a good sign after a nuclear depth charge attack, Admiral,” Vova said.

“Are the air assets able to fly?” Zhigunov asked, intending to vector in a swarm of antisubmarine warfare aircraft to the site of the surfacing of the Novosibirsk escape chamber.

“Yes, Admiral,” the AI chief said, just as all the screens went black. He looked at Zhigunov. “I may have been premature stating that, Admiral. My apologies.”

“Just fucking fix it,” Zhigunov said, glaring at the AI chief and spinning on his heel to return to his office, where he shut down his computer and grabbed the crystal vodka decanter and poured a triple and downed it in one gulp, then poured another.

That Voronezh hadn’t communicated probably meant she went down, Zhigunov thought, pouring another triple vodka. He held his head in his hands, remembering his life with Nina and young Boris Novikov. If there were any way to extract revenge from the savage criminal Americans, he would find it.

31

The deck trembled with the power of the reactor at one hundred percent output. Lieutenant Anthony Pacino left Lieutenant Don Eisenhart in the central command post and ducked into the navigation space, checking their course toward Mumbai and the rendezvous with HMS Explorer II. There was nothing much for him to do until time to surface at the rendezvous point, some four hours later. He considered trying to get some sleep, but he was too jangly from the Iranian coffee and the tenseness of the mission. He decided to go to the wardroom and reload on coffee, jumpy nerves be damned, he thought.

At the passageway outside the wardroom, two petty officers from the Vermont stood guard, both carrying heavy.

“Petty Officer Watson,” Pacino said, smiling at the machinist mate who’d first greeted him at the gangway on the day Pacino had reported aboard Vermont, which seemed like a hundred years ago. “How was the swim over?” Watson was one of Vermont’s divers and regularly took his men over the side to inspect the hull for mines or bombs before getting underway.

“It was cake for me, Mr. Patch, but all these non-divers were a pain.”

“Well, good to have you aboard our good ship.”

Watson smiled. “Good? This rust-bucket is straight from the seventies. We must be making more noise than a garbage truck dragging chains.”

Pacino nodded. “Kind of makes you appreciate Vermont all the more, eh?”

“Yes, definitely, sir. You going in? We have the Russian officers inside.”

“How many?”

“Seven in there. We took one of their guys to crew’s berthing. He and a couple of the enlisted guys are pretty sick. I’m not sure if they’ll even make it to the rendezvous. The SEAL medic, Tucker-Santos, says it must be radiation poisoning, and a bad case at that.”

“Yeah,” Pacino says. “Odds are, all of them have it. The sick guys must have been back aft.”

“Be careful in there, sir. The Russians are plenty pissed. The blonde female one especially. She’s the only one who speaks English, yet she’s giving everyone the silent treatment.”

“Hell, Watson,” Pacino said, “we’d probably be slightly out of sorts too if we’d gotten nuked and then plucked out of the sea by the bastards who’d nuked us.”

“Well, still, Mr. Patch, exercise caution. She might bite you.”

Pacino smiled and waved as he opened the door.

Inside, the seven sullen Russian officers sat in the aft seating area with one at a chair of the table, all of them with towels around their shoulders from swimming up to the hull. Pacino nodded at them, feeling all their gazes fixed on him. Grip Aquatong stood near the door with Tiny Tim Fishman at the other end of the room, both holding their Mark 6 non-lethal weapons, both strapped with their sidearms and belts full of ammunition, their thighs and calves strapped with long-bladed combat knives.

“Gentlemen,” Pacino said to the SEALs. He looked at Aquatong. “Must be nice to be away from the wheel for once, eh, Grip?”

“Nah, I like driving,” Aquatong said.

“Everybody playing nice in here?”

“Only one speaks English. The woman at the table. Abakumov was in here for a while. Spoke to her. He said her name is Trusov. Irina Trusov. She was the weapons boss on that sub.”

Pacino made his way behind the table to the credenza with the coffee maker. He looked at the woman, who had platinum blonde hair, a slightly sunburned light complexion and big blue eyes, a dark frown on her face. Her damp uniform was stained and smelled bad. Her wet hair was in knots. He could tell both bothered her.

“Coffee?” he offered. She shook her head, glaring at him. He filled his cup and sat at the table opposite her. “I’m Lieutenant Anthony Pacino from the submarine Vermont. Crew calls me ‘Patch.’”

“Or ‘Lipstick,’” Grip said.

Pacino smiled. “Or Lipstick.”

“Leep-steek,” the woman said in a thick accent. “Why?”

Pacino grimaced. “An unfortunate accident in a liberty port. Anyway.” Pacino took a sip of the scorching high octane coffee. “This stuff will clear your sinuses. Are you sure you don’t want any?”

“I do not drink coffee,” she said.

“Your name is Trusov? Irina Trusov? Am I saying that right?”

She nodded. “Are you here to interrogate me? And the other officers?” She glanced aft at the others.

“No,” Pacino said. “I should probably be sleeping until the rendezvous, but I’ve been doing too much of this stuff.” He pointed to the coffee cup.

“You know caffeine was invented by the CIA,” Trusov said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Pacino smiled. “Are you hungry? We have some pretty good food aboard. Our radio chief made beef stroganoff, pretty authentic stuff. Homemade noodles, and that gravy, it’s to die for.”

Trusov’s eyes got wider, but then she frowned again. “I cannot take food when I am a prisoner.”

“A prisoner?” Pacino took another pull of the coffee, feeling the surge of energy. Or was it talking to this woman that was giving his spirit a boost? “You’re not prisoners. These guys with guns — they’re just making sure you don’t try to take back Panther. We went to a lot of trouble stealing her. Anyway, we’re taking you to a rescue ship. We’ll be there a little after nineteen hundred. They have good medical facilities, doctors, surgeons, and they can attend to you better than we can. They’ll get you to Mumbai, India, where there are good hospitals. And from there, you’re flying back to Russia, courtesy of the U.S. Navy.”

“You are repatriating us? No prison?”

“Of course,” Pacino said. “Why would we put you in prison?”

“Our mission was to sink you,” Trusov said. “Our objective was to kill you.”

“You were just doing your job,” Pacino shrugged. “Just like we were, stealing this submarine. It was just business, not personal.”

Trusov stared at him as if he’d just walked off a flying saucer.

“But you will interrogate us first?”

Pacino shrugged. “Why? What’s there to know? You were sent here to escort the Panther, and when Panther ended up in our hands, you got search-and-destroy orders.”

“Are you not curious about who our orders came from, or things about our submarine, weapons, tactics? Things like that?”

Pacino waved. “We already know all that stuff. You think there are many secrets left, what with both of our intelligence agencies poking around, trying to stay gainfully employed?” He finished the coffee and stood to get more. “Besides, it’s urgent we get you to the rescue ship. You guys are all probably sick. Maybe you don’t feel it now, but in a day or two it’ll get bad. Radiation casualties are not fun. My dad got a huge radiation dose when I was a kid. He got a bone marrow transplant and could barely walk for a year. We wondered if he’d even make it.” He looked at her. “Maybe some tea?”

She looked at him for a long time, her gaze softening just slightly. “Some hot tea might be nice,” she admitted. Pacino put the hot water carafe on the table with a tray of cups, tea bags, sugar, sweetener and honey.

Trusov made herself a cup, pouring honey into it. “Honey is a luxury at sea,” she said.

“Where we come from, we take the best stuff to sea. If you’re going to be underwater, away from the sunshine and weather for weeks on end, you may as well have good food. And ideally, good movies, but that can fall flat.”

Trusov drank her tea, pouring more when she got to the bottom of her cup.

“Where are you from?” she asked him.

“Virginia, on the Atlantic coast. Virginia Beach. My dad was in the submarine force and operated out of the naval base at Norfolk, a thirty-minute drive away when the aircraft carriers are at sea, ninety minutes when they’re in port.” He smiled at her, realizing when she wasn’t frowning or glowering, she was beautiful. “What about you?”

“Moscow,” she said. “Then Murmansk. We are with the Northern Fleet.”

“Pretty cold, Murmansk,” Pacino said, mock shivering.

“Murmansk has its charms,” she said. “It is actually nice this time of year.”

Pacino smiled. “Maybe after all this, I’ll come visit you.”

Trusov smiled for just a brief moment.

“You sure you don’t want something to eat? For all of you, I mean?”

“Captain Orlov ordered us not to accept any food from the Americans.”

“Why? Poisoning? If we were going to hurt you guys, Grip Aquatong over there would just shoot you.”

“I’d use my knife,” Aquatong said. “Stray bullets in a submarine are unhealthy for the equipment.”

“See?”

Trusov stared at him again.

“How about a shower? We have hot water. Fresh uniforms. Great shampoo.” He smiled. “And conditioner. Great conditioner. Even hair dryers. For all you guys. One at a time, of course.”

Trusov turned to one of the men sitting aft in the seating area, and said something in Russian. He replied. Finally, after they talked for some time, Trusov looked at Pacino.

“A shower and fresh clothes would be very nice,” she said, “provided all the crew get the same treatment.”

“I’ll arrange it,” Pacino said, standing to get to the phone. He glanced at Trusov. “Naturally, we’ll need to escort you to the shower and stand guard. Hope you won’t mind. It’s not that we don’t trust you, just making sure there’s no uprising from your people. So I’ll have one of the female chiefs stand watch when you shower.”

Trusov blushed. “No,” she said. “I want you to stand guard.”

Fifteen minutes later, Trusov took her seat again, the grime of the sunken submarine washed off. Pacino could tell she felt better. She actually smiled at him, and he realized she was more than beautiful, she was stunning. He smiled back.

“Listen,” he said, “I know you guys have orders not to eat, but I’m starving. I’ll bring in some of the stroganoff. I’ll have a plate, and if you want it, great. If not, that’s fine too.” He made a call while Trusov and her captain exchanged more words. A third officer came back from the shower, escorted by two petty officers from the Vermont, and a fourth went with them to get washed up. When the fourth returned, Chief Goreliki came in with a tray of the beef stroganoff. Pacino got plates from the cabinet above the coffee machine. “Sorry, we’ll have to make do using spoons. Can’t give you guys knives or forks. Which means I’ll have to use a spoon myself.”

He put some of the food on a plate and slid it across the table to Trusov, then got some for himself. He felt silly eating it with a spoon, but it wasn’t that inconvenient. Trusov stared at the food.

“Anyone else?” He waved the serving platter at the others. The Russian captain lifted his hand, and Pacino brought him a plateful and a spoon. “You guys?” Two of the other Russian officers nodded. Soon all of the Russians were eating ravenously. Pacino reached into the adjoining pantry for something cold to drink and cups, finding lemonade and a cold bottle of water. He filled up cups for the Russians, then sat back down, waving the lemonade container at Trusov, his eyebrow lifted. She nodded. He poured for her, then finished his plate, washing it down with the too-sweet lemonade. He cleared his plate to the pantry, then sat back down. Trusov had cleaned her plate. He took it from her, piling it in the dirty dish bin, then collected plates from the other Russians.

He sat again. “We’ll surface at nineteen hundred,” he said. “I guess I should go do something useful.”

“No,” Trusov said. “Stay.” She coughed as if embarrassed that she’d been revealing. “Tell me more about this place, Virginia.”

Pacino smiled at her. “Sure. My dad had this house on the beach of the Atlantic Ocean in a place called Sandbridge, south of the city of Virginia Beach. He had this huge black lab that used to love to run on the beach.” Trusov looked into his eyes as if entranced. Pacino continued, and before he knew it, it was time to get ready to surface.

Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov stood behind the command console with the unit’s display selected to the number two optronic periscope. In the crosshairs, Panther was surfaced alongside the rescue ship. The rescue ship’s bright floodlights lit the scene. The Explorer II had lowered a long staircase down her side, medics in white coveralls helping the crew of Russians up the steps. On Panther’s aft hull, three men lay in stretchers, with the crane from the deck getting ready to hoist them to the rescue ship.

“Sonar, any contacts?” Romanov asked Petty Officer Mercer, who stood watch at the BQQ-10 stack. It wouldn’t do for them to get ambushed when they were vulnerable like this. While it was hard to imagine the Russians shooting at the ships that were rescuing their people, stranger things had happened.

“No contacts, OOD,” Mercer reported. “Towed array is sagging with us hovering, though. As soon as we can get some speed on, I can be more confident.”

Romanov checked her watch. The last of the Russians were off the Panther. Panther steamed slowly away and turned to the south.

“Pilot, status of the lockout trunk?”

“Wait one, OOD,” Chief Dysart said, calling aft to the lockout trunk. “Trunk upper hatch is open, last group is coming aboard now.”

The Vermont personnel they’d lent to the Panther were coming back aboard, now that there was no need for the enhanced security aboard the stolen submarine.

“Report when the upper hatch shuts.”

“Aye, ma’am.”

Romanov looked at Seagraves and Quinnivan. “Maybe the rest of this trip will be routine,” she said.

“Control, Radio,” the overhead speaker rasped.

“Go ahead Radio,” Romanov said.

“We have immediate traffic, marked personal for CO.”

“Very well, Radio, route it to control. Captain is standing by.”

The radioman brought a pad computer to Seagraves, who read it, then passed it to Quinnivan, who handed it to Romanov. She scanned the message, then read it more carefully.

“That’s not good,” she said. There was another Yasen-M attack submarine out there, either coming into the Indian Ocean to meet them, or lying in wait at the Cape of Good Hope. “We have to tell Panther,” she said, turning back to the periscope view, but there was no sign of the Iranian submarine. “Dammit, they pulled the plug already.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” Seagraves said. “We suspected there would be more opposition forces out there. This is just confirming what we expected.”

“We’ve been lucky so far they haven’t thrown an ASW aircraft at the area,” Romanov said. “Or a dozen. But I hope to hell Panther takes the Cape of Good Hope wide.”

“The plan won’t change,” Seagraves said. “I’ll be in my stateroom. XO, maybe you’d better get a nap in before mid-rats.”

Quinnivan nodded and waved at Romanov and went aft, trailing the captain. Romanov tried to take a deep cleansing breath. This damned op seemed endless.

“OOD, lockout trunk upper hatch is shut,” Dysart reported from the ship control panel. “Lockout trunk rigged for dive by Chief Quartane and checked by Lieutenant Ganghadharan.”

“Very well, Pilot, all ahead two thirds, make your depth five-four-six feet, steer course two-zero-zero.”

While Dysart acknowledged, the view out the scope sank closer to the waves, then burst into foam and bubbles.

“Scope’s under,” Romanov called. “Lowering number two scope.” When the scope indicated retracted all the way, Romanov called to Dysart again. “Pilot, turns for ten knots. Sonar, let’s get in a leg on this course, then turn to reciprocal to make sure the sea’s empty.”

The deck tilted far down and the hull groaned from above as Vermont plunged into the colder deep depths of the Arabian Sea.

The Indian Air Force Mi-26 heavy lift helicopter touched down on the after helicopter deck of HMS Explorer II and bounced, settling in place and throttling down its engines, the huge rotors slowing to idle.

The survivors of the Novosibirsk, the ones that weren’t on the first medical evacuation helicopter, ran across the helo-pad and climbed into the airframe, Yuri Orlov first, then Ivan Vlasenko, Misha Dobryvnik, Irina Trusov and Vasiliy Naumov. After a moment, TK Sukolov, Arish Vasilev and twenty-four enlisted crewmen climbed aboard, and the engines roared and the helicopter shook hard, its deck tilting far forward as it climbed away from the rescue ship. The ship’s lights faded below, leaving the helicopter in complete darkness.

Orlov put on the headset, the large earpieces offering some protection from the thunderous noise of the helicopter’s engines and rotors. It was plugged into the bulkhead behind him, doubling as an intercom. He shut his eyes, mentally writing his after-action report to the Northern Fleet, wondering how bad his and his crew’s punishment would be for losing the battle. Something crackled in his ear. It was a voice. Orlov looked up. Irina Trusov was trying to get his attention. He lowered his boom microphone to his lips.

“Yes, Irina. What is it?”

“Sir, in your report, will you please say that the Americans treated us humanely? Kindly?”

“You want me to say that? Captain Lieutenant Trusov, since I’ve known you, you’ve harbored a singular hatred in your heart for America and the Americans.”

“They were, well, human, to us, Captain. Even though they knew we had been out to kill them. It is possible my previous thinking, well, perhaps it was misguided.”

Orlov smiled. People were full of surprises, he thought. “You seemed to get along quite well with the American lieutenant,” he observed.

Trusov smiled back. “The Handsome One, I call him in my mind.”

“Yes, Irina. The Handsome One.”

The helicopter flew on toward Mumbai, where a Russian civilian airliner plane waited on the tarmac to take them to St. Petersburg. There would be a debriefing at Admiralty Headquarters as soon as they could all wash up and get into fresh uniforms. And afterward, he thought, where would the next destination be? He thought of the damage to the reputation of Russia that had been caused by his submarine. Humiliated by a pre-emptive nuclear strike by the Americans. There was no doubt — how Trusov used to feel about the Americans was how he felt about them now.

Still, there had been great heroism trying to save Novosibirsk, he thought. Perhaps the admirals would take that into consideration. He could only hope.

“You got it, Chief?” AOIC Anthony Pacino asked Chief Sonarman Tom Albanese, who would be taking the deck and the conn while Pacino joined the rest of the crew for OIC Dankleff’s first 0800 daily meeting.

“I’ve got the bubble, Mr. Patch. I relieve you, sir.”

“I stand relieved. In central command, Chief Albanese has the deck and the conn,” Pacino announced loudly.

“Very funny,” Albanese said from the ship control station. “I’m the only one here.”

“Not sure how long this will last, but with luck, less than an hour.”

“You go enjoy coffee with your pinky-in-the-air officers. I’ll be right here, operating this combat submarine. By myself. All alone.”

“It’s a meeting with all the chiefs, too, Whale. And with you standing officer of the deck, you know, you’re kind of an officer yourself, now.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Albanese said in mock anger. “I take offense to that. My parents were married, after all.”

“That joke got old in the War of 1812, Chief.”

“And yet, it works every time.”

“Have a safe watch, Chief. Yell for me if something looks funky.”

“Jaysus, L-T, everything in this bucket of bolts looks funky.”

Pacino nodded. “That it does.” He stepped into the navigation room and grabbed the four charts that he’d carefully rolled up and rubber banded, with a notebook showing his calculations. He took the ladder down to the middle level and walked down the passageway to the wardroom door. The room was crowded, the entire Panther boarding party crew there, seated at the table or on the chairs at the aft end of the room, including the Iranian captain and the Russian reactor technician. Pacino hurried to his AOIC seat to the right of OIC Dankleff before the chronometer struck eight. Dankleff was a stickler for promptness, which Pacino would expect from a Naval Academy grad but not from an engineer who’d attended freewheeling RPI.

“Zero eight hundred meeting! Zero eight hundred meeting!” Dankleff said. “Pacino, you’re late!”

“I am not, sir, I am right on time.”

“This is U-Boat’s command, AOIC, where, if you’re early, you’re on-time, if you’re on-time, you’re late, and if you’re late, you’re off the team.”

“Damned good thing I’m not late then,” Pacino said. “Being off the team might mean being shot out of a torpedo tube.”

“You have charts? What’s going on? Are you hijacking my 0800 meeting into some kind of nav brief?”

Pacino nodded, stood and unrolled the charts onto the table. Chart one showed the Arabian Sea emptying into the Indian Ocean and the east Africa coast. Chart two showed south Africa, the Indian Ocean to the east, the South Atlantic to the west, Antarctica to the south. Chart three showed the South Atlantic from Africa’s southern coast to the equator, and chart four showed the North Atlantic from the equator to North America’s eastern seaboard. Pacino had marked a course in pencil on all four charts.

On the first chart, he’d marked the pencil line, “PANTHER EXFILTRATION PHASE I,” the line extending from their present position southwest of Mumbai, India, going southward and crossing the equator and continuing south to within 1200 nautical miles north of the Antarctic coast, where the turning point was labeled as “Point B.” He’d marked this segment with the notation, “4200 NM.”

The line then showed the second phase of the exfiltration on the second chart, from Point B due west to the waters south of the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, extending to Cape Town, where the line was labeled “Point C.” The segment was marked “2500 NM.” At a point 600 miles west of Cape Town, Pacino had labeled the location “B-PRIME.”

The third chart showed the exfiltration course line continuing on a great circle route toward AUTEC, with point “C-PRIME” marked 800 miles northwest of Cape Town, with the line’s crossing of the equator labeled “POINT D.” That segment had been labeled “2800 NM.”

Past Point D, on the fourth chart, there were two segments, one going from the Point D at the equator toward the leeward islands of the Caribbean chain, with “POINT E” placed just east of Barbados, with this line marked “2000 NM.” At Barbados, the track bent farther west toward the northern approaches to Andros Island, Bahamas, where the chart labeled their destination “POINT F.” This final segment was marked “1000 NM.”

Dankleff looked at the charts. “I have a headache already. I’m sure there’s some point to all this?”

“There’s a big point, OIC,” Pacino began. “If we use a path off the great circle routes until we get to Antarctica, then go straight on the great circle route to the Bahamas, using our normal six hours at eighteen knots on the reactor to charge the batteries, then eighteen hours at six knots to creepy-crawl slowly to avoid detection, we make a speed-of-advance averaging nine knots overall. Starting now, that has us in transit for seventy days. Chief Goreliki, you’re the unofficial cook and supply officer. How many days is our food loadout?”

Goreliki caught on immediately. She addressed the room. “At our present rate of consumption, we’ve got twenty-five days of rations.”

“How long if we tighten our belts?” Pacino asked.

“Maybe thirty. Five days more if that last week we survive on crackers and apple juice. So thirty-five. But I’ve been on a run where we ran out of food. It’s not pleasant, Mr. Patch. And the worst thing? We only have that many days of coffee. When a submarine runs out of coffee, it’s crazy time.”

“This boat is propelled by coffee,” Lieutenant Muhammad Varney said. “Not nuclear fission.”

Pacino looked around the room, his expression hard. “I know the CIA had these secret evil lemon-scented plans for clandestine resupply, OIC. But they’re complete bullshit. Re-provisioning while hovering submerged? That’s completely insane. It would take days. That would leave us vulnerable to detection and attack. Guys, we all need to face a damned hard truth. There can be no resupply if we’re to complete this mission. We try to resupply, we’re going to get torpedoed. So, sorry to say, but what we have is all we’ll have.”

“Big problem,” Dankleff thought. “What about some kind of resupply from Vermont? We get a message out, they lock out divers with food and bring it to us, we lock it in?”

“Even if you could coordinate that, OIC, the Vermont has the same problem. She was loaded up for a 40-day run, because that’s the maximum you can load unless you get rid of torpedoes, people or equipment. Today, U-Boat, happens to be day thirty.”

“Wait, they loaded stores at AUTEC before we left.”

“Are you sure?”

Dankleff laughed. “You were too busy earning your new nickname, Lipstick, but yeah, we loaded back out to forty days.”

“So forty days from May 15,” Pacino said. “That makes this day twenty-four. Vermont runs out of food in sixteen days. That’s June 24.”

“Hey, Vermont can cut rations down too. If they have sixteen days, they can stretch that to thirty-two, easy,” Dankleff said. “So all the two-hundred pound guys return to port at one-eighty. Builds character.”

“So we agree,” Pacino said. “We can’t continue this nine-knot overall speed transit. That would take us to August 16, seventy days from now. My plan gets us to AUTEC in thirty-four days. July 12. A Tuesday between 1300 and 1400. After thirty-four days? We might be a bit hungry and in caffeine withdrawal, but we’ll make it fine. And so will Vermont. But OIC, that means we start the reactor now and run flank until we get to Point Bravo-Prime.”

“What? Full-out?”

“Yes, and then at Bravo-Prime, six hundred miles from South Africa, we slow down to six knots and sneak through the Cape of Good Hope in case the third Yasen-M is waiting for us there. So we and Vermont can hear him if he’s there, and make the minimum amount of noise until we slip into the Atlantic. Then, when we get eight hundred miles past Cape Town, we throttle back up to flank and we flank it at maximum speed all the way to AUTEC.”

Pacino sat back in his seat, mentally exhausted. He had a headache. Perhaps it was caffeine withdrawal after all. Maybe Irina Trusov was right, that caffeine was invented by the CIA. He smiled to himself, thinking about her big blue eyes when she’d looked at him, wishing he’d met her under happier circumstances.

“Well, who would ever have thought that our tactical plan was based on what’s in the goddamned kitchen?” Dankleff grumbled, looking at Pacino. “But I suppose there’s some iron hard logic in there. You know, we could just say fuck it and take the great circle route out of the Indian Ocean and straight into the Cape of Good Hope.”

“I thought about that,” Pacino said. “I was sorely tempted, believe me. But I think the third Yasen-M might sneak into the Indian Ocean and look for us based on transients, so that’s the leg where we need to keep him confused. There’s no help for the Cape of Good Hope. We have to go around South Africa no matter what — the globe is just built that way. Trouble is, we’ll still have to charge batteries every eighteen hours, but for the six-hour charge period, we’ll run only six knots. And that will be the time we’ll be making the most noise and be the most vulnerable, so we’ll charge during the mid-watch. Russians tend to put their second string on the graveyard shift. So bottom line, I’m whistling through the graveyard by going six knots through the Cape of Good Hope passage, but otherwise, I’m flanking it, just not on a great circle route until Cape Town is behind us.”

“That isn’t logic, Lipstick, it’s instinct,” Varney said.

“Label it however you want,” Pacino said. “But we have to get this mission to end, and if we have to burn nuclear fuel to do it, so be it. Less dangerous to be loud at thirty-one knots than stopping for food two or three goddamned times between here and the Bahamas.”

“Your lips to God’s ear. Anyone else have anything for this meeting?” Dankleff asked. “Let’s get back to work then, or to your racks, or to your watch station. Mr. Abakumov, start the reactor immediately and report to central command when you’re ready to answer all bells. Patch, stick around for a minute, I want to talk to you.”

Varney, Ahmadi, the SEALs, the chiefs and Abakumov filed out of the room, leaving Pacino alone with Dankleff. Pacino stood and made coffee for them both, then sat back down at the wardroom table.

“Jesus, Lipstick,” Dankleff said, “if we go flank this whole way, we’re going to be eating a torpedo from that Yasen-M. Or a dozen.”

Pacino looked at Dankleff. “I know. The odds of us getting safely to AUTEC? I put them at one in four.”

“You talk to any of the others about that feeling?”

“It would do harm to the mission,” Pacino said. “We need the crew to keep their happy thoughts. So I kept my mouth shut. It’s a no-win, U-Boat. Either we starve or we get torpedoed. As for me, I guess I’d rather die fast. But I have a plan.”

“I’ve noticed something about you, Patch. You always have a plan.”

Pacino nodded. “Ahmadi says we can open the outer torpedo tube doors and keep two weapons powered up for an hour at a time before their gyros melt. We can rotate through the tubes, so we don’t destroy any weapons, but at all times, our gun is loaded and cocked. We get the slightest indication a bad guy is out there, we fire — even without the slightest hint of a solution — for effect. Best if we launch a Shkval, that bastard making noise and blasting through the ocean. If nothing else, it would alert Vermont. Or, if we hear Vermont launching weapons, we toss our own in the same direction.”

“This is more of your desire to go down with an empty torpedo room, isn’t it?” Dankleff looked at Pacino, his expression serious and empathetic.

“Doesn’t it make sense, U-Boat?” Pacino asked. “If we go down, don’t we want to go down shooting? Even if we’re shooting at shadows? Don’t act like you paid for those torpedoes with your own money, U-Boat.”

Dankleff laughed. “Okay, Patch. You’re unofficial navigator and unofficial weapons officer. Load our guns and cock them. If the bad guys give us any shit, let’s toss it right back at them.”

“Damn straight, OIC.” Pacino scooped up the charts and left the room to return to the navigation space. Dankleff stared after him.

We’re going to end up on the bottom of the ocean, Dankleff thought. This mission had never been survivable.