The Zhukov Briefing

CHAPTER TWO

As Milovych went through the watertight door to the missile control centre, Yenev moved to the sonar screen. He was turning the scale to short range when the control-room shook violently, the lights went out and there was the subdued roar of an explosion. Yenev, thrown forward against the sonar screen, at first thought Zhukov had struck a mine.

The control-room reverberated with the sounds of disaster. The rattle of broken glass, the tinkle of metallic chips, the hiss of ruptured hydraulic and air pressure lines, the snap and crackle of electric circuits shorting, all mingled with the startled cries of men. The emergency lighting came on. Yenev and others who had fallen staggered to their feet. Crewmen, dazed by the shock, groped drunkenly for support and blood flowed from lacerated hands and faces.

Through a haze of smoke the deck could be seen to be littered with fragments of broken glass, metal and plastics from instrument panels, and paint flakes lay scattered like thin snow. Over this scene of chaos hung an invisible pall: the smell of burnt oil and smouldering rubber.

Within seconds of the explosion Yenev ordered, ‘Blow all main and trim tanks. Planes to hard-arise.’ From long habit he noted the time. It was eighteen minutes past midnight.

Feodotik, the chief technician at the diving systems console, repeated the order as he flicked switches with one hand and blood from his face with the other.

Stefan Lomov, the executive officer and second-in-command, came rushing into the control-room. The seated fore- and after-planesmen had their joy sticks pulled fully back for hard-arise. Lomov, standing behind them, watched the depth, rate-of-rise, and trim gauges with intense concentration. The depth was decreasing: 140 metres… 127… 105… but it was doing so too slowly. The trim level showed Zhukov had not assumed anything like the bows-up angle she should have.

‘Depth decreasing, Captain, but the response is slow. She’s bow heavy.’

Yenev said, ‘As long as she’s rising all’s well.’ His voice was steady and in the dim light he looked calm. He felt anything but that. There were many decisions to be made, many problems to be resolved. If the explosion had damaged the pressure hull he should reduce speed. But if he reduced speed the hydroplanes upon which so much now depended would become less effective. And he still did not know the cause of the explosion or where it was, except that it appeared to be somewhere forward.

From the diving systems console Feodotik reported, ‘All tanks blown, Captain.’

Yenev looked at the bilge alarm lights on the warning panel. The three red lights glowing among the line of green struck him between the eyes like a clenched fist. The bilges in three compartments were flooding: the torpedo, the air-conditioning and emergency generating spaces. The last two were on the lower deck, immediately forward of the watertight bulkhead to the missile compartment, well aft of the torpedo-compartment. So the damage was not localized. The force of the explosion had, he realized, generated a shock wave through the submarine the passage of which had been marked by whipping and straining of the hull. Immediately he thought of the welding defects revealed on sea trials.

He picked up the action mike. ‘Torpedo-compartment Captain here.’ He repeated the call several times but there was no reply. He tested the circuit. It was alive. Instinctively, he knew that the explosion had taken place there. The torpedomen must have been killed or so severely injured that they could not answer.

Krasnov, his pale face drawn with fear, appeared at the captain’s elbow. Yenev shouted at him. ‘There’s been an explosion in the torpedo-compartment. It’s flooding.’ He pointed to the lights on the warning panel. ‘Put an armed sentry on the watertight doors and shut all vents. Even if tapping is heard from the compartment the W.T. doors and air conditioning vents must be kept shut.’ As Krasnov moved away Yenev added, ‘When we’ve surfaced we may be able to do something for them. If they’re alive.’

It went through his mind that he might well have said if we surface. It depended now on the rate of flooding and the extent to which Zhukov’s powerful pumps could cope with the inflow of water.

A stream of damage reports was coming into the control-room; some of them delayed by shorts, thrown switches and other failures in communication circuits. The missile compartment, reactor, boiler and engine-rooms were intact but for damaged instruments and electrical and hydraulic failures caused by shock waves.

The main communications centre immediately abaft and one deck above the torpedo-compartment had been seriously damaged by a leak in the pressure hull, the throwing of various switches and circuit breakers and electrical fires. The carbon-dioxide extinguishers had operated automatically and the now gas-filled compartment had been evacuated. The communications officer and some of his men were preparing to re-enter with respirators but a number of tests and precautionary measures had first to be taken.

There were severe leaks through cable and pipe glands in the pressure hull in the air-conditioning room and in the emergency generating centre alongside it, though the two compartments were separated by a fore-and-aft watertight bulkhead. Chlorine fumes were leaking from the storage batteries beneath the seamen’s bunk-deck, and a confused report of damage in the emergency communications room on the main deck, abaft the missile control compartment, had just come in. Yenev decided to sort these out later. For the moment all his faculties were concentrated on getting Zhukov to the surface.

He picked up the telephone to the engine-room. Vladimir Ilyitch, the senior engineer officer, answered. Yenev said, ‘Captain here. Concentrate all pumping power on the torpedo-compartment. We’re losing buoyancy forward. Difficulty in keeping the bows up.’

‘I’ll harness everything we’ve got, Captain. She’ll have to be taking a lot of water if that doesn’t cope with it.’

‘She is taking a lot of water,’ said Yenev quietly.

He knew that if the pumps could discharge more water from the torpedo-compartment than it was receiving he’d get the submarine back to the surface. It would be time enough then to consider the other problems. In the meantime officers and technicians in various compartments would be doing all that could be done. They were well drilled in damage control. He only hoped they would come up to scratch now that they were faced with the real thing.

These thoughts fed into Yenev’s mind like the input of a computer, just as the damage reports had registered there, been evaluated and the necessary decisions taken. Yenev had spent fifteen years in submarines and survived two disasters. He was as frightened now as any intelligent man would be, but that did not upset his judgement. To the men in the control-room he seemed a model of calm and resolution.

Still more reports were coming in. The shock of the explosion and the electrical failures it had caused had thrown the master gyros out of phase. This in turn had upset the running of the SINS, the navigational plot, the compasses and much other equipment fed by the gyros. Kulchev, the navigating officer, had already up-dated the submarine’s position by dead-reckoning. When Yenev joined the young lieutenant at the chart-table he saw this. ‘You have done well, Kulchev,’ he said, Yenev noted that Vrakoy, almost abeam, now bore 135 degrees, distant 15 kilometres. At once he ordered an alteration of course to starboard, towards the island. That meant making for shallower water while the fight to get Zhukov to the surface went on.

Boris Milovych, flabby face agitated, appeared in the control-room. He made for Yenev at the systems console. ‘What do you make of it, Yenev?’ he mumbled, forgetting in his distress the ‘comrade’. For once he was not smiling. There was nothing like the imminence of death to clear the commissar’s mind. Here was a situation which was not in the least amusing and certainly one which no amount of political expertise was likely to clarify.

It was Yenev’s moment and he knew it. ‘There’s been an explosion in the torpedo-compartment. We are having difficulty in controlling the flooding.’

Milovych’s eyes bulged. ‘You mean…?’

‘I mean there have been failures in the pressure hull. Not only in the torpedo-compartment. Water is entering the main communications centre, the air-conditioning and emergency generating centres and the battery spaces.’

‘But what… I mean how has all this happened, comrade?’

‘The explosion. The shock wave has shaken the whole ship. The welding must have failed in several places, probably around pipe and cable glands in the pressure hull. Maybe in the plating also. Where the shock was most severe.’

‘God help us.’ Milovych blanched, kneading his hands together. The reference to ‘God’ caused Krasnov, who had just returned to the control-room, some surprise, worried and frightened as he was. It was not the Party line to invoke the aid of the Almighty. Krasnov liked neither the commissar nor the Party.

‘What can we do?’ In his distress Milovych again omitted the ‘comrade’.

‘I’m already doing it,’ said Yenev tersely. ‘But I’m too busy to explain.’ He swung away from the commissar. ‘How’s the trim now, Lomov?’

The executive officer’s eyes never left the instruments on the panel in front of the planesmen. The depth-gauge needles seemed to exert a hypnotic influence. ‘Depth 103 metres, Captain. We have some positive buoyancy. She’s coming up slowly but…’ he hesitated, ‘… the rate of rise is also decreasing slowly.’ They both knew what that meant. Zhukov was losing positive buoyancy.

Yenev picked up the telephone to the machinery control platform. ‘Machinery control, Captain here.’

‘Ilyitch here,’ came the senior engineer officer’s voice.

‘We are losing positive buoyancy. Are you pumping to full capacity yet?’

‘About eighty per cent, Captain.’

‘What’s the delay?’

‘We’re rigging and testing emergency power cables and pumping lines. It takes time, Captain.’

‘How much time?’

‘Another five, ten minutes, maybe.’

‘We might get away with five. We won’t with ten.’

‘We’ll do our best, Captain.’ There was a note of desperation in Vladimir Ilyitch’s voice. He and his team were working like men possessed. It was impossible to do more.

Yenev knew that too, but the urgency had to be driven home. The additional pumping power, once it was harnessed, could mean the difference between losing Zhukov and saving her. It was typical of Yenev that he thought of the disaster in terms of the ship rather than those in her.

He went across to Lomov. ‘We should have full pumping capacity soon. When we do we’ll flood aft and see if we can’t get the bows up a little.’

He called Feodotik, ‘How are things looking now, chief?’

‘Almost holding the water level in the torpedo-compartment, Captain. But we’ll have to switch some pumping capacity soon. The air-conditioning and emergency generating centres are taking water. The battery spaces too.’

‘Much?’

‘Nothing like the torpedo-compartment, Captain. But enough to be serious.’

‘Soon we’ll have full capacity, chief. Then you can do something about them. Top priority now is the torpedo-compartment. We’ve got to get more water out than’s coming in if we’re to get the bows up. If we don’t, we won’t make the surface.’

Feodotik nodded. ‘Yes, Captain.’ In the red light he looked as if he’d seen a ghost.

The bleep on the captain’s phone sounded. He lifted the handset from its rack. ‘Captain speaking.’

‘Gallinin here, Captain. Radiation level in emergency communications room rising.’ Gallinin was the officer in charge of the atmospheric and radiation control centre. It was on Zhukov’s middle deck, immediately abaft the control-room. The console there contained a complex of systems relating to radiation and air-conditioning. Instruments fed by geiger counters and other devices recorded radiation in the seas through which the submarine travelled and measured radiation levels, temperatures, humidities and air pollution in all compartments.

Yenev shivered involuntarily. There was much about the new generation of ballistic missile submarines he liked and admired but not their radiation potential. It was a new hazard in an already hazardous environment. He tried to recall details of the confused report which had reached him earlier about damage to the emergency communications room. Something about an electrical fire?

‘Any idea what’s causing the trouble, Gallinin?’

‘The emergency communications room is one deck above the reactor, Captain. The reactor screening is on the same deck.’

‘But there are watertight bulkheads between these compartments.’

‘Possibly the shock of the explosion has invalidated their integrity.’ It was like Gallinin to report in such formal jargon. He, too, was a graduate entry.

Yenev said, ‘Do what you can, Gallinin. Once we’ve surfaced things’ll be easier.’

‘Yes, Captain.’

Yenev swore as he hung up the phone. As if he hadn’t enough problems without rising radiation levels.