The Zhukov Briefing

CHAPTER FIVE

Much to Yenev’s concern Zhukov was not able to maintain fifteen knots. The submarine had covered no more than three kilometres when Ilyitch reported the inflow of water to be increasing. Yenev at once reduced to twelve knots. Even that proved too much. Soon afterwards he ordered ten.

He and Kulchev stood shoulder to shoulder on the small bridge, the easterly wind cold in their faces. The darkness of the night intensified by a cloud-covered sky, was relieved by the lights of ships and the wink and glitter of those of the Vesteralen Islands. On second thoughts Yenev ordered the Zhukov’s steaming lights to be switched off. There was no point in advertising the presence of the submarine. It was upon the flashing lights of Langoy, Anda, Fyrberg and Andness that the two men concentrated. The navigating officer, head and shoulders in the chart recess beneath the bridge screen, plotted the position of the submarine as Yenev called the compass bearings.

Normally this would have been done in the control-room. Now, with so much equipment damaged, Yenev had decided the bridge would be better. To assist the task of pilotage, a leading seaman in the control-room sent up a steady stream of readings from the ocean depth-recorder.

‘Position, Kulchev?’ Yenev asked for the fourth time in as many minutes.

‘One-six-seven Firberg light, distant seven kilometres, Captain.’

‘Distance to Uklarvik?’

‘Eleven point four kilometres, Captain.’

Yenev looked at the luminous dial of his wristwatch and did some mental arithmetic. The bridge phone bleeped. ‘Tomov here, Captain. We continue to lose buoyancy. I believe we have at most twenty minutes left.’ The executive officer’s voice, normally calm, betrayed anxiety.

‘Very well,’ Yenev sighed with resignation. ‘We shall make for Knausnes.’ He turned to Kulchek. ‘Alter course for Knausnes. Make allowance for the north-going stream. It’s close to high water.’ Thank God for that, he thought. It would at least help to get Zhukov on to the rockshelf. Kulchev acknowledged the order. Yenev spoke again to Lomov. ‘Have the inflatable skimmer made ready for launching. Two seamen to stand by to man her. Give them a radio berthing set, a battery-powered signal lamp and a hand lead-line. Kulchev will take charge. As we approach the shoal water near the rocks, Kulchev will station the skimmer five hundred metres ahead, report soundings on the rockshelf and lead us in. It may not help much but it will be better than nothing.’

‘Yes, Captain,’ said Lomov. ‘I’ll organize that at once.’

For a moment the captain’s thoughts ran away with him. The situation was a nightmarish one. The huge submarine lumbering through the dark northern night, rolling slowly to the incoming swell, her buoyancy and with it her life ebbing away with each minute that passed, ahead the rocky shelf on to which he was conning his command in a desperate effort to save her. Would he wake to find it was no more than a horrific dream brought on by indigestion? His thoughts were interrupted by the bridge look-out’s urgent, ‘White light bearing red-four-zero. Close.’

Yenev trained his night glasses to port. A swinging white light had appeared on the port bow. Soon, faint green and red side-lights showed up and he heard the throb of a diesel engine. It was a small fishing boat which had just come clear of the rocky headland at Knausnes. The light at Fyrbergnes was an automatic one, unattended; there were no witnesses there. But this fishing boat was an unwelcome complication.

It came closer and a voice hailed them from the darkness. Yenev at once ordered Krasnov who spoke fluent Norwegian to come to the bridge with a loud-hailer, ‘Ask him what he wants,’ said Yenev.

Krasnov shouted the message through the loud-hailer and a reply came rumbling across the water.

‘What’s he saying, Krasnov?’

‘Warning us that we’re making for the rocks off Knausnes. Only a few kilometres ahead.’

‘Tell him to keep clear. Say we know what we are doing.’

Krasnov relayed the message. Again a shouted reply drifted over the water.

Krasnov said, ‘He says we must be mad, Captain.’

Yenev swore softly. ‘Don’t blame him. But tell him to keep clear. Say we are full of explosives. That’ll frighten him off.’

It did. The fishing boat passed astern, chugged away into the dark night. Yenev saw that it was making for Fyrbergnes. He said, ‘Returning to Kolfjord, I expect.’ He knew that the story of a giant submarine without navigation lights heading for the rocks off Knausnes would soon be out. But there was nothing he could do about that. More urgent matters demanded attention.

When Kulchev reported the rockshelf to be only three and a half kilometres ahead, Yenev ordered, ‘Stop main engines. Keep her steady on one-four-zero.’

In the control-room the coxswain repeated the orders and the rhythmic hum of the turbines ceased. The sound of breakers ahead could be heard clearly on the bridge. From the chart recess Kulchev called, ‘Two and a half kilometres to go, Captain.’

Yenev said, ‘Carry on in the skimmer, Kulchev. You know what to do.’

The navigating officer left the bridge. Yenev ordered the signalman to train an Aldis lamp along the fore-casing. Although he’d expected it, he was alarmed at the extent to which the submarine was down by the bows. The forward hydroplanes were no longer visible and sea swirled around the foot of the huge sail-like fin.

If confirmation were needed that the submarine was sinking there it was.

When Kulchev reached the after-casing he found it almost awash. Most of the crew had mustered there. Huddled in a long line in the darkness, they were holding on to a wire which had been rigged from the tail stabilizing fin to the after end of the conning-tower. It was evident to Kulchev that Zhukov was unlikely to remain afloat much longer.

The leading hand reported that the skimmer was ready for launching. Kulchev informed the bridge by radio berthing set. Yenev ordered, ‘Slow astern together.’ When way was almost off the submarine, the skimmer was lowered over the side. Kulchev and two seamen boarded her. With a sound like a buzz-saw the outboard engine came alive and the skimmer passed quickly up the side of Zhukov to take station ahead. From the submarine’s bridge nothing could be seen but the glow of the small craft’s stern light.

Yenev increased revolutions until Zhukov was moving through the water at three knots. He was talking to Kulchev by voice-radio when the bridge phone bleeped. It was Lomov. ‘We can’t keep her afloat much longer, Captain. We have perhaps only a few minutes.’

Yenev acknowledged, swore with anxiety and concentrated on the bobbing stern light ahead.

In the skimmer Kulchev switched on the Aldis lamp and searched the darkness with its powerful beam. The effect was dramatic. A chain of jagged rocks seemed suddenly to leap from the sea ahead and to port.

Yenev did not know that Vrakoy’s fishermen knew them as the Dragetennene — the Dragon’s teeth. Beyond them loomed the rocky cliffs of Knausnes. Around and to the south and west of the Dragetennene, the sea swirled and foamed on an invisible rockshelf. Kulchev steered for that part of it which lay in the lee of the rocks. There the sea was least disturbed.

Zhukov was now so deep in the water that she needed at least fourteen or fifteen metres under her keel if she were not to touch bottom before grounding. Using the signal lamp as a probe Kulchev edged the skimmer forward while providing Yenev with a running commentary by radio. ‘The leadsman has not found bottom yet,’ he reported. ‘But it won’t be long now. We’re coming to shoal water in the lee of the big rocks. I see what looks like a small cove between two lines of shallow rocks and am heading for it. Steer about ten degrees to starboard.’

Soon afterwards the seaman on the leadline called out, ‘Twenty-five metres, Lieutenant.’ Kulchev reported the sounding to Yenev. They had left the deep water and were now over the shelf. The broken shoal water shook and buffeted the skimmer, whirls and eddies making steering difficult. But Kulchev clung to the tiller, making for the centre of the cove. The leadsman, kneeling to steady himself, kept the lead going. The soundings he called revealed that the depths over the rockshelf had become fairly constant. The tallow in the heel of the lead kept showing sand. Because Kulchev knew that was of enormous importance, his voice rose when he reported, ‘We are in the cove now, Captain. The bottom is sand, repeat sand. We have already traversed half its length and so far the bottom is sand.’

Quickly Yenev asked, ‘How many metres is that, Kulchev?’

‘About two hundred, Captain. Depths over the first fifty metres were between twenty and twenty-five metres. After that between fifteen and sixteen metres. Still shoaling.’

‘Right,’ came the reply. ‘It’ll have to do. Stay in position over the point where you think our bows should ground.’

‘Will do, Captain.’

Moments later a beam of light from Zhukov’s bridge pierced the darkness, picked up the skimmer and held it.

To Yenev on the bridge the light revealed not only the skimmer but the chain of jagged rocks reaching out dark and sinister from Knausnes. Beyond them steep cliffs towered over the submarine as she edged her way in.

Zhukov was still in deep water, wallowing more than rolling in the north-westerly swell. Yenev steadied the bows on the skimmer’s white light and ordered, ‘Stop main engines.’ Then, ‘Slow astern.’ He waited in a sweat of anxiety as the shallow rocks lining the cove came slowly towards them. Several times he gave wheel and engine orders to keep the submarine heading up the centre of the cove. Much depended, he realized, upon the sand Kulchev had reported. Was it a thin layer over a rocky bottom, or was it something more? A really sandy bottom, perhaps. That would be the only good fortune which had come Zhukov’s way that night.

‘The water is shoaling rapidly now, Captain,’ came Kulchev’s urgent report. ‘We have covered about one hundred and fifty metres of the cove. I am stopping.’

Yenev acknowledged, stopped engines and waited, helpless. The Zhukov was committed. There was nothing more he could do. Soon she seemed almost to have stopped but the illusion was dispelled when the sunken bow lifted and she lurched, rumbled and shuddered along the bottom she’d touched sooner than expected. The bow-down trim and the swell had done that. The impact was softened by the sand but each incoming swell lifted the huge hull and pushed it forward, and with each onward lurch the submarine trembled as if in the grip of a giant hand. From the control-room beneath the bridge came the clatter and rattle of loose gear being thrown about.

To Yenev it seemed that the Zhukov would never come to rest. In fact less than two minutes elapsed between the first impact and the final grounding.

Having ordered Kulchev to take soundings round the submarine, Yenev went down to the control-room. The crew on the after-casing had returned to their normal stations and reports of damage state were coming in from various compartments. It was evident that the hull forward had suffered, but not as much as Yenev had feared. He concluded that the strength of the pressure hull and the apparent smoothness of the rockbed under the sand had combined to minimize the damage on impact.

He recorded in the log-book that the submarine had been stranded in a cove south of Knausnes at 0047 in accordance with the decision taken earlier. ‘The stern, for a distance of approximately twenty metres, is overhanging the edge of the rockshelf at the entrance to the cove,’ he wrote. ‘But she is not working unduly in the prevailing weather. It is now within a few minutes of high water.’

As the tide fell she would, he knew, settle more firmly.

The only satisfaction he could derive from an otherwise disastrous situation with that wind and sea were moderate, and the rocks off Knausnes provided more of a lee than he’d expected. But Zhukov still shook and trembled as the swell, its main force broken by the Dragetennene, surged into the cove.

Yenev called his officers together in the control-room. There a lengthy discussion took place on the problems associated with maintaining the submarine, her machinery, equipment and living conditions in reasonable shape until assistance arrived.

Later, to decide how best to get that assistance, he asked Boris Milovych to his cabin.

It was several hours after midnight before they concluded their discussions. These ranged over a wide field: the overriding need to communicate with Soviet naval bases in Leningrad or Murmansk; the security arrangements to protect the submarine and her secrets; the extent of the damage suffered and possibilities of salvage. If salvage were not possible, all classified equipment and radioactive material would have to be removed or destroyed, and the submarine blown up. Ultimately these would be matters for naval headquarters and the Soviet salvage experts to decide. There was the highly complicating factor that Zhukov was stranded on Norwegian soil. That, they knew, was a matter the USSR and Norway would have to settle on a government-to-government basis. And there was the NATO involvement.

Throughout the remaining hours of darkness Zhukov’s men were busy surveying the damage, carrying out emergency repairs and restoring interrupted services. Pumping was maintained at full capacity, but with positive buoyancy now gone the submarine had settled firmly on the bottom of the cove. Nevertheless, it was still vital to control flooding as far as possible, particularly in view of the high tides which would be experienced. Skin divers went down to the flooded bilges and compartments to examine and report on damage, and Ilyitch and his technicians considered ways and means of checking the inrush of water by temporary patching.

On Yenev’s orders the watertight doors and vents to the torpedo-compartment were kept shut since the bows had been further damaged by grounding and the flooding in that compartment could no longer be contained. Armed sentries were posted on the bridge and on the casing at the foot of the fin. Sonic buoys were lowered to port and starboard, a listening watch instituted and two armed scuba divers maintained a continuous anti-swimmer underwater patrol around the hull of the submarine.

Yenev intended to make things difficult for underwater snoopers.