Voyage of the Devilfish

CHAPTER 9

Admiral Richard Donchez lit his first Havana of the day, ignoring the pained expression on Captain Fred Rummel’s face. Rummel, the SUBLANT Chief Intelligence Officer, had called Donchez to the Top Secret Conference Room for an urgent brief. Donchez had been in the office before the sun to work on plans for a Stingray monument. The memorial had been kicking up objections from Naval Intelligence, which wanted the entire affair forgotten.

“Sir,” Rummel began, “CIA PHOTOINT sent us this.” The room lights dimmed and a slide projector clicked on to show a view of the Kola Peninsula on the Russian north coast. Most of the countryside was a cool blue, while bright orange dots lit up half a dozen points on the coastline.

“Infrared,” Rummel said. “Blue is cold, orange is hot. As you can plainly see, we’re getting hot spots at the submarine bases of the Northern Fleet along Russia’s northern coast.” Donchez nodded. “Power plants, buildings with poor insulation, floodlights. Lots of thermal sources.”

“Right. That’s why it took a few hours for us to get around to looking at this.” The slide changed to a closer view of one of the submarine bases. Donchez stood up slowly. “Oh shit,” he said softly, dropping cigar ashes into the carpeting.

“Indeed, sir. As you can see, each of the twenty-five submarines here has an orange spot showing mid-length in her hull. Those thermal traces are reactor cores. They look like that when they’re critical, making power, but also when they’re shut down. But look aft of each reactor. The steam lines inside the turbine rooms are also glowing. These submarines are all hot, the reactors are critical. They’re making steam.” Rummel now clicked the control on the slide projector and the machine ran through a dozen similar shots, each a different Kola Peninsula base, each showing nuclear submarines with reactors and engine rooms hot.

A knock came at the door and a petty officer looked in at Rummel, handed him a sealed envelope lined with a red banner and quickly left.

“How old are those photos?” Donchez asked.

“Three hours, sir.”

“We need to see what’s happening now.”

Rummel opened the envelope. “This is hot off the TS fax machine, sir.” He pulled out a long strip of paper with the same kinds of coloring as the slides. Donchez turned up the room lights as Rummel spread the fax out from one end of the long table to the other— every fourteen inches was a photo of a submarine base. Donchez looked from one photo to the next.

“They’re gone. Every god damned one of them.”

Rummel nodded, face tight. Each photo showed the same bases as the three-hour-old shots, but in the new photos the piers were empty.

“How many attack subs are in their Northern Fleet?”

“One hundred twenty, sir.”

“Any in dock for repair?”

“No, sir. Not one.”

“Any activity out of Vladivostok?”

“No, sir. The Pacific Fleet is dead quiet. Almost all their submarines are in port, shut down, getting routine maintenance. This activity is altogether confined to the Northern Fleet.”

Donchez sat back down in his seat while Rummel folded up the fax. The cigar’s tip had gone cold. “Get SOSUS on NESTOR,” he ordered, referring to the secure UHF radio telephone to the Sound Surveillance System Control Room on the eastern shore of Maryland, the receiving and analysis point for the ten thousand miles of U.S. sonar-array cables laid on the Atlantic.

In the two minutes it took to get the SOSUS duty officer on the line, Donchez had summoned his own duty officer to the conference room.

“SOSUS CONTROL ROOM. DUTY OFFICER,” the speaker rasped out to the room. Donchez nodded at Rummel.

“SOSUS, this is SUBLANT. Report any detects in the North Atlantic and Barents Sea that are new within the last three hours. Over.”

“SUBLANT, SOSUS. SORRY FOR THE DELAY — THERE SHOULD BE AN IMMEDIATE MESSAGE COMING OVER YOUR UHF SATELLITE NETWORK NOW. WE HAVE MULTIPLE SONAR DETECTS, TOO MANY TO DISTINGUISH. CONTACTS SEEM TO BE WARSHIPS WITH SUBMARINE-TYPE SCREW PATTERNS. BEARINGS GENERALLY CORRELATE TO THE NORTH ATLANTIC AND REGIONS IN VICINITY OF KOLA PENINSULA AND NOVAYA ZEMLYA. OVER.”

Rummel acknowledged and broke the connection. Donchez turned to the SUBLANT duty officer.

“Assemble my staff in this conference room, then get on NESTOR to CINCLANTFLEET and tell Admiral McGee I’ll be briefing him in a half hour.”

The Duty Officer left in a hurry.

“What do you think, Rummel?” Donchez asked, pulling his Piranha lighter from his jacket pocket to relight his dead cigar.

“A deployment exercise… what else? Things are pretty cozy between us and them these days…”

Donchez pointed to the fax photographs. “Does that look cozy? Get on the horn with Langley and ask about the Russian SSN-X-27 cruise missiles’ status. Put the same question to OP Oh Nineteen at the Pentagon. I want to know if these attack subs are loaded with anything that could be tossed at us. Cozy, my ass.”

Rummel took off without a word. Donchez watched the smoke from the Havana rise toward the ceiling, and wondered what in hell Admiral Alexi Novskoyy was up to now.

Captain Vlasenko knocked on the door to his commandeered stateroom. It was time to take back the ship.

Novskoyy called out, “Who is it?”

“Captain Vlasenko, sir.”

Through the door Vlasenko heard the rustling of papers, the sound of books being shuffled and the safe door being shut. Finally the door mechanism clicked as it was unlocked. The door opened and Vlasenko saw Novskoyy’s back as the admiral returned to his seat at his desk. The desk’s papers and books had been covered by a chart, laid blank side up, revealing only the TOP SECRET stamps on its blank wide surface.

“What can I do for you, Captain?” The glance at the stateroom had momentarily thrown Vlasenko off balance.

“Sir, I had wanted to talk to you about, well, about what you are doing aboard. You’ve practically taken over this ship, aborting my sea-trials agenda without letting me brief the crew on what we’re doing, giving direct orders to my officers, threatening my Security Warrant Officer, transmitting messages from my control compartment without my signature, assigning maintenance schedules to the Communications Officer. Sir, I am the captain of this vessel, these orders should come through me…”

He had run out of steam, and was furious with himself. It sounded like a plea for Novskoyy to give him back the ship please? sir?

Novskoyy seemed to have barely heard. “Whatever you like, Vlasenko. Now you’ll excuse me, I have some matters to attend to. By the way, I’ve instructed the Deck Officer to use the topsounder and find the nearest polynya. We will be surfacing as soon as there is thin ice overhead.”

Vlasenko stared. What was Novskoyy doing? An order to surface along with his demand that the radio sets be fully functional…? Vlasenko started to protest but Novskoyy cut him off.

“Captain, shut the door behind you and set the lock, if you please.”

He hadn’t so much as looked at Vlasenko’s face as he said it, his eyes focused on the far bulkhead. Without further word the admiral began to unlock his safe again as Vlasenko moved out, locking the stateroom door behind him.

In his stateroom Vlasenko again thought of the spare key to the captain’s — Novskoyy’s — stateroom. It was in the First Officer’s safe, and the combination was set so that it would be easy to remember — his graduation date from the Marshal Grechko Higher Naval School of Underwater Navigation: right to zero five, left twice to twenty-eight, right again to sixty-eight.

The small safe opened, and at the bottom was an envelope with a single key. The key to the captain’s stateroom. No question in Vlasenko’s mind now— after what he had seen… or rather not seen… he had to get in and find out what Novskoyy was up to.

Admiral Novskoyy stared at the room’s door after Captain Vlasenko left, eventually shrugged and returned to his study of the deployment of his submarines. They would dictate the disarmament of the U.S. Dictate and if necessary force… Excitement, exhilaration over the plan now moving to fruition mingled with a wash of exhaustion. It was a heady feeling, one he had not known since twenty years ago when the USS Stingray went to the bottom…

Vlasenko sat at the polished oak foldout table, hating his situation, being deprived of his ship. He had been with the Kaliningrad through its five years of construction, since the first beam of structural titanium had arrived from the west by railcar. He was there when the beam was rolled into a ring, at the first hoop of framing, when the keel had been laid. He had watched the gigantic hull grow, module by module, deck by deck. And every day of those five years he had waited for the moment when she would submerge under the waves, with Vlasenko in command. He had devoted thirty years of his life to the Navy, almost all of them at sea. He had never married, never made love to a woman, unless you counted the Severomorsk and Vladivostok prostitutes. When he died his name would die with him. He had given it all up for the submarine force. Not to be Novskoyy’s errand boy.

Vlasenko shut his eyes, let his mind wander, hoping it would somehow take him away from the pain. Instead, it returned to the epicenter of the hurt. Clear as day he saw himself some twenty-five years earlier, the day he had pulled in on that run under the ice, the run when Novskoyy had shot and destroyed the American attack submarine…

It was December of 1973. It had been blowing wet snow the entire ride in. The waves were violent, spraying cold seawater onto the shivering officers and men on the bridge, coating them with its gritty salt.

At the time a senior lieutenant, Yuri Vlasenko had been Deck Officer. Normally he would have been proud to drive the new attack submarine into the Polyarnyy piers, but this time he was exhausted and overcome by a deep unease. As the Leningrad’s lines were thrown over to the men on the pier, a long black Zil limousine drove up to their berth. Twin red flags fluttered on the fenders, each flag displaying five stars — the limo of Fleet Admiral Konalev, commander of the entire Red Banner Northern Fleet. The car skidded to a halt on the ice-coated pier, and Vlasenko put down the bullhorn, the line handlers having finished securing the ship. He called down to the control room to have nuclear control parallel into shorepower and shutdown the reactor.

Captain Novskoyy looked ready to leave the bridge. Vlasenko decided to speak his mind, cautiously.

“Captain…” Vlasenko began.

Captain Novskoyy frowned. “What is it, Vlasenko? The admiral is waiting for my report.”

“Sir, I was just wondering… what are you going to tell the admiral?” His meaning was clear. Would the captain tell the admiral he’d sunk an American submarine without any real provocation, only because the American had been trailing them for a time, actually risking a nuclear conflict with the Americans?

Novskoyy’s face seemed to grow as dark as the storm that blew around them.

“Vlasenko, you are impertinent. However, to enlighten you… I will tell Admiral Konalev the truth.”

“The truth?” The words escaped Vlasenko’s lips before he could stop them.

Novskoyy stared clear through him, his expression now blank, controlled. He leaned over until his gray eyes were within centimeters from Vlasenko’s.

“The truth. Lieutenant, is that the American submarine ambushed us with an offensive salvo of torpedoes. We fired back to save ourselves. After we outran the American weapon our torpedoes sent the enemy to the bottom, which he deserved.”

Novskoyy continued to stare down at Vlasenko. A bead of sweat dripped down Vlasenko’s chin in spite of the cold. He was, by too long conditioning, literally frozen in place. Novskoyy finally broke off his stare, opened the tunnel hatch to the control room below and went through. If he had stopped and looked back up at Vlasenko, he would have seen a lieutenant standing stiff at attention. If he had looked into the man’s soul, he would have seen profound hatred, smothered below layers of fear. It would take years to peel them away…

Admiral Richard Donchez walked into the conference room and shut the door.

“Attention on deck!” someone shouted. The room’s officers came to attention. Donchez waved them to their chairs and sat at the head of the table.

“Good morning, gentlemen. Today at zero nine hundred Greenwich Mean Time our Bigbird II reconnaissance satellite passed over the Kola Peninsula and the Russian northern-coast submarine bases. The Bigbird satellite found all the piers empty. Empty. The previous pass, approximately four hours before, showed all 120 nuclear attack submarines in port. SOSUS hydrophones reported a large number of submarines under way in the Barents Sea. They seem to be heading in the direction of the North Atlantic. Toward us…”

“This remarkable deployment, we suspect, may well have to do with the commander of the Northern Fleet, Admiral Alexi Novskoyy. Last night Novskoyy was reported by intelligence assets to be embarked aboard the new OMEGA-class attack submarine Kaliningrad, which left Severomorsk for the Arctic yesterday, supposedly for sea trials. And meanwhile his fleet is deploying with speed and precision. Novskoyy is now at an undetermined location under the polar icecap.”

Donchez let the news sink in.

“What he is up to is anyone’s guess. The DIA, CIA and NSA are on the case. But they don’t ever have to face an opponent at sea. We do. Therefore, I am ordering the immediate deployment of the east-coast attack-submarine force. I want repairs accelerated until every vessel is underway submerged. Unfortunately, that is only sixty-seven ships, which means each one of ours will have to trail two of theirs. The classification for this information is TOP SECRET THUNDERBOLT. Any leaks and I guarantee the leaker will spend the rest of his career in Leavenworth Military Prison. That is all. Dismissed.”

The mid-afternoon sun gave little warmth as Squadron Seven’s leader Commodore Benjamin Adams, shivering in a light khaki jacket, stepped off the long sloping gangway of the Hercules, Squadron Seven’s tender ship. The diesel engines of Pier Seven’s four cranes rumbled as they removed shorepower cables and gangways. Two of the squadron’s submarines were in the channel already and one was taking in her lines now.

Adams walked down the pier to the berth of the Billfish. From the sub’s flying bridge Captain Toth saluted Adams, who returned the salute and gave him a thumbs-up. The tugs pulled Billfish away from the pier and towed her to the center of the channel at the pier’s end. Tossing off the tug lines, Toth ordered ahead standard, the wake boiled up around Billfish’s rudder and she surged forward.

Ben Adams watched the same scene played out for the Spadefish, the Archerfish, the Whale, the Barracuda, the Pargo, the Sturgeon and the Piranha. When the sun set, Pier Seven was empty except for the tender ship Hercules.

Bill Sweeney, commodore of Squadron Twelve, joined Adams on the pier. “Can you believe this?”

“Did you get everyone under way?” Adams asked, ignoring the question.

“All but the Charleston,” Sweeney told him. “She was blowing resin in drydock. Word has it they’re throwing her engine room and reactor compartment back together, sending her to sea with no resin refill.”

“Jesus,” Adams breathed. The ion exchange resin of the purification system, he knew, kept the radioactive particles in the nuclear coolant down to a minimum. Without resin the engine room could become a high-radiation area. COMSUBLANT wouldn’t order a boat to sea without resin unless the situation was damn serious…

Sweeney took a deep breath. “I haven’t seen anything like this since ‘82, and even then, it turned out that COMSUBLANT and COMSUBPAC had a bet on who could scramble their sub forces the quickest.”

“I remember,” Adams said. He had been XO of the Whale at the time, but talk of the deployment exercise had gone on for years.

“You don’t send a boat to sea without resin for a bet,” Sweeney said.

“What do you hear in the wardroom?” Adams asked. The wardroom was the seat of scuttlebutt.

“My intel officer was reluctant to brief me. Can you believe it? My own damn intel officer worried I’d leak it.” Adams hadn’t had time to consult intelligence. The rush to get the pierside boats under way had taken all his concentration and time.

“Bill, tell me what the hell’s going on. I haven’t heard anything.”

“Well, it seems the Russians went to sea this morning with 120 attack submarines. Every damn ship in the Northern Fleet. No one knows why. They must have been nursing those boats for months getting ready for this. Their maintenance problems are supposed to be worse than ours.”

“Why? They’re not crazy. What’s it supposed to mean? Why are we reacting this way?”

Sweeney shrugged. “I’m no intel spook, Ben. I’m gonna head home and watch CNN until my eyeballs fall out. Not much to do here.”

When the ships were at sea their skippers reported directly to Admiral Donchez, COMSUBLANT. The commodores had no tactical control.

Adams waved at his counterpart and walked back up the gangway to the Hercules, exhausted. He climbed the ladders to his stateroom, gathered his briefcase, waved to his Chief of Staff and walked back down the ramp to the pier and the parking lot. His Mercedes was in the first reserved space at the end of the pier. As he started to unlock the driver’s side door he saw a Devilfish sticker the size of a dinnerplate plastered to the window, its grinning ram’s head staring out at him. Patch Pacino’s son’s way of saying good-bye. Good hunting, he murmured, wishing he were more than a damn pierside jockey.