Voyage of the Devilfish

CHAPTER 10

Admiral Novskoyy stood in the Kaliningrad’s control compartment and watched the topsounder display table. The short shriek of the topsounding sonar was audible through both hulls of the ship as it searched for a polynya — the open water that formed when heavy rafts of ice were torn apart. The open water of a polynya might last all of ten minutes, the admiral knew, before skinning over and freezing in the subzero temperature, and within days the two disparate rafts would again be welded together into a solid mass of ice. Novskoyy peered at the navigation display tied into the high-frequency-contour sonar. The topsounder “sensed” the ice’s thickness and mapped out the shape on the navigation display. The plot was two-dimensional but using a hybrid holography technology, it looked three-dimensional, a tight grid deformed into mountains and valleys and plateaus. The mountains corresponded to thick ice, the flat plains to thin ice. In the center of the nav plot was a “bug,” a small illuminated circle that symbolized the ship, which now was in the middle of a large elliptical field of flatness, a valley surrounded by large but distant ridges. Clearly the polynya was big enough to allow surfacing four vessels the size of the Kaliningrad.

Captain Vlasenko, the Deck Officer for the ascent, stood in the periscope well.

“Ship Control Officer, pump centerline amidships variable ballast to sea. Establish one meter per second vertical ascent.”

The Ship Control Officer, Lieutenant Katmonov, touched his panel in the fixed-function-key sector. In front of him the screen was selected to display a multicolored graphic of the variable ballast systems, a series of tanks in the belly of the huge ship linked by a piping network, and the heart of the system, a positive displacement pump the size of a truck. A three-way valve on the display, the one to the centerline amidships-tank, changed color from white to green. The valve was open. The graphic of the pump flashed “ON” and “4000 LPS” as the pump pushed thousands of liters per second from the tank. As the tanks emptied, Kaliningrad grew lighter and the forces of buoyancy began to move her upward. The depth graphic steadily counted off the meters and sixty million kilograms of attack submarine rocketed toward the thin ice above. As the ship rose through the ocean, the light around the hull became slowly brighter, until at 30 meters, the hull could be distinguished from the black water around her. The deck trembled gently and the deceleration from the halted ascent made Novskoyy momentarily weightless. The ship had surfaced.

“Captain, depth zero,” Katmonov reported. “We are on the surface.”

“Very good. Ship Control. Bubble the ballast tanks and rig for surfaced-at-ice.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Captain-Lieutenant Ivanov, take the deck,” Vlasenko said. “Admiral, the ship is surfaced-at-ice.” Novskoyy nodded and sat down at the communications console, typed in the command to raise the multifunction antenna, concentrating on the communication console screen and a binder full of notes. It was clear there had been a reason for him to order Ivanov to repair the systems. Vlasenko could not wait any longer. He had to find out what the admiral was doing.

“Admiral, permission to go below,” Vlasenko said. Novskoyy waved a dismissal, still typing into the computer.

Vlasenko moved quietly through the main shaft of the second compartment upper level, past the doors to officers’ messroom to the first compartment bulkhead. To his left was the captain’s stateroom door. He could not afford to look hesitant. He was the captain. He was unlocking and entering the captain’s stateroom, his stateroom. Right. He unlocked the door and pushed his way in, went directly to the inner stateroom’s tactical safe and dialed in the combination. He drew a breath and pulled the lever. The safe opened. Inside were some musty and dated publications like the Emergency Warsaw Pact War Plan and the Prolonged Naval Warfare War Plan. Also the Nuclear Release Code. On top of such dusty pubs was a chart marked TOP SECRET and a binder, a slim volume of red plastic that looked like the one Novskoyy had thrown across his desk to conceal his papers.

Vlasenko pulled out the chart and unfolded it. It was a chart of the Atlantic Ocean, with dozens of red dots marked in the ocean east of the U.S. coast. A hundred blue circles were drawn around cities on the east coast. Clusters of blue circles were drawn around Washington, New York, Boston, Philadelphia. Other cities such as Portsmouth, New London, Norfolk, Charleston, Jacksonville and Port Canaveral had blue stars. All the blue stars were U.S. Navy bases. Why? Novskoyy could hardly be thinking of a ballistic missile assault against the U.S. The ballistic missile submarines were nearly all decommissioned. Even when operational they had been under the control of the officers of the Strategic Rocket Forces. Novskoyy couldn’t order an attack with them. The blue dots at sea — launching positions? — seemed too close to the targets. And there were at least 100 of the dots… the fleet had only two dozen I.C.B.M-equipped submarines. Even a depressed trajectory ballistic missile needed several hundred nautical miles for a standoff range… but a city-assault could be done by cruise missiles if the fleet were armed with them. And if the fleet was in position. But to do that, the dozens of submarines would all have to be at sea, which would mean months of preparations, and Vlasenko knew very few of the Northern Fleet’s submarines would be ready to make a run to the mid-Atlantic on short notice. Besides, such a move would make a lot of noise, he would have heard about it from his fellow skippers. So it had to be some kind of wargame, a drill… Except why would Novskoyy be so secretive if it was a drill or communication exercise? Vlasenko turned to the red binder and opened it. The first page was answer enough.

Vlasenko slammed the book shut, put back the volume and chart and locked the safe. He looked around the stateroom, to make sure that no trace of his search was visible, moved into the passageway outside and went quickly to the First Officer’s stateroom, slamming the door behind him. He tried to reassure himself with the words “if necessary,” “could achieve.” Novskoyy wasn’t crazy, he just had a contingency plan. Maybe he was planning to target U.S. cities, not actually fire on them — but even that was inevitably dangerous. The admiral, self-convinced of his course as always… Vlasenko could not forget the wanton sinking of the U.S. boat years ago. He was frustrated by the dismemberment of the old Soviet Union and with it so much of his power. He had concocted this operation. For Novskoyy, an enemy was an enemy forever. He was an old man from another era who couldn’t believe he had ever been wrong. No, he wasn’t crazy. It was worse. He was a desperate man, highly skilled, who never doubted his righteousness. Much worse than mere crazy… Novskoyy would have to be stopped.

Low earth orbit arctic circle The KH-17 Bigbird II satellite sent up that year had been launched into a polar orbit. Such an orbit facilitated looking at the Chinese activity in the antarctic as well as monitoring the Russian naval force strength up north. The latter was the key to the Naval Disarmament Treaty. As Reagan had said years before, “Trust but verify.” The KH-17’s were built to verify.

As the twelve-ton spy-platform crossed the Arctic Circle, it trained its high-resolution visual mirror to search to the east of track. The prime-viewing area this orbit was deemed to be to the right side of the Bigbird’s path over the icepack. While the optics trained over, the infrared sensors followed, scanning the same swath, searching for heat attributable only to warm-blooded life or a man-made source in the frigid cold. For the last hundred orbits, only seven arctic heat traces had been scanned. All had been polar bears. Now the Bigbird’s computer found its eighth heat trace, much larger than the others. Twelve meters long, five meters high. The computer searched its memory as its program commanded. Nothing in its flight history to date had been this big. The next program step told the onboard radio to send an alarm message to the Langley CIA Reconnaissance Section control facility. As the alarm message transmitted, the third program command instructed the optical telescope to train over the heat trace and zoom in. The Bigbird relayed the telemetry back to Langley until the images shrank and were lost in the clouds over the horizon. Start to finish, the detection episode had lasted less than four minutes.

Four thousand miles away, in the east wing of Langley’s CIA Reconnaissance Center, the four-minute-long optical trace slowly printed out on the high-resolution facsimile machine. The senior duty analyst pulled the image trace from the machine. Probably another polar bear, he thought.

He laid the image out on the table to the side of the fax machine and emitted a low whistle. It was a submarine’s conning tower that had pushed through the ice. A damn big conning tower. He reached for a secure phone and dialed in the code for COMSUBLANT Headquarters, Norfolk, Virginia.