Voyage of the Devilfish

CHAPTER 14

The periscope video-repeater showed the dark water, the ridge of ice ahead and the low arctic sun shining coldly in the local morning. This far north, in the marginal ice zone, where the sun lingered low on the horizon most of the days, the MIZ was a dangerous area of icebergs and drift-ice, the transition between open water and the cover of the polar icecap. Submarines usually avoided going to periscope depth in the MIZ. The risk of collision was great, and the hull could easily be torn open by an iceberg. But Pacino had insisted on one last look and for twenty minutes had trained the scope around in slow circles. What Pacino saw looked like snow-covered, mountainous terrain on the horizon. Cold, deserted, desolate, dead.

Still, at least it was the surface, complete with the sun and the sea and the ice. And fresh clean air not filtered by charcoal, not scrubbed of carbon dioxide by an amine bed, not fed through carbon-monoxide burners, not electrified by the precipitators. Not the dry coppery artificial air generated by the “Bomb,” the oxygen generator that split water into hydrogen and oxygen, storing the oxygen and discarding the hydrogen, the mixture of gases dangerous enough to breach the hull in a violent explosion should it fail, and giving the machine its nickname.

Christman’s voice, edged with uncertainty, interrupted Pacino’s thoughts.

“Captain, range to the ice raft ahead is nineteen-hundred yards by SHARKTOOTH sonar.”

Lieutenant Commander Christman, Officer of the Deck, stood at the underice sonar, the SHARKTOOTH, a console with a joystick and a vertical video readout. At the top panel was a stripchart used to record the depth of the ice overhead. The display on the center panel looked very much like a radar, was generated by a hydrophone on the forward edge of the sail that transmitted a faint high pitched tone in a pattern like a police siren. If the sound pitch was plotted against time on a graph, the waveforms looked like shark teeth. With the changing transmission frequency, it could transmit and interpret the echo simultaneously, giving continuous ranges and bearings to ice-shapes ahead, which now formed a solid bank less than a mile away.

For a moment Pacino had a sense that this might be the last time he would see the surface and the sky and the sun… not an unheard of thought among submariners… and quickly censored the thought as he snapped the periscope grips up and rotated the hydraulic control ring. As the scope optic-module descended into the well the stainless steel pole felt extremely cold brushing Pacino’s arm.

“Take her deep,” he said without looking at Christman, then moved forward on the periscope stand to the pole of the number-one periscope, the World War II relic used only for surface navigation, and stared at the Conn sonar console on the port side. The TV screen was red to keep the OOD’s eyes night-adjusted. The display was a waterfall cascading downward. The horizontal axis was bearing — north on the left, south in the center and north-northwest on the right. The vertical axis was time — the top now, the older data lower. All the data fell downward on the screen like a “waterfall.” Like the moon “following” a moving car, a distant contact would show up as a vertical trace on the display, its bearing constant, but a close contact would have a slanted slope, showing it moving from one true bearing to another. At the moment the displays were only filled with static. Then a definite sloping trace appeared on the short-duration display. High-bearing rate, a close contact. Pacino reached for the microphone.

“Sonar, Captain, report the contact at zero four zero.”

“CONN, SONAR, AYE, CONTACT NOW BEARING ZERO SIX TWO IS BIOLOGICS.”

Pacino frowned. A whale or a school of fish.

“Sonar, Captain, select the narrowband beam on the trace’s bearing and integrate on narrowband time-freq.”

“CONN, SONAR, AYE.”

Pacino pressed a selector-pad button below the display. The waterfalls disappeared, replaced by six graphs, each a plot of intensity on the vertical axis versus sound frequency on the horizontal axis. Fed by the towed array, the narrowband processors listened for specific frequencies known to be emitted by most Russian submarine classes, from such as their turbine-generator resonance, a 300-cycle-per-sec- and sound. One of the graphs was centered on the anticipated 300-hertz tonal. If the contact was a Russian there was a high probability it would get a narrow vertical spike centered near 300 hertz. The time-frequency data took about five minutes to come up with a meaningful display. Like the camera taking an evening-time exposure photograph, the sonar system “integrated” the sound data over a long-time period to make sure tonals weren’t just background noises. For a full five minutes Pacino stared at the 300-hertz graph, not aware of Christman staring at him. The graph was flat. No spike anywhere near 300 hertz. Pacino shook his head, pushed a button on the selector pad and the broadband waterfall display returned.

“Sonar, Captain, return to your search.” The trace had definitely been biologies.

“CONN, SONAR, AYE.”

The short-duration display began to fill with traces. Noise from rafts of ice shifting and grating against each other. Soon it would be audible to the naked ear.

Pacino moved through the gap between the port Conn console and the aft telephone-communications bulkhead, squeezing past the radar console, which was shut down and useless when submerged. On the other side of the radar was the SHARKTOOTH underice sonar. Pacino looked down at the forward scan screen. The ridge of ice was now astern, and ahead were some more ridges, stalactites of ice hanging down from the ice canopy overhead. Just gentle ridges now, but soon they would stab down deeply enough to smash into them if the OOD made a mistake. Dimly Pacino heard Christman giving slight rudder adjustments to avoid the ridges. For the rest of their time under ice the OOD or his assistant, the Junior Officer of the Deck, would stand here at the underice sonar steering the ship. The JOOD would also help with underice navigation or man the fire-control computer, ensuring a weapon was programmed and ready. In case.

“Offsa’deck, clear baffles,” Pacino ordered. “And don’t go more than two hours without a baffle clear. I don’t want to be surprised out here.”

“Clear baffles, Offsa’deck, aye. Helm, right five degrees rudder, steady course one three zero.” Christman picked up a microphone at the underice sonar console. “Sonar, Conn, clearing baffles to the right.”

“CONN, SONAR, AYE.”

Pacino climbed back up to the periscope stand and stared at the short-duration waterfall display, thinking of the Russian that came out of the Stingray’s baffles decades before.

Admiral Donchez stared up at 120 flashing red X’s. The sons of bitches had arrived, he thought. The subs were lining up from off the coast of Maine down to the Carolinas. The southernmost portions of the coast were still clear, the last Russians still on the way to these more distant stations. His attack submarines were in force off the coast, but 67 boats against 120 … not good odds for a face-off, if it came to that. His message to his submarines had been carefully worded to be as vague as possible yet still give their commanders some leeway to engage… if necessary.

It was the best he could do. No one could shoot unless one of the Russian attack boats shot first. But why would they be deploying? To test American nerves?

Donchez walked to the elevator to go to his office and watch the construction on the Stingray monument. For all the good he was doing in Flag Plot, he might as well walk out to the site and help them pour concrete. As he left Flag Plot he looked at the charts and promised himself he would not come back to the room until the Russians turned around and abandoned their game of chicken, or war of nerves, or whatever the hell they thought it was.

Admiral Alexi Novskoyy sat at the communications console in the control compartment and watched the laser printer reel off page after page of papers from the computer’s storage memory. Only five minutes after the hour Novskoyy had appointed for the boats to be onstation, he had 120 messages from his submarines. He picked up the ream of messages and took them to the ladder to the upper level of the second compartment below, nodded to the Deck Officer, Captain-Lieutenant Ivanov, the only other occupant of the space.

“Good night, Ivanov.”

“Good night, sir.”

Novskoyy continued down the ladder and through the passageway to his stateroom, where he turned on a small stereo and sat down at the desk. It took over an hour to decrypt the messages, but when he was done he stared down at the checklist with satisfaction. Each of the 120 attack submarines was in position along the coast of the U.S., and none had encountered any harassment. The Americans seemed to be giving them a wide berth. He leaned back in his chair and let his eyes unfocus. He had expected at least a dozen reports of bumps and collisions with the U.S. attack submarines in the Atlantic, perhaps lines of frigates and destroyers filling the water with sonar pings, aircraft doing low flyovers and dropping sonobuoys, squadrons of helicopters chopping over the waves dipping sonar receivers on long cables. But nothing. The Atlantic was deserted. Not even a sniff of the American attack submarines Dretzski had reported. Something had to be wrong. It was too perfect. Novskoyy took off his reading glasses and shut his eyes. It had to be Agent Fishhook coming through. That and the U.N. inspection. The plan had worked.

He sat back to listen to the sounds of the symphony music washing over him, but the nagging thought kept intruding… why had the fleet achieved positions without opposition?

The USS Billfish cruised slowly northeast at four knots, bare steerage way, at a depth of 658 feet. The ship was rigged for ultraquiet. All offwatch personnel were ordered to their bunks. Lights throughout the ship were off or switched to a dim red setting. The P.A. Circuit One speakers were disabled, an announcement on them might be detected outside the hull. In each space men stood with headphones and boom microphones, linked on a single ship wide phone circuit, ready to pass urgent orders by voice. Every running pump or piece of equipment in the ship had redundancy; the equipment selected to be running was the one in a set that was the quietest. All maintenance activity was halted. Non-essential gear such as galley equipment was turned off — the crew would eat cold meals for the duration of ultraquiet. Hard-soled shoes were prohibited, the crew had switched to sneakers and slippers. Stereos, radios, televisions were turned off. The spare gyro was shut down, as well as the Bomb, the oxygen generator. Reactor main coolant pumps were in slow speed. The ship was dead quiet. In the torpedo room all four tubes had signs on the inner doors reading WARSHOT LOADED. Tubes three and four were flooded, sea pressure equalized to the outside pressure, outer doors open and weapons powered up, their gyros spinning rapidly, their computers activated, ready for a fire-control solution. In the control room only the whine of the gyro and the humming of the fire-control computer were audible. The watchsection fire-control team was ready to track and, on orders, shoot any contact.

Lieutenant Culverson, the Officer of the Deck, stood on the Conn and stared at the sonar-repeater console, a television screen covered with red filter glass. A heavily built Texan with a string tie around the collar of his blue poopy suit, Culverson wore a pair of blue Hush Puppies loafers. After all, the rig for ultraquiet had deprived him of his usual cowboy boots. Culverson, wearing red goggles to preserve his night vision in case the ship needed to come to periscope depth, stared at the sonar screen, straining to find a submarine in the mass of stringlike indications of random ocean noises and biologies. Twenty feet aft the sonar space was rigged for black, with only the six sonar console screens showing light in the room. Sonarman Chief Dawson sat at the central console of the sonar panel, the space silent except for a faint high pitched whine from the video screens. The center lower screen was tuned to the athwartships beam of the towed sonar array, a set of hydrophones towed astern on a mile long cable. The beam examined a thin slice of ocean, looking for specific frequency tonals from an AKULA-class attack sub that COMSUBLANT Intelligence had predicted would come into the Billfish’s patrol area. The central console graphs were displaying the frequencies surrounding the anticipated 314-hertz tonal of the AKULA’s turbine generators.

As Dawson watched, the graph slowly grew a narrow hill in the center. The minutes clicked by, and the graph’s peak, the hill, became a mountain, then a pillar, then a thin sharp spike. 314.0 hertz. Exactly. Too clear and sustained to be a natural phenomenon. Dawson flipped through the other displays. One harmonic of 154 hertz was also spiking. With a 314 and a 154, it had to be an AKULA class. Dawson selected the LOFAR display, the low frequency analyzer that examined a contact’s screw pattern. The lines of frequency were showing the repetitious vibrations of an eight-bladed screw. It all added up to a Russian AKULA-class attack sub where it had no business being — 150 miles east of Norfolk, Virginia. Dawson keyed his microphone.

“Conn, Sonar, narrowband contact Sierra One, bearing either three five zero or one seven zero, is a submerged contact, Russian nuclear type four, probable AKULA class, making three zero turns on one eight bladed screw. Recommend coming to course… zero three zero to resolve the bearing ambiguity.”

“SONAR, CONN, AYE, WAIT.”

Dawson switched the display to the broadband waterfall, the display of all frequencies in the ocean around them. He concentrated on the two possible bearings to the narrowband contact. There was the beginning of a trace at 350. He put his palm on the cursor ball set into the horizontal section of the console and rolled it, moving the computer cursor to the trace, thereby tuning his audio set to that direction and that direction only. He shut his eyes, listened. What he heard was static, white noise, like rain, or water flowing in a creek. Broadband noise. He cut in a filter, removing the lower frequencies. He selected higher and higher frequencies and waited. Finally he heard it. poosh… poosh… poosh… He dialed in a higher frequency and listened. roosh… roosh… roosh… Still higher. floosh… floosh… floosh… He turned up the volume. The new Russian reactor coolant pumps on the AKULA class made that sound. FLOOSH … FLOOSH … FLOOSH … He keyed his mike.

“Conn, Sonar, trace on broadband bearing three four seven is definite AKULA class, bearing rate left and picking up. Contact is closing, approaching CPA. Recommend course one eight zero to get a second leg.”

“Sonar, Conn, aye,” Culverson replied in his headset. “Designate the new contact Target One. I’m coming around now to one eight zero to the left.”

“Conn, Sonar,” Dawson said to his microphone, “recommend coming around to the right. You’ll be pointing at the contact. Otherwise you could hit him—”

“No, we’re coming around to the left. Better to hit him than loose him in the baffles. Skipper’s orders.”

Dawson shook his head; this was how underwater collisions happened.

The word to man tracking stations spread throughout the ship by the watchstanders. The tracking teammembers hurried to their stations. In the control room Culverson was programming the fire-control solution to Target One into the weapons in tubes three and four when Captain Harrison Toth IV arrived and looked over his shoulder. Culverson looked up at Toth, in his late forties, portly and bald. Not exactly a thing of beauty, but after coming up through the ranks as a former sonar chief he knew more about submarines than just about anyone in the fleet. He also never let his officers forget it. But for all Culverson’s gripes about Toth, he felt relieved to see him on the Conn this day.

Captain Dmitri Krakov held onto the handrail of the periscope well as the AKULA-class fleet submarine Vladivostok tossed in the sea off the continental shelf of the United States. Vladivostok had been at her hold-coordinate off the city of Norfolk, Virginia, for some twenty hours, rolling and pitching at periscope depth, waiting for any further mission directive. During the last week the crew had become increasingly edgy, and no wonder. So far Krakov had been unable to tell them exactly what their mission was. He wasn’t sure himself.

Now he tapped the deck officer on the shoulder to ask for the periscope. The junior lieutenant quickly moved away from the scope, and Krakov grasped the horizontal periscope grips somehow reassured by the feel of the antiskid etching on the cylindrical grips. He put his eye on the rubber of the eyepiece, still warm from the deck officer’s face, and looked out at the waves splashing and spraying over the periscope-view. If it was sickening to stand in the control compartment in these tossing seas, it was worse looking out the periscope. A queasy stomach was a hell of a condition for a submariner, but there it was.

Krakov waved the deck officer to take the periscope back. He was as impatient as his crew. More so. Like Vlasenko, he had been aboard the Leningrad in 1973, but unlike Vlasenko he had not felt in conflict over the sinking of the American submarine. He was, after all, a military man, raised and trained to destroy the enemy, and the enemy had been… how soon some forgot… the Americans. The politicians had had their way and now the country was being disarmed, destroying its capacity to defend it self. He had long had such feelings, but under the tutelage of Admiral Novskoyy his feelings had not only been kept alive, they had been hardened. It was thanks to Novskoyy that he had risen through the ranks to gain his own command the previous year. The admiral was the man he most admired, most trusted to do what was best and right for him, and for the future of his troubled country. Indeed, he felt very much toward the admiral as a son might toward a father his own having died when he was just entering his teen-age years. It was because of his admiration for Novskoyy that he had chosen the navy and submarine service. If Admiral Novskoyy wanted him here, he had his reasons, and that was good enough for Captain Krakov. Captain… he relished the sound of it, and the responsibility that went with it. He loved it, all of it… except, of course, the secret miseries his stomach still underwent. Well, nothing was perfect…

He thought now of the ultrasecret loading of the SSN-X27, listed on the inventory as an “exercise unit,” loaded in its canister in the number-four torpedo tube. He thought of the nursing of the ship’s mechanical and electrical system in the months prior to this sudden deployment. He thought of the deployment itself, so obviously planned with their food loadout and equipment maintenance, but without immediate warning in the hours before the order to depart the pier. Krakov felt sure that the long, tortuous hours at periscope depth would soon be rewarded. And in a special way that along with the legendary Admiral Alexi Novskoyy, he would be called on to play an historic role. The thought of it was strong enough to overcome even his rebellious stomach.

Devilfish had arrived at coordinate A21.2-53.6 on top-secret Chart Zl, the position relayed by Donchez. Her position was drawn on the chart on the navigation table. The anticipated coordinate of the OMEGA was shown as an orange dot. Pacino leaned over the chart in the navigation alcove, aware of the ghostly moan of the SHARKTOOTH sonar beams illuminating their way in the ice rafts and stalactites ahead, OOD Stokes giving slight rudder orders to the helm to steer the ship around the pressure ridges, and the creaking of the ice around them as the masses of ice rafts shifted and ground against each other.

The position report from Donchez had given the OMEGA’s approximate position, but even drawing a 30-mile circle around the reported position had not led to a detection. The satellite coordinate must have been subject to some kind of error. There were no sonar detects on the OMEGA on broadband, and none on any of the guessed narrowband frequency gates they were searching in.

Was the OMEGA gone? Or was he going about this the wrong way? Instead of searching for the OMEGA, should he be searching for a polynya? Pacino walked to the SHARKTOOTH sonar console.

“Energize the topsounder,” he told Stokes. Stokes nodded and dialed in a rotary switch that activated the ultrahigh-frequency hydrophones on top of the sail, which pinged upward, and “listened” for two pings— the first a reflection off the bottom of the ice, the second a reflection off the top. The comparison of the two showed distance to the ice overhead as well as its thickness.

“Looks like a pressure ridge above now, sir,” Stokes drawled. “Thick ice. One-hundred-fifty feet.”

Pacino called over the Junior Officer of the Deck, Lieutenant Brayton.

“JOOD, establish a zigzag search of this area for thin ice.” Pacino drew a square around the omega’s reported position three miles on a side. “Do a search in this block, then search in blocks further outward from the position. Keep plotting ice thickness. And notify me the instant you’ve got thin ice.”

Before Pacino left the control room, he glanced over at the SHARKTOOTH’s topsounders. Still thick ice. 125 feet. The possibility of not finding the OMEGA before she turned around and returned to port suddenly hit Pacino hard — the aching in his neck and shoulders feeling like knives going through him. Knives wielded by one Alexi Novskoyy…

All through the night Devilfish moved back and forth under the ice, the secure pulse topsounder clucking, finding only thick ice and pressure ridges. At 0810 GMT Devilfish had to go down to 350 feet to avoid a deep pressure ridge. Back in the control room, Pacino watched in frustration as the ice got thicker. 90 feet. 120 feet. 130 feet. He glanced at the chart, seeing that this was the furthest block to the east they had yet tried. Obviously the east side of the OMEGA position would turn up nothing but thick ice. It was hopeless. Pacino marked on the chart in bold pencil the area to avoid on the east side and again summoned the JOOD.

“Just thick ice here. Get us back west, to this area. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find the polynya there.” Brayton plotted a course to get the ship to the new search sector.

“One-hundred-fifty feet, thick ice,” Stokes called out from the SHARKTOOTH console. Brayton moved up beside him and told him the new course. Stokes nodded, giving the overhead-ice-thickness readout a grimace before making the rudder order. He looked over to the helmsman.

“Helm, left fifteen degrees rudder, steady course two seven zero.”

After several minutes, for a split second, the ice-thickness readout on the SHARKTOOTH sloped from 145 feet down to five. But as the ship came around, the ice thickness grew back to 175 feet.

“Get back to zero nine zero,” Pacino ordered. Stokes understood. “Helm, shift your rudder!”

“Shift my rudder, helm aye, my rudder is right fifteen degrees, passing course zero one five to the right, no ordered course, sir.”

“Aye, helm,” from Stokes. Pacino patted Stokes on the back as they watched the ice thickness, at the same time Pacino wondering if it had been only a phantom reflection from a void in the ice. But as they got under the thick part of the pressure ridge the ice thickness once again sloped down, from 155 to under five feet in less than thirty seconds. It was an inverted cliff overhead. The polynya.

“Helm, steady as she goes,” Stokes said, trying to contain his excitement. And Devilfish sailed out from under the pressure ridge to the underside of a wide flat lake of thin ice that stretched on for almost four thousand yards. Pacino allowed himself to believe. This had to be it.

“JOOD, map the polynya,” Stokes called to Brayton, who turned on the plot table in the forward starboard corner of the control room. Actually the table was more a flat box with a glass top. Inside the box was a device that received inputs from the ship’s gyro-and-speed indicator and moved inside the box in scale to the ship’s motion in the sea. The device shined a small crosshair upward to the glass. Brayton taped down a large sheet of tracing paper to the glass top and began to plot blue dots on the paper at the crosshairlight’s position every minute-mark of the chronometer. As the ship continued east, the ice remained thin, and Brayton continued with blue dots, connecting them with blue line segments. Finally, two and a half miles east, the ice became thick again, coming down in craggy inverted mountains overhead until it was 190 feet thick. As the boat moved from thin ice to thick, Brayton marked the crosshair and began to plot the dots in orange with orange dashes connecting them and indicating thick ice. With Brayton’s directions Stokes was able to drive the ship in a cloverleaf pattern to explore the boundaries of the polynya — a procedure that could be vital to the ship’s survival… if there was a fire or flooding Devilfish would have to try to make it back to the polynya and surface through the ice. It was essential to know its shape so in an emergency with a loss of the topsounder the captain could make an educated guess where the thin ice was by using the plot table. It was low-tech, dating back to the 1950s, but it worked and would continue to work even if the computers died.

Finally Pacino ordered the ship to bare steerage way under the polynya, affixed his headphone and boom microphone and climbed the step up to the Conn.

“Sonar, Captain,” he said into the microphone, “we’re under thin ice at a two-and-a-half-by-three mile polynya. The OMEGA may be surfaced here. Use maximum positive deflection/elevation and check for signs of him.”

Pacino stared at the sonar panel on the Conn console as he flipped through the displays with the selector keypad. The screen was blank. They were alone.

“Conn, Sonar,” the headphone intoned, “even with max D/E selection we have no trace of a broadband detect on the OMEGA.”

“What about narrowband?” Pacino pressed.

“Cap’n, Sonar, the towed array is dragging at this speed, but it’s still negative.”

The son-of-a-bitch either wasn’t at this polynya or had moved on, Pacino decided.

As the ship cruised at two knots, Stokes keeping it under the thin ice, Pacino returned to the navigation table to try to figure the next search-step. Maybe there was a new intelligence message in the satellite waiting to tell him the OMEGA had gone or been spotted elsewhere. No, an ELF transmission would have called him up from the deep if that were the case. Which meant… the OMEGA still had to be on the surface. Pacino reached into the overhead and grabbed the control ring for the number-two periscope.

“Lookaround number-two scope,” he called out.

“Depth 300 feet, speed two knots,” Stokes called back.

“Up scope,” Pacino said, and rotated the ring a quarterturn. The hydraulics thunked above him as the high-pressure oil fought the sea pressure outside the ship. It seemed to take an eternity for the pole to come out of the well. The smooth stainless steel climbed up and up from the well, until the control module peeked out from the well and climbed even with Pacino’s midriff. Another clunk as the hydraulics stopped. Pacino snapped down the periscope grips and trained the view upward with the left grip. Nothing but darkness, until the view was almost directly overhead. And then there was a faint light, a glow from the thin ice above.

“Off’sa’deck, bring us up slowly to one five zero feet. Two knots.”

Stokes made the orders. Pacino rotated the periscope in slow circles, looking overhead, trying to see any sign of broken ice, any sign of the OMEGA. His earpiece crackled.

“Conn, Sonar, we have a transient, no, a whole lot of transients at bearing two seven five.” Pacino strained to see. Two seven five was on the aftport quarter. Sonar could be hearing an ice raft collapsing the polynya. The polynya might not last if the two ice rafts on either side started to move together. The ice could crush a submarine hull if she was unlucky enough to wait too long on the surface. Maybe the OMEGA had heard the ice shifting and had submerged to avoid trouble…

Something dark was blocking out the top of Pacino’s periscope view, now rotated up to the maximum, about seventy degrees from the horizontal. Not completely upward but almost.

“Conn, Sonar,” Pacino’s earpiece crackled, “we’ve got… broadband steam noises… definite near-field effect transient broadband steam noises! Conn, there’s a submerged contact directly overhead!”

“Sonar, Conn, aye,” Pacino called, straining his eyes to see upward as the dark spot on the periscope view enlarged and became a line and then a blot that blocked out half the light from the surface. Pacino ordered Devilfish deeper so he could see the shape. Fifty feet lower was not enough to see either end of the behemoth that was above him, but any deeper would cut off the light. This had to be the OMEGA, he decided, and it was the biggest submarine he could have imagined. It dwarfed Devilfish. There must be room for at least ten Piranha-class submarines inside that huge hull. How could he hope to defeat something that big and invulnerable? And then he reminded himself that inside that… monster was the man who had killed his father. The same man that now threatened him, his crew and the ship that he loved.

When he looked away from the periscope he saw that the eyes of the men and officers were on him. He was, after all, the captain, and they were trained to trust him so that it had become a matter of instinct. They also had, short of mutiny, no alternative. There was the temptation to talk to them, to explain, but that was not his role. Pacino put his eye back on the periscope and called to Stokes.

“Off sa’deck, I have the Conn. Man silent battle stations. Rig ship for ultraquiet. Flood tubes one and two and open the outer doors. Spin the Mark 50’s in tubes one, two, three and four. And prepare to hover.”

As Stokes got busy, Pacino looked up at the OMEGA, which he could not hear until he was close enough to touch it. For a moment he wished Donchez had simply ordered him to sink the OMEGA outright, but then realized he couldn’t do that. Don’t shoot unless shot at, was the order. So if the OMEGA shot a torpedo at them…

“Attention fire-control team,” Pacino announced, “the OMEGA is surfaced at the polynya above. Designate the OMEGA Target One. We will position ourselves directly under Target One. We will come up on the hovering system with the maximum rate and hit Target One’s bottom. We’ll get deep again and monitor Target One’s actions. If Target One shoots at us, we will have verified hostile intentions, as COMSUBLANT has asked us to verify. And if that is the case, we will put Target One on the bottom…”

Pacino looked around the room. “If Target One does nothing or attempts to communicate with us, we will need to make a decision, whether her actions are genuinely friendly or a deception. All right, carry on.”

And what the hell do I do if the OMEGA refuses to be provoked, Pacino asked himself. Put a torpedo in the water? If the Russian could not be provoked, he would have no authorization to shoot it. The order to shoot would be unlawful. All right, you bastard, give me an excuse. Don’t make me make one. Pacino turned back to periscope and positioned the ship at 675 feet, hell aft-hull directly underneath the OMEGA at a right angle to the Russian, the OMEGA pointed north and Devilfish pointed east. He was looking back aft at the OMEGA hull, which was above his own reactor compartment. That way any possible contact would spare the periscope and the sail, both of which he might need later to break through the ice of the polynya.

Captain Vlasenko opened his locker, hoping his service pistol was there. Or had he left it behind? Yes, he must have left it in his apartment, it was mostly ceremonial. Perhaps he had avoided wearing it since those days on the Leningrad, an unconscious attempt to distance himself from Novskoyy’s affectations. What he intended to do would be much harder without a handgun. Perhaps impossible. But this had to stop, and the only way to stop it was to remove the admiral from control of the ship. From overhead Vlasenko heard the sound of a mast rising up, reminding him of Novskoyy and the communications console. He had waited long enough. If the admiral actually intended to launch an attack, he could order it to commence any minute. Vlasenko had tried hard to convince himself that this deployment was just an exercise. But seeing Novskoyy cover his papers with the chart, and the chart itself — how could he deny such evidence to the contrary? The operation profile in the red binder had chilled his blood.

The evening before, Vlasenko had gone to the control compartment to check out the weather through the periscope and found that Novskoyy had gone and had taken his stacks of messages with him. While Novskoyy was still gone, one message had come in. Vlasenko had pulled the message out of the discharge tray and the deck officer, Captain-Lieutenant Ivanov, had tapped his shoulder, telling him not to touch any of the admiral’s messages. Vlasenko had ignored Ivanov. The message was a lightning bolt through his guts. It was from the Alexander Nevsky, addressed to Novskoyy. Nevsky was a fairly new ship, an ALFA class. In his mind’s eye he could still see the block letters on the crisp laserprinted page:

So it seemed that the chart was not just a theoretical plan — the Nevsky was on the way to a position off the U.S. coast. And what was “t-hour?” The time of a time-on-target assault? If Nevsky was three-and-a-half hours late at 1230 GMT, that put T-hour at 0900 GMT. But what day? Today? Tomorrow? Vlasenko had glanced at the chronometer, which read 0850 GMT. If it was today, it was in ten minutes! Disabling the radio would stop any transmission of a gocode to launch cruise missiles. But then it would be repaired. Disable the radio after smashing all the spare parts? The Kaliningrad had too many back-up systems and redundant circuits, and in the computer cabinets functions were in some cases combined. You could think you were smashing the radio modules and end up disabling the ship-control system instead. Even in the best-case scenario the radio could be repaired and the go-code could be transmitted.

He could order the Operations Officer to open the small-arms locker for inspection and get an automatic pistol. Except Ivanov, the Operations Officer and Acting First Officer, was on watch in the control compartment as Deck Officer, and only he had the keys to the small-arms safe, which was to be opened only by him. Not even Captain Vlasenko could take the key without violating his own standing orders. It would surely make the admiral suspicious if he ordered Ivanov off the watch or ordered him to turn over the keys. And waiting for the normal rotation so that Ivanov was offwatch was too risky… the watch shifted at noon, over three hours from now.

Vlasenko had considered briefing his officers on what Novskoyy was apparently up to, but most were in awe — or fear — of Novskoyy. He was, after all, the Fleet Commander. An order to arrest the man would not exactly be popular in the officers’ mess, and even if he did get the officers together, there was virtually no way he could do it without Novskoyy knowing about it. There was no time for persuasion, for a committee decision. It was too dangerous not to take some action now. He hated the decision, but there was no escaping it. This was his problem. His responsibility.

He took a deep breath, left the stateroom and walked aft to the third compartment and found the tool bench on the starboard side. He pulled open a cabinet and unlatched a heavy wrench from a restraining bracket. He went back forward and climbed the long ladder to the control compartment, the heavy wrench in his right hand. He would have preferred a pistol. He neared the upper rungs of the ladder, trying to keep the wrench from knocking against the rungs, still without a clear idea what he would do with the wrench. He could lean it in an inconspicuous place, and when the time came, when the chronometer neared 0900, he could knock Novskoyy unconscious and lock him up in the stores locker in the third compartment. With Novskoyy out of the picture, he felt reasonably confident there would be no one else to carry out his plan. With Novskoyy’s need for total control of any mission, it was most likely he had issued instructions to his fleet not to fire the cruise missiles unless he sent his implementation message. Otherwise, why were they surfaced here at the polynya?

Vlasenko had two steps up to go. He heard the conversations of the control compartment clearly now, the officers at their posts. The wrench was heavy. Vlasenko’s hands were wet with sweat. What if he was seen with the damned wrench? How could he explain it? Vlasenko held the wrench behind his right leg with his right hand and proceeded to pull himself up to the landing with his left— It was too awkward. The wrench slipped out of his hand just as Deck Officer Ivanov announced that the captain was in control. The heavy tool clattered down the ladder and landed at the base six meters below. Novskoyy looked over at Vlasenko.

“So, Vlasenko,” his hand reaching for his hip holster! “what brings you to control… with a wrench? Going to fix the fire-control computer? Ivanov, call security. Now!”

Ivanov looked first at Vlasenko, then Novskoyy, stunned, as his hand reached for the phone.

Novskoyy kept his service pistol trained on Vlasenko for the full two minutes it took the Security Warrant Officer to arrive in the control compartment. Vlasenko looked to his officers, saw none was going to challenge the admiral. Who could blame them? He turned to Novskoyy.

“Sir, why are you provoking the Americans? Getting ready to attack them…?” The watch officers stared, astonished, at the two men. “I saw your attack plan. Admiral—”

“It’s an exercise, you fool. You are destroying yourself over an exercise. I’m afraid, Vlasenko, that you have gone quite mad. I am sorry for you, and all the years I wasted trying to make a man of you. You are not worthy of your commission.”

“Admiral, your fleet doesn’t move without orders from you. That’s the reason for this surfacing. Your action begins in… five minutes? Is that when you send the message? Launch the missiles?” He was partly testing, but the look on Novskoyy’s face, his lack of any rebuttal, the sound of Novskoyy’s clicking off the safety on his pistol… it all added up to a horrible confirmation. It was the admiral, not Vlasenko, who seemed to have gone over the edge, to have gone from a threatening deployment to an actual attack mode…

The security officer had arrived at the landing from the ladder to the second compartment upper level. He looked at the two men, momentarily hesitating at the remarkable scene of the admiral threatening the ship’s captain with a semiautomatic pistol.

“Warrant, place Captain Vlasenko under arrest.” Novskoyy looked around, noting the clock. It read 0856.

“Put him in the control-compartment escape pod and shut the hatch. Stand guard at the ladder, when we go deep we will transfer him to a holding cell.”

“Sir, I can take the captain to the storage compartment now,” Warrant Danalov said.

“No. For the moment I want him where I can be sure of his actions. Take him up, shut the hatch and stand guard. And make sure you disable the pod-disconnect circuit. We don’t want the poor man blowing the bolts and rolling onto the ice. There is a better punishment for this man.”

The ladder to the escape pod was three meters tall and led to a lower hatch. It was awkward for the warrant to push Vlasenko up the ladder and follow with his pistol drawn, and for a moment Vlasenko considered kicking Danalov and trying to disarm him. Except Novskoyy’s gun was still levelled at him, the admiral’s trigger finger in place.

Just before he opened the pod hatch and left the control room Vlasenko glanced at Deck Officer Ivanov, hoping for some sort of action. Any action. Ivanov seemed immobilized. It had all happened too fast, Vlasenko realized. Now, when it was too late, he decided he should have shown Ivanov and others the plans in Novskoyy’s stateroom.

It was completely dark inside the pod. Groping for the light switch, Vlasenko felt only the clammy frozen wall of the titanium spherical-pod bulkhead. When he did manage to find the switch, he looked for some way to change the scenario being written below. He saw none. The pod was round, about six meters in diameter, capable of holding two dozen men in an emergency. Wood benches were set against the bulkhead, but most of the occupants would stand or sit on the deck during an emergency ascent. The control station on the starboard side contained a depth gage, currently reading zero meters, and a release circuit tied into explosive bolts below. This was the circuit Novskoyy had ordered disconnected. Vlasenko would try it anyway. He pulled the cover off a switch marked ARM and put the switch in the ARM ENGAGE position. Below it was a lighted green button marked POD RELEASE. He pressed the button. No light came on. No explosive bolts fired. As he had expected. He returned the top switch to the NORMAL position and replaced the cover. Below the circuit was a manual release lever. He tried it, but it too was locked out from below.

One last possibility — the upper escape hatch. The hatch was dogged shut with six heavy metal claws tied into a central ring. Vlasenko reached for the ring, startled by how cold it was, and tried to twist it. It wouldn’t budge. Not surprising, considering that the hatch opened up to the outside, above the ice from the leading edge of the teardrop-shaped sail. When the Kaliningrad’s sail popped through the ice cover to the air outside, the water clinging to the metal surface had apparently frozen solid over the hatch fairing.

Not that it would have done him any good. His underway uniform would have offered slight protection from the cold. He would have died from exposure within minutes in the subzero temperature outside. Finally Vlasenko sat on one of the pod benches. There was no ventilation in the pod, no fresh air, no heat. It was not long before he was shivering, the taste of terrible frustration acid in his mouth.

Novskoyy took his seat in the padded chair in front of the communication console. It was time to type in the message to be transmitted to his fleet. Behind him, in the periscope well, Ivanov looked into the optics of the combat periscope, training it in slow circles, watching the storm above the Kaliningrad. An arctic blizzard had rolled in from the dark featureless thick overcast of the sky. The flakes were as big as bullets. Visibility was shrinking. Below the Kaliningrad, a U.S. Piranha-class nuclear submarine named Devilfish floated to a halt, over 200 meters further below in the blackness of the frigid arctic water. Eight thousand kilometers from the Kaliningrad, 120 nuclear attack submarines awaited Novskoyy’s transmission. The admiral finished typing and went over the message one last time.