Voyage of the Devilfish

CHAPTER 2

The Severomorsk Naval Complex near Murmansk on the Russian northern coast was the size of a city. Within its barbed wire fence and concrete barriers were two sprawling shipyards, repair yards, submarine and surface-ship operating bases, a weapons depot and the many buildings of Northern Reel headquarters. It was drab and massive. Shipyard workers crowded the walkways. Sailors and naval officers were almost as numerous. In the submarine building yards a half-dozen gigantic buildingways and drydocks were centers of frantic activity, three shifts a day, seven days a week. The largest construction drydock, Building Dock 4, was over 500 meters long and 20 meters deep. A six-story building could have been built in Dock 4 without rising above the rim. The dock was pumped dry of the brackish channel water. Nestled in the dock was a submarine, the first ship of the Project 985 class of attack vessels. Outside the security building for the dock two men met and shook hands. The first was a barrel-chested man in a long greatcoat, the red epaulettes on his shoulders showing four gold stars. His head was covered by a fur cap also displaying four stars. The second was bundled in a long overcoat with a suit and tie showing at the collar of the coat. The shipyard workers avoided him.

“Colonel Dretzski,” the man with the stars said.

“Admiral Novskoyy,” said Dretzski. Ivan Dretzski was assigned to the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, headquartered at Yasenevo. His specialty was nuclear weapon intelligence. Novskoyy motioned Dretzski into the security building and pointed to a row of white visitor’s hardhats. The sentry handed Novskoyy a special gleaming red hard hat. The hat had the emblem of the Northern Fleet on the front and words in block letters above and below the emblem: ADMIRAL A. NOVSKOYY, SUPREME COMMANDER, RED BANNER NORTHERN FLEET. Novskoyy looked at the hardhat and turned to Dretzski.

“This is why we can’t build a quality submarine within budget. Colonel. We spend too many rubles making hardhats.” Novskoyy tossed it back to the sentry. “Hand me one of the visitor’s hats,” he said, taking off his fur cap and putting on an old scratched hardhat. Novskoyy then motioned Dretzski out a door in the far wall of the security building to a deck overlooking the drydock. Below the men the vast submarine stretched to the vanishing point in each direction. Dretzski heard his own whistle.

“Yolki palki, admiral. Enormous!”

Novskoyy nodded. “Two hundred meters long, sixty thousand tons of submarine. Colonel. Six times bigger than the Los Angeles-class sub. Its reactors produce over three thousand megawatts of power, enough to light the lights of Moscow. Project 985. My design. Beautiful. Enough weaponry to sink a fleet and enough cruise missiles to wipe out a continent. This ship is the Kaliningrad. The Americans call it the Omega. The last letter of the Greek alphabet. The end-all, the ultimate.”

For a moment the two men watched a huge crane below move a periscope into position for lowering into the teardrop-shaped conning tower. The black hull was oval in cross-section, making it seem fat. The tail section had a teardrop-shaped pod mounted horizontally on the vertical tail fin. The screw was shrouded in a cylindrical cover. Up forward two hatches were open and men and supplies were passing in and out from the gangway to the drydock rim.

“The ship is ready to be floated out of the dock, but first I want to show it to you from below.”

Colonel Dretzski followed Novskoyy downstairs to the drydock floor. Novskoyy walked under the keel of the ship.

When they were underneath it, a waiting shipyard worker walked up with a ladder. Novskoyy had the ladder erected at an open passage through the skin of the submarine above and climbed the ladder and disappeared into the hole, calling down to Dretzski to follow. Dretzski grimaced and climbed the ladder into the black hole above. He found himself standing inside the hull in a black space. A flashlight clicked on. In its wandering beam he saw Novskoyy a few meters away. He was in some sort of tank. The top surface, the ceiling, was three meters above his head.

“Amazing, isn’t it, Ivan Ivanovich?”

“Admiral, what is this?”

“This is a ballast tank. The Kaliningrad is a doublehulled submarine, a ship within a ship. Look up there.” And Novskoyy shined the light upward. A man could stand on top of another man’s shoulders in the tank and still not hit his head on the ceiling. “That is the pressure hull. We are standing inside the steel outer hull. This doughnut-shaped space between the inner and outer hull is filled with water when the ship is submerged. An enemy torpedo would have to penetrate five meters of water to get to the inner hull. The water is a sort of armor. The inner hull is a titanium alloy, the strongest submarine hull in the world. This ship is practically invulnerable to all but a direct hit from a nuclear warhead.”

Dretzski was impressed. “Now, Alexi, you did have some reason to bring me here other than to show me a ballast tank.”

Novskoyy motioned Dretzski down the ladder. Once they were back on the floor of the drydock, the shipyard worker bolted a louvered grill over the hole in the hull and the two men climbed out of the deep dock back up to the deck by the security hut. At the end of the drydock an officer motioned for the pump house to open the flood valves. Water jetted out into the dock from eight huge holes in the dock walls. Instantly the floor of the dock was filled with water, which then rose at a meter every minute. For a time they watched the ship in the flooding dock as the water began to lap at the keel. In a few minutes the water began to climb up the hull of the vessel.

Dretzski began: “It’s worse than we thought. Admiral, much worse. The Americans’ nuclear-tipped land-attack cruise missiles, the Javelins, are still loaded aboard their attack submarines. Peace dividend is rhetoric. We’re guessing they have about two hundred fifty of them.”

Novskoyy’s eyes narrowed, staring down at the dock and the mammoth ship. “Yes, exactly. While our weapons are waiting to be destroyed in front of a U.N. team. The latest negotiating round featured another reckless offer to eliminate sea-launched cruise missiles, all in storage in the Severomorsk arms depot. The Americans’ cruise missiles remain deployed on their nuclear submarines. Submarines that can sneak right up to the northern coast and launch dozens of their missiles at treetop level, ready to detonate on target… Did you hear about the latest Javelin test?” Novskoyy asked.

Dretzski nodded. “Yes, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine launched a cruise missile from a point in the Atlantic about 300 kilometers east of Jacksonville, Florida. The missile went completely undetected by civilian and military radars. It flew over Florida’s panhandle, through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and into Texas. A hundred kilometers over the Texas state line it flew to its target, a village constructed for such tests at the Lone Star Naval Weapons Station. The target was a three-story building behind a five-story office building in the center of a 40-block downtown. The missile not only hit the target building, it hit the target window in the target floor…”

As they spoke, the two men watched the dock continue to flood so as to launch the Kaliningrad.

“Our leaders are making peace,” Dretzski said heavily.

“People don’t seem to be worrying—”

“In the United States, presidents come and go,” Novskoyy said quickly. “Not long ago they elected a tired old actor who joked about dropping bombs on our people. The one after him loved his wars… They still put billions into Star Wars. They are building the Seawolf-class submarines as we speak. They still have Stealth bombers and fighters. Phased array radar-defense networks. Don’t forget America is the one that dropped two atomic bombs on civilians just fifty years ago. Why must we always make the good-faith gesture?”

“Admiral, we agree on all that,” Dretzski said, “it is what brought us together in the first place. Do you have some plan to change this situation?”

Novskoyy nodded, seemingly to himself, and stared into the distance of the channel.

“I do. Some may consider it extreme, but I am convinced it is necessary for our survival. We must get rid of the threat of their terrible destabilizing missiles…” Dretzski began to look uneasy, although he was the one who had originally briefed Novskoyy on the American advantage when no one in the Kremlin or Russian Republic would take action. In fact, he had been recently passed over for promotion in the KGB, being labeled an antiquated Cold War holdover.

“I have one hundred twenty attack submarines prepared to go to sea. Each has been loaded with one SSN-X-27 nuclear-warhead-carrying cruise missile, which I managed to acquire from the arms depot. They will take station off the eastern coast of the U.S. and target every port with submarines that have the missiles aboard. When we inform both our government and theirs, there will be no missiles left. The threat will be gone.”

“It sounds very risky.”

“No. Under the threat of our missiles, poised to deliver, we will restore the balance we once had. The nai’vete of our present leaders that somehow the U.S. has gone pacifist, that its military-industrial complex has actually given up and not made contingency plans to retain destructive weapons secretly is nothing but wishful thinking. What did one of their philosophers say? Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. It is to their advantage, my friend, to see us completely disarmed while they, as you yourself have said, maintain capabilities to destroy us.”

Novskoyy looked closely at Dretzski to see if his lecture was sinking in — and being believed. More than once he had asked himself if he thought his plan would work without needing to fire a shot, and had tried to convince himself that it would. But if not, well, he would deal with that contingency when and if it happened. He was a man who had already destroyed an American submarine for what he believed in. He remembered, he had never forgotten, the incident over twenty years ago under the icecap when he had commanded the Leningrad. If necessary…

Dretzski felt it necessary at least to play devil’s advocate.

“Admiral, remember Contingency 12, the one we got from the spy Walker. If an American submarine commander comes to periscope depth and is convinced that his nation is the victim of a surprise attack — ongoing or potential — he is authorized to use his missiles. What about their forty submarine captains at sea—”

“We monitor their deployments with our trawlers and satellites. And there are not forty at sea at any one time.”

The water in the drydock was now three-quarters of the way up the sides of the Kaliningrad, and a loudspeaker crackled across the dock: “LIFTOFF FROM THE BLOCKS. THE UNIT IS WATERBORNE.” Novskoyy gripped the handrail tightly and smiled.

“Colonel, I am beginning to worry about you. Let me remind you that nuclear weapons are your responsibility. If it ever comes out that I was able to take these weapons without your knowledge, it will not be to your advantage, to say the least. If you decide to do anything so rash as to report prematurely what I have told you, I promise you, you will regret it.”

Dretzski knew the admiral was right. He was caught up in this, willingly or not. “But what if word gets out. Admiral, that the submarine fleet has departed?”

“Colonel, you know the answer to that. It is just another deployment exercise.”

“But won’t the authorities get suspicious if you don’t return in a week, at least? And it will take that long, will it not, to get your boats into position…”

“Yes, they may get suspicious. Colonel. And that is where you fit into the plan. You may not be the most popular man in the government, but it should not be too difficult for you to convince them that all is normal, routine. They will not suspect you of further endangering yourself. And in any case, once they realize, if they do, what I am doing, it will be too late. We will have the U.S. ports under siege, with the threat of destruction. What can they do in Moscow or anywhere else?”

“Still, sir, suppose Washington learns from Moscow of your deployment? Learns its real purpose. The American submarines could be waiting for you.”

“Again your job, Colonel. Your plant in the American military. Fishhook, better known as General Herman Tyler, I believe, will insist that this is an exercise, and that this is no time to show distrust of the Russians, who have been so cooperative…”

“Fishhook? But, Admiral, that would put him in danger of blowing his cover. The KGB placed him in the U.S. Air Force nearly thirty-five years ago. It seems he is a brilliant officer but a mediocre agent… stubborn and argumentative. At SAC headquarters he never produced the target list he had been put in place to provide. Eventually we even considered removing him, but decided, flawed as he was, to keep him on as a contingency. It had been a mistake, I believe. He became a general, and then incredibly was named as the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and a year later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. An overwhelming and unexpected intelligence victory, you might say. But not so. If word ever leaked out that the Americans had a Russian penetration agent so high in their government they would clean house like never before, become once again paranoid as they were in the Fifties. We’ve pretty much left Fishhook alone ever since he became a general officer.”

“Nonetheless, Colonel, given his high station, he should easily convince his leaders that this deployment is an exercise. Remember, the Americans themselves conducted an exercise such as this will seem in 1984. And remember that first we thought it was a preemptive strike and then realized it was a drill. They will react the same way now.”

Dretzski did not like it but realized there was little more he could say in opposition, except to ask the admiral how he planned to give instructions to his fleet once deployed. The answer, as he suspected, was that the molniya, the “gocode,” would be issued by the admiral from the Kaliningrad.

Below them, the massive caisson door at the seaward end of the drydock was being pulled open by a tugboat now that the level of water in the dock matched the level in the channel. Soon the giant ship would be able to be towed out of the dock to a waiting pier.

“That is how we avoid detection,” the admiral went on. “I will take this ship north to the polar icecap while my fleet heads to the Atlantic. There I will be invisible, hiding a quiet submarine among the noise of the shifting and creaking ice. I will remain undisturbed and untouchable. The Kaliningrad is a fortress flagship. When it is time, I will surface through the ice and transmit my messages to Washington and Moscow. And, if it becomes necessary, I will send the molniya.”

Tugboats now began to pull the Kaliningrad out of the dock.

Novskoyy held out his hand to Dretzski, who ignored it.

“I don’t like this. Admiral. It is terribly risky—”

Novskoyy dropped his hand and nodded gravely.

“Of course, you are right, Ivan Ivanovich. But it is all that has been left to us. Come, I will walk you to your car.”

As Dretzski followed Novskoyy to the security building, he took one last look at the gigantic Kaliningrad being towed out of the dock to the deep water channel beyond. At that moment he hated the ship, and the man who would command her. And what of himself, of Colonel Ivan Ivanovich Dretzski? How did he feel about him…?