Jack let out a long exhalation and sat back against the walkway. “So what do we do now?”
“It’s direct current, so the charge flow will be one way. If I cut the negative, there’ll be a surge and we’re gone. If I cut the positive, everything should go dead and we’ll be safe.”
“Which is which?”
Costas rolled his head to the right and looked ruefully through the narrow space at Jack. “Our friend might still have the last laugh. With such low amperage there’s no way of telling.”
Jack lay back on the walkway and closed his eyes. After a moment Costas spoke again.
“To ignite a bomb with an electrical surge, the flashpoint needs to be in direct contact with the explosive materials in the detonator or main charge. They would need to have opened up the warhead to introduce the outflow wire. There’s more room to manoeuvre on Katya’s side so I suggest that’s where it’s attached. That would make the wire to my left the positive one.”
Costas turned towards Katya and pushed as far as he could against the torpedo, extending his left arm under the rack until he touched the wire that emerged from the warhead. He dropped his hand to the deck and began scrabbling around in the encrustation.
“I can feel wire.”
Katya uncovered more and pulled it taut as far back as the weapons loading chute. She hurried over and peered up the ladder before returning.
“It goes back to the switch,” she announced.
“Right. I’m convinced.” Costas withdrew his arm and reached into his belt for a compact multi-tool, pulling it open to form a pair of high-precision wire-cutters. The rubber in his E-suit glove would provide insulation against electric shock, though if that happened he would not live long enough to care.
He tilted his head back towards Jack.
“You’re with me on this one?”
“I’m with you.”
Costas resumed his position of a moment before, his left hand now holding the cutters directly beneath the wire where it hung in a shallow arc from the plughole in the warhead housing.
For a few seconds he lay motionless. The only sound was the steady drip of condensation and the shallow rasp of breathing from their respirators. Katya and Jack stared at each other beneath the torpedo rack.
Costas was sweating behind his mask and snapped it open with his right hand for a clearer view. He pulled off his glove between his knees and wiped his brow before staring determinedly at the wire.
Katya shut her eyes tight in the split second it took Costas to lock the cutter’s blades on the wire. He squeezed hard and there was a loud snap.
Then silence.
All three of them held their breath for what seemed an eternity. Then Costas let out a long sigh and slumped on the deck. After a pause he holstered his multi-tool and reconnected his visor and respirator. He tilted his head towards Jack with a twinkle in his eye.
“See? No problem.”
Jack had the thousand-yard stare of a man who had looked death in the face once too often. He shifted his gaze to Costas and managed a half-smile.
“No problem.”
CHAPTER 15
At the entrance to the Weapons Bay Costas extracted another gadget from his belt, a yellow box the size of a cellphone. He flipped open the lid to reveal a small LCD screen which glowed dull green.
“Global positioning system,” he announced. “This should do the trick.”
“How can it work here?” Katya asked.
A series of figures flashed on the screen.
“That box is our speciality, a combined underwater acoustic GPS receiver and navigation computer,” Jack said. “Inside the sub we can’t send out acoustic waves so we have no access to GPS. Instead we downloaded the specs for this class of sub from the IMU database and mated it with a series of GPS fixes we took via surface buoys outside the submarine on our Aquapod recce this morning. The computer should allow us to navigate inside as if we were using GPS.”
“Got it,” Costas announced. “In the Aquapod I took a fix where the stairway disappeared under the submarine. It’s on the port side of the torpedo room. Bearing two hundred and forty-one degrees from our present position, seven point six metres ahead and two metres down. That puts us beyond the weapons racks just ahead of the port-side ballast tank.”
As Costas began to look for a way through the crowded racks, Katya reached out and held his arm.
“Before we go there’s something you should see.”
She pointed towards the central aisle in the weapons bay just beyond the spot where they had lain in mortal fear only minutes before.
“That aisle should be unobstructed to allow the gantry to sling the weapons off the racks and ferry them to the tubes. But it’s blocked.”
It should have been glaringly obvious, but they had been so focused on the booby trap they had failed to take in the rest of the room.
“It’s a pair of stacked crates.” Costas eased himself into the narrow space on the left-hand side between the crates and the weapons racks, his head just protruding over the uppermost box.
“There are two more behind. And another two beyond that.” Costas’ voice was muffled as he slid further along. “Six altogether, each about four metres long by one and a half metres across. They must have been hoisted down the chute and jigged into place using the torpedo harness.”
“Are they weapons crates?” Jack asked.
Costas re-emerged and shook off the white precipitate clinging to him. “They’re too short for a torpedo or missile and too wide to be tube-launched. We’d need to open one up, but we don’t have the equipment or the time.”
“There are some markings.” Katya was squatting down in front of the lower crate and rubbing vigorously at the encrustation. It fell away to reveal a metallic surface with impressed figures in two separate clusters. “Soviet Defence Ministry encodings.” She pointed at the uppermost group of symbols. “These are weapons all right.”
Her hand moved to the other group which she inspected more closely.
“Electro…” She faltered. “Electrochimpribor.”
They were beginning to think the unthinkable.
“Combine Electrochimpribor,” Katya said quietly. “Otherwise known as Plant 418, the main Soviet thermonuclear weapons assembly site.”
Costas slumped heavily against the torpedo rack. “Holy Mother of God. These are nukes. Each of these crates is just about the right size for an SLBM warhead.”
“Type SS-N-20 Sturgeon, to be precise.” Katya stood up and faced the two men. “Each one is five times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. There are six crates, ten warheads in each.” She paused and stared at the crates. “The authorities went to elaborate lengths to keep the loss of this submarine a secret. Afterwards there were a number of perplexing disappearances, especially from Kazbek’s home port of Sevastopol. I now believe they were victims of an old-fashioned Stalinist purge. The executions went unnoticed in the momentous events of that year.”
“Are you suggesting these nukes were stolen?” Costas asked incredulously.