“The Soviet military was deeply disillusioned after the Afghan war in the 1980s. The navy had begun to disintegrate with ships laid up and crews idle. Pay was dismal or non-existent. More intelligence was sold to the West during the final few years of the Soviet Union than during the height of the Cold War.”
“How does Antonov fit in?” Costas asked.
“He was a man who could be harnessed to good effect but was dangerous when the reins were loosened. He hated glasnost and perestroika and came to despise the regime for its collusion with the West. This looks like his ultimate act of defiance.”
“If the regime could no longer hit at the West, then he could,” Costas murmured.
“And his crew would follow him anywhere, especially with the lure of prize money.”
“Where would he be taking these?”
“Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The Taliban in Afghanistan. Hezbollah in Syria. The North Koreans. This was 1991, remember.”
“There must have been a middleman,” Jack said.
“The vultures were already circling, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Katya replied bleakly.
“I underestimated our friend the political officer,” Costas said quietly. “He may have been a fanatic, but he may also have saved humanity from its worst catastrophe.”
“It’s not over yet.” Jack straightened. “Somewhere out there is a dissatisfied customer, someone who has been watching and waiting over the years. And his potential clients now are far worse than ever before; they’re terrorists driven only by hate.”
The blue glow from the submarine’s emergency lighting barely penetrated the gloom at the forward end of the torpedo room. Costas switched his headlamp to full beam before leading the way through the maze of weapons racks towards the co-ordinates indicated by his transceiver. Jack and Katya followed close behind, their survival suits taking on an increasingly spectral hue as they brushed against the white encrustation which clung to every surface of the submarine’s interior. After squeezing through a final passage they crouched in single file on a narrow walkway flush with the hull casing.
Costas braced himself with his back against the casing. He hooked his fingers through one of the metre-long floor grates.
“Here goes.”
He rocked forward and heaved with all his strength. Seconds later the grate relented with a metallic shriek and a shower of precipitate. Jack crawled forward to help shift it aside, leaving Costas space to swing his legs over and peer into the darkness below. He lowered himself until only his helmet was visible below the walkway.
“I’m on the floor above the bilges,” he announced. “This is as far down as you can go without wading in toxic soup.” He took the GPS unit from his pocket.
Jack stepped over the hole to let Katya move up to the edge. All three headlamps now shone at the flickering green display.
“Bingo.” Costas looked up from the screen and stared at the casing less than an arm’s length away. “I’m five metres above the point where the steps disappeared under the submarine. We’re bang on target.”
“How does the casing look?” Jack asked.
“We’re in luck. For most of its length Kazbek has a double skin, an inner pressure casing and an outer hydrodynamic hull separated by twenty centimetres of rubber. It provides better acoustic insulation and space for a ballast tank. But just before the nose cone it reverts to single thickness to allow more internal space as the casing tapers.”
Katya leaned forward. “There’s something I don’t fully understand.”
“Fire away.”
“Between us and that rock face lies a twenty-centimetre-thick wall of metal. How do we get through?”
Costas craned his neck up to look at Katya. He had left his visor open since defusing the warheads and the mixture of sweat-streaked grime and white precipitate looked like some bizarre war paint.
“Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.”
Katya paused. “Laser?”
“You got it.”
At that moment there was a metallic clatter behind them. Before leaving the weapons bay Costas had radioed Ben and Andy in the DSRV with instructions on how to reach the torpedo room. The two men had taken the perimeter walkway and now appeared fully kitted up in E-suits and festooned with gearbags.
“We’ll need a bigger opening,” Costas said to the men. “Then come down and join me.”
Jack and Katya prised out two more grates so the men could lower themselves to the bilge floor. As soon as they had settled in the confined space, they unzipped the bags and began assembling the apparatus inside.
Costas chalked a circle about a metre in diameter on the hull casing, using a tape measure as a crude compass. He moved aside as the two crewmen lifted the apparatus into place. It looked like a scaled-down lunar module, a cluster of articulated legs extending from a polyhedral central unit the size of a desktop PC. Ben held the unit in front of the GPS fix while Andy positioned the legs round the chalked circle. After a quick inspection he flipped a switch and the suction pads sealed against the hull. At the same time a cluster of rods sprang through each joint to lock the apparatus into one unyielding mass.
Ben extended a telescopic tube from both sides of the unit, one end to the centre of the chalked circle and the other to the dark recess below the metal grating of the floor. To the left of the unit was an open-topped three-sided box about half a metre across. Above the tube was a sighting device and below it a handle and trigger.
After a quick check Ben plugged in a cable they had trailed from the DSRV. The LCD screen behind the unit came to life and booted through a series of readouts before settling on a blank display peppered with program icons.
“Good work, guys,” Costas said. “Now let’s get this baby into action.”
He tapped in a series of commands, his eyes darting between keyboard and screen. After the program finalized, he leaned forward and pressed his right eye against the viewfinder, making small adjustments to the tube alignment using a pair of joysticks on either side.
Less than five minutes after the power had been connected he rocked back and looked up at Jack.
“We’re ready.”
“Fire away.”
Costas grasped the handle with the trigger. As he pulled it a cathode-ray tube above the keyboard began to flash amber.
“T minus sixty seconds.”
The light transformed to continuous green.
“Good to go,” Costas announced.
“Time frame?” Jack demanded.
“Two minutes. We could slice through the casing like butter but the drain on the DSRV’s batteries would be intolerable. Even what we’re doing will stretch our safety margins if we’re planning to use the DSRV to return to Seaquest.” Costas looked up at Katya, his face a picture of suppressed excitement.
“What you’re looking at is a far-infrared sealed gas semiconductor laser,” he explained. “Hook this baby up to the DSRV’s two seven hundred amp silver-zinc batteries and you have a ten kilowatt ten point six micron beam. That’s enough to give the Klingons pause for thought.”
Jack grunted impatiently as Costas checked the timer and flicked a switch on the keyboard.
“The viewfinder is a positioning device which allows us to fire the beam perpendicular to the fix on the hull,” he continued. “The laser is currently burning a hole in the casing one centimetre in diameter. I’ve just fired in a one-way valve which allows us to extrude material while keeping seawater out.”
“In theory,” Jack retorted.
“Nothing wrong with a cold shower.”
The module began emitting a low warning sound. Costas resumed his position behind the screen and began running a series of diagnostics. After a pause he placed his right hand round the handle.