“Watch Officer,” Novikov said to Navigator Lukashenko at the far-right console, “take us toward the Novosibirsk, heading zero four five, speed ten knots.”
“He was farther away from the Kilo than we were,” Isakova said, pursing her lips. “Most likely, he did not hear it.”
“Once we establish communications with Novosibirsk, we can report our findings and see if he had a detect. Then we can coordinate the approach to this damned target,” Novikov said, shaking his head. This operation was already getting messy. It would have been better if that pud-thumper Orlov and his incompetent submarine Novosibirsk had stayed behind in Petropavlovsk. Let them play in the Pacific Ocean and leave the Arabian Sea to the professionals.
Navigator Captain Third Rank Misha Dobryvnik yawned as he took the teacup from the tea service brought from the galley. He yawned as he spooned sugar into the cup and looked over from the far port side seat of the command console at the command duty officer, Captain Second Rank Ivan Vlasenko, who was already halfway through his tea.
“First watch starts getting wearing about this hour,” he said to Vlasenko. Vlasenko nodded, not saying anything. When the first officer was tired, Dobryvnik thought, he seemingly lost all the upper functions of his brain, operating on the lizard brain alone. He could walk, breathe, blink and swallow, but otherwise he was somewhere else. Which was fine, Dobryvnik thought, since he himself was senior enough that he could run the central command post watchsection by himself during the tense search for the escaped Kilo submarine.
Dobryvnik checked his pad computer, selecting it to the calendar. It was the wee hours of Tuesday June 7. They’d been given orders to make haste to the west coast of India at mid-day Friday June 3, arriving at Point Marmagao after a maximum-speed run, arriving the morning of June 5, Sunday. Since then, they’d crawled north-northwest at walking speed, barely enough velocity to keep the towed array close to being level, searching for the stolen Kilo submarine and the rumored American escort submarine. Dobryvnik had theorized, during an operational briefing in the wardroom, that there was no American escort submarine, that the Kilo was operating alone.
“Where did the commandos raiding the Kilo come from, then?” Iron Irina Trusov, the weapons officer had asked.
“Madam Weapons Officer,” Dobryvnik replied. “They may have been dropped by a helicopter from a distance with a swimmer delivery vehicle, the vehicle either parachuted with them or dropped there, waiting for them. They could have come in a swimmer delivery vehicle dropped by one of the hundreds of merchant ships in the gulf. There’s a hundred ways to deliver commandos.”
“How would you know?” Trusov had said coldly, tossing a lock of platinum blonde hair off her shoulder.
“My roommate is a senior lieutenant in the Spetsnaz GRU,” Dobryvnik said. “He should keep his mouth shut about what he does for exercises, but his stories of insertion and extraction are epic.”
That was all the opening the communications officer had needed. Captain Lieutenant Mikhail “TK” Sukolov, hearing ‘insertion’ and ‘extraction,’ had made an obscene gesture with his hands simulating copulation.
“Oh shut up, TK. Why don’t you go to the radio room and lock yourself in for a couple of watches?” Dobryvnik had said, smirking. “The point is, we have no confirmation of an American submarine escort ship. There’s zero intelligence that one was present.”
His was definitely the minority opinion. The rest all believed that the only way the Kilo could have been taken was with a front-line American attack submarine. A Virginia-class.
Dobryvnik lazily selected the console to do a rotation through all screens, selecting the hold time on each screen to seven seconds. Long enough he could absorb information, not so long that he’d get bored or distracted, the screen rotation time discovered from long first watches, trying to stay plugged into the tactical situation, more often just trying to stay awake.
They said anything important always happened on the midnight watch, but Dobryvnik didn’t believe it. His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of Chernobyl Chernobrovin, the engineer, who grabbed Dobryvnik by both shoulders and shook him, as if to wake him up.
“Wake up, Watch Officer! Vigilance is our creed!” Chernobrovin said, grinning.
“Who let you forward of frame two-oh-seven?” Dobryvnik asked in jest.
The engineer had freshly showered and had donned fresh coveralls, the straight creases still in them from being pressed at the base’s dry cleaners.
“Special occasion, Chernobyl? For some reason you’re not covered in lube oil and soaked in sweat. Hot date tonight?”
The engineer smiled. He and the navigator had been junior officers on the Pacific Fleet’s Project 971 Shchuka-B submarine K-157 Vepr. Dobryvnik had started as sonar officer, then had become the weapons officer, while Chernobrovin had maintained core engineering duties, starting as the reactor controls officer, then after a year, taking over the mechanical and auxiliary mechanical battle sections. They had requested to take department head tours on the same submarine, and getting assigned to a freshly commissioned Yasen-M submarine was like a lottery win. They’d contemplated renting an apartment and being roommates, but Chernobrovin maintained that they saw enough of each other as it was, and Dobryvnik would cramp his bachelor lifestyle. Dobryvnik had snorted at that, as if Chernobrovin had been with a woman alone in all the years he’d known him, since graduation from the Marshal Grechko School of Underwater Navigation.
“The special occasion is this, that this is the watch when something happens, I can feel it in my bones, my navigator friend — which, by the way, as the ship’s navigator, do you have the slightest idea where we are?”
Dobryvnik smiled and vaulted out of his seat at command console three and stepped to the portside navigation chart table. The chart showed the upper Arabian Sea, the coastline of India forming the east side, the far distant Arabian peninsula on the west side, the top of the triangle formed by the coastline of Pakistan to the northeast and Iran to the northwest.
“We’re here,” Dobryvnik stabbed his finger at the pulsing blue dot off the Indian town of Veraval, perhaps 180 kilometers northwest of Mumbai, a dark blue line extending behind it, marking the history of their recent motion.
“Yeah? So where’s the Northern Fleet sub, Voronezh?”
“Wow, you do pay attention to tactical briefings, don’t you? I didn’t think you could get your head out of the crankcase of the emergency diesel long enough.”
“Hey, it takes real intelligence to comprehend both engineering and tactics,” Chernobrovin said. “Anybody can navigate. Hell, my grandmother can navigate better than you, and she’s been dead for two years.”
“Fuck you, Chernobyl,” Dobryvnik said, smiling.
“The hell is wrong with you guys?” Vlasenko said in irritation from command console position one. “Why don’t you two get a room?”
“Oh, the first officer awakens,” Chernobrovin said.
“Listen, Engineer,” Vlasenko said, his blood rising.
“Mr. First! Mr. Navigator! We have a sonar pulse!” Senior Lieutenant Arisha Vasilev yelled from the port forward sonar-and-sensor console. Vasilev was the new sonar officer, arriving just before Novosibirsk sailed from Petropavlovsk. Dobryvnik and Chernobrovin had shared private comments about her, that with her long, gleaming black hair, perfect petite ballerina body and pretty face, she was much too hot to be a submarine officer, and would do better to be the wife of a submarine officer, and then they’d argued for hours about which officer she should become the wife of.