“We have everyone?” Alexeyev asked Lebedev.
“Yes, Captain. We’re ready.”
Alexeyev got right to the point. “I’m projecting my screen,” he said, flashing up the message he’d received from Northern Fleet headquarters. He allowed a moment for the officers to scan and reread the message.
“So,” Alexeyev said, his voice low-pitched and slow. “Here’s what we know. Both submarines Voronezh and Novosibirsk were destroyed by an American nuclear strike.” He looked at the gathered officers, who were all staring at the message, as shocked as he’d been when he first went through the intelligence digest and op-order update, all of them thinking the same thing — who did they know from the crews of the downed submarines? “The American boat escorting the Panther out of the Arabian Sea found out the positions of Voronezh and Novosibirsk from detecting them at periscope depth, then fired two cruise missile-mounted nuclear depth charges at a target location probability circle. And apparently, they got lucky and hit both submarines. How did the Americans find out our positions? The GRU reports that American agents have managed to install transmitters on all our periscopes that tattletale our locations to their satellites every time we are on the surface or at periscope depth. For that reason, assuming the American agents somehow got a transponder installed on this ship, we have made our last excursion to periscope depth, until the mission concludes.”
Navigator Maksimov spoke first. “Captain, the bottom contours here are poor for use for navigation. Without the navigation satellite, our position error will grow. The fix error circle could be fifty kilometers in diameter in two days. In a week, we’ll barely know what ocean we’re in.”
“I know,” Alexeyev said. “So be it. Better to be guessing at our navigation than give away our position to the Americans. For that reason, I’ve ordered us to withdraw from the Cape Town barrier search point and move the center of the search to a position farther northwest of where we initially set up. It’s less optimal for catching the Panther, but it is outside of the nuclear weapon blast circle damage radius from where we were at the last periscope depth.”
Engineer Alesya Matveev spoke up. “Captain, we have housekeeping to do at periscope depth. In four days, I’m going to need to blow down our steam generators or else the level controls will go so crazy that we’ll trip the reactor. And we have to be shallow to blow down the boilers, sir, or the pressure of the deep won’t allow flow.”
“And we need to eject trash,” Supply Officer Vladik Yakovlev said. “Otherwise we’ll be up to our eyeballs in trash, and the boat will start to stink.”
Alexeyev waved at the objections. “We can still come shallow to eject trash or blowdown the steam generators, we’ll just do it without putting up the periscope.”
“Captain, that’s dangerous,” Maksimov said. “We risk collision. The shipping lanes here are busy, sir, and they’re directly overhead.” She glanced up at the overhead as she said it.
“Can’t be helped, Navigator,” Alexeyev said. “It’s just another risk we take when we go into a combat situation.” Alexeyev continued. “Also of note, more bad news, is that our recovery from the Medved’ Grizli worm has been problematic. The air assets of the Northern and Pacific Fleets are still grounded, and the surface vessels remain down hard. The destroyer fleet can’t even start their engines. Even their interior communication telephones won’t work. Somehow our submarines managed to escape the effects of the worm, but the air fleet grounding means no MPA aircraft will arrive to help us search for the target submarines. In attempting to recover from the cyberattack, we lost two Il-114s in the Pacific fleet and one from the Northern Fleet. So we are to expect no help from antisubmarine aircraft.”
Weapons Officer Katerina Sobol put out her hand to be recognized. “Go ahead, Sobol,” Lebedev said.
“Captain, that is going to make detecting these submarines nearly impossible,” Sobol said in her high-pitched cartoon character voice. “This barrier search at the Cape of Good Hope, it’s not much of a so-called choke point. There’s thousands of miles from the South Africa coast to the shores of Antarctica. The target submarines could be going through any of that.”
“Weps is right, Captain,” Maksimov said. “From Cape Town to the Antarctic coast is over four thousand kilometers. Perfect for hiding the transit of two submarines, one of them a diesel boat running on batteries, the other a front-line nuclear attack submarine.”
Alexeyev took a deep breath, which Lebedev knew meant he had the same doubts, but needed to put a presentable face on the bad news. “Navigator, let us not forget what we know. The Panther may be a diesel submarine, and perhaps he is running on his batteries with a rig for silent running, but somehow I doubt it. I believe he is blasting through the sea using his nuclear reactor, and that he will be loud. We will detect him from his reactor noises. The nuclear plant of the Panther is not built for stealth, just raw power. He’s fast now, I’ll give him that, but he’s loud enough to be heard out to a hundred kilometers, maybe even three times that.”
“But sir,” Maksimov continued, “why do you think he’s going maximum speed using his reactor? Wouldn’t he want to be dead quiet when transiting the Cape of Good Hope? Afraid we might be lying in wait? Particularly if the Americans got our position from our last periscope depth excursion?”
“I’ll tell you why, Madam Navigator,” Alexeyev said, his voice flat, level and dead. He turned off the projector and walked up to the projection screen, which doubled as a whiteboard, grabbing a dry-erase marker from the credenza top drawer. He wrote PANTHER and under it a date—3 JUNE. Under that, another date, today’s date, 3 JULY. Then a vertical arrow connecting the dates together and beside that, the notation, 30 DAYS. He wrote next to that, KAZAN and beneath that, the dates 4 JUNE and 3 JULY, annotating an arrow between them as 29 DAYS. He looked at the supply officer. “Since Panther was taken, they’ve been at sea for thirty days. Kazan emergency sortied the day after the Americans took Panther, so we’ve been unsupported and deployed for twenty-nine days. Mr. Supply Officer, when did you do your last supply inventory?”
“Yesterday afternoon’s watch, Captain,” Yakovlev said.
“And at normal rations, how many days do we have left?”
“With the present rate of consumption, Captain, we have twenty-one days left of food. Three weeks. At the twenty day to-go point, we’d discussed cutting rations in half to stretch us to forty days.”
“Navigator, if we left tomorrow morning for home, how long to get there, assuming a speed of advance at maximum with intermittent shallow and slow excursions for housekeeping, say thirty-four knots?”