“Did the engineering directorate have recommendations to harden the equipment in the room?” Matveev asked.
Alexeyev looked at her and shook his head. “No. As usual, the engineering directorate can only point out flaws, not fixes. I mention it in passing, Engineer. Be ready in case we take a close-aboard torpedo detonation. The torpedo might not kill us, but auxiliary machinery room number two might. We’ll need to brief all watchsections and have them ready to shut down ventilation and flood machinery two in the event of trouble. And if we’re heading into a shooting situation, we’ll need to cut the oxygen feed and shut down and purge out the oxygen generators. And to be safe, cut off the carbon dioxide scrubbers and shut down the monoxide burners.”
Matveev shook her head. “We’d better hope any weapon exchange happens fast, Captain, because with no oxygen bleed or generation and no carbon dioxide removal, we’ll all be suffocating slowly.”
Alexeyev nodded. “The choice, Madam Engineer, seems to be between dying slowly or going out in a blaze of glory, a literal one, because we’ll be on fire. I think my choice is I’ll suffer the breathing discomfort until our weapons have done their duty.”
Matveev nodded. “Understood, Captain. Meanwhile, I will take a tour of the room and see if there is anything we can do to harden it against attack. But, we’ve been saying for years that the design is defective.”
Alexeyev waved his hand. “I know. Do what you can, Alesya. If we take a hit from a torpedo, I’d rather it be the hull breach that kills us, not our own atmo-control equipment.”
“Yes, sir,” Matveev said. “By your leave, sir.”
“Dismissed,” Alexeyev said.
Ten seconds later, Georgy Alexeyev was alone in his sea cabin. And alone in his life. Natalia’s last email, downloaded in their late morning periscope depth excursion, confirmed that there was another man, a new man, and she confessed she was interested in sexually, and would Alexeyev kindly and gracefully agree to the idea of her having sex with another man in his apartment, in his bed? Because Alexeyev had essentially abandoned her, sneaking out to sea in the middle of the night with no good-bye, no idea when he’d be back, on an operation so shrouded in secrecy the entire base had no idea they’d deployed. And besides which, he hadn’t emailed her in almost three weeks, and his silence had distressed her.
Natalia could not tolerate abandonment, not since her father had put a pistol barrel in his mouth and departed life when Natalia was only eight, the word of his suicide taking two years to reach Natalia’s mother and eventually Natalia herself. Why, Alexeyev wondered, did she bother with ship captains? They disappeared for weeks, months on end. It was by definition the nature of their jobs.
And there was no doubt that Alexeyev had been deeply and desperately in love with Natalia, until his venereal disease diagnosis, and made worse now by her blatant betrayal, all this so unexpected and so fatal to his spirit. The last message from Natalia hammered the last nail in the coffin of the relationship, as suddenly as Natalia’s father’s bullet had ended him.
The crime of the situation is that she could have just sat him down, one adult to another, and told him she was unhappy in the relationship and that she was leaving him. He would have politely let her go and wished her Godspeed. But instead, she had exploited her intimate knowledge of him to know exactly what his vulnerabilities were, where his insecurities were seated, the exact placement of a kill switch that would cause his great love for her to self-destruct. When he thought about it, it was a cowardly act. And the more he thought about it, the more rage he felt.
Alexeyev had written her back, the email leaving the ship before the edict to stop coming to periscope depth. His message had read, Natalia, you are a whore and a degenerate slut. You and your cheating ways have led to me having a venereal disease and perhaps herpes in my eye. I strongly advise you to get your things and move out. If I find out that you brought another man into my apartment and into my bed, I swear by my mother’s hallowed grave that I will find you and I will drain the lifeblood out of you with a thirty-centimeter rusty knife that I will use to cut your carotid arteries.
Now that the message was sent, Natalia was no longer one of the centers of his life, the other being his beloved Kazan. But everywhere he went, he was damned by flashing memories of Natalia, even here in his sea cabin, as he remembered the Saturday last summer when he’d first taken her on a tour of the boat and shown her his sea cabin. With a mischievous smile, Natalia had double-locked both doors and pulled her shirt off and started to kiss him, and before he could respond she was naked and spread out on his conference table, and he’d taken her, gently at first, and then with the energy of a rocket booster, until they’d both collapsed drenched in sweat. Then came the knock on the door, the Inport Duty Officer Pavlovsky’s voice on the other side of the door, Sir, are you okay? We heard noises. He could still see Natalia, naked and gorgeous, covering her mouth to suppress her musical laugh.
Natalia, he thought. How had his life brought him to this? He tried to concentrate on the mission, hoping it would take his mind out of this swirling emotional cesspool, but somehow this mission, this fool’s errand to find an invisible and silent needle in a vast haystack, was not enough of a distraction. He wondered if there were any alcohol onboard. If they were back in port, he would have called up his closest friend, Sergei Kovalov, captain of the K-564 Arkhangelsk, and together they’d find the answers to life’s questions at the bottom of a bottle of Ruskova vodka. That, of course, assumed that Natalia wasn’t in Kovalov’s life by that time.
AOIC Anthony Pacino had the morning watch in the central command post. He’d brought the Cape of Good Hope chart to central command and taped it to the horizontal section of the pos one console, frequently updating it from the inertial navigation repeater. His impatience to get north into the North Atlantic made their slow crawl miserable. Every time he went to update the chart, their position was right on top of the one from the last update. This was just intolerably slow.
The phone buzzed and he answered it at pos one. “Central command, Pacino,” he said.
“It’s Varney and Ahmadi in the first compartment. Weapons in tubes one and two have been powered up for almost an hour. Request to spin up the UGST weapons in tubes three and four and open their outer doors and shut the doors to one and two and depressurize and shut down one and two.”
“Wait one. I’ll call you back.” He clicked off and dialed up the sonar room.
“Sonar, Albanese.”
“You got anything? Varney wants to rotate tubes and shut and open doors.” The operation was loud, Pacino thought.
“Yeah, I’ve got about sixty merchant ships overhead in the exit from the Indian Ocean into the South Atlantic. The ambient noise is so loud it hurts to put on the headset.”
Pacino had thought about making the transit shallow, using the thunderous noise of the merchant ships to mask their own noise, but some of those vessels were so huge with such deep drafts that collision was practically guaranteed. The only way to get that done was to continuously ping with the under ice and mine detection sonar, and doing that would broadcast their position. Pacino inhaled.
“But no submerged warships?” Pacino asked.