“So what’s the status, Mr. Chief Engineer?”
“Sir, the new control rod drive is installed and is mechanically complete. We’re loop checking it now. It’s responding. But we need to test it at operating temperature and pressure, and the only way to do that is to start the reactor and warm it up. The shipyard will ask to start it up and heat it up, then perform a normal shutdown, then restart it, then trip it manually to make sure it responds to a manual trip, then restart it again and send it a trip signal from the reactor control panel to make sure it responds to a programmed trip. Since there are five programmed trips, we’ll have to do that test five times. Only then will they clear us for sea.”
Orlov looked at Vlasenko, frowning. “How long is all that going to take?”
Chernobrovin checked his watch. “About twenty hours from now, Captain, if you give me permission to test the reactor and start up and shut down as the testing dictates.”
Orlov looked at the sky, then at Vlasenko. “We could test it while we maneuver out on the diesel. Assuming the weather cooperated.”
“Shipyard techs want to document a thousand data points from the testing, Captain. And if the unit fails to respond to a trip signal, it’s not safe. And it could even run away from us in a control rod withdrawal accident if the power connections got their polarity reversed or if a connection shorts out. And they want us tied up to the pier in case they have to call for more replacement parts.”
“Twenty hours, then,” Orlov said, shaking his head in frustration. Goddamned Sevmash Shipyard. They’d humped the pooch yet again. “You have permission to start up and shut down the reactor as necessary to accomplish the tests. When you’re done, remain steaming and critical. We’re heading out to sea the moment the ink on the closeout paperwork dries.”
“Yes, sir.” Chernobrovin saluted and turned and walked back down the gangway. Orlov watched him, then looked at the hull of the Novosibirsk. The ship was black and sleek, her hull covered with anechoic foam tiling to absorb sonar pings and to suppress noise from the inside. She was 130 meters long and 13 meters wide at her beam. Her graceful conning tower was tall and long, rising at a slight angle at the forward edge, continuing straight aft, then sloping down gently to the after deck. The vertical rudder aft rose almost as high as the conning tower, the cigar-shaped hull continuing as a simple cylinder forward to where the bullet nose vanished into the brackish water of Port Aden. She was, in a word, beautiful. Not like the drab, boring, functional cylinders of the American submarines. Their naval architects had no souls. Give him a Russian ship designer any day, Orlov thought, but it would be nice if they could manufacture their gorgeous designs with some goddamned workmanship. And throw in some reliability. Maybe Russia could get the Germans or Swiss to build submarines for them some day in the far future. Or even the Italians.
An hour later, as the sun was beginning to set, Orlov, Vlasenko, Sukolov, Trusov and the navigator, Captain Third Rank Misha Dobryvnik, were led to red leather seats at a cherrywood table in a room paneled in the dark mahogany. The waiter brought out glasses and a large bottle of Coca Cola with a bucket of ice, handed them menus and left.
“Madam Weapons Officer, would you do the honors?” Orlov asked Trusov.
Captain Lieutenant Irina Trusov smiled with straight white teeth at the captain, tossing a lock of white-blonde hair out of her blue eyes with a shake of her head, her expression worried at the prospect of getting caught committing a crime in a foreign country.
“Happy to, sir.” She pulled a large bottle of vodka from a dufflebag and filled up four rocks glasses. “Ice, sir?”
“Only amateurs put ice in vodka,” Orlov said, winking at Dobryvnik as the navigator dropped three ice cubes into his drink.
“Only cretins drink it straight,” Dobryvnik said, smiling at Orlov.
“A toast,” Vlasenko said. “To a successful mission for us—”
“—and a failed one for that asshole Novikov and his stinking boat, the Voronezh,” Orlov finished. They all held up their glasses, Trusov having put ice and cola in her glass, then drank the contents. Trusov, without being prompted, immediately refilled their glasses.
“Captain,” Dobryvnik said, “tell us the story of you and ‘that asshole’ Novikov. I’m the only one who hasn’t heard it.”
Dobryvnik was a big man with black hair, dark skin, narrow eyes, a flattened wide nose and a round face. In a wardroom composed of mostly blue-eyed Slavic blondes, he stood out. As a junior officer on the Akula III-class submarine K-419 Kuzbass, he had excelled at under-ice navigation, earning his navigation billet on the Novosibirsk. He was the newest officer to report aboard, but Orlov already had a good feeling about the younger officer. He was sharp-witted, sarcastic and funny. The crew had a taken a liking to him from the first day.
Orlov shook his head sadly. “The others only know the first half of the story. The second half is much worse.”
“Pray tell, Captain,” Vlasenko said, passing around the bottle for the third round, “what could possibly be worse than you two loading a torpedo onto the Severodvinsk and having its engine start, blast out of the torpedo tube and zip across the harbor and blow up a tugboat?”
“What?” Dobryvnik almost spilled his drink.
The waiter came in then to take their orders. Orlov and Vlasenko put in their orders, the others hurrying to scan the menu, their minds previously far from thinking about their dinner orders. When the waiter had collected their menus and shut the room’s door behind him, Orlov continued.
“Totally not my fault,” Orlov said, smirking, the worn expression he used when telling the story an inside joke between him and Vlasenko. “The board of inquiry blamed it all on that asshole Novikov, since he was on the loading platform and had direct control of the weapon, but some of his stink rubbed off on me, since I was on the wharf supervising.”
“Did it really blow up and sink the tug?” Dobryvnik stared at Orlov, his eyes wide.
“Not with the full force of the warhead.” Orlov put out his glass for a refill. Vlasenko poured for the captain and himself. “Only maybe ten percent of the high explosive went off, but the impact and that small detonation put a hole in the tugboat big enough that it took on water, and fast. We got lucky. It was right under a six-hundred-ton rail-mounted crane, and a quick-thinking crew and operator put the hook to a cable wrapped around the tugboat’s deck cleats and lifted it up so it wouldn’t sink and held it long enough that they could rig a drain pump and pontoons and patch the hole. But it occupied the crane for a week, and that delayed some important depot-level maintenance.”
“It’s a better story when you have the tug blow up and sink, though, Captain,” Vlasenko laughed.
“A few more vodkas in, and that tugboat in the story gets blown to holy hell,” Orlov smiled. “That asshole Novikov got knocked down a rank and I got one of those letters in my service jacket, the kind that’s not entertaining reading.”
“So what’s the second half of the story, Captain?” Dobryvnik asked.
“Let’s just say that that asshole Novikov was as furious at me as I was at him.”
“Why, what did you do to him?”
“He thinks I could have argued he was blameless before the board of inquiry, that the weapon was defective. Stupid idea, they recovered what was left of the torpedo and they would have seen we were both lying. I told the board Novikov took the safety bolts off to make the weapon easier to load. It was a common practice, but frowned on, and I personally told Novikov that would be unacceptable, but I didn’t check personally that the bolts were installed. Weapon got cockeyed in the tube and the arming circuit went off, had an internal short, started the engine, and the force of the screw on the metal of the tube walked it outward from the hull despite Novikov and his midshipman trying to stop it. Finally, they had to run out of the way and the torpedo started its journey. He blames me for his reduction in rank.”