“Yes, Admiral. Voronezh is a front-line Yasen-M-class. The best in the world. The boat will hear the Panther long before the Panther is even aware we are shooting at it.”
“Oh my God,” Stanislav said to Zhabin. “Can you believe the stupidity?” He turned back to Zhigunov. “Zhigunov, where do you think those commandos came from? Deep space? The sky? You didn’t see parachutes did you?”
“No, sir.”
“So, where did they come from?”
“Perhaps another submarine, Admiral.”
“Look at this brilliant mind at work, Zhabin,” Stanislav said the first deputy, who shook his head in contempt. Zhigunov could feel his face flushing with anger.
“That’s right. Another submarine. So Andreyushkin, why don’t you try your luck at this? Where do you think the commandos came from?”
“An American submarine, sir.”
“And do you think the Americans sent their second string, their bottom shelf submarine, to execute their savage mission violating international law, their piracy on the high seas?”
“No, Admiral,” Andreyushkin said quietly. “I think they sent their best submarine.”
“And what would that be?”
“A Virginia-class, sir.”
“Well, we’re banging on all eight cylinders today, aren’t we, Andreyushkin? So, if they sent a Virginia-class, does that worry you?”
“No sir, My boat Novosibirsk will find it and sink it. All they need is the order, sir, to fire upon first detection.”
“If you think this will be easy, Admiral Andreyushkin, you are sadly mistaken. And you too, Zhigunov. All this drivel you read about in the newspapers, about the Yasen-M-class being the best in the world — that’s not for your eyes, it’s for the eyes of the rest of the world, so they’ll fear us. But now we come down to it, gentlemen. Are your two submarines, with all their weapons and sensors, equal to a fight with one Virginia-class?”
“Absolutely, sir,” Zhigunov said. “Do I understand you that we have permission to release weapons upon initial detection, sir? No radioing fleet headquarters for permission?”
“Listen to me and listen damned good, Zhigunov, and you too, Andreyushkin. You are ordered to fire on first detection. Put the Panther and the Virginia-class on the bottom. And there’s more.”
More, Zhigunov thought. What more could there be?
“You have nuclear weapon release authority, both of you. It will be coming to you in a coded, authenticated directive issued by the office of the president within the hour.”
Zhigunov stared at the screen. Nuclear weapons?
“And one more thing. None of this goes in writing to your submarine commanders. You bring them up into secure video conferences. I want you to look into their eyes and make damned sure they understand the orders. Is that clear?”
Both Zhigunov and Andreyushkin answered in the affirmative at the same time.
“That’s all. I expect a call from you on a secure line, any time, day or night, the second you get word that the Panther and the Virginia are destroyed. You got that?”
“Yes, sir,” the junior admirals both answered.
The moment the screen went blank, Northern Fleet Commander Admiral Gennady Zhigunov stood up so fast his brushed steel chair fell back to the floor and bounced on the wall. He picked up his paper notebook and threw it at the screen, hard, just as it flashed back to life and the red face of the Pacific fleet commander came up.
Embarrassed, Zhigunov righted the chair and sat back down. Admiral Andreyushkin was far from a friend, but after their reprimand from Stanislav, they were almost compatriots. Comrades, even.
“Aleksandr,” Zhigunov said.
“Gennady,” Andreyushkin said. “I think we should get our orders out to our boats immediately, before they get in-theater, so our recalling them to periscope depth won’t endanger them. We need to tell them not only about the search-and-destroy mission, but that they are steaming into a hot combat zone, because if we have shoot-on-detection orders, surely the Americans do as well.”
Four submarines out there, Zhigunov thought. Perhaps only one would sail home.
“I’m listening,” Zhigunov said, looking at his watch.
“We need to coordinate together, Gennady. We can’t afford to face Stanislav with a broken mission. What if one of our boats shoots the other?”
“Friendly fire,” Zhigunov said. “I doubt either of us would survive that eventuality.”
“Precisely. We need to direct Novosibirsk and Voronezh to work together. It’s the only way.”
“You have a plan?”
“Allow me to show our present situation.”
Admiral Andreyushkin vanished from the screen, replaced with an overhead view of the Arabian peninsula and the Arabian Sea. A black line extended southeast from the Bandar Abbas Iranian Naval base into the Gulf of Oman. The line, once it entered the Arabian Sea, turned due south toward the Indian Ocean.
“This is the track that the Panther intended to take on its way to the test area,” Andreyushkin said.
A red circle bloomed over the black line at the point the black line left the Gulf of Oman and entered the Arabian Sea.
“This red circle is the point where Panther was taken.”
Two blue flashing dots appeared, one off the east coast of Oman, perhaps 300 kilometers southwest of the red circle of the hijacking. The second blue dot was farther southwest, off the coast of Yemen, another 250 kilometers southwest of the first dot.
“The northern blue dot is Novosibirsk. The southern one is Voronezh.”
Suddenly Zhigunov realized the hopelessness of the situation. The search area was huge, a triangle almost 2500 kilometers wide at its base and 900 kilometers tall. East to west, it would take one of their submarines 48 hours to traverse the area at maximum speed and 16 hours from north to south. In that time, anything could happen.
“This is a huge ocean, Aleksandr.”
“Not so much, Gennady. First, what speed do you imagine the Panther and its escort sub to be making in their escape?”
“Well, they will keep the reactor shutdown and inert,” Zhigunov said, thinking aloud. “They don’t know how to start it up, and if they did, they’d accomplish our mission for us by exploding. So they would proceed at a speed that would maximize their battery endurance. Six knots, maybe seven.”
“Exactly, and then they’d come up shallow to snorkel on the diesel to charge batteries, and that speed might even be slower so as to minimize a rooster-tail wake from the periscope and snorkel mast, but let us imagine that speed to be six knots as well. So from the point that Panther was taken, here is a time-based expansion circle.”
The red circle from the hijacking point expanded slowly, the time stamp on the map rolling hour by hour, each hour the circle barely moving, going so slowly.
“Here is the circle at time-zero plus twenty-four hours,” Andreyushkin explained. “As you can see, the possible places Panther can be has only moved less than two hundred seventy-five kilometers from the hijacking point. At maximum speed, that’s a distance we could cover in five hours. At time-zero plus forty-eight hours, the circle is another two hundred seventy-five kilometers from the hijacking point. At seventy-two hours, the circle looks like this, perhaps seven hundred kilometers wide. If we approach this without panicking, Gennady, we could search this effectively.
“I propose the northern boat, my Novosibirsk proceed northeast into the northern part of this expanding circle of probability while your Voronezh turns due east to capture the southern part. From there, Novosibirsk will seek the targets from the north, while Voronezh approaches from the south.” Andreyushkin sat back in his seat, looking satisfied.