By sundown, or what passes for a sundown in the season of the White Nights, he was running through the long wide lakes toward the town of Segeza. They reached the town around midnight, and then turned into the narrow inland canal that begins south of Nadvojcy. It was a four-hour run on this very slow stretch up to the next lake, and the master of the Tolkach was glad both he and Ivan had slept for most of the evening while the first mate and the navigator had taken over the helms.
At 0258 on June 12, lit by the bright glow in the northern sky, the Kilos were just four and a half miles south of the lake, and six miles south of the town of Kockoma. The water was flat, there was no breeze and little traffic when Captain Volkov sensed a long and distant rumble beneath the keel. He had heard such a noise before, and he knew what had happened. “FUCK!” he shouted. “WE’RE AGROUND…”
Reaching for his phone he yelled for Ivan, uncertain whether there had been a steering failure. He heard a truly sensational thundering sound again right beneath the keel. “CHRIST! WE’VE HIT SOMETHING…JESUS…IVAN!! WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?”
But there was no reply, and Captain Volkov put his engines to stop as he left the bridge and rushed down the companionway, running along the deck beneath the port side of the Kilo. When he reached the bow, where the two Tolkach freighters were joined, he could not believe what he was seeing. The lead barge was listing to starboard before his eyes, the deck now at a forty-five-degree angle.
He could see the guard hanging on to one of the great wooden blocks that held the submarine in place. Suddenly there was another thunderous roar from under the keel, and the front barge twisted farther to starboard. As it did, two-and-a-half thousand tons of Kilo Class submarine swayed, and then toppled sideways, smashing into the barge’s deck edge before hitting the water with a gigantic splash, and disappearing almost immediately beneath the surface.
But the Kilo vanished for only a split second before it surged upward again with terrifying force, like a giant breaching whale, before settling on the soft bottom of the canal, with the lead barge capsized on top of it. Deep beneath the surface the waters of the canal rushed through the huge split in the submarine’s hull caused by the impact with the deck edge and began to fill the Kilo with water.
But Captain Volkov had more immediate worries. The lead Tolkach had now broached, and the clockwise pressure on the coupling that attached his own rear barge was immense. They were swinging right across the canal, and he could feel his ship twisting to starboard. She lurched right just as the force on the coupling became too great. The entire barge rolled right over, in massive slow motion, sending the Captain hurtling to his death, across the deck and into the tortured, fractured coupling area under the bow. More spectacularly, the second Kilo hurtled off the deck onto the right-hand eastern wall of the canal.
The Kilo hit the bank with crushing force, smashing the concrete and destroying the hull. The submarine rolled back into the side of the barge, then down into the water with an impact almost equal to that of the first one. Split wide open below the sail, she lay half submerged, with water gushing in, pinned to the bottom to the great Tolkach that had carried her halfway across Russia. Ivan Volkov had somehow survived and fought his way to the shore, not yet knowing that his father had died.
He clambered out just in time to hear the muffled underwater roar of Lieutenant Ray Schaeffer’s slightly later Semtex charges blast eight gaping holes along the underside hull of the rear Tolkach. He heard the dull thunder, as his father had done four minutes earlier, and then he stood and stared as the six-hundred-foot following barge began to list and then to lurch dramatically as the water rushed in below. She seemed to rise, and then groan her way onto her port side, just as John Bergstrom had planned.
From Ivan’s perspective, the barge seemed to roll with agonizing slowness, and he watched in horror as the rear Kilo wobbled, then crashed majestically, plunging down from her keel blocks, twenty feet above the water. The Kilo hit the surface of the Belomorski Canal with breathtaking reverberations before rebounding back into the water with a gaping hole behind her tower, and a giant split all the way aft, through which water gushed, short-circuiting and wrecking the battery, flooding the diesels, ruining the computerized firing systems, wiping out the sonar, the radar, the operations center, and flooding every compartment.
No crane would ever be able to lift even one of the Kilos out of the water. In under six minutes the explosives set by Admiral Bergstrom’s SEALs had destroyed three Kilo Class submarines worth $900 million, sunk three of the biggest freighters in Russia, and completely blocked the Belomorski Canal for months, or even a year. At least until the Russians could begin to bring in frogmen, lifting “camels,” and start raising the hulls off the bottom.
Ivan Volkov was the sole survivor. As he stood on the chilly, battered banks of the canal, shivering with cold and shock, miles from anywhere, the waters settled slowly and quietly over the wreckage. To the northeast he could see the sun, glowing pink at 3 AM, on the distant horizon. But there was no movement anywhere, and he knew instinctively that no human being could have survived such a crash.
He also knew now why he had survived. As his Tolkach had listed to starboard, he had sensed the danger and dived straight over the bow of the lead barge, from the area directly in front of his wheelhouse. He had plunged into the dark water, out to the left, swimming away from the hull, kicking off his boots as he did so. At the moment she capsized, he was forty yards clear…and safe.
In all of Russia’s northern territories, Ivan was the only man who knew the disaster could not have been an accident. He had heard the thunder beneath the surface, not only on the articulated “double” barge, which he was himself steering, but also from the quite separate rear barge. Young Volkov knew something diabolical was afoot. Someone had blown up the convoy. Of that he was certain.
He had no recollection of having passed any sign of life in the previous few miles before the barges overturned, so he decided to walk north to look for help, taking off his soaking-wet shirt and jacket, deeply regretting losing his boots. Sometimes he walked, sometimes he ran, trying to keep his circulation going until he reached a waterside village. But it was a long way.
Meanwhile, moving slowly north up the canal, some twenty-two miles south of the disaster, was the 1,700-ton river cargo ship Baltica, laden to her gunwales with timber from the central Volga and bound for the northern shipyards. It took her more than four hours to reach the site of the catastrophe, and it was shortly after 0730 when the first mate spotted the completely unexpected wreckage in the water nearly a mile up ahead. He called for the Captain to return to the bridge: “Look out, sir…what the hell’s that…in the water right on our bow?”
“Where?” asked the Captain, peering north at the jutting hull of the rear Tolkach. “JESUS!..FULL ASTERN!”
The freighter was slow to stop when she was empty, even at seven knots. But now, weighed down by hundreds of tons of timber, she was almost impossible to bring to a halt in the short distance remaining. Her ancient engines slowed, then stopped, then restarted in reverse, seeming to take forever. The ship shuddered from end to end as her screw fought to slow her forward momentum as she slid inexorably toward the half-exposed propeller of the rear Tolkach. She bumped hard, hardly saved by the heavy tractor half-tires Captain Perov had fixed on his bow to avoid damage in the often-crowded Russian trading ports. The engine pulled her off, and there was no real harm done, but the Captain and his small crew were completely overwhelmed by the sight before them. There was wreckage all over the surface of the water. There was another colossal barge overturned on its side just up ahead. There was yet another, jutting out of the water still farther ahead. And on the left near side of the canal was the unmistakable shape of a submarine, its stern visible, slammed against the obliterated bank of the canal.