Vetrov closed his eyes and felt the rising throb in the Krasnoyarskiy's steel decking, felt the silent shudder through his hull as his pace through the depths increased. It required daring to command one of the State's newest and most deadly attack submarines, and he would show the old men at Fleet headquarters in Vladivostok that he had the daring it took.
Anatoli Vesilevich had been in the Navy for twenty-five years, nearly all of them in submarines. He was, as they said,
well connected in the service. His uncle on his mother's side was none other than the now-legendary Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union S.G. Gorshkov, the man who'd single-handedly dragged the Soviet Navy out of the Dark Ages during his tenure from 1967 until his retirement just two years ago.
Vetrov allowed himself a wolfish grin. One of old Uncle Sasha's personal crusades had been the elimination of the nepotism and favoritism corrupting the entire Navy from top to bottom. He'd made an issue of not helping those of his relatives who were also in the service, especially those who, like Anatoli, were on the fast command track.
Small matter. Gorshkov might have been a full member of the Central Committee, a deputy minister of defense, and the Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union, but there were some facts of life in Russia that not even he could change, not completely. Anatoli Vesilevich was ambitious, and he had a keen eye for politics… and for power, which was much the same thing. He'd fought for command within the State's submarine service, and his family connections had prised open tightly locked doors more than once. One did not need to call God in order to invoke His power. The mere knowledge that a quiet word in a certain quarter could end a career, ruin a reputation, or result in transfer to coastal patrol duties in Novaya Zemlya was more than sufficient.
Even so, it had not been easy. Diplomacy had never been one of Vetrov's stronger points — with his family connections, why should he need it? — and he'd made more than a few enemies in his climb up the ladder of rank and command. That unfortunate incident in '77 with that base commander's young, pretty, and very bored wife at Severodvinsk, for instance, had come close to leaving him beached, and his first command the following year had been a creaking rustbucket of an SK, a conventionally powered boat of the type the Americans called Foxtrot.
He'd needed to pull quite a few strings after that to get transferred beyond that bastard's reach, to the Soviet Red Banner Pacific Fleet, and the headquarters station at Vladivostok. His next command had been of a Kal'mar class PLARB — the West called them Delta Is — first of the Soviet Union's true ICBM missile boats and the largest submarine in the world when it was first launched in 1972.
There was enormous prestige in being commander of a doomsday machine, one of the Rodina's PLARB missile boats, which could incinerate western cities within a few hours' notice. But Vetrov had hungered for more. PLARBs were vastly powerful and their command carried with it considerable prestige, but Soviet strategic and tactical doctrine limited them to the closely guarded bastions in Okhotsk, the Barents and Kara Seas, and beneath the Arctic ice. A PLARB skipper was hemmed in by regulations and the prying of his zampolit, his political officer. In fact, he was little more than a deliveryman, a truck driver at the wheel of an extraordinarily expensive and dangerous vehicle almost entirely directed by others.
It was the difference between the pilot of a Tupelov Tu-26 strategic bomber, and the pilot of a high-performance MiG-29 interceptor. Vetrov was, by nature, a hunter, a predator… and one did not exercise such instincts cowering in a bastion, shielded by ice and protected by others.
Still using his web of connections throughout the Fleet, connections that would have been impossible without the mere existence of his powerful uncle, he'd managed a transfer to the hunters. In 1983, he'd won command of the 50 Let SSR — the name translated as "Fifty Years of the Soviet Union," and under his captaincy the vessel had garnered an impressive list of efficiency awards and honors, including one awarded personally by none other than Uncle Sasha himself.
He'd commanded two more attack boats since… including one of the hot little interceptors NATO called Alfas — the Zolotaya Ryba, or "Golden Fish" as Russian submariners called him, because of his incredible development costs. He'd nearly ended his career then, as well, when an American Los Angeles submarine had picked him up on sonar and dogged his baffles once when he'd been on patrol guarding a PLARB bastion in the Chukchi Sea. He'd tried every trick he knew to shake the Yankee… and nothing had worked until, at last, he'd been forced to outrun it, which, of course, meant he'd had to leave his assigned patrol station.
The matter had been satisfactorily covered up, however. And now, finally, he was captain of the Krasnoyarskiy Komsomolets.
The Americans, he been told, called the vessel Mike. He was the largest and most deadly hunter-killer submarine in the world — displacing 9,700m tons submerged, and with a 122-meter length that dwarfed the Americans' Los Angeles boats. Slower than an Alfa, which could make forty-five-knot dashes submerged, he was still able to manage a respectable thirty-eight knots, faster than any Western submarine. He was better armed, too, with both 533mm and 650mm torpedo tubes forward, and launch tubes for the SS-N-21 cruise missile, equivalent to the American Tomahawk, as well.
Krasnoyarskiy Komsomolets and his brothers were still experimental, technically test platforms for a whole array of new technologies and design elements. Privately, many captains believed the boat to represent design elements stolen from the Americans, but Vetrov ridiculed that idea publicly with every opportunity he found. The Soviet Union was capable of creating dazzling new weapons on her own, without recourse to theft or dealings with traitors.
And if, as the whispers claimed, Krasnoyarskiy Komsomolets had been stolen from American Los Angeles class vessel plans and specifications… why had he been deployed on this mission, to track, cripple, and capture one of their Los Angeles boats?…
A boat that was, he was confident, in every way inferior to his own.
It was difficult sometimes to read between the lines of one's orders, but these had been clear enough. An American SSN had been tracked entering the Sea of Okhotsk, and was now operating off the northern mouth of the Tatar Straits, in the vicinity of Litke and Puir, and uncomfortably close to the big shipbuilding base and naval port up the Amur at Nikolayevsk. His orders were extremely specific: The American intruder was to be forced to the surface, trapped against the Far Eastern coast, and captured at all costs — captured, not destroyed.
There might well be technological secrets to be gleaned from such a prize, but Vetrov knew that the real prize here would be the political humiliation of the old enemy, the United States, and the final vindication and triumph in the Soviet Navy's long struggle with the American foe.
And for Vetrov, personally, there would be revenge for the affair in the Chukchi Sea. There were men in the high command—those old men in Vladivostok—who felt he owed his current position entirely to the influence of his famous uncle. He'd been called incompetent, lickboot, climber, and worse.
He would show them. He would show them all….
"Captain! Reactor now at one hundred fifteen percent," his Executive Officer informed him. "We are making turns for thirty-eight knots!"
"Excellent," he replied. "We are going hunting, Felix Nikolaevich. We are going hunting after the most deadly game of all!"