She left the central command post by the aft door and hurried aft to the dogged-shut hatch to the third compartment with its shielded deck over the reactor. She realized she was panting like a sprinter. The oxygen level had fallen since the machinery room exploded and with atmo control gone, the carbon dioxide levels were climbing, but it seemed too early to be this winded. Perhaps it was just adrenaline, she thought. She was forced to slow down on her way aft. She opened the hatch and shut it behind her. The emergency lights were out in the space, and it was coal mine black. She felt for a flashlight on the bulkhead, and it was where she’d expected it, hopefully fully charged. She clicked it on, then made her way to the compartment’s aft hatch, going through it to the darkened fourth compartment with its electronic cabinets, and main breaker bank, through its aft hatch to the fifth compartment, the steam machinery room, where far aft, the nuclear control room was situated. Nuclear control was an enclosed space with its own air conditioning, cooling it in the environment with a hundred steam leaks, which even in arctic waters, made the compartment hot and humid. One would erupt in sweat just in the walk from the fourth compartment to nuclear control, but not now. The space was eerily cool, which was a very bad sign. Cool and dark. She stopped just outside nuclear control when she heard something. It was the rush of water flowing. She shone her light aft, to the narrow passageway to the hatch to the sixth compartment.
She went to the hatch with its circular window and shone her light into the window. She could see a water level halfway up the window and climbing. Which meant the sixth compartment was almost completely flooded. The sixth compartment contained the engineering plant’s battery, and if it had flooded, there would be no power without the reactor, but the reactor needed power to start, to run all the pumps and controls for the plant’s systems.
She wondered if there were a way to connect the forward battery in the first compartment to the engineering space’s systems, but she was a tactical officer and not qualified in the propulsion plant systems. She had to find someone who was. She returned to the door to nuclear control and tried to open it, but it would only come open a few centimeters. There was a body lying against the door. She shoved on it mightily, moving the body of the chief engineer out of the way. Sobol stepped over the body of the chief. On the deck the body of Chief Engineer Captain Third Rank Cobalt Ausra was nearly decapitated and lying in a hideous pool of blood, her head connected to her torso by a few blood vessels, a large bloody binder on the deck next to Ausra’s head the probable culprit. The book must have flown off a shelf and hit the chief engineer right in her throat. The book was labeled, RUKOVODSTVO PO REAKTORNOY USTANOVKE—REACTOR PLANT MANUAL. The Sevmash engineers still insisted on paper procedures rather than switching to pad computer documents, and this was the result, Sobol thought.
Sobol stepped away from the dead chief engineer toward the seat of the engineering watch officer, Senior Lieutenant Anatoly Blackbeard Pavlovsky. She felt his throat for a pulse, and it was weak but present. She slapped his cheeks, but there was no response. In a cupholder was a covered cup of tea that had remained in the holder despite the massive shock wave. Sobol picked it up and felt it — the tea was cold. She removed the top and splashed it into Pavlovsky’s face. He sputtered and spit, opening one eye, then the second and peered at Sobol as if he were in a dream. His eyes stared into the distance without focus. Sobol slapped his cheek again, harder this time.
“Pavlovsky! Blackbeard! Wake the hell up!” She shouted into his face and he shook his head, then put his hand on his neck. He must have suffered whiplash, she thought, hoping he hadn’t broken his neck.
“Blackbeard. I know you can hear me. Wake up!”
“What?” he said slowly. “What the hell happened?”
“Nothing,” Sobol said, her voice pitch even higher than normal. “Just a goddamned nuclear explosion. Come on, we’re the only two awake. There’s flooding in the sixth. The aft battery’s gone. We need to see if we can get power from the forward battery and restart the reactor!”
Pavlovsky slowly unbuckled himself from his seat and tried to stand. Sobol helped him stay upright.
“Are you hurt badly?” she asked.
“I think I’m okay,” he said. He sniffed the air. “Smoke,” he said. “And it’s stuffy. Hard to breathe.” He took Sobol’s flashlight from her and shone it toward the door and saw the body of Ausra. “Oh hell,” he said. “Without her, I don’t think we’re coming back from this.”
“Can’t you restart the reactor?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. And there are systems in the sixth we’d need. There’s no training drill for something like this.”
“Well, hell,” Sobol said. “Let’s find anyone still alive from the spaces and get them forward then. Maybe we can evacuate the ship.”
“Evacuate? How are you going to abandon ship under thick ice? The escape chamber will just clunk into the bottom of the ice cover.”
“Maybe the Gigantskiy explosion opened up a polynya overhead.”
“You can’t count on that, Weapons Officer.”
“Maybe we can call for the Losharik to pull us out. That’s why they undocked before we shot the Gigantskiy.”
“They did? I didn’t know,” Pavlovsky said. “But you’ll have to communicate with it.”
“If we can get the central command post power, we can light off the Bolshoi-Feniks sonar communications system.”
“Didn’t the first detonation kill our active sonar?”
“Wow, you are paying attention to goings-on in the central command post. It did, but Bolshoi-Feniks can be switched over to an emergency sonar array with its own hydrophones. If we can connect it to the forward battery, we’ll be in business. Come on.”
Sobol led a limping Pavlovsky through the upper level of the compartment, trying to collect the other engineering watchstanders, pausing to try to wake them up. Three crewmen were able to regain their feet, but four couldn’t get off the deck and another two were dead.
There was no doubt, Sobol thought. This was going to be a very long day.
As she opened the hatch to the fourth compartment, a loud ripping noise slammed her ears, followed by a roaring like a mighty waterfall. Sobol turned around and saw the stream of seawater flooding the space, presumably from the main seawater piping rupturing. She pulled the hatch shut behind her and dogged it, peering through the high-pressure glass window into the space as its lights went out and it filled with seawater.
Goddammit, she thought. This day just kept getting worse.
Georgy Alexeyev sat at a table on the sun swept sidewalk in front of the UDC Café on Moscow’s Kamergersky Lane, a pedestrian-only area decorated year-round with hanging lights, the sounds of a street musician’s guitar playing soulfully a block away. Alexeyev smiled, happily sipping a double espresso, waiting for his wife Natalia to join him after a leisurely Saturday afternoon of shopping. He glanced down at the pad computer’s article he’d been reading, about President Vostov and his five-year program for the Navy. Fortunately, the president was a true believer in the power of the Navy of the Russian Republic. Alexeyev was halfway through the article when his cell phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his sports jacket’s inner pocket. The caller was unidentified, but he decided to answer it.
“Go for Alexeyev,” he said, which was a better and more concise way to answer than Captain First Rank Alexeyev. It worked for strangers, subordinates, and superiors alike.