Captain Lieutenant Shvets had grown exhausted after a dozen hard slams of the sledgehammer, and he’d sat, sweating, the tool between his knees, when the sound of a banging noise came through the hull at the upper hatch. Alexeyev looked at Lebedev.
“Did you hear that?” he said. “Or am I dreaming?”
Shvets vaulted back to his feet and smacked the hull again with the sledgehammer. He was answered with a bang from outside.
“Open the upper hatch,” Alexeyev said, looking again at Lebedev. “If there’s no one there, he won’t be able to get the hatch opened because of the sea pressure. If the hatch opens? We’re rescued.”
He watched, holding his breath, as Shvets operated the circular hatch opening mechanism and pushed on the hatch.
The hatch came open.
Shvets blinked in the glare of a battlelantern from above.
It was Kovalov.
“Anybody awake in here?” Kovalov asked. “Can I interest anyone in a ride in a deep-diver submarine?”
Alexeyev smiled and laughed with Lebedev. He wiped a tear out of his eye.
They were rescued.
Captain Third Rank Svetlana Anna opened her closet door from the inside and peeked into her stateroom. Three times, crewmembers had opened the door and called for her, searching the room and her bathroom, but had finally given up. The noise of the crew abandoning ship had been loud for some time, as they marshaled heavy weather gear, emergency transmitters and rations and loaded the equipment and themselves into the escape chamber. Captain Alexeyev had called multiple times on the ship’s general announcing circuit for any survivors to muster at the ladder to the escape chamber hatch, which was close to the door to Anna’s stateroom.
When the noise of the crew’s evacuation was finally quiet, she’d waited another ten minutes, finally emerging into her stateroom. There were still lights, although they’d been flickering since the crew’s evacuation. There was probably not much time, Anna thought. The air was stuffy and hazy with smoke. It had been hard to breathe, just sitting in the closet. Anna imagined she’d get severely winded doing the next part of her mission.
The ship had been crippled and abandoned as a wreck. But the Status-6 Poseidon torpedoes had survived, the three of them nestled securely in their two-meter diameter torpedo tubes in the bow. With them intact, Anna’s mission was incomplete. The Navy could send Losharik or another deep-diver sub back here and pull the Status-6 units out of the wreckage and still use them. Her mission could only end, she thought, when those Poseidons were gone.
She stood and reached for the handle to the large rollaway bag. The black bag weighed over fifty kilograms and had taken two men to lug into the hatch and down to her stateroom. Northern Fleet security, on scanning their luggage for this run, had singled the bag out for a visual inspection, just as her FSB contact in Severomorsk had said they would, and she had fed the security inspector a cover story.
“It’s a hydrotherapy rig, Senior Lieutenant,” she’d said with a smile. “For high colonics.”
“Hydrotherapy? High colonics? What is that?” the security officer had asked.
Anna had pulled out a special nozzle connected to a thick black tube that snaked into the guts of the mechanicals inside the suitcase.
“It’s for a special kind of warm water enema. This nozzle gets special lubrication, and when the subject is sufficiently relaxed, this tube goes up into—“
The security officer had stopped her. “Ugh. That’s just disgusting. Please put it away.” He’d waved her on, and two enlisted personnel from Belgorod had muscled the heavy bag into her stateroom. She’d asked them to put it in the closet, hoping she’d never need it. But today, it would fulfil its destiny, she thought. Assuming it would work.
She hoped she’d be able to get it to the torpedo room without falling down the steep stairs. It was probably too delicate to survive a tumble down the stairs.
As she rolled it to the forward stairs, she could hear a banging noise from up above. She paused for a moment, and the noise came again. Probably someone banging on the hull, hoping for rescue, she thought.
She lined the bag up to the top of the stairs, climbing down four steps, pulling the handle of the bag down with her. The bag rotated until it was horizontal, then tilted downward. Anna pulled it slowly and it made a thump as it came down one step. She was breathing heavily, but she nodded to herself. She’d managed to keep control of the bag. Only fifteen more steps to go, she thought. With painstaking caution, she lowered the bag down each step, until finally it came to rest at the middle level landing. She pulled the handle and the bag was vertical again.
Anna was soaked in sweat and becoming exhausted, but there was just a little more to do, she thought. She pulled the bag with determination until she reached the hatchway to the first compartment. She undogged the hatch and opened it on the latch, then with a gigantic effort, pulled the bag up over the hatch coaming and into the first compartment. She pulled the rolling bag down the catwalks between the empty torpedo racks until she finally reached the forward bulkhead, where the door to the electronics room was located, where she’d come before to sabotage the tube launching mechanisms. She leaned the bag against the bulkhead and sank down to sit on the deck next to it, huffing, puffing, and sweating like she’d run a marathon.
The hammering and pounding had continued during her voyage to the forward bulkhead of the first compartment, but it had finally stopped. Either the crew had given up the attempt, she thought, or they’d been rescued by the Losharik. The latter seemed unlikely. A nuclear explosion violent enough to destroy Belgorod had to have been merciless on Losharik, but she imagined that it depended on the deep-diver sub’s distance to the detonation.
Still, she waited, just in case the Losharik was pulling crewmembers out of the escape chamber. After twenty minutes, with the air so unbreathable that Anna knew she was barely clinging to consciousness and could wait no more, she admitted to herself it was time. She unzipped the bag and discarded the hose and nozzle, which had been attached to the plumbing of the mechanism for show. She opened the latches of the door of the unit, exposing the arming controls. She rotated a switch from SAFE to ARMED. She rolled the TIME DELAY selector to its lowest setting, 5 minutes. She pressed the TIMED DETONATE button and watched the timer start rolling downward. Four minutes and fifty seconds.
Anna shut her eyes and tried to breathe deeply. In a few short minutes, the mission would be accomplished.
The bomb, a suitcase nuclear demolition explosive, was a compact hydrogen bomb designed to generate a twelve-kiloton thermonuclear explosion. The plasma from initial detonation would consume the front half of Belgorod, including the Poseidon torpedoes. They would be nothing but atoms after the detonation. The aft half of the boat might still exist, but would be mostly splinters and small pieces. The heavy components like the reactor vessels might survive, and the boilers, maybe the pumps, but the remaining wreckage would be unrecognizable as having belonged to a submarine.