“The emergence of autonomous weapons systems and the prospect of losing meaningful human control over the use of force are grave threats that demand urgent action.”
“The prospect of a future where the decision to take a human life is delegated to machines is abhorrent.”
“Pentagon Confirms Russia Has a Submarine Nuke Delivery Drone.
This is very bad news.
The existence of Status-6 was originally greeted with some skepticism — the weapon sounds so horrible, so devastating, so completely over the top it is difficult to process that someone would actually want to build such a thing. Unfortunately for all of mankind, it appears that it is very real.”
“You find a leak. Flooding finds you.”
“Save the mission, save the ship, save the reactor, then save the crew — in that order.”
“I still have one torpedo and two main engines.”
“If I have to die on this mission, I intend to die with an empty torpedo room.”
PROLOGUE
The panicked communication that a fire had broken out in the middle level of the forward compartment came over his headphones, since the boat was rigged-for-ultraquiet with the 1MC general announcing speakers disabled.
Lieutenant Anthony Pacino felt the hard shot of adrenalin hit his system as he selected the ship-wide circuit and barked into his boom microphone. “Fire in forward compartment middle level, fire in forward compartment middle level, casualty assistance team muster in the torpedo room! All hands, don EABs!” He could feel his thinking becoming intensely focused, one track of his mind responding automatically to repeated training for this emergency, another wondering what started the fire and how bad it was, a third thinking ahead to what this meant to the mission. The submarine force’s directive rang in his mind—save the mission, save the ship, save the reactor, then save the crew, in that order. If the fire were severe, there would be no saving this mission, he thought, glancing at the chart display for an escape route.
Pacino hurriedly pulled on his emergency air breathing mask with the fireproof hood, took an experimental breath of the dry, hot air and frowned through the mask’s faceplate at the navigator. The control room they stood in was on the widest deck of the boat, straddling the centerline of the cylindrical hull of the submarine. In the forward compartment. In the forward compartment’s middle level. The very same level as the fire.
“Navigator,” Pacino ordered, “get the fuck to the scene and see what the hell is going on.”
The rigged-for-ultraquiet submarine Vermont hovered a hundred yards north of the twin islands of the deep channel of the Zapadnaya Litsa Fjord, less than 1500 yards from the Russian Federation’s Zapadnaya Litsa Submarine Base.
U.S. Navy Lieutenant Anthony Pacino stood from where he’d been leaning over the navigation chart display along with the navigator, the Nav stationed due to the restricted waters the ship had entered, supplementing the section tracking party. The chart showed their present position, just northeast of the turn an emerging submarine would take to get to the fjord’s channel. The expected outbound transit of the colossal, modified Omega II-class Russian submarine Belgorod was expected to start any minute.
Pacino walked to the port forward large flat panel display, which showed a real-time image taken from an orbiting Apex drone high overhead, the drone’s data beamed down to their floating wire antenna, the picture showing the eight piers of the submarine base. Pacino shook his head — that the Russians had chosen this godforsaken ground for a sub base showed how differently they thought than westerners. The base was in one of the harshest climates on the planet, 175 nautical miles north of the Arctic Circle, with scant vegetation growing on the rocky mountains that rose suddenly from the deep cracks in the earth’s crust that formed the fjord. It was August, and even so, the control room felt cold, the fjord’s water temperature barely climbing above freezing. He imagined that in winter, it would take constant patrols from icebreaking ships to keep the fjord open, and the piers would be piled high with snow and ice. The satellite image showed the same status as an hour ago, when they’d arrived on station, five miles deep into the length of the fjord.
Pacino called to the navigator, “Zoom in closer to the Omega’s pier.” The navigator sidestepped to the command console and manipulated the panel and the image slowly zoomed in until the length of the pier took up half of the large widescreen display.
Tied to the pier was a huge black submarine. It wasn’t apparent from the view how enormous and wide the sub was, but the small figures of four long-haul trucks on the pier lent a clue. Two tugboats were tied up on the outboard side of the sub, and if Pacino’s guess were correct, each tug would be at least 80 feet long. That made the Russian’s sub’s length over 700 feet, 55 feet in beam, matching the secret-level intelligence estimate that claimed she displaced a whopping 35,000 tons. That was bigger than the largest World War II aircraft carriers. By comparison, their own submarine, the Block IV Virginia-class USS Vermont, was tiny, only 8000 tons submerged, 377 feet long and 34 feet in beam. And if its size were not impressive enough, the Omega II could act as a mother ship to a smaller nuclear powered deep submergence submarine, the Omega built to host a deep-diver called Losharik. The op-brief insisted Losharik could dive to a mile deep or even deeper.
“You’re right,” Pacino said, smirking at the navigator. “They should have named it the ‘BUFF.’”
The navigator nodded back without smiling, glancing between the overhead drone intel display and the chart table. “Big ugly fat fucker, it definitely is.”
“You know, Nav, I still think it’s odd that Belgorod is tied up at Zapadnaya Litsa instead of Olenya Guba outside of Polyarny. Olenya Guba’s their usual base, where they pick up the Losharik.”
“Who knows what the crazy-ass Russians are thinking at any given moment,” the navigator said, frowning down at the chart display, laying in a red dotted line for the expected track of the Belgorod when it departed the fjord for the open seas of the Barents. “They must be leaving without the deep-diver being docked to the underside of the hull.”
The navigator, Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov, looked up from the chart at Lieutenant Anthony “Patch” Pacino, fifty thoughts about him flashing through her mind. The youth had walked back to the command console and leaned over it, wearing his black coveralls with the gold embroidered submariner’s dolphins over his name patch on his left pocket, the U.S. flag patch on his left shoulder, the emblem of the USS Vermont on his right. He was tall, just over six feet, and trim without being bulky, as if he were a swimmer or a runner. He had straight, thick, longer-than-regulation chestnut hair that reflected the red of the overhead lamps, all of them turned red under the rig-for-ultraquiet as a reminder for absolute noise quieting. His face at first gave the impression of being rugged, as if it would seem natural to see him in a sheepskin coat on horseback, but on closer examination, his individual features were smoothly refined, almost feminine, his face narrow with strong cheekbones, a sculpted nose over puffy lips that a vain woman would pay a plastic surgeon a fortune for, but the feature that stood out the most were his almond-shaped eyes colored a deep emerald green. There was no doubt that on looks alone, if he desired, he could stop a woman’s heart. Romanov had noticed him on his first day and constantly had to remind herself not to stare at him, hoping he didn’t notice how attracted to him she was. Yet it was clear from his demeanor that Pacino had no idea of his good looks. There was a deep humility to the kid, she thought.