“You’ve laid out the track to the rendezvous?”
“Yes, Captain,” Maksimov said. Svetka “Velikolepnyy” “Gorgeous” Maksimov was a striking young woman, model-beautiful, even with her hair pulled back in a bun and no makeup on her face. The other officers had been known to tease her about it, but she’d never reacted. As long as Alexeyev had known her, she’d been calm and professional, but quiet. He couldn’t remember her ever contributing to the officers’ mess conversations.
First Officer Ania Lebedev joined them at the chart table. Alexeyev looked at her and nodded solemnly. For the underway operation, Lebedev would be in the command post, monitoring the watchstanders while Alexeyev and Weapons Officer Sobol would lay to the conning tower’s bridge and drive the submarine out on the surface and into the Barents until they reached the dive point.
“It’s time, Captain,” Lebedev reminded him. She glanced at the captain for a moment. Alexeyev was tall and slender, his formerly black hair now streaked with gray, the gray arriving suddenly on their last mission to the South Atlantic. He was wearing his great coat, his officer’s cap clasped under his arm, and still wearing his black eye patch after the loss of his right eye from an infection, also afflicting him in the South Atlantic. He was a strange, quiet officer, Lebedev mused, living deep inside his head, rarely sharing his thoughts with the officers in the mess during meals, only opening up slightly when they were both alone in his stateroom. So far, he had yet to comment on this mission besides the discussion with President Vostov the week before, but Lebedev suspected he might privately have serious doubts about the operation. But as he’d said, they were in business to execute the orders, not formulate them. After what they’d suffered together, Lebedev had gained a deep respect — perhaps bordering on affection — for the enigmatic commanding officer. There was just something about his presence that calmed her, she thought. As long as Alexeyev were here, everything would be okay.
Alexeyev nodded wordlessly and left the command post by the forward door leading to the stairs to the conning tower.
13
Captain First Rank Sergei Kovalov shook out what must be his fifth cigarette in the last fifteen minutes as he stood on the pier waiting for Admiral Zhigunov’s staff truck. He looked at his new command, the Project 10831 deep-diving nuclear-powered special salvage submarine AS-31 Losharik. It was an eighth the size of his last submarine, the Yasen-M attack submarine Arkhangelsk, the boat he’d been pulled off to command Losharik for this mission. That had made sense to Admiral Zhigunov, since Arkhangelsk was occupied with a long drydock repair availability, which had taken her out of action, and this mission demanded a seasoned submarine commander. But Losharik was a freakish submarine, Kovalov thought privately. He’d never give voice to that opinion, not to his crew and not to his wife, but perhaps only to his friend Georgy Alexeyev. The vessel was a deep-diving special purpose boat, designed to dive to 2500 meters and her titanium hull could probably take her several hundreds of meters deeper, to almost three kilometers beneath the surface.
The deep-diving aspect worried Kovalov, giving him recurring nightmares of hull collapse and flooding so far beneath the sea. The boat had no emergency deballasting system, so flooding at depth would likely result in loss of the ship and all hands. And what was perhaps worse was that it carried no weapons. Torpedoes and cruise missiles had always been something of a security blanket for Kovalov. He believed that in an undersea battle, even if he didn’t win and went down with the submarine, at least he could fight back. But this boat? Completely unarmed. With the exception of the cradles installed to allow them to carry Status-6 Poseidon torpedoes, the weapons carried on the port and starboard side of the boat, but Poseidons weren’t defensive weapons. They were little more than expensive time bombs, Kovalov thought, useless in a fight. He consoled himself that Losharik would be docked with Belgorod, and Belgorod had plenty of defensive and offensive weapons. Thirty Futlyar Fizik-2 torpedoes and ten Kalibr submarine-launched cruise missiles, two of them nuclear-tipped in the hundred kiloton range. The Futlyar units had anti-torpedo settings if needed, and could bring down an incoming American or British torpedo. And, of course, Belgorod carried the two Gigantskiy nuclear-tipped torpedoes that had been loaded aboard for this mission, but Kovalov considered them suicide weapons, especially if used under ice. A one megaton warhead? No matter the stand-off range, the shock wave from a weapon that big would deeply damage the firing ship — or sink it outright.
But this mission, not even begun, had impossible challenges. Docking to the submerged Belgorod had been attempted twice, and both times had resulted in failure. And unloading an exercise dummy of the Status-6 Poseidon torpedo from Belgorod to the carrying cradles of Losharik had only been tried once, and they’d dropped the unit to the seafloor of the Barents Sea. At first, it had been thought that Losharik, being a deep-diving ship capable of salvage, could retrieve the unit, but her manipulator arms malfunctioned and had to be repaired later by Sevmash. They’d had to abandon the effort, to the extreme disappointment of Northern Fleet Command.
As if reading his thoughts, his first officer, Ivan Vlasenko, strode up on his pre-watch inspection of the ship and said, “Worried about the mission, Captain?” Vlasenko pulled out his own pack and lit a cigarette, some odd French brand his traveling sister-in-law had gotten him.
“I suppose,” Kovalov said. “But if there is any good news, it’s that sometimes a difficult day in the Navy can distract from a difficult day at home.”
Vlasenko nodded seriously, although he himself lived a life without the heavy problems that Kovalov shouldered. “The troubles with Magna?”
“Still giving me the silent treatment. After two years since the, well, the thing.” Magna was Kovalov’s sixteen-year-old daughter by his first wife Adele. Two years before, when Magna was at the tender age of fourteen, she’d been brought to the apartment by the police, dragged out of a rave party where she had been high on drugs, naked, and having sex with two boys at the same time, a third naked boy watching them. Kovalov’s present wife, Ivana, had been apoplectic and panicky over the incident, and they’d applied what discipline they thought appropriate — yelling, grounding her, taking her computer privileges away. But not two weeks later, in the middle of a Saturday night, the police visited again, and again had the same story, except that the drugs were harder, heroin this time, and there were more boys piling on, and Magna didn’t care about her parents’ disapproval, openly cursing them, waving off any punishment with indifference.
And that had led to what Kovalov mentally called the grand convening of the wives. It must be understood, first, that ex-wife Adele and present-wife Ivana absolutely hated each other. Given an advance presidential pardon and a loaded pistol, each would murder the other without a second’s reflection. But what had united them was their love for Magna, since Magna was born of Adele but taken care of daily by Ivana. It was Ivana’s voice that was the stronger of the two. How much do you love your daughter, Sergei? When he’d stated he would do anything for her, Ivana had looked into his eyes with that penetrating look of hers that seemingly could see all the way through him to his back collar and said, Do you love her enough to hit her? When he looked confused, Adele had joined in, saying If she keeps on like this, she’ll be in a coffin inside a year. Do you love your daughter enough to beat her to get her attention? He’d protested that he could never raise a hand to her, but then Ivana doubled down. We can’t do it. We’re mothers. We’re there to nurture. Shoulders to cry on. You’re the father. You’re the man. So step up and act like a man. You have to beat her. Hard. When he had argued that there was no way he could convincingly beat his daughter physically, that he couldn’t be an actor, that it would be all over his face that he was reluctant, not angry, the wives had stepped closer to him, pelting him with that weaponized question, How much do you love your daughter? He had shut his eyes for five seconds and thought about it. All Magna’s life, he had been a gentle father, if anything, being the one who comforted her when she was angry at Adele or Ivana. Magna had always been a daddy’s girl, with him as her best friend. There simply was nothing he would not do for his beloved daughter. He’d take a bullet for her. He’d willingly give her both kidneys. And then life had come for him and made this terrible demand. The promiscuity and the drugs, the police had said, all lead to only one future for the girl — she will be found lying in an alley, naked, with needles in her veins, fading away into death or already dead.