The payload, the hydrogen bomb mounted in a depth charge, armed itself and prepared for detonation. When the altimeter indicated it was at sea level, it would detonate the nuclear warhead.
The aim point got closer and closer as the warhead fell. A drogue parachute blew out one end, stabilizing the depth charge long enough for the main chute to deploy, which slowed the depth charge down to walking speed as it fell lower to the ice.
The ice approached from below and the depth charge impacted against a steep cliff and bounced off it, then came to an abrupt stop in an ice valley. The altimeter read twenty-four feet above sea level. The warhead’s protocol for detonation was unsatisfied. It was programmed to detonate at between twenty and zero feet, not twenty-four. The depth charge rolled to a halt, its computer system kept alive by a small battery, but battery endurance would be measured only in minutes.
As the depth charge’s battery died, the second-fired missile streaked overhead, five nautical miles to the north, its winglets rotating to bring it to the vertical flight path of its pop-up maneuver. It arced downward and the missile body blew off and the second depth charge descended, its descent masked by the ice ridge that the first depth charge had hit.
Thirty seconds after the death of the first-fired depth charge, the second one detonated, the 250-kiloton hydrogen bomb’s explosion sixteen times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The explosion pounded downward into the ice and blew two pressure ridges aside. The ice under the depth charge vaporized, the water below with it.
Five miles to the south, the shock wave of the second-fired depth charge hit the Belgorod and the Losharik, and like the explosion of the second Gigantskiy, the cruel shock wave showed no mercy.
Captain Second Rank Iron Irina Trusov removed her headset and hung it on a hook on the starboard side of her pilot-in-command console in the cockpit of the Losharik. She looked at Captain Sergei Kovalov to her left, in the mission commander’s seat.
“All sonar systems deactivated, Captain,” she said in a dead voice. “We’re bottomed out at four hundred seventy meters, thrusted snug against the west ice wall of the north-south passage. All water-tight doors are shut and ship is prepared for shock impact.”
Kovalov nodded. “Not much we can do now except wait for the Gigantskiy detonation,” he said.
Trusov pursed her lips in annoyance. A combat operation was happening just outside the ship and she was trapped in a research vessel when she should be the one shooting torpedoes in anger. She’d been preparing for undersea combat her entire life.
When Trusov was ten years old, she and her father, Captain First Rank Volodya Trusov, had built a huge model of the submarine he commanded, the Shchuka-class submarine B-448 Tambov, the model carved from a soft wood and fully a meter-and-a-half long. The submarine’s flank could be removed to show the interior, that she and her father had carefully crafted, carving each feature out of wood and painting them, then inserting them into the hull. All three decks of the submarine were shown up forward, with the second compartment’s central command post, electronics rooms, officer berthing, the middle level mess facilities and crew’s berthing, and the lower-level machinery spaces with atmospheric control. The first compartment was shown, with the torpedoes in their cradles, the tubes running forward to the nosecone, even the sonar array below the torpedo tubes. Aft, the model depicted the reactor compartment and the machinery compartments. At a party her father gave for his officers, she had proudly displayed the model, to the astonishment and delight of the guests, who lauded her for her detailed work. They had laughed that other little girls played with dollhouses, but Irina played with nuclear attack submarines. One of the visitors, her father’s second-in-command, had cautioned Captain Trusov against running afoul of the GRU and KGB for a military security violation, so accurate was the model. That had been the happiest day of Irina Trusov’s life.
It was less than a month later that her father lay quietly in his grave, dead of a heart attack at the age of forty-one. Irina’s mother was a classic beauty, with long, shining platinum blonde hair — just as her daughter had — and big, bright blue eyes — also exactly as her daughter had. It came as no surprise to anyone when her mother remarried, but no one could ever replace Daddy. Worse was that Irina’s alcoholic stepfather, Borya Feodor, was a sloppy, bald, fat, supply logistics manager in the closed city of Severomorsk, where they’d lived when Daddy was alive. By then, Irina was thirteen and blooming from girlhood to womanhood, a fact that greatly interested her stepfather, who had taken to sneaking into the bathroom whenever Irina showered. The first time that had happened, Irina pitched a fit to her mother, but her mother ignored the implications and insisted that Father Borya was merely trying to be friendly. Friendly, right, Irina had argued, standing next to her in the shower naked, insisting on touching her to wash her back or her hair, and lately he’d begun to become excited as he did so, his disgusting male organ swelling, sometimes tapping her hip or buttocks as he washed her. Her mother dismissed the allegations, saying that Irina was exaggerating.
Irina tried everything to forestall the bathroom visitations, locking the door and putting a chair against the knob or showering in the middle of the night. She had gone so far as to shorten her shower duration by chopping off her shining platinum hair, cutting it almost as short as a boy’s, thinking it would have the added advantage of making her look less feminine to the boorish Borya, but nothing seemed to stop her stepfather.
No matter her protestations to her mother, the shower invasions continued, and Irina feared that her stepfather would progress to even more overt harassment, perhaps even rape. Finally, Irina had planned to run away from home to get away from the pervert. On a Sunday afternoon, she’d decided to take one last shower before escaping — with all that was going on, she felt constantly dirty and greasy. No amount of soap or shampoo seemed to ease the dirty feeling. She was rubbing shampoo into her hair when Borya, as usual, opened the shower curtain from behind her and slipped into the shower, naked and aroused.
It was all too much and the rage filled her in a tenth of a second, and without even rinsing the shampoo out of her eyes, she grabbed Borya by his head with both her hands and with all her strength, rammed his head into the water fixture as hard as she could. Borya fell to the floor, the warm water washing over him. Irina cleared her eyes of the shampoo and leaned over his prone body. Blood was flooding the floor of the shower, but when she felt his neck, she could feel a pulse. He was only unconscious, and for how long, Irina couldn’t guess. She crouched down over him and clamped one hand over his mouth, sealing it, and with the other, pinched his nostrils. She shut her eyes and counted to two hundred, and by then the water had gone cold, but she didn’t care. When she reached the end of her count, she checked for a pulse again, and there was none. Borya was gone.
She rinsed, then turned off the water and got out, finding her bath sheet and drying herself. She wrapped the towel around herself and left the bathroom to find her mother, who was calmly reading the newspaper in the kitchen.
“I think something’s wrong with Father Borya,” Irina said calmly. “He fell in the shower.”
She could still hear her mother’s plaintive wailing all these years later. Irina had moved in with her father’s former first officer’s family, who were childless and lonely, and they finished raising her with affection, dealing with her lingering anger as best they could. Fortunately for Irina, she was the number one student in her school, and with that and the legacy of her father, she was accepted into the M.V. Frunze Military Academy in Moscow for undergraduate studies, then continuing her education at the Komsomol Submarine Navigation Higher Naval School, graduating first in her class.