The medical assistant and Hugo Smallbone dragged Hitchens to one side so that Pike could get back into the tower. Water streaming past him, he reached up, and fumbled for the flood valve to shut it off.
Soaked and shivering he collapsed onto the deck, water swilling away into the drains that led to the bilges.
‘Jesus!’ he panted. ‘Jesus Christ!’
Neither the Ametyst nor the Ladny was aware of the other’s presence, both deafened by the speed at which they were moving. Their two captains had a single aim; to find the British submarine before it could lay more mines.
The Ladny had been ordered to head inshore, the Ametyst was bound for the open sea.
The collision came at a combined underwater speed of 72 knots.
The Ladny struck the Ametyst aft of the forward planes. The protective outer casings of the two vessels crumpled like paper, until the pressure hulls struck with a terrible wrenching of steel and an explosion of escaping air.
The forward weapon compartment of the Ladny telescoped, then split open like an egg dropped on concrete, spewing men and oil into the black water. The section of the Ametyst ahead of the fin was torn away by the impact. Exploding electrical circuitry jolted the foreshortened hull nose-up, allowing air to escape in a seething column to the surface.
Water surged down through the control and accommodation spaces, stopping only at the watertight hatches through the reactor compartment. Battered and disorientated by the violent movement, the men had no time to don escape masks. Within minutes, more than half the crew had drowned — amongst them Vice-Admiral Feliks Astashenkov.
Devoid of buoyancy, the forward section fell towards the sea-bed fifty metres below, propelled by the still-rotating screw. The aft section of her hull lifted up by the air trapped in it, the Ametyst began to somersault.
The safety systems in the two reactors tripped as the hull passed through the critical angle, but it was too late. The hull inverted. Steam percolated back into the reactor pressure vessel, replacing the water which moderated the nuclear reaction. Deprived of coolant, the temperature in the core began to rise. By the time the broken nose of the hull buried itself in the mud of the sea-bed the core was melting.
On the Ladny, too, there were no survivors forward of the reactor section. The boat sank to the sea-bed, nose-down, but upright. The engineering crew aft succeeded in scramming the reactors; control rods dropped into the core to absorb the neutron flow and damp down the reaction. Then panic set in.
One hundred metres separated the two wrecks on the bottom. The heat in Ametyst’s reactors climbed fast. The molten core burned through the steel of the reactor compartment, then through the hull itself. Ice-cold water surged in and exploded into steam.
The detonation of the reactor compartment released a tidal wave of energy, scattering the shreds of the Ametyst like sea-weed, and knocking the Ladny onto its side.
The sounds of the collision, the ripping of metal, and the explosions that followed were heard by the two British submarines twenty miles to the north.
Andrew took the headphones from the sonar rating in the sound room and listened to the brain-curdling racket.
‘Where’s it coming from, for God’s sake?’ he asked, suddenly scared that Philip could have laid other mines earlier.
‘Bearing one-nine-five, sir. Range twenty miles.’
Andrew hurried to the navigation plot, and picked up the dividers. He measured the distance onto the chart.
‘Five miles north of the inlet. Not guilty. Truculent never got that far south.’
‘It’s that Victor III,’ announced Colqhoun. ‘She was sprinting. We tracked her all the way in. Look, it’s on disc.’
‘Play it back, CPO.’
The sonar chief cued the disc and directed Andrew to the VDU. The phosphor-green wave pattern began to spread up the screen.
‘That’s the Victor III, sir,’ explained the chief, pointing to a ridge on the waterfall pattern at the frequency generated by vibration from the Soviet submarine’s pumps.
‘And what’s that next to it?’ Andrew asked.
‘Just an echo, sir. Shallow water.’
‘Couldn’t it be another boat?’ Andrew pressed.
The CPO keyed the target information into a window on the screen.
‘Same bearing, sir. Just an echo.’
‘But if there were two boats, and they collided.…’
‘See what you mean, sir.’
‘Spin back five minutes on the disc.’
It took a few seconds.
The chief keyed instructions for the computer to analyse the tracks.
‘You’re dead right, sir. They were on different bearings.’
Andrew folded his arms. For two Soviet vessels, the submariners’ nightmare had come true. A collision at speed.
Peter Biddle appeared at his shoulder.
‘We’ve got to get a signal off fast,’ Andrew announced. ‘Before the Russians accuse us of sinking their boats.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Journalists in London and Washington were invited at short notice to special briefings at Downing Street and the White House respectively.
They were told the British and US governments had received irrefutable intelligence information that two Soviet submarines had collided accidentally earlier that day, with heavy loss of life. American spy satellites had picked up extensive radio traffic emanating from the major rescue operation the Soviet Navy was mounting.
When asked why they were releasing the information in such an unprecedented manner, the press were told that it was to forestall any attempt the Soviets might make to blame the incident on the West, and more particularly on the NATO exercise Ocean Guardian.
The story made the lead on late-night television news bulletins and would form the splash headline in the newspapers the following morning.
The telephoned report from Admiral Grekov was not the one Nikolai Savkin had expected. The disaster stunned him.
Couldn’t it have been NATO mines that had been responsible, he’d asked? Grekov had been adamant. A collision. They’d used the word on open communications. They’d had to; most of the rescue and pollution control vessels had no encrypted communications systems.
Incompetence was the cause, Grekov had insisted. The real culprit was whoever had instructed Feliks Astashenkov to defy orders and take the Ametyst to sea.
From the bitter note of recrimination in Grekov’s voice, Savkin knew that he knew.
He sat slumped in his chair, in the dimly-lit sitting-room of his Kremlin apartment. Who would they send, he wondered?
An hour had passed since Grekov’s call. Then there came a gentle tap on the door.
‘Ah, it’s you, Vasily,’ Savkin sighed with relief at the sight of his Foreign Minister and friend. ‘Thank…’
His voice caught in his throat as KGB chief Medvedev followed Kalinin into the room.
‘There was a meeting earlier this evening,’ Kalinin began, unsmiling. ‘The vote went against you. You no longer have a majority in the Politburo.’
‘Who was it? Which one changed his mind?’
Kalinin dropped his eyes.
‘You?’ Savkin whispered incredulously.