And Danilov was leading the pack. Abe Danilov — that crafty son of a bitch, Reed mused affectionately to himself. It hadn’t been so many years back that he’d first encountered the Russian when they were both commanding attack boats. It was all still so very clear in his mind. Intelligence had indicated before they departed New London that it was more than likely he might encounter Danilov among the Soviet boats operating off Greenland… and they’d been absolutely correct.
After his return, Reed had taken his sonar tapes to the library just to compare the sounds of that Russian against the others. There was no doubt about it. It had been Danilov. Everything he’d read seemed to indicate that it was the same man he’d met in that undersea dogfight over a three-day period.
The Russian had been the first to establish contact, a lesson Reed remembered. There seemed to be nothing nearby as he’d raced after that contact dead on their bow. About the same time that sonar identified it as a noise-maker, they also picked up the Soviet boat behind them. If they’d been at war, Andy Reed and his boat would have been at the bottom — with no warning at all until the whine of the torpedoes had been picked up.
Once the game had begun, Andy Reed confirmed what the navy had been claiming for so many years. The American boats were faster, quieter, more maneuverable, the Russians were noisier, slower, and they had to close their range more for accurate firing. But that didn’t account for experience. Danilov was wily — that was the word that had come to him. He read the intelligence reports confirming that Abe Danilov would now be commanding the Soviet hunter-killer group — like a fox — no, a ferret was a more apt term.
Reed understood that any man who looked forward to combat was crazy, unfit to command, but what a challenge Danilov presented. There was no other submariner in the world whom he respected more.
4
ABE DANILOV’S EYES flew open as the sound of footsteps halted outside his stateroom. When the messenger snapped on the overhead light, after knocking politely, he found the admiral’s eyes eerily fixed on his own. The sailor had been on the staff long enough to grow accustomed to such habits, yet this one continued to be disconcerting.
There was time for an automatic salute — but before the messenger could say a word, Danilov ordered, “Leave the message board with me. Please inform Captain Sergoff I will breakfast with him in fifteen minutes.” He dismissed the sailor with a wave of his hand.
Danilov stretched in the manner the doctor had ordered. First he pointed the toes of his right foot, tensing the muscles of his leg, then did the same with his left. Next he stretched his arms in front of him, balling his fists as he raised his arms above his head. Satisfied, he allowed himself the luxury of the kind of catlike stretch that any man enjoyed in the morning. Lying still, his eyes searched out the comfortable, familiar facets of the tiny stateroom. Though it normally belonged to Seratov’s commanding officer, it would be his for the duration of this operation.
Finally, again following the doctor’s instructions, he took three deep breaths, exhaling slowly before he sat up on the edge of the narrow bunk. It was maddening, this getting older, even though he felt perfectly fine, well rested with only two or three hours of sleep. Danilov admitted his body did not respond as it had when he was a fresh, young officer, but he was still disturbed on principle, if nothing else, that the young doctor’s orders were supported by higher authority. Admirals were not to bound out of bed — he could go along with that. Engage the senses one at a time; allow the aging body the privilege of waking and functioning properly — that wasn’t as bad as it sounded at first. Yet many of the habits that Danilov had enjoyed over the years had now been recategorized by official Moscow as abuses to the body — and only a fool, a simpering old fool, would allow someone to toss his beloved, bad habits out the window.
But Abe Danilov accommodated their purposes with good humor, even though there was one ailment his seniors could do nothing about — he was lonely. Danilov desperately wanted to be beside his Anna. She was much of the reason he had slept but a few hours that night. That first haunting letter of hers would not retreat to the back of his mind no matter how hard he willed it. He read it completely through three times the previous night and found that he understood his Anna so well that parts of it were almost automatically committed to his memory, while other sections brought tears to his eyes.
After pulling on his pants, he hung the message board to one side of the mirror, a routine Danilov followed every morning. While he brushed his teeth, washed, and shaved, he would study each message out of the comer of his eye, pulling them off the board one by one so that his routine never ceased. Danilov was uncomfortable without his habits.
The general messages intended “for flag officers only” related the movements of forces around the world over the last twenty-four hours. Some involved actual confrontation. others the day-to-day Cold War challenges of a bristling world. Each commander was made aware of the events that could affect his small part of Soviet national strategy. None of it really interested Danilov. If anything occurred that directly affected him, he knew he would be awakened by a messenger in the night.
But there was one noteworthy communication that caught his eye as he shaved — the hunter-killer unit dispatched a few days previously from the eastern submarine base of Petropavlovsk was approaching a sector on Imperator’s projected path. That would be interesting, he mused, just to be a fly on the wall… to watch what each of those units would do that day. He knew that Imperator would not be alone. The Americans would have their own submarines out in front while this massive new weapon experimented with itself. And what would they do with the Soviet submarines? Would they simply let them tag along recording each of Imperator’s capabilities? Danilov doubted that very much as he washed the shaving cream off his face. He expected that if they didn’t turn away at a reasonable point in time that they might find themselves going down a drain… much like the shaving cream that disappeared from the metal sink before his eyes.
As he finished knotting his tie — Danilov always wore a tie until they were well away from the piers — he studied the local weather message. No change — the same stinking spring weather that constantly swept across the Kola Peninsula from the Barents Sea — snow, sleet, gusty winds. It would be an unpleasant passage to their diving point. He would probably be ill. He usually was when they got underway from Polyarnyy, even in midsummer. Too much time ashore these days, he realized, and fervently hoped no one, not even Sergoff, would notice that now he could only enjoy a voyage below the surface where the water was calm and his stomach could return to normal. The doctor was right, in a way, about age. When he was younger, Danilov never dreaded those first couple of hours on the surface. He was tough then.
He knew he was tough now, especially mentally. But this sense of loneliness was intruding and pervasive. It would take all of his willpower to put it aside once the hunt began.
There was room for only two people in Seratov’s tiny bridge as she departed the ice-choked harbor at Polyarnyy — Abe Danilov and the submarine’s commander, Stevan Lozak. The younger man had been handpicked by his admiral the year before. His selection was much like Admiral Gorshkov’s sponsorship of young Abe Danilov. Mentors were invaluable in the Soviet military.