10
“Green board,” announced the starpom.
Sergei Botkin checked the hull opening indicator paneclass="underline" Six rows of bright green lights confirmed that the K-480 was rigged for dive.
Botkin, aware that Scott had been evaluating his every move since departing Olenya Bay, cleared his throat and commanded, “Dive the boat.”
A piercing siren sounded twice, followed by “Dive! Dive!” from the lieutenant serving as Botkin’s starpom.
Scott watched the diving operation unfold, gauging the proficiency of the young officers and men manipulating the ship’s controls. There was no margin for error when operating a submarine on the surface or submerged.
“Flood forward and after groups,” the starpom diving officer ordered. Ten-degree down bubble.”
Air trapped inside the ballast tanks discharged through the vent risers with a loud whoosh. At once the big submarine pitched down and drove her blunt nose under the Barents Sea.
“Make your depth ninety meters,” Botkin ordered.
“Ninety meters, aye, Kapitan.”
Seawater chuckled over the hull, gurgled into super structure voids, and rose quickly up the sides of the sail. A water hammer pounded, then stopped abruptly. The ship’s hydraulic pump moaned in protest like a man on his deathbed. Something in the pump room under the CCP made a loud clank that Scott felt through the soles of his sea boots. And when the hull began to creak and pop under increasing water pressure, some of the newer men exchanged frightened looks.
Scott knew the K-480 was a cranky ship and made a mental note to inspect the engineering logs to see if routine maintenance on vital equipment had been deferred, and if so for how long. That important machinery might fail when needed most was a prospect Scott knew Russian submariners, unlike their American counterparts, accepted as a fact of life. The Russian Navy had a long history of submarine disasters — sinkings, collisions, reactor mishaps — that had gone unreported. So had many of the human casualties. Not only did he have to find and kill the K-363, he also had to bring Alex, Abakov, and the crew back in one piece. Given the K-480’s condition, he wasn’t at all sure the mission was survivable.
Scott glanced over his shoulder at Yuri Abakov. The colonel’s face shone with sweat and his coveralls had dark stains under the arms. He watched Abakov swallow hard to equalize the pressure building up in his ears and wondered if he was having second thoughts about joining the mission, wishing instead that he was home with his wife and children in their khrusheba apartment.
Alex, he saw, didn’t appear bothered by all the noise and confusion. She had been eager to go aboard, saying, “There’s too much at stake to back out now.” For a moment Scott had allowed himself to think that her decision might also have had something to do with her feelings for him and what might be possible when this was over. Wishful thinking, he told himself.
Alex, her body English compensating for the downward tilted deck, glanced at Scott.
“Hang on tight,” he mouthed over the racket of venting and flooding, the creaking and popping of the submarine’s hull as it drove beneath the icy waters.
“Passing fifty meters, Kapitan.”
“Very well,” Botkin said.
Scott’s attention shunted from Alex to a valve tagged in Russian FEED CIRCULATOR that was spewing seawater from overhead. He ordered an auxiliaryman, “Tighten the packing on that valve.” Scott made another mental note, to keep an eye on it.
“Eighty meters, Kapitan.”
“Ease your bubble.”
The men at the diving station drew back on their joysticks, taking angle off the planes.
“Eighty-five meters, Kapitan.”
A huge cockroach skittered over an instrument panel. An auxilliaryman seated at the panel lashed out and crushed the bug under his palm, then wiped the gore on his pant leg.
Scott met Botkin’s gaze across the CCP. The young skipper gave him a lopsided grin, as if apologizing for the deficiencies he knew Scott had logged. Botkin had a slight build and blond hair and eyebrows so fair that they almost looked white, a look that didn’t come close to matching the heroic image of a nuclear sub skipper fostered by the Russian Navy.
Scott sympathized with Botkin. He was the product of a post-Soviet navy in desperate circumstances and in such dire need of officers to command their waning fleet of nuclear submarines that the Chechen, Georgi Litvanov, had command of a weapon that he and his cohort Zakayev could use against Russia. Madness.
“Depth ninety meters, Kapitan.”
The K-480 leveled out just before reaching her ordered depth.
Botkin issued orders to the helm and the K-480 turned onto a new heading inside the hundred-fathom curve. “You wish conference, Captain Scott?” Botkin said in English.
Scott unrolled a chart, which Botkin weighted at the corners with instruction manuals and an ashtray.
Alex, Abakov, Botkin, and the starpom navigator pressed in around him. The CCP was silent now except for the low whine of the gyroscope in its binnacle and the hum of fire-control computers and their cooling fans.
Scott swept a hand over the chart and said. “This is our primary search area, the Barents Sea.”
“But this is a huge area to search,” Abakov said.
Scott’s fingers walked the chart, stepping off estimated distances. “Over half a million square miles.”
Abakov let out a low whistle.
“Time is also a factor,” Scott said. “We’ve only got days to find the K-363. The message we received from NorFleet in Severomorsk, said they had established an ASW patrol line between Spitsbergen and Novaya Zemlya.” He pointed to them, an archipelago and two large islands north of the Arctic Circle off Russia’s northeast coast.
“Long-range Il-38s are patrolling south toward the Kola Peninsula. NorFleet’s also inserted fifteen MPK patrol craft on a line off the coast of the Kola Peninsula.”
The Kola Peninsula, a tundralike extension of the Scandinavian Peninsula, was fringed with islands and deeply indented with fjords. To the west, Norway’s North Cape, the northernmost point in Europe, marked the invisible line of demarcation between the Barents Sea and the Norwegian Sea.
“NorFleet’s plan is to sweep north and feed more units into the line as they tighten the search box,”
Scott said.
“Like a pincer,” Alex said.
“Exactly.”
“And how will they conduct their search?” Abakov said.
“The Il-38s will drop thousands of sonobuoys that can pick up noise from the K-363’s reactor coolant pumps and turbogenerators — the three-hundred-hertz tone. The patrol boats use passive towed sonar arrays. Once they make contact with the sub, they’ll track her, then attack with homing torpedoes.”
“But excuse me, Captain Scott,” Botkin said. “Litvanov has ways of evading detection. He can run ultra quiet. If he is in deep water, there are present thermal layers that deflect sonar, while in shallow water sonar pulses scatter off the bottom and make it difficult to pick a target out of the echoes.”
“Right. We’re up against a clever skipper,” Scott said, “in command of one of the Russian Navy’s best submarines — an Akula, like the one we’re aboard,” he added for Alex and Abakov.
“How capable are they?” asked Abakov.
“They’re comparable to the U.S. Navy’s Improved 688 Los Angeles — class boats. They have a 190-megawatt nuclear reactor and can make over thirty-three knots submerged. They’re 370 feet long and displace about eight thousand tons. They also have advanced sonar suites and are extremely quiet and therefore hard to detect.”