“Fire one!” Scott commanded.
The sea erupted with the roar of submarine engines, whining torpedoes, and chattering decoys. There was no need to hide anymore; speed, not stealth would decide the outcome.
The sonar screens lit up with blips and flashed warnings.
“Kapitan, torpedo in the water! Starboard side!”
Scott saw it on the monitor: a heavy red line streaking away from the target blip that was the K-363.
After painting the K-480 with sonar and shooting, Litvanov had sheered off the firing point. The torpedo Scott had fired at the K-363 showed up on the monitor as a heavy green line streaking toward the K-363. A moment later two thin red lines signaled the launch of paired decoys from the K-363.
The K-480 accelerated fiercely. She was as deep as she could go without suffering a collapse of the damaged tunnel inside the sail, and without the escape trunk splitting open and flooding the ship.
Scott knew that the two torpedoes would search in a widening spiral until they found their targets or, confused by sound-reflecting thermal layers, homed in on the decoys. If the K-363’s torpedo went for the kill instead of the decoy, Scott wasn’t sure that the K-480 could outrun it.
As Scott watched, a white blossom erupted on the monitor at the point where the thick green line and one of the thin red lines had converged.
The sonarman flinched. “Shit! Our torpedo, their decoy.”
The thunder of an exploding warhead rippled through the K-480 ahead of the shock wave, which, like the hand of an unseen giant, gave the boat a hard shove.
“Can you hear his inbound fish?” Scott said.
The sonarman had to wait for the turbulence to clear, for the blast bubble to collapse and gas to disperse. Even so, and with their own sonar degraded by the K-480’s high-speed dash, the sonar screens were lit with a confusing tangle of overlapping lines, blips, and waterfalls. Scott knew the picture would be just as confusing aboard the K-363, a slight advantage he might utilize.
“Kapitan, I hear something, a decoy…. Ah!”
Another clap of thunder shook the boat.
Alex huddled with Scott and asked, “Did we get him?”
The sonar display still had not cleared sufficiently to provide a picture Scott could evaluate.
“I can’t tell for sure. Our decoys may have seduced his fish like his seduced ours.”
Overloaded with data, the computer running the K-480’s sonar system paused, then recycled and began reprocessing information. On the monitors, squiggles and blips that had represented torpedoes and targets turned into rows of straight lines and dots.
“Where the hell is she?” Scott queried the sonarman.
He shook his head. “I don’t hear anything, sir. Only a single decoy, one of ours, I think, very faint.”
“All engines stop,” Scott ordered. “Rig for ultraquiet. Secure main circulating pumps. Right full rudder.”
“Why are we laying to?” Alex said in a small voice as the boat wound down and began to coast. She watched the compass repeater unwind. “And why are we turning around?”
Scott preoccupied, snapped at her over his shoulder. “Litvanov leaves nothing to chance. I’m betting that he’s as confused as we are and will want to know whether or not he got us.”
“But won’t he assume, as you did, that both torpedoes were seduced by decoys?”
“There’s always that shade of doubt.”
The computer system came back on line with a confusing array of targets, any one of which could be the K-363.
“And what if Litvanov does come back?”
Scott tore his gaze from the monitors and gave Alex a vexed look. But she had put steepled fingers to her lips and closed her eyes. Scott wondered if she was praying. He decided he’d take whatever help he could get.
Litvanov looked at the sonar monitor and saw no sign of another submarine nearby or any traces of one crashing to the seabed in pieces after being torpedoed. The water falls simply cascaded down the sonar monitors undisturbed. It could be a trick by the Amerikanski, some tactic he wasn’t aware of. Litvanov blew through his teeth. An American skipper in a Russian sub. Unbelievable. What he knew about U.S. submarine doctrine dictated that the American skipper would have tried to outrun the torpedo, not go silent and rely on a decoy. But this skipper was not your typical American skipper, which made him very dangerous. Not only that, but the two torpedoes that had detonated less than three kilometers away from the K-363’s current position would draw Russian planes and patrol craft. Litvanov felt the box around him getting smaller. Still, he had to know.
“Both engines ahead slow,” he commanded. “Helmsman, put us on a reciprocal course.”
“Aye, Kapitan.”
“Fire Control, shift to constant data upload and stand by.”
Litvanov’s eyes roamed the control panels: They still had four tubes loaded and green-lighted. Torpedo gyros and turbines spun to prelaunch.
“Ready to fire, sir.”
Then something flashed at the periphery of Litvanov’s vision. Zakayev on his feet, armed with the tool Veroshilov had brandished, dodged around equipment as he sprinted for the dogged watertight door in the after bulkhead of the CCP.
Litvanov hurled after him, but Zakayev was too fast. He wrenched open the door and dove through the opening. Litvanov, pistol in his fist, arrived in time to have the heavy door slam shut in his face and hear the dogs crash home.
The charges, Litvanov thought. The demolition charges.
“Ali! Ali! Ali!” screamed Litvanov after he, too, had yanked open the door and dived through the opening. He thundered down the narrow passageway and collided with the corner of a partition where the passageway jogged right and opened on the deserted after machinery space.
It was a part of the ship he rarely visited and smelled of oil, diesel, and hot metal, a place where off-duty sailors congregated to smoke dope and drink vodka when the captain wasn’t aboard. The passageway continued on past the machinery space and ended at the sealed door that gave access to the reactor control compartment. On the other side of the reactor control compartment was the shielded tunnel with its airlock to the reactor compartment itself, and the set charges.
Zakayev suddenly darted into the passageway from his hide near the watertight door and hurled the heavy tool at Litvanov. It missed and caromed off the partition with a loud clang but struck Litvanov’s right forearm raised to fend it off. Pain seared through his arm like a bolt of electricity, which brought him to his knees in agony. He staggered like a drunk and fell against the thin metal partition and felt it give under his weight. The pistol had skittered away and, fogged by pain, he couldn’t find it.
“Ali! Ali! Ali!” he cried.
“A dropped hatch lid, Kapitan?”
“I don’t think so. Play it back.”
The sonarman flipped switches, adjusted gain, and punched Replay.
The clear sound of steel ringing on steel came from the speaker over the sonar monitoring station.
“Sounds like the same noise we heard before, metal on metal, like a bell,” Scott said. “Not a hatch lid, something else, something lighter.”
“A dropped tool?” Abakov said.
“That’s what I think,” Scott said. He tapped the sonarman’s shoulder. “Input it to fire control.”
“Aye, Kapitan.”
Scott swung toward the fire control station, where data began to flow between sonar, fire control, and the torpedo room.
“You were right,” Alex said. “Litvanov came back.”
Scott, intent on the plot he’d scribbled on paper with the automated system down for ultraquiet, ignored her.
A moment later a barely audible sonar contact appeared as a trace on the sonar monitor.
“If it’s him, Kapitan,” said the sonarman, “he’s maneuvering on a very low power setting. Convection cooling, no pumps.”