Captain’s stateroom
The Belgorod (K-329)
Operating AREA KD-11
Barents Sea
1551 local time
Konstantin stared at the shattered glass screen of his mobile phone—damage that he’d elected not to repair. He’d dropped it at the hospital that day, and now it was a metaphor for his life. The main fissure in the glass cut transversely across Calina’s neck, an ungodly reminder that his life was meant to be punishment.
He stared at this image often, the last and final picture he’d taken of his wife.
The worried look in her eyes, the waning curl of her lips . . .
In that moment, she’d known. Somehow, she’d known it would happen.
“You should have said something to me,” he said to her image, tears pressing. “I could have intervened. I could have taken you to a different hospital.”
A knock on the door snapped him from the macabre moment.
“Come,” he said, collecting himself.
The door opened.
“Captain, I was instructed by Captain Lieutenant Blok to bring you the rig for dive checklist for your review and signature,” said the messenger.
“Very well, bring it to me.”
The young sailor, whose nervous face Konstantin did not recognize, entered his stateroom and handed him a clipboard with a multipage document. The captain’s gaze dropped to the seaman’s name tag, and he committed the name to memory as he accepted the clipboard. The messenger quickly backpedaled to the passageway outside and moved to shut the door.
“Leave it open,” Konstantin said, scanning the top page. “This won’t take long.”
Prior to diving the submarine, a verification check was performed to validate the status and proper position of all hatches and valves associated with hull penetrations that could result in flooding when transitioning from surfaced to submerged operations. This practice, which the Soviet Navy had borrowed from the Americans, was a two-party verification—with two qualified watch standers performing the checklist separately and independently. The “independent” element was essential, with the second checker functioning as a backup to the first. During his early days as an officer in training, Konstantin had performed the rig for dive checklist many times as both first and second checker. On multiple occasions, he’d found mistakes. Sometimes a stuck valve feels like a shut valve on its seat. Sometimes people confuse clockwise and counterclockwise directions. And sometimes people are in a hurry and simply miss things.
“The ocean is an unforgiving master,” Konstantin said as he flipped to the second page, scanning for two sets of initials beside every line item. “Seaman Danovich, do you know what the water pressure is at a depth of five hundred meters?”
Danovich hesitated a moment before saying, “No, Captain. I do not.”
“Every ten meters of depth is one bar of pressure. This submarine’s diving limit is five hundred meters, which equates to fifty bars, or fifty atmospheres of pressure. Do you understand?” The young seaman nodded, but Konstantin could see that he didn’t really comprehend the significance. “If there is a leak when we are deep, it is not like on the surface. You can’t stick your finger in the hole to plug it. The pressure is so great, it will cut your arm off like a laser. A hole as small as one centimeter will produce a stream of seawater so powerful that the water will atomize, flooding the air and your lungs instantly, drowning you where you stand.”
Danovich swallowed hard, not liking this new knowledge. “That is terrible.”
The sub captain tapped the checklist with his index finger. “Yes, which is why this checklist is so important. As part of your qualifications, someday you will do this important job. I need you to understand why it matters.”
“Yes, Captain . . . I will learn and do it well.”
Konstantin finished his review, signed the completed checklist at the bottom, annotating the date and time of his signature, and handed the clipboard back to the messenger.
“Return this document to the conning officer.”
“Yes, sir, Captain,” Danovich said and, leaving, closed the door.
A few minutes later, his telephone rang.
“Da,” he said, pressing the handset to his ear.
“Captain, this is the conning officer,” Blok said. “The ship is at the dive coordinates inside operating area KD-11. All preparations for submerged operations are complete. The ship is ready to dive.”
“Very well,” Konstantin said and returned the handset to its cradle.
With a grunt, he slid his heavy chair back from his desk, stood, and straightened his uniform. An old, familiar anticipation washed over him. The first dive on every underway was an exciting and nerve-racking event. A submarine on the surface was like a gladiator without his shield and sword—still a warrior, but stripped of his power. Bobbing on the surface, the Belgorod was slow, perceptible, and vulnerable, but beneath the waves, it was a silent, invisible killer. He couldn’t wait to be underwater. However, if something was going to go wrong—and by wrong he meant terribly wrong—it would likely happen on the first submergence after leaving port.
The first dive of every underway was the risky one.
Northern Fleet Joint Strategic Command had not announced this underway. Only after the Western submarine watchers posted news online about K-329’s surprise voyage would the propaganda machine kick in. Russia’s public explanation for their underway would be that the Belgorod was conducting the final phase of sea trials. In reality, sea trials were already complete. Still, work on the hull and the large-diameter torpedo tubes had been conducted in the Sevmash Shipyard before this underway. The threat of a mistake during that work that could lead to flooding was very real, so he needed everyone vigilant during this first dive.
“Captain on the conn,” the helmsman announced as Konstantin strode into the submarine’s control room. All conversation stopped. Everyone standing stood a little taller, and everyone sitting sat a little straighter as the captain entered.
“Conning officer report,” he said in his command voice as he took a position behind the trio of watch standers at the submarine control station, or SCS, where the helmsman, planesman, and diving officer were seated.
The conning officer handed off periscope duties to a junior officer and took position alongside Konstantin’s right shoulder. “Captain, the ship is rigged for dive, on course three-five-five at twelve knots. We have one distant sonar contact, designated C-1, range twenty-two thousand meters. Based on propulsion signature, C-1 is classified as a merchant vessel and not a tactical concern. Sounding is two hundred thirty-five meters beneath the keel and matches charted depth. Request permission to dive the ship.”
Konstantin glanced at the sonar repeater display located to the right of the SCS and evaluated the lone sonar trace. The bright trace showed a steady bearing over time, a condition known as zero bearing rate—when the course and speed of both the submarine and the contact created a geometry in which the contact angle did not change. In maritime parlance, the two vessels were on a collision course. But this merchant was far away and by the time the intersection happened, the Belgorod would be cruising one hundred meters below the surface, making collision impossible. Nyet, Konstantin was not worried about this merchant vessel with its noisy twin screws and massive broadband sonar signature. The threat he was concerned about was the submerged variety—an American hunter-killer submarine silently cruising the depths with a quiet propulsor and no detectable broadband signature. This was not an irrational fear—there was always a submarine lurking out there, prepared for the hunt. With satellite surveillance, in the modern world no vessel got underway undetected and the American hunter-killers were always on the prowl. The last decades had seen a considerable asymmetry develop between the adversaries, with the American Virginia-class submarines tipping the scales in their favor. The Belgorod, however, would restore the balance.
It’s time, he thought with a fatalistic, closed-lip smile, to deploy this machine of war as the designers intended.
“Conning officer, submerge the ship to a depth of fifty meters and conduct leak checks,” Konstantin ordered, folding his arms across his chest.
Captain Lieutenant Blok repeated back the order, then parroted the command to the diving officer.
The diving officer keyed the microphone in his hand. “Dive, dive,” he said on the ship-wide comms circuit and sounded two blasts of the Klaxon:
AAHHOOGAA.
AAHHOOGAA.
“Dive, dive,” he repeated a second time. After that, he holstered the microphone handset and operated a series of toggle switches to vent air from the fore and aft ballast tanks. “Venting all ballast tanks,” he announced to the control room.
“Confirm venting forward . . . Confirm venting aft,” the periscope operator reported while swiveling one hundred eighty degrees on the scope so as to visually verify the air escaping.
“Planes, make your depth fifty meters,” the diving officer said. “Ease into your down bubble.”
The planesman repeated the order and pressed his control yoke forward to adjust the angle of the submarine’s stern and bow planes, which were linked in a coordination mode where the angles were optimized by the ship’s computer. On the Belgorod, either control station could operate the planes or the rudder, but by convention the helmsman sat in the inboard chair and the planesman the outboard. The diving officer sat behind them and had a small control panel that he operated between them. Due to its massive size, the venting of the Belgorod’s ballast tanks did not happen instantaneously. Nearly a minute passed before the goliath sub tilted forward and began to descend. The diving officer called out depth changes in five-meter increments as they descended toward the target depth. Upon reaching fifty meters, the planesman eased the submarine back to zero bubble to level from the descent, while the helmsman maintained the ordered heading of three hundred fifty-five degrees.
Once on depth, the diving officer made a ship-wide announcement for all watch standers to conduct leak checks. While the control room waited for the reports to come in, Konstantin walked over to the primary sonar repeater and studied the screen. The single bright trace of the merchant contact C-1 remained the only visible vessel on the waterfall display. He knew that the American submarines used a similar display, with time on the y-axis and relative bearing on the x-axis. The noise of the sea—a combination of biologics, wind, and wave action—looked like falling snow on the screen. Somewhere in that white noise hid an American fast-attack submarine, already submerged and waiting to observe the Belgorod’s dive. After Konstantin submerged, the Americans would fall in trail behind him and silently track his ship from the acoustic blind spot that submariners referred to as their baffles. But Konstantin had a surprise up his sleeve for the Americans, something the Russian Navy had never tried before.
“Conning officer, dive checks are complete in all stations. No leaks detected,” the diving officer said.
Blok acknowledged the report and parroted the information to Konstantin.
“Very well,” he said, but was racked with a sudden stab of pain in his middle abdomen that buckled him at the waist.
“Captain, are you okay?” Blok said, reaching for the captain’s arm, but stopping before making contact.
The pain would pass in a moment, it always did . . . He just needed to grit his teeth and bear it until that happened. Konstantin cleared his throat and forced himself to stand up straight.
“I’m fine,” he said, putting on a stoic face. “Indigestion, that’s all.”
Aware of many pairs of eyes on him, he stood tall—like a captain should—until the pain ebbed. Once he’d regained his bearing and a clear head, the sub captain walked over to the closest comms box to perform the most important evolution of the day. With a deep, cleansing breath, he selected “all stations” using a selector knob and picked up the microphone handset.
“Officers and crew of the Belgorod, this is your captain. Today marks a historic event in the Russian Navy. This ship—our ship—is a one-of-a-kind creation. Best in class. The biggest, quietest, and most tactically important submarine in the fleet. We are a special missions boat. Never forget that. This submarine is designed to conduct operations in denied areas, where we will monitor, frustrate, and challenge our oldest and most capable adversary, and that is exactly what we are going to do. The Americans know we exist, but they do not know what we are capable of. On this deployment, we are going to show them just how capable we are . . .”
He pulled a folded page from his left breast pocket and opened it.
“I have received our orders and they are as follows. First, we will head north to conduct a brief training evolution with one of our most capable hunter-killer Akula-class submarines—K-335, the Gepard. We will simulate being an American submarine with a sound augmentation device so K-335 can test their new towed array sonar system and hunting skills. After this, we will head west. Using our stealth, we will execute our special charter and conduct a deep submersible mission, code-named Operation Guillotine, against the Americans’ new, top secret deep-ocean submarine detection network. Once we have rendered the enemy blind and deaf to our presence, we will reposition off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and deploy our Status-6 multipurpose UUV. Russia is the only nation in the world to possess this advanced technology, and the Belgorod is the only submarine in the fleet that is carrying it. After launch, it will travel autonomously all the way into Norfolk Harbor in Virginia. There, it will bottom and wait undetected until the day we need it to wipe the American Atlantic fleet off the map.”
He paused to allow cheers and boasts from the crew, smiling at his men in the control room.
“That’s right, intrepid sons of Russia. Today you make your captain proud. Your families proud. The Kremlin proud. Today, we begin an adventure that will change the balance of power in the world forever.”
With a stoic smile, Konstantin returned the microphone to its cradle and walked over to look at the current sound velocity profile, or SVP, trace. Using thermographic bathymetry, the machine created a graphic representation of the speed of sound as a function of depth, temperature, and salinity. Unlike the Atlantic Ocean, with an average depth of thirty-six hundred meters, the Barents Sea was shallow, with an average depth of only two hundred thirty meters, making it not much deeper than the Belgorod was long. While they were stuck in the Barents, their speed and depth were significantly constrained.
As a special-activities platform capable of deploying deep-diving submersibles, K-329 had a large operating window. Normally, Konstantin would select his depth to maximize the probability of operating in a “shadow zone,” an area where sound waves bent in advantageous ways, making detection of the Belgorod by an adversary more difficult.
But not today.
Today, I want to be found.
“Conning officer, make your depth one hundred twenty-five meters, increase speed to fifteen knots, and proceed north,” he said.
Captain Lieutenant Blok echoed the order, then said, “Anything else, Captain?”
“Da, secure the diving and surface-maneuvering watch parties, and transition to submerged watch sections. Then send the engineer to my stateroom. I need to talk to him.”
“Yes, Captain. Straight away, sir.”
Konstantin gave the helmsman’s shoulder a squeeze and headed back to his stateroom to prepare for the next phase of his plan.