The Belgorod (K-329)
North Atlantic
759 kilometers east of Norfolk
1531 local time
Konstantin vomited until he thought his insides might be coming out.
The nausea had been so acute and sudden he’d barely made it to the toilet. Had he not retired to his stateroom for a short rest, he certainly would not have made it off the conn before evacuating his stomach. He spit, wiped his mouth, and peered down into the commode. Crimson swirls colored the bowl and fresh blood stained the wad of white tissues in his hand. He tossed them in and flushed.
Sweat dappled his forehead.
Getting to his feet was a labor, and once upright he instantly felt as though he might black out. He shuffled to his rack and crawled in, curling into a ball on his side. The momentary relief he’d earned from vomiting was erased by a fresh solar flare of pain in his midsection—pain so intense he heard himself moan and tears rimmed his eyes.
Russian men don’t cry, a voice chastised him in his head, but these were not tears borne of self-pity or sorrow. These tears were involuntary, a product of a biological mechanism over which he had no control.
Russian men don’t cry, the voice said again, pitiless. Get up.
“I can’t,” he groaned from where he lay in a fetal position on his rack.
Get up and do your duty, Captain.
Gritting his teeth, he swung his legs off the side of the rack and let them dangle a moment. He could still taste blood in his mouth and his undershirt felt soaked with sweat. He forced himself to take three deep breaths and then pressed to his feet. The pain ebbed as he did but, as goes the tide, he knew the next surge was inevitable. He shuffled to the lone mirror in his stateroom and met his reflection with stoic resignation. The man staring back at him looked like the Grim Reaper’s familiar visage—sunken cheeks, gray pallor, and weary eyes.
“Don’t do it, my love,” his dead wife’s voice said behind him.
He whirled around, but she was not there.
When he turned back to the mirror, he saw her in the reflection, standing behind him, her thin, bone-white fingers resting on his shoulder and her sad, beautiful face staring at him. He knew he was hallucinating. He knew if he turned to look behind him again, she would not be there, and so he didn’t, because he would not rob himself of this moment.
“Calina?”
“Yes, my love. It’s me.”
“I’ve missed you,” he said, choking on the words. “I’m lost without you.”
“I know you are . . . The man I married would never do such a thing as you are planning.”
“But he has to pay.”
“Who has to pay?”
“Jack Ryan,” he said with a bloody-lipped sneer. “It’s all his fault. He robbed me of the life I was supposed to have.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I never told you, did I?”
“Told me what?”
“About the true fate of the Red October . . . I knew there was more to the story. I knew they were hiding something. And so I dug, and I dug, and I traded favors, and paid bribes until I finally learned the truth. Marko Ramius defected and handed the Americans the Red October on a silver platter. And the American CIA analyst who made it happen was Jack Ryan.”
“So you blame this man for your father’s death?”
“And my mother’s, and yours, and our son’s . . .”
She laid her head on his shoulder and fixed him with a pitying stare. “And so you will punish this man by taking the lives of tens of thousands . . . perhaps millions? Robbing the innocent and the blameless of their mothers, and wives, and sons. You will trade a wrong for a wrong?”
“Da, because their blood will be on Ryan’s hands. His penance is to feel as I do.”
A tear trickled down her cheek and he turned to embrace her . . .
“Calina?” he said, scanning his stateroom in a panic. He turned back to the mirror, but found himself alone. “Calina, don’t go! Please don’t go!”
A knock on his stateroom door snapped him from the mania.
“Who is it?” he barked.
“Tarasov.”
Konstantin ran his fingers through his hair, stood up straight, and said, “Come.”
The engineer opened the door, took one look at his captain, and quickly slammed it shut. He rushed to Konstantin and immediately put a hand to the sub captain’s forehead. “You’re burning with fever, Captain.”
The idea had not occurred to him, but made sense now.
Tarasov took a step back and stared at Konstantin with the same dispassionate expression he used when assessing a broken piece of equipment in need of emergency maintenance. After a moment, he said, “In the next few minutes, the quartermaster will report that we have reached the launch coordinates you selected. Do you still want to carry out the plan?”
“Yes,” Konstantin said firmly, but his voice was softer than he intended.
“Very well,” Tarasov said, fulfilling the promise he’d made to take control if his captain faltered.
Like a squire dressing a knight, Konstantin let his most trusted lieutenant help him change out of his coveralls into his black dress uniform. He let Tarasov wipe the sweat from his face and brow and comb his hair. He let Tarasov straighten his medals and tie his shoes. And when the ritual dressing was complete, Tarasov put a hand on Konstantin’s shoulder and met the captain’s gaze.
“I have always considered you as both a brother and a father. In my darkest hours, in my lowest times, you never abandoned me, Captain. I have served with you and under you for over ten years . . .”
Konstantin pulled Tarasov in for a hug, the first and only time he’d embraced the man as a brother. As a son. “You honor me,” he said.
The CO’s stateroom phone buzzed.
“It’s time,” Tarasov said and turned toward the door to leave.
Konstantin nodded and picked up the handset. “Da . . .”
“Captain, we’ve reached the launch coordinates,” the quartermaster said.
“Very well, I’m on my way.”
Konstantin paused in front of the mirror, hoping to see Calina one last time. But he was alone. Alone in all his splendor and glory. Jaw set, he walked to his safe, turned the dial to enter the combination, and retrieved his captain’s key, which hung on a steel-chain lanyard. He put the loop over his head and positioned the dangling launch key in the center of his chest. Then, chin high and shoulders back, Konstantin Gorov strode out of his stateroom for the last time and into control.
All eyes locked on him and he saw both reverence and confusion in their eyes. This was good. Tarasov’s instincts had been sound. He walked to the nav plot, confirmed the sub’s position, then checked the sonar repeater on the conn. Immediately after securing his boat from hovering and departing the data node coordinates, Konstantin had ordered the Belgorod’s towed array deployed. The kilometer-long string of highly tuned cylindrical hydrophones had allowed the sub to reacquire the USS Ford carrier strike group, despite the distant range, and also search for American hunter-killer submarines, of which he suspected at least one trailed them at this very moment.
Unfortunately, even though significant gains had been made over the past decade in Russian sonar hardware and software technology, the Americans had maintained an advantage with the Virginia-class submarine design improvements that made them virtually undetectable with passive sonar alone. Konstantin had ordered several course changes to search his baffles, but the American subs were black holes in the water and the sweeps had found nothing.
No matter, he decided. I will have first mover advantage. There is nothing the Americans can do to stop me.
He shifted his attention to the weapons control console, where Morozov should have been standing, but found the post vacant.
“Where is the weapons officer?” he asked, not addressing the question to anyone in particular.
“The torpedo room,” the conning officer, Captain Lieutenant Blok, said.
“Firing-point procedures, conning officer. Ready salvo one—torpedo tubes one and two,” Konstantin announced.
Blok hesitated a beat, then repeated the order back and announced, “All stations, Conn, firing-point procedures. Ready salvo one—torpedo tubes one and two.”
Konstantin listened as all the stations acknowledged the order . . . all stations except for the torpedo room. “Conning officer, query the torpedo room,” he said after thirty seconds of waiting.
“Aye, Captain,” Blok said and nodded to the fire control watch stander at the weapons launch console, who was in direct communication with the phone talker in the torpedo room.
The fire control technician turned to Blok. “Conning officer, the torpedo room is not responding.”
Konstantin marched over to the weapons launch console, removed the launch key lanyard from his neck, and inserted the key into the launch permissive selector switch. As with the SSBNs, which carry nuclear-tipped ICBMs, the designers of the Belgorod had carried forward the same design of redundant keyed interlocks at two locations—the weapons launch console in control and the torpedo launch console in the torpedo room. The captain carried one key and the weapons officer carried the other. That way no single key and no single man could independently launch a nuclear-armed Poseidon.
Konstantin turned his key from “locked” to “permissive.”
Then he scanned the conn for Tarasov, who—having clearly anticipated this development—stood in the back starboard corner with his arms crossed.
“Engineer, you’re with me,” he said to his loyal officer.
The captain marched out of the control room, took two down ladders, and made his way into the torpedo room, with Tarasov in trail. Upon entering the massive weapons handling compartment, Konstantin was surprised to find it empty.
“Where is everyone?” he said, turning to Tarasov, who he now noticed clutched a large shiny spanner wrench in his left hand.
“I dismissed them,” Morozov said, stepping around the corner of the torpedo launch console, behind which he’d apparently been waiting.
Konstantin met the man’s eyes and, in the moment, he knew. “You turned on the noisemaker.”
Morozov looked down at his feet, but nodded.
“Very clever, wiring it inside the lock-out chamber at the bottom of the hull. If not for Tarasov, I don’t think we ever would have found it.”
Morozov’s eyes rose again and ticked from Konstantin to Tarasov to the spanner wrench in the engineer’s hand.
“Why did you do it?” the captain asked.
“Because somebody had to try to stop you. And if I fail, maybe the Americans will succeed.”
“Well, despite your best efforts you have failed. Captain Lieutenant Morozov, you are hereby relieved of duty. Captain Lieutenant Tarasov, you are now the acting weapons officer.”
“Aye, Captain,” Tarasov said behind him.
“Surrender your launch key,” Konstantin said to Morozov.
“Nyet.”
“I said, surrender your launch key!”
Morozov crossed his arms in defiance and did not move.
“Captain Lieutenant Tarasov, summon the ship’s master-at-arms and place this man under arrest,” Konstantin said.
“Aye, Captian,” Tarasov said, but he didn’t call the master-at-arms.
Instead, the engineer slipped past Konstantin and, in a blur of premeditated fury that took both the captain and the former WEPS by surprise, Tarasov slammed the spanner wrench into Morozov’s temple. Konstantin heard a sickening crunch and watched the light leave the man’s eyes. Morozov was dead before his limp body hit the floor.
Tarasov took a knee beside his murdered comrade and lifted the dead man’s head via a fistful of hair with one hand while he removed the silver chain from his neck with the other. After retrieving the key, he let Morozov’s head go, and the back of the dead man’s skull hit the metal deck with a loud thump. The engineer, still kneeling, turned to show Konstantin the key . . . which was not a key, but a metal washer hanging from the chain.
Instead of fury and rage, ironic laughter consumed Konstantin.
“What is so funny?” Tarasov said, standing.
When he finally caught his breath, the captain said, “It appears by killing him, you made Morozov the victor. Without his key, we cannot launch.”
The engineer’s face twisted in anger as he stared at the washer in his palm, but then the scowl morphed into a self-satisfied grin.
“What?” Konstantin said, his curiosity piqued.
“I wonder,” the engineer said and set off at a quick pace.
A fresh wave of pain buckled Konstantin at the waist before he could follow.
“I’ll wait here,” the captain said and took a seat on a toolbox strapped to the deck. While he waited, he stared at Morozov’s unmoving body. The spanner blow had collapsed the side of the skull, deforming the right eye socket. “You had courage, comrade, I’ll give you that.”
A long moment later, he heard the pounding of boots on the deck as Tarasov returned, huffing. With a victorious smile he held up the missing launch key.
“Where?” Konstantin asked.
“The repair shop in the forward auxiliary mechanical room,” Tarasov said proudly. “It is where I would go to find an M20 washer.”
“You know your boat quite well,” Konstantin said and then, with great effort, pressed to his feet. “Acting Weapons Officer Tarasov—insert the launch into the torpedo control panel launch selector switch and select ‘permissive.’ ”
“Aye, Captain.” Tarasov walked over to the torpedo launch control panel and used the key to override the nuclear safety interlock. “Launch selector switch is in permissive.”
Konstantin exhaled.
The target data, detonation coordinates, and attack parameters had already been loaded into the onboard computers inside Poseidon One and Two. The torpedo tubes were flooded. The shutter doors were open. And there was nobody here to stop them. The system allowed the launch to be initiated from the control panel at either the weapons launch console or locally in the torpedo room from the torpedo control panel.
A wave of vertigo washed over Konstantin, and he stuck out a hand to steady himself.
Sweat ran from his brow in twin rivulets down his temples.
His vision began to blur.
He blinked. Where a moment ago, Tarasov had been the one standing at the control panel, now stood his dead wife. She was pregnant and holding her bulging stomach.
“Don’t do this, my love . . . For us, please.”
He reached for her. “Calina?”
“Captain, are you all right?” she said, but the voice was not hers.
Konstantin blinked hard and squinted at the person in front of him. “Tarasov? Is that you?”
“Da, Captain. It’s me.”
“I’ve changed my mind, Tarasov. Stand down and secure the weapons.”
“I’m sorry, Captain. I made you a promise, and I am a man of my word,” the engineer said with a cold, hard stare. He then turned and pressed the launch buttons for Poseidon torpedoes One and Two.