Gulf of Oman
Monday, May 30
Pacino found his usual seat in the wardroom. Captain Seagraves took his seat at the aft end of the table, XO Quinnivan to his right, Navigator Romanov to his left. Opposite Pacino was U-Boat Dankleff and Boozy Varney, then Chiefs Albanese and Kim next to Varney, with Chief Goreliki seated to Pacino’s left on his side of the table. Dankleff passed around a carafe of coffee and Pacino filled up and passed it to Chief Goreliki.
“So, Nav, I notice we have problems with our rules of engagement,” Seagraves began, opening the meeting.
“Captain, any escorting forces with teeth cause mission failure,” Romanov said evenly. “We need to know how badly the bosses want the Panther. Enough to let us turn some ADCAP torpedoes loose on an escorting Russian attack sub or pop a nuke in the ocean to confuse things? We need authorization to use lethal force pre-emptively at the discretion of Vermont’s commanding officer. We need to send a message requesting revised rules of engagement.”
“We’re in a radio-silenced dark transit,” Quinnivan said to Romanov. “Do I really have to remind you?”
“We could pop a SLOT coded for a delayed transmission,” Pacino offered. “Wait twenty-four hours, come up to PD in the gulf and raise the HDR and see what the brass say.” A SLOT was a submarine-launched one-way transmitter buoy, the unit the size of a baseball bat and fired while submerged from one of two signal ejectors, each a miniature torpedo tube pointed skyward. The SLOT would be loaded with an encrypted coded preformatted message, and when it broached the surface, it would transmit in a brief burst communication to the CommStar communications satellite constellation in low earth orbit, then self-destruct and sink. The reply would take some time, presumably requiring permission from the president himself, but when it arrived it would come back down from the satellite to their HDR high data rate radio antenna, which was more sensitive and faster than the receiver on the periscope.
Seagraves considered for a moment. “You have a problem with that XO, Navigator?”
Quinnivan and Romanov glanced at each other. Romanov found her voice. “It violates the op-order, sir,” she said, “but I think we could be forgiven for coloring outside the lines this one time.”
“I say we do it, Captain,” Quinnivan said, his hand making a fist on the table.
“Navigator, bring the coded draft of the message to my stateroom and have the communicator standing by with a SLOT buoy. Then notify the OOD.”
“Yes, sir,” Romanov said, standing, shooting a piercing glare at Pacino for a moment before she left, the captain and XO following behind her, the chief petty officers rising and clearing out, their clan famous for not liking being in the wardroom any longer than they had to be.
Dankleff stared into the distance. Pacino snapped his fingers in front of U-Boat’s eyes.
“Hey, OIC, where are you?”
Dankleff blinked and returned to the present. “This mission just started to feel real,” he said. “It’s not just a war game simulation or a scenario anymore. And I’m just wondering what the chances are of the Russians not guarding their nuclear reactor test platform. I feel like, fuck, Patch, I feel like I can hear Russian subs out there.”
“Can you hear the sounds of their hulls imploding as they go down from our ADCAP torpedoes?”
“Whoa, there, Mister Aggressive. Just because Dominatrix Navigatrix isn’t your sweetheart anymore doesn’t mean you should go all firing-point-procedures on our Russian friends.”
“Hey,” Pacino said, smirking. “I’m a pirate and a warrior.”
Washington, D.C., USA
The White House
Monday, May 30
National Security Advisor Michael Pacino put President Carlucci’s torch lighter to the tip of the Cuban Cohiba and puffed it to life, peering through the smoke at the president as he passed the lighter back, the torch lighter showing the worn emblem of VFA-41 with its ace of trumps emblem, the logo of the F-18 squadron that had once been attached to the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan.
“Two fingers?” Carlucci asked, a crystal carafe of Balvenie 30 scotch poised over Pacino’s empty crystal rocks glass.
“Perfect,” Pacino said.
Vito Nunzio Carlucci, who went by the first name “Paul” in an effort to defuse a name that the local Ohio media had once characterized as sounding like it belonged to a New Jersey mob enforcer, was a tall, slender, distinguished fifty-year old with a full head of gray hair that swept over his ears, his features seeming more aristocratically British than Italian. He had once been in the Navy as a young junior officer, leaving the fleet to run for mayor of his native city of Cleveland. The lore of his Navy career had boosted him in the lion’s den of Ohio politics since Carlucci had flown one of the fighter jets off the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan in the Bo Hai Bay rescue mission of the captured submarine Tampa and the Seawolf, which was how he and Pacino eventually met, when Pacino paid him a visit to thank him for saving his Seawolf from the relentless depth charging of the Red Chinese surface action force. Carlucci’s F-18’s missiles had blown apart three Chinese destroyers and sank a fast frigate, allowing the Seawolf to survive and live to fight another day. By the day of their meeting, Carlucci was running for the American Party’s U.S senate seat from Ohio, and the two men became fast friends.
Carlucci avoided the Oval Office, much preferring the remodeled presidential study a few doors down, the room done in dark mahogany paneling with a large tigerwood desk and overstuffed leather chairs facing a ridiculously huge fireplace, where Carlucci kept a fire going even in sweltering Washington summers, the new air conditioning unit able to keep the room feeling freezing despite the logs crackling in the hearth. The windowless room was outfitted as a SCIF, a special compartmented information facility, with air-gapped electronics, no wifi, no ethernet connections, and best of all—according to Carlucci—no phone. A fan of Cuban cigars and scotch, Carlucci particularly enjoyed brainstorming with Pacino, since they could fill the room with smoke and get creative under the mild influence of Scotland’s finest.
Former Admiral Michael Pacino had turned sixty last fall, but was still as gaunt as he’d been as a midshipman. Well over six feet tall, Pacino’s stark cheekbones and penetrating emerald-green eyes shone under a canopy of snow-white hair, the legend that his once coal-black hair had gone to white after the Arctic Ocean mission’s sinking of the first USS Devilfish. Other than the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and the weathered skin of his face, Pacino looked like a youngish fifty-year old, as if he could be in a commercial for one of those Florida retirement golf-course neighborhoods.
“You know, Patch, the media scolded me for appointing you.” Carlucci put down his glass and made a sweeping motion with his arms and hands, as if framing a large headline. “‘Carlucci appoints warmonger admiral as top advisor in nod to military-industrial complex.’ Can you believe that?”
“Well, sir, the War of the East China Sea was somewhat bloody,” Pacino admitted. “Are you sure you still want me on the payroll?”
“Hell, yes, Patch. Those wonks can suck wind. You’re the one I want doing my thinking. Seriously, this office, this position? There’s way too much going on to think clearly, cohesively, about the one thing that truly matters—national security. No doubt about it, you’re the man.”
“Glad to help, sir,” Pacino said, peering through a cloud of smoke at the president.
“So, Patch, this just came in. The duty officer rushed in here right before you arrived. Gave me this.”
Carlucci handed over a clipboard with a simple printout on it. Pacino scanned it, then read it slowly from the beginning, then read it a second time. The USS Vermont had broken radio silence to request a change in the rules of engagement to capture the Iranian nuclear submarine test platform, the enhanced ROE to include approval to attack and sink foreign submarines, surface ships and employ nuclear weapons—presumably in an effort to confuse the opposition force, but also with the possibility that they’d be used on the opposition forces themselves. Finally Pacino looked up at President Carlucci.
“So, Mr. President, how vital is capturing and keeping this Iranian submarine? Is it worth slaughtering Russians over? Is it worth the public relations disaster of tossing a nuclear weapon in anger?”
“Assuming you know what I know, what do you think the answer to that question is?”
“Shouldn’t we be convening the joint chiefs at the Pentagon, and the Secretary of War, SecNav, SecAirForce and SecArmy?”
“You’d think that would be logical, Patch,” Carlucci said, pouring himself another two fingers. “But none of them are cleared for Top Secret Fractal Chaos. They have this annoying tendency to leak juicy things to the SNN NewsFiles. So, for the moment, it’s just you, me, Admiral Catardi and two top officials at CIA.”
“You didn’t answer the question, sir.”
“What question?”
“How important is it to grab this nuclear-powered Iranian sub? The context of this mission suggests that if Russian or Iranian forces oppose the Vermont crew, that Vermont should clear datum, get out of there undetected and let the Kilo test platform go. It’s a test of a revolutionary new reactor and the placing of a nuclear-powered sub in the hands of the Iranians—neither of which are good news for us, but not something to risk a shooting war with the Russians over.”
Carlucci considered for a long moment, then looked up a Pacino. “You remember, just now, I said to assume you know everything I know? Well, no surprise, you don’t. There’s another program I’m reading you into now. It’s classified Release-12. A program run by the Director Combined Intelligence, Margo Allende, and Admiral Rand, the CINC of the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. Its codename is Operation Blue Hardhat.” Carlucci opened his desk and withdrew a folder, broke the top-secret seal and handed it to Pacino. Pacino scanned it, then stood to put pen to the twelve places he had to sign to acknowledge the secrecy of the program. He handed the folder back and sat back down, raising an eyebrow at Carlucci.
“Blue Hardhat is a human intelligence operation,” Carlucci began, “infiltrating Russian shipyards with our own engineers, technicians and scientists. There’s an encyclopedia of information that’s come out of it, but it boils down to one disappointing fact. The Russian submarine program has leapfrogged over our own. Their improved ‘Yasen-M’ class, built on the old Severodvinsk submarine platform, is suspected to have an acoustic advantage over our Virginia class. They’re now believed to be quieter and stealthier, at least by the Blue Hardhat guys.”
Pacino frowned. “That’s not good.”
“Vostov is starting to brag about his weapons systems. He talks about Russian resurgence as a superpower. He’s rattling his saber louder and louder every time we talk.”
“Is he bluffing?”
“I have no idea. But something comes to mind, a chat I had with Vostov a year ago, and God help me, I hope this isn’t part of his thinking now.”
“What do you mean, Mr. President?”
“Let’s assume for a moment that at that time, Dmitri Vostov and I had a close and trusting friendship in spite of all the craziness of our military-industrial complexes and our differing views of the roles of our nations in the world. I told Vostov there was a huge gap in both of our knowledge of the other—that is, who had the most capable attack submarine. With programs that both our nations are investing tens of billions into? So I was thinking, shouldn’t we know, not guess, whose submarines are superior? I told Dmitri that I had this crazy idea that we should each send one submarine into an open sea and let them take each other on. One submarine only. And no surface ships and no antisubmarine warfare aircraft. Just submarine vs. submarine. And each one would have unlimited weapons release. Who would win? Of course, Vostov laughed and said his Yasen-M would put my Virginia-class on the bottom without breaking a sweat. As for me, I told him I remained confident and convinced that our submarine would prevail. Don’t you feel the same way, Patch?”
Pacino considered for a long time. “Sir, beyond the ships’ acoustic advantage or disadvantage, it comes down to the crews of both ships, the rules of engagement and the scenario. Hell, it could come down to which crew is more rested and who had the better breakfast. But on a good day, yes, I think a Virginia could put down a sole Yasen-M. But against two or three? That’s a different story. And no realistic scenario in the open seas would result in a hot battle happening between two lone attack submarines. There would always be a surface warship force involved, destroyers with antisubmarine helicopters. And MPA marine patrol aircraft dropping sonobuoys all over the place and using the magnetic anomaly detectors and hydrogen stream detectors. The slightest sniff of an unfriendly submarine and that submarine would be on the bottom, perhaps even hundreds of miles from the other submarine. So, it would never, ever come down to our sub vs. their sub.” Pacino’s words about ‘open seas’ were significant, he thought, because a million years ago, his USS Devilfish was sent into just that situation, one American submarine taking on a Russian, but that had been under the polar icecap where no aircraft could detect a submarine and no surface ships could intrude.
Carlucci nodded. “Anyway, enough about that fantasy of one submarine going up against the other. Back to the present. This mission came up, and now it’s clear we need to take that Iranian submarine. And now there’s the worry that it may be escorted by a Yasen-M sub. And Patch, despite the possibility of an escort Russian force, we have to grab that Iranian. There’s no question about it. And as to rules of engagement, we were going to wait until Vermont arrived in-theater, and then send them a directive authorizing any and all force to be used at the discretion of the USS Vermont commanding officer against any opposition force. That the mission is of the highest importance to the national security of the United States. That this is a must-win situation. That anything standing between Vermont and mission success should be, well, blown to bits.”
Pacino looked at his cigar, which had gone cold. He put it in Carlucci’s ash tray.
“I know what you’re thinking, Patch. Your boy is on the Vermont. And here I am sending his sub on this mission.”
Pacino consciously tried to harden his expression. “My son will be fine, Mr. President.” Could Carlucci detect that Pacino’s voice had quivered, just slightly, from the emotions rushing through him?
“He’s quite a kid, isn’t he, Patch? That story from the Piranha sinking, just amazing.”
“He is, sir. Listen, Mr. President, I looked into the crew of the Vermont. They’re our best officers, chiefs and enlisted, driving our newest Virginia-class, which is loaded with every weapon that would ever be needed. A Yasen-M trying anything—with our new rules of engagement—might be defeated, sir, assuming the action happens fast. But if this develops over an extended period of time, the Russians could send in destroyers and frigates with helicopters and blanket the sea with sonobuoys dropped by antisubmarine aircraft, all of which are loaded with torpedoes. A concerted and coordinated Russian antisubmarine effort from submarines, surface ships and aircraft would simply doom our Virginia-class. And the mission would fail.”
“I see your point, Patch. Let’s hope it won’t come to that. With luck, we’ll get in, get out and sneak out of there, and no one gets hurt, and the Yasen-M’s never even hear us. Don’t worry, Patch. The Vermont and your boy will be fine.”
But as Pacino drove back to the Annapolis house, long after dark, all he could do was worry. Anthony, Pacino’s flesh and blood, was at sea on a project submarine with orders to arm its weapons and use any and all force against Russian opposition, on a mission that was dangerous on a good day.
There was no doubt. If Anthony’s mother ever heard about this, National Security Advisor Michael Pacino was a dead man.
Gulf of Oman
40 hours from Point “Hotel,” central point of Hormuz Strait barrier search
USS Vermont
Wednesday, June 1
“Depth two hundred feet, ma’am,” Pilot Ganghadharan reported to Officer of the Deck Romanov.
The phone at the conn’s command console buzzed. “Officer of the Deck,” Romanov said.
“Radio,” Chief Goreliki’s voice came over the circuit. “Flash message in the buffer, marked ‘personal for commanding officer.’ Also, there’s an immediate priority intelligence file update.”
“Send the message to the captain’s stateroom,” Romanov said.
She clicked into her pad computer to look at the intelligence file update. There was a recent set of aerial photographs taken by a Predator drone, looking down on the Iranian Navy’s Bandar Abbas base, the photos showing a submarine steaming out of the interior basins of the base and past the breakwater to the Strait of Hormuz. She zoomed far in, and it was definitely a Kilo-class, a stretched hull Kilo-class. No doubt, that was the Panther.
Dammit, she thought, Vermont wouldn’t be at the Point “Hotel” barrier search point near Bandar Abbas until Thursday after midnight. They should have been at the barrier search outside the straight when the Kilo was towed out of the base and into the deep waters of the gulf. The previous intelligence had the test run starting with the Kilo leaving port next Monday, June 6. This was almost a week early. Now they would have to intercept the Kilo on his run eastward out of the gulf, toward the Arabian Sea and beyond to the Indian Ocean. And if he submerged and went silent on his batteries, there was risk he’d get by them, with the result a mission failure. Another mission failure, she thought.
The conn phone buzzed again. “Officer of the Deck.”
“Captain,” Seagraves’ baritone came over the circuit. “I’m sending the flash message to your pad computer. Get the engineer to relieve you on the conn and come to the wardroom. Emergent op brief.”
“Yessir,” Romanov said. She hung up the phone and turned to see Lieutenant Commander Lewinsky standing behind her. “What took you so long, Feng?” she said, smirking. She gave him a brief on the tactical picture.
“I’ve got it. I relieve you, ma’am,” the engineer said.
“I stand relieved,” Romanov replied. “Pilot, Nav-ET, Lieutenant Commander Lewinsky has the deck and the conn.” She was already out of the room as they acknowledged her. She hurried aft in the passageway to the wardroom while scanning the incoming flash message. As she reached the middle of the message, she stopped and read the remainder. “Holy shit,” she gasped.
The wardroom was crowded. Seagraves and Quinnivan were already seated. She made her way to her seat, since she wouldn’t be presenting.
“Okay, quiet, everybody,” Quinnivan said, frowning at his computer. He projected his tablet’s display onto the large flatpanel screen, showing the text of the incoming message.
“As all of you can see,” Seagraves began, “we have a change to the rules of engagement. We are not only authorized but ordered to use all quote, necessary force, unquote, to accomplish this mission, including the tactical use of nuclear weapons, all at the complete discretion of the commanding officer.”
There was a shocked silence in the room for a moment. Romanov spoke up. “Captain, if that’s the case, we need to get back to the simulation war games. At the time we did them, we considered Russian or Iranian opposition forces to be unlikely or something that would cancel the operation. Any simulated battles we did with those forces were somewhat whimsical.” And ended with mission failure or worse, the sinking of the Kilo or Vermont herself, Romanov thought. “With this ROE change, we need to practice in earnest against attacks and counterattacks from a Russian attack boat or an Iranian destroyer.”
Seagraves checked his watch. “You have less than forty hours before we reach barrier search Point Hotel,” he said. “I suggest you all get busy. XO, my stateroom, if you please.”
Quinnivan shut the door and sank into his usual seat at the captain’s table.
“What do you think, XO?” Seagraves’ arms were crossed across his chest.
“I think there’s more to this mission than stealing an Iranian modified Kilo submarine. Maybe there’s something on that sub that the brass aren’t telling us.”
“I don’t think so. This order,” Seagraves slapped the display of his pad computer, “almost makes it seem like the NSC and the president want us to pick a fight with an opposition force. And sink it. As if this is some type of demonstration of capability. Or a message to Tehran or Moscow. Or both.”
Quinnivan thought a moment. “That’s one thing if it’s a submarine we’re up against. Sinking a sub doesn’t leave much of an immediate forensic trace. Submarines are lost at sea every year. Too many bad things can happen deep underwater, yeah? But a surface ASW force? Sinking an antisubmarine warfare destroyer is going to make for a juicy headline. Satellite News Network will be blasting that all over the globe within minutes. Every swingin’ dick out there owns a satellite-synched cell phone with video capability now. There’s a good chance a destroyer sailor could film the whole thing, or even live-stream it, while it’s attacked from an apparently empty ocean. Worse if we use a Tomahawk cruise missile. A flame trail would lead right down to the launch point. And to us.”
“That last doesn’t worry me,” Seagraves said. “If I have to attack by daylight, I’ll use the delay function on the cruise missile capsule. It’ll just float there until the timer goes off, then launch, and by then we’ll be a mile away. What does worry me is if a Russian Akula III or, God help us, a Yasen-M-class attack sub shows up. No one’s very certain back in the hallowed halls of Submarine Force HQ whether, on an even playing field, we could take them down.”
“Bah,” Quinnivan said dismissively. “The fookin Severodvinsk was dreamed up in the late 1980s. They laid the keel in, what, 1993? Then it rusted till they found the money to complete it in the teens. Sub didn’t get operational till 2013. And I’d remind you, for the last ten years, it’s been at the bottom of the Atlantic, in a million pieces, put there by an American torpedo. The Yasen-class are an old, obsolete, hunk of junk design, Skipper. We’d take a Yasen to the bottom before it even had a sniff of us on its sonar.”
“Severodvinsk was a Yasen class,” Seagraves said, paging his computer to an intelligence file. “The only one. The Yasens after that are ‘Yasen-M,’ for modernized. An understatement. Everything is new. You can hardly compare the Yasen-M to the old rustbucket Severodvinsk. The Yasen-M should probably have been given a new class name, but the Russians were doing something funny with their budget office, wanted to make it seem like they were just cost-effectively building the next unit of the model, but the M-class is new from the propulsor to the sonar dome. All new electronics, with a high level of automation. From a tonnage standpoint, the M is twice our size, almost fourteen thousand tons to our eight thousand. Her reactor is a two-hundred-megawatt monster to our mere ninety. Her crew is all of sixty officers and enlisted, less than half our hundred and thirty, a sure indicator of automation and the incorporation of AI systems. The M can do thirty-five knots to our thirty-two, and in silent mode with natural circulation, it’ll do twenty-eight to our twenty-five. XO, our test depth is twelve hundred feet. Yasen-M can take it down to over two thousand, and do I need to remind you, that depth is knocking on the door of the crush depth of the Mod 9 ADCAP torpedo? If we ever got into a hot war with the Russians, hell, they’d just take her to test depth plus a little more and wait till our torpedoes implode, then shoot us out of the water. We’re still guessing how many weapons she carries, but I’d lay you odds she’s got the jump on us in sheer number of torpedoes. And don’t get me started on the hellish weapons she has. And acoustically? Should I remind you that we’ve never yet been able to trail a Yasen-M submarine? Our Virginias have lurked outside the Zapadnaya Litsa Northern Fleet submarine base for the M-class and fell in trail for all of half a mile before the target would vanish. For all we know, they can hear us before we can hear them. Our so-called acoustic advantage may have flipped in favor of the M-class. Let’s just admit it, XO, we wouldn’t want to run into a Yasen-M-class in a dark alley.”
Quinnivan whistled as he paged his own tablet through the intelligence. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he said after a moment. “Maybe there won’t be an opposition force. Maybe the Panther will go out alone to do his reactor test. It’s dangerous, so going out there alone without an escort is a damned good probability.”
“Yeah,” Seagraves said. “I’m sure you’re right.”
Gulf of Aden, Yemen
Port Aden Container Facility,
K-573 Novosibirsk
Wednesday, June 1
Captain First Rank Yuri Orlov stood on the pier looking at the seemingly combat-ready Yasen-M-class attack submarine K-573 Novosibirsk of the proud Russian Federation Pacific fleet.
“Another one, Captain?” his first officer, Captain Second Rank Ivan Vlasenko asked. When Orlov nodded, Vlasenko shook out another cigarette, the highly coveted American brand, Camel, almost impossible to get on the Russian Pacific coast. They tasted so much smoother than the Russian brands, Orlov thought, which tasted like toilet paper and left an aftertaste like cleaning chemicals.
“Where did you get these?” Orlov puffed the cigarette to life, inhaling the smoke deeply, then looking at the glowing tip of the cigarette. There was no doubt about it, a man could think with a cigarette between his fingers.
“My wife’s sister travels for business. Somehow she got them through customs. I suspect she has a thing going on with a customs agent.”
“If your wife’s sister is anywhere as good-looking as your wife, I’d say that is totally possible.”
“You know, Captain, having a gorgeous wife is a blessing and a curse. Long sea voyages? With all those hound dogs at the base? It keeps a loving husband up at night.”
“Try being divorced, Ivan. I guarantee you, it is a scenario much worse than having a beautiful, sexy wife whose faithfulness you have to worry about.”
“Damned shame, Captain,” Vlasenko said, blowing out smoke from his nostrils.
“Definitely, Mr. First. Anyway, we should turn our attention to the mission.”
Vlasenko glanced for a moment at Novosibirsk’s commanding officer. Yuri Orlov was tall for submarine duty, with dirty-blonde hair, blue eyes, a sculpted face, though his face was pockmarked from his adolescent acne, but the roughness of his facial skin made him look tough. He was thin, almost too thin, Vlasenko thought. Perhaps that was the fault of the Novosibirsk’s mess cooks. As for his own appearance, Vlasenko didn’t have that problem. His wife was a self-proclaimed master chef, and had fattened him up much more than he had been when they had said their vows, yet another reason Vlasenko worried about his wife finding another suitor more to her liking than chubby Vlasenko.
“Agreed, Captain. If the gods are with us, we should be putting to sea tomorrow.”
Five days ago, a reactor casualty had forced an end to their maximum speed run to the Gulf of Oman, originating from the Pacific Submarine Fleet’s Rybachiy Nuclear Submarine Base in Kamchatka. The reactor controls had alarmed and the unit had tripped, and it had taken the ship out of the deep to periscope depth, barely making way while snorkeling on the emergency diesel. The engineer, Captain Third Rank Kiril “Chernobyl” Chernobrovin had taken an hour to thread through the distributed control system’s history module to diagnose the problem, and when he did, the problem was serious—a dropped control rod from a burned out control rod drive motor. Dropping a rod while critical meant the neighboring fuel modules would pick up the load and it was possible they could reach melting temperature, and melted fuel meant a bad day at sea—radiation levels within the hull rising to near fatal for the crew, and to complicate the miserable situation, a failed rod drive was not repairable at sea. No one carried a spare for that, and to Orlov’s knowledge, no one had ever dropped a rod in real life. It had always been a dreamt-up drill run for training, but here it was, cursing this mission.
The dropped control rod in the reactor that happened the day they arrived in the Arabian Sea had forced Novosibirsk to turn sharply west to pull into the port of Aden, Yemen, to await repair crews to arrive from Vladivostok with the exotic parts and tools needed to repair a control rod drive. And every minute it had taken that crew to arrive and fix the reactor was another minute that that asshole Boris Novikov had to get his submarine in-theater. Orlov frowned. “Mr. First, if that asshole Novikov beats us to the Gulf of Oman, I’m going to be seriously annoyed.”
“Your history with Novikov is the stuff of legend, Captain.”
Orlov nodded somberly. “That scum. I’d torpedo him myself if I could get away with it. But that aside, Mr. First, where do we stand with the repair?”
“Let me call Chernobyl, Captain.” Vlasenko pulled a VHF radio from his belt. “Topside Duty Officer, First Officer.”
The radio clicked as the topside watchstander, who stood aft of the graceful conning tower, waved and held his radio to his lips. “Topside, sir.”
“Get the engineer up here. Tell him we want an up-to-the-minute report.”
“Right away, sir,” the duty officer said, the radio clicking back to silence.
“You know, Captain, this will be our last night ashore for five, maybe six weeks. T.K. Sukolov reported he found a bar called ‘The Tent’ in the Sheraton hotel. We could get a cab, maybe grab some dinner, put away some vodka. You know, for good luck.”
“Fat chance of that, Ivan. You’re standing on the soil of a country that has outlawed alcohol.”
“The Western restaurants allow you to bring in two bottles per party as long as you drink behind closed doors.”
“Really?”
“Sukolov was very hungover this morning, Captain. And very happy. Seems he met a flight crew and they invited him and Dobryvnik to their private dining room. So vodka and a little female company.”
“Sukolov’s a dog,” Orlov said, suppressing a smile. The young communications officer, Captain Lieutenant Mikhail “T.K.” Sukolov, was perpetually looking for excitement ashore, and not the sort that an upstanding citizen would seek. “But let me ask you, Mr. First, do we even have any vodka onboard?”
“Officially, sir? Nyet.”
“And unofficially?”
“Unofficially, Trusov could fill a bathtub.”
The weapons officer, Captain Lieutenant Irina Trusov, was a teetotaler. Everything about that woman was prudish, cold, severe and wrapped up entirely too tight, in Orlov’s opinion, but he wouldn’t say that aloud to Vlasenko. Trusov was Vlasenko’s protégé, his creation, recruiting her personally from a distant branch of his family. They were third cousins, if Orlov remembered right.
“Good plan, having a non-drinker guard the vodka. But tell me, will she give it up if you ask?”
“I’ll probably have to resort to stealing it like Sukolov did.”
Orlov made a hissing sound. “Sukolov probably tried to sweet talk her first.”
“I have it on good authority he hit a brick wall with Iron Irina Trusov.”
“Grab the navigator to come with us, and Irina as well—she can make sure we don’t get into too much trouble. I’m assuming the engineer will have to stay with the technicians to supervise the repair.”
Vlasenko snickered. “And as punishment that it’s his equipment that interrupted our mission.”
Captain Third Rank Chernobrovin stepped quickly down the gangway from the boat to the pier, snapped to attention and saluted Orlov and Vlasenko.
“Engineer, reporting as ordered, sir.”
Orlov casually waved a salute back as he took in Chernobrovin, who wore sweat- and grease-stained blue coveralls with horizontal high-visibility reflective stripes across the top and bottoms of his sleeves. The youth looked underfed and hungry, with a perpetual five o’clock shadow on his face even if he had just shaved, his usual at-sea beard gnarly and atrocious, but he was newly married, and apparently the wife didn’t approve of facial hair. That in itself seemed odd, since a woman who liked baby-faced men would never ordinarily connect with a swarthy lad like Chernobrovin, but who could predict feminine attraction? And there was one perpetual constant in the universe, Orlov thought, the undeniable female urge to change her man from what he was to what she wanted him to be.
“So what’s the status, Mr. Chief Engineer?”
“Sir, the new control rod drive is installed and is mechanically complete. We’re loop checking it now. It’s responding. But we need to test it at operating temperature and pressure, and the only way to do that is to start the reactor and warm it up. The shipyard will ask to start it up and heat it up, then perform a normal shutdown, then restart it, then trip it manually to make sure it responds to a manual trip, then restart it again and send it a trip signal from the reactor control panel to make sure it responds to a programmed trip. Since there are five programmed trips, we’ll have to do that test five times. Only then will they clear us for sea.”
Orlov looked at Vlasenko, frowning. “How long is all that going to take?”
Chernobrovin checked his watch. “About twenty hours from now, Captain, if you give me permission to test the reactor and start up and shut down as the testing dictates.”
Orlov looked at the sky, then at Vlasenko. “We could test it while we maneuver out on the diesel. Assuming the weather cooperated.”
“Shipyard techs want to document a thousand data points from the testing, Captain. And if the unit fails to respond to a trip signal, it’s not safe. And it could even run away from us in a control rod withdrawal accident if the power connections got their polarity reversed or if a connection shorts out. And they want us tied up to the pier in case they have to call for more replacement parts.”
“Twenty hours, then,” Orlov said, shaking his head in frustration. Goddamned Sevmash Shipyard. They’d humped the pooch yet again. “You have permission to start up and shut down the reactor as necessary to accomplish the tests. When you’re done, remain steaming and critical. We’re heading out to sea the moment the ink on the closeout paperwork dries.”
“Yes, sir.” Chernobrovin saluted and turned and walked back down the gangway. Orlov watched him, then looked at the hull of the Novosibirsk. The ship was black and sleek, her hull covered with anechoic foam tiling to absorb sonar pings and to suppress noise from the inside. She was 130 meters long and 13 meters wide at her beam. Her graceful conning tower was tall and long, rising at a slight angle at the forward edge, continuing straight aft, then sloping down gently to the after deck. The vertical rudder aft rose almost as high as the conning tower, the cigar-shaped hull continuing as a simple cylinder forward to where the bullet nose vanished into the brackish water of Port Aden. She was, in a word, beautiful. Not like the drab, boring, functional cylinders of the American submarines. Their naval architects had no souls. Give him a Russian ship designer any day, Orlov thought, but it would be nice if they could manufacture their gorgeous designs with some goddamned workmanship. And throw in some reliability. Maybe Russia could get the Germans or Swiss to build submarines for them some day in the far future. Or even the Italians.
An hour later, as the sun was beginning to set, Orlov, Vlasenko, Sukolov, Trusov and the navigator, Captain Third Rank Misha Dobryvnik, were led to red leather seats at a cherrywood table in a room paneled in the dark mahogany. The waiter brought out glasses and a large bottle of Coca Cola with a bucket of ice, handed them menus and left.
“Madam Weapons Officer, would you do the honors?” Orlov asked Trusov.
Captain Lieutenant Irina Trusov smiled with straight white teeth at the captain, tossing a lock of white-blonde hair out of her blue eyes with a shake of her head, her expression worried at the prospect of getting caught committing a crime in a foreign country.
“Happy to, sir.” She pulled a large bottle of vodka from a dufflebag and filled up four rocks glasses. “Ice, sir?”
“Only amateurs put ice in vodka,” Orlov said, winking at Dobryvnik as the navigator dropped three ice cubes into his drink.
“Only cretins drink it straight,” Dobryvnik said, smiling at Orlov.
“A toast,” Vlasenko said. “To a successful mission for us—”
“—and a failed one for that asshole Novikov and his stinking boat, the Voronezh,” Orlov finished. They all held up their glasses, Trusov having put ice and cola in her glass, then drank the contents. Trusov, without being prompted, immediately refilled their glasses.
“Captain,” Dobryvnik said, “tell us the story of you and ‘that asshole’ Novikov. I’m the only one who hasn’t heard it.”
Dobryvnik was a big man with black hair, dark skin, narrow eyes, a flattened wide nose and a round face. In a wardroom composed of mostly blue-eyed Slavic blondes, he stood out. As a junior officer on the Akula III-class submarine K-419 Kuzbass, he had excelled at under-ice navigation, earning his navigation billet on the Novosibirsk. He was the newest officer to report aboard, but Orlov already had a good feeling about the younger officer. He was sharp-witted, sarcastic and funny. The crew had a taken a liking to him from the first day.
Orlov shook his head sadly. “The others only know the first half of the story. The second half is much worse.”
“Pray tell, Captain,” Vlasenko said, passing around the bottle for the third round, “what could possibly be worse than you two loading a torpedo onto the Severodvinsk and having its engine start, blast out of the torpedo tube and zip across the harbor and blow up a tugboat?”
“What?” Dobryvnik almost spilled his drink.
The waiter came in then to take their orders. Orlov and Vlasenko put in their orders, the others hurrying to scan the menu, their minds previously far from thinking about their dinner orders. When the waiter had collected their menus and shut the room’s door behind him, Orlov continued.
“Totally not my fault,” Orlov said, smirking, the worn expression he used when telling the story an inside joke between him and Vlasenko. “The board of inquiry blamed it all on that asshole Novikov, since he was on the loading platform and had direct control of the weapon, but some of his stink rubbed off on me, since I was on the wharf supervising.”
“Did it really blow up and sink the tug?” Dobryvnik stared at Orlov, his eyes wide.
“Not with the full force of the warhead.” Orlov put out his glass for a refill. Vlasenko poured for the captain and himself. “Only maybe ten percent of the high explosive went off, but the impact and that small detonation put a hole in the tugboat big enough that it took on water, and fast. We got lucky. It was right under a six-hundred-ton rail-mounted crane, and a quick-thinking crew and operator put the hook to a cable wrapped around the tugboat’s deck cleats and lifted it up so it wouldn’t sink and held it long enough that they could rig a drain pump and pontoons and patch the hole. But it occupied the crane for a week, and that delayed some important depot-level maintenance.”
“It’s a better story when you have the tug blow up and sink, though, Captain,” Vlasenko laughed.
“A few more vodkas in, and that tugboat in the story gets blown to holy hell,” Orlov smiled. “That asshole Novikov got knocked down a rank and I got one of those letters in my service jacket, the kind that’s not entertaining reading.”
“So what’s the second half of the story, Captain?” Dobryvnik asked.
“Let’s just say that that asshole Novikov was as furious at me as I was at him.”
“Why, what did you do to him?”
“He thinks I could have argued he was blameless before the board of inquiry, that the weapon was defective. Stupid idea, they recovered what was left of the torpedo and they would have seen we were both lying. I told the board Novikov took the safety bolts off to make the weapon easier to load. It was a common practice, but frowned on, and I personally told Novikov that would be unacceptable, but I didn’t check personally that the bolts were installed. Weapon got cockeyed in the tube and the arming circuit went off, had an internal short, started the engine, and the force of the screw on the metal of the tube walked it outward from the hull despite Novikov and his midshipman trying to stop it. Finally, they had to run out of the way and the torpedo started its journey. He blames me for his reduction in rank.”
“Didn’t hurt his career any, not that I saw, Captain,” Vlasenko said. “He may be only a captain second rank, but he’s in command of the Yasen-M boat Voronezh.”
“You know why, right? That asshole Novikov is the adopted son of Admiral Gennady Zhigunov, and Zhigunov is married to the daughter of the Minister of Defense. So. Connections.”
“You said there was more?” Vlasenko prompted.
“That asshole Novikov is pretty much the reason I’m divorced.”
Irina Trusov stared at him. “Really, sir?”
Orlov poured another vodka. “After the board of inquiry, he apparently decided to strike for me where it hurt. While I was on an under-ice run in the Arctic Ocean, that asshole Novikov was busy chatting up and seducing my wife.”
The room went silent, almost as if someone had let all the air out of the room. Orlov looked up from his glass and shook his head. “Yeah, and the story doesn’t have a happy ending, not for either of us.”
“What do you mean, Captain?” Trusov put her hand briefly on Orlov’s sleeve, a gesture of empathy.
“She left me for him,” Orlov said. “And that asshole Novikov was stupid enough to fall for her, just like I did. And would you believe it? She did the same thing to him that she did to me, not even a full year later. His next Barents Sea exercise, she ended up in the bed of the captain of the Kazan.”
“Mother of God,” Vlasenko said. “That woman certainly has a thing for submarine commanders.”
Orlov pulled out his phone and selected a photo of his former wife and passed it to Vlasenko, who handed it to Sukolov—who whistled—who handed it to Dobryvnik, then to Trusov.
“She could be a movie star,” Trusov said, impressed.
The woman in the photo was a platinum bombshell blonde with deep blue eyes, puffy red lips, a small upturned nose; she was slender but with an enormous chest and mile-long legs. She looked like she stepped right off one of those graphics that graced the noses of the bombers of the Great Patriotic War.
“She stopped traffic everywhere she went. It was stupid of me to marry her. Stupider still for that asshole Novikov to fall in love with her.”
“Damn,” Vlasenko said. “Now I feel sorry for both of you.”
“I didn’t mean to turn the evening into a downer,” Orlov said, standing. “I’ll close out the tab. You guys finish without me. I’ll find a cab back to the boat.”
On the cab ride back to the port facility, Orlov leaned his head against the window, berating himself for spilling his sad life story to his officers. For the thousandth time, he cursed the day he met Natalia.
And for the ten thousandth time, he cursed that asshole Novikov. Orlov wondered where that asshole Novikov was at that moment. Probably speeding at full ahead, reactor circulating pumps at fast speed, leaving the Arabian Sea and entering the Gulf of Oman, making his 8300 nautical mile passage from the Northern Fleet Kola base at Zapadnaya Litsa through the Suez Canal look like a breeze compared to Orlov’s 8100 mile run from Rybachiy in the Kamchatka peninsula. The thought of that asshole Novikov entering the Gulf of Oman ahead of them made Orlov sick. As the cab arrived at the pier, Captain First Rank Yuri Orlov, Navy of the Russian Republic and captain of the frontline nuclear fast attack submarine Novosibirsk, opened the door and vomited what seemed like gallons.