South Atlantic Ocean
235 kilometers west-southwest of Cape Town, South Africa
K-561 Kazan
Sunday, July 3; 1102 UTC, 1:02 pm Moscow time
Captain Second Rank Ania Lebedev hurried the mess cooks out of the wardroom, making sure the noon meal dishes were cleared. Captain Alexeyev had been taking his meals in his sea cabin since they’d arrived at the Cape Town barrier search point, almost three weeks ago. That was the same time he’d taken to wearing a black eye patch over his right eye, that and his constant scowl making him look sinister. The supply officer, Yakovlev, had tried to inject some humor into the odd situation, saying to the captain that perhaps he needed a parrot on his shoulder to complete his pirate ensemble. Alexeyev had said nothing, just stared him down with his good eye as if he could burn a hole into the young officer.
Since that day, Alexeyev had only been visible to the crew at the daily one o’clock operational briefing for the officers and during his midnight watch senior supervisory shift in the central command post, preferring the peace of the graveyard quiet of the midwatch over the busier daytime watches. This morning, when Lebedev had relieved the captain at 6:00 am, Alexeyev had said something about “noise in his head,” as if she were supposed to understand what the hell he meant.
It was just another data point asserting that the captain was borderline autistic, she thought, living deep within whatever world existed in his mind, withdrawing from the crew completely for the better part of a month. Lebedev pondered the possible reasons. Perhaps loneliness from being away from that slutty blonde bombshell girlfriend of his, who scandalously insisted on keeping the name of the captain of the Novosibirsk and had emerged into Alexeyev’s life still sweating from the bed of the commanding officer of the Voronezh. Or perhaps something the girlfriend had written him had put him in a funk, likely that woman finding yet another submarine captain to play with. Lebedev watched the captain’s face closely when he read the intelligence summaries after every periscope depth excursion, trying to see if one of the personal emails included in their daily feed included anything that would be a cause of pain for the man, but Alexeyev seemed steady in his depressed mood.
Until today at 11:45 of this morning’s watch. When Kazan had proceeded deep from the periscope depth trip, there was something in the feed that had been marked most secret and personal for commanding officer. Usually, a message like that would be cause for celebration, Lebedev thought, because that was how orders arrived that had an exact location of their target, gleaned from various intelligence sources. Sometimes the intel came from another submarine, other times from an maritime patrol antisubmarine aircraft, an Il-114 flyover that detected the target submarine using sonobuoys or magnetic anomaly detection, and rarely from a destroyer streaming a variable depth towed array sonar that could search deep in the thermal layer. Other times the intel was scrubbed of sources, like that time Kazan had been tipped off to a submarine leaving its base in Faslane, Scotland by virtue of what could only be a pierside prostitute, one of the dozens who worked for the GRU military intelligence organization. When today’s message had been received, according to the radioman of the watch, Captain Alexeyev had cursed and thrown the pad computer onto his bed, furious.
Which meant that this afternoon’s daily briefing would be difficult for the crew. Lebedev chided herself for fretting so much over the moodiness of her captain, but the man could be brutal, screaming epithets at officers who made mistakes, in front of the crew, a mortal sin in the mind of Lebedev, who strictly believed in commendations in public and reprimands in private. She had mostly avoided Alexeyev’s screaming fits, but somehow they were still something to be feared. She looked around the room, making sure everyone was there.
“Where’s the sonar officer?” Lebedev harshly asked Navigator Svetka Maksimov, who sat in the chair to Lebedev’s right. Maksimov was yet another source of annoyance for Lebedev. Women as pretty as Maksimov would do better to go into the fashion industry, Lebedev thought, or marrying well. If she absolutely insisted on being in the military, she needed to tone down her looks—put her damned flowing black locks in a ponytail, wear less makeup, look professional. Instead, she looked like a stripper sent in as a joke, a made-up, coiffed sex-pot just temporarily stuffed into submarine coveralls. Lebedev tried to hide her dislike, but it proved a monumental task.
Maksimov lunged for the corner table phone and made a call, saying a few quiet words. “He’s on his way,” Maksimov said, nodding at the first officer.
The wardroom door opened and Sonar Officer Ilia Kovalev stepped quickly in, looking embarrassed.
“Sorry, Madam First,” he said to Lebedev, “the turnover in central took too long.”
“Why? What’s on the screens?”
“A haystack of merchant shipping, Madam First. No sign of our needle.”
“Two needles,” Lebedev reminded Kovalev. “The Panther and the escort sub, most likely a Virginia-class unit.” Lebedev grabbed the phone under the table near the captain’s station and dialed his stateroom using the buttons set into the handset.
“Captain,” Alexeyev said, sounding far away.
“Sir, the officers are gathered for the one o’clock,” Lebedev said.
“I’m on the way,” he said and hung up.
Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev entered the wardroom from the forward door, slid the door shut and took his seat at the end of the table, with Lebedev to his right and Engineer Alesya Matveev to his left. Lebedev glanced at him. He was still wearing that black eye patch. And was it Lebedev’s imagination, or was he developing streaks of gray in his once jet-black hair? He was freshly showered, wearing clean coveralls, but he hadn’t shaved in at least three days. The male officers had started their at-sea beards when Kazan first shoved off 29 days ago, Navy regulations allowing the relaxation of grooming standards when at sea for submariners, but still requiring beards be closely trimmed, not growing all over the place like a terrorist. Several times this run, Lebedev had scolded the electrical officer, Senior Lieutenant Anatoly Pavlovsky, for overgrowing his thick black beard, but the man was too proud of it, the beard even earning him his pirate nickname, Blackbeard. But all those relaxed grooming standards assumed the male crewmen would commit to growing and maintaining the beard, not skipping shaving for four or five days, looking constantly scruffy, like a homeless person. There was no doubt, the state of the commanding officer’s mental health was starting to become a real concern, Lebedev thought.
“We have everyone?” Alexeyev asked Lebedev.
“Yes, Captain. We’re ready.”
Alexeyev got right to the point. “I’m projecting my screen,” he said, flashing up the message he’d received from Northern Fleet headquarters. He allowed a moment for the officers to scan and reread the message.
“So,” Alexeyev said, his voice low-pitched and slow. “Here’s what we know. Both submarines Voronezh and Novosibirsk were destroyed by an American nuclear strike.” He looked at the gathered officers, who were all staring at the message, as shocked as he’d been when he first went through the intelligence digest and op-order update, all of them thinking the same thing—who did they know from the crews of the downed submarines? “The American boat escorting the Panther out of the Arabian Sea found out the positions of Voronezh and Novosibirsk from detecting them at periscope depth, then fired two cruise missile-mounted nuclear depth charges at a target location probability circle. And apparently, they got lucky and hit both submarines. How did the Americans find out our positions? The GRU reports that American agents have managed to install transmitters on all our periscopes that tattletale our locations to their satellites every time we are on the surface or at periscope depth. For that reason, assuming the American agents somehow got a transponder installed on this ship, we have made our last excursion to periscope depth, until the mission concludes.”
Navigator Maksimov spoke first. “Captain, the bottom contours here are poor for use for navigation. Without the navigation satellite, our position error will grow. The fix error circle could be fifty kilometers in diameter in two days. In a week, we’ll barely know what ocean we’re in.”
“I know,” Alexeyev said. “So be it. Better to be guessing at our navigation than give away our position to the Americans. For that reason, I’ve ordered us to withdraw from the Cape Town barrier search point and move the center of the search to a position farther northwest of where we initially set up. It’s less optimal for catching the Panther, but it is outside of the nuclear weapon blast circle damage radius from where we were at the last periscope depth.”
Engineer Alesya Matveev spoke up. “Captain, we have housekeeping to do at periscope depth. In four days, I’m going to need to blow down our steam generators or else the level controls will go so crazy that we’ll trip the reactor. And we have to be shallow to blow down the boilers, sir, or the pressure of the deep won’t allow flow.”
“And we need to eject trash,” Supply Officer Vladik Yakovlev said. “Otherwise we’ll be up to our eyeballs in trash, and the boat will start to stink.”
Alexeyev waved at the objections. “We can still come shallow to eject trash or blowdown the steam generators, we’ll just do it without putting up the periscope.”
“Captain, that’s dangerous,” Maksimov said. “We risk collision. The shipping lanes here are busy, sir, and they’re directly overhead.” She glanced up at the overhead as she said it.
“Can’t be helped, Navigator,” Alexeyev said. “It’s just another risk we take when we go into a combat situation.” Alexeyev continued. “Also of note, more bad news, is that our recovery from the Medved’ Grizli worm has been problematic. The air assets of the Northern and Pacific Fleets are still grounded, and the surface vessels remain down hard. The destroyer fleet can’t even start their engines. Even their interior communication telephones won’t work. Somehow our submarines managed to escape the effects of the worm, but the air fleet grounding means no MPA aircraft will arrive to help us search for the target submarines. In attempting to recover from the cyberattack, we lost two Il-114s in the Pacific fleet and one from the Northern Fleet. So we are to expect no help from antisubmarine aircraft.”
Weapons Officer Katerina Sobol put out her hand to be recognized. “Go ahead, Sobol,” Lebedev said.
“Captain, that is going to make detecting these submarines nearly impossible,” Sobol said in her high-pitched cartoon character voice. “This barrier search at the Cape of Good Hope, it’s not much of a so-called choke point. There’s thousands of miles from the South Africa coast to the shores of Antarctica. The target submarines could be going through any of that.”
“Weps is right, Captain,” Maksimov said. “From Cape Town to the Antarctic coast is over four thousand kilometers. Perfect for hiding the transit of two submarines, one of them a diesel boat running on batteries, the other a front-line nuclear attack submarine.”
Alexeyev took a deep breath, which Lebedev knew meant he had the same doubts, but needed to put a presentable face on the bad news. “Navigator, let us not forget what we know. The Panther may be a diesel submarine, and perhaps he is running on his batteries with a rig for silent running, but somehow I doubt it. I believe he is blasting through the sea using his nuclear reactor, and that he will be loud. We will detect him from his reactor noises. The nuclear plant of the Panther is not built for stealth, just raw power. He’s fast now, I’ll give him that, but he’s loud enough to be heard out to a hundred kilometers, maybe even three times that.”
“But sir,” Maksimov continued, “why do you think he’s going maximum speed using his reactor? Wouldn’t he want to be dead quiet when transiting the Cape of Good Hope? Afraid we might be lying in wait? Particularly if the Americans got our position from our last periscope depth excursion?”
“I’ll tell you why, Madam Navigator,” Alexeyev said, his voice flat, level and dead. He turned off the projector and walked up to the projection screen, which doubled as a whiteboard, grabbing a dry-erase marker from the credenza top drawer. He wrote PANTHER and under it a date—3 JUNE. Under that, another date, today’s date, 3 JULY. Then a vertical arrow connecting the dates together and beside that, the notation, 30 DAYS. He wrote next to that, KAZAN and beneath that, the dates 4 JUNE and 3 JULY, annotating an arrow between them as 29 DAYS. He looked at the supply officer. “Since Panther was taken, they’ve been at sea for thirty days. Kazan emergency sortied the day after the Americans took Panther, so we’ve been unsupported and deployed for twenty-nine days. Mr. Supply Officer, when did you do your last supply inventory?”
“Yesterday afternoon’s watch, Captain,” Yakovlev said.
“And at normal rations, how many days do we have left?”
“With the present rate of consumption, Captain, we have twenty-one days left of food. Three weeks. At the twenty day to-go point, we’d discussed cutting rations in half to stretch us to forty days.”
“Navigator, if we left tomorrow morning for home, how long to get there, assuming a speed of advance at maximum with intermittent shallow and slow excursions for housekeeping, say thirty-four knots?”
Maksimov calculated on her pad computer, then looked up. “Ten days, Captain.”
“So, if we cut rations now and have forty days left, with ten days to get home and no contingency, we have thirty days left here on-station. But we are a Yasen-M-class submarine, and a fifty-day loadout fills our boat. The American Virginia-class is half our size, people, with double the crew. How many days of food do you think they have left? Like us, they can’t exactly pull into Cape Town and go grocery shopping. And if it’s bad for the Virginia-class, what can it be for the Panther? Her test mission was set for a week. They maybe had ten days of food for the whole crew. Now there’s probably a third of that number aboard now with the commandos who took her and presumably some officers from the Virginia-class to sail her. That would stretch her food from ten days to thirty. Which means, officers, the Panther just ran out of food. So you tell me, Mr. Supply Officer, in that situation, would you be poking along at six knots, extending your ex-filtration for two months, or would you increase speed to maximum and be on starvation rations for only two weeks?”
Yakovlev looked down at the table and mumbled something.
“Speak up when the commanding officer asks you a question, Yakovlev!” Lebedev said sternly.
“Yes, ma’am. Captain, I’d increase speed to maximum,” he said.
“So, people,” Alexeyev said, looking at the room’s officers, “we revise our sonar search plan for the Panther at maximum speed on her reactor and the Virginia-class running forced circulation and fast speed reactor recirculation pumps.”
“What if they just slow down for the five hundred or so kilometer passage through the Cape of Good Hope, Captain?” Weapons Officer Sobol asked. “If they’re creepy-crawling when they go around the horn, we might never detect them.”
“Doing that would add weeks to their trip,” Alexeyev said. “They’re starving now. I think they’ll risk it. I also think that means they won’t be taking the Cape wide, going down by Antarctica. I think they’ll come right down the center of the shipping lanes, going on a great circle route back to the American east coast. I’ve positioned the barrier search center point along that route, north and west of Cape Town. Let’s see if our calculus proves out. Meanwhile, Mr. Supply Officer, cut all rations in half, starting after the evening meal.”
“Perhaps one good meal before we cut rations, Captain?” Yakovlev asked.
“No. That would seem like a celebration, Supply Officer,” Alexeyev said, his voice somehow disconnected and distracted. “We will not be celebrating on this ship until the targets are on the bottom and we are on our way home. Anything else?” No one spoke. Alexeyev looked at the chief engineer, Captain Third Rank Matveev. “Fine. Engineer? I want to see you in my sea cabin.” Without another word, he stood and made his way back to his sea cabin, his gaze staring at something miles away.
The officers hastily gathered up their pad computers and cleaned off their cups and hurried to the passageway. Lebedev was somewhat annoyed that Captain Alexeyev hadn’t asked her along to his sea cabin to talk to Engineer Matveev about whatever was on his mind. The first officer looked at the navigator, who was almost at the wardroom door.
“Madam Navigator, stay a moment, if you don’t mind,” Lebedev said, forcing her expression to depart from its usual harshness. Maksimov nodded, inhaling. Lebedev could tell the navigator was bracing for a reprimand, but it was occurring to Lebedev that while Maksimov was usually about as far from an ally as Lebedev could imagine, today, Maksimov’s questioning attitude to the captain was in complete synchronization with Lebedev’s own thoughts. And Maksimov had demonstrated integrity and grit confronting the captain on his possibly faulty assumptions, as well as showing a penetrating intelligence, heretofore masked by her weaponized femininity. Lebedev began to think her initial impressions of the youthful navigator might have been too hasty. She could have been judging the too-pretty officer by her physical appearance, and doing that violated everything Lebedev stood for. Maksimov sat back down, crossing the table to be able to sit opposite the second-in-command rather than at her usual seat to the first officer’s immediate right.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“What do you think, Navigator?” Lebedev asked, looking at Maksimov, turning to find the teapot and refilling her cup, handing Maksimov a fresh cup, hoping her own facial expression had softened from her usual frown as she extended the teapot.
“Captain’s making a pretty big gamble, Madam First,” Maksimov said, accepting the cup from the first officer and holding it so Lebedev could pour tea into it.
Lebedev agreed, but decided to try to frame an argument that would express loyalty to the captain, however lame such an argument might be. Theatrically, she shrugged. “He has to do something. He made a tactical decision. Let’s see if it plays out.”
“Madam First, if those target subs get past us, there will be hell to pay with the Admiralty.”
“We all need to quit thinking that way,” Lebedev said gently. “Think positive. We will nail these damned targets and prevail. Before we pull into port, we will paint two small American flags on our conning tower to commemorate the kills. Shut your eyes, Nav. Can you see it in your mind?”
Maksimov smiled at her. Lebedev realized that in all her association with the young navigator, this was the first time Maksimov had smiled in Lebedev’s presence.
“Don’t worry, Nav,” Lebedev continued gently. “We’ll win this thing. I believe it in every cell of my body. And you should too. This is the Kazan. We are the supreme nuclear attack submarine on the planet.”
Maksimov nodded. “I like that, Madam First.” She stood up. “By your leave, ma’am?”
“Dismissed, Navigator,” Lebedev said, smiling back at Maksimov.
The navigator left, and Lebedev was alone in the wardroom, staring at the whiteboard. Maksimov had hit the nail on the head, Lebedev thought. Alexeyev’s gamble was extreme. And possibly stupid. But without antisubmarine aircraft to help them get a position of the targets, the oceans were simply too big. The chances of detecting the American and rogue Iranian subs were so low that she would have to think ahead to what would happen to her career if the submarines made it all the way to American shores.
In Captain Georgy Alexeyev’s sea cabin, Chief Engineer Alesya Matveev entered, finding a seat at the small table opposite Alexeyev’s command chair.
“You wanted to see me, Captain?” Matveev prompted.
“There is an urgent communication from the engineering directorate that evaluated the casualties on Voronezh and Novosibirsk.”
“But Captain,” Matveev said, “Our boats sank from getting hit with a nuclear strike.”
“A debrief of the surviving crewmembers of the Novosibirsk revealed that under the shock impact of the nuclear weapon, the atmospheric control equipment in auxiliary machinery room number two disassembled and caused complete chaos. You can imagine. Hydrogen. Oxygen. The oxygen storage banks. Complete loss of emergency breathing air. An explosion in machinery two would doom the ship. And apparently, it did. The explosion from machinery two was strong enough to cause the reactor vessel to jump on its mountings, resulting in a dual rod ejection accident. The fuel overpowered and caused a steam explosion and blew the lid off the vessel and blew melted nuclear fuel all over the third compartment and irradiated the entire crew. So. Machinery two is essentially one big design flaw.”
“Did the engineering directorate have recommendations to harden the equipment in the room?” Matveev asked.
Alexeyev looked at her and shook his head. “No. As usual, the engineering directorate can only point out flaws, not fixes. I mention it in passing, Engineer. Be ready in case we take a close-aboard torpedo detonation. The torpedo might not kill us, but auxiliary machinery room number two might. We’ll need to brief all watchsections and have them ready to shut down ventilation and flood machinery two in the event of trouble. And if we’re heading into a shooting situation, we’ll need to cut the oxygen feed and shut down and purge out the oxygen generators. And to be safe, cut off the carbon dioxide scrubbers and shut down the monoxide burners.”
Matveev shook her head. “We’d better hope any weapon exchange happens fast, Captain, because with no oxygen bleed or generation and no carbon dioxide removal, we’ll all be suffocating slowly.”
Alexeyev nodded. “The choice, Madam Engineer, seems to be between dying slowly or going out in a blaze of glory, a literal one, because we’ll be on fire. I think my choice is I’ll suffer the breathing discomfort until our weapons have done their duty.”
Matveev nodded. “Understood, Captain. Meanwhile, I will take a tour of the room and see if there is anything we can do to harden it against attack. But, we’ve been saying for years that the design is defective.”
Alexeyev waved his hand. “I know. Do what you can, Alesya. If we take a hit from a torpedo, I’d rather it be the hull breach that kills us, not our own atmo-control equipment.”
“Yes, sir,” Matveev said. “By your leave, sir.”
“Dismissed,” Alexeyev said.
Ten seconds later, Georgy Alexeyev was alone in his sea cabin. And alone in his life. Natalia’s last email, downloaded in their late morning periscope depth excursion, confirmed that there was another man, a new man, and she confessed she was interested in sexually, and would Alexeyev kindly and gracefully agree to the idea of her having sex with another man in his apartment, in his bed? Because Alexeyev had essentially abandoned her, sneaking out to sea in the middle of the night with no good-bye, no idea when he’d be back, on an operation so shrouded in secrecy the entire base had no idea they’d deployed. And besides which, he hadn’t emailed her in almost three weeks, and his silence had distressed her.
Natalia could not tolerate abandonment, not since her father had put a pistol barrel in his mouth and departed life when Natalia was only eight, the word of his suicide taking two years to reach Natalia’s mother and eventually Natalia herself. Why, Alexeyev wondered, did she bother with ship captains? They disappeared for weeks, months on end. It was by definition the nature of their jobs.
And there was no doubt that Alexeyev had been deeply and desperately in love with Natalia, until his venereal disease diagnosis, and made worse now by her blatant betrayal, all this so unexpected and so fatal to his spirit. The last message from Natalia hammered the last nail in the coffin of the relationship, as suddenly as Natalia’s father’s bullet had ended him.
The crime of the situation is that she could have just sat him down, one adult to another, and told him she was unhappy in the relationship and that she was leaving him. He would have politely let her go and wished her Godspeed. But instead, she had exploited her intimate knowledge of him to know exactly what his vulnerabilities were, where his insecurities were seated, the exact placement of a kill switch that would cause his great love for her to self-destruct. When he thought about it, it was a cowardly act. And the more he thought about it, the more rage he felt.
Alexeyev had written her back, the email leaving the ship before the edict to stop coming to periscope depth. His message had read, Natalia, you are a whore and a degenerate slut. You and your cheating ways have led to me having a venereal disease and perhaps herpes in my eye. I strongly advise you to get your things and move out. If I find out that you brought another man into my apartment and into my bed, I swear by my mother’s hallowed grave that I will find you and I will drain the lifeblood out of you with a thirty-centimeter rusty knife that I will use to cut your carotid arteries.
Now that the message was sent, Natalia was no longer one of the centers of his life, the other being his beloved Kazan. But everywhere he went, he was damned by flashing memories of Natalia, even here in his sea cabin, as he remembered the Saturday last summer when he’d first taken her on a tour of the boat and shown her his sea cabin. With a mischievous smile, Natalia had double-locked both doors and pulled her shirt off and started to kiss him, and before he could respond she was naked and spread out on his conference table, and he’d taken her, gently at first, and then with the energy of a rocket booster, until they’d both collapsed drenched in sweat. Then came the knock on the door, the Inport Duty Officer Pavlovsky’s voice on the other side of the door, Sir, are you okay? We heard noises. He could still see Natalia, naked and gorgeous, covering her mouth to suppress her musical laugh.
Natalia, he thought. How had his life brought him to this? He tried to concentrate on the mission, hoping it would take his mind out of this swirling emotional cesspool, but somehow this mission, this fool’s errand to find an invisible and silent needle in a vast haystack, was not enough of a distraction. He wondered if there were any alcohol onboard. If they were back in port, he would have called up his closest friend, Sergei Kovalov, captain of the K-564 Arkhangelsk, and together they’d find the answers to life’s questions at the bottom of a bottle of Ruskova vodka. That, of course, assumed that Natalia wasn’t in Kovalov’s life by that time.
South Atlantic Ocean
98 miles west-southwest of Cape Town, South Africa
B-902 Panther
Sunday, July 3; 1102 UTC
AOIC Anthony Pacino had the morning watch in the central command post. He’d brought the Cape of Good Hope chart to central command and taped it to the horizontal section of the pos one console, frequently updating it from the inertial navigation repeater. His impatience to get north into the North Atlantic made their slow crawl miserable. Every time he went to update the chart, their position was right on top of the one from the last update. This was just intolerably slow.
The phone buzzed and he answered it at pos one. “Central command, Pacino,” he said.
“It’s Varney and Ahmadi in the first compartment. Weapons in tubes one and two have been powered up for almost an hour. Request to spin up the UGST weapons in tubes three and four and open their outer doors and shut the doors to one and two and depressurize and shut down one and two.”
“Wait one. I’ll call you back.” He clicked off and dialed up the sonar room.
“Sonar, Albanese.”
“You got anything? Varney wants to rotate tubes and shut and open doors.” The operation was loud, Pacino thought.
“Yeah, I’ve got about sixty merchant ships overhead in the exit from the Indian Ocean into the South Atlantic. The ambient noise is so loud it hurts to put on the headset.”
Pacino had thought about making the transit shallow, using the thunderous noise of the merchant ships to mask their own noise, but some of those vessels were so huge with such deep drafts that collision was practically guaranteed. The only way to get that done was to continuously ping with the under ice and mine detection sonar, and doing that would broadcast their position. Pacino inhaled.
“But no submerged warships?” Pacino asked.
“Nope. Vermont is invisible. Presumably, so is the Yasen-M.”
“Well, yell if you do pick something up.”
“Our first sign will probably be Vermont firing torpedoes,” Albanese said.
“Yeah. You doing okay otherwise, Chief?”
“L-T, I’ve run out of cigarettes. I’m miserable.”
Pacino laughed. “Think how healthy you’ll be when we finally make it to AUTEC.”
“Between not smoking and our starvation rations, I’ll be a shadow of myself, L-T.”
“Just keep listening and try not to think about smokes or food,” Pacino said, smiling to himself as he hung up. He dialed the first compartment.
“Torpedo room, Varney.”
“Mr. Varney, you have permission to spin up three and four, shut down one and two, and open and shut outer doors as necessary.”
“Thank you, AOIC. I’ll call up when it’s done.”
Pacino hung up and felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Alexie Abakumov, the Russian reactor engineer. Pacino looked at him.
“You wanted to start the reactor, yes?” he said to Pacino.
Pacino nodded. “Let’s see how the batteries are doing.” Pacino scanned four gauges. They had perhaps 20 percent capacity. It was time to start up the plant to recharge. He looked at his watch. “I’ll get OIC up here to take the watch.” He dialed Dankleff’s sea cabin.
A sleepy U-Boat Dankleff answered. “OIC.”
“It’s Patch. Abakumov needs to start the reactor and I want to perform the startup under instruction.” He and Dankleff had discussed that they needed to know how to operate the nuclear reactor in case something happened to Abakumov.
“I’ll be up. I want to walk under the water and put on fresh coveralls. Give me ten.”
Pacino looked at the Russian. “I’ll be aft in ten. Don’t commence without me.”
Abakumov nodded. He had dark circles under his eyes and his cheeks looked more hollow than usual. He, too, had run out of cigarettes. And vodka. And the cut in rations was hitting him as hard as the rest of the crew. No doubt, Pacino thought, they had to speed up to maximum as soon as they could get past the Cape’s choke point.
Dankleff arrived, holding a steaming coffee cup, his eyes puffy from sleep. “There’s only days of coffee left, Lipstick. This trip sucks.”
“I know, U-Boat. Another nine days and we’ll be done. And tomorrow morning when I come on watch, we’ll crank it back up to flank. At least that will feel better than this tiptoeing. And we can reopen the galley for hot food.” They’d shut down cooking during the Cape of Good Hope transit to minimize noise.
“So, anything I should know?”
“Albanese has nothing but merchant ships. But that’s no surprise. Varney is rotating three and four into readiness and shutting down one and two, operating outer doors. Otherwise, nothing is going on.”
“I relieve you, sir,” Dankleff said formally.
“I stand relieved. I’ll call from nuclear control when we’re ready for your permission.”
Dankleff nodded, yawned and took a pull of his coffee.
Pacino hurried aft, through the hatch to the shielded tunnel that traversed the third compartment where the reactor was housed, out the aft tunnel hatch into the motor-generator room, turning left into the nuclear control room, a cubbyhole created from what had once been a spare parts closet, but now had three walls of flatpanel displays, all of them busy with instrument indications, temperature and pressure graphs, a mimic depiction of the piping, valves and pumps of the primary loop, with the secondary system depicted on a neighboring screen, showing the piping, turbines, condensers and pumps of its systems. On the horizontal portion of the single seat’s console was a section with four large rotary switches and a pistol grip switch that operated the nuclear control rods.
“You should call for permission,” Abakumov said. “We must hurry.”
Pacino hoisted the handset of the aft wall phone to his ear and dialed central command.
“Central, OIC.”
“Nuclear control, AOIC, request permission to start the reactor and place the propulsion turbine on the main motor and the ship’s service turbine on the ship’s load generator.”
“AOIC, you have permission to start the reactor and place turbines on line. Call when we’re on nuclear power.”
“AOIC, aye,” Pacino said, hanging up. He looked at Abakumov. “So. Operating procedure twenty-seven is displayed on the far-left upper display. Initial conditions are set, running one slow speed main coolant pump in each loop. Step one, energize inverters?”
Abakumov nodded.
“Energizing inverters alpha, bravo and charlie.” Pacino pressed the touch screen that depicted the inverters that controlled the rod drive mechanisms. All their lights changed from red to green. “Inverters are on line. So now, step two, latch rods?”
“Yes, Mr. Patch.”
Pacino reached for the pistol grip on the console and pulled it vertically out of the panel, and it came up a few inches. “Latch voltage applied,” he said, then rotated the pistol grip counterclockwise to the nine o’clock position. “Driving control rod drive mechanisms inward.” Three green lights lit above the mimic picture of the reactor vessel. “CRDMs indicate latched,” he said, glancing at the procedure, then putting the pistol grip switch back to its neutral twelve o’clock position and letting it drop back into the console. “Step three, select rod one and pull it to one hundred centimeters while monitoring startup rate?”
“Yes, but pause at eighty centimeters.”
“Pulling rod one to eighty,” Pacino said, selecting the pistol grip so that it was selected to only control rod one, and rotated the pistol grip to pull the rod out.
Ten minutes later, rods one and two were all the way out of the core at 100 centimeters height with rod three at 33 centimeters. The reactor had climbed steadily out of the nonvisible range into the intermediate range and then into the power range. Pacino had opened the valves to pull steam out of the steam generators, boiling them down while warming up the massive steam headers. As the condensed water was forced out of the large bore steam piping system, the venting in the space was incredibly loud.
“Too bad you guys didn’t find a way to muffle that,” Pacino said, his fingers in his ears.
Abakumov shrugged. “Is not combat system,” he said, as if that explained everything.
“I’m losing boiler level. I may have to start a feed pump on the batteries.”
“If you do that, you risk tripping out many systems. Feed pump pulls too many amps. Must make it on boiler steam. This is where men are separated from boys.”
Pacino’s jaw clenched. “Main steam header is clear. Admitting steam to ship’s service steam turbine.” Pacino pressed the touch screen to open the throttle valve to the SSTG. A low-pitched but loud hum came from ahead of them, then the pitch rose from bass to tenor. The turbine was spinning up, sounding like a jet engine on startup. Soon the pitch had risen to a screaming, ear-piercing squeal. “It’s almost like you guys went out of your way to make it loud,” he shouted over the noise.
“SSTG is at three thousand RPM, on the governor and ready for loading. Quick, shut the breaker to the ship’s service generator and open the battery breaker to the ship’s service generator.”
Pacino did as he was told, bringing the ship’s service turbine on line and taking the battery out of the circuit. He glanced at the boiler levels, and they were perilously low. If he didn’t start a feed pump immediately, they’d boil dry and they’d lose the entire plant.
“Ten centimeters of level in the boilers,” Abakumov prompted.
“SSTG has all ship’s loads, battery breaker open, ready to start a feed pump.”
“Do it.”
Pacino punched the flatpanel at the indication of the main feed pump, one eye on the boiler level, now at 4 centimeters. The pump had better start on the first try, he thought. The pump was the size of a refrigerator and drew more current than anything on board. As it started, all the lights throughout the ship dimmed and blinked, the electrical transient causing alarms to go off in central command. Pacino watched. The pump indicated at max RPM and boiler levels were climbing from 2 centimeters, back on their way to 80. He breathed a sigh of relief. It had worked.
“You are obviously man, not boy,” Abakumov said, slapping Pacino on the back and smiling.
“Good to know,” Pacino said. “I suspected, but confirmation is important. Now, for the propulsion turbine.”
This was easier, similar to starting the ship’s service turbine, but this unit was five times the size of the SSTG, its screaming to full revolutions ear-piercing. Hard to imagine that this much noise wouldn’t blast out into the sea and be detected by someone out there, but there was nothing they could do about it.
Finally, the battery breaker to the main motor was open and the propulsion turbine was powering the main motor. The ship was underway on nuclear power.
“Start the battery charge,” Abakumov said.
Pacino lined up the breakers to put the SSTG onto the battery and push current into it to restore its state of charge. As the amp-hour meter began to climb, he stepped back from the panel and looked at the status of the equipment. It was all nominal. No alarms, no red flashing annunciators. He’d done it. He found the phone.
“Central, OIC.”
“Nuclear control, AOIC. Propulsion shifted to nuclear power, battery charge in progress.”
“Very well. Now get up here and take back over your watch, ya non-qual slacker.”
Pacino smiled, turned over the propulsion plant watch to Abakumov and walked forward.