by Captain Peter Huchthausen, Captain First Rank Igor Kurdin, Russian Navy, and R. Alan White.
Atrio of sailors and writers combined to create the gripping narrative Hostile Waters, one of the most thrilling accounts of submarines and superpowers during the Cold War. Captain Peter Huchthausen, U.S. Navy (Ret.), has had a distinguished career serving at sea and on land as a Soviet naval analyst and as a naval attaché in Yugo slavia, Romania, and the Soviet Union. During the Vietnam conflict, he rescued a badly injured Viet nam ese child in the Mekong Delta, only to lose her during the Tet Offensive. They were reunited years later, when he was able to sponsor her immigration to the United States, and the entire incredible story is chronicled in his book Echoes of the Mekong. He is now a consultant and writer, and is the author of the bestselling Hostile Waters, along with his nonfiction books October Fury, Shadow Voyage, America’s Splendid Little Wars, and K-19: The Widowmaker, among others.
Captain First Rank Igor Kurdin saw the ill-fated K-219 off from the dock on its last voyage. A Russian submarine officer who had served aboard the outdated nuclear submarine, Kurdin later provided hours of interviews with various crew members, myriad photographs, and other factual material, which Peter Huchthausen translated for their book Hostile Waters. Currently he is the chairman of the St. Petersburg Submariners Club, founded to honor the valiant men aboard the Kursk and their families.
In addition to his work on Hostile Waters, R. Alan White has written five thrillers, including Siberian Light, Typhoon, and The Ice Curtain. He currently lives with his wife near Monterey, California.
Like any other piece of modern equipment, a nuclear submarine is a vast, complicated, self-contained environment made up of dozens of interlocking systems that all must work perfectly in order for the vessel and its crew to perform their duties. When an obsolete, decrepit Yankee-class submarine puts out to sea staffed with new submariners on their first patrol and faulty systems, the results can be catastrophic. In the following pages, the first major problem with K-219’s weapons systems reaches critical mass, putting everyone on board in danger, and bringing the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. one step closer to all-out war in the deep freeze of the Cold War of the 1980s.
In compartment four, Weapons Officer Petrachkov felt the sudden onset of the Crazy Ivan and grabbed at the catwalk railing. Voroblev said, “What’s he—”
An instant later the water-level alarm shrieked. Petrachkov stood there for a moment, stunned, then looked at the gauge for silo six.
It showed forty liters. Full.
“Pump it!” Voroblev shouted.
He screamed to the missilemen below, “Pump silo six now!” Then he vaulted down the ladder to help line up the valves and pumps. He landed on his knees and frantically spun the valves on the suction line, then slammed his fist into the black rubber start button on the pump. It started to whir.
He jumped to cut off the alarm. As he did, he saw the chemical-fume detector at full deflection, redlined. A new alarm began to sound.
Seawater and missile fuel had found one another. Nitric acid was the result. Acid that even now could be eating into the pressurized vitals of the RSM-25 rocket. An explosion could happen any second.
Only venting the missile tube to the sea could save them.
Petrachkov grabbed the intercom microphone. “Control! This is Pe-trach kov in four! We have a major seawater leak in tube six! There’s gas! I have to vent it! Give us fifty meters! I’m disengaging the hatch cover!” He threw the kashtan down. He threw open the panel on the missile tube control board, flipped open the red switch cover marked Six, and turned the red handle inside.
Outside on the pressure hull, high-pressure air began to turn the missile-hatch cover mechanism to the unlocked position. The chemical-fume alarm was blaring. Petrachkov listened for the rumble of air escaping the open hatch. It didn’t come. “All of you!” he shouted to the stunned missilemen. “Put on your masks now! Get them on!”
From the bottom level smoking cubicle, the executive officer sprinted forward to his battle station in the central command post. Markov, the communications officer, lingered slightly too long. He didn’t make it to the hatch before all watertight hatches were sealed. It clanged shut in his face. The two lounging cooks vanished back aft to compartment five. Voroblev, the damage-control specialist, stood by silo six at the upper level, his hand on the cold steel.
The process of opening the silo’s muzzle hatch was automatic. Once begun it could not be stopped. But it took five minutes to complete. It was 0532, Moscow time.
“General Alarm!” Britanov shouted, all thoughts of the American submarine gone now. “Make depth for fifty meters!”
The planesman pulled his joystick back, heading the submarine up as sharply as she’d dived not a few moments ago. The hull creaked, her bulkheads groaned as the crushing pressures shifted.
Political Officer Sergiyenko was holding on to the hatch coaming leading into the mess area for dear life as the submarine planed steeply up. He could hear the engines laboring, the propellers speeding. He could hear the alarm from somewhere forward.
Forward was compartment four, the missile room.
The deck slanted up alarmingly. Suddenly, on the far side of the mess deck, the hatch to the missile room slammed open and Weapons Officer Pe-trachkov appeared along with Lieutenant Markov.
“Gas! Everyone clear out of here now!” He dived back into compartment four. Markov remained in the mess area.
After a stunned second, the sleepy men bolted from the mess, heading aft, away from the missiles, nearly trampling the political officer as they ran. Sergiyenko knew he should do something, that he should somehow take command. He was a representative of the Party, after all. But the words wouldn’t come, nor would his feet obey him. He was frozen, panicked.
Captain Britanov’s voice exploded over the intercom. His tone was completely different from the one he used in drills. It terrified Sergiyenko.
“Battle stations! Battle stations! Toxic gas in silo six! This is not a drill!”
The submarine was still pointed uphill when a massive detonation boomed through the hull. The lights blinked out at once. The battle lanterns flickered and once again went black. The deck fell away beneath Sergiyenko’s feet as the boat stopped her rise and began, instead, to dive. As he held on to the edge of the hatch, he could hear water rushing in someplace nearby, flooding this dark, doomed pipe plunging out of control to the bottom of the sea.
The rolling detonation blasted the partially open missile hatch open and reverberated like thunder through the wounded submarine. The command post battle lamps remained lit.
Britanov had to hold on to a steel handle to keep his feet beneath him; the deck was plunging at an acute angle.
“Planes full up!” he ordered.
“Depth one hundred meters.” The planesman had the joysticks full back, trying to arrest the dive. “My planes are full up. No response.”
“Engines!” barked Britanov. “Turns for twenty knots! No. Make that all ahead full, both engines.”
“All ahead full!”
Navigator Aznabaev heard the shouts, the alarms. He felt the steepness of the dive, the creaks and groans of steel squeezed by the increasing water pressure.
“Two hundred meters, Captain,” said the planesman. “Still diving.”
“Get ready to blow all tanks—”
“Depth two hundred and forty meters!”
How deep would they go before they pulled out—
“Three hundred meters, Captain!”
The navigator’s hands shook as he plotted their position from the inertial navigation system: four hundred fifty miles northeast of Bermuda.
It was 0538 Moscow time, and K-219, oldest member of the NAVAGA class of ballistic-missile submarines still in operation, had just hours to live.
The chemical explosion inside silo six ejected the smashed remains of the RSM-25 rocket and its two warheads into the sea. Some of the high explosive surrounding the warheads’ plutonium cores also detonated, scattering radioactive debris both into the ocean and down the shattered silo. The blast caused the silo’s thick steel skin to split like an overripe banana. A cataract of seawater, plutonium fragments, and spilled missile fuel roared through the fissure. Its thunder drowned the screams of men and the groans of the hull as K-219 plunged out of control. The bottom of the Hatteras Abyss lay three and a half miles below her keel.
The battle lamps in compartment four came on automatically at the loss of main power. But almost at once they began to dim.
Two missilemen from the mid-deck scrambled down the ladder to the lower level to get away from the site of the explosion and the high-pressure stream of water. But down at the bottom near the officers’ smoking cubicle, the water was already to their knees. Above it swirled an acrid brown vapor. The two missilemen started to cough, then retch. Both men snatched at their waist pouches and pulled out their masks. They managed to get them on and plugged into the central oxygen manifold as the water rose around their legs. Clean oxygen began to blow, but they had breathed too much of the strange brown mist. Their lungs began to fill with mucus, the wet tissues seared by nitric acid. A green foam flecked with red blood rose up their throats. First one, then the other, fell unconscious to the deck.
“Helm!” Britanov shouted. “Full speed on both engines!”
“Sir! Engines are both full! We’re only making fifteen knots!”
“Depth now three hundred fifty meters!”
Fifteen knots? Why so slow? They needed speed to energize the diving planes. Something was slowing them down. Drag? A propeller problem? There were too many possibilities and no time to figure it out. “Blow the bow tanks.”
“Blowing bow ballast!”
A whoosh came from the forward ballast tanks as high-pressure air forced out seawater. In theory, it would raise the bow and permit the engines to pull the sub out of her dive. Britanov swayed as he held on to a steel handle. The submarine was shuddering violently as engine rpm surged. Steam from one reactor was driving both screws.
The planesman had the joystick that controlled the planes full back. The depth gauge raced in reverse. “No response!” K-219 still had her bow pointed at the bottom.
“Gennady!” Britanov shouted to the propulsion engineer. “I need the port reactor on-line!”
“I’m already working on it,” said the unflappable Kapitulsky. The blast had spun the propulsion engineer in his swivel chair away from the main reactor control panel. It left him facing a depth gauge which did not contain good news. The starboard reactor was feeding maximum steam pressure to both turbines. But he could double the amount of power by bringing the port reactor on-line. It was a process that normally took five hours, but that was only if you wanted to do it safely. He was cutting corners with every switch, every button, every valve he operated.
Kapitulsky knew the port reactor’s power might be needed, and very soon.
He continued the sequence, his hands flying over the panel even before his brain knew what it was he was pushing, pulling, and switching. He activated the primary and secondary coolant heaters, then before the necessary temperature rise, he punched the button that started the reactor’s electric circulator pumps.
An alarm went oft. The coolant was still too cold. Thermal shock had split more than one reactor and had killed more than one Soviet sailor. But that was theoretical. K-219 had more immediate concerns.
“What’s wrong, Gennady?” Britanov called.
“Don’t worry about it!” It was just a reactor alarm, a sound that would have sent men running anywhere but here. He selected the first bank of reactor quench baffles, the control rods used to smother the nuclear fires, and commanded them to retract.
Glowing in the light of the battle lamps, a beautiful woman in an ad for French lingerie gazed down on him like an angel. Did angels really look like that? As he raised the second bank of quench baffles, he realized that he might just have an opportunity to find out.
Alarms were being triggered in the central command post too fast to respond to them; the port reactor was too cold, there were fumes invading compartment four. The newest one warned of radiation in the missile room. That meant the blast had destroyed at least one of the RSM-25 rockets, and its plutonium warheads were scattered in pieces inside the submarine. Plutonium was the most deadly poison known to man, though at the moment Bri-tanov doubted they’d live long enough to die from it.
“Depth three hundred eighty meters!”
Britanov’s brain was mired, the images came too fast, his reactions too slow. He sensed the first tendrils of surrender. The feeling those lost in the snow sometimes had, when the endless white is like a warm feather bed, beckoning you down to rest, to sleep, to give in. It wasn’t going to work. They were sinking deeper and deeper; the flood of water he could hear from where he stood would get worse as the outside pressures on the hull increased. At some point, the sea would simply crush them.
Britanov looked up at the small framed plaque that had caused so much consternation to the boat’s political officer. Submarine Life Is Not a Service, But a Religion. No. He could not surrender. Not yet. This was his command. These men were his responsibility. He’d vowed to bring them home alive.
The dive made Britanov light on his feet in just the same way a dropping elevator gave the illusion of no gravity. It was like floating, floating upward even as ten thousand tons of low-magnetic steel and 119 men plunged deeper into the lightless deep.
“She’s still going down!”
“Captain!” called the planesman, panic in his voice. Britanov looked up. The CCP watch all stared at him. Sonar, the planesman, Helm. Everyone. “All right,” he said. “Blow the tanks.”
“Which tanks do you—”
“Everything!” he ordered. “Blow all tanks! Emergency surface!”
Britanov didn’t know how much water she had taken in through compartment four. He didn’t know whether blowing all ballast would be enough to offset the damage. It might take every liter of high-pressure air they had. For all he knew the lines themselves were ruptured and all he would accomplish was pumping precious air into the sea. But he had to try. He would not surrender. He would fight.
All that was left for him, for his crew, was to wait and see if it would be enough.
In compartment four, Missile Officer Petrachkov fought his way through a torrent of cascading water to the mid-deck intercom station to report the damage from the explosion. He was soaked to the waist and breathing heavily. At some point he must have noticed the strange smell: a sharp, acid odor mixed with the sickly sweet scent of bitter almonds. In the dim light cast by the few working battle lamps, swirling brown mist hung low to the decks, curling evil tendrils up and into the main air vents.
He began to cough. Petrachkov didn’t need the damage control officer to tell him what had happened. The brown mist was spilled missile fuel reacting with seawater. He was splashing through an appalling cocktail of flammable poison. And the scent of bitter almonds was nitric acid. Petrachkov pulled a rubber mask from his waist pouch and put it on. He tried to plug the end of the hose into the central manifold, but for some reason he was having trouble seeing it.
The coughing became worse. He yanked the hose out and tried to screw the fitting onto his OBA canister. He gasped, then retched. First it was dry heaves, then wet, then burning, then agony. He staggered against a bulkhead as an evil green foam rose from his lungs and filled his throat with fire. He opened his mouth and the green bubbles flowed into his mask. He was drowning, drowning, not from the sea but from the foam filling his lungs, his throat, his nostrils. He spat it out but more came. Petrachkov couldn’t breathe. He sank to his knees below the intercom as the last dim battle lamp winked dark.
In compartment five, immediately aft of the flooding missile room, Dr. Igor Kochergin picked himself up off the deck. The explosion had tossed him out of his bunk and thrown him against the ceiling of sick bay. He ended up huddled against the forward bulkhead, the one separating his cabin from whatever was happening in the missile room.
For ten seconds the deck dropped from under him. He could hear the loud creaks and groans as the submarine’s skin and bulkheads were squeezed by building water pressure. The lights were out, the battle lamps dead.
The twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant from Leningrad pushed away from the bulkhead. He hunted in the dark for his slippers, feeling the strange way the deck plates were now no longer flat, but buckled upward. He could still hear the roar of water flooding into compartment four as well as the clank and thud of the engines from astern.
He found his slippers and put them on, then sat back against his bunk in the darkness, his brain mired in shock at the nearness of death. Miraculously, the sick bay battle lamp switched itself on.
Although it was the doctor’s first submarine cruise since graduating from Naval Medical School, he could tell from the strange sensation of falling that the submarine was diving more steeply than he had ever felt her dive before. He knew from training that the water would crush them eventually, perhaps at a depth sufficient to compress the remaining air pockets and ignite them in a flash of fire. To be incinerated at the bottom of the sea, that was surely a curious way to die. He stared dumbly, his eyes hollow. Only after a few moments did his brain register what he was looking at.
His desk drawer hung open, pulled out by the submarine’s acute dive. But on top of the desk stood a small glass dish with a sprig of evergreens in it, unmoved by blast or the steep deck angle. His eight-month-old son had given him the tiny branch the day they’d sailed from Gadzhievo and he’d kept it fresh for nearly a month. He could hear his son’s voice, see his wife, Galina, their apartment in a gray concrete complex that overlooked the harbor, and from which you could sometimes see the mouth of the fjord itself. All from this tiny piece of green. In some way he did not understand, it gave him courage.
He stood, sliding on the angled, buckled deck, and started putting sick bay back together. The cabin was the size of a dentist’s operating room. He closed his desk and locked it shut, opened his medical kit, found his supply of OBA canisters and rubber fume masks, and spread all the equipment he thought he might need out on his bunk. When his assistant, a conscript with barely six months’ training, came in looking pale, Dr. Igor Kochergin was ready for customers.
“Captain! Helm is answering!”
“Depth now three hundred fifty meters.”
“Mother of God,” someone whispered. “We’re going up!”
A cheer went up in the central command post. But Britanov knew it was premature. New alarms were still going off. The precise nature of the explosion was not yet identified, and they were still taking on water. But it was no small victory that the bow continued to rise under the influence of the pounding screws and the fully deflected diving planes.
“Where’s Voroblev?” Britanov demanded. He needed his damage-control specialist at his side.
“Compartment four, Comrade Captain,” said someone. “Petrachkov called for him.”
Compartment four. Was Voroblev even alive? Was Petrachkov? What had happened to his submarine? The fume alarm meant a chemical explosion had taken place. The radioactivity alarm meant the blast had damaged at least one of K-219’s fifteen missiles. The water meant a hull breach. Fumes, plutonium, and flooding. If even one of those was true it was too soon for cheering.
With one hand holding on to the steel handle to keep his balance, Britanov grabbed the kashtan microphone and tried to calm his breathing and his voice before he spoke. He took a long, deep breath, then let it out.
“This is the captain. All compartments report! Set the emergency damage-control bill! Report from compartment four!” The words came automatically, without any thinking, the result of years and years of practice and drilling, all against a moment like this. But those were drills.
“Compartment one is manned and ready,” came the quick reply from the forwardmost space. “No damage, no casualties.”
“Two is manned and ready and very busy just now,” said Propulsion Engineer Kapitulsky. “You’ll have more power soon if we don’t blow up or sink first.”
“Helm?”
“Depth two hundred meters, Captain. Still rising. Speed eighteen knots.”
The CCP watch team was beginning to function again. “Keep us heading up. All the way.” Not that he could stop them. With her ballast tanks filled with air, nothing could keep them from bobbing to the surface now. It was the end of the patrol for certain. The only thing that remained to be seen was whether they could save the boat, and to see what the butcher’s bill already totaled.
“Compartment four, report,” he said.
There was no reply.
“Compartment four, answer.”
“They must have evacuated it,” said someone.
Britanov nodded, but he was thinking of the blast, the flooding. There could be twenty men inside compartment four. More if some off-duty crew were caught in there. How many of them were—
“One hundred meters depth, Captain.”
The bulkheads creaked and groaned as the sea’s fist slowly relaxed. Dust rose into the air, and loose gear not already knocked to the deck by the blast and the dive slid off in a clatter. The battle lamps blinked.
Chief Engineer Krasilnikov swore as his hands flew over the main power distribution panel. The lights faded, then brightened, then faded, as though trying to decide whether to fail.
Please, thought Britanov. Not now. Don’t die.
“There!” said Krasilnikov as he lined up his switches. He threw a final one and the CCP’s main lights came on strongly. The battle lamps winked out.
“Well done, Grandfather!” Britanov clapped him on the back.
“Depth fifty meters.”
Almost periscope depth. Why wasn’t he getting damage reports from aft? Had he lost communication with the rest of the submarine? Were they all dead? Why—
The rising submarine broached the surface like a missile fired from underwater. The bow rose, rose, then in a huge wave of white water, the ten-thousand-ton vessel stopped, and slowly slid backward.
The world seemed to tumble inside the CCP. If Britanov had let go of the handle he would have been dashed against first the overhead, then the rear bulkhead. He rode the violent rocking and rolling, feeling each motion slightly less than the one before.
“Engines all stop!”
“All stop!”
The lights flickered once again, but came back burning more brightly.
K-219 was on the surface under the stars, rolling in the low seas, her weather deck nearly awash, a black, smoking shape darker than the moonlit waves.
“I need damage reports. Someone go aft and find out what’s happened,” said Britanov. “And stop those damned bells!”
The alarms went off one by one. Then it was strangely quiet except for the normal hum of machinery.
It was 0540 Moscow time, just two minutes since the explosion. Two minutes for K-219 to die, and to be reborn.
Britanov was about to go back into compartment four to see for himself what had happened when the squawk of a man speaking through a heavy rubber mask came in over the kashtan.
“Compartment four… heavy fumes. Heavy fumes in here!” “Who’s reporting?” Britanov demanded. “Petrachkov?” “Petrachkov is… there’s fumes. He’s… he’s unconscious.” The intercom went dead for a moment, then another voice came on. “Compartment five manned and ready,” said Dr. Kochergin. “I can go forward into four if you want, sir. I have no communication with anyone in there, though.”
The first voice came back. “We’re in here! It’s hot! It’s hot in here. W ater… there’s smoke and fumes everywhere! Request permission to evacuate compartment four!”
Smoke, heat, and fumes. A missile-fuel accident for certain, and perhaps a fire, thought Britanov. Petrachkov was unconscious, but Dr. Kochergin was ready to treat casualties. Britanov put the mike to his lips. “This is Britanov. All compartments don life-support masks. We’ll vent compartment four from here. Doctor, is Yoroblev with you?”
“No, sir.”
“Then you’ll have to do it. When I give the word, I want you to go into four and report to me at once. Make sure everyone’s on their OBA. Understood?”
“Understood.”
Kochergin slipped on his rubber mask, checked to make sure the air bladder was inflated, then joined Security Officer Valery Pshenichny at the sealed hatch leading into the stricken missile compartment. A gauge mounted on the bulkhead showed the pressure differential between four and five was high, but coming down slowly. Tons of air pressure locked the watertight hatch in place. The seal could not be broken until pressures inside the two compartments were roughly equal. The door would not operate.
The doctor felt the need to do something. He found the kashtan hanging by the hatch and dialed Kapitulsky. “This is Kochergin in five. Are there any casualties forward?”
“We’re all right,” said the busy propulsion engineer. “But I’m getting some strange readings from four.”
“Strange?”
“Radiation. Make sure you’re protected before you go in.”
The doctor hung the mike back up and looked at the security officer. There were no antiradiation suits in compartment five.
“Where’s Voroblev? We need him. What do we do?” the doctor asked the security officer.
“Take your pulse, Doctor, and calm down. There are procedures for this. We’ll follow them.” Pshenichny was the senior officer in compartment five; maybe, depending on who was still alive, the ranking officer in the entire rear half of the boat. Even though he was a KGB man, Pshenichny had completed submarine training and earned the honor of being a qualified watch officer. He’d served aboard several Gadzhievo submarines and the crew respected him in a way it did not respect Zampolit Sergiyenko. That he shared their disdain for him and made no attempt to hide it only left Pshenichny more popular with the crew.
“There’s radiation,” said Kochergin.
“We’ll follow procedures, but we’ll follow them fast. Agreed?”
The doctor swallowed. “Agreed.”
The gauge on the bulkhead now showed zero. Britanov’s calming voice boomed over the intercom. “Pressures in four and five are equalized. Open the hatch and evacuate those inside to sick bay. Look for Petrachkov.”
“You’re ready?” asked Pshenichny. “What’s your pulse?”
“Offscale.” said Kochergin. He reached for the bar that would unlock the hatch. He noticed the silver glint from the security officer’s open collar. A chain. From that chain dangled one of the three keys necessary to launch K-219’s missiles. Britanov had one and so did Sergiyenko. Nuclear missiles meant to destroy people Kochergin didn’t know, men and women he didn’t have anything against, really. Those overaged, obsolete, dangerous damned missiles. They were why they were here. Why, the doctor was now quite sure, men on the other side of the steel barrier were dead and dying. He swung the lock bar down and opened the hatch.
Sergei Voroblev, the damage-control officer, nearly fell through the opening. He was staggering under the weight of a body in his arms. He was wearing his OBA, at least. The doctor only gradually recognized the body as Markov, the sub’s communications officer. Markov was not wearing any protective gear at all. His face and uniform were flecked with green foam. Five more men of the missile crew followed them, all of them wearing masks.
“Take Markov to sick bay!” Kochergin shouted through his OBA mask.
Beyond the open hatch, compartment four was dim, filled with a thick brown mist and eerie with the sound of dripping water. There was a sizzling hiss Kochergin could not quite identify. Like meat frying in a cast-iron pan. He turned to Pshenichny. “I’ll take the mid-deck. You go up. Petrachkov is there someplace.”
Together they gingerly stepped inside the damaged space. Kochergin was first. Not two steps in he stumbled against something soft on the deck. He looked down, shining his explosion-proof lamp to see what it was.
He’d stepped on a sailor lying on his back, his fingers clutched tightly against his throat as though he were trying to rip away the skin. His mask was partly on, but all around it oozed a flood of bright green foam. It dripped onto the deck. Kochergin had slipped in it and his own shoe was now covered.
The sailor was drowning in green foam. “It’s Kharchenko!” he said to a warrant officer who had just come in the hatch. Kharchenko was on the missile crew. “Help me get him out!”
The sailor’s eyes were white, his mouth open. He gasped for breath and foam pumped from his mouth and nostrils. As Kochergin pulled him up from the deck, a huge quantity of it bubbled up and spilled down his chest. Despite his training, the doctor looked away, the bile rising in his own throat. When he looked back down, the sailor was no longer breathing.
They hauled Kharchenko out of compartment four and put him down on the deck just inside five. Kochergin attempted first aid, even injecting adrenaline straight into the heart. But without air there could be no life, and there was no forcing air down the injured man’s clogged throat.
Nitric acid poisoning, the doctor knew. The acid had been strong enough to eat away the metal fuel tank of the blasted missile. What would such an acid do to mere lungs? The green foam was a mucus response from inhaling nitric oxide vapor; the vapor, when combined with wet tissue, formed acid. The brown mist. Kochergin looked back into the hatch. He could see tendrils of it snaking their way into compartment five. Even through his mask he could taste the telltale flavor of burnt almonds on his tongue. He let Kharchenko fall limp to the steel deck.
“Doctor! There are more men in here!” the security officer yelled back from the brown, murky space.
He left the dead sailor behind and began to grope his way deeper into the stricken compartment, looking for men he might still be able to save.
It was a war zone in compartment four. Acrid smoke billowed up from the bilges below. It was hot, far too hot for safety. The sizzling sound came from below. Water still dripped from above. Bodies were everywhere. Kochergin counted twelve; it was impossible to know who was dead and who was alive. When the tiny sick bay cabin could hold no more, he ordered the rest laid out like cordwood in the narrow passageway.
Missile Officer Petrachkov was not among them.
Dr. Kochergin’s own breathing was becoming labored. He checked his air canister and saw the rubber bag almost deflated. He had little oxygen left, and he had ample proof that the air beyond his mask was lethal. But he couldn’t stop. He knew that men might be alive somewhere in the big dark missile room. Men who would die if he didn’t find them.
He reentered four and found the ladder leading down to the smoking, hot bilges. His light lanced through clouds of thick brown vapor. There he spotted two more men face down on the deck. He hoisted one to his shoulder and called out above for help. For some reason he looked at his watch. It was 0745.
Someone shouted back a name: “I have Petrachkov!”
The missile officer! The doctor hurried up the ladder, or at least he hurried to the extent that carrying a heavy, unconscious man permitted. Kocher-gin was slightly built; the men joked that his arms were too thin for an injection—the needle would come through. Ye t he found the strength to accomplish things his rational mind would have scoffed at as impossible.
Kochergin slid the injured man through the open hatch to compartment five, then turned back as a warrant officer carried Petrachkov by. Like the others, his face was covered in green foam.
Behind them was Pshenichny. He was staggering as he weaved in the direction of the open hatch.
As the doctor watched, Pshenichny collapsed to the deck and began groping at his rubber mask. The bladder feeding it oxygen had collapsed, the canister empty.
Not him, too. Pshenichny had to survive. He was senior officer aft. Kocher-gin ripped off his own mask and strapped it over the security officer’s face. “Breathe!”
Pshenichny’s eyes lolled.
“Breathe!” Kochergin grabbed him under the arms and lifted him to his feet. He tried to hold his breath as he dragged him back to the hatch. He nearly made it before his lungs screamed for air, and despite what he knew, despite everything he’d seen, Kochergin opened his mouth and sucked down a gulp of pure poison.
“Port reactor is now on-line, sir,” said Kapitulsky.
Britanov took the kashtan and said, “Compartment four, I need a report!”
A warrant officer surveying the damage reported improved visibility, a large rupture in the top of silo six, and poisonous fumes rising from the bilges.
“What about Petrachkov?”
“We just found him. He didn’t look good.”
“What about the rest?”
“There are many injured. Two dead, I think. I don’t know how many. Kochergin has been moving them back to five.”
“Where is Kochergin?”
A pause, then, “I don’t see him.”
“Keep looking. I want everyone moved out and silo six purged. Can you operate the silo flush controls?”
“I don’t know… I’ve never done it. I’m not assigned to the missiles, Comrade Captain.”
“You are now.” The ones who did know how to flush silo six were either dead or incapacitated. He needed to get that poison out of his ship before it killed anyone else.
“I’ll go back myself,” said Chief Engineer Krasilnikov.
“No. I need you here.” Britanov gave Krasilnikov the kashtan. “The engineer will talk you through the procedure. In the meantime, rig some fans to blow the fumes away from the hatch to compartment five. Panyatno?”
“Da, yest,” the warrant officer replied. “Understood.”
Britanov paused, then turned to Zhenya Aznabaev, the boat’s navigator. “Markov is back there, maybe dead. I need a radio officer more than a navigator.”
“I can do it, Captain.”
“Good. We have to send a report to fleet headquarters. Request emergency assistance from all units. The preset codes don’t cover what’s happened. You’ll have to send it in the clear.”
The young executive officer Vladmirov piped in. “It’s against regulations, sir. If we break radio silence with an uncoded message, the Americans will know everything.”
“It’s against regulations to sink, too,” said Britanov. He looked at Az-nabaev. “Send it.”
As Krasilnikov talked the men in compartment four through the procedure to flush silo six, the situation aboard K-219 seemed to stabilize. At least there were no new catastrophes demanding Britanov’s attention. After four attempts to attract Moscow’s attention to their plight, Navigator Aznabaev finally received a terse, noncommittal ac knowledgment from Northern Fleet headquarters in Severmorsk; five minutes later a second reply carne from Naval High Command in Moscow.
But fifteen minutes after the warrant officers turned the last valve and then switched on the purging pumps to clear the poisonous brew seething inside the shattered missile silo, it became clear that conditions were far from stable. Gas was once more forming in the flooded bilges below the lower deck in compartment four, awash in both seawater and oxidizer, and the temperature inside had risen to one hundred twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The fourteen other missiles, although apparently undamaged by the blast, could explode if the temperature continued to rise.
“Do you want us to purge the silo again?” asked one of the warrant officers.
“No,” said Britanov. “Get out of there and make sure there’s no one left behind. We’ll try to vent the space to atmosphere.”
“There’s something burning in there,” growled Engineer Krasilnikov. He wanted nothing so much as to go aft and get his hands dirty solving the problem. He knew Britanov was relying on him here in central command, but he didn’t like telling others how to do things that he could do better and faster himself. Getting back there wouldn’t be so easy though. Maybe over the deck and down the hatch in ten?
“What about the other rockets?” asked Britanov.
“Who knows?” Krasilnikov answered testily. “We’ve lost all remote readings from them. But I can feel it. W e’ve got a fire someplace. Most likely it’s electrical.”
Britanov trusted the engineer’s feelings. He was about to order a thorough search of the bilge areas for any sign of flame when the kashtan buzzed. It was Pshenichny, the KGB officer.
“Everyone’s out of four, Captain. I’m ready to seal the hatch.”
“Proceed.”
The security officer counted noses a third time—it was too easy to miss someone when everybody wore identical rubber masks—then slammed the heavy metal hatch shut. He spun the locking wheel, then stepped back. At least there was no way the poison could come through solid—
“Look!” said one of the warrant officers. He was pointing at the hatch.
From around the perimeter came a thin stream of brown mist. “It didn’t seal.”
They opened it, then closed it more carefully, pulling the locking wheel tighter. The brown mist still seeped around the edges.
When they opened the hatch a third time, Pshenichny took a close look at the rubber seals. They were curled like old, dried meat. The nitric acid from the spilled missile fuel had attacked them. He shut the hatch a final time, then retreated with the other men aft to compartment six. There he reported.
“Fumes now in compartment five, Captain.”
“Five? Is the hatch closed?”
“It’s coming right through. It’s the acid. The seals are damaged.” Britanov unfolded the greaseboard outline of K-219. He put a big black X across compartments four and five. His command had been cut in two, with no way to send help aft through the missile room, and no way to evacuate the injured forward. Like a train with locked doors, he thought. “What about water? Will it hold?”
“I don’t know if the hatch will stop it.”
Poison gas, rocket fuel, and seawater. They were eating away at the vitals of his submarine. It was then, at this very moment, that Britanov thought for the first time the problems in compartment four might not be stopped before they consumed the whole boat. If the acid was destroying hatch seals so far from the explosion, what must it be doing to all the cables and controls that pass right by it? Cables that controlled the engines, the missiles, even the reactors. “Pshenichny?”
“Sir.”
“There’s no way you can move men forward through all that gas. Move everyone back into compartment eight. When you get everyone there, report in. Is Voroblev there?”
“I’m still in compartment six, Captain,” said the damage-control specialist. “I was in four when it went off.”
“What’s your best guess of the damage?”
“It was a leaking muzzle hatch. The explosion ripped the silo apart. There’s flooding, fire, gas. It’s spreading through the hatches, all right. I’m surveying now for gas.”
“You heard about the seals?”
“I heard.”
“Make your survey and head to eight with Pshenichny.” Britanov hung the kashtan back up and saw the other men in central command looking at him. “Helm. Make your course zero four five degrees. Gennady!” he shouted at the propulsion engineer. “How much speed can you give me?”
“No more than fourteen knots. If we go any faster we’ll take waves over the missile deck. The water will start pouring in again and those seals might—”
“Turns for fourteen knots.” He looked at Grandfather Krasilnikov. “We have to isolate four somehow.”
“I can repressurize the boat and vent four out to the atmosphere. It might slow the fumes down.”
“Do it.” Then, into the kashtan again, he said, “This is Britanov. Seal all intercompartment hatches now. We’re going to pressurize the boat to isolate compartment four.”
Krasilnikov set the air controls and looked at Britanov for a signal to activate them.
“Wait,” said the captain, “I want to see for myself what we’re fighting.” He grabbed his oilskins from the hook beside the small framed plaque with the saying that had so upset Zampolit Sergiyenko. He went to the ladder leading up to the main hatch. “I’m going to have a look. Interested?”
Krasilnikov was on his feet in an instant. Together they ascended the ladder into the closed bridge, climbed a second ladder, then undogged the main escape trunk hatch.
The sound of the sea echoed down through the open hatch. For the first time since diving off Gadzhievo, Britanov breathed the sweet, salty smell of fresh ocean air. The sky was filled with the first gray light of the new day.
Single file, the two climbed out into the exposed bridge, turned aft, and switched on their portable lamps.
Water sloshed over the missile deck. As each wave cleared, it parted like a curtain around the place where silo six’s hatch should be. “Mother of God.”
The hatch was gone and a shiny streak of gouged metal ran aft from it. Something heavy and sharp had cut the rubber coating that plated the missile deck, ripping away the hatch and exposing the underlying metal.
“Captain,” said the chief engineer. “It doesn’t look so much like a simple explosion.”
“What are you saying?”
“It looks like we hit something. Or perhaps something hit us. I’ve seen damage like this before, but only after a collision.”
Britanov swept the dark sea with his lamp. There was nothing out here to hit. Nothing, he thought, except for another submarine.
“Captain!” called up Aznabaev. “New message from Fleet.”
“Let’s go below,” he said to Krasilnikov. “We’ll have Pshenichny photograph this when it gets lighter.”
Back in the close confines of central command, Britanov read the newly decoded message from Northern Fleet headquarters. Three merchant ships were changing course to render assistance to K-219.
Help from a freighter. He was about to comment on how quickly the situation had changed when the damage-control officer called in on the intercom.
“I’ve just completed the damage survey, Captain,” said Voroblev. “I started in four and worked all the way aft to ten. There are traces of gas as far as seven.”
“Gas is in seven? You’re sure?”
“Yes, sir. It’s bad in four and five, but it’s spreading through the boat. There’s an electrical problem in four as well. We may have lost some wire bundles in the explosion.”
“Which bundles, Voroblev?”
“It’s too hot to go down and see. But the reactor control cables run right through the worst area.”
“All right. We’re going to close everything up and pump some air into four.”
“Understood, Captain.”
Britanov was about to tell him to check again when the planesman shouted. Everyone in central command stopped and looked at him as he pointed at the overhead ventilator grille.
A thin wisp of brown mist emerged from it, carrying the sweet smell of almonds, of fuming nitrogen tetroxide, of death.
Britanov ordered the pressure increased inside central command. The flow of poison through the ventilator grille slowed to a thin stream, a wisp, and then finally stopped. But flushing silo six only made the situation worse in the missile room. Britanov had no choice but to order the space abandoned. When Security Officer Pshenichny reported fumes coming right through the dogged hatch leading to compartment five, he ordered that space evacuated, too.
Now, four hours after the initial explosion, as the sun broke the flat, gray horizon, dense brown smoke had found its way back to the hatch leading into compartment six, a tightly packed space filled with reactor controls, steam pipes, and storage lockers. The fumes were briefly stopped by the steel door, but the nitric acid had lost none of its potency. Gas and smoke began to seep through the ruined hatch seals. A seaman wearing an OBA was standing watch. He tried to close the hatch tighter, but when he tightened the locking bars the seals crumbled to powder. Smoke began to pour through, filling the passageway. And something more: seawater was coming over the lower lip of the hatch, flowing unimpeded through the same faulty seals.
“Captain! Smoke… smoke and water now in six!” he said into the kash-tan mounted by the hatch. He’d seen the bodies carried out covered in brown rocket-fuel slime and green foam. Before waiting for an answer, he dropped the microphone and splashed aft. As he ran, he thought for an instant that it was the first time in his young life that he’d ever run toward a pair of nuclear reactors in order to feel safe.
Smoke and water in six. Britanov ran his hand over his cheek, feeling the un-shaved stubble. How long had he been fighting this battle? It felt like days.
Engineer Krasilnikov was watching him. “Captain? Are you all right?”
He rubbed his eyes to clear away the fatigue. To think. Britanov was trying to save his boat without knowing enough about what was happening to it. He took the greaseboard outline of K-219 and placed another black X on it. That made three uninhabitable spaces: Compartment four had blast damage, water, poison gas, radiation, and fire. Five had smoke so there was fire there, too. Now lethal smoke and water were spilling into six.
Three compartments, three deaths. So far. Another dozen or more of his crew were unconscious and some of them would almost certainly die without proper medical care. Kochergin, the boat’s only qualified doctor, was one of the casualties. So was his communications specialist, Markov. Where would that medical care come from?
“I’m going up top,” he told the chief engineer. He grabbed his oilskin coat and climbed the ladder up to the enclosed bridge. From there he climbed a second ladder, opened the main trunk, and pulled himself wearily up into the clean air.
The morning light was clear and penetrating. Purple-brown smoke billowed up in distinct puffs from the shattered missile silo like the exhaust from an old locomotive. He wondered, Why puffs? Then he saw the reason.
Low seas washed over the missing muzzle hatch in K-219’s missile deck. Every time water flowed down into compartment four, the column of smoke stopped. When the silo drained, smoke poured out once more.
Every wave meant more water, more water meant more reacting missile fuel, more weight, less habitable space, and less chance of saving his boat.
The clean air sharpened his thinking, blowing away the mental fog. An alteration began to take hold in Britanov, from trying to save his command at any cost to saving his men and to hell with the submarine. It was a subtle change, something like the way the waves in the fjord at Gadzhievo had become more serious out in the open Barents Sea.
Britanov had always thought of his crew’s welfare. Some said he thought too much about it to be an effective commander. Well, perhaps they’d been right. His thinking now was different from what it had been when they first dived off Gadzhievo. Like the waves, it had become more serious.
He took a last breath of clean air, a last look at the light of the new day, and went back below.
“Yevgeny!” he shouted to the senior navigator, and now radio operator as well. “Find out which of those freighters is closest. I want an estimated time of arrival from all three. And let Moscow know we’re still on fire with smoke and flooding now in compartment six.”
“You want that sent in the clear, Captain?”
“I don’t care if you use a semaphore.”
His boat had been cut into two and the crew was being cornered, forced aft to escape the spreading damage radiating from the ruined missile room. At some point they would have to stop running. At some point there was nowhere else to go.
Compartment seven contained K-219’s reactors. Compartment eight her engines. Nine and ten housed machinery spaces as well as sonar and steering gear. At the submarine’s farthest point aft in ten was another escape trunk for the crew.
The poison was herding them to it. “Damage-control crews forward to six, I need a report.”
A seaman in a full-body protective suit, breathing from his self-contained OBA canister, fought his way through the dim, smoky passageways and reported electrical insulation burning in five and the bulkhead to four black with charred paint and nearly glowing with heat. The deck was awash with brown missile fuel and seawater. His OBA had two cartridges each good for ten minutes of normal breathing. Under the heat and stress the rubber bladder began to collapse after only eight. Britanov ordered him aft to compartment eight to join the rest of the crew.
Britanov took stock. A fire raging unchallenged on the bottom level of the missile room. Progressive flooding spreading through acid-eaten seals. A bulkhead black with burning paint. All remote readings of the fourteen remaining RSM-25 rockets lost with temperatures surely approaching the critical point. At some point the rockets would detonate, cooking off in the heat. When they did there was no way to predict the extent of the blast. Each rocket carried two six-hundred-kiloton thermonuclear warheads.
Engineer-Seaman Sergei Preminin sat at the blinking reactor control console at the aft end of compartment six. The console duplicated the gauges and controls that Kapitulsky had in compartment two. The indicators monitored the health and status of K-219’s twin VM-4 reactors.
Right beyond the gray bulkhead, both ninety-megawatt power plants were putting out a sizable portion of their rated energy. A sphere of uranium nuclear fuel initiated a chain reaction, the fission generated heat, and the heat turned water into steam. This steam drove the engines as well as the generators needed to keep the submarine afloat, lit, and supplied with air.
Beside Preminin was his superior, Reactor Officer Belikov. They both wore masks plugged into the boat’s central oxygen system. They were the only two nuclear-qualified men in the aft section of the sub.
The sound of pounding feet came from beyond the control space. Premi-nin’s protective mask afforded limited forward vision and no peripheral view at all. He had to turn to see a silver-suited figure dash by, heading aft. The fleeing sailor stopped, turned back, and stuck his head into the reactor control space. “Smoke’s coming through from five! There’s a big fire forward! You’d better move it!” he yelled, then ran off again.
The twenty-one-year-old sat in silence, wondering why a fireman was running and he was sitting here. He wanted to run, too. But he had to wait until Belikov gave the word.
It was just his second operational cruise since graduating from engineering school. Sergei Preminin came from a tiny, landlocked village that had only recently seen the advent of electricity. He and his brother had escaped its medieval life by joining the Navy. Preminin worked hard to remain a part of the elite submarine service. He knew what kind of a life waited for him back home. He took his duty very seriously.
He watched the status board, waiting for Belikov to give the order to evacuate. All hell had broken loose inside K-219, and the situation was getting harder to understand. Why was gas seeping through closed hatches? Had panicky sailors fled and forgotten to shut them? All Preminin knew for certain was that compartment five was empty and that he and Belikov were now alone in compartment six. After so many days of crowded living conditions, the sudden emptiness was more than a little unnerving.
Lieutenant Belikov reached for his kashtan. “Captain. Lieutenant Belikov at station sixty-five. There’s smoke reported now in compartment six and a fire, too.”
“I heard,” said Britanov wearily. “You’re on ship’s oxygen?”
“Yes, sir. Do you need us to remain here?”
“If it’s unsafe you should evacuate to eight. The air’s still good back there. Kapitulsky can control the reactors from here. It’s your call, Lieutenant. Don’t take any chances.”
Belikov thought about it for a second, then said, “We’re leaving.” He hung the mike back up and nodded to Seaman Preminin. “Let’s get out of here.”
Together they shut down their console, leaving it on automatic status. Be-likov took a last look at the gauges; coolant flow was fluctuating more than it should, but then power was being drawn from the reactors for damage control. It wasn’t a matter of steady steaming.
They plugged their masks into their OBAs and made their way out into the passageway. A rivulet of seawater was already running aft along the deck. They splashed through it back to the hatch leading into compartment seven, the heart of the submarine. The reactor room.
The compartment was lit only by the dim glow of battle lamps. A minor steam line had ruptured in the initial explosion and it was still venting. Thank God it wasn’t part of the primary or secondary reactor steam loops or they’d all be glowing. But it was enough of a leak to fill the air with a mist made even more eerie by the weak orange light given off by the dying lamps.
“It’s hot in here,” said Preminin as they passed the locked hatches leading to the reactors themselves. He could feel the sweat begin to flow almost at once. It was like stepping into a steam bath.
Belikov put his mask close to one of the remote temperature gauges. His lenses kept fogging. With poison nitric acid gas and smoke from the fires reported, he didn’t dare take it off. “Preminin. Come over here. What does this say?”
Preminin came close. Why was it so hot in here? Maybe it had something to do with how the captain had pressurized the boat? It couldn’t be fire, could it?
Preminin peered at the round instrument. Like the ones on Kapitulsky’s console, like those back at his own station in compartment six, it looked as if it had been made for a locomotive. He read the needle, then blinked.
“Well?”
“It says—”
Before he could finish his sentence, the first reactor overheat alarm went off. Its terrifying screech echoed throughout the boat, through the burning, ruined spaces flickering with fire and through the increasingly crowded passageways where men huddled. But here, right next to the reactors themselves, it was deafening.
The screech of the reactor alarm paralyzed the command post watch. For an instant, Britanov thought this could not be happening. It was one of those drills conducted by a sadistic trainer back at submarine school, one who delighted in taking you to the very edge, then giving you a good, hard shove.
He grabbed the mike and switched the intercom to Kapitulsky’s station in compartment two. “Gennady! Report!”
“I’ve lost all remote readings to the reactors. The wires must have burned through in compartment four. I don’t know what’s happening, but if the overheat is real, we have to shut them down. I can’t… there’s no response from my controls. They’re running away!”
Britanov heard the thin blade of panic in Kapitulsky’s normally unflappable demeanor. Shutting down a reactor was normally accomplished from Kapitulsky’s station. But he was no longer connected to his power plants. It was why he sounded so brittle, so near to breaking. If Kapitulsky could lose control, then anyone could. Even Britanov. “Gennady. Listen to me. Belikov is back there. Have him revert the reactors to manual control and scram them if he has to.”
“I should do it—”
“No. Talk him through it. I’ll stand by.”
A pause, then, “Belikov?” said Kapitulsky.
The sound of the alarm doubled as the screech was fed over the intercom. “We’re both still in compartment seven,” said Belikov. “The readings are all going crazy back here and it’s hot.”
“Read me all the temperatures. Start with primary coolant.”
Belikov wiped away the steam from his mask and read them off just the way he’d been taught in reactor disaster drills. “Primary temperature on number one is—” He stopped. “It’s too high. It’s way too high. Same with, number two!”
“Coolant flow?”
“Low and dropping.”
Kapitulsky thought there was a good chance the readings were inaccurate. After all, a moment before all seemed to be well with the VM-4s. What could have caused them to suddenly run away like this? On the other hand, if the readings were true, they were moments away from a real meltdown, one that would eat right through the reactor vessel, burn through the bottom of the submarine, and then, when the mass of glowing hot slag hit cold water, explode in a fireball of radioactive steam. “Captain,” he said, “if we shut one down we won’t be able to make fourteen knots. We may lose all power except for the diesels.”
“Do it,” Britanov said to the propulsion engineer. “Start the diesels. Shut both reactors down. Start with the hottest one and scram it.”
As he listened to Kapitulsky tell Belikov what to do, Britanov realized the crew was not the only one getting backed into a corner.
“Unlock the gravity release for quench baffles one through four,” said Ka-pitulsky. “Did you hear, Belikov?”
“Yes…”
“That should do it,” Kapitulsky finished. The baffles would absorb the runaway fission reaction, dousing the nuclear fires. There was a pause. The reactor alarm was still screeching horribly. “Well?”
“Sir!” said Belikov. “I can’t!”
“What do you mean you can’t?”
“Something… something’s gone wrong with the gravity release. The quench baffles won’t drop. The springs… they aren’t forcing them down. It must be the heat. The metal’s binding.”
Kapitulsky grew pale. The quench baffles were designed to drop automatically when reactor temperatures got too high. If they failed to drop automatically, they could be commanded to drop by a sequence of steps Belikov had just taken; if they did not drop then, they still could be forced down, but by hand, from inside the reactors, by a man wielding a specially made oversized wrench.
“Captain?” said Kapitulsky. “Scram was unsuccessful. We have to go in there and crank them down.”
Grandfather Krasilnikov stepped up beside the captain. “I can go back and do it,” said the chief engineer. “I can walk out topside and drop back down through the escape hatch in ten. I’m old and I have all the children I want. Let me do it, Captain.”
And lose his chief engineer when he might have need for him? Britanov shook his head. “I still need you here, Igor. What about protective gear?”
“There are two antiradiation suits back in eight,” said Krasilnikov, “but they’re designed for steam leaks in the coolant circuit. Not for going into the reactors. It’s never done.”
Britanov knew why. “Gennady? Tell Belikov about the suits. Tell him they may not shield him enough to be safe.”
“He knows that, Captain.”
“Belikov. Can you hear me? This is Captain Britanov.”
“I hear you, Captain.”
“We have to scram the reactors. You’ll have to go in. There are some protective suits in eight but they—”
“I know, Captain,” said the young reactor officer. “I’ll shut them down myself. But my OBA canister is almost empty.” In fact, Belikov was beginning to feel light-headed as his portable supply gave out.
“Go back to compartment eight. Pshenichny will get you equipped.”
“We’re leaving seven for eight.”
Security Officer Pshenichny listened to the intercom speaker as he and sixty men sat huddled in the main engine room. Fourteen of them lay unconscious on the steel deck; two missile technicians and Petrachkov were dead. It was very hot here so close to the big, steam-driven turbomachinery. The air in compartment eight smelled of oil and hydraulic fluid, but it wasn’t yet lethal. Pshenichny looked back at the refugees from the abandoned compartments. “How many OBA canisters do we have?”
A quick count came up with more men than oxygen canisters; there were thirty OBAs altogether, most of them already partly used. There were just six full ones left. Pshenichny took all six and lined them up on the deck.
Belikov and Seaman Preminin showed up, their blue coveralls black with sweat. Belikov’s mask was still on, the lenses were still fogged. His OBA canister was nearly empty; the sides of the rubber bladder were sticking together.
Pshenichny reached over and pulled off Belikov’s mask. The reactor officer looked frightened, but then realized no one else in compartment eight was wearing a mask, either. He took a long gasp of air. The two protective suits were handed up the line. Belikov noticed the small pile of canisters. “Where are the rest?”
“Those are the last of them,” said Pshenichny.
Krasilnikov still hovered by the captain. “Belikov will do the job. But when he comes out,” said the chief engineer, “he’ll be as sterile as a mule.” “If he doesn’t get it done,” said Britanov, “it won’t matter.”
“I’ll go with you, Lieutenant,” said Preminin. He reached for the second an-tiradiation suit. It was made from heavy silvered rubber.
“No,” said Belikov. “One of us in there is bad enough. If I can’t get all the baffles down, you’ll have to finish it.” He put on the OBA mask and tested to be sure he could breathe, then stepped through the hatch to compartment seven. It shut behind him with a solid clang. Security Officer Pshenichny grabbed the locking bar and pulled the dogs tight against the rubber seals.
The lights had almost completely failed inside compartment seven, but Belikov knew every inch of the complex reactor space by feel. He didn’t need light to find his way down the ladder to the lower machinery space. When he stepped off the bottom rung he found filthy seawater pooled on the deck. It was oily with brown fluid. A lone battle lamp cast enough yellow light to see that when he disturbed the water with his boot it gave off wisps of smoke. He could hear a steady inrush of water from somewhere forward.
To expect a steel pipe to float had always seemed a little bit unreasonable. Of course, so was asking a man to crawl into a live nuclear reactor.
Both VM-4s were down here on the bottom level, separated from the machinery spaces by heavy shielded bulkheads and accessed through a small, low hatch ablaze with serious warnings. Belikov remembered the story of a cook aboard the Lenin, a nuclear-powered icebreaker. A real peasant from the gu-binka, the deep countryside, he’d seen nothing wrong with using a high-pressure steam tap off the primary reactor coolant loop to scour a crusted pan clean. He suffered radiation burns over his whole body and died soon afterward, but he had very clean pans.
Now Belikov was the cook heading into harm’s way.
The high-temperature alarm was still shrieking. He’d stopped hearing it. But then, an hour ago he wouldn’t have considered walking into a hot nuclear reactor, either. It was amazing what a person could become accustomed to.
He had to bend as he made his way along the bottom level. Belikov was tall, a full six feet. He kept bumping his head against things, obstructions he couldn’t quite see kept snatching at his mask, threatening to pull it off. What was the air like here, anyway? In the dim orange light he could see swirling vapor.
It was like going down to a leaky, dark basement filled with a maze of steam pipes and sparking, damaged electrical conduits. A high-pressure air line hissed where a weld had failed. The heat near the two nuclear cauldrons was intense; even outside the shielded bulkhead it was well over fifty degrees Celsius. Hotter by far than any banya Belikov had ever taken, though the heavy rubber suit helped a little.
The tool he needed to crank down the jammed quench baffles was stored in a locker. Water had risen to its bottom lip by the time he found it. Of course it was locked. Of course he had no key. What do they expect us to do, steal tools and sell them to the fish?
He felt his way around to where he knew a fire ax was mounted to the bulkhead. His gloved hand closed around the wooden handle. He hefted it and used the heavy blade to pry open the locker.
The special crank resembled an oversized meat grinder. It was heavy, made of solid steel. He dropped the ax and returned to the small hatch that led into the shielded reactor space. There was a tiny, thick window in the middle of it. Through the leaded glazing he could see the two squat shapes of the reactor domes.
He didn’t bother with the warnings. No one in their right mind would come in here with the reactors running. He reached down and unlocked the hatch.
A blast-furnace gust flowed out so strongly he could feel it through the insulated suit. Better not to waste time. He folded himself through the small hatch, then stood up inside the reactor space.
The two reactor vessels were before him, two domed cylinders seething with nuclear fire. The heat was intense. There was an odd, ozonelike smell to the air.
A sinking submarine stuffed with nuclear poisons. They should all be paddling from K-219 as fast as they could swim. Who cared if a reactor blew up right next to America? It wasn’t as though they were bobbing off Odessa. What Russian would pay a kopeck to keep enriched uranium from dusting American beaches?
Belikov was paying a good deal more than a kopeck. He knew he was taking a huge dose of radiation by standing here. Enough to sterilize him for sure. To keep America safe. That was what he was sacrificing his manhood for.
It was really a crazy world.
He walked up to the first reactor, the starboard VM-4. Its domed top contained four hexagonal sockets. They operated a worm-gear mechanism that would force one of the quench baffles down.
Here, right next to the sizzling reactor, the temperature was eighty degrees Celsius, nearly one hundred eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Enough to cook flesh. Enough to kill. What the dev il was he doing?
Belikov inserted the handle into the first socket and began to crank. He saw at once why the safety system had failed: it took all his effort to move it. The heat had warped the guides badly. And without those baffles down, the heat only became worse, the nuclear fire brighter, hotter. It was a self-sustaining reaction. Eventually, without a flow of coolant to take away the heat, the sphere of uranium fuel would melt through the bottom of the reactor vessel, through the hull of the sub, and detonate when it hit cold sea-water. A hydrogen blast, not a nuclear explosion, but for anyone close by the difference would be slight. A hydrogen bubble had burst at Chernobyl just a few months back, and look at the mess that made.
He threw himself against the steel bar and the jammed gears began to squeal. He followed the handle around the vessel. Each time his suit touched the reactor he heard a sizzle and smelled burning rubber.
How long is this going to take? He’d performed a manual crankdown on a cold reactor as part of nuclear reactor school. Normally it took less than five minutes for all four baffles to be lowered. Sweat poured down his face as he shoved the crank with all his might. It evaporated the instant it emerged from beneath his mask. It was so hot. So very hot. And the radiation, well, it didn’t pay to think about some things. He kept turning until his vision began to blur, until he was gasping. Only then did he look down at his OBA canister.
The rubber air bladder was completely collapsed. How was that possible? He’d barely lowered the first baffle. He’d only been here for… for how long?
Spots swam in front of his eyes. He stepped back, fighting the urge to tear off the mask and breathe. Belikov was holding the heavy crank handle. It weighed so much, it pulled his arm down to his side. He was so tired, and he’d barely lowered… Air. He needed air. He had to get back to eight.
Shuffling like a drunk, Belikov staggered back to the low hatch in the shielded bulkhead, got through, forgot to close it behind, remembered, stood up, and stumbled aft to the ladder leading up to compartment eight. He still had the heavy crank handle. Somehow he climbed. Somehow he made it back to the hatch. He used the crank as a hammer and pounded on the door. When it opened, he fell through and passed out on the deck at Preminin’s feet.
Pshenichny propped Belikov against the bulkhead, ripped off the mask, and splashed his face with water. It was warm water, but it seemed to help. “Are they shut down?” he asked Belikov.
The lieutenant’s face was very pale, even though his neck was splotched red. He looked up at Pshenichny and mouthed the word no.
“Sergei,” said the security officer to Seaman Preminin. “You’ll have to—”
“I know.” Preminin was already putting on the second, cumbersome radiation suit. He clipped two OBA canisters to his belt.
There were just two more unused canisters left in the whole after section of K-219.
Chief Engineer Krasilnikov pulled the circuit breaker for the reactor overtemp alarm. Finally, the blood-chilling screech went silent and the command post team could speak, even think.
“Captain,” said Aznabaev. The navigator held up a microphone from his ship-to-ship set. “I have direct contact with the Fyodor Bredkin. She’s fifty kilometers out. Do you want to speak with her?”
Britanov felt both shame and relief. Shame that he might need some rust-bucket of a freighter to save his command; relief that if he did need them, they would at least be here. Fumes were spreading right through sealed hatches. So was fire. So was water. The reactors would have to be shut down or else they would burn a hole right through K-219’s belly. Then they would all go up in a cloud of radioactive steam. Even if he did get them shut down, it left him with only battery and diesel power to control damage.
It wouldn’t be enough. He knew that he would have to get some of his men off to save them. He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk. I want to see him. What speed can he make?”
The sub’s navigator spoke into the mike, waited a moment, then said to Bri-tanov, “ETA is two hours forty minutes. He wants to know our condition.”
“Tell him so do I.”
“Captain!” came a cry from the young man sitting at the radar display. “Aerial contact inbound. He’s illuminating us with search radar. It looks like an American patrol plane.”
“Zhenya,” Britanov said to the navigator, “tell the master of the Fyodor Bredkin if he wants to know how we’re doing, he can ask the Americans.” He picked up the kashtan. “Pshenichny! What’s happening with those reactors?”
The security officer helped Preminin close the last fastener on his radiation suit. He picked up the kashtan. “They’re going back in now, Captain,” he said as he undogged the hatch leading forward into compartment seven. “The alarm is off.”
“We killed the power to it,” Britanov said. “We have no readings up here at all. Kapitulsky is ready to start the diesels but you’ve got to get those reactors secured.”
“We’ll do our duty, Captain.” He looked at Preminin. The young seaman had the heavy crank handle now. Belikov looked too weak to pick it up. Was it heat, the air, or radiation?
“How’s Belikov?” Britanov asked.
Belikov was wobbly as he stood. Premmin took the kashtan and answered for them both. “We’re okay, Captain. Trust us to do the job,” he said, then put his mask on, checked the flow from the OBA canister, and together with Belikov went back in.
Any idea that the alarm’s silence was a good sign was instantly dispelled by the raging heat inside compartment seven. With the pumps failed, each glowing uranium sphere was dumping heat into an insufficient supply of coolant; the heat radiated through the steel reactor vessels and into the submarine.
Belikov knew it was worse than before. He followed Preminin down the ladder to the bottom.
“Comrade Lieutenant,” said Preminin, “let me go in. You can stay by the gauges and relay reports to central command.”
Belikov knew it was a polite way of saying that he didn’t look able to help. He nodded. Preminin went through the low hatch and into the shielded reactor space.
Belikov picked up the kashtan by the gauges. “Comrade Captain. It’s Be-likov, sir. I’m at the local reactor control board now in compartment seven.”
“Belikov, read me the temperatures off the panel,” said Kapitulsky. “Start with the highest.”
“The temperatures are all redlined. Starboard and port reactors are both starved for water. Coolant flow is almost zero in the port reactor. There’s still some circulation in the starboard.”
“The readings, they’re accurate?” asked Kapitulsky. “What’s the air temperature in there, Belikov?”
“Very hot,” he said weakly. He knew that as hot as it was standing out here, inside the reactor space, right next to those two hellish vessels, it was worse.
Preminin inserted the crank and managed to force the first quench baffle, the one Belikov had started, all the way down. Even through the rubber suit it was like standing under a powerful infrared lamp; the heat was like nothing he’d ever experienced. “Number one down!” he shouted.
Belikov had cranked that one down most of the way himself. Still, it was progress. “Number one baffle down, port reactor,” he reported. All four baffles were needed to surround the uranium sphere.
Preminin inserted the handle into the second socket. He pushed. It refused to move at all. He pushed harder, then with all his strength.
The handle bent, threatened to break, then, with a crack that Belikov could hear all the way outside the reactor space, it moved. Preminin cranked the second baffle down by throwing himself at it, working his way around the blazingly hot steel vessel.
“Second… I mean, number two baffle… baffle is down,” he said through dry, parched lips. He picked up the handle and found it oddly difficult to insert it into the third socket. Sweat streamed down his brow and into his eyes. The intense heat evaporated it instantly, leaving a mask of salt over Premi-nin’s face.
“Preminin!” shouted Belikov. “Check your OBA!”
“I’m… I’m not feeling so good, Comrade Lieutenant.” He groaned the words as the steel crank fell into the third socket. He pushed. Like the others it required all his strength, all his weight, to budge. He was beyond feeling as he threw himself against the handle. It moved, stubbornly, then moved again, again, and finally stopped. He leaned against it. The steel bent. Only then did he realize the third baffle was fully down. “Number… number three is—” He stopped, swaying on his feet next to the steel reactor vessel.
“Preminin!” Belikov dropped the kashtan and rushed into the reactor space.
Preminin was on the deck. Belikov picked up the handle and inserted it into the fourth socket. Preminin had broken through the tightest place on the warped guide and it moved more easily. He cranked the last baffle down, then dragged Preminin out through the hatch to the outer reactor space.
“Captain! Belikov… here. Port reactor is—” He stopped and felt the heat rising up his body. The spots were back in his eyes. He looked down at his OBA canister. Once again the sides of the rubber bladder were sticking together. He was out of air! “Port reactor is secure! I’m taking Preminin… out.”
He dropped the mike and dragged Preminin up the ladder. When they opened the hatch leading back to compartment eight, they fell through in a single heap.
“Water!” shouted Pshenichny as he pulled the mask from the lieutenant’s face. Belikov’s skin was dead white. His eyes bloodshot and bulging. He tried to lift his head so that he might take a sip but Belikov flopped back to the deck like a dead man. Preminin was coming around, slowly, as someone brought a cupful of tepid water. Pshenichny splashed both men, then gave the rest to Preminin to drink.
“What about the starboard reactor?” Britanov’s voice boomed in over the loudspeaker.
“We’re down to two OBA canisters, Captain,” said Pshenichny. “We need more if they’re going to both go back in.” Though looking at Belikov, he didn’t think the lieutenant was going to walk again any time soon, much less go back into the reactors.
“We can’t get anyone back through compartment four,” said Britanov. “I need that second reactor shut down now, Valery.”
Pshenichny was about to tell Britanov that he would have to wait until the two men regained their feet when a small, weak voice interrupted.
“I’ll go,” said Preminin. He got his legs under him and stood. “Give him the OBA canisters,” Pshenichny ordered one of the warrant officers.
“But they’re our last ones,” the michman demurred. There were no other oxygen canisters in the entire after section of the sub. If that poison gas came here they’d all suffocate before—
“Give them to Preminin.” He looked at the young seaman. “You have to shut it down by yourself.”
“I would have done it before, but it’s hot in there,” said Preminin as he adjusted the mask over his face. “Count on me.”
Preminin grabbed the handle and went back to the hatch. This time when it opened, an acrid whiff of bitter almond wafted through. He stopped for an instant and turned, as though he wanted to say something, but changed his mind.
A stronger smell of poison billowed in from the dark, hot compartment beyond the bulkhead.
Preminin shuffled into the darkness, alone, the last man in compartment seven, the only one left who could shut the runaway reactor down.
“Close that hatch!” Pshenichny bellowed after Preminin disappeared. A warrant officer leaned against the steel door as two sailors dogged it down tight. With poison gas now on the other side and no OBA canisters left, they had to rely on the rubber seals around the hatch to keep them alive. “Seal it!”
The clang of the last dog was loud and final in a way that would come back to haunt Pshenichny. It would come back to haunt them all.
Sergei Preminin was gasping, not breathing, as he went down the long, dark ladder into the bowels of compartment seven. He had to force air into his lungs through the OBA mask; he kept worrying that the canister was empty, but the real reason was the rapid buildup of pressure in the compartment. Between the broken steam line and the intense heat radiated by the reactors, compartment seven had pressurized like a hot-air balloon with the burners on full. A constant hiss of escaping steam could be heard above the gurgle of seeping water. Preminin had never felt so hot in all his life.
The sound of water cooled him. It reminded him of the stream near his home village of Skornyakovo. It was cold and crystal clear, and the fish he caught with his brother were a treat for the family, so much better than the drab tinned meat, old, moldy cheese, and hard bread from the state store.
Those fishing expeditions with his brother were what made him interested in the Navy to begin with; if something so clean, so alive as a beautiful fish could be found amidst so much squalor, then a life on the water, or in it, might hold promise. It might give Sergei something, some pride, a job at the local flax mill could never supply.
The rubber suit was very heavy. It was lined with lead foil to protect against radiation. Moving was like swimming in some thick fluid, like being underwater, if the sea had turned hot enough to cook you like a crab in a pot.
At the bottom of the ladder he turned, flashed his light, then walked six meters down a short corridor. The darkness didn’t frighten him. But to have it empty, filled with poison gas, to have seawater running down the passage like a stream, to be sealed in seven alone, that was something else.
Preminin turned right, then took the three steps up to the local reactor control area outside the shielded space. The hazy beam of his explosion-proof light swept the panel of gauges.
Coolant pressure was zero on both reactors. Coolant flow, almost zero. The first reactor’s temperature was only now beginning to drop; the second VM-4 was pegged, the needle into the far right corner of the red zone. How far? How hot could it be in there? It had to be very close to meltdown. He thought of the men back in compartment eight. Sixty of his mates, fourteen of them unconscious, three already dead. They’d all be killed if that hot radioactive slag melted through and found the cold sea. Everyone was counting on him now. Belikov, Pshenichny, most especially Captain Britanov. No one else could do the job.
It had all come down to Engineer-Seaman Sergei Preminin.
He saw the dangling kashtan swinging on its cord. He picked it up and said, “Captain? This is Seaman Preminin. I’m in the local reactor control area in seven.” He read the dismal numbers off the gauges, then said, “I’m going back in now.”
“You can do it, Sergei,” Britanov said, though his worried tone said something else.
“Yes, sir. I will.” He groped his way to the small access hatch and unlocked it. The steel door blew back and slammed against the bulkhead as though someone had been trapped inside and now wanted out very badly. The high pressure hissed out through the opening, then subsided.
Beyond the hatch was an inferno. He felt the heat on his knees through the rubber, through the lead, through everything. He folded himself through the low hatch and reentered the reactor space.
He stood up. It was just three steps to the starboard reactor. He inserted the crank into the domed top and began to push.
Preminin gasped for air as he worked. The air pressure made his ears fill and crackle. He kept swallowing. His mouth, his throat, were dry as poured sand.
The first quench baffle squealed as he forced it down into position. He did the same for the second, the third. His head was light enough to float. He realized he was gasping harder now, like a fish brought up from the water. He looked down: the first OBA canister was empty. He took a deep breath.
He unscrewed the oxygen source and threw it away, holding his breath as he threaded on the second, and last, canister. The fittings would not align. They jammed, cross-threaded. His ears began to tingle, his throat burned, a traitorous impulse in his lungs screamed, Breathe!
He had to get the second canister connected. The air beyond his mask swirled with poison. He yanked the metal cartridge off the fitting and slowly, deliberately, with all the calmness a man can muster when he is suffocating, twisted it onto the end of his air tube.
The threads lined up. He screwed it on tight, then took a small taste of air.
Something sharp etched his throat as he sucked down the air. Like breathing shards of glass. The strange feeling filled his lungs, then disappeared.
Preminin went back to the reactor. He inserted the crank into the fourth, and last, baffle. He had to push with all his strength. His home village had a communal well that still relied on the steady clopping of an old horse hitched to its handle. Round and round, the horse was always walking but it never got anyplace.
Sergei Preminin was doing the same thing, hitched instead to a ninety-megawatt nuclear reactor. He walked his way around the blazingly hot steel dome. His suit was now scorched black instead of silver. He could smell burnt rubber through his mask. There were holes in the breathing tube, and through those holes he could smell bitter almond. If he took a deeper breath than normal, the sharp, glassy scratch filled his lungs. Each gasp was raw and painful, but a little poison was better than suffocating. He’d never told anyone, not the Navy recruiters, definitely not his mates on board K-219, but he had a fear of being trapped. He hated elevators. Let the doors shut and he’d break out in a sweat.
Well, it was too hot now to sweat, even if the steel walls curved in around him, the atmosphere heavy, hot, and lethal.
Preminin went round and round. How many more turns left? Just a few. Then he would leave this space, this oven. The doors would open. He would escape the trap.
Britanov waited with Kapitulsky in central command. There had been no word from Preminin now for too long. “Sergei?” Britanov said into the kashtan. “Are they secured, Sergei?”
“They have to be,” said Kapitulsky. “It doesn’t take that long. It can’t.”
There was no answer over the intercom.
“Start the forward diesel generator,” said Britanov. “We’re going to need all the power we can get from it.”
“Understood.” The propulsion engineer went forward to crank up the emergency generator.
“Captain?” said the radar operator. “Aircraft overhead now. He’s circling us.”
“Sergei!” Britanov shouted into the mike. “Report!”
Still nothing.
“Captain, this is Pshenichny in eight. Have you heard from Preminin? We haven’t seen him since he went in and our intercom won’t dial into seven.” Pshenichny could talk to central command, but not to Preminin. “He only had two canisters with him. Did he shut the plant down?”
“We don’t know,” said Britanov as the thrum and clank of the forward emergency diesel began.
“Switching the main power bus to backup,” said Krasilnikov. The lights in CCP blinked off, then grew bright. The intercom scratched, then squealed. A weak voice came through the loudspeaker. “Captain?”
“Pshenichny?”
“… Seaman Preminin.”
“Sergei! Where are you?”
“Comrade Commander, the…” The weak voice faded.
“Sergei! What is it?”
“Captain, the reactors are secured.”
Britanov realized he’d been holding his breath. It went out in a long whoosh as a cheer went up in the CCP. “I’m leaving… for the exit now.”
“Well done, Sergei!” said Britanov. “You’re a hero. How do you feel?”
“It’s very hot in here. I’m on my last OBA.”
“Then get the hell out of there.”
The intercom went dead.
“Zhenya!” Britanov called for the navigator. “Tell Moscow our reactors are shut down. They’re safe.”
“Yes, sir!”