Voyage of the Devilfish mp-1

by Michael Dimercurio

  Novskoyy’s face seemed to grow as dark as the storm that blew around them.

  “Vlasenko, you are impertinent. However, to enlighten you… I will tell Admiral Konalev the truth.”

  “The truth?” The words escaped Vlasenko’s lips before he could stop them.

  Novskoyy stared clear through him, his expression now blank, controlled. He leaned over until his gray eyes were within centimeters from Vlasenko’s.

  “The truth. Lieutenant, is that the American submarine ambushed us with an offensive salvo of torpedoes. We fired back to save ourselves. After we outran the American weapon our torpedoes sent the enemy to the bottom, which he deserved.”

  Novskoyy continued to stare down at Vlasenko. A bead of sweat dripped down Vlasenko’s chin in spite of the cold. He was, by too long conditioning, literally frozen in place. Novskoyy finally broke off his stare, opened the tunnel hatch to the control room below and went through. If he had stopped and looked back up at Vlasenko, he would have seen a lieutenant standing stiff at attention. If he had looked into the man’s soul, he would have seen profound hatred, smothered below layers of fear. It would take years to peel them away…

  NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

  COMSUBLANT HEADQUARTERS

  Admiral Richard Donchez walked into the conference room and shut the door.

  “Attention on deck!” someone shouted. The room’s officers came to attention. Donchez waved them to their chairs and sat at the head of the table.

  “Good morning, gentlemen. Today at zero nine hundred Greenwich Mean Time our Bigbird II reconnaissance satellite passed over the Kola Peninsula and the Russian northern-coast submarine bases. The Bigbird satellite found all the piers empty. Empty. The previous pass, approximately four hours before, showed all 120 nuclear attack submarines in port. SOSUS hydrophones reported a large number of submarines under way in the Barents Sea. They seem to be heading in the direction of the North Atlantic. Toward us…”

  “This remarkable deployment, we suspect, may well have to do with the commander of the Northern Fleet, Admiral Alexi Novskoyy. Last night Novskoyy was reported by intelligence assets to be embarked aboard the new OMEGA-class attack submarine Kaliningrad, which left Severomorsk for the Arctic yesterday, supposedly for sea trials. And meanwhile his fleet is deploying with speed and precision. Novskoyy is now at an undetermined location under the polar icecap.”

  Donchez let the news sink in.

  “What he is up to is anyone’s guess. The DIA, CIA and NSA are on the case. But they don’t ever have to face an opponent at sea. We do. Therefore, I am ordering the immediate deployment of the east-coast attack-submarine force. I want repairs accelerated until every vessel is underway submerged. Unfortunately, that is only sixty-seven ships, which means each one of ours will have to trail two of theirs. The classification for this information is TOP SECRET THUNDERBOLT. Any leaks and I guarantee the leaker will spend the rest of his career in Leavenworth Military Prison. That is all. Dismissed.”

  NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

  NORFOLK NAVAL BASE PIER 7

  The mid-afternoon sun gave little warmth as Squadron Seven’s leader Commodore Benjamin Adams, shivering in a light khaki jacket, stepped off the long sloping gangway of the Hercules, Squadron Seven’s tender ship. The diesel engines of Pier Seven’s four cranes rumbled as they removed shorepower cables and gangways. Two of the squadron’s submarines were in the channel already and one was taking in her lines now.

  Adams walked down the pier to the berth of the Billfish. From the sub’s flying bridge Captain Toth saluted Adams, who returned the salute and gave him a thumbs-up. The tugs pulled Billfish away from the pier and towed her to the center of the channel at the pier’s end. Tossing off the tug lines, Toth ordered ahead standard, the wake boiled up around Billfish’s rudder and she surged forward.

  Ben Adams watched the same scene played out for the Spadefish, the Archerfish, the Whale, the Barracuda, the Pargo, the Sturgeon and the Piranha. When the sun set, Pier Seven was empty except for the tender ship Hercules.

  Bill Sweeney, commodore of Squadron Twelve, joined Adams on the pier. “Can you believe this?”

  “Did you get everyone under way?” Adams asked, ignoring the question.

  “All but the Charleston,” Sweeney told him. “She was blowing resin in drydock. Word has it they’re throwing her engine room and reactor compartment back together, sending her to sea with no resin refill.”

  “Jesus,” Adams breathed. The ion exchange resin of the purification system, he knew, kept the radioactive particles in the nuclear coolant down to a minimum. Without resin the engine room could become a high-radiation area. COMSUBLANT wouldn’t order a boat to sea without resin unless the situation was damn serious…

  Sweeney took a deep breath. “I haven’t seen anything like this since ‘82, and even then, it turned out that COMSUBLANT and COMSUBPAC had a bet on who could scramble their sub forces the quickest.”

  “I remember,” Adams said. He had been XO of the Whale at the time, but talk of the deployment exercise had gone on for years.

  “You don’t send a boat to sea without resin for a bet,” Sweeney said.

  “What do you hear in the wardroom?” Adams asked. The wardroom was the seat of scuttlebutt.

  “My intel officer was reluctant to brief me. Can you believe it? My own damn intel officer worried I’d leak it.” Adams hadn’t had time to consult intelligence. The rush to get the pierside boats under way had taken all his concentration and time.

  “Bill, tell me what the hell’s going on. I haven’t heard anything.”

  “Well, it seems the Russians went to sea this morning with 120 attack submarines. Every damn ship in the Northern Fleet. No one knows why. They must have been nursing those boats for months getting ready for this. Their maintenance problems are supposed to be worse than ours.”

  “Why? They’re not crazy. What’s it supposed to mean? Why are we reacting this way?”

  Sweeney shrugged. “I’m no intel spook, Ben. I’m gonna head home and watch CNN until my eyeballs fall out. Not much to do here.”

  When the ships were at sea their skippers reported directly to Admiral Donchez, COMSUBLANT. The commodores had no tactical control.

  Adams waved at his counterpart and walked back up the gangway to the Hercules, exhausted. He climbed the ladders to his stateroom, gathered his briefcase, waved to his Chief of Staff and walked back down the ramp to the pier and the parking lot. His Mercedes was in the first reserved space at the end of the pier. As he started to unlock the driver’s side door he saw a Devilfish sticker the size of a dinnerplate plastered to the window, its grinning ram’s head staring out at him. Patch Pacino’s son’s way of saying good-bye. Good hunting, he murmured, wishing he were more than a damn pierside jockey.

  CHAPTER 10

  WEDNESDAY, 15 DECEMBER

  ARCTIC OCEAN

  BENEATH THE POLAR ICECAP

  Admiral Novskoyy stood in the Kaliningrad’s control compartment and watched the topsounder display table. The short shriek of the topsounding sonar was audible through both hulls of the ship as it searched for a polynya — the open water that formed when heavy rafts of ice were torn apart. The open water of a polynya might last all of ten minutes, the admiral knew, before skinning over and freezing in the subzero temperature, and within days the two disparate rafts would again be welded together into a solid mass of ice. Novskoyy peered at the navigation display tied into the high-frequency-contour sonar. The topsounder “sensed” the ice’s thickness and mapped out the shape on the navigation display. The plot was two-dimensional but using a hybrid holography technology, it looked three-dimensional, a tight grid deformed into mountains and valleys and plateaus. The mountains corresponded to thick ice, the flat plains to thin ice. In the center of the nav plot was a “bug,” a small illuminated circle that symbolized the ship, which now was in the middle of a large elliptical field of flatness, a valley surrounded by large but distant ridges. Clearly the polynya was big enough
to allow surfacing four vessels the size of the Kaliningrad.

  Captain Vlasenko, the Deck Officer for the ascent, stood in the periscope well.

  “Ship Control Officer, pump centerline amidships variable ballast to sea. Establish one meter per second vertical ascent.”

  The Ship Control Officer, Lieutenant Katmonov, touched his panel in the fixed-function-key sector. In front of him the screen was selected to display a multicolored graphic of the variable ballast systems, a series of tanks in the belly of the huge ship linked by a piping network, and the heart of the system, a positive displacement pump the size of a truck. A three-way valve on the display, the one to the centerline amidships-tank, changed color from white to green. The valve was open. The graphic of the pump flashed “ON” and “4000 LPS” as the pump pushed thousands of liters per second from the tank. As the tanks emptied, Kaliningrad grew lighter and the forces of buoyancy began to move her upward. The depth graphic steadily counted off the meters and sixty million kilograms of attack submarine rocketed toward the thin ice above. As the ship rose through the ocean, the light around the hull became slowly brighter, until at 30 meters, the hull could be distinguished from the black water around her. The deck trembled gently and the deceleration from the halted ascent made Novskoyy momentarily weightless. The ship had surfaced.

  “Captain, depth zero,” Katmonov reported. “We are on the surface.”

  “Very good. Ship Control. Bubble the ballast tanks and rig for surfaced-at-ice.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “Captain-Lieutenant Ivanov, take the deck,” Vlasenko said. “Admiral, the ship is surfaced-at-ice.” Novskoyy nodded and sat down at the communications console, typed in the command to raise the multifunction antenna, concentrating on the communication console screen and a binder full of notes. It was clear there had been a reason for him to order Ivanov to repair the systems. Vlasenko could not wait any longer. He had to find out what the admiral was doing.

  “Admiral, permission to go below,” Vlasenko said. Novskoyy waved a dismissal, still typing into the computer.

  Vlasenko moved quietly through the main shaft of the second compartment upper level, past the doors to officers’ messroom to the first compartment bulkhead. To his left was the captain’s stateroom door. He could not afford to look hesitant. He was the captain. He was unlocking and entering the captain’s stateroom, his stateroom. Right. He unlocked the door and pushed his way in, went directly to the inner stateroom’s tactical safe and dialed in the combination. He drew a breath and pulled the lever. The safe opened. Inside were some musty and dated publications like the Emergency Warsaw Pact War Plan and the Prolonged Naval Warfare War Plan. Also the Nuclear Release Code. On top of such dusty pubs was a chart marked TOP SECRET and a binder, a slim volume of red plastic that looked like the one Novskoyy had thrown across his desk to conceal his papers.

  Vlasenko pulled out the chart and unfolded it. It was a chart of the Atlantic Ocean, with dozens of red dots marked in the ocean east of the U.S. coast. A hundred blue circles were drawn around cities on the east coast. Clusters of blue circles were drawn around Washington, New York, Boston, Philadelphia. Other cities such as Portsmouth, New London, Norfolk, Charleston, Jacksonville and Port Canaveral had blue stars. All the blue stars were U.S. Navy bases. Why? Novskoyy could hardly be thinking of a ballistic missile assault against the U.S. The ballistic missile submarines were nearly all decommissioned. Even when operational they had been under the control of the officers of the Strategic Rocket Forces. Novskoyy couldn’t order an attack with them. The blue dots at sea — launching positions? — seemed too close to the targets. And there were at least 100 of the dots… the fleet had only two dozen I.C.B.M-equipped submarines. Even a depressed trajectory ballistic missile needed several hundred nautical miles for a standoff range… but a city-assault could be done by cruise missiles if the fleet were armed with them. And if the fleet was in position. But to do that, the dozens of submarines would all have to be at sea, which would mean months of preparations, and Vlasenko knew very few of the Northern Fleet’s submarines would be ready to make a run to the mid-Atlantic on short notice. Besides, such a move would make a lot of noise, he would have heard about it from his fellow skippers. So it had to be some kind of wargame, a drill… Except why would Novskoyy be so secretive if it was a drill or communication exercise? Vlasenko turned to the red binder and opened it. The first page was answer enough.

  ** FLEET BATTLE STUDY 93-1169 ** T.O.T. NLACM U.S. EAST COAST ATTACK PURPOSE: TO EXAMINE THE EFFECT, IF NECESSARY, OF A TIME-ON-TARGET NUCLEAR LAND ATTACK CRUISE MISSILE (NLACM) ASSAULT ON THE UNITED STATES BY A FORCE OF ATTACK SUBMARINES DEPLOYED TO THE WESTERN ATLANTIC.

  ABSTRACT: THE ATTACK WOULD REQUIRE A MINIMUM OF 100 SSN-X-27 NUCLEAR LAND ATTACK CRUISE MISSILES FIRED FROM AS MANY PLATFORMS AS POSSIBLE TO AVOID UNIT LOSSES. THE T.O.T. ASSAULT WOULD INSURE THAT ALL WARHEADS, REGARDLESS OF FLIGHT TIME, WOULD DETONATE AT THE SAME INSTANT. THE EFFECT OF A TIME-ON-TARGET ASSAULT ON THE EAST COAST OF THE USA COULD ACHIEVE CASTRATION/CAPITATION STRATEGY OBJECTIVE.

  Vlasenko slammed the book shut, put back the volume and chart and locked the safe. He looked around the stateroom, to make sure that no trace of his search was visible, moved into the passageway outside and went quickly to the First Officer’s stateroom, slamming the door behind him. He tried to reassure himself with the words “if necessary,” “could achieve.” Novskoyy wasn’t crazy, he just had a contingency plan. Maybe he was planning to target U.S. cities, not actually fire on them — but even that was inevitably dangerous. The admiral, self-convinced of his course as always… Vlasenko could not forget the wanton sinking of the U.S. boat years ago. He was frustrated by the dismemberment of the old Soviet Union and with it so much of his power. He had concocted this operation. For Novskoyy, an enemy was an enemy forever. He was an old man from another era who couldn’t believe he had ever been wrong. No, he wasn’t crazy. It was worse. He was a desperate man, highly skilled, who never doubted his righteousness. Much worse than mere crazy… Novskoyy would have to be stopped.

  * * *

  Low earth orbit arctic circle The KH-17 Bigbird II satellite sent up that year had been launched into a polar orbit. Such an orbit facilitated looking at the Chinese activity in the antarctic as well as monitoring the Russian naval force strength up north. The latter was the key to the Naval Disarmament Treaty. As Reagan had said years before, “Trust but verify.” The KH-17’s were built to verify.

  As the twelve-ton spy-platform crossed the Arctic Circle, it trained its high-resolution visual mirror to search to the east of track. The prime-viewing area this orbit was deemed to be to the right side of the Bigbird’s path over the icepack. While the optics trained over, the infrared sensors followed, scanning the same swath, searching for heat attributable only to warm-blooded life or a man-made source in the frigid cold. For the last hundred orbits, only seven arctic heat traces had been scanned. All had been polar bears. Now the Bigbird’s computer found its eighth heat trace, much larger than the others. Twelve meters long, five meters high. The computer searched its memory as its program commanded. Nothing in its flight history to date had been this big. The next program step told the onboard radio to send an alarm message to the Langley CIA Reconnaissance Section control facility. As the alarm message transmitted, the third program command instructed the optical telescope to train over the heat trace and zoom in. The Bigbird relayed the telemetry back to Langley until the images shrank and were lost in the clouds over the horizon. Start to finish, the detection episode had lasted less than four minutes.

  Four thousand miles away, in the east wing of Langley’s CIA Reconnaissance Center, the four-minute-long optical trace slowly printed out on the high-resolution facsimile machine. The senior duty analyst pulled the image trace from the machine. Probably another polar bear, he thought.

  He laid the image out on the table to the side of the fax machine and emitted a low whistle. It was a submarine’s conning tower that had pushed throu
gh the ice. A damn big conning tower. He reached for a secure phone and dialed in the code for COMSUBLANT Headquarters, Norfolk, Virginia.

  CHAPTER 11

  THURSDAY, 16 DECEMBER

  NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

  COMSUBLANT HEADQUARTERS

  Admiral Richard Donchez stared at the Flag Plot room’s North Atlantic electronic wall chart, at the mass of red X’s blinking on and off, as they cleared Great Britain and headed to the west Atlantic. Just offshore, Donchez felt certain. The neighboring chart, the western Atlantic, showed blue X’s moving away from the coastline. His fast-attack submarines headed out into a zone-defense of the coast. With some luck, his ships should be able to confront… or intercept… the Russian boats as they pulled up at America’s east coast. Except the Rules of Engagement said that no offensive action could be taken until one of the enemy ships did something — no fair hitting unless the other guy hits first. Donchez shook his head as he crouched over a table with the CIA photographic intelligence of the OMEGA submarine surfaced at the icecap, the detail fine enough to see the rungs of the handholds going up the side of the sail to the bridge. It was more than an implicit revenge sanction now, he thought, in the context of officially making Pacino’s mission one of getting a probing sonar profile of the guts of the new OMEGA. Before the Russian deployment, he had let Patch’s son believe his mission was also a belated payback for Stingray. But now… Novskoyy and the OMEGA had to have something to do with the Russian deployment. And Novskoyy must have anticipated some sort of counterdeployment, he might even be expecting a U.S. attack sub to visit him. This was turning into a potential general skirmish…