Voyage of the Devilfish mp-1

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Off sa’deck, I have the Conn. Man silent battle stations. Rig ship for ultraquiet. Flood tubes one and two and open the outer doors. Spin the Mark 50’s in tubes one, two, three and four. And prepare to hover.”

  As Stokes got busy, Pacino looked up at the OMEGA, which he could not hear until he was close enough to touch it. For a moment he wished Donchez had simply ordered him to sink the OMEGA outright, but then realized he couldn’t do that. Don’t shoot unless shot at, was the order. So if the OMEGA shot a torpedo at them…

  “Attention fire-control team,” Pacino announced, “the OMEGA is surfaced at the polynya above. Designate the OMEGA Target One. We will position ourselves directly under Target One. We will come up on the hovering system with the maximum rate and hit Target One’s bottom. We’ll get deep again and monitor Target One’s actions. If Target One shoots at us, we will have verified hostile intentions, as COMSUBLANT has asked us to verify. And if that is the case, we will put Target One on the bottom…”

  Pacino looked around the room. “If Target One does nothing or attempts to communicate with us, we will need to make a decision, whether her actions are genuinely friendly or a deception. All right, carry on.”

  And what the hell do I do if the OMEGA refuses to be provoked, Pacino asked himself. Put a torpedo in the water? If the Russian could not be provoked, he would have no authorization to shoot it. The order to shoot would be unlawful. All right, you bastard, give me an excuse. Don’t make me make one. Pacino turned back to periscope and positioned the ship at 675 feet, hell aft-hull directly underneath the OMEGA at a right angle to the Russian, the OMEGA pointed north and Devilfish pointed east. He was looking back aft at the OMEGA hull, which was above his own reactor compartment. That way any possible contact would spare the periscope and the sail, both of which he might need later to break through the ice of the polynya.

  ARCTIC OCEAN

  POLYNYA SURFACE

  FS KALININGRAD

  Captain Vlasenko opened his locker, hoping his service pistol was there. Or had he left it behind? Yes, he must have left it in his apartment, it was mostly ceremonial. Perhaps he had avoided wearing it since those days on the Leningrad, an unconscious attempt to distance himself from Novskoyy’s affectations. What he intended to do would be much harder without a handgun. Perhaps impossible. But this had to stop, and the only way to stop it was to remove the admiral from control of the ship. From overhead Vlasenko heard the sound of a mast rising up, reminding him of Novskoyy and the communications console. He had waited long enough. If the admiral actually intended to launch an attack, he could order it to commence any minute. Vlasenko had tried hard to convince himself that this deployment was just an exercise. But seeing Novskoyy cover his papers with the chart, and the chart itself — how could he deny such evidence to the contrary? The operation profile in the red binder had chilled his blood.

  The evening before, Vlasenko had gone to the control compartment to check out the weather through the periscope and found that Novskoyy had gone and had taken his stacks of messages with him. While Novskoyy was still gone, one message had come in. Vlasenko had pulled the message out of the discharge tray and the deck officer, Captain-Lieutenant Ivanov, had tapped his shoulder, telling him not to touch any of the admiral’s messages. Vlasenko had ignored Ivanov. The message was a lightning bolt through his guts. It was from the Alexander Nevsky, addressed to Novskoyy. Nevsky was a fairly new ship, an ALFA class. In his mind’s eye he could still see the block letters on the crisp laserprinted page:

  WILL NOT BE IN POSITION AT T-HOUR. ETA AT PORTSMOUTH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, HOLD COORDINATE IS 1230 GMT, T-HOUR PLUS 3.5. INTEND TO RENDEZVOUS LATE, ANTICIPATING FINITE POSSIBILITY THAT T-HOUR MAY BE DELAYED DUE TO WEATHER.

  So it seemed that the chart was not just a theoretical plan — the Nevsky was on the way to a position off the U.S. coast. And what was “t-hour?” The time of a time-on-target assault? If Nevsky was three-and-a-half hours late at 1230 GMT, that put T-hour at 0900 GMT. But what day? Today? Tomorrow? Vlasenko had glanced at the chronometer, which read 0850 GMT. If it was today, it was in ten minutes! Disabling the radio would stop any transmission of a gocode to launch cruise missiles. But then it would be repaired. Disable the radio after smashing all the spare parts? The Kaliningrad had too many back-up systems and redundant circuits, and in the computer cabinets functions were in some cases combined. You could think you were smashing the radio modules and end up disabling the ship-control system instead. Even in the best-case scenario the radio could be repaired and the go-code could be transmitted.

  He could order the Operations Officer to open the small-arms locker for inspection and get an automatic pistol. Except Ivanov, the Operations Officer and Acting First Officer, was on watch in the control compartment as Deck Officer, and only he had the keys to the small-arms safe, which was to be opened only by him. Not even Captain Vlasenko could take the key without violating his own standing orders. It would surely make the admiral suspicious if he ordered Ivanov off the watch or ordered him to turn over the keys. And waiting for the normal rotation so that Ivanov was offwatch was too risky… the watch shifted at noon, over three hours from now.

  Vlasenko had considered briefing his officers on what Novskoyy was apparently up to, but most were in awe — or fear — of Novskoyy. He was, after all, the Fleet Commander. An order to arrest the man would not exactly be popular in the officers’ mess, and even if he did get the officers together, there was virtually no way he could do it without Novskoyy knowing about it. There was no time for persuasion, for a committee decision. It was too dangerous not to take some action now. He hated the decision, but there was no escaping it. This was his problem. His responsibility.

  He took a deep breath, left the stateroom and walked aft to the third compartment and found the tool bench on the starboard side. He pulled open a cabinet and unlatched a heavy wrench from a restraining bracket. He went back forward and climbed the long ladder to the control compartment, the heavy wrench in his right hand. He would have preferred a pistol. He neared the upper rungs of the ladder, trying to keep the wrench from knocking against the rungs, still without a clear idea what he would do with the wrench. He could lean it in an inconspicuous place, and when the time came, when the chronometer neared 0900, he could knock Novskoyy unconscious and lock him up in the stores locker in the third compartment. With Novskoyy out of the picture, he felt reasonably confident there would be no one else to carry out his plan. With Novskoyy’s need for total control of any mission, it was most likely he had issued instructions to his fleet not to fire the cruise missiles unless he sent his implementation message. Otherwise, why were they surfaced here at the polynya?

  Vlasenko had two steps up to go. He heard the conversations of the control compartment clearly now, the officers at their posts. The wrench was heavy. Vlasenko’s hands were wet with sweat. What if he was seen with the damned wrench? How could he explain it? Vlasenko held the wrench behind his right leg with his right hand and proceeded to pull himself up to the landing with his left— It was too awkward. The wrench slipped out of his hand just as Deck Officer Ivanov announced that the captain was in control. The heavy tool clattered down the ladder and landed at the base six meters below. Novskoyy looked over at Vlasenko.

  “So, Vlasenko,” his hand reaching for his hip holster! “what brings you to control… with a wrench? Going to fix the fire-control computer? Ivanov, call security. Now!”

  Ivanov looked first at Vlasenko, then Novskoyy, stunned, as his hand reached for the phone.

  Novskoyy kept his service pistol trained on Vlasenko for the full two minutes it took the Security Warrant Officer to arrive in the control compartment. Vlasenko looked to his officers, saw none was going to challenge the admiral. Who could blame them? He turned to Novskoyy.

  “Sir, why are you provoking the Americans? Getting ready to attack them…?” The watch officers stared, astonished, at the two men. “I saw your attack plan. Admiral—”

  “It’s an exe
rcise, you fool. You are destroying yourself over an exercise. I’m afraid, Vlasenko, that you have gone quite mad. I am sorry for you, and all the years I wasted trying to make a man of you. You are not worthy of your commission.”

  “Admiral, your fleet doesn’t move without orders from you. That’s the reason for this surfacing. Your action begins in… five minutes? Is that when you send the message? Launch the missiles?” He was partly testing, but the look on Novskoyy’s face, his lack of any rebuttal, the sound of Novskoyy’s clicking off the safety on his pistol… it all added up to a horrible confirmation. It was the admiral, not Vlasenko, who seemed to have gone over the edge, to have gone from a threatening deployment to an actual attack mode…

  The security officer had arrived at the landing from the ladder to the second compartment upper level. He looked at the two men, momentarily hesitating at the remarkable scene of the admiral threatening the ship’s captain with a semiautomatic pistol.

  “Warrant, place Captain Vlasenko under arrest.” Novskoyy looked around, noting the clock. It read 0856.

  “Put him in the control-compartment escape pod and shut the hatch. Stand guard at the ladder, when we go deep we will transfer him to a holding cell.”

  “Sir, I can take the captain to the storage compartment now,” Warrant Danalov said.

  “No. For the moment I want him where I can be sure of his actions. Take him up, shut the hatch and stand guard. And make sure you disable the pod-disconnect circuit. We don’t want the poor man blowing the bolts and rolling onto the ice. There is a better punishment for this man.”

  The ladder to the escape pod was three meters tall and led to a lower hatch. It was awkward for the warrant to push Vlasenko up the ladder and follow with his pistol drawn, and for a moment Vlasenko considered kicking Danalov and trying to disarm him. Except Novskoyy’s gun was still levelled at him, the admiral’s trigger finger in place.

  Just before he opened the pod hatch and left the control room Vlasenko glanced at Deck Officer Ivanov, hoping for some sort of action. Any action. Ivanov seemed immobilized. It had all happened too fast, Vlasenko realized. Now, when it was too late, he decided he should have shown Ivanov and others the plans in Novskoyy’s stateroom.

  * * *

  It was completely dark inside the pod. Groping for the light switch, Vlasenko felt only the clammy frozen wall of the titanium spherical-pod bulkhead. When he did manage to find the switch, he looked for some way to change the scenario being written below. He saw none. The pod was round, about six meters in diameter, capable of holding two dozen men in an emergency. Wood benches were set against the bulkhead, but most of the occupants would stand or sit on the deck during an emergency ascent. The control station on the starboard side contained a depth gage, currently reading zero meters, and a release circuit tied into explosive bolts below. This was the circuit Novskoyy had ordered disconnected. Vlasenko would try it anyway. He pulled the cover off a switch marked ARM and put the switch in the ARM ENGAGE position. Below it was a lighted green button marked POD RELEASE. He pressed the button. No light came on. No explosive bolts fired. As he had expected. He returned the top switch to the NORMAL position and replaced the cover. Below the circuit was a manual release lever. He tried it, but it too was locked out from below.

  One last possibility — the upper escape hatch. The hatch was dogged shut with six heavy metal claws tied into a central ring. Vlasenko reached for the ring, startled by how cold it was, and tried to twist it. It wouldn’t budge. Not surprising, considering that the hatch opened up to the outside, above the ice from the leading edge of the teardrop-shaped sail. When the Kaliningrad’s sail popped through the ice cover to the air outside, the water clinging to the metal surface had apparently frozen solid over the hatch fairing.

  Not that it would have done him any good. His underway uniform would have offered slight protection from the cold. He would have died from exposure within minutes in the subzero temperature outside. Finally Vlasenko sat on one of the pod benches. There was no ventilation in the pod, no fresh air, no heat. It was not long before he was shivering, the taste of terrible frustration acid in his mouth.

  * * *

  Novskoyy took his seat in the padded chair in front of the communication console. It was time to type in the message to be transmitted to his fleet. Behind him, in the periscope well, Ivanov looked into the optics of the combat periscope, training it in slow circles, watching the storm above the Kaliningrad. An arctic blizzard had rolled in from the dark featureless thick overcast of the sky. The flakes were as big as bullets. Visibility was shrinking. Below the Kaliningrad, a U.S. Piranha-class nuclear submarine named Devilfish floated to a halt, over 200 meters further below in the blackness of the frigid arctic water. Eight thousand kilometers from the Kaliningrad, 120 nuclear attack submarines awaited Novskoyy’s transmission. The admiral finished typing and went over the message one last time.

  ********** MOLNIYA **********

  FROM NORTHERN FLEET COMMANDER/EMBARKED FS KALININGRAD

  TO ALL UNITS SUBMARINE TASK FORCE NF-ONE

  DATE 19 DEC

  TIME 0850 GMT

  PURP LAUNCH PREPARATION PER SEALED ATTACK INSTRUCTION NF-211-9

  ACTION

  1. THIS MESSAGE AUTHORIZES AND ORDERS ADDRESSEES TO MAKE ALL PREPARATIONS FOR SSN-X-27 LAUNCH ON TARGETS OF PRIMARY CONTINGENCY AS LISTED IN NORTHERN FLEET SEALED ATTACK INSTRUCTIONS NF-211-9 OF 13 DEC.

  2. UNSEAL ATTACK PROFILE NF-211-9 AND PROGRAM SSN-X-27 MISSILE FOR PRIMARY TARGET LISTED THEREIN.

  3. ON 18 DECEMBER UNITED NATIONS INSPECTORS MONITORED DESTRUCTION OF SSN-X-27 NUCLEAR CRUISE MISSILES.

  4. CURRENT DEPLOYMENT INTENDED TO FORCE UNITED STATES TO DESTROY OWN SEA LAUNCHED CRUISE MISSILES. WARSHOT SSNX-27 MISSILES WITH EXERCISE-UNIT MARKINGS HAVE BEEN LOADED ABOARD NORTHERN FLEET SHIPS AS CONTINGENCY.

  5. DO NOT EXECUTE MISSILE LAUNCH UNTIL INSTRUCTED TO DO SO BY AUTHENTICATED MOLNIYA EXECUTION MESSAGE SCHEDULED FOR0910GMT.

  6. TRANSMITTED BY SUPREME COMMANDER, NORTHERN FLEET, ADMIRAL ALEXI NOVSKOYY.

  CHAPTER 15

  SUNDAY, 19 DECEMBER 0859 GREENWICH MEAN TIME

  ARCTIC OCEAN

  BENEATH THE POLAR ICECAP

  “Captain,” Stokes said, “ship is ready to hover. Depth is six seven five feet, speed zero, depth rate zero.”

  “Very well.” Pacino stood at the periscope watching the distant glow of the ice overhead. “Attention in the fire-control team…” The room quieted, the eerie silence filled only with the whine of the computers and the bass of the ventilation fans.

  “… Here we go. After we upset this guy, be ready to make the recovery and get deep. Off sa’deck, to all spaces, rig ship for collision and prepare to report any damage. Diving Officer, engage the hovering system and give me max blow until Aux 2 is dry, report ascent rate.”

  This dangerous maneuver might go sour, Pacino realized. If the Devilfish’s hovering system failed they might rise up with a drift to the side and collide with the ice. Trying to induce your enemy to lead so you could counterpunch was a risky business. If he started the ascent from a shallower depth it might not be enough to affect the OMEGA. To a ship that massive, even a blow from Devilfish from a mere 200 feet would scarcely jar it. There were just no guarantees, too many variables, too many ways his maneuver could turn against him. But to do nothing was to risk losing the OMEGA if she left the polynya and went deep. The thing was too damned quiet. He’d never catch up with it. The time was now.

  Chief of the Watch Robertson at the wraparound ballast-control panel reached for the hovering joystick and pushed it to the BLOW position to put high-pressure air into the aux tank and blow out the ballast water to lighten the ship.

  A slight sound was perceptible above the roar of the fans, the sound of air blowing into a tank. The digital depth gage clicked. The ascent had begun.

  “Aux 2 empty, sir. Securing the blow,” Robertson intoned. Pacino snapped up the periscope grips and adjusted the control ring to lower the peri
scope so it would not be smashed by the ascent.

  “Six hundred feet, sir,” Diving Officer Lanscomb called from his seat between the planesmen. “Ascent rate five feet per second… seven… ten… fifteen…” On the ship-control console in front of the Diving Officer the numbers on the depth gage began to spin rapidly. The deck now tilted to the port side. Pacino, behind Stokes at the forward end of the Conn, looked up at the bubble inclinometer, which showed a list of ten degrees. The sail must be dragging them into this tilted ascent. As the water flowed at great speed over the hull, the sail acted as a brake, heeling them over. Pacino grabbed a handrail set into the side of the Conn sonar console. Now five hundred feet below the OMEGA submarine, Devilfish continued upward at terminal velocity, her hull level fore and aft but heeled over, her sail tilted to a fifteen-degree angle. She was a 4500-ton express elevator, roaring through the dark arctic depths toward the most advanced attack submarine in the world.

  ARCTIC OCEAN

  POLYNYA SURFACE

  Admiral Novskoyy checked the bulkhead chronometer, set as usual to Greenwich Mean Time. As he waited for the seconds to click away till 0900, he again read his message. Brief and official, Novskoyy thought. He typed in the next words in the sequence: TRANSMIT SEQUENCE STATUS? And the computer said: READY… It was time. Novskoyy typed in: TRANSMIT And the computer replied: TRANSMITTING…

  There were now only ten minutes, until 0910, to decide whether to send the execution message for missile launch to his fleet. Novskoyy had told Dretzski at the Severomorsk shipyards that this deployment was to force U.S. compliance with his demands for total destruction of their nuclear weapons. And he had believed it, at least up to a point. He had also acknowledged to himself that if necessary he would take the next step, as he had done all those years ago against the USS Stingray. Well, his ships were deployed; the mole, General Tyler, had already gone to lengths to convince the U.S. authorities that this was merely another exercise. Would they seriously believe a sudden reversal, believe that the threat was real? Certainly not from Tyler. And certainly not from a Russian admiral. Never again would he and his forces have such an opportunity. Had he ever, in fact, really believed it would not come to more than a deployment? As the Kaliningrad’s multifrequency antenna began transmitting the standby order to the COSMOS 21 communications satellite, Novskoyy doubted he would need the ten minutes to decide whether to follow up with the execution message for missile launch. The decision was made.