Voyage of the Devilfish mp-1

by Michael Dimercurio

  The lights were still on in the narrow fore-and-aft passageway. As Pacino went toward the control room he nearly tripped over a body, half lying in the passageway at the door to Sonar, half in the sonar room. Chief Sonarman Jethro Helms was dead, eyes staring at the overhead, blood running out of his mouth.

  As Pacino forced himself forward past the door to Sonar, the overhead lights went out. The battery he thought. The battery has flooded with seawater and it’s shorted out and the ship is dying with no power and the hull is filling with chlorine gas from the reaction of seawater with the huge wet cells. He ran forward until he was in the control room, feeling his way by instinct from years of living with the geometry common to all Piranha-class submarines. He felt the deck under his feet give, he was sliding in the darkness, something wet on the deck. He reached into the overhead for the switch to a manual lantern, not sure if he was slipping on oil, water or blood. The lights came back on as he struggled for the switch to the battle lantern, but he switched on the light anyway in case the overhead lights went out again. He realized the ship was running solely on battery, and when it went he would be in an uncontrollable hulk, suspended in seawater with no depth control.

  It took several seconds for him to take in the scene in the control room. Filled with smoke. No one moved. Watchstanders collapsed on the deck surrounded by the broken glass of the video fire-control and sonar screens and instrument faces. The plot table of the geographic plot had smashed itself into the narrow aisle behind the fire-control cabinets and the curving starboard bulkhead. The ship-control team was still strapped into their seats, their heads lolling on their shoulders. The Chief of the Watch was nowhere in sight. The OOD, Nathanial Stokes, was collapsed on the periscope stand, a phone handset resting on his face, the smashed panel that was once the sonar-repeater screen half-lying on his chest. Jon Rapier sat on a fire-control bench, his head on the console, his arms dangling. Behind him the Pos Two console was in flames. Lieutenant Scon Brayton had fallen between the bench and the lower portion of the Pos Three console. Ensign Brett Fasteen, the Pos One operator, was lying on the deck with his arms and legs in unnatural positions, his chest toward the deck, his head twisted clear around so that his face was upward. No sign of Steve Bahnhoff or lan Christman, but there were still unexplored shadows and piles of rubble.

  Pacino heard a brief sound of an electrical arc. The sound of flooding had stopped, leaving the room deathly quiet. Pacino grabbed the P.A. Circuit Seven microphone, clicked on its speak button: “Engineer, Captain.” Pacino was talking to himself… the microphone was hanging from the severed cord. He threw it to the deck, grabbed the phone handset off of Brayton’s chest: “Maneuvering, Captain. Engineer, pick up the Circuit JA phone!” Lieutenant Commander Matt Delaney’s voice came over the JA phone circuit. Pacino got out his question before Delaney could finish saying, “Engineer.”

  “Eng, what’s your status?” Delaney was shouting, as if the line reception was poor. Or maybe he was just scared, Pacino thought. He had a right to be.

  “Flooding in port main seawater isolated by the chicken switch. We took on maybe two feet of water in the bilges and I need the drain pump but it takes too much current for the battery. Battery’s got maybe five minutes left. We had a fast leak. in the primary coolant system. Not sure where it was from but I isolated both loops with the main coolant cutout valves and the leak stopped. We were watching loop pressures when you called — okay, it’s starboard.” There was the sound of Delaney’s voice getting distant as he shouted instructions to the maneuvering crew, probably the reactor operator.

  “Skipper, you still there?” Delaney’s hoarse voice.

  “I’m here, Eng.”

  “I’m opening up the port loop cutout valves. Okay, pressurizer level’s holding.” For a moment Delaney’s voice was muffled. “Charge to the port loop.” Delaney’s voice came back as he screamed into the phone. “Skipper, we gotta restart the reactor with an emergency heatup rate. If we wait any longer we won’t have enough juice to run a main coolant pump to start up. We need an emergency fastrecovery reactor startup.”

  “Engineer, conduct a fastrecovery reactor startup. Put the switch in battleshort and use an emergency heatup rate on the reactor. Do an emergency warmup of the turbines, SSTG’s first. I want propulsion in four minutes.”

  “Cap’n, we’ll be up in three.” The phone clicked. Pacino slowly put the phone handset back in its cradle and turned to look at the XO. Rapier was breathing. When Pacino touched his cheek, his skin was warm. Pacino slapped his cheek gently, trying to bring him to. Rapier moaned, slowly moving his head from side to side.

  “C’mon, damn it, wake up…” Rapier’s eyelids opened, then shut, then opened again. His eyes were out of focus, pupils dilated wide.

  Pacino bit his lip, turned and hurried out of the control room and down the stairs to middle level, then up twenty feet forward nearly to the hatch to the bow compartment and down the stairs to operations lower level, to the torpedo room. Once in the forward door Pacino froze. It was worse than he had imagined.

  FS KALININGRAD

  Novskoyy looked through a dark tunnel with an odd pattern at the end. As the fuzzy edges of the tunnel faded and more of the pattern became clear, Novskoyy realized he was staring, close range, at the vinyl covering of the deck of the control compartment, his face on the cold deck. There was an electric, tingling sensation in his tongue, and when the tingling stopped, the taste of copper. Blood. He moved his tongue in his mouth, feeling the cut in his inner cheek where he had bit nearly through the flesh. The tunnel was gone but his vision was still out of focus. He tried to pull his head off the deck, but the deck came spinning back up again. A wave of nausea and dizziness took over. When the feelings receded he again lifted his head off the deck, slowly, and realized his face was in the periscope well and his feet up on the main-deck level.

  He felt his head, pulled back a hand covered in crusty warm ooze and realized he must have opened his scalp. He tried to drag himself upright but soon saw that he already was upright just by pushing his body slightly away from the deck of the periscope well. Which meant the ship, what was left of it, was nearly vertical going downward into a dive. His greatest disappointment was not at losing the ship or even dying, but that he would be unable to transmit the molniya, that his grand plan to neutralize the U.S. was dying with him aboard the Kaliningrad. He had lived to be a man of history… instead, it seemed, he would go down with the most advanced technological underseas craft on earth, a footnote, not an architect of events.

  He turned to find the other officers in the compartment lying against what once was the forward bulkhead but with the dive was rapidly becoming the new deck. The eerily tipping room was illuminated only by the light of the battle lanterns, their beams uneven, leaving gaps of darkness. On the forward bulkhead below, still strapped into the seat in front of the control panel, Senior Lieutenant Vasily Katmonov stared unblinkingly into his lifeless control screen, his body hanging limply from the straps. If not for his moaning, Novskoyy would have thought him dead. To Katmonov’s left, at the corner of the room below the compartment’s escapepod ladder. Warrant Officer Danalov was collapsed in a heap, eyes shut, face white, a hole in his forehead. Under Katmonov’s seat, lying in the corner of what was once the deck and the forward bulkhead. Captain 3rd Rank Dmitri Ivanov watched his blood drip from his arm onto the deck. His face was a grimace of pain as he held his fractured leg with two hands. Ivanov’s pained breaths were the only sounds in the compartment other than the arcing of a stray electrical short circuit in the aft area now far overhead. To Katmonov’s right, on the forward bulkhead, now almost horizontal from the ship’s dive, Captain-Lieutenant Viktor Chekechev lay half in the shadows, his lower body obscured. What was visible gave little hope… face deathly white, breathing uneven, blood trickling from his mouth.

  Novskoyy moved to go to Chekechev but dizziness enveloped him and he fell, landing on Katmonov’s control seat. He ducked his head between his k
nees and hoped the blood would return, and finally the dizziness did ease and his senses returned. The pod, he thought. Get to the pod. He limped across the tilted room and found the pod-control panel. He hit the toggle switch that would open the massive motor-driven hatch. Nothing happened. Fighting dizziness, he looked for a pry bar, any piece of long metal. Nothing. The room was not designed to require pry bars or primitive valve-extension handles. If the deck wasn’t so tilted he might have gotten the wrench that Vlasenko had dropped, the wrench the captain had brought to kill him with. He climbed back to the hatch and started to bang on the lower hatch with a flashlight, hoping Vlasenko would hear and open the pod from inside. No response.

  CHAPTER 21

  SUNDAY, 19 DECEMBER, 0950 GREENWICH MEAN TIME

  NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

  NORFOLK NAVAL AIR STATION

  Admiral Caspar “Bobby” McGee, CINCLANT, exited the helicopter and hurried up the ladder rungs to the door of the DC-9 idling at the end of the runway. He had barely gotten to the top of the ladder when his aide pulled in the ladder and shouted go to the pilot. McGee had nearly been knocked off his feet as the pilot throttled up, the concrete of runway zero five immediately blurring outside the still open door as the aide struggled to shut it.

  McGee had never taken seriously the notion of an attack on the U.S… Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, moves in the political chess game far away. That is, until a half hour before when the call came that a missile was on its way in.

  The helicopter had landed in his front yard moments later, startling his sleeping neighbors. Now McGee listened to his aide’s briefing of the current threat — the positions of the enemy submarines, the status of the U.S. units tracking them. His conversation with Admiral Donchez replayed itself in his mind. How could he have not thought that a nation… or some renegade in it… with 27,000 nuclear weapons, a nation fractured apart, would never be tempted to use weapons one last time? How could General Tyler in particular so badly have misread the situation? A question for another day.

  The NESTOR UHF satellite secure-voice circuit blooped, the crypto-gear making the strange noises that indicated its awakening. And as the DC-9 continued climbing to the east at full throttle, McGee took the call from the White House…

  NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

  COMSUBLANT HEADQUARTERS

  The President’s accent, clear even through the scrambled voice phone, grated on Admiral Donchez’s nerves. Particularly when the voice was saying something he disagreed with.

  “Sir, we’ve got one-hundred-twenty covert Russian attack subs off the coast. One of them just launched a nuclear cruise missile, headed for me and—”

  “Admiral, my advisors tell me you’re having it shot down, there’s no danger. And there won’t be any more missiles launched. I’ve just received assurances, and I believe them, from President Yulenski that this is a mistake… the deployment, the launch… He’s ordering the fleet back home right now, said he’d order the subs to surface—”

  “Can he bring back the dead? Sir, I’ve been warning about this sort of thing now for days, no one wanted to hear it. General Herman X. Tyler didn’t want to hear any doomsday talk out of me. Shooting down this missile isn’t exactly a done deal, sir.”

  “Dick,” Admiral McGee’s voice said on the three-way connection, “better listen to the President—”

  “Donchez,” the President ordered, “tell your submarines not to fire on the Russian units. Have them call the Russians on underwater telephone-sonar and tell them to surface. If they won’t, well, then you can bump or collide with them, but do not shoot them. Clear?”

  “Sir,” Donchez said, “we have a Los Angeles Javelin vertical-launch sub off the Russian northern coast right now. I have her on missile alert. One word from you and she’ll have twelve Javelins on their way.”

  “Admiral, recall that submarine. Now, god damnit.”

  “Admiral, McGee here. The situation is coming under control, don’t make it worse—”

  “What’s your ETA to Pattern Charlie?” Donchez wanted to know when operational control of the fleet would pass to McGee, when he’d be 100 miles out of Norfolk.

  “About ten minutes. I’ll contact you on NESTOR.”

  “Roger, ten to Pattern Charlie, and will comply with your orders,” Donchez said, trying to keep the anger from his voice. “I’ll recall the Javelin sub. But I still recommend reconsidering retaliation—”

  But the President had already hung up.

  ARCTIC OCEAN

  BENEATH THE POLAR ICECAP

  FS KALININGRAD

  CONTROL COMPARTMENT ESCAPE POD

  When the shock wave had hit the ship and the pod, Vlasenko had been bounced around hitting every surface in the pod. For a moment he wondered if he was blind, felt a warm drip and realized blood was flowing into his eyes.

  The pod was turned on its side. The ship, he decided, must be in a terminal velocity dive for the ocean bottom. The rumbling sound of another weapon explosion in the first compartment indicated he had less than a few seconds to try to get into the control compartment and load anyone he could into the pod and detach. He wondered if they were close enough to thin ice for an attempt to escape. It was the only chance he had.

  Vlasenko pulled the pod-release lever from the control panel and inserted it between spokes of the hatch-control wheel, then with a grunt pulled on the lever, using it as a pry bar until the wheel broke away. Now he pulled the steel rod out of the wheel and was shocked to see the wheel furiously rotate by itself. The rotating mechanism pulled the hatch-dogs — each a thick banana of steel holding the hatch shut — clear of the pod hatch jamb. He had to jump out of the way as the hatch flew sideways and into the pod. And Vlasenko found himself staring into the eyes of Admiral Alexi Novskoyy, whose arms were occupied holding the ladder. Vlasenko balled his fist and smashed it into Novskoyy’s face, and the admiral collapsed, falling away into the darkness of the shattered control compartment.

  BARENTS SEA

  TEN NAUTICAL MILES OFF SEVERMORSK NAVAL COMPLEX

  USS ALLENTOWN

  As the radioman handed Commander Henry Duckett the flash message, he felt the eyes of the crewmen on him, awaiting word to launch the Javelins. When he read the message the breath went out of him, partly relief, partly disappointment. He handed the message to Mills, the OOD.

  “Goddamn, sir, first they want us to hightail it up here, then they want us to cock the gun, then they want us to forget it and come on home.”

  Duckett shook his head. “Secure battle stations, spin down the Javelins and bring us around to course three zero zero, all ahead two thirds. We’re getting the hell out of here.”

  NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

  COMSUBLANT HEADQUARTERS

  The speaker monitoring the radio communications of the F-14 had just tolled its unhappy message.

  “I’ll be god damned, the Mongooses missed, I don’t believe it… they both missed. The cruise missile is still inbound…” The F-14 crew lapsed into stunned silence, the commentary on the Mongoose missiles coming to a sudden halt.

  * * *

  In the COMSUBLANT Flag Plot room Admiral Richard Donchez was the center of attention. Donchez’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Lieutenant Commander Kodiak.

  “See if CINCLANT’s DC-9 is at the Pattern Charlie point. If it is patch in Admiral McGee.”

  Kodiak nodded. Until McGee could get outside the 100-mile radius of the city Donchez would remain in command, but once the DC-9 hit the Pattern Charlie point McGee was to take over.

  “Sir, the DC-9 is at Pattern Charlie,” Kodiak said. Donchez took the red radiotelephone handset from Kodiak and clicked the speak button. “Nathan Hale, this is Underdog, over.”

  A longish silence, then: “Nathan Hale standing by,” McGee’s distorted voice replied. “Go ahead. Underdog. Over.” The speaker rasped McGee’s voice, ending with a beep as the NESTOR secure-voice signal made its way through the encryption equipment.

  “Execute Pattern Charlie. Repeat, execu
te Pattern Charlie. Break. Acknowledge Pattern Charlie. Break. Over,” Donchez said, transferring operational control of all CINCLANTFLEET to the airborne admiral. This operation was now officially McGee’s problem, along with the President’s and General Tyler’s.

  “Dick, McGee here. Copy your Pattern Charlie and acknowledge same. Break…” There was a pause, followed by McGee’s “Good luck, Dick, see you soon.”

  When Donchez spoke, his voice was gravelly. “Kodiak, get on the horn to that F-14 driver. If he hasn’t figured it out yet, you ask him if he remembers what a Kamikaze is.”

  BARENTS SEA

  USS ALLENTOWN

  Commander Henry Duckett heard the long, rumbling roar come through the hull followed by a vibration that started to shake the ship. The deck trembled, the rumbling got louder, then diminished to a dim growl, which after a moment faded, leaving Duckett’s small cabin in silence. Duckett went to the control room and stepped up on the Conn. Senior Chief Sonarman Jameson emerged from Sonar.

  “The noise you heard was an explosion. Captain, a definite underwater explosion. Bearing was north-northeast, covered a broad sector. The bearing line points to an underice explosion.”

  “Was it a hull breaking up?”

  “No,” Jameson said, shaking his head. “There’s a sonar blueout for ten degrees on either side of the bearing.”

  “A blueout? But blueouts can only be caused by bubbles and echoes from a… a nuclear detonation—”

  Jameson gave him a look. “Exactly, skipper. We believe the explosion was nuclear… Was there any warhead test going on out here? Anything in the intel brief about Russian tests under the icecap?”