Cold Choices

by Larry Bond

  “Thank you, sir. But, I fear it will be a short meeting.” Borisov couldn’t tell if Petrov was joking or not.

  USS Churchill

  * * *

  Captain Baker told his crew after the Russians tugs stopped pulling. Most of them already knew. When the tugs had whipsawed, and the escape chamber hadn’t appeared, it was obvious they’d failed. But Baker waited, like everyone else, hoping and praying for a miracle.

  Patterson was with him, on the bridge, when he spoke on the 1MC. If the expressions of the bridge watchstanders were typical, the crew took it pretty hard. She tried to understand why the crew of Churchill would care so much about the Russians. They’d even printed pictures of the crew from the Wives and Mothers website and posted them in the mess. Perhaps her husband had best summed it up when he said, “It was a sailor’s thing.”

  A short time later, they watched while workboats transferred the cables from the tugs’ sterns back to the buoys, freeing them to maneuver. Saving the cables was pointless, really, but nobody wanted to abandon that physical link to Severodvinsk.

  More by mutual agreement than design, many of Patterson’s group had congregated in the wardroom, along with several of Churchill’s officers. It had the feeling of a wake, or a deathwatch. Nobody used either of those words, but they gathered and talked quietly, or simply shared each other’s company. When they did talk, they searched for any alternative, however absurd, that might have been overlooked or dismissed as being too risky.

  Some talked of stretching the crew’s breathable air somehow. Others wanted to move the sub. Commander Silas actually suggested detonating a small nuclear weapon on the seabed. “It’s simple physics. Figure out how much force we want to apply to the hull, account for the transmission through the rock formation, and then drop the device far enough away. Boom. The sub rolls upright and up they come.”

  Unfortunately, the general consensus was that the resulting blast would still crush what was left of Severodvinsk like a dented beer can, and besides, there wasn’t enough time to do all the necessary calculations to figure out if it were truly feasible. Sometimes, physics isn’t quite so simple.

  Each scheme, no matter how harebrained, was inspected, measured, and eventually found wanting, either time or technical reasons, sometimes both. It was pointless, but there was nothing else to do while they waited.

  USS Seawolf

  * * *

  They listened to the conversation between Petrov and Admiral Borisov over the underwater telephone. Rudel didn’t have anything to add; besides, he wasn’t part of the Russian chain of command. There’d be opportunities to talk later, when Petrov might need it more.

  Most of Seawolf’s officers had also gathered in their wardroom. They weren’t as shy as Churchill’s or Patterson’s people. Shimko had called it a “deathwatch” from the start. Men like them, men they could easily have been, were slipping off the edge of existence. Jerry, Shimko, Lavoie, and others sat and talked about what should happen next, or what should have happened.

  “The big mistake was getting too cocky,” Shimko declared. “We got complacent and assumed nobody was in the area, so we got sloppy in our searching when we were recovering the UUVs. We could have placed one in a position to cover our blind spot aft, to make sure we weren’t caught unawares.”

  Jerry shook his head. “That would have meant less survey time for the UUVs on each sortie, and we have a limited number of sorties. We would have been out here longer, which would have increased our risk of discovery. No, all I had to do was realize that the Russian, Petrov, was trying to cut a tether that Patty didn’t have. If we had sent Patty straight away at max speed, Petrov would have seen his mistake.”

  Lavoie disagreed this time. “That only explains the first two passes. By the third pass, he had doped it out. On the third pass he was trying to corral Seawolf.”

  “And once he’d made that decision, the result was inevitable.” Rudel’s voice surprised them, and they started to rise, but he motioned for them to sit. He poured himself a cup of coffee, then sat down wearily. “I don’t like my stateroom right now.” He paused for a moment, contemplating, searching for the right words. “There’s no rule that says there has to be a solution for every problem. Sometimes you’re just going to be on the receiving end, no matter what you do.”

  “How do you handle those situations, sir?” Will Hayes asked, frustrated and perplexed.

  “Many times, Will, there are answers,” Rudel replied, “but that’s not when you earn your pay. You get paid the big bucks for situations like this—when all the outcomes are bad. Having to choose between rival goods, or worse, rival evils, is when one truly understands the burden of command.”

  He paused again; nobody spoke, or even moved. Rudel continued, “Recovering from a complicated, dangerous situation, with no outcomes but lousy choices, requires more than skill. Beating yourselves up over the road not taken is worse than a distraction. It may lead you to believe that you’re no longer able to make a good decision. Learning from the past is the mark of a good officer, but don’t ever think it has all the right answers.”

  Rudel leaned back, seeming to sit straighter than before. Looking around the wardroom table, he noticed Lieutenant (j.g.) Williams. As the damage-control assistant, he was responsible for life support on Seawolf and was the resident expert on a sub’s atmosphere. “Todd, what’s your estimate?”

  “Based on Petrov’s last report, carbon dioxide is probably near three point four or three point five percent now. It will build up very quickly once it’s over four percent.” He seemed reluctant to give any details, but finally concluded, “I don’t think anyone’s going to be conscious in twelve hours.”

  Rudel nodded. “Thanks, Todd. That matches my own estimate.”

  “What about ballons? Flotation bags? We could put them in the damaged ballast tanks, or have the Norwegians weld attachment points right to the hull.” Ensign Santana looked excited, hopeful. “There’s room for dozens of lines to be rigged, and it could be done quickly.”

  Rudel answered, “No, they thought of that on day one. Putting the bags inside is a good solution, but the ballast tanks would have to be opened up even more to get the bags inside. It would have taken too long, about a week. Now we’ve got less than a day. And just attaching bags to the hull? Severodvinsk displaces some twelve thousand tons submerged, and then add the water in three or four flooded compartments. She probably displaces close to fifteen thousand tons. How many bags would we need to shift her?”

  Lavoie added, “That’s more right than you know, sir. I just spoke with Halsfjord’s chief engineer. Lindstrom and the rest of his team are kicking themselves. They’re still trying to figure out why their plan didn’t work. He wanted to run over some of the figures. So many tons from the tugs, so many from flooding the starboard tanks, and so on.”

  The engineer explained, “Their problem wasn’t that the mooring point pulled loose from the sub’s hull. At that time, the tugs were at full power, and Severodvinsk hadn’t shifted a single degree! She should have shown some sort of movement. Their bet is that if the fitting hadn’t come off one of the cables would have parted.”

  Rudel sighed. “In other words, they just couldn’t couple enough force to Severodvinsk’s hull to do the job.”

  Lavoie said, “The only thing they could have changed was to push Severodvinsk from the side with AS-34, but that only increased the total force on her hull by a few percent. And that’s before Priz’s batteries failed. She was never really an option.”

  Jerry’s eyes widened a little bit. In that quiet gathering, several people noticed his hopeful expression. “What is it?” asked Shimko.

  “What if we did the pushing?” The idea, half-formed, took shape as he spoke. “We don’t ram Severodvinsk. Ease in. We can use Maxine to guide us. Make contact at a slow creep, and then carefully increase power in stages. And unlike tow cables, we apply the force directly, hull-to-hull contact.”

  Nobody responded i
mmediately, although from their expressions it was clear they had heard him. “Brute force,” he explained. “Seawolf can generate nearly three times the push of both those tugs.”

  Lavoie was the first to respond. “But our bow . . .”

  Then Chandler said, “They’ll never agree . . .”

  And Wolfe replied, “Hell, we’re going in the yards anyway.”

  Shimko started to speak, then paused, and stated flatly, “The forward pressure hull is not at full strength. It might not hold. If it goes, we’ll be in the hurt locker.”

  Jerry answered, “Once we start pushing, it will only take a few minutes to do the job. We’ll be ready for it, and do an emergency blow the moment the escape chamber separates.”

  Lavoie speculated, “We’d have to cut away some of the debris forward to make a smoother contact surface. The supporting structure for the forward arrays is like a spear. It would slice right through Severodvinsk.”

  “Skipper, we can do this,” Jerry pleaded. Captain Rudel had sat silently through the exchange, listening. Like every other officer in the room, Jerry could see him calculating. Seawolf added almost forty-six thousand shaft horsepower to the equation.

  Rudel stood suddenly and headed for the wardroom door. “We’ll meet back here with department heads and chief of the boat in fifteen minutes . . .” He paused, since two-thirds of his wardroom was already there, and added, “Others may also attend. Have a rough draft of the procedure and a timeline ready for me.”

  He turned to leave, but then looked back. “Mr. Lavoie, calculate how long we can handle flooding forward before we can’t surface from an emergency blow.”

  Rudel disappeared, and Jerry helped Shimko summon the few missing officers and chiefs to the wardroom.

  USS Churchill

  * * *

  “It’s Seawolf, ma’am, Commander Rudel is on the scrambler phone.” Everyone in the wardroom mirrored Patterson’s puzzled look. All other ship-to-ship communications had been in the clear.

  “He says it’s urgent, ma’am. Captain Baker is already in CIC.”

  Patterson knew the way well enough by now that the messenger let her set the pace while he followed. In CIC, Baker stood, holding the handset. “All he’d say is that he has to tell you first.”

  “Tell me what?” Patterson asked as she took the handset. “This is Dr. Patterson,” she said cautiously.

  “We’ve got a plan to save Severodvinsk.” His explanation followed so quickly and was so fantastic that she had him repeat it—twice.

  By the time he’d finished, Baker had guessed enough from her side of the conversation to understand Rudel’s plan, and he wondered if his expression matched hers.

  “And you’re just informing me? Not asking my permission?”

  She heard Rudel sigh. “If I ask your permission, you might say no. If you say yes, you could be buying yourself some serious trouble. I don’t want to take anybody else down with me.”

  “Forget that, Captain. Are you sure Seawolf will come out of this intact?”

  “I wouldn’t suggest it otherwise.”

  Rudel sounded defensive, and she quickly said, “I’m sorry, Captain, but I had to ask that question. You not only have my official permission, but my cooperation. What can we do?”

  “I’ll know that after my officers tell me. Can you please call Admiral Borisov and Arne Lindstrom? Set up a conference call for thirty minutes from now?”

  “When will you be ready?” she asked.

  “They’re going to tell me that, too.” After a short pause, he added, “We will be ready in time.”

  “Then I will speak with you again in half an hour, Captain, and God bless you.”

  “I hope so. We’ll need all the help we can get.”

  Petr Velikiy

  * * *

  When he heard the topic, Admiral Borisov had followed Patterson’s advice and cleared the flag plot of everyone but Kurganov and their two deputies. He didn’t know what would be worse: Hearing some bizarre scheme that was doomed to fail, or having to hope again.

  Lindstrom was on the screen five minutes early, fidgeting in front of the TV camera, then Patterson and Baker sitting together, and finally Rudel, looking hurried, almost breathless. His watchstanders had reported Seawolf surfacing ten minutes earlier.

  “Admiral, Doctor, Captain, Mr. Lindstrom, thank you for agreeing to listen to me. My officers and I have a plan that has a good chance of working. But we will need help to make it work, and I’m open to any suggestions that will improve it.”

  Borisov spoke first. “Petrov and his men will not be able to move into the chamber for much longer. Even if they move in now, they will not be able to release it if they are unconscious.”

  Rudel asked, “What is your best estimate of their CO2 level?”

  “They could start losing consciousness in as little as eight hours. Some perhaps as long as fifteen.”

  “Then we need every welder and engineer in the rescue force. It would be best if we tied up alongside Halsfjord. Is that acceptable, Mr. Lindstrom?”

  Lindstrom looked off-camera and spoke in Norwegian briefly. “Yes, port side. Bow-to-bow?”

  Rudel shook his head. “No sir, bow-to-stern. We need your aft fifty-ton crane to lift out the damaged forward array structure once it is detached. Perhaps Pamir and Altay can moor outboard of us. Detaching the forward arrays and cleaning up the surface will take the most time, and anything we can do to speed that up will help.”

  Kurganov added, “Rudnitskiy will join you as well. She has divers for the underwater work.”

  “What about cushioning the impact?” Lindstrom asked. “We could construct a framework of timbers that would fit over your bow. My men could fabricate it on deck while others are cutting away the arrays and their mountings.”

  “How long?” Rudel asked.

  “No longer than it takes to remove the sonar structure,” Lindstrom answered. He looked to the side and spoke in Norwegian. “And we’ve just started.”

  The two Russians spoke briefly, then Borisov said, “We assume you will also be reinforcing your pressure hull.”

  Rudel shrugged. “We will do what we can, but space is limited.”

  Borisov spoke again, smiling. “I noticed during my visit to Seawolf that the shoring in your electronics space was wooden, with brackets spot-welded in place.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Russian damage-control shoring is steel, in prefabricated sections, with threaded brackets on the end to ensure a snug fit. Would they be of use to you?”

  Rudel smiled. “I’d gratefully accept them, gentlemen.”

  “Can this be done in time?” Kurganov asked. “On our boats the main hydroacoustic array and its mounting weigh over ten tons.”

  Rudel answered, “Things come apart a lot faster than they go together.” He smiled. “And we don’t have to worry about being neat.”

  Severodvinsk

  * * *

  Petrov hadn’t expected a call from Borisov so soon. It had been only an hour or so since the last conversation. The final good-byes would come later, so he assumed the admiral wanted to ask about the carbon dioxide levels. Useless, really, but there was nothing else to do.

  “Captain Petrov, prepare to get your men back into the escape chamber.”

  “What? I just finished getting my men out of it. They will be much more comfortable in the hull.”

  “Rudel has a plan to right your boat.” Borisov started describing it, but Petrov grasped it almost immediately, and cut off the admiral. “Is he insane? Have you all lost your minds? We don’t need another boat next to us.”

  “He is convinced this will work, and he has convinced all of us as well: Lindstrom, Patterson, everyone. Work has already started.”

  “Can I speak to him?” Petrov asked.

  “Seawolf is already surrounded by other vessels. With all the noise, I doubt if her underwater telephone would even function. You should see it, Aleksey. It would amaze you. For
eign vessels, including a Russian salvage and rescue ship, surround an American nuclear submarine preparing it for this effort. Workers from three countries cover the bow like ants. And there are over half a dozen divers underwater right now with their cutting torches blazing, a dozen more standing by.”

  Borisov’s description fired his imagination. Petrov’s first surprise had worn off, and his mind had begun to consider the plan more dispassionately. Would it work? The problem with believing in that plan was that Petrov and his men had already begun to accept their fate. He didn’t know if they could hope again, or withstand the fear that came with it.

  The admiral described Rudel’s plan in more detail, and explained, “You must move up into the chamber as soon as you can, while your men still have the strength to do so.”

  Petrov answered, “Some of them have taken sedatives. I’ll have to see what Balanov can do to rouse them. And the extra activity will drive the carbon dioxide levels even higher.”

  “We’ve factored that into our calculations. And we’ll need hourly updates, to check those figures.”

  “You’ll have them, Admiral. And tell Rudel to make a careful job of it. No rushed work. That’s when accidents happen.”

  The White House

  * * *

  President Huber didn’t mind the budget meeting being interrupted, but he had a vital meeting with an industry group in fifteen minutes that he couldn’t ignore. Wright had insisted the call was extremely urgent.

  “Sir, I’ve just spoken with Dr. Patterson. There’s to be another attempt to save the Russian sub.”

  “What?” Huber’s voice showed more confusion than was expected from a chief executive. “You told me not half an hour ago that there was nothing more to be done. My people are working on a statement of condolence now.”