Atlantis jh-1

by David Gibbins

  Jack felt a surge of adrenaline as he saw the response was unanimous and without reservation. They had come too far to let their target slip from their grasp. By now Seaquest’s movements would have excited interest among their adversaries, men who would eliminate them without a moment’s hesitation if they stood in their way. They knew this was their only chance.

  Jack picked up the mike again.

  “We are staying. I repeat, we are staying. We’ll turn the weather to our advantage. I assume no hostile vessels will be able to get near either. We’ll need the time you’re away to get through the sub. Over.”

  “I understand.” The voice was barely discernible through the static. “Retract your radio buoy and only use it in an emergency as it’ll be picked up by every receiver for miles around. Wait for us to contact you. The best of luck to you all. Seaquest out.”

  For a moment the only sound was the low hum of the CO2 scrubbers and the whirr of the electric motor used to pull in the radio buoy.

  “Ten minutes are up,” Ben said from the console. “You’re good to go.”

  “Right. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Andy slid over and unlocked the docking clamp. The hatch opened outwards with no resistance, the pressure inside the DSRV and the submarine now equalized.

  Costas swung his legs over and found the rungs of the ladder on the inside wall. He started to raise his mask and then paused.

  “One final thing.”

  Jack and Katya looked at him.

  “This is no Mary Celeste. The Kazbek had a full complement of seventy-three men when she went down. There may be some pretty grim sights in there.”

  “We’ll head forward through the passageway. The bulkhead behind us seals off the reactor compartment.”

  Costas stepped off the final rung of the ladder in the escape trunk and swung round, his headlamp throwing a wavering beam into the heart of the submarine. Jack followed close behind, his tall frame bent nearly double as he reached back to offer Katya a hand. She cast a final glance up at the crewmen peering down from the DSRV before ducking through the hatch behind the two men.

  “What’s the white stuff?” she asked.

  Everywhere they looked a pale encrustation covered the surface like icing. Katya rubbed her glove along a railing, causing the substance to sprinkle off like snow and revealing the shiny metal beneath.

  “It’s a precipitate,” Costas replied. “Probably the result of an ionization reaction between the metal and the increased levels of carbon dioxide after the scrubbers shut down.”

  The ghostly lustre only added to the sense that this was a place utterly cut off, so far removed from the images outside that the ancient city seemed to belong to another kind of dream world.

  They advanced slowly along a raised gangway into an open space obscured by darkness. A few steps inside, Costas stopped below an electrical box set between the piping above their heads. He delved into his tool belt for a miniature pneumatic cleaner attached to a CO2 cartridge and used it to blow away precipitate from a socket. After plugging in a cord he had trailed from the DSRV, an orange indicator light flashed above the panel.

  “Hey, presto. It still works after all these years. And we all thought Soviet technology was so inferior.” He looked at Katya. “No offence intended.”

  “None taken.”

  A few moments later the fluorescent lighting came on, its first pulses surging like distant lightning. As they switched off their headlamps a bizarre world came into view, a jumble of consoles and equipment shrouded in mottled white. It was as if they were in an ice cave, an impression enhanced by the blue lighting and the clouds of exhalation that issued from their masks into the frigid air.

  “This is the control room attack centre,” said Costas. “There should be some clue here to what happened.”

  They made their way cautiously to the end of the gangway and down a short flight of steps. On the deck lay a pile of Kalashnikov rifles, the familiar banana-shaped magazines jutting out in front of the stairway. Jack picked one up as Katya looked on.

  “Special Forces issue, with folding stock,” she commented. “AK-74M, the 5.45 millimetre derivative of the AK-47. With the worsening political situation the Soviet General Staff’s Intelligence Directorate put naval spetsialnoe naznachenie—special purpose — troops on some nuclear submarines. Better known by their acronym spetsnaz. The GRU were terrified of defection or insurrection and the spetsnaz were directly answerable to them rather than the captain.”

  “But their weapons would normally be locked away in the armoury,” Jack pointed out. “And there’s something else strange here.” He snapped off the magazine and pulled back the bolt. “The magazine’s half empty and there’s a round in the chamber. This gun’s been fired.”

  A quick check revealed that the other weapons were in a similar state. Below the assault rifles they could see a jumble of handguns, empty magazines and spent cartridge cases.

  “It looks like someone cleaned up after a battle.”

  “That’s exactly what happened.” Costas spoke from the centre of the room. “Take a look around you.”

  In the middle was a command chair flanked by two columns housing the periscope arrays. Set into the walls around the dais were consoles for weapons and navigation control, which made up the operational heart of the vessel.

  Everywhere they looked was destruction. Computer monitors had been reduced to jagged holes of broken glass, their innards spewed out in a jumble of wires and circuit boards. Both periscopes had been smashed beyond recognition, the mangled eyepieces hanging off at crazy angles. The chart table had been violently ripped apart, the jagged gouges running across its surface the unmistakable result of automatic rifle fire.

  “The ship control station is shot to hell.” Costas was surveying the wreckage at the far corner of the room. “Now I see why they couldn’t move.”

  “Where are they?” Katya demanded. “The crew?”

  “There were survivors.” Costas paused. “Someone stashed those weapons, and I’d guess there were bodies which have been disposed of somewhere.”

  “Wherever they camped out, it wasn’t here,” said Jack. “I suggest we move on to the accommodation quarters.”

  Katya led them along the walkway towards the forward compartments of the submarine. Once again they plunged into darkness, the auxiliary electrical system only providing emergency lighting in the main compartments. As they inched forward, Jack and Costas could just make out Katya’s silhouette as she felt for the handrail and fumbled for the switch on her headlamp.

  There was a sudden clatter and an ear-piercing shriek. Jack and Costas leapt forward. Katya was slumped in the passageway.

  Jack knelt over her and checked her regulator. His face was drawn with concern as he looked into her eyes.

  She was mumbling incoherently in Russian. After a moment she raised herself on one elbow and the two men helped her to her feet. She spoke falteringly.

  “I’ve had a…shock, that’s all. I’ve just seen…”

  Her voice faded away as she raised her arm and pointed in the direction of the sonar room at the end of the corridor.

  Jack switched on his headlamp. What it revealed was an image of horror, a spectre drawn from the worst nightmare. Looming out of the darkness was the white-shrouded form of a hanging man, the arms dangling like some ghoulish puppet, the face lolling and grotesque as it leered through long-dead eyes.

  It was the very apparition of death, the guardian of a tomb where no living being belonged. Jack suddenly felt chilled to the bone.

  Katya recovered herself and straightened. Cautiously the three of them edged into the room. The body was wearing the dark serge of a Soviet naval officer and was suspended by the neck from a wire noose. The floor was strewn with discarded food cartons and other debris.

  “His name was Sergei Vassilyevich Kuznetsov.” Katya was reading from a diary she’d found on the table behind the corpse. “Captain, Second Rank, Soviet Navy
. Order of the Red Star for services to state security. He was the Kazbek’s zampolit, the zamestitel’ komandira po politicheskoi chasti, the deputy commander for political affairs. Responsible for overseeing political reliability and ensuring the captain carried out his orders.”

  “A KGB stooge,” Costas said.

  “I can think of a few captains I knew in the Black Sea Fleet who would not be displeased by this sight.” She read on. “He spent his final days right here. The active sonar had been disabled so he couldn’t send a signal. But he monitored the passive radar pulse wave detector for any sign of surface vessels in the vicinity.” She turned a page.

  “My God. The final entry is for December 25th, 1991. By coincidence the last day the Red Flag flew over the Kremlin.” She looked up at Jack and Costas, her eyes wide. “The sub went down on June 17th that year, which means this man was alive in here for more than six months!”

  They looked in horrified fascination at the corpse.

  “It’s possible,” Costas said eventually. “Physically, that is. The battery could have sustained the CO2 scrubbers and the electrolysis desalination machine that extracts oxygen from seawater. And there was evidently plenty to eat and drink.” He surveyed the scatter of empty vodka bottles among the rubbish on the floor. “Psychologically is another matter. How anyone could remain sane in these conditions is beyond me.”

  “The diary’s full of political rhetoric, the kind of empty communist propaganda we had drummed into us like religion,” Katya said. “Only the most fanatical party members were chosen as political officers, the equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo.”

  “Something very odd went on here,” Jack murmured. “I can’t believe in six months he found no way of signalling the surface. He could have manually ejected a buoy through a torpedo tube or discharged floating waste. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Listen to this.” Katya’s voice betrayed a dawning realization as she flicked from page to page, pausing occasionally to scan an entry. She lingered for a moment and then began to translate.

  “I am the chosen one. I have buried my comrades with full military honours. They sacrificed their lives for the Motherland. Their strength gives me strength. Long live the Revolution!” She looked up.

  “What does it mean?” Costas asked.

  “According to this diary, there were twelve of them. Five days after the sinking they selected one man to survive. The rest took cyanide tablets. Their bodies were weighted and ejected through the torpedo tubes.”

  “Had they given up all hope?” Costas sounded incredulous.

  “They were determined beyond reason that the submarine should not fall into NATO hands. They were prepared to destroy the vessel if any would-be rescuer turned out to be hostile.”

  “I can almost see the logic,” Costas said. “You only need one man to detonate charges. One man uses less food and air, so the submarine can be guarded that much longer. Everyone else is worse than redundant, a drain on precious resources. They must have chosen the man least likely to crack up.”

  Jack knelt down beside the empty bottles and shook his head. “There must be more to it than that. It still doesn’t add up.”

  “Their world was about to collapse,” Costas said. “Diehards like these may have convinced themselves they were a last bastion of communism, a final bulwark against the West.”

  They looked at Katya.

  “We all knew the end was near,” she said, “and some refused to accept it. But they did not put madmen in nuclear submarines.”

  One question had been nagging at them since they first saw the dangling corpse, and Costas finally spoke up.

  “What happened to the rest of the crew?”

  Katya was reading another part of the diary, a look of increasing incredulity on her face as she began to piece it together.

  “It’s as we suspected in naval intelligence at the time, only worse,” she said. “This was a renegade boat. Her captain, Yevgeni Mikhailovich Antonov, set out on a routine patrol from the Black Sea Fleet submarine base at Sevastopol. He disappeared south without ever making contact again.”

  “He could never have hoped to get out of the Black Sea without being detected,” Costas said. “The Turks maintain a one hundred per cent sonar blanket over the Bosporus.”

  “I don’t believe that was his intention. I believe he was heading to a rendezvous, perhaps at this island.”

  “It seems a strange time to defect,” Jack remarked. “Right at the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union in sight. Any astute naval officer would have seen it coming. It would have made more sense simply to hang on and wait.”

  “Antonov was a brilliant submariner but also a maverick. He hated the Americans so much he was deemed too risky for ballistic missile boats. I do not think this was a defection.”

  Jack was still troubled. “He must have had something to offer someone, something to make it worthwhile.”

  “Does the diary say what happened to him?” Costas asked.

  Katya read before looking up again. “Our friend the zampolit got to know what was afoot several hours before the sinking. He rallied the spetsnaz team and confronted the captain in the control room. Antonov had already issued sidearms to his officers but they were no match for assault rifles. After a bloody battle they forced the captain and the surviving crew to surrender, but not before the sub had run out of control and crashed into the sea floor.”

  “What did they do with the captain?”

  “Before the confrontation Kuznetsov sealed off the engineering compartment and reversed the extractor fans to pump in the carbon monoxide collected in the scrubbers. The engineers would have been dead before they knew what was happening. As for Antonov and his men, they were forced back behind the escape trunk and sealed in the reactor compartment.”

  “Death by slow irradiation. It could have taken days, even weeks.” Costas stared at the mummified face, a hideous sentinel that seemed duty-bound even in death. He looked as if he wanted to drive his fist into the shrivelled head. “You deserved your end, you sadistic bastard.”

  CHAPTER 14

  This is a ship of the dead. The sooner we get out of here the better.” Katya snapped shut the diary and led them out of the sonar room past the dangling corpse. She avoided a final glance at the body, its ghastly visage already seared into her mind.

  “Headlamps on all the time now,” Costas ordered. “We must assume he rigged this boat to blow.”

  After a few steps he held up his hand.

  “That’s the weapons loading hatch above us,” he said. “We should be able to take the chute directly down to the torpedo room. It’s an open elevator shaft but has a rung ladder on the inside.”

  They moved to the edge of the shaft directly below the hatch. Just as Costas was about to step onto the upper rung, he paused and eyed one of the pipes that led from the sonar room down the chute. He brushed away the encrustation from a slight ridge that ran the length of the pipe, revealing a pair of red-coated wires taped to the metal.

  “Wait here.”

  He worked his way back towards the sonar room, occasionally stopping to flick away encrustation. He briefly disappeared behind the dangling corpse and then made his way back.

  “Just as I suspected,” he said. “The wires lead back to a switch which has been duct-taped to the console. It’s an SPDT switch, a single-pole double-throw device which can actuate a current and control two different circuits. My guess is the wires go down to the torpedo room where our friend has activated a pair of warheads. The explosion would blow this boat into bite-sized chunks, and us with it.”

  Costas led the way, tracing the wires down the chute, and the other two cautiously followed. The encrustation softened the reverberations of their feet to a dull echo that thudded ominously through the shaft. Halfway down they paused to peer through a hatch into the officers’ wardroom, their headlamps revealing another scene of disarray with bedding and packages strewn over the floor.

 
Moments later Costas reached the base of the chute.

  “Good. The emergency lighting works here as well.”

  The compartment beyond was filled with tightly packed racks, only a narrow aisle allowing access to the far end. It had been designed so that weapons could be lowered down the chute directly into the holding racks and be fed by automated gantry to the launch tubes.

  “A normal complement on a Project 971U would be thirty weapons,” Katya said. “Up to twelve SS-N-21 Sampson cruise missiles and an assortment of anti-ship missiles. But the largest warheads will probably be on the torpedoes.”

  Costas followed the wires into a tight passageway between the racks to the left of the central aisle. After a few moments on his hands and knees, he stood up with a triumphant gleam in his eye.

  “Bingo. It’s those two cradles directly in front of you. A pair of 65–76 Kit torpedoes. The largest torpedoes ever built, almost eleven metres long. Each packs 450 kilograms of HE, enough to punch through a titanium-armoured pressure hull. But it should be a simple matter to deactivate the warheads and remove the wires.”

  “Since when have you been an expert on defusing Russian torpedoes?” Jack asked doubtfully.

  “Every time I try something new it seems to work. You should know that by now.” Costas’ demeanour suddenly turned serious. “We have no choice. The fuses are electromagnetic, and there’s going to be decay in the circuitry after so many years in this environment. They’re probably dangerously unstable as they are, and our equipment will disturb the electromagnetic field. It’s a problem we can’t bypass.”

  “OK, you win.” Jack looked at Katya, who nodded in agreement. “We’ve come this far. Let’s do it.”

  Costas lay on his back in the confined space between the racks and pushed his way in feet first until his head came to rest a quarter of the way down the torpedoes. He lifted his visor for a moment and wrinkled his nose as he took his first breath inside the submarine without the benefit of the SCLS filter.