Atlantis jh-1

by David Gibbins

  The other two came up alongside, Jack in the narrow walkway to the left and Katya in the wider central aisle. They could see Costas’ upturned face on the deck between the torpedoes. He wriggled towards the torpedo beside Jack until his head was nearly beneath it.

  “We’re in luck. They have a screw-off plug in the outer casing which allows the warheads to be armed manually in the event of electronic failure. The plug on this one has been opened and the wire goes inside. I should be able to reach in and switch off the fuse, and then cut the wire.” Costas rolled over sideways and inspected the other torpedo. “Same on this one.”

  “Remember these things are volatile,” Katya cautioned. “They’re not electric like most torpedoes but run on kerosene and hydrogen peroxide. The submarine Kursk was destroyed in the Barents Sea in 2000 by the explosion of leaked hydrogen peroxide from a 65–76 torpedo, one of these.”

  Costas grimaced and nodded. He rolled back and lay motionless between the two racks, his headlamp shining directly upwards.

  “What’s the delay?” Jack demanded.

  “I’m putting myself in our friend’s position. If he and his buddies were so fanatical about protecting this sub they must have had a contingency in case they all died. They must have assumed the wreck would eventually be found. My hunch is he booby-trapped this detonator. It’s too simple as it is.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “There’s one obvious possibility.” Costas reached down to his tool belt and pulled out a device the size of a pocket calculator. They could just make out the green glow of a digital LCD screen as he activated the sensor. He raised the device to the wire that ran between the torpedoes just above his head and carefully attached it using a miniature alligator clip.

  “Christ. Just as I thought.”

  “What is it?”

  “This is a volt-amp meter. It’s giving a positive reading of fifteen milliamps. This wire is live.”

  “What does that mean?” Jack asked.

  “It means the wiring must be hooked up to a battery outlet. The sub’s main lead-acid batteries probably still have enough stored voltage to produce a current at this low amperage. The wiring must be a continuous loop from the positive to the negative poles of the battery, with the switch in the sonar room forming the actuator and the two warhead fuses the link. Setting it up would have been risky but they must have calculated the amperage would be too weak to detonate the warheads. The key is the electrical surge if anyone tries to remove the wires. Disconnect the warhead fuse activator and you have an instantaneous surge. Flip the switch in the sonar room and you get the same thing. There’s no circuit breaker to cut off the current. We’d be atomized before I’d taken my fingers off the wire.”

  Jack let out a long exhalation and sat back against the walkway. “So what do we do now?”

  “It’s direct current, so the charge flow will be one way. If I cut the negative, there’ll be a surge and we’re gone. If I cut the positive, everything should go dead and we’ll be safe.”

  “Which is which?”

  Costas rolled his head to the right and looked ruefully through the narrow space at Jack. “Our friend might still have the last laugh. With such low amperage there’s no way of telling.”

  Jack lay back on the walkway and closed his eyes. After a moment Costas spoke again.

  “To ignite a bomb with an electrical surge, the flashpoint needs to be in direct contact with the explosive materials in the detonator or main charge. They would need to have opened up the warhead to introduce the outflow wire. There’s more room to manoeuvre on Katya’s side so I suggest that’s where it’s attached. That would make the wire to my left the positive one.”

  Costas turned towards Katya and pushed as far as he could against the torpedo, extending his left arm under the rack until he touched the wire that emerged from the warhead. He dropped his hand to the deck and began scrabbling around in the encrustation.

  “I can feel wire.”

  Katya uncovered more and pulled it taut as far back as the weapons loading chute. She hurried over and peered up the ladder before returning.

  “It goes back to the switch,” she announced.

  “Right. I’m convinced.” Costas withdrew his arm and reached into his belt for a compact multi-tool, pulling it open to form a pair of high-precision wire-cutters. The rubber in his E-suit glove would provide insulation against electric shock, though if that happened he would not live long enough to care.

  He tilted his head back towards Jack.

  “You’re with me on this one?”

  “I’m with you.”

  Costas resumed his position of a moment before, his left hand now holding the cutters directly beneath the wire where it hung in a shallow arc from the plughole in the warhead housing.

  For a few seconds he lay motionless. The only sound was the steady drip of condensation and the shallow rasp of breathing from their respirators. Katya and Jack stared at each other beneath the torpedo rack.

  Costas was sweating behind his mask and snapped it open with his right hand for a clearer view. He pulled off his glove between his knees and wiped his brow before staring determinedly at the wire.

  Katya shut her eyes tight in the split second it took Costas to lock the cutter’s blades on the wire. He squeezed hard and there was a loud snap.

  Then silence.

  All three of them held their breath for what seemed an eternity. Then Costas let out a long sigh and slumped on the deck. After a pause he holstered his multi-tool and reconnected his visor and respirator. He tilted his head towards Jack with a twinkle in his eye.

  “See? No problem.”

  Jack had the thousand-yard stare of a man who had looked death in the face once too often. He shifted his gaze to Costas and managed a half-smile.

  “No problem.”

  CHAPTER 15

  At the entrance to the Weapons Bay Costas extracted another gadget from his belt, a yellow box the size of a cellphone. He flipped open the lid to reveal a small LCD screen which glowed dull green.

  “Global positioning system,” he announced. “This should do the trick.”

  “How can it work here?” Katya asked.

  A series of figures flashed on the screen.

  “That box is our speciality, a combined underwater acoustic GPS receiver and navigation computer,” Jack said. “Inside the sub we can’t send out acoustic waves so we have no access to GPS. Instead we downloaded the specs for this class of sub from the IMU database and mated it with a series of GPS fixes we took via surface buoys outside the submarine on our Aquapod recce this morning. The computer should allow us to navigate inside as if we were using GPS.”

  “Got it,” Costas announced. “In the Aquapod I took a fix where the stairway disappeared under the submarine. It’s on the port side of the torpedo room. Bearing two hundred and forty-one degrees from our present position, seven point six metres ahead and two metres down. That puts us beyond the weapons racks just ahead of the port-side ballast tank.”

  As Costas began to look for a way through the crowded racks, Katya reached out and held his arm.

  “Before we go there’s something you should see.”

  She pointed towards the central aisle in the weapons bay just beyond the spot where they had lain in mortal fear only minutes before.

  “That aisle should be unobstructed to allow the gantry to sling the weapons off the racks and ferry them to the tubes. But it’s blocked.”

  It should have been glaringly obvious, but they had been so focused on the booby trap they had failed to take in the rest of the room.

  “It’s a pair of stacked crates.” Costas eased himself into the narrow space on the left-hand side between the crates and the weapons racks, his head just protruding over the uppermost box.

  “There are two more behind. And another two beyond that.” Costas’ voice was muffled as he slid further along. “Six altogether, each about four metres long by one and a half metres across. They mus
t have been hoisted down the chute and jigged into place using the torpedo harness.”

  “Are they weapons crates?” Jack asked.

  Costas re-emerged and shook off the white precipitate clinging to him. “They’re too short for a torpedo or missile and too wide to be tube-launched. We’d need to open one up, but we don’t have the equipment or the time.”

  “There are some markings.” Katya was squatting down in front of the lower crate and rubbing vigorously at the encrustation. It fell away to reveal a metallic surface with impressed figures in two separate clusters. “Soviet Defence Ministry encodings.” She pointed at the uppermost group of symbols. “These are weapons all right.”

  Her hand moved to the other group which she inspected more closely.

  “Electro…” She faltered. “Electrochimpribor.”

  They were beginning to think the unthinkable.

  “Combine Electrochimpribor,” Katya said quietly. “Otherwise known as Plant 418, the main Soviet thermonuclear weapons assembly site.”

  Costas slumped heavily against the torpedo rack. “Holy Mother of God. These are nukes. Each of these crates is just about the right size for an SLBM warhead.”

  “Type SS-N-20 Sturgeon, to be precise.” Katya stood up and faced the two men. “Each one is five times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. There are six crates, ten warheads in each.” She paused and stared at the crates. “The authorities went to elaborate lengths to keep the loss of this submarine a secret. Afterwards there were a number of perplexing disappearances, especially from Kazbek’s home port of Sevastopol. I now believe they were victims of an old-fashioned Stalinist purge. The executions went unnoticed in the momentous events of that year.”

  “Are you suggesting these nukes were stolen?” Costas asked incredulously.

  “The Soviet military was deeply disillusioned after the Afghan war in the 1980s. The navy had begun to disintegrate with ships laid up and crews idle. Pay was dismal or non-existent. More intelligence was sold to the West during the final few years of the Soviet Union than during the height of the Cold War.”

  “How does Antonov fit in?” Costas asked.

  “He was a man who could be harnessed to good effect but was dangerous when the reins were loosened. He hated glasnost and perestroika and came to despise the regime for its collusion with the West. This looks like his ultimate act of defiance.”

  “If the regime could no longer hit at the West, then he could,” Costas murmured.

  “And his crew would follow him anywhere, especially with the lure of prize money.”

  “Where would he be taking these?”

  “Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The Taliban in Afghanistan. Hezbollah in Syria. The North Koreans. This was 1991, remember.”

  “There must have been a middleman,” Jack said.

  “The vultures were already circling, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Katya replied bleakly.

  “I underestimated our friend the political officer,” Costas said quietly. “He may have been a fanatic, but he may also have saved humanity from its worst catastrophe.”

  “It’s not over yet.” Jack straightened. “Somewhere out there is a dissatisfied customer, someone who has been watching and waiting over the years. And his potential clients now are far worse than ever before; they’re terrorists driven only by hate.”

  The blue glow from the submarine’s emergency lighting barely penetrated the gloom at the forward end of the torpedo room. Costas switched his headlamp to full beam before leading the way through the maze of weapons racks towards the co-ordinates indicated by his transceiver. Jack and Katya followed close behind, their survival suits taking on an increasingly spectral hue as they brushed against the white encrustation which clung to every surface of the submarine’s interior. After squeezing through a final passage they crouched in single file on a narrow walkway flush with the hull casing.

  Costas braced himself with his back against the casing. He hooked his fingers through one of the metre-long floor grates.

  “Here goes.”

  He rocked forward and heaved with all his strength. Seconds later the grate relented with a metallic shriek and a shower of precipitate. Jack crawled forward to help shift it aside, leaving Costas space to swing his legs over and peer into the darkness below. He lowered himself until only his helmet was visible below the walkway.

  “I’m on the floor above the bilges,” he announced. “This is as far down as you can go without wading in toxic soup.” He took the GPS unit from his pocket.

  Jack stepped over the hole to let Katya move up to the edge. All three headlamps now shone at the flickering green display.

  “Bingo.” Costas looked up from the screen and stared at the casing less than an arm’s length away. “I’m five metres above the point where the steps disappeared under the submarine. We’re bang on target.”

  “How does the casing look?” Jack asked.

  “We’re in luck. For most of its length Kazbek has a double skin, an inner pressure casing and an outer hydrodynamic hull separated by twenty centimetres of rubber. It provides better acoustic insulation and space for a ballast tank. But just before the nose cone it reverts to single thickness to allow more internal space as the casing tapers.”

  Katya leaned forward. “There’s something I don’t fully understand.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Between us and that rock face lies a twenty-centimetre-thick wall of metal. How do we get through?”

  Costas craned his neck up to look at Katya. He had left his visor open since defusing the warheads and the mixture of sweat-streaked grime and white precipitate looked like some bizarre war paint.

  “Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.”

  Katya paused. “Laser?”

  “You got it.”

  At that moment there was a metallic clatter behind them. Before leaving the weapons bay Costas had radioed Ben and Andy in the DSRV with instructions on how to reach the torpedo room. The two men had taken the perimeter walkway and now appeared fully kitted up in E-suits and festooned with gearbags.

  “We’ll need a bigger opening,” Costas said to the men. “Then come down and join me.”

  Jack and Katya prised out two more grates so the men could lower themselves to the bilge floor. As soon as they had settled in the confined space, they unzipped the bags and began assembling the apparatus inside.

  Costas chalked a circle about a metre in diameter on the hull casing, using a tape measure as a crude compass. He moved aside as the two crewmen lifted the apparatus into place. It looked like a scaled-down lunar module, a cluster of articulated legs extending from a polyhedral central unit the size of a desktop PC. Ben held the unit in front of the GPS fix while Andy positioned the legs round the chalked circle. After a quick inspection he flipped a switch and the suction pads sealed against the hull. At the same time a cluster of rods sprang through each joint to lock the apparatus into one unyielding mass.

  Ben extended a telescopic tube from both sides of the unit, one end to the centre of the chalked circle and the other to the dark recess below the metal grating of the floor. To the left of the unit was an open-topped three-sided box about half a metre across. Above the tube was a sighting device and below it a handle and trigger.

  After a quick check Ben plugged in a cable they had trailed from the DSRV. The LCD screen behind the unit came to life and booted through a series of readouts before settling on a blank display peppered with program icons.

  “Good work, guys,” Costas said. “Now let’s get this baby into action.”

  He tapped in a series of commands, his eyes darting between keyboard and screen. After the program finalized, he leaned forward and pressed his right eye against the viewfinder, making small adjustments to the tube alignment using a pair of joysticks on either side.

  Less than five minutes after the power had been connected he rocked back and looked up at Jack.

  “We’re ready.”

&
nbsp; “Fire away.”

  Costas grasped the handle with the trigger. As he pulled it a cathode-ray tube above the keyboard began to flash amber.

  “T minus sixty seconds.”

  The light transformed to continuous green.

  “Good to go,” Costas announced.

  “Time frame?” Jack demanded.

  “Two minutes. We could slice through the casing like butter but the drain on the DSRV’s batteries would be intolerable. Even what we’re doing will stretch our safety margins if we’re planning to use the DSRV to return to Seaquest.” Costas looked up at Katya, his face a picture of suppressed excitement.

  “What you’re looking at is a far-infrared sealed gas semiconductor laser,” he explained. “Hook this baby up to the DSRV’s two seven hundred amp silver-zinc batteries and you have a ten kilowatt ten point six micron beam. That’s enough to give the Klingons pause for thought.”

  Jack grunted impatiently as Costas checked the timer and flicked a switch on the keyboard.

  “The viewfinder is a positioning device which allows us to fire the beam perpendicular to the fix on the hull,” he continued. “The laser is currently burning a hole in the casing one centimetre in diameter. I’ve just fired in a one-way valve which allows us to extrude material while keeping seawater out.”

  “In theory,” Jack retorted.

  “Nothing wrong with a cold shower.”

  The module began emitting a low warning sound. Costas resumed his position behind the screen and began running a series of diagnostics. After a pause he placed his right hand round the handle.

  “The beam automatically shut off five millimetres before completion. I’m reactivating now.”

  He squeezed the trigger and remained motionless. After a few moments the green light suddenly reverted to flashing amber. Costas peered down the viewfinder, the sweat from his forehead dripping over the tube. He leaned back and relaxed.

  “The plug held. We’re through.”