Worse, Kislovodsk had been one of the last of the Victor IIIS to come off the ways at Komsomolsk in 1985, and he ― Russians always thought of their ships as he ― was decidedly showing his age. There were few alternatives, but Vyatkin found the obvious one of flight to be distasteful in the extreme. To allow the hunter wolf to be chivied away from its prey by the squawking of crows… no. There was another way. A better way, one that might help unite this crew that had been beaten on the day it had set out to sea, and perhaps instill in these men confidence in their commanding officer.
“Torpedo room reports Kukla loaded, Comrade Captain.”
“Open outer torpedo doors, and prepare to fire.”
“At once, Comrade Captain.”
He might be old and slow, Vyatkin thought, but the creaking dedushka Kislovodsk had a few tricks left in him Yet.
“Captain! Sonar! He’s opening his outer doors!”
“Damn!” Lang slapped the intercom switch on the console just above his head. “Torpedo room! Stand by tubes one and three!”
“Tubes one and three ready, Captain,” a seaman’s voice came back. He sounded young… and scared. “ADCAP, standard war shot.”
“Sonar! What’s he doing?”
“Hard to tell, Captain,” Davies replied. “It’s hard to hear through the pinging.”
Lang cursed. This was bad, damned bad. Range to the Jefferson was still over twenty nautical miles, too far for a standard 533mm torpedo, but easily within the range of the big Russian 650mm monsters. Those babies could travel over fifty miles at thirty knots… or twenty-seven miles at fifty, and they packed one-ton warheads, powerful enough to do serious damage to the Jeff if one connected.
Fire only if fired upon.
But that particular Rule of Engagement couldn’t apply here, not to submarine combat. To wait for the other guy to get the first shot in was suicide. Orlando was here, astern of the Victor, precisely to keep the son of a bitch from firing the shot that might sink or cripple the Jefferson.
And all Lang had to go on was what his sonar operator was hearing amid the churning, ping-echoing water ahead.
Naval careers were made and broken by decision points like this one. He was in a perfect firing position. Moments before, when the helicopters had started their deafening pinging of the contact ahead, he’d ordered Orlando to drop back a ways, partly to stay out of the sonar barrage, partly to set the Orlando up with a good shot if the need arose.
The need, apparently, had arisen; if he guessed wrong, though, firing recklessly before he was sure, he could start a war.
The hell with that. If he guessed wrong, erring on the side of caution, he would be responsible for the deaths of hundreds aboard the Jefferson. “Weapons Officer!” he snapped.
“Tubes one and three, loaded and ready, sir.”
“Fire one!”
Orlando’s weapons officer slapped the topmost of four red switches on the bulkhead console. The deck lurched slightly, and a light on the console winked red.
“One away, sir. Running hot and true.”
“Fire three!”
Again, the lurch transmitted through the deck.
“Three away. Running time for number one is twelve seconds.”
He found himself counting off the seconds in melodramatic anticipation.
CHAPTER 5
Kukla ― the Russian word meant puppet ― was a decoy, a standard 533mm torpedo with the warhead removed and a sophisticated packet of microelectronics tucked away in its place that broadcast a convincing facsimile of the submarine’s sound signature. The ploy would not be successful with active sonar, of course ― the Americans would be able to tell from the echoes whether a target was 6.4 meters long or 104. Still, Captain First Rank Vyatkin had enormous faith in the effectiveness of confusion as both weapon and tactic in combat. If Kislovodsk cut his engines at the same moment he launched the Kukla, there would be several moments of confusion. When their passive sonar receivers picked up the sound of the SSN moving off at top speed, they would almost certainly stop pinging and listen, trying to get what information they could about the sub’s new course and speed.
And in those critical few moments, before they realized that they were tracking an electronic decoy, he would bring Kislovodsk onto a new heading and slip out from beneath the very noses of the American ASW forces. A simple maneuver, but an effective one. He’d seen it used successfully more than once, on boats he’d served aboard as a junior officer during the Cold War.
“Fire Kukla!” he ordered. There was a hiss as the torpedo slid clear of the tube on a blast of compressed air.
Aleksei Vyatkin and the men with him on the Kislovodsk’s control room deck never heard the approach of the two American torpedoes. They were coming straight out of the sub’s baffles, for one thing, and for another the water around the submerged vessel was filled with the echoing pings from the helicopters’ dipping sonars, and the Victor III’s aging electronics suite was hard-pressed to separate the cascading signals from one another in any kind of order that made sense to the human listeners.
The first ADCAP torpedo, wire-guided by an operator aboard the Orlando, passed just beneath the Kislovodsk’s starboard stern plane and slammed into the aft trim tank about ten meters forward of the screw. Three hundred kilograms of high explosive detonated with a roar of white noise detected by every sonar within hundreds of miles.
The second Advanced Capabilities torpedo struck the Victor III’s vertical stabilizer, vaporizing the teardrop-shaped towed-array sonar housing, smashing the steering mechanism and tearing away the eight-bladed screw.
Normally, one submarine firing at another from the target vessel’s baffles would have sent the wire-guided ship-killers on long, looping courses that would bring them in on the target’s port or starboard side. This increased the likelihood of a kill, both by presenting the incoming torpedoes with a larger target, and by exposing the most vulnerable sections of the target sub, the large compartments forward and amidships, to attack. This time, however, the attacker had gone for a straight-in shot; steering the ADCAP torpedoes in by wire across a roundabout attack path would use up precious minutes during which the Victor III could launch his own torpedoes at the Jefferson.
That single small note of urgency saved the Victor’s crew ― some of them, at least. As the after trim tank and three after bulkheads collapsed, a wall of water smashed its way forward through the main engine room, the switchboard room, and the reactor compartment. Twelve of the eighty-five men aboard were killed as the after compartments flooded, but watertight hatches were dogged shut and the sea’s invasion of the Victor was halted just abaft the auxiliary machine room, stores hatch, and aft escape trunk. The lights failed, plunging everyone aboard into a screaming, panicking darkness, then returned as emergency batteries came on-line.
Vyatkin’s palm came down on the alarm Klaxon, and he scooped up a microphone. “Emergency surface!” he yelled, as the Victor lurched heavily to port, trembling with the inrush of hundreds of tons of seawater. “Blow all ballast!”
Kislovodsk shuddered again, harder, and the deck canted sharply as the stricken attack sub rolled back to starboard, flinging crewmen and anything else not tied down across the deck. With a shrill scream of escaping air under high pressure, the water in the sub’s ballast tanks was blasted into the surrounding sea.
“Pressurize the aft compartments!”