"Range four hundred yards. Time to impact forty seconds."
The Alexander Popovich The Black Sea
The wind whipped hard around the stern of the ship. A sudden surge of cool air in her face and hair emboldened her to the task at hand.
She knew this was the time.
It was either him or her.
She held her hand in place behind her back to avoid revealing the knife until the last second.
"Something wrong with your back, Miss Katovich?"
"I think I pulled a muscle, that is all. What did you want to see me about?"
"It is about the children." He pulled a black pistol from his jacket. "I am sorry to have to do this to such a beautiful woman."
"Emergency! Emergency!" A voice boomed over the ship's loudspeakers. "Torpedo in the water! Torpedo in the water! Brace for impact!"
The captain looked up. She dived at his midsection, lunging at him with the knife. A deafening explosion rocked the ship, spraying columns of seawater high into the air. The explosion knocked Masha off her feet. The ship rolled and listed in the water.
Masha pushed herself up and saw the captain writhing on the back deck, just in front of the Russian flag that flew off the stern. The knife was plunged deep into his midsection just below his sternum. Blood gushed around the knife. The captain moaned. "My ship! Oh, my ship!"
The gun had fallen on the deck near his outstretched hand. Adrenaline shot Masha's hand toward the gun. When she grabbed it, the thought hit her.
Dima!
The USS Honolulu The Black Sea
Contact! Contact! We got 'em, Captain!" Cheers erupted in the Honolulu's control room. Officers and enlisted men high-fived each other.
"Quiet! Quiet in the conn!" Pete held his palms down. His men responded to his call for silence. "I understand your exuberance, gentlemen, but we've still got work to do."
"Conn. Sonar."
"Go ahead, Sonar!"
"Captain, we're picking up sounds of explosions coming through the water."
"Any other contacts in the area?"
"That's a negative, Captain. Not yet, anyway!"
"Notify me when we make first sonar contact." Pete looked at his OOD. "Lieutenant McCaffity. Up scope."
"Up scope, aye, sir." McCaffity pushed the button to raise the Type 2 attack periscope. A few seconds later, Pete brought his eyes to the scope again. The powerful blast of the Mark 48 torpedo had broken the freighter into two sections. The torp had exploded under the keel, just as it was designed to do, essentially breaking the ship's back.
Thick black smoke billowed from the forward section, which was listing badly, and had floated about one hundred yards from the aft section. As bad as it was listing, the bow section might have another five minutes before slipping under the surface.
Pete hit the magnification button. This brought the whole wreckage into a close-up view.
The back section was also floating, but listing. Pete could see people scrambling around on the deck of the back section. They looked like… Children?
No. His eyes were playing tricks on him. Pete squinted and looked again. Whoever he saw running on the deck of the sinking freighter was gone.
It was time to get out of here.
"Down scope."
"Down scope, aye, Captain."
"Five degrees down bubble, make depth one-five-zero feet."
The submarine dropped another ninety feet in the water from a depth of sixty feet to a depth of one hundred fifty feet.
"Float VLF buoy, " Pete said. "I want to monitor any low frequency radio waves for a while."
The submarine released its very low frequency buoy, designed to float to the surface to monitor for radio signals emanating from sources on the surface.
"Chief of the Boat, how far to our rendezvous point with the Volga River?"
"Approximately two hundred miles, south-southeast, Captain."
"Set course for one-seven-zero degrees. All ahead one-half. Let's get out of here."
The Alexander Popovich The Black Sea
We need the captain! We must find the captain!" the helmsman shouted in a panic.
"I am in charge on the bridge!" First Officer Joseph Radin snapped. "The captain may be dead! We have no time. Get our radio up and running or we will all go down and never be found."
"I have a connection, Mr. Radin!" the communications officer announced. "We have a broadcast frequency!"
"Give me that microphone!" Radin took the microphone in hand. "Mayday! Mayday! This is the Russian freighter Alexander Popovich. We have been struck by torpedo! Location: Black Sea. Ninety miles west of Sevastopol. We have children on board. We are sinking!
"Mayday! Mayday! This is the Alexander Popovich. We have children on board and we are sinking!"
"Mr. Radin!" the helmsman screamed. "We must leave now! We are sinking!"
Masha pulled herself up off the deck, trying to keep her balance. The ship was tilting to the left, forcing her to toss the gun back down to the deck and hang onto a rope that was strung between the walkway. She grasped the rope tightly as she walked back around the deck toward the ship's midsection.
The smoke and flames resembled the special effects in an American science fiction movie. The bow section of the ship had broken off and was standing on its end in the sea, perhaps a hundred yards away from the rest of the ship.
Masha froze in her tracks, paralyzed by the sight of it all. A great creaking sound, then twising metal, then almost a moaning came from the bow section.
The bow section stood up higher in the water, then higher. Now about a hundred feet off the surface of the water, the tip of the bow pointed up toward the sun, like a skyscraper standing erect in the water.
For a few seconds more twisting sounds followed. The sea grew strangely calm, and then the bow of the ship began slipping down into the water, disappearing into a huge whirlpool.
A loud explosion rocked the back of the stern section. Masha looked back. Flames lapped into the sky from behind. The heat intensified. The air was warming, almost like an oven.
The front of the stern section was angling down, slightly at this point, into the water. Waves lapped onto the deck in front of her. Behind her, the flaming rear section was rising into the sky, as if the floating hulk was turning into a flaming seesaw.
Masha had seen clips on the internet of the World Trade Center Towers falling. The sinking bow died in the same surrealistic manner. Now the stern section would soon do the same.
"Masha! Masha!" Sasha's voice screamed across the tilting deck. Crouching to avoid falling from the tilt, she walked across and embraced him. Katya was crying beside him. "We are going to die! We are going to die!"
"No! No! We are not going to die!" Masha looked around for her children. They lay all over the deck. Screaming. Wailing. Crying. "We're sinking! We're sinking!"
"We are going to be okay!" She frantically tried to comfort them all. Some were bruised and bleeding. Many had black smut on their faces.
"Dima! Dima!" She looked around everywhere for him. Please God, let him be alive.
"Masha! Get over here!" Aleksey was behind her, leaning over the side of the ship.
Masha pried the children's arms from around her and ran to the side of the ship. Aleksey was slowly uncoiling the rope from a winch. She looked over the side. A wooden lifeboat was slowly descending down to the water.
"Masha! Look in the box just to your right. There is a rope ladder. Get it out. We need to get the children off the ship!"
"Where are the rest of my children?"
"Some are in the water already! I threw them flotation devices! Hurry!"
Masha ran for the rope ladder, and together they unrolled it over the side.
"You must go now!" Aleksey Anatolyvich screamed at Masha.
She looked over the side of the ship, down into the water at the empty lifeboat. "I am not going without my children!"
"Masha, I will send your children down one by one! I need you at the bottom to help them into the boat! Do what I say, or all of them will die!" She looked down at the boat, then back up at Aleksey. "Okay."