Anton nearly grinned. How did Katshora manage to get himself saddled with a skimmer? The surface Navy was so prim and proper. Try taking a submarine to sea with more than a hundred men crammed into a two-hundred-foot boat, sharing racks, no showers, open toilets that fail continually, and see how prim and proper you’d be after a month. You come back with fifty happy couples, goes the joke.
Anton nodded at the lieutenant. “Give the admiral my respects, Lieutenant Serigy. Anything else?”
“No, sir.” The man snapped to attention and saluted the two men.
Anton and Gesny stared for a moment. “Oh,” Anton exclaimed before raising his hand and returning the salute.
The two submariners watched the young aide leave the dock area, and once the hatch was secured behind the officer, Gesny turned to Anton.
“Well, Captain, that was refreshing.”
Anton chuckled. “It is a good reminder of the caliber of those riding the monotony of the surface while we fly beneath the waves.”
“That gives me great confidence,” Gesny replied without breaking a smile.
The concussion hit both men simultaneously, knocking them to the deck. The sound of an explosion immediately followed.
Anton started to get up but was hit by something that slammed him back into the metal deck and bounced away. Anton looked left. The sailor who had been shouting directions to the seamen moments ago had landed on him. The sailor lay in an awkward pile several feet away.
Anton pushed himself up. “You okay?” he asked Gesny as he stood also.
“I think so.”
Both men looked toward the aft portion of the submarine, saw smoke coming from it, and took off at a run toward the gangway.
The general-quarters alarm began to “oogle” as the two officers ran across the gangplank. Smoke poured from the air exchange valve near the engine room.
Anton grabbed Gesny at the base of the conning tower. “You get on board and take charge. I’m going aft.”
Gesny grabbed him before he could let go. “That smoke is radioactive.”
“I don’t care! We have sailors down there. We’ll worry about ourselves later. Get everyone out who isn’t part of the damage control party!” He jerked Gesny’s hands away. “Now go!” Anton raced toward the rear of the submarine. He did not see Gesny hesitate for a few seconds, watching him, before the XO scrambled up the ladder to the bridge area.
Chiefs and sailors scurried out of the aft hatch. One of the chiefs grabbed two of the sailors. Anton heard the chief shouting orders for deploying the hoses, starting the deflooding pumps, and approved.
Anton hurried to the main induction valves, useless to the Whale, since it no longer had diesel engines. Someone had opened them. Smoke poured from the two far port and starboard ones. The chief who had taken charge rushed up alongside him.
“Captain! We have men trapped!”
Anton leaned against the bulkhead, looking at the Whale. The smoke from the aft air exchange had stopped, but the smell filled the trapped enclosure of the covered dock. The usual debris from a firefight — hose, foam, several exhausted sailors, and an odd ax on the pier — dotted the aft portion of the Whale.
“Captain, some water, sir?”
One of the sailors, his face soot-smeared, held out a glass in a hand likewise befouled from the fire. It was the man’s foul-weather jacket that caught his attention. Fire had burned away fabric. Water from the firefight had already frozen across the shoulders of the foul-weather garment.
He took the glass, paying closer attention to the sailor’s bare hands. “Thank you. Now, you go see the doctor.”
“He is too busy right now, sir. Besides,” the sailor added, holding up his hands and twisting them in the air. It was then Anton realized that beneath the soot, the hands had been blistered in the fire. “The air is cool on them. They can wait.”
“They look bad.”
“Yes, sir; and they feel bad, but they are not as bad as they look. And I am much better than the two the doctor is treating.” Gesny walked up. The sailor saluted Anton and turned toward the long table set up alongside the rear wall of the dock.
“Well?” Anton asked. He lifted the glass and drank deeply, the water icy cold as it went down. He shivered slightly.
“Reflash watch is set in the aft torpedo room. We were able to keep the damage to that area.”
“I don’t think we lost anyone,” Anton said, straightening and looking around the port side of the dock where most of the sailors were congregating. “Do you have the final muster, XO?”
“Three crewmen have some third-degree burns. Two of them are serious enough that once the medical team is done here, they will be transported to the hospital. We have a few crewmen with some minor burns; most of them are out here with you. Doctor Zotkin told me that medical teams from Northern Fleet headquarters are on the way over, on board one of the warships.”
“That’s good of him to be concerned,” Anton added.
Gesny grunted. “His only concern is whether the fire is going to delay the test.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the Whale. “Doctor Zotkin and his team are in the engineering room now. They are assessing damage, if any. I don’t think they’ll be done anytime soon, and when they are done, he’ll come out here and tell you he sees no reason for not going forward with the at-sea trials next Monday.”
“The fire was restricted to the aft torpedo room. Depending on the damage to the hull integrity, the valves, the pipes, the tubes, we might be able to do it,” Anton said with a measure of cynicism.
“Aye, Comrade Captain; he knows that. He could care less about the torpedo room. If the aft and fore ends of the boat fell off, he’d be concerned about the engine room only.”
Anton nodded. “We will do our own assessment when the temperature has cooled.” He set the empty glass on one of the steel beams running along the dock wall. “I want to know what caused it.”
Gesny shrugged. “Don’t know. We won’t be able to get in there for several more hours until it cools down. We are lucky there were no torpedoes on board. The third at-sea test scheduled involves a torpedo exercise along with multiple depth maneuvering.”
“We do have torpedoes in the forward torpedo room, XO.” Gesny held up four fingers. “Only four, and two of them are exercise torpedoes.” He crossed his arms. “Have no idea why they would give us two live torpedoes along with the exercise torpedoes. Probably a supply foul-up, where they either did not have the time to remove them or the means to transport them away, so the easy solution was to leave them on board.”
“Do you think we should insist they be taken off? After all, we are a test platform and won’t return to full fleet duties until Zotkin is satisfied with his atomic reactor.”
Gesny looked down at his feet for a moment; then his eyes locked with Anton’s. “I would just leave them, Captain, is my recommendation. If the crew misunderstands why we are removing torpedoes from the forward torpedo room, no telling what will go through their minds.”
Anton nodded. “I want to know what caused the fire, and I want to make sure we don’t have a similar incident in the forward torpedo room.” He put his hands on his hips.
Over Gesny’s shoulder, Lieutenant Gavril Lebedev, his operations officer, approached. “Excuse me, Comrade Captain — XO.” He handed Anton a foul-weather jacket. “For you, Captain. It is growing colder.”
Anton looked at his watch. Nearly four hours since they had returned to the dock. It seemed longer. Fires were a sailor’s bane. A fire could burn a ship to the waterline and sink her in minutes. Most fires brought flooding with them, but water could be pumped out of a compartment and you still had a compartment. Everything else became secondary when you were fighting a fire at sea. Control the fire and you save the ship.