He pulled himself forward, then lost his grip and was washed back. There was almost a foot of water on the deck already. He had to reach that valve….
25
"Damage-control parties lay forward to the torpedo room!" Latham bellowed over the intercom. "Flooding in torpedo compartment! That is, flooding in the torpedo compartment!" He turned and locked stares with Gordon. "It sounds bad, sir!"
"I'm having to adjust forward trim," Warren announced, working his board behind and to the left of the helmsman and planesman positions. "We're taking on a lot of water forward."
"Stay with it," Gordon said. "Helm! Bring us around to new heading… one-seven-zero. Maintain depth!" If they started to go down by the head, he wanted it to be a short trip to the surface if he had to blow ballast.
"Conn, Sonar!"
"Sonar! Go ahead!"
"Picking up sounds of a submarine blowing ballast, sir."
"What?"
"It's Sierra One. I think… I think Sierra Five-zero fired at him, and he's going up on the roof! But he's damned close to the Kresta, sir! Sounds like the cruiser is right on top of him!.. "
This was fast becoming a comedy of errors … and would be funny if it wasn't so damned deadly serious. The Kresta must have confused the Sierra II with the Pittsburgh. That, or they thought the Sierra was a second American submarine.
But how was that possible? The Kresta and the Sierra had been working together. The ASW cruiser's skipper knew the Sierra was out there. So why…
"Conn, Sonar!"
"Yeah."
"Sir, picking up new contact, designated Sierra Five-one. Bearing three-zero-five, range ten thousand, speed… God, Skipper. Forty-five knots!" There was a pause. "Sierra Five-one identified. It's Mike Two, and he's coming in hell-bent for leather."
The Mike. Called in by the sounds of explosions, no doubt. Gordon could see the tactical layout, the unfolding of the situation in his mind's eye. The Kresta II's sonar people must have picked up the sounds of three submarines, where only one was known to be friendly. They had the Los Angeles to the southeast, a second target coming in from the west, and now a third underwater target coming from the northwest. They would have lost all of the sonar contacts each time the underwater explosions went off. And then, just when they'd hit the target to the southeast and were on the verge of driving it to the surface, they'd picked up one sub coming in at forty-five knots from the northwest, another coming almost directly toward them out of the west.
Someone had panicked, or simply made a bad call. The Kresta had fired an RBU-6000 spread at the second target. Apparently they hadn't hit it, but…
"Conn, Sonar! I have sounds of a collision! Sierra One just went afoul of Sierra Five-zero!.. "
Dubrynin was hurled over the safety rail beside the periscope position, as thunder boomed from directly overhead. He slammed onto the deck, pain exploding through his back and side. The control-room lights dimmed, as lighting fixtures shattered behind their protective cages.
He could hear the throb of the Voroshilov's screws… mingled with the hair-raising squeal of metal grating across metal. The Ivan Rogov heeled sharply to starboard as the grating shriek shrilled through the control room, as loud as the Trump of the Apocalypse.
Dubrynin had never considered himself religious, but his grandmother's teachings were flooding back now. They were all going to die, and he was not ready….
There was another crash, even louder, and a violent shudder ran through the stricken vessel. Water began spraying down from around the rim of the closed but undogged hatch in the overhead leading up to the conning tower, until a seaman reached up and sealed the hatch. Several more bumping, grinding sounds echoed down from overhead, and then the control room was death-silent, save for the groans of several injured men.
Grabbing hold of a console, he levered himself to his feet, testing his back, wondering if he were badly injured. Miraculously, everything worked, though he hurt like hell, and a biting pain shot through his uselessly dangling left arm. It felt broken.
"Damage control to the bridge!" he called, and he heard his order being relayed over the intercom. "Diving Officer! What is our status!"
"We are maintaining depth, sir, at one-three meters. Conning tower is awash. We have lost port-side trim and are listing to starboard by fifteen degrees. We may have flooding in the conning tower."
"But we're not sinking?"
"The situation is stable… for now,Captain."
He knew better than to check through the periscope. They'd just rammed the Voroshilov with the Ivan Rogovs sail, and the delicate optics would have been smashed, the housings themselves twisted into uselessness.
"Sonar Officer! Where is the Voroshilov?"
"Marshal Voroshilov is off our port beam, sir," Krychkov replied. "Range… a few meters. We're close. Sir, I'm also picking up a new contact. It is the Krasnoyarskiy Komsomolets."
"Never mind that! Are we clear above? Are we clear to surface?"
"Clear to surface, Captain."
"Bring us all the way to the surface, Diving Officer." He did not add if you can.
His career, Dubrynin thought, was over, a casualty of this so-called Cold War. He should have checked before surfacing, but had thought they were clear. The Board of Inquiry would find him guilty of negligence. And they would be right. There were extenuating circumstances to be sure — the Voroshilov firing on his submarine, the clouding of the sonar picture by the RBU explosions all around. Perhaps they'd been fooled by the Krasnoyarskiy's unexpected arrival out of the Rogovs baffles.
None of that mattered. The Board of Inquiry would need a scapegoat for the collision. And he would be the easiest target.
Somehow, it didn't matter. Oh, it would matter later, of course, and he would fight the inevitable ruling. But right now, he had to save his last command….
Randall clung to the steel frame of the rack, struggling against a most unSEALish surge of panic. It was as though he were back in the Russian sub again, trapped in a slender metal-walled pipe, plunged into darkness, with water thundering in.
This was, in fact, much worse than his time aboard the crawler sub; at least he'd had emergency lighting there, and the inflow had been a trickle compared to this.
But he felt the same catch at his throat as he contemplated a claustrophobic drowning, trapped aboard a flooding submarine in the icy depths of a sea most Americans had never heard of.
"I can't reach it!" he heard O'Brien's voice calling in the darkness to his left. "It's Flood Feed One! I can't reach it!"
He wasn't sure where the others in the compartment were. He'd heard Chief Allison announcing the flooding from the intercom, aft… and someone was groaning in the dark just in front of him. But it felt like he might be the closest to O'Brien, who evidently was trying to breast the force of the infalling water in order to shut it down.