Vlasenko had two steps up to go. He heard the conversations of the control compartment clearly now, the officers at their posts. The wrench was heavy. Vlasenko’s hands were wet with sweat. What if he was seen with the damned wrench? How could he explain it? Vlasenko held the wrench behind his right leg with his right hand and proceeded to pull himself up to the landing with his left— It was too awkward. The wrench slipped out of his hand just as Deck Officer Ivanov announced that the captain was in control. The heavy tool clattered down the ladder and landed at the base six meters below. Novskoyy looked over at Vlasenko.
“So, Vlasenko,” his hand reaching for his hip holster! “what brings you to control… with a wrench? Going to fix the fire-control computer? Ivanov, call security. Now!”
Ivanov looked first at Vlasenko, then Novskoyy, stunned, as his hand reached for the phone.
Novskoyy kept his service pistol trained on Vlasenko for the full two minutes it took the Security Warrant Officer to arrive in the control compartment. Vlasenko looked to his officers, saw none was going to challenge the admiral. Who could blame them? He turned to Novskoyy.
“Sir, why are you provoking the Americans? Getting ready to attack them…?” The watch officers stared, astonished, at the two men. “I saw your attack plan. Admiral—”
“It’s an exercise, you fool. You are destroying yourself over an exercise. I’m afraid, Vlasenko, that you have gone quite mad. I am sorry for you, and all the years I wasted trying to make a man of you. You are not worthy of your commission.”
“Admiral, your fleet doesn’t move without orders from you. That’s the reason for this surfacing. Your action begins in… five minutes? Is that when you send the message? Launch the missiles?” He was partly testing, but the look on Novskoyy’s face, his lack of any rebuttal, the sound of Novskoyy’s clicking off the safety on his pistol… it all added up to a horrible confirmation. It was the admiral, not Vlasenko, who seemed to have gone over the edge, to have gone from a threatening deployment to an actual attack mode…
The security officer had arrived at the landing from the ladder to the second compartment upper level. He looked at the two men, momentarily hesitating at the remarkable scene of the admiral threatening the ship’s captain with a semiautomatic pistol.
“Warrant, place Captain Vlasenko under arrest.” Novskoyy looked around, noting the clock. It read 0856.
“Put him in the control-compartment escape pod and shut the hatch. Stand guard at the ladder, when we go deep we will transfer him to a holding cell.”
“Sir, I can take the captain to the storage compartment now,” Warrant Danalov said.
“No. For the moment I want him where I can be sure of his actions. Take him up, shut the hatch and stand guard. And make sure you disable the pod-disconnect circuit. We don’t want the poor man blowing the bolts and rolling onto the ice. There is a better punishment for this man.”
The ladder to the escape pod was three meters tall and led to a lower hatch. It was awkward for the warrant to push Vlasenko up the ladder and follow with his pistol drawn, and for a moment Vlasenko considered kicking Danalov and trying to disarm him. Except Novskoyy’s gun was still levelled at him, the admiral’s trigger finger in place.
Just before he opened the pod hatch and left the control room Vlasenko glanced at Deck Officer Ivanov, hoping for some sort of action. Any action. Ivanov seemed immobilized. It had all happened too fast, Vlasenko realized. Now, when it was too late, he decided he should have shown Ivanov and others the plans in Novskoyy’s stateroom.
It was completely dark inside the pod. Groping for the light switch, Vlasenko felt only the clammy frozen wall of the titanium spherical-pod bulkhead. When he did manage to find the switch, he looked for some way to change the scenario being written below. He saw none. The pod was round, about six meters in diameter, capable of holding two dozen men in an emergency. Wood benches were set against the bulkhead, but most of the occupants would stand or sit on the deck during an emergency ascent. The control station on the starboard side contained a depth gage, currently reading zero meters, and a release circuit tied into explosive bolts below. This was the circuit Novskoyy had ordered disconnected. Vlasenko would try it anyway. He pulled the cover off a switch marked ARM and put the switch in the ARM ENGAGE position. Below it was a lighted green button marked POD RELEASE. He pressed the button. No light came on. No explosive bolts fired. As he had expected. He returned the top switch to the NORMAL position and replaced the cover. Below the circuit was a manual release lever. He tried it, but it too was locked out from below.
One last possibility — the upper escape hatch. The hatch was dogged shut with six heavy metal claws tied into a central ring. Vlasenko reached for the ring, startled by how cold it was, and tried to twist it. It wouldn’t budge. Not surprising, considering that the hatch opened up to the outside, above the ice from the leading edge of the teardrop-shaped sail. When the Kaliningrad’s sail popped through the ice cover to the air outside, the water clinging to the metal surface had apparently frozen solid over the hatch fairing.
Not that it would have done him any good. His underway uniform would have offered slight protection from the cold. He would have died from exposure within minutes in the subzero temperature outside. Finally Vlasenko sat on one of the pod benches. There was no ventilation in the pod, no fresh air, no heat. It was not long before he was shivering, the taste of terrible frustration acid in his mouth.
Novskoyy took his seat in the padded chair in front of the communication console. It was time to type in the message to be transmitted to his fleet. Behind him, in the periscope well, Ivanov looked into the optics of the combat periscope, training it in slow circles, watching the storm above the Kaliningrad. An arctic blizzard had rolled in from the dark featureless thick overcast of the sky. The flakes were as big as bullets. Visibility was shrinking. Below the Kaliningrad, a U.S. Piranha-class nuclear submarine named Devilfish floated to a halt, over 200 meters further below in the blackness of the frigid arctic water. Eight thousand kilometers from the Kaliningrad, 120 nuclear attack submarines awaited Novskoyy’s transmission. The admiral finished typing and went over the message one last time.
********** MOLNIYA **********
FROM NORTHERN FLEET COMMANDER/EMBARKED FS KALININGRAD
TO ALL UNITS SUBMARINE TASK FORCE NF-ONE
DATE 19 DEC
TIME 0850 GMT
PURP LAUNCH PREPARATION PER SEALED ATTACK INSTRUCTION NF-211-9
ACTION
1. THIS MESSAGE AUTHORIZES AND ORDERS ADDRESSEES TO MAKE ALL PREPARATIONS FOR SSN-X-27 LAUNCH ON TARGETS OF PRIMARY CONTINGENCY AS LISTED IN NORTHERN FLEET SEALED ATTACK INSTRUCTIONS NF-211-9 OF 13 DEC.
2. UNSEAL ATTACK PROFILE NF-211-9 AND PROGRAM SSN-X-27 MISSILE FOR PRIMARY TARGET LISTED THEREIN.
3. ON 18 DECEMBER UNITED NATIONS INSPECTORS MONITORED DESTRUCTION OF SSN-X-27 NUCLEAR CRUISE MISSILES.