Starpom Veroshilov had horsed out of an open hatch and looked around, trying to see what the weather promised. “Clearing,” he said mostly to himself, looking up at the night sky where, through holes ripped in the pale cloud cover, stars twinkled. “Dropping temperatures. Moderate seas.”
Litvanov appeared on deck. “Starpom, sound quarters for getting under way. We stand out on the flood tide.”
“Aye, Kapitan.”
“What was your final muster?”
Veroshilov recited from memory. “The twenty-three men you selected are aboard. The rest — ten officers, eight warrant officers, three petty officers, ten able seamen — are ashore on liberty and will be left behind.”
“Very well.”
Veroshilov, after delivering this report, had gone forward to the brow, where he knelt and disconnected a thin, black drooping cable hanging between the pier and the K-363. The cable provided intermittent phone service to submarine headquarters at the sprawling Olenya Bay Naval Base complex. The phone rarely ever rang, and Litvanov liked it that way.
Litvanov had glanced at the Russian tricolor — white, blue, and red — snapping from a staff planted on the sail, then turned to Zakayev and said, “So, now it starts.”
Shortly, Litvanov maneuvered the K-363 away from the pier and stood down the Tuloma River under cover of darkness. He had invited Zakayev to the bridge high in the submarine’s streamlined sail and, like a guide on a sightseeing cruise gliding silently down the river, pointed out the sights: darkened, abandoned warships anchored in the roadstead; two rusting and mottled radioactive waste transport ships, the Amur and the Vala; the defunct Letinskiy lighthouse at the point where the Tuloma River emptied into Kola Bay, and where balls of sleet peppered the K-363.
“So much for the weather report,” Litvanov had said and sounded the diving siren.
Now Litvanov stood at the chart table in the CCP, laying off ranges and bearings. He studied the chart, working his jaw from side to side as if reciting a silent incantation known only to him. He said to Starpom Veroshilov, who was also the ship’s navigator, “Hold this course until we pass the channel marker buoy in another”—he looked at the chronometer mounted over the chart table—“twenty minutes. Then come to course three-five-zero.”
“Aye, sir,” said Veroshilov, marking their course line, which, laid out, was six nautical miles due west of Kil’din Island off the Kola Peninsula.
Submerged, rigged for silent operation, the K-363 crept northeast at five knots. Tension had risen steadily until it showed on the burnished faces of the sailors on duty in the CCP exchanging nervous glances. They knew that the K-363’s submerged transit of Kola Bay was a gross violation of Northern Fleet regulations and that they ran the risk of being attacked by Russian patrol boats on the lookout for intruding foreign submarines.
Litvanov tapped the chart and said, “No sign of any patrol boats. Good thing too: Those idiots might panic if they hear us and start dropping depth charges.” He glanced at the girl, dressed in a pair of baggy gray regulation submarine coveralls that hid her slim figure, to gauge her reaction. She calmly held his gaze with her big, expressive eyes and said nothing.
“Where do you think they are?” Zakayev said.
Litvanov shrugged. “Maybe they heard a whale, thought it was a sub, went chasing after it, and are miles away. Or maybe they decided to hang around to catch some poor fisherman with his nets over the side in a prohibited area. You never know.”
“How good is their sound equipment?”
“Fair. They have hull-mounted and dipping sonars. Torpedoes, anti-ship rockets, and guns. Nasty little bastards. But they don’t maintain their equipment and they get lazy when nothing exciting ever happens. They don’t have much to do, now that the Amerikanskis don’t spy on us like they used to.
During the Cold War they’d stick the noses of their Los Angeles — class boats into the Tuloma River delta and—”
“Kapitan, sonar. Sound contact bearing zero-five zero degrees!”
Litvanov reached for a kashtan microphone attached to the end of a coiled wire hanging from the overhead. “Fire Control, Kapitan. Range?”
The range had been generated from multiple bearings. “Under four thousand meters.”
Litvanov pushed away from the chart table and went forward from the CCP to poke his head into the sonar room, where a spike of noise on a green waterfall slowly worked its way down a sonar screen.
“Contact drifting east-southeast, Kapitan.” The senior sonarman, intent on tracking the contact, didn’t look up. “Light twin-screw beat — I’d say sixty turns.”
“Five knots,” Litvanov said. He tugged his nose and waited.
A minute later the sonarman looked up at Litvanov. “Contact moving abaft the beam. No change in speed.”
“Can you identify him?” Litvanov said.
The fire control computer searched its memory banks for a matching sound profile. “MPK patrol boat, Kapitan.”
Litvanov considered. The K-363 was more than ten minutes away from a planned course change to the northwest and into the Barents Sea. But now they had to sidestep the pesky patrol boat. “Come left ten degrees,” Litvanov ordered briskly.
“Come left ten degrees, aye,” from the helmsman.
Litvanov waited as the K-363 turned and settled on her new course. “Anything?”
“Contact diminishing, Kapitan.”
Veroshilov’s tongue flicked across dry lips. He followed the action and made manual course adjustments on the chart, which was updated automatically by a plotter stylus moving over an acetate overlay. He also kept track using information marked on the chart of how much water lay under the keel. A Fathometer sounding would confirm it but a ping bounced off the sea bottom would reveal their position.
“Hold this course for fifteen minutes,” Litvanov ordered, “then we’ll come back to our original base course. By then he may be gone.” He caught Zakayev’s eye. “What did I tell you?”
Zakayev turned his gaze on the girl. She looked composed yet intrigued by the utter complexity of the CCP. Like snakes, cables and wiring, some thick as a man’s arm, crawled over every available surface inside the hull. Men sat or stood facing control panels and consoles covered with red, green, and orange lights indicating the status of the submarine’s nuclear reactor, fire control system, weapons, countermeasures, and hull integrity. Other men sat in comfortable padded chairs while they manipulated the wheels and joysticks used to control the boat’s direction and attitude underwater.
Throughout the entire compartment a bewildering forest of valves and levers sprouted from pipes and hydraulic lines running every which way, concocted, it seemed, by a team of plumbers gone mad.
Litvanov, arms folded, brow rutted in concentration, hovered near the periscope stand while he waited for a fresh report from sonar.
“All clear, Kapitan. Contact fading.”
Litvanov gave the order to resume their earlier course. A minute later he ordered, “Come to periscope depth.”
“Periscope depth, aye. Fore and aft up ten.”
The K-363 rose toward the surface.
Litvanov stood by at the night vision scope. He motioned up to the quartermaster of the watch. The quartermaster yanked the periscope lift handle and the heavy tube rose from its well in the deck.
Litvanov slapped the scope’s training handles down as soon as they appeared above the stand.
Crouched, eye pressed into the rubber buffer surrounding the ocular, he rose with the scope to a standing position. First he walked the scope around 360 degrees to check for intruders, then checked his swing on the bearing where the patrol boat had been reported by sonar, slowly moving abaft the starboard quarter. He wigwagged the scope left, right, left.