The Seventh Angel - Страница 15

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Kaulana would repeat that line of reasoning at his court martial a little over a year later. The officers of the court would ultimately give him the benefit of the doubt and find that — based upon the information available to him at the time— Technical Sergeant George Kaulana had not been derelict in the execution of his duties when he’d declined to investigate the Ro-Ro vessels further. But the military court would also remind Kaulana that all of the death and destruction that came after might have been averted if he’d paid more attention to that harmless looking pair of Chinese merchant ships.

CHAPTER 12

KUZBASS (K-419)

NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE KURIL ISLAND CHAIN)

WEDNESDAY; 27 FEBRUARY

1402 hours (2:02 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Kapitan Igor Albinovich Kharitonov of the Russian Navy stood to the left of #1 periscope and glanced at the spot above the ballast control panel where the master dive clock should have been. He felt a familiar stab of annoyance as his eyes found the gaping rectangular hole where the oversized digital clock had been pried from its mounting.

They had stolen the master dive clock. His fists tightened unconsciously. The Kuzbass was a front-line nuclear attack submarine, and some svoloch had stolen the master dive clock. The very thought made Kharitonov want to punch someone repeatedly in the head. He was kapitan of the boat, and such behavior was not permitted in senior naval officers. But regulations wouldn’t keep him from beating the thieving bastard to death if they ever caught him.

The theft had occurred at Pavlovskoye submarine base, the submarine’s home port near Vladivostok. The Kuzbass had been moored to a guarded pier in the naval station’s security area, and still someone had managed to get into the control room and make off with the damned dive clock. How was such a thing even possible?

The base militia was investigating the theft, which meant precisely nothing. It had probably been one of their guards who had let the thief on board to begin with, no doubt in exchange for a couple of hundred rubles, or a few American dollars. Unless, of course, the thief was a member of Kharitonov’s own crew. He couldn’t rule that out. A man could barely feed himself on what the junior Sailors got paid. It was impossible to provide for a family on wages that low, and some of the junior men did have families.

Kharitonov sighed and shifted his gaze to the clunky analog clock that had been borrowed from the Officer’s Mess and strapped to a pipe as a temporary replacement for the missing dive clock.

Temporary, of course, was a relative term. The Supply Officer had requisitioned a replacement part. But there were no master dive clocks to be had in the navy warehouses. The inventory records showed eleven clocks available for requisition, but none could actually be located. Officially, the missing clocks had been misplaced, which likely meant that they were sitting alongside the clock from Kuzbass in the back room of some dealer in stolen property.

The temporary clock said fourteen-oh-three. It was nearly time.

Kharitonov checked his wristwatch a half-second later: a habit born out of a career’s worth of training and personal experience. A nuclear submarine Sailor could afford to take nothing for granted. Every cross-check was an opportunity to catch a mistake or malfunction before it killed you.

The watch was a relic of the Cold War: a stainless steel Vostok Komandirskie, with brushed steel hands, and a featureless black dial with large white machine-stamped numerals. The only ornamentation on the watch was the red star of the Soviet Union, embossed above the 6 o’clock position near the bottom of the dial.

Kharitonov noted with satisfaction that his watch matched the time on the temporary master clock to the second. Not that he’d expected otherwise, but expectations and certainties were not quite the same things.

He gave the stem three twists to keep the mainspring taut. The steel gears clicked solidly, oddly loud sounds that spoke of both mechanical precision and overkill craftsmanship. According to popular rumor, the old Komandirskie models were supposed to be bulletproof: an assertion which Kharitonov had never felt the slightest desire to test. But the watch’s rugged construction did seem to lend credence to the idea.

He lowered his wrist and scanned the control room, his eyes carefully avoiding the empty spot that marked the theft — instead taking in the oversized gauges, clumsy electrical switches, and heavy-duty pipes and valves that formed the submarine’s control systems. Like the heavy old watch, his submarine, the Kuzbass, was a masterpiece of Soviet brute force engineering. And, like his watch, the Kuzbass had out-lasted the old Soviet Union, and now lived on in the service of Rossiyskaya Federatsiya, the Russian Federation.

The Americans called this class of submarines the Akulas, akula being the Russian word for shark. The official Russian Navy designation was Schuka-B, after a highly aggressive breed of freshwater pike. Kharitonov preferred the American term. The image of a shark was more dangerous and glamorous than that of any fish, but — far more significantly — the term conveyed a compliment of the highest order. The Americans were the most lethal nuclear submarine Sailors on the planet, and the Schuka/Akula class were the first Russian-built attack subs that scared the hell out of them.

Although they bore many of the unwieldy earmarks of Soviet Cold War engineering, the Akula subs were extremely fast, and exceptionally quiet. Not as silent as the new American Virginia or Seawolf class boats, but quieter than the vaunted Los Angeles class nuclear attack subs that were the backbone of the US Navy’s submarine fleet. In any case, the Akulas were nearly undetectable to most types of sonar.

Armed with a combination of 65 centimeter and 53 centimeter torpedoes, RPK-255 Granat strategic cruise missiles, and an impressive array of mines and antisubmarine missiles, Akula class submarines were far more deadly than any shark that had ever prowled the ocean depths.

Kapitan Kharitonov was proud of his boat. Despite the heavy hands of her designers and the light fingers of the unidentified asshole who had stolen the dive clock, Kuzbass was 110 meters of lethal black steel.

Kharitonov himself looked like he might have been designed by the same brute force engineers who had laid the plans for his submarine. Exactly two meters tall, he was within centimeters of the maximum allowable height for Russian submarine Sailors. His shoulders were broad enough to force him to go through hatches at an angle, and his arms were so thick that even the heavy steel Komandirskie looked like a child’s watch against the wide bones of his wrist.

His dark hair and eyebrows were a near perfect match for the black serge of his winter uniform. Thanks to some skillful needlework on the part of his wife, the uniform did a bit to disguise his oversized frame, as did the speed and agility of his movements. In his youth, Kharitonov had been a fencer. Although he hadn’t touched a saber or a foil in nearly a decade, he’d never lost the quickness and balance he had learned on the fencing floor at Pogosov.

What had happened to the Russia of his youth? A few short years before, the formidable Soviet military had been undefeatable. The vision of worldwide communism had been a foregone conclusion. Now the great Russian military couldn’t even keep the riff-raff from stealing its submarines a piece at a time. How had the mighty Soviet empire fallen so far and so quickly?

Kharitonov checked the temporary dive clock again. Fourteen-oh-five. It was time. He tapped the Watch Officer on the shoulder. “Take the boat to periscope depth.”

The Kuzbass had been ordered to rendezvous with a Tupolev TU-142 anti-submarine warfare aircraft based out of Yelizovo air station on Kamchatka. Upon establishing contact, the submarine and aircraft were to conduct a detect and evade exercise. For three hours, the big lumbering bomber-turned-submarine-hunter would pepper the ocean with sonobuoys and crisscross the waves with its magnetic detection equipment in an attempt to locate and track Kuzbass. All the while, the submarine would be doing its best to avoid detection by the sensors of the searching aircraft.

The Watch Officer glanced back at Kharitonov and nodded. “Sir, take the boat to periscope depth, aye!” He turned toward the Diving Officer. “Make your depth forty meters.”

The Diving Officer acknowledged the order and repeated it back. Not more than two seconds later, he issued his own order to the Stern Planesman. “Five degree up bubble. Make your new depth four-zero meters.”

The Stern Planesman, Seaman Viktor Petrovich Ermakov, repeated back his orders and pulled back slowly on the steering wheel shaped control yoke. Eyes locked on the plane angle indicator, he leaned slightly closer to the Helmsman seated to his right. “I’m sick of this recycled air,” he said quietly. “In a few moments, I’ll be topside with the kapitan, breathing real air for a change!”

Before the official start of the exercise, the Kuzbass was scheduled to surface in order to give the sensor operators on board the TU-142 an opportunity to practice using their video cameras and infrared cameras to detect and track a real submarine.

Once the boat was on the surface, depth control would be handled by the controlled flooding and pumping of the trim and drain tanks, leaving the Stern Planesman with nothing to do. Aboard the Kuzbass, as aboard most Russian submarines, the Stern Planesman became the topside lookout when the sub was on the surface. Which meant that Viktor would soon be up in the conning tower with his commanding officer, enjoying sunshine and non-recycled air.