“Get below!” Chelyag concluded. “I will deal with you later, when I
have the time!”
The sailors filed from the mess hall, but Chelyag had the feeling he’d
not made that much of an impression. While they all shared the
responsibility for the accident–himself included, he was quick to
admit–it was virtually impossible to make rankers accept the
responsibility for their own actions.
It was, Chelyag thought, one of the flaws in the Soviet system, though
he knew better than to admit that to anyone less trustworthy than
himself. Russian submarine crewmen were usually assigned rather than
being volunteers, and they tended to be indifferent seamen. Mistakes
were inevitable, especially when the men were under pressure.
But could Russia’s most modern, most deadly high-tech instrument of war
actually be crippled by a thirty-meter length of ten-centimeter wire
rope?
The two great Typhoon ballistic-missile submarines, his own Leninskiy
Nesokrushimyy Pravda and Captain First Rank Dobrynin’s Slavnyy
Oktyabrskaya Revolutsita, had been lying side by side at their
subterranean moorings, ready for sea, awaiting only the order from
Admiral Karelin before proceeding with Derzkiy Plamya, Operation
Audacious Flame. Save for the ground-line communications link with
Kandalaksha, the cavern was cut off from the outside world. Chelyag had
no way of knowing whether or not the diversionary operation Ognevoy had
gone off as planned, whether or not the American carriers had been
destroyed or damaged, whether or not American ASW aircraft or submarines
might be waiting in the area off the Kola Inlet.
Then at 0740 hours, the awaited word had come. American and neo-Soviet
aircraft were engaged over the Barents Sea off North Cape; the Yankee
carriers were on the point of being overwhelmed by waves of Russian
aircraft and missiles.
Pravda and Revolutsita were to leave their shelter at once, make their
way north from the Kola Inlet to their assigned strategic bastion
beneath the Arctic ice, and await final orders via ELF communications
from Kandalaksha.
The Glorious October Revolution had pulled away from her moorings almost
at once, the line-handling parties on her fore-and afterdecks cheering
and waving as the great submarine slowly chugged past Lenin’s Invincible
Truth.
Chelyag had bellowed at his own line-handling parties. “Cast off
astern!
Move yourselves! Do you want the Revolution to show us his ass as he
leads us into the channel?”
It was a common practice to exercise naval crews against one another in
good-natured competition, to accustom them to working under pressure,
and to instill camaraderie and team spirit among the men. The afterdeck
line-handlers had signaled “lines clear” even as the men on the pier
were still slipping the huge loop on the stern line clear of its bollard
and tossing it toward the waiting Pravda sailors. One man had grabbed
the line, overbalanced, and fallen into the water between submarine and
pier, dragging the stern line with him.
Unaware that his men aft were taking some strictly nonregulation
shortcuts with proper naval procedure, Chelyag, in Pravda’s weather
cockpit high atop the sail, had ordered one quarter ahead on both
engines. Pravda had churned slowly ahead, drawing away from the pier
…
… and then the trailing stern line had fouled around the Typhoon’s
port screw, wrapping itself tightly about the shaft. Chelyag had felt
the change in the vibrations coming through the deck, a hard, unpleasant
shudder like the rasp of the keel going aground … and then the Pravda
was swinging toward the pier, propelled now by her starboard engine
alone.
Chelyag had bellowed the order “All stop!” Too late. Pravda had caught
the pier on her port side midway between bow and sail, the collision
hard enough to make Chelyag grasp the cockpit railing. The pier had
crumpled like styrofoam, splintering with the impact and sending the
dockside line-handlers scattering in every direction.
That had been an hour ago, and only now had the final word come up from
damage control. There was a possibility that one of the blades on the
Typhoon’s port screw had been bent ever so slightly out of alignment.
If true, it might be enough to cause significant cavitation. Cavitation,
the creation of momentary pockets of vacuum behind a turning propeller
that then collapsed with a distinctive sound, was the bane of all