CARRIER 6: COUNTDOWN By Keith Douglass

“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

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