target was 6.4 meters long or 104. Still, Captain First Rank Vyatkin had
enormous faith in the effectiveness of confusion as both weapon and
tactic in combat. If Kislovodsk cut his engines at the same moment he
launched the Kukla, there would be several moments of confusion. When
their passive sonar receivers picked up the sound of the SSN moving off
at top speed, they would almost certainly stop pinging and listen,
trying to get what information they could about the sub’s new course and
speed.
And in those critical few moments, before they realized that they were
tracking an electronic decoy, he would bring Kislovodsk onto a new
heading and slip out from beneath the very noses of the American ASW
forces. A simple maneuver, but an effective one. He’d seen it used
successfully more than once, on boats he’d served aboard as a junior
officer during the Cold War.
“Fire Kukla!” he ordered. There was a hiss as the torpedo slid clear of
the tube on a blast of compressed air.
Aleksei Vyatkin and the men with him on the Kislovodsk’s control room
deck never heard the approach of the two American torpedoes. They were
coming straight out of the sub’s baffles, for one thing, and for another
the water around the submerged vessel was filled with the echoing pings
from the helicopters’ dipping sonars, and the Victor III’s aging
electronics suite was hard-pressed to separate the cascading signals
from one another in any kind of order that made sense to the human
listeners.
The first ADCAP torpedo, wire-guided by an operator aboard the Orlando,
passed just beneath the Kislovodsk’s starboard stern plane and slammed
into the aft trim tank about ten meters forward of the screw. Three
hundred kilograms of high explosive detonated with a roar of white noise
detected by every sonar within hundreds of miles.
The second Advanced Capabilities torpedo struck the Victor III’s
vertical stabilizer, vaporizing the teardrop-shaped towed-array sonar
housing, smashing the steering mechanism and tearing away the
eight-bladed screw.
Normally, one submarine firing at another from the target vessel’s
baffles would have sent the wire-guided ship-killers on long, looping
courses that would bring them in on the target’s port or starboard side.
This increased the likelihood of a kill, both by presenting the incoming
torpedoes with a larger target, and by exposing the most vulnerable
sections of the target sub, the large compartments forward and
amidships, to attack. This time, however, the attacker had gone for a
straight-in shot; steering the ADCAP torpedoes in by wire across a
roundabout attack path would use up precious minutes during which the
Victor III could launch his own torpedoes at the Jefferson.
That single small note of urgency saved the Victor’s crew–some of them,
at least. As the after trim tank and three after bulkheads collapsed, a
wall of water smashed its way forward through the main engine room, the
switchboard room, and the reactor compartment. Twelve of the eighty-five
men aboard were killed as the after compartments flooded, but watertight
hatches were dogged shut and the sea’s invasion of the Victor was halted
just abaft the auxiliary machine room, stores hatch, and aft escape
trunk. The lights failed, plunging everyone aboard into a screaming,
panicking darkness, then returned as emergency batteries came on-line.
Vyatkin’s palm came down on the alarm Klaxon, and he scooped up a
microphone. “Emergency surface!” he yelled, as the Victor lurched
heavily to port, trembling with the inrush of hundreds of tons of
seawater. “Blow all ballast!”
Kislovodsk shuddered again, harder, and the deck canted sharply as the
stricken attack sub rolled back to starboard, flinging crewmen and
anything else not tied down across the deck. With a shrill scream of
escaping air under high pressure, the water in the sub’s ballast tanks
was blasted into the surrounding sea.
“Pressurize the aft compartments!”
“Sir, the pressurization feed pipelines-”
“Force air into every compartment you can, damn it! We’ve got to fight
the flooding!”
Vyatkin clung to the railing circling the periscope well as the vessel’s
bow came up. Everything, everything depended on how much of Kislovodsk’s
stern was flooded, on how many compartments might yet be sealed off and
still contain air, on whether or not the flooding could be contained by