Petchukocov knew he was dead. He saw the paint on the forward bulkhead turn black, and his last impression was of a dark mass surrounded with the blue glow. The engineer’s body vaporized an instant later, and the mass of slag dropped to the next bulkhead aft.
Forward, the submarine’s nearly vertical angle in the water eased. The high-pressure air in the ballast tanks spilled out of the bottom floods and the tanks filled with water, dropping the angle of the boat and submerging her. In the forward part of the submarine men were screaming. The captain struggled to his feet, ignoring his broken leg, trying to get control, to get his men organized and out of the submarine before it was too late, but the luck of Evgeni Sigismondavich Politovskiy would plague his namesake one last time. Only one man escaped. The cook opened the escape trunk hatch and got out. Following what he had learned during the drill, he began to seal the hatch so that men behind him could use it, but a wave slapped him off the hull as the sub slid backwards.
In the engine room, the changing angle dropped the melted core to the deck. The hot mass attacked the steel deck first, burning through that, then the titanium of the hull. Five seconds later the engine room was vented to the sea. The Politovskiy’s largest compartment filled rapidly with water. This destroyed what little reserve buoyancy the ship had, and the acute down-angle returned. The Alfa began her last dive.
The stern dropped just as the captain began to get his control room crew to react to orders again. His head struck an instrument console. What slim hopes his crew had died with him. The Politovskiy was falling backwards, her propeller wind-milling the wrong way as she slid to the bottom of the sea.
The Pogy
“Skipper, I was on the Chopper back in sixty-nine,” the Fogy’s chief said, referring to a horrifying accident on a diesel-powered submarine.
“That’s what it sounds like,” his captain said. He was now listening to direct sonar input. There was no mistaking it. The submarine was flooding. They had heard the ballast tanks refill; this could only mean interior compartments were filling with water. If they had been closer, they might have heard the screams of men in that doomed hull. Wood was just as happy he couldn’t. The continuing rush of water was dreadful enough. Men were dying. Russians, his enemy, but men not unlike himself, and there was not a thing that could be done about it.
Bait 1, he saw, was proceeding, unmindful of what had happened to her trailing sister.
The E. S. Politovskiy
It took nine minutes for the Politovskiy to fall the two thousand feet to the ocean floor. She impacted savagely on the hard sand bottom at the edge of the continental shelf. It was a tribute to her builders that her interior bulkheads held. All the compartments from the reactor room aft were flooded and half the crew killed in them, but the forward compartments were dry. Even this was more curse than blessing. With the aft air storage banks unusable and only emergency battery power to run the complex environmental control systems, the forty men had only a limited supply of air. They were spared a rapid death from the crushing North Atlantic only to face a slower one from asphyxiation.
THE NINTH DAY
SATURDAY, 11 DECEMBER
The Pentagon
A female yeoman first class held the door open for Tyler. He walked in to find General Harris standing alone over the large chart table pondering the placement of tiny ship models.
“You must be Skip Tyler.” Harris looked up.
“Yes, sir.” Tyler was standing as rigidly at attention as his prosthetic leg allowed. Harris came over quickly to shake hands.
“Greer says you used to play ball.”
“Yes, General, I played right tackle at Annapolis. Those were good years.” Tyler smiled, flexing his fingers. Harris looked like an iron-pumper.
“Okay, if you used to play ball, you can call me Ed.” Harris poked him in the chest. “Your number was seventy-eight, and you made All American, right?”
“Second string, sir. Nice to know somebody remembers.”
“I was on temporary duty at the Academy for a few months back then, and I caught a couple games. I never forget a good offensive lineman. I made All Conference at Montana — long time ago. What happened to the leg?”
“Drunk driver clipped me. I was the lucky one. The drunk didn’t make it.”
“Serves the bastard right.”
Tyler nodded agreement, but remembered that the drunken shipfitter had had his own wife and family, according to the police. “Where is everybody?”
“The chiefs are at their normal — well, normal for a weekday, not a Saturday — intelligence briefing. They ought to be down in a few minutes. So, you’re teaching engineering at Annapolis now, eh?”
“Yes, sir. I got a doctorate in that along the way.”
“Name’s Ed, Skip. And this morning you’re going to tell us how we can hold onto that maverick Russian sub?”
“Yes, sir — Ed.”
“Tell me about it, but let’s get some coffee first.” The two men went to a table in the corner with coffee and donuts. Harris listened to the younger man for five minutes, sipping his coffee and devouring a couple of jelly donuts. It took a lot of food to support his frame.
“Son of a gun,” the J-3 observed when Tyler finished. He walked over to the chart. “That’s interesting. Your idea depends a lot on sleight of hand. We’d have to keep them away from where we’re pulling this off. About here, you say?” He tapped the chart.
“Yes, General. The thing is, the way they seem to be operating we can do this to seaward of them — “
“And do a double shuffle. I like it. Yeah, I like it, but Dan Foster won’t like losing one of our own boats.”
“I’d say it’s worth the trade.”
“So would I,” Harris agreed. “But they’re not my boats. After we do this, where do we hide her — if we get her?”
“General, there are some nice places right here on the Chesapeake Bay. There’s a deep spot on the York River and another on the Patuxent, both owned by the navy, both marked Keep Out on the charts. Nice thing about subs, they’re supposed to be invisible. You just find a deep enough spot and flood your tanks. That’s temporary, of course. For a more permanent spot, maybe Truk or Kwajalein in the Pacific. Nice and far from any place.”
“And the Soviets would never notice the presence of a sub tender and three hundred submarine technicians there all of a sudden? Besides, those islands don’t really belong to us anymore, remember?”
Tyler hadn’t expected this man to be a dummy. “So, what if they do find out in a few months? What will they do, announce it to the whole world? I don’t think so. By that time we’ll have all the information we want, and we can always produce the defecting officers in a nice news conference. How would that look for them? Anyway, it figures that after we’ve had her for a while, we’ll break her up. The reactor’ll go to Idaho for tests. The missiles and warheads will get taken off. The electronics gear will be taken to California for testing, and the CIA, NSA, and navy will have gunfights over the crypto gear. The stripped hulk will be taken to a nice deep spot and scuttled. No evidence. We don’t have to keep this a secret forever, just for a few months.”
Harris set his cup down. “You’ll have to forgive me for playing devil’s advocate. I see you’ve thought this out. Fine, I think it’s worth a hard look. It means coordinating a lot of hardware, but it doesn’t really interfere with what we’re already doing. Okay, you have my vote.”
The Joint Chiefs arrived three minutes later. Tyler had never seen so many stars in one room.
“You wanted to see all of us, Eddie?” Hilton asked.
“Yes, General. This is Dr. Skip Tyler.”
Admiral Foster came over first to take his hand. “You got us that performance data on Red October that we were just briefed on. Good work, Commander.”
“Dr. Tyler thinks we should hold onto her if we get her,” Harris said deadpan. “And he thinks he has a way we can do it.”
“We already thought of killing the crew,” Commandant Maxwell said. “The president won’t let us.”
“Gentlemen, what if I told you that there was a way to send the crewmen home without them knowing that we have her? That’s the issue, right? We have to send the crewmen back to Mother Russia. I say there’s a way to do that, and the remaining question is where to hide her.”
“We’re listening,” Hilton said suspiciously.