Voyage of the Devilfish

“Sonar, Conn, aye,” Pacino called, straining his eyes to see upward as the dark spot on the periscope view enlarged and became a line and then a blot that blocked out half the light from the surface. Pacino ordered Devilfish deeper so he could see the shape. Fifty feet lower was not enough to see either end of the behemoth that was above him, but any deeper would cut off the light. This had to be the OMEGA, he decided, and it was the biggest submarine he could have imagined. It dwarfed Devilfish. There must be room for at least ten Piranha-class submarines inside that huge hull. How could he hope to defeat something that big and invulnerable? And then he reminded himself that inside that… monster was the man who had killed his father. The same man that now threatened him, his crew and the ship that he loved. When he looked away from the periscope he saw that the eyes of the men and officers were on him. He was, after all, the captain, and they were trained to trust him so that it had become a matter of instinct. They also had, short of mutiny, no alternative. There was the temptation to talk to them, to explain, but that was not his role. Pacino put his eye back on the periscope and called to Stokes.

“Off sa’deck, I have the Conn. Man silent battle stations. Rig ship for ultraquiet. Flood tubes one and two and open the outer doors. Spin the Mark 50’s in tubes one, two, three and four. And prepare to hover.”

As Stokes got busy, Pacino looked up at the OMEGA, which he could not hear until he was close enough to touch it. For a moment he wished Donchez had simply ordered him to sink the OMEGA outright, but then realized he couldn’t do that. Don’t shoot unless shot at, was the order. So if the OMEGA shot a torpedo at them…

“Attention firecontrol team,” Pacino announced, “the OMEGA is surfaced at the polynya above. Designate the OMEGA Target One. We will position ourselves directly under Target One. We will come up on the hovering system with the maximum rate and hit Target One’s bottom. We’ll get deep again and monitor Target One’s actions. If Target One shoots at us, we will have verified hostile intentions, as COMSUBLANT has asked us to verify. And if that is the case, we will put Target One on the bottom…”

Pacino looked around the room. “If Target One does nothing or attempts to communicate with us, we will need to make a decision, whether her actions are genuinely friendly or a deception. All right, carry on.”

And what the hell do I do if the OMEGA refuses to be provoked, Pacino asked himself. Put a torpedo in the water? If the Russian could not be provoked, he would have no authorization to shoot it. The order to shoot would be unlawful. All right, you bastard, give me an excuse. Don’t make me make one. Pacino turned back to periscope and positioned the ship at 675 feet, hell aft-hull directly underneath the OMEGA at a right angle to the Russian, the OMEGA pointed north and Devilfish pointed east. He was looking back aft at the OMEGA hull, which was above his own reactor compartment. That way any possible contact would spare the periscope and the sail, both of which he might need later to break through the ice of the polynya.

ARCTIC OCEAN

POLYNYA SURFACE

FS KALININGRAD

Captain Vlasenko opened his locker, hoping his service pistol was there. Or had he left it behind? Yes, he must have left it in his apartment, it was mostly ceremonial. Perhaps he had avoided wearing it since those days on the Leningrad, an unconscious attempt to distance himself from Novskoyy’s affectations. What he intended to do would be much harder without a handgun. Perhaps impossible. But this had to stop, and the only way to stop it was to remove the admiral from control of the ship. From overhead Vlasenko heard the sound of a mast rising up, reminding him of Novskoyy and the communications console. He had waited long enough. If the admiral actually intended to launch an attack, he could order it to commence any minute. Vlasenko had tried hard to convince himself that this deployment was just an exercise. But seeing Novskoyy cover his papers with the chart, and the chart itself — how could he deny such evidence to the contrary? The operation profile in the red binder had chilled his blood.

The evening before, Vlasenko had gone to the control compartment to check out the weather through the periscope and found that Novskoyy had gone and had taken his stacks of messages with him. While Novskoyy was still gone, one message had come in. Vlasenko had pulled the message out of the discharge tray and the deck officer, Captain-Lieutenant Ivanov, had tapped his shoulder, telling him not to touch any of the admiral’s messages. Vlasenko had ignored Ivanov. The message was a lightning bolt through his guts. It was from the Alexander Nevsky, addressed to Novskoyy. Nevsky was a fairly new ship, an ALFA class. In his mind’s eye he could still see the block letters on the crisp laserprinted page: