The Seventh Angel (11 page)

They were coming to the end now. The damaged submersible was nearing the surface. In a minute or so, the Nereus would break through the wave tops — hauled unceremoniously back from the dark ocean depths.

The winch operator watched the cable meter on his control console scroll slowly, like the odometer of a car. “One hundred feet!” His words seemed to hang in the cold bright air. No one else made a sound.

“
Fifty feet.” His voice was softer this time, as if he were a little unnerved by the oddly persistent ring of his own words.

“
Twenty feet.” It was the last depth report he gave.

The water surrounding the cable was beginning to bubble and churn. The crowd held its collective breath as the water heaved and frothed. Almost without warning, the
Nereus
broke the surface.

The winch continued to turn, lifting the little submarine free of the water. The hull of the submersible was streaked with the sticky dark silt of the sea bottom. The orange and blue paint scheme of her hull looked almost toy-like, as if this were the plaything of some spoiled child. It suddenly seemed ludicrous to entrust human lives to such a frail and silly machine.

The riggers moved forward, attaching their tag-lines, and swinging the submersible into her cradle. The divers were moving almost before the sub was firmly seated, scrambling up the curved silt-covered sides of the hull to the hatch at the top. They spun the handle furiously, and the pressure seal relaxed with an audible hiss.

The hatch swung up and open, and one of the black-suited divers lowered himself through the opening immediately. His head and shoulders reappeared through the hatch a few seconds later. He raised his hands into the air, and pointed both of his thumbs toward the sky. “They’re alive!”

He said something else, but his words were lost in a roar of shouts and laughter.

They were
alive
!

21
^ST
SPACE OPERATIONS CENTER

ONIZUKA AIR FORCE STATION

SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA

TUESDAY; 26 FEBRUARY

1238 hours (12:38 PM)

TIME ZONE -8 ‘UNIFORM’

Technical Sergeant George Kaulana looked at the two oblong smears of video on the display screen of his SAWS console and raised his eyebrows. “Where are
you
guys going?” The SAWS console—short for
S
atellite
A
nalyst
W
ork
s
tation
—was receiving an imagery download from
Forager 715
, a U.S. Air Force Oracle III series surveillance satellite currently passing over southeastern Russia.
Forager’s
primary surveillance mission was the nuclear reactor facility in Brushehr, Iran, so the perigee of the satellite’s elliptical orbit was designed to bring it to an altitude of only about 280 kilometers during passes over the Middle East. The digital cameras built into the satellite’s 2.4 meter mirror telescope were designed to take their best pictures from that altitude.

At the moment,
Forager
was on the outbound leg of its transit, heading toward apogee, the farthest reach of its orbit, 1,005 kilometers above the earth. The altitude of the satellite as it passed over southeastern Russia was about 500 kilometers and increasing steadily. Its camera’s were still functional at that altitude, but they were operating well outside of their optimum focal length. The images scrolling across the screen of Technical Sergeant Kaulana’s console were of significantly lower resolution than images shot from
Forager’s
preferred altitude, but the satellite analyst had no trouble identifying the two blurred oblongs as ships.

Kaulana’s job for this particular satellite pass was to count the number of submarines tied to the pier at the Russian naval base at Petropavlosk, Kamchatka. The ballistic missile submarines based in Petropavlosk represented a sizeable fraction of Russia’s nuclear strike capability. The movement of those subs was an ongoing concern. The United States and Russia might not be enemies anymore, but it wasn’t smart to lose track of another country’s nuclear arsenal if you could avoid it.

The two blurry shapes on Kaulana’s screen were obviously not submarines and the Russian Navy didn’t maintain surface warships in Kamchatka, so the two unidentified ships were probably nothing to worry about. If they’d been following the shipping lanes toward the West Coast of the U.S., he wouldn’t have given them a second look. But both of the unidentified ships were well north of the shipping lanes, and based on the orientation of their hulls, it looked like they were heading toward Petropavlosk. There wasn’t necessarily anything unusual about that. Avacha Bay, the harbor at Petropavlosk, got quite a bit of merchant shipping. But the destination of the ships was cause enough to give them a closer inspection, just to verify that they weren’t military vessels. If Kaulana let a couple of warships slip unnoticed into Petro on his watch, the Lieutenant would skin him alive. Better to check them out.

He used his trackball to pull a wireframe cursor around one of the shapes and keyed the SAWS console for image enlargement and digital enhancement. The video display flickered briefly as it reacted to the increased demand for processing power. A few seconds later, the enhanced image appeared on Kaulana’s screen.

He looked at the blocky white superstructure that ran most of the length of the ship. It wasn’t a tanker or a container ship, but it was definitely some kind of merchant vessel.

He shifted his cursor to the other shape on his screen and repeated the enlarge and enhance process. A few seconds later he was looking at another merchant vessel with the same sort of blocky white superstructure, an apparent duplicate of the first ship.

He increased the image contrast to make the details of the ship’s structure stand out more clearly, and then spent nearly a minute using his cursor to carefully tag points along the outline of the hull and the corners of all visible topside features. When he thought he had given his console’s computer enough clues about the shape of the vessel, he pressed a key to activate a silhouette recognition module in the system’s software.

He got a match in seconds. His unknown ships were 20,000-ton Ro-Ro vessels, built by HuangHai Shipyard in China.

Kaulana drummed his fingers on the gray steel shelf that housed the SAWS console’s keyboard. He could identify nearly every class of warship in the world by sight, but he wasn’t very well versed when it came to merchant ships. What in the heck was a
Ro-Ro
?

He punched a few keys to query the computer, and was rewarded with a brief explanation.
Ro-Ro
was the common abbreviation for
Roll-on/Roll-off
. Ro-Ro ships were vehicle carriers, designed to transport cars or other vehicles from one seaport to another. The
Roll-on/Roll-off
designation referred to built-in hydraulic ramps that could be lowered to allow a vessel’s cargo of vehicles to drive onto the ship at loading, and drive off when the ship reached its destination. According to the computer summary, the two Ro-Ros on Kaulana’s screen were capable of carrying about 2,000 cars each.

He whistled through his teeth. That was a lot of cars. He shrugged and released the images from his console’s processing queue. As long as the ships weren’t military, it didn’t really matter where they were going. The destinations of a couple of Chinese car carriers could hardly be considered a matter of national security.

* * *

Kaulana would repeat that line of reasoning at his court martial a little over a year later. The officers of the court would ultimately give him the benefit of the doubt and find that—based upon the information available to him at the time— Technical Sergeant George Kaulana had
not
been derelict in the execution of his duties when he’d declined to investigate the Ro-Ro vessels further. But the military court would also remind Kaulana that all of the death and destruction that came after might have been averted if he’d paid more attention to that harmless looking pair of Chinese merchant ships.

KUZBASS (K-419)

NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE KURIL ISLAND CHAIN)

WEDNESDAY; 27 FEBRUARY

1402 hours (2:02 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Kapitan Igor Albinovich Kharitonov of the Russian Navy stood to the left of #1 periscope and glanced at the spot above the ballast control panel where the master dive clock should have been. He felt a familiar stab of annoyance as his eyes found the gaping rectangular hole where the oversized digital clock had been pried from its mounting.

They had
stolen
the master dive clock. His fists tightened unconsciously. The
Kuzbass
was a front-line nuclear attack submarine, and some
svoloch
had stolen the master dive clock. The very thought made Kharitonov want to punch someone repeatedly in the head. He was kapitan of the boat, and such behavior was not permitted in senior naval officers. But regulations wouldn’t keep him from beating the thieving bastard to death if they ever caught him.

The theft had occurred at
Pavlovskoye
submarine base, the submarine’s home port near Vladivostok. The
Kuzbass
had been moored to a guarded pier in the naval station’s security area, and
still
someone had managed to get into the control room and make off with the damned dive clock. How was such a thing even possible?

The base militia was investigating the theft, which meant precisely nothing. It had probably been one of their guards who had let the thief on board to begin with, no doubt in exchange for a couple of hundred rubles, or a few American dollars. Unless, of course, the thief was a member of Kharitonov’s own crew. He couldn’t rule that out. A man could barely feed himself on what the junior Sailors got paid. It was impossible to provide for a family on wages that low, and some of the junior men
did
have families.

Kharitonov sighed and shifted his gaze to the clunky analog clock that had been borrowed from the Officer’s Mess and strapped to a pipe as a temporary replacement for the missing dive clock.

Temporary
, of course, was a relative term. The Supply Officer had requisitioned a replacement part. But there were no master dive clocks to be had in the navy warehouses. The inventory records showed eleven clocks available for requisition, but none could actually be located. Officially, the missing clocks had been misplaced, which likely meant that they were sitting alongside the clock from
Kuzbass
in the back room of some dealer in stolen property.

The temporary clock said fourteen-oh-three. It was nearly time.

Kharitonov checked his wristwatch a half-second later: a habit born out of a career’s worth of training and personal experience. A nuclear submarine Sailor could afford to take nothing for granted. Every cross-check was an opportunity to catch a mistake or malfunction before it killed you.

The watch was a relic of the Cold War: a stainless steel
Vostok Komandirskie
, with brushed steel hands, and a featureless black dial with large white machine-stamped numerals. The only ornamentation on the watch was the red star of the Soviet Union, embossed above the 6 o’clock position near the bottom of the dial.

Kharitonov noted with satisfaction that his watch matched the time on the temporary master clock to the second. Not that he’d expected otherwise, but expectations and certainties were not quite the same things.

He gave the stem three twists to keep the mainspring taut. The steel gears clicked solidly, oddly loud sounds that spoke of both mechanical precision and overkill craftsmanship. According to popular rumor, the old Komandirskie models were supposed to be bulletproof: an assertion which Kharitonov had never felt the slightest desire to test. But the watch’s rugged construction did seem to lend credence to the idea.

He lowered his wrist and scanned the control room, his eyes carefully avoiding the empty spot that marked the theft—instead taking in the oversized gauges, clumsy electrical switches, and heavy-duty pipes and valves that formed the submarine’s control systems. Like the heavy old watch, his submarine, the
Kuzbass
, was a masterpiece of Soviet brute force engineering. And, like his watch, the
Kuzbass
had out-lasted the old Soviet Union, and now lived on in the service of
Rossiyskaya Federatsiya
, the Russian Federation.

The Americans called this class of submarines the
Akulas
, akula being the Russian word for
shark
. The official Russian Navy designation was
Schuka-B
, after a highly aggressive breed of freshwater pike. Kharitonov preferred the American term. The image of a shark was more dangerous and glamorous than that of any fish, but—far more significantly—the term conveyed a compliment of the highest order. The Americans were the most lethal nuclear submarine Sailors on the planet, and the
Schuka
/
Akula
class were the first Russian-built attack subs that scared the hell out of them.