To Kill the Potemkin (16 page)

Still
brandishing
the pistol, Kurnachov paced
around the control room, unsure what to do. After a minute of waffling,
he
called out, "Stern planes, down twenty degrees. Reverse engines. Slow
revolutions."

No
one moved.
Alexis, the chief engineer,
appeared in the control room hatch. "What the hell is going on here?"

Kurnachov
moved
across the compartment and
put the barrel of the pistol in his face. "Chief Engineer, get back to
the
engineering room."

The
engineer
stood his ground. "Where is
the captain?"

"I
am now the
captain. Do as you've been
ordered."

"Good
God. An
apparatchik
in
command of
Potemkin
."

Shaking
his head,
the engineer left the
control room. Still, nobody moved.

"Planesman,
stern
planes down twenty
degrees or I will charge you with mutiny. I'll also shoot you, you son
of a
bitch."

The
planesman
turned his wheel.

"Reverse
engines.
Slow revolutions."

The
hull
shuddered once as the turbine
started to revolve. The ship began to angle down at the stern and
descend
backward into the unknown. Kurnachov's heart was beating so fast he
thought he
might have a seizure. He felt giddy with power. He was in command for
the first
time in his life. He had, he believed, saved
Potemkin
.

On
Barracuda
Davic stood in the
control room, holding his asbestos helmet under his arm as he listened
to the
captain's instructions.

"Tell
him to
surface. Tell him we will
make no attempt to interfere with him or to board his ship."

"Aye
aye, sir."

Davic switched
on
the gertrude.
"Pogdorny Sovetski..."
he began.

Before
he could
continue, Sorensen's voice
interrupted over the intercom. "Sonar to control, sonar to control. I
hear
him. Captain, he's right on top of us. He's backing down out of the
thermal.
Left full rudder.
"

The
helmsman was
cranking his joystick before
Springfield could give the order. Barely making way.
Barracuda
slowly
turned to the left.

For
one terrible
moment everyone froze as
Potemkin
's portside stern plane brushed
Barracuda
's bow. The impact reverberated
through
Barracuda
's hull like a giant gong.

Collision
alarms
began screaming, circuits
popped, sirens went off. Every soul aboard expected the sea to pour
into the
ship.

In
the torpedo
room the solid steel bulkhead
bulged into the compartment and snapped back into place with a
thundering bang.
The young torpedomen were terrified. One dropped to his knees and began
to
pray, holding a crucifix.

"Get
on your
feet, Baker," Chief
Lopez ordered. "Seal the hatch." He yanked the young sailor to his
feet and pushed him toward the rear of the compartment. Johnson, the
mate,
already was spinning the wheel. If the torpedo room flooded, the ship
theoretically
would remain buoyant if water could be kept out of the other
compartments.

Lopez
braced
himself for a sudden pitch
forward, praying to the Virgin of his childhood for the pressure hull
to hold.
Making a grinding noise, the keel of the Russian sub slid down the
starboard
side of the hull, rolling
Barracuda
over to the
right and sending men
sprawling. There was a lurch, another metallic crunch... and the ships
separated. Baker lay screaming on the deck, his leg fractured.

Barracuda
swung back to the left and righted herself. On top of the fire-control
panel
Zapata's glass cage slid to the steel floor and shattered. Miraculously
uninjured,
the scorpion skittered away and hid in the shadows of the torpedo racks.

Lopez
rushed to
the fire-control panel and
saw that one of the outer-tube-door indicators had changed from green
to red.
Tube number four was ruptured, having been the exact point of impact by
the tip
of the Russian sub's stern plane. Lopez was certain the inner door
would burst
open.

"Torpedo
room to
control. Tube number
four open to sea."

In
the control
room an indicator light on
Pisaro's diving panel changed from green to red. He blanched.

"Torpedo
tube
number four open to
sea," he said, making the greatest effort to sound calm.

"Blow
all ballast
tanks, surface,"
ordered the captain.

As
water was
expelled from the ballast tanks,
the sub slowly began to rise.

"Fire
yellow
distress rocket."

"Rocket
away."

"Control
to
torpedo room, damage
report."

"Torpedo
room to
control. Tube number
four open to sea. Inner door is holding. We've got a small electrical
fire
here."

"Casualty
report."

"We
got a man
with a busted leg."

"Attention
all
hands. Damage control
team to torpedo room, on the double. Corpsman to torpedo room."

"Sonar,
where's
the Russian?"

Sorensen
switched
on the active sonar, afraid
of what he might hear. Instantly an erratically pulsating sphere of
sound
expanded around
Barracuda
.

He
stared at his
screen. It took him a moment
to realize that the sonars on the starboard side of the hull were
damaged. He
played with his console to compensate.

"Fogarty,
switch
to bottom scanners.
Sonar to control. I hear no reactor noises. He's lost power."

Fogarty
activated
the down-searching bottom
scanners and made contact. "Oh no," he said, and closed his eyes.

Sorensen
looked
at Fogarty's screen and
slowly removed his headphones. He switched on the overhead speakers.
Shaking
his head he said, very quietly, "Sonar to control, he's sinking. He's
already down to two thousand feet. He's going down without power. He
can't blow
his tanks."

Sorensen
began to
fidget. The sub was going
to sink until the pressure of the sea became too great. Then she would
implode.
What they had feared would happen to them a moment before was about to
happen
to the Russians. The Soviet sub was too heavy. Somehow the collision
had left
her without power, and she had no pumps and negative buoyancy. In a few
seconds
her hull would rupture, the sea would come crashing in and instantly
raise the
atmospheric pressure in the boat to the point of incandescence. In a
blinding
flash the Russians would fry before they were crushed. None would live
long
enough to drown.

Springfield
entered the sonar room and
stopped in midstep. Sorensen was pale. Fogarty looked like he was
watching an
execution.

Sorensen
said,
"Three thousand
feet."

The
captain
stared at the screen in
disbelief. "Three thousand feet." The sub already was far deeper than
any other submarine had ever dived.

Springfield
didn't need this, the Navy didn't
need this, the Russians certainly didn't need this. There would be a
Court of
Inquiry. The Russians would make their own investigation and it was
going to be
one hell of a mess.

"Thirty-one
hundred feet," said
Sorensen. He imagined the scene aboard the Russian sub... the men in
there
knowing they had only moments to live, some praying, others weeping or
gone mad
with panic and fear. But most, he was sure, were trying their best to
make
their machinery do the impossible. They were trying to get power to the
pumps
to blow her tanks and make her rise—

"Good
God," said
Sorensen,
"they fired a torpedo."

He
stood up and
backed away from the console.
On the screen the slowly sinking blip divided in two. They heard the
whine of
an electric motor. A guide wire between the blips was clearly visible.
Someone aboard
the doomed sub was attempting to steer the torpedo.

With
her tanks
blown
Barracuda
was
rising swiftly. They were going to die on the surface.

Springfield
shouted, "Evasive maneuvers.
All ahead full. Right full rudder." But before the helm could respond,
the
torpedo went awry and plunged straight down to four thousand feet.

While
all eyes
were on the torpedo, the
Russian sub imploded—painfully loud cracks separated by a fraction of a
second
as each of the ship's compartments ruptured in close sequence. At
tremendous
velocity the sea poured through the fractured pressure hull pushing the
air
inside into a smaller and smaller bubble until the air itself exploded,
blowing
out the bulkheads between the individually pressurized compartments.
The
explosions and fires lasted only the briefest instant until the full
weight of
the sea smashed the hull and everything in it into tiny, scarcely
recognizable
fragments.

Debris
filled
Barracuda
's sonar
screens. A cloud of tiny blips drifted to the bottom and scattered over
a vast
area.

"My
God, my God..." Springfield
said over and over. "Did you get it all on tape, Sorensen?"

"Yes,
sir..."

"Seal
that tape
and bring it to my
cabin."

"Aye
aye, sir."

"You
people in
here are not to say a
word about this to anyone. Understand?"

"Aye
aye, sir."

Springfield
returned to the control room.
"Take her up to the surface, Leo. We'll have to send off a message to
ComSubLant. You have the conn. I'm going to inspect the torpedo room."

In
the
operations center on
Kitty Hawk
the sonar contact
alarm had sounded with
a waspish buzz, On the screen the blip representing
Swordfish
had
divided like an amoeba and had resolved into two separate contacts,
both of
which were heading directly toward
Kitty Hawk
. A
moment later the echo-ranging
sonars of the surface ships
had begun to interfere with one another, and the blips had dissolved
into
electronic chaff.

Admiral
Horning had realized that he was caught in a
terrible dilemma. Neither sub had been positively identified as
Barracuda
, although
he was
certain that one was his nemesis.

With
a
sudden roar of propulsion machinery, both subs had descended below the
thermal
layer, and the sonar data became increasingly erratic until the sounds
had
stopped altogether. Helicopters had dropped sonar buoys around the
carrier, but
the noises generated by the huge ship garbled everything. This was the
penultimate moment.
Barracuda
had to slow to fire
her torpedoes, and a
thousand pairs of eyes had scanned the horizon, expecting the deadly
white
streaks at any moment.

Netts
felt vindicated. One submarine had
neutralized the entire fleet.
Kitty Hawk
wallowed
helplessly before the
onslaught of
Barracuda
. He was reminded of the final
chapters of
Moby
Dick
. Horning had found his whale, and the sea beast was
about to eat him
alive—

Without
warning the loudspeakers had roared out the sound of a collision, metal
grinding on metal, the shrieking horror that said death in the sea.
After
fifteen interminable seconds the screeching had stopped and was
followed by a
long silence. Finally, the sound of a submarine blowing its ballast
tanks had meant
one of the subs was attempting to rise. After another long pause... a
series
of violent eruptions and then the groans and crunches of a ship
breaking up.

Everyone
on the bridge of
Kitty Hawk
saw the distress rocket
break the surface a
mile away, streak into the sky and explode into a yellow cloud.

A
moment
later, in the midst of a boiling white sea,
Barracuda
bobbed to the
surface. A hatch in the sail opened, and two men in scuba gear
scrambled out,
climbed down to the diving plane and jumped into the sea. Netts held
his
breath, waiting for the hatches in the hull to open. If the sub were
about to
sink, the crew would scramble out. Instead the hatches stayed closed
and a
blinking light on the bridge began flashing a message.

Captain
Lewis, commander of
Kitty Hawk
, immediately
dispatched a helicopter to lower a surgeon to the sub. Springfield
continued to
signal with lights rather than radio so as to keep his transmission out
of the
hands of the Soviet trawlers trailing the fleet. If
Barracuda
were in imminent danger of sinking, he would not hesitate to say so.
Nevertheless, Captain Lewis ordered rescue teams to stand by, ready to
take off
the crew in a hurry.

Admiral
Horning
was furious. The destroyers
had let Springfield slip through the perimeter. No ship had fired at
Barracuda
, and she
had not
launched her weapons, so the war game was technically a stalemate, but
Horning
knew he had lost. All hell had broken loose down below, then
Barracuda
had reared up out of the sea like a nuclear sea monster only two
thousand yards
from his flag. He glared at the sub with deep loathing.

As
dozens of
reports came in from the fleet,
the communications officers were trying desperately to make sense out
of the
confusion. One message was a routine communication from
Swordfish
. She was
seventy-four miles from
where the destroyers had reported her earlier. Several ships reported
the
sounds of bulkheads bursting as a ship sank.

Two
subs were
unaccounted for.
Dragonfish
and
Stingray
were scheduled to make routine
position reports within the
hour. With growing horror, Horning realized that if the sub that sank
was not
Swordfish
, it had to
be one
of them. Who would take the blame? This was shaping up as a real
disaster for
the navy, the kind of foul-up that destroyed careers and raised hell
with
congressional committees. It was Netts's Folly. Now let his head roll.