To Kill the Potemkin (19 page)

"In
spite of what
you think, Alexis, the
Americans are not stupid. They don't have political officers."

"Perhaps
because
of Kurnachov, once and
for all we will be rid of these fools."

Federov
shook his
head. "We stand a
better chance of getting rid of the Americans than our own idiots."

Alexis
smiled.
"My friend, in time this
too shall pass. The Americans tend to be arrogant. They've become
diverted.
They are preoccupied with Viet Nam, which drains their treasure, their
blood
and their will. With thirty
Potemkin
-class
submarines we will put an end to their primacy on the
seas. Their missile submarines are no match for this," the engineer
said,
softly rapping the hull. "But we need to buy time..."

"We
should live
so long, Comrade Chief
Engineer."

Alexis
tried to
phrase his next question
delicately, "What are we going to do about the carbon dioxide?"

"What
are you
going to suggest, Alexis?
That I surface, pass through the Bosporus into the Black Sea and make
for
Odessa?"

"I
feel the words
must be said. It's my
duty—"

Federov
smiled.
"You have done your
duty. Good. You will continue to do your duty but the answer is no. We
are not
going to surface and steam through Istanbul. Our orders are to avoid
detection
at all costs, even if we have to scuttle
Potemkin
ourselves. We are
going through Gibraltar."

"But
the
scrubber, Captain. We need the
filters."

"We
can snorkel.
We can escape detection
by running very slow, very quiet and very deep."

"And
if we're
detected?"

Federov
ignored
the question and turned his
attention to a chart.

Running
Potemkin
on minimal reactor power and maintaining a depth
below three thousand feet, Federov had maneuvered his ship toward
Gibraltar. He
hugged the North African Coast, taking care to avoid major shipping
lanes and
NATO operations areas. No one was looking for him at that depth, and
even if
they were, he believed, their sonars would not find him.... He'd heard
only
vague rumors of an advanced American sonar system being deployed and
tended to
discount them. He was always hearing how the Americans were getting
ahead,
followed by a spurt in his own country's military expenditures. He
exercised
extreme caution, though. Without the silicon packing on the turbine,
Potemkin
generated a great deal of noise at any velocity
above eight knots,
so Federov maintained a slow speed and a steady westerly course.

After
five days the carbon dioxide concentration was four percent. The
crew was breathing at an increased rate, pumping more and more carbon
dioxide
into the atmosphere. The men were weakening and their resistance to
infection
was crumbling. An outbreak of colds ravaged the engineers.

To
vent the sub's noxious atmosphere Federov had to snorkel, had to rise
near the surface, push a tube into the ocean air, pump out the carbon
dioxide-rich atmosphere and suck in fresh air, just like an
old-fashioned
diesel-electric sub. However, by doing so Federov knew he also ran the
risk of
exposing the snorkel to hostile radar. He had to be certain that he was
beyond
detection before he raised the metal tube above the surface. Federov
cursed his
bad luck. The failure of one simple subsystem had reduced
Potemkin
to a
primitive submersible craft. He needed air!

As
the
fifth day drew to a close,
Potemkin
was fifty miles
off the Libyan
coast. The submarine had to snorkel, though Federov was still leery of
approaching the surface and exposing
Potemkin.
In no
more than another
four hours the CO
₂
concentration would reach a
point of extremely
dangerous toxicity and the crew of
Potemkin
would be
subjected to carbon
dioxide narcosis. Federov studied his charts. It seemed as safe a place
as he
would find.

"Prepare
to
surface," he ordered.
"Ready the snorkel. Alexis, take us up to one hundred fifty meters."

Potemkin
rose slowly from
the depths, circling at five hundred feet to clear baffles.

Only
halfway
through the circle, Popov
intoned, "Contact, subsurface. Two screws, diesel-electric. Range five
thousand meters, bearing one five two, course three three one, speed
eight
knots." He hoped his tone masked his fear.

On
the sonar
screen the sub was a
two-dimensional streak on one quadrant of the screen, above and ahead of
Potemkin,
going slowly.

Keep
going,
Federov silently urged the
intruder... not even wanting to think on what it would mean if the
other sub
stopped.

"Identify,
please, Popov."

"French,
Daphné
class. Probably
Sirène
."

"All
ahead, dead
slow. Down planes
fifteen degrees. Make our depth eight hundred meters."

In
the
engineering room, four coughing,
sneezing men cranked down the stern planes, and
Potemkin
descended.

Federov
spoke
quietly into the command
intercom. "Torpedo room, load tubes one and two—"

"Nikolai,
you
can't shoot him, you can't
know if—"

"If
he's looking
for us, Alexis, if the
Americans have announced that reports of our death were premature, what
choice
do I have? If this French captain reports our position, more will come
looking,
the British will blockade the Strait of Gibraltar. We will have no
escape. And
we will all die here if we do not snorkel..."

"Range
to target,
five thousand seven
hundred meters."

"Flood
tubes."

For
a moment
aboard
Sirène
, just a fleeting
moment, the sonarman thought he saw a blip on his screen, but it was
too
slight, too faint, and he well remembered how once before he had been
severely
reprimanded for sounding a false alarm... and now whatever it was,
if it was
ever anything, had disappeared. In his experience only whales dove so
deep, and
in his log he recorded
baleine
.

Now
at eight
hundred meters, having gone
quickly down from five hundred feet,
Potemkin
was
too deep for discovery
by the Frenchman's sonars. But it was not safe, not unless the French
ship
cleared the area.

"Popov,"
Federov
asked, "what
is the depth under our keel?"

"Four
thousand
six hundred meters. We're
over the Tunisian Trench."

"Range
to
contact."

"Range
five
thousand nine hundred
meters, captain. I've lost an active sonar. I don't think he's
stopping...
no, he seems to be moving..."

Keep
moving,
please
, Federov
silently intoned to
himself.

And
as he did, a
tired and disgruntled
Frenchman some eight hundred meters above him and five thousand nine
hundred
meters distant leaned back from his console, sighing mightily, and made
the
easy decision not to report what he probably had not seen, thereby
allowing the
Sirène
to proceed. "Captain, still no active sonar. Range now six thousand
meters. I'm losing him." And he allowed a bright smile as he said it.

Federov
smiled
back at him. "All ahead
slow, right full rudder," and then to Alexis,
"he seems to have missed
us, but we can't
snorkel with
him in the area. Attention all
hands, put on oxygen masks"—he knew this was mostly an empty gesture,
the
masks having long since become all but useless—"there will be a delay
before resurfacing." Greeted by mumbling and curses. "Torpedo room,
unload torpedoes." Greeted by relief.

Federov
and
Alexis exchanged glances, each
knowing that this was a reprieve only. They could take in some good air
now,
vent the carbon dioxide, but it would build up, and they could not
snorkel all
the way back to Murmansk. They were not a ship on display...

An
hour later
Potemkin
rose to a depth
of sixty feet. The snorkel and a radar antenna broke the surface for
half an
hour and then disappeared. A lonely old Tunisian fisherman saw what he
thought
was a strange blue light in the sea and called his mate, who was
asleep. By the
time he woke up and arrived on deck, the strange light was gone, and
the
fisherman, who of late had been accused of seeing things because of
failing
eyesight, never mentioned it to anyone.

Seventy
crewmen were transferred to barracks ashore, leaving a skeleton crew of
twenty-nine men on
Barracuda
to supervise the
repairs to the bow.

Pisaro
called Sorensen and Lopez into his office. "At ease," he said,
offering his tin of cigars. "Sit down and light up if you like."

Lopez
selected a Havana, and Sorensen stuck a Lucky in his mouth.

Pisaro
leaned back in his chair. "We're going to do the work of ten weeks in
ten
days. So, the word for everybody is 'no slack.' That goes for crew and
civilians alike. They've flown in a 'tiger team' from the naval
shipyard at Portsmouth,
New Hampshire. These guys are the best, they know their jobs, but they
don't
have to live with their work. We do. Lopez, I want you all over the
welders.
They're going to take off your roof, Chief. You make sure they put it
back
right."

"Check,
Commander."

"Sorensen,
you stand over the electricians every minute while they replace the
sonars.
Anything they touch, you test."

"Aye
aye, sir."

"Very
well. You'll want some help. Ace."

"Yes,
sir. I sent Davic ashore, but I need
Willie Joe.
I might as well keep Fogarty, too. He'll have a chance to see the
system torn apart."

"Very
well. Any
questions?"

"Yes,
sir," said
Sorensen.
"Will there be a court of inquiry?"

"You
bet, but not
until we return to
Norfolk. Our orders are to get
Barracuda
back to sea
as quickly as
possible."

Lopez
asked,
"What about liberty for the
men who are staying on the ship?"

"We'll
see how it
goes with the repairs,
Chief. The men ashore are already going in rotation. Anything else? No?
Then
that's all. Dismissed."

A
Navy tug nudged
Barracuda
into the
well of the floating dry dock. A canopy was stretched over the sail,
the gates
locked, and the water pumped out. Gently, the sub settled onto the
steel braces
of the huge repair ship. Naked, with the entire 252 feet of teardrop
hull exposed.
Barracuda
was a beached Leviathan of massive proportions.

The
tiger team
from Portsmouth, a polished
and professional assortment of specialists in the art of submarine
repair,
turned on portable floodlights and began to erect scaffolding over the
bow and
eighty feet down the starboard side where the Russian sub had scraped
along the
hull.

While
the
scaffolding was under construction,
Sorensen went up on deck to see what the Russians had done to his ship.
He had
to lie on his belly and skitter crablike over the hull to get a look at
the
damaged sonars. For half an hour he lay spreadeagled, trying to match
what he
saw with what he had heard during the collision. It looked as though
Godzilla
had walked across the bow, gouging out steel with every step.

The
point of
impact was directly in the
center of a torpedo tube door. The Soviet sub had sideswiped two
torpedo doors
and six sonar transducers. The outer hull, the thin shell of steel that
contained the ballast tanks, had sustained a small puncture, but none
of the
tanks was ruptured. No vital piping was damaged.

He
tried to
imagine what had happened to the
Russian sub. How had she sustained enough damage to sink and implode?
Did her
reactor scram? Did she suffer stern plane failure? Was her hull
ruptured? Did
she lose her prop? He climbed back through the hatch and into the ship,
his
mind racing through the possibilities. He stood in the control room,
watching
the electricians, pondering what to do. Finally he knocked on Pisaro's
door.

"Come
in. What is
it. Ace?"

"Sir,
I request
permission to listen to
the tape of the collision. I would like you to listen with me, Mr.
Pisaro. I
want to edit the tape."

"What
do you
mean, Sorensen?"

"If
we could just
listen to the tape,
sir, you'll hear what I mean."

"All
right."

A
minute later
Sorensen and Pisaro were alone
in the sonar room. Pisaro broke the seal on a reel of tape, and
Sorensen
threaded it into one of the big recorders.

They
listened to
the voices on the command
intercom, the machinery noises, and then the clash of the collision
reverberated around the room, followed by the torpedo motor and the
implosions.
When it ended, Sorensen reversed the tape to the point where the
Russian fired
the torpedo, and again they listened to the high whine of the torpedo's
gas
turbine motor.

"What
does it
sound like to you,
sir?"

"It
sounds like a
Russian torpedo,
Sorensen. I think hearing that sound and living to tell about it is a
fucking
miracle."

"It
appears that
way, sir. I heard the
motor, and I saw a guide-wire on the screen, but I won't swear that is
a
torpedo."

"What
else could
it have been?"

"I
don't know,
but everything that sub
did was strange. It was trying to make us think it was
Swordfish
when it
wasn't. I don't trust any of the sounds I heard from that sub. Just
because it
sounded like a torpedo doesn't mean it was a torpedo."