Voyage of the Devilfish

“Indeed, sir. As you can see, each of the twenty-five submarines here has an orange spot showing mid-length in her hull. Those thermal traces are reactor cores. They look like that when they’re critical, making power, but also when they’re shut down. But look aft of each reactor. The steam lines inside the turbine rooms are also glowing. These submarines are all hot, the reactors are critical. They’re making steam.” Rummel now clicked the control on the slide projector and the machine ran through a dozen similar shots, each a different Kola Peninsula base, each showing nuclear submarines with reactors and engine rooms hot.

A knock came at the door and a petty officer looked in at Rummel, handed him a sealed envelope lined with a red banner and quickly left.

“How old are those photos?” Donchez asked.

“Three hours, sir.”

“We need to see what’s happening now.” Rummel opened the envelope. “This is hot off the TS fax machine, sir.” He pulled out a long strip of paper with the same kinds of coloring as the slides. Donchez turned up the room lights as Rummel spread the fax out from one end of the long table to the other— every fourteen inches was a photo of a submarine base. Donchez looked from one photo to the next. “They’re gone. Every god damned one of them.” Rummel nodded, face tight. Each photo showed the same bases as the three-hour-old shots, but in the new photos the piers were empty.

“How many attack subs are in their Northern Fleet?”

“One hundred twenty, sir.”

“Any in dock for repair?”

“No, sir. Not one.”

“Any activity out of Vladivostok?”

“No, sir. The Pacific Fleet is dead quiet. Almost all their submarines are in port, shut down, getting routine maintenance. This activity is altogether confined to the Northern Fleet.” Donchez sat back down in his seat while Rummel folded up the fax. The cigar’s tip had gone cold. “Get SOSUS on NESTOR,” he ordered, referring to the secure UHF radio telephone to the Sound Surveillance System Control Room on the eastern shore of Maryland, the receiving and analysis point for the ten thousand miles of U.S. sonar-array cables laid on the Atlantic. In the two minutes it took to get the SOSUS duty officer on the line, Donchez had summoned his own duty officer to the conference room.

“SOSUS CONTROL ROOM. DUTY OFFICER,” the speaker rasped out to the room. Donchez nodded at Rummel.

“SOSUS, this is SUBLANT. Report any detects in the North Atlantic and Barents Sea that are new within the last three hours. Over.”

“SUBLANT, SOSUS. SORRY FOR THE DELAY-THERE SHOULD BE AN IMMEDIATE MESSAGE COMING OVER YOUR UHF SATELLITE NETWORK NOW. WE HAVE MULTIPLE SONAR DETECTS, TOO MANY TO DISTINGUISH. CONTACTS SEEM TO BE WARSHIPS WITH SUBMARINE-TYPE SCREW PATTERNS. BEARINGS GENERALLY CORRELATE TO THE NORTH ATLANTIC AND REGIONS IN VICINITY OF KOLA PENINSULA AND NOVAYA ZEMLYA.

OVER.” Rummel acknowledged and broke the connection. Donchez turned to the SUBLANT duty officer.

“Assemble my staff in this conference room, then get on NESTOR to CINCLANTFLEET and tell Admiral McGee I’ll be briefing him in a half hour.” The Duty Officer left in a hurry.

“What do you think, Rummel?” Donchez asked, pulling his Piranha lighter from his jacket pocket to relight his dead cigar.

“A deployment exercise… what else? Things are pretty cozy between us and them these days…”

Donchez pointed to the fax photographs. “Does that look cozy? Get on the horn with Langley and ask about the Russian SSN-X-27 cruise missiles’ status. Put the same question to OP Oh Nineteen at the Pentagon. I want to know if these attack subs are loaded with anything that could be tossed at us. Cozy, my ass.”

Rummel took off without a word. Donchez watched the smoke from the Havana rise toward the ceiling, and wondered what in hell Admiral Alexi Novskoyy was up to now.

ARCTIC OCEAN

BENEATH THE POLAR ICECAP

Captain Vlasenko knocked on the door to his commandeered stateroom. It was time to take back the ship.

Novskoyy called out, “Who is it?”

“Captain Vlasenko, sir.”

Through the door Vlasenko heard the rustling of papers, the sound of books being shuffled and the safe door being shut. Finally the door mechanism clicked as it was unlocked. The door opened and Vlasenko saw Novskoyy’s back as the admiral returned to his seat at his desk. The desk’s papers and books had been covered by a chart, laid blank side up, revealing only the TOP SECRET stamps on its blank wide surface.

“What can I do for you, Captain?” The glance at the stateroom had momentarily thrown Vlasenko off balance.