Voyage of the Devilfish

“Jesus,” Adams breathed. The ion exchange resin of the purification system, he knew, kept the radioactive particles in the nuclear coolant down to a minimum. Without resin the engine room could become a high-radiation area. COMSUBLANT wouldn’t order a boat to sea without resin unless the situation was damn serious…

Sweeney took a deep breath. “I haven’t seen anything like this since ‘82, and even then, it turned out that COMSUBLANT and COMSUBPAC had a bet on who could scramble their sub forces the quickest.”

“I remember,” Adams said. He had been XO of the Whale at the time, but talk of the deployment exercise had gone on for years.

“You don’t send a boat to sea without resin for a bet,” Sweeney said.

“What do you hear in the wardroom?” Adams asked. The wardroom was the seat of scuttlebutt.

“My intel officer was reluctant to brief me. Can you believe it? My own damn intel officer worried I’d leak it.” Adams hadn’t had time to consult intelligence. The rush to get the pierside boats under way had taken all his concentration and time. “Bill, tell me what the hell’s going on.

I haven’t heard anything.”

“Well, it seems the Russians went to sea this morning with 120 attack submarines. Every damn ship in the Northern Fleet. No one knows why. They must have been nursing those boats for months getting ready for this. Their maintenance problems are supposed to be worse than ours.”

“Why? They’re not crazy. What’s it supposed to mean? Why are we reacting this way?” Sweeney shrugged. “I’m no intel spook, Ben. I’m gonna head home and watch CNN until my eyeballs fall out. Not much to do here.” When the ships were at sea their skippers reported directly to Admiral Donchez, COMSUBLANT. The commodores had no tactical control.

Adams waved at his counterpart and walked back up the gangway to the Hercules, exhausted. He climbed the ladders to his stateroom, gathered his briefcase, waved to his Chief of Staff and walked back down the ramp to the pier and the parking lot. His Mercedes was in the first reserved space at the end of the pier. As he started to unlock the driver’s side door he saw a Devilfish sticker the size of a dinnerplate plastered to the window, its grinning ram’s head staring out at him. Patch Pacino’s son’s way of saying good-bye. Good hunting, he murmured, wishing he were more than a damn pierside jockey.

CHAPTER 10

WEDNESDAY, 15 DECEMBER

ARCTIC OCEAN

BENEATH THE POLAR ICECAP

Admiral Novskoyy stood in the Kaliningrad’s control compartment and watched the topsounder display table. The short shriek of the topsounding sonar was audible through both hulls of the ship as it searched for a polynya — the open water that formed when heavy rafts of ice were torn apart. The open water of a polynya might last all of ten minutes, the admiral knew, before skinning over and freezing in the subzero temperature, and within days the two disparate rafts would again be welded together into a solid mass of ice. Novskoyy peered at the navigation display tied into the high-frequency-contour sonar. The topsounder “sensed” the ice’s thickness and mapped out the shape on the navigation display. The plot was two-dimensional but using a hybrid holography technology, it looked three-dimensional, a tight grid deformed into mountains and valleys and plateaus. The mountains corresponded to thick ice, the flat plains to thin ice. In the center of the nav plot was a “bug,” a small illuminated circle that symbolized the ship, which now was in the middle of a large elliptical field of flatness, a valley surrounded by large but distant ridges. Clearly the polynya was big enough to allow surfacing four vessels the size of the Kaliningrad. Captain Vlasenko, the Deck Officer for the ascent, stood in the periscope well.