Voyage of the Devilfish

The shock of the detonation had quickly penetrated Vlasenko’s sluggish doze induced by exposure to the cold. The bare titanium of the escape pod was so cold that his cheek burned from the direct contact. With a major effort he lifted his head off the curved wall of the sphere, skin sticking to the metal, pulling off a patch of flesh. The wound was the least of his problems. The onset of hypothermia from the freezing pod was evident in his numb limbs, and if he had been able to check a mirror he would have seen that his lips were blue. He tried to force himself to motion, struggling against the pain, struggling against the cold… The intruding submarine, he decided, must have managed to get a torpedo in close, and the fact that he was still alive at least meant that the enemy did not use nuclear warheads on their torpedoes — Severomorsk’s intelligence estimates had been correct, after all. Conventional explosives were relatively ineffective against Kaliningrad’s hardened combination of titanium and steel, and Vlasenko allowed himself a moment of pride in the ship that had, after all, survived a direct hit. He listened for the sounds of another torpedolaunch but heard none. Strange. If he had been in command he would have pumped out more weapons, even if he had already launched a salvo of Magp”ms. But the torpedo tubes were silent. Why?

USS DEVILFISH

A loud explosion reverberated from the port side of the stuffy control room. The controlroom watchstanders believed the OMEGA was sinking. Pacino, stone-faced, held up his palm for quiet.

A sound came from the other side of the control room, faint, high-pitched. A screw at high speed, coming from… the west… the direction the Magnum had driven off to. Commander Jon Rapier’s face lost its color. “Captain… it’s coming back. The Magnum. We fooled it once…”

“I know, XO. It could be doing a default routine. Why else would it have turned around and come back? This thing may detonate with or without contact on us, a nuisance detonation—”

“A damned sight worse than a nuisance, skipper.” Pacino looked at Rapier, standing there at the base of the periscope stand, scanning his face, looking for answers. Pacino was out of answers.

“Yes, XO. Much worse than a nuisance,” was all he said.

FS KALININGRAD

CONTROL COMPARTMENT ESCAPE POD

Captain Vlasenko strained to hear sounds from the inside of the control compartment. What was going on below now? Was Novskoyy approaching the enemy to return fire? Was he headed back to the polynya to transmit his doomsday message? He heard nothing. Complete silence.

A new thought occurred — what if the attacking submarine was Russian? What if Northern Fleet Headquarters had pieced together Novskoyy’s wild scheme and sent an attack submarine to stop him. It made sense — another Russian ship would try a collision before shooting them, to stop the transmission and try to save a crew held hostage by Novskoyy. The thought buoyed him as he began to hope for the success of the other submarine. Who would HQ have sent? The Smolensk? The Novgorod? The Nevski? The Leningrad? That would be an irony — Novskoyy sunk by his own former submarine Leningrad. How could he himself help them? There was nothing to bang on the pod wall with, so he couldn’t make noise. Wait — there was the lever for the manual-pod release. But then he realized the attacking submarine would not need noise. They had already found Kaliningrad with a close torpedo. Perhaps they would finish it off with their own Magnum. Was it right to hope for the sinking of his own ship?

After thinking on it a moment, he decided it would be better for the Kaliningrad to sink than for Novskoyy to let loose his incredibly destructive plan. Still, the thought of losing the Kaliningrad made him sick. As Vlasenko sat in the cold of the pod, his breath still clouding the air, his mind on terrible events he had no power to change, a Magnum nuclear-tipped torpedo only seven kilometers away, launched by the Kaliningrad, began to explode.

CHAPTER 20

SUNDAY, 19 DECEMBER 0945, GREENWICH MEAN TIME