Crash Dive: An Alex Hawke Story (12 page)
At Sea, Aboard
K-550 Aleksandr Nevskiy
T
here is a problem, sir,” the Russian submarine’s
starpom
, or executive officer, said, approaching and saluting his captain. The man, Aleksandr Ivanov-Pavlov, was ramrod straight, inside and out, and it had served him well over the years.
“Problem, Aleksandr? No! Aboard this vessel? Tell me it’s not true.”
The Central Command Post (CCP) men and officers nearby smiled at their skipper’s infamous sarcasm. It was one of the reasons they not only respected him, but liked him.
The captain smiled his famously enigmatic smile, his teeth white in his full salt-and-pepper beard. A career submariner, the oldest-serving skipper in the Russian Navy, the barrel-chested, white-haired Sergei Petrovich Lyachin, had recently been honored with command of the
Nevskiy,
Russia’s newest nuclear ballistic submarine. It had been a decidedly mixed blessing.
The new boat had cost a billion dollars. She could dive to a depth of six hundred meters and run at a maximum speed of thirty knots on the surface, twenty-eight knots submerged, all official numbers only, of course. Her real performance parameters were highly classified. In addition to powerful antiship torpedoes, her armament included sixteen Bulava SLBM ballistic missiles and six SS-N-15 cruise missiles. Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov, commander in chief of the Russian Navy, had described the
Nevskiy
as the most effective multipurpose submarine in the world.
Effective, perhaps, but plagued with a cascade of ever more difficult problems and now, according to the XO, it seemed she had yet another.
Lyachin, an old Cold Warrior, had formerly served in the Northern Fleet for many years. Respected, liked, and not a little feared by his crew, the stern-faced sub driver was commonly referred to as
Barya,
father.
Lyachin had recently endured weeks of dry-dock repairs to his malfunctioning ballast controls and dive planes. All of this courtesy of Hugo Chavez’s navy technicians, in a steamy, mosquito-ridden port of La Guaira on the verdant coast of Venezuela. The insects were starting to get on his nerves. Standing on the sub’s conning tower early one evening, he had said to his chief engineer, “Hell, Arkady, you kill one Venezuelan mosquito and ten more come to its funeral.”
La Guaira was the port city for Caracas, Venezuela.
Nevskiy
had been in dry dock there while all necessary repairs were effected and the boat’s
zampolit,
the KGB political officer, attended a series of secret meetings with President Hugo Chavez and his advisers. The Russians and the Venezuelans were planning joint naval exercises for the following spring. Stick a little needle in the American navy’s arrogant balloon, right in their own backyard.
A
fter a miserable three weeks, Captain Lyachin was finally once again where he felt most comfortable, under the water and on patrol in the Caribbean Sea. His mission was to conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions against the Americans. He had also resumed playing cat and mouse with an American Virginia class sub, SSN 775, the USS
Texas
. He knew the man in command of the
Texas,
a formidable opponent named Captain Flagg Youngblood. They’d never met, of course, but each man had long enjoyed their underwater confrontations in the oceans of the world.
Lyachin was privately struggling with a grave secret. It was something so outlandish that he had not even confided his suspicions to his XO. He was beginning to suspect that his sub’s multiplying problems were not simply human error, bad luck, or bad engineering. He thought perhaps his boat was the target of invasive electronic warfare, directed from the nearby American sub
Texas
. Ever since the infamous Stuxnet takedown of the Iranian centrifuge, he’d worried that one day warships might suffer a similar fate.
Intel he’d seen indicated three countries were leading in this new techno arms race: Israel, China, and the United States.
He had done considerable research on the subject for the fleet commander, who then ordered him to host seminars on offensive and defensive electronic warfare at the Naval War College whenever he was land-bound.
Stuxnet, he told his classes, was a fearsome cyberweapon, first discovered by a security firm based in Belarus. It is like a worm that invades and then spies on and reprograms high-value infrastructures like Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz. It is also capable of hiding its pathways and its changes. Many in the military considered it so powerful as to lead to the start of a new worldwide arms race. If you can take down a nuclear power plant, they reasoned, why not a nuclear submarine?
Lyachin was now beginning to believe that the U.S. Navy had somehow acquired the ability to use just such cyberweapons to influence events aboard his vessel by somehow subverting or overcoming his built-in electronic firewalls.
Nevskiy
was nearly six hundred feet long and a fourth-generation Borei class. At thirty-two thousand tons submerged, she was roughly the size of a World War II aircraft carrier. She was, according to the Russian Admiralty, state of the art. But to Lyachin’s chagrin, she had been besieged with myriad problems in the past months. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had proudly pronounced her seaworthy prior to the launching at Vladivostok and she’d headed for the Caribbean.
And that’s when the real trouble started.
The
Nevskiy
’s XO, Lieutenant Aleksandr Ivanov-Pavlov, smiled back at his captain’s wry response to this most recent dose of bad news. He understood the old man’s sense of humor. Or he pretended to, at any rate. Son of a powerful Kremlin insider, young Aleksandr had been learning the political ropes since childhood. His father had been murdered in a KGB power struggle that had left him bereft of two uncles as well.
It was his close relationship with the
Nevskiy
’s captain that engendered free-flowing communications between the boat’s skipper and its 118-man crew, comprising 86 commissioned and warrant officers and 32 noncommissioned officers and sailors.
Captain Lyachin was seated in his raised black leather command chair in the center of the CCP. His command post was set just forward on the conning tower and aft of the torpedoes, the second compartment in the boat. The CCP, an oval-shaped room, was fairly spacious, but with thirty or so submariners crowded inside, it felt and smelled like a traditional Russian
banya,
or steam bath. The captain, frustrated in his efforts to quit smoking, lit another cigarette, his tenth.
To Lyachin’s right sat his helmsman, gripping a wheel the size of a dinner plate that controlled the boat’s aft stabilizers. Next to him was the planesman, who controlled the sub’s hydroplanes. His responsibility was to “steer” the boat up and down while submerged, or remain at any given depth the captain had ordered.
Arrayed in front of these men was a bank of computer screens showing depth, speed, and course, among other vitally important information. Next to them, the sonar officer, Lieutenant Petrov, monitored his screen, which displayed a flickering cascade of sound. In addition, the compartment had consoles for radar, weapons, electronic countermeasures, and damage control, all manned by specialists.
Petrov suddenly got a hit, but the signal was buried in surface clutter and needed to be washed. He leaned forward and thumbed the switch initiating the ALS, algorithmic processing systems. The ALS would analyze and filter, eliminating any signals not matching his desired target. He kept his eyes focused on the screen, waiting for the results.
Lyachin sat back in his heavily padded chair and expelled a sigh of frustration. “Tell me, Aleksandr, what fresh hell do we have on our hands now?”
“Frankly, it doesn’t make any sense,” Ivanov-Pavlov, the XO said. “We are getting repeated power spikes from the reactor. On a regular basis. But we see no indication of anything amiss on any of the monitoring systems, nor cooling, nor do the surges affect normal functions and operations.”
“Radiation leaks?”
“No, sir.”
“Makes no sense,” Lyachin said, scratching his chin. His thoughts turned to his greatest fear, the loss of his boat, not with a bang, but with a bug.
“No, sir.”
“Electronic security, Alexei? Has the engineer been able to detect any evidence of a viral infection in any system?”
The XO thought before he responded. “Unless some traitor among the crew boarded this vessel at La Guaira with a dirty mobile phone up his ass, this boat is still clean.”
“Inform the engineer that I want another sweep. Stem to stern,” Lyachin said.
“Yes, Captain, right away.”
“Fucking hell,” the captain said under his breath. He had a very bad feeling about this. Too many inexplicable things had been going wrong aboard the
Nevskiy
. He was beginning to believe his own theorem that it wasn’t just bad luck or sloppy engineers. Perhaps, he thought, it was the
Texas
. Perhaps the American sub he’d been chasing was somehow capable of infiltrating—
There was a brief burst of metallic static from the speaker above the skipper. “Conn, Sonar, new contact bearing zero-nine-five. Designate contact number Alpha 7-3.”
Lyachin thumbed his microphone. “Captain, aye. What have you got, Lieutenant Petrov?”
“Distant contact. Surface. Large vessel. In these waters, I’d guess a tanker. Maybe a cruise ship, sir.
Amerikanski
.”
“Periscope depth,” Lyachin said. “Let’s have a look around. See what we see.” The other possibility, of course, was an American spy vessel, disguised as a freighter and crammed to the gunwales with offensive electronic weaponry. If not the
Texas,
then surely it was the American spy vessel that was bugging him.
“Periscope depth!” the XO called out.
“Periscope depth, aye,” said Lieutenant Viktor Kamarov, the planesman on duty, and he adjusted the boat’s attitude accordingly.
“Engine turns for fifteen knots,” Lyachin said.
“Fifteen knots, aye.”
“Initial course two-zero-one.”
“Two-zero-one, aye.”
Nevskiy,
which had been transiting the Bahamian Trough at two hundred meters, began to rise, driven by its two steam turbines and the hydrodynamic action of her diving planes.
“Raise periscope and power up the ESM mast,” Lyachin ordered. The ESM antenna was designed to sniff out electronic signals from any snooping subs or ships. If the
Texas,
or anyone else, was indeed trying to penetrate the
Nevskiy
’s electronic barriers, he needed to know about it now. Lyachin grabbed the periscope rising from its well and swiveled the two handles around to face west where the signal had been acquired.
Born cautious, he first quickly scanned the horizon. His search periscope featured infrared detection, a live-feed video facility, and satellite communications capability to forward real-time video to Russia’s Strategic Submarine Command. The weather had deteriorated since he’d submerged. The seas had to be running twelve to fifteen feet, the wind blowing spumy froth from the tips of the whitecaps. He kept swiveling a few degrees before coming to a stop. He could make out the distant silhouette of a large vessel on the horizon.
Nevskiy
was closing fast on the vessel, running at periscope depth, around sixteen to eighteen meters below the surface. Her periscope, which resembled a hooded cobra with a large glass eye, trailed a long white wake behind it.
Lyachin said, “Visual contact Alpha 7-3, bearing one-nine-five, speed fifteen knots. Large displacement American cruise ship. Headed for Jamaica, I would guess. And right into the teeth of that storm we’ve been tracking.” He turned to his
starpom
.
“Sound General Quarters, Aleksandr. Battle stations. Prepare for torpedo attack.”
The XO picked up a microphone and his voice echoed throughout the submarine.
“Battle stations! Battle stations! Prepare torpedo attack!”
Lyachin had received “Eyes Only” orders from the commander, Strategic Submarine Forces, South Atlantic Fleet, to launch a practice torpedo attack, a dry run, sometime before 0500 tomorrow. He had glanced up at the ship’s chronometer mounted on the bulkhead. Now was as good a time as any. And the big American cruise ship hauling sunburned tourists full of rum was as good a simulated target of opportunity as any.
T
ED
B
ELL
is the former chairman of the board and worldwide creative director of Young & Rubicam, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. He is the
New York Times
bestselling author of
Warlord, Hawke, Assassin, Pirate, Spy,
and
Tsar,
as well as the YA adventure novels
Nick of Time
and
The Time Pirate
. He is currently writer-in-residence at Cambridge University (U.K.) and visiting scholar at the Department of Politics and International Relations.
You can follow Ted Bell on Facebook and at TedBellBooks.com
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www.AuthorTracker.com
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FICTION
Warlord
Tsar
Spy
Pirate
Assassin
Hawke
YOUNG ADULT BOOKS
The Time Pirate
Nick of Time
Cover image provided by Lockheed Martin.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
CRASH DIVE
. Copyright © 2012 by Theodore A. Bell. Excerpt from
Phantom
copyright © 2012 by Theodore A. Bell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition FEBRUARY 2012 ISBN 9780062210821
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