Peter Sasgen - War Plan Red

“Kapitan, I hear something, a decoy…. Ah!”

Another clap of thunder shook the boat.

Alex huddled with Scott and asked, “Did we get him?”

The sonar display still had not cleared sufficiently to provide a picture Scott could evaluate.

“I can’t tell for sure. Our decoys may have seduced his fish like his seduced ours.”

Overloaded with data, the computer running the K-480’s sonar system paused, then recycled and began reprocessing information. On the monitors, squiggles and blips that had represented torpedoes and targets turned into rows of straight lines and dots.

“Where the hell is she?” Scott queried the sonarman.

He shook his head. “I don’t hear anything, sir. Only a single decoy, one of ours, I think, very faint.” “All engines stop,” Scott ordered. “Rig for ultraquiet. Secure main circulating pumps. Right full rudder.”

“Why are we laying to?” Alex said in a small voice as the boat wound down and began to coast. She watched the compass repeater unwind. “And why are we turning around?”

Scott preoccupied, snapped at her over his shoulder. “Litvanov leaves nothing to chance. I’m betting that he’s as confused as we are and will want to know whether or not he got us.”

“But won't he assume, as you did, that both torpedoes were seduced by decoys?”

“There’s always that shade of doubt.”

The computer system came back on line with a confusing array of targets, any one of which could be the K-363.

“And what if Litvanov does come back?”

Scott tore his gaze from the monitors and gave Alex a vexed look. But she had put steepled fingers to her lips and closed her eyes. Scott wondered if she was praying. He decided he’d take whatever help he could get.

Litvanov looked at the sonar monitor and saw no sign of another submarine nearby or any traces of one crashing to the seabed in pieces after being torpedoed. The water falls simply cascaded down the sonar monitors undisturbed. It could be a trick by the Amerikanski, some tactic he wasn’t aware of. Litvanov blew through his teeth. An American skipper in a Russian sub. Unbelievable. What he knew about U.S. submarine doctrine dictated that the American skipper would have tried to outrun the torpedo, not go silent and rely on a decoy. But this skipper was not your typical American skipper, which made him very dangerous. Not only that, but the two torpedoes that had detonated less than three kilometers away from the K-363’s current position would draw Russian planes and patrol craft. Litvanov felt the box around him getting smaller. Still, he had to know.

“Both engines ahead slow,” he commanded. “Helmsman, put us on a reciprocal course.”

“Aye, Kapitan.”

“Fire Control, shift to constant data upload and stand by.”

Litvanov’s eyes roamed the control panels: They still had four tubes loaded and green-lighted. Torpedo gyros and turbines spun to prelaunch.

“Ready to fire, sir.”

Then something flashed at the periphery of Litvanov’s vision. Zakayev on his feet, armed with the tool Veroshilov had brandished, dodged around equipment as he sprinted for the dogged watertight door in the after bulkhead of the CCP.

Litvanov hurled after him, but Zakayev was too fast. He wrenched open the door and dove through the opening. Litvanov, pistol in his fist, arrived in time to have the heavy door slam shut in his face and hear the dogs crash home.

The charges, Litvanov thought. The demolition charges.

“Ali! Ali! Ali!” screamed Litvanov after he, too, had yanked open the door and dived through the opening. He thundered down the narrow passageway and collided with the corner of a partition where the passageway jogged right and opened on the deserted after machinery space.

It was a part of the ship he rarely visited and smelled of oil, diesel, and hot metal, a place where off-duty sailors congregated to smoke dope and drink vodka when the captain wasn’t aboard. The passageway continued on past the machinery space and ended at the sealed door that gave access to the reactor control compartment. On the other side of the reactor control compartment was the shielded tunnel with its airlock to the reactor compartment itself, and the set charges.

Zakayev suddenly darted into the passageway from his hide near the watertight door and hurled the heavy tool at Litvanov. It missed and caromed off the partition with a loud clang but struck Litvanov’s right forearm raised to fend it off. Pain seared through his arm like a bolt of electricity, which brought him to his knees in agony. He staggered like a drunk and fell against the thin metal partition and felt it give under his weight. The pistol had skittered away and, fogged by pain, he couldn't find it.

“Ali! Ali! Ali!” he cried.

“A dropped hatch lid, Kapitan?”

“I don’t think so. Play it back.”

The sonarman flipped switches, adjusted gain, and punched Replay.

The clear sound of steel ringing on steel came from the speaker over the sonar monitoring station.

“Sounds like the same noise we heard before, metal on metal, like a bell,” Scott said. “Not a hatch lid, something else, something lighter.”

“A dropped tool?” Abakov said.

“That’s what I think,” Scott said. He tapped the sonarman’s shoulder. “Input it to fire control.”

“Aye, Kapitan.”

Scott swung toward the fire control station, where data began to flow between sonar, fire control, and the torpedo room.

“You were right,” Alex said. “Litvanov came back.”

Scott, intent on the plot he’d scribbled on paper with the automated system down for ultraquiet, ignored her.

A moment later a barely audible sonar contact appeared as a trace on the sonar monitor.

“If it’s him, Kapitan,” said the sonarman, “he’s maneuvering on a very low power setting. Convection cooling, no pumps.”

“Yes, he’s barely making steerage.”

Scott saw the range to the target click down but asked anyway.

“Three kilometers, sir.”

“And dead ahead,” said Abakov to himself.

“At that rate it’ll take him all day to get here.” Scott stood back from the monitors and stretched a kink from his back. “Let’s try something.”

The men heard this and tensed, ready to carry out Scott’s commands.

“We’re going to fire a fish at him with a wide initial gyro angle and also with a sharp cutback to get the fish in behind him. There’s no way he can ignore a fish in the water, even if it’s not aimed directly at him initially. He'll hear it coming and haul out—fast. And that'll give the fish a target to home in on.”

Alex started to say something but Scott silenced her. “By the time he gets a bearing on our torpedo and figures out where we are, we'll have moved off the firing point and put another fish in the water.

Maybe up his ass.”

Litvanov sagged against the knob and switch-studded control panel connected to the auxiliary diesel generator set. He gripped the tool Zakayev had thrown, too weak to lift it. Points of light danced before his eyes. He felt slightly nauseous and wondered if he had a concussion, or worse.

Litvanov peeked around the corner of the control panel at the sealed watertight door to the reactor control compartment. He knew exactly where Zakayev was hiding, in a small storage locker used for stowing lubricants and clean cotton waste. Because he was small in stature, Zakayev could easily fit inside the locker. But he had trapped himself. And if he tried to open the water tight door, Litvanov had only to throw the tool a short distance to brain him or at least smash his backbone. Litvanov knew his arm was broken and couldn’t possibly go hand-to-hand with Zakayev.

Litvanov, sitting on deck, looked up and saw an SC1 mike clipped to the edge of the auxiliary control panel. He reached up and undipped it and, with the cable stretched out full, toggled the Talk button and called the CCP, his voice echoing throughout the ship from speakers mounted in every compartment.