George Wallace - Hunter Killer [Movie Tie-In]

Crawford stood, stretched, and stepped over to stand beside the navigator. He looked at the positions of the two subs, Miami and the unknown Russian, on the chart of the Arctic Ocean. Their tracks were on a course to pass just clear of the northernmost tip of that piece of frozen real estate. From there, it was a straight shot past Franz Josef Land, a small archipelago of mostly uninhabited islands at the edge of the permanent pack ice, into the Arctic Ocean, and then to the Bering Straits and the Pacific Ocean.

Crawford scratched the day-old stubble on his chin for a minute, lost in thought.

“Possible, Nav,” he answered. “It’s been a while since they’ve done an interocean transfer, and I don’t recall ever hearing about a winter one. If that’s what this is, something’s up and we’re in for a long haul. We better find ourselves a polynya. It’s time to tell the boss what we’re doing.”

Schutte pulled another chart out of the large roll he kept tucked under the table. He spread it out and put a coffee cup on each corner to hold it flat. The chart, the result of decades of polar research, showed the expected locations for polynyas in the wintertime Arctic. Still, it would be a real trick to find one so they could surface and get a quick message off to COMSUBLANT back in Norfolk. And do it while maintaining sonar contact on the Russian sub. They did not want to lose track of this intriguing boat right now.

Schutte shook his head as he perused the chart. “Not much around here, Skipper. Looks like the best bet is over near Novaya Zemlya. Chart says there should be a few sensible heat polynyas over there.”

“Okay, let’s head over that way.”

Gerson joined the two at the chart table.

“We still have good contact on this guy,” he reported. “The twenty-nine is holding him fine out to twenty thousand yards. He’s still steaming straight and normal, far as we can tell. Want to ease up a little closer and see if we can get any better info?”

Crawford shook his head. “No, XO. You weren’t around when we used to play with these guys all the time. We’re doing fine out here on the thin-line. If he is an Akula, we wouldn’t be able to detect him on the hull-mounted arrays until we were inside four thousand yards. That’s the same range he needs to be able to hear us. Getting counterdetected is bad.”

Gerson nodded in agreement. “I see what you mean. Not a good trade.”

“Besides, we don’t know what he’s up to,” Crawford continued. “If he’s not transiting to the Pacific after all, if he’s out here getting ready for some exercise or something, we might get caught up in the middle of that nonsense. Nope, better to stay out here in loose trail until we can see what this guy is up to.”

All three men stared hard at the mark on the chart that represented the Russian submarine, as if his identity and mission would magically come clear for them. There was nothing. The intrigue, the excitement of the hunt, had revived them.

Brad Crawford whistled tunelessly when he returned to his seat by the periscope.

Dimitriy Pishkovski pushed the buzzer button. He waited several seconds and pushed it again even harder, as if force might make the noise louder. He heard Sergei Andropoyov’s groggy voice on the other end of the phone.

“Yes, Dimitriy, what do you want?”

The Gepard ’s skipper had been catching a few minutes of rest in his stateroom.

“Captain, you asked to be awakened when we were an hour away from the rendezvous. We are ten kilometers from the point now.”

“Thank you, First Officer. Any contact with the K-461?”

Pishkovski held the phone in one hand while he pressed the buttons on the sonar repeater with the other, looking at all the displays for the hundredth time in the last few hours. The captain had voiced the question that had been hounding him for the last little while. He looked up from the sonar scope and shook his head as he spoke into the phone’s mouthpiece. “Captain, no sign of the K-461. I don’t understand. We are at the right place and on schedule. I have checked the navigation. Where could he be?”

“I will be right there. Perhaps Igorovich Serebnitskiv has been delayed and will arrive later.”

Or perhaps the bastard was playing games with them. Andropoyov didn’t trust Serebnitskiv one iota. He had seen too many indications of the man’s ruthless quest for promotion. He would stop at nothing to make Andropoyov look bad if it served his ambitions.

Pishkovski was unconvinced, too, and his voice showed it.

“Perhaps,” he said. He put the phone down and resumed searching the sonar screen for some sign of their comrade.

Captain Second Rank Igor Serebnitskiv watched the sonar display with undisguised glee. The dim white line that was the Gepard built from the southwest.

Andropoyov, the haughty bastard, was walking into the trap, unaware of his fate.

Where was the American boat? There was still a single trace on the display. The rest of the screen was lightly dusted with the snow of background noise, not even the subtlest hint of another sub.

Serebnitskiv allowed the Gepard to sail right on past, a kilometer in front of his icy hiding place, unaware of his presence. Surely the American would be following, sniffing like a dog following a bitch in heat . He waited while the new Russian boat glided well past, beyond the range of his sonar, and disappeared from the screen.

He studied the display. Still no trailing American.

Serebnitskiv knew he was out there. He could feel it in his bones, smell the stink of the foreign boat fouling his home waters.

It was time to revise the plan. The American would have to be enticed into the trap more forcefully.

It wasn’t the way Uncle Durov had ordered, but the old man was back in the cozy warmth of his office, not out here beneath the pack ice.

Serebnitskiv made his decision. The success of the mission depended on his ability to improvise, and that’s what he would do. Results were all that counted. His uncle would eventually acknowledge his brilliance.

The trace for the Gepard reappeared on the sonar screen, this time coming from the northeast.

She’s looking for us, Serebnitskiv thought. How heartwarming!

When the Gepard was in front of the Volk , a kilometer away, Serebnitskiv keyed a button on the high-frequency underwater telephone, sending a special coded pulse into the water at a frequency well above human hearing. The pulse was received by two transponders hidden inside the ballast tanks on the Gepard . They had been secretly placed there three years before, when she was still being built, and they had sat there, undetected, waiting for just this signal.

One of the transponders was hidden in the after ballast tank, right beneath the massive main shaft, where it penetrated the pressure hull. On recognition of Serebnitskiv’s signal, it shut a tiny microswitch, completing a circuit that energized a relay. The relay sent a small jolt of electricity into the primer circuit, firing a squib charge that ignited the main explosive charge waiting there.

Most of the explosive force vented downward and outward, instantly rupturing all the after ballast tanks. Sufficient energy jammed upward to bend the meter-thick shaft to a right angle and to punch a hole that was half a meter in diameter through ten-centimeter-thick high-strength steel and into the aft compartment of the new sub.

The other charge, sitting in the ballast tank beneath the torpedo room, also received and recognized the command signal. But a tiny leak had developed in the circuitry. The wiring to the microswitch had corroded through, so the circuit was not completed. The explosives sat there, inert, without the electric charge necessary to ignite them.