George Wallace - Hunter Killer [Movie Tie-In]

Serebnitskiv smiled as he both heard and felt the jolt of the explosion as it passed through the water and into the hull of his boat.

Now all he needed to do was wait while the wolf came charging to the squeals of the dying rabbit.

Michman Rudi Tschierschkey was lying in his bunk in the aftermost compartment on Gepard , trying to find a position to suit his aching muscles. Everyone else was forward, on the mess decks watching a movie, an old American Western that he normally would have wanted to see. Tonight he was too tired. Better to lie here in his bunk and try to get some sleep so he would be ready to go again in a few hours.

A long, hard day had been spent repairing the shoddy workmanship of the bastards at the Servomorsk Shipyard. Damn civilian workers didn’t care, as long as they got their daily ration of vodka.

This afternoon’s task had been to fix leaks in the still. Seawater kept seeping through bad solder joints into the distilled water, ruining it. He had to resolder most of them, and do it while bent double with his head and one arm inside the heat exchanger, a valve handle digging into his back.

He was getting too old for this. Submarining was a young man’s game. Maybe after this exercise, it was time for him to retire and find that nice warm beach on the Black Sea he had been promising himself and his long-suffering wife for so many years.

The sudden blast ripped the covers off Tschierschkey and flung him violently upward, into the bottom of the bunk above him. For a few seconds he was knocked senseless. Then the unmistakable roar and rush of seawater under pressure revived him.

It was a submariner’s worst nightmare: ice-cold seawater pouring in, the bilges already full, the boat sinking by the stern.

There was no time for panic. He pulled himself out of his bunk and fell hard against the after bulkhead.

Water was already waist deep, and bone-numbing cold.

Tschierschkey knew he had no hope of reaching the hatch and getting out of the compartment now. Even if he could, he wouldn’t be able to lift its massive weight to shut it all by himself.

The sailor didn’t have to ponder the situation. He was already a dead man. No retirement, no sitting on a beach on the Black Sea with his wife and children.

He would do what he had to do in order to save his boat.

Tschierschkey dove beneath the chilling water and fished around until he found the big red hydraulic handle that was mounted on the aft bulkhead. When his fingers located the handle, he yanked at it, but lost his grip as his cold, unfeeling fingers refused to obey the orders from his brain. He tried again, jerking it upward, forcing hydraulic oil into the piston for the emergency closure system.

The hatch slammed shut.

Rudi Tschierschkey floated there and waited as the compartment filled with water. Tears blended with the inrushing seawater as he thought of his wife, of his two boys, of the warm sand on the Black Sea beach that he would never feel beneath his feet.

The sudden explosion threw Sergei Andropoyov to the deck and slammed Pishkovski into the depth control station. The commander lay stunned and horrified for a moment as he felt the stern of his new sub begin to sink lower. He could see the depth gauge as his boat rapidly slid down into the depths.

Pishkovski was unconscious, slumped over, his body caught on some piping. Bright red blood streamed down from a gash on the first officer’s head, dripping onto the slanting deck.

Andropoyov pushed himself erect and climbed over to the main propulsion control station. He did his best to cling to stanchions and pipes to keep from being slammed against the after bulkhead.

The michman who should have been sitting at the propulsion control panel was gone. Andropoyov spotted his limp form resting against the after bulkhead, where the blast had tossed him.

The captain yanked the controls to force the screw to answer an emergency “ahead” bell. He watched in disbelief as nothing happened. It didn’t respond at all.

Gepard was no longer moving forward.

Instead, she was sliding backward into the cold black depths of the Barents Sea.

Every indication told Andropoyov that something was terribly wrong. The explosion, whatever had caused it, had resulted in flooding somewhere in the after part of his boat. If this happened in open water, the procedure would be obvious: He would blow the water out of the ballast tanks and bob to the surface as quickly as they could.

That wouldn’t work beneath ten meters or more of granite-hard ice. The Gepard would be smashed like an egg against the ice pack if he tried to surface here, and that was if he could even get air into the tanks with this much angle on the boat.

Andropoyov was stymied. The depth gauge ticked away as the boat sank backward.

The depth gauge read three hundred and thirty meters when the stern of Gepard slammed into the muddy bottom of the sea. The tail of the sub plowed out a trench over fifteen meters long as she ground to an abrupt halt. The force of the bottoming tore Andropoyov loose from the grip he had on a pipe and flung him hard against the deck. He was fighting for breath once again, even as the desperation of their plight hit him full force.

The men trapped inside the Gepard were alone on the bottom of one of the most isolated and inhospitable seas in the world.

“Damn! What the…”

Aaron Miller tore his headphones off, shook his head hard and tossed his headphones on the deck, wiggling a finger in each ear. They rang from the blast, amplified by the BQQ-10 sonar receiver. The sonar screen blossomed into a white blob as the intense noise blotted out everything else in the sea.

Miller shook his head again. He reached above him to grab the microphone that was hanging there. Still deafened, he yelled when he spoke. “Conn, sonar! Loud transient on bearing three-four-seven. Sounded like an explosion.”

Andy Gerson glanced at the fire control computer’s solution for the mysterious Akula-class sub they had been shadowing for the last day. Sure enough, it was on bearing three-four-seven.

Bill Wittstrom was the first one to see the signal light blink out on the narrow-band tracker.

“Hey, we’ve lost the tracker on the Akula!” he yelled.

Commander Brad Crawford jumped up from the stool where he had been resting and stared wide-eyed at the sonar repeater. Sure enough, the noise signal from the mystery sub was abruptly gone. He punched the buttons, leafing through the displays in a vain attempt to find her again.

The clamor from the Russian sub had not faded away. It disappeared.

It didn’t make sense. The explosion, loud as it was, would not blank out the narrow-band signal, only the broadband. Yet the sub appeared to be gone.

Crawford knew he needed answers, and he needed them now! He grabbed the 21MC microphone.

“Sonar, Captain. What happened to the Akula?” he demanded.

The sonar supervisor was just as mystified as his skipper. He was frantically punching buttons on the narrow-band stack.

“Captain, the signal’s just gone,” he answered. “It went away at the same time as the explosion. I checked the tapes. It just went away. Our equipment checks out fine. No problems at this end.”

So that left one explanation. It was not a heartening one.

Whatever had caused the explosion somehow involved their mystery sub. That was not good. Not good at all. If the boat they had been trailing had some kind of accident on board, there could be fellow submariners out there battling for their lives at that very moment.

Crawford chewed his lower lip as he weighed in his mind the possibilities and potential courses of action. A sub in distress up here on top of the world, underneath all this ice, was pretty much on its own. There would be no way for it to signal that it needed help and no way for help to get to it in a hurry, even if someone knew a boat was in trouble.