George Wallace - Hunter Killer [Movie Tie-In]

He plopped down in his chair and grabbed the outside phone. “Joe Glass here, Commodore.”

“Well, Joe, it’s good to hear your voice. How is it going out there?”

“Real good. This is a good boat and a good crew. They learn real fast. I gotta tell you one thing, though. When I climbed up on the bridge for that first under way out of Norfolk and the officer of the deck turned around and asked for permission to get under way, I looked behind me to see where you were standing. It took me a few seconds to realize he was talking to me.”

Glass could hear Ward chuckling on the other end of the line.

“Joe, that happens to every new skipper on his first time out. I remember feeling the same thing myself the first time we got Spadefish under way.” Ward paused for a moment for an obvious change of subject. “Joe, I’ve been looking at your exercise messages. It looks like you got your butt kicked on the first run.”

Glass grimaced. He might have expected it. It was like a high school teacher inspecting a former student’s first college grades.

“Yeah, Turbulent is real good and a lot quieter than we thought. We got in too close and she shot us before we were ready. We all learned a valuable lesson there.”

Glass wasn’t about to go into detail, to talk about Edwards’s unjustified reliance on Zillich’s “gut feel,” or the slow response of the fire control party. He wouldn’t share those things with anyone else, not even his old skipper. That kind of information was kept inside the lifelines. Outside the lifelines, any problem with Toledo was a problem with her skipper.

There was a serious tone in Ward’s voice when he went on. “I’m glad you learned it when the lesson was cheap. Next time may not be. That’s why we hold drills, Skipper. Let’s go secure.”

Glass felt a sudden shiver of cold go down his spine as he pushed the button on the secure phone. He listened to the electronics chirp and crackle for a few seconds, until the red light flickered to green. Ward’s voice now sounded oddly distant and hollow.

“Hold you secure, Joe.”

“Hold you the same,” Glass answered. “Now, what’s going on? This ain’t some exercise.”

Ward paused a moment before answering. “Day before yesterday, SUBLANT received a message from Miami . She was on one of those scientific exercises up in the Barents Sea at the ice edge. Had a load of eggheads from Woods Hole on board, listening to narwhals.”

“That’s Brad Crawford’s boat, isn’t it? He was in the same Prospective Commanding Officer class with me. A real good guy.”

“Yeah, Crawford has Miami ,” Ward answered. “You’re right. He’s a good one. Real cool under pressure. Great service reputation. He seems to have all the right buttons punched. Anyway, back to the story. SUBLANT gets this message from Crawford. He says he picked up a new type of Akula coming out of Polyarnyy on his thin-line array. It was real quiet and not showing most of the Akula tonals.”

Glass whistled and rubbed his chin. “A new boat out of Russia? They haven’t even been getting the ones they have under way lately. I hear they have no money for upkeep and the boats that they have are rusting alongside the pier. How the hell are they going to build something new?”

“I have no idea, Joe,” Ward replied. “An even bigger question is how they could keep something like that secret from us. Anyway, Miami reports trailing this new boat up under the ice. They get two hundred miles northwest of Novaya Zemlya when the Akula explodes and sinks. Crawford said he talked to survivors on the underwater telephone and they’re in dire straits. They don’t know what happened but they’ve lost their reactor power. They’re on the bottom in a thousand feet of water and under a lot of pack ice.”

“Jesus,” Glass answered. “New boat. Not shaken down. Who knows what might have gone sour on the thing? Okay, so we tell the Russians what we know and they crank up an effort to go up there and get their guys. They’re not that far from Polyarnyy. You still haven’t explained why we’re here in the middle of all this hurry-up and secrecy.”

“You’re getting ahead of the story, Joe. The Russians claim they don’t have any boats at sea at all right now and that none have gone missing. Our last satellite pass did show all their boats accounted for, all cold iron sitting right there alongside their piers. To top that, they are bringing up that old claim again about the Barents being a territorial sea. They told us in no uncertain terms to stay out of there.”

A clanging bell outside the door grabbed Glass’s attention. He looked up to see one of the green war-shot torpedoes sliding ominously down the loading hoist. “Jon, you haven’t told me why we’re loading war-shot torpedoes if we’re looking for a sunken Russian sub.”

“Those aren’t ordinary fish you’re loading,” Jon Ward said. “They are specially outfitted for underice operations. The sonar and the electronics are tuned for that environment. Those are the only four underice ADCAP torpedoes in our entire inventory.”

Glass swallowed hard. “You still haven’t answered my question. Why do I need them?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Joe Glass could hear the faint hum of the secure phone line, the creaking of the hoist that was lowering the sophisticated ordnance into the bowels of his boat.

“Joe, Miami was supposed to communicate again twelve hours after her first message,” Jon Ward answered. “We haven’t heard a thing since. She has been overdue for more than a day now.”

“What do you think, Jon?”

“I don’t know. But, Joe, you better be damn careful up there.”

Joe Glass watched from high atop the sail as the big yellow-and-orange Royal Navy tugs churned up alongside his submarine, preparing to pull Toledo away from the pier. He took a deep breath. The chill wind blowing down from the north felt invigorating, even as the bits of sleet and snow it bore stung as they nipped at his face.

Dawn was still three hours away. It had been a long night, capping off a hard day. Glass knew he was about to embark with his boat and crew on a mission that had real purpose. There was also the uncertainty. He had no way to know if he and his men were ready for what they might find up there on top of the world, beneath the unforgiving ice.

His equipment was state-of-the-art, the best his government had, and he had worked with his men long enough to have confidence in their abilities. Uncertain missions were what he had trained for his entire Navy career.

He was as ready as he would ever be!

The Mystic was latched to the sub’s back, rigged for the long transit to the polar ice. The special ADCAP torpedoes were stowed in the torpedo room, ready for tube loading later. Eric Hobson, the weapons officer, had put them to bed along with the unmanned submersible.

The crew, those not manning watches for the under way, were still stowing food for the run north. Dan Perkins and his DSRV team were finishing the final checks on their baby and stowing their gear for the long, rapid ride.

“We’re ready to go, Skipper,” Hobson yelled up to Glass. The weapons officer stood in the bridge cockpit just below him. “Tugs are tied and ready to take a strain.”

The words were snatched away by the brisk wind. Glass had to lean in to hear him. “Very well. Cast off all lines.”

Once under way, Toledo jumped ahead as if she, too, sensed the urgency of once again getting to sea, out of the loch, so she could head northward to whatever awaited them.

The crusty old submarine looked as if it had long since been abandoned to the Arctic weather. The signboard dangling from the sail was faded and barely readable. VIPR , it read, in dim yellowing Cyrillic letters. Broad bands of red rust streaked down the sides of the rounded sail. Great chunks of its anechoic rubber coating were missing, as if the sub suffered from the pocking of a severe case of acne. Her deck was covered with a thick coating of ice, blackened by dirt and grit blown across the fjord from the shipyard.