George Wallace - Hunter Killer [Movie Tie-In]

Without even a “good morning,” his omnipresent executive assistant, Cheryl Mitchell, announced that Mark Stern wanted to speak with him. He sounded, she noted, “Pissed, as usual.”

Mark Stern was the leading investment partner for the West Coast venture capital firm Private Pacific Partners. It was Stern and PPP who were providing the stacks of cash that kept Alan Smythe and OptiMarx afloat.

Smythe grimaced. He took a deep breath before he picked up the telephone and spoke. “Morning, Mark. You’re up early. It’s… what… six o’clock out there on the coast?”

“Alan, I know damn good and well what time it is,” Stern growled. “My question is, do you? We’ve shoveled over fifty million into that company of yours to date. So far, all we’ve gotten for our money are more and more delays. That excuse you have for a chief technology officer is giving us some cockamamie story about ‘ITS’ and ‘SIAC’ and ‘POPs’ and half a dozen other acronyms that make no sense to us at all. We don’t want alphabet soup, Alan, unless it’s ‘ROI.’ We want return on investment. Is that so hard to understand?”

Cheryl had stepped into the office to deposit a stack of folders on his desk. Smythe hit the MUTE button on the phone and muttered under his breath.

“Damn VCs. They have egos the size they think their dicks are and brains the size they really are.”

Cheryl waggled her finger and looked at him over the tops of her half-glasses. “Play nice,” she mouthed, then turned and left. Smythe unmuted the phone.

“Mark, calm down. We’ve just had a little delay while the SEC reviews our plan. Couple of days. No big deal. We’re still on schedule. Testing the algorithm is going well and that’s the tough part. Ustinov is doing a great job.”

“Well, maybe you oughta make Ustinov your CTO instead of that idiot Andretti,” Stern shouted into the phone.

Smythe held the phone away from his ear while the venture capitalist vented some more. He put the receiver back in place and spoke again, calling on his most soothing voice. “Mark, ease off a bit, old chap. Remember, what we are doing is revolutionary. There are going to be unexpected glitches. Carl Andretti is performing miracles every day. We need him. Now, I’ll give you a call this evening, just before I leave for the coast for the board meeting. I’ll have the latest numbers for you and an update on the progress. It’ll be good news, I promise.”

Smythe hung up with a happy “Cheerio!” He massaged the bridge of his nose. God, he hated these calls! Venture capitalists were the worst scum of the world. They had to be endured. They were the ones with the money, after all, and it took money to build empires.

Now, next on the agenda, he would have to deal with that idiot Carl Andretti. He shouted at the door, “Cheryl, get Andretti and tell him I want to see him right away.”

“Should he wear his asbestos drawers?” she shouted back.

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea!”

Captain Second Rank Sergei Andropoyov climbed the long ladder from the control room to the bridge of the Russian submarine K-475 . He loved this new boat, so much more modern than the old rust buckets he had served on so far in his Navy career. Most of those boats were now tied up over at the Polyarnyy main piers, moldering into oblivion.

Gepard was brand-new and equipped with enough technological advances to make her equal to any American submarine. She was an Akula II – class boat— akula being Russian for “shark,” a name most appropriate.

Andropoyov climbed through the hatch, leaving the cozy warmth below, and stood in the cockpit at the top of the submarine’s sail. The huge cement and steel structure of the submarine pen stretched above him and far to either side. The piers were all empty, except the one where K-475 was tied up, and another down the way where K-461, the Volk , an older Akula I sub, sat. She was ready to follow him out into the Barents and stand guard while he tested Gepard .

The commander remembered how it had been a few years ago, when this building was always buzzing with furious activity. Boats preparing to go out into the cold, dark waters of the Barents Sea to challenge the Americans and to protect the Rodina . Boats returning from arduous patrols, needing rest and repair. This eerie quiet was most unsettling after all that purposeful activity.

The giant doors at the end of the pier were open already, revealing Olenya Bay and Murmansk Fjord beyond. A biting cold wind howled out there, close and strong enough to find a way to reach in to chill them even inside the sub pen. A rusty old icebreaker stood by at the building’s entrance, smoke whisping from its single large stack. It would break a path through whatever ice there might be in the bay and fjord and lead K-475 out to the open water of the sea.

Andropoyov glanced at his watch. He turned to Dimitriy Pishkovski, his first officer. “Dimitriy, I believe it is time. If you would be so kind as to get us under way?”

The short, swarthy white Russian smiled. “I will be happy to, Captain. It is good to be heading to sea once more.”

Pishkovski said a few sentences into the phone at his ear. The knot of men standing on the pier broke up and scurried off to stand beside the bollards, ready to tend the lines that still held Gepard tied up in the pen.

He spoke again into the phone. The men standing on Gepard ’s broad rounded main deck released the lines from her cleats and let them slide off into the water. The line handlers on the pier growled and cursed as they pulled the ice-cold, wet lines from the water.

Pishkovski ordered the two small reserve propeller systems to twist Gepard . Unlike American subs, she had a small electric-driven propeller a few feet to either side of her mammoth main screw. They were designed to bring her home if anything happened to the main propulsion system, but they were also very handy for maneuvering in close quarters. By having the starboard screw go astern while the port went ahead, Pishkovski was able to twist Gepard ’s bow away from the pier while walking the stern out, too.

With two meters of black water between the sub and the pier, Pishkovski ordered the main propulsion system to drive K-475 out of the sub pen. The water at the stern churned white as the six-meter-diameter, seven-bladed screw started to turn. The black sub cut through the water smoothly now that she was back in her natural element.

The rusty old icebreaker churned ahead of her, crunching through the layer of ice covering the bay, leaving a broad trail of crushed and crumpled ice floating on the black water. The high, steep hills surrounding the bay hid the sky except for a small patch overhead. A thick, heavy layer of ominous clouds reflected the lights from the Polyarnyy Naval Base and the Severomorsk Shipyard farther down the fjord.

Andropoyov stamped his feet, attempting to keep them warm as he stood on the hard steel deck. The wind whipped across the sub’s bridge as they moved into the bay, its force so brutal he had to shout to be heard.

“I feel a storm, Mr. Pishkovski. The Barents will not be a nice place to loiter on the surface. We will dive before the last turn of the fjord. Please make sure there are no delays.”

“Yes, Captain. There will be no delays.” The first officer clapped his mittened hands together hard. “Damn, it is cold!”

The icebreaker made the wide, sweeping turn from Olenya Bay out into the Murmansk Fjord. The fjord faced due north and the high rocky hills on either side channeled the Arctic wind into a bone-chilling blast down the narrow stretch of water. Anyone unlucky enough to be standing unprotected was dealt the full force of the cold. Exposed skin froze in moments. The two officers huddled for protection below the edge of the cockpit, drawing slight comfort from the meager trickle of warm air drifting up the hatch from below. They took turns rising to look out at the water ahead before ducking back down out of the blasting wind.