Ultra Deep (11 page)

He wondered if he had overstated his case. The television networks had quoted him, almost word for word.

He was on the verge of self-recrimination when the phone on Nelson’s desk rang. The editor picked it up, listened, spoke, hung up.

“That was the international desk, Will. It’s your story, you run with it.”

“Whoosh,” Overton let his breath go. “I suspect Defense will get involved. Maybe I’ll go out there.”

“No. You go out to Dulles and catch the first flight you can for Honolulu. While you’re on the way, I’ll arrange a charter boat. Call me the minute you’re on the ground in Honolulu, and I’ll tell you what I’ve lined up.”

When the pilot whispered over the intercom that they were passing over Indianapolis, Overton looked out his window and saw the faraway lights, all checkerboarded. Good old middle America.

He wished he were in it, solidly placed and confident.

Instead of heading into the unknown.

The unknown was the fear.

He pulled his notebook from his jacket pocket and jotted a few notes on that theme.

*

1524 HOURS LOCAL, VLADIVOSTOK

The skies were overcast, a flattened dome of dull concrete gray that stretched infinitely toward every horizon. The air was chilled, not yet absolutely cold, but threatening. There was probably snow in the forecast, Oberstev thought.

He cracked his window open and sniffed the air. It was tangy with salt.

The car moved through the streets quickly, following the other polished black Zil. Around him, the city, the primary city of the Primorsky Territory, had a frontier flavor. There were newer apartment blocks, but they were interspersed with rows of wooden-framed houses. The people on the streets, most of them dressed roughly, ignored the official motorcade as it sped past them. Oberstev envied them their aloofness.

Janos Sodur tried to strike up a conversation, but he was inept at small talk.

“Have you been to Vladivostok before, Colonel?” Oberstev asked.

“No, never.”

“Then you should take advantage of the opportunity to see it now.”

Sodur, sitting in a jump seat, took the hint and craned his neck to watch the small shops passing by. Free enterprise reigned in some of them.

Oberstev looked across the wide seat toward his aide, Alexi Cherbykov. Cherbykov shook his head minutely. He, too, was agitated that Sodur had finagled his way into this trip.

The three of them were in the back of the second Zil. The first Zil contained Aerospace Subcommittee Chairman Yevgeni and Admired Orlov as well as the commander of the Vladivostok naval base, the largest of the CIS Pacific Fleet, who had met them at the airfield.

The base commander knew where his priorities were best placed.

Oberstev did not mind his relegation to the second car. The eight-hour flight from Moscow had covered 6,000 kilometers and six time zones, and he was fatigued. He had slept, but fitfully and erratically and more as a matter of combatting exhaustion than as a normal part of a biological cycle.

Soon, they turned onto a coastal highway and the gray Sea of Japan was visible. The whaling and fishing fleets were out, and the harbor looked almost barren. A few dozen freighters and tankers lay at anchor or were drawn up to the docks. There were perhaps twenty good-size warships near the naval base’s facilities.

Oberstev watched the activity on the docks as they drove past. The workers moved desultorily, filling nets with cargo, off-loading small cars, wrestling with reluctant equipment. They seemed not to care about anything.

Once on the grounds of the base, the commander’s car led them directly to a gray brick building with a white sign that identified it as the operations center.

The drivers of both cars braked to a stop, then hopped out to open the rear doors.

The passengers emerged, then merged as a group of six as they entered the building.

The base commander explained, “I have set aside the officers’ mess as a command center, Admiral Orlov, if that will be sufficient?”

“That will be fine, Admiral,” Orlov told him. “With any luck at all, we will not be here long.”

They went down a long, wide hallway and were briefed on accommodations for bed and board. Quarters in the guest officers’ barracks were being prepared, and their luggage would be delivered there. Food would be sent in, anytime it was requested.

In the officers’ mess, they shed their greatcoats. Navy seamen jumped forward to collect them.

The mess had been fitted with a table surrounded by padded chairs and topped with a dozen telephones in addition to notepads, pens, pitchers of water, and glasses. Tea was brewing in an urn at one side of the room. Navy technicians stood at attention before six electronic consoles until Orlov told them to return to their duties. A large map had been tacked to the far wall.

Oberstev settled into a chair. His eyes felt bleary. Removing his glasses, he methodically polished the lenses. He wondered if his slender shoulders could take the burden that he felt was coming.

Yevgeni sat at the head of the table, his sycophant Sodur close by. Orlov spoke to a captain named Kokoshin who, in turn, barked a few orders, and technicians began to fly. In minutes, variously colored symbols appeared on the map, identifying the positions of ships and submarines. The area of the sunken A2e was designated by a circular set of dashes drawn in red grease pencil.

Captain Kokoshin came forward to brief them on the symbols. He rattled off coordinates and ship types and estimated times of arrival in the area of operations, now called the AO.

“Questions, comrades?” Orlov asked.

“Deep submersibles?” Yevgeni asked.

“The submersible based here is fully disassembled, retrofitting, as is its support ship. According to CIS Navy Headquarters, the
Sea
Lion
, currently in the Barents Sea, has been identified as the alternate choice and is en route to Murmansk.”

“Tell me about the timelines and the preparations, Captain,” Orlov said.

“Admiral Orlov, the information given me is that the
Sea
Lion
will be in Vladivostok within twenty-four hours. It will need, of course, a support vessel, and the patrol ship
Timofey
Ol’yantsev
is now being fitted with lifting booms and other necessary equipment. It should be ready as soon as the submersible arrives.”

“And then?”

“And then, Admiral,” Kokoshin said, “it will require seventy-five hours to put the
Olʼyantsev
into the area of operations.”

Oberstev appreciated a briefer who had his facts right at hand. Admiral Orlov may have also appreciated Kokoshin, but he scowled. “It will be four days before we have the submersible in place.”

“I am afraid so, Admiral. However, it may take that long for the submarines to locate the wreckage.”

Oberstev thought that response highly optimistic. He assumed that the nuclear experts had not reported in, for there was no mention of the state of the reactor, or when that state might irrevocably change.

His scowl deepening, the commander in chief of the navy asked, “Other questions?”

Oberstev would really have preferred taking a short nap, but he pointed at the map and asked, “Captain, you have identified only CIS shipping?”

“That is true, General”

“What of American ships in the area?”

“They are there, of course, General. We have not concerned ourselves with them for this operation. An overflight by a Tupolev Tu-20 reconnaissance aircraft revealed that U.S. naval units from Midway Island are en route. Additionally, there have been surveillance flights out of Midway Island. In the area itself are several civilian boats.”

“They are there on purpose? The civilian ships?”

“We assume so, General. American television and radio broadcasts identified the coordinates, though not exactly. Again, we do not think that the civilian ships will be of concern.”

“I recommend that you do concern yourself, Captain,” Oberstev said. “I don’t think the Americans will rest until this passes over. They tend to think of themselves as superior beings when it comes to salvage.”

Kokoshin looked to Orlov.

The commander nodded. “Locate them.”

Oberstev looked at the red-dotted circle on the map, thinking about what was within it somewhere.

And he feared that one day he might be remembered, not for constructing the world’s best and most effective space station, but for putting something very lethal inside a red-dotted circle.

On the atlases in children’s schoolbooks.

*

1637 HOURS LOCAL, 41° 16' NORTH, 166° 22' EAST

Two hours earlier, in response to a coded ELF signal, the
Winter
Storm
had surfaced briefly to receive two burst messages. They were coded for Gurevenich’s eyes only, and he had taken them to his cabin, retrieved the code book from his safe, and spent twenty minutes decoding the first.

He uncovered several terse statements. 1) A CIS Rocket Forces A2e had gone down in the Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of 26° 20' North, 176° 10' East, 2) the payload was exceptionally important, 3) the
Winter
Storm
was to rendezvous with an
Atomnaya
Protivolodochnaya
Podlodka
boat — a hunter/ killer submarine of the class called Alfa by NATO — named
Tashkent
, and 4) the two of them were to locate the sunken rocket and its payload. Additionally, the
Kirov
and the
Kynda
, with their two task forces, were en route to the site.

The frantic tone of urgency, urgency, urgency permeated the message.

Mikhail Gurevenich did not understand the urgency. Rockets failed occasionally, though most often over a land mass and were destroyed in the air. If they did go down at sea, the navy’s deep-diving submersibles frequently recovered parts of them. He wondered if the
Kirov
was escorting a salvage vessel with a submersible. It was possible.

The underlying impetuosity might be a reaction to a pay-load that defied space treaties, or that contained supersecret components.

That, he could understand.

The
Winter
Storm
, normally an antisubmarine warfare (ASW) vessel, was designed to hunt down and sink hostile submarines, and Gurevenich assumed from his orders to search for this downed rocket that the payload was, indeed, highly classified.

The captain decoded the next message. It was short, directed to the captain personally, and was not, repeat not, to be disseminated among the crew.

Gurevenich’s heart throbbed, his arteries suddenly clogged with foreign objects.

Nuclear reactor in meltdown.

Or just a possible meltdown.

It was a mild fear, never realized, with which nuclear submarine captains always lived.

And he was ordered into the furnace.

To what end?

Gurevenich doubted that his deep-tow sonars would find the debris. The waters were over 5,000 meters deep. The
Winter
Storm
was stretching her capability at 700 meters of depth.

He dropped the second message into the shredder, stood up, and slipped out of his cabin into the narrow passageway. Making his way forward, he reached the control center and signaled Sr. Lt. Mostovets.

The lieutenant crossed the center and met him at the plotting table.

Gurevenich pointed out the X marked on the charted line of their projected course. “Is that the latest position, Lieutenant?”

“It is, Captain. About five minutes ago.”

Gurevenich calculated quickly. They had covered almost 536 nautical miles in fourteen hours. “Speed?” he asked.

“We have managed thirty-eight knots, Captain.”

“And the target area?”

“Nine hundred and fourteen nautical miles, Captain. If we maintain speed, we can achieve it in about twenty-four hours.”

The
Winter
Storm
could make forty-three knots, but Gurevenich did not like to sustain that speed, despite the forced march requirement that he read into the message.

“We will maintain thirty-eight, Ivan Yosipovich. Notify the sonar operators that we may be hearing the
Tashkent
and the
Kirov
sometime within the next fourteen or fifteen hours. The
Kirov
will have three escorts. Later, the
Kynda
and her escorts will close on the area.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“And then stand down half of most watches. We will want everyone rested by the time we reach the target area.”

He saw the question marks in Mostovets’s eyes, but elected to not further enlighten the lieutenant.

*

2315 HOURS LOCAL, SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA