“Depth seventy-five metres and dropping. We should be entering visible range now.”
Katya peered through the Plexiglas porthole to her left. What at first seemed impenetrable gloom gradually revealed itself as a seascape of massive shapes and shadows. The dark hull of the sunken submarine suddenly loomed ahead in all its awesome magnitude.
Costas pulled back on the steering column and turned to his co-pilot. “Jack, get ready with the landing gear. Prepare for a jolt.”
Katya was sitting beside two crewmen and a mass of equipment in the central fuselage of the DSRV-4, the deep submergence rescue vehicle which was standard on all IMU Sea-class vessels. The floor in front held a universal coupling which could be mated with the escape hatch of virtually any submarine, allowing trapped sailors to be removed in batches of eight or ten. The crewmen had been making final adjustments to the generic docking collar to fit the Russian SSN.
Twenty minutes earlier they had glimpsed their last of Seaquest as her wavering silhouette receded in the turbulent waters above.
“Coming about 180 degrees due south. Making my depth 95 metres.”
There was a dull thump as they came to rest on the submarine’s forward casing. Ahead of them rose the bulk of the conning tower, the periscope and antenna array just visible in the floodlight above the dark portholes of the bridge. For the first time they could appreciate the immense size of the submarine, almost twice the tonnage of Seaquest and as long as a football pitch.
Costas looked over at Jack. “The Akula class was the quietest sub the Soviets ever designed. It’s got an anechoic coating, thin tiles of rubber on the outer casing designed to absorb active sonar pulses. That’s why we didn’t make a bigger bang when we landed. It also makes it easier to grip the casing using the hydraulic suction cups on our landing gear.”
He eased the control stick forward and the DSRV bounced a few metres closer to the fin. As he dropped down again the entrance to the escape trunk came into view.
“Just as York suspected. The trunk’s closed and sealed. Any attempt at escape and it would have been open.”
Costas had calculated that the ancient stairway would be under the torpedo room near the nose cone, making the forward escape hatch their nearest access point. Katya had explained that even in a low-level emergency the bulkheads would have automatically sealed off the reactor from the forward operational area, leaving no way of accessing the torpedo room from the aft hatch.
“Gently as she goes.”
Costas had been using the digital navigational display to align the DSRV with its objective. A moment later there was a satisfying thud as the docking ring settled over the escape hatch. He switched off the navigational array and flipped up four handles on either side of the joystick, bringing the DSRV down flush with the deck and engaging the stabilizing legs with their suction feet.
“Have soft seal. Docking secured.”
He undid his seatbelt and craned round to address Katya and the two crewmen.
“Let’s rehearse the drill one last time. The deep-penetration sonar on the ROV suggests the forward part of the submarine remains watertight. The rest we’re unsure about because the reactor and other machinery fills much of the internal space, but it could also be dry.”
He crawled towards the coupling array, Jack following closely behind.
“Directly beneath us is the forward escape trunk,” he continued. “In a wet escape crewmen climb into the chamber and don their rebreathers. The lower hatch closes, the trunk fills up and the crewmen escape through the upper hatch.”
“And a dry escape?” Katya asked.
“The DSRV couples directly with the outer escape hatch,” Costas replied. “In the modified Akula I the hatch is set two metres into the hull, creating an additional outer chamber which acts as a safety measure for the rescue crew. With our own hatch shut we can couple with the hull, open the casing hatch, pump the outer chamber dry and open the escape hatch two metres below with a robotic arm. We then use the DSRV’s external sensor array to test the interior environment without actually exposing ourselves to it.”
Costas nodded at the crewmen and they set about securing the seal. After manually locking the ring they crawled to the aft part of the submersible and sat side by side at a small console. With the flick of a switch the covering over the hatch in front of Katya retracted into the DSRV’s hull casing, revealing a concave Plexiglas dome which lit up as a floodlight activated and the crewmen set about decoupling the submarine’s hatch. A few moments later there was a sharp hiss as the seawater inside the chamber was pumped out and replaced with air from one of the DSRV’s external high-pressure cylinders.
“Chamber evacuated and equalized,” one of the crewmen said. “Activating robotic arm now.”
Katya squeezed in between Costas and Jack for a better view. Below them they could see a thin tube terminating in a grapple-like device, its movement controlled by one of the crewmen using a small joystick and navigation screen.
“It works by pressure differential,” Costas explained. “We’ve filled the chamber with air at ambient barometric pressure, the same as inside the DSRV. We hook that arm to the hatch, ratchet it up to exert some pull, then slowly decrease the pressure in the chamber until it’s lower than the submarine. Then bingo, it springs open.”
They watched as the robotic arm disengaged the safety lock and clenched the central handle, the shaft straightening as tension was applied. The crewman at the far end of the console was concentrating on a screen which gave him a close-up view of the casing.
“Pressure one bar. Reducing now.” He cracked open a valve on a pipe above him and activated an extractor pump which drew air out of the chamber.
“Point nine five bar. Point nine zero. Point eight five. Point eight zero. Now!”
As he snapped the valve shut they could see the hatch waft up as if it were riding a wave. The arm automatically retracted and pulled the hatch taut against the side of the chamber. They could see through into the bowels of the submarine, the floodlight dancing off piping and bulkheads in the passageway below.
“Pressure point seven nine five bar.”
“About what I expected.” Costas looked at the crewmen. “Give me full environmental specs before we compensate.”
A sensor array incorporating a gas spectrometer, a Geiger counter and a radiation dosimeter was lowered into view from the external pod.
“Radiation dose zero point six millirems per hour, less than you get in an airliner. General toxicity level moderate, with no indication of significant gas or chemical leakage. High ammonia content probably due to organic decay. Oxygen eight point two per cent, nitrogen seventy per cent, carbon dioxide twenty-two per cent, carbon monoxide zero point eight per cent, a little risky for prolonged exposure. Temperature plus two degrees Celsius.”
“Thanks, Andy.” Costas looked wryly at Jack. “Stepping in there now would be like landing on top of Everest in tropical kit with a mouthful of rotten eggs.”
“Wonderful,” Jack said. “Why is it this kind of thing always happens when you take the lead?”
Costas grinned and looked back at the console. “Andy, compensate to ambient using pure oxygen and engage CO2 scrubbers.”
There was a sharp hiss as the DSRV began to bleed oxygen into the hatch from its external gas cylinders.
“The Akula class has its own scrubbers,” Katya said. “If we could activate them they’d do the job for us. There’s also a unit that breaks down seawater to release oxygen. These subs can stay down for months at a time with air that’s cleaner and better oxygenated than on the surface.”
Costas wiped the sweat from his brow and looked at her. “It would take too long. The battery which powered those systems would have depleted within a few months of the auxiliary diesel shutting down, and I’d prefer to save the DSRV battery for reactivating the emergency lighting. Our own scrubber incorporates carbon monoxide and hydrogen burners as well as a range of chemical filters.”
A voice broke in from the console. “We’ve reached ambient pressure. In ten minutes the scrubbing cycle will be complete.”
“Right,” said Costas. “Time to kit up.”
They wore close-fitting E-suits, all-environment shells of Kevlar-reinforced crushed neoprene which were an amalgam of the latest diving drysuits with US Navy SEALs chemical and biological warfare gear. Wrapped round their calves were flexible silicon fins which could be pulled down over their feet underwater.
Costas quickly briefed them as he clipped on his straps. “We should be able to breathe safely but I suggest we wear full-face masks anyway, as the regulators will moisturize and warm up the air as well as filter out residual impurities. There’s a supplemental oxygen feed which kicks in as soon as the sensor detects atmospheric depletion.”
The mask was a silicon-enriched helmet which conformed closely to the shape of the face. After finalizing his own gear, Jack helped Katya don her self-contained life support system, a streamlined polypropylene backpack which contained a compact oxygen rebreather, a multi-stage regulator and a triple set of titanium-reinforced cylinders pumped up to eight hundred times barometric pressure. The IMU cylinders were ultralight and slimline, weighing less than a single old-fashioned scuba set and ergonomically designed so they were hardly aware of the extra bulk.
On their wrists micro-consoles displayed full environmental data as well as computations for a range of breathing mixtures from the helium, oxygen and nitrogen in the cylinders. The gas was mixed automatically, the computer taking account of depth, dive profile, temperature and even individual physiology.
“The intercom should allow us to communicate with the DSRV,” Costas said. “Switch it on when you activate the SCLS system just before we go in.”
After they had double-checked each other, Jack took down a 9-millimetre Beretta 92FS from a shelf above the hatch. He slammed a fifteen-round magazine into the butt and sealed the pistol in a waterproof holster with a spare magazine on his chest.
“Standard equipment.” He glanced reassuringly at Katya, remembering their conversation the night before about the risks involved. “You can never be too safe in this game.”
“Dr. Howard. Urgent message from Seaquest.”
“Put it on audio.” Jack snapped open his visor and took the mike from the crewman. “This is Howard. Over.”
“Jack, this is Tom.” The voice was crackling with static. “That weather front has finally hit us. Violent electrical storms, visibility down to fifty metres. Storm force ten and rising. Far worse than I feared. I cannot hold present position so close to the island. I repeat, I cannot hold present position. Over.”
The urgency in his voice was absolutely clear despite the disturbance.
Jack clicked the reply button. “What’s the forecast? Over.”
“One of the biggest fronts ever recorded at this time of year. Your chance to abort is now. Over.”
The DSRV was too large to be deployed through Seaquest’s inner berth and instead had been swung out over the stern davits. The experience had given them a sharp appreciation of the perils of returning in rough seas.
“What’s the alternative? Over.”
“You’d be on your own for twenty-four hours. I intend to take Seaquest north twenty nautical miles behind the front and then follow it back south. Over.”
“There’s no way the DSRV could follow Seaquest that far underwater,” Costas muttered. “The battery’s designed for life support during rescue operations and would only power us a couple of miles before draining.”
Jack paused before raising the mike. “Tom, give us a moment. Over.”
In the brief silence Jack looked at the others and received a nod from each of them. Andy and Ben were IMU veterans, Andy a submersibles specialist who was Costas’ chief technician and Ben a former Royal Marine who had served in the Special Boat Section before joining Peter Howe’s security department. Both men would follow Jack anywhere and were deeply committed to the goals of IMU.
Jack felt a surge of adrenaline as he saw the response was unanimous and without reservation. They had come too far to let their target slip from their grasp. By now Seaquest’s movements would have excited interest among their adversaries, men who would eliminate them without a moment’s hesitation if they stood in their way. They knew this was their only chance.
Jack picked up the mike again.
“We are staying. I repeat, we are staying. We’ll turn the weather to our advantage. I assume no hostile vessels will be able to get near either. We’ll need the time you’re away to get through the sub. Over.”
“I understand.” The voice was barely discernible through the static. “Retract your radio buoy and only use it in an emergency as it’ll be picked up by every receiver for miles around. Wait for us to contact you. The best of luck to you all. Seaquest out.”
For a moment the only sound was the low hum of the CO2 scrubbers and the whirr of the electric motor used to pull in the radio buoy.
“Ten minutes are up,” Ben said from the console. “You’re good to go.”
“Right. Let’s get this show on the road.”
Andy slid over and unlocked the docking clamp. The hatch opened outwards with no resistance, the pressure inside the DSRV and the submarine now equalized.
Costas swung his legs over and found the rungs of the ladder on the inside wall. He started to raise his mask and then paused.
“One final thing.”
Jack and Katya looked at him.
“This is no Mary Celeste. The Kazbek had a full complement of seventy-three men when she went down. There may be some pretty grim sights in there.”
“We’ll head forward through the passageway. The bulkhead behind us seals off the reactor compartment.”
Costas stepped off the final rung of the ladder in the escape trunk and swung round, his headlamp throwing a wavering beam into the heart of the submarine. Jack followed close behind, his tall frame bent nearly double as he reached back to offer Katya a hand. She cast a final glance up at the crewmen peering down from the DSRV before ducking through the hatch behind the two men.
“What’s the white stuff?” she asked.
Everywhere they looked a pale encrustation covered the surface like icing. Katya rubbed her glove along a railing, causing the substance to sprinkle off like snow and revealing the shiny metal beneath.
“It’s a precipitate,” Costas replied. “Probably the result of an ionization reaction between the metal and the increased levels of carbon dioxide after the scrubbers shut down.”
The ghostly lustre only added to the sense that this was a place utterly cut off, so far removed from the images outside that the ancient city seemed to belong to another kind of dream world.
They advanced slowly along a raised gangway into an open space obscured by darkness. A few steps inside, Costas stopped below an electrical box set between the piping above their heads. He delved into his tool belt for a miniature pneumatic cleaner attached to a CO2 cartridge and used it to blow away precipitate from a socket. After plugging in a cord he had trailed from the DSRV, an orange indicator light flashed above the panel.
“Hey, presto. It still works after all these years. And we all thought Soviet technology was so inferior.” He looked at Katya. “No offence intended.”
“None taken.”
A few moments later the fluorescent lighting came on, its first pulses surging like distant lightning. As they switched off their headlamps a bizarre world came into view, a jumble of consoles and equipment shrouded in mottled white. It was as if they were in an ice cave, an impression enhanced by the blue lighting and the clouds of exhalation that issued from their masks into the frigid air.
“This is the control room attack centre,” said Costas. “There should be some clue here to what happened.”
They made their way cautiously to the end of the gangway and down a short flight of steps. On the deck lay a pile of Kalashnikov rifles, the familiar banana-shaped magazines jutting out in front of the stairway. Jack picked one up as Katya looked on.
“Special Forces issue, with folding stock,” she commented. “AK-74M, the 5.45 millimetre derivative of the AK-47. With the worsening political situation the Soviet General Staff’s Intelligence Directorate put naval spetsialnoe naznachenie—special purpose—troops on some nuclear submarines. Better known by their acronym spetsnaz. The GRU were terrified of defection or insurrection and the spetsnaz were directly answerable to them rather than the captain.”
“But their weapons would normally be locked away in the armoury,” Jack pointed out. “And there’s something else strange here.” He snapped off the magazine and pulled back the bolt. “The magazine’s half empty and there’s a round in the chamber. This gun’s been fired.”
A quick check revealed that the other weapons were in a similar state. Below the assault rifles they could see a jumble of handguns, empty magazines and spent cartridge cases.
“It looks like someone cleaned up after a battle.”
“That’s exactly what happened.” Costas spoke from the centre of the room. “Take a look around you.”
In the middle was a command chair flanked by two columns housing the periscope arrays. Set into the walls around the dais were consoles for weapons and navigation control, which made up the operational heart of the vessel.
Everywhere they looked was destruction. Computer monitors had been reduced to jagged holes of broken glass, their innards spewed out in a jumble of wires and circuit boards. Both periscopes had been smashed beyond recognition, the mangled eyepieces hanging off at crazy angles. The chart table had been violently ripped apart, the jagged gouges running across its surface the unmistakable result of automatic rifle fire.
“The ship control station is shot to hell.” Costas was surveying the wreckage at the far corner of the room. “Now I see why they couldn’t move.”
“Where are they?” Katya demanded. “The crew?”
“There were survivors.” Costas paused. “Someone stashed those weapons, and I’d guess there were bodies which have been disposed of somewhere.”
“Wherever they camped out, it wasn’t here,” said Jack. “I suggest we move on to the accommodation quarters.”
Katya led them along the walkway towards the forward compartments of the submarine. Once again they plunged into darkness, the auxiliary electrical system only providing emergency lighting in the main compartments. As they inched forward, Jack and Costas could just make out Katya’s silhouette as she felt for the handrail and fumbled for the switch on her headlamp.
There was a sudden clatter and an ear-piercing shriek. Jack and Costas leapt forward. Katya was slumped in the passageway.
Jack knelt over her and checked her regulator. His face was drawn with concern as he looked into her eyes.
She was mumbling incoherently in Russian. After a moment she raised herself on one elbow and the two men helped her to her feet. She spoke falteringly.
“I’ve had a…shock, that’s all. I’ve just seen…”
Her voice faded away as she raised her arm and pointed in the direction of the sonar room at the end of the corridor.
Jack switched on his headlamp. What it revealed was an image of horror, a spectre drawn from the worst nightmare. Looming out of the darkness was the white-shrouded form of a hanging man, the arms dangling like some ghoulish puppet, the face lolling and grotesque as it leered through long-dead eyes.
It was the very apparition of death, the guardian of a tomb where no living being belonged. Jack suddenly felt chilled to the bone.
Katya recovered herself and straightened. Cautiously the three of them edged into the room. The body was wearing the dark serge of a Soviet naval officer and was suspended by the neck from a wire noose. The floor was strewn with discarded food cartons and other debris.
“His name was Sergei Vassilyevich Kuznetsov.” Katya was reading from a diary she’d found on the table behind the corpse. “Captain, Second Rank, Soviet Navy. Order of the Red Star for services to state security. He was the Kazbek’s zampolit, the zamestitel’ komandira po politicheskoi chasti, the deputy commander for political affairs. Responsible for overseeing political reliability and ensuring the captain carried out his orders.”
“A KGB stooge,” Costas said.
“I can think of a few captains I knew in the Black Sea Fleet who would not be displeased by this sight.” She read on. “He spent his final days right here. The active sonar had been disabled so he couldn’t send a signal. But he monitored the passive radar pulse wave detector for any sign of surface vessels in the vicinity.” She turned a page.
“My God. The final entry is for December 25th, 1991. By coincidence the last day the Red Flag flew over the Kremlin.” She looked up at Jack and Costas, her eyes wide. “The sub went down on June 17th that year, which means this man was alive in here for more than six months!”
They looked in horrified fascination at the corpse.
“It’s possible,” Costas said eventually. “Physically, that is. The battery could have sustained the CO2 scrubbers and the electrolysis desalination machine that extracts oxygen from seawater. And there was evidently plenty to eat and drink.” He surveyed the scatter of empty vodka bottles among the rubbish on the floor. “Psychologically is another matter. How anyone could remain sane in these conditions is beyond me.”
“The diary’s full of political rhetoric, the kind of empty communist propaganda we had drummed into us like religion,” Katya said. “Only the most fanatical party members were chosen as political officers, the equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo.”
“Something very odd went on here,” Jack murmured. “I can’t believe in six months he found no way of signalling the surface. He could have manually ejected a buoy through a torpedo tube or discharged floating waste. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Listen to this.” Katya’s voice betrayed a dawning realization as she flicked from page to page, pausing occasionally to scan an entry. She lingered for a moment and then began to translate.
“I am the chosen one. I have buried my comrades with full military honours. They sacrificed their lives for the Motherland. Their strength gives me strength. Long live the Revolution!” She looked up.
“What does it mean?” Costas asked.
“According to this diary, there were twelve of them. Five days after the sinking they selected one man to survive. The rest took cyanide tablets. Their bodies were weighted and ejected through the torpedo tubes.”
“Had they given up all hope?” Costas sounded incredulous.
“They were determined beyond reason that the submarine should not fall into NATO hands. They were prepared to destroy the vessel if any would-be rescuer turned out to be hostile.”
“I can almost see the logic,” Costas said. “You only need one man to detonate charges. One man uses less food and air, so the submarine can be guarded that much longer. Everyone else is worse than redundant, a drain on precious resources. They must have chosen the man least likely to crack up.”
Jack knelt down beside the empty bottles and shook his head. “There must be more to it than that. It still doesn’t add up.”
“Their world was about to collapse,” Costas said. “Diehards like these may have convinced themselves they were a last bastion of communism, a final bulwark against the West.”
They looked at Katya.
“We all knew the end was near,” she said, “and some refused to accept it. But they did not put madmen in nuclear submarines.”
One question had been nagging at them since they first saw the dangling corpse, and Costas finally spoke up.
“What happened to the rest of the crew?”
Katya was reading another part of the diary, a look of increasing incredulity on her face as she began to piece it together.
“It’s as we suspected in naval intelligence at the time, only worse,” she said. “This was a renegade boat. Her captain, Yevgeni Mikhailovich Antonov, set out on a routine patrol from the Black Sea Fleet submarine base at Sevastopol. He disappeared south without ever making contact again.”
“He could never have hoped to get out of the Black Sea without being detected,” Costas said. “The Turks maintain a one hundred per cent sonar blanket over the Bosporus.”
“I don’t believe that was his intention. I believe he was heading to a rendezvous, perhaps at this island.”
“It seems a strange time to defect,” Jack remarked. “Right at the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union in sight. Any astute naval officer would have seen it coming. It would have made more sense simply to hang on and wait.”
“Antonov was a brilliant submariner but also a maverick. He hated the Americans so much he was deemed too risky for ballistic missile boats. I do not think this was a defection.”
Jack was still troubled. “He must have had something to offer someone, something to make it worthwhile.”
“Does the diary say what happened to him?” Costas asked.
Katya read before looking up again. “Our friend the zampolit got to know what was afoot several hours before the sinking. He rallied the spetsnaz team and confronted the captain in the control room. Antonov had already issued sidearms to his officers but they were no match for assault rifles. After a bloody battle they forced the captain and the surviving crew to surrender, but not before the sub had run out of control and crashed into the sea floor.”
“What did they do with the captain?”
“Before the confrontation Kuznetsov sealed off the engineering compartment and reversed the extractor fans to pump in the carbon monoxide collected in the scrubbers. The engineers would have been dead before they knew what was happening. As for Antonov and his men, they were forced back behind the escape trunk and sealed in the reactor compartment.”
“Death by slow irradiation. It could have taken days, even weeks.” Costas stared at the mummified face, a hideous sentinel that seemed duty-bound even in death. He looked as if he wanted to drive his fist into the shrivelled head. “You deserved your end, you sadistic bastard.”