“Good. Sonar, do you still hold the Shkval engine?”
“Yes, Captain, no, wait, I have a detonation at bearing zero eight seven. The Shkval warhead has exploded. No rocket engine noises.”
“How loud was the impact? Any secondary detonations? Hull creaking noises? Bubbles?”
Senior Lieutenant Valerina Palinkova spun at her seat at the sonar and sensor console to look at the captain. “Sorry, sir, no.”
“Dammit,” Alexeyev breathed to First Officer Lebedev. “Attention in central command, prepare for firing of Gigantskiy unit two.”
It was two months ago that Captain Third Rank Svetlana Anna was led by a male secretary into the outer office of the Chief of Staff and First Deputy Commander of the Navy, Vice Admiral Pavel Zhabin. Her heart raced and she imagined that other people could tell that it was about to jump out of her chest. Flustered, she ran her hand through her long chestnut colored hair, hoping it was in place to meet the number three officer in the entire Navy, although the admiral-in-command, Anatoly Stanislav was gravely ill, and his deputy, Mikhail Myshkin, had recently died, leaving Zhabin as the heir apparent.
She’d been flown out from Murmansk to Moscow in a Navy private jet, with her as the only passenger, for this meeting late yesterday, arriving at almost midnight at the hotel, with this morning’s meeting starting before many Muscovites had even awakened. The cryptic orders sending her here had said nothing except where to meet the plane, where to check into the hotel, and what time to meet the driver who would bring her to the Admiralty building.
The large mahogany doors of Zhabin’s office opened with a majestic creak, revealing the admiral himself and another person, a woman in a well-tailored business suit. Zhabin was in his sixties, balding, going to fat, but with a face so fierce that it was rumored in the fleet that he could stare a man to death. His nickname — and it was unknown whether he himself knew it — was
“Please, Captain Anna,” Admiral Zhabin said, attempting to be gracious, which came off false with his snarling expression. “Have a seat with us here.” He waved Anna to a wing chair that faced a couch across the coffee table, on which was an elaborate sterling silver tea service. “How do you like your tea?”
“One sugar, two creams, sir,” she said. Zhabin poured and sat on the couch next to the elegant woman.
“Allow me to introduce you to SVR Chairman Lana Lilya,” Zhabin said.
Anna rose to stand to greet the director of the foreign intelligence service, but Lilya waved her back to her seat. “Please,” Lilya said in a honey-smooth voice with an elegant central Moscow accent. “Let’s be informal here, Captain. Do you mind if I call you Svetlana?”
“That’s fine, Madam Chairwoman,” Anna said.
“Please call me Lana,” Lilya said, smiling at her with movie-star perfect white teeth.
“And you can call me ‘admiral,’” Zhabin said, chuckling. “But let us proceed to business, Svetlana. I’m sure you have important matters waiting for you up at Northern Fleet.”
Anna adjusted her posture in her chair, taking a sip of tea to be polite, but she had no desire for it. Her pulse had slowed, but she still felt as if she were in deep water.
“Yes, Admiral?”
“We brought you here to brief you on a mission so secret that no one can or will commit it to writing. You and your group of ‘test wives’—that is the proper term, yes?”
Anna nodded.
“We will be ordering you to put to sea with the
“Sir, we’ve never deployed on submarines before.”
“Relax, Svetlana. It is not so different than a Navy surface ship sailing at night. No sunshine.” Zhabin smiled at her, or tried to, but his eyes remained cold.
“Understood, then, sir. How long is the mission?”
“Svetlana, it could be months. President Vostov has ordered that the submarine transit to the Pacific by way of the polar icecap to avoid detection by the Americans’ sonar trip wires in the North Atlantic. Then around South America. So it could take as long as four months to get in position.”
