Panic Switch полностью

The hammering and pounding had continued during her voyage to the forward bulkhead of the first compartment, but it had finally stopped. Either the crew had given up the attempt, she thought, or they’d been rescued by the Losharik. The latter seemed unlikely. A nuclear explosion violent enough to destroy Belgorod had to have been merciless on Losharik, but she imagined that it depended on the deep-diver sub’s distance to the detonation.

Still, she waited, just in case the Losharik was pulling crewmembers out of the escape chamber. After twenty minutes, with the air so unbreathable that Anna knew she was barely clinging to consciousness and could wait no more, she admitted to herself it was time. She unzipped the bag and discarded the hose and nozzle, which had been attached to the plumbing of the mechanism for show. She opened the latches of the door of the unit, exposing the arming controls. She rotated a switch from SAFE to ARMED. She rolled the TIME DELAY selector to its lowest setting, 5 minutes. She pressed the TIMED DETONATE button and watched the timer start rolling downward. Four minutes and fifty seconds.

Anna shut her eyes and tried to breathe deeply. In a few short minutes, the mission would be accomplished.

The bomb, a suitcase nuclear demolition explosive, was a compact hydrogen bomb designed to generate a twelve-kiloton thermonuclear explosion. The plasma from initial detonation would consume the front half of Belgorod, including the Poseidon torpedoes. They would be nothing but atoms after the detonation. The aft half of the boat might still exist, but would be mostly splinters and small pieces. The heavy components like the reactor vessels might survive, and the boilers, maybe the pumps, but the remaining wreckage would be unrecognizable as having belonged to a submarine.

And there would be nothing left of Svetlana Anna.

While she waited for the timer to roll down, the sweat rolling down her forehead, she tried to think about her happiest memory. It was the communal farm where she lived with her aunt and uncle when she was a little girl. They had owned an adorable Siberian Husky puppy named Baku, and Anna had delighted in playing with him. Baku, all his life, had had this unusual and funny bark, sort of a high-pitched rough-raow sound, that she would imitate and bark back at him, which would make him smile and bounce on his front paws and bark even louder at her. She’d been inseparable from Baku all through school and college, but Baku had gotten old and one summer day he stopped eating and just lay on his bed, whining. Anna wouldn’t leave his side, putting blankets down next to him to try to keep him company during the night, and the last night, while she held him, his whining gave way to wheezing, and finally, the wheezing got quieter and shallower, and Baku breathed his last. As Anna remembered, a tear leaked out of her eye.

The timer of the bomb ran out. There was a loud click, and then Anna’s vision was filled with a blindingly bright light that faded to a deep black, but oddly, the blackness had a texture to it, almost as if it were made of dark thunderclouds, and the clouds were rotating around her and seemed to form a sort of tunnel, and a lightness grew at the center of the tunnel, at what seemed a tremendous distance, until the light grew brighter and warmer and then the strangest thing happened.

Svetlana Anna could hear a noise.

It was a happy noise.

Rough-raow, the sound came. Rough-raow!

It was Baku!

The memory of that trip was so vivid, it seemed like it happened yesterday, despite it having been over a month ago.

“Can I get you a drink, ma’am?”

“After a day like this? I think a vodka martini with a twist, chilled and up,” CIA Director Margo Allende said to the steward.

The Gulfstream SS-12A jet had lifted off from Ronald Reagan International at 1800, climbing swiftly east-northeast toward the Atlantic.

She looked across the aisle at Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Rob Catardi, who had asked for an old fashioned. The steward came by with a tray and handed her a drink, then set down Catardi’s.

“Do you think this has any chance of success?” she asked Catardi.

Catardi shrugged. “Who knows what the crazy Russians will do at any moment,” he said. “I’m just surprised they accepted your invitation.”

She nodded, then opened her tablet computer and scanned through the intelligence updates. The Status-6 torpedoes were late being loaded onto Belgorod. The intel brief suspected that there were technical problems with them, and the shipyard at Sevmash had recalled them for modifications. But Allende knew the truth, that CIA’s assets within the shipyard had been sabotaging the torpedoes. Unfortunately, the Status-6 units had been placed under more rigid security — perhaps someone suspecting sabotage — and the units left Sevmash fully functional.