Panic Switch полностью

U.S. Navy Lieutenant Anthony Pacino stood from where he’d been leaning over the navigation chart display along with the navigator, the Nav stationed due to the restricted waters the ship had entered, supplementing the section tracking party. The chart showed their present position, just northeast of the turn an emerging submarine would take to get to the fjord’s channel. The expected outbound transit of the colossal, modified Omega II-class Russian submarine Belgorod was expected to start any minute.

Pacino walked to the port forward large flat panel display, which showed a real-time image taken from an orbiting Apex drone high overhead, the drone’s data beamed down to their floating wire antenna, the picture showing the eight piers of the submarine base. Pacino shook his head — that the Russians had chosen this godforsaken ground for a sub base showed how differently they thought than westerners. The base was in one of the harshest climates on the planet, 175 nautical miles north of the Arctic Circle, with scant vegetation growing on the rocky mountains that rose suddenly from the deep cracks in the earth’s crust that formed the fjord. It was August, and even so, the control room felt cold, the fjord’s water temperature barely climbing above freezing. He imagined that in winter, it would take constant patrols from icebreaking ships to keep the fjord open, and the piers would be piled high with snow and ice. The satellite image showed the same status as an hour ago, when they’d arrived on station, five miles deep into the length of the fjord.

Pacino called to the navigator, “Zoom in closer to the Omega’s pier.” The navigator sidestepped to the command console and manipulated the panel and the image slowly zoomed in until the length of the pier took up half of the large widescreen display.

Tied to the pier was a huge black submarine. It wasn’t apparent from the view how enormous and wide the sub was, but the small figures of four long-haul trucks on the pier lent a clue. Two tugboats were tied up on the outboard side of the sub, and if Pacino’s guess were correct, each tug would be at least 80 feet long. That made the Russian’s sub’s length over 700 feet, 55 feet in beam, matching the secret-level intelligence estimate that claimed she displaced a whopping 35,000 tons. That was bigger than the largest World War II aircraft carriers. By comparison, their own submarine, the Block IV Virginia-class USS Vermont, was tiny, only 8000 tons submerged, 377 feet long and 34 feet in beam. And if its size were not impressive enough, the Omega II could act as a mother ship to a smaller nuclear powered deep submergence submarine, the Omega built to host a deep-diver called Losharik. The op-brief insisted Losharik could dive to a mile deep or even deeper.

“You’re right,” Pacino said, smirking at the navigator. “They should have named it the ‘BUFF.’”

The navigator nodded back without smiling, glancing between the overhead drone intel display and the chart table. “Big ugly fat fucker, it definitely is.”

“You know, Nav, I still think it’s odd that Belgorod is tied up at Zapadnaya Litsa instead of Olenya Guba outside of Polyarny. Olenya Guba’s their usual base, where they pick up the Losharik.”

“Who knows what the crazy-ass Russians are thinking at any given moment,” the navigator said, frowning down at the chart display, laying in a red dotted line for the expected track of the Belgorod when it departed the fjord for the open seas of the Barents. “They must be leaving without the deep-diver being docked to the underside of the hull.”