Panic Switch полностью

Sobol laughed. She’d heard the story at least a dozen times. Some idiot removed the safety bolts from a UGST torpedo during loading and the weapon engine started. It walked its way out of the tube, armed itself and flashed across the bay and hit a tugboat, about a tenth of its explosive charge detonating, blowing a hole in the tug the size of a turkey platter. The shipyard had had to scramble to save the tug, tying it off to a rail-mounted crane until pontoons could be mobilized and a patch fashioned that would last long enough to get it into a drydock, which had royally messed up the maintenance schedule of the shipyard. It was fortunate for all that the full power of the warhead hadn’t gone off, or else the entire pier, rail crane and tugboat would have been destroyed.

“Believe me, Madam First, we are absolutely doing this by the book.” She showed Lebedev the dogeared procedure manual, which was opened to the page where the steps were shown that the load crew were executing now.

“Good. Any sign of the captain?”

“No. He’s been at Northern Fleet HQ all day.”

“Well, let me know if you see him coming down the pier, and let me know when the Status-6 units arrive — if they do arrive. I’ll be advising Sevmash that if they’re not here by the time you’re done loading the Gigantskiy, they’ll be waiting until tomorrow for the Status-6 load.”

“Understood, ma’am. Can I ask you a question? I can’t get a feel for how urgent this mission is. How much of a hurry are we in?”

Lebedev grimaced and shook her head. “If we even make speed-over-ground of four or five knots on average to the Bering Strait, I’d be pleased. That could be a hundred days into the operation. So, another day to load weapons and test them out with the Second Captain won’t make a difference.”

Sobol nodded. The Gigantskiy was fully inserted into the tube. Now for the next step of shutting the muzzle door. After that, they’d open the breach door, connect the torpedo to the interface to the weapon control system, shut the breach door and flood the tube. With any luck, that wouldn’t short out the torpedo, which would force them to start all over again.

“Anyway, I think I’ll lay below to see how Michman Yegor is doing with the electronic checks,” Lebedev said.

“He should be well along with the tube four Gigantskiy,” Sobol said.

“Stay alert up here, Weapons Officer,” Lebedev said. “I’ll have hot tea sent up.”

“Thanks, ma’am.” Sobol saluted Lebedev and the first officer returned the salute, turned, and walked back in-hull.

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino leaned over the chart table and glanced at the chronometer in the red-lit control room of the project submarine USS New Jersey, which had deeply penetrated Russian territorial waters, which made them all outlaws. It was surreal being submerged in the Zapadnaya Litsa Fjord, barely a nautical mile from the Russian submarine base, not far from the spot that the Vermont had been simulated to be when the exercise had gone bad.

New Jersey had been loitering on-station for the past day-and-a-half, rigged for ultraquiet and hovering with one side of the engineroom shut down for sound quieting. The flank run to Faslane had ended a week ago, and their weapon load-out had been done by dark of night in a covered structure they’d been winched into. As expected, the Virginia Payload modules had been loaded with fourteen Tomahawk cruise missiles, twelve of them carrying conventional antisubmarine warfare depth charges, two of them loaded with 250 kiloton nuclear depth charges. Usually, the nukes would be useless, since nuclear release authority had to come from the president himself, and obviously the White House would be out of communication when they would be under ice, but perhaps anticipating the need, the ship had sailed from Faslane with advance nuclear release authority, granting to the captain the decision if and when to deploy nukes, which was a chilling development. Someone in the Pentagon had had a nightmare that New Jersey would need to employ nukes. And yet nuclear cruise missiles? They were useless under ice. Big Navy and the upper levels at the Pentagon, Pacino thought, were clueless.

The torpedo room had been filled up with twenty-one ADCAP Mark 48 Mod 9 torpedoes, two SLMM Mark 67 submarine launched mobile mines, and two of the newer swimmer-delivered Mark 80 mines. The dry-deck shelter had been mated to the top of the hull in the same barn, lowered from a bridge crane. Pacino had supervised the shelter being mated to the plug trunk hatch, noting that its height was half the height of the sail. If, when under the ice, they were called on to break through the ice, the vertical surfacing could crush the shelter. They’d been assigned the unit that didn’t have the upper surface hardened for ice collisions. Typical Big Navy, Pacino thought, never thinking ahead to contingencies.