Panic Switch полностью

Captain First Rank Sergei Kovalov shook out what must be his fifth cigarette in the last fifteen minutes as he stood on the pier waiting for Admiral Zhigunov’s staff truck. He looked at his new command, the Project 10831 deep-diving nuclear-powered special salvage submarine AS-31 Losharik. It was an eighth the size of his last submarine, the Yasen-M attack submarine Arkhangelsk, the boat he’d been pulled off to command Losharik for this mission. That had made sense to Admiral Zhigunov, since Arkhangelsk was occupied with a long drydock repair availability, which had taken her out of action, and this mission demanded a seasoned submarine commander. But Losharik was a freakish submarine, Kovalov thought privately. He’d never give voice to that opinion, not to his crew and not to his wife, but perhaps only to his friend Georgy Alexeyev. The vessel was a deep-diving special purpose boat, designed to dive to 2500 meters and her titanium hull could probably take her several hundreds of meters deeper, to almost three kilometers beneath the surface.

The deep-diving aspect worried Kovalov, giving him recurring nightmares of hull collapse and flooding so far beneath the sea. The boat had no emergency deballasting system, so flooding at depth would likely result in loss of the ship and all hands. And what was perhaps worse was that it carried no weapons. Torpedoes and cruise missiles had always been something of a security blanket for Kovalov. He believed that in an undersea battle, even if he didn’t win and went down with the submarine, at least he could fight back. But this boat? Completely unarmed. With the exception of the cradles installed to allow them to carry Status-6 Poseidon torpedoes, the weapons carried on the port and starboard side of the boat, but Poseidons weren’t defensive weapons. They were little more than expensive time bombs, Kovalov thought, useless in a fight. He consoled himself that Losharik would be docked with Belgorod, and Belgorod had plenty of defensive and offensive weapons. Thirty Futlyar Fizik-2 torpedoes and ten Kalibr submarine-launched cruise missiles, two of them nuclear-tipped in the hundred kiloton range. The Futlyar units had anti-torpedo settings if needed, and could bring down an incoming American or British torpedo. And, of course, Belgorod carried the two Gigantskiy nuclear-tipped torpedoes that had been loaded aboard for this mission, but Kovalov considered them suicide weapons, especially if used under ice. A one megaton warhead? No matter the stand-off range, the shock wave from a weapon that big would deeply damage the firing ship — or sink it outright.

But this mission, not even begun, had impossible challenges. Docking to the submerged Belgorod had been attempted twice, and both times had resulted in failure. And unloading an exercise dummy of the Status-6 Poseidon torpedo from Belgorod to the carrying cradles of Losharik had only been tried once, and they’d dropped the unit to the seafloor of the Barents Sea. At first, it had been thought that Losharik, being a deep-diving ship capable of salvage, could retrieve the unit, but her manipulator arms malfunctioned and had to be repaired later by Sevmash. They’d had to abandon the effort, to the extreme disappointment of Northern Fleet Command.

As if reading his thoughts, his first officer, Ivan Vlasenko, strode up on his pre-watch inspection of the ship and said, “Worried about the mission, Captain?” Vlasenko pulled out his own pack and lit a cigarette, some odd French brand his traveling sister-in-law had gotten him.

“I suppose,” Kovalov said. “But if there is any good news, it’s that sometimes a difficult day in the Navy can distract from a difficult day at home.”

Vlasenko nodded seriously, although he himself lived a life without the heavy problems that Kovalov shouldered. “The troubles with Magna?”

“Still giving me the silent treatment. After two years since the, well, the thing.” Magna was Kovalov’s sixteen-year-old daughter by his first wife Adele. Two years before, when Magna was at the tender age of fourteen, she’d been brought to the apartment by the police, dragged out of a rave party where she had been high on drugs, naked, and having sex with two boys at the same time, a third naked boy watching them. Kovalov’s present wife, Ivana, had been apoplectic and panicky over the incident, and they’d applied what discipline they thought appropriate — yelling, grounding her, taking her computer privileges away. But not two weeks later, in the middle of a Saturday night, the police visited again, and again had the same story, except that the drugs were harder, heroin this time, and there were more boys piling on, and Magna didn’t care about her parents’ disapproval, openly cursing them, waving off any punishment with indifference.