And he understood fully the perils of the GIUK, where the U.S. and Royal Navy listening systems were so electrifyingly sensitive. He knew he might be detected, at whatever speed, and simply concentrated on trying to bend the odds in his favor.
They were west of the Faeroe Isles now, just east of the central dividing line between the UK and Iceland, heading into the Norwegian Sea. And Captain Vanislav did not consider they had been detected. But in this he was wrong. The U.S. listening stations on the east coast of Greenland and the one on the southeast coast of Iceland had both detected a transient contact moving slowly northeast.
They had each assessed the tiny paint on the screen as a submarine, and in Iceland they had sufficient data to list it,
The sonar operators there, positioned considerably nearer than their American colleagues, had picked up
They immediately had the submarine positioned in a wide hundred-mile square, but over the next forty- eight-hours, by process of elimination, and two further detections, they now had the submarine in a ten-mile square. The SOSUS system was on red alert for her predicted position the next time she crossed the undersea wire.
In the blackest of all possible Black Ops, two U.S. hunter-killer submarines, fifty miles apart, guided by the satellites, were patrolling the northern reaches of the GIUK, closing in as the
Two minutes…
Captain Vanislav reacted instantly, attack, not defense…
Captain Vanislav was going for the classic but reckless standard Russian defense of driving flat-out into the direct path of an incoming torpedo. But, too late, he shouted his last command,
It blasted a massive hole in the pressure hull, and the thunderous force of the ocean smashed through the bulkheads as if they were made of cardboard. Along with his entire crew, Captain Vanislav died instantly, much as the crew of the
She went down in 750 fathoms of ocean, just a few miles short of the Norwegian Basin, where the North Atlantic shelves down to a colossal depth of 12,000 feet, more than two miles.
Admiral Arnold Morgan smiled a thin smile as he scanned the front page of the
Basically, Arnold quietly rejoiced in the demise of any left-wing leader of a Western country. And, anyway, that particular PM was never going to survive the catastrophe of the Falkland Islands.
What caught his eye far more sharply was a front-page cross-reference to a story on page three, concerning the loss of a Russian nuclear submarine.
It was an agency story, credited to
The Admiral read it carefully:
The Russian Navy's 9,000-ton nuclear-powered Akula-class submarine Viper, hull number K-157, has been lost in the North Atlantic. Naval officials believe it sank in the Norwegian Basin northeast of the Faeroe Isles, where the water is more than two miles deep. Both the search area and depth are so vast no rescue operation is planned. According to Russian Navy sources, Viper missed first one then a second satellite call sign. Every effort was made to make contact, but the submarine was patrolling hundreds of miles offshore. When it missed its third call sign, Viper had been missing for possibly three days and the search area, given a ten-knot average speed, would have been 360,000 square miles. There has been no further contact between the submarine and its base, and Russian naval authorities now accept the submarine has sunk, with all hands. A spokesman for the Russian Navy's Commander in Chief, Admiral Vitaly Rankov, said last night: 'Sadly, we have no information as to what caused the accident, and at this stage we are presuming a nuclear reactor failure, possibly at great depth. In Admiral Rankov's opinion, we may never know the answers.'
Admiral Morgan betrayed no emotion. He set the paper aside, just as Kathy came in bearing coffee and toast.
'Did you read about that Russian submarine?' she said. 'I saw it on CNN just now.'
'I sure did,' he replied. 'Took 'em long enough to admit they'd lost her.'
'You're always so critical of the Russians,' she said, smiling. 'Poor Admiral Rankov, he's such a jolly man… and anyway you don't know when she sank, any more than they do.'
'Don't I?' grunted the Admiral, darkly.
