Arctic Front

“Range?”

“Thirty-five hundred meters.”

“Bearing?”

“Steady. Zero eight four.”

“Shoot!” ordered Valery.

“Set,” came the firing officer’s reply.

“Fire one!”

“Fire one,” confirmed the firing officer.

“Fire three,” said Valery. A slight tremor passed through the sub as one was away and running.

“Fire three,” came the confirmation.

“Fire five… fire six.. down scope.”

“Down scope, sir.”

“Hold position.”

The first officer was reading out the count from 120 seconds as the four twenty-one-foot-long torpedoes sped, without visible wakes, toward their target.

“Two apiece,” announced the officer of the deck. Valery said nothing, his eyes on the computer clock. He knew he should hit both of them if all the computations were right, but with such a storm raging on the surface off the heavily timbered and logged coast there were bound to be deadheads, or floating logs, in the water. It would take only one torpedo to hit a piece of waterlogged timber and the remaining three torpedoes could all be blown off track. “Molis”— “Pray,” said Valery. “Sonar?”

“Sir?”

“Everything alright?”

“Humming, sir. Beautiful.”

“Pipe it to the PA but low on the volume.”

“Yes, sir.”

Now everyone throughout the sub, as if equipped with stethoscopes, could hear the fast, heavy heartbeats of the tankers and the steady hiss of the four torpedoes running for them.

“Get the book,” said Valery. The officer of the deck passed over the enemy ship silhouette recognition binder. The moment they blew — if they blew — it was Valery’s intention to surface for quick visual confirmation of type. Naval intelligence at Vladivostok would want to know. For a moment the surge of adrenaline in him stopped as he remembered the reason for HQ’s insistence on getting all possible information including sea conditions during attack. The scuttlebutt going the rounds of Vladivostok was that apparently some Jews from the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, or region, around the Sino/Soviet border along the Amur River had been sabotaging munitions. Valery hoped it had only been air force and army munitions that had been tampered with and that when they found the saboteurs they hanged them — slowly. Shooting was too quick for saboteurs.

“Nine seconds to go,” answered the first officer softly. Valery nodded, still leafing through the book, trying to identify the class of tankers he was attacking from the brief glimpse he’d had through the scope. He tried to suppress his excitement, but it was difficult. It was so easy — a dream of an attack. One thing he knew already — they were not VLCCs — very large crude carriers but ULCCs — ultra large crude carriers. “Ha,” he exclaimed to the first officer. “Give it to the Americans — they always do things big, eh?” Even if only one was hit there’d be a hell of a spill; and if the crude’s flash point was raised high enough and it started to burn, there would be no way the enemy crews could put it out. He could use the light to take his time on the second should any of the first four torpedoes miss.

* * *

On the first tanker, MV Sitka, captained by Jesus Llamos, assistant radio operator Sandra Thompson was taking her break. A shy, slim redhead, the subject of half the crew’s on- and off-duty fantasies — despite the fact that she was married and in the early stages of pregnancy — she stood on the quiet, semidarkened bridge of the enormous tanker watching the amber island of light that was the Marconi anticollision radar. She found the phosphorescent dance of its hypnotic sweep comforting. Nothing was showing west of them. Eastward the coastline ran crooked, the radar trace a knotted, amber-colored snake flanked by the salt-and-pepper dots of offshore islands.

Glancing up from the radar for a moment, out through the darkness of the Sitka’s bridge, Sandra could see the moonlight bathing the sea’s turbulence in a deceptively soft light, the great, sliding, gray metallic swells momentarily robbed of their violence. Something hit her, like a strong, hot wind. As she reached for the radar’s console for support there was a flash from forward midships, an enormous crash, the ship shaking violently like a car at speed with a blowout, then a tremendous whoomp as the shock wave rebounded. In an ethereal moment of calm she saw Captain Llamos running toward the steering console, but his image shivered, and he looked as if he were moving in slow motion, hands outstretched for the auto-to-manual levers.

Then the ship listed to port. For a second Sandra thought the tanker had collided with one of the big tugs. The next moment the bridge shifted violently to port, and she was thrown hard in the darkness onto the cleated matting, glass shattering, its invisible hail all about her, alarm klaxons blaring, several lights on the wing tank monitor console blinking furiously, indicating at least five of the forward starboard wing tanks were ruptured, spilling their liquid cargo into the sea. Her face and hands soaking wet, she tried to get up, but the port list had increased to fifteen degrees, and she felt herself sliding down the incline. Suddenly lights came on.

“Put that damn switch off!” It was Llamos’s voice shouting at the starboard lookout, Llamos hunched, hanging onto the steering console in the middle of the bridge.

“We’re hit, aren’t we?” the lookout yelled defiantly.

“You don’t have to make it easier for them,” Llamos shouted. “Keep the damn light off.” Sandra could see him dimly against the shattered bridge glass as he flicked on the intercom to the radio room, ordering the operator to send an SOS. There was no reply. He gave the order again. Still no reply.”Thompson?” he called out. “Sandra?”

“Yes, sir, I’m here.”

“Go do it.”

“Yes, sir.” Pushing herself off the wet latticed decking she grabbed a flashlight from the port lookout’s rack, making her way downhill to the radio room. Within seconds she was drenched, the sprinkler system going full bore. In the gossamer spray, cut cleanly by the beam of her flashlight, she saw blood streaming down her arms, only now realizing that her face had been lacerated by glass shards from the bridge. There was another flash of light; momentarily night became day. The second tanker was hit, one of her tanks immediately catching fire, an overwhelming explosion of crimson flame curling in the blackest smoke she’d ever seen, the flames now spiralling and joining. In the corner of the radio room she saw the operator trying to get up, holding his head. Instinctively moving to help, she checked herself and instead issued the SOS. As she went into the third repeat, giving the tanker’s approximate position from the last fix, the computer readout dead, there was another sound like an enormous door creaking. The radio room began to move as if disembodied from the ship proper, and she knew that the Sitka was breaking, its spine snapped by either torpedoes or acoustic mines.

* * *

One of the Russian sub’s torpedoes hadn’t exploded. Valery entered it in the Saratov’s log as a possible dud, though he noted that given the sea’s condition it might have gone off course because of a sudden thermocline. In any case, all Valery was concerned with now was that he had sunk two tankers — the first, though not on fire, was doomed, its funnel and aft crew sections, each half a quarter-mile long, drifting apart and in toward the wild coastline of British Columbia. Meanwhile the inferno on the second tanker was spreading over the sea in huge, fiery fingers, riding up and down the swells in the fast current. Because of the lack of surf between the protective offshore islands, the fiery spill, fed by its enormous tar balls and mousse blankets of crude, was already washing up on the pristine shoreline. Fanned by the gale-force winds, the huge flames were licking the dense shoreline forests, setting the timber here in the dry cold several hundred feet below the coastal range’s snow line afire in what would be the biggest single blaze and ecological disaster since the oil spills and fires of the Iraqi war.

In the search scope Valery could easily identify the stricken tankers illuminated by the flames as ultrA-1arge carriers of the Globtik Tokyo class, both in excess of three hundred thousand dead weight tons. “Even better than I had hoped,” he informed the officer of the deck. “But I don’t understand why the first tanker isn’t burning.”