Cold Choices

No, all I had to do was realize that the Russian, Petrov, was trying to cut a tether that Patty didn’t have. If we had sent Patty straight away at max speed, Petrov would have seen his mistake.”

Lavoie disagreed this time. “That only explains the first two passes. By the third pass, he had doped it out. On the third pass he was trying to corral Seawolf!’

“And once he’d made that decision, the result was inevitable.” Rudel’s voice surprised them, and they started to rise, but he motioned for them to sit. He poured himself a cup of coffee, then sat down wearily. “I don’t like my stateroom right now.” He paused for a moment, contemplating, searching for the right words. “There’s no rule that says there has to be a solution for every problem. Sometimes you’re just going to be on the receiving end, no matter what you do.”

“How do you handle those situations, sir?” Will Hayes asked, frustrated and perplexed.

“Many times, Will, there are answers,” Rudel replied, “but that’s not when you earn your pay. You get paid the big bucks for situations like this— when all the outcomes are bad. Having to choose between rival goods, or worse, rival evils, is when one truly understands the burden of command.”

He paused again; nobody spoke, or even moved. Rudel continued, “Recovering from a complicated, dangerous situation, with no outcomes but lousy choices, requires more than skill. Beating yourselves up over the road not taken is worse than a distraction. It may lead you to believe that you’re no longer able to make a good decision. Learning from the past is the mark of a good officer, but don’t ever think it has all the right answers.”

Rudel leaned back, seeming to sit straighter than before. Looking around the wardroom table, he noticed Lieutenant (j.g.) Williams. As the damage-control assistant, he was responsible for life support on Seawolf and was the resident expert on a sub’s atmosphere. “Todd, what’s your estimate?”

“Based on Petrov’s last report, carbon dioxide is probably near three point four or three point five percent now. It will build up very quickly once it’s over four percent.” He seemed reluctant to give any details, but finally concluded, “I don’t think anyone’s going to be conscious in twelve hours.”

Rudel nodded. “Thanks, Todd. That matches my own estimate.”

“What about balloons? Flotation bags? We could put them in the damaged ballast tanks, or have the Norwegians weld attachment points right to the hull.” Ensign Santana looked excited, hopeful. “There’s room for dozens of lines to be rigged, and it could be done quickly.”

Rudel answered, “No, they thought of that on day one. Putting the bags inside is a good solution, but the ballast tanks would have to be opened up even more to get the bags inside. It would have taken too long, about a week. Now we’ve got less than a day. And just attaching bags to the hull? Severodvinsk displaces some twelve thousand tons submerged, and then add the water in three or four flooded compartments. She probably displaces close to fifteen thousand tons. How many bags would we need to shift her?”

Lavoie added, “That’s more right than you know, sir. I just spoke with Halsfjord’s chief engineer. Lindstrom and the rest of his team are kicking themselves. They’re still trying to figure out why their plan didn’t work. He wanted to run over some of the figures. So many tons from the tugs, so many from flooding the starboard tanks, and so on.”

The engineer explained, “Their problem wasn’t that the mooring point pulled loose from the sub’s hull. At that time, the tugs were at full power, and Severodvinsk hadn’t shifted a single degree! She should have shown some sort of movement. Their bet is that if the fitting hadn’t come off one of the cables would have parted.”

Rudel sighed. “In other words, they just couldn’t couple enough force to Severodvinsk’s hull to do the job.”

Lavoie said, “The only thing they could have changed was to push Severodvinsk from the side with AS-34, but that only increased the total force on her hull by a few percent. And that’s before Priz’s batteries failed. She was never really an option.”

Jerry’s eyes widened a little bit. In that quiet gathering, several people noticed his hopeful expression. “What is it?” asked Shimko.

“What if we did the pushing?” The idea, half-formed, took shape as he spoke. “We don’t ram Severodvinsk. Ease in. We can use Maxine to guide us. Make contact at a slow creep, and then carefully increase power in stages. And unlike tow cables, we apply the force directly, hull-to-hull contact.”

Nobody responded immediately, although from their expressions it was clear they had heard him. “Brute force,” he explained.”Seawolf can generate nearly three times the push of both those tugs.”

Lavoie was the first to respond. “But our bow. ”

Then Chandler said, “They’ll never agree. ”

And Wolfe replied, “Hell, we’re going in the yards anyway.”

Shimko started to speak, then paused, and stated flatly, “The forward pressure hull is not at full strength. It might not hold. If it goes, we’ll be in the hurt locker.”

Jerry answered, “Once we start pushing, it will only take a few minutes to do the job. We’ll be ready for it, and do an emergency blow the moment the escape chamber separates.”

Lavoie speculated, “We’d have to cut away some of the debris forward to make a smoother contact surface. The supporting structure for the forward arrays is like a spear. It would slice right through Severodvinsk.”

“Skipper, we can do this,” Jerry pleaded. Captain Rudel had sat silently through the exchange, listening. Like every other officer in the room, Jerry could see him calculating. Seawolf added almost forty-six thousand shaft horsepower to the equation.

Rudel stood suddenly and headed for the wardroom door. “We’ll meet back here with department heads and chief of the boat in fifteen minutes. ” He paused, since two-thirds of his wardroom was already there, and added, “Others may also attend. Have a rough draft of the procedure and a timeline ready for me.”

He turned to leave, but then looked back. “Mr. Lavoie, calculate how long we can handle flooding forward before we can’t surface from an emergency blow.”

Rudel disappeared, and Jerry helped Shimko summon the few missing officers and chiefs to the wardroom.

USS Churchill

“It’s Seawolf, ma’am, Commander Rudel is on the scrambler phone.” Everyone in the wardroom mirrored Patterson’s puzzled look. All other ship-to-ship communications had been in the clear.

“He says it’s urgent, ma’am. Captain Baker is already in CIC.”

Patterson knew the way well enough by now that the messenger let her set the pace while he followed. In CIC, Baker stood, holding the handset. “All he’d say is that he has to tell you first.”

“Tell me what?” Patterson asked as she took the handset. “This is Dr. Patterson,” she said cautiously

“We’ve got a plan to save Severodvinsk.” His explanation followed so quickly and was so fantastic that she had him repeat it — twice.

By the time he’d finished, Baker had guessed enough from her side of the conversation to understand Rudel’s plan, and he wondered if his expression matched hers.

“And you’re just informing me? Not asking my permission?”

She heard Rudel sigh. “If I ask your permission, you might say no. If you say yes, you could be buying yourself some serious trouble. I don’t want to take anybody else down with me.”

“Forget that, Captain. Are you sure Seawolf will come out of this intact?”

“I wouldn’t suggest it otherwise.”

Rudel sounded defensive, and she quickly said, “I’m sorry, Captain, but I had to ask that question. You not only have my official permission, but my cooperation. What can we do?”

“I’ll know that after my officers tell me. Can you please call Admiral Borisov and Arne Lindstrom? Set up a conference call for thirty minutes from now?”

“When will you be ready?” she asked.

“They’re going to tell me that, too.” After a short pause, he added, “We will be ready in time.”