Cold Choices

precedence. Nothing much since.”

“Well, it certainly makes sense to just hunker down in that kind of weather,” responded Anderson. “You know what this place is like if we get even an inch of snow. Say, I’m going down to the cafeteria for some coffee. You want anything?”

Ferguson didn’t respond; he seemed to be mesmerized by his computer screen. “Jack, I said do you want anything?”

“Holy shit! Paul, you’d better get over here. I’m seeing over two dozen urgent messages from just about every major ship in the Northern Fleet.”

“What!? This couldn’t possibly be an exercise. Not in that weather,” stated Anderson incredulously.

“Look at these ships that are answering. That is Petr Velikiy. And that is Marshal Ustinov. There is the Admiral Kuznetsov. Everybody and their brother is rogering up for something. And whatever it is, it’s big.”

“All right Jack, start writing this up. I want a FLASH precedence message reporting this activity in ten minutes. Do you have any theories as to what is going on?”

“I do now,” Ferguson replied smugly. “I just saw the Mikhail Rudnitskiy, the submarine rescue ship, send its reply. I think we have a submarine emergency.”

12. COLD CHOICE

Lieutenant Chandler knocked on the captain’s doorframe, just as a formality. The captain, the XO, and Jerry had all stopped their conversation and waited expectantly.

“One LF and one HF receiver are up,” Chandler reported. “I just came from radio and they’re copying the broadcast off the floating wire.”

Captain Rudel smiled. It was a tired smile, but it was one of the few Jerry had seen from him since the collision. “Good news. Well done, Chiefs, Mr. Chandler.” Then, turning to Jerry, “And you too, Mr. Mitchell.”

Rudel asked the chiefs, “Are your people still up there?”

Hudson nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Well, let’s go see them.” Rudel headed out of his cabin and up the ladder to the next deck. The officers and chiefs crowding the passageway melted against the bulkheads to make room, then Chandler and the chiefs followed. Jerry and the XO remained behind. Let Chandler get his face time with the captain, Jerry thought. He’s earned it this time.

Shimko smiled, broader than the captain’s. “That’s good. Once he talks with some of the crew, he’ll start to pull out of it. He loves his guys, and when he sees they’re okay, he’ll be okay.”

* * *

Rudel did appear at dinner that evening, subdued, but he was there. Chief Morrison also appeared shortly after the meal started and handed out message traffic to a mixture of applause and a few boos.

“Couldn’t you have left the receivers down for a few more days?” joked Al Constantino. The supply officer, as usual, had one of the thicker piles of message traffic.

“You could just ignore your traffic,” Morrison suggested playfully. “Maybe nobody would notice.”

“Oh, they’d notice,” Constantino sighed.

Jerry’s own message traffic was trivial, but he looked through them as if they were the first naval messages he’d ever read. A weather report, some All-Navy notices, school availabilities. It was all routine, but they were back in touch with the rest of the world.

Shimko gave everyone ten minutes with their message traffic before he started working through his own list. They were going to show up, unannounced, at Faslane in a little less than two weeks and there were literally dozens of things that had to be done, arrangements to be made. Jerry’s task list grew rapidly, but his mood improved as his workload rose. They were moving forward; getting back into the swing of things. Navy business could deal with almost any circumstance — just wrap it in paper. As the XO so quaintly put it, “There is no greater cure for misery than hard work.”

As the first seating finished up, Jerry saw one of the cryptological technicians in the passageway, waiting. He caught the XO’s eye, and the two of them headed forward. Jerry followed. He usually checked the nav plot after dinner, and besides, he was curious.

Entering control, he saw Shimko disappear through the aft door, the CT behind him, heading for officers’ country. He’d barely had time to look at the chart before the XO came back and told the chief of the watch, “Pass the word, department heads to the Captain’s cabin.” His tone was routine, but Shimko’s expression said he’d heard bad news.

Lieutenant Commander Lavoie, the engineering officer, had the deck watch, and the XO added quickly, “And get a relief. You need to be there, too.” Lavoie nodded and picked up the phone.

Jerry hurried forward to find Rudel seated, head resting on one hand, staring at a single sheet of paper. The XO and the CT stood in the cabin, taking up what little floor space there was. Jerry knocked quietly on the doorframe, and Shimko looked over. All he said was “Stand by.” Jerry waited silently.

Constantino showed up a moment later, with Wolfe right behind him. Even with the operations, supply, and weapons department heads present, the XO still kept everyone waiting. Finally Stan Lavoie, temporarily relieved as the OOD, appeared.

Rudel saw Lavoie in the doorway and stood, his department heads clustered at the door, the XO and the CT standing behind him. He spoke softly, as was his habit.

“CT1 Sayers brought the XO this intercept a few minutes ago.” The CTs, or cryptological technicians, were intelligence specialists who recorded and analyzed Russian radio transmissions. As soon as the HF receiver had been repaired, they’d been able to resume their jobs. Their first priority had been listening for any reaction by the Northern Fleet to the collision, for example, looking for a sortie of an ASW vessel or aircraft to look for the offending U.S. boat.

Sayers was a big man, a blond crew cut already starting to thin as he entered his thirties. He seemed to shrink, uncomfortable among so many listeners. His work was rarely this public, or this immediate. At Rudel’s prompting, he explained.

“Most of the stuff we just tape for later analysis. It’s almost always encoded, and even the voice stuff usually uses code words or phrases.” He pointed to the paper. “But this was broadcast in the clear. Someone on the submarine rescue ship Mikhail Rudnitskiy asked the Northern Fleet Headquarters to confirm the emergency alert and to verify the coordinates. The duty officer at fleet headquarters was none too happy about it too. Chewed the guy’s ass off.”

“An emergency alert?” asked Lavoie. “What kind of emergency?”

“The message that the guy on Rudnitskiy referred to was Signal Number Six, a coded alert the Russians send out for a submarine in distress. The location given was supposedly where the missing sub was last heard from. It was near where we had the collision.”

“I don’t understand.” Stan Lavoie’s reaction was automatic, uncomprehending. “They lost a submarine? That can’t be the one we collided with. We lost that encounter. It left and went home.”

“We assumed it went home,” the XO corrected him.

Jerry tried to process the information. If the Russian Northern Fleet had declared an alert, then the boat had failed to communicate with its base. Had the other sub lost its radio, too? But they were close enough to be home by now, even if they had to crawl at five knots. And if they were adrift on the surface, they had rescue gear and emergency-transmitters, short-range equipment that they could use to call for help.

And they had that big escape capsule. Every modern Russian attack sub had a built-in escape chamber, large enough to hold the entire crew. It included emergency radios as well. Had they been prevented from using even that last resort?

He listened to others list and then dismiss the same possibilities, and others besides. It wasn’t impossible that another sub had gone down, but with so few Russian attack boats in operational service, the chances of two of them operating together, with one being lost and the other not sounding the alarm, were nil.

Rudel listened to the discussion silently, letting it run its course. “The only reasonable explanation is that the