Seas of Crisis

“Man silent battle stations, aye,” the senior chief acknowledged. He spoke to the phone talker, and the order was relayed throughout the ship. Bell’s control room first team began to arrive. COB looked like he’d been showering — his hair was still wet and his Latino skin had a rosy tinge from vigorous use of a scrub brush. Patel appeared, his facial features softened as if by sleep, but he sharpened up quickly. Meltzer and Torelli dashed in together, brushing crumbs off their clothes and still chewing the last bites of food — they’d been snacking in the wardroom. Finch, O’Hanlon, Sessions, and over a dozen technicians and chiefs arrived in a flood. Soon COB reported that the ship was at battle stations.

“Make signal to Carter, ‘Man silent battle stations. Prepare to receive my orders for final melee.’ ”

Sessions acknowledged, typed, and reported that Harley had received and understood the message.

Jeffrey turned to the Ru-ling. “Make signal to Wild Boar and Cheetah. ‘Man silent battle stations. Prepare to receive my orders for final melee.’ ”

The Ru-ling acknowledged, then the Russian captains did.

“I think we’ve worn down and lulled the Amethyste’s poor German skipper long enough. Captain Bell, the key to beating an opponent who might go nuclear, using only high-explosive ordnance ourselves, is to stick to the fundamentals.”

“Commodore?”

“Surprise, and overwhelming firepower.”

A half-hour later, all the orders were relayed and acknowledged. All the torpedo tubes and weapons in them were ready.

“Make signal to Carter,” Jeffrey ordered, “ ‘Implement. Repeat, implement.’ ”

On both tactical plots, Carter-Amethyste continued to behave as before, steaming east at twenty-five knots just below the reach of summer ice keels. But for the first time in two days, the tactical plots showed very different symbols.

On the real plot, the icon that was Carter stayed on track but changed into the icon representing a brilliant decoy, programmed to act and sound like the Amethyste. The icon for Carter split off and turned south, slowed to fifteen knots to stay quiet while getting out of the way, steaming south toward distant Alaskan territorial waters. On the fake plot, the one from the combined task force perspective — the Russian point of view — the icon steaming east continued to show the actual Amethyste. There was no icon there for Carter.

“Ru-ling, make signal to Wild Boar and Cheetah. ‘Prepare to open fire.’ ”

Both Akula-IIs acknowledged quickly, their captains eager to go into action and share credit for an actual combat kill — not just a paper score in some training exercise.

Jeffrey kept a careful eye on the chronometer. Everything had to be coordinated to the second.

Now. “Ru-ling, make signal to Wild Boar and Cheetah, ‘Open fire. Repeat, open fire.’ ”

The Ru-ling typed. The Russian captains didn’t even bother acknowledging.

“Hydrophone effects!” O’Hanlon shouted. “Multiple torpedoes in the water! UGSTs!”

“Captain Bell, open fire. Launch the decoys in tubes seven and eight.”

Bell began to issue his orders. Soon Challenger had eight units in the water, rising toward shallow depth from below the twenty high-explosive UGSTs launched by the Russians — a full salvo from each Akula-II.

Jeffrey watched the tactical plots. As he’d ordered, everything was targeted at the Amethyste. The Russian torpedoes began to spread out, horizontally and vertically, to leave the German no room to run — even accounting for several inevitable Russian torpedo malfunctions.

Not much longer. His heart raced. If the timing was off, if the coordination between Carter’s and Challenger’s decoys wasn’t precise enough, if any of them broke down or had a programming input error or a software bug — or if Bell’s units from tubes seven and eight were destroyed by shocks from the real weapons that they absolutely had to stay near — the whole grand deception scheme would collapse. If so, the next overwhelming Russian salvo would be aimed at Challenger, and would be nuclear.

Wild Boar and Cheetah between them could fire twenty nukes at once. Challenger only had eight tubes. Her better speed and crush depth would be no help against so many twenty-kiloton fission warheads. Russian nukes would surely get through, while none of her puny one-kiloton Mark 88 fish would reach the Russians. Challenger and all aboard her would die. The enraged Akulas would hunt down Carter and then go home and report the terrible truth of American treachery.

Apocalypse Soon, Apocalypse Later, Apocalypse Now.

The decoy that was the Amethyste began to give off the sounds of noisemakers and jammers. Already making flank speed, this was all her imaginary captain could do. According to Jeffrey’s endgame scheme — reinforced by him scolding the Russians about having given away the UGST’s special capability — the Germans had figured out, from seeing the search pattern used by the four torpedoes the day before, that the Russian weapons possessed some way to successfully search for a nuclear submarine hiding quiet and still against the ice. The Russian captains might wonder why the German captain didn’t return fire, but decoys couldn’t launch convincing phony torpedoes — and real torpedoes from Carter had entirely different sound signatures from the weapons used by Amethyste-IIs. Decoys from Carter pretending to be German weapons, coming at the Russians, would never fool them, and would leave irrefutable physical proof that the pseudo-Amethyste was really American.

This was a loophole in Jeffrey’s strategy that he’d simply have to live with — or die with: the German captain would not return fire. Maybe he’d used up his few torpedoes and decoys days ago, approaching Russia, his weapons load drastically reduced to make room for so many commandos. Maybe he’d had a mechanical breakdown in the torpedo room. Or maybe he realized, with the geometries of torpedo maximum ranges versus ship flank speeds, that his countershots had no chance of being effective.

One tactical plot showed twenty-eight torpedoes quickly catching up with the Amethyste. The other plot showed twenty-six torpedoes and two decoys. Everything depended on those decoys doing exactly what Jeffrey needed them to do, exactly when he needed them to do it. They were the last two Mark III brilliant decoys Challenger had. They were preprogrammed, and fully autonomous once launched, with no guidance wire and no way to recover them. If something went wrong and they ran astray they’d be more forensic evidence unmasking Jeffrey’s elaborate subterfuge. The consequences will be far worse than Russians calling me a liar.

Challenger’s Mark 88 fish, launched from tubes one through six, were faster than the UGSTs, making almost seventy knots. Though they’d been fired from much deeper depth, they reached the target first. Jeffrey had counted on this. It was essential that Carter’s decoy be pulverized, but Challenger’s decoys had to survive because their indispensable tasks were yet to come.

Torelli crossed himself, and ordered his people to detonate their warheads via the fiber-optic guidance wires. Their massive high-explosive warhead charges caused tremendous, thundering blasts. Russian torpedoes began to explode right behind them, some command-detonated through intact guidance wires, others because the nearby blasts touched off their warheads sympathetically or spoofed their arming software, and a few because they’d been programmed for contact-fusing against anything solid they hit — including ice bummocks. Challenger was buffeted by many shock waves and strong turbulence.

Did the brilliant decoys survive? Months of mission preparation, weeks of hard work and bloody sacrifice and terrible risks, all came down to the next few moments. And then it happened. The blasts, echoes, and protesting ice cap were drowned out by a much louder sound, the unmistakable implosion of a submarine hull. A shower of wreckage of all shapes and sizes made flow noise as it fell, thudding into the seafloor.

The real tactical plot showed that these last effects were coming from Bell’s two deep-capable decoys, emitting a modified rendition of a recording of the real Amethyste’s death here two weeks before. As they dove for