The Seventh Angel

replacement part. But there were no master dive clocks to be had in the navy warehouses. The inventory records showed eleven clocks available for requisition, but none could actually be located. Officially, the missing clocks had been misplaced, which likely meant that they were sitting alongside the clock from Kuzbass in the back room of some dealer in stolen property.

The temporary clock said fourteen-oh-three. It was nearly time.

Kharitonov checked his wristwatch a half-second later: a habit born out of a career’s worth of training and personal experience. A nuclear submarine Sailor could afford to take nothing for granted. Every cross-check was an opportunity to catch a mistake or malfunction before it killed you.

The watch was a relic of the Cold War: a stainless steel Vostok Komandirskie, with brushed steel hands, and a featureless black dial with large white machine-stamped numerals. The only ornamentation on the watch was the red star of the Soviet Union, embossed above the 6 o’clock position near the bottom of the dial.

Kharitonov noted with satisfaction that his watch matched the time on the temporary master clock to the second. Not that he’d expected otherwise, but expectations and certainties were not quite the same things.

He gave the stem three twists to keep the mainspring taut. The steel gears clicked solidly, oddly loud sounds that spoke of both mechanical precision and overkill craftsmanship. According to popular rumor, the old Komandirskie models were supposed to be bulletproof: an assertion which Kharitonov had never felt the slightest desire to test. But the watch’s rugged construction did seem to lend credence to the idea.

He lowered his wrist and scanned the control room, his eyes carefully avoiding the empty spot that marked the theft — instead taking in the oversized gauges, clumsy electrical switches, and heavy-duty pipes and valves that formed the submarine’s control systems. Like the heavy old watch, his submarine, the Kuzbass, was a masterpiece of Soviet brute force engineering. And, like his watch, the Kuzbass had out-lasted the old Soviet Union, and now lived on in the service of Rossiyskaya Federatsiya, the Russian Federation.

The Americans called this class of submarines the Akulas, akula being the Russian word for shark. The official Russian Navy designation was Schuka- B, after a highly aggressive breed of freshwater pike. Kharitonov preferred the American term. The image of a shark was more dangerous and glamorous than that of any fish, but — far more significantly — the term conveyed a compliment of the highest order. The Americans were the most lethal nuclear submarine Sailors on the planet, and the Schuka/Akula class were the first Russian-built attack subs that scared the hell out of them.

Although they bore many of the unwieldy earmarks of Soviet Cold War engineering, the Akula subs were extremely fast, and exceptionally quiet. Not as silent as the new American Virginia or Seawolf class boats, but quieter than the vaunted Los Angeles class nuclear attack subs that were the backbone of the US Navy’s submarine fleet. In any case, the Akulas were nearly undetectable to most types of sonar.

Armed with a combination of 65 centimeter and 53 centimeter torpedoes, RPK-255 Granat strategic cruise missiles, and an impressive array of mines and antisubmarine missiles, Akula class submarines were far more deadly than any shark that had ever prowled the ocean depths.

Kapitan Kharitonov was proud of his boat. Despite the heavy hands of her designers and the light fingers of the unidentified asshole who had stolen the dive clock, Kuzbass was 110 meters of lethal black steel.

Kharitonov himself looked like he might have been designed by the same brute force engineers who had laid the plans for his submarine. Exactly two meters tall, he was within centimeters of the maximum allowable height for Russian submarine Sailors. His shoulders were broad enough to force him to go through hatches at an angle, and his arms were so thick that even the heavy steel Komandirskie looked like a child’s watch against the wide bones of his wrist.

His dark hair and eyebrows were a near perfect match for the black serge of his winter uniform. Thanks to some skillful needlework on the part of his wife, the uniform did a bit to disguise his oversized frame, as did the speed and agility of his movements. In his youth, Kharitonov had been a fencer. Although he hadn’t touched a saber or a foil in nearly a decade, he’d never lost the quickness and balance he had learned on the fencing floor at Pogosov.

What had happened to the Russia of his youth? A few short years before, the formidable Soviet military had been undefeatable. The vision of worldwide communism had been a foregone conclusion. Now the great Russian military couldn’t even keep the riff-raff from stealing its submarines a piece at a time. How had the mighty Soviet empire fallen so far and so quickly?

Kharitonov checked the temporary dive clock again. Fourteen-oh-five. It was time. He tapped the Watch Officer on the shoulder. “Take the boat to periscope depth.”

The Kuzbass had been ordered to rendezvous with a Tupolev TU-142 anti- submarine warfare aircraft based out of Yelizovo air station on Kamchatka. Upon establishing contact, the submarine and aircraft were to conduct a detect and evade exercise. For three hours, the big lumbering bomber- turned-submarine-hunter would pepper the ocean with sonobuoys and crisscross the waves with its magnetic detection equipment in an attempt to locate and track Kuzbass. All the while, the submarine would be doing its best to avoid detection by the sensors of the searching aircraft.

The Watch Officer glanced back at Kharitonov and nodded. “Sir, take the boat to periscope depth, aye!” He turned toward the Diving Officer. “Make your depth forty meters.”

The Diving Officer acknowledged the order and repeated it back. Not more than two seconds later, he issued his own order to the Stern Planesman. “Five degree up bubble. Make your new depth four-zero meters.”

The Stern Planesman, Seaman Viktor Petrovich Ermakov, repeated back his orders and pulled back slowly on the steering wheel shaped control yoke. Eyes locked on the plane angle indicator, he leaned slightly closer to the Helmsman seated to his right. “I’m sick of this recycled air,” he said quietly. “In a few moments, I’ll be topside with the kapitan, breathing real air for a change!”

Before the official start of the exercise, the Kuzbass was scheduled to surface in order to give the sensor operators on board the TU-142 an opportunity to practice using their video cameras and infrared cameras to detect and track a real submarine.

Once the boat was on the surface, depth control would be handled by the controlled flooding and pumping of the trim and drain tanks, leaving the Stern Planesman with nothing to do. Aboard the Kuzbass, as aboard most Russian submarines, the Stern Planesman became the topside lookout when the sub was on the surface. Which meant that Viktor would soon be up in the conning tower with his commanding officer, enjoying sunshine and non-recycled air.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” the Helmsman said. “We aren’t more than twenty kilometers from the ice pack. It’s nice and warm down here, but the air up topside will be colder than a Siberian whore.” He chuckled. “Your sosiska will freeze and fall off!” A sosiska was a thin Russian sausage.

Viktor elbowed his friend in the ribs. “You’ve been drinking the water from the reactor again, haven’t you? You’re hallucinating. My sardelka is fat and juicy! It is a man’s sausage!”

The Helmsman snorted. “You’ll see how fat and juicy it is when that cold air hits it.”

Viktor laughed, but kept his eye on the depth readout. He cleared his throat. “Passing sixty meters.”

The Diving Officer nodded. “Very well. Zero your bubble. Take all planes to horizontal. Level off at four-zero meters.”

The Watch Officer pulled a communications microphone from its cradle in the overhead angle irons. “Sonar — Watch Officer, coming shallow in preparation for going to periscope depth. Report all contacts.”

The answer came from an overhead speaker a few seconds later. “Watch Officer — Sonar, we hold three contacts at this time, all evaluated as fishing boats, and all bearing to the South. Target number one, surface, bearing 176 degrees with slow left bearing drift. Target number two, surface, bearing 194 degrees with moderate left bearing drift. Target number three, surface, bearing 212 degrees with slow left bearing drift.”

“Watch Officer, aye.”

The Watch Officer reached up and grasped the hydraulic control ring that encircled the upper hull penetration