flickered and dimmed once again until the only illumination was from small, self-contained emergency lighting units near the deck. A terrible grating, shrilling noise filled the near-darkness, coming from beyond the aft bulkhead. At first he thought someone was screaming back there, but the scream grew louder, and still louder, reaching a pitch and a volume that no human throat could possibly manage. The scream gave way to thunder… and the sub jolted hard, whip-snapping from starboard to port to starboard again, as though it were a bone being worried by a particularly large and playful dog.
The scream, Vyatkin realized with something like sickness in his soul, was Kislovodsk’s death cry, the shrilling of steel tearing like cloth.
“I’m getting break-up noises, Captain!” Davies reported. He had to listen hard, pressing the headphones against his ears to shut out the cheering of the crew.
“All right people!” Captain Lang shouted. “Quiet down!”
“As you were, there!” Callahan, the Chief of the Boat, added. “Stand to!” The noise subsided.
Lang was standing just behind Davies’s chair. “A kill?”
“Captain…” He shook his head. “Damn.”
“What is it?”
“Okay… it’s a bit confused out there. The blasts scrambled the water, y’know? For a minute, I thought I heard two subs, though.”
Lang’s eyes widened. “Two-“
“No, it’s okay. I think the torp launch we heard was a decoy. I can still hear it… running at zero-nine-eight, at about thirty knots. Making noises like our contact, but I’m also getting definite break-up noises. I think the contact launched a decoy just before our ADCAPS took him down.”
“Oh, shit!”
“Sir?”
“We may have jumped the gun a bit on that one. Okay, Davies. Is he going down?”
“Up, I think.” The sonarman listed a moment longer. “Yes, sir. I’m not getting any engine noise, but there’s lots of bubbling, hull stress and structural flexing sounds. And it’s headed toward the roof.”
“Diving Officer! Bring us up… slow. Follow the contact UP.”
“Coming up slow, Captain,” the diving officer of the watch repeated.
Lang felt the deck tilting up beneath his feet. He felt sick inside, a mingling of combat eagerness and shock at what had just happened. “If that poor bastard didn’t launch on us,” he said softly, “we’d better be on hand to render assistance.”
For a time, the Kislovodsk hung suspended between the surface and the black depths below… caught in a very temporary balance between buoyancy and flooding. Then, with a final grinding shudder, the keel parted just beneath the sub’s reactor compartment; hull plates and ribbing shredded like paper as the aft third of the Russian submarine tore free and plunged into unrelieved night, trailing bubbles, oil, and a thin, spreading plume of radioactivity from the ruptured reactor containment vessel.
The forward part of the sub leaped toward the surface with an explosive jolt. Moments later, the crippled vessel’s prow burst up through the surface and into the air above in a vast explosion of spray. It was already well past sunset and the sky was overcast, but enough twilight remained to gleam from the white foam breaking across the bow and past the low, rounded sweep of the sail. In seconds, the aft, forward, and sail hatches had been cracked, and crewmen were scrambling out into the cold, wet, and windswept near-darkness, battling the black waves breaking over the submarine from bow to shattered stern as they ripped open deck panels and broke out the life rafts. Their task was made more difficult by panic, and by the fact that the deck was canted sharply aft and to port; the sail was listing at a forty-five-degree angle, and each swell of the sea breaking over and past it sent torrents of water cascading down the after escape trunk hatch.
Vyatkin clung to the railing at the side of the bridge, high atop the sail, and watched miserably as his crew fought to save themselves. For a time, he’d thought, possibly, that Kislovodsk might be saved. He’d known the damage to the engineering spaces and propeller shaft must be grave, but if the sub could be kept on the surface, a tug out of Sevastopol could have them back in port by morning.
But that final shock that had catapulted them to the surface ? that had been the final blow. He could tell by the wallowing feel of the vessel that he would remain at the surface only a few more moments before making his final dive.
Vyatkin only hoped that all of the crew could get out first.
He heard the thuttering roar of helicopters… probably the Americans who’d been pinging them. The nearest Russian ships must be a hundred miles away. If only-Light exploded from starboard, a dazzling whiteness that, at first, he thought was a flare. Then the beam swept across Kislovodsk’s hull, illuminating dozens of life-jacketed sailors already afloat in the water, the soft orange shape of a raft already smothered by desperate men, and the black sheen of oil. It took Vyatkin a mind-numbing moment to realize that another submarine had surfaced a hundred meters abeam, that it was playing a searchlight across his dying command. By the back-scatter of that light, he could see one of the helicopters approaching, its rotor noise growing louder as it gentled toward the stricken Kislovodsk. A second light winked on, gleaming from the helo’s side. Something spilled from the open door, expanding as it fell.
A life raft. The Americans were dropping life rafts.
“Comrade Captain!” Aleksanyan called, shouting into his ear to be heard above the wind and the growing thunder of the helicopters. “We must leave! Now!”
Grimly, Vyatkin nodded. For a moment, he’d entertained romantic notions of going down with his command… but he found that, after all, he wasn’t quite ready to die.
Aleksanyan handed him a life jacket and he began to strap it on.
Commander Willis E. “Coyote” Grant strapped on the safety helmet, known aboard ship as a “cranial,” before stepping out of the Mangler’s 0–4 compartment and onto the carrier’s flight deck. The air inside the compartment was crackling with radio calls; the Deck Handler ? more familiarly called the “Mangler” ? and his crew were frantically repositioning aircraft silhouettes on the big Plexiglas diagram of Jefferson’s flight deck, updating the model to reflect the realities of aircraft positions outside.
He stepped through the doorway and onto the flight deck; the gathering night was held at bay here by the glare of spotlights, both from Jefferson’s island and from the helicopters overhead. Most deck operations had been suspended half an hour earlier when the word had come down that a Russian sub was in trouble twenty miles to the northwest. SH-3 Sea Kings were shuttling back and forth between the Jefferson and the sub now, bringing in another handful of wet, oil-smeared survivors with each trip.
It was a painstakingly slow process. The Sea Kings of HS-19 were ASW aircraft, their cargo compartments crammed with so much electronics gear that there was precious little room for passengers above and beyond the usual four-man crew.
Still, there was a little space aft of the sensor suite, and each aircraft was fitted with a winch and sling to haul people out of the water. They were ferrying survivors back to Jefferson’s flight deck just as quickly as they could harvest them from the oil-slicked waters of the Black Sea.
With a thunderous roar, a Sea King gentled itself toward the deck just ahead, guided down by a deck handler waving a pair of glowing, yellow Chemlite wands. The SH-3 touched down, bouncing slightly against its hydraulics as a dozen men hurried across the deck, heads bent low to avoid the descent of the slowing rotors. The side door was already open, and a crewman was helping the first of several black-coated men stumble off the aircraft and onto Jefferson’s flight deck. Helmeted American sailors reached him at the same moment, helping him walk clear of the helicopter. Others moved in with wire-frame Stokes stretchers to take off the men unable to walk. It took only a few minutes to off-load the survivors. Then, as deck personnel scattered and the handler raised his lighted wands, rotating them rapidly, the Sea King lifted off once more, making room on the deck for the next incoming flight.
Thirty or forty Russian submarine crew members were gathered already on the deck in the lee of the island,
