America (4 page)

Then Kolnikov went into the control room. He knew what to expect—indeed, he had studied wall-sized photographs of the displays. Still, the massive screens and control consoles were so different from those on the submarines that he had served aboard in the Russian Navy, and before that the Soviet Navy, that he stopped involuntarily and took a deep breath.

The bodies of two men lay on the deck between the consoles, two wearing khaki. One was the body of the OOD, the other the control room chief. The radioman was slumped in his cubicle beside the control room.

“Get them out,” Kolnikov told Heydrich, meaning the American officers and sailors who stood there with their hands raised. “The bodies too. Put them in the water.”

“The men in the engineering spaces have secured the hatches,” Heydrich said, “and jammed the dogs.”

“You know what to do,” Kolnikov replied.

Heydrich turned to the nearest man wearing khaki. He grabbed him by the arm, then turned to a sailor wearing a sound-powered telephone headset. “Tell them they have ten seconds to open that hatch, and if they don't, I shoot this man. Ten seconds later I shall shoot a second man. You will be last. Tell them to take all the time they want.”

Heydrich put the muzzle of the pistol against the forehead of the sound-powered telephone operator. “If they SCRAM the reactor, we will kill each and every man on this boat. All of them. Every single one. The ten seconds start now. Tell them.”

The operator was about twenty, with fair hair and acne. He began talking. He looked as if he were about to faint. Heydrich lowered his gaze to his watch, studied it. The talker was still delivering his message when Heydrich pointed the pistol at the man whose arm he held and killed him with one shot in the side of the head. The talker almost lost it on the spot.

He began babbling to Heydrich and Kolnikov, “No, no, they are opening the hatch. They are opening it!”

*   *   *

On the bridge of
John Paul Jones,
the captain and watch team listened without breathing to the garbled sounds of Heydrich and the sound-powered telephone operator. The dead radioman's foot rested on the push-to-talk pedal, so everything picked up by his lip microphone went out over the air.

“Are they recording this in the radio room?” Harvey Warfield snapped to the OOD.

The OOD spoke into the telephone she was holding against her ear. “Yes, sir.”

The report of the silenced pistol was barely audible on the destroyer's bridge, but the fear in the voice of the talker and Heydrich's accented English came across plainly.

Harvey Warfield had heard enough. “General quarters,” he roared. “All ahead one-third, Ms. OOD. Steer for the sub. Have the radio room send a flash immediate message to Washington telling them what's going on.” The general quarters alarm began bonging away. The captain merely raised his voice to be heard above the hubbub. “Get some helicopters out here right now to sit on this sub and get the admiral at New London on the radio. Right now, people! Make it happen!”

*   *   *

The sullen men from the torpedo room and berthing spaces came slowly up the ladders and filed forward. The men from the engine room came through the reactor tunnel one by one. They looked at the dead men lying on the floor, at the Russians and Germans holding weapons, and filed on by.

The last American out of the engineering spaces was a second-class petty officer named Callahan—Heydrich was behind him with a pistol in his back. “This is the reactor man,” he told Kolnikov in English. “He was at the panel.”

“Half of them out now,” Kolnikov told Turchak, “the other half later.” He held up a hand to Callahan. “Not you. You stay here.”

At that moment one of the SEALs stuck a knife into a German and grabbed his weapon. Heydrich killed the American sailor before he could get his finger on the trigger.

“Get them out of the control room,” Kolnikov roared. “Get some into the water and the others down to the mess hall. Make the men going into the water carry the bodies. When they are in the water, shut the forward hatch. Turchak, let's get the boat moving.”

He sat down at the control console and smoothly pushed the power lever forward a half inch. The motion of the boat steadied out. “Steeckt, up into the cockpit. Quickly now. We have no time to lose. Turchak, put the radar display on that screen right there,” and he pointed.

*   *   *

“
America
is making way, Captain,” the OOD reported to Harvey Warfield. “The lookouts report that men seem to be jumping into the water from the deck forward of the sail.”

Warfield focused his binoculars. The radio transmission from
America
had ceased. The dead radioman's foot was no longer holding down the transmit switch; Warfield didn't know that, and it really didn't matter. The silence, however, was ominous. “Give me her course and speed,” he snapped to the watch team.

“Little over a knot, sir. Coming starboard, heading passing one zero zero.”

“Distance?”

“Thirteen hundred yards.”

He could see people going over the side into the water. Jumping. Three or four jumped as he watched. Two men shoved someone—a body, perhaps—into the water.

“How many people in the water? OOD, ask the lookouts.”

That was futile. He could see only the starboard side of the sub … the tug was just now coming into view as the sub turned. The tug was down seriously at the stern.

“More than a dozen, Captain.”

“Get that Coast Guard cutter to pick them up.”

“She's steady at two knots, Captain, probably just enough to keep the rudder effective, heading one two zero.”

*   *   *

Aboard
America,
Kolnikov and Turchak studied the computer displays and controls on the consoles, the analog instruments, all the labels in English.…

The whole thing—the control room, the computers, the displays, everything—was overwhelming. They had studied all the available information, had run through simulation after simulation, but neither of them was prepared for the reality of
America
's control room. Workstation after station, the sonar control group, the combat systems group, the engineering group—the enormity of the task before them hit them with hammer force. For the first time, Kolnikov was truly frightened.

Two of the men with them, both Germans, were computer experts. They were seated now at the consoles, taking it all in. Unfortunately, there was little time. A few minutes at most.

Rothberg, the American, was there, thank God. He was dashing from console to console, setting up displays, checking computerized data, selecting automated operating modes wherever possible.

“How does it look, Rothberg?” Kolnikov asked.

“No sweat,” the American said without looking up from the console he was working on.

America
was unique, in Kolnikov's experience, because the control room did not sit under the sail, but behind it, in a section of the hull that was clear of the machinery necessary to raise and lower the radar, communications, and photonics masts. This positioning was possible because
America
didn't have a conventional periscope, which formed the center of every other submarine's control room. The telescoping masts were housed in the sail, and none penetrated the pressure hull. Aboard
America
the periscope function was performed by the photonics mast, so-called because it contained sensors and cameras for capturing photons of light and heat, which were converted to digital form, run through the computers, and presented as images on one of these large screens in the control room. The information from these sensors could also be integrated with the data from all the other sensors, such as sonar and radar, to form a complete tactical picture for the control room team and its leader, the commanding officer.

“How is the reactor functioning?” Kolnikov asked Callahan, the American sailor who was standing with Heydrich near the main tactical display in the center of the control room. This display was horizontal, a high-tech chart on which the boat's position and the position of all contacts, friendly and hostile, were automatically plotted by the computer in real time. And of course, the display could be advanced to predict positions at any future point in time, which allowed one to instantly see the closest point of approach, study possible attack headings, visualize possible defensive maneuvers, etc.

“Reactor's perfect,” Callahan said. “Someone should be on the board, though, every minute.”

“We don't have that luxury,” Kolnikov muttered, more to himself than anyone else.

All the boat's systems were controlled from this room—the reactor, turbines, sonar, weapons, life-support systems, everything except the stove in the galley and the commode in the head. Of course, the reactor control panel in the engine room had more complete instrumentation—doctrine in the American and Russian navies demanded that the panel be monitored constantly, twenty-four hours a day, even if the reactor were shut down. Unfortunately, Kolnikov didn't have enough men. And the ones he did have didn't know enough to make sound decisions. He was going to have to monitor the readouts himself from the control room and trust to luck.

Kolnikov bent over and looked at the German the SEAL had stabbed. The knife had gone into his heart. He was still alive, but he would die soon. He motioned to two of his men. “Carry him below.”

They blanched.

“He's dying. We can't help him. Do it.”

Callahan took a step closer to Kolnikov, glanced around the control room to ensure none of his shipmates were there, then said, “Hey, listen. I've done my part. The only SCRAM button that is still wired up is in the engine room. How about letting me get off now? You guys sail over the horizon and bon voyage.”

Kolnikov glanced at Callahan, then nodded at Heydrich.

A wave of relief crossed Callahan's face. He started forward with Heydrich following.

Twenty seconds later Heydrich walked back into the compartment, his pistol in his hand.

“He knew too much,” Heydrich said to Kolnikov as he slid the weapon into his belt. “We'll get rid of the body later.”

Kolnikov nodded. He had other things on his mind. He had read and studied every scrap of information he could get about this submarine from every conceivable source. “Are you certain you can handle this boat?” the man in Paris had asked last week at their final meeting.

“No one could be absolutely certain unless he had read all the manuals and spent many hours in the simulator,” he had replied, a reasonable response, he believed.

“So you are willing to try it?”

“Assuming the boat is not damaged in the hijacking, we will be able to take the boat to sea, submerge it, and proceed slowly away from the North American continent. Then we will spend three or four days figuring out what we have, how it works, what we can do with it.”

“What are the dangers of this approach?”

Kolnikov had maintained control of his face, though his shoulders twitched. “Submarining is not chess,” he said coolly. “Mistakes can be fatal. We must pray the boat functions as it should. We have had a limited time to prepare, we haven't seen the real ship. We will be unable to properly deal with malfunctions or emergencies until we discover exactly how the boat is laid out, how the control systems work.”

“And the reactor?”

“The operation of the reactor is mostly automatic. All the critical parameters are automatically monitored by a computer, which will shut down the reactor if anything goes wrong. People monitor the parameters to back up the computer—we will have to forgo that luxury. If the computer shuts down the reactor, we will abandon ship. That is our only option.”

“And if the Americans come hunting for you?”

“I have no doubt that they will,” Kolnikov had replied. “We must ensure that they are unable to find us until we are ready for them.”

The man in Paris had looked at him as if he had lost his sanity. Perhaps he had.

Yet Turchak had believed, for the man was here. A former boomer skipper himself, Turchak had been the hardest sell. When he agreed to come, the others did too.

Now, as Kolnikov stared at the horizontal and vertical large-screen displays and the keyboards on the consoles surrounding him, the cold truth hit him like a hammer. They had been damn fools to attempt to sail this thing. It would take hours to work through the options of the weapons program; their only option just now was to run and pray that no one shoots.

Still, this was Vladimir Kolnikov's big chance, as it was for Turchak and the other Russians. On the beach, with no money or prospect for earning any, stranded in the midst of an absolutely corrupt third-world country—yes, Turchak and the others welcomed a chance to steal a submarine. Whether they would ever see any money for their efforts remained to be seen, but the Russians had nothing to lose.

Nothing to lose but their lives, and after all, what were they worth?

And if Kolnikov and Turchak and the others died trying for the gold … well, submariners risked their lives every time they went to sea.

The Germans were also here for the money. None of them had experience in nuclear submarines, but they were computer and sonar experts. Heydrich was neither. He was here because the man in Paris demanded that he be included.

How willing we are to volunteer for unknown risks when we are broke and hungry, standing on dry land.

Kolnikov turned to his most pressing problem, the American destroyer. Everything depended on what the skipper of the destroyer decided to do. “What is the destroyer doing now?” Kolnikov asked.

Eck, one of the German computer men, had a tactical display on the large-screen vertical display in the forward port corner of the compartment. Boldt, the other, worked on the ship's main system computer. Rothberg ran from one to the other, coaching them, reaching over their shoulders and pushing buttons when required. Eck's display showed tactical information from the main combat system computer, information derived from radar and photonic data. In fact, the image from the light sensor in the photonics mast, the tip of which was raised several feet above its housing, was presented on a large-screen vertical display that formed the centerpiece of the control room. The destroyer was about a thousand yards away, closing. Five more vertical displays hung on the port bulkhead, four on the starboard, and one each in the forward corners of the compartment. At the forward end of the space were two ship-control consoles, with vertical displays above them. Seven consoles to manage the integrated sonar suite lined the port side of the room. Four combat control station consoles were on the starboard side; the navigation engineering stations were behind the ship-control consoles and in front of the horizontal tactical display. A momentary twinge of panic gripped Kolnikov. Operating these systems with just five men—only one of whom, Rothberg, knew the systems cold—was idiocy, he thought.