Chapter 21
Arctic
Captain First Rank Arkady Khurtin stood behind his ship’s sonar station, his eyes locked on a display showing the fading acoustic signature of the USS Cheyenne. The Americans were getting away, but that was of little consequence. Today’s battle was already won.
He had been playing cat-and-mouse with the Cheyenne for two days now, a silent stalk he viewed as a resounding success.
Khurtin commanded the Aurora, the first of the Russian Navy’s new Laika-class nuclear attack submarines.
His boat was, technically, still in the developmental stage.
The war in Ukraine had sapped funding for most big-ruble military projects, and the Laika-class program had fallen years behind schedule.
Yet Aurora was, undeniably, the future of the Russian Navy.
Her initial sea trials had proven so promising, so potentially game-changing, that the Kremlin had ordered her to be tested in the real world.
In truth, the voyage was also a bit of gamesmanship.
As with its newest fighter jets and hypersonic missiles, Russia had learned that fielding the next generation of weapons, even if they weren’t completely battle ready, spawned panic-stricken headlines from foreign news services.
Such glowing reviews of fearsome new technologies not only triggered worry overseas, but when echoed in official state media they distracted ordinary Russians from the fact that troops on the front lines were being slaughtered by the tens of thousands.
Yet in the Aurora’s case, unlike many other new weapon systems, the panic was warranted.
During her initial exercises with the Northern Fleet, she had not only matched the capabilities of Western boats—she had surpassed them.
Her hull was coated with new composites, giving an acoustic signature so low that, under most conditions, it was absorbed by the ocean’s background noise.
Her jet propulsion system was proving remarkably silent at low and midrange speeds.
She was fitted with the latest weapons, including Tsirkon hypersonic cruise missiles.
Taken together, Aurora offered capabilities never before available to the captains of Russia’s attack fleet.
And no one appreciated that more than the man standing in her control room.
The neatly cropped gray at Khurtin’s temples attested to his experience, but the smile on his face was more telling. For the first time, he truly felt like he had the upper hand on an American boat.
“We will lose her soon,” said Captain Second Rank Grekov, his executive officer and second-in-command. “Do you wish to increase speed?”
“No, let her go,” Khurtin replied. “Make speed ten knots and continue present course and depth. She is sailing a straight line. We can pursue her at our leisure and make contact later if she slows.”
Grekov echoed the order, then asked, “Why do you think the Cheyenne darted away?”
Khurtin was wondering the same thing. When they had first acquired the Cheyenne, two days earlier, she had been in no particular hurry.
Nor had her crew been under orders to maintain silence.
Pots could be heard clanging in her galley, toilets were flushing, and tools got dropped by mechanics.
She had surfaced yesterday, punching through the ice to undertake some kind of exercise on the ice pack.
This wasn’t unusual, and it suggested a low-priority training mission.
Then, with little notice, the Cheyenne had submerged and set off at high speed, once again making no attempt to minimize her noise signature.
“Do you think she noticed us?” the exec asked.
“Certainly not,” the captain said assuredly.
There were a dozen crewmen around them in the control room, manning various stations.
Khurtin had long ago learned the importance of showing confidence in front of his crew, yet his last response was not completely truthful.
His initial take on the Cheyenne’s maneuver was that they had indeed detected the Aurora.
If that was the case, then bolting might have been an attempt to entice the Aurora to follow.
And while his boat might be the quietest in the Russian Navy, no submarine could be stealthy at 20-plus knots.
“Captain, there is an alert in the new message,” said a seaman at the communications station.
Ten minutes earlier they had found a small break in the ice and raised a tethered buoy for a burst communication. Khurtin edged over and looked at the screen.
“What is it?” inquired Grekov from across the room.
“Headquarters has forwarded a news release issued by the Americans.”
“A news release? What possible news from America would we care about?”
“It seems that air-traffic control authorities have lost contact with an airliner in this area. Hemisphere Airlines Flight 777. It was traveling from Hong Kong to New York. There were no distress calls, but the Americans are working with Canadian authorities to coordinate a response. We are to monitor the area and report any possible responses.”
“So there is our answer,” the exec conjectured. “This is why the Cheyenne is running north at high speed.”
Grekov was a thinly built man with a sharp intellect. He could quote Navy manuals with the adeptness of any officer, yet there was a shrewdness to his intellect, a flair for extracting nuances from complex tactical situations, that the captain respected.
As was often the case, Khurtin agreed with his second-in-command. “Yes, I think you are right.”
“For once, Fokino has given us useful information,” Grekov said, referring to Russia’s Pacific Fleet Headquarters.
“Let’s see.” The captain meandered toward the sonar station, and after a thoughtful pause, said, “Remove the filtering on surface contact Three. I want a position and course plot.”
The operator repeated the command and began working.
Half an hour earlier, the Cheyenne’s fading acoustics had been drowned out by an icebreaker thundering overhead.
At the time, Khurtin had thought little of it, viewing the ship, which they easily identified as a Chinese icebreaker, as a mere acoustic obstacle to tracking the nearly silent Americans.
This new message, however, potentially altered that calculus.
A map flashed to the primary screen and the geometry of both vessels, relative to the Aurora, was presented.
The captain swapped a glance with his second.
“One Chinese and one American, heading in different directions,” the exec commented.
And there it was again. Grekov was in line to get his own boat soon. When he did, Khurtin would miss his company, and even more so his keen mind.
The captain nodded distractedly. “Another excellent point. The question is, why?”