Chapter 50
Arkady Khurtin was so incensed he barely felt the pain in his arm.
He was quite sure it was broken. He was standing in the control room, ankle-deep in glacial seawater.
The lights blinked on and off like a disco gone haywire as Aurora’s emergency electrical buses, where many of its critical circuits converged, ping-ponged between power sources.
The blackness, he knew, would win. The only question was how long it would take.
He had witnessed the collision sequence from atop the sail, ordering the Aurora to general quarters as the icebreaker bore down on his boat.
There had not been enough time to rig for a dive.
Khurtin could do nothing more than stand his ground and prepare for the worst, seized by a sense of helplessness he had never before felt.
The crash had sent him flying to the deck, and his left arm took the brunt of it, striking the base of a solidly welded stanchion.
The pain was immediate, although not incapacitating.
Realizing that his arm was broken, he had quickly fashioned a sling from a torn life jacket.
That kept the discomfort to a minimum. Truth be told, after fifteen minutes of appalling casualty and damage reports, he found the pain… invigorating.
Khurtin was convinced the ramming of his ship was intentional.
The only questions were, Who had ordered it and why?
Was the icebreaker’s skipper carrying out instructions from his headquarters?
Had some member of the crew, perhaps the captain himself, gone insane and caused the collision?
There had to be irrationality at some level for an icebreaker to attack a Russian warship without provocation.
A warship that had been, until that moment, engaged in giving aid to the survivors of an air disaster.
Yet some of what Khurtin had seen in the final moments seemed incongruous.
He’d noticed a crewman near the bow, no doubt a man on watch duty, screaming and flailing, waving his arms toward the bridge in warning.
Khurtin had heard the icebreaker’s collision alarm clearly, meaning those in command were aware that impact was imminent.
Yet the ship had taken no evasive maneuvers, and she was traveling at what had to be flank speed.
None of it made sense.
Could they really be that incompetent? he wondered.
“Captain!” Grekov said as he descended into view from the sail.
Khurtin had put his exec in charge of the topside emergency response.
His face was a bloody mess from a head wound, but he seemed perfectly lucid.
“We have recovered three bodies from the water. Eighteen men are now shoreside, sixteen missing. The rest are manning their battle stations. Damage control reports that compartments eighteen, nine, and six are fully flooded.”
“The pumps?” Khurtin asked as he shifted his bad arm.
“Only half are working, and power to those is intermittent. We are losing the battle.”
In line with his nature, Khurtin fell inordinately still.
This had always been his temperament, as if something in his brain was miswired.
The more fury he felt, the more dire the situation, the greater the calm that enveloped him.
It was the ideal disposition for a sub commander, and never more so than now.
“Should we abandon ship?” Grekov prompted.
The captain checked the roll and pitch indicators.
Aurora was listing 10 degrees to starboard.
Far more worryingly, what was left of her bow was down 18 degrees.
He knew the situation was hopeless. They had been rammed full speed by a ship four times their size that had a hardened bow.
Aurora would not survive. Yet she wouldn’t go down without a fight.
The doors would hold for a time and the pumps would buy a bit longer.
He gave it an hour, perhaps two. Enough time to tend to his casualties and salvage some equipment.
“Comm,” he said, “any luck sending that mayday?”
“No, Captain. The communications buses are down, most likely flooded. The backup satcom has no connection, probably damage to the antenna. And the communications buoys were all in the forward section, which…” He didn’t need to finish that thought.
“I’m going topside to have a look,” Khurtin said.
One-handed, he climbed the crooked ladder to the platform on the Aurora’s damaged sail.
The scene was absolute bedlam. Fire, smoke, bodies being hauled from the ice-clad sea.
The bow section of the Aurora, what had been the forward torpedo room, was simply gone, completely sheared away.
It was probably just now settling on the bottom, a half dozen training torpedoes rattling around inside.
At the front of the boat now were the gaping remains of the crew’s quarters, a forest of jagged metal and torn wiring.
These two sections, he knew, were where the fatalities had been suffered.
He stared venomously at the ship that had wrought this destruction.
The big icebreaker had settled, her bow lower than it had been immediately after the strike.
A gash along her side was taking on water, but her pumps were working furiously, gushers of water spewing from every exhaust port.
Unlike Aurora, the Snow Dragon 2 would probably sail another day.
Khurtin stood statue-like, his blue eyes lasering in on a group of a dozen Chinese.
They were gathering on the ice near a gangway, midway along the icebreaker’s waist. Central among them was a man in uniform wearing captain’s stripes.
Three of the men around him held weapons, what looked like old Type 56 battle rifles—China’s knockoff of the venerable AK-47.
All of them wore the working clothes of merchant seamen.
On the ship’s main deck, ten other men stood along the safety rail gawking at the scene.
Khurtin estimated that such a ship would run with a crew of between fifty and seventy, a mix of merchant seamen, technicians, and scientists.
He contrasted this to his own ship’s complement, seventy-two of the best sailors in the Russian Navy.
That number had been halved by casualties, but he still had under his command a solid contingent of highly trained men.
All of whom, in light of what had just happened, were highly pissed-off.
He regarded Aurora solemnly. The pride of the Russian Navy, she had been placed under his stewardship.
On another day, in another place, he might have used the last of her faltering battery power to drive her onto a sandbar.
But here? Aurora’s final resting place was written in stone.
Or actually, ice. Khurtin could make a case that he had done all he could, and his men would back him up.
Even so, it would be a stain on his record that could never be erased. This would be his last command.
My last command. Those words looped gravely in his mind. His expression remained blank, and his heart rate was metronomic. But his eyes drilled into the Chinese captain.
“Grekov!” he bellowed down the ladder.
His exec appeared quickly.
“Do your best with the boat. I am going ashore.”
“Ashore, Captain?”
“Yes, and I want ten men to accompany me. They are to bring a stretcher and a blanket. Have the remaining crew who are not directly involved in rescue operations standing by.” When he explained his plan, his exec smiled, which Khurtin took as tacit approval.
Grekov added, “You should take our Mandarin speaker with you, Andreyev.”
Khurtin nodded with otherworldly composure. “Yes, an excellent idea.”