Raise the Red Dawn - Couverture souple

Davis, Bart

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Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0671696637 ISBN 13 : 9780671696634

Editeur : Pocket Books, 1991

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Raise the Red Dawn Chapter One

In winter the Kola Peninsula is a land of frozen granite mountains and snow-covered glacial valleys. Fifty years ago Allied merchant ships fought Nazi U-boats and numbing arctic cold crossing the North Sea to reach the port of Murmansk on Kola’s northern coast carrying supplies to the Soviet army resisting Adolf Hitler. They were cheered when they limped into the harbor, battle-scarred and weary, lighter only for the dead they had left in the slate gray waves along the way.

Captain Vassily Kalik stood in the control center of the Soviet Northern Fleet’s main submarine base at Kola Bay, only miles from his boyhood harbor, remembering the cheers. He and the other boys out gathering wood for fuel would race back from the pine forests to help their mothers and the old scarf-draped babushkas pass cargo hand over hand in a line that stretched all the way from the ship to a waiting convoy of trucks. Kalik fancied that the bright new rifles and the stubby green grenades the ships brought would find their way to his father’s regiment fighting outside Leningrad. State atheism aside, Kalik was a religious boy who believed in fate and the power of God. He thought about signing his name to a weapon, as one might a letter, hoping that would somehow help it find its way into his father’s hands. He didn’t, and his father never came home. More than once over the years, as the boy grew into a man, he wondered if there could have been a connection.

The fleet main submarine base was built right into the icy mountains surrounding Kola Bay. Engineers had carved out the interiors of the granite monoliths, and the resulting network of watery chambers housed both submarines and the equivalent of a small city to service them. The subs entered and left through tunnels cut into the base of the mountains. The command staff observed their comings and goings from a cantilevered control center jutting out of the sheer cliff face overhead. The panoramic view from the center stretched from the outdoor pens to the misty horizon where the steel blue Barents Sea met the pale northern sky. Beyond that lay the polar ice cap, easily accessible to the ballistic missile and attack submarines that left Kola Bay regularly to lurk beneath it.

Kalik picked up a pair of binoculars and scanned the concrete pens below. Dark green water lapped at a humpbacked Delta IV. A fat, stubby Typhoon with its 25 meter beam was being serviced at one of the dockside stations and he counted a Victor III and two Alfas floating in parallel pens. Beyond these his own ship waited, the sleek Akula with the distinctive T type sonar pod mounted on top of her rear fin. Akula was the newest Soviet attack sub, and her speed and quieting were justifiably giving the Americans a fit. Akula. In English the name meant “shark.” Kalik smiled. That she was. That she was.

“Comrade Captain? Senior Lieutenant Volkov radios that preparations for sailing are almost complete.”

Kalik located the source of the voice in the busy room, a young radio operator sitting before an instrument console. “Tell him I’m on my way.” The operator spun his chair back around to his console to comply, but Kalik had an afterthought. “What about Red Dawn?” he asked.

“They are holding, Comrade Captain. At least half an hour.”

Kalik took up the glasses again and swung his gaze past Akula to the reason he and his sub were in Kola Bay. He saw what the American satellites would see, looking down as they assuredly were: just an aging, nondescript Tango class diesel submarine commissioned over twenty years earlier. No glamour, no fancy electronics masts, nothing to suggest that her familiar lines harbored anything unusual. But appearances were deceiving. Kalik was sure that right now Red Dawn was inarguably the most important submarine in the world.

A knot of technicians wearing thick yellow parkas stood by Red Dawn’s aft hatch arguing or conferring—it was often hard to tell the difference—with the rest of the scientific team as they had done ad infinitum during the months of preparation, refit, and preliminary testing. As usual, the elderly Nobel laureate, Dr. Karl Ligichev, was at the center of the knot. Ligichev was chief scientist at the Kronsky Naval Institute and solely in charge of this project. Even from this distance, Kalik could spot the mane of white hair that Ligichev combed straight back from his widow’s peak like some manic conductor. Next to him was his daughter, Dr. Ivanna Ligichova, whose bold mane of jet black hair was as thick and straight as her father’s. But the similarity between the two of them ended there. Ligichev was a myopic, scholarly type. Ivanna had a confident carriage and the fiery eyes of a racehorse. The father was almost painfully thin. Youthful Ivanna had the figure of an athlete, with breasts that rose like arrows against her coveralls. Physical differences aside, however, word was that although she was barely into her twenties she was almost as brilliant as Ligichev, and he was rarely without her. Scoffing at ancient custom, he had chosen to take her with him on what was, in a fundamental way, Red Dawn’s maiden voyage.

Kalik left the control room and took a high-speed elevator down to sea level. He stepped out into a concrete arena bustling with pedestrian traffic passing through to office buildings, dormitories, factories, and docks. On the pier the smell of the sea mixed with gas and oil fumes and the sounds of men hard at work welding and hammering metal. Stepping over tangles of cables on the grimy floor Kalik flipped his I.D. at the guard, settled into an electric cart, and barked a quick “Akula” to the uniformed driver.

Kalik clenched his thick blue coat tighter around himself and held his cap down over his steel gray hair as they sped along the docks. He blew out a frosty breath. Goddamn January. Another new year he’d start out freezing. This far north the cold reached in and crept up your clothes. True, it was a damn sight colder where they were going, but having reached his fifties, Kalik was too much the fatalist to worry about the future. Now there was only the pleasure of Akula’s sleek black hull looming ahead and the fish-briney smell of the harbor water filling his nose, which, like his own petite madeleine, always prompted memories of the shores of his youth.

Ahead, the conference on Red Dawn’s deck broke up and the figures disappeared below. Good. Enough talk. Either it would work or it would not.

Kalik was pleased by the expectant air of preparedness about Akula as he dropped through the hatch and moved about. Sailors worked attentively at their stations under what had come to be known as Kalik’s Maxim: check it, recheck it, and then check the son of a bitch twice more. In the galley, cooks wrestled heavy milk tins into storage. In the weapons area, the torpedomen made sure their potentially violent charges were nestled in for the ride.

He stepped into the control room where his senior officer, Viktor Volkov, was hunched over the navigation officer’s console.

“Hello, Viktor. Things looks good.”

“Comrade Captain. Glad to have you on board,” the senior lieutenant said warmly. “We are almost ready to sail.”

“I got your message. Very good.” He was pleased to add, “As always.”

Volkov accepted the compliment with a quick nod of his head, but Kalik knew it was appreciated.

“By the way,” Volkov announced, “Cook promises to make blinis as soon as we’re under way.”

“Tell Cook for blinis I will promote him to admiral . . . or marry him, whichever he wishes.”

Volkov laughed. The hardest thing about being in command was leadership—and the hardest thing about leadership was learning it. He had learned a lot serving under Kalik for the past two years. The captain was a proud man, scrupulously fair, and his mind was as sharp as a blade on a cold morning when it came to battle tactics at sea, especially under the ice. Kalik took immense pride in Akula, the first Soviet submarine to reduce the long-standing noise vulnerability. More than once Volkov had watched Kalik spend hours cagily stalking an unsuspecting American sub, waiting for the perfect moment to attack. Then he would give them the peacetime equivalent of a torpedo launch—a nasty raking with active sonar pings at max power. For Kalik, Volkov knew, sneaking up on the Americans’ most advanced Los Angeles class subs was, basically, thumbing his nose at the competition.

For his part, Kalik watched Volkov with the crew and found his senior lieutenant’s calm professionalism a balm. Volkov was flexible in his management, a sensible way to deal with men working in cramped confines for months undersea, yet he had sufficient force of personality—a thing that could not be taught—to maintain order and discipline, especially among the junior officers. Someday he’d be a fine captain.

“Comrade Captain, it’s Red Dawn,” announced the radio officer. “Preparations are complete. She is ready to get under way on your signal.”

“Signal Red Dawn: Proceed as previously directed.”

“Maneuvering watch is stationed,” Volkov reported. “The ship is ready to get under way and prepared for dive except for the deck.”

“Very well.” Kalik hit the intercom. “Engine Room, this is the captain. Stand by to answer maneuvering orders.”

“We are ready to answer all bells, Comrade Captain.”

Kalik nodded. “Radio Officer. To Red Dawn: P...

Biographie de l'auteur :

Bart Davis has written four nonfiction books, The Woman Who Can’t Forget, Closure, Shooting Stars, and Holy War on the Home Front. He is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and Stony Brook University and holds a BA in English and an MA in social work.

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