Cover

DANGER UNDER THE SEA

“Torpedoes passed astern!” Tommy Zillich yelled as he listened to the headset, his hands pressing the earpieces closer to his ears so he could hear everything going on out there. “We may be clear!”

Toledo was still angling sharply downward, toward the bottom, racing to get clear of the Russian weapons. They had all heard the deep rumble of the other submarine as it exploded. Now the control room was silent, everyone listening for the high-pitched scream of the incoming weapons.

That sound, as all the men aboard knew, would signal their immediate death.

A few of them breathed sighs of relief when they heard Zillich’s report. Glass knew better. They weren’t free yet. Those two torpedoes were still out there, still searching doggedly for them.

The sonar man confirmed his worst fears.

“Torpedoes! Both coming out of the baffles!” Zillich yelled over the 7MC. Now he had lost his calm demeanor. His voice was high and strained. “They’re closing!”

The Russian weapons had crossed astern of them and then turned back, looking once again for Toledo. They were both still relentlessly coming after them.

FIRING
POINT

GEORGE WALLACE
AND DON KEITH

A SIGNET BOOK

Dedication

How little do the landsmen know of what we sailors feel,
When the waves do mount and the winds do blow!
But we have hearts of steel.

—“The Sailor’s Resolution” (eighteenth century)

Prologue

Captain Second Rank Sergei Andropoyov pulled the heavy sealskin coat even more tightly around his body and stepped out of the Naval Command Building into the bitter Arctic wind. He hated winters in this gray godforsaken land. The sun never dared rise above the horizon and the icy wind, its fangs bare, howled in off the Barents Sea, just a few miles to the north.

At times Sergei wondered why anyone would ever build a submarine base in a desolate place such as this, but he knew the answer: water. When she was a mighty sea power, Mother Russia needed access to the world’s oceans, and this was the best she had. The warm southern ports were all bottled up on inland seas, but here, ports on the bleak, bitter-cold Kola Peninsula offered a gateway to the West. Submarines could depart into a narrow ribbon of open water in the Barents Sea before disappearing under thousands of square miles of Arctic ice. Driving submarines out of this extreme environment demanded hard men and strong ships, but those sailors and boats had done their jobs for the motherland, and had done them well.