Vivilav was too busy to hear the splashes from the American Mark 46 torpedoes when they entered the water. The sonar operators were occupied, too, concentrating on the cruiser. They never heard the motors come up to speed as the tiny twin counterrotating propellers drove the deadly fish toward Vipr. The first time Vivilav realized he was under attack was when the threat receiver above his head began alarming shrilly. It was detecting the forty-kilohertz active sonar from the torpedoes as they drove home.

There wasn’t time to run. Or even to pray.

The first torpedo hit just under the control room. The shape charge in its warhead drove a half-meter-wide hole through Vipr’s steel side. It vented molten metal and superheated explosive gases into the compartment. Fires spontaneously ignited all around the compartment. The ice-cold Baltic poured in.

That’s when the other three torpedos hit.

The one that struck in the reactor compartment caused the reactor to shut down and ripped open a weld in the steam piping. High-pressure steam roared out into the engine room, scalding vapor parboiling everyone unfortunate enough to be in the compartment. The temperature was driven up to two hundred degrees and the pressure to six atmospheres before the cold sea temperature started to condense it.

The third one hit the screw, blasting it sideways and destroying the shaft. The bent shaft became a one-meter-thick, forty-ton steel snake as it slammed around the engine room, smashing machinery and people. Water roared in through the massive hole the shaft left in the aft end of the doomed submarine.

Vipr was dying, but the Mark 46 that hit the torpedo room was the merciful coup de grâce. It hit torpedo tube number ten, where one of the Viyogas was armed and ready to launch toward Anzio. The blast detonated the missile’s volatile fuel and its four-hundred-kilogram warhead. The warhead, designed to sink an American aircraft carrier with a single hit, ripped the bow off the submarine.

Those few crewmen still left alive after the initial blasts died as the Vipr plowed into the muddy bottom of the Gulf of Finland.

Chapter 43

Joe Glass stared at Toledo’s sonar screen. The noise from the Russian torpedoes exploding in the fjord had died down, and now passive sonar was picking up contacts again. The two Russian Grisha frigates were still pinging, still looking for them somewhere astern. Zillich reported that they had now moved away from the knuckle and were resuming a search pattern. They must have realized that they had been nibbling at the wrong bait.

The Udaloy destroyer was still up ahead somewhere, between Toledo and the open sea. He was playing it very cagey. Glass couldn’t find a trace of the bastard on any of the sonar screens. He was there, though, waiting to spring his deadly trap. A decoy wouldn’t fool him this time.