Read The Chase: One Courageous Skipper Battling The Perilous Evil Out To Destroy Him. (Sea Action & Adventure) for Free Online Page B

Comrade Kashenko," he turned to the senior navigation officer, "you will have our waypoints ready for me at the same hour."
    His eyes scanned the room as he exclaimed sharply - "dismissed".
    Immediately everybody was thrown into his duties, hurrying to get their jobs done on time. Grisha, the Chief, stayed on to talk to the Captain. He was the Captain's most entrusted man, the only officer whose loyalty was without question and the only one with whom Captain Poliakov could share his thoughts and worries. They were about the same age, both of the same fraternity of W.W.II veterans who survived both the Nazis and Stalin. They both had to fight for survival in this age of atomic submarines, electronics and bright eager young officers who were very loyal to the government and the party.
    Wordlessly, the Captain asked Grisha to stay behind as the rest of the officers left the chamber.
    First lieutenant Sasha was the last officer to leave the room. He was obviously busy with his thoughts as he strolled through the narrow passage. Both the Captain and the Chief followed the young officer with their eyes, fatherly appreciating the strain these young men must take. Little did they know that his worries were of a different kind altogether.
     
    Sasha, the Second Navigation officer was, in fact, a Naval Intelligence agent assigned to the sub, serving the K.G.B. It was universally accepted that there would be a K.G.B. agent on board but no one knew who it was. Captain Poliakov suspected there might be one, but never found any particular suspect. Sasha himself was quite sure there was one more agent besides himself, a second agent, operating independently and unknown to him. Only after his first year aboard did he stop searching and guessing about that other agent.
    He was now thinking fast for his time was running short. Thirty-five hours ago the submarine hit a sailing yacht, lost its ELINT millimeter wave antenna and Captain Poliakov did not report any of it to Navy headquarters. Moreover, the young K.G.B. agent assumed the Captain had any intention of doing so in the future. Sasha figured that he had dithered long enough, now he must act, he must notify his home office.
    He hurried to the navigation station, which was just behind the bridge and across the hall from the communication room in a chamber all by itself. The chief navigator, third lieutenant Sergey Kashenko, was leaning over the large navigation table which occupied the center of the room, busily marking a 1:100,000 naval chart. The chart, originally printed by the British Admiralty had proved extremely useful during the sail into the lagoon and he had no reason to doubt its accuracy now. He was marking the waypoints and calculating their time of arrival as Sasha walked in and proceeded to the instrument bay. He was the wizard of all these sophisticated equipment - inertial navigation, CHAYKA (the Russian version of LORAN) a western LORAN-C unit. The CHAYKA navigation console had a five-position selector knob used for tuning in on one of four networks. The fifth position was marked AUX and was assumed to have been left for future expansion. Sasha went through a series of well-rehearsed procedure. He turned the selector switch to AUX then switched on the CHAYKA unit, selected OPERATION MODE - AUTO and frequency band - D. This was a totally meaningless combination of control setting - except for Sasha. This was his special way of communicating, via a secret communication satellite, with the K.G.B.'s listening post at Kerch, on the shore of the Black Sea.
    He was in receiving mode, attempting to verify communication with the satellite. The LAT position display, which normally indicates the LATITUDE of the vessel in degrees, minutes and decimals of minutes, should show SSS, the last digit indicating the channel over which the link is established.
    Communication with the K.G.B was, of course, a complete secret aboard the Slavianka. Sasha had been provided with an automatic