Free Paths of Courage by Mike Woodhams Page B

sufficient railside cover. Once safely over the multiple lines, they made their way past cultivated fields and outlying dwellings on the western perimeter of a broad valley, before heading north into the foothills of the lower Hamgyong Mountains.

8

    When K449 slipped her moorings and sailed out of Rybachiy under cover of darkness into the northwestern Pacific, Captain Vladimir Sergeyevich Grosky had felt a little uneasy; something about the whole thing did not quite feel right. On board was North Korean Admiral Park Hyok, Iranian submarine Captain Asad Kamani, and Kamani’s executive officer, Lieutenant Hamid Zaha. It was an unusual situation that did not sit well with the Russian submarine captain. Grosky, a brusque, no-nonsense submariner of the old school, was grateful to be back at the helm of the vessel he’d spent so much time in. He was in his early fifties, but was still fit and wiry, and yearning for action. The captain had all but given up hope of ever going to sea again when the Delta III was mothballed then, much to his delight, Eastern Command had ordered him to take K449 back into the Pacific to undertake sea trials for the new owners. His operational orders would be given to him by the Korean admiral once at sea. The order from command was again highly unusual, he had to admit; but K449 had been maintained in very good condition in case of emergencies and both he and the remaining crew needed the operational pay. They also needed the stimulation and excitement of entering international waters once more.
    On leaving Rybachiy, Captain Grosky had opened the sealed envelope containing his orders and was shocked to read that he was required to take K449 to a remote island deep in the southern Indian Ocean, maintain radio silence all the way and once there leave the vessel with his crew. He was to rendezvous with a surface vessel, then hand over the command of the submarine to the Korean admiral. He began to suspect this was less to do with sea trials and more to do with a clandestine operation. The double provisioning had also added to his suspicions. Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, Russian submarines never stayed out on patrols for months on end, due to the greatly reduced budgets that halved normal provisioning and forced them to keep mainly to the Bering Sea and northern regions of the Pacific. This mission was indeed unusual.
    The course he’d been instructed to follow would take them west across the Bering Sea, through the Aleutian Island string at Unimak Pass and then deep down into the southern Pacific roughly on the 135 th line of longitude west until reaching the Antarctic Circle. Once there, they would head due west along the line of latitude 53 degrees south until reaching an island deep in the Indian Ocean. This very oblique course would at least avoid the Aleutian Trench to a large extent, heavily wired with the U.S. Navy’s sensitive deep-water long-range Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) and patrolled regularly by U.S. submarines. He knew they had to be extremely careful anywhere in the northern Pacific. The Americans could get very trigger-happy at unidentified submarines moving around in what they regarded as their own backyard. He definitely did not want his career to come to an abrupt halt at the bottom of this vast ocean and was therefore not unhappy with the designated course.
    Just after K449 had entered the Bering Sea via the remote stretch of water between the Russian Komandorskiye group of islands and the Alaskan Near group of islands situated at the extreme western end of the Aleutian Archipelago, they encountered their first spot of trouble. Keeping as close to the Komandorskiyes as they possibly could to stay clear of the U.S. listening station on Attu, the main island of the Nears some 600 miles to the southeast of their position, they were ‘pinged’ by active sonar, maybe from another submarine or perhaps a surface vessel. However, it was brief,