Effective, perhaps, but plagued with a cascade of ever more difficult problems and now, according to the XO, it seemed she had yet another.

Lyachin, an old Cold Warrior, had formerly served in the Northern Fleet for many years. Respected, liked, and not a little feared by his crew, the stern-faced sub driver was commonly referred to as Barya, father.

Lyachin had recently endured weeks of dry-dock repairs to his malfunctioning ballast controls and dive planes. All of this courtesy of Hugo Chavez’s navy technicians, in a steamy, mosquito-ridden port of La Guaira on the verdant coast of Venezuela. The insects were starting to get on his nerves. Standing on the sub’s conning tower early one evening, he had said to his chief engineer, “Hell, Arkady, you kill one Venezuelan mosquito and ten more come to its funeral.”

La Guaira was the port city for Caracas, Venezuela. Nevskiy had been in dry dock there while all necessary repairs were effected and the boat’s zampolit, the KGB political officer, attended a series of secret meetings with President Hugo Chavez and his advisers. The Russians and the Venezuelans were planning joint naval exercises for the following spring. Stick a little needle in the American navy’s arrogant balloon, right in their own backyard.

After a miserable three weeks, Captain Lyachin was finally once again where he felt most comfortable, under the water and on patrol in the Caribbean Sea. His mission was to conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions against the Americans. He had also resumed playing cat and mouse with an American Virginia class sub, SSN 775, the USS Texas. He knew the man in command of the Texas, a formidable opponent named Captain Flagg Youngblood. They’d never met, of course, but each man had long enjoyed their underwater confrontations in the oceans of the world.

Lyachin was privately struggling with a grave secret. It was something so outlandish that he had not even confided his suspicions to his XO. He was beginning to suspect that his sub’s multiplying problems were not simply human error, bad luck, or bad engineering. He thought perhaps his boat was the target of invasive electronic warfare, directed from the nearby American sub Texas. Ever since the infamous Stuxnet takedown of the Iranian centrifuge, he’d worried that one day warships might suffer a similar fate.

Intel he’d seen indicated three countries were leading in this new techno arms race: Israel, China, and the United States.

He had done considerable research on the subject for the fleet commander, who then ordered him to host seminars on offensive and defensive electronic warfare at the Naval War College whenever he was land-bound.

Stuxnet, he told his classes, was a fearsome cyberweapon, first discovered by a security firm based in Belarus. It is like a worm that invades and then spies on and reprograms high-value infrastructures like Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz. It is also capable of hiding its pathways and its changes. Many in the military considered it so powerful as to lead to the start of a new worldwide arms race. If you can take down a nuclear power plant, they reasoned, why not a nuclear submarine?

Lyachin was now beginning to believe that the U.S. Navy had somehow acquired the ability to use just such cyberweapons to influence events aboard his vessel by somehow subverting or overcoming his built-in electronic firewalls.

Nevskiy was nearly six hundred feet long and a fourth-generation Borei class. At thirty-two thousand tons submerged, she was roughly the size of a World War II aircraft carrier. She was, according to the Russian Admiralty, state of the art. But to Lyachin’s chagrin, she had been besieged with myriad problems in the past months. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had proudly pronounced her seaworthy prior to the launching at Vladivostok and she’d headed for the Caribbean.

And that’s when the real trouble started.

The Nevskiy’s XO, Lieutenant Aleksandr Ivanov-Pavlov, smiled back at his captain’s wry response to this most recent dose of bad news. He understood the old man’s sense of humor. Or he pretended to, at any rate. Son of a powerful Kremlin insider, young Aleksandr had been learning the political ropes since childhood. His father had been murdered in a KGB power struggle that had left him bereft of two uncles as well.

It was his close relationship with the Nevskiy’s captain that engendered free-flowing communications between the boat’s skipper and its 118-man crew, comprising 86 commissioned and warrant officers and 32 noncommissioned officers and sailors.

Captain Lyachin was seated in his raised black leather command chair in the center of the CCP. His command post was set just forward on the conning tower and aft of the torpedoes, the second compartment in the boat. The CCP, an oval-shaped room, was fairly spacious, but with thirty or so submariners crowded inside, it felt and smelled like a traditional Russian banya, or steam bath. The captain, frustrated in his efforts to quit smoking, lit another cigarette, his tenth.

To Lyachin’s right sat his helmsman, gripping a wheel the size of a dinner plate that controlled the boat’s aft stabilizers. Next to him was the planesman, who controlled the sub’s hydroplanes. His responsibility was to “steer” the boat up and down while submerged, or remain at any given depth the captain had ordered.

Arrayed in front of these men was a bank of computer screens showing depth, speed, and course, among other vitally important information. Next to them, the sonar officer, Lieutenant Petrov, monitored his screen, which displayed a flickering cascade of sound. In addition, the compartment had consoles for radar, weapons, electronic countermeasures, and damage control, all manned by specialists.

Petrov suddenly got a hit, but the signal was buried in surface clutter and needed to be washed. He leaned forward and thumbed the switch initiating the ALS, algorithmic processing systems. The ALS would analyze and filter, eliminating any signals not matching his desired target. He kept his eyes focused on the screen, waiting for the results.

Lyachin sat back in his heavily padded chair and expelled a sigh of frustration. “Tell me, Aleksandr, what fresh hell do we have on our hands now?”

“Frankly, it doesn’t make any sense,” Ivanov-Pavlov, the XO said. “We are getting repeated power spikes from the reactor. On a regular basis. But we see no indication of anything amiss on any of the monitoring systems, nor cooling, nor do the surges affect normal functions and operations.”

“Radiation leaks?”

“No, sir.”

“Makes no sense,” Lyachin said, scratching his chin. His thoughts turned to his greatest fear, the loss of his boat, not with a bang, but with a bug.

“No, sir.”

“Electronic security, Alexei? Has the engineer been able to detect any evidence of a viral infection in any system?”

The XO thought before he responded. “Unless some traitor among the crew boarded this vessel at La Guaira with a dirty mobile phone up his ass, this boat is still clean.”

“Inform the engineer that I want another sweep. Stem to stern,” Lyachin said.

“Yes, Captain, right away.”

“Fucking hell,” the captain said under his breath. He had a very bad feeling about this. Too many inexplicable things had been going wrong aboard the Nevskiy. He was beginning to believe his own theorem that it wasn’t just bad luck or sloppy engineers. Perhaps, he thought, it was the Texas. Perhaps the American sub he’d been chasing was somehow capable of infiltrating—

There was a brief burst of metallic static from the speaker above the skipper. “Conn, Sonar, new contact bearing zero-nine-five. Designate contact number Alpha 7-3.”

Lyachin thumbed his microphone. “Captain, aye. What have you got, Lieutenant Petrov?”