To Kill the Potemkin (30 page)

On
this occasion
Captain First Rank Felix
Andreivitch Olonov had enjoyed nineteen days of a successful patrol
without
incident. A chess tournament engrossed the crew. In the engine room the
engineers were constructing a
model two meters long of the czarist battleship
Potemkin
at the moment
of her famous mutiny in 1917. Detailed with czarist officers hanging
from the
rigging, maggots in the food and the blood of revolution, the model was
nearing
completion.

Olonov
took no
interest in the toy boat.
Closer to his heart. First Officer Piznoshov had revealed a craving for
English
spy novels, of which Olonov had a plentiful
store. Occupied with the heroics of George Smiley, James Bond and
Sidney
Reilly, the commanders of
Dherzinski
scarcely gave a
thought to the
three missiles in the sail aimed at America, eight hundred miles
northwest, or
to the Americans themselves.

Dherzinski
's
presence so close to the North American mainland and her supply base in
Cuba
were among the most carefully guarded secrets in the Soviet Navy,
second only
to the existence of
Potemkin.
For a year
Dherzinski
had operated
regular twenty-one-day patrols out of Havana, moving in and out of the
harbor
by steaming directly under Soviet cargo vessels. The huge sub, 328 feet
long,
never surfaced, and the satellites which frequently passed over Cuba
never
photographed her. Submerged in the harbor, moored under a Soviet
freighter with
a false bottom, she took aboard supplies and new crewmen via a
submersible
elevator that clamped over her forward hatch. The sailors never went
into
Havana. When they left the ship, they were taken directly to an
airstrip and
flown to the Soviet Union.

Olonov
had seen
neither the sun nor the stars
in over a year. Seventeen times, by his count, he had piloted his ship
into the
harbor, stopped under the freighter and
watched his crewmen go
through the hatch and into the watertight elevator. The lift went up,
paused,
then returned full of strangers, and
Dherzinski
went back on patrol.

Olonov
was
in his cabin reading
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
when the nervous
voice of the senior radio operator called him to the radio room.

Annoyed,
Olonov demanded, "What is it?"

"A
very low frequency message is arriving from Leningrad."

"Which
code?"

"Priority
one-time, book three."

Olonov
blinked and tried to swallow. His throat was dry. The code was the one
to be
used in the event of war. Only he or the first officer could decode the
message. Olonov locked himself in his cabin and rendered the
transmission into
Russian.

Olonov's
first reaction was relief. The message was not an order to launch his
missiles,
but it was almost as bad. He summoned Piznoshov.

"A
rendezvous on the surface? With one of our subs?" said the first
officer.

"We're
not going to rendezvous with
Nautilus
."

"You
can't be serious," Piznoshov said vehemently. "Gorshkov himself has
ordered
Dherzinski
to surface? It's crazy."

"I
know," Orlov said. "Obviously the
scrubber failed on
this ship, and they have a reactor problem. It's
happened before."

"Yes,
but
Gorshkov has never pulled a
missile sub off-station. Never. Right now
Dherzinski
is the most
important ship in the Soviet Navy—"

"Perhaps
not..."

Olonov
was not
officially aware of
Potemkin's
existence, but he was a man of long experience, with many friends, and
he had
heard rumors of a titanium-hulled attack sub. This was not the kind of
information he wished to share with a political officer.

"If
the scrubber
on this mysterious submarine
has failed, why doesn't he simply snorkel back to Murmansk? Why
compromise
Dherzinski?
"
Piznoshov
made an obscene gesture indicating what he thought Gorshkov should be
doing
with himself.

"Ours
is not to
reason why. Comrade
First Officer, but I have a rather good idea of what this is all about.
And
there is no question we have an appointment thirty-five hours and
twenty
minutes from now. Prepare to make way."

Twenty-two
hours had passed since contact was lost with
Potemkin
.
Barracuda
had continued
southwest at full speed, stopping frequently to clear baffles, and now
was one
hundred miles south of the Azores.

"Prepare
for all stop. We're going to transmit a position report."

"Aye
aye, sir."

"Control
to engineering, all stop."

A
moment
later the roar of
Barracuda
's
propulsion plant slackened, and the ship rocked in its own turbulence.

"Control
to sonar. Clear baffles."

"Sonar
to control. Clearing baffles, aye."

Barracuda
circled and Sorensen echo-ranged three hundred sixty
degrees.

"Sonar
to control. All clear."

"Very
well, sonar. Radio depth. Take us up, Leo."

Above
on the surface it was seven minutes after
midnight. May 21. A new year greeted the ancient sky whose stars
gleamed like
pearls above the clean ocean air. To the west, America tossed and
turned in
troubled sleep. Much farther west, in southeast Asia, soldiers died in
the
noonday sun. To the east in the Soviet Union tank battalions prepared
for the
invasion of Czechoslovakia, scheduled for later in the summer. Much
farther east.
Red Guards burned books in the Great Square of Peking.

They
were
far into the Atlantic now, alone in the great ocean. Sorensen heard no
ships,
no whales, no sign of life. Alone. Fogarty was in the control room,
learning
from Hoek how to track a target on the weapons console. Sorensen felt
weary. He
had sat through three consecutive watches and was an hour into a
fourth,
obstinately refusing to relinquish the console to less experienced
hands while
there was a possibility of
Barracuda
chancing on the
Alpha. The cards,
he thought, were in
Barracuda
's
favor. The North Atlantic was the U.S. Navy's
mare nostrum
.
They could track the Alpha just
about all the way to Murmansk if they had to. Of course the closer they
came to
Mother Russia, the greater the risk. Not that the tracking itself
wasn't a
risk. But that was the order—track, observe, photograph. Aye aye, sir.

A
moment
later
Barracuda
's
radio
antenna broke the surface and a message flashed the ship's position to
Norfolk.
A radio operator in Virginia immediately sent a reply. Springfield and
Pisaro
decoded the message in the captain's cabin.

"We
hit the
bull's-eye!
Dherzinski
's coming right at
us. She must be going for a rendezvous with the Alpha. We're going to
catch up
with them both."

Pisaro
sounded
more excited than any time
Springfield could remember. He tried to sound especially calm as he
said,
"Call the officers into the ward room. We need to brief everyone.
Meanwhile, set course two three zero. All ahead full. Let's not waste
time."

Lt.
Hoek went
directly from the officers'
briefing to the sonar room, where he found Sorensen mesmerized by the
blank
screen.

"You
trying to
set a world record for
consecutive watches, Ace? You've been in here for thirteen hours."

"What's
the word
from Norfolk,
Lieutenant?"

"They
picked up
the Alpha three hours
ago. She was two hundred twelve miles southwest of our present
position."

"That
it?"

"No.
They found
traces of titanium in
the hull sections cut out of the bow."

"Titanium?
Son of
a bitch. That explains
how they go so deep and how they survived the collision. Titanium,
Jesus, that
stuff is unbelievably hard. What else, Lieutenant?"

"They're
tracking
Dherzinski
. She's
coming this way."

"
Dherzinski?
That's the Cuban boat. We put a tail on her for a couple of days last
year.
Lord, talk about out of the frying pan into the fire. Do you know what
this
means, Lieutenant?"

"You're
goddamn
right I know what it
means."

"The
Russians
aren't going to like this."

"Well,
tough shit
for them. They've been
throwing their weight around, it's time we get them to back down...
Look,
Ace, you're beat. Willie Joe is on his way in. Take a break, get outta
here."

"Aye
aye, sir."

"By
the way, I
heard a rumor about a new
batch of plutonium wine back in engineering."

"No
shit? Is it
any good?"

"Is
what any
good? I didn't say
anything."

Sorensen
stood
up, stretched, went out and
shut the door and paused in the control room to watch Fogarty practice
on the
weapons console. In the center of the CRT a pulsing red blip simulated
a
target, a Soviet FBM. Red speckles danced in Fogarty's eyes as he
jabbed a
finger at his keyboard.

The
red blip
disappeared. "Very good,
Fogarty. Only, that time we nuked ourselves too. That gets you a
posthumous
Navy Cross and your kid can go to the Naval Academy."

Unaware
that
Sorensen had been observing him,
Fogarty swiveled around in his seat. "If we ever get the order...
well,
there won't be a Naval Academy."

"So,
what are we
now, kid?
Kamikazes?"

"It's
just the
simulator, Sorensen. Like
you like to say, cool it."

"Yeah,
right. In
a few hours you won't
need a simulator. You're going to have a real boomer on the screen.
You'd
better pull all the Soviet FBM tapes. You'll like the
Dherzinski
tape. I
made it last year."

Sorensen
shuffled
through the passageways to
the engine room, where Chief Wong gave him a Dixie cup of distilled
grapefruit
juice.

"Happy
days,
Chief. Thanks."

"Don't
mention
it."

Sorensen
drained
the cup and Wong gave him
another. "How come you're so jazzed on this Alpha, Sorensen? It ain't
nothin' but another boat."

"Maybe
you're
right, Chief. I hope
you're right."

"I
mean, this is
for officers, not for
us. I know you're pals with that cherry admiral, what's his name?"

"Netts."

"Yeah,
him,
Netts. I'll bet a dollar
against your dime that he's never told you the whole story. And
probably even
Springfield isn't telling the whole story, although he's a good guy.
Why sweat
it? Sorensen, you been around for a long time. You know nothin' is what
it
looks like. You should follow your own advice. Leave your mind behind.
Jack."

Sorensen
smiled.
"Just keep up a good
head of steam. Chief. We may have to drive all the way to Murmansk."

He
continued aft
to Sorensen's Beach, snapped
on the sunlamps, put on his wraparound Italian sunglasses, stripped off
his
jumpsuit and began doing pushups in his red Bermudas.

"One
two, one
two, one two..."

He
wanted to
flush the Russians out his
pores. After five minutes he stopped, opened the cabinet and pulled out
the
deck chair. Casually, he unfolded the chair, set it on the deck and dug
into
the stock of magazines.

As
he was about
to sit down he glanced
down—and there was long lost Zapata.

The
scorpion eyed
him, tail aquiver.

"Jesus
H. Christ,
I almost sat on
you."

He
didn't know
whether to kill it, catch it
or walk out and leave it. Before he could make up his mind, Zapata
scrambled
off the chair and disappeared under the pipes at the rear of the
compartment.

Sorensen
got down
on hands and knees and
searched the shadows under the machinery, but the little arachnid was
invisible. Cautiously, he backed up to the chair and stretched out,
keeping one
eye on the pipes beyond his feet.

"I'll
make a deal
with you, bug. You
stay out of sight and I won't step on you."

The
heat from the
lamps felt good. After a
few minutes of lying perfectly still, Sorensen noticed the scorpion
crawling
out of the shadow of a pipe. It came to rest in a pool of warm light.

"You
little
devil. I get it," said
Sorensen to Zapata. "You found your way in here because it's warm.
Those
steam pipes are real cozy, aren't they? Like the desert. I bet you miss
the
desert. Hot sand, cactus, real rocks, lots of bugs to eat. Maybe I
should take
you down to Mexico and turn you loose on a pyramid. Would you like
that, or
would you rather go back and live with Lopez in the torpedo room? You
don't
have to make up your mind until we get back to Norfolk, but you can't
stay on
this boat. She's going into the yard. They're going to cut her into
pieces, rip
her guts out and use her for target practice. The only
Barracuda
left
will be this one right here." Sorensen tapped himself on his tattoo,
and
suddenly felt foolish. The scorpion must think he was a jerk. Don't rat
on me,
you scorpion. You do and you'll be a damn scorpion-rat. Now there's a
combo for
you...