To Kill the Potemkin

by Mark Joseph

  "We must have carbon dioxide filters if we are to make it to Murmansk," he said. "Once under the icepack we can't snorkel. Potemkin is many things, but an icebreaker she is not. The sail is not sufficiently hardened to crack through."

  "Who can help us? Deflektor?" Alexis named the surveillance ship stationed in the Bay of Cádiz.

  "No. They don't carry stores for us. and even if they did, the Americans would follow her if she pulled off-station."

  "But we have no tenders in the Atlantic."

  "I know. We have better than a tender. As first officer you are entitled to learn a few secrets, my friend."

  Federov unlocked his safe and removed a sealed set of documents that contained the disposition of all Soviet Navy vessels throughout the world. He broke the seal, unfolded a chart of the Caribbean and put his thumb on Cuba.

  "We can't go there—"

  "You're right, but Dherzinski is operating from there, and he can meet us here, where the Americans least expect it."

  Federov moved his thumb to a spot five hundred miles southwest of the Azores.

  * * *

  Two thousand miles west, Dherzinski, a Soviet fleet ballistic missile submarine of the Hotel class, hunkered under a half mile of water in the Puerto Rican trench, the deepest part of the Caribbean. Inside her enlongated sail three huge Serb missiles, armed with hydrogen warheads, were aimed at Washington, D.C., Norfolk. Virginia, and Charleston. South Carolina.

  Hovering in silence in the Puerto Rican trench was not exciting. The sub drifted slightly in the current, requiring the constant attention of the junior officers to keep her on-station and thereby target her missiles accurately.

  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: DHERZINSKI: RENDEZVOUS ON SURFACE 52

  WEST 33 NORTH PLUS 36 HOURS SONIC CODE 2. SUPPLY

  LITHIUM HYDROXIDE FILTERS FOR C02 SCRUBBER M7.

  TAKE EIGHT CASUALTIES SUPPLY EIGHT REACTOR

  TECHNICIANS. GORSHKOV.

  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."

  26

  Zapata

  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 cabi
n.

  COMSUBLANT: BARRACUDA SSN 593: SOVIET ALPHA

  CLASS SSN DETECTED BY SOSUS GMT 2200 HRS 052068 LAT

  LONG 30 W 56 N COURSE TWO THREE ZERO SPEED

  UNKNOWN. SPECTROGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF

  BARRACUDA HULL FRAGMENTS SHOW TRACES OF

  TITANIUM. SOVIET FBM HOTEL CLASS DHERZ.lNSKl

  DETECTED BY SOSUS GMT 2330 HOURS 052068 LAT 27 N

  LONG 53 W. SPEED THREE ZERO KNOTS. COURSE ZERO

  FIVE ZERO. PROCEED ON COURSE TWO THREE ZERO.

  INTERCEPT. PHOTOGRAPH. TRACK DHERZINSKI. IF SHE

  RETURNS TO CUBAN WATERS, NOTIFY COMSUBLANT

  IMMEDIATELY. NETTS

  "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...

  He grabbed a magazine. National Geographic. Clean, slick. He flipped through it, knowing he would never find the article he wanted to read... "Inside the Newest Soviet Submarine—the Alpha, a Marvel of the Deep." He wondered what its name was. The Russians named their subs for cities or heroes of the People. They didn't have one named Joseph Stalin, so maybe that was it. After all, it had sounded like a tank division. Whatever had made it quiet at first had stopped working for good—he caught himself. He had hoped he could forget about the Russians for an hour but apparently he couldn't. Whenever he pushed them out of his mind for five minutes, one popped up again where he wasn't expected—sort of like old Zapata there.

  It was, it seemed, finally getting to him. He had left his mind behind a long time ago, and it occurred to him that if he stayed underwater much longer he would damn well lose it forever. As a young man, hardly more than a boy, he had found a perfect niche for his talent. His temperament was suited to life underwater. He enjoyed it so much he never pulled back and questioned it. Now, for the first time in his life he was confused by doubts. By tears. Yes, the Ace was afraid. He began to speak again to Zapata.

  "Listen up, bug. They want to make me chief of the boat. What do you make of that? If I was chief, for once things would get done right. No Muzak on my boat, no way. And no bullshit, definitely no bullshit. Better movies too. And Star Trek every day if I want it. Man, being chief is better than being captain. I would own th
e pharmacist's mate. The supply officer would be mine.

  "Would you like to hear a secret? I'll tell you why I really joined the navy. When I was a kid in Oakland my dad used to take me to watch the Giants play in old Seals Stadium in San Francisco. We'd go to watch Willie Mays. Willie was different. He was the best. He never let up and never gave less than one hundred percent. When he stepped between the white lines he was all there, and I wanted to be like him. One day we drove across the bridge to watch the Giants and the Cardinals. Bob Gibson hung a curve ball and Willie sent it into the parking lot. After the game we found the ball lying on the front seat of our car. Willie had smashed the windshield five hundred feet from home plate. That busted windshield was like a monument to true greatness, and we drove downtown with the wind of Willie's bat in our faces.

  "After the game we went downtown to eat. Market Street was always jammed with sailors from Hunter's Point. I thought they were pretty sharp in their uniforms and cocky hats. They all had Lucky Strikes stuffed into their jumper pockets, and they strutted up and down the sidewalk like recruiting posters. On the day that Willie hit that home run I knew I'd never be a ballplayer, so in the back of my mind I figured the next best thing was to be a sailor. So, here I am, and you want to know something? I'm the best at what I do. Like Willie. I ain't braggin', it's the truth. Anyway, there's no one here but you and me, right?... Except just what do I have to show for it? Ten years underwater, an ex-wife, string of dockside whores, binges, brawls and a bunch of stripes down my arm. Nothing fixed, no lady. In this life nothing matters except the ship, a set of earphones and the screen. Well, they're taking the ship away and want to give me a new one. I've done my bit, just like Barracuda. Me and the ship, we're finishing together... That Netts, he's trying to jack me off with his line of baloney. He knows I can make thirty, forty grand a year in any sound studio in the world, so he wants to make me chief of the boat. Wang it, Netts. Chief of the boat and then what? Another five years of Cowboys and Cossacks? Making the world safe for World War Three?... Well, old buddy, I ain't gonna be no chief of no boat. Fuck no. I'll get my own studio somewhere. Sorensen Sound, three hundred dollars an hour. Not bad. Right on Market Street. No more chasing around. Besides, nobody in his right mind wants to live underwater. So why am I doing this?" He grinned. "I know why, because I'm alive down here. I also love it. Well, I'd better learn to live topside, love something else."