“And unfortunately, all of the rest of us are aboard as well, so we will have to live with the consequences of your short temper and eagerness for war. That is what we have in front of us now, Mister Karpov. It will not be a few ships here, a few ships there. They will come out to look for us in force, to hunt us down with nothing but well justified vengeance in their minds and hearts. And do you know what? I think there may even be a little contest between them to see which one finds and sinks us first.” He paused to see if that might sink into his Captain’s head, but Karpov seemed as stolid and unbending as ever.
Vengeance was something he understood all too well, and he expressed his thought. “They are not the only ones needing a little revenge, sir. Now they get a taste of it from us for a change.”
Volsky sighed. “You think these are the men responsible for our lot in life? You think they have caused our economy to collapse, our cities to stagnate and rot? They were all dead before the Iron Curtain fell and the nation that men like Stalin and Khrushchev built came down in a pile of stink. What did you hope to accomplish with this attack?”
“I was only defending the ship, sir.”
“I can see this is leading us nowhere. Defending the ship? All you have done is increase the danger that lies ahead for us. It might have been possible to reason with these men. I was steering this course to consider that possibility, but after this, I’m afraid they will not care much for a friendly chat.”
“But at least they will respect us,” said Karpov, and just a little too sharply. The Doctor noticed his tone immediately, shifting uneasily in his chair.
The Captain continued. “This brings us to a point I feel compelled to raise now, sir.” He looked at Zolkin. “But perhaps the Doctor would excuse us?”
Zolkin looked up at him, then leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head. “I think you are wanting to talk about nuclear bombs, yes? No, Captain, I will not wander off to my sick bay and rattle about with my stethoscope and thermometers. I am a Captain of the Second Rank, and third in the chain of command aboard this ship. In fact, it is mine to say whether either one of you, or any man aboard, is deemed fit for duty. So I think I will stay. If you have some idea about blowing up the world out there, I’d like to hear about it. It may help me decide whether or not you are still sane.”
Part X
Cauldron of Fate
“ Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things…”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
Chapter 28
August 7, 1941
The Cruiser Augusta and her escorts was running at flank speed, doubling up from the sedate 15 knots she had been steaming. Behind her, falling slowly behind, was the old battleship Arkansas. Two other cruisers and the fast destroyers of Desron 7 went ahead with Augusta. The President was in a hurry, and Arkansas would have to catch up as best she could.
Messages had come in from all quarters, the British Admiralty sharing intelligence, their Home Fleet coordinating the arrival of the Prime Minister, the American Task Force 16 withdrawing slowly back to St John’s Newfoundland bearing the survivors of TF-1. Captain Jerauld Wright aboard Mississippi had to be reined in to compel him to turn about. When he saw the wreckage of the Wasp and Vincennes he wanted to immediately steam north to deal with the German raider, but cooler heads prevailed.
Admiral King had directly ordered him to withdraw, and also radioed back to the Navy base at Long Island, NY and ordered all the now orphaned strike squadrons of CV Wasp to fly out to the airfields near Ship Harbor on Newfoundland. The place was rapidly becoming one of the most active military bases on the east coast, its numerous inlets to soon become anchorages for over twenty U.S. warships, with more still coming from home ports. The British had an equal force at sea. They were all just a day away now, the battle fleets eager to deliver their high ranking civilian and military officials to the secret conference, and then get quickly out to sea to hunt down this new German threat. Planes were up from Newfoundland’s Patrol Wing 7 flying PBY Catalinas and Mariners in Squadrons 71 and 72, keeping a wary eye to the north.
Admiral Ernest King was the sixty-three year old Commander of the Atlantic Fleet. “The King” or simply “Rey” to those closest to him, was an old battleship captain, he had served through WWI and even saw action as an observer on a few Royal Navy ships at that time. The experience made him somewhat suspicious and wary of the British, who clearly considered themselves the rightful masters of the Atlantic ocean, all other vessels sailing there by their leave. Yet, as the United States emerged as a strong naval power, she was still not fully ready to project real power into the Atlantic as Britain had done for decades the world over. The new bases leased to the U.S. by England in exchange for 50 old US destroyers had helped to give the Americans a means of better projecting that power, and Argentia was one such base.
After the first great war, King floundered with assignments administering the submarine fleet, and posts involving Naval aviation, receiving his qualifying wings in 1927. By June of 1930 he found himself assigned as Captain of “Lady Lex,” the aircraft carrier Lexington. He remained an opinionated man, somewhat surly and prone to anger, and his acerbic jousting with other hatbands saw him disliked by many of his colleagues, and had almost landed him in a graveyard post with the Navy’s General Board, a grey priesthood of aging officers who would sit around discussing policy and ship programs. One of the few allies he had in the service, Admiral Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, thought he could serve better as the Commander of the Atlantic Fleet, and he appointed, some say “anointed,” King as such in late 1940.
Roosevelt once described King as “a man who shaved every morning with a blow torch,” his disposition and demeanor being so fiery and easily riled. Like the Army’s General Patton, the Admiral was of the opinion that when trouble came around “they send for the sons-of bitches,” as he put it indelicately. He was one of them. His first reaction to the news that Wasp had been sunk was to send Captain Wright on the Mississippi out to find the Germans and rip their heads off. It was his old friend and still senior Admiral Starke who had advised him to be cautious.
“The British say this raider can steam up at thirty knots or more, Rey,” said Starke. “ Mississippi can push it at 23 knots if she’s lucky. This is work for fast cruisers-and for that matter, we’ve got the President here aboard one, and we need to get him safely off this ship.”
King reluctantly agreed, gave the order to pull back Task Force 16, but the old “son-of-a-bitch” wasn’t happy, and he let everyone around him know it. Earlier, he had given his destroyer captains orders to be aggressive at sea if they encountered German U-Boats, and he had also formulated numerous plans on how to deal with German surface raiders. He had even considered the Graf Zeppelin in his schemes, and directed that this ship would be fair game for cruisers and destroyers if ever encountered at sea.
Though he was leery of British intelligence on the matter, when he learned that the Royal Navy believed they were pursuing this German aircraft carrier he wanted to get there first. So he sent the fast destroyers of Desron 7 out ahead telling them to fuel up as fast as they could and take up a screening position off the cape of Newfoundland. And he told Captain Wright on the Mississippi to hover just behind that screen until other warships could augment his force for the hunt he was now determined to pursue in earnest.
“The only thing now,” he said “is whether we can get this bastard before the Brits do! If they catch and sink this ship first, they’ll crow about how they saved the U.S. Navy for the next hundred years. Well, I’m not going to stand for that. They come over here, hat in hand, and I’d like to drop this little trophy into their bag, courtesy of the United States Navy. Then we can get on with the real business of this war-the damn Japanese. If Roosevelt manages to get congress to declare war on Germany over this, then Tojo and his samurai brotherhood will fall right in line beside Hitler. That’s where the Navy’s fight will be in the end, not out her
e garrisoning Iceland and holding hands with Convoy Masters.”
Aboard Kirov, another “son-of-a-bitch” was angry as well. Karpov had a heated discussion with the Admiral, leaving sick bay unsatisfied, and quite unhappy. Volsky had been adamant that no nuclear warheads were to be mounted on any of the missiles except on his expressed order. The Captain had argued about it with him, implored him to see the logic of their situation, but he closed ranks with Zolkin and refused to listen. He gave him orders not to engage in any further combat, and even went so far as to threaten to remove him from the bridge watch if he persisted with these ideas, an insult that enraged the Captain to no end, particularly in front of the Doctor. All he had done was plead with the Admiral to allow the ship to mount the weapons in the event they needed them ready for quick action. But Volsky was adamant.
Karpov went to his quarters, stewing over the matter for some time, frustrated that he could not have simply collected the Admiral’s command key and passed it on to Orlov as he had hoped. And the Doctor was no help either. Zolkin was clearly running interference for the Admiral, supporting his arguments at every opportunity, and even going so far as to suggest that the Captain was overly stressed, a statement which Karpov vehemently refuted.
The Captain sat in his bunk, a nervous frustration keeping him from sleep, which he dearly needed now. Chastened by the Admiral, his old doubts and fears began to re-emerge. It was clear to him that the brief window of command he had enjoyed was closing, and that Volsky would soon be casting his considerable shadow on the bridge again. The tension of these last hours had been hard on him, in spite of his resolve to do what he believed he must in the situation. If he could just get a few hours sleep while Orlov held the watch, he could clear his head a bit.
Restless, and discontented, he took a book from his cabin and lay down on the bunk to read. It was an old favorite, Dostoevsky’s Notes From The Underground, the same book he had quoted to Fedorov on the bridge earlier. He opened it, flipping through the pages, and his eye fell on a segment he had bookmarked many years ago when he last read the book in earnest.
Dostoevsky had been talking about the injustice of life, and the cruelty of fate, comparing man to a pantry mouse thirsting for just a little revenge. “Now let us look at this mouse in action. Let us suppose, for instance, that it feels insulted, too (and it almost always does feel insulted), and wants to revenge itself. Through his innate stupidity a man looks upon his revenge as justice, pure and simple; while the mouse does not believe in the justice of it. To come at last to the deed itself, to the very act of revenge, the luckless mouse succeeds in creating doubts and questions…there inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions… Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and creep ignominiously into its mouse hole. ”
He paused, an ashen, disconsolate look on his face. Here he was, tucked away in his mouse hole. He knew what he wanted to do, what he should do, and yet, he had done exactly what Dostoevsky said. He had worked himself up with questions, and reasons and doubts, that same fatal brew that so confounds the mouse in every man’s heart. He was ashamed of himself for not being stronger than he was. What was all his conniving and planning and bluster for if, in the end, he could not be a man instead of this confused little mouse? His tired eyes strayed again over the well worn text, and the words scolded him, leaping off the tattered pages of the book that he had read so many times.
“There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in everlasting spite. For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details… Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, knowing that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself.”
That was the story of his life, thought Karpov. He had sulked in his mouse hole, and slipped out in the dark to steal one man’s cheese and another’s bread. And yes, he had oh so carefully avoided all the mouse traps, dodged the hard coiled springs that might snap down on his tail and catch him, particularly after Gazprom. He had crept about the big drafty old mansion that his country had become for forty years, and brought pain and suffering to more than one rival in all that time. All it had brought him was this aching sense of isolation and doubt when things came right down to this last awful moment when he suffered the final humiliation, dressed down by Volsky like that, right in front of the Doctor! Now he knew that all these years he had indeed been a mouse, and not a man. When it came down to the pitting of his will against that of a man like Volsky, here he was in his mouse hole again, reading books.
He flipped ahead, noting a passage he had underlined where Dostoevsky’s character had described his inability to enact the vengeance he had spoken of on a fellow officer and rival.
“I did not slink away through cowardice,” he read on, “but through an unbounded vanity. What I was afraid of was that everyone present would jeer at me and fail to understand when I began to protest… I stared at him with spite and hatred and so it went on… for several years! My resentment grew even deeper with years. In this way everything was at last ready. It would never have done to act offhand, at random; the plan had to be carried out skillfully, by degrees… I made every preparation, I was quite determined — it seemed as though we should run into one another directly — and before I knew what I was doing I had stepped aside for him again and he had passed without noticing me. One time I had made up my mind thoroughly, but it ended in my stumbling and falling at his feet because at the very last instant when I was six inches from him my courage failed me.”
The words burned him now, seared him, shamed him. He had finally found that ‘officer’ Dostoevsky had written about, the last man on the rungs of the ladder above him that he needed to topple in order to reach his goal, his rightful place, the place he should have earned long ago with all the intelligence, guile and skill he brought to the task. Now Severomorsk was gone, and so were any who might one day sit in judgment on him. Fate had delivered him to this moment, and so he went to the Admiral to see if he could get the man to do what was necessary, and if not, to bid him to step aside. But it was he that had stepped aside again, Vladimir Ivanovich Karpov, Captain of the First Rank. He felt useless, lost and humiliated by his own fear and inadequacy, and the only thing he could do to comfort himself was fashion these two things into hatred.
It wasn’t Volsky he hated now, not Papa Volsky-not the amiable father that had endeared himself to his crew-not the man, but the Admiral. He was better than the man, or so Karpov believed of himself. It was just that the man had a uniform, that was all, and on that uniform there were stripes and stars that, when he looked upon his own cuff, were missing. Volsky was the whole of it in his mind just then, that whole stinking, creaking, drafty old house he had been living in all these forty years as a tired little mouse. “…I have been forty years listening to you through a crack in the floor…”
There in that stark and bleak infirmary, he had finally faced off with a sick old man and come away defeated yet again, not by the man, he believed, but by the uniform he wore, by the stars and bars on his cuff. Yet that uniform was nothing more than the tired vestige of a nation and a system that no longer existed! The Admiral had even threatened to relieve him, to take from him everything he had labored and suffered for all these many years in his mouse-like existence, the few stripes he had had earned on his own. What, did he need yet more? Didn’t he have enough already?
Karpov sat with that for a while, until that old, self-satisfied feeling of warm comfort settled over him again, calming his troubled mind. It was a stink, he knew, but one he had come to like after all these years. People grow accustomed to anything in time, and he had become familiar with the stench of his own shame.
Here he sat, at a moment that might change the whole of his life, and not only his life, but the li
ves of every man aboard the ship, and the lives of all those many generations ahead that Fedorov so worried about, and yet he could not act. That was the last awful truth he had to face as he sat there in his mouse hole in the stench of his own shame, that his failure was now complete and it could not be any other way; that when it came to the final moment, he was not a man after all, but that sneaking, conniving mouse; that this was his fate, and there was no changing it. He could not become a real man, not now, not ever, because in the final analysis, he could not see or even imagine that real man he thought to become. He could not come out of his darkened hole and face the light that would clearly reveal the state of his own wretched condition, and so he turned away from it. Now when he looked, there was nothing there but his own shadow, a dark stain on the stark gray paint of the ship’s deck, stretching out before him when he walked the long empty passageways; nothing but the shadow of a man that he could never be.
His clenched fist held all these thoughts as one last voice cried out within his troubled mind. He could do this. He still had time to act before Volsky returned to take the ship away from him again. Then the little doubts and fears returned in their well practiced chorus. Yes, he could do this, but then what? What after? What when the eyes of the crew were on him in the passages and crawlways of the ship-the other mice all gathered here in the kollectiv? The eyes would judge him, condemn him, weighted down with their notions of good and bad, right and wrong, justice and injustice. The more he thought about it, the more paralyzed he became, until he perceived, welling from within, a long restrained anger and rage surging up in him, like some deep, smoldering magma in his soul. He turned another well worn page and his eye fell on the only remedy Dostoevsky had devised for his dilemma… “ Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things…”
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