Eyeball to Eyeball (Final Failure)

by Douglas Niles

  He was sweating, slightly. Even though the speech had been broadcast on all the networks and was recorded by countless agencies both official and private, he felt the burden of making sure that his recordings were perfect. The taping machines that almost filled this small room would provide the official documentation of the President’s speech. Perhaps nobody would ever know about them, or hear them, but even so Rickett felt the pressure of that responsibility like a physical weight.

  It was a weight he bore willingly, even eagerly, because he could do it so well. Now he checked the needles, reassured that they all rested at “0,” accurately indicating that there was no sound reaching the microphones in the Presidential office. The needles monitoring the mics in the conference room flickered slightly, and Pickett knew that the cleaning crew was in there, quietly dusting, moving the chairs around. A vacuum cleaner suddenly started to whine, and the needles flickered upward.

  Good. All was as it should be. Pickett boxed up the two duplicate tapes of the speech, labeled each in his precise, neatly blocked hand, and placed them on the shelf next to the tapes of all that month’s eventful discussion. History had been made, was still being made, in this building, across the city, the nation, and the world—but that reality was far from his mind.

  Instead, as he left the room, closed the door, and locked it under the watchful eyes of Secret Service agent Morris, Ron Pickett merely felt the calm satisfaction of a job well done.

  2300 hours

  Soviet Submarine B-59, Submerged

  1300 miles NE of Cuba, Atlantic Ocean

  The vast, rolling expanse of black ocean waters parted suddenly, churning into froth as a metallic prow and sleek, tapered sail emerged from the sea to glisten in the night air. Waves spilled to port and starboard as the rest of the boat broke the surface. Immediately the three diesel engines chugged into life, propelled the submarine even as they spun additional energy into the dynamos that began to reenergize the exhausted batteries.

  Captain (2nd Rank) Valentin Savitsky, as usual, was the first one up through the hatch into the small observation platform atop the sail. He couldn’t see stars through the overcast skies above, but at least the ocean surface was reasonably calm. The long, narrow deck below him remained above the waves, and he immediately opened the speaking tube and addressed his executive officer, in the command compartment directly below.

  “Send the men up to the surface in shifts. Every man gets thirty minutes of fresh air. We will submerge as soon as the batteries are recharged.”

  “Da, captain,” replied Commander Vasily Arkhipov, gratitude in his voice.

  Indeed, that gratitude would soon permeate the entire boat, Savitsky knew. The submarine, a diesel-powered boat of the Foxtrot class, had been designed for the defense of the Soviet coasts and nearby ocean waters. It was a fairly reliable vessel, only four years old, but the design lacked several features of more modern submarines—in fact, except for the fact that it was larger, the Foxtrots were not very different from late WW2-era German U-boats.

  And they had never been intended for a mission like this. Savitsky and his crew had been at sea for more than three weeks, running submerged except when they needed to surface to recharge the sub’s powerful batteries by running the diesel engines—and then only in the dead of night. They had already crossed some ten thousand miles of ocean, venturing farther from Mother Russia than any Soviet submarine had ever done before. And for weeks, now, the problems had been mounting.

  The submarine was one of four Foxtrots dispatched toward Cuba as part of Operation Anadyr, but Savitsky had no means of communicating directly with the other boats. Contact and orders from Soviet Naval headquarters, in Murmansk, was spotty, with a few long-range instructions reaching the submarine when it was on the surface. But those orders had contained precious little information, and absolutely nothing about the rest of the submarines, or anything else involving Cuba or the Americans. And constrained by the need for radio silence, Savitsky had been unable to send any reports back to the USSR, or to any other Soviet Bloc ships at sea. Secrecy in this mission was paramount: the Americans were not to have any clue that the Soviet navy was venturing into the western Atlantic Ocean.

  He and his crew existed in their own little claustrophobic universe, and it was a universe growing more uninhabitable by the day. Forty-eight hours ago the boat’s ventilation system had failed, and nothing the crew had done had been able to get the central fan unit to operate again. The captain suspected that the culprit was the high humidity, a corrosive effect of the steamy air caused by the warmth of these tropical waters. To compensate, they kept the hatches open between compartments, but even so the temperature in the boat was running at a steady 110 degrees Fahrenheit. In the engine room, where the diesel’s were not cooling properly, it was even worse, ranging 20 or 30 degrees warmer than the rest of the boat—a virtual oven.

  And the air quality was going from bad to worse. Carbon dioxide concentrations had risen to dangerous levels, and it was not uncommon for one or more of Savitsky’s sailors to faint at his post. The diesel coolers had become completely inoperative, probably clogged with salt, so the overheating engines continued to raise the temperature in the hull. The only respite from the poisonous air were these precious minutes atop the water, concealed only by the cloak of darkness.

  The previous night they had surfaced into stormy seas. The B-59 had churned along, charging her batteries, but the thunderous waves sweeping over the deck had prevented the captain from allowing any of his crewmen to come up for a breath of fresh air. So they had sweltered and gasped through another day.

  Wiping the spray from his forehead with an oily rag, the captain looked down to the foredeck, where sailors were already emerging from the forward hatch, stretching and breathing deeply as they escaped the stale air inside the hull.

  “Captain?” Arkhipov’s voice echoed in the speaking tube.

  “What is it, Vasily Andreivich?”

  “Feklisov, sir. He asks for permission to forego his deck time. He doesn’t want to leave his baby.”

  Savitsky uttered a bark of laughter. “Permission granted,” he said.

  He thought of Lt. Commander Anatoly Feklisov and his charge, which was the one piece of modern equipment on this old-fashioned boat. The “baby” was a very special weapon, a type 53-58 torpedo. Like the other twenty-one torpedoes of B-59’s weapon complement, it was capable of running for more than six miles under the ocean while it sought the metal hull of an enemy ship. It could be pre-set before launch to curve through an arc, to climb or to dive, as it sought a target. Unlike the other torpedoes, however, it was not equipped with a standard TNT-explosive warhead. Instead, Feklisov’s torpedo was capped by the RDS-9 warhead, a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb. The weapon was nearly as powerful as the one the Americans had dropped on Hiroshima during WW2. It was this torpedo that made the B-59 a truly powerful ship of war. Feksilov would do well to keep a close eye on that device.

  An hour later, again below decks, the captain made his way to the forward torpedo room, where he found the lieutenant commander, as usual, stationed right beside the nuclear-armed torpedo, encased as it was in its shiny gray tube. Eleven of the submarine’s twelve torpedo tubes were loaded with conventional weapons, but the twelfth tube was empty, merely waiting for this lethal device to be activated and slipped into firing position. Once that had been done, a process that took only about five minutes, the B-59 could unleash hell against any American warship, or even devastate a small fleet.

  “How fares the boat, Comrade Captain?” asked the bookish younger officer. Lieutenant Commander Anatoly Feklisov was not so much a sailor as an engineer, in the captain’s eyes. It was his job to tend the nuclear warhead, to maintain it, and to make sure that it would work if Savitsky ever ordered it to be fired. But the captain liked and trusted the young man, who sometimes seemed scarcely older than a boy.

  “Not so good, Anatoly Yakovlivich,” Savitsky replied glumly. “The air is shit, and getting
shittier.” He looked at the sleek gray container next to Feklisov, and thought about the power there. “But at least we can kick the Americans in the ass if they try to give us any trouble, eh?” he added, forcing a laugh.

  “That we can, Captain. That we can,” Feklisov agreed.

  Meanwhile, the temperature in the engine room continued to climb, and the air grew even more stale, heavy with CO2. The duty engineer, feeling dizzy, had to step forward for a moment, to get a few breaths of the comparably “fresh” air from the command compartment in the middle of the boat. He didn’t hear the noise, only a small snap really, that emanated from the rear of the engine room.

  There, in the very farthest aft part of the boat, a tired roller bearing had been turning relentlessly for more than three weeks, cradling the steady rotation of the starboard propeller shaft. Now, suddenly, a tiny fatigue crack broke the perfect seal where the shaft passed through the outer hull of the submarine. Unseen and unsensed by any crewmember, the crack was so small that only the tiniest trickle of water, at first, could force its way into the boat.

  One: Operation Anadyr

  “What if we throw a hedgehog down Uncle Sam’s pants?”

  Communist Party Chairman Nikita Khrushchev

  Proposing Operation Anadyr, April 1962

  15 September 1962

  2340 hours (Saturday night)

  Khrushchev Dacha, Lenin Hills

  Outside of Moscow, Russia

  The stately country home occupied a prominent bluff over the Moscow River. The great city, former capital of the czars and now the heart of the USSR, spread out in all its vastness below, yet here the countryside was wooded, rural, and private. The winding road rose from the river valley, past several checkpoints on the way to the sprawling compound on top of the hill. A tall, concrete barrier ringed the grounds of the manor, and alert KGB guards checked the credentials and faces of all who arrived. Other guards patrolled the outside and inside of the wall, some accompanied by dogs, all carrying their Kalishnikov assault rifles at the ready.

  Yet past the wall, in and around the manor, the security teams and the paranoia might as well have been a distant illusion. The great house thrummed with lights and life. A string quartet played classical Russian music on a balcony while guests mingled, sampling from tables laden with exotic canapés centered around a mountain of glistening black caviar. Laughter rang out everywhere, growing louder and more deeply toned as the evening progressed and the wine and vodka flowed.

  It was the kind of event that Nikita Khrushchev truly loved: a hundred people in attendance and having a good time, with himself as the center of attention. The evening was further enhanced by a unique opportunity: a chance for the de facto Premier of the Soviet empire to flirt with a beautiful American reporter.

  For an hour Stella Widener had been working on him, making her case with every argument, expression, and wile she could bring to bear. She was trying to convince him to grant her permission to film a documentary, intended for American television broadcast, within the Kremlin itself. He had more or less decided to let her do it, but he enjoyed the power of his control, so he had not yet revealed the fact to her. Instead, the Chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had enjoyed every moment of the conversation.

  “Did you know that Napoleon stood upon this very hill after his army occupied Moscow in 1821?” he asked her, veering the topic away from her job. “He saw the city in flames—we Russians burned it, you know—and he must have realized the end of all his dreams of conquest.”

  “That’s a fascinating detail. Clearly you have a great insight into your nation’s history,” Stella said. “That’s all the more reason to let me tell your story!”

  “I don’t see how I could let you bring your cameras into the Kremlin!” he objected in mock horror, gesturing vaguely toward the great city. “Why, you would be sure to capture many state secrets!”

  He winked, even before the translator finished relaying his words to Widener, who flipped her blond hairdo with a shake of her head as she pressed forward with her cause.

  “Really, Mister Chairman—it would be historic! Of course your security men would have final approval over everything I film. But think of the chance: you could show the West one of the most magnificent structures in the world! And you would have the opportunity to prove your peaceful intentions, to deny some of the terrible things that are said about you.”

  Though his official title was merely “Chairman,” everyone at the reception understood that Nikita Khrushchev was no less than the supreme dictator of one of the two most powerful nations on the face of the earth. He was also a vain man, a volatile man, and a man who desperately wanted to be liked. The vodka buzzed in his system, but it didn’t fog his brain, and he knew that the American woman was appealing to instincts that lay at his very core.

  Still, he shook his head, showing a stern face. “I tell you, it is impossible. The hallowed halls of the Kremlin will not be displayed to the Western world like some gaudy drapery festooned about your imperial capitals!”

  She shook her head, an expression of real regret on her face. “But now, when so much is at stake…when people worry about the tensions between our nations, about the possibility of war—” The translator kept up with her words so effectively that the Chairman cut her off in mid sentence with an abrupt chop of his right hand.

  “The war you speak of is cold!” he declared. “Only the United States can make it hot! It is your President who always blusters, speaks of war and threats and bombs. We are a peaceful people, a peace-loving people.” He remembered, he had seen, the price of that peace, at Stalingrad and Kharkov and Kiev, and he believed his own words.

  “Then let me help you prove that,” Stella Widener said, fixing her blue eyes on his face. She was a little taller than he was, but for some reason that didn’t bother him. He sensed his stern facade weakening, and this he would not allow.

  His excuse came as he saw Marshal Malinovsky looking at him from across the room. The Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union clearly needed a word with his Chairman.

  “I tell you, I cannot allow it,” Khrushchev said. “Now, if you will excuse me, I must attend to some state business.”

  For the first time, the reporter’s professional mask cracked slightly, and she looked almost petulant. In the next second the Chairman turned away, satisfied, even pleased with the conversation. She really was a beautiful woman, so blond, so Western, and everything from her looks to her voice gave him a little thrill. He had something she wanted; that was nice. If only.…

  Then he spotted his wife, Raisa, in her straight black dress and sturdy shoes, talking to some generals’ wives, and he felt a little sag of regret. He shook his head, reminding himself that he had won the encounter with Stella Widener, and that was perhaps the most important thing. He allowed himself to smile broadly as he approached Malinovsky, tall and resplendent in his uniform with the red stripes and gold epaulets.

  “Comrade Marshal, it is good to see you,” the Chairman said. “Do you bring me some news?”

  “Indeed, Nikita Sergeiyevich. The latest dispatches from…the north,” he concluded discreetly.

  “Follow me.” Khruschev led his senior military commander out of the ballroom, down a short hall and into his private office. The music, the laughter and conversation of the party reached them only as a muted background of sound. “What is your news…from the ‘north’?” He laughed as he mimicked his subordinate’s minor deception.

  “I refer of course to the Cuban mission, Operation Anadyr,” the general said stiffly. The name was the chairman’s own brainchild: Anadyr was a river, city, and province in far northern Siberia, so it had appealed to Khrushchev to conceal the most tropical deployment in Soviet military history behind the name of an Arctic location. Some of the soldiers had even been equipped with skis, snowshoes, and winter clothing, all as part of the maskirovka—the cloak of strategic deception so cherished by Russian commanders.


  “The surface-to-air missile batteries have all reached their positions, Comrade Chairman. The motorized rifle regiments and the personnel of all three divisions of the Strategic Rocket Forces have either debarked in Cuba or will be there within a matter of days. The rockets should arrive shortly, with the warheads about three or four weeks behind. Even as we speak, the troops on the ground are beginning to move out to their final positions—traveling by night, of course.”

  “And the Americans?”

  “They have been watching, but they have seen nothing. They have an electronic surveillance ship patrolling back and forth off the north coast of the island. But our men are observing strict radio silence, so they have not been able to learn anything through radio intercepts. They overfly our ships on the open seas with their reconnaissance aircraft, but all our military personnel remain below decks during daylight. And the cargo—the military cargo, in any event—has been stored in holds for the most part. In the case of our Il-28 bombs, and the coastal gunboats, the items have been secured in crates carried on deck. And while the Americans fly and patrol over the waters surrounding the island, it has been more than a month since they have sent a reconnaissance aircraft over Cuba itself.”