Red traitor, p.25
Red Traitor, page 25
21
Pioneers’ Ponds, Moscow
Sunday, 28 October 1962, 09:32 Moscow Time / 02:32 EDT
“Ears, you sure the mikes are working?” Lyubimov looked up testily from his binoculars. “They’ve been in there for twenty minutes and barely a word from either of them. And now she’s gone.”
Ears fiddled with the levels on his devices and was rewarded with a deafening burst of music as Morozov turned on the kitchen radio.
“What the hell was all that?” Lyubimov sat back on his chair as Sofia passed out of sight under the golden-leaved trees of Pioneers’ Ponds.
“Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto, I think,” replied Ears.
“Funny guy.” Lyubimov reached for the surveillance log to record the departure of Sofia Rafaelovna Guzman from the premises. “Your turn to make us some coffee, radio-head.”
22
Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, Moscow
Sunday, 28 October 1962, 09:39 Moscow Time / 02:39 EDT
At the corner of Malaya Bronnaya and the Garden Ring road, Sofia paused. Stepping into a doorway, facing away from the street, she slipped the paper out of Morozov’s envelope. Her eyes widened in incomprehension as she read the instructions he had written for Vasin. So it was true. Morozov really was a traitor. A sudden, weird sense of dread washed over her. She looked up to check the address plaque on the side of the building, just above the doorway where she was standing: Bolshaya Sadovaya 25. The address in Morozov’s instructions was exactly where she stood at that moment. How could he have known? She felt a moment of giddy panic before forcing herself to calm down. This was just a stupid coincidence, not witchcraft. Nothing left to do but push on with the crazy plan—to put her fate and Morozov’s in Vasin’s hands. She stuffed Morozov’s note back inside its envelope. Seized with a burning desire to get rid of it as soon as humanly possible, Sofia hurried toward the Mayakovskaya metro station.
Vasin spotted Sofia a hundred yards away. Her forward motion, head down as though advancing into a gale, told him all he needed to know. Morozov had given her the goods. Vasin raised his hand to attract her attention. Glancing quickly from side to side, she hurried through the cars parked outside Tchaikovsky Concert Hall.
Sofia’s face was pale with tension. Her eyes, as she approached him, narrowed with suspicion. Vasin began to speak, but Sofia merely smacked the envelope into his chest and hurried away, breaking into a run as she crossed the road to the metro.
For a moment Vasin considered following Sofia, attempting to reassure her that all would be well. But he knew he had no time. If Morozov had kept his word, he’d made some kind of signal to his American handlers to collect a dead-letter drop. Vasin had no idea how soon that would be. He opened the envelope, palmed the tiny film capsule, and read Morozov’s instructions.
The drop-off address was, Vasin saw immediately, just a couple of hundred meters from where he stood, and the same distance to Pioneers’ Ponds. That made sense—an emergency drop site needs to be close enough for the agent to reach it in a hurry. Trash receptacle in a semi-public place. Also logical. And the chalk mark, too—standard operating procedure for spies around the world, evidently.
All he needed was a packet of Kazbek. They were old-fashioned, cheap, workers’ papirosy, a cardboard and paper tube with an inch and a half of strong tobacco in the end. Vasin himself smoked posh Orbitas. Cursing, he pocketed the paper, wound up the window, and went in search of a tobacconist.
Yeliseyevsky Emporium, an incongruously grand pre-Revolutionary palace of a grocery shop, was on the opposite side of Gorky Street. A line of citizens stood waiting patiently for admittance. Evidently something good had just been delivered, and word had spread through the mysterious bush telegraph that connected Moscow shoppers. Vasin shouldered his way past the head of the line, his urgent confidence clearly signaling that he was not in the waiting-in-line class. There were no protests as he squeezed inside and made for the tabak counter.
23
USS Bache, Sargasso Sea
Sunday, 28 October 1962, 02:51 EDT / 09:51 Moscow Time
Somewhere under the dark sea were at least two Soviet subs, no more than a couple of miles distant. Billings knew it because his sonarmen could see the sons of bitches as clearly as burglars suddenly caught in a floodlight on a back lawn. Forty minutes earlier the second sub had slowed to a near halt some fifteen hundred yards from its companion. That meant the skipper had paused to take a look around. Run, listen, run—that was the submariners’ way. And the other submarine had near as goddamned run right up his fellow Sov sub’s ass. Now both Soviet commanders, listening intently on passive sonar, would have heard the screw noises of the flotilla that had been scrambled to intercept them.
But in water less than five hundred meters deep, the Sovs had no way to hide from the powerful active sonar arrays installed on the USS Bache and her fellow sub-hunting destroyer, the USS Cony. The pressure wave the deep pings made through the water traced their profiles on the sonarmen’s blotchy green screens like pulsing, deadly sea ghosts. Recordings of the noise of the Sovs’ propellers had been fed into some newfangled computer at Patuxent which stored all known Soviet submarine acoustic signatures. The sonar profile told Billings that the Sovs were big fuckers. And the eggheads at the naval air station had radioed a few hours before to confirm that they were Foxtrot-class subs. Oilers: the big diesel-electric boats that were the backbone of the Soviet submarine fleet. Not nuclear-powered boats, which were sleeker and faster than these guys. And not ballistic-missile subs, thank Almighty God.
The two boats Billings now had in his sights had actually been heading away from Cuba when they’d first been picked up by US Navy Orions. A feint? An attempt to evade the blockade by giving the US ships a wide berth? Or were they actually heading home? Would they still try to escape and push on toward Cuba, despite being spotted?
Billings scanned the black horizon once more. A sliver of new moon hung low over the Caicos Islands to the west. No word from the sonar team of any increase of the subs’ engine noise, no blowing of tanks, no nothing. The Sovs were just…waiting. Which made Billings nervous.
“Pete. What you reckon?”
Kimble took his time before answering. Both men knew their orders. To force any Soviet submarine they found to surface, give it a formal warning—to be recorded on newsreel film—then make sure the fuckers headed back where they’d come from. And if they refused? Both Billings and his executive officer had been listening to the radio, too. Kennedy had been very clear. Running the blockade would be an act of war.
“Don’ like it none, skip. They’re just sitting there. Only one reason why an attack sub would just sit there in the water for longer than it takes to get their bearings. And that’s to calculate a firing solution. Maybe these guys got orders to not be taken alive. Kamee-kadze-style. If you know what I’m talkin’ about.”
Billings pondered for a moment and shook his head. Soviets weren’t Japs.
“Must be, what, at least fourteen hours since they could have had any comms with command, right? Probably more. If the Russki skipper wanted to take a shot, he’d already have done it. If he’d reckoned he could outrun us and get to Cuba, he’d have tried that, too. But he hasn’t done either of those things. My guess—he’s just sitting tight, hopin’ we’re just gonna give up and leave him alone. If he were on a nuke, he could go on sitting down there for weeks, makin’ his own air. But Patuxent tells us we got ourselves a brace of diesels down there. Diesel subs gotta come up for air, sooner or later.”
Kimble worked his tongue around the inside of his bottom lip—a habit he hadn’t lost since the days of his youth when he used to dip snuff.
“We’ve waited just about long enough, I reckon. When do you think we’ll get the green light to rattle Ivan’s cage an itty bit? Focus those Russ’n gentlemen’s minds a little? As in, time to come out, gals. Game’s up.”
As if in answer, a red light flicked on in front of the Captain’s console. The radio room. Billings picked up the receiver, grunted an affirmation, then pressed the telephone into his chest for a moment as he turned to Kimble.
“It’s the Randolph. Patching me to Admiral McKenzie. Maybe you’d better get ready to rattle those cages, Pete.”
* * *
—
The afterdeck of the Bache was illuminated by a row of fierce white spotlights. The roll of the sea had calmed to a gentle swell, and a shower shrouded the deck in a drifting halo of mist. Billings, in a tropical rain slicker, walked out among the racks of shining black depth charges. Trolleys of practice charges, painted white with red stripes, stood by as sailors loaded them into the arrays of launchers that fanned out across the Bache’s stern.
Billings was acutely conscious that a lot of important eyes were on his task. The signaling code—five depth charges every fifteen minutes, plus a more frequent code of max-volume sonar pings—had been cleared not only by ExComm, the White House crisis command, but by Kennedy himself. Even the damn Kremlin had been alerted. Somehow the Sovs were meant to pass that signal on to their sub commanders. Right. Good luck with that. If anyone had worked out a way to communicate with a submarine three hundred feet underwater, Billings hadn’t heard of it. Sounded to Billings like Kennedy and his boys were just covering their asses.
No. Those subs were out there on their own, blind, deaf, and cornered. This was between him and the Sov commanders. Both were waiting for the other to make a wrong move. It was personal. Very.
And if the subs refused to surface? Or worse, loosed a torpedo? They would be dead. If the brass gave the order, Billings could crush the two subs as flat as stamped-on tin cans. Because the Bache—as well as the Beale and the Cony—were carrying special weapons of their own.
A supply of nuclear depth charges.
Only a small group of specially trained able seamen and a handful of the officers knew about the nuclear weapons. Billings himself had never seen one of the eleven-kiloton W34 bombs detonate, not even on exercises. But he did know that the things sent a shock wave through the water powerful enough to crush any submarine within a five-nautical-mile radius and raise a twelve-foot-high wave on the surface—as well as destroy most of the marine life in the visible horizon.
But it wouldn’t come to that. Hopefully.
The Bache’s weapons officer, saluting, reported that the first set of charges were ready to fire.
“Okay, boys. Let ’em go.”
PART SIX
BATTLE STATIONS
If you start throwing hedgehogs under me, I shall throw a couple of porcupines under you.
—Nikita Khrushchev, 1963
1
B-59, Sargasso Sea
Sunday, 28 October 1962, 03:01 EDT / 10:01 Moscow Time
At ninety meters’ depth, the pop of the cartridges that propelled the barrel-like depth charges from the launching racks arrayed on the gunwales of the USS Bache were inaudible to B-59’s sonar operator. But the unmistakable splash of a hundred fifty kilos of dense material being dumped rhythmically off the side of a ship certainly was. It was the noise that every submariner dreaded most—the deep, splashing gulp of a sinking barrel of high explosives. A weapon that could send a shock wave through the water powerful enough to burst his ship’s steel plates like an eggshell.
Warrant Officer Sergei Komarov snatched his headphones off his ears.
“Depth charges!” Komarov’s voice was an unbelieving shriek as he leapt up from his console as though it had suddenly become electric. In the command center everyone froze as Komarov’s shout echoed from the intercom. Seconds passed. Then came the thud of five successive underwater explosions—muffled, but unmistakable.
Savitsky, startled, jumped up from his seat in the command station.
“The attack is starting!”
Arkhipov pushed his way out of the navigator’s compartment and in three steps was at the Captain’s side. Both men listened intently for the deadly sounds of creaking steel that signified the boat was breaking up. But none came.
“All compartments—damage reports!” Savitsky barked into the triple intercoms behind his seat. Sounding off one by one, the seven compartment chiefs called in the all clear.
Arkhipov saw that the Captain was swaying, bleary-eyed with exhaustion. Savitsky had refused to leave his post for more than a few minutes at a time since they had dived—even though the temperature in the command center was close to unbearable. The huge banks of accumulator batteries had been designed for the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, not the tepid Sargasso Sea. True, the temperature was even worse back in the electric engine compartment, where the chief engineer was reporting temperatures of sixty-one degrees Celsius—as hot as a banya. Hot enough to liquefy the heavy grease on the propeller shafts. Hot enough to shred the nerves and addle the wits of strong men.
Over the last few hours the crew had been dropping like dominoes, slumping into unconsciousness in front of their instruments. But still Savitsky sat on, his shirt drenched in sweat and his head hanging doggedly between his clenched fists. Now the dull thudding of the depth charges roused him from his torpor. He looked around the alarmed faces on the command deck which had turned to him for orders, his jaw working as he thought. Abruptly, the skipper lurched aft. Arkhipov followed a pace behind as Savitsky ducked between the periscope and snorkel tubes into the weapons control room. Political Officer Maslennikov was already there, unlocking the steel gate that closed off the compartment except during emergencies or firing drills.
The cramped space, little more than two meters square, was almost filled by the most sophisticated piece of electronics on the ship. The size of two large refrigerators, the targeting computer was capable of a mind-boggling thousand calculations per second. Back when Arkhipov had been a naval cadet, submarine captains would have to surface in order to fire their torpedoes, calculating ranges and speeds on a slide rule and aiming by eye. But that had been before the space age. Now the USSR’s attack boats had the benefit of the newest technology that the Ministry of Medium Machine Building could provide. This amazing computer would calculate the B-59’s speed, the sea current, the bearing and direction of the targets, and come up with a perfect firing solution for the boat’s torpedoes. Junior Lieutenant Andrei Kotov, the keeper of the targeting machine’s secrets, appeared at his station flustered and bleary with sleep.
“Kotov. Plot firing solutions for all the enemy vessels in the vicinity,” Savitsky growled.
Arkhipov and Maslennikov exchanged glances as they squeezed aside to allow the young officer to take his place in front of the computer.
“Start with a firing solution for the special weapon. An enemy vessel at ten thousand meters’ range. The bigger the better.”
“Valentin Grigorievich! The special weapon? What are you thinking?”
Savitsky’s lowering glare focused on Arkhipov, his voice loud and furious.
“Maybe the war has already started up there, while we are doing somersaults down here!” Savitsky roared. “Our orders are to use the special weapon when attacked. And we are under attack now!”
Arkhipov heard the unmistakable edge of hysteria in Savitsky’s voice, and fought to keep his own firm and calm.
“Wait, Captain…”
Savitsky swiveled to the political officer.
“Tell him, Maslennikov. Comrade Arkhipov seems to have forgotten our instructions.”
The younger man’s eyes flicked nervously between his two superiors.
“Vasily Alexandrovich, the Captain is correct. We are required to prepare firing solutions for our weapons immediately on close contact with the enemy. That is a standing order. And I presume that to mean firing solutions for all our weapons. Including the special weapon. Sir.”
A moment later another thud came through the hull, fainter and sharper than the previous ones. It was followed by four more, at roughly five-second intervals. The weapons control center had its own direct intercom link to the sonar room.
“Sonar?” Savitsky barked into the machine. A moment passed before the sonarman’s voice replied.
“Not depth charges, Captain. And not from the same direction. Detonations from another American ship, sir. At this range it sounds like…grenades?”
Savitsky swung back to face Arkhipov.
“Satisfied now? First depth charges, now grenades. You still say this is not an attack?”
“Why would they attack us with grenades, Savitsky? This may be contact with the enemy—but it’s not an attack. Read the manual, Captain.”
“This ship is crewed by fighting sailors. The place for men who have swallowed a training manual is on shore. In a classroom.”
Arkhipov held Savitsky’s eye as he struggled to control himself.
“ ‘A Soviet commander is at all times calm, level-headed, and resolute.’ ” Arkhipov was quoting from the preamble to the Standing Instructions to Soviet Marine Officers.
The Captain made no reply and shouldered his way out of the cubicle, pushing past Arkhipov with unnecessary force. Arkhipov and the Politruk exchanged a long glance before turning to watch the young lieutenant key the various coordinates of the surrounding ships into his machine.
It was a laborious process. To avoid being pinpointed, B-59 could not send out sonic pings from her active sonar, and had to rely on the indistinct rumbles and swishes that she could hear on her passive listening devices. Even with two sonarmen working as fast as they could, each contact had to be verified by three separate systems—the Feliks, Hercules, and Clarification sonars that were mounted in a bulb on B-59’s bow. Moreover, to get an idea of the speed and direction of every one of their pursuers, the sonar team would have to check back on every American ship every ten minutes. And as if that were not complex enough, there was the bulk of their sister submarine—B-36—lying some five kilometers to the east and interfering with the sonar signals with the backwash of her propellers. One of Arkhipov’s old instructors had joked that piloting a submarine was like trying to drive a truck up Gorky Street with the windows painted over, with only your ears to guide you. Suddenly the joke didn’t seem so funny.
