Red traitor, p.32
Red Traitor, page 32
“Savitsky, get back here. Maslennikov—remind the Captain of our instructions.”
The Captain straightened, his back to Arkhipov, and addressed the Political Officer.
“I gave you an order, Commander Maslennikov. We are going to arm the special weapon. I command it.”
“Sir. Comrade Captains.” There was a stammer in Maslennikov’s voice as he faced his two superiors. “Our orders are that we may retaliate if attacked.”
Arkhipov took a step closer toward the trembling man.
“And that the decision to fire is at whose discretion, Maslennikov?”
Savitsky answered for him.
“The boat’s commanding officer. And its political officer. Now let us get on with the attack.”
“No, Captain.” Arkhipov struggled to keep his voice steady. “The boat’s senior officer. That’s what it says, in black on white. On this boat, you command. But the senior officer of the flotilla is me. Is that not correct, Maslennikov? We do things by the book, remember?”
Quaking, the Political Officer met Savitsky’s fiery stare.
“Actually—Comrade Arkhipov is right, Captain. The decision is the senior officer’s. And that is the flotilla commander.”
“Correct. The decision is mine.” Arkhipov pushed in between Savitsky and the hatchway. “And my order is that we do not fire. We are not under attack.”
“We’re being chased around the Sargasso Sea by an American fleet!” Red spots of anger were kindling in Savitsky’s already flushed face.
“I tell you again that we are not under attack, Valentin Grigorievich.”
“You prefer that they sink us before we have a chance to use the special weapon, Comrade Captain?” The natural imperiousness of Savitsky’s voice had become husky. “I would rather die than become the shame of the fleet.”
Arkhipov placed his hand, palm flat, on the steel bulkhead behind Savitsky’s head.
“I, as chief of staff of the flotilla and senior officer on board this boat, will be the judge of what shame is to be apportioned.”
The Captain’s voice sank to a vicious, urgent hiss.
“The crew will obey me, not you, Arkhipov.”
Tension snapped between the two men like an electric charge. Barratry. That was the sea-law term for what Savitsky was suggesting. Mutiny was an uprising by the enlisted men. Barratry was a revolt of the officers against their commander. Except in this case there were two commanders—B-59’s own and the outsider, Arkhipov. Which would the crew choose, if it came to it—loyalty to their skipper, or their lives?
“You want us to continue to circle like goldfish until the batteries run out, then surface and surrender?” Savitsky continued, implacable. “You wish to hand over the Red Banner Northern Fleet attack submarine B-59 to the enemy without a fight? Are you a traitor, Vasily Alexandrovich? Or just a coward?”
Arkhipov felt tension throbbing in his sweating temples. He would have liked to have a man-to-man shouting match with the truculent Captain. But he fought to keep his voice low to match Savitsky’s hiss. The two men’s faces were centimeters apart.
“Surrendering is not my order, Captain. And no—the men will not obey you. Opening the torpedo tube doors with the enemy this close will be suicide. They all know it. They will not do it. And the second you step through that hatch, I will make an announcement on this intercom here that our mission is aborted and we are returning home. Try getting them to follow your order then.”
Arkhipov’s hand had crept along the bulkhead and rested next to the bank of three intercoms over the commander’s seat. All he had to do was flick a switch and the whole boat would be able to hear their conversation. Savitsky’s eye flicked from Arkhipov’s face to the intercoms. The Captain could easily reach up himself and shout his own order. But he hesitated a second. And a second more. Finally Savitsky took a deep, ragged breath, as though it were the first he’d taken for minutes, and hung his head.
“Good. Enough of this.” Arkhipov flicked on the intercom to the communications room. “Radio? Contact our comrades on B-36 on the underwater telephone. Flotilla ordered to surface and recharge batteries. No independent radio contact with the enemy.”
Maslennikov spoke up, indignant.
“Sir—what about radio silence?”
Arkhipov ignored him and addressed the control room crew.
“Raise periscope and snorkel. Blow tanks and surface.”
The petty officer who sat at the diving-plane controls looked from Arkhipov to Savitsky and back again. His hands did not move.
“Captain, give the order. This is a flotilla maneuver under my authority.”
Savitsky, sitting in his commander’s seat, remained motionless. His voice, when it came, trembled with anger.
“I will not allow you to surrender my boat.”
“Fine. Have it your way.”
Arkhipov reached over the Captain’s head to the three engine-room telegraphs and quickly racked the levers from Full Stop to Stand By. A couple of seconds later, the chief engineer responded, the three dials acknowledging the order with a trio of loud mechanical dings. Arkhipov sprinted four steps aft to the bank of taps that controlled the supply of compressed air to the ballast tanks. Before the able seaman who stood at the post could react, Arkhipov twisted one tap, then another and another. The distinctive rumble of displaced water came from all sides of the command center. The main diving gauge immediately began to sink toward zero. From a depth of ten meters it would take B-59 less than a minute to surface.
Savitsky gave a cry and lunged for the diving fin controls just a couple of meters from his post—a desperate way of forcing the sub deeper under the power of its engines, even as its sudden buoyancy propelled it toward the surface.
“No, Captain!”
Arkhipov’s hand closed around the handle of the Makarov tucked in the back of his trousers.
9
USS Bache, Sargasso Sea
Sunday, 28 October 1962, 14:12 EDT / 21:12 Moscow Time
From his post on the flying bridge, Billings saw the creaming, narrow wake of B-59’s periscope break the ocean’s surface, followed by the thicker column of the snorkel pipe. Was the Sov commander going to try to recharge his batteries by ventilating his engines through the snorkel? That would be as dumb as a little kid trying to hide behind his own hands.
But no. A wider wake of spreading white foam appeared, followed by the black steel profile of the submarine’s conning tower. A billow of thick, black smoke erupted from the vents at the top of the sail as the sub’s diesels rumbled into motion. Following the column of exhaust as it traveled across the water like an unfurling flag, Billings spotted the distinctive black sail of another surfacing sub a couple of thousand yards distant. Red stars were painted on the sides of both boats’ conning towers. After two decades of hunting and evading Soviet submarines, these were the first Billings had ever actually seen as anything but menacing shadows on a sonar screen.
“Well I’ll be goddammed.”
Billings pressed the intercom on the far extremity of the bridge.
“Scramble those deck teams, double quick. Sov submarines on the surface.”
10
B-59, Sargasso Sea
Sunday, 28 October 1962, 14:12 EDT / 21:12 Moscow Time
Arkhipov felt the weight of the pistol in his hand, but he did not draw it. If he pulled the gun, Arkhipov knew that he would immediately put himself in the wrong. And that someone would die. Maybe him. And that all survivors would end up in a court-martial—and then, most likely, the Gulag.
As the rumble of the starting engines vibrated through the boat, the intercom on the bulkhead crackled to life.
“Comrade Captain?” The sonar operator’s voice was timid, but the alarm in his tone commanded the immediate attention of everyone on the command station. “Something strange is happening.”
Arkhipov, Savitsky, and Maslennikov all froze. The Captain turned to bark irritably into the machine.
“What?”
“It’s…music, sir. From the American destroyer. I can hear music.”
The three senior officers looked at one another in incomprehension.
“Put it on the speakers.”
There was a crackle as the young sonarman fiddled to place his headphones over his own intercom. The noise that came through the speaker was muffled but unmistakable. A band was playing…jazz.
Every man on the bridge stood transfixed by the bizarre, tinny noise of jaunty music spilling from the public address system. Arkhipov’s mind, pounding with adrenaline, at first refused to process what was happening. But at that moment cool, fresh air pumped by the powerful engine-room fans began to blow from the air-conditioning vents. The air cleared the confused fog in Arkhipov’s mind like an opened window in a smoky room.
“They’re playing us up. Savitsky! The Americans are welcoming us. There is no damn war.”
Savitsky stood, wide-eyed, like a man stunned. His bloodshot eyes met Arkhipov’s.
“There’s no war, do you understand?” Arkhipov repeated. “We’re in international waters. No need to surrender.”
Arkhipov took another lungful of sweet, fresh air and closed his eyes. He would have offered a prayer, if he’d known how.
11
KGB Headquarters, Moscow
Sunday, 28 October 1962, 21:32 Moscow Time / 14:32 EDT
The arrangements were far from perfect, Orlov knew. But then again, what was ever perfect in the Lubyanka? In life? He was constrained by time and space. The necessity to keep his prisoner a very close secret. Two men may speak in private, the founder of the Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, had once said—as long as one of them falls into a deep hole immediately afterward. By this point, five hours after he had detained Morozov, some dozen people—his entire personal staff—knew. At least they knew that a secret prisoner was their private guest in the classified archive on the ninth floor. And by necessity, that number now included the lanky, pale Estonian misfit that Orlov was waiting, with mounting impatience, to brief in the anteroom before seeing Morozov.
The boy was a senior sergeant, hauled up from the anti-dissident section of the kontora and hastily dressed in foreign clothes borrowed from the Actors’ Wardrobe. The idea of the Lubyanka in the role of a giant opera house, equipped with a casting department and even a costume store, gave Orlov half a second of amusement. Dressed in a slightly baggy suit of old-fashioned American cut, his unruly red hair peremptorily Brylcreemed into submission, the kid almost looked the part of an American spy.
“Sven Arvovich?” The boy stood to attention, his already pale face washed chalk white with apprehension. Orlov handed him a memorandum, hastily handwritten in the General’s own hand. No need to share his secrets with a typist. “This is an account of what you did over the last twenty-four hours. You have fifteen minutes to memorize it. At that point you will be brought back here, an apparent prisoner. A man will be waiting in this room. The two of you will undergo a formal judicial confrontation, before witnesses. I will question you. You will speak in bad Russian. Your heaviest foreign accent. You will answer to the name of Richard Jacob, an American diplomat, which I will read from an identity card.”
Orlov fervently hoped that his secretary was up to the job of substituting this young man’s photograph on Jacob’s Embassy ID, and inking in the Soviet Foreign Ministry stamp on a corner of the image. Orlov had no wish to involve the professionals on the fourth floor.
“You will protest that you must speak to your colleagues at the American Embassy. I will tell you that you are under arrest for an assault on a Soviet officer. And for espionage. Both criminal acts and violations of the new Vienna Convention on the proper conduct of diplomats. We will not go into details, but I shall show you a microfilm canister with which you were caught red-handed. I will tell you that you may be released if you answer our questions concerning the man before you. You will demur. I may hit you. I may hit you hard. But when I press you, the second or third time but not before, you will positively identify this suspect as an agent whose photograph you have seen at the CIA station at the Embassy. Your place of work. You will answer no to my questions only once—when I ask you whether you know the man’s name. To that you will answer that it was a secret. Now repeat my instructions back to me. In your accent. Go.”
The young Estonian, by now in a state of quaking shock, managed to stammer through a close enough recall of his orders. Frightened was good. Orlov surveyed the kid one last time before his brief, but vital, appearance in the little show that Orlov was staging. Something was wrong, though it took the General a minute to work out what it was. The kid smelled. The familiar semiwashed tang of a Soviet young adult. Pleased by his own perspicacity, Orlov sent an orderly to fetch the bottle of French eau de cologne that he kept in his office drawer for his own private purposes.
“Now—read. Memorize. And remember—the security of the Motherland depends on your performance, Sergeant.”
12
Pioneers’ Ponds, Moscow
Sunday, 28 October 1962, 21:52 Moscow Time / 14:52 EDT
There was a man in a children’s storybook Vasin used to read to his son, Nikita. A carpenter. The man had no wife and was lonely, so he made himself a toy child out of wood. He fashioned pegged joints for the doll’s knees and elbows so that he could move almost like a real boy. As he walked back to his car, Vasin’s legs stiffened and his entire body seemed to turn rigid and woody. He felt an urgent need to urinate. He had become like the wooden boy: not really alive. An inanimate thing, inexplicably walking, jerking into life propelled by nothing but the power of loneliness.
What Vasin wanted to do most—almost more than he’d wanted to do anything in his life—was to drive home. Let himself into his own apartment and kneel down by his sleeping son. They’d never said much to each other, especially when alone. Vasin had always thought of quiet as his gift to the child, eternally harassed by a demanding world which bombarded him with a constant onslaught of demands. Nikita was a taciturn kid, thoughtful, obliging, not spoiled or cocky like the other children who played in the courtyard of the elite apartment block where they had moved the previous year.
He’d like to kneel down by his son, watch his no-longer-childish face sleeping for a little while. And if the boy woke, he’d suggest a game of chess. And a cup of tea, sipped in companionable silence in the still of the night.
Vasin realized that he’d been standing, stock-still and keys in hand, in front of his car. The street was deserted. Slowly, he gripped the cold steel of the handle and got in. He did not turn the ignition.
He had failed. He had risked his life to save the Motherland, to avert war, and his plan has misfired spectacularly. Betrayed by Sofia? He had to assume so.
Where could he go where Orlov couldn’t find him? What was the point of running, except to die tired? What was the point of fleeing, if nuclear war was about to break out and destroy his family?
13
B-59, Sargasso Sea
Sunday, 28 October 1962, 14:52 EDT / 21:52 Moscow Time
The taste of the tropical sea air as Arkhipov climbed through the hatch onto the top of B-59’s conning tower was inexpressibly sweet. The tiny cockpit was already crowded with two lookouts, but they instinctively made space for Arkhipov as he made his tour of the small steel oval.
Three destroyers lay within a half-kilometer circle around B-59, crews on deck gawping at the Soviet submarines. The Americans had already identified themselves by radio and semaphore as USS Cony, Beale, and Lowry. Arkhipov had ordered only the briefest of acknowledgments.
A few hundred meters to the north he saw their sister boat, B-36. The two disgraced Soviet ships had exchanged only curt messages, knowing that the Yankees would be listening in to their radio comms.
A band on the deck of the USS Beale doggedly played on. New Orleans jazz. Songs by Louis Armstrong, according to one of the kids from B-59’s radio room. The sailor evidently spent too much time listening to American radio stations.
Arkhipov looked up. The sky was overcast, and a turning wind blew the diesel exhaust that billowed from the vents into the cockpit. But he was alive. His crew, the American musicians, the crew of B-36—they were all alive. Right now, that felt good enough.
In just over four hours, B-59’s batteries would be charged once more. And they’d maybe be able to finally reestablish comms with Moscow. Contact with the enemy was listed as an authorized reason for breaking radio silence. Already the radio room was busy sending out Arkhipov’s coded report to fleet headquarters. Trapped by enemy boats, forced to surface. Requesting further mission instructions.
Not a good message for any flotilla commander to have to send.
Arkhipov guessed what his new orders would be: Abandon mission, return to base. And there, in all probability, disgrace. He’d put even money on Savitsky denouncing him for cowardice, in cahoots with Maslennikov, during their inevitable debriefing by military intelligence. It would be their word against his. At the very least, Arkhkipov knew that this would be his last operational command.
He gripped the chilly steel rail of the cockpit and felt the roll of his boat in the long Atlantic swell. Christ, Captain Arkhipov thought. It’s good to breathe air.
14
KGB Headquarters, Moscow
Monday, 29 October 1962, 07:25 Moscow Time / 00:25 EDT
Morozov broke just before dawn. To the prisoner, it was always the hour of despair. Some old-school NKVD bruiser who specialized in extracting confessions had once advised Orlov to bring the accused out into the yard at daybreak to look at the sky. The colder and bleaker the morning, the better. As he walked down the corridor to his office, Morozov’s signed confession in his hand, Orlov wondered why that trick worked so reliably. Perhaps something to do with the prisoner’s realization that his nightmare was seamlessly about to become a day-mare. Maybe it was that a glimpse of the world from which he had been so violently removed was heartbreaking. Or perhaps some trick of the sleepless mind—the dawning of day confirming that there would be no rest, no slumber until the accused did what was demanded of him.
