To Kill the Potemkin

22

The longitude and latitude readouts on the navigation console stopped flickering and came to a rest. Barracuda hovered six hundred feet deep at the edge of the Atlantic. Above her, dozens of ships passed through one of the busiest waterways of the world, oblivious to her presence.

"Attention all hands, this is the captain. We are now on-station four miles west of the Strait of Gibraltar. Our orders are to monitor all westbound submarine traffic passing from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic. We might be here quite some time waiting for the Alpha. When she emerges, our orders are to track her into the Atlantic. Be advised that three more Soviet subs have been detected in the eastern North Atlantic. One of them is certainly Arkangel. Twelve hours ago they were reported approximately three hundred miles northeast of Rota. Prepare for combat drills. That is all."

Some two hundred surface ships and several submarines passed through the Strait of Gibraltar every day, giving the crew plenty of targets for combat drills. At the moment twelve ships were on the sonar screens, eleven surface ships and a Turkish Navy relic from World War Two making a submerged passage east-bound through the Strait.

Willie Joe was practicing for his qualifying exam for first class. While Davic and Fogarty watched, Willie Joe sat with Sorensen, tracking the old sub. They listened to the fixed arrays on the bottom ping off the Turkish hull. The sub was so old the computer had no record of her signature. Always thorough, Sorensen recorded her machinery and logged it into the signature program.

Willie Joe tracked the sub through the Strait, a difficult task because of the heavy surface traffic. At the extreme edge of his range, when he was about to lose it, the new sonars picked up another submerged contact. A sub was hovering near the eastern entrance to the Strait.

Willie Joe shouted, "Sweet Jesus, it's a nuke. It's the Russkie—" He immediately punched the button on the console that turned on his intercom mike, but before he could speak, Sorensen stabbed at the keyboard and turned it off.

"Take it easy, Willie Joe. Check it out. Listen up, she's not going anywhere. Get a positive ID."

Sorensen snapped on the overhead speakers. The sub was extremely quiet, but they could hear the freshwater still operating. "If that was a Russian boat, they'd shut everything down, including their still. Anyone, identification?"

Fogarty replied instantly, "HMS Valiant."

"Correct. One brownie point for Fogarty. The Brits are on the job."

"Dirty limeys," said Davic, the all all-American.

Sorensen didn't bother to respond. What was the point? Their newest ethnic was the biggest bigot. Apparently he thought it made him more American to hate all non-Americans. Fuck him.

For two days Springfield ran the crew through repeated combat drills, using the endless stream of ships as simulated targets. As the third day began, Willie Joe was spending his watch tracking a giant container ship and feeding data to Hoek, who was sitting at the weapons console. Hoek thought he'd died and gone to weapons officers' heaven. In two days he had pretended to sink more tonnage than was sunk in all the wars of the twentieth century.

The container ship passed a mile away, the cavitation of her giant screws and the whoosh of her bow wave obliterating every other sound for ten minutes. Hoek simulated her destruction, sending tens of thousands of Japanese televisions to the bottom.

The rest of the sonar gang were in the mess for dinner. They filed through the chow line, carried trays of roast chicken, giblet gravy, peas and mashed potatoes to one of the tables and squeezed in next to the torpedomen.

It was a lively mess. There was talk of home, of wives and girlfriends and kids.

"Say, Fogarty," Sorensen said, "you have any plans for the thirty days' liberty we have coming up?"

"I thought I'd go home and see my dad."

"You ever been to Japan?" Sorensen asked.

"Nope."

"Ever think about going?"

"Nope. Too far away."

"Hey, man, you're in the navy. You can hop a military flight anywhere, any time. I went to Tokyo and came back in two and a half days, no sweat. This time there's no hurry. Look, I want a new tape recorder. Wanna go with me?"

"Maybe. I'll think about it."

"Well, you do that. Think about having a little fun. A woman walking on your back with tiny feet is very nice."

"For chrissake, Sorensen, don't talk about women right now."

Sorensen's eyes twinkled, "Tell me, Fogarty, was the Brit a good lay?"

"Yes, sure. But why get people upset with talk about women? By the way, don't you ever go home, Sorensen?"

"Home?"

"Oakland."

"This is home, Fogarty. I don't recommend it for everybody. But it's got its advantages… Most of these guys have families, or did. They all have trouble with their wives and more than half get divorced. They have kids they never see and parents who don't know where they are. Home for them is mostly some tract house on a Navy base with a busted washing machine and a Pontiac that burns oil. Their heads are full of Russians but they can't talk about it to anybody. It drives a man bananas. I tried it and it didn't work. Up there I'm a misfit. Down here I'm at least a well-adjusted misfit."

That drew a few knowing guffaws from the table. Sorensen went on to describe a night on Tokyo's Ginza that began in a massage parlor and ended in a sushi bar where the chef carved raw fish into erotic figures. Tunafish penis, octopus vagina. Everyone listened except Davic, who propped a Russian magazine against a water tumbler and methodically turned the pages, leaving greasy fingerprints on the paper and ink on his fingers.

Watching Davic, Fogarty picked at his chicken and let his curiosity grow. When Sorensen finished his story, Fogarty asked, "What are you reading, Davic?"

"An article on Czechoslovakia."

"That's interesting. What's it say?"

Sorensen now turned to listen.

"It says, 'The Soviet cultural attache left the Spring Art Festival in Prague in indignation after he learned that the colorful abstractions presented by several artists could be interpreted as anti-Soviet propaganda.' "

"My goodness, how rude," cried Sorensen.

Fogarty clapped his hand to his forehead.

"What happened to the artists?"

"It doesn't say. But for them, the gulag."

"Hey, Davic," Sorensen asked, "aren't you from New York?"

"I've lived there, why?"

"You ever been to Greenwich Village?"

"No."

"How about Coney Island? You been there?"

"No."

"You ever go to Yankee Stadium?"

Davic shook his head. "No, no sports for me. Except once I saw Moscow Dynamo play ice hockey at Madison Square Garden."

"Who'd they play?"

"Some Canadians, I think."

"Who won?"

"I don't know. They made me leave."

"For what?"

"I threw firecrackers at the Russians. Bang bang bang. It was wonderful."

"Davic, you're a fucking nut case, you know that?" Sorensen laughed. "Did you get arrested?"

"Sure, I've been arrested many times. At the UN, at the Russian consulate, at the Russian embassy in Washington. The KGB used to follow me home."

"How do you know it was the KGB? Why would they bother with you?"

"It was them."

"Davic," Sorensen said, "I know a lot of guys who don't like the Russians, but you, it's like an obsession with you."

Davic folded up his magazine and leaned across the table.

"Does that bother you, Sorensen?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"We're supposed to be professionals. Too much emotion can foul up our decisions. You should know that."

"You want to know why I hate them?"

"Shoot."

"They killed my father in Budapest in nineteen fifty-six when I was twelve years old."

"During the Hungarian uprising, the Freedom Fighters and all that?"

"Yes."

"Well. I can understand that. What happened?"

"Do you really want to know or do you want to make some kind of joke?"

"You've got the floor, Davic." Sorensen felt a little sheepish.

No one had ever heard Davic say much more than a couple of words at a time — usually a bitch of some kind. When he saw that all hands at the table were listening, he decided he'd go ahead and tell his story. He also decided he'd kill anyone who made fun of him…

"My family had a small grocery store on the ground floor of a new apartment building. It was a newly rebuilt part of Budapest. When the Russian tanks entered the city my father tried to keep me inside, but I wanted to watch the tanks and hear the roar of the guns. I was across the street when the first tank came down our block.

"A gang of boys attacked the tank with rocks. One threw a Molotov cocktail that just smashed against the tread of the huge tank and shattered. The gunner fired one shot over their heads to frighten them away.

"The shell landed in the store. Two soldiers climbed out of the tank and went in. When they came out, their arms were full of groceries, as much as they could carry. A ham, cans of fruit, jars of honey, bags of rice. I watched them go back again and again. When the tank finally left I went into the store. They didn't even move my father's body out of the way. They just pushed a few broken crates over him to get at the rest…"

Davic said these last words in a quavering voice.

"That's real bad, Davic," Sorensen said quietly. "But even for that you can't want to nuke all the people in Moscow—"

"Yes," Davic said, "and Leningrad and Kiev and Odessa too. The Russians have been doing the same thing for hundreds of years. The communists are no different from the czars. They rule through fear. They treat the whole world like my father's grocery store."

Sorensen now had to fight to keep his own temper under control. "You want revenge, Davic, an eye for an eye? That's how we got into this bind in the first place."

"The Russians understand revenge."

"Everybody understands revenge, you peabrain. Look what we did to the Japanese. We nuked 'em. Twice. But if we attack the Russians, that makes us just like the Japs when they sneak-bombed Pearl Harbor. Besides, when we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we saved millions of American lives. Or at least so they said. And remember, ethics and shit aside, they didn't have any atomic bombs to throw back at us. The Russians do." Sorensen took a deep breath, sort of pleased with his lecture. He hoped it got through to Davic and any others aboard who thought like he did.

Davic shook his head violently. "You're wrong, Sorensen. They are very patient. They will wait for their moment, and when it comes they will recognize it and they will strike. If they think they can win, they will launch. What's the matter with you, Sorensen? Are you blind? We sit and watch their power grow every day. More ships, more weapons, more men. Like this new Alpha. The only way to save ourselves is to stop them now…"

Davic sat back and looked around the mess. All conversation had ceased. Every sailor was looking at him.

Johnson, sitting at the far end of the table among the torpedomen, leaned over and said, "Right on, Davic."

Davic nodded and smiled. It was the first show of approval since he'd been aboard and it was heady stuff. Sorensen thought he caught a couple more heads nod, torpedomen. Fogarty stood up and was about to walk out of the mess.

"Stay put, kid. Look the old monster in the eye. It's the best way to put it back in its cage. Besides, Davic is doing us a favor, helping some of the guys face their worst nightmares and maybe get rid of them."

Pisaro, passing through the galley, had overheard some of the exchange, then pushed through the hatch.

"Attention!" Sorensen ordered.

Pisaro smiled and rubbed his hands over his scalp. "Gentlemen, let's try to keep it cool. You too, Davic."

"Yes, sir. Aye aye, sir."

"World War Three hasn't started yet. Our job is to see that it doesn't," and he left the mess, shaking his head.

In sonar Willie Joe was chatting over the intercom with Hoek. "How many is that, Lieutenant?"

"Let's see. That makes one eight eight. That's hulls, not tonnage. The last one was a big one."

"When's the next sub scheduled to come through?"

"We've got an Italian due in three hours."

"Okay, I've got a tanker on the screen. Big sucker. Let's take it."

"My treat," said the lieutenant, and three minutes later enough hypothetical crude was spilled to pollute the Strait for a hundred years.

As the noise from the tanker faded away, a bright streak flashed across Willie Joe's screen. He blinked and rechecked the list of submarines scheduled to pass through the Strait. Through his earphones he heard distinct propulsion noises. An unscheduled submarine was approaching the Strait from the west at high speed.

"Do you see him, Lieutenant?"

"I do."

"That's not our Italian."

"Agreed."

"Sonar to control, we have a contact. Bearing two five five, course one two one, speed three zero knots, range ten miles and closing."

"Control to sonar. Do you have identification?"

"Sonar to control. Soviet November class. It's Arkangel."

"Control to sonar, we have him on the repeater. Attention all hands. Attention all hands. General quarters. general quarters. Man battle stations, man battle stations. Control to radio, send up a buoy."

In ten seconds the mess was empty. Sorensen and Fogarty were in the sonar room.

Willie Joe stood up. "She's all yours, Ace."

"Who is it?" Sorensen asked, sitting down.

"Who else? Arkangel," said Willie Joe on his way out. "If she's after Vallejo, she's three days late."

As Sorensen sat down, a second streak appeared on the screen, diverging at a slight angle.

"Sonar to control, we have another contact. Same bearing, same course, same speed."

Then a third streak appeared. The sound of the three subs together was as loud as Niagara Falls.

Sorensen had never heard anything like it. "This is a wolfpack assault on the Strait," he said to Fogarty. "The Russians are storming into the Mediterranean like—"

"Like Cossacks?" Said with a straight face.

"Yeah. Sonar to control."

"Sonar, this is the captain, we see her. Thank you. We see all of them."

The Russians were following the eastbound NATO beacon through the Strait, the lead ship, Arkangel, directly astride it, the others following on either side.

Sorensen sat back in his chair, staring at the screen as the subs passed from right to left three miles south. The Russians blew through the Strait and into the Mediterranean in a remarkable display of arrogance and power.

Fogarty hunched over and watched his screen. "If this were chess," he said, "I'd say this looks like a sacrifice."

"Could be, Fogarty. Could be. But this ain't chess. It's boys playing with boats. I don't know what's worse, Davic or these maniacs."

They heard Valiant start her turbines and take off in pursuit.

Springfield sent up a radio buoy and made his report. Thirty seconds after it was received in Rota, the alarm sounded in the helicopter hangar on the Spanish carrier, Dédalo. An instant later the message was relayed to Gibraltar, and British ASW helicopters were in the air.

The helicopters quickly outdistanced the Russian subs. At one hundred fifty miles per hour, six British choppers raced over the sea and dropped a cordon of sonar buoys in their path. The hydrophones, dangling two hundred feet below the buoys, easily picked up the loud sound of the three subs. Arkangel plowed right through. The helicopters leapfrogged ahead, dropped a second cordon, located Odessa, and dropped two-dozen sonic depth charges. Within the hour the antisubmarine forces of the Sixth Fleet, still in Naples and still smarting from the humiliation by Barracuda, were brought to bear on the noisy Russian subs.

Barracuda remained on station west of the Strait.

"I'm no Davic," Fogarty said, "but I don't see why we don't track them instead of just sitting here and letting the blood pressure build."

"If this is a sacrifice, as you say," Sorensen said, "there's no reason to make it. These old Russian subs are so noisy they won't be able to hide. The Brits will take care of tracking them, seeing they behave. We don't give a shit about Arkangel or these other boats. We want the Alpha, and we're going to sit here until she comes through."