To Kill the Potemkin

16

Seventy crewmen were transferred to barracks ashore, leaving a skeleton crew of twenty-nine men on Barracuda to supervise the repairs to the bow.

Pisaro called Sorensen and Lopez into his office. "At ease," he said, offering his tin of cigars. "Sit down and light up if you like."

Lopez selected a Havana, and Sorensen stuck a Lucky in his mouth.

Pisaro leaned back in his chair. "We're going to do the work of ten weeks in ten days. So, the word for everybody is 'no slack.' That goes for crew and civilians alike. They've flown in a 'tiger team' from the naval shipyard at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. These guys are the best, they know their jobs, but they don't have to live with their work. We do. Lopez, I want you all over the welders. They're going to take off your roof, Chief. You make sure they put it back right."

"Check, Commander."

"Sorensen, you stand over the electricians every minute while they replace the sonars. Anything they touch, you test."

"Aye aye, sir."

"Very well. You'll want some help. Ace."

"Yes, sir. I sent Davic ashore, but I need Willie Joe. I might as well keep Fogarty, too. He'll have a chance to see the system torn apart."

"Very well. Any questions?"

"Yes, sir," said Sorensen. "Will there be a court of inquiry?"

"You bet, but not until we return to Norfolk. Our orders are to get Barracuda back to sea as quickly as possible."

Lopez asked, "What about liberty for the men who are staying on the ship?"

"We'll see how it goes with the repairs, Chief. The men ashore are already going in rotation. Anything else? No? Then that's all. Dismissed."

A Navy tug nudged Barracuda into the well of the floating dry dock. A canopy was stretched over the sail, the gates locked, and the water pumped out. Gently, the sub settled onto the steel braces of the huge repair ship. Naked, with the entire 252 feet of teardrop hull exposed. Barracuda was a beached Leviathan of massive proportions.

The tiger team from Portsmouth, a polished and professional assortment of specialists in the art of submarine repair, turned on portable floodlights and began to erect scaffolding over the bow and eighty feet down the starboard side where the Russian sub had scraped along the hull.

While the scaffolding was under construction, Sorensen went up on deck to see what the Russians had done to his ship. He had to lie on his belly and skitter crablike over the hull to get a look at the damaged sonars. For half an hour he lay spreadeagled, trying to match what he saw with what he had heard during the collision. It looked as though Godzilla had walked across the bow, gouging out steel with every step.

The point of impact was directly in the center of a torpedo tube door. The Soviet sub had sideswiped two torpedo doors and six sonar transducers. The outer hull, the thin shell of steel that contained the ballast tanks, had sustained a small puncture, but none of the tanks was ruptured. No vital piping was damaged.

He tried to imagine what had happened to the Russian sub. How had she sustained enough damage to sink and implode? Did her reactor scram? Did she suffer stern plane failure? Was her hull ruptured? Did she lose her prop? He climbed back through the hatch and into the ship, his mind racing through the possibilities. He stood in the control room, watching the electricians, pondering what to do. Finally he knocked on Pisaro's door.

"Come in. What is it. Ace?"

"Sir, I request permission to listen to the tape of the collision. I would like you to listen with me, Mr. Pisaro. I want to edit the tape."

"What do you mean, Sorensen?"

"If we could just listen to the tape, sir, you'll hear what I mean."

"All right."

A minute later Sorensen and Pisaro were alone in the sonar room. Pisaro broke the seal on a reel of tape, and Sorensen threaded it into one of the big recorders.

They listened to the voices on the command intercom, the machinery noises, and then the clash of the collision reverberated around the room, followed by the torpedo motor and the implosions. When it ended, Sorensen reversed the tape to the point where the Russian fired the torpedo, and again they listened to the high whine of the torpedo's gas turbine motor.

"What does it sound like to you, sir?"

"It sounds like a Russian torpedo, Sorensen. I think hearing that sound and living to tell about it is a fucking miracle."

"It appears that way, sir. I heard the motor, and I saw a guide-wire on the screen, but I won't swear that is a torpedo."

"What else could it have been?"

"I don't know, but everything that sub did was strange. It was trying to make us think it was Swordfish when it wasn't. I don't trust any of the sounds I heard from that sub. Just because it sounded like a torpedo doesn't mean it was a torpedo."

"Please explain."

"Maybe they jettisoned some secret equipment. I don't know. I don't think they were trying to sink us. It doesn't make sense, unless there was an electrical circuit failure that fired a torpedo accidentally. But in that case the torpedo already would have been armed and loaded in a tube. Look, Commander, everything that boat did was an acoustic trick. Suppose they thought they weren't going to implode. They thought they could blow their tanks and surface, which would have put them right in the middle of the fleet. In that case they might jettison all their secret equipment, acoustic gadgetry, code books, ciphers, everything. Only, for some reason, they couldn't blow their tanks. They had no power. All the machinery noises had stopped. Maybe in the collision they ruptured their ballast tanks. Who knows? On the other hand if they were sure they were heading for the deep six they might have jettisoned all the equipment in order to prevent us from going down and salvaging it with the Trieste, like we did the Thresher."

"All right. Now what do you want to do?"

Sorensen quickly made a copy of the tape and gave the original back to Pisaro. He ran the duplicate forward to where the Russian fired the torpedo, then played it at a slow speed up to the sound of the first implosion, where he stopped it. With the filters built into his console he laboriously removed each implosion and explosion from the tape, then took out the sounds of the ship breaking up, the wrenching of metal, the screaming of the sea. It was tedious work but after an hour he had a tape of the sounds that were left.

The torpedo motor was still there. It was faint, but it was clear, and the sound continued to the end of the tape.

"Son of a bitch," Pisaro swore. "I'll have to show this to the skipper right away."

After Pisaro left the sonar room Sorensen popped open his console and removed the tape from his concealed recorder. He was about to take it back to Sorensen's Beach when Fogarty came in, slumped in his seat and stared, brooding, at the large X drawn through the Viktor on the profile sheet.

"What's buggin' you, kid?"

"What do you think, Sorensen? For example, is this going to get us into a war?"

Sorensen shrugged. "Only a little one."

"C'mon. The electricians were in here this morning. They said every sub in Portsmouth and Groton has put to sea. There's an alert. World War Three could start any minute. The whole world could blow up and no one will know why it started."

"Fogarty, the Russians are not going to start World War Three over one lost sub. If it had been a missile sub, that would be different. Besides, it was an accident."

"But it's crazy. Back home nobody is coming on the six o'clock news to say, 'Well, folks, kiss your mama good-bye. We just sank a Russian sub and the Russians don't like it.' "

"We didn't sink a Russian sub."

"The Russians might not see it that way. If it were out in the open, if people knew the truth, that might defuse the situation."

"What good does knowing about this do anybody? It will just get people excited. Look, kid, you can't be the conscience of the navy or even of this ship. You're a pain in the ass."

"Doesn't it matter to you whether we have a war or not?"

"Sure… still, I figure at worst we'll have a little skirmish. If we're lucky we might get a chance to see if any of this shit works. The world isn't going to end, if that's what you're afraid of."

"I don't know," Fogarty said, "the people at home have the right to know—"

"They do? Since when?"

"You think they don't?"

"I know they don't, not since the National Security Act. Reality is classified, kid."

"But that's crazy."

"Fogarty, the only thing worse than spying for the Russians is telling your own people the truth. Look, everybody who has ever been on this ship has thought the same thing. Me, too. Wow! What if people knew about all this stuff, you know? All this secret stuff and all the games with the Russians. But the truth is, they don't want to know."

"That's what you say. I say they'd sure want to know about something like this—"

"Don't be so sure. Look, here's Joe Blow sitting at home watching his TV and he hears, 'Sub Sinks. War Threatens,' and he goes nuts. And when you tell him, you also tell the guy watching the news in Moscow. Did you give him two seconds' thought? He learns that ninety of his country's finest are lying dead on the bottom, and he starts screaming for war. Is he going to believe it was an accident? Is that what Pravda is going to say to him? Don't be a dummy. It works both ways. If it was us down there, would you want every maniac in America to know about it? Don't you know what they would do? Half the United States Senate would vote to nuke the Russians in a minute. So we don't tell people anything. It might be wrong, but the other way is worse."

"So we just forget about it, like it never happened."

"Something like that. Yeah. Learn to live with it like I have. I just ride around in my submarine, and when I go ashore I act like every other stupid drunken sailor you ever heard of. That way I don't have to think about all this shit. Wise up, Fogarty. Look at it this way, if the Russians were going to start a war over this they already would've done it."

"Maybe they don't know about it yet."

"Don't bet on it. They know more than you think, and so do we." Sorensen bit his tongue. "Look, kid, I know you feel bad about the Russians. It was just their tough luck."

"It could have been us, Sorensen."

"I know." He thought about telling Fogarty he now had evidence that maybe the Russian sub didn't sink. But he wasn't positive, not yet, and he wanted his point to sink in.

There was a knock on the door. "Comin' through." Willie Joe came in, followed by a pair of electricians carrying coils of cable over their shoulders. One was wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. "You the sonar guys?" he asked.

"No," Sorensen replied. "I'm Captain Nemo."

"Right, chief. You ready to test about five hundred circuits?"