Red Traitor, page 9
Captain First Class Valentin Savitsky spotted Arkhipov and stood, waving.
“Over here. Welcome!”
Arkhipov’s comrades occupied a large wooden picnic table in a small grove overlooking the river. It was laid with an assortment of bottles and jars, a bowl of cucumbers and tomatoes, a great platter of cold cuts.
Half a dozen men sat around the table, all in civilian shirtsleeves and baggy summer trousers or shorts. Most had identical patches of sunburn on their chests and necks from working in the sun in their uniform undershirts. They all stood as Arkhipov approached—except for an older man who remained seated at the head of the table.
“Comrade Admiral—a wonderful surprise.” Arkhipov saluted smartly.
Vice Admiral Leonid Leontyev, deputy commander of the Northern Fleet, waved down his salute with an open palm.
“No formality today, Vasily. We’re all comrades together. Come, sit by me. You know everyone here…” Arkhipov nodded to the skippers and first officers of his new flotilla. “Except maybe young Maslennikov here? My sister’s boy. Commander Ivan Semyonovich Maslennikov, naval intelligence. He’ll be shipping with you and Savitsky on B-59. Your politruk.”
Politruk—the boat’s political officer. The Party’s man on board, second only to the skipper in authority and his equal when it came to fire control. On ballistic-missile boats, only the commander and the Politruk carried the arming keys necessary to fire the nukes.
Maslennikov made to salute, stopped himself, then did it anyway. “It’s an honor to serve under you, Captain.”
The group shifted along the two wooden benches to make space for Arkhipov. Plates were passed and loaded with food, glasses filled. Toasts were drunk to the Soviet Navy, to their respective boats, to wives and sweethearts—may they never meet. The oldest joke in the fleet. Arkhipov wasn’t really a drinking man—and after K-19, the docs had kept him off the booze for most of the last year. He could feel the summer heat and the chilled Kristall vodka going to his head.
“Let us drink to Captain Arkhipov’s Order of the Red Banner!” The old admiral was by now also unsteady with drink. “Vasily Alexandrovich—to your decoration. To your heroism, sir.”
There was something in Leontyev’s hearty tone that caught on Arkhipov’s ear. He raised his glass and stood, a little unsteadily.
“With your permission, sir? We all know why I got that medal. So let’s not drink to my heroism. We’ll drink to our lost comrades.” The husky seriousness in Arkhipov’s voice brought all the men to their feet, composing their faces into appropriate solemnity. “For them.”
They did not clink glasses, as was customary when drinking for the dead, and drank off the toast in silence. When they resumed their seats, the jovial mood of the lunch party had evaporated. Leontyev was the first to break the silence.
“I’ll say it, because nobody else will. What really happened on K-19, son? Tell us the war story. We all want to hear it.”
Arkhipov looked down the table at the men who would be commanding his flotilla, at the eager young face of Maslennikov, at the weatherbeaten face of the Admiral.
“Out with it, man. All we ever heard was official guff and outlandish rumors. Do us good to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Do you good to tell it. To fellow submariners. Shipmates.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
Arkhipov poured himself another shot and downed it grimly, without waiting for a toast. He paused, then came to a private decision.
“Very well. Just between us. As you know, it was K-19’s maiden voyage. Brand-new boat, pride of our fleet. Our first nuclear-powered ballistic-missile sub. First of her class. The whole crew were veterans, proud to serve on her. No wet-behind-the-ears new recruits. Best food in the whole Navy. The cook was seconded from the Navy Staff headquarters. Anyway. We had some teething troubles getting her up and running. A reactor screw-up before her sea trials meant that the whole kettle had to be taken apart and rebuilt. Then, when we finally got her out to sea to stretch her legs, a faulty gasket nearly flooded her. The old lags from the engineering section started to say she was unlucky.”
“I was at her launch,” interrupted the Admiral. “Some old Politburo dinosaur did the honors. Should have been launched by a woman, not a man, and when the damn fool swung the champagne bottle against her in the dry dock, it hadn’t broken. Whole hull was covered in heavy rubberized paint, remember? Bottle just bounced off. Superstitious bunch, we sailors.”
Maslennikov looked shocked. Mocking a member of the Politburo in front of junior officers was pushing the boundaries even of old Leontyev’s seniority.
“We put to sea in June last year,” continued Arkhipov. “On our way to our first war games. Our orders were to sneak into the North Atlantic undetected by the Yankees. Everything was going well. We celebrated the Captain’s birthday with double rations of ice cream and red wine. Zateyev, Nikolai Vladimirovich—that was the skipper. You served under him, didn’t you, Savitsky?”
“I did.” Savitsky’s booming voice contrasted with Arkhipov’s confiding tone. “Fine fighting officer. Old-school, that man. Zateyev was a war veteran, like the respected Comrade Admiral here. No time for pussyfooting about. Would rather go to the bottom than stain the reputation of the fleet.”
Arkhipov weighed his words for a long moment before resuming.
“You’re correct, Savitsky. The Captain cared a lot about the honor of the service. More, maybe, than he did for his sailors. Anyway, he certainly kept a tight ship, made sure the men were happy. We got orders to proceed north along the west coast of Greenland and then cruise under the Arctic ice. Test how good the boat was at generating her own oxygen, see. She was built to stay under for weeks. In theory. Sneak all the way up to the Yankee coast without being detected.”
“Amazing machine,” breathed Leontyev, shaking his head.
“Indeed, sir. On the morning of July fourth I’d just started my watch, taken command of the boat. We were cruising at about ninety meters’ depth, all systems normal. Then I had a call from the reactor control room. Me and Yura—Yury Postev, the lieutenant in charge of propulsion—ran to see what was wrong. The Captain would fine you for swearing. But Yura started saying, ‘Shit, shit, shit.’ Vibration in the coolant pressure. Needle went all the way down to zero. Then an alarm went off. The reactor SCRAM system kicked in, shut the reactor down automatically.”
“And it did shut down, immediately?” It was Captain Rurik Ketov of B-4 who spoke—a former reactor officer himself.
“Sure. Control rods went in fine, under their own weight, just like they were designed to. So, yeah, the reactor shut down okay. But that wasn’t the problem. The core was no longer producing power—but it had so much residual heat that we still needed to pump coolant in for days afterward. But the cooling piping was bust. The reactor compartment was full of radioactive steam from the breached coolant circuit. Temperature up to a hundred forty degrees in there. And the core itself was pushing eight hundred degrees and rising. Thing got so hot that it started a fire as the insulation of the coolant system caught light. Filin—the reactor officer—took a crew in there and put out the fire himself. Bloody hero, that man…”
Arkhipov’s voice trailed into nothing until Leontyev prompted him.
“Didn’t Zateyev order an evacuation?”
“Evacuate? We were still submerged, Admiral. For nearly two hours after the accident. Wasn’t until after six a.m. that the skipper ordered us to surface. Guess he was worried about giving away our position until he was absolutely sure the reactor was screwed. Thing is, without the reactor we were more or less immobilized. A sitting duck. But it was not like we had a choice. We hoisted up the long-range radio mast to signal Moscow for orders, but the damn antenna had been damaged. So we put out a distress call on our short-range set and raised one of our diesel subs, S-270. She was about half a day’s sailing to the south of us. Then we got a signal from another boat, much closer. But she was an American warship. Offered to come to our assistance. Captain Zateyev refused. Didn’t want the boat falling into the hands of the imperialists. He was more concerned with what the kontora guys would do to him when he got back than with saving the lives of his crew…”
“Damn right,” Savitsky chimed in. “You don’t surrender a fighting ship to the enemy just because of some technical fault. Or maybe you disagree, Captain?”
Arkhipov pointedly ignored the interruption.
“So we were on our own till S-270 reached us. The skipper called all the officers into the mess. We were ventilating the reactor spaces to the outside air as hard as the air-con pumps would run. But even aft of the bridge it was still hot as a sauna. The runaway reactor was cooking up the whole boat. Filin said that unless we got the coolant running once again, the core was going to melt right through the hull and send us all to the bottom. Laid the reactor schematics out on the table. Said, ‘We have one chance. Connect the ship’s fresh water supply to the coolant system, and pump it full of cold fresh water.’ But that meant welding inside the reactor compartment, which was hotter than hell, and radioactive to boot. Radiation gauges showing lethal levels. And there wasn’t any kind of protective gear aboard, apart from gas capes. The skipper knew he would be sending the lads to their deaths, so he asked for volunteers.”
Something, a kind of smile of pain, crossed Arkhipov’s face as he paused, weighing the memory in his mind’s eye.
“Filin’s whole engineering team stepped forward. Every one. Eight men. That’s heroism. Filin organized a system where the men went in in pairs, for no longer than ten minutes at a time. In their foul-weather capes and rubber thermal suits. That’s all the protection they had. Doctor mixed them up some dried milk to drink. Milk, can you imagine! But the lads drank it down like it was a magic potion. First one in was an engineer sergeant, with a hacksaw. Boris Korchalov. Came out ten minutes later, red in the face like he’d been too long in the banya. Puked his guts out and collapsed when they pulled him through the hatch. Couple of the others lined up to go in started to weep, so Filin slapped them in the face, one by one, told them to pull themselves together. So in they went, one after another, sawing, sawing, resting for a while, then back again when their turn came. Took them two hours to saw through the steel piping and cut new threads. The steam had spread through the whole sub by now. Everyone knew we were breathing poison. In the galley the cook had a panic attack, started screaming to be let out of this floating coffin, scrambling for the escape hatch. Maybe that’s why the Captain didn’t want to surface at first. Nowhere to go when you’re underwater. On the surface, you’ve got to fight the urge to run up that ladder into God’s fresh air.”
“The skipper didn’t want to let the crew out on the deck?” Captain Alexei Dubivko of B-36 this time, his face creased with strain as he imagined the unfolding disaster. “Away from the poison?”
“It’s the North Atlantic, Comrade. You know it as well as I do. Swell breaking over the hull would have swept the men away. And in any case, how would he ever get the men back down? No. The skipper felt the panic flickering like a flame up and down the ship. I went from compartment to compartment telling everyone reassuring lies. I got back to the control room and the Captain had ordered the sergeant-at-arms to gather all the small arms from the lockers and throw them overboard.”
“He thought the crew would mutiny?” Leontyev was shaking his head. “That wasn’t in the official report.”
“Somehow word got out from the radio operators that the skipper had turned down the offer of help from the Yanks. Crew were muttering that the boss preferred them all to die heroes than surrender the boat. So yeah, the Captain was probably right. He even ordered the rocket flares from the inflatable lifeboats tossed. He kept one pistol for himself and issued four more to his most trusted officers. That included me—just in case you were wondering, Savitsky.”
The two men exchanged a hard look down the table.
“But then the word came forward that Filin had done it. Rigged up a pipe to the cooling system and started running water through. The Captain got on the intercom and asked for three cheers for the engineering crew. Not that the poor bastards could hear much. Horrible sight. Skin peeling off them, hair falling out. Looked like they’d been boiled alive. But the reactor core temperature was coming down. For an hour or so. Then the seal they’d made burst. Filin had to get his men off their stretchers and in there again to fit a new one. With superheated steam pouring out of the cooling system. It was hell. They were all scalded.”
Arkhipov ran his hand down his face as though to erase the image from his eyes.
“You were heroes, Vasily. Real heroes.” The old admiral put his hand on Arkhipov’s shoulder.
“No, sir. Those men who went into the reactor were heroes. The rest of us? Sweated out that infernal steam and thanked God it wasn’t us.”
“But you got the boat home. And the crew.”
“We did. S-270 finally showed up more than thirteen hours after the accident. When I finally got on deck, that first breath of sea air was like being born again. The evening sky, those stars, were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. We extended the stabilizer fins till they touched to make a bridge to carry the stretchers with casualties over to S-270. We got all the crew into the relief sub, by some miracle. We all know how cramped a sub is, even with its normal complement. Once we were all on board, S-270 was like a crowded trolleybus at rush hour. Every man double or triple bunking, even the Captain. We were in there like sardines in a can. Crew didn’t want to touch us. I mean physically. They made us share berths with each other rather than bunk up with one of us. It was like we were contagious. Even after they’d tossed the clothes of the engineering crew overboard, their bodies still emitted radiation. Their actual bodies had become radioactive.
“They turned the petty officers’ quarters into a field hospital. The first man from the engineering crew died a day later, another seven within a week. The worst-injured men started to sweat blood. Medic ran out of painkillers. The guys could barely whisper, they were in such pain. They begged the doc to kill them, put them out of their misery.
“We towed K-19 nearly a thousand kilometers home. First few days we had to stop every watch to check that the coolant pumps that Filin had rigged were still working, till the reactor core had cooled down. I volunteered to go back nearly ten times. Suppose that’s why I got my medal. But Christ. It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, open that hatch and go down into the boat. Like diving into a well of poison. And so we crawled home. They didn’t send a faster boat to evacuate us. Political department wanted it kept a secret.”
Arkhipov’s eyes locked on Maslennikov, down at the foot of the table.
“Isn’t that right, Comrade Political Officer? We’d become the shame of the fleet. An embarrassment to be covered up.”
Maslennikov blushed, and launched into a stammering answer.
“Not an embarrassment, sir. Never that. But I guess they were thinking of the effect on the morale of the fleet. Seeing the men like that. Seeing K-19—the pride of the Red Banner Northern Fleet—limping home under tow? Think about how that would look.”
Arkhipov furrowed his brows. He was working hard to keep bitterness out of his voice.
“They even made us wait until dark in order to creep back into the nuclear boat base at Polyarniy, like thieves. That’s the pride of the Soviet Navy for you.”
Maslennikov lowered his eyes to the table. Despite his struggle to remain upbeat, Arkhipov felt his composure crumbling as his eyes bored into the political officer.
“Commander Maslennikov, look at me. And tell me something—whose fault do you think it was? The reactor accident?”
“Whose fault?” Maslennikov raised his head and peered at Arkhipov quizzically, as though the question had been asked in Chinese.
“Someone must have screwed up, Commander. Whose negligence caused the accident?”
“Captain—we all saw the official report. The inquiry established that the accident was caused by faulty welding during the boat’s construction. Some welder failed to cover the exposed pipe surfaces with asbestos cloths while he was working. A drop of hot steel fell on an unprotected surface. Produced an invisible crack. The pressure in that primary cooling system is more than two hundred atmospheres, so the pipe eventually burst.”
“You have a good memory for detail, Comrade Maslennikov. But were the engineers punished? The quality control people? The welder himself?”
Maslennikov looked baffled, then offended.
“They removed some people from their posts, sir. Reviewed the quality control protocols, took steps…”
Arkhipov realized that his tone had become aggressive, but plowed on regardless.
“Nobody was punished. How many of our comrades died? Seventeen. Seventeen dead Soviet heroes. All decorated posthumously. But their murderers got off scot-free. That’s how our glorious Soviet Motherland works. Punish the innocent, leave the guilty at their posts.”
Maslennikov’s face had clouded with something close to horror. The Admiral raised his hands in an emphatic gesture, as though he were stopping traffic.
“Enough! Vasily, dear man. What the devil’s got into you? It was an accident.”
Arkhipov glanced around at his comrades, suddenly ashamed at his anger. He had no right to take away his colleagues’ sincere beliefs in his service and country. More, Arkhipov realized that maybe something in him even envied their faith. Sensing that he had gone too far, he made his tone lighter.
“Forgive me, Admiral. You’re right. Good news is that most of us survived. Out of our complement of a hundred thirty-nine, only seventeen dead. They made us all have full blood transfusions. Even tried bone marrow transplants on some of us. The latest thing. No expense spared to save us. The medics have worked wonders.”
