A quick check revealed that the other weapons were in a similar state. Below the assault rifles they could see a jumble of handguns, empty magazines and spent cartridge cases.
“It looks like someone cleaned up after a battle.”
“That’s exactly what happened.” Costas spoke from the centre of the room. “Take a look around you.”
In the middle was a command chair flanked by two columns housing the periscope arrays. Set into the walls around the dais were consoles for weapons and navigation control, which made up the operational heart of the vessel.
Everywhere they looked was destruction. Computer monitors had been reduced to jagged holes of broken glass, their innards spewed out in a jumble of wires and circuit boards. Both periscopes had been smashed beyond recognition, the mangled eyepieces hanging off at crazy angles. The chart table had been violently ripped apart, the jagged gouges running across its surface the unmistakable result of automatic rifle fire.
“The ship control station is shot to hell.” Costas was surveying the wreckage at the far corner of the room. “Now I see why they couldn’t move.”
“Where are they?” Katya demanded. “The crew?”
“There were survivors.” Costas paused. “Someone stashed those weapons, and I’d guess there were bodies which have been disposed of somewhere.”
“Wherever they camped out, it wasn’t here,” said Jack. “I suggest we move on to the accommodation quarters.”
Katya led them along the walkway towards the forward compartments of the submarine. Once again they plunged into darkness, the auxiliary electrical system only providing emergency lighting in the main compartments. As they inched forward, Jack and Costas could just make out Katya’s silhouette as she felt for the handrail and fumbled for the switch on her headlamp.
There was a sudden clatter and an ear-piercing shriek. Jack and Costas leapt forward. Katya was slumped in the passageway.
Jack knelt over her and checked her regulator. His face was drawn with concern as he looked into her eyes.
She was mumbling incoherently in Russian. After a moment she raised herself on one elbow and the two men helped her to her feet. She spoke falteringly.
“I’ve had a…shock, that’s all. I’ve just seen…”
Her voice faded away as she raised her arm and pointed in the direction of the sonar room at the end of the corridor.
Jack switched on his headlamp. What it revealed was an image of horror, a spectre drawn from the worst nightmare. Looming out of the darkness was the white-shrouded form of a hanging man, the arms dangling like some ghoulish puppet, the face lolling and grotesque as it leered through long-dead eyes.
It was the very apparition of death, the guardian of a tomb where no living being belonged. Jack suddenly felt chilled to the bone.
Katya recovered herself and straightened. Cautiously the three of them edged into the room. The body was wearing the dark serge of a Soviet naval officer and was suspended by the neck from a wire noose. The floor was strewn with discarded food cartons and other debris.
“His name was Sergei Vassilyevich Kuznetsov.” Katya was reading from a diary she’d found on the table behind the corpse. “Captain, Second Rank, Soviet Navy. Order of the Red Star for services to state security. He was the Kazbek’s zampolit, the zamestitel’ komandira po politicheskoi chasti, the deputy commander for political affairs. Responsible for overseeing political reliability and ensuring the captain carried out his orders.”
“A KGB stooge,” Costas said.
“I can think of a few captains I knew in the Black Sea Fleet who would not be displeased by this sight.” She read on. “He spent his final days right here. The active sonar had been disabled so he couldn’t send a signal. But he monitored the passive radar pulse wave detector for any sign of surface vessels in the vicinity.” She turned a page.
“My God. The final entry is for December 25th, 1991. By coincidence the last day the Red Flag flew over the Kremlin.” She looked up at Jack and Costas, her eyes wide. “The sub went down on June 17th that year, which means this man was alive in here for more than six months!”
They looked in horrified fascination at the corpse.
“It’s possible,” Costas said eventually. “Physically, that is. The battery could have sustained the CO2 scrubbers and the electrolysis desalination machine that extracts oxygen from seawater. And there was evidently plenty to eat and drink.” He surveyed the scatter of empty vodka bottles among the rubbish on the floor. “Psychologically is another matter. How anyone could remain sane in these conditions is beyond me.”
“The diary’s full of political rhetoric, the kind of empty communist propaganda we had drummed into us like religion,” Katya said. “Only the most fanatical party members were chosen as political officers, the equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo.”
“Something very odd went on here,” Jack murmured. “I can’t believe in six months he found no way of signalling the surface. He could have manually ejected a buoy through a torpedo tube or discharged floating waste. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Listen to this.” Katya’s voice betrayed a dawning realization as she flicked from page to page, pausing occasionally to scan an entry. She lingered for a moment and then began to translate.
“I am the chosen one. I have buried my comrades with full military honours. They sacrificed their lives for the Motherland. Their strength gives me strength. Long live the Revolution!” She looked up.
“What does it mean?” Costas asked.
“According to this diary, there were twelve of them. Five days after the sinking they selected one man to survive. The rest took cyanide tablets. Their bodies were weighted and ejected through the torpedo tubes.”
“Had they given up all hope?” Costas sounded incredulous.
“They were determined beyond reason that the submarine should not fall into NATO hands. They were prepared to destroy the vessel if any would-be rescuer turned out to be hostile.”
“I can almost see the logic,” Costas said. “You only need one man to detonate charges. One man uses less food and air, so the submarine can be guarded that much longer. Everyone else is worse than redundant, a drain on precious resources. They must have chosen the man least likely to crack up.”
Jack knelt down beside the empty bottles and shook his head. “There must be more to it than that. It still doesn’t add up.”
“Their world was about to collapse,” Costas said. “Diehards like these may have convinced themselves they were a last bastion of communism, a final bulwark against the West.”
They looked at Katya.
“We all knew the end was near,” she said, “and some refused to accept it. But they did not put madmen in nuclear submarines.”
One question had been nagging at them since they first saw the dangling corpse, and Costas finally spoke up.
“What happened to the rest of the crew?”
Katya was reading another part of the diary, a look of increasing incredulity on her face as she began to piece it together.
“It’s as we suspected in naval intelligence at the time, only worse,” she said. “This was a renegade boat. Her captain, Yevgeni Mikhailovich Antonov, set out on a routine patrol from the Black Sea Fleet submarine base at Sevastopol. He disappeared south without ever making contact again.”
“He could never have hoped to get out of the Black Sea without being detected,” Costas said. “The Turks maintain a one hundred per cent sonar blanket over the Bosporus.”