“I order you to put down your weapons,” Sablin tells them in a measured voice. He is catching his second wind. Whatever fate is in store for him, he feels the first test is now.
“No,” Lieutenant Stepanov replies coolly. “We’re all going to wait here until help arrives. Then you will be arrested and the captain will be set free.” He shakes his head. “Thank God you weren’t dumb enough to kill him!”
“There is no help coming—”
“Yes, there is!” Kovalchenkov shouts. “Lieutenant Firsov is leaving the ship—”
“Shut up, you stupid fool!” Stepanov cries.
Sablin is rocked back on his heels. All of his planning, everything he has worked for, is disappearing before his eyes.
He turns to see if Sakhnevich is still there, but the corridor is empty. Sablin’s heart sinks even lower.
“Grab him!” Stepanov shouts, and suddenly Sablin is rushed, hands are plucking at his sleeves, someone is trying to take the pistol out of his hand, and he is shoved up against the bulkhead, his head banging against the steel plating.
Sablin manages to break free for an instant and he raises his pistol, meaning to fire a warning shot overhead, but Seaman Sakhnevich is suddenly crowding into the cabin with three other young sailors.
Stepanov and the warrant officers are armed, but not one shot is fired as the sailors roughly pull and shove them away and manage to drag their zampolit out into the corridor and slam the door.
One of the sailors produces a key and locks the door from the outside. There’ll be no escape for the three officers now. The Storozhevoy is a sturdy Russian warship; there’ll be no shooting their way out for the three officers.
Sablin’s heart, which has been pounding practically out of his chest, is beginning to slow down as he catches his breath.
Firsov.
The name crystallizes in Sablin’s mind.
There’d been absolutely no doubt which way Firsov had voted. The young senior lieutenant of the electrical division had dropped a white backgammon piece into the basket. He was for the mutiny. He had grasped perfectly what Sablin was trying to do.
Gindin was a disappointment, but Firsov was solidly behind the plan.
Sablin focuses on Sakhnevich. “Good work, Aleksei,” he says. “Thank you. But we have to find Lieutenant Firsov, before he gets off the ship.”
“Maybe he’s already gone,” Sakhnevich says.
“If that’s the case I need to know it immediately. The entire operation depends on it.”
Sakhnevich and the other sailors are rooted to their spots. They’re not quite sure what to do. They realize that this situation has the potential to change everything. Their lives could literally be hanging in the balance.
“Now,” Sablin urges. “Before it’s too late. Find him!”
32. DESERTER
Crouched in the chilly darkness at the massive anchor hawsehole near the bow, Senior Lieutenant Vladimir Firsov is at odds with himself, as he has been ever since he’d first begun to suspect what Sablin was up to. That was weeks ago when Sablin began asking questions about how the electrical systems aboard the ship were supposed to work, that and the zampolit’s not-so-subtle comments about what a mess the bureaucrats in Moscow had made of Lenin’s fine ideas.
Firsov has acted as head of the ship’s Communist Party Club. That meant that he ran meetings once a month for the dozen or so men aboard who were already members of the Party or had been nominated for membership. This is a big deal in the Soviet Union and an even bigger deal in the military. Being a member of the Party opens all sorts of doors, and with them come privileges.
Because Firsov is a Communist Party cell commander, the zampolit has treated him especially well. Firsov is one of the chosen few, with a fine future ahead of him.
But hunched down and shivering now he isn’t so sure of anything except for the look on his friend Boris Gindin’s face in the midshipmen’s dining hall. Boris was disappointed, and that hurt more than anything Firsov can ever recall. He has a great deal of respect for his roommate. Firsov hopes someday to explain what he did this evening and why.
Gindin never thought about Firsov’s Party membership until much later, but by then it was too late to bring it up. “I thought that at first Vladimir might have shared Sablin’s ideas, but later, after he’d had time to calm down and think things through, he might have had a change of heart, so he jumped ship to call for help.
“Maybe he realized just how dangerous a situation Sablin had gotten us into and decided to warn somebody what was happening before it was too late.”
Or maybe Firsov was even smarter than that.
“Maybe it was Vladimir’s strategy to try to save us all,” Gindin recalls. “Maybe he volunteered to go over to Sablin’s side to penetrate into the zampolit’s circle in order to find a way out of the mess.”
It’s not known for sure what Firsov’s actual motivations were on that evening or exactly what he was thinking at that moment near the bow of the ship.
Someone shouts something from aft, toward the starboard side of the superstructure, and Firsov turns toward the noise. He heard his name! Somehow they know! Sablin has set men to look for him!
Someone else shouts something.
Firsov rises up just tall enough to look over the side of the bulwarks. An Alpha submarine, low in the water, dark, menacing, is at the same mooring as the Storozhevoy. He can make out a dim red glow from the open hatch at the top of the sail. The sub’s captain will know what to do.
Firsov looks over his shoulder to make sure that there’s no one to see him, and he wiggles through the hawsehole, the filthy seventy-centimeter mooring line getting his uniform dirty, and scrambles down to the bow deck of the sub.
33. THE ALARM
Sablin is hanging over the rail at the bow of the Storozhevoy trying to peer through the fog at something going on in the water below, just to the starboard side of the submarine sitting low in the water, his decks just a meter or so above the surface of the water.
It is a few minutes before 2300, and by now the entire ship has been thoroughly searched from stem to stern and from top to bottom. The sailors and officers have checked every single compartment, crawl space, and locker where a man could possibly hide.
Senior Lieutenant Firsov is not aboard. Kovalchenkov and the others locked in Stepanov’s cabin below were right. Firsov has somehow gotten off the ship and is sending for help. Right now Sablin thinks he knows how it was done.
There is something going on below. He can make out a dim red light coming from the open hatch at the top of the sail. The Storozhevoy’s mooring line goes almost straight down. A man such as Firsov could have easily have crawled through the hawsehole, shimmied down the mooring line, and made it to the deck of the sub.
But would the submarine’s commander or anyone else aboard believe such a wild story about the zampolit arresting Potulniy and taking over the ship?
A brief flash of white light from below illuminates someone scrambling down into a small launch tied up to the side of the sub. It’s like a pulse of a strobe in Sablin’s eyes, an image of a slightly built man in a navy uniform getting into that little boat.
Moments later the small boat’s engine comes to life, and the launch heads away from the submarine.
Sablin rears back. He can hear the speech he means to broadcast as if the recording were playing right now through the ship’s 1MC.