“Take your coat off, Sergei,” Alexeyev said.
“Oh,” Sergei Kovalov said, shaking his head. “My mind is elsewhere. Pour one for me, will you?” Kovalov went back to the door, took off his jacket and returned as Alexeyev was corking the bottle. He slid over into the seat opposite Alexeyev. Captain First Rank Sergei Kovalov was a shorter man, built like a bear, everything about the man thick and hairy. He had a fleshy face with wide penetrating eyes, red hair, and a thick mustache. He was the son of a high-ranking government official, although Alexeyev had no idea what Kovalov’s father had been, since Kovalov refused to speak about him. Alexeyev and Kovalov had been friends ever since their junior officer tours on the Tambov a million years ago. Kovalov had nursed many a drink with Alexeyev during the troubled times of Kovalov’s divorce, the two of them convinced they could find the answers to life’s problems at the bottom of a bottle. And while they’d proved that theory wrong on multiple occasions, that didn’t stop them from continuing to try.
Kovalov raised his glass, and Alexeyev joined him. “To fallen comrades,” Kovalov said, and Alexeyev thought for a sad moment about the personnel he’d lost in the South Atlantic when his K-561 Kazan went down, at the wrong end of a damned Russian supercavitating torpedo. Alexeyev shut his eyes and drank, saying a momentary prayer that wherever the souls he’d lost were, they were okay. When he opened his eyes, he noticed his friend was staring down at the table, seeming lost.
“Are you okay, Sergei?” Alexeyev asked.
“Wife and daughter are driving me crazy,” Kovalov said, blinking. “Tonight they were screaming at each other so loud that not one, but two neighbors pounded on the apartment door to demand quiet. And then Ivana insisted that I remove Magna’s door from her room. Somehow, Mommy thinks that destroying the girl’s privacy is the cure to the trouble. And through all this, Magna’s still not speaking to me. After, you know, the thing. So at home? Pure chaos.”
“Removing a teenage girl’s door? You’d be throwing gasoline onto a fire already burning,” Alexeyev said.
“I know. So, Georgy, enough about my problems. You wanted to talk. Are there new sorrows to drown?”
Alexeyev poured more scotch for both of them. “You know, Sergei, the trouble with the attempt to drown sorrows in alcohol is that sorrows are such good swimmers.”
Kovalov smiled and tilted his glass back, drained it, and called for more.
“My sorrows are the usual, I suppose,” Alexeyev said. “Natalia was upset at living close to the base and insisted on us moving to Murmansk City. At least I’m close to your apartment now. But is she happy now? No. Now she’s throwing a fit about my being away on the next mission. And I can’t even tell her if we sail in a week or a month.”
Kovalov waved his friend’s complaint aside. “Please, Georgy, you have no problems. That woman loves you more than her next breath. It’s obvious for anyone to see when they see you together. Count your blessings. You have a gorgeous female who thinks the sun rises and sets over your head. Of course she’s going to bitch about you disappearing to the far reaches of the Atlantic Ocean for two months, maybe more.”
“That’s not all that’s on my mind, Sergei. It’s the new mission profile. It’s not like anything we’ve seen before.”
Kovalov nodded. He looked around the bar, but it was mostly empty and no one was near. “I know,” he said quietly. “Deploying Status-6 units in enemy harbors. It’s a terrible idea. If any of this stupid plan leaks out, well, it will be a disaster.”
“If the American defenses are waiting for us, it might be a bad day.”
“Yes, exactly,” Kovalov replied. “Being depth-charged to death could ruin your entire week.”
“Natalia doesn’t know that she could have even bigger things to complain about.”
Kovalov looked at his drink. “If we’re lucky, the depth charges could be nuclear. I imagine dying in a nuclear explosion is a good way to go. It’s over before you even realize something is wrong.”
“No way I want to go out that way,” Alexeyev said. “I’d like a minute or two to consider my own mortality. I always figured an airplane accident from high altitude would be the way to die. A short time of contemplation, then lights out in an instant.”
“Either way,” Kovalov said, “it beats dying in a flooding submarine.”
Or one on fire, Alexeyev thought. “I’ll drink to that.”
In the morning, Georgy Alexeyev awakened to an empty bed. His wife Natalia was up early, presumably to make breakfast for him.
As he sat up in bed, he realized that what woke him up was a smell. A bad smell. It was a Belomorkanal cigarette, a bastard child of cigars and cigarettes, a papirosa with a cardboard tube instead of a filter, with cigar-type tobacco stuffed into it, the foul-smelling cigarette that had the characteristic stench of a dead wet dog tossed into a bonfire. The kind of cigarette that only one person in his life had ever smoked — Captain Third Rank Alesya Matveev, his dead chief engineer on K-561 Kazan.
He looked over at the table and chairs on the window side of the bedroom, and there Matveev was, sitting there at the table, her legs crossed, calmly smoking the cigarette, her big brown eyes fixed on him. She wore the powder-blue coveralls with the high-vis stripes on the sleeves, upper torso and ankles, the color she’d picked out for her engineering department. He’d never known her to wear makeup, and in life she would have had to strive to become plain, but as she sat there, her face radiated a tranquil, serene beauty. Alexeyev wasn’t sure if it were the light from the low-on-the-horizon sun shining through the blinds or something from within her, but she seemed to be backlit by a kind of aura made of white light.
Twenty emotions ran through him like the current from a high voltage short circuit, and instinctively he backed away from the apparition, slinking back against the headboard, his mouth open. An acidic witch’s brew of abject terror, intense sadness and dark guilt pumped through his veins. He tried to speak, but his voice wouldn’t come. He felt like a fish dying on a pier, his lips moving, but no sound coming out, and he realized he couldn’t breathe, a uncontrollable panic starting to bubble up in his mind.
It was then she spoke to him. It was Matveev’s scratchy voice, but it came to him in his mind. Her lips never moved.
Hello, Captain. She smiled at him mysteriously, not showing her teeth, but her eyes making happy horizontal commas the way they did the rare times she’d smile when she was alive. The voice seemed to soothe his terrified and guilty spirit, and the fear drained from him, replaced with an odd, calm, intense focus.
Alexeyev finally found his voice. “Chief,” he said, calling her by her former shipboard title, short for chief engineer, then thinking that sounded too formal. “Alesya.”
She dipped her head in a half nod of respect, tamped out her cigarette in a large K-561 ashtray, reached for another, and lit it with a lighter with the colorful coat-of-arms of the K-561, the smoke curling toward the ceiling.
“Why are you here?” he asked. When she just looked at him, he got the feeling she would only answer if he asked her the right question. “Ty v poryadke, gde ty? Are you okay where you are? Are you safe there? Are the others okay?” He meant the other engineering watchstanders who’d perished with her on that awful day. But Chief Engineer Matveev just kept looking at him, a seeming amusement in her eyes.