“Five meters, ten meters, seventeen meters”, the duty seaman called out the depths into which the submarine was diving.
“I don’t like this, Dimitri”, whispered Yevgeni.
“You’ve probably seen too many movies with bursting pipes and flooding inside old submarines. I can promise you that this won’t happen to us. Even statistically, the probability of exposure to nuclear radiation here is much higher than the risk of sinking.”
“Good, thanks. You’ve really calmed me down. Do you also know what the probability is for these two things to happen exactly simultaneously, exactly today and exactly in this submarine?”
“No, I don’t know, but if we are playing statistics this morning, then the probability of our Minister of Defense having our heads today is so much higher than the probability of something happening to us and to this submarine”, Dimitri concluded.
Yevgeni, still terrified, decided not to continue the conversation so as not to give his mate Dimitri the chance to play on his weaknesses.
“One hundred meters, one hundred and ten meters”, the duty seaman continued counting out the diving data.
Dimitri looked again at Yevgeni, who had been silent from a depth of thirty-five meters.
“Are you all right?”
“More or less, considering the circumstances. You know that all is relative, and here is a story. A fellow who wants to commit suicide, throws himself from the twentieth floor. On his way down, on the tenth floor, a neighbor sees him and asks, “How are you doing?” The fellow committing suicide answers: “So far, so good”.
Dimitri gave a short bark of laughter, then spoke to Yevgeni quietly.
“I am intentionally not taking you around the submarine to show you the instruments that will measure the blast’s data. I don’t want any one of the operators to understand that later on, they might encounter such an event. As far as they’re concerned, we are totally transparent, no more than tourists.”
“You’re absolutely right. Everything should be done in the most natural and routine way, as if we were not here at all.”
Dimitri looked at his watch. “Very soon we’ll be arriving at the point that we set for the submarine, and five minutes after that, the explosion will take place, exactly at 1005 hours.”
The Captain summoned them to him with a motion of his hand.
“We will be arriving at the location point that you gave us within two minutes, and there we’ll stop. Actually, we’re already stopping. You can see here right in front of you, on the diving meter, that we are already at the depth that you requested, two hundred and ninety meters.”
“Thank you, Captain”, Yevgeni replied, and turned to his mate Dimitri, who seemed restless and preoccupied.
“What’s happening, Dimitri? You seem worried. Have you become me?”
Dimitri did not seem to hear Yevgeni’s words. He looked at his watch again, then suddenly leapt at Captain Yashin, clutching his arm.
“Quickly, quickly, captain! Change direction to three hundred sixty at full steam and maintain a speed of twenty-one knots. Now!”
The submarine commander and Yevgeni had no idea of what had come upon Dimitri at that moment. The captain looked quizzically at Dimitri before responding.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, yes. This is critical. “Go, go now”, Dimitri called out, his voice high-pitched and urgent.
Colonel Yashin took the microphone and the loudspeakers throughout the ship broadcast his order in his quiet and authoritative voice: “Full steam, direction three hundred sixty.”
Dimitri looked at Yevgeni with relief. It seemed that a huge load had just been lifted from his shoulders.
“We are three minutes from our test”, he said.
“Then explain to me in half a minute, why the sudden outburst?”
“I’ll tell you exactly why. I suddenly realized that if the submarine were motionless, our test would not take place under real-life conditions. When the submarine is in motion, there are many environmental noises. For example, the propellers’ noise, or the friction between the submarine’s girth and the water. Then, if we did the same with the American submarine, it would be in motion. Therefore, I want us to test in real conditions, with noise and vibrations, not under controlled laboratory conditions, while we are standing still and everything around us is quiet.”
Dimitri looked at his watch again.
“We have one more minute, and I don’t have any idea what to expect.”
Yevgeni felt that all their frantic efforts of the last few days were being channeled into one critical moment. The thoughts raced through his mind. We either continue from here proudly, with heads held high, or someone will have our heads cut off.
“Sir”, the duty seaman called out to Captain Yashin, “Position Four is reporting an earthquake detected at one seventy-five degrees. The magnitude is very low and he is trying to confirm the data with several other sources.”
“Received”, Captain Yashin said, and looked for any reaction from Dimitri and Yevgeni.
Dimitri shrugged his shoulders as if not understanding the meaning of the report. Dimitri turned his back to the seaman beside him and pressed his finger to his lips, warning motioned to the Captain not to say a word.
The seaman called out again.
“Sir, Captain. Position Two detected a distant sound from the same direction.”
Dimitri watched Yevgeni’s face, which bore a troubled expression.
“I was afraid of this. We have obviously failed”, Yevgeni said finally. Dimitri continued watching him without saying a word. Indeed, Yevgeni appeared as if the sky was crashing down on him, and Dimitri tried to think of a way, some way, to lift his mate’s spirits.
“Look, Yevgeni. The blast provided the right indications of an earthquake or a nuclear explosion far away. Where we failed is in estimating the correct distance from the blast point, because some acoustic noise from the explosion was sensed in the submarine. What we need to do now is get farther away from the American submarine with the blast, and we need to know by how much. If we get too far, they will still not hear the noise of the explosion, but the earthquake effects on the Richter scale would be either too low or borderline.”
The duty seaman called out again.
“Sir, Captain, Number Four crossed data and determined that the epicenter of the quake is within the area of our firing range. That can explain the noise received at position Number Two. Maybe they dropped a big depth charge there.”
The submarine commander looked at Dimitri without speaking.
“We have finished”, said Dimitri. “We can head back home.”
“This submarine has never had such a short mission”, Captain Yashin said laconically. He had probably noticed his guests’ low spirits, and was taking advantage of this in his own way, adding insult to injury.
“Where do we go from here?” Dimitri asked Yevgeni.
“Most probably, we are already on our way to a gulag in Siberia.” Dimitri wrapped his arm round Yevgeni’s shoulder.
“Everything will be all right, Mr. Pessimist. We’ll come up with a solution. I think you’re exaggerating; this is not a total failure, because we did achieve the right effect. The problem is with the acoustic noise. This is not simple, as it depends on the water temperature at the selected site and, of course, also on the sensitivity of the instruments on board the American submarine. I don’t think anyone can tell us for certain if their acoustic instruments are more sensitive than those in our own submarines.”
“Do you really not know? If not, you should know that they are ahead of us in almost every technological development. I think the last time we were ahead of them in anything was about 20 years ago, April 1961, with Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin.”