Fortunes of War (14 page)

“If a man missed this fight, he might regret it all his life.”

“I doubt that,” Cassidy snapped. Jiro Kimura flashed into his mind. He bit his lip.

“All his life, he might wonder,” Lacy insisted.

“It won't be easy,” Bob Cassidy remarked, more than a little unhappy with the way this conversation was going.

Lacy looked intense. Too intense. Now Cassidy was almost certain the man was a nut.

“Flying was almost a religion with me,” Lacy said after a moment. “With me and my friends. We all thought that way. Didn't think I would ever leave it, but…” He shrugged. “That's the way things go. I got tired of the peacetime routine. Got tired of the annual budget slashing in Congress. Tired of the eternal cutbacks and resizing and reductions in force. It's a conspiracy, slashing the defense budget so far that America can't defend itself. It's a conspiracy by foreigners, to throw open our borders. They've always been against everything American.”

Cassidy said nothing.

Lacy went on, “Of course, I've never been in combat. Can't honestly say how I'll handle it, because I don't know. I
think
everything will be fine. I won't pee my pants. I won't forget to retract the gear or arm the gun. I will manage to do what they trained me to do.”

“Hmm,” Cassidy said.

“I always thought I could kill someone if I really had to. If there were no choice. Then I could do what I had to do. But to go to Siberia to strap on a plane to fight Japanese pilots…well, the whole thing is slightly unreal. Sitting here, I can feel the doubt. It's tangible. I don't know if I could kill anyone, Colonel.”

“Well, if you have tangible doubts, Clay, you—”

“I think I could, you understand, but I don't know for a fact.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No one could know, until it happened to them.”

“Not everyone is cut out for—”

Lacy mused, “Maybe that's why I'm here, instead of still in uniform.” He frowned.

Now he looked at Cassidy with a start, as if suddenly realizing he was talking to a colonel. “I probably shouldn't be saying these things,” he added hastily.

“It's a complicated world we—”

“I'll think about it, sir. Let you know. Do you have a telephone number?”

Cassidy thought for several seconds before he gave the man a card. “Don't do anything rash,” he told Lacy.

“At night, I miss the flying the worst. I can close my eyes and feel myself blasting through space.”

“Think about it carefully.”

“Maybe I—”

“Kill or be killed. The Japs are pretty damn good, Lacy. The Zero drivers will punch the missiles off the rails and they'll be coming hard. If you don't handle it right you're gonna be toast. Even if you handle it right, you may get zapped.”

“I—”

“You tell me you want to go, Lacy, you better be sure. I don't want your blood on my hands. I'm toting enough of a load through life as it is.”

“I'll think it over and call you, sir,” Clay Lacy promised.

“When Lacy had gone to class, Cassidy put a check mark beside his name on the list. Okay, he's a nutcase, but if he can fly the plane and pull the trigger, he'll do.

“Svechin has been into the torpedo juice again.”

“Anybody else?”

“Three or four of them have been sipping it, Captain. They do it because Svechin eggs them on.”

Pavel Saratov eyed the chief of the boat, a senior warrant, or
starshi michman
, who averted his gaze.

“They haven't been paid in five months, sir.”

“I know that.”

“They ask why we are here.”

“There is a war. We defend Mother Russia.”

“Ha! There is no money. There is no food. There is no clothing. The electricity is off half the time. There is no medicine, no vodka, no tobacco. The politicians are all thieves, children are sick, people are dying from pollution, industrial poisoning.”

Saratov rubbed his face, then his head.

The chief continued: “We don't have a country. That is what the men say. We left our families to starve in the dark and sailed away to drown at sea. If the Japanese want Siberia, let them have it. We might be better off under the Japanese. I hear they eat regularly.”

“The men say that?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“What is your opinion?”

“That is what the men say.”

“And you? Answer me.”

The chief's Adam's apple bobbed up and down. “The men think we are doomed. That we have no chance. The P-3s will find us again. We should surrender while we are still alive.”

“And you?”

“I am a loyal Russian, Captain.”

Saratov said nothing.

“We might sail to Hawaii,” the chief offered tentatively. After a
moment of silence, he added, “Or the Aleutians. Ask for asylum from the Americans. I wish I were an American.”

Saratov played with the chart on the desk. Off to one side lay the messages. The Japanese had taken Nikolayevsk, Petropavlosk, and Korsakov. The Japanese had parachuted into Ostrov and Okha on Sakhalin Island, where Russian troops were resisting fiercely, according to the Kremlin. The Japanese had attacked Magadan and Gavan—no mention by the Kremlin of Russian resistance. Unconventional warfare teams had taken four emergency submarine resupply bases on the northern shore of the Sea of Okhotsk and in the Kurils—probably less than a dozen well-trained men in each team.

Saratov was certain that all these conquests had been ridiculously easy. The four sub resupply bases didn't even have troops assigned anymore, not since the turn of the century.

The officer who decoded these messages, Bogrov, had whispered the news to two friends, who whispered to friends. Every man on the boat had heard the news by now.

“Bring Svechin to the control room in fifteen minutes.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

The cramped space of the captain's cabin held only a bunk, a foldout desk, and a chair. It was on this desk that Saratov had the chart spread. He stared at it without seeing it.

The men were defeated. Without firing a shot, they were ready to surrender.

Every man on the boat had grown up on Communist propaganda, that New Communist Man bullshit, an endless diet of crap about how the Party knows best, the moral imperative to care for everyone according to their needs. All that was over, finally, gone forever. Rampant inflation and an ever-expanding population destroyed the bureaucrats' ability to provide. In an age of ever-increasing scarcity of basic necessities, corruption became endemic, crime rampant. Rusted, rotten, and dilapidated, the social framework shuddered one last time in the rising wind, then slowly collapsed. The Soviet Union died in the wreckage, leaving only starving republics without the resources to cope. Seventeen years later, Russia, the largest republic, was ruled by criminals and incompetents interested primarily in lining their own pockets.

The men on this boat were here solely because they had a better chance of eating in the navy than they did out of it. And it was just a chance. For weeks last winter, everyone at the Petropavlosk Naval Base
had survived on a diet of beets. Not even bread. Beets three times a day for four and a half weeks. Meanwhile, old babushkas and abandoned children starved in the streets. There were whispers of cannibalism out in the boondocks, but no one knew anything for certain.

The rest of the world is high-teching its way to wealth and fortune, Saratov reflected bitterly. Even Chinese peasants eat better than poor Russians. The Japanese are rich, rich, rich, not to mention the Americans.

And Pavel Saratov drained the alcohol from a torpedo and sold it on the black market to get money to buy food to feed his crew for this cruise! Of course, the torpedoes were not supposed to have alcohol in them. Their fuel was a devil's brew of chemicals that allowed them to run at up to 55 knots, but the torpedo fuel had deteriorated so much over the years while in storage that it was worthless. The armory people fueled the torpedoes now with alcohol, because they had nothing better.

Perhaps he should take the boat to an American port. He had more than enough diesel fuel to make Adak, in the Aleutians. The P-3s were probably patrolling over the Japanese fleet off Vladivostok and Nikolayevsk, guarding the convoys in the Sea of Japan. The way east was wide open.

He wiped his face with his hands, tried to think.

These thoughts were unworthy. Shameful.

He was a Russian officer. Russian officers had led men valiantly and gloriously for hundreds of years,
hundreds
.

Glory
. What crap!

For seventy years a fierce, venal oligarchy had ruled the Russian people. Mass murder, starvation, imprisonment, torture, and terror were routinely used to control the population and prevent unrest. And the Russian people had let it happen.

Russians drank guilt with their mother's milk.

They were beaten. Defeated by life. Defeated by their own stupidities and inadequacies.

His men were typical. Most of them just wanted alcohol—vodka or torpedo juice or fermented fruit, whatever. If you gave them alcohol you owned them, body and soul.

We are animals
.

Why was he thinking these thoughts?

No one gave a good goddamn about one little diesel/electric submarine or the fifty men inside her. Fifty men, not the sixty-five the ship was supposed to have. Certainly not the brass in Moscow. Those paper
shuffling tubes of fatty Russian sausage sent this submarine to demolish a wreck that had blocked a channel for
ten
years, and they didn't bother asking if the captain had food to feed the crew. Or fuel. Or charts. Or trained men. Just an order from on high: do this, or we will find someone who can.

His eye fell on the Russian Orthodox liturgy book tucked into a cranny in the angle iron above the bunk. The old book had been given to him long, long ago by his mother. The Communists had never allowed religion in the armed forces, a policy that Saratov failed to understand. Banning religion made sense only to Communists. When the navy got rid of its political officers, Saratov began reading services aloud on Sunday mornings at sea and in port. He didn't ask permission; he just did it. At first some of the men grumbled. They soon stopped. They got that essential alcohol occasionally, now and then food, so what did prayers matter?

He could hear the chief in the control room, six paces aft of his door. Bogrov was talking to the XO, then to Svechin, who was loud and sullen, still drunk.

Saratov opened his desk safe and removed his pistol, a 7.62-mm Tokarev. The magazine was full. He inserted it into the handle, jacked the slide to chamber a round. Then he carefully lowered the hammer. The pistol had no safety. He put it into his pocket.

He took the book with him.

Everyone in the packed control room fell silent when he entered. The extra bodies filled the place, took every square inch not taken by the watch team. Even though he was inured to it, the stench of unwashed bodies took Saratov's breath for a moment. He tossed the old book on the chart table.

Svechin was obviously drunk, not at attention. He eyed the captain insolently.

The boat was submerged. Saratov forced himself to check the gauges as everyone stared at him. The boat was four hundred feet down, making three knots to the southeast.

“Drunk again, eh, Svechin?”

“I don't think—”

“Stand at attention when you speak to me,” Saratov roared. “All of you. Attention!”

There was a general stiffening all around.

Even Svechin stood a bit straighter. “I—”

“Alcohol from the torpedoes!”

Svechin looked sullen, half-sick. He refused to look at the captain.

“Russia is at war. The torpedoes are our weapons. You are guilty of sabotage, Svechin. In wartime, sabotage is a capital offense.”

Svechin blanched. The chief's Adam's apple was in constant motion, up and down, up and down.

“Lieutenant Bogrov discusses classified messages as if they were newspaper articles.”

Bogrov was from Moscow, and he believed that gave him some special standing; most of his shipmates came from the provinces, from small squalid villages scattered all over Russia. They had joined the navy to escape all that.

“Captain, I—” Bogrov began.

“Silence, you son of a bitch. I'll deal with you later.”

Svechin was pale now, his lips pinched into a thin line.

Saratov could hear them breathing, all of them, above the little noises of the boat running deep. They breathed in and out like blown horses. And he could still smell their stench, which surprised him. Normally his own stink masked that of the other men.

“You men talk of surrender. Of fleeing to a neutral county.”

Just the breathing.

“Talk, talk, talk. There isn't a man on this boat! God, what miserable creatures you are!”

Better get it over with
.

He pulled the pistol from his pocket, gripped it firmly, and cocked the hammer.

“Do you have anything to say, Svechin, before I carry out the penalty prescribed for sabotage in wartime?”

Svechin's tongue came out. He wet his lips. Perspiration made his face shine. He had thick lips and pimples. “Please, Captain, I didn't mean…We are all doomed. We're going to die. I—”

Pavel Saratov leveled the pistol and shot Svechin once, in the center of the forehead. The report was a thunderclap in the small space.

Svechin slumped to the floor. His bowels relaxed. The odor of shit nauseated Saratov.

The captain held the pistol pointed toward the overhead, so everyone could see it, while he waited for his ears to stop ringing. He worked his jaw from side to side.

He had an overpowering urge to urinate, but he fought it back, somehow.

“I should shoot you too, Bogrov.” That came out like a frog croaking.

He moved so that Bogrov was forced to look into his eyes.

“You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.” Bogrov was at rigid attention. He refused to focus his eyes.

Saratov moved to the next man, then the next, staring into the eyes of each in turn.

“Chief, bring the boat to course two three five degrees. One hour after sunset, take the boat to periscope depth and rig the snorkel.”

“Aye aye, captain.”

“Call me then.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Put Svechin in a torpedo tube. XO, read the funeral service. Then pop him out.”

“Aye aye, sir,” the XO said.

Saratov used both hands to lower the hammer on the pistol, pocketed it, then went back to his cabin.

He was sitting in his chair with the curtain drawn fifteen minutes later when he heard Bogrov say softly to the chief, “He shoots a man dead, then orders the XO to pray over him. That's one for the books.”

“Better shut your mouth, sir.” That was one of the steersmen.

“Shut up, both of you,” the chief roared, unable to control himself.

 

The sun was still above the horizon in Moscow at ten o'clock the evening Kalugin entered the Congress of People's Deputies. He came in through the lobby and walked up the aisle, nodding right and left at deputies he knew, but not pausing to shake hands.

He had been a busy man this past week. During the last seventy-two hours he had had almost no sleep, but it didn't show. As he walked down the aisle toward the raised speaker's platform he looked like an aged lion girding himself for his last great battle.

In fact he had already fought the battle and was the victor. Once he believed that Japan really intended to invade Russia, he had moved swiftly to create a political consensus that the nation's survival was at stake. That was the easy part. Then came the crunch: Kalugin demanded that the elected representatives of the people of Russia grant him dictatorial powers to mobilize the nation and save it.

Of course, he had made many enemies through the years. Those he judged to be his worst enemies, he buried. Seven new corpses were now resting in hastily dug graves in the woods outside Moscow. Several dozen deputies who might be brought around if properly persuaded were locked in Lubyanka. Kalugin bought support where required, appointed ministers, and drafted decrees. Tonight, as he walked into the Congress amid the buzz of crisis, with the television cameras of the world watching, he was ready to declare his victory.

Janos Ilin was one of the people in the gallery, packed shoulder-to-shoulder with his fellow FIS officers. He could see the top of Kalugin's balding head as the president moved through the crowd of sycophant deputies.

A dictator. Another dictator. To solve Russia's problems with brute force and hot blood and endless rules and regulations, administered by powerless little men who lived in terror.

Kalugin, the savior.

Kalugin ascended the dais. Now he approached the podium. Massive applause.

Everyone rose to their feet, still applauding.

Finally, Kalugin motioned for his audience to be seated.

“Tonight is a grave hour in the history of Russia. Japanese forces in the far east have captured Vladivostok; Nikolayevsk; Petropavlosk, on the Kamchatka Peninsula; and Sakhalin Island….