Kirov (4 page)

 “Wait
until this front passes through and the weather clears. The targeting buoys and
towing lines will be all in a tangle in these seas. Tell Rudnikov to get his
missiles sorted out and meet us off Jan Mayen tomorrow at 1100 hours. There is
no further need to proceed here. We should stand the men down and try again
later.”

The
Admiral looked at him sourly. “That will put us another day late back to Severomorsk,”
he said. Then a look of resignation crossed his features, his eyes dim and
distant. “Probably best to do as you suggest,” he decided. “Give the orders,
Karpov. Give the damn orders, and let me know when
Orel
is finally ready.
Tell Rudnikov—this time no excuses!”

“Aye,
sir. I'll see to it.”

Chapter
2

Captain
Karpov
was a
straight laced and competent man, with a sharp intelligence, strong will, and
much ambition. One of the only men on the ship that did not owe his present
position to Volsky, the Captain had a volatile personality that sometimes
seemed oddly out of place in a man with his obvious intellectual capacity. He
was easily frustrated, sharp tempered, somewhat high strung and very defensive
at times, though he balanced these emotions well with the steely logic of his
mind. A thinker and planner, he had already plotted his course to the bridge of
Kirov
, winning the post in a hard fought competition with two other men.
Volsky had, in fact, preferred another man, but Karpov had ingratiated himself
with senior officers on the naval board, and won approval by other means. And
he had even bigger plans if things went the way he imagined.

One
day he would be wearing the Admiral's cap and the bold gold stripes on the cuff
of his jacket. But not today. Today his black sheep wool Ushanka hat and thick
leather sea jacket would serve him well enough, and he was content to be
captain of the ship where his considerable talents could be put to the best use
possible—as long as he
could
be captain. He saluted as the Admiral left
the bridge, pleased to have the citadel to himself again.

He
felt a strange sense of kinship with the battlecruiser.
Kirov
was rebuilt
from an older life, just as he was with his new career in the navy. Russia had
been doing some grave digging, he thought. Finances were so tight, resources so
limited, that we have to pull ships out of retirement and refit them to have
anything seaworthy these days. Oh, they had given the ship
a clever new
coat of radar absorbing paint, fitted those new carbon fiber tiles to her
siding, with a curious coating of phototropic material that would change colors
in various lighting conditions. It was a futile attempt to make the big ship
less observable to both electronic and optical systems at a distance, and
sometimes it worked quite well, but
Kirov
was a large vessel with a
distinctive prow and silhouette that would be recognized without much
difficulty. These features built into her redesign on the citadels, gun
turrets, and all weather siding would make her seem smaller than she was to a
curious radar set, but she would by no means be considered a stealthy ship.

That
was fine by him, he thought. A warship should look like it could fight, and
Kirov
had all of the classic sharp angles, stalwart masts and radar festooned towers
that brought the word battlecruiser to mind when you looked at her. This is a
ship that was meant to be seen and feared, not something that would slink
through the seas in the dark of night like a whisper of fog, hoping to remain
undiscovered like a submarine. No,
Kirov
was a warship, a predator at
sea, menacing, dangerous and intimidating in every line and angle of her
design.

Karpov
hated submarines, and he justifiably feared them. When offered a chance to
train for undersea warfare, he refused the assignment, recoiled from it, as if
he might be joining a colony of lepers if he went. There was something vile
about a submarine, he thought, something devious, something that too closely
reminded him of the darker aspects of himself. He understood the work of an
undersea boat only too well. In fact, he had captained his life like any good
submariner might up until that first great failure that had sent him to the
bottom of the sea.

Karpov
had planned and plotted his way up through the corporate ranks of Gazprom, but
his career took a turn for the worse under the Putin administration. The
executive class of the company had evaded taxes, stripped off assets and
distributed them to family members, but the Putin reforms began to root out the
corruption and return control of the company to the state, which was really
nothing more than taking them out of the frying pan and putting them into the
fire.

In
the midst of the turmoil, Karpov’s long negotiations with Western oil and gas
companies came under scrutiny, the special favors, privileged access, the perks
and gifts exchanged, and he found himself betrayed and back-stabbed when a
consortium of Western companies led by British Petroleum undercut his position,
reneged on a technology transfer deal, and left him dangerously exposed to
government scrutiny. He could hear the investigators listening for him, then
pinging out a more invasive search, and he was very afraid. When a government
committee dropped a depth charge in the water that he knew he could not avoid,
he abandoned that first career ship and went into the cold waters of
unemployment, burning with resentment and vowing he would one day get even with
BP and the other Western companies that had ended his career.

A
few hard years followed where he sat at harbor himself, a derelict like the old
hulk of the ship he now captained, without heading or compass, until he
eventually decided, like so many other ruined men in Russia, to turn to the
military. He joined the navy as a lieutenant where his devious skill and
ruthless efficiency saw him advance quickly.

Like
Kirov
, Karpov had struggled to rebuild himself as well, yet to do so he
had brought the same old habits and strategies of the corporate oligarchy along
with him, climbing the ranks here by using the same guile and conniving undersea
tactics that had seen him move up the ladder in Gazprom. The navy was just the
sort of environment a man like Karpov thrived in. There were established rules
here, clear pathways for advancement, well honed protocols and decorum. One
could follow a sure and certain route through the ranks, much like the halls
and gangways of the ship itself, and he climbed the ladders well.

It
was not an easy climb, or one without conflict. Russians still had a deep
distrust of capitalism, and businessmen in general after those dark years of
collapse. It was as if his contemporaries could sense he had come from another
world, a submarine world, and that there was no place for him now on a ship
like
Kirov
. The Captain had to offset all this by finding the right men
to please, and the right voices to silence with a well planned reprisal when
necessary.

 Russians
were meant to suffer, or so they seemed to believe, and Karpov would see that
his enemies suffered well if they blocked his way forward. His ability to
undermine a potential rival was a long practiced skill. Even as a young school
boy he had found that he had to use his head to survive in this world.
Physically small, and even somewhat frail as a boy, he nonetheless possessed a
sharp intelligence and aggressive, competitive spirit. When the boys would play
in the yard, choosing up sides with the strongest among them as team captains,
Karpov hated it when he would be the last one picked by either side, and hated
it even more that none of the other boys would trust him to ever carry the ball
in the scrimmage matches they played.

In
secondary school he had taken to closeting himself away and finding solace in
the souls of Russia’s great writers, and he soon fancied himself a man from the
Underground, just as Dostoevsky had written about it.

“My
schoolfellows met me with spiteful and merciless jibes because I was not like
any of them. But I could not endure their taunts; I could not give in to them
with the ignoble readiness with which they gave in to one another. I hated them
from the first, and shut myself away from everyone in timid, wounded and
disproportionate pride. In the end I could not put up with it: with years, a
craving for society, for friends, developed in me. I attempted to get on friendly
terms with some of my schoolfellows; but somehow or other my intimacy with them
was always strained and soon ended of itself…”

Russia
was a big, bruising, and rough place. Her men were the same way at times,
uncultured, and relying more on brawn than brains. Karpov saw how the physical
was glorified in school athletics, and knew there was no way forward for him
there. He was not like any of the other boys. He could not run fast enough,
jump high enough, or push his way through the line to get at the ball. Yet he
suppressed his shame and determined to become a team captain nonetheless, by
some other means, by any means necessary. To do so he had courted the favor of
his athletic coach, staying late in the dressing room, bringing him food from
home, and even gifting him with a small vial of vodka that he had found in his
father’s old liquor cabinet.

Gradually,
he was given more responsibility there, helping to draft the rosters, inventory
the athletic equipment and see that everything was accounted for and locked up
in the bins properly at day’s end. His position soon saw him assigned the task
of distributing the balls and equipment to the various squads, and handing out
their shoes and uniforms as well, and he loved his hard won authority and the
small measure of power and control it gave him over the other boys. He saw to
it that any boy who had ever offended him ended up with the most shoddy
equipment in reprisal. The strong young team captains who had so cavalierly
passed over him before, now had to come begging, and those who did not soon
found themselves undermined in other ways as well.

Academically
gifted, Karpov helped the boys he favored in their studies, and shunned and
even impeded those he perceived as rivals or threats. He once went so far as to
see that one lad received the wrong list of words for study on a particularly
important test, and it was enough to put a torpedo into his chances for a
scholarship that semester. It ended his athletic program as well when the boy
failed the exam so miserably that he could not participate in the crucial team
competitions that spring.

When
he moved on to university studies Karpov followed much the same route, surfacing
to becoming a teacher’s aide, docent, librarian’s assistant. Here it was not
footballs and helmets he controlled access to, but books and information. He
saw to it that he worked the desk for special reference volumes, keeping track
of book requests, and here he decided who got the materials, and who did not.
He moved students up or down on his lists, sometimes extracting favors and
forcing them to support his other agendas if they wanted access to important
information he controlled in the library.

Once,
when embarrassed in debate class by another gifted student who had opposed him
too skillfully, Karpov saw to it that the student waited longer than anyone
else, and after finally releasing an important volume to him he found a way to
slip into his dormitory room and steal away the book, hiding it back in the
shelves and then spending the next two weeks pressuring and haranguing the
student for its return, berating him for losing it and threatening to take the
matter up with school officials.

Even
the professors came, in time, to fear and dislike him when he was instrumental
in ending the career of a teacher who had graded him low in an important class.
He had confronted the man in his office, saying he had failed to properly
consider and evaluate his essays, but his protest came to naught. The teacher
would not revise his grade, and so Karpov determined how best to get even. It
was here that the fine art of spreading rumor and fomenting scandal came into
play. He slipped bottles of vodka into the teacher’s classroom closet, then
whispered he was a drunken lush, and often kept certain students too long after
class, and for reasons that were far from academics. He soon discovered the
devious art of the lie, and its power to influence and harm others.

There
were two kinds of lies in the Russian mind, and Karpov was a master of both. One
was
vranyo
, the posturing and lip service everyone paid to the system, a
little white lie here and there, whispered to an audience who knew very well it
was
a little white lie, and was perfectly content to stand as the
willing believer, knowing full well that the other party knew the matter at
hand was a bent and tarnished version of the truth. Russians traded
vranyo
with each other on a daily basis, one the liar, one the listener, and both
knowing it was all a casual play. Dostoevsky had gone so far as to claim: ‘A delicate
reciprocity of
vranyo
is almost the first condition of Russian
society—of all Russian meetings, parties, clubs, and associations.’

The
other lies were something more, called
lozh
, which was a conscious and
deliberate intention to deceive. While most Russians were well adept at the
subtle gamesmanship of
vranyo
, they often failed completely at the
darker art of
lozh
. Writer and dramatist Leonid Andreyev wrote that
Russians really have no talent for real lies, which were, ‘an art, difficult
and demanding intelligence, talent, character and stamina.’ Karpov was an
exception. His talent for spinning out real lies served him very well over the
years. He made an accusation that ended the troublesome teacher’s tenure, and
was skillful enough to make the lie stick. Karpov had learned early on that
even the appearance of wrongdoing could have the same debilitating effects as a
real misdeed.