Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt For Red October (10 page)

It’s less than ten hours before the mutiny, and there’s a growing edginess throughout the ship. Ordinary military discipline isn’t exactly flowing out the hatches, but nothing seems right. Just after breakfast Gindin spots one of his sailors lugging a heavy wrench, about the length of an umbrella, forward as if he were on an urgent repair job. A half hour later the same sailor is scurrying aft with the same wrench and the same determined expression on his face. And just a few minutes later the sailor is heading forward again, the wrench over his shoulder. The boy isn’t on any repair mission; he’s trying to
look
as if he were busy to avoid any real work. But the wrench was really heavy, and the last Gindin saw of the boy, sweat was pouring off his forehead. The kid was doing more work trying to get out of work.

The same look of determination is on Firsov’s and Bogonets’s faces. They want to play a practical joke on Bogomolov. Unless the
Storozhevoy
is tied up at a dock and connected to shoreside utilities, water is so scarce aboard ship that the men are allowed to take very few showers. Many of them go weeks or even a month without a shower. That includes the officers. Part of Gindin’s job is control of the water pumps and steam heat. In other words, anyone who wants to take a shower needs Gindin’s cooperation.

“Let’s give Nikolay a shower he’ll never forget,” Bogonets suggests, his face lit up, and Gindin immediately understands just what kind of a shower these guys have in mind.

Topsides, in officers’ territory, Sergey and Vladimir hold back out of sight as Gindin offers to let Bogomolov take a shower. It’s a gesture
of real friendship that Nikolay appreciates. He rushes back to his room for his soap, towel, and clean clothes and hops into the shower room, giving Gindin a big grin.

Of course, Gindin turns off the steam right in the middle of Bogomolov’s shower, so that the water immediately switches from hot to ice cold. Nikolay lets out an ear-piercing screech and scrambles out of the shower, his body covered in soapsuds, a towel hastily wrapped around his waist. Gindin, Firsov, and Bogonets are all standing in the passageway laughing so hard that tears are streaming down their cheeks. But this is the kind of stuff that happens at the end of a six-month rotation at sea. The only problem is that the crew will have just time enough to get the
Storozhevoy
back in shape, take a short leave to see families, and it’ll all start over again.

It’s the Cold War, against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and especially the Russians’ main adversary, the United States, that could turn hot at a moment’s notice. They’ll be ready. Gindin and other officers just like him will make sure of that.
At least that’s what most of them believe in their hearts this mid-morning, moored in the middle of the Daugava River, near downtown Riga.

NATO war planners describe the
Storozhevoy
as a Krivak-class frigate, which means his size is somewhere between two thousand and six thousand tons, and his main job should be as an offensive surface warship. But the Russians designed the Krivaks as defensive ASW ships. That’s a big difference in how each side sees the class. In the West the ships were viewed as just another example of the Soviet Union’s aggressive military posture, while Gindin and his fellow officers thought of their ship as a last-ditch stand against Allied submarines.

The
Storozhevoy
is 405 feet long on deck, carries two hundred men and officers, and can cruise forty-five hundred nautical miles at 20 knots or, if he’s in a hurry, less than seven hundred nautical miles at 32 knots. He was built in 1972-74 in the Yantar Zavod 820 shipyard in Kaliningrad and was outfitted with an impressive number of weapons systems. In addition to quadruple torpedo tubes amidships port and starboard, his most effective ASW platform is a four-tube launcher for the SS-N-14, which is backed up by missile launchers for the radar-guided SA-N-4 SAMs, plus a variety of 30mm Gatling and three-inch
guns, the usual complements of mines, and a pair of twelve-barrel RBU-6000 ASW mortars forward of the bridge. This last weapons system is deadly effective out to 3.3 nautical miles and is automatically loaded. As fast as the weapons officer, who happens to be Senior Lieutenant Bogomolov, pushes the button, the RBUs will fire until they run out of missiles.

The ships are equipped with state-of-the-art electronics including the Head Net C search radar, a pair of Eye Bowl radar systems to control the SS-N-14 missiles, Pop Group radars for the SA-N-4 missiles, plus Owl Screech radar for the guns, Don Kay, Palm Frond Surface Search Radars, and the usual array of VHF and IFF radio communications systems, and a complete suite of ESMs equipment to detect any sort of electronic noise from a submarine or any other ship.

In Gindin’s mind, and in the minds of Captain Potulniy and most of the other officers, the
Storozhevoy
epitomizes what a modern navy warship should be. He and his brother Krivaks are the largest ASW ships in the Baltic and provide the last line of defense against any NATO submarine attack on the Rodina.

There may have been better captains in the Soviet navy, but none could have been so proud of his position as was Potulniy. He was assigned to take command while the ship was still under construction in 1973, so he could help supervise the building. He’d been executive officer on the
Bditelny,
the first of the Krivaks, so he knew how the ship was supposed to be put together. He was only thirty-seven at the time, and although he called all of his officers by their first names, he was generally more preoccupied with the needs of
his
ship than the needs of his men. He practically lived on the bridge, and while at sea he was always on duty, day and night, leaving the care of his crew to his
zampolit,
Captain Third Rank Sablin. It was an arrangement that both men felt comfortable with but one that Potulniy would regret for the rest of his life.

The two men couldn’t have been more different. Although they both graduated from the prestigious Frunze Military Academy, which
put them on a fast track to command positions, Sablin opted to become a political officer. That in some ways is professional suicide, because
zampolits
never become ship captains and therefore promotions are few and far between. Also, political officers are generally not liked very much by the officers or the crew. They’re the ones whose job it is not only to force-feed the standard Marxist-Leninist doctrine down everybody’s throats but also to sugarcoat the latest Party orders no matter how stupid they are. The captain is the absolute ruler aboard his ship, while the political officer is the Party hack. Every sailor must attend political classes every two weeks. Normally the
zampolit
supplies the lesson materials and the officers teach the sailors in their sections.

On the one hand the captain should be close to his crew, know their names and backgrounds, know who can be trusted to come through in a tight situation and who will probably fold. After all, the safety of the ship depends on his men. On the other hand, the
zampolit
is just the guy who dishes out the propaganda that no one ever wants to hear.

But the situation on the
Storozhevoy,
this crisp November day in Riga, is different. Potulniy really does seem to care more about his ship than he does about his officers and men. He is an aloof man who goes strictly by the book. He is young, and he has a lot to prove. Being the captain of an ASW ship is just the start; it’s a stepping-stone to much bigger and better things. But Sablin is everybody’s friend—officer, midshipman, and ordinary sailor alike. He takes time to talk to the men, find out about their towns and their families, about their fears and ambitions. He’s not afraid to talk about a sailor’s dreams and what they might mean or help a sailor figure out his love life, or lack of love life. Sablin is there to be a friend and to act as the father figure, a role that the captain should be playing. But the
zampolit
is kind to the other officers as well, offering to take over their political classes when they are too tired or bored. And he’s always cheerful, always ready with a pat on the back, ready to lend a hand, and always genuinely interested in what a man’s job is and how he does it.

Like this morning at breakfast.

Gindin has some vague premonitions this morning, but he does not connect them to the captain or to Sablin or to the marked differences between the two officers. He just has this unsettling feeling of unrest, and he thinks that most everyone else aboard feels the same way to one degree or another. But he can’t put his finger on it.

When he tried to talk to Potulniy about his fears a couple hours ago, the captain dismissed him out of hand.

“Stick to your duties, Boris,” the captain said. “Do your job correctly, supervise your crew, make sure that they’re physically and mentally fit, and everything else will take care of itself.”

It’s as if the captain is so distant from his crew that he doesn’t know what’s really going on aboard his own ship. But that’s not true, either.

They were on their way down to Cuba, and Gindin, like every other officer aboard, did normal duty rotations, which were four hours on, four hours on standby, and four hours off. The rotations were changed each month, so you didn’t always get the same shifts.

On this night, Gindin had the midnight to 4:00 A.M. rotation with two gas turbine specialists, two motor/diesel men, one steam/fuel sailor, and one electrician. These were all young kids, and with nothing much happening on the graveyard shift and their last meal at nine in the evening, they would get hungry. And as stomachs growl, ingenuity increases.

Gindin’s crew wants to know if he’d like something to eat. Of course he says yes, and he’s led aft to the machinery room, where two of the gas turbine engines are turning over. Somehow the men have gotten some potatoes from the galley, some oil, and a frying pan. Each turbine develops a hot spot on its upper casing and they are using one of them to fry up the potatoes. Gindin knows he’s supposed to put a stop to this business, and his sailors know it, too. They’re all standing there, looking at him expectantly, waiting for the shoe to drop, but the smell of the frying potatoes is almost too much to bear.

Anyway, Gindin is not much older than his men, it’s the middle of the night, there is no safety issue to worry about, the engines are running
normally and he’s hungry, too. So he says, “Sure,” and the meal is nothing short of fantastic, almost as good as the kinds of snacks he’d had with his dad, picking mushrooms in the woods.

A couple of days later Gindin is called up to the bridge. “We have a small problem, Boris,” the captain starts out pleasantly enough, but Gindin’s stomach does a slow roll. He has a pretty good idea what’s coming next. The cook has been complaining to Potulniy that potatoes keep disappearing and he doesn’t know where. Every night Gindin’s inventive sailors sneak up to the pantry area where the potatoes are kept under lock and key. These are the engineering crew, so it’s no trouble for them to break into the locked boxes, steal some potatoes, and then fix the locks so no one can tell what’s happened.

The only bad luck was that the captain was wandering around the ship in the middle of the night and passing the machinery room smelled the frying potatoes.

“They’re young boys and they were hungry,” Gindin admits. “And I had some, too, sir.”

Potulniy barely smiles. “It will not happen again, Boris. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly, Captain,” Gindin replies.

So the captain
was
aware of what was going on aboard his ship, but the difference between him and Sablin was that the
zampolit
would have understood and probably would have joined the men for an early-morning snack of fried potatoes if for no other reason than to find out how the crew was doing.

But there’s something about Russians that’s fairly well universal, if not practically eternal: They’re usually more complicated than they seem at first glance. Certainly after four and a half centuries of hardships and deaths, naval officers may be the most complex of Russians. All along they’ve had to balance their jobs of protecting the Rodina, whether it be from Turkey or Sweden or Germany or the United States and NATO, with protecting themselves from their own government, whether it be run by a tsar or a Communist Party Secretary.

Potulniy is no exception. On the one hand, he is aloof from his men, while on the other, he understands they are all his responsiblity. The
Storozhevoy,
his ship, includes his men, and he’ll never blame his crew for his own mistakes.

It was 1974 when the
Storozhevoy
was ordered out of his base at Baltiysk for a short training cruise of just a few hours. It was a fairly common occurrence between deployments, mostly to maintain crew efficiency and check on repairs and new equipment. The
Storozhevoy
is fitted with four gas turbine engines. Two of them, called marching engines, produce 18,000 horsepower and are used for normal cruising. The other two are boost engines developing 36,000 horsepower and are used for battle conditions when more speed is needed.

One of the boost engines was down, and the mechanical crew was having trouble finding the problem. At the time, Captain Lieutenant Alexander Ivanov was in control of all BCH-5, but the engines were Gindin’s responsiblity. Ivanov reported the downed gas turbine to Potulniy and, according to regulations, to the assistant division commander on shore, who gave the go-ahead for the brief mission anyway.

The shakedown cruise goes without a hitch until they head back and are about fifteen minutes from the dock, when both marching engines break down and neither will restart.

It’s Gindin’s rotation and as the ship loses control he reports the situation to the captain, who orders the anchor to be immediately lowered. They are in the narrow cut leading to the base, and the wind is shoving them toward the land. When the anchor bites, the
Storozhevoy
turns broadside, completely blocking the ship channel.