Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt For Red October (20 page)

The fleet, which consists of nearly forty major surface warships, more than three hundred small combat vessels, 150-plus auxiliaries, two dozen submarines, 250 navy aircraft, and the one naval infantry brigade that Admiral Gorshkov promised each unit, is a formidable power. And yet the town of Baltiysk, where the bulk of the fleet put in after each rotation, is not much more than a village that opens to the Gulf of Gdansk and the Baltic.

Gindin recalls that the base was always busy with ships coming and going. While they were in port they were tied alongside four long docks and were connected to the shore by not only the bow and stern and spring lines but also lines and hoses that supplied electricity, potable water, and fuel.

The base always stank of oil and foul bilge water drained overboard. But everyone felt a sense of invincibility here. At sea you were sometimes surrounded by the enemy—American aircraft carriers, Italian submarines, the bastard German destroyer that had tried to crowd them—but at Baltiysk you were home free. Safe.

The main street of the base is tree lined in the summer, pleasant with buffets and little shops where sailors can buy milk and cookies and cigarettes and other homely little things.

And there is soccer competition. Eight ships in the
Storozhevoy’s
Bpk division have formed a league. They play on a field near the docks, with benches on the sidelines for the fans. Gindin and Firsov are among the men representing their ship, and whenever they play, Potulniy and Sablin and most of the other officers not on duty or away from the ship come down to the field to give their noisy support.

Soccer is the national sport of the navy, if not of all the Soviet Union. The competition is fierce, as such things are among young military men, and in the end tournaments are held to see which ship will get the Bpk division award.

Those are the very best of times that Gindin remembers now. The
Storozhevoy’s
team is playing a very tight match when one of the midshipmen sprains his ankle. The game is stopped until the injured man
can be helped off the field and brought back to the ship and a replacement player put in.

That evening Zampolit Sablin visits the midshipman’s quarters to make sure he’s not in too much pain and to ask if he needs anything. It’s almost surreal at this moment thinking about the incident. But Gindin can’t help himself; he’s fallen into another trough.

Across the street is the security guard at the main gate. Once you clear that point you are free to go into the town, which is right there on the other side of the fence. But it’s tiny, only three restaurants, two movie theaters, and a few stores spread out here and there. Plus the
gaubvachta,
the military prison, there to remind every man, officer and sailor alike, that the Soviet navy takes its regulations very seriously.

During the winter the chimneys constantly belch wood smoke, which fills the sharp, crisp air. The townspeople mostly stay indoors, so when it’s cold the streets are all but deserted. It feels like life has been halted in mid-step, waiting for the spring to return.

In the summer, however, the streets are filled with wives pushing baby carriages or taking the children to the park to play. Sometimes off-duty officers will go to the park, too, where they will mingle with the children and the locals.

Gindin remembers a town beach that everyone could use, civilians as well as naval personnel. But the only way to get to it was through the base, so everyone had to be cleared at the gate and driven down to the water.

Other than that there was almost nothing for the wives to do while their husbands were away at sea for six months at a stretch. It was only one of many reasons that the divorce rate among young officers was so high.

Nevertheless, thinking about Baltiysk gives Gindin a little warm feeling. The base is safe, the workload there is 10 percent of what it is at sea, and it’s where the Rossia, his favorite restaurant, is located. Food aboard a Soviet warship, even aboard the
Storozhevoy
and even for an officer, is not very good compared to the meals they can get ashore.

When the ship is at base and Gindin is not on leave, he and the other officers and crew are given a part of one day in four when they can go through the gate into town. The wives of some of the officers live in Baltiysk, and others take the train to the base whenever the
Storozhevoy
is in port. But for Gindin, who is single, the Rossia is the first place he heads for.

The restaurant is cozy and the lighting is dim and romantic, things that speak to a Russian’s soul. The Rossia is a place where a guy like Gindin can dream about a wife he’s yet to meet. Besides that, the food is fantastic and there’s always entertainment, someone playing a guitar and singing sad Russian folk songs.

Gindin is a regular customer, he tips very well, and he is obviously single. Every waitress in the always-crowded house loves him. There are always lines of people outside waiting to get in. Any spot inside will be fine. But when Gindin shows up, the waitresses scramble to get him a special place right in front of the singers. Even if every table is filled, one of the waitresses will race to the back room, grab one of the spares, and hustle it out to the floor for the lieutenant.

The crowds are usually split eighty-twenty between navy people and civilians. But everyone in Baltiysk serves the navy in one way or another, either in uniform or as a subcontractor or as a waitress in the Rossia. So every night the main topic of conversation in the packed restaurant is the navy. The faster the vodka flows, the faster the stories blossom, and the faster the guys grab any available girls and get up on the dance floor. As the noise level rises, so does the fun.

The Rossia is the place to be in Baltiysk. It has an atmosphere of relaxation and excitement. A secret place only a few hundred meters away from the ship that is light-years away from military duty, discipline, and responsibilities.

“Hey, Boris,” one of the waitresses calls when Gindin finally gets into the restaurant. She is carrying a table across the room, and he threads his way across the packed floor to where she sets it up.

She’s a pretty girl, with long blond hair, blue eyes, and a million-watt
smile. She can afford to be extra nice; Boris would make a great catch. She brings him vodka, then herring and fried potatoes, pickles, stew, crusty bread, a quintessentially Russian supper, and he is in seventh heaven.

He has friends in the restaurant, and they have to wonder why he is getting such good service when they may have to wait for a drink or something to eat. But Boris is a regular, he’s an officer, he’s single, and he tips 30 percent.

That night in particular sticks out in Boris’s mind at this moment in the midshipmen’s dining hall, because of the warmth he felt. He was at peace with himself and the world. There were no difficult decisions to be made. No white or black backgammon piece to choose.

The waitress watches him that night, and at one point she comes over and lets him know that she gets off work at one in the morning. She’s interested. She would definitely like to spend some time with him. But it can’t happen. He has to be back aboard ship by midnight.

“Maybe another night,” Boris tells her.

She lowers her eyes in disappointment. “Sure, Boris,” she replies. She looks up and smiles. “May I get you another vodka?”

“Please,” he says.

After she leaves, he spots some friends, who join him for a few hours of fun. They’ve brought a girl, Olya, and everyone dances with her and sings and drinks and has something to eat. It’s not the most perfect night of his life to that point, but it sticks out in his mind right this moment, facing Zampolit Sablin and an absolutely insanely impossible choice.

Gindin’s thoughts are tumbling over one another now so fast it’s getting difficult to concentrate on any one thing, except for some crazy reason he fixates on how his fellow officers and sailors see him. It’s as if he’s looking at himself through the wrong end of a telescope. He’s way down at the end of the long tunnel, but he can’t make any sense of the details.

He’s always had what he feels is a good relationship with Captain Potulniy and just about everyone else aboard the ship. That includes the cook. But at this moment one incident sticks out in Gindin’s mind. He’s spent two days and nights fixing one of the diesel generators. He’s had little or no time to sleep, nothing substantial to eat, and he’s dead on his feet and hungry enough to eat a bear when he finally gets back to his cabin.

It’s late, well after the dinner hour, when he calls the officers’ galley and asks if the cook could send something up to his cabin.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but dinner is done. All the food has been put away, all the dishes have been washed, and the galley will not be open again until morning.”

“Okay,” Boris says. “I understand.” He goes to bed hungry that night. It’s not the end of the world, but a little something to eat would have been nice.

As it happens, the very next day the cook rushes to Gindin’s cabin. There’s absolutely no water—hot or cold—with which to wash the dishes. “We have to carry all the dishes and all the pots and pans back to the crew’s galley, where they’ve got water,” the cook complains bitterly. “It’s damned hard work, Lieutenant.”

Boris is combing his hair in the mirror and doesn’t even glance over at the cook. “I guess it must be
very
hard work. But I’m sorry; there’s nothing I can do about it.”

The cook knows better. It’s not that Gindin
can’t
do anything about the water problem—he’s the engineer after all—it’s that he
won’t
do anything about it.

After that Gindin never has a problem with the galley. If he has to work overtime and misses a meal, the cook personally delivers something good to eat to the senior lieutenant’s cabin, and in turn the galley is never without all the hot and cold running water it needs. Gindin doesn’t think he’s ever abused the system, but sitting now in the midshipmen’s dining hall he can’t be sure.

And yesterday, after the parade, when the entire ship was in a festive mood, Gindin made the rounds of all the machinery spaces to check everything, including the bilge pumps that ensured the
Storozhevoy
would not sink at his mooring if he were to take on water.

Gindin was in a mixed mood all that day, happy about the parade, proud to be a Soviet naval officer, sad about his father’s death, looking forward to his new job at Zhdanov, and impatient to get on with his life.

It’s possible, he thinks now, that he might have been impatient with his sailors, too. It was a holiday after all, yet he spent nearly two hours going over every single detail. Nothing missed his scrutiny, not a grease fitting that wasn’t cleaned properly, not an engine gauge reading that was off by one tiny decimal point, not a finger smudge in one of the logbooks. Everything had to be exactly correct.

Maybe at the end of a six-month rotation, when all they could think about was getting off the ship and going home to see their families, they felt he was being too tough on them. Maybe they resented his orders. Maybe Fomenko, who couldn’t get out of his bunk because his father was an alcoholic, was hatching some revenge plot.

Afterward Gindin went to lunch with some of the other officers. They talked, he remembers that much now, but he cannot seem to focus. He can’t get a grip in his head. For the life of him he cannot remember one single scrap of conversation at yesterday’s lunch. Not one word of it.

He does remember returning to his cabin to lie down, but Sergey Bogonets knocks on the door. He wants to talk because he’s lonely. They all are. It’s a holiday and they’re missing their families. Sergey talks about his wife and son. She flew down to Baltiysk, but they could only stay a couple of days before they had to fly home. Their leaving put Sergey into a depression and he just wanted a little human contact.

They went out on deck to smoke a cigarette. It was getting dark and cold by then. Only a few people were still out and about to admire the ships. Now that the lights were coming on throughout the town and aboard the fleet, the evening was getting pretty. Even festive.

Gindin does remember thinking that the people of Riga were at home now, behind the brightly lit windows with their families, getting set to celebrate the holiday: “We envied all those lucky strangers.”

He and Bogonets stayed on deck for a long time before they parted. Gindin went back down to the engine room, this time not to inspect but to talk to his sailors. They seemed to be in just as odd a mood as he was, lonely, missing their families, feeling a little strained.

So they start to talk about their lives before they were drafted into the navy. One of them is a big, tall guy from the suburbs near Dnepropetrovsk in south-central Ukraine. He came from a family of farmers and he and his four brothers had to help with the chores. They had chickens, rabbits, and pigs but no refrigerator. In the spring they would slaughter a pig, cut it into small chops and roasts, pack it in salt,
and store it in the root cellar, where it would stay cool. One pig would provide enough meat to feed the entire family all winter. When they wanted to have pork for dinner, a cut would be brought from the root cellar the night before and soaked in freshwater to get rid of the salt.

“It was always salty, just the same,” the sailor lamented. But he would have exchanged the
Storozhevoy
for just one bite of his mother’s cooking, salty or not.

The Soviet Union has lied to Gindin as well as it has to Sablin. The only difference is Gindin knows that he personally can’t do a thing about it, while Sablin believes that he can do something to change the system. Not only that, he feels that it’s his
sacred duty
as a good Communist to do something.

It’s these similar but divergent views that create the problem.

In the academy and then aboard every ship and at every base Gindin has been assigned to he’s had to give political classes to the sailors who report to him. It’s nothing new. It’s a fact of life for every officer in the Soviet military. And like the vast majority of officers, Gindin does what he’s told, but he doesn’t have to like those orders, nor does he have to comply beyond the strict letter of the law. He’s given his lectures, every second Monday, and at this moment, sitting in the midshipmen’s dining hall, for the life of him he could not give even a simple report of any political lecture he’s ever given. Not even the one from last week in which Sablin had taken such an interest.