Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt For Red October (9 page)

The very next year, a Russian fleet of ten ships of the line, armed with 366 guns and a crew of more than two thousand officers and men, plus two galleys and sixteen smaller boats, broke out into the Black Sea and headed toward Constantinople. The Turks were so impressed they surrendered without a shot ever being fired. It was one of the very few times that the bells did
not
ring in Moscow.

With the northern fleet set at Arkhangel’sk to take care of business on Russia’s Arctic coast and the southern fleet in the Black Sea to mostly keep the Turks at bay, Peter I turned his attention next to his second most hated enemy, Sweden.

Although the northern fleet had successfully defended the realm against the Swedes trying to attack over the Northern Route, the tsar figured the only way to beat them was to have a Baltic fleet. If he could pull that off, Russia would not only present a serious threat to Sweden but could also take a run at Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, not to mention Finland and even Denmark. The only problem was that Sweden had thirty-nine ships in the Baltic and Russia didn’t have one. Nor were the Swedes about to leave the Russians alone long enough to build such a fleet.

Thus in 1700 began the navy’s part in the twenty-year Great Northern War, when a fleet of seven Swedish ships attacked the Arctic port at Arkhangel’sk. The Russians not only beat them back but also followed them, capturing strategic Swedish territory and even a couple of Swedish ships that had tried to come up the mouth of the Neva River to St. Petersburg. The bells in Moscow rang again, but everyone who survived got a medal with the inscription:
The unprecedented has happened.
The Order of St. Andrew the Summoned was created.

Even more important, on May 16, 1703, Peter I ordered the building of St. Petersburg Fortress at the mouth of the Neva and Fort Kronshlot in the Gulf of Finland to protect a new admiralty on the left bank of the Neva where the Baltic fleet would be built.

One year later a second Swedish attack against St. Petersburg was beaten back, and in the summer of 1705 a much smaller Russian fleet sent the Swedes packing after a fierce sea battle that lasted several days. The Russians didn’t have a modern navy yet, but they were sure heading that way. And no one could fault the Russian sailors, officers, and crewmen alike for lacking courage and sheer tenacity. As a result the Moscow bells never seemed to stop ringing.

The great northern struggle finally came to an end. Peter I died in 1725, and for a couple of decades the Russian navy fired no shots in anger. Waging war was an expensive business, and Russia needed to refresh its coffers.

The Nautical School and Maritime Academy continued to crank out midshipmen who went on voyages of exploration and mapping along the Arctic Circle in the Pacific, looking for a passage to India and China. Among the Russian navigators were Ivan Fyodorov and Mikhail Gvozdev, who accurately charted the route of Captain-Commodore Vitus Bering, who discovered the narrow passage that was named after him, between the Asian and North American continents, at the top of present-day Alaska. In fact, many of the seas and gulfs above the Arctic Circle are named after Russian naval explorers of the era: the Kara, Laptev, and Chuckhi seas and even the Sea of Okhotsk, north of Japan. Russian explorers made it all the way south to Japan, thus finally circumnavigating, and therefore mapping, the entire Russian empire. Not only that, but the Russian Alexey Chirikov, along with Captain-Commodore Vitus Bering, explored well down the west coast of the North American continent.

But the peace for Russian sailors did not last long, and in the fall of 1769 the bells in Moscow began ringing in earnest, when the sixty-six-gun
Yevstafy
broke out into the Mediterranean Sea to help the Greeks whip the Turks.

In July 1773 Russian ships attacked Beirut, in present-day Lebanon, because the territory had for a long time helped fund the Turkish military.

In 1783 the Russian naval presence on the Black Sea was strong enough that the Crimean Peninsula, along with most of the coastal territory around the entire sea, was annexed and the city of Sevastapol was founded.

By 1788, with another war against Sweden looming on the horizon, Russian ships of the line were being refitted with new, more powerful guns that fired shells instead of cannonballs, copper sheathing was installed to help protect hulls from damage and increase speed, and each year one hundred new officers graduated from the Naval Academy, now called the Naval Cadet Corps.

In 1798 just about everybody became allies, including Russia and her old adversary Turkey, to fight Napoléon. But by 1826 Tsar Nicholas I ordered his navy to switch sides, this time becoming allies of the French and English, to help the Greeks fight the Turks. Of course the Turks hired as their chief naval adviser a Frenchman by the name of Letellieu, which in due course led to the Russian-Turkish War of 1828-29, and this time plenty of bells were rung in Moscow.

In the first half of the nineteenth century Russian warships under sail were among the best in any ocean, but then, with the invention of the steam engine, the entire world was turned upside down. The Russians managed to build four steam frigates and a twenty-three-gun screw-propeller frigate, the
Archimede,
by 1849. And they managed to successfully wage war against Egypt, which was trying to invade Turkey, and against Prussia, which was trying to grab as much territory from Denmark as it possibly could.

Even more bells were rung in Moscow, but it was nothing compared to what was on the horizon with the start of the Crimean War, in which Great Britain and France as allies came to the aid of Turkey. That was in 1853, and that fall the allies began a siege of the Russian town of Sevastopol that would last six long, bloody months, which most
historians regard as one of the most distinguished events in Russia’s military history, even though the Russians lost. The entire Black Sea fleet was destroyed; three admirals, more than one hundred officers, and nearly four thousand sailors were killed defending the town. And more than fourteen thousand were wounded.

Eventually the Russians lost not only the battle for Sevastopol but the entire war. A treaty was signed on March 18, 1856, by the new tsar, Alexander II. Russia’s Black Sea fleet and coastal fortifications were taken away, but in exchange the shattered remains of Sevastopol were returned to Russian control.

Every bell in Moscow rang continuously for the entire two years. Medals were awarded, new naval academy midshipmen were graduated, and Russia, as did the rest of the world, entered the age of the ironclads, starting with eighteen steam-powered ships of the line and ten frigates as a new, modern Baltic fleet.

The fight was not over.

By 1876 the Russian navy was ranked number three in the entire world, and one year later Russia began another war with Turkey using torpedo boats, a brand-new innovation so effective that the Turks pulled almost all of their forces from the Black Sea.

Disaster loomed just on the horizon for Russia’s Pacific Fleet, which responded to a growing threat from Japan. But the path to that war was complicated by alliances that seemed to ebb and flow with the tides. First Russians and Chinese moved to the verge of war, before the Chinese backed off. Next the Japanese were building a powerful army and navy because they wanted a foothold on the Asian mainland. Russia, now allied with France and Germany to help China resist the Japanese, sent its Pacific squadron to the region, and Japan backed off. For the moment.

But war was coming, and everybody knew it, so the Russians started building ships at a breakneck pace, which they based on the Kwantung Peninsula, which they leased from the Chinese. That included a fortress at Port Arthur.

On the morning of January 27, 1904, the main body of Japan’s naval forces, under the command of Vice-Admiral Togo Heihachiro, appeared like an apparition out of the darkness off Port Arthur, very much like their surprise attack against another enemy less than forty years in the future. Nineteen months later the war was over, with Russia the loser in more than one way. More than five thousand Russian sailors were killed and six thousand taken prisoner.

And so it continued right up through World War I, with more good Russian men and boys going to the bottom of the sea, until the new Bolshevik regime declared peace with Germany, and for a brief period the bells of Moscow were silent.

But in the years that followed, under the Communists,
babushkas
and mothers and wives and sweethearts who had marched off to church to weep and pray for their sailors lost at sea could only cry silently and pray in their hearts, because God and churches were no longer permitted. A darkness began to settle over the land. Maybe the sailors who had given their lives for the Rodina were the lucky ones after all.

Standing at the rail, Gindin finishes the last of his cigarette and flicks it in a long arc down toward the dirty water between the
Storozhevoy
and the Alpha sub moored just below them. He’s having some trouble shaking off the sense of foreboding he’s been getting all morning, with Seaman Fomenko’s defiance in the
cubrick,
with the group of sullen sailors huddling in the corridor, and with Sablin’s strangely animated mood in the officers’ dining hall.

Gindin hesitates a moment longer in the crisp morning air before turning and heading belowdecks and aft to his machinery spaces. It’s his day off, but he’s restless. Anyway, there’s not a day goes by that he doesn’t check in with his engineering crew and machinery. He helped build the ship and, like Captain Potulniy, feels a sense of, if not ownership, at least pride.

Gindin has also been working on a maintenance and repair plan for when they get to the Yantar Shipyard in Kaliningrad tomorrow. They’ll have a couple of weeks there to get the
Storozhevoy
ready for his next six-month rotation, and Gindin wants to make sure not only that everything
in engineering that needs to be fixed, rebuilt, or replaced is done, but also that he can get all the spare parts he needs. This time he doesn’t think Potulniy will offer any serious objections if the ship rides below his waterline.

After those two weeks they’ll dock at Baltiysk, their home base, for regular shoreside duty until it’s time to head to sea again. Gindin will get some time off so that he can see his mother and sister and try to put his father’s death in some kind of perspective. But that will be tough, and the more Boris thinks about never seeing his dad again, the tougher it gets for him.

Gindin comes around a corner belowdecks and practically runs headlong into Sergey, who is one of his crewmen. He’s a tall, dark guy with a mustache who usually kept everything to himself. If Boris needed something, Sergey would never volunteer, even though he had good mechanical skills. He was a loner and didn’t talk much. And this morning, when Gindin comes around the corner, Sergey looks up like a frightened animal caught in headlights, hesitates for just a second, and then turns on his heel and tries to get away, but Gindin stops him.

Sergey is supposedly on duty right now, so Gindin is more than a little concerned. “What’s going on?” he asks.

Sergey doesn’t want to look up, let alone answer any stupid questions. He is clutching something in his left hand, and it looks as if he is on the verge of tears.

“Look, I’m your superior officer,” Gindin says mildly. “I want to know what’s wrong, and that’s an order.”

“I just got a letter from my mother,” Sergey says. He’s having real trouble not bursting into tears. “She says Larissa is going around town with some other guy.” His eyes are wide. “We’re engaged to be married, Senior Lieutenant.”

It’s the next thing to a Dear John letter, the kind that half the sailors in the fleet either have gotten or will get at some time or another. The normally tough, antisocial Sergey can hardly hold his emotions in check. Gindin feels sorry for him, because he didn’t deserve
something like this. He was just a young kid, far away from his family, carrying out his duties, maybe getting only four hours’ sleep a day, working like a dog, and then he gets this letter. He is grief stricken, and the more Gindin talks to him the worse it gets. Maybe he’ll actually do harm to himself; it’s happened before.

“You’re young,” Gindin tells him. “You have your entire life ahead of you. This girl doesn’t deserve a guy like you, out here serving his country.”

Sergey isn’t buying it.

Gindin is trying to convince his sailor that all the men in the turbo/motor division are friends and crewmates who respect him. He doesn’t need to be treated this way by any girl.

Being away from home puts a lot of emotional stress on the crew, especially the sailors who are just kids, mostly eighteen or nineteen and from small towns or farms out in the country. They’re capable of doing some really stupid things, and it’s up to the officers to make sure nothing bad happens. Gindin spends fifteen or twenty minutes talking with Sergey, trying to put some good perspective in his head and make sure the kid will be okay. But watching Sergey head back to work, Gindin isn’t so sure that he’s helped very much. The sailor mumbled his thanks, but that was it. The mask was back, leaving an unreadable expression. They could have been discussing the weather.

Standing alone for a moment, listening to the sounds of the ship tied to a mooring, engines off, Gindin thinks that already this day is dragging when it’s supposed to be relaxing. He and Firsov agreed at breakfast that this evening they would get together with some of the other officers for a few drinks, maybe swap some jokes. Tomorrow it would be back to work for all of them, so this was their last day to relax. But for some reason the day seems to stretch; every minute seems like an hour. No one aboard ship is having any fun; everyone is long faced, down in the dumps.

Just forward of the machinery rooms, Gindin runs into Firsov and Sergey Bogonets, who is a senior lieutenant of the BCH-3 torpedo
systems section. The two of them have hatched a practical joke on Senior Lieutenant Nikolay Bogomolov, in charge of the BCH-3 rocket systems section. He and Bogonets are roommates, and practically no one aboard ship likes Bogomolov. He’s sneaky, and whenever he sees somebody doing something wrong—officer or crewman—he immediately runs to tell the captain. Bogomolov has tried to build a friendship with Gindin and Firsov, but it can’t work because they think he’s a
stukach,
a snitch.