To Kill the Potemkin (20 page)

"Please explain."

"Maybe
they
jettisoned some secret
equipment. I don't know. I don't think they were trying to sink us. It
doesn't
make sense, unless there was an electrical circuit failure that fired a
torpedo
accidentally. But in that case the torpedo already would have been
armed and
loaded in a tube. Look, Commander, everything that boat did was an
acoustic
trick. Suppose they thought they weren't going to implode. They thought
they
could blow their tanks and surface, which would have put them right in
the
middle of the fleet. In that case they might jettison all their secret
equipment, acoustic gadgetry, code books, ciphers, everything. Only,
for some
reason, they couldn't blow their tanks. They had no power. All the
machinery
noises had stopped. Maybe in the collision they ruptured their ballast
tanks.
Who knows? On the other hand if they were sure they were heading for
the deep
six they might have jettisoned all the equipment in order to prevent us
from
going down and salvaging it with the
Trieste
, like
we did the
Thresher
."

"All
right. Now
what do you want to
do?"

Sorensen
quickly
made a copy of the tape and
gave the original back to Pisaro. He ran the duplicate forward to where
the
Russian fired the torpedo, then played it at a slow speed up to the
sound of
the first implosion, where he stopped it. With the filters built into
his console he laboriously removed each implosion and explosion from
the tape,
then took out the sounds of the ship breaking up, the wrenching of
metal, the
screaming of the sea. It was tedious work but after an hour he had a
tape of
the sounds that were left.

The
torpedo motor was still there. It was faint, but it was clear, and the
sound
continued to the end of the tape.

"Son
of a bitch," Pisaro swore. "I'll have to show this to the skipper
right away."

After
Pisaro left the sonar room Sorensen popped open his console and removed
the
tape from his concealed recorder. He was about to take it back to
Sorensen's
Beach when Fogarty came in, slumped in his seat and stared, brooding,
at the
large
X
drawn through the Viktor on the profile sheet.

"What's
buggin' you, kid?"

"What
do you think, Sorensen? For example, is this going to get us into a
war?"

Sorensen
shrugged. "Only a little one."

"C'mon.
The electricians were in here this morning. They said every sub in
Portsmouth
and Groton has put to sea. There's an alert. World War Three could
start any
minute. The whole world could blow up and no one will know why it
started."

"Fogarty,
the Russians are not going to start World War Three over one lost sub.
If it
had been a missile sub, that would be different. Besides, it was an
accident."

"But
it's crazy. Back home nobody is coming on the six o'clock news to say,
'Well,
folks, kiss your mama good-bye. We just sank a Russian sub and the
Russians
don't like it.' "

"We
didn't sink a Russian sub."

"The
Russians might not see it that way. If it
were out
in the open, if people knew the truth, that might defuse the
situation."

"What
good does
knowing about this do
anybody? It will just get people excited. Look, kid, you can't be the
conscience of the navy or even of this ship. You're a pain in the ass."

"Doesn't
it
matter to you whether we
have a war or not?"

"Sure...
still, I figure at worst
we'll have a little skirmish. If we're lucky we might get a chance to
see if
any of this shit works. The world isn't going to end, if that's what
you're
afraid of."

"I
don't know,"
Fogarty said,
"the people at home have the right to know—"

"They
do? Since
when?"

"You
think they
don't?"

"I
know they
don't, not since the
National Security Act. Reality is classified, kid."

"But
that's
crazy."

"Fogarty,
the
only thing worse than
spying for the Russians is telling your own people the truth. Look,
everybody
who has ever been on this ship has thought the same thing. Me, too.
Wow! What
if people knew about all this stuff, you know? All this secret stuff
and all
the games with the Russians. But the truth is, they don't want to know."

"That's
what you
say. I say they'd sure
want to know about something like this—"

"Don't
be so
sure. Look, here's Joe Blow
sitting at home watching his TV and he hears, 'Sub Sinks. War
Threatens,' and
he goes nuts. And when you tell him, you also tell the guy watching the
news in
Moscow. Did you give him two seconds' thought? He learns that ninety of
his
country's finest are lying dead on the bottom, and he starts screaming
for war.
Is he going to believe it was an accident? Is that what
Pravda
is going
to say to him? Don't be a dummy. It works both ways. If it was us down
there,
would you want every maniac in America to know about it? Don't you know
what
they would do? Half the United States Senate would vote to nuke the
Russians in
a minute. So we don't tell people anything. It might be wrong, but the
other
way is worse."

"So
we just
forget about it, like it
never happened."

"Something
like
that. Yeah. Learn to
live with it like I have. I just ride around in my submarine, and when
I go
ashore I act like every other stupid drunken sailor you ever heard of.
That way
I don't have to think about all this shit. Wise up, Fogarty. Look at it
this
way, if the Russians were going to start a war over this they already
would've
done it."

"Maybe
they don't
know about it
yet."

"Don't
bet on it.
They know more than
you think, and so do we." Sorensen bit his tongue. "Look, kid, I know
you feel bad about the Russians. It was just their tough luck."

"It
could have
been us, Sorensen."

"I
know." He
thought about telling
Fogarty he now had evidence that maybe the Russian sub didn't sink. But
he
wasn't positive, not yet, and he wanted his point to sink in.

There
was a knock
on the door. "Comin'
through." Willie Joe came in, followed by a pair of electricians
carrying
coils of cable over their shoulders. One was wearing a Boston Red Sox
baseball
cap. "You the sonar guys?" he asked.

"No,"
Sorensen
replied. "I'm
Captain Nemo."

"Right,
chief.
You ready to test about
five hundred circuits?"

After
a
week in dry dock, the welding of the bow was completed and new sonars
and
torpedo doors installed.
Barracuda
was moved to a
finger pier where
electricians continued to work on the circuitry.

Sorensen
and Fogarty were in the control room, pulling hundreds of feet of
inch-thick
cable up from the torpedo room and arranging it in coils. "This is
going
to help you qualify in record time," Sorensen said. "You might even
make second class."

Panting
with exertion, Fogarty said, "Pulling cable? You're nuts. You're just
trying to keep me busy, keep my mind off what's happened—"

"C'mon,
quit yer bitchin'. Heave."

They
grunted and moved four hundred pounds of cable six inches. Fogarty
wiped his
brow.

"I
sure could go for a cold beer."

Sorensen
dropped the cable. "That's the most sensible thing I've heard you say
since you've been aboard. I could go for a dozen myself."

"You
been in Rota before?"

"Once."

"What's
it like?"

"It's
just another scumbag Navy town, kid. Don't get your hopes up." Sorensen
raised his voice. "Willie Joe."

The
redhead leaned out of the sonar room.

"Yo."

"You
finish the
circuit test on the new
down-searching array?"

"Not
yet."

"Forget
it. Come
give us a hand."

Willie
Joe picked
up a coil of cable. For an
hour they dragged the coils out of the ship and stacked them on the
pier. When
the last coil was placed on top of the pile they lounged on the pier
and
watched the civilians work.

A
light warm rain
started to fall. They could
see running lights on the bay. The Russian trawler moved along its
picket line
from Cádiz to Rota, then turned around and went back.

"What
are they so
interested in?"
Fogarty asked.

"The
Vallejo
," Sorensen
replied. "What
else?"

The
USS
Mariano G. Vallejo
,
a missile submarine, was berthed at
the next pier. Her sixteen Polaris A-3 missiles and their warheads
represented
more firepower than all the bullets and bombs in all the wars in
history.

One
of the
missile hatches was open, and a
team of technicians was removing the nose cone from a missile. The
yardbirds
stared inside at the bundles of wires and warheads. One grinned and
whooshed
his hands in a gesture of explosion.

Willie
Joe sat
down next to Fogarty, who
appeared concentrated on the big missile ship.

"Say,
Fogarty,"
he asked,
"where'd you learn that karate?"

"It's
not karate,
it's
tae kwan do
."

"Tie
what? What's
that?"

"Korean
martial
art."

"I
never figured
a guy like you would
know that stuff."

"Oh,
yeah? What
kind of guy are you
supposed to be to know it."

"I
dunno. Mean."

"Maybe
you've
seen too many movies,
Willie Joe."

"Did
you go to a
school and all like
that?"

"Sure."

"Will
you teach
me some of those
moves?" Willie Joe tried to smile, but his teeth were bad and his
attempt
to hide them twisted his smile into more like a smirk.

"Why
do you want
to learn?"

"So
I can whip
your ass. Why do you
think?"

Before
Fogarty
could answer, they heard pipes
followed by the quartermaster's voice blaring from the loudspeakers on
the
pier.

"Now
hear this.
Liberty call, Liberty
call. Liberty for the first division will commence at twenty hundred
hours.
Cards will be good for twenty-four hours. Be advised that by order of
the base
CO, all personnel are restricted to the naval station and the town of
Rota. The
city of Cádiz is off limits. That is all."

"That's
us," said
Sorensen.
"I'll buy you sweethearts a beer."

Pisaro
came down
the gangway hollering,
"Sorensen, what are you jawing about?"

"How
much we love
the navy, sir!"

"Is
that a fact.
Listen, Ace, I want you
back here tomorrow night at twenty hundred hours. Make sure you're on
time."

"Aye
aye, sir."

"And
sober."

"Yes,
sir."

By
the time they
changed, members of the
third division were straggling in. Among them was Corpsman Luther.

"I
was hoping
you'd show up,"
Sorensen said. Luther nodded and they slipped quietly into the tiny
dispensary
where the medical stores were kept.

"What's
happening
in town, Eddie?"

"The
usual. A new
guy named Buzz took
over the Farolito."

"What's
he like?"

"He's
an old
bubblehead with a red
nose."

"That
figures."

A
moment later
Sorensen emerged with enough
Desoxyn to keep him going all night.

"Let's
go, let's
go," he said,
hustling up the ladder. He popped a pill into his mouth. "Where's
Willie
Joe?"

"He
caught the
bus," Fogarty said.
"We have to walk."

He
was getting to
feel as mean as Willie Jo
figured he was.

Nothing
looks
more like a sailor than a
sailor on liberty in civilian clothes. Fogarty had the haircut, the
brand-new
plaid shirt from the Navy Exchange, the creased Levis, the clumsy black
leather
shoes, and the all-American smile. Even Sorensen, who took pains to
look like
anything but a GI, was doomed to failure. The wraparound sunglasses and
custom-made cowboy boots helped, as did the faded jeans and Guatemalan
shirt,
but there was nothing he could do about his swagger or his natural
tendency to
walk in step with his buddy.

The
main gate to
the naval station was in the
middle of the town. Sorensen and Fogarty flashed IDs at the American
and
Spanish Marine guards in the sentry box and passed through the
barriers. They
repeated the process at a second checkpoint manned by the Guardia
Civil,
policemen with three-cornered leather hats and snub-nosed machine
pistols. They
crossed railroad tracks and skirted around a traffic rotary
that spun off cars and trucks in five directions. Directly opposite the
gate,
at the foot of the Avenida de Sevilla, an eight-foot painted plaster
statue of
the Virgin Mary looked down on them from atop a thirty-foot pedestal. A
halo of
blue light surrounded the head of the idol. Sorensen looked up at the
Virgin's
merciless eyes and said, "
That
tells you everything
you need to
know about Spanish women. You leave them alone."

They
stood on the
Avenida de Sevilla, rocking
on their heels, surveying the scene. A string of seedy bars and cheap
hotels
tailed away from the gate, their faint lights barely illuminating the
dank
slum. The rain had stopped, and the cobbled streets glistened. Tiny
trucks and
motorscooters buzzed past, sending a fine spray into the night. A few
sailors
in white hats, and many more in civilian clothes, milled from bar to
bar,
sharing narrow sidewalks with whores, hustlers, priests and old women
dressed
in black.