Red Traitor by Owen Matthews

Author:Owen Matthews [Matthews, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

PART FIVE

THE HUNT FOR B-59

If they slap you on the left cheek, do not let them slap you on the right one.

—Admiral Vitaliy A. Fokin, first deputy head of the Soviet Navy, instructions to the captains of the Operation Anadyr submarine flotilla, 3 October 1962

1

Sargasso Sea

Thursday, 25 October 1962, 06:12 EDT / 13:12 Moscow Time

B-59’s emergency diving klaxon sounded deafeningly in all compartments, accompanied by the noise of rushing water flooding the ballast tanks arrayed along the outside of the pressure hull. Within seconds, the boat lurched downward, sending charts and rulers skittering off the small table in the control room.

“The devil…” swore Savitsky as he grabbed the underside of the commander’s chair to avoid being pitched forward. Arkhipov flattened himself against the periscope pillars to make room for a midshipman as he frantically worked his way along an array of taps to trim the boat’s steep dive. The diesels had gone abruptly silent, their clatter replaced by the revving whine of the electric engines spooling up. A heavy clang sounded from the periscope compartment directly above the control room as the conning tower’s topside hatch was hurriedly sealed. Arkhipov could feel the deep pneumatic rumble of the radio masts retracting into their mighty tubes, immediately behind his back. The depth gauge in front of him trembled before detaching and moving first to five, then ten meters. It had taken less than thirty seconds for the boat to disappear underwater.

“Plane overhead,” Ivanov, the officer of the watch, called down into the control room. A moment later the young seaman who’d been on lookout in the cockpit slid down the steel ladder into the crowded control room to make his report to Savitsky, seawater streaming off his oilskins.

“Looked like American military, Comrade Captain. Turboprop, not a jet. Bearing two hundred seventy degrees. Just spotted it for a moment through a break in the clouds.”

“Did they see us?”

“Don’t think so, sir. Seas are still pretty high.”

Savitsky leaned right and yanked the lever by his seat that controlled the main rudder toward him, putting the boat into a hard turn to port. He then cranked the three engine telegraph levers arranged above his head to dead slow. A moment later the telegraphs indicated with a ding that the engine room had acknowledged the order.

The control room crew froze in anxious silence, every man looking up to the sloping steel roof as they strained their ears to listen.

A faint sonar ping rang through the steel hull. Arkhipov turned urgently to Savitsky.

“The damn plane’s dropped a sonar buoy.”

Both captains knew that their best chance to escape the sonar tracking was to get into deep water, fast.

“Make our depth one twenty meters, conn,” Savitsky ordered. There was no sound in the control center except the low thrum of the electric engines and the slow sloshing of water in the ballast tanks.

A second ping, fainter than the first, rang through the boat.

The indicator of the shallow depth gauge fluttered to a stop on its maximum setting—sixty meters.

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