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‘Engines all stop,’ Borodin ordered.
‘All stop.’ The quartermaster, a starshina (petty officer), dialled the annunciator to the STOP position. An instant later the order was confirmed by the inner dial, and a few seconds after that the dull rumble of the engines died away.
Borodin picked up the phone and punched the button for engineering. ‘Comrade Chief Engineer, prepare to engage the caterpillar.’
It wasn’t the official name for the new drive system. It had no name as such, just a project number. The nickname caterpillar had been given it by a young engineer who had been involved in the sub’s development. Neither Ramius nor Borodin knew why, but as often happens with such names, it had stuck.
‘Ready, Comrade Borodin,’ the chief engineer reported back in a moment.
‘Open doors fore and aft,’ Borodin ordered next.
The michman of the watch reached up the control board and threw four switches. The status light over each changed from red to green. ‘Doors show open. Comrade.’
‘Engage caterpillar. Build speed slowly to thirteen knots.’
‘Build slowly to one-three knots, Comrade,’ the engineer acknowledged.
The hull, which had gone momentarily silent, now had a new sound. The engine noises were lower and very different from what they had been. The reactor plant noises, mainly from pumps that circulated the cooling water, were almost imperceptible. The caterpillar did not use a great deal of power for what it did. At the michman’s station the speed gauge, which had dropped to five knots, began to creep upward again. Forward of the missile room, in a space shoe-horned into the crew’s accommodations, the handful of sleeping men stirred briefly in their bunks as they noted an intermittent rumble aft and the hum of electric motors a few feet away, separated from them by the pressure hull. They were tired enough even on their first full day at sea to ignore the noise, fighting back to their precious allotments of sleep.
‘Caterpillar functioning normally, Comrade Captain,’ Borodin reported.
‘Excellent. Steer two-six-zero, helm,’ Ramius ordered.
‘Two-six-zero, Comrade.’ The helmsman turned his wheel to the left.
THE USS BREMERTON
Thirty miles to the northeast, the USS Bremerton was on a heading of two-two-five, just emerging from under the icepack. A 688-class attack submarine, she had been on an ELINT – electronic intelligence gathering – mission in the Kara Sea when she was ordered west to the Kola Peninsula. The Russian missile boat wasn’t supposed to have sailed for another week, and the Bremerton’s skipper was annoyed at this latest intelligence screw-up. He would have been in place to track the Red October if she had sailed as scheduled. Even so, the American sonarmen had picked up on the Soviet sub a few minutes earlier, despite the fact that they were travelling at fourteen knots.
‘Conn, sonar.’
Commander Wilson lifted the phone. ‘Conn, aye.’
‘Contact lost, sir. His screws stopped a few minutes ago and have not restarted. There’s some other activity to the east, but the missile sub has gone dead.’
‘Very well. He’s probably settling down to a slow drift. We’ll be creeping up on him. Stay awake, Chief.’ Commander Wilson thought this over as he took two steps to the chart table. The two officers of the fire control tracking party who had just been establishing the track for the contact looked up to learn their commander’s opinion.
‘If it was me, I’d go down near the bottom and circle slowly right about here.’ Wilson traced a rough circle on the chart that enclosed the Red October’s position. ‘So let’s creep up on him. We’ll reduce speed to five knots and see if we can move in and reacquire him from his reactor plant noise.’ Wilson turned to the officer of the deck. ‘Reduce speed to five knots.’
‘Aye, Skipper.’
SEVEROMORSK, USSR
In the Central Post Office building in Severomorsk a mail sorter watched sourly as a truck driver dumped a large canvas sack on his work table and went back out the door. He was late – well, not really late, the clerk corrected himself, since the idiot had not been on time once in five years. It was a Saturday, and he resented being at work. Only a few years before, the forty-hour week had been started in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately this change had never affected such vital public services as mail delivery. So, here he was, still working a six-day week – and without extra pay! A disgrace, he thought, and had said often enough in his apartment, playing cards with his workmates over vodka and cucumbers.
He untied the drawstring and turned the sack over. Several smaller bags tumbled out. There was no sense in hurrying. It was only the beginning of the month, and they still had weeks to move their quota of letters and parcels from one side of the building to the other. In the Soviet Union every worker is a government worker, and they have a saying: As long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.
Opening a small mailbag, he pulled out an official-looking envelope addressed to the Main Political Administration of the Navy in Moscow. The clerk paused, fingering the envelope. It probably came from one of the submarines based at Polyarnyy, on the other side of the fjord. What did the letter say? the sorter wondered, playing the mental game that amused mailmen all over the world. Was it an announcement that all was ready for the final attack on the imperialist West? A list of Party members who were late paying their dues, or a requisition for more toilet paper? There was no telling. Submariners! They were all prima donnas – even the farmboy conscripts still picking shit from between their toes paraded around like members of the Party elite.
The clerk was sixty-two. In the Great Patriotic War he had been a tankrider serving in a guards tank corps attached to Konev’s First Ukrainian Front. That, he told himself, was a man’s job, riding into action on the back of the great battle tanks, leaping off to hunt for the German infantrymen as they cowered in their holes. When something needed doing against those slugs, it was done! Now what had become of Soviet fighting men? Living aboard luxury liners with plenty of good food and warm beds. The only warm bed he had ever known was over the exhaust vent of his tank’s diesel – and he’d had to fight for that! It was crazy what the world had become. Now sailors acted like czarist princes and wrote tons of letters back and forth and called it work. These pampered boys didn’t know what hardship was. And their privileges! Every word they committed to paper was priority mail. Whimpering letters to their sweethearts, most of it, and here he was sorting through it all on a Saturday to see that it got to their womenfolk – even though they couldn’t possibly have a reply for two weeks. It just wasn’t like the old days.
The sorter tossed the envelope with a negligent flick of the wrist towards the surface mailbag for Moscow on the far side of his work table. It missed, dropping to the concrete floor. The letter would be placed aboard the train a day late. The sorter didn’t care. There was a hockey game that night, the biggest game of the young season, Central Army against Wings. He had a litre of vodka bet on Wings.
MORROW, ENGLAND
‘Halsey’s greatest popular success was his greatest error. In establishing himself as a popular hero with legendary aggressiveness, the admiral would blind later generations to his impressive intellectual abilities and a shrewd gambler’s instinct to –’ Jack Ryan frowned at his computer. It sounded too much like a doctoral dissertation, and he had already done one of those. He thought of dumping the whole passage from the memory disc but decided against it. He had to follow this line of reasoning for his introduction. Bad as it was, it did serve as a guide for what he wanted to say. Why was it that introductions always seemed to be the hardest part of a history book? For three years now he had been working on Fighting Sailor, an authorized biography of Fleet Admiral William Halsey. Nearly all of it was contained on a half-dozen floppy discs lying next to his Apple computer.
‘Daddy?’ Ryan’s daughter was staring up at him.
‘And how’s my little Sally today?’
‘Fine.’
Ryan picked her up and set her on his lap, careful to slide his chair away from the keyboard. Sally was all checked out on games and educational programmes, and occasionally thought that this meant she was able to handle Wordstar also. Once that had resulted in the loss of twenty thousand words of electronically recorded manuscript. And a spanking.
She leaned her head against her father’s shoulder.
‘You don’t look fine. What’s bothering my little girl?’
‘Well, Daddy, y’see, it’s almost Chris’mas, an … I’m not sure that Santa knows where we are. We’re not where we were last year.’
‘Oh, I see. And you’re afraid he doesn’t come here?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Why didn’t you ask me before? Of course he comes here. Promise.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
‘Okay.’ She kissed her father and ran out of the room, back to watching cartoons on the telly, as they called it in England. Ryan was glad she had interrupted him. He didn’t want to forget to pick up a few things when he flew over to Washington. Where was – oh, yeah. He pulled a disc from his desk drawer and inserted it in the spare disc drive. After clearing the screen, he scrolled up the Christmas list, things he still had to get. With a simple command a copy of the list was made on the adjacent printer. Ryan tore the page off and tucked it in his wallet. Work didn’t appeal to him this Saturday morning. He decided to play with his kids. After all, he’d be stuck in Washington for much of the coming week.
THE V.K. KONOVALOV
The Soviet submarine V. K. Konovalov crept above the hard sand bottom of the Barents Sea at three knots. She was at the southwest corner of grid square 54–90 and for the past ten hours had been drifting back and forth on a north – south line, waiting for the Red October to arrive for the beginning of Exercise OCTOBER FROST. Captain Second Rank Viktor Alexievich Tupolev paced slowly around the periscope pedestal in the control room of his small, fast attack sub. He was waiting for his old mentor to show up, hoping to play a few tricks on him. He had served with the Schoolmaster for two years. They had been good years, and while he found his former commander to be something of a cynic, especially about the Party, he would unhesitatingly testify to Ramius’ skill and craftiness.
And his own. Tupolev, now in his third year of command, had been one of the Schoolmaster’s star pupils. His current vessel was a brand-new Alfa, the fastest submarine ever made. A month earlier, while Ramius had been fitting out the Red October after her initial shakedown, Tupolev and three of his officers had flown down to see the model sub that had been the test-bed for the prototype drive system. Thirty-two metres long and diesel-electric powered, it was based in the Caspian Sea, far from the eyes of imperialist spies, and kept in a covered dock, hidden from their photographic satellites. Ramius had had a hand in the development of the caterpillar, and Tupolev recognized the mark of the master. It would be a bastard to detect. Not quite impossible, though. After a week of following the model around the north end of the Caspian Sea in an electrically powered launch, trailing the best passive sonar array his country had yet made, he thought he had found a flaw. Not a big one, just big enough to exploit.
Of course there was no guarantee of success. He was not only in competition with a machine, but also with the captain commanding her. Tupolev knew this area intimately. The water was almost perfectly isothermal; there was no thermal layer for a submarine to hide under. They were far enough from the freshwater rivers on the north coast of Russia not to have to worry about pools and walls of variable salinity interfering with their sonar searches. The Konovalov had been built with the best sonar systems the Soviet Union had yet produced, copied closely from the French DUUV-23 and a bit improved, the factory technicians said.
Tupolev planned to mimic the American tactic of drifting slowly, with just enough speed to maintain steerage, perfectly quiet and waiting for the Red October to cross his path. He would then trail his quarry closely and log each change in course and speed, so that when they compared logs in a few weeks the Schoolmaster would see that his erstwhile student had played his own winning game. It was about time someone did.
‘Anything new on sonar?’ Tupolev was getting tense. Patience came hard to him.
‘Nothing new, Comrade Captain.’ The starpom tapped the X on the chart that marked the position of the Rokossovskiy, a Delta-class missile sub they had been tracking for several hours in the same exercise area. ‘Our friend is still cruising in a slow circle. Do you think that Rokossovskiy might be trying to confuse us? Would Captain Ramius have arranged for him to be here, to complicate our task?’
The thought had occurred to Tupolev. ‘Perhaps, but probably not. This exercise was arranged by Korov himself. Our mission orders were sealed, and Marko’s orders should have been also. But then, Admiral Korov is an old friend of our Marko.’ Tupolev paused for a moment and shook his head. ‘No. Korov is an honourable man. I think Ramius is proceeding this way as slowly as he can. To make us nervous, to make us question ourselves. He will know we are to hunt him and will adjust his plans accordingly. He might try to enter the square from an unexpected direction – or to make us think that he is. You have never served under Ramius, Comrade Lieutenant. He is a fox, that one, an old grey-whiskered fox. I think we will continue to patrol as we are for another four hours. If we have not yet acquired him then, we will cross over to the southeast corner of the square and work our way in to the centre. Yes.’
Tupolev had never expected that this would be easy. No attack submarine commander had ever embarrassed Ramius. He was determined to be the first, and the difficulty of the task would only confirm his own prowess. In one or two more years, Tupolev planned to be the new master.
THE THIRD DAY (#)
Sunday, 5 December (#)
THE RED OCTOBER
The Red October had no time of her own. For her the sun neither rose nor set, and the days of the week had little significance. Unlike surface ships, which changed their clocks to conform with the local time wherever they were, submarines generally adhered to a single time reference. For American subs this was Zulu, or Greenwich mean time. For the Red October it was Moscow standard time, which by normal reckoning was actually one hour ahead of standard time to save on utility expenses.
Ramius entered the control room in mid-morning. Their course was now two-five-zero, speed thirteen knots, and the submarine was running thirty metres above the bottom at the west edge of the Barents Sea. In a few more hours the bottom would drop away to an abyssal plain, allowing them to go much deeper. Ramius examined the chart first, then the numerous banks of instruments covering both side bulkheads in the compartment. Last he made some notations in the order book.
‘Lieutenant Ivanov!’ he said sharply to the junior officer of the watch.
‘Yes, Comrade Captain!’ Ivanov was the greenest officer aboard, fresh from Lenin’s Komsomol School in Leningrad, pale, skinny, and eager.
‘I will be calling a meeting of the senior officers in the wardroom. You will now be the officer of the watch. This is your first cruise, Ivanov. How do you like it?’
‘It is better than I had hoped, Comrade Captain,’ Ivanov replied with greater confidence than he could possibly have felt.
‘That is good, Comrade Lieutenant. It is my practice to give junior officers as much responsibility as they can handle. While we senior officers are having our weekly political discussion, you are in command of this vessel! The safety of this ship and all his crew is your responsibility! You have been taught all you need to know, and my instructions are in the order book. If we detect another submarine or surface ship you will inform me at once and instantly initiate evasion drill. Any questions?’
‘No, Comrade Captain.’ Ivanov was standing at rigid attention.
‘Good.’ Ramius smiled. ‘Pavel Ilych, you will forever remember this as one of the great moments of your life. I know, I can still remember my first watch. Do not forget your orders or your responsibilities!’
Pride sparkled in the boy’s eyes. It was too bad what would happen to him, Ramius thought, still the teacher. On first inspection, Ivanov looked to have the makings of a good officer.
Ramius walked briskly aft to the ship’s medical office.
‘Good morning, Doctor.’
‘Good morning to you, Comrade Captain. It is time for our political meeting?’ Petrov had been reading the manual for the sub’s new X-ray machine.
‘Yes, it is. Comrade Doctor, but I do not wish you to attend. There is something else I want you to do. While the senior officers are at the meeting, I have the three youngsters standing watch in control and the engineering spaces.’
‘Oh?’ Petrov’s eyes went wide. It was his first time on a submarine in several years.
Ramius smiled. ‘Be at ease, Comrade. I can get from the wardroom to control in twenty seconds, as you know, and Comrade Melekhin can get to his precious reactor just as fast. Sooner or later our young officers must learn to function on their own. I prefer that they learn sooner. I want you to keep an eye on them. I know that they all have the knowledge to do their duties. I want to know if they have the temperament. If Borodin or I watch over them, they will not act normally. And in any case, this is a medical judgement, no?’
‘Ah, you wish me to observe how they react to their responsibilities.’
‘Without the pressure of being observed by a senior line officer,’ Ramius confirmed. ‘One must give young officers room to grow – but not too much. If you observe something that you question, you will inform me at once. There should be no problems. We are in open sea, there is no traffic about, and the reactor is running at a fraction of its total power. The first test for young officers ought to be an easy one. Find some excuse for travelling back and forth, and keep an eye on the children. Ask questions about what they are doing.’
Petrov laughed at that. ‘Ah, and also you would have me learn a few things, Comrade Captain? They told me about you at Severomorsk. Fine, it will be as you say. But this will be the first political meeting I have missed in years.’
‘From what your file says, you could teach Party doctrine to the Politburo, Yevgeni Konstantinovich.’ Which said little about his medical ability, Ramius thought.
The captain moved forward to the wardroom to join his brother officers, who were waiting for him. A steward had left several pots of tea along with black bread and butter to snack on. Ramius looked at the corner of the table. The bloodstain had long since been wiped away, but he could remember exactly what it looked like. This, he reflected, was one difference between himself and the man he had murdered. Ramius had a conscience. Before taking his seat, he turned to lock the door behind him. His officers were all sitting at attention, since the compartment was not large enough for them to stand once the bench seats were folded down.
Sunday was the normal day for the political awareness session at sea. Ordinarily Putin would have officiated, reading some Pravda editorials, followed by selected quotations from the works of Lenin and a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the readings. It was very much like a church service.
With the demise of the zampolit this duty devolved upon the commanding officer, but Ramius doubted that regulations anticipated the sort of discussion on today’s agenda. Each officer in this room was a member of his conspiracy. Ramius outlined their plans – there had been some minor changes which he had not mentioned to anyone. Then he told them about the letter.
‘So, there is no going back,’ Borodin observed.
‘We have all agreed upon our course of action. Now we are committed to it.’ Their reactions to his words were just what he expected them to be – sober. As well they might be. All were single; no one left behind a wife or children. All were Party members in good standing, their dues paid up to the end of the year, their Party cards right where they were supposed to be, ‘next to their hearts.’ And each one shared with his comrades a deep-seated dissatisfaction with, in some cases a hatred of, the Soviet government.
The planning had begun soon after the death of his Natalia. The rage he had almost unknowingly suppressed throughout his life had burst forth with a violence and passion that he had struggled to contain. A lifetime of self-control had enabled him to conceal it, and a lifetime of naval training had enabled him to choose a purpose worthy of it.
Ramius had not yet begun school when he first heard tales from other children about what his father Aleksandr had done in Lithuania in 1940 and after that country’s dubious liberation from the Germans in 1944. These were the repeated whisperings of their parents. One little girl told Marko a story that he recounted to Aleksandr, and to the boy’s uncomprehending horror her father vanished. For his unwitting mistake Marko was branded an informer. Stung by the name he was given for committing a crime – which the State taught was not a crime at all – whose enormity never stopped pulling at his conscience, he never informed again.
In the formative years of his life, while the elder Ramius ruled the Lithuanian Party Central Committee in Vilnius, the motherless boy was raised by his paternal grandmother, common practice in a country savaged by four years of brutal war. Her only son left home at an early age to join Lenin’s Red Guards, and while he was away she kept to the old ways, going to mass every day until 1940 and never forgetting the religious education that had been passed on to her. Ramius remembered her as a silver-haired old woman who told wonderful bedtime stories. Religious stories. It would have been far too dangerous for her to bring Marko to the religious ceremonies that had never been entirely stamped out, but she did manage to have him baptized a Roman Catholic soon after his father had deposited him with her. She never told Marko about this. The risk would have been too great. Roman Catholicism had been brutally suppressed in the Baltic states. It was a religion, and as he grew older Marko learned that Marxism-Leninism was a jealous god, tolerating no competing loyalties.
Grandmother Hilda told him bedtime stories from the Bible, each with a lesson of right and wrong, virtue and reward. As a child he found them merely entertaining, but he never told his father about them because even then he knew that Aleksandr would object. After the elder Ramius again resumed control of his son’s life, this religious education faded into Marko’s memory, neither fully remembered nor fully forgotten.
As a boy, Ramius sensed more than thought that Soviet Communism ignored a basic human need. In his teens, his misgivings began to take a coherent shape. The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man’s soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value. It also cast aside the objective measure of justice and ethics which, he decided, was the principal legacy of religion to civilized life. From earliest adulthood on, Marko had his own idea about right and wrong, an idea he did not share with the State. It gave him a means of gauging his actions and those of others. It was something he was careful to conceal. It served as an anchor for his soul and, like an anchor, it was hidden far below the visible surface.
Even as the boy was grappling with his first doubts about his country, no one could have suspected it. Like all Soviet children, Ramius joined the Little Octobrists, then the Young Pioneers. He paraded at the requisite battle shrines in polished boots and blood-red scarf, and gravely stood watch over the remains of some unknown soldier while clasping to his chest a deactivated PPSh submachinegun, his back ramrod straight before the eternal flame. The solemnity of such duty was no accident. As a boy Marko was certain that the brave men whose graves he guarded so intensely had met their fates with the same sort of selfless heroism that he saw portrayed in endless war movies at the local cinema. They had fought the hated Germans to protect the women and children and old people behind the lines. And like a nobleman’s son of an earlier Russia, he took special pride in being the son of a Party chieftain. The party, he heard a hundred times before he was five, was the Soul of the People; the unity of Party, People, and Nation was the holy trinity of the Soviet Union, albeit with one segment more important than the others. His father fitted easily into the cinematic image of a Party apparatchik. Stern but fair, to Marko he was a frequently absent, gruffly kind man who brought his son what presents he could and saw to it that he had all the advantages the son of a Party secretary was entitled to.
Although outwardly he was the model Soviet child, inwardly he wondered why what he learned from his father and in school conflicted with the other lessons of his youth. Why did some parents refuse to let their children play with him? Why when he passed them did his classmates whisper ‘stukach,’ the cruel and bitter epithet of informer? His father and the Party taught that informing was an act of patriotism, but for having done it once he was shunned. He resented the taunts of his boyhood peers, but he never once complained to his father, knowing that this would be an evil thing to do.
Something was very wrong – but what? He decided that he had to find the answers for himself. By choice Marko became individual in his thinking, and so unknowingly committed the gravest sin in the Communist pantheon. Outwardly the model of a Party member’s son, he played the game carefully and according to all the rules. He did his duty for all Party organizations, and was always the first to volunteer for the menial tasks allotted to children aspiring to Party membership, which he knew was the only path to success or even comfort in the Soviet Union. He became good at sports. Not team sports – he worked at track and field events in which he could compete as an individual and measure the performances of others. Over the years he learned to do the same in all of his endeavours, to watch and judge the actions of his fellow citizens and officers with cool detachment, behind a blank face that concealed his conclusions.
In the summer of his eighth year the course of his life was forever changed. When no one would play with ‘the little stukach,’ he would wander down to the fishing docks of the small village where his grandmother had made her home. A ragtag collection of old wooden boats sailed each morning, always behind a screen of patrol boats manned by MGB – as the KGB was then known – border guards, to reap a modest harvest from the Gulf of Finland. Their catch supplemented the local diet with needed protein and provided a minuscule income for the fishermen. One boat captain was old Sasha. An officer in the czar’s navy, he had revolted with the crew of the cruiser Avrora, helping to spark the chain of events that changed the face of the world. Marko did not learn until many years later that the crewmen of the Avrora had broken with Lenin – and been savagely put down by Red Guards. Sasha had spent twenty years in labour camps for his part in that collective indiscretion and only been released at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The Rodina had found herself in need of experienced seamen to pilot ships into the ports of Murmansk and Archangel, to which the Allies were bringing weapons, food, and the sundries that allow a modern army to function. Sasha had learned his lesson in the gulag: he did his duty efficiently and well, asking for nothing in return. After the war, he’d been given a kind of freedom for his services, the right to perform back-breaking work under perpetual suspicion.
By the time Marko met him, Sasha was over sixty, a nearly bald man with ropy old muscles, a seaman’s eye, and a talent for stories that left the youngster wide-eyed. He’d been a midshipman under the famous Admiral Marakov at Port Arthur in 1906. Probably the finest seaman in Russian history, Marakov’s reputation as a patriot and an innovative fighting sailor was sufficiently unblemished that a Communist government would eventually see fit to name a missile cruiser in his memory. At first wary of the boy’s reputation, Sasha saw something in him that others missed. The boy without friends and the sailor without a family became comrades. Sasha spent hours telling and retelling the tale of how he had been on the admiral’s flagship, the Petropavlovsk, and participated in the one Russian victory over the hated Japanese – only to have his battleship sunk and his admiral killed by a mine while returning to port. After this Sasha had led his seamen as naval infantry, winning three decorations for courage under fire. This experience – he waggled his finger seriously at the boy – taught him of the mindless corruption of the czarist regime and convinced him to join one of the first naval soviets when such action meant certain death at the hands of the czar’s secret police, the okhrana. He told his own version of the October Revolution from the thrilling perspective of an eyewitness. But Sasha was very careful to leave the later parts out.
He allowed Marko to sail with him and taught him the fundamentals of seamanship that decided a boy not yet nine that his destiny lay with the sea. There was a freedom at sea he could never have on land. There was a romance about it that touched the man growing within the boy. There were also dangers, but in a summer-long series of simple, effective lessons, Sasha taught the boy that preparation, knowledge, and discipline can deal with any form of danger; that danger confronted properly is not something a man must fear. In later years Marko would reflect often on the value this summer had held for him, and wonder just how far Sasha’s career might have led if other events had not cut it short.
Marko told his father about Sasha towards the end of that long Baltic summer and even took him to meet the old seadog. The elder Ramius was sufficiently impressed with him and what he had done for his son that he arranged for Sasha to have command of a newer, larger boat and moved him up on the list for a new apartment. Marko almost believed that the Party could do a good deed – that he himself had done his first manly good deed. But old Sasha died the following winter, and the good deed came to nothing. Many years later Marko realized that he hadn’t known his friend’s last name. Even after years of faithful service to the Rodina, Sasha had been an unperson.
At thirteen Marko travelled to Leningrad to attend the Nakhimov School. There he decided that he, too, would become a professional naval officer. Marko would follow the quest for adventure that had for centuries called young men to the sea. The Nakhimov School was a special three-year prep school for youngsters aspiring to a career at sea. The Soviet Navy at that time was little more than a coastal defence force, but Marko wanted very much to be a part of it. His father urged him to a life of Party work, promising rapid promotion, a life of comfort and privilege. But Marko wanted to earn whatever he received on his own merits, not to be remembered as an appendage of the ‘liberator’ of Lithuania. And a life at sea offered romance and excitement that even made serving the State something he could tolerate. The navy had little tradition to build on. Marko sensed that in it there was room to grow, and saw that many aspiring naval cadets were like himself, if not mavericks then as close to mavericks as was possible in a society so closely controlled as his own. The teenager thrived with his first experience of fellowship.
Nearing graduation, his class was exposed to the various components of the Russian fleet. Ramius at once fell in love with submarines. The boats at that time were small, dirty, and smelled from the open bilges that the crews used as a convenient latrine. At the same time submarines were the only offensive arm that the navy had, and from the first Marko wanted to be on the cutting edge. He’d had enough lectures on naval history to know that submarines had twice nearly strangled England’s maritime empire and had successfully emasculated the economy of Japan. This had greatly pleased him; he was glad the Americans had crushed the Japanese navy that had so nearly killed his mentor.
He graduated from the Nakhimov School first in his class, winner of the gold-plated sextant for his mastery of theoretical navigation. As leader of his class, Marko was allowed the school of his choice. He selected the Higher Naval School for Underwater Navigation, named for Lenin’s Komsomol, VVMUPP, still the principal submarine school of the Soviet Union.
His five years at VVMUPP were the most demanding of his life, the more so since he was determined not to succeed but to excel. He was first in his class in every subject, in every year. His essay on the political significance of Soviet naval power was forwarded to Sergey Georgiyevich Gorshkov, then commander in chief of the Baltic Fleet and clearly the coming man of the Soviet Navy. Gorshkov had seen the essay published in Morskoi Sbornik (Naval Collections), the leading Soviet naval journal. It was a model of progressive Party thought, quoting Lenin six different times.
By this time Marko’s father was a candidate member of the Presidium, as the Politburo was then called, and very proud of his son. The elder Ramius was no one’s fool. He finally recognized that the Red Fleet was a growing flower and that his son would someday have a position of importance in it. His influence moved his son’s career rapidly along.
By thirty, Marko had his first command and a new wife. Natalia Bogdanova was the daughter of another Presidium member whose diplomatic duties had taken him and his family all over the world. Natalia had never been a healthy girl. They had no children, their three attempts each ending in miscarriage, the last of which had nearly killed her. She was a pretty, delicate woman, sophisticated by Russian standards, who polished her husband’s passable English with American and British books – politically approved ones to be sure, mainly the thoughts of Western leftists, but also a smattering of genuine literature, including Hemingway, Twain, and Upton Sinclair. Along with his naval career, Natalia had been the centre of his life. Their marriage, punctuated by prolonged absences and joyous returns, made their love even more precious than it might have been.
When construction began on the first class of Soviet nuclear-powered submarines, Marko found himself in the yards learning how the steel sharks were designed and built. He was soon known as a very hard man to please as a junior quality control inspector. His own life, he was aware, would ride on the workmanship of these often drunk welders and fitters. He became an expert in nuclear engineering, spent two years as a starpom, and then received his first nuclear command. She was a November-class attack submarine, the first crude attempt by the Soviets to make a battleworthy long-range attack boat to threaten Western navies and lines of communication. Not a month later a sister ship suffered a major reactor casualty off the Norwegian coast, and Marko was first to arrive on the scene. As ordered, he successfully rescued the crew, then sank the disabled sub lest Western navies learn her secrets. Both tasks he performed expertly and well, a noteworthy tour de force for a young commander. Good performance was something he had always felt it was important to reward in his subordinates, and the fleet commander at that time felt the same way. Marko soon moved on to a new Charlie I-class sub.
It was men like Ramius who went out to challenge the Americans and the British. Marko took few illusions with him. The Americans, he knew, had long experience in naval warfare – their own greatest fighter, Jones, had once served the Russian navy for the Czaritza Catherine. Their submariners were legendary for their craftiness, and Ramius found himself pitted against the last of the war-trained Americans, men who had endured the sweaty fear of underwater combat and utterly defeated a modern navy. The deadly serious game of hide-and-seek he played with them was not an easy one, the less so because they had submarines years ahead of Soviet designs. But it was not a time without a few victories.
Ramius gradually learned to play the game by American rules, training his officers and men with care. His crews were rarely as prepared as he wished – still the Soviet Navy’s greatest problem – but where other commanders cursed their men for their failings, Marko corrected the failings of his men. His first Charlie-class submarine was called the Vilnius Academy. This was partially a slur against his half-Lithuanian blood – though since he had been born in Leningrad of a Great Russian, his internal passport designated him as that – but mainly recognition that officers came to him half-trained and left him ready for advancement and eventual command. The same was true of his conscripted crewmen. Ramius did not permit the low-level terrorism normal throughout the Soviet military. He saw his task as the building of seamen, and he produced a greater percentage of reenlistments than any other submarine commander. A full ninth of the michmanyy in the Northern Fleet submarine force were Ramius-trained professionals. His brother submarine commanders were delighted to take aboard his starshini, and more than one advanced to officers’ school.
