“No, and if you are accustomed to good food, you may find Krazny Oktyabr not to your liking.”
“Maybe I can fix that. How many men aboard?”
‘Twelve. Ten Soviet, the Englishman, and the spy.” Borodin glanced at Ryan with a thin smile.
“Okay.” Mancuso reached into his coat and came out with a radio. ‘This is Mancuso.”
“We’re here, Skipper,” Chambers replied.
“Get some food together for our friends. Six meals for twenty-five men. Send a cook over with it. Wally, I want to show these men some good chow. Got it?”
“Aye aye, Skipper. Out.”
“I got some good cooks, Captain. Shame this wasn’t last week. We had lasagna, just like momma used to make. All that was missing was the Chianti.”
“They have vodka,” Ryan observed.
“Only for spies,” Borodin said. Two hours after the shootout Ryan had had the shakes badly, and Borodin had sent him a drink from the medical stores. “We are told that your submarine men are greatly pampered.”
“Maybe so,” Mancuso nodded. “But we stay out sixty or seventy days at a time. That’s hard enough, don’t you think?”
“How about we go below?” Ryan suggested. Everyone agreed. It was getting cold.
Borodin, Ryan and Mancuso went below to find the Americans on one side of the control room and the Soviets on the other, just like before. The American captain broke the ice.
“Captain Borodin, this is the man who found you. Come here, Jonesy.”
“It wasn’t very easy, sir,” Jones said. “Can I get to work?
Can I see your sonar room?”
“Bugayev.” Borodin waved the ship’s electronics officer over. The captain-lieutenant led the sonarman aft.
Jones took one look at the equipment and muttered, “Kludge.” The face plates all had louvers on them to let out the heat. God, did they use vacuum tubes? Jones wondered. He pulled a screwdriver from his pocket to find out.
“You speak English, sir?”
“Yes, a little.”
“Can I see the circuit diagrams for these, please?”
Bugayev blinked. No enlisted man, and only one of his michmanyy, had ever asked for it. Then he took the binder of schematics from its shelf on the forward bulkhead.
Jones matched the code number of the set he was checking with the right section of the binder. Unfolding the diagram, he noted with relief that ohms were ohms, all over the world. He began tracing his finger along the page, then pulled the cover panel off to look inside the set.
“Kludge, megakludge to the max!” Jones was shocked enough to lapse into Valspeak.
“Excuse me, what is this ‘kludge’?”
“Oh, pardon me, sir. That’s an expression we use in the navy. I don’t know how to say it in Russian. Sorry.” Jones stifled a grin as he went back to the schematic. “Sir, this one here’s a low-powered high-frequency set, right? You use this for mines and stuff?”
It was Bugayev’s turn to be shocked. “You have been trained in Soviet equipment?”
“No, sir, but I’ve sure heard a lot of it.” Wasn’t this obvious? Jones wondered. “Sir, this is a high-frequency set, but it doesn’t draw a lot of power. What else is it good for? A low-power FM set you use for mines, for work under ice, and for docking, right?”
“Correct.”
“You have a gertrude, sir?”
“Gertrude?”
“Underwater telephone, sir, for talking to other subs.” Didn’t this guy know anything?
“Ah, yes, but it is located in control, and it is broken.”
“Uh-huh.” Jones looked over the diagram again. “I think I can rig a modulator on this baby, then, and make it into a gertrude for you. Might be useful. You think your skipper would want that, sir?”
“I will ask.” He expected Jones to stay put, but the young sonarman was right behind him when he went to control. Bugayev explained the suggestion to Borodin while Jones talked to Mancuso.
“They got a little FM set that looks just like the old gertrudes in sonar school. We have a spare modulator in stores, and I can probably rig it up in thirty minutes, no sweat,” the sonarman said.
“Captain Borodin, do you agree?” Mancuso asked.
Borodin felt as if he were being pushed too fast, even though the suggestion made perfectly good sense. “Yes, have your man do it.”
“Skipper, how long we gonna be here?” Jones asked.
“A day or two, why?”
“Sir, this boat looks kinda thin on creature comforts, you know? How ‘bout I grab a TV and a tape machine? Give ‘em something to look at, you know, sort of give ‘em a quick look at the USA?”
Mancuso laughed. They wanted to learn everything they could about this boat, but they had plenty of time for that, and Jones’ idea looked like a good way to ease the tension. On the other hand, he didn’t want to incite a mutiny on his own sub. “Okay, take the one from the wardroom.”
“Right, Skipper.”
The Zodiac delivered the Pogy’s corpsman a few minutes later, and Jones took the boat back to the Dallas. Gradually the officers were beginning to engage in conversation. Two Russians were trying to talk to Mannion and were looking at his hair. They had never met a black man before.
“Captain Borodin, I have orders to take something out of the control room that will identify — I mean, something that comes from this boat.” Mancuso pointed. “Can I take that depth gauge? I can have one of my men rig a substitute.” The gauge, he saw, had a number.
“For what reason?”
“Beats me, but those are my orders.”
“Yes,” Borodin replied.
Mancuso ordered one of his chiefs to perform the job. The chief pulled a crescent wrench from his pocket and removed the nut holding the needle and dial in place.
“This is a little bigger than ours, Skipper, but not by much. I think we have a spare. I can flip it backwards and scribe in the markings, okay?”
Mancuso handed his radio over. “Call it in and have Jonesy bring the spare back with him.”
“Aye, Cap’n.” The chief put the needle back in place after setting the dial on the deck.
The Sea Stallion did not attempt to land, though the pilot was tempted. The deck was almost large enough to try. As it was, the helicopter hovered a few feet over the missile deck, and the doctor leaped into the arms of two seamen. His supplies were tossed down a moment later. The colonel remained in the back of the chopper and slid the door shut. The bird turned slowly to move back southwest, its massive rotor raising spray from the waters of Pamlico Sound.
“Was that what I think it was?” the pilot asked over the intercom.
“Wasn’t it backwards? I thought missile subs had the missiles aft of the sail. Those were in front of the sail, weren’t they? I mean, wasn’t that the rudder sticking up behind the sail?” the copilot responded quizzically.
“It was a Russian sub!” the pilot said.
“What?” It was too late to see, they were already two miles away. “Those were our guys on the deck. They weren’t Russians.”
“Son of a bitch!” the major swore wonderingly. And he couldn’t say a thing. The colonel of division intelligence had been damned specific about that: “You don’t see nothin’, you don’t hear nothin’, you don’t think nothin’, and you goddamned well don’t ever say nothin’.”
“I’m Doctor Noyes,” the commander said to Mancuso in the control room. He had never been on a submarine before, and when he looked around he saw a compartment full of instruments all in a foreign language. “What ship is this?”
“Krazny Oktyabr,” Borodin said, coming over. In the centerpiece of his cap there was a gleaming red star.
“What the hell is going on here?” Noyes demanded.
“Doc,” Ryan took him by the arm, “you have two patients aft. Why not let’s worry about them?”
Noyes followed him aft to sick bay. “What’s going on here?” he persisted more quietly.
“The Russians just lost a submarine,” Ryan explained, “and now she belongs to us. And if you tell anybody — “
“I read you, but I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to believe me. What kind of cutter are you?”
“Thoracic.”
“Good,” Ryan turned into sick bay, “you have a gunshot wound victim who needs you bad.”
Williams was lying naked on the table. A sailor came in with an armful of medical supplies and set them on Petrov’s desk. The October’s medical locker had a supply of frozen plasma, and the two corpsmen already had two units running into the lieutenant. A chest tube was in, draining into a vacuum bottle.
“We got a nine-millimeter in this man’s chest,” one of the corpsmen said after introducing himself and his partner. “He’s had a chest tube in the last ten hours, they tell me. The head looks worse than it is. Right pupil is a little blown, but no big deal. The chest is bad, sir. You’d better take a listen.”