David Hagberg - Mutiny - The True Events That Inspired The Hunt for Red October

It’s as if Sablin has stuck his finger in a light socket. “How do you know this?” he demands.

“They’re in the lieutenant’s cabin and the door is half-open! I heard them talking when I walked past!”

“Are you sure?”

“They’ve got guns.”

“Stay here,” Sablin tells the sailor guarding his cabin. “You, come with me,” he tells Sakhnevich, and they race down the corridor.

Lieutenant Stepanov was one of the officers who hadn’t reported for the meeting in the midshipmen’s dining hall. He was on duty, and Sablin had planned on talking with him and the few others, all of them warrant officers, who’d also been aboard ship but absent later this evening. What could a handful of officers do to interfere with the rest of the ship?

At the lieutenant’s cabin, Sablin pulls out his Makarov pistol, kicks open the door, and bursts inside, Sakhnevich holding back in the corridor.

It’s Lieutenant Stepanov and Warrant Officers Kovalchenkov and Saitov, and they all have pistols. They look up in alarm as their zampolit, brandishing a gun, comes through the doorway.

“What’s the meaning of this meeting?” Sablin cries, and his words sound stupid even in his own ears.

Stepanov steps back, raises his pistol, and thumbs the safety catch to the off position. “You’re a traitor!” he shouts.

“I’m trying to help!” Sablin pleads. “Most of the officers and all the sailors are with me! We have to do this!” He is pointing his pistol in the general direction of Stepanov and the others, but he’s neglected to switch the safety off. His weapon is not ready to fire.

“It doesn’t matter, because this mutiny will soon be over,” one of the warrant officers blurts out.

“What are you talking about? We’re getting out of here in the morning, and I’m going a make a broadcast to the people. It’ll be up to them to decide who is right.”

“This ship is going nowhere under your command!” one of the others shouts. He, too, has raised his pistol and is pointing it directly at Sablin’s chest. His face is white, but whether it’s from rage or fear even he doesn’t know for sure.

The four men are facing each other, like gunfighters at the OK Corral. All it will take is for one man to make a mistake and blood will be shed in this tiny compartment.

“I order you to put down your weapons,” Sablin tells them in a measured voice. He is catching his second wind. Whatever fate is in store for him, he feels the first test is now.

“No,” Lieutenant Stepanov replies coolly. “We’re all going to wait here until help arrives. Then you will be arrested and the captain will be set free.” He shakes his head. “Thank God you weren’t dumb enough to kill him!”

“There is no help coming—”

“Yes, there is!” Kovalchenkov shouts. “Lieutenant Firsov is leaving the ship—”

“Shut up, you stupid fool!” Stepanov cries.

Sablin is rocked back on his heels. All of his planning, everything he has worked for, is disappearing before his eyes.

He turns to see if Sakhnevich is still there, but the corridor is empty. Sablin’s heart sinks even lower.

“Grab him!” Stepanov shouts, and suddenly Sablin is rushed, hands are plucking at his sleeves, someone is trying to take the pistol out of his hand, and he is shoved up against the bulkhead, his head banging against the steel plating.

Sablin manages to break free for an instant and he raises his pistol, meaning to fire a warning shot overhead, but Seaman Sakhnevich is suddenly crowding into the cabin with three other young sailors.

Stepanov and the warrant officers are armed, but not one shot is fired as the sailors roughly pull and shove them away and manage to drag their zampolit out into the corridor and slam the door.

One of the sailors produces a key and locks the door from the outside. There’ll be no escape for the three officers now. The Storozhevoy is a sturdy Russian warship; there’ll be no shooting their way out for the three officers.

Sablin’s heart, which has been pounding practically out of his chest, is beginning to slow down as he catches his breath.

Firsov.

The name crystallizes in Sablin’s mind.

There’d been absolutely no doubt which way Firsov had voted. The young senior lieutenant of the electrical division had dropped a white backgammon piece into the basket. He was for the mutiny. He had grasped perfectly what Sablin was trying to do.

Gindin was a disappointment, but Firsov was solidly behind the plan.

Sablin focuses on Sakhnevich. “Good work, Aleksei,” he says. “Thank you. But we have to find Lieutenant Firsov, before he gets off the ship.”

“Maybe he’s already gone,” Sakhnevich says.

“If that’s the case I need to know it immediately. The entire operation depends on it.”

Sakhnevich and the other sailors are rooted to their spots. They’re not quite sure what to do. They realize that this situation has the potential to change everything. Their lives could literally be hanging in the balance.

“Now,” Sablin urges. “Before it’s too late. Find him!”

Crouched in the chilly darkness at the massive anchor hawsehole near the bow, Senior Lieutenant Vladimir Firsov is at odds with himself, as he has been ever since he’d first begun to suspect what Sablin was up to. That was weeks ago when Sablin began asking questions about how the electrical systems aboard the ship were supposed to work, that and the zampolit’s not-so-subtle comments about what a mess the bureaucrats in Moscow had made of Lenin’s fine ideas.

Firsov has acted as head of the ship’s Communist Party Club. That meant that he ran meetings once a month for the dozen or so men aboard who were already members of the Party or had been nominated for membership. This is a big deal in the Soviet Union and an even bigger deal in the military. Being a member of the Party opens all sorts of doors, and with them come privileges.

Because Firsov is a Communist Party cell commander, the zampolit has treated him especially well. Firsov is one of the chosen few, with a fine future ahead of him.

But hunched down and shivering now he isn’t so sure of anything except for the look on his friend Boris Gindin’s face in the midshipmen’s dining hall. Boris was disappointed, and that hurt more than anything Firsov can ever recall. He has a great deal of respect for his roommate. Firsov hopes someday to explain what he did this evening and why.

Gindin never thought about Firsov’s Party membership until much later, but by then it was too late to bring it up. “I thought that at first Vladimir might have shared Sablin’s ideas, but later, after he’d had time to calm down and think things through, he might have had a change of heart, so he jumped ship to call for help.

“Maybe he realized just how dangerous a situation Sablin had gotten us into and decided to warn somebody what was happening before it was too late.”

Or maybe Firsov was even smarter than that.

“Maybe it was Vladimir’s strategy to try to save us all,” Gindin recalls. “Maybe he volunteered to go over to Sablin’s side to penetrate into the zampolit’s circle in order to find a way out of the mess.”

It’s not known for sure what Firsov’s actual motivations were on that evening or exactly what he was thinking at that moment near the bow of the ship.

Someone shouts something from aft, toward the starboard side of the superstructure, and Firsov turns toward the noise. He heard his name! Somehow they know! Sablin has set men to look for him!

Someone else shouts something.

Firsov rises up just tall enough to look over the side of the bulwarks. An Alpha submarine, low in the water, dark, menacing, is at the same mooring as the Storozhevoy. He can make out a dim red glow from the open hatch at the top of the sail. The sub’s captain will know what to do.