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

“They’re attacking!” Soloviev shouts, needlessly.

Sablin wants to get on the radio to tell the pilots that they are making a dreadful mistake. But he cannot move.

The jets were so low and close that he was certain he could see the faces of the crew. Two men in each cockpit.

But the jets are gone now, and the shooting has ceased.

“Is it over—,” Makismenko starts to ask when a tremendous explosion slams into the ship somewhere aft.

This time the blow is so massive that Sablin is actually knocked off his feet.

“It was a bomb!” Maksimenko cries. “Captain, they’re bombing us!”

More jets appear out of the fog, shooting their cannons into the Storozhevoy’s hull, the ship actually shuddering with each hit as if he were a mortally wounded animal.

The ship suddenly begins to turn to the left. Soloviev is fighting the wheel, but it’s having no effect.

Sablin scrambles to his feet. “Come back on course!” he shouts.

“I can’t,” Soloviev says. “I think the rudder has jammed.”

“Captain, we need to stop and surrender before it is too late!” Maksimenko shouts. “We’re going to die here!”

“Nobody’s going to die!” Sablin shouts back, and he reaches for the radio as a second laser-guided 250-kilogram bomb hits the stern, shoving the ship twenty meters off his track.

Gindin and the others locked in the sonar compartment can smell smoke coming through the ventilators. Besides cannon fire, the ship has taken at least two indirect hits by bombs somewhere toward the stern.

They suddenly made a turn to port but have not straightened out. The rudder has probably been hit and put out of commission. They are like sitting ducks now.

None of them has any doubt that word has gotten to the Kremlin and the order is to find the Storozhevoy and send him to the bottom with all hands.

“We have to get out of here!” Proshutinsky shouts over the din of the bombs and cannon shells slamming into the ship.

Gindin and Kuzmin have found a couple of screwdrivers and wrenches, and they are desperately trying to dismantle the hinges on the hatch to the corridor. But it’s no use. The job is impossible. What they need is an acetylene torch.

“Can you get the hatch open?” Proshutinsky demands.

Gindin turns to him and is about to shake his head when they hear someone out in the corridor. It sounds like someone shouting something, but Gindin can’t make out what he’s saying over the noise of the attack.

Gindin pounds on the hatch. “Let us out!”

Kuzmin also slams an open palm against the hatch.

Something heavy, maybe a pry bar, falls away and clatters on the deck out in the corridor. The dogging wheel begins to turn.

“Watch out; they probably have guns,” Proshutinsky warns.

At this point Gindin doesn’t care. If the attack continues, the Storozhevoy will sooner or later be struck a mortal blow and sink to the bottom. He’d rather face a few men with pistols than remain locked up down here to drown.

He and Kuzmin step back and prepare to launch a charge the moment the hatch is opened.

“Good luck,” Kuzmin says.

“Da,” Gindin replies as the hatch swings open.

There are three men there, Petty Officer 2nd Class Kopilov and two seamen. Gindin launches himself out into the corridor, slamming into the petty officer and knocking the man backward against the bulkhead.

Kuzmin is right behind Gindin at the same moment another tremendous explosion comes from somewhere aft. The ship is violently shoved sideways.

Kopilov is just a kid and obviously frightened out of his skull. “You have to help us, before he kills us all,” he shouts. “They’re attacking us. We’ll all be killed.”

The other officers and midshipmen are scrambling out of the sonar compartment. “First we need to release the captain,” Proshutinksy orders.

Kopilov leads the way forward to the other sonar compartment. The hatch has been braced shut with a large piece of dunnage, a heavy wooden beam fifteen or twenty centimeters on a side and two or three meters long. It takes Gindin and the sailors to prise the beam away from the hatch and pass it back to the others.

“Captain, it’s Boris; we’re opening the hatch for you!” Gindin shouts. He undogs the hatch and yanks it open.

Potulniy is right there, his face screwed up into a mask of rage. Gindin doesn’t think he’s ever seen a man so angry.

“I’ll kill the bastard!” the captain shouts. He looks at the others, mentally cataloging the faces of everyone with him. “Do we have any weapons?”

Kopilov pulls a Makarov pistol from his belt under his tunic and hands it to Potulniy.

“I’m going to the bridge to put an end to this,” the captain tells them. “The rest of you get to one of the the armories and see if you can find some other weapons. I want half of you to cover the ship from somewhere aft and the other half to go forward. But be careful; I don’t want you getting shot up.”

“I’ll take the stern,” Proshutinsky volunteers.

“Good,” Potulniy says. He turns to Gindin. “Get down to the engine room, and see what you can do to talk some sense into your men. We’re probably going to have company real soon, unless they mean to sink us.”

“Captain, I don’t think Captain Sablin is a traitor,” Gindin says. “I think he somehow got his head up his ass. He’s naive, not a criminal.”

“Naive or not, the bastard’s going to get us all killed.”

Another bomb hits somewhere aft, and the ship shudders from stem to stern.

“Go!” Potulniy orders, and he turns on his heel and heads for the bridge as fast as he can move.

Heading down to the engineering spaces, Gindin has to think, God help anyone who tries to get in the captain’s way now. And God help Sablin.

On the way up from deep within the ship, Potulniy encounters a half-dozen sailors but no officers and no one with any guns. The kids are all clearly frightened and have no idea what they’re supposed to do.

The murderous rage continues to build inside him. He wants very badly to lash out at someone, something, for what is being done to his ship. But not these kids.

“Return to your duty stations,” he orders.

The attacks seem to have stopped, at least for the moment, when Potulniy reaches the bridge deck. He pulls up short just around the corner from the open hatch. From where he’s standing he can see one of the seamen by the radar set and can hear Sablin talking frantically on the radio, but it’s difficult to make out who the zampolit is talking to or what he’s saying. But he sounds just as frightened as the rest of the crew.

As well as the bastard should be, Potulniy thinks. Naive, my ass.

His own naval career is finished. He will never be able to explain to a court-martial board how he came to lose command of his ship. Or why he wasn’t able to stop the destruction of his vessel.

But Sablin has another reason to be afraid. Potulniy means to kill him. Right now.

The captain thumbs the pistol’s safety catch to the off position and steps around the corner and onto the bridge.

The seamen at the radar set and the two standing at the now useless helm all look up, first in alarm and then in relief.

“Captain,” Soloviev says.

Sablin begins to turn as Potulniy raises the pistol, his finger tightening on the trigger. But then the man holding the microphone is just Valery, married to Nina, with a son, Misha. Sablin is a fellow officer, misguided, foolish, and, da, naive, but not a criminal.

“Captain—,” Sablin blurts.

Potulniy lowers his aim and fires one shot, catching the zampolit in the left leg, just above the knee.