Anton shook his head. “No, Seaman Miskin. I will see you in about an hour.”
Anton waited until the door shut before sitting back down on the couch. So this was to be his first broadside for the party and for the Soviet Union. A first broadside that would change the course of the Soviet Navy, and he was to deliver it. Maybe Elena was right. Maybe he was destined for the stars of an admiral. He shook the idea away.
At precisely fifteen to ten, the door to the office opened. Anton had used the time to inspect the office and see what was available. The sparse selection of books, such as The Party of Lenin, were the same in Katshora’s office as they were on board the ships.
“This way, Comrade Captain,” Miskin said, pointing down a side passageway.
Within minutes Anton was sitting in the front row of the morning briefing by Doctor Zotkin. Anton acted surprised when the doctor told him of atomic power. Zotkin was pleased with his reaction.
It was after one o’clock when the meeting ended, with sandwiches brought in for a working lunch. When Anton left the meeting, Miskin met him in the hallway.
“Sir, if you will follow me, I will take you to your boat.”
A feeling of elation filled him. Finally he was going to see the submarine Zotkin kept referring to as the K-2 project. He wondered why a seaman was the person taking him as he followed Miskin.
Finally, Anton thought, I’m going to see the Whale. How many other commanding officers had been kept away from even seeing their boat for an hour, much less nearly two days? On a Navy base run by a real naval officer and not by mad scientists, the second thing — right after the handshake with the Group commander— would have been seeing the boat. Only someone who had been a commanding officer of a submarine could understood the initial thrill of a commanding officer when he first sees his boat.
Regardless of what Zotkin said, not every submarine was the same. Some had great reputations for carrying the fight to the enemy, such as the S-13, which had sunk the Wilhelm Gustloff. Admiral Katshora led that sinking. Because of the S-13 and Katshora’s submarine, the Navy had stopped the German Army from evacuating over 8,000 troops from their entrapment by the Soviet Army.
To the victor goes history, and the Soviet Union had been more a victor than the other Allies, Anton thought as he followed Miskin. It had borne the wrath and the might of the German juggernaut while the other allies built their Armies and Navies.
“We are here, Comrade Captain.” Miskin grabbed the wheel sealing the watertight door and gave it a couple of spins.
A hatch leads to the sea, was Anton’s belief. Sometimes it took more than two, but if you kept opening them, eventually the waters appeared. On board a submarine, everyone knew where every hatch led. On a surface ship, it was no mean thing to open a hatch just to see what was on the other side. If you didn’t know what was on the other side of a hatch on a submarine, you should not be a submariner.
The hatch flew back suddenly, breaking Miskin’s grip and bouncing lightly off the bulkhead of the passageway before stopping a few inches from it. A stiff breeze of Arctic wind whipped through the hatch, hitting Anton in the face. The cold air took his breath away for a moment as it filled his lungs. He unconsciously raised his hand and quickly slipped the large top button of the bridge coat through the hole, sealing out the cold.
“It is so warm inside the floating dock, Comrade Captain, that the temperature seems colder than it is.” Miskin nodded, tightening the neck strap on the foul-weather coat he wore.
Anton ducked to avoid hitting the metal arch above the hatchway. He stopped a few steps on the other side. In the dim light of the artificial night created by the huge hangar covering the floating dock, it took a few seconds for his vision to adjust.
Miskin struggled against the wind for a few seconds as he shut the hatch, quickly spinning the wheel to seal it. “Captain, this is the K-2. The boat they call the Whaler
He nodded without looking at the sailor. So, he would call her the Whale. Before and during World War II nearly every nation called their boats by a letter-numeral indicator, but during the war the Allies began naming theirs. The Soviet Union still used the letter-numeral designation, but when party officials refused or forgot to name a boat, crews named them.
For Doctor Zotkin and his assistants, he knew his boat would always be the K-2 project. Submarines without names are like men without balls — a eunuch; useless.
“Did you say something, Captain?”
“No, Comrade Miskin; I was thinking of how much I enjoy serving our nation, our party. And how honored I am to have been chosen for this mission.” He smiled. Over the years, he had gotten this self-written cliche down to a pat answer. An answer that covered nearly any circumstance.
“Doctor Zotkin and his scientists call the Whale the K-2, but then you already know that, Captain. We sailors call her the Whale’.’
“There is room for both names, Miskin.”
“That is what Admiral Katshora says also, sir.”
For the public and for the enemy, letters and numbers were good operational security, but for a crew who disappeared into a warship that could become their coffin, a name created a sense of comfort. He did not understand how, but he knew it to be so.
Letters and numbers were inhumane to submariners. You would never call your wife “K-2” or “S-3.” Submariners were fiercely loyal to their boat. They lived, ate, slept, and shit together. The boat was their family, and family deserves a name. Whale was a great name for a new boat. Why could he not have seen it yesterday?
“Because you were a day early” is what Zotkin had told him.
He could have been here hours ago except for the good doctor’s love of his voice.
The briefing had taken longer than any self-respecting Navy officer should have to suffer. If you can’t tell your story in thirty minutes, then you don’t know your story. Thirty minutes is all a submariner needs to know the mission; receive orders; and ask any l ast-minute questions as he scrambles from wherever and whoever was delivering the stuff.
The mission part of the brief took only minutes: prove that the Soviet submarine K-2 was a fully functional submarine capable of using atomic power. He smiled at the epiphany of the moment when he realized that Zotkin and his assistants lowered their voices almost reverently whenever they used the word “atomic.”
“Yes, sir; it is a magnificent sight,” Miskin said upon noticing Anton’s smile.
Anton’s smile broadened. “Yes, it is, Comrade Seaman. Shall we go aboard it?”
Miskin stood at attention. “Sir, this is as far as I go. It is your boat. The admiral would not understand if I went aboard with you.”
Anton’s eyebrows furrowed. “Why is that?” He turned and looked at Miskin.
“I am his steward, sir, and while he has assigned me to you, my duty station is not aboard the boat. He frowns—”
“ ‘Frowns’?”
Miskin’s lips pushed together as his eyebrows lifted for a moment. Then Anton realized that Miskin was frightened over the idea of going into a submarine. There were many unable to bring themselves to go through the narrow hatches that led inside. There had been some during the war who discovered their mental incompatibility with the rigors of submarine life, but eventually went on to serve the party and the motherland heroically on board surface ships.