“For love of Siberia,” Zotkin said with a grimace. The scientist tossed his ruler toward the table, but it hit the edge and bounced onto the floor. One of the scientists at the head of the table leaned down and picked it up. Zotkin walked to the door. “You two, come take Doctor Danzinger to his quarters.”
The young man and woman who earlier had helped with the blackboard hurried to where the German scientist had collapsed. No one spoke as they helped the scientist to his feet. As they neared the door, Zotkin spoke: “Search his quarters and remove any drink you find.”
When the door shut, Zotkin continued as if nothing had happened. “Captain Zegouniov, you will be submerged for five days.” Zotkin held up his hand with his fingers spread. “Five days! Can you believe it? We are going to take a submarine to sea and submerge her for five days.” He picked up his ruler. “The Americans have proven they can do it for more than thirty days. When their USS Nautilus set sail using atomic power, it was only two years ago. Before the age of the Soviet Union, we would never have caught up with the Americans. Now we are only two years behind them, and we will surpass them in atomic power technology.”
“Thirty days?” another scientist asked from the far end of the table. “I think, Doctor Zotkin, we are able to surpass that.”
Doctor Zotkin picked up the ruler, pointed it at the young man, and smiled. “You are so right, Doctor Minsky.” Zotkin looked around the table. “If the Americans can do thirty days under the surface of the ocean, then we can do twice that.”
Anton took a deep breath. Staying underwater for more than three days exhausted the batteries and burned up the air of the crew. If atomic power permitted unlimited time beneath the sea, it did not mean the air would last that long. He immediately saw that the critical element for sustained underwater time was not the atomic power or the food — they could carry and ration enough food for sixty days — but it would be the air. Five days? The technology to remove the bad air was in the Northern Fleet.
Plus, things break on board a submarine, and while no one would say it aloud, things broke more often on those things built within the Soviet Union.
“All we have to do is figure out how to reclaim the oxygen from the carbon dioxide that breathing produces,” Zotkin continued, the blackboard forgotten.
Oh, just a little thing, Anton thought. He noticed that Gesny was writing down the list from the blackboard. Good, he thought. They’d need to scrutinize it closely in the next four days to develop their navigational plan. Regardless of how good the destroyers were, the Whale was his boat and his responsibility. No matter what orders were given or directives issued, eventually responsibility for everything that was done on board a warship came back to the commanding officer, and he was the commanding officer.
An hour later, thirty minutes longer than Zotkin had scheduled, the meeting ended. The past hour had been spent on available technology to reclaim oxygen from carbon dioxide. Even diesels had chemicals in each compartment that worked sufficiently to give them an extra day submerged, but if battery power was the limiting system, then the chemicals made little difference.
The briefing was much too long. Anyone knowing his subject should be able to explain anything in thirty minutes. Otherwise they lost their audience; especially admirals and generals, whose aged bladders dictated the length of a meeting. As the meeting droned, Anton had begun to think of other things, such as the sticky ballast valve on the water line running across the overhead of the control room. Then there was his lack of confidence in the crew to be able to perform a number of critical exercises that every submarine crew should be able to do.
He had had two familiarization cruises since he arrived. Both of them back to back; one on Saturday, the seventeenth, and the second on Sunday, the eighteenth of November. Not sufficient to take the Whale out to sea for intense operations, but enough to do the basics. The first was nothing more than to show him how the boat handled on the surface and while submerged. Even that event was insufficient to him.
Real submarine crews could spend weeks at sea going through exercises from damage control to fire to flood to blowing emergency ballasts and never achieve the crew cohesiveness to fight the boat. He was commander of a submarine where he was denied access to the engine room. Regardless, the Navy would never allow that to take away his responsibility for it.
His executive officer, Gesny, furnished him the logs showing the crew training. One thing for sure, the young zampolit had been doing his party-political training. Each crew member was either a dyed-in-the-wool, pure-blooded Communist, or a raving lunatic by now. Anton believed in communism. He believed in the party. It had brought a feudal, mid-eighteenth-century family rule into the twentieth century. And just in time, too. Pulling Russia — the Soviet Union — out of World War I gave the homeland time to build on the principle that every man was created equal and that work by all constituted work by all.
The Great Patriotic War against Hitler, as terrible as it was, melded the diverse people of the Soviet Union into a country of one. The war built patriotism between everyone. It solidified the bond of communism across a nation that encompassed thirteen time zones. It was moments such as these when Anton felt the pride of patriotism sweeping through his body. These young men who served their nation today have no appreciation for the sacrifice the average Soviet citizen gave for his or her nation during that war.
The hero city of Stalingrad; the flight from Moscow; the rout of the Germans in the Ukraine. No, they would never know the depression of sacrifice and the thrill of victory that the Great Patriotic War brought to the Soviet Union.
Now Anton stood on the precipice of another historical event that would continue the voyage of his nation in the twentieth century: atomic power. Atomic power developed by Soviet scientists in Soviet laboratories. He shook his head once. If this was true, then what was the German scientist doing here? Was he a Communist sympathizer who had defected? Or as he questioned himself earlier, could this Danzinger be a prisoner from the Great Patriotic War with Germany?
He turned the next corner, continuing his thoughts about his nation, about what it would mean to have an atomic-powered submarine force, and occasionally thinking about Danzinger, who had to be helped out of the conference room, apparently drunk.
Several minutes later, he glanced at his watch and realized that fifteen minutes had passed. Anton stopped, raising his head to realize that somewhere along the way he had managed once again to lose his way in the myriad of passageways, floors, and laboratories that surrounded the covered dock that hid the
Whale from the prying overhead eyes of the United States.
He stopped, debating whether to try to retrace his steps, when he heard voices ahead of him. Where was he? The lights were dimmer in this portion of the facility. Anton’s nose twitched at an unfamiliar odor that seemed to lie beneath the cold air he was breathing. In his thoughts, the faint odor had gone unnoticed, but for submariners every breath of air when submerged meant a moment longer of living. Every submariner recognized when the air grew stale and carbon dioxide increased. Every submariner could tell by the smell of the air from the bow to the stern which compartment he was in.
This odor had a tinge of a hospital smell. Maybe he was near more laboratories. If so, he’d find some of the scientists there, and they could point him in the right direction.
As he approached the bend in the passageway, the noise of wheels squeaking as they turned across a rough floor reminded him of the shopping carts in the state-run shop Pretroyska. The noise of the wheels masked the voices he was hearing.