Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt for Red October

“They couldn’t be left on their own, if there was an emergency,” Sablin said. He is looking at gauges on the control panel. “Say if you were delayed for some reason, they wouldn’t know what to do. They’d be lost.”

“If it was a big enough emergency and our lives depended on getting under way, they could manage until I could get down here,” Gindin said.

Now, locked in the compartment, he realizes just how shortsighted he’d been.

“What are you talking about?” Vinogradov demands.

Gindin looks at his fellow officers. All of them have stopped their shouting and banging, and they’re all staring at him like he was a man from Mars. “If he has the enlisted crew with him, plus Vladimir and the other officers, he could do it.”

“What, start the engines and sail out of here?” Kuzmin demands.

Gindin has talked with some of the other officers who found Sablin’s behavior over the past few weeks just as odd as he has. The zampolit has been asking a lot of questions.

“I think so,” Gindin says.

“Who’ll navigate for him?” Vinogradov wants to know.

Gindin shakes his head. “He could head down the river, and once out in the open Baltic he just has to follow his nose.”

“So he follows his nose, Boris,” Vinogradov asks. “But to where?”

“Sweden,” Kuzmin breaks the sudden, dark silence.

“My God,” one of the other officers says softly. “The bastards insane. He means to defect. We’re all dead.”

“Not unless we can get out of here first,” Gindin says. “Sablin told us he wasn’t leaving until morning.”

“But there’s only nine of us,” Kuzmin points out. “If he convinced even half the crew to go along with him, there’s nothing we could do aboutit. There’s just too many of them. They wouldn’t even need guns.”

“If we can get out of here we’ll find the captain; he’ll know what to do,” Gindin says.

“If they haven’t killed him,” someone counters. “Or if he’s thrown in with the mutiny, and is just lying low.”

Some of the others start to object, but Vinogradov holds up a hand to silence them. “Shut up and listen to me. The captain would never go along with a crazy scheme like this, no matter how convincing Sablin is.”

No one says a thing,

“Has anyone seen him this afternoon?”

Still no one says a word. The compartment is absolutely still. They all understand that their lives hang in the balance of a great number of factors, most of which are totally out of their control.

“Maybe Sablin shot him and hid his body somewhere,” Vinogradov suggests.

“That’s not possible,” Gindin says.

“How do you know, Boris? How can you be sure? Are you willing to bet your life, all of our lives, on Sablin’s kindness? If he’s killed the captain, what’s to prevent him from killing us all?”

“I don’t know anything for sure,” Gindin admits. “Except that unless we get out of here we’ll never know.”

“If we try to escape, what will our chances be?” one of the officers asks.

“I don’t know that, either,” Gindin says. “But I know for sure that unless we try our chances will be zero.”

The sonar supply compartment is actually two small rooms, equipped with only one work bench, a small closet that contains the power supplies, repeaters, targeting computers, and other electronic equipment that supports the sonar stations, and drawers that contain some non-classified schematics, a set of spare parts and a few screwdrivers, socket sets, and other small maintenance tools and testing gear.

At this point there is no phone in the compartment, nor is there any way in which to signal someone else aboard the ship, other than by banging on the light blue steel bulkheads.

The second, somewhat smaller compartment contains only more built-in drawers that hold more tools and test equipment and some technical manuals, which are supposed to be kept three decks up in the library.

Gindin steps through the open doorway into this compartment and almost immediately spots a water pump bolted to the deck in one corner. Pumps like these are located throughout the ship to move potable water from the tanks below to the various compartments where it’s needed. The designers placed the pumps wherever they saw fit in order to minimize the lengths of pipe runs. It is one of those Soviet economy measures that aren’t very elegant and don’t look good but work.