Atlantis

“His name was Sergei Vassilyevich Kuznetsov.” Katya was reading from a diary she’d found on the table behind the corpse. “Captain, Second Rank, Soviet Navy. Order of the Red Star for services to state security. He was the Kazbek’s zampolit, the zamestitel’ komandira po politicheskoi chasti, the deputy commander for political affairs. Responsible for overseeing political reliability and ensuring the captain carried out his orders.”

“A KGB stooge,” Costas said.

“I can think of a few captains I knew in the Black Sea Fleet who would not be displeased by this sight.” She read on. “He spent his final days right here. The active sonar had been disabled so he couldn’t send a signal. But he monitored the passive radar pulse wave detector for any sign of surface vessels in the vicinity.” She turned a page.

“My God. The final entry is for December 25^th, 1991. By coincidence the last day the Red Flag flew over the Kremlin.” She looked up at Jack and Costas, her eyes wide. “The sub went down on June 17^th that year, which means this man was alive in here for more than six months!”

They looked in horrified fascination at the corpse.

“It’s possible,” Costas said eventually. “Physically, that is. The battery could have sustained the CO₂ scrubbers and the electrolysis desalination machine that extracts oxygen from seawater. And there was evidently plenty to eat and drink.” He surveyed the scatter of empty vodka bottles among the rubbish on the floor. “Psychologically is another matter. How anyone could remain sane in these conditions is beyond me.”

“The diary’s full of political rhetoric, the kind of empty communist propaganda we had drummed into us like religion,” Katya said. “Only the most fanatical party members were chosen as political officers, the equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo.”

“Something very odd went on here,” Jack murmured. “I can’t believe in six months he found no way of signalling the surface. He could have manually ejected a buoy through a torpedo tube or discharged floating waste. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Listen to this.” Katya’s voice betrayed a dawning realization as she flicked from page to page, pausing occasionally to scan an entry. She lingered for a moment and then began to translate.

“I am the chosen one. I have buried my comrades with full military honours. They sacrificed their lives for the Motherland. Their strength gives me strength. Long live the Revolution!” She looked up.

“What does it mean?” Costas asked.

“According to this diary, there were twelve of them. Five days after the sinking they selected one man to survive. The rest took cyanide tablets. Their bodies were weighted and ejected through the torpedo tubes.”

“Had they given up all hope?” Costas sounded incredulous.

“They were determined beyond reason that the submarine should not fall into NATO hands. They were prepared to destroy the vessel if any would-be rescuer turned out to be hostile.”

“I can almost see the logic,” Costas said. “You only need one man to detonate charges. One man uses less food and air, so the submarine can be guarded that much longer. Everyone else is worse than redundant, a drain on precious resources. They must have chosen the man least likely to crack up.”

Jack knelt down beside the empty bottles and shook his head. “There must be more to it than that. It still doesn’t add up.”

“Their world was about to collapse,” Costas said. “Diehards like these may have convinced themselves they were a last bastion of communism, a final bulwark against the West.”

They looked at Katya.

“We all knew the end was near,” she said, “and some refused to accept it. But they did not put madmen in nuclear submarines.”

One question had been nagging at them since they first saw the dangling corpse, and Costas finally spoke up.

“What happened to the rest of the crew?”

Katya was reading another part of the diary, a look of increasing incredulity on her face as she began to piece it together.

“It’s as we suspected in naval intelligence at the time, only worse,” she said. “This was a renegade boat. Her captain, Yevgeni Mikhailovich Antonov, set out on a routine patrol from the Black Sea Fleet submarine base at Sevastopol. He disappeared south without ever making contact again.”

“He could never have hoped to get out of the Black Sea without being detected,” Costas said. “The Turks maintain a one hundred per cent sonar blanket over the Bosporus.”

“I don’t believe that was his intention. I believe he was heading to a rendezvous, perhaps at this island.”

“It seems a strange time to defect,” Jack remarked. “Right at the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union in sight. Any astute naval officer would have seen it coming. It would have made more sense simply to hang on and wait.”

“Antonov was a brilliant submariner but also a maverick. He hated the Americans so much he was deemed too risky for ballistic missile boats. I do not think this was a defection.”

Jack was still troubled. “He must have had something to offer someone, something to make it worthwhile.”

“Does the diary say what happened to him?” Costas asked.

Katya read before looking up again. “Our friend the zampolit got to know what was afoot several hours before the sinking. He rallied the spetsnaz team and confronted the captain in the control room. Antonov had already issued sidearms to his officers but they were no match for assault rifles. After a bloody battle they forced the captain and the surviving crew to surrender, but not before the sub had run out of control and crashed into the sea floor.”

“What did they do with the captain?”

“Before the confrontation Kuznetsov sealed off the engineering compartment and reversed the extractor fans to pump in the carbon monoxide collected in the scrubbers. The engineers would have been dead before they knew what was happening. As for Antonov and his men, they were forced back behind the escape trunk and sealed in the reactor compartment.”

“Death by slow irradiation. It could have taken days, even weeks.” Costas stared at the mummified face, a hideous sentinel that seemed duty-bound even in death. He looked as if he wanted to drive his fist into the shrivelled head. “You deserved your end, you sadistic bastard.”

CHAPTER 14

This is a ship of the dead. The sooner we get out of here the better.” Katya snapped shut the diary and led them out of the sonar room past the dangling corpse. She avoided a final glance at the body, its ghastly visage already seared into her mind.

“Headlamps on all the time now,” Costas ordered. “We must assume he rigged this boat to blow.”

After a few steps he held up his hand.

“That’s the weapons loading hatch above us,” he said. “We should be able to take the chute directly down to the torpedo room. It’s an open elevator shaft but has a rung ladder on the inside.”

They moved to the edge of the shaft directly below the hatch. Just as Costas was about to step onto the upper rung, he paused and eyed one of the pipes that led from the sonar room down the chute. He brushed away the encrustation from a slight ridge that ran the length of the pipe, revealing a pair of red-coated wires taped to the metal.

“Wait here.”

He worked his way back towards the sonar room, occasionally stopping to flick away encrustation. He briefly disappeared behind the dangling corpse and then made his way back.

“Just as I suspected,” he said. “The wires lead back to a switch which has been duct-taped to the console.