winning the post in a hard fought competition with two other men. Volsky had, in fact, preferred another man, but Karpov had ingratiated himself with senior officers on the naval board, and won approval by other means. And he had even bigger plans if things went the way he imagined.
One day he would be wearing the Admiral's cap and the bold gold stripes on the cuff of his jacket. But not today. Today his black sheep wool Ushanka hat and thick leather sea jacket would serve him well enough, and he was content to be captain of the ship where his considerable talents could be put to the best use possible-as long as he could be captain. He saluted as the Admiral left the bridge, pleased to have the citadel to himself again.
He felt a strange sense of kinship with the battlecruiser. Kirov was rebuilt from an older life, just as he was with his new career in the navy. Russia had been doing some grave digging, he thought. Finances were so tight, resources so limited, that we have to pull ships out of retirement and refit them to have anything seaworthy these days. Oh, they had given the ship a clever new coat of radar absorbing paint, fitted those new carbon fiber tiles to her siding, with a curious coating of phototropic material that would change colors in various lighting conditions. It was a futile attempt to make the big ship less observable to both electronic and optical systems at a distance, and sometimes it worked quite well, but Kirov was a large vessel with a distinctive prow and silhouette that would be recognized without much difficulty. These features built into her redesign on the citadels, gun turrets, and all weather siding would make her seem smaller than she was to a curious radar set, but she would by no means be considered a stealthy ship.
That was fine by him, he thought. A warship should look like it could fight, and Kirov had all of the classic sharp angles, stalwart masts and radar festooned towers that brought the word battlecruiser to mind when you looked at her. This is a ship that was meant to be seen and feared, not something that would slink through the seas in the dark of night like a whisper of fog, hoping to remain undiscovered like a submarine. No, Kirov was a warship, a predator at sea, menacing, dangerous and intimidating in every line and angle of her design.
Karpov hated submarines, and he justifiably feared them. When offered a chance to train for undersea warfare, he refused the assignment, recoiled from it, as if he might be joining a colony of lepers if he went. There was something vile about a submarine, he thought, something devious, something that too closely reminded him of the darker aspects of himself. He understood the work of an undersea boat only too well. In fact, he had captained his life like any good submariner might up until that first great failure that had sent him to the bottom of the sea.
Karpov had planned and plotted his way up through the corporate ranks of Gazprom, but his career took a turn for the worse under the Putin administration. The executive class of the company had evaded taxes, stripped off assets and distributed them to family members, but the Putin reforms began to root out the corruption and return control of the company to the state, which was really nothing more than taking them out of the frying pan and putting them into the fire.
In the midst of the turmoil, Karpov’s long negotiations with Western oil and gas companies came under scrutiny, the special favors, privileged access, the perks and gifts exchanged, and he found himself betrayed and back-stabbed when a consortium of Western companies led by British Petroleum undercut his position, reneged on a technology transfer deal, and left him dangerously exposed to government scrutiny. He could hear the investigators listening for him, then pinging out a more invasive search, and he was very afraid. When a government committee dropped a depth charge in the water that he knew he could not avoid, he abandoned that first career ship and went into the cold waters of unemployment, burning with resentment and vowing he would one day get even with BP and the other Western companies that had ended his career.
A few hard years followed where he sat at harbor himself, a derelict like the old hulk of the ship he now captained, without heading or compass, until he eventually decided, like so many other ruined men in Russia, to turn to the military. He joined the navy as a lieutenant where his devious skill and ruthless efficiency saw him advance quickly.
Like Kirov, Karpov had struggled to rebuild himself as well, yet to do so he had brought the same old habits and strategies of the corporate oligarchy along with him, climbing the ranks here by using the same guile and conniving undersea tactics that had seen him move up the ladder in Gazprom. The navy was just the sort of environment a man like Karpov thrived in. There were established rules here, clear pathways for advancement, well honed protocols and decorum. One could follow a sure and certain route through the ranks, much like the halls and gangways of the ship itself, and he climbed the ladders well.
It was not an easy climb, or one without conflict. Russians still had a deep distrust of capitalism, and businessmen in general after those dark years of collapse. It was as if his contemporaries could sense he had come from another world, a submarine world, and that there was no place for him now on a ship like Kirov. The Captain had to offset all this by finding the right men to please, and the right voices to silence with a well planned reprisal when necessary.
Russians were meant to suffer, or so they seemed to believe, and Karpov would see that his enemies suffered well if they blocked his way forward. His ability to undermine a potential rival was a long practiced skill. Even as a young school boy he had found that he had to use his head to survive in this world. Physically small, and even somewhat frail as a boy, he nonetheless possessed a sharp intelligence and aggressive, competitive spirit. When the boys would play in the yard, choosing up sides with the strongest among them as team captains, Karpov hated it when he would be the last one picked by either side, and hated it even more that none of the other boys would trust him to ever carry the ball in the scrimmage matches they played.
In secondary school he had taken to closeting himself away and finding solace in the souls of Russia’s great writers, and he soon fancied himself a man from the Underground, just as Dostoevsky had written about it.
“My schoolfellows met me with spiteful and merciless jibes because I was not like any of them. But I could not endure their taunts; I could not give in to them with the ignoble readiness with which they gave in to one another. I hated them from the first, and shut myself away from everyone in timid, wounded and disproportionate pride. In the end I could not put up with it: with years, a craving for society, for friends, developed in me. I attempted to get on friendly terms with some of my schoolfellows; but somehow or other my intimacy with them was always strained and soon ended of itself…”
Russia was a big, bruising, and rough place. Her men were the same way at times, uncultured, and relying more on brawn than brains. Karpov saw how the physical was glorified in school athletics, and knew there was no way forward for him there. He was not like any of the other boys. He could not run fast enough, jump high enough, or push his way through the line to get at the ball. Yet he suppressed his shame and determined to become a team captain nonetheless, by some other means, by any means necessary. To do so he had courted the favor of his athletic coach, staying late in the dressing room, bringing him food from home, and even gifting him with a small vial of vodka that he had found in his father’s old liquor cabinet.
Gradually, he was given more responsibility there, helping to draft the rosters, inventory the athletic equipment and see that everything was accounted for and locked up in the bins properly at day’s end. His position soon saw him assigned the task of distributing the balls and equipment to the various squads, and handing out their shoes and uniforms as well, and he loved his hard won authority and the small measure of power and control it gave him over the other boys. He saw to it that any boy who had ever offended him ended up with the most shoddy equipment in reprisal. The strong young team captains who had so cavalierly passed over him before, now had to come begging, and those who did not soon found themselves undermined in other ways as well.
Academically gifted, Karpov helped the boys he favored in their studies, and shunned and even impeded those he perceived as rivals or threats. He once went so far as to see that one lad received the wrong list of words for study on a particularly important test, and it was enough to put a torpedo into his chances for a scholarship that semester. It ended his athletic program as well when the boy failed the exam so miserably that he could not participate in the crucial team competitions that spring.
When he moved on to university studies Karpov followed much the same route, surfacing to becoming a teacher’s aide, docent, librarian’s assistant. Here it was not footballs and helmets he controlled access to, but books and information. He saw to it that he worked the desk for special reference volumes, keeping track of book requests, and here he decided who got the materials, and who did not. He moved students up or down on his lists, sometimes extracting favors and forcing them to support his other agendas if they wanted access to important information he controlled in the library.
Once, when embarrassed in debate class by another gifted student who had opposed him too skillfully, Karpov saw to it that the student waited longer than anyone else, and after finally releasing an important volume to him he found a way to slip into his dormitory room and steal away the book, hiding it back in the shelves and then
