one another directly — and before I knew what I was doing I had stepped aside for him again and he had passed without noticing me. One time I had made up my mind thoroughly, but it ended in my stumbling and falling at his feet because at the very last instant when I was six inches from him my courage failed me.”
The words burned him now, seared him, shamed him. He had finally found that ‘officer’ Dostoevsky had written about, the last man on the rungs of the ladder above him that he needed to topple in order to reach his goal, his rightful place, the place he should have earned long ago with all the intelligence, guile and skill he brought to the task. Now Severomorsk was gone, and so were any who might one day sit in judgment on him. Fate had delivered him to this moment, and so he went to the Admiral to see if he could get the man to do what was necessary, and if not, to bid him to step aside. But it was he that had stepped aside again, Vladimir Ivanovich Karpov, Captain of the First Rank. He felt useless, lost and humiliated by his own fear and inadequacy, and the only thing he could do to comfort himself was fashion these two things into hatred.
It wasn’t Volsky he hated now, not Papa Volsky-not the amiable father that had endeared himself to his crew-not the man, but the Admiral. He was better than the man, or so Karpov believed of himself. It was just that the man had a uniform, that was all, and on that uniform there were stripes and stars that, when he looked upon his own cuff, were missing. Volsky was the whole of it in his mind just then, that whole stinking, creaking, drafty old house he had been living in all these forty years as a tired little mouse. “…I have been forty years listening to you through a crack in the floor…”
There in that stark and bleak infirmary, he had finally faced off with a sick old man and come away defeated yet again, not by the man, he believed, but by the uniform he wore, by the stars and bars on his cuff. Yet that uniform was nothing more than the tired vestige of a nation and a system that no longer existed! The Admiral had even threatened to relieve him, to take from him everything he had labored and suffered for all these many years in his mouse-like existence, the few stripes he had had earned on his own. What, did he need yet more? Didn’t he have enough already?
Karpov sat with that for a while, until that old, self-satisfied feeling of warm comfort settled over him again, calming his troubled mind. It was a stink, he knew, but one he had come to like after all these years. People grow accustomed to anything in time, and he had become familiar with the stench of his own shame.
Here he sat, at a moment that might change the whole of his life, and not only his life, but the lives of every man aboard the ship, and the lives of all those many generations ahead that Fedorov so worried about, and yet he could not act. That was the last awful truth he had to face as he sat there in his mouse hole in the stench of his own shame, that his failure was now complete and it could not be any other way; that when it came to the final moment, he was not a man after all, but that sneaking, conniving mouse; that this was his fate, and there was no changing it. He could not become a real man, not now, not ever, because in the final analysis, he could not see or even imagine that real man he thought to become. He could not come out of his darkened hole and face the light that would clearly reveal the state of his own wretched condition, and so he turned away from it. Now when he looked, there was nothing there but his own shadow, a dark stain on the stark gray paint of the ship’s deck, stretching out before him when he walked the long empty passageways; nothing but the shadow of a man that he could never be.
His clenched fist held all these thoughts as one last voice cried out within his troubled mind. He could do this. He still had time to act before Volsky returned to take the ship away from him again. Then the little doubts and fears returned in their well practiced chorus. Yes, he could do this, but then what? What after? What when the eyes of the crew were on him in the passages and crawlways of the ship-the other mice all gathered here in the kollectiv? The eyes would judge him, condemn him, weighted down with their notions of good and bad, right and wrong, justice and injustice. The more he thought about it, the more paralyzed he became, until he perceived, welling from within, a long restrained anger and rage surging up in him, like some deep, smoldering magma in his soul. He turned another well worn page and his eye fell on the only remedy Dostoevsky had devised for his dilemma… “ Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things…”
Karpov closed the book, and closed his eyes as well. What am I, he asked himself? Am I that mouse in my hole, or am I a man? Have I lived at all? He was suddenly done with the good or bad of things, not realizing at that moment the death of the very thing he had hoped to become-the death of the man struggling to be born within him. In his place there was something else now, something that could also act, willfully, with determination, with ruthless efficiency, but it was not a man. There was no moral compass guiding that thing, only the flight from pain, and the long restrained rage in his soul. Only that last line remained with him now, feeding a quiet inner rage that had been slowly gathering and smoking away the whole of his life. Yet he mistook it badly for the strength of purpose a man might have, unable to fathom how far from the truth his impulse actually was.
The Captain sat up abruptly and got out of the bed. He stood up on unsteady legs and calmed himself, looking at his sallow features in the mirror by the sink. Instinctively, he ran a hand through his thinning hair, and then opened the cabinet above the sink and took the small flask there to open it. There were many pleasures in life that a man might distract himself with to make the tooth ache of his own inadequacy go away. He took a sip of vodka to brace himself, and put the flask away. Then he put on his sheep’s wool Ushanka and straightened it on his head just the way he liked it, pulling sharply on the hem of his service jacket after he did so, just as the Admiral often did.
Time to creep out of his hole, he thought. He had things to do, people to check on, and he decided to put a few more stops on his agenda before he rested. He would go down to the missile magazines below decks and talk to that idiot, Chief Petty Officer Martinov. Then he needed to see Troyak…Yes, Troyak was essential. After that it was down to engineering for a little rooting around in the service bay. One last stop on his way back to the bridge would be the end of it-or rather the beginning of it all if he dared. He had no idea where things would lead after that. Nobody who dared to do a thing like the one he was contemplating ever did.
Fedorov would fret and worry and wonder what might happen in all the unlived days ahead. Fedorov would be possessed by right and wrong and paralyzed, as he had been just a single moment ago. What good would that do him? He expended all his mental energy to build a wall around his dusty old history books, and safeguard a distant future he would never live to see. What a fool he was! Fedorov had his mouse hole too.
As for Orlov? The chief would understand what he would soon be about, perhaps more than any other man aboard, and he would know the why of it. Orlov understood it instinctively, reflexively. He grasped it in his thick palm every time he had hold of a mishman by his scrubby little neck. He understood only too well what it was like to live with a toothache, and come to enjoy it after a while.
Chapter 29
“See to it that our Moskit-IIs are double checked for integrity, Chief Martinov, and reloaded in all silos where they have been expended,” Karpov ordered.
“We will have all silos full in an hour, sir.”
“See that you do.” Then the Captain lowered his voice, leaning in close to the chief so none of the other crewmen in the loading area would hear what he would say next. “And as for those five special warheads, make sure they are secure.”
“Five Captain? But we only received three.”
“Yes, of course. Three. I was thinking of another mission. Well for this mission we will need to have proper weapons selection for our forward mounted MOS-III system. Has missile number ten been double checked for readiness?” Karpov assumed there was one compatible warhead for each of his three surface-to-surface missile systems. The MOS-III was a high speed hypersonic missile, and the battery was arrayed in three vertical silos of three missiles each. The number ten missile was in a special silo, with control seals and extra protection. He wanted to be sure the warhead was there and not in inventory within the missile magazine.
The chief was one of the few men aboard ship other than Admiral Volsky who actually knew what the nuclear inventory was. The size and number of the warheads was kept in a sealed envelope, in a small vault that could be opened only by inserting both the Admiral's and the Captain’s keys. Yet the chief had to store the missiles and warheads securely on board, so he was obviously privy to the matter, yet sworn to say nothing whatsoever about the weapons. Under normal circumstances he would have never discussed the weapons with anyone, but the Captain, he assumed, was surely informed by now and knew what he was talking about. He shifted
