Kirov (48 page)

Dostoevsky
had been talking about the injustice of life, and the cruelty of fate,
comparing man to a pantry mouse thirsting for just a little revenge.
“Now
let us look at this mouse in action. Let us suppose, for instance, that it
feels insulted, too (and it almost always does feel insulted), and wants to
revenge itself. Through his innate stupidity a man looks upon his revenge as
justice, pure and simple; while the mouse does not believe in the justice of
it. To come at last to the deed itself, to the very act of revenge, the
luckless mouse succeeds in creating doubts and questions …there inevitably
works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its
doubts, emotions…. Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that
with a wave of its paw, and creep ignominiously into its mouse hole.
”

He
paused, an ashen, disconsolate look on his face. Here he was, tucked away in
his mouse hole. He knew what he wanted to do, what he
should
do, and
yet, he had done exactly what Dostoevsky said. He had worked himself up with
questions, and reasons and doubts, that same fatal brew that so confounds the
mouse in every man’s heart. He was ashamed of himself for not being stronger
than he was. What was all his conniving and planning and bluster for if, in the
end, he could not be a man instead of this confused little mouse? His tired
eyes strayed again over the well worn text, and the words scolded him, leaping
off the tattered pages of the book that he had read so many times.

“There
in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed
mouse promptly becomes absorbed in everlasting spite. For forty years together
it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details.…
Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in
trivial ways, knowing that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a
hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself.”

 That
was the story of his life, thought Karpov. He had sulked in his mouse hole, and
slipped out in the dark to steal one man’s cheese and another’s bread. And yes,
he had oh so carefully avoided all the mouse traps, dodged the hard coiled
springs that might snap down on his tail and catch him, particularly after
Gazprom. He had crept about the big drafty old mansion that his country had
become for forty years, and brought pain and suffering to more than one rival
in all that time. All it had brought him was this aching sense of isolation and
doubt when things came right down to this last awful moment when he suffered the
final humiliation, dressed down by Volsky like that, right in front of the
Doctor! Now he knew that all these years he had indeed been a mouse, and not a
man. When it came down to the pitting of his will against that of a man like
Volsky, here he was in his mouse hole again, reading books.

He
flipped ahead, noting a passage he had underlined where Dostoevsky’s character
had described his inability to enact the vengeance he had spoken of on a fellow
officer and rival.

“I
did not slink away through cowardice,”
he read on,
“but through an unbounded vanity. What I was afraid of was that
everyone present would jeer at me and fail to understand when I began to
protest… I stared at him with spite and hatred and so it went on ... for
several years! My resentment grew even deeper with years. In this way
everything was at last ready. It would never have done to act offhand, at
random; the plan had to be carried out skillfully, by degrees … I made every
preparation, I was quite determined – it seemed as though we should run into
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 uncomfortably.

“Excuse
me, Captain. Mount the number ten missile?”

“Correct,”
said Karpov, his voice hard and controlled.

“But
I will need permission from—”