Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt For Red October by Boris Gindin, David Hagberg Page A

heel and tries to get away, but Gindin stops him.
    Sergey is supposedly on duty right now, so Gindin is more than a little concerned. “What’s going on?” he asks.
    Sergey doesn’t want to look up, let alone answer any stupid questions. He is clutching something in his left hand, and it looks as if he is on the verge of tears.
    “Look, I’m your superior officer,” Gindin says mildly. “I want to know what’s wrong, and that’s an order.”
    “I just got a letter from my mother,” Sergey says. He’s having real trouble not bursting into tears. “She says Larissa is going around town with some other guy.” His eyes are wide. “We’re engaged to be married, Senior Lieutenant.”
    It’s the next thing to a Dear John letter, the kind that half the sailors in the fleet either have gotten or will get at some time or another. The normally tough, antisocial Sergey can hardly hold his emotions in check. Gindin feels sorry for him, because he didn’t deservesomething like this. He was just a young kid, far away from his family, carrying out his duties, maybe getting only four hours’ sleep a day, working like a dog, and then he gets this letter. He is grief stricken, and the more Gindin talks to him the worse it gets. Maybe he’ll actually do harm to himself; it’s happened before.
    “You’re young,” Gindin tells him. “You have your entire life ahead of you. This girl doesn’t deserve a guy like you, out here serving his country.”
    Sergey isn’t buying it.
    Gindin is trying to convince his sailor that all the men in the turbo/motor division are friends and crewmates who respect him. He doesn’t need to be treated this way by any girl.
    Being away from home puts a lot of emotional stress on the crew, especially the sailors who are just kids, mostly eighteen or nineteen and from small towns or farms out in the country. They’re capable of doing some really stupid things, and it’s up to the officers to make sure nothing bad happens. Gindin spends fifteen or twenty minutes talking with Sergey, trying to put some good perspective in his head and make sure the kid will be okay. But watching Sergey head back to work, Gindin isn’t so sure that he’s helped very much. The sailor mumbled his thanks, but that was it. The mask was back, leaving an unreadable expression. They could have been discussing the weather.
    Standing alone for a moment, listening to the sounds of the ship tied to a mooring, engines off, Gindin thinks that already this day is dragging when it’s supposed to be relaxing. He and Firsov agreed at breakfast that this evening they would get together with some of the other officers for a few drinks, maybe swap some jokes. Tomorrow it would be back to work for all of them, so this was their last day to relax. But for some reason the day seems to stretch; every minute seems like an hour. No one aboard ship is having any fun; everyone is long faced, down in the dumps.
    Just forward of the machinery rooms, Gindin runs into Firsov and Sergey Bogonets, who is a senior lieutenant of the BCH-3 torpedosystems section. The two of them have hatched a practical joke on Senior Lieutenant Nikolay Bogomolov, in charge of the BCH-3 rocket systems section. He and Bogonets are roommates, and practically no one aboard ship likes Bogomolov. He’s sneaky, and whenever he sees somebody doing something wrong—officer or crewman—he immediately runs to tell the captain. Bogomolov has tried to build a friendship with Gindin and Firsov, but it can’t work because they think he’s a
stukach,
a snitch.
    It’s less than ten hours before the mutiny, and there’s a growing edginess throughout the ship. Ordinary military discipline isn’t exactly flowing out the hatches, but nothing seems right. Just after breakfast Gindin spots one of his sailors lugging a heavy wrench, about the length of an umbrella, forward as if he were on an urgent repair job. A half hour later the same sailor is scurrying aft with the same