Anahtar

Boots on wet concrete. That was the first

sound, before the engines, before the orders —

boots on wet concrete and the slow industrial

breathing of the pier cranes shifting their

weight in the dark.

The floodlights over Pier Four turned the water

the color of used motor oil. K-52 lay against

the rubber fenders the way an old dog lies

against a wall, heavy and patient and not quite

asleep.Verkhoyansk, in faded Cyrillic on her

sail. The men called her Vera. They had always

called her Vera. Tonight, walking past her in

the rain, none of them did.

Captain First Rank Sergei Viktorovich

Morozov stood at the head of the brow with his

cap level and his hands at his sides. He was

forty-nine years old, a thin man, narrow at the

shoulders, the gray in his beard cut close. He

had been told twenty-two minutes ago that the

boat was sailing. He had been told nineteen

minutes ago that he would not be told why.

Sailors moved past him onto the deck. He

counted them without appearing to count. He

noted the ones whose tunics were misbuttoned

and the ones who carried nothing — no kit bag, no second pair of boots, nothing. A young michman

went by with a duffel that still had the laundry tag pinned to it. Behind him a torpedoman in a

civilian jacket, the rain darkening the wool. Morozov did not stop them. He looked at each face

once, briefly, the way a priest looks at a coffin.

Captain Second Rank Pavel Andreyevich Sokolov came down the brow at a half-run and stopped at

his elbow. The first officer was thirty-six, square-built, clean-shaven to the point of severity. He

saluted out of habit even though they were standing two meters apart.

“Reactor’s warm,” Sokolov said. “Anisimov says forty minutes.”

“Tell him thirty.”

“He won’t like it.”

“He doesn’t have to like it.”

Sokolov did not move yet. There was a small thing in his face that he was working out whether to say. Morozov gave him the second of silence to decide.

“Six men still ashore,” Sokolov said. “Two are in the city. One is a torpedoman, one is —”“Leave them.”

Sokolov’s jaw set. “Sir.”

“Note it in the log. Names, ranks, last known. I want it correct.”

“Yes, sir.”

He went back up the brow. Morozov watched him go and thought, briefly and without pleasure, that

Sokolov was a man who had never in his life left anyone behind, and that this was the first time he was learning what it cost.

The wind shifted. Diesel, brine, a thread of something burnt from the shore — perhaps the bakery on Lenina Street, perhaps not. Morozov turned his face out of it and walked up the brow himself.

In the missile compartment the lights were already on full. Captain Third Rank Mikhail Olegovich Baranov stood beneath the third tube with a clipboard that he did not need and a pen that he was not using. He was checking the seals by eye. He had checked them by eye three hours ago, when the boat was scheduled for a maintenance cycle and he had been planning to take his daughter to a puppet theater on Saturday. The puppet theater was on Saturday. This was Wednesday. A great many things had moved.

A warrant officer named Kuzin stood at his shoulder and waited.

“Tube four,” Baranov said. “Pressure.”

“Nominal.”

“Read it to me.”

Kuzin read it to him. Baranov nodded once. He moved to tube five. He did this for each of them. He had done it for each of them at the start of every patrol of his career, and he did it now in the same voice, with the same small economical movements, and Kuzin, who had served with him for two years, understood with a sudden dropping feeling in his stomach that the captain third rank was frightened.

Baranov was not frightened of the missiles. He was frightened because the order had come down with a code group he had only ever seen in exercises, and even in exercises only twice.

He kept his face flat and walked to tube six.

In the radio room Starshina Ilya Romanovich Belov had his headphones on one ear and his thumb on the dial of the secondary set. He was twenty-four. He had a wife in Severodvinsk and a habit of humming Vysotsky under his breath when he was thinking. He was not humming now.

The fleet net was strange.

It was not silent — silence he would have understood. Silence happened. Silence had a shape. This was not silence. This was the wrong kind of traffic. Routine call signs were absent. An auxiliary frequency that ought to have been carrying weather was carrying a tone, a flat unmodulated tone, the kind they used for a held channel. Two encrypted bursts had come through in the last ten minutes, both very short, both addressed to vessels he did not recognize by pennant.He wrote down what he heard. He wrote down what he did not hear. The second list was longer.

Lieutenant Artyom Sergeyevich Kravtsov leaned in through the doorway. He was the sonar officer, twenty-nine, lean, with the raw red knuckles of a man who washed his hands too often.

“Anything?”

“Not for us,” Belov said. “Not yet.”

Kravtsov looked at the second list. He read it the way a doctor reads a chart.

“Nothing from Northern Fleet HQ at all?”

“One. Twelve minutes ago. Three groups.”

“Three?”

Belov nodded. Three groups was a sailing order. Three groups was also, on certain days that had been drilled and never used, something else. He did not say so. Kravtsov did not ask.

“All right,” Kravtsov said, and went forward.

Podpolkovnik Dmitri Arkadyevich Zorin was in the wardroom, because there was nowhere else for him to be. He had come aboard at 0340 with a leather case and a sealed envelope and a pass signed at a level that had made the duty officer’s hand shake taking it. He was a slight man, gray-suited under his greatcoat, with a face that gave away nothing because there was very little in it to give. He drank tea. He had been offered the tea by a steward who had not looked at him.

Doctor Elena Mikhailovna Orlova came in, saw him, and almost turned around. She did not. She crossed to the samovar instead and poured a glass for herself and stood with her back to him while it cooled. She was forty-one, a small woman, dark-haired, with the kind of competent hands that had stopped a man’s bleeding in a Pacific port once and had not been quite steady afterward.

“Doctor,” Zorin said, behind her.

“Yes.”

“You have your manifest of medications.”

It was not a question.

“Yes.”

“I would like a copy.”

She turned. She looked at him over the rim of the tea glass. She thought, very clearly and very briefly:he is not a doctor and he does not care about medications and he is asking me this because he wants to know if I will give him things without a fight.

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll bring it after we sail.”

He inclined his head a quarter of an inch. She left the wardroom without drinking the tea.In the passageway she passed a young seaman, an electrician’s mate, who was buttoning his tunic with one hand because the other held a paper bag. Inside the bag was a sandwich his mother had pressed into it at the gate. She had not been allowed onto the pier. He had not been allowed off.

They had spoken through the wire for perhaps a minute. He had not eaten the sandwich. He would not eat it. He would carry it down with him and put it in his locker, and four days from now, when he opened the locker for a clean shirt, the smell of the bread would make him sit down on the deck plates and put his face in his hands, and a torpedoman he did not know well would step over him and say nothing, because by then there would be nothing to say.

Orlova did not see all of that. She saw the boy, and the bag, and his hand on the buttons. She put her palm flat on his shoulder as she passed and said, “Eat something tonight. That’s an order.”

“Yes, doctor.”

She went on.

In the engineering spaces Captain Second Rank Nikolai Petrovich Anisimov had his hand on a steam line and was listening to it the way other men listened to their wives. He was fifty-two. He had been on this boat, on and off, for nineteen years. He knew where she leaked. He knew which valves were honest and which lied. He knew the particular note the starboard turbine made at sixty percent that meant nothing and the slightly different note at sixty percent that meant everything, and tonight she was making neither, which was its own kind of warning, because Vera always made some sound and tonight she was being quiet for him.

A michman came up with a clipboard. “Captain wants thirty minutes.”

Anisimov did not look up. “Captain can have thirty-five.”

“He said thirty.”

“Then thirty-five.”

The michman waited. Anisimov took his hand off the line, wiped it on a rag that had stopped being

any color years ago, and said, “Tell him thirty-two and bring me Pyotr from the auxiliary panel.

Go.”

The michman went. Anisimov put his hand back on the steam line. He spoke to the boat under his breath.Slowly, old woman. Slowly. We’re going out.

At 0512 the brow came up. At 0514 the lines came in. At 0517 the tugs took her, and the Verkhoyansk moved away from Pier Four with the slow indifference of something very large and very tired that has been woken up.

Morozov stood on the bridge in the sail with Sokolov half a step behind him and a junior officer at the voicepipe. The rain had thinned to a mist. The shore lights smeared on the wet steel. A patrol boat sat off the harbor mouth with its running lights doused, which was wrong, and a second patrol boat sat behind it, which was more wrong, and beyond them, where there should have been three merchantmen at anchor waiting for the morning pilots, there was nothing at all.

Sokolov saw it. He did not speak.The harbormaster’s voice came up the line, thin and formal. ”Verkhoyansk, you are clear of thechannel. Good hunting.”

It was the wrong phrase. It was not a phrase used for departing patrols. It was older than that, anduglier, and a man on the harbormaster’s staff had used it without thinking, perhaps because no onehad given him the right one tonight.

Morozov took the handset.

“Acknowledged,” he said. ”Verkhoyanskclear.”

He gave the handset back. He looked once, briefly, at the lights of the base falling away — the sodium yellows, the sour reds of the warning beacons, the single white square that was the windowof the duty office where someone he had known for twenty years was, presumably, still standing —and then he turned his face forward, into the dark, and did not look back.

“Take her down to the deep water line, Pavel Andreyevich.”

“Tak tochno, Kapitan.”

They cleared the headland. The swell came up under her and Vera shouldered into it the way she had always shouldered into it, and the men in the sail felt, through their boots and their bones, the old animal wakefulness of a submarine going to sea.

At the deep water line Morozov dropped down through the hatch. Sokolov followed. The lookouts came down. The hatch was dogged. In the control room the red night-lighting made every face thesame face.

“Make your depth eighty meters,” Morozov said. “Course three-four-zero. Speed twelve.”

The orders went around the room in low voices. The deck tilted, very slightly, under their feet.

Belov, in the radio shack, took the headphones off his ear and set them down. He logged the time.

He looked at the second hand of the bulkhead clock as it crossed the twelve.

“Radio silence,” he said, to no one in particular.

The sea closed over them.