Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt For Red October (22 page)

Shein’s only real worry is that Sablin might be planning to defect to the West with the ship. The seaman has learned to have a lot of respect for the
zampolit,
but he asks point-blank if Sablin is a foreign spy.

Sablin has to laugh. He claps the young man on the shoulder. “If I were a spy I would simply blow up the ship; I wouldn’t bother with a mutiny,” he says. “Nor would I bother to send a message to the people.”

Shein has listened to the tape-recorded message, which made little or no sense to him. He is just a kid from Togliatti, a small town on the remote Chinese border, who got into some trouble and was forced to join the navy or go to jail. What does he know about political statements? All he knows is that if he and the others help out, the
zampolit
will get them out of the navy.

“If this goes wrong, we’ll all be shot,” Shein argues. He’s frightened, and it shows. “The KGB doesn’t screw around.”

“No one’s going to get shot; trust me,” Sablin promises. “Anyway, if something like that happened it would only be the officers, not the enlisted men.”

“I don’t want to end up in a gulag, freezing my ass off, eating rats.”

“It won’t be like that, either,” Sablin says. “Are you with me?”

Shein nods a little uncertainly, still not 100 percent sure of anything, except that he would like to get out of the navy and return home.

“Good man,” Sablin says, beaming. He hands Shein the envelope addressed to the captain and instructs the seaman to go to the ship’s library and pick out a few books that Captain Potulniy might like to read.

Again Shein nods uncertainly, even less sure what’s going on. What does getting some books for the captain have to do with a mutiny?

“I want you to take the books and the letter down to sonar parts compartment two,” Sablin orders. It’s far forward and at just about the lowest point in the ship, except for the bilges, and at this hour of the evening, at a mooring, the compartment will be unmanned. “Then I want you to disconnect the phone and take it out of there.”

“Yes, sir,” Shein says. He’s really confused, but suddenly Sablin makes everything frighteningly clear.

“As soon as you have the compartment ready, let me know. It’s where we’ll keep the captain after I arrest him.”

Shein steps back a pace, the enormity of what they are about to do striking him in the gut. Arrest Captain Potulniy? The captain is not a bad man. In fact, Shein has never exchanged so much as one word with him. And it’s not the captain who’s at fault for what Sablin preaches is a failure of trust by Moscow.

Sablin pulls a Makarov 9mm pistol out of a drawer. “Take this, and when you’re finished belowdecks go directly to the midshipmen’s dining hall, and I’ll meet you.” He grins. “Right now Comrade Mauser is empty, but I’ll give you the magazine in plenty of time.”

“I don’t want to shoot anybody,” Shein complains.

“Not to worry, Alexander, you won’t have to shoot anybody,” Sablin says, getting to his feet. “I promise you. Now hurry and get the compartment ready for our guest; we don’t have much time left.”

Shein turns and leaves, but before he does Sablin can read the confusion and worry in the boy’s eyes. To this point Shein had been led to believe that Captain Potulniy was going along with the plot. There was going to be a mutiny, but in name only, because the captain himself would be a part of the conspiracy. It is a small white lie, in Sablin’s mind, but a necessary lie to ensure that everything goes well.

If Potulniy gets so much as a whiff of the plot before he is secured in the compartment below, he will sound the alarm and fight back. At that point all of Sablin’s carefully laid plans will be reduced to nothing more than an exercise in futility.

A
dangerous exercise in futility, because officers who attempt mutiny and fail at it get their nine ounces. A 9mm bullet to the back of the head.

The next fifteen minutes while Sablin waits for Shein to report back that the sonar compartment is ready are difficult for Sablin, who paces his compartment. This part of the plot wouldn’t have been so critical if Potulniy had gone ashore this afternoon for a few hours of liberty. Sablin had planned on going with the captain and somehow ditching him in Riga.

How Sablin had planned accomplishing that part will probably never be known, but he was, if nothing else, a romantic, and ditching the captain ashore sounded swashbuckling.

But Potulniy refused. He had too much work to do aboard before they sailed for the shipyards tomorrow. Which was too bad, because Sablin had a real respect for the captain, and everybody knew it.

Shein appears back at Sablin’s cabin. “It’s done,” he says, a little breathlessly. His face is pale and his brow sweaty.

“Good,” Sablin says. “Now get yourself to the midshipmen’s dining hall and wait for me.”

“What about the bullets?”

“As soon as I’m finished with the captain,” Sablin says. “Now go!”

When Shein disappears down the corridor, Sablin takes a moment to compose himself before he rushes to the captain’s cabin and without knocking throws the door open.

Potulniy, in shirtsleeves, is sitting at his desk doing some paperwork, and he looks up in surprise. “What is it, Valery?”

“Captain we have a CP!” Sablin shouts. It is a
Chrez’vychainoy Polozhenie,
a situation.

“What has happened?” Potulniy demands, getting to his feet.

“Some men are drinking belowdecks, in the supply compartment,” Sablin reports. “Captain, I think they mean to do some damage unless they’re stopped.”

“We’ll see about that,” Potulniy snaps. “Come with me.”

He rushes forward and down ladder after ladder, deep into the forward bowels of the ship, his
zampolit
right on his heels.

Reaching the sonar compartment, Potulniy looks over his shoulder. “Here?”

“Yes, Captain, just inside,” Sablin says.

The captain pulls open the hatch and climbs down into the compartment. The moment his head clears the level of the deck, Sablin slams the hatch shut and dogs it down.

“Valery, what are you doing?” Potulniy shouts. At this point he has no comprehension of what is happening.

“Saving the Soviet Union,” Sablin calls back, and even to his ears the statement seems grandiose.

“What are you talking about? Let me out of here. That’s an order!”

“I can’t do that, Captain, not until later. For now, most of the officers and I are taking control of the ship.”

“Mutiny?” Poltuniy screams. “You bastards. You’ll all hang.”

“What I’m doing is just as much for your benefit as for the Rodina’s. Can’t you see?”

“I thought you were my friend.”

“I am. Believe me, Anatoly, I am your best friend.”

“Then why are you doing this? Have you gone insane?”

“We’re going to broadcast on radio and television directly to the people.”

“Broadcast what?”

“A call for revolution. A return to the true meanings of Marx and Lenin. We’re tired of the lies, tired of the stagnation, tired of having no say in our future. Can’t you see—?”

Potulniy slams something that sounds like a piece of metal against the hatch. “You bastard! You miserable fucking traitor! Let me out now!”

Sablin steps back, his heart pounding nearly out of his chest, until he finally catches his breath. He makes certain that the hatch is truly locked, then turns and heads back up to the midshipmen’s dining hall, for the next part of the mutiny to unfold.

The act of mutiny is punishable by death in just about every navy in the world. Even failing to report a suspicion that someone else aboard ship is about to commit mutiny can be punishable by death. National governments take this crime
very
seriously.

Technically, mutiny is a crime of nothing more than disobeying a legal order. If the captain says, “Scrub the decks,” and the sailors refuse, they may be court-martialed for mutiny. The reason the crewmen disobey the order doesn’t matter; all that matters is that the order was a lawful one.

That means the captain of a ship has been placed in charge of the vessel and his crew.
Every
order the captain issues is, by definition, a legal one, unless of course it goes against all common sense or is clearly against the Geneva Convention. But even then the issue is almost impossible to prove, because the benefit of the doubt always lies with the captain. According to the British Royal Navy’s Articles of War (1757), which most nations, including the Soviet Union, adopted:

Probably the most famous of all mutinies was that of HMS
Bounty
in the spring of 1789, when First Officer Fletcher Christian and twenty-six sailors of the forty-four crewmen arrested Captain William Bligh and the eighteen remaining crew and set them adrift in a twenty-three-foot launch in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. That story and its aftermath have been the stuff of books, articles, novels, and, in the last seventy years or so, movies.

In at least one aspect the incident aboard the
Bounty
was similar to that of the
Storozhevoy
—how the officer who mutinied felt about his captain. Aboard the
Bounty,
Christian and Bligh were close personal friends, and aboard
Storozhevoy
Sablin and Potulniy had gotten along from day one. They had a mutual respect for each other. That’s one of the reasons the captain so blindly followed Sablin’s lead down into the bowels of the warship, where he could so easily be locked up.

When the
Bounty
sailed from Spithead, England, two days before Christmas 1787, she carried Captain Bligh, who was the only commissioned officer aboard, and a crew of forty-five men. Most crewmen aboard British men-of-war at that time were pressed into service. Very few of the ordinary sailors were volunteers. In fact, the author Samuel Johnson complained often and bitterly about the practice, writing that “no man will be a sailor who had contrivance enough to get himself into jail, for being in a ship is like being in jail with the chance of being drowned … and a man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”

But it was different aboard the
Bounty
because every man in the crew had volunteered for the cruise. So there wasn’t supposed to be any trouble. At least that’s what Bligh and Christian thought at the beginning.

Bligh was a short, stout man with thick black hair, pale blue eyes, and a milky, almost albino complexion. But he knew what he was doing. He’d gone to sea at the age of sixteen as an ordinary seaman, but less than a year after he’d signed on he was given his warrant as a midshipman because he was bright, energetic, and earnest. He loved being in the navy, and he put every bit of his heart and soul into being the best officer he could be.

By the time Bligh had turned twenty-three his reputation was such that Captain James Cook tapped him to be the navigator for the famous South Pacific explorations of the fabled Tahiti and beyond. When the expedition was all over, Cook couldn’t write enough good things in the ship’s log about Bligh, and in fact the nautical charts that
the young navigator drew from that expedition were so good, so precise, that many of them were still in use more than two centuries later.

Near the end of the expedition, Cook was killed by natives in the Hawaiian Islands, and it was Bligh who brought Cook’s ship, HMS
Resolution,
back to England, which was a pretty good bit of navigating for a man not yet twenty-five.

War broke out with France, and Bligh did a good job in the fleet, earning a promotion to lieutenant, got married to Elizabeth Bethman, was appointed master of HMS
Cambridge,
and got to know and become friends with Fletcher Christian, who taught him how to use the sextant and who, he wrote in his diary, treated him like a “brother.”

Then disaster struck in the form of peace. England cut its navy in half and Bligh, like just about every officer, had his pay cut in half. But his wife was rich and she had connections, so Bligh was given command of a merchant ship, the
Britannia,
which sailed to the West Indies and back on a regular schedule. Fletcher Christian also served aboard, and their friendship grew and solidified.

In 1787 Bligh was given command of the
Bounty,
technically HMAV (Her Majesty’s Armed Vessel)
Bounty,
for which he had to take another pay cut. Navy men were paid less than merchant marine officers. But he saw it as a chance for promotion. The deal was that if he made it back from the South Pacific in one piece he would be promoted to captain. And that was a big prize.

A lot of things were happening in the world at about that time. In Europe the French Revolution was getting off the ground, in America the Constitution was being voted on, and in England George III was being battered by the prestigious Royal Society to do something— anything—that would promote England scientifically or economically. The war with the colonies had been lost; it was time to get past it. England needed to save some serious face in the world arena. And Bligh, who needed to do the same for his own career, was just the man for the job.