Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [88]
Kennedy wanted to know what the U.S. navy intended to do if the ships refused to observe the quarantine.
McNamara told him: a U.S. destroyer would intercept the Kimovsk while helicopters from the aircraft carrier USS Essex would “attempt to divert the sub, or subs.”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“Well, Mr. President, the helicopters would drop practice depth charges, nonlethal depth charges, to persuade the sub to surface.”
Kennedy did not look well. He had that puffiness around his eyes that made him look slightly Asian, and his posture suggested that he was in pain.
“Jesus,” he said very quietly.
“Sir?”
“Well, Bob, I guess that Russian sub wouldn’t know that these were practice charges. I mean, is there any way . . . ? They’re gonna think they’re under attack, aren’t they? And they might take it into their heads to retaliate. These Foxtrots, they can carry nuclear torpedoes, as I recall. If he doesn’t surface, if he takes some action, some action to assist the merchant ship, are we going to attack him for real? At what point are we gonna attack him? I think we should wait on that. We don’t want the first thing we attack as a Soviet submarine. I’d much rather have a merchant ship.”
McNamara said, “I think it would be extremely dangerous, Mr. President, to defer attack on this sub in the situation we’re in. We could easily lose an American ship by that means. . . .”
The secretary of defense clammed up. A CIA man had entered the Cabinet Room. He spooked his way over to McCone, handed his boss a note, and spooked his way out again. McCone read the note and looked up.
“We’ve just received information that all six Soviet ships currently identified in Cuban waters have either stopped or reversed course.”
For a moment or two it seemed, and sounded, like victory. Backs were slapped, God was thanked. Then Dean Rusk spoiled it.
“Whadya mean, John, Cuban waters?”
McCone said, “Uh, Dean, I don’t know exactly what that means at this moment.”
Kennedy said, “So, are these ships that were already inside the quarantine? Were they ships going in, or going out?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Makes a helluva difference,” Rusk said dryly.
Laughter, of a sort.
“I’ll go and investigate,” McCone said.
The commander of B-130, the submarine that troubled ExComm, was Captain Nikolai Shumkov, and he was a deeply unhappy man. The voyage from his Arctic base to the Caribbean was far longer than his boat had been designed for. Its batteries were faulty, and Shumkov had had to surface too frequently to recharge them. In the middle of the Atlantic, he’d run into a hurricane, and the sub had tipped and slewed in the water like a drowned rocking horse. Most of his crew had fallen violently seasick, and cleansing a submarine of vomit is not the easiest thing in the world. When they reached tropical waters, the temperature and the humidity inside the sub rose to unbearable levels. They had insufficient fresh water. Shumkov and his men stripped to their underwear. A combination of noxious air, poor diet, and dehydration brought on an outbreak of a suppurating skin rash. The medical officer treated it with an ointment the color of boiled spinach. Clad in sopping singlets and sad underpants, daubed in green, the crew looked like bad actors playing Venusians in a cheap sci-fi movie. By the time B-130 was a week from Havana, two of its three diesel engines had stopped working and the boat was struggling to keep up with the merchant ships it was meant to be protecting. Shumkov was