Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (54 page)

Lieutenant Boris Korchilov was on his first submarine cruise, and he was the first to volunteer. Others from the reactor team followed. These men, still boys really, made their way into the compartment. There they stood, a team of eight, welding pipes, connecting them to pumps and valves. They remained in the compartment for two hours, braving the heat and the invisible particles that shot through their bodies. Each received one hundred times the lethal dose of radiation.

Ivan Kulakov, a twenty-two-year-old chief petty officer, watched as they came out of the compartment, each man barely able to move, unable to speak, their faces changed beyond recognition. He watched horrified as the first team's efforts failed. As the cooling pumps came apart, it became clear that someone had to jury-rig the jury-rig. Kulakov volunteered. He was certain that he could do the work fastest. And he was just as certain that he was going to die trying.

Kulakov's mind played back the faces of those first eight men, a running loop that wouldn't stop as he walked through a lake of radioactive water, ankle deep. As the water soaked through his leather shoes, as the radiation began to burn his feet, he thought he saw the walls and water shine, perhaps glow.

His hands were burned as he opened valves to draw steam from the reactor. He could barely see. He could barely breathe. All he could do was pray that he could finish, make his way out without falling headlong into the horrible, painful, radioactive lake that was already destroying his feet.

Finally, he did get out, only to watch another valve fail, only to know he had to go back in. He had already taken on five times the lethal dose of radiation. Outside the compartment were the living dead. Back inside, he was more certain than ever that he was one of them.

Then, just as the fuel rods reached 1,470 degrees, the pipes held, the valves held. The makeshift cooling system began to do its work. Kulakov stumbled out of the boa's mouth, and Captain Posetiev turned K-19 around in a run toward the fleet they had left still conducting exercises a lifetime ago, at least eight men's lifetimes ago. He knew he couldn't try for home. His entire crew would be fatally irradiated if he didn't get them off the sub fast.

The team of eight, those first men into the compartment during the crisis, died before the week was out. They were buried in lead coffins.

Posetiev lingered longer: three weeks. Other crewmen who had come too close to the outer door of the reactor compartment lasted a month, some a little longer, before they too succumbed. Kulakov, whose feet and hands were irreparably burned, managed to survive with transfusions and bone marrow transplants. He would always be crippled.

Even with all this, Moscow wasn't willing to let go of one of its few nuclear subs. Khrushchev was still racing the Americans. Men would one day be sent back into K-19, back into that reactor compartment. Only now, K-19 would bear a new name. She would be known as the Hiroshima.

The Missile That Was Never Launched

In 1962 the Soviet Navy wanted very much to appease Khrushchev, who wanted very much to see a nuclear submarine launch a ballistic missile from underwater. His naval leaders came forward with a sub that they told him would give him just what he demanded, another success to herald in the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper.

Khrushchev witnessed just such a test and was so delighted that he declared a reward for a perfect missile firing to the crew of the nuclear sub on display, the K-3, which had also just made a successful transit to the North Pole. Nobody would ever dare tell him he had just offered up an award for a clever illusion.

The Soviet Navy was still having too many problems getting its nukes to shoot, much less shoot straight, to risk yet another failure with Khrushchev looking on. So, instead of letting K-3 even make the attempt, commanders strategically positioned a Golf diesel sub near the nuke. Hidden and in anonymity, it was the diesel boat that made the perfect shot.

And so Soviet naval history marched on, intermingling the heroic, the tragic, and the comic.

The Race to the Mediterranean

It was June 1967, the eve of the Arab-Israeli War, and the K-131 had been sent to the Adriatic Sea, outside the Mediterranean, to await orders from command. Those orders came as the first shots were fired. Captain Vadim Kulinchenko was given fifteen hours to bring his sub in position to aim nuclear missiles at Tel Aviv.

The captain was flabbergasted. He knew he didn't want to fire nuclear weapons at Israel, but he also knew he wouldn't have to. In order to make it from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean, in order to race past Greece, past Crete, and arrive within reach of Israel's coast, K-131 would have to somehow reach speeds of fifty-seven knots. Her normal transit speed was twenty knots.

He had to make a show of trying, but when the war ended six days later, Kulinchenko, K-131, and her nuclear weapons were still in transit. Eventually he met up with his battle group in the Med, forty surface ships and ten diesel subs from the Black Sea fleet. The K-131 didn't belong with this group, she wasn't from the Black Sea. But for their show of force in the Med, the Soviets wanted one of their new Northern Fleet nuclear submarines. It was a beginning. Soon the Med would be the new battleground in the submarine wars.

For now, however, most of the Soviet Navy had little idea of what nuclear subs couldn't do, or for that matter, what they could. Indeed, before the war, when K-131 was on her way to the Adriatic, a supply ship helpfully offered fuel and water-although, the supply ship noted, those were two commodities it was running low on.

"We have fresh water, as much as you like," came the answer from the submarine. "We've just cooked it and are ready to give it to you." The Black Sea fleet didn't have nuclear subs, and the astonished supply crew had no idea that water and fuel were two of the things any nuclear boat can produce for itself.

Disaster Strikes Again

One of the next Soviet subs to travel to the Mediterranean was the K3, the same sub that Khrushchev had rewarded for the nonexistent missile launch. Only this time, one of her officers, Lev Kamorkin, had a had feeling.

Two days before embarking from a port in the Barents, he walked with his five-year-old daughter and a friend, who recalls him confiding: "I don't know why, but I don't want at all to go to this voyage."

The feeling was so strong, the urge not to leave so powerful, that Kamorkin swore that this would be his very last trip on a submarine. Sadly for the little girl who listened as her father talked of his misgivings, Kamorkin was right.

On September 8, 1967, at 1:52 A.M., a fire broke out in one of K-3's oxygen generators. She was returning from that run to the Mediterranean and was near home, just off the North Cape of Norway, just about where Cochino had suffered her first explosion.

Showing much of the honor of Cochino's Rafael C. Benitez, Kamorkin raced to prevent the fires from blowing the torpedoes and sinking his boat. He ordered everyone out of the weapons compartment and stayed behind to let the ocean in and flood the room. As he watched the waters rise to cover the torpedoes, he knew that he had engineered his own death. He drowned alongside the weapons.

He would never know that forty of the men he had tried so valiantly to save would succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning and die moments after he did.

The Hiroshima Makes a Final Appearance

The sub already known as Hiroshima continued to cause problems for the Soviet sub command. In November 1969, she ran into the USS Cato with a blow that forced her into a steep bow-first dive, sending the huge volume of Navigational Astronomy tumbling down off a bookshelf and onto Captain Valentin Anatolievich Shabanov, who had been dozing. The collision also knocked out the sub's forward sonar and crushed the doors of her torpedo tubes.

Still, Hiroshima continued to operate long enough for one final disaster. In 1972 fire broke out on the sub when she was about six hundred miles northeast of Newfoundland. This time, twenty-six officers and crewmen were killed. There were twelve others who expected to die, men who were entombed inside the sub's stern compartment, unable to make it through the gassed portions of the sub. They stayed there for twenty-three days until Hiroshima limped home.

That those twelve men lived is the only happy ending ever written for Hiroshima. She is remembered and memorialized as the submarine that earned her name for fire, radiation, and death.

Trawlers and Spies

The Soviets added a twist to the at-sea espionage routine by supplementing their fleets of subs with surface trawlers (specially equipped to eavesdrop), known as AGIs. There was a certain genius in this since it was the cheapest and easiest way for the Soviet Union to post a sentry off all the major U.S. bases, both here and abroad. U.S. missile boats went to great lengths to avoid these trawlers. One sub even grounded in the late 1960s while trying to keep from being detected by an AGI lurking off of Holy Loch, Scotland.