To Kill the Potemkin Read Online Free PDF Page B

cook, Stanley Real, had worked for hours on a sauce
demi-glace. Stanley fancied himself a chef de cuisine rather than a
navy cook. He was trying to explain the difference to Cakes Colby, the
steward.
    "This
sauce it is cook for three days."
    Cakes
thought Stanley's fuss over the sauce was ludicrous.
    "It
looks like gravy to me, Stanley."
    The
cook
waved a slotted spoon in Cakes's face. "Once, they say to me, cook for
the
President Marcos. On the Andrew Jackson in Subic Bay
the President
Marcos eat his dinner on the ship. Big missile sub, yes, the Andrew Jackson. The President Marcos he come and he run his hand all up and down the
missile, like
he love it, then he eat. He like what he eat. He call me from the
galley to the
officers' mess and he say come cook for me in the palace of the
president. No
no, I say, I am loyal to the U.S. Navy. I am qualified as a submarine,
first class, I say. I am
citizen of the U.S.A."
    Cakes
was making
his last cruise. The only
member of the crew to have served in World War Two, he had seen a lot
of cooks
in twenty-five years, but never one like Stanley Real.
    "Good
God,
Stanley. Where do they find
guys like you?" Cakes muttered as he locked away the officers' flatwear
in
a cabinet. "Whatever happened to white beans and ham hocks?"
----
    In
the forward
crew quarters, in a bunk on
the third tier, Fogarty lay sleepless, all in a sweat. In two days his
world
had changed so completely that he seemed to have forgotten who he was.
The
discipline of the sub often required him to react without thinking, as
if he
were a robot, and he lay now in his bunk pretending that his brain had
been
replaced by a reactor. Someone pulled the control rod a little ways out
of his
head, and he speeded up. Pull it all the way out and he speeds up so
much, he
melts. Push it all the way in and he stops, he scrams.
    Fogarty
understood that on a submarine there
was no margin for error. A moment's hesitation could mean disaster.
Fogarty
knew that in time the discipline would become automatic, but the
learning was
painful. Two hours out of Norfolk, as the crew raced through their
first
damage-control drill, he had banged his knee on a bulkhead while
scrambling through a hatch, and it
still hurt. Yet the bruises to his body were nothing compared to what
was being
done to his brain. He was being bombarded by information. A whole new
world was
being revealed to him in the sonar room—the sea and all its
multifarious
sounds—and he was close to overload. Sitting watches with Sorensen was
an
exacting experience. In his casual way, Sorensen was a perfectionist
who never
tolerated mistakes. Off watch, Fogarty frequently found himself running
from
one end of the ship to the other during endlessly repeated drills. Not
a single
watch had passed without a drill, and he felt as if he had a terminal
case of
jet lag. Night and day had been replaced by the rotation of the
watches; his
circadian rhythm was off. He knew it was five o'clock in the
morning—four
hundred feet up there was weather, a sunrise, a sky—but on Barracuda there was only machinery, a handful of radioactive metal and one
hundred men.
    The
compartment
was dark. His bunk was a tidy
cocoon. To his right he could feel the acoustic rubber insulation that
lined
the pressure hull. To his left a flimsy gray curtain gave him a sense
of
seclusion. He heard the whir of air conditioners, and the sounds of
sleeping
men packed together as carefully as the uranium pellets in the reactor.
    His
mind refused
to shut down. Electrical
circuits popped like flashcards into his imagination, demanding
recognition.
When those were exhausted he started going through the signatures of
Soviet
submarines, retrieving the sounds from memory. The Russian ships were
noisy,
but he had had no real idea how loud they were until Sorensen played a
tape of
a Hotel-class fleet ballistic missile submarine. Fogarty thought it was
the
most frightening thing he had ever heard.
    Fogarty could hardly believe
that