Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt for Red October

All the medical bulletins and monographs agree on a few basic points: A victim of a gunshot wound to the head, especially to the back of the head, probably will not survive without immediate medical help, and even then the prognosis is extremely poor. Shooting someone in the back of the head at close range is a fairly sure way of ensuring the victim will not survive to tell any tale.

It all comes down to the amount of kinetic energy transferred from the bullet to the bone and soft matter of the skull and brain. So long as the projectle remains inside the skull—it does not plow through brain and come out the other side—all the energy of the bullet is transferred to the skull and brain. The damage is maximized.

If a silencer is used and the pistol is fired into the back of the skull at point-blank or near point-blank range, the entrance wound will probably be greater and the damage to the soft tissue even more extensive than with a nonsilenced gunshot wound. Either way, however, such wounds are usually fatal.

When the bullet hits first the bone of the skull, it deforms and sometimes even fragments before it enters the brain. In each case the damage is worse than if the bullet entered the brain intact.

The energy from a bullet entering the brain at the speed of sound will probably cause hyrdraulic shock, which will rupture blood vessels on all sides of the bullet’s path. Bits of shattered bone fragments pushed into the brain also cause more damage. And the discharge gases that spew out of the muzzle can also enter the brain through the wound in the skull and act like a blowtorch.

When the pistol is pressed against the back of the victim’s head or within an inch of contact, the edges of the wound are seared by the hot gasses, just like a piece of meat held over an open flame will be cooked and turn black from the soot baked into the skin.

The KGB knows all these details, but for men such as Sablin who are caught up in their grand adventure they cannot think beyond the possibility of their arrest and execution. After all, what does it matter how a man dies, so long as it is quick and painless? A bullet to the back of the skull is certainly quick and, for the rare few who get immediate medical attention and survive, almost completely painless.

But the KGB never takes its victims to the hospital. Once they enter the execution room, their next trip will be to an unmarked grave, and just about every Russian knows it. That includes Sablin and his coconspirators.

PART 8 THE HUNT FOR FFG STOROZHEVOY

41. CHAIN OF COMMAND

The thunder spread through the chain of command like shock waves left behind a jet passing overhead at the speed of sound. Fleet Admiral Sergei Gorshkov and his wife had gone out to their dacha about fifty kilometers northeast of Moscow, not too far from Star City, to spend a relaxing holiday with a few friends. He didn’t drink much alcohol, unless it was required of him during state affairs. In fact, most of the time he preferred water from fresh coconuts, which he sipped through a straw.

Nevertheless, he stays up until nearly three in the morning, talking and laughing with his friends, before he finally goes to bed, after another long, exhausting day. Perhaps he is finally beginning to think about retirement. He’d been promoted to fleet admiral in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev and personally seen to the modernization of the entire Soviet navy, which was no mean feat considering the kind of money the Americans were throwing around on their nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.

On this chilly November morning even all his experience as a naval officer does not prepare him for what he will face in the coming hours when his aide, Senior Lieutenant Yevgenni Markin, scurries down the hall, taps lightly on Gorshkov’s door, and enters his bedroom.

The admiral opens his eyes, instantly awake despite the fact he’s only had one hour of sleep. He’s always imagined that the global thermonuclear war they’ve dreaded since 1945 would begin this way: a frightened aide coming to his commander with news that a nuclear missile attack had been launched against the Soviet Union.

“Da, what is it?” the admiral asks, softly so as not to disturb his wife sleeping next to him.

“No one is sure, Admiral,” Markin whispers. “But it’s possible that a mutiny may be in progress aboard one of our ships in the Baltic Fleet.”

Gorshkov sits up in bed, and by the time he tosses the covers aside and gets to his feet Markin is there with his robe and slippers.

“Would you like tea?”

“Yes,” the admiral says, and he marches out of his bedroom, down a long corridor, through a glassed-in unheated porch to his office at the back of the house. During the day it looks down a wooded slope to a small stream from which he has pulled some trout in happier times.

Mutiny. Not in his navy!