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just a little forced, like now. He is married and has one son, but more important, Sablin comes from an important, well-to-do family and attended the Frunze Military Academy, the most prestigious military school in all of Russia. You’ll never make it to the top in the navy unless you’ve graduated from Frunze. This is where all the officers of the line went to school, but instead of opting for a command position, Sablin chose to become a political officer. Ideologues, these guys are sometimes called. They’re almost always the ones with the cobs up their asses, who’ve swallowed the Party line and whose one mission in life is to shove it down everyone else’s throats.
    “But he’s a very social guy,” Gindin says. “Always talking to the sailors and officers about their families.” Once, when Gindin comes back from a vacation to Leningrad, Sablin wants to know how people are getting along in the city, what their mood is, what they’re talkingabout, and whether they are generally happy with the way things are or seem to be dissatisfied. Those are strange questions to be asking a young officer, but even stranger this morning is Sablin wanting to know the procedures for the emergency start-up of the gas turbines. Normally it takes a full hour to go through the necessary steps to safely bring the engines on line from a cold start. But if the captain is in a big hurry the engines can be started and brought up to full speed in as little as fifteen minutes. It’s a dangerous procedure and has to be done just right to avoid any sort of problem. Sablin also wanted to know if Gindin’s sailors knew these procedures. In a real emergency, if Gindin was injured or unable to reach his duty station, could his men do the job? Of course they could; Gindin has trained them well.
    That strange conversation sticks in Gindin’s mind this morning. From the day Sablin was assigned to the
Storozhevoy
he took a great interest not only in the men and their personal lives but also in the operations of the ship: the electronics and navigation systems, the weapons and their computers, even the pumps and mechanical equipment. So it should come as no surprise that he is interested in the gas turbines.
    But later that same morning, after the parade in town, Sablin is even more animated than usual, Gindin recalls. “Asking me how I liked the parade and how everything went. He also asked me if everything was okay on the ship, the engines, the mechanical systems. I got the feeling he was putting so much emphasis on this day that something personal and significant must have happened in his life. Or was about to happen. But he was kind enough to ask about my mother’s health and her condition after my father’s death.” It touches Gindin deeply that someone cares.
    Still, as Gindin is standing at the rail, everything that’s happened in the couple of days since they came up from Baltiysk adds up to an odd foreboding.

DEFENDING THE RODINA
     

    The Russian navy has been continuously at war for nearly its entire history and, since the end of WWII, preparing for the mother of all wars with the United States. A lot of ships have gone to the bottom since the late 1500s and early 1600s, and with them tens of thousands of sailors.
    The Russians have fought the Swedes, the Danes, the Finns, the Italians, the English, the French, the Chinese, and the Japanese, but mostly the Turks, with whom they battled from 1575 until the end of 1917, when Vladimir Lenin’s new government ended the war, dissolved the Russian navy, and created the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Fleet.
    In the early days the Slavic Cossacks sailed in tiny ships called
chaikas,
which meant “seagulls,” because they could fly across the water so fast. Scarcely fifty feet at the waterline, the open boats could hold as many as seventy warriors, who would crouch down beneath the gunwales, which were bordered with twisted cane for extra buoyancy and protection. These were ships