The Delayed Detonator

The submarine had been running without radio contact for almost four days. The vessel was a Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine, diesel-powered, operating in the North Atlantic near the Sargasso Sea in late October of nineteen sixty-two. The crew did not know, with any certainty, whether war had started. The radio receiver could pick up low-frequency military transmissions at depth, but they had heard nothing clear and authoritative from Moscow in days. What they had heard, and felt, were depth charges — American destroyers dropping signaling grenades around the hull, standard naval procedure to force a submarine to surface and identify itself. They were not designed to destroy the vessel. They were close enough that some of the crew believed otherwise. The submarine was hot. Foxtrot-class boats had no air conditioning, and running submerged on battery power in tropical water had driven the internal temperature in some compartments above fifty degrees Celsius. The crew was exhausted. The captain, Valentin Savitsky, had been awake for most of the preceding days.