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surface. The Soviet admiralty blamed the crews and officers all the same.
    The ice surrounding the pier had offered little resistance to the K-129, cracking into sheets that rode up on the curved pressure hull as the sub came to rest against the rubber bumpers of the concrete pier. Sailors wearing life jackets over winter coats caught the knotted lines thrown by the men on the pier. These ropes were attached to the heavier mooring lines that would secure the sub.
    The seamen kept busy as they waited for their captain to return. The deck of the submarine was a beehive of activity as men set up safety lines and engineers worked at connecting the heavy auxiliary cables that would supply the submarine with electrical power while in port. A gang-way had been hoisted from the pier to the deck, but nobody dared cross it. They wouldn’t have to wait long, anyway. The crew was certain there would be no extra confinement this time—the mission had gone without incident.
    The eighty-three crew members had every reason to expect a well-deserved six months in port, with only brief coastal drills and routine maintenance and repair work until midsummer, when they would sail again.
    Concrete submarine pens lined the entire south shore of Krashennini Cove, a bristling arm of naval activity off the larger bay. The cove provided slight relief from the strong winds that occasionally lifted the low clouds for brief views of the snowy peaks. In midwinter, at this latitude, there were just four hours of gloomy daylight, made even grayer by the incessant fogs and scudding low clouds off the Bering Sea. Rybachiy was less than 750 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
    When the north winds were strong, waves lapped over the decks of the boats tied up at the concrete piers built low to the water to accommodate submarines. Wet and icy in patches, the decks appeared a darker gray than the looming conning towers and launch tubes encapsulated behind them.
    The submarine base was located across the bay from the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, the capital of the Kamchatka oblast. With a civilian population of three hundred thousand, it was the largest city on the 470,000-square-mile, mostly wilderness peninsula. Naval yards, military camps, and KGB border-guard stations dotted the bay shores. Because of its secret installations, the region, including the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, was closed to everyone except Soviet citizens and visiting allies. Commercial fishing was the only nonmilitary economy of the region. Even then, the ostensibly civilian trawlers of the fishing fleets doubled as military intelligence boats.
    This fogbound bay sheltered the submarine pens for the deadly Kamchatka Flotilla, to which K-129 was assigned. The facility, exclusively dedicated to the dispatch of Soviet missile and attack submarines, was one of the most guarded installations of the Soviet navy.
    By the mid-1960s, Avachinskaya Bay had become the Soviet Pacific Fleet’s most important submarine center. It was a major naval asset in the Communist giant’s mighty striving to compete with the rapidly modernizing United States Navy.
    The Soviets had struggled for the first decade of the Cold War to meet Joseph Stalin’s impossibly audacious military goal of building the world’s largest submarine force. The Soviet dictator believed that the outcome of World War II would have been far different if Hitler had invested more of Germany’s resources in submarines. In the early 1950s, Stalin ordered more than twelve hundred submarines built.
    Although that grandiose plan was abandoned at Stalin’s death in 1953, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, saw the submarine service as an essential part of the Soviet military strategy and placed an emphasis on upgrading the Red Navy with fewer, but more modern, submarines.
    Construction of nuclear-propelled, ballistic missile submarines was once again given top priority when Leonid Brezhnev assumed power after a Moscow cabal ousted