Sorenson is a veteran who jokes about submarine warfare as a game (which he calls "Cowboys and Cossacks"), and he's determined to never lose.
Fogerty, a promising but inexperienced sonar analyst newly assigned to Barracuda, is determined to learn from Sorensen.
The first of its kind, Potemkin is equipped with an experimental stereo/sonar system designed to reproduce recorded tapes of American, British, and other submarines to fool the sonar nets stationed in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
While Barracuda survives and reports the accident to higher authorities, it is revealed that the Soviet ship was damaged by the collision but was not sunk.
Unbeknownst to the superior officers of the ship, he made a separate recording of the collision and the sinking and after listening to it, suspects something is wrong.
With the ship's zampolit under arrest for negligence and the captain back in command, Potemkin makes a break for the Atlantic Ocean and a rendezvous with Soviet vessels working undercover in Cuba.
The environmental system was damaged in the collision so the atmosphere can not be maintained leading to a build-up of carbon dioxide that slowly poisons the crew.
The torpedo that was fired earlier by the Russian sub malfunctions and goes to "active seeking" mode and homes in on the noise made by Barracuda's reactor pumps.
The explosion blows the American sub in two; the vessel sinks in eight-tenths of a second and is crushed by the pressure of the deep sea, killing the whole crew.
While To Kill the Potemkin is a work of fiction, the novel shares parallels with the true story of the loss of USS Scorpion (SSN-589), a Skipjack-class nuclear fast-attack submarine which sank in the Atlantic on May 22, 1968, under circumstances that have yet to be explained.
The time and place setting of To Kill the Potemkin parallel those of the Scorpion, which had been involved in operations in the Mediterranean Sea in 1968.