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‘Skip, it’s Monday. You get us this data by Friday and there’s twenty thousand dollars in it. You’re worth it, and we want this data. Agreed?’
‘Sold.’ They shook hands. ‘Can I keep the pictures?’
‘I can leave them if you have a secure place to keep them. Nobody gets to see them, Skip. Nobody.’
‘There’s a nice safe in the superintendent’s office.’
‘Fine, but he doesn’t see them.’ The superintendent was a former submariner.
‘He won’t like it,’ Tyler said. ‘But okay.’
‘Have him call Admiral Greer if he objects. This number.’ Ryan handed him a card. ‘You can reach me here if you need me. If I’m not in, ask for the admiral.’
‘Just how important is this?’
‘Important enough. You’re the first guy who’s come up with a sensible explanation for these hatches. That’s why I came here. If you can model this for us, it’ll be damned useful. Skip, one more time: This is highly sensitive. If you let anybody see these, it’s my ass.’
‘Aye aye, Jack. Well, you’ve laid a deadline on me, I better get down to it. See you.’ After shaking hands, Tyler took out a lined pad and started listing the things he had to do. Ryan left the building with his driver. He remembered a Toys-R-Us right up Route 2 from Annapolis, and he wanted to get that doll for Sally.
CIA HEADQUARTERS
Ryan was back at the CIA by eight that evening. It was a quick trip past the security guards to Greer’s office.
‘Well, did you get your Surfing Barbie?’ Greer looked up.
‘Skiing Barbie,’ Ryan corrected. ‘Yes, sir. Come on, didn’t you ever play Santa?’
‘They grew up too fast, Jack. Even my grandchildren are all past that stage.’ He turned to get some coffee. Ryan wondered if he ever slept. ‘We have something more on Red October. The Russians seem to have a major ASW exercise running in the northeast Barents Sea. Half a dozen ASW search aircraft, a bunch of frigates, and an Alfa-class attack boat, all running around in circles.’
‘Probably an acquisition exercise. Skip Tyler says those doors are for a new drive system.’
‘Indeed.’ Greer sat back. ‘Tell me about it.’
Ryan took out his notes and summarized his education in submarine technology. ‘Skip says he can generate a computer simulation of its effectiveness,’ he concluded.
Greer’s eyebrows went up. ‘How soon?’
‘End of the week, maybe. I told him if he had it done by Friday we’d pay him for it. Twenty thousand sound reasonable?’
‘Will it mean anything?’
‘If he gets the background data he needs, it ought to, sir. Skip’s a very sharp cookie. I mean, they don’t give doctorates away at MIT, and he was in the top five of his Academy class.’
‘Worth twenty thousand dollars of our money?’ Greer was notoriously tight with a buck.
Ryan knew how to answer this. ‘Sir, if we followed normal procedure on this, we’d contract one of the Beltway Bandits –’ Ryan referred to the consulting firms that dotted the beltway around Washington, DC ‘– they’d charge us five or ten times as much, and we’d be lucky to have the data by Easter. This way we might just have it while the boat’s still at sea. If worst comes to worst, sir, I’ll foot the bill. I figured you’d want this data fast, and it’s right up his alley.’
‘You’re right.’ It wasn’t the first time Ryan had short-circuited normal procedure. The other times had worked out fairly well. Greer was a man who looked for results. ‘Okay, the Soviets have a new missile boat with a silent drive system. What does it all mean?’
‘Nothing good. We depend on our ability to track their boomers with our attack boats. Hell, that’s why they agreed a few years back to our proposal about keeping them five thousand miles from each other’s coasts, and why they keep their missile subs in port most of the time. This could change the game a bit. By the way, October’s hull, I haven’t seen what it’s made of.’
‘Steel. She’s too big for a titanium hull, at least for what it would cost. You know what they have to spend on their Alfas?’
‘Too much for what they got. You spend that much money for a superstrong hull, then put a noisy power plant in it. Dumb.’
‘Maybe. I wouldn’t mind having that speed, though. Anyway, if this silent drive system really works, they might be able to creep up onto the continental shelf.’
‘Depressed-trajectory shot,’ Ryan said. This was one of the nastier nuclear war scenarios in which a sea-based missile was fired from within a few hundred miles of its target. Washington is a bare hundred air miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Though a missile on a low, fast flight path loses much of its accuracy, a few of them can be launched to explode over Washington in less than five minutes’ time, too little for a president to react. If the Soviets were able to kill the president that quickly, the resulting disruption of the chain of command would give them ample time to take out the land-based missiles – there would be no one with authority to fire. This scenario is a grand-strategic version of a simple mugging, Ryan thought. A mugger doesn’t attack his victim’s arms – he goes for the head. ‘You think October was built with that in mind?’
‘I’m sure the thought occurred to them,’ Greer observed. ‘It would have occurred to us. Well, we have Bremerton up there to keep an eye on her, and if this data turns out to be useful we’ll see if we can come up with an answer. How are you feeling?’
‘I’ve been on the go since five thirty London time. Long day, sir.’
‘I expect so. Okay, we’ll go over the Afghanistan business tomorrow morning. Get some sleep, son.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ Ryan got his coat. ‘Good night.’
It was a fifteen-minute drive to the Marriott. Ryan made the mistake of turning the TV on to the beginning of Monday Night Football. Cincinnati was playing San Francisco, the two best quarterbacks in the league pitted against one another. Football was something he missed, living in England, and he managed to stay awake nearly three hours before fading out with the television on.
SOSUS CONTROL
Except for the fact that everyone was in uniform, a visitor might easily have mistaken the room for a NASA control centre. There were six wide rows of consoles, each with its own TV screen and typewriter keyboard supplemented by lighted plastic buttons, dials, headphone jacks, and analogue and digital controls. Senior Chief Oceanographic Technician Deke Franklin was seated at console fifteen.
The room was SOSUS (sonar surveillance system) Atlantic Control. It was in a fairly nondescript building, uninspired government layer cake, with windowless concrete walls, a large air-conditioning system on a flat roof, and an acronym-coded blue sign on a well-tended but now yellowed lawn. There were armed marines inconspicuously on guard inside the three entrances. In the basement were a pair of Cray-2 supercomputers tended by twenty acolytes, and behind the building was a trio of satellite ground stations, all up- and down-links. The men at the consoles and the computers were linked electronically by satellite and landline to the SOSUS system.
Throughout the oceans of the world, and especially astride the passages that Soviet submarines had to cross to reach the open sea, the United States and other NATO countries had deployed gangs of highly sensitive sonar receptors. The hundreds of SOSUS sensors received and forwarded an unimaginably vast amount of information, and to help the system operators classify and analyse it a whole new family of computers had to be designed, the supercomputers. SOSUS served its purpose admirably well. Very little could cross a barrier without being detected. Even the ultraquiet American and British attack submarines were generally picked up. The sensors, lying on the bottom of the sea, were periodically updated; many now had their own signal processors to presort the data they forwarded, lightening the load on the central computers and enabling more rapid and accurate classification of targets.
Chief Franklin’s console received data from a string of sensors planted off the coast of Iceland. He was responsible for an area forty nautical miles across, and his sector overlapped the ones east and west so that, theoretically, three operators were constantly monitoring any segment of the barrier. If he got a contact, he would first notify his brother operators, then type a contact report into his computer terminal, which would in turn be displayed on the master control board in the control room at the back of the floor. The senior duty officer had the frequently exercised authority to prosecute a contact with a wide range of assets, from surface ships to antisubmarine aircraft. Two world wars had taught American and British officers the necessity of keeping their sea lines of communication – SLOCs – open.
Although this quiet, tomblike facility had never been shown to the public, and though it had none of the drama associated with military life, the men on duty here were among the most important in the service of their country. In a war, without them, whole nations might starve.
Franklin was leaning back in his swivel chair, puffing contemplatively on an old briar pipe. Around him the room was dead quiet. Even had it not been, his five-hundred-dollar headphones would have effectively sealed him off from the outside world. A twenty-six-year chief, Franklin had served his entire career on destroyers and frigates. To him, submarines and submariners were the enemy, regardless of what flag they might fly or what uniform they might wear.
An eyebrow went up, and his nearly bald head cocked to one side. The pulls on the pipe grew irregular. His right hand reached forward to the control panel and switched off the signal processors so that he could get the sound without computerized interference. But it was no good. There was too much background noise. He switched the filters back on. Next he tried some changes in his azimuth controls. The SOSUS sensors were designed to give bearing checks through the selective use of individual receptors, which he could manipulate electronically, first getting one bearing, then using a neighbouring gang to triangulate for a fix. The contact was very faint, but not too far from the line, he judged. Franklin queried his computer terminal. The USS Dallas was up there. Gotcha! he said with a thin smile. Another noise came through, a low-frequency rumble that only lasted a few seconds before fading out. Not all that quiet, though. Why hadn’t he heard it before switching the reception azimuth? He set his pipe down and began making adjustments on his control board.
‘Chief?’ A voice came over his headphones. It was the senior duty officer.
‘Yes, Commander?’
‘Can you come back to control? I have something I want you to hear.’
‘On the way, sir.’ Franklin rose quietly. Commander Quentin was a former destroyer skipper on a limited duty after a winning battle with cancer. Almost a winning battle, Franklin corrected himself. Chemotherapy had killed the cancer – at the cost of nearly all his hair, and turning his skin into a sort of transparent parchment. Too bad, he thought, Quentin was a pretty good man.
The control room was elevated a few feet from the rest of the floor so that its occupants could see over the whole crew of duty operators and the main tactical display on the far wall. It was separated from the floor by glass, which allowed them to speak to one another without disturbing the operators. Franklin found Quentin at his command station, where he could tap into any console on the floor.
‘Howdy, Commander.’ Franklin noted that the officer was gaining some weight back. It was about time. ‘What do you have for me, sir?’
‘On the Barents Sea net.’ Quentin handed him a pair of phones. Franklin listened for several minutes, but he didn’t sit down. Like many people he had a gut suspicion that cancer was contagious.
‘Damned if they ain’t pretty busy up there. I read of a pair of Alfas, a Charlie, a Tango, and a few surface ships. What gives, sir?’
‘There’s a Delta there, too, but she just surfaced and killed her engines.’
‘Surfaced, Skipper?’
‘Yep. They were lashing her pretty hard with active sonar, then a ’can queried her on a gertrude.’
‘Uh-huh. Acquisition game, and the sub lost.’
‘Maybe.’ Quentin rubbed his eyes. The man looked tired. He was pushing himself too hard, and his stamina wasn’t half what it should have been. ‘But the Alfas are still pinging, and now they’re headed west, as you heard.’
‘Oh.’ Franklin pondered that for a moment. ‘They’re looking for another boat, then. The Typhoon that was supposed to have sailed the other day, maybe?’
‘That’s what I thought – except she headed west, and the exercise area is northeast of the fjord. We lost her the other day on SOSUS. Bremerton’s up sniffing around for her now.’
‘Cagey skipper,’ Franklin decided. ‘Cut his plant all the way back and just drifting.’
‘Yeah,’ Quentin agreed. ‘I want you to move down to the North Cape barrier supervisory board and see if you can find her, Chief. She’ll still have her reactor working, and she’ll be making some noise. The operators we have on that sector are a little young. I’ll take one and switch him to your board for a while.’
‘Right, Skipper.’ Franklin nodded. That part of the team was still green, used to working on ships. SOSUS required more finesse. Quentin didn’t have to say that he expected Franklin to check in on the whole North Cape team’s boards and maybe drop a few small lessons as he listened in on their channels.
‘Did you pick up on Dallas?’
‘Yes, sir. Real faint, but I think I got her crossing my sector, headed northwest for Toll Booth. If we get an Orion down there, we might just get her locked in. Can we rattle their cage a little?’
Quentin chuckled. He didn’t much care for submariners either. ‘No, NIFTY DOLPHIN is over, Chief. We’ll just log it and let the skipper know when he comes back home. Nice work, though. You know her reputation. We’re not supposed to hear her at all.’
‘That’ll be the day!’ Franklin snorted.
‘Let me know what you find, Deke.’
‘Aye aye, Skipper. You take care of yourself, hear?’
THE FIFTH DAY (#)
Tuesday, 7 December (#)
MOSCOW
It was not the grandest office in the Kremlin, but it suited his needs. Admiral Yuri Ilych Padorin showed up for work at his customary seven o’clock after the drive from his six-room apartment in the Kutuzovskiy Prospekt. The large office windows overlooked the Kremlin walls; except for those he would have had a view of the Moscow River, now frozen solid. Padorin did not miss the view, though he had won his spurs commanding river gunboats forty years before, running supplies across the Volga into Stalingrad. Padorin was now the chief political officer of the Soviet Navy. His job was men, not ships.
On the way in he nodded curtly to his secretary, a man of forty. The yeoman leaped to his feet and followed his admiral into the inner office to help him off with his greatcoat. Padorin’s navy-blue jacket was ablaze with ribbons and the gold star medal of the most coveted award in the Soviet military, Hero of the Soviet Union. He had won that in combat as a freckled boy of twenty, shuttling back and forth on the Volga. Those were good days, he told himself, dodging bombs from the German Stukas and the more random artillery fire with which the Fascists had tried to interdict his squadron … Like most men he was unable to remember the stark terror of combat.
It was a Tuesday morning, and Padorin had a pile of mail waiting on his desk. His yeoman got him a pot of tea and a cup – the usual Russian glass cup set in a metal holder, sterling silver in this case. Padorin had worked long and hard for the perks that came with this office. He settled in his chair and read first through the intelligence dispatches, information copies of data sent each morning and evening to the operational commands of the Soviet Navy. A political officer had to keep current, to know what the imperialists were up to so that he could brief his men on the threat.
Next came the official mail from within the People’s Commissariat of the Navy and the Ministry of Defence. He had access to all of the correspondence from the former, while that from the latter had been carefully vetted since the Soviet armed services share as little information as possible. There wasn’t too much mail from either place today. The usual Monday afternoon meeting had covered most of what had to be done that week, and nearly everything Padorin was concerned with was now in the hands of his staff for disposition. He poured a second cup of tea and opened a new pack of unfiltered cigarettes, a habit he’d been unable to break despite a mild heart attack three years earlier. He checked his desk calendar – good, no appointments until ten.
Near the bottom of the pile was an official-looking envelope from the Northern Fleet. The code number at the upper left corner showed that it came from the Red October. Hadn’t he just read something about that?
Padorin rechecked his ops dispatches. So, Ramius hadn’t turned up in his exercise area? He shrugged. Missile submarines were supposed to be elusive, and it would not have surprised the old admiral at all if Ramius were twisting a few tails. The son of Aleksandr Ramius was a prima donna who had the troubling habit of seeming to build his own personality cult: he kept some of the men he trained and discarded others. Padorin reflected that those rejected for line service had made excellent zampoliti, and appeared to have more line knowledge than was the norm. Even so, Ramius was a captain who needed watching. Sometimes Padorin suspected that he was too much a sailor and not enough a Communist. On the other hand, his father had been a model Party member and a hero of the Great Patriotic War. Certainly he had been well thought of, Lithuanian or not. And the son? Years of letter-perfect performance, as many years of stalwart Party membership. He was known for his spirited participation at meetings and occasionally brilliant essays. The people in the naval branch of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, reported that the imperialists regarded him as a dangerous and skilled enemy. Good, Padorin thought, the bastards ought to fear our men. He turned his attention back to the envelope.
Red October, now there was a fitting name for a Soviet warship! Named not only for the revolution that had forever changed the history of the world but also for the Red October Tractor Plant. Many was the dawn when Padorin had looked west to Stalingrad to see if the factory still stood, a symbol to the Soviet fighting men struggling against the Hitlerite bandits. The envelope was marked Confidential, and his yeoman had not opened it as he had the other routine mail. The admiral took his letter opener from the desk drawer. It was a sentimental object, having been his service knife years before. When his first gunboat had been sunk under him, one hot August night in 1942, he had swum to shore and been pounced on by a German infantryman who hadn’t expected resistance from a half-drowned sailor. Padorin had surprised him, sinking the knife in his chest and breaking off half the blade as he stole his enemy’s life. Later a machinist had trimmed the blade down. It was no longer a proper knife, but Padorin wasn’t about to throw this sort of souvenir away.
‘Comrade Admiral,’ the letter began – but the type had been scratched out and replaced with a hand-written ‘Uncle Yuri.’ Ramius had jokingly called him that years back when Padorin was chief political officer of the Northern Fleet. ‘Thank you for your confidence, and for the opportunity you have given me with command of this magnificent ship!’ Ramius ought to be grateful, Padorin thought. Performance or not, you don’t give this sort of command to –
What? Padorin stopped reading and started over. He forgot the cigarette smouldering in his ashtray as he reached the bottom of the first page. A joke. Ramius was known for his jokes – but he’d pay for this one. This was going too fucking far! He turned the page.
‘This is no joke, Uncle Yuri – Marko.’
Padorin stopped and looked out of the window. The Kremlin wall at this point was a beehive of niches for the ashes of the Party faithful. He couldn’t have read the letter correctly. He started to read it again. His hands began to shake.
He had a direct line to Admiral Gorshkov, with no yeomen or secretaries to bar the way.
‘Comrade Admiral, this is Padorin.’
‘Good morning, Yuri,’ Gorshkov said pleasantly.
‘I must see you immediately. I have a situation here.’
‘What sort of situation?’ Gorshkov asked warily.
‘We must discuss it in person. I am coming over now.’ There was no way he’d discuss this over the phone; he knew it was tapped.
THE USS DALLAS
Sonarman Second Class Ronald Jones, his division officer noted, was in his usual trance. The young college dropout was hunched over his instrument table, body limp, eyes closed, face locked into the same neutral expression he wore when listening to one of the many Bach tapes on his expensive personal cassette player. Jones was the sort who categorized his tapes by their flaws, a ragged piano tempo, a botched flute, a wavering French horn. He listened to sea sounds with the same discriminating intensity. In all the navies of the world, submariners were regarded as a curious breed, and submariners themselves looked upon sonar operators as odd. Their eccentricities, however, were among the most tolerated in the military service. The executive officer liked to tell a story about a sonar chief he’d served with for two years, a man who had patrolled the same areas in missile submarines for virtually his whole career. He became so familiar with the humpback whales that summered in the area that he took to calling them by name. On retiring, he went to work for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, where his talent was regarded not so much with amusement as awe.
Three years earlier, Jones had been asked to leave the California Institute of Technology in the middle of his junior year. He had pulled one of the ingenious pranks for which Cal Tech students were justly famous, only it hadn’t worked. Now he was serving his time in the navy to finance his return. It was his announced intention to get a doctorate in cybernetics and signal processing. In return for an early out, after receiving his degree he would go to work for the Naval Research Laboratory. Lieutenant Thompson believed it. On joining the Dallas six months earlier, he had read the files of all his men. Jones’ IQ was 158, the highest on the boat by a fair margin. He had a placid face and sad brown eyes that women found irresistible. On the beach Jones had enough action to wear down a squad of marines. It didn’t make much sense to the lieutenant. He’d been the football hero at Annapolis. Jones was a skinny kid who listened to Bach. It didn’t figure.
The USS Dallas, a 688-class attack submarine, was forty miles from the coast of Iceland, approaching her patrol station, code-named Toll Booth. She was two days late getting there. A week earlier, she had participated in the NATO war game NIFTY DOLPHIN, which had been postponed several days because the worst North Atlantic weather in twenty years had delayed other ships detailed to it. In that exercise the Dallas, teamed with HMS Swiftsure, had used the foul weather to penetrate and ravage the simulated enemy formation. It was yet another top performance for the Dallas and her skipper, Commander Bart Mancuso, one of the youngest submarine commanders in the US Navy. The mission had been followed by a courtesy call at the Swiftsure’s Royal Navy base in Scotland, and the American sailors were still shaking off hangovers from the celebration … Now they had a different mission, a new development in the Atlantic submarine game. For three weeks, the Dallas was to report on traffic in and out of Red Route One.
Over the past fourteen months, newer Soviet submarines had been using a strange, effective tactic for shedding their American and British shadowers. Southwest of Iceland the Russian boats would race down the Reykjanes Ridge, a finger of underwater highlands pointing to the deep Atlantic basin. Spaced at intervals from five miles to half a mile, these mountains with their knife-edged ridges of brittle igneous rock rivalled the Alps in size. Their peaks were about a thousand feet beneath the stormy surface of the North Atlantic. Before the late sixties submarines could barely approach the peaks, much less probe their myriad valleys. Throughout the seventies Soviet naval survey vessels had been seen patrolling the ridge – in all seasons, in all weather, quartering and requartering the area in thousands of cruises. Then, fourteen months before the Dallas’ present patrol, the USS Los Angeles had been tracking a Soviet Victor II-class attack submarine. The Victor had skirted the Icelandic coast and gone deep as she approached the ridge. The Los Angeles had followed. The Victor proceeded at eight knots until she passed between the first pair of seamounts, informally known as Thor’s Twins. All at once she went to full speed and moved southwest. The skipper of the Los Angeles made a determined effort to track the Victor and came away from it badly shaken. Although the 688-class submarines were faster than the older Victors, the Russian submarine had simply not slowed down – for fifteen hours, it was later determined.
At first it had not been all that dangerous. Submarines had highly accurate inertial navigation systems able to fix their positions to within a few hundred yards from one second to another. But the Victor was skirting cliffs as though her skipper could see them, like a fighter dodging down a canyon to avoid surface-to-air missile fire. The Los Angeles could not keep track of the cliffs. At any speed over twenty knots both her passive and active sonar, including the echo-fathometer, became almost useless. The Los Angeles thus found herself navigating completely blind. It was, the skipper later reported, like driving a car with the windows painted over, steering with a map and a stopwatch. This was theoretically possible, but the captain quickly realized that the inertial navigation system had a built-in error factor of several hundred yards; this was aggravated by gravitational disturbances, which affected the ‘local vertical,’ which in turn affected the inertial fix. Worst of all, his charts were made for surface ships. Objects below a few hundred feet had been known to be misplaced by miles – something that mattered to no one until recently. The interval between mountains had quickly become less than his cumulative navigational error – sooner or later his submarine would drive into a mountainside at over thirty knots. The captain backed off. The Victor got away.
Initially it was theorized that the Soviets had somehow staked out one particular route, that their submarines were able to follow it at high speed. Russian skippers were known to pull some crazy stunts, and perhaps they were trusting to a combination of inertial systems, magnetic and gyro compasses attuned to a specific track. This theory had never developed much of a following, and in a few weeks it was known for certain that the Soviet submarines speeding through the ridge were following a multiplicity of tracks. The only thing American and British subs could do was stop periodically to get a sonar fix of their positions, then race to catch up. But the Soviet subs never slowed, and the 688s and Trafalgars kept falling behind.
The Dallas was on Toll Booth station to monitor passing Russian subs, to watch the entrance to the passage the US Navy was now calling Red Route One, and to listen for any external evidence of a new gadget that might enable the Soviets to run the ridge so boldly. Until the Americans could copy it, there were three unsavoury alternatives: they could continue losing contact with the Russians; they could station valuable attack subs at the known exits from the route; or they could set up a whole new SOSUS line.
Jones’ trance lasted ten minutes – longer than usual. He ordinarily had a contact figured out in far less time. The sailor leaned back and lit a cigarette.
‘Got something, Mr Thompson.’
‘What is it?’ Thompson leaned against the bulkhead.
‘I don’t know.’ Jones picked up a spare set of phones and handed them to his officer. ‘Listen up, sir.’
Thompson himself was a masters candidate in electrical engineering, an expert in sonar system design. His eyes screwed shut as he concentrated on the sound. It was a very faint low-frequency rumble – or swish. He couldn’t decide. He listened for several minutes before setting the headphones down, then shook his head.
