by Tom Clancy
“Corporal, I want to see Admiral Painter.”
“The admiral’s in flag quarters, sir. Do you require escort?”
“No, son. I used to command this ship. Come along, Jack.” Ryan got to carry both bags.
“Gawd, sir, you actually used to do this for a living?” Ryan asked.
“Night carrier landings? Sure, I’ve done a couple of hundred. What’s the big deal?” Davenport seemed surprised at Ryan’s awe. Jack was sure it was an act.
The inside of the Kennedy was much like the interior of the USS Guam, the helicopter assault ship Ryan had been assigned to during his brief military career. It was the usual navy maze of steel bulkheads and pipes, everything painted the same shade of cave-gray. The pipes had some colored bands and stenciled acronyms which probably meant something to the men who ran the ship. To Ryan they might as well have been neolithic cave paintings. Davenport led him through a corridor, around a corner, down a “ladder” made entirely of steel and so steep he almost lost his balance, down another passageway, and around another corner. By this time Ryan was thoroughly lost. They came to a door with a marine stationed in front. The sergeant saluted perfectly, and opened the door for them.
Ryan followed Davenport in—and was amazed. Flag quarters on the USS Kennedy might have been transported as a block from a Beacon Hill mansion. To his right was a wall-sized mural large enough to dominate a big living room. A half-dozen oils, one of them a portrait of the ship’s namesake, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, dotted the other walls, themselves covered with expensive-looking paneling. The deck was covered in thick crimson wool, and the furniture was pure civilian, French provincial, oak and brocade. One could almost imagine they were not aboard a ship at all, except that the ceiling—“overhead”—had the usual collection of pipes, all painted gray. It was a decidedly odd contrast to the rest of the room.
“Hi ya, Charlie!” Rear Admiral Joshua Painter emerged from the next room, drying his hands with a towel. “How was it coming in?”
“Little rocky,” Davenport allowed, shaking hands. “This is Jack Ryan.”
Ryan had never met Painter but knew him by reputation. A Phantom pilot during the Vietnam War, he had written a book, Paddystrikes, on the conduct of the air campaigns. It had been a truthful book, not the sort of thing that wins friends. He was a small, feisty man who could not have weighed more than a hundred thirty pounds. He was also a gifted tactician and a man of puritanical integrity.
“One of yours, Charlie?”
“No, Admiral, I work for James Greer. I am not a naval officer. Please accept my apologies. I don’t like pretending to be what I’m not. The uniform was the CIA’s idea.” This drew a frown.
“Oh? Well, I suppose that means you’re going to tell me what Ivan’s up to. Good, I hope to hell somebody knows. First time on a carrier? How did you like the flight in?”
“It might be a good way to interrogate prisoners of war,” Ryan said as offhandedly as he could. The two flag officers had a good laugh at his expense, and Painter called for some food to be sent in.
The double doors to the passageway opened serveral minutes later and a pair of stewards—“mess management specialists”—came in, one bearing a tray of food, the other two pots of coffee. The three men were served in a style appropriate to their rank. The food, served on silver-trimmed plates, was simple but appetizing to Ryan, who hadn’t eaten in twelve hours. He dished cole slaw and potato salad onto his plate and selected a pair of corned-beef-on-ryes.
“Thank you. That’s all for now,” Painter said. The stewards came to attention before leaving. “Okay, let’s get down to business.”
Ryan gulped down half a sandwich. “Admiral, this information is only twenty hours old.” He took the briefing folders from his bag and handed them around. His delivery took twenty minutes, during which he managed to consume the two sandwiches and a goodly portion of his cole slaw and spill coffee on his hand-written notes. The two flag officers were a perfect audience, not interrupting once, only darting a few disbelieving looks at him.
“God Almighty,” Painter said when Ryan finished. Davenport just stared poker-faced as he contemplated the possibility of examining a Soviet missile sub from the inside. Jack decided he’d be a formidable opponent over cards. Painter went on, “Do you really believe this?”
“Yes, sir, I do.” Ryan poured himself another cup of coffee. He would have preferred a beer to go with his corned beef. It hadn’t been bad at all, and good kosher corned beef was something he’d been unable to find in London.
Painter leaned back and looked at Davenport. “Charlie, you tell Greer to teach this lad a few lessons—like how a bureaucrat ain’t supposed to stick his neck this far out on the block. Don’t you think this is a little far-fetched?”
“Josh, Ryan here’s the guy who did the report last June on Soviet missile-sub patrol patterns.”
“Oh? That was a nice piece of work. It confirmed something I’ve been saying for two or three years.” Painter rose and walked to the corner to look out at the stormy sea. “So, what are we supposed to do about all this?”
“The exact details of the operation have not been determined. What I expect is that you will be directed to locate Red October and attempt to establish communications with her skipper. After that? We’ll have to figure a way to get her to a safe place. You see, the president doesn’t think we’ll be able to hold onto her once we get her—if we get her.”
“What?” Painter spun around and spoke a tenth of a second before Davenport did. Ryan explained for several minutes.
“Dear God above! You give me one impossible task, then you tell me that if we succeed in it, we gotta give the goddamned thing back to them!”
“Admiral, my recommendation—the president asked me for one—was that we keep the submarine. For what it’s worth, the Joint Chiefs are on your side, too, along with the CIA. As it is, though, if the crewmen want to go back home, we have to send them back, and then the Soviets will know we have the boat for sure. As a practical matter, I can see the other side’s point. The vessel is worth a pile of money, and it is their property. And how would we hide a 30,000-ton submarine?”
“You hide a submarine by sinking it,” Painter said angrily. “They’re designed to do that, you know. ‘Their property!’ We’re not talking about a damned passenger liner. That’s something designed to kill people—our people!”
“Admiral, I am on your side,” Ryan said quietly. “Sir, you said we’ve given you an impossible task, Why?”
“Ryan, finding a boomer that does not want to be found is not the easiest thing in the world. We practice against our own. We damned near always fail, and you say this one’s already passed all the northeast SOSUS lines. The Atlantic’s a rather large ocean, and a missile sub’s noise footprint is very small.”
“Yes, sir.” Ryan noted to himself that he might have been overly optimistic about their chances for success.
“What sort of shape are you in, Josh?” Davenport asked.
“Pretty good, really. The exercise we just ran, NIFTY DOLPHIN, worked out all right. Our part of it,” Painter corrected himself. “Dallas raised some hell on the other side. My ASW crews are functioning very well. What sort of help are we getting?”
“When I left the Pentagon, the CNO was checking the availability of P-3s out on the Pacific, so you’ll probably be seeing more of those. Everything that’ll move is putting to sea. You’re the only carrier, so you’ve got overall tactical command, right? Come on, Josh, you’re our best ASW operator.”
Painter poured some coffee for himself. “Okay, we have one carrier deck. America and Nimitz are still a good week away. Ryan, you said you’re flying out to Invincible. We get her, too, right?”
“The president was working on that. Want her?”
“Sure. Admiral White has a good nose for ASW, and his boys really lucked out during DOLPHIN. They killed two of our attack boats, and Vince Gallery was some kind of pissed about that. Luck’s a big p
art of this game. That would give us two decks instead of one. I wonder if we can get some more S-3s?” Painter referred to the Lockheed Vikings, carrier-borne antisubmarine aircraft.
“Why?” Davenport asked.
“I can transfer my F-18s to shore, and that’ll give us room for twenty more Vikings. I don’t like losing the striking power, but what we’re going to need is more ASW muscle. That means more S-3s. Jack, you know that if you’re wrong, that Russkie surface force is going to be a handful to deal with. You know how many surface-to-surface missiles they’re packing?”
“No, sir.” Ryan was certain it was too many.
“We’re one carrier, and that makes us their primary target. If they start shooting at us, it’ll get awful lonesome—then it’ll get awful exciting.” The phone rang. “Painter here…Yes. Thank you. Well, Invincible just turned around. Good, they’re giving her to us along with two tin cans. The rest of the escorts and the three attack subs are still heading home.” He frowned. “I can’t really fault them for that. That means we have to give them some escorts, but it’s a good trade. I want that flight deck.”
“Can we chopper Jack out to her?” Ryan wondered if Davenport knew what the president had ordered him to do. The admiral seemed interested in getting him off the Kennedy.
Painter shook his head. “Too far for a chopper. Maybe they can send a Harrier back for him.”
“The Harrier’s a fighter, sir,” Ryan commented.
“They have an experimental two-seat version set up for ASW patrolling. It’s supposed to work reasonably well outside their helo perimeter. That’s how they bagged one of our attack boats, caught her napping.” Painter finished off the last of his coffee.
“Okay, gentlemen, let’s get ourselves down to ASW control and try and figure a way to run this circus act. CINCLANT will want to hear what I have in mind. I suppose I’d better decide for myself. We’ll also call Invincible and have them send a bird back to ferry you out, Ryan.”
Ryan followed the two admirals out of the room. He spent two hours watching Painter move ships around the ocean like a chess master with his pieces.
The USS Dallas
Bart Mancuso had been on duty in the attack center for more than twenty hours. Only a few hours of sleep separated this stretch from the previous one. He had been eating sandwiches and drinking coffee, and two cups of soup had been thrown in by his cooks for variety’s sake. He examined his latest cup of freeze-dried without affection.
“Cap’n?” He turned. It was Roger Thompson, his sonar officer.
“Yes, what is it?” Mancuso pulled himself away from the tactical display that had occupied his attention for several days. Thompson was standing at the rear of the compartment. Jones was standing beside him holding a clipboard and what looked like a tape machine.
“Sir, Jonesy has something I think you ought to look at.”
Mancuso didn’t want to be bothered—extended time on duty always taxed his patience. But Jones looked eager and excited. “Okay, come on over to the chart table.”
The Dallas’ chart table was a new gadget wired into the BC-10 and projected onto a TV-type glass screen four feet square. The display moved as the Dallas moved. This made paper charts obsolete, though they were kept anyway. Charts can’t break.
“Thanks, Skipper,” Jones said, more humbly than usual. “I know you’re kinda busy, but I think I got something here. That anomalous contact we had the other day’s been bothering me. I had to leave it after the ruckus the other Russkie subs kicked up, but I was able to come back to it three times to make sure it was still there. The fourth time it was gone, faded out. I want to show you what I worked up. Can you punch up our course track for back then on this baby, sir?”
The chart table was interfaced through the BC-10 into the ship’s inertial navigation system, SINS. Mancuso punched the command in himself. It was getting so that they couldn’t flush the head without a computer command…The Dallas’ course track showed up as a convoluted red line, with tick marks displayed at fifteen-minute intervals.
“Great!” Jones commented. “I’ve never seen it do that before. That’s all right. Okay.” Jones pulled a handful of pencils from his back pocket. “Now, I got the contact first at 0915 or so, and the bearing was about two-six-nine.” He set a pencil down, eraser at Dallas’ position, point directed west towards the target. “Then at 0930 it was bearing a two-six-zero. At 0948, it was two-five-zero. There’s some error built into these, Cap’n. It was a tough signal to lock in on, but the errors should average out. Right about then we got all this other activity, and I had to go after them, but I came back to it about 1000, and the bearing was two-four-two.” Jones set down another pencil on the due-east line traced when the Dallas had moved away from the Icelandic coast. “At 1015 it was two-three-four, and at 1030 it was two-two-seven. These last two are shaky, sir. The signal was real faint, and I didn’t have a very good lock on it.” Jones looked up. He appeared nervous.
“So far, so good. Relax, Jonesy. Light up if you want.”
“Thanks, Cap’n.” Jones fished out a cigarette and lit it with a butane lighter. He had never approached the captain quite this way. He knew Mancuso to be a tolerant, easygoing commander—if you had something to say. He was not a man who liked his time wasted, and it was sure as hell he wouldn’t want it wasted now. “Okay, sir, we gotta figure he couldn’t be too far away from us, right? I mean, he had to be between us and Iceland. So let’s say he was about halfway between. That gives him a course about like this.” Jones set down some more pencils.
“Hold it, Jonesy. Where does the course come from?”
“Oh, yeah.” Jones flipped open his clipboard. “Yesterday morning, night, whatever it was, after I got off watch, it started bothering me, so I used the move we made offshore as a baseline to do a little course track for him. I know how, Skipper. I read the manual. It’s easy, just like we used to do at Cal Tech to chart star motion. I took an astronomy course in my freshman year.”
Mancuso stifled a groan. It was the first time he had ever heard this called easy, but on looking at Jones’ figures and diagrams, it appeared that he had done it right. “Go on.”
Jones pulled a Hewlitt Packard scientific calculator from his pocket and what looked like a National Geographic map liberally coated with pencil marks and scribblings. “You want to check my figures, sir?”
“We will, but I’ll trust you for now. What’s the map?”
“Skipper, I know it’s against the rules an’ all, but I keep this as a personal record of the tracks the bad guys use. It doesn’t leave the boat, sir, honest. I may be a little off, but all this translates to a course of about two-two-zero and a speed of ten knots. And that aims him right at the entrance of Route One. Okay?”
“Go on.” Mancuso had already figured that one. Jonesy was on to something.
“Well, I couldn’t sleep after that, so I skipped back to sonar and pulled the tape on the contact. I had to run it through the computer a few times to filter out all the crap—sea sounds, the other subs, you know—then I rerecorded it at ten times normal speed.” He set his cassette recorder on the chart table. “Listen to this, Skipper.”
The tape was scratchy, but every few seconds there was a thrum. Two minutes of listening seemed to indicate a regular interval of about five seconds. By this time Lieutenant Mannion was looking over Thompson’s shoulder, listening, and nodding speculatively.
“Skipper, that’s gotta be a man-made sound. It’s just too regular for anything else. At normal speed it didn’t make much sense, but once I speeded it up, I had the sucker.”
“Okay, Jonesy, finish it,” Mancuso said.
“Captain, what you just heard was the acoustical signature of a Russian submarine. He was heading for Route One, taking the inshore track off the Icelandic coast. You can bet money on that, Skipper.”
“Roger?”
“He sold me, Captain,” Thompson replied.
Mancuso took another look at the course track,
trying to figure an alternative. There wasn’t any. “Me, too. Roger, Jonesy makes sonarman first class today. I want to see the paper work done by the turn of the next watch, along with a nice letter of commendation for my signature. Ron,” he poked the sonarman in the shoulder, “that’s all right. Damned well done!”
“Thanks, Skipper.” Jones’ smile stretched from ear to ear.
“Pat, please call Lieutenant Butler to the attack center.”
Mannion went to the phones to call the boat’s chief engineer.
“Any idea what it is, Jonesy?” Mancuso turned back.
The sonarman shook his head. “It isn’t screw sounds. I’ve never heard anything like it.” He ran the tape back and played it again.
Two minutes later, Lieutenant Earl Butler came into the attack center. “You rang, Skipper?”
“Listen to this, Earl.” Mancuso rewound the tape and played it a third time.
Butler was a graduate of the University of Texas and every school the navy had for submarines and their engine systems. “What’s that supposed to be?”
“Jonesy says it’s a Russian sub. I think he’s right.”
“Tell me about the tape,” Butler said to Jones.
“Sir, it’s speeded up ten times, and I washed it through the BC-10 five times. At normal speed it doesn’t sound like much of anything.” With uncharacteristic modesty, Jones did not point out that it had sounded like something to him.
“Some sort of harmonic? I mean, if it was a propeller, it’d have to be a hundred feet across, and we’d be hearing one blade at a time. The regular interval suggests some sort of harmonic.” Butler’s face screwed up. “But a harmonic what?”
“Whatever it was, it was headed right here.” Mancuso tapped Thor’s Twins with his pencil.
“That makes him a Russian, all right,” Butler agreed. “Then they’re using something new. Again.”