by Tom Clancy
Vice Admiral James Greer was reclining in his high-backed judge’s chair reading through a folder. His oversized mahogany desk was covered with neat piles of folders whose edges were bordered with red tape and whose covers bore various code words.
“Hiya, Jack!” he called across the room. “Coffee?”
“Yes, thank you, sir.”
James Greer was sixty-six, a naval officer past retirement age who kept working through brute competence, much as Hyman Rickover had, though Greer was a far easier man to work for. He was a “mustang,” a man who had entered the naval service as an enlisted man, earned his way into the Naval Academy, and spent forty years working his way to a three-star flag, first commanding submarines, then as a full-time intelligence specialist. Greer was a demanding boss, but one who took care of those who pleased him. Ryan was one of these.
Somewhat to Nancy’s chagrin, Greer liked to make his own coffee with a West Bend drip machine on the credenza behind his desk, where he could just turn around to reach it. Ryan poured himself a cup — actually a navy-style handleless mug. It was traditional navy coffee, brewed strong, with a pinch of salt.
“You hungry, Jack?” Greer pulled a pastry box from a desk drawer. “I got some sticky buns here.”
“Why, thanks, sir. I didn’t eat much on the plane.” Ryan took one, along with a paper napkin.
“Still don’t like to fly?” Greer was amused.
Ryan sat down in the chair opposite his boss. “I suppose I ought to be getting used to it. I like the Concorde better than the wide-bodies. You only have to be terrified half as long.”
“How’s the family?”
“Fine, thank you, sir. Sally’s in first grade — loves it. And little Jack is toddling around the house. These buns are pretty good.”
“New bakery just opened up a few blocks from my place. I pass it on the way in every morning.” The admiral sat upright in his chair. “So, what brings you over today?”
“Photographs of the new Soviet missile boat, Red October,” Ryan said casually between sips.
“Oh, and what do our British cousins want in return?” Greer asked suspiciously.
“They want a peek at Barry Somers’ new enhancement gadgets. Not the machines themselves — at first — just the finished product. I think it’s a fair bargain, sir.” Ryan knew the CIA didn’t have any shots of the new sub. The operations directorate did not have a man at the building yard at Severodvinsk or a reliable man at the Polyarnyy submarine base. Worse, the rows of “boat barns” built to shelter the missile submarines, modeled on World War II German submarine pens, made satellite photography impossible. “We have ten frames, low obliques, five each bow and stern, and one from each perspective is undeveloped so that Somers can work on them fresh. We are not committed, sir, but I told Sir Basil that you’d think it over.”
The admiral grunted. Sir Basil Charleston, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, was a master of the quid pro quo, occasionally offering to share sources with his wealthier cousins and a month later asking for something in return. The intelligence game was often like a primitive marketplace. “To use the new system, Jack, we need the camera used to take the shots.”
“I know.” Ryan pulled the camera from his coat pocket. “It’s a modified Kodak disk camera. Sir Basil says it’s the coming thing in spy cameras, nice and flat. This one, he says, was hidden in a tobacco pouch.”
“How did you know that — that we need the camera?”
“You mean how Somers uses lasers to—”
“Ryan!” Greer snapped. “How much do you know?”
“Relax, sir. Remember back in February, I was over to discuss those new SS-20 sites on the Chinese border? Somers was here, and you asked me to drive him out to the airport. On the way out he started babbling about this great new idea he was heading west to work on. He talked about it all the way to Dulles. From what little I understood, I gather that he shoots laser beams through the camera lenses to make a mathematical model of the lens. From that, I suppose, he can take the exposed negative, break down the image into the — original incoming light beams, I guess, then use a computer to run that through a computer-generated theoretical lens to make a perfect picture. I probably have it wrong.” Ryan could tell from Greer’s face that he didn’t.
“Somers talks too goddamned much.”
“I told him that, sir. But once the guy gets started, how the hell do you shut him up?”
“And what do the Brits know?” Greer asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine, sir. Sir Basil asked me about it, and I told him that he was asking the wrong guy — I mean, my degrees are in economics and history, not physics. I told him we needed the camera — but he already knew that. Took it right out of his desk and tossed it to me. I did not reveal a thing about this, sir.”
“I wonder how many other people he spilled to. Geniuses! They operate in their own crazy little worlds. Somers is like a little kid sometimes. And you know the First Rule of Security: The likelihood of a secret’s being blown is proportional to the square of the number of people who’re in on it.” It was Greer’s favorite dictum.
His phone buzzed. “Greer…Right.” He hung up. “Charlie Davenport’s on the way up, per your suggestion, Jack. Supposed to be here half an hour ago. Must be the snow.” The admiral jerked a hand towards the window. There were two inches on the ground, with another inch expected by nightfall. “One flake hits this town and everything goes to hell.”
Ryan laughed. That was something Greer, a down-easter from Maine, never could seem to understand.
“So, Jack, you say this is worth the price?”
“Sir, we’ve wanted these pictures for some time, what with all the contradictory data we’ve been getting on the sub. It’s your decision and the judge’s but, yes, I think they’re worth the price. These shots are very interesting.”
“We ought to have our own men in that damned yard,” Greer grumped. Ryan didn’t know how Operations had screwed that one up. He had little interest in field operations. Ryan was an analyst. How the data came to his desk was not his concern, and he was careful to avoid finding out. “I don’t suppose Basil told you anything about their man?”
Ryan smiled, shaking his head. “No, sir, and I did not ask.” Greer nodded his approval.
“Morning, James!”
Ryan turned to see Rear Admiral Charles Davenport, director of naval intelligence, with a captain trailing in his wake.
“Hi, Charlie. You know Jack Ryan, don’t you?”
“Hello, Ryan.”
“We’ve met,” Ryan said.
“This is Captain Casimir.”
Ryan shook hands with both men. He’d met Davenport a few years before while delivering a paper at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Davenport had given him a hard time in the question-and-answer session. He was supposed to be a bastard to work for, a former aviator who had lost flight status after a barrier crash and, some said, still bore a grudge. Against whom? Nobody really knew.
“Weather in England must be as bad as here, Ryan.” Davenport dropped his bridge coat on top of Ryan’s. “I see you stole a Royal Navy overcoat.”
Ryan was fond of his toggle coat. “A gift, sir, and quite warm.”
“Christ, you even talk like a Brit. James, we gotta bring this boy home.”
“Be nice to him, Charlie. He’s got a present for you. Grab yourself some coffee.”
Casimir scurried over to fill a mug for his boss, then sat down at his right hand. Ryan let them wait a moment before opening his briefcase. He took out four folders, keeping one and handing the others around.
“They say you’ve been doing some fairly good work, Ryan,” Davenport said. Jack knew him to be a mercurial man, affable one moment, brittle the next. Probably to keep his subordinates off balance. “And — Jesus Christ!” Davenport had opened his folder.
“Gentlemen, I give you Red October, courtesy of the British Secret Intelligence Service,” Ryan said
formally.
The folders had the photographs arranged in pairs, four each of four-by-four prints. In the back were ten-by-ten blowups of each. The photos had been taken from a low-oblique angle, probably from the rim of the graving dock that had held the boat during her post-shakedown refit. The shots were paired, fore and aft, fore and aft.
“Gentlemen, as you can see, the lighting wasn’t all that great. Nothing fancy here. It was a pocket camera loaded with 400-speed color film. The first pair was processed normally to establish high levels. The second was pushed for greater brightness using normal procedures. The third pair was digitally enhanced for color resolution, and the fourth was digitally enhanced for line resolution. I have undeveloped frames of each view for Barry Somers to play with.”
“Oh?” Davenport looked up briefly. “That’s right neighborly of the Brits. What’s the price?” Greer told him. “Pay up. It’s worth it.”
“That’s what Jack says.”
“Figures,” Davenport chuckled. “You know he really is working for them.”
Ryan bristled at that. He liked the English, liked working with their intelligence community, but he knew what country he came from. Jack took a deep breath. Davenport liked to goad people, and if he reacted Davenport would win.
“I gather that Sir John Ryan is still well connected on the other side of the ocean?” Davenport said, extending the prod.
Ryan’s knighthood was an honorary one. It was his reward for having broken up a terrorist incident that had erupted around him in St. James’s Park, London. He’d been a tourist at the time, the innocent American abroad, long before he’d been asked to join the CIA. The fact that he had unknowingly prevented the assassination of two very prominent figures had gotten him more publicity than he’d ever wanted, but it had also brought him in contact with a lot of people in England, most of them worth the time. Those connections had made him valuable enough that the CIA asked him to be part of a joint American-British liaison group. That was how he had established a good working relationship with Sir Basil Charleston.
“We have lots of friends over there, sir, and some of them were kind enough to give you these,” Ryan said coolly.
Davenport softened. “Okay, Jack, then you do me a favor. You see whoever gave us these gets something nice in his stocking. They’re worth plenty. So, exactly what do we have here?”
To the unschooled observer, the photographs showed the standard nuclear missile submarine. The steel hull was blunt at one end, tapered at the other. The workmen standing on the floor of the dock provided scale — she was huge. There were twin bronze propellers at the stern, on either side of a flat appendage which the Russians called a beaver tail, or so the intelligence reports said. With the twin screws the stern was unremarkable except in one detail.
“What are these doors for?” Casimir asked.
“Hmm. She’s a big bastard.” Davenport evidently hadn’t heard. “Forty feet longer than we expected, by the look of her.”
“Forty-four, roughly.” Ryan didn’t much like Davenport, but the man did know his stuff. “Somers can calibrate that for us. And more beam, two meters more than the other Typhoons. She’s an obvious development of the Typhoon class, but—”
“You’re right, Captain,” Davenport interrupted. “What are those doors?”
“That’s why I came over.” Ryan had wondered how long this would take. He’d caught onto them in the first five seconds. “I don’t know, and neither do the Brits.”
The Red October had two doors at the bow and stern, each about two meters in diameter, though they were not quite circular. They had been closed when the photos were shot and only showed up well on the number four pair.
“Torpedo tubes? No — four of them are inboard.” Greer reached into his drawer and came out with a magnifying glass. In an age of computer-enhanced imagery it struck Ryan as charmingly anachronistic.
“You’re the sub driver, James,” Davenport observed.
“Twenty years ago, Charlie.” He’d made the switch from line officer to professional spook in the early sixties. Captain Casimir, Ryan noted, wore the wings of a naval aviator and had the good sense to remain quiet. He wasn’t a “nuc.”
“Well, they can’t be torpedo tubes. They have the normal four of them at the bow, inboard of these openings…must be six or seven feet across. How about launch tubes for the new cruise missile they’re developing?”
“That’s what the Royal Navy thinks. I had a chance to talk it over with their intelligence chaps. But I don’t buy it. Why put an anti-surface-ship weapon on a strategic platform? We don’t, and we deploy our boomers a lot further forward than they do. The doors are symmetrical through the boat’s axis. You can’t launch a missile out of the stern, sir. The openings barely clear the screws.”
“Toward sonar array,” Davenport said.
“Granted they could do that, if they trail one screw. But why two of them?” Ryan asked.
Davenport gave him a nasty look. “They love redundancies.”
“Two doors forward, two aft, I can buy cruise missile tubes. I can buy a towed array. But both sets of doors exactly the same size?” Ryan shook his head. “Too much of a coincidence. I think it’s something new. That’s what interrupted her construction for so long. They figured something new for her and spent the last two years rebuilding the Typhoon configuration to accommodate it. Note also that they added six more missiles for good measure.”
“Opinion,” Davenport observed.
“That’s what I’m paid for.”
“Okay, Jack, what do you think it is?” Greer asked.
“Beats me, sir. I’m no engineer.”
Admiral Greer looked his guests over for a few seconds. He smiled and leaned back in his chair. “Gentlemen, we have what? Ninety years of naval experience in this room, plus this young amateur.” He gestured at Ryan. “Okay, Jack, you’ve set us up for something. Why did you bring this over personally?”
“I want to show these to somebody.”
“Who?” Greer’s head cocked suspiciously to one side.
“Skip Tyler. Any of you fellows know him?”
“I do,” Casimir nodded. “He was a year behind me at Annapolis. Didn’t he get hurt or something?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Lost his leg in an auto accident four years ago. He was up for command of the Los Angeles and a drunk driver clipped him. Now he teaches engineering at the Academy and does a lot of consulting work with Sea Systems Command — technical analysis, looking at their ship designs. He has a doctorate in engineering from MIT, and he knows how to think unconventionally.”
“How about his security clearance?” Greer asked.
“Top secret or better, sir, because of his Crystal City work.”
“Objections, Charlie?”
Davenport frowned. Tyler was not part of the intelligence community. “Is this the guy who did the evaluation of the new Kirov?”
Yes, sir, now that I think about it,” Casimir said. “Him and Saunders over at Sea Systems.”
“That was a nice piece of work. It’s okay with me.”
“When do you want to see him?” Greer asked Ryan.
“Today, if it’s all right with you, sir. I have to run over to Annapolis anyway, to get something from the house, and — well, do some quick Christmas shopping.”
“Oh? A few dolls?” Davenport asked.
Ryan turned to look the admiral in the eye. “Yes, sir, as a matter of fact. My little girl wants a Skiing Barbie doll and some Jordache doll outfits. Didn’t you ever play Santa, Admiral?”
Davenport saw that Ryan wasn’t going to back off anymore. He wasn’t a subordinate to be browbeaten. Ryan could always walk away. He tried a new tack. “Did they tell you over there that October sailed last Friday?”
“Oh?” They hadn’t. Ryan was caught off guard. “I thought she wasn’t scheduled to sail until this Friday.”
“So did we. Her skipper is Marko Ramius. You heard about him?”
“Only secondhand stuff. The Brits say he’s pretty good.”
“Better than that,” Greer noted. “He’s about the best sub driver they have, a real charger. We had a considerable file on him when I was at DIA. Who’s bird-doggin’ him for you, Charlie?”
“Bremerton was assigned to it. She was out of position doing some ELINT work when Ramius sailed, but she was ordered over. Her skipper’s Bud Wilson. Remember his dad?”
Greer laughed out loud. “Red Wilson? Now there was one spirited submarine driver! His boy any good?”
“So they say. Ramius is about the best the Soviets have, but Wilson’s got a 688 boat. By the end of the week, we’ll be able to start a new book on Red October.” Davenport stood. “We gotta head back, James.” Casimir hurried to get the coats. “I can keep these?”
“I suppose, Charlie. Just don’t go hanging them on the wall, even to throw darts at. And I guess you want to get moving, too, Jack?”
“Yes, sir.”
Greer lifted his phone. “Nancy, Dr. Ryan will need a car and a driver in fifteen minutes. Right.” He set the receiver down and waited for Davenport to leave. “No sense getting you killed out there in the snow. Besides, you’d probably drive on the wrong side of the road after a year in England. Skiing Barbie, Jack?”
“You had all boys, didn’t you, sir? Girls are different.” Ryan grinned. “You’ve never met my little Sally.”
“Daddy’s girl?”
“Yep. God help whoever marries her. Can I leave these photographs with Tyler?”
“I hope you’re right about him, son. Yes, he can hold onto them — if and only if he has a good place to keep them.”
“Understood, sir.”
“When you get back — probably be late, the way the roads are. You’re staying at the Marriott?”
“Yes, sir.”
Greer thought that over. “I’ll probably be working late. Stop by here before you bed down. I may want to go over a few things with you.”
“Will do, sir. Thanks for the car.” Ryan stood.
“Go buy your dolls, son.”
Greer watched him leave. He liked Ryan. The boy was not afraid to speak his mind. Part of that came from having money and being married to more money. It was a sort of independence that had advantages. Ryan could not be bought, bribed, or bullied. He could always go back to writing history books full time. Ryan had made money on his own in four years as a stockbroker, betting his own money on high-risk issues and scoring big before leaving it all behind — because, he said, he hadn’t wanted to press his luck. Greer didn’t believe that. He thought Jack had been bored — bored with making money. He shook his head. The talent that had enabled him to pick winning stocks Ryan now applied to the CIA. He was rapidly becoming one of Greer’s star analysts, and his British connections made him doubly valuable. Ryan had the ability to sort through a pile of data and come out with the three or four facts that meant something. This was too rare a thing at the CIA. The agency still spent too much of its money collecting data, Greer thought, and not enough collating it. Analysts had none of the supposed glamour — a Hollywood-generated illusion — of a secret agent in a foreign land. But Jack knew how to analyze reports from such men and data from technical sources. He knew how to make a decision and was not afraid to say what he thought, whether his bosses liked it or not. This sometimes grated the old admiral, but on the whole he liked having subordinates whom he could respect. The CIA had too many people whose only skill was kissing ass.