by Tom Clancy
The timer went off and he lifted the rack, shaking it carefully over the tank. No sense getting the chemical — silver nitrate? something like that — on his uniform. The rack went into the second tank, and he set the timer again. Pity the orders had been so damned secret — he could have brought his tropical uniform. He’d sweat like a pig in the Cuban heat. Of course, none of those savages ever bothered to wash. Maybe they had learned something in the past fifteen years? He’d see.
The timer dinged again, and Petrov lifted the rack a second time, shaking it and setting it in the water-filled basin. Another boring job completed. Why couldn’t a sailor fall down a ladder and break something? He wanted to use his East German X-ray machine on a live patient. He didn’t trust the Germans, Marxists or not, but they did make good medical equipment, including his X-ray, autoclave, and most of his pharmaceuticals. Time. Petrov lifted the rack and held it up against the X-ray reading plate, which he switched on.
“Nichevo!” Petrov breathed. He had to think. His badge was fogged. Its number was 3-4-8: third badge series, frame fifty-four (the medical office, galley section), aft (officers’) accommodations.
Though only two centimeters across, the badges were made with variable sensitivity. Ten vertically segmented columns were used to quantify the exposure level. Petrov saw that his was fogged all the way to segment four. The engine room crewmen’s were fogged to segment five, and the torpedomen, who spent all their time forward, showed contamination only in segment one.
“Son of a bitch.” He knew the sensitivity levels by heart. He took the manual down to check them anyway. Fortunately, the segments were logarithmic. His exposure was twelve rads. Fifteen to twenty-five for the engineers. Twelve to twenty-five rads in two days, not enough to be dangerous. Not really life threatening, but…Petrov went back into his office, careful to leave the films in the labs. He picked up the phone.
“Captain Ramius? Petrov here. Could you come aft to my office, please?”
“On the way, Comrade Doctor.”
Ramius took his time. He knew what the call was about. The day before they sailed, while Petrov had been ashore procuring drugs for his cupboard, Borodin had contaminated the badges with the X-ray machine.
“Yes, Petrov?” Ramius closed the door behind him.
“Comrade Captain, we have a radiation leak.”
“Nonsense. Our instruments would have detected it at once.”
Petrov got the films from the lab and handed them to the captain. “Look here.”
Ramius held them up to the light, scanning the film strips top to bottom. He frowned. “Who knows of this?”
“You and I, Comrade Captain.”
“You will tell no one — no one.” Ramius paused. “Any chance that the films were — that they have something wrong, that you made an error in the developing process?”
Petrov shook his head emphatically. “No, Comrade Captain. Only you, Comrade Borodin, and I have access to these. As you know, I tested random samples from each batch three days before we sailed.” Petrov wouldn’t admit that, like everyone, he had taken the samples from the top of the box they were stored in. They weren’t really random.
“The maximum exposure I see here is…ten to twenty?” Ramius understated it. “Whose numbers?”
“Bulganin and Surzpoi. The torpedomen forward are all under three rads.”
“Very well. What we have here, Comrade Doctor, is a possible minor — minor, Petrov — leak in the reactor spaces. At worst a gas leak of some sort. This has happened before, and no one has ever died from it. The leak will be found and fixed. We will keep this little secret. There is no reason to get the men excited over nothing.”
Petrov nodded agreement, knowing that men had died in 1970 in an accident on the submarine Voroshilov, more in the icebreaker Lenin. Both accidents were a long time ago, though, and he was sure Ramius could handle things. Wasn’t he?
The Pentagon
The E ring was the outermost and largest of the Pentagon’s rings, and since its outside windows offered something other than a view of sunless courtyards, this was where the most senior defense officials had their offices. One of these was the office of the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the J-3. He wasn’t there. He was down in a subbasement room known colloquially as the Tank because its metal walls were dotted with electronic noisemakers to foil other electronic devices.
He had been there for twenty-four hours, though one would not have known this from his appearance. His green trousers were still creased, his khaki shirt still showed the folds made by the laundry, its collar starched plywood-stiff, and his tie was held neatly in place by a gold marine corps tiepin. Lieutenant General Edwin Harris was neither a diplomat nor a service academy graduate, but he was playing peacemaker. An odd position for a marine.
“God damn it!” It was the voice of Admiral Blackburn, CINCLANT. Also present was his own operations officer, Rear Admiral Pete Stanford. “Is this any way to run an operation?”
The Joint Chiefs were all there, and none of them thought so.
“Look, Blackie, I told you where the orders come from.” General Hilton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sounded tired.
“I understand that, General, but this is largely a submarine operation, right? I gotta get Vince Gallery in on this, and you should have Sam Dodge working up at this end. Dan and I are both fighter jocks, Pete’s an ASW expert. We need a sub driver in on this.”
“Gentlemen,” Harris said calmly, “for the moment the plan we have to take to the president need only deal with the Soviet threat. Let’s hold this story about the defecting boomer in abeyance for the moment, shall we?”
“I agree,” Stanford nodded. “We have enough to worry about right here.”
The attention of the eight flag officers turned to the map table. Fifty-eight Soviet submarines and twenty-eight surface warships, plus a gaggle of oilers and replenishment ships, were unmistakably heading for the American coast. To face this, the U.S. Navy had one available carrier. The Invincible did not rate as such. The threat was considerable. Among them the Soviet vessels carried over three hundred surface-to-surface cruise missiles. Though principally designed as antiship weapons, the third of them believed to carry nuclear warheads were sufficient to devastate the cities of the East Coast. From a position off New Jersey, these missiles could range from Norfolk to Boston.
“Josh Painter proposes that we keep Kennedy inshore,” Admiral Blackburn said. “He wants to run the ASW operation from his carrier, transferring his light attack squadrons to shore and replacing them with S-3s. He wants Invincible out on their seaward flank.”
“I don’t like it,” General Harris said. Neither did Pete Stanford, and they had agreed earlier that the J-3 would launch the counterplan. “Gentlemen, if we’re only going to have one deck to use, we damned well ought to have a carrier and not an oversized ASW platform.”
“We’re listening, Eddie,” Hilton said.
“Let’s move Kennedy out here.” He moved the counter to a position west of the Azores. “Josh keeps his attack squadrons. We move Invincible inshore to handle the ASW work. It’s what the Brits designed her for, right? They’re supposed to be good at it. Kennedy is an offensive weapon, her mission is to threaten them. Okay, if we deploy like this, she is the threat. From over here she can range against their surface force from outside their surface-to-surface missile perimeter—”
“Better yet,” Stanford interjected, pointing to some vessels on the map, “threaten this service force here. If they lose these oilers, they ain’t going home. To meet that threat they’ll have to redeploy themselves. For starters, they’ll have to move Kiev offshore to give themselves some kind of air defense against Kennedy. We can use the spare S-3s from shore bases. They can still patrol the same areas.” He traced a line about five hundred miles off the coast.
“Leaves Invincible kind of naked, though,” the CNO, Admiral Foster, noted.
“Josh was asking about some
E-3 coverage for the Brits.” Blackburn looked at the air force chief of staff, General Claire Barnes.
“You want help, you get help,” Barnes said. “We’ll have a Sentry operating over Invincible at dawn tomorrow, and if you move her inshore we can maintain that round the clock. I’ll throw in a wing of F-16s if you want.”
“What do you want in return, Max?” Foster asked. Nobody called him Claire.
“The way I see this, you have Saratoga’s air wing sitting around doing nothing. Okay, by Saturday I’ll have five hundred tactical fighters deployed from Dover to Loring. My boys don’t know much about antiship stuff. They’ll have to learn in a hurry. I want you to send your kids to work with mine, and I also want your Tomcats. I like the fighter-missile combination. Let one squadron work out of Iceland, the other out of New England to track the Bears Ivan’s starting to send our way. I’ll sweeten that. If you want, we’ll send some tankers to Lajes to help keep Kennedy’s birds flying.”
“Blackie?” Foster asked.
“Deal,” Blackburn nodded. “The only thing that bothers me is that Invincible doesn’t have all that much ASW capacity.”
“So we get more,” Stanford said. “Admiral, what say we take Tarawa out of Little Creek, team her with New Jersey’s group, with a dozen ASW choppers aboard and seven or eight Harriers?”
“I like it,” Harris said quickly. “Then we have two baby carriers with a noteworthy striking force right in front of their groups, Kennedy playing stalking tiger to their east, and a few hundred tactical fighters to the west. They have to come into a three-way box. This actually gives us more ASW patrolling capacity than we’d have otherwise.”
“Can Kennedy handle her mission alone out there?” Hilton asked.
“Depend on it,” Blackburn replied. “We can kill any one, maybe any two of these four groups in an hour. The ones nearest shore will be your job, Max.”
“How long did you two characters rehearse this?” General Maxwell, commandant of the marine corps, asked the operations officer. Everyone chuckled.
The Red October
Chief Engineer Melekhin cleared the reactor compartment before beginning the check for the leak. Ramius and Petrov were there also, plus the engineering duty officers and one of the young lieutenants, Svyadov. Three of the officers carried Geiger counters.
The reactor room was quite large. It had to be to accommodate the massive, barrel-shaped steel vessel. The object was warm to the touch despite being inactive. Automatic radiation detectors were in every corner of the room, each surrounded by a red circle. More were hanging on the fore and aft bulkheads. Of all the compartments on the submarine, this was the cleanest. The deck and bulkheads were spotless white-painted steel. The reason was obvious: the smallest leak of reactor coolant had to be instantly visible even if all the detectors failed.
Svyadov climbed an aluminum ladder affixed to the side of the reactor vessel to run the detachable probe from his counter over every welded pipe joint. The speaker-annunciator on the hand-held box was turned to maximum so that everyone in the compartment could hear it, and Svyadov had an earpiece plugged in for even greater sensitivity. A youngster of twenty-one, he was nervous. Only a fool would feel entirely safe looking for a radiation leak. There is a joke in the Soviet Navy: How do you tell a sailor from the Northern Fleet? He glows in the dark. It had been a good laugh on the beach, but not now. He knew that he was conducting the search because he was the youngest, least experienced, and most expendable officer. It was an effort to keep his knees from wobbling as he strained to reach all over and around the reactor piping.
The counter was not entirely silent, and Svyadov’s stomach cringed at each click generated by the passage of a random particle through the tube of ionized gas. Every few seconds his eyes flickered to the dial that measured intensity. It was well inside the safe range, hardly registering at all. The reactor vessel was a quadruple-layer design, each layer several centimeters of tough stainless steel. The three inner spaces were filled with a barium-water mixture, then a barrier of lead, then polyethylene, all designed to prevent the escape of neutrons and gamma particles. The combination of steel, barium, lead, and plastic successfully contained the dangerous elements of the reaction, allowing only a few degrees of heat to escape, and the dial showed, much to his relief, that the radiation level was less than that on the beach at Sochi. The highest reading was made next to a light bulb. This made the lieutenant smile.
“All readings in normal range, comrades,” Svyadov reported.
“Start over,” Melekhin ordered, “from the beginning.”
Twenty minutes later Svyadov, now sweating from the warm air that gathered at the top of the compartment, made an identical report. He came down awkwardly, his arms and legs tired.
“Have a cigarette,” Ramius suggested. “You did well, Svyadov.”
“Thank you, Comrade Captain. It’s warm up there from the lights and the coolant pipes.” The lieutenant handed the counter to Melekhin. The lower dial showed a cumulative count, well within the safe range.
“Probably some contaminated badges,” the chief engineer commented sourly. “It would not be the first time. Some joker in the factory or at the yard supply office — something for our friends in the GRU to check into. ‘Wreckers!’ A joke like this ought to earn somebody a bullet.”
“Perhaps,” Ramius chuckled. “Remember the incident on Lenin?” He referred to the nuclear-powered icebreaker that had spent two years tied to the dock, unusable because of a reactor mishap. “A ship’s cook had some badly crusted pans, and a madman of an engineer suggested that he use live steam to get them cleaned. So the idiot walked down to the steam generator and opened an inspection valve, with his pots under it!”
Melekhin rolled his eyes. “I remember it! I was a staff engineering officer then. The captain had asked for a Kazakh cook—”
“He liked horsemeat with his kasha,” Ramius said.
“—and the fool didn’t know the first thing about a ship. Killed himself and three other men, contaminated the whole fucking compartment for twenty months. The captain only got out of the gulag last year.”
“I bet the cook got his pans cleaned, though,” Ramius observed.
“Indeed, Marko Aleksandrovich — they may even be safe to use in another fifty years.” Melekhin laughed raucously.
That was a hell of a thing to say in front of a young officer, Petrov thought. There was nothing, nothing at all funny about a reactor leak. But Melekhin was known for his heavy sense of humor, and the doctor imagined that twenty years of working on reactors allowed him and the captain to view the potential dangers phlegmatically. Then, there was the implicit lesson in the story: never let someone who does not belong into the reactor spaces.
“Very well,” Melekhin said, “now we check the pipes in the generator room. Come, Svyadov, we still need your young legs.”
The next compartment aft contained the heat exchanger/steam generator, turboalternators, and auxiliary equipment. The main turbines were in the next compartment, now inactive while the electrically driven caterpillar was operating. In any case, the steam that turned them was supposed to be clean. The only radioactivity was in the inside loop. The reactor coolant, which carried short-lived but dangerous radioactivity, never flashed to steam. This was in the outside loop and boiled from uncontaminated water. The two water supplies met but never mixed inside the heat exchanger, the most likely site for a coolant leak because of its more numerous fittings and valves.
The more complex piping required a full fifty minutes to check. These pipes were not as well insulated as those forward. Svyadov nearly burned himself twice, and his face was bathed in perspiration by the time he finished his first sweep.
“Readings all safe again, comrades.”
“Good,” Melekhin said. “Come down and rest a moment before you check it again.”
Svyadov almost thanked his chief for that, but this would not have done at all. As a young, dedicated officer and member of the
Komsomol, no exertion was too great. He came down carefully, and Melekhin handed him another cigarette. The chief engineer was a gray-haired perfectionist who took decent care of his men.
“Why, thank you, Comrade,” Svyadov said.
Petrov got a folding chair. “Sit, Comrade Lieutenant, rest your legs.”
The lieutenant sat down at once, stretching his legs to work out the knots. The officers at VVMUPP had told him how lucky he was to draw this assignment. Ramius and Melekhin were the two best teachers in the fleet, men whose crews appreciated their kindness along with their competence.
“They really should insulate those pipes,” Ramius said. Melekhin shook his head.
“Then they’d be too hard to inspect.” He handed the counter to his captain.
“Entirely safe,” the captain read off the cumulative dial. “You get more exposure tending a garden.”
“Indeed,” Melekhin said. “Coal miners get more exposure than we do, from the release of radon gas in the mines. Bad badges, that’s what it has to be. Why not take out a whole batch and check it?”
“I could, Comrade,” Petrov answered. “But then, due to the extended nature of our cruise, we’d have to run for several days without any. Contrary to regulations. I’m afraid.”
“You are correct. In any case the badges are only a backup to our instruments.” Ramius gestured to the red-circled detectors all over the compartment.
“Do you really want to recheck the piping?” Melekhin asked.
“I think we should,” Ramius said.
Svyadov swore to himself, looking down at the deck.
“There is no extravagance in the pursuit of safety,” Petrov quoted doctrine. “Sorry, Lieutenant.” The doctor was not a bit sorry. He had been genuinely worried, and was now feeling a lot better.
An hour later the second check had been completed. Petrov took Svyadov forward for salt tablets and tea to rehydrate himself. The senior officers left, and Melekhin ordered the reactor plant restarted.