by Tom Clancy
His duty electrician moved along the electrical control panels switching from main power to emergency, since residual steam power in the turboalternators would die in a few more seconds. In a moment the submarine’s power completely depended on standby batteries.
In the control room power was lost to the electrically controlled trim tabs on the trailing edge of the diving planes, which automatically switched back to electrohydraulic control. This powered not just the small trim tabs but the diving planes as well. The control assemblies moved instantly to a fifteen-degree up-angle — and she was still moving at thirty-nine knots. With all her ballast tanks now blasted free of water by compressed air, the submarine was very light, and she rose like a climbing aircraft. In seconds the astonished control room crew felt their boat rise to an up-angle that was forty-five degrees and getting worse. A moment later they were too busy trying to stand to come to grips with the problem. Now the Alfa was climbing almost vertically at thirty miles per hour. Every man and unsecured item aboard fell sternward.
In the motor control room aft, a crewman crashed against the main electrical switchboard, short-circuiting it with his body, and all power aboard was lost. A cook who had been inventorying survival gear in the torpedo room forward struggled into the escape trunk as he fought his way into an exposure suit. Even with only a year’s experience, he was quick to understand the meaning of the hooting alarms and unprecedented actions of his boat. He yanked the hatch shut and began to work the escape controls as he had been taught in submarine school.
The Politovskiy soared through the surface of the Atlantic like a broaching whale, coming three quarters of her length out of the water before crashing back.
The USS Pogy
“Conn, sonar.”
“Conn, aye, Captain speaking.”
“Skipper, you better hear this. Something just went crazy on Bait 2,” Pogy’s chief reported. Wood was in the sonar room in seconds, putting on earphones plugged into a tape recorder which had a two-minute offset. Commander Wood heard a whooshing sound. The engine noises stopped. A few seconds later there was an explosion of compressed air, and a staccato of hull popping noises as a submarine changed depth rapidly.
“What’s going on?” Wood asked quickly.
The E. S. Politovskiy
In the Politovskiy’s reactor, the runaway fission reaction had virtually annihilated both the incoming seawater and the uranium fuel rods. Their debris settled on the after wall of the reactor vessel. In a minute there was a meter-wide puddle of radioactive slag, enough to form its own critical mass. The reaction continued unabated, this time directly attacking the tough stainless steel of the vessel. Nothing man made could long withstand five thousand degrees of direct heat. In ten seconds the vessel wall failed. The uranium mass dropped free, against the aft bulkhead.
Petchukocov knew he was dead. He saw the paint on the forward bulkhead turn black, and his last impression was of a dark mass surrounded with the blue glow. The engineer’s body vaporized an instant later, and the mass of slag dropped to the next bulkhead aft.
Forward, the submarine’s nearly vertical angle in the water eased. The high-pressure air in the ballast tanks spilled out of the bottom floods and the tanks filled with water, dropping the angle of the boat and submerging her. In the forward part of the submarine men were screaming. The captain struggled to his feet, ignoring his broken leg, trying to get control, to get his men organized and out of the submarine before it was too late, but the luck of Evgeni Sigismondavich Politovskiy would plague his namesake one last time. Only one man escaped. The cook opened the escape trunk hatch and got out. Following what he had learned during the drill, he began to seal the hatch so that men behind him could use it, but a wave slapped him off the hull as the sub slid backwards.
In the engine room, the changing angle dropped the melted core to the deck. The hot mass attacked the steel deck first, burning through that, then the titanium of the hull. Five seconds later the engine room was vented to the sea. The Politovskiy’s largest compartment filled rapidly with water. This destroyed what little reserve buoyancy the ship had, and the acute down-angle returned. The Alfa began her last dive.
The stern dropped just as the captain began to get his control room crew to react to orders again. His head struck an instrument console. What slim hopes his crew had died with him. The Politovskiy was falling backwards, her propeller windmilling the wrong way as she slid to the bottom of the sea.
The Pogy
“Skipper, I was on the Chopper back in sixty-nine,” the Pogy’s chief said, referring to a horrifying accident on a diesel-powered submarine.
“That’s what it sounds like,” his captain said. He was now listening to direct sonar input. There was no mistaking it. The submarine was flooding. They had heard the ballast tanks refill; this could only mean interior compartments were filling with water. If they had been closer, they might have heard the screams of men in that doomed hull. Wood was just as happy he couldn’t. The continuing rush of water was dreadful enough. Men were dying. Russians, his enemy, but men not unlike himself, and there was not a thing that could be done about it.
Bait 1, he saw, was proceeding, unmindful of what had happened to her trailing sister.
The E. S. Politovskiy
It took nine minutes for the Politovskiy to fall the two thousand feet to the ocean floor. She impacted savagely on the hard sand bottom at the edge of the continental shelf. It was a tribute to her builders that her interior bulkheads held. All the compartments from the reactor room aft were flooded and half the crew killed in them, but the forward compartments were dry. Even this was more curse than blessing. With the aft air storage banks unusable and only emergency battery power to run the complex environmental control systems, the forty men had only a limited supply of air. They were spared a rapid death from the crushing North Atlantic only to face a slower one from asphyxiation.
THE NINTH DAY
SATURDAY, 11 DECEMBER
The Pentagon
A female yeoman first class held the door open for Tyler. He walked in to find General Harris standing alone over the large chart table pondering the placement of tiny ship models.
“You must be Skip Tyler.” Harris looked up.
“Yes, sir.” Tyler was standing as rigidly at attention as his prosthetic leg allowed. Harris came over quickly to shake hands.
“Greer says you used to play ball.”
“Yes, General, I played right tackle at Annapolis. Those were good years.” Tyler smiled, flexing his fingers. Harris looked like an iron-pumper.
“Okay, if you used to play ball, you can call me Ed.” Harris poked him in the chest. “Your number was seventy-eight, and you made All American, right?”
“Second string, sir. Nice to know somebody remembers.”
“I was on temporary duty at the Academy for a few months back then, and I caught a couple games. I never forget a good offensive lineman. I made All Conference at Montana — long time ago. What happened to the leg?”
“Drunk driver clipped me. I was the lucky one. The drunk didn’t make it.”
“Serves the bastard right.”
Tyler nodded agreement, but remembered that the drunken shipfitter had had his own wife and family, according to the police. “Where is everybody?”
“The chiefs are at their normal — well, normal for a weekday, not a Saturday — intelligence briefing. They ought to be down in a few minutes. So, you’re teaching engineering at Annapolis now, eh?”
“Yes, sir. I got a doctorate in that along the way.”
“Name’s Ed, Skip. And this morning you’re going to tell us how we can hold onto that maverick Russian sub?”
“Yes, sir — Ed.”
“Tell me about it, but let’s get some coffee first.” The two men went to a table in the corner with coffee and donuts. Harris listened to the younger man for five minutes, sipping his coffee and devouring a couple of jelly donuts. It took a lot of food to support his frame.
“Son of a gun,” the J-3 observed when Tyler finished. He walked over to the chart. “That’s interesting. Your idea depends a lot on sleight of hand. We’d have to keep them away from where we’re pulling this off. About here, you say?” He tapped the chart.
“Yes, General. The thing is, the way they seem to be operating we can do this to seaward of them—”
“And do a double shuffle. I like it. Yeah, I like it, but Dan Foster won’t like losing one of our own boats.”
“I’d say it’s worth the trade.”
“So would I,” Harris agreed. “But they’re not my boats. After we do this, where do we hide her — if we get her?”
“General, there are some nice places right here on the Chesapeake Bay. There’s a deep spot on the York River and another on the Patuxent, both owned by the navy, both marked Keep Out on the charts. Nice thing about subs, they’re supposed to be invisible. You just find a deep enough spot and flood your tanks. That’s temporary, of course. For a more permanent spot, maybe Truk or Kwajalein in the Pacific. Nice and far from any place.”
“And the Soviets would never notice the presence of a sub tender and three hundred submarine technicians there all of a sudden? Besides, those islands don’t really belong to us anymore, remember?”
Tyler hadn’t expected this man to be a dummy. “So, what if they do find out in a few months? What will they do, announce it to the whole world? I don’t think so. By that time we’ll have all the information we want, and we can always produce the defecting officers in a nice news conference. How would that look for them? Anyway, it figures that after we’ve had her for a while, we’ll break her up. The reactor’ll go to Idaho for tests. The missiles and warheads will get taken off. The electronics gear will be taken to California for testing, and the CIA, NSA, and navy will have gunfights over the crypto gear. The stripped hulk will be taken to a nice deep spot and scuttled. No evidence. We don’t have to keep this a secret forever, just for a few months.”
Harris set his cup down. “You’ll have to forgive me for playing devil’s advocate. I see you’ve thought this out. Fine, I think it’s worth a hard look. It means coordinating a lot of hardware, but it doesn’t really interfere with what we’re already doing. Okay, you have my vote.”
The Joint Chiefs arrived three minutes later. Tyler had never seen so many stars in one room.
“You wanted to see all of us, Eddie?” Hilton asked.
“Yes, General. This is Dr. Skip Tyler.”
Admiral Foster came over first to take his hand. “You got us that performance data on Red October that we were just briefed on. Good work, Commander.”
“Dr. Tyler thinks we should hold onto her if we get her,” Harris said deadpan. “And he thinks he has a way we can do it.”
“We already thought of killing the crew,” Commandant Maxwell said. “The president won’t let us.”
“Gentlemen, what if I told you that there was a way to send the crewmen home without them knowing that we have her? That’s the issue, right? We have to send the crewmen back to Mother Russia. I say there’s a way to do that, and the remaining question is where to hide her.”
“We’re listening,” Hilton said suspiciously.
“Well, sir, we’ll have to move quickly to get everything in place. We’ll need Avalon from the West Coast. Mystic is already aboard the Pigeon in Charleston. We need both of them, and we need an old boomer of our own that we can afford to do without. That’s the hardware. The real trick, however, is the timing — and we have to find her. That may be the hardest part.”
“Maybe not,” Foster said. “Admiral Gallery reported this morning that Dallas may be onto her. Her report dovetails nicely with your engineering model. We’ll know more in a few days. Go on.”
Tyler explained. It took ten minutes since he had to answer questions and use the chart to diagram time and space constraints. When he was finished, General Barnes was at the phone calling the commander of the Military Airlift Command. Foster left the room to call Norfolk, and Hilton was on his way to the White House.
The Red October
Except for those on watch, every officer was in the wardroom. Several pots of tea were on the table, all untouched, and again the door was locked.
“Comrades,” Petrov reported, “the second set of badges was contaminated, worse than the first.”
Ramius noted that Petrov was rattled. It wasn’t the first set of badges, or the second. It was the third and fourth since sailing. He had chosen his ship’s doctor well.
“Bad badges,” Melekhin growled. “Some bastard of a trickster in Severomorsk — or perhaps an imperialist spy playing a typical enemy trick on us. When they catch the son of a bitch I will shoot him myself — whoever he is! This sort of thing is treasonous!”
“Regulations require that I report this,” Petrov noted. “Even though the instruments show safe levels.”
“Your adherence to the rules is noted, Comrade Doctor. You have acted correctly,” Ramius said. “And now regulations stipulate that we make yet another check. Melekhin, I want you and Borodin to do it personally. First check the radiation instruments themselves. If they are working properly, we will be certain that the badges are defective — or have been tampered with. If so, my report on this incident will demand someone’s head.” It was not unknown for drunken shipyard workers to be sent to the gulag. “Comrades, in my opinion there is nothing at all to concern us. If there were a leak, Comrade Melekhin would have discovered it days ago. So. We all have work to do.”
They were all back in the wardroom half an hour later. Passing crewmen noticed this, and already the whispering started.
“Comrades,” Melekhin announced, “we have a major problem.”
The officers, especially the younger ones, looked a little pale. On the table was a Geiger counter stripped into a score of small parts. Next to it was a radiation detector taken off the reactor room bulkhead, its inspection cover removed.
“Sabotage,” Melekhin hissed. It was a word fearsome enough to make any Soviet citizen shudder. The room went deathly still, and Ramius noted that Svyadov was holding his face under rigid control.
“Comrades, mechanically speaking these instruments are quite simple. As you know, this counter has ten different settings. We can choose from ten sensitivity ranges, using the same instrument to detect a minor leak or to quantify a major one. We do that by dialing this selector, which engages one of ten electrical resistors of increasing value. A child could design this, or maintain and repair it.” The chief enginer tapped the underside of the selector dial. “In this case the proper resistors have been clipped off, and new ones soldered on. Settings one to eight have the same impedance value. All of our counters were inspected by the same dockyard technician three days before we sailed. Here is his inspection sheet.” Melekhin tossed it on the table contemptuously.
“Either he or another spy sabotaged this and all the other counters I’ve looked at. It would have taken a skilled man no more than an hour. In the case of this instrument.” The engineer turned the fixed detector over. “You see that the electrical parts have been disconnected, except for the test circuit, which was rewired. Borodin and I removed this from the forward bulkhead. This is skilled work; whoever did this is no amateur. I believe that an imperialist agent has sabotaged our ship. First he disabled our radiation monitor instruments, then he probably arranged a low-level leak in our hot piping. It would appear, comrades, that Comrade Petrov was correct. We may have a leak. My apologies, Doctor.”
Petrov nodded jerkily. Compliments like this he could easily forego.
“Total exposure, Comrade Petrov?” Ramius asked.
“The greatest is for the enginemen, of course. The maximum is fifty rads for Comrades Melekhin and Svyadov. The other engine crewmen run from twenty to forty-five rads, and the cumulative exposure drops rapidly as one moves forward. The torpedomen have only five rads or so, mostly less. The officers exclusive of engineers run from ten to twenty-five.” Petrov pau
sed, telling himself to be more positive. “Comrades, these are not lethal doses. In fact, one can tolerate a dose of up to a hundred rads without any near-term physiological effects, and one can survive several hundred. We do face a serious problem here, but it is not yet a life-threatening emergency.”
“Melekhin?” the captain asked.
“It is my engine plant, and my responsibility. We do not yet know that we have a leak. The badges could still be defective or sabotaged. This could all be a vicious psychological trick played on us by the main enemy to damage our morale. Borodin will assist me. We will personally repair these and conduct a thorough inspection of all reactor systems. I am too old to have children. For the moment, I suggest that we deactivate the reactor and proceed on battery. The inspection will take us four hours at most. I also recommend that we reduce reactor watches to two hours. Agreed, Captain?”
“Certainly, Comrade. I know that there is nothing you cannot repair.”
“Excuse me, Comrade Captain,” Ivanov spoke up. “Should we report this to fleet headquarters?”
“Our orders are not to break radio silence,” Ramius said.
“If the imperialists were able to sabotage our instruments…What if they knew our orders beforehand and are attempting to make us use the radio so they can locate us?” Borodin asked.
“A possibility,” Ramius replied. “First we will determine if we have a problem, then its severity. Comrades, we have a fine crew and the best officers in the fleet. We will see to our own problems, conquer them, and continue our mission. We all have a date in Cuba that I intend to meet — to hell with imperialist plots!”
“Well said,” Melekhin concurred.
“Comrades, we will keep this secret. There is no reason to excite the crew over what may be nothing, and at most is something we can handle on our own.” Ramius ended the meeting.
Petrov was less sure, and Svyadov was trying very hard not to shake. He had a sweetheart at home and wanted one day to have children. The young lieutenant had been painstakingly trained to understand everything that went on in the reactor systems and to know what to do if things went awry. And it was some consolation to know that most of the solutions to reactor problems to be found in the book had been written by some of the men in this room. Even so, something that could neither be seen nor felt was invading his body, and no rational person would be happy with that.