by Tom Clancy
“Long time ago,” Lieutenant Butler, the engineering officer, said. “I heard a story about it while I was at Arco. It didn’t work out, but I don’t remember why. Whatever it is, it’s really knocked down on the propulsion noises. That rumble though…It’s some sort of harmonic all right — but a harmonic of what? You know, except for that we’d never have picked it up in the first place.”
“Maybe,” Mancuso said. “Jonesy says that the signal processors have tended to filter this noise out, almost as though the Soviets know what SAPS does and have tailored a system to beat it. But that’s hard to believe.” There was general agreement on this point. Everyone knew the principles on which SAPS operated, but there were probably not fifty men in the country who could really explain the nuts and bolts details.
“We’re agreed she’s a boomer?” Mancuso asked.
Butler nodded. “No way you could fit that power plant into an attack hull. More important, she acts like a boomer.”
“Could be an Oscar,” Chambers suggested.
“No. Why send an Oscar this far south? Oscar’s an antiship platform. Uh-uh, this guy’s driving a boomer. He ran the route at the speed he’s running now — and that’s acting like a missile boat,” Lieutenant Mannion noted. “What are they up to with all this other activity? That’s the real question. Maybe trying to sneak up on our coast — just to see if they can do it. It’s been done before, and all this other activity makes for a hell of a diversion.”
They all considered that. The trick had been tried before by both sides. Most recently, in 1978, a Soviet Yankee-class missile sub had closed to the edge of the continental shelf off the coast of New England. The evident objective had been to see if the United States could detect it or not. The navy had succeeded, and then the question had been whether or not to react and let the Soviets know.
“Well, I think we can leave the grand strategy to the folks on the beach. Let’s phone this one in. Lieutenant Mannion, tell the OOD to get us to periscope depth in twenty minutes. We’ll try to slip away and back without his noticing.” Mancuso frowned. This was never easy.
A half an hour later the Dallas radioed her message.
Z140925ZDEC
TOP SECRET THEO
FR: USS DALLAS
TO: COMSUBLANT
INFO: CINCLANTFLT
A. USS DALLAS Z090414ZDEC
1. ANOMALOUS CONTACT REACQUIRED 0538Z 13DEC. CURRENT POSITION LAT 42° 35$$$ LONG 49° 12$$$. COURSE 194 SPEED 13 DEPTH 600. HAVE TRACKED 24 HOURS WITHOUT COUNTERDETECTION. CONTACT EVALUATED AS REDFLEET SSBN GROSS SIZE, ENGINE CHARACTERISTICS INDICATIVE TYPHOON CLASS. HOWEVER CONTACT USING NEW DRIVE SYSTEM NOT REPEAT NOT PROPELLERS. HAVE ESTABLISHED DETAILED SIGNATURE PROFILE.
2. RETURNING TO TRACKING OPERATIONS. REQUEST ADDITIONAL OPAREA ASSIGNMENTS. AWAIT REPLY 1030Z.
COMSUBLANT Operations
“Bingo!” Gallery said to himself. He walked back to his office, careful to close the door before lifting the scrambled line to Washington.
“Sam, this is Vince. Listen up: Dallas reports she is tracking a Russian boomer with a new kind of quiet drive system, about six hundred miles southwest of the Grand Banks, course one-nine-four, speed thirteen knots.”
“All right! That’s Mancuso?” Dodge said.
“Bartolomeo Vito Mancuso, my favorite Guinea,” Gallery confirmed. Getting him this command had not been easy because of his age. Gallery had gone the distance for him. “I told you the kid was good, Sam.”
“Jesus, you see how close they are to the Kiev group?” Dodge was looking at his tactical display.
“They are cutting it close,” Gallery agreed. “Invincible’s not too far away, though, and I have Pogy out there, too. We moved her off the shelf when we called Scamp back in. I figure Dallas will need help. The question is how obvious do we want to be.”
“Not very. Look, Vince, I have to talk to Dan Foster about this.”
“Okay. I have to reply to Dallas in, hell, in fifty-five minutes. You know the score. He has to break contact to reach us, then sneak back. Hustle, Sam.”
“Right, Vince.” Dodge switched buttons on his phone. “This is Admiral Dodge. I need to talk to Admiral Foster right now.”
The Pentagon
“Ouch. Between Kiev and Kirov. Nice.” Lieutenant General Harris took a marker from his pocket to represent the Red October. It was a sub-shaped piece of wood with a Jolly Roger attached. Harris had an odd sense of humor. “The president says we can try and keep her?” he asked.
“If we can get her to the place we want at the time we want,” General Hilton said. “Can Dallas signal her?”
“Good trick, General.” Foster shook his head. “First things first. Let’s get Pogy and Invincible there for starters, then we figure out how to warn him. From this course track, Christ, he’s heading right for Norfolk. You believe the balls on this guy? If worse comes to worse, we can always try to escort him in.”
“Then we’d have to give the boat back,” Admiral Dodge objected.
“We have to have a fall-back position, Sam. If we can’t warn him off, we can try and run a bunch of ships through with him to keep Ivan from shooting.”
“The law of the sea is your bailiwick, not mine,” General Barnes, the air force chief of staff, commented. “But from where I sit doing that could be called anything from piracy to an overt act of war. Isn’t this exercise complicated enough already?”
“Good point, General,” Foster said.
“Gentlemen, I think we need time to consider this. Okay, we still have time, but right now let’s tell Dallas to sit tight and track the bugger,” Harris said. “And report any changes in course or speed. I figure we have about fifteen minutes to do that. Next we can get Pogy and Invincible staked out on their path.”
“Right, Eddie.” Hilton turned to Admiral Foster. “If you agree, let’s do that right now.”
“Send the message, Sam,” Foster ordered.
“Aye aye.” Dodge went to the phone and ordered Admiral Gallery to send the reply.
Z141030ZDEC
TOP SECRET
FR: COMSUBLANT
TO: USS DALLAS
A. USS DALLAS Z140925ZDEC
1. CONTINUE TRACKING. REPORT ANY CHANGES IN COURSE OR SPEED. HELP ON THE WAY.
2. ELF TRANSMISSION “G” DESIGNATES FLASH OPS DIRECTIVE READY FOR YOU.
3. YOUR OPAREA UNRESTRICTED BRAVO ZULU DALLAS KEEP IT UP. VADM GALLERY SENDS.
“Okay, let’s look at this,” Harris said. “What the Russians are up to never has figured, has it?”
“What do you mean, Eddie?” Hilton asked.
“Their force composition for one thing. Half these surface platforms are antiair and antisurface, not primary ASW assets. And why bring Kirov along at all? Granted she makes a nice force flag, but they could do the same thing with Kiev.”
“We talked about that already,” Foster observed. “They ran down the list of what they had that could travel this far at a high speed of advance and took everything that would steam. Same with the subs they sent, half of them are antisurface SSGNs with limited utility against submarines. The reason, Eddie, is that Gorshkov wants every platform here he can get. A half-capable ship is better than nothing. Even one of the old Echoes might get lucky, and Sergey is probably hitting the knees every night praying for luck.”
“Even so, they’ve split their surface groups into three forces, each with antiair and antisurface elements, and they’re kind of thin on ASW hulls. Nor have they sent their ASW aircraft to stage out of Cuba. Now that is curious,” Harris pointed out.
“It would blow their cover story. You don’t look for a dead sub with aircraft — well, they might, but if they started using a wing of Bears out of Cuba, the president would go ape,” Foster said. “We’d harass them so much they’d never accomplish anything. For us this would be a technical operation, but they factor politics into everything they do.”
“Fine, but that still doesn’t explain it. What ASW ships and choppers they do
have are pinging away like mad. You might look for a dead sub that way, but October ain’t dead, is she?”
“I don’t understand, Eddie,” Hilton said.
“How would you look for a stray sub, given these circumstances?” Harris asked Foster.
“Not like this,” Foster said after a moment. “Using surface, active sonar would warn the boat off long before they could get a hard contact. Boomers are fat on passive sonar. She’d hear them coming and skedaddle out of the way. You’re right, Eddie. It’s a sham.”
“So what the hell are their surface ships up to?” Barnes asked, puzzled.
“Soviet naval doctrine is to use surface ships to support submarine operations,” Harris explained. “Gorshkov is a decent tactical theoretician, and occasionally a very innovative gent. He said years ago that for submarines to operate effectively they have to have outside help, air or surface assets in direct or proximate support. They can’t use air this far from home without staging out of Cuba, and at best finding a boat in open ocean that doesn’t want to be found would be a difficult assignment.
“On the other hand, they know where she’s heading, a limited number of discrete areas, and those are staked out with fifty-eight submarines. The purpose of the surface forces, therefore, is not to participate in the hunt itself — though if they got lucky, they wouldn’t mind. The purpose of the surface forces is to keep us from interfering with their submarines. They can do that by staking out the areas we’re likely to be with their surface assets and watching what we’re doing.” Harris paused for a moment. “That’s smart. We have to cover them, right? And since they’re on a ‘rescue’ mission, we have to do more or less what they’re doing, so we ping away also, and they can use our own ASW expertise against us for their own purposes. We play right into their hands.”
“Why?” Barnes asked again.
“We’re committed to helping in the search. If we find their boat, they’re close enough to find out, acquire, localize, and shoot — and what can we do about it? Not a thing.
“Like I said, they figure to locate and shoot with their submarines. A surface acquisition would be pure luck, and you don’t plan for luck. So, the primary objective of the surface fleet is to ride shotgun for, and draw our forces away from, their subs. Secondarily they can act as beaters, driving the game to the shooters — and again, since we’re pinging, we’re helping them. We’re providing an additional stalking horse.” Harris shook his head in grudging admiration. “Not too shabby, is it? If Red October hears them coming, she runs a little harder for whatever port the skipper wants, right into a nice, tight trap. Dan, what are the chances they can bag her coming into Norfolk, say?”
Foster looked down at the chart. Russian submarines were staked out on every port from Maine to Florida. “They have more subs than we have ports. Now we know that this guy can be picked up, and there’s only so much area to cover off each port, even outside the territorial limit…You’re right, Eddie. They have too good a chance of making the kill. Our surface groups are too far away to do anything about it. Our subs don’t know what’s happening, we have orders not to tell them, and even if we could, how could they interfere? Fire at the Russian subs before they could shoot — and start a war?” Foster let out a long breath. “We gotta warn him off.”
“How?” Hilton asked.
“Sonar, a gertrude message maybe,” Harris suggested.
Admiral Dodge shook his head. “You can hear that through the hull. If we continue to assume that only the officers are in on this, well, the crew might figure out what’s happening, and there’s no predicting the consequences. Think we can use Nimitz and America to force them off the coast? They’ll be close enough to enter the operation soon. Damn! I don’t want this guy to get this close, then get blown away right off our coast.”
“Not a chance,” Harris said. “Ever since the raid on Kirov they’ve been acting too docile. That’s pretty cute, too. I bet they had that figured out. They know that having so many of their ships operating off our coast is bound to provoke us, so they make the first move, we up the ante, and they just plain fold — so now if we keep leaning on them, we’re the bad guys. They’re just doing a rescue operation, not threatening anybody. The Post reported this morning that we have a Russian survivor in the Norfolk naval hospital. Anyway, the good news is that they’ve miscalculated October’s speed. These two groups will pass her left and right, and with their seven-knot speed advantage they’ll just pass her by.”
“Disregard the surface groups entirely?” Maxwell asked.
“No,” Hilton said, “that tells them we are no longer buying the cover story. They’d wonder why — and we still have to cover their surface groups. They’re a threat whether they’re acting like honest merchants or not.”
“What we can do is pretend to release Invincible. With Nimitz and America ready to enter the game, we can send her home. As they pass October we can use that to our advantage. We put Invincible to seaward of their surface groups as though she’s heading home and interpose her on October’s course. We still have to figure out a way to communicate with her, though. I can see how to get the assets in place, but that hurdle remains, gentlemen. For the moment, are we agreed to position Invincible and Pogy for the intercept?”
The Invincible
“How far is she from us?” Ryan asked.
“Two hundred miles. We can be there in ten hours.” Captain Hunter marked the position on the chart. “USS Pogy is coming east, and she ought to be able to rendezvous with Dallas an hour or so after we do. This will put us about a hundred miles east of this surface group when October arrives. Bloody hell, Kiev and Kirov are a hundred miles east and west of her.”
“You suppose her captain knows it?” Ryan looked at the chart, measuring the distances with his eyes.
“Unlikely. He’s deep, and their passive sonars are not as good as ours. Sea conditions are against it also. A twenty-knot surface wind can play havoc with sonar, even that deep.”
“We have to warn him off.” Admiral White looked at the ops dispatch. “‘Without using acoustical devices.’”
“How the hell do you do that? You can’t reach down that far with a radio,” Ryan noted. “Even I know that. My God, this guy’s come four thousand miles, and he’s going to get killed within sight of his objective.”
“How to communicate with a submarine?”
Commander Barclay straightened up. “Gentlemen, we are not trying to communicate with a submarine, we are trying to communicate with a man.”
“What are you thinking?” Hunter asked.
“What do we know about Marko Ramius?” Barclay’s eyes narrowed.
“He’s a cowboy, typical submarine commander, thinks he can walk on water,” Captain Carstairs said.
“Who spent most of his time in attack submarines,” Barclay added. “Marko’s bet his life that he could sneak into an American port undetected by anyone. We have to shake that confidence to warn him off.”
“We have to talk to him first,” Ryan said sharply.
“And so we shall,” Barclay smiled, the thought now fully formed in his mind. “He’s a former attack submarine commander. He’ll still be thinking about how to attack his enemies, and how does a sub commander do that?”
“Well?” Ryan demanded.
Barclay’s answer was the obvious one. They discussed his idea for another hour, then Ryan transmitted it to Washington for approval. A rapid exchange of technical information followed. The Invincible would have to make the rendezvous in daylight, and there was not time for that. The operation was set back twelve hours. The Pogy joined formation with the Invincible, standing as sonar sentry twenty miles to her east. An hour before midnight, the ELF transmitter in northern Michigan transmitted a message: “G.” Twenty minutes later, the Dallas approached the surface to get her orders.
THE THIRTEENTH DAY
WEDNESDAY, 15 DECEMBER
The Dallas
“Crazy Ivan,” Jones called out again, �
�turning to port!”
“Okay, all stop,” Mancuso ordered, holding a dispatch in his hand which he had been rereading for hours. He was not pleased with it.
“All stop, sir,” the helmsman responded.
“All back full.”
“All back full, sir.” The helmsman dialed in the command and turned, his face a question.
Throughout the Dallas the crew heard noise, too much noise as poppet valves opened to vent steam onto the reverse turbine blades, trying to spin the propeller the wrong way. It made for instant vibration and cavitation noises aft.
“Right full rudder.”
“Right full rudder, aye.”
“Conn, sonar, we are cavitating,” Jones spoke over the intercom.
“Very well, sonar!” Mancuso answered sharply. He did not understand his new orders, and things he didn’t understand made him angry.
“Speed down to four knots,” Lieutenant Goodman reported.
“Rudder amidships, all stop.”
“Rudder amidships aye, all stop aye,” the helmsman responded at once. He didn’t want the captain barking at him. “Sir, my rudder is amidships.”
“Jesus!” Jones said in the sonar room. “What’s the skipper doin’?”
Mancuso was in sonar a second later.
“Still doing the turn to port, Cap’n. He’s astern of us ’cause of the turn we made,” Jones observed as neutrally as he could. It was close to an accusation, Mancuso noticed.
“Flushing the game, Jonesy,” Mancuso said coolly.
You’re the boss, Jones thought, smart enough not to say anything else. The captain looked as though he was going to snap somebody’s head off, and Jones had just used up a month’s worth of tolerance. He switched his phones to the towed array plug.