by Tom Clancy
“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.”
“Mr. Butler’s right,” Jones said. “It does sound like a harmonic rumble. The other funny thing is, well, there was this background noise, kinda like water going through a pipe. I don’t know, it didn’t pick up on this. I guess the computer filtered it off. It was real faint to start with—anyway, that’s outside my field.”
“That’s all right. You’ve done enough for one day. How do you feel?” Mancuso asked.
“A little tired, Skipper. I’ve been working on this for a while.”
“If we get close to this guy again, you think you can track him down?” Mancuso knew the answer.
“You bet, Cap’n! Now that we know what to listen for, you bet I’ll bag the sucker!”
Mancuso looked at the chart table. “Okay, if he was heading for the Twins, and then ran the route at, say twenty-eight or thirty knots, and then settled down to his base course and speed of about ten or so…that puts him about here now. Long ways off. Now, if we run at top speed…forty-eight hours will put us here, and that’ll put us in front of him. Pat?”
“That’s about right, sir,” Lieutenant Mannion concurred. “You’re figuring he ran the route at full speed, then settled down—makes sense. He wouldn’t need the quiet drive in that damned maze. It gives him a free shot for four or five hundred miles, so why not uncrank his engines? That’s what I’d do.”
“That’s what we’ll try and do, then. We’ll radio in for permission to leave Toll Booth station and track this character down. Jonesy, running at max speed means you sonarmen will be out of work for a while. Set up the contact tape on the simulator and make sure the operators all know what this guy sounds like, but get some rest. All of you. I want you at a hundred percent when we try to reacquire this guy. Have yourself a shower. Make that a Hollywood shower—you’ve earned it—and rack out. When we do go after this character, it’ll be a long, tough hunt.”
“No sweat, Captain. We’ll get him for you. Bet on it. You want to keep my tape, sir?”
“Yeah.” Mancuso ejected the tape and looked up in surprise. “You sacrificed a Bach for this?”
“Not a good one, sir. I have a Christopher Hogwood of this piece that’s much better.”
Mancuso pocketed the tape. “Dismissed, Jonesy. Nice work.”
“A pleasure, Cap’n.” Jones left the attack center counting the extra money for jumping a rate.
“Roger, make sure your people are well rested over the next two days. When we do go after this guy, it’s going to be a bastard.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Pat, get us up to periscope depth. We’re going to call this one into Norfolk right now. Earl, I want you thinking about what’s making that noise.”
“Right, Captain.”
While Mancuso drafted his message, Lieutenant Mannion brought the Dallas to periscope-antenna depth with an upward angle on the diving planes. It took five minutes to get from five hundred feet to just below the stormy surface. The submarine was subject to wave action, and while it was very gentle by surface ship standards, the crew noted her rocking. Mannion raised the periscope and ESM (electronic support measures) antenna, the latter used for the broad-band receiver designed to detect possible radar emissions. There was nothing in view—he could see about five miles—and the ESM instruments showed nothing except for aircraft sets, which were too far away to matter. Next Mannion raised two more masts. One was a reed-like UHF (ultrahigh frequency) receiving antenna. The other was new, a laser transmitter. This rotated and locked onto the carrier wave signal of the Atlantic SSIX, the communications satellite used exclusively by submarines. With the laser, they could send high-density transmissions without giving away the sub’s position.
“All ready, sir,” the duty radioman reported.
“Transmit.”
The radioman pressed a button. The signal, sent in a fraction of a second, was received by photovoltaic cells, read over to a UHF transmitter, and shot back down by a parabolic dish antenna towards Atlantic Fleet Communications headquarters. At Norfolk another radioman noted the reception and pressed a button that transmitted the same signal up to the satellite and back to the Dallas. It was a simple way to identify garbles.
The Dallas operator compared the received signal with the one he’d just sent. “Good copy, sir.”
Mancuso ordered Mannion to lower everything but the ESM and UHF antennae.
Atlantic Fleet Communications
In Norfolk the first line of the dispatch revealed the page and line of the one-time-pad cipher sequence, which was recorded on computer tape in the maximum security section of the communications complex. An officer typed the proper numbers into his computer terminal, and an instant later the machine generated a clear text. The officer checked it again for garbles. Satisfied there were none, he took the printout to the other side of the room where a yeoman was seated at a telex. The officer handed him the dispatch.
The yeoman keyed up the proper addressee and transmitted the message by dedicated landline to COMSUBLANT Operations, half a mile away. The landline was fiber optic, located in a steel conduit under a paved street. It was checked three times a week for security purposes. Not even the secrets of nuclear weapons performance were as closely guarded as day-to-day tactical communications.
COMSUBLANT Operations
A bell went off in the operations room as the message came up on the “hot” printer. It bore a Z prefix, which indicated FLASH-priority status.
Z090414ZDEC
TOP SECRET THEO
FM: USS DALLAS
TO: COMSUBLANT
INFO: CINCLANTFLT
//NOOOOO//
REDFLEET SUBOPS
1. REPORT ANOMALOUS SONAR CONTACT ABOUT 0900Z 7DEC AND LOST AFTER INCREASE IN REDFLEET SUB ACTIVITY. CONTACT SUBSEQUENTLY EVALUATED AS REDFLEET SSN/SSBN TRANSITING ICELAND INSHORE TRACK TOWARDS ROUTE ONE. COURSE SOUTHWEST SPEED TEN DEPTH UNKNOWN.
2. CONTACT EVIDENCED UNUSUAL REPEAT UNUSUAL ACOUSTICAL CHARACTERISTICS. SIGNATURE UNLIKE ANY KNOWN REDFLEET SUBMARINE.
3. REQUEST PERMISSION TO LEAVE TOLL BOOTH TO PURSUE AND INVESTIGATE. BELIEVE A NEW DRIVE SYSTEM WITH UNUSUAL SOUND CHARACTERISTICS BEING USED THIS SUB. BELIEVE GOOD PROBABILITY CAN LOCATE AND IDENTIFY.
A lieutenant junior grade took the dispatch to the office of Vice Admiral Vincent Gallery. COMSUBLANT had been on duty since the Soviet subs had started moving. He was in an evil mood.
“A FLASH priority from Dallas, sir.”
“Uh-huh.” Gallery took the yellow form and read it twice. “What do you suppose this means?”
“No telling, sir. Looks like he heard something, took his time figuring it out, and wants another crack at it. He seems to think he’s onto something unusual.”
“Okay, what do I tell him? Come on, mister. You might be an admiral yourself someday and have to make decisions.” An unlikely prospect, Gallery thought.
“Sir, Dallas is in an ideal position to shadow their surface force when it gets to Iceland. We need her where she is.”
“Good textbook answer.” Gallery smiled up at the youngster, preparing to cut him off at the knees. “On the other hand, Dallas is commanded by a fairly competent man who wouldn’t be bothering us unless he really thought he had something. He doesn’t go into specifics, probably because it’
s too complicated for a tactical FLASH dispatch, and also because he thinks that we know his judgment is good enough to take his word on something. ‘New drive system with unusual sound characteristics.’ That may be a crock, but he’s the man on the scene, and he wants an answer. We tell him yes.”
“Aye aye, sir,” the lieutenant said, wondering if the skinny old bastard made decisions by flipping a coin when his back was turned.
The Dallas
Z090432ZDEC
TOP SECRET
FM: COMSUBLANT
TO: USS DALLAS
A. USS DALLAS Z090414ZDEC
B. COMSUBLANT INST 2000.5
OPAREA ASSIGNMENT //N04220//
1. REQUEST REF A GRANTED.
2. AREAS BRAVO ECHO GOLF REF B ASSIGNED FOR UNRESTRICTED OPS 090500Z TO 140001Z. REPORT AS NECESSARY. VADM GALLERY SENDS.
“Hot damn!” Mancuso chuckled. That was one nice thing about Gallery. When you asked him a question, by God, you got an answer, yes or no, before you could rig your antenna in. Of course, he reflected, if it turned out that Jonesy was wrong and this was a wild-goose chase, he’d have some explaining to do. Gallery had handed more than one sub skipper his head in a bag and set him on the beach.
Which was where he was headed regardless, Mancuso knew. Since his first year at Annapolis all he had ever wanted was command of his own attack boat. He had that now, and he knew that the rest of his career would be downhill. In the rest of the navy your first command was just that, a first command. You could move up the ladder and command a fleet at sea eventually, if you were lucky and had the right stuff. Not submariners, though. Whether he did well with the Dallas or poorly, he’d lose her soon enough. He had this one and only chance. And afterwards, what? The best he could hope for was command of a missile boat. He’d served on those before and was sure that commanding one, even a new Ohio, was about as exciting as watching paint dry. The boomer’s job was to stay hidden. Mancuso wanted to be the hunter, that was the exciting end of the business. And after commanding a missile boat? He could get a “major surface command,” perhaps a nice oiler—it would be like switching mounts from Secretariat to Elsie the Cow. Or he could get a squadron command and sit in an office onboard a tender, pushing paper. At best in that position he’d go to sea once a month, his main purpose being to bother sub skippers who didn’t want him there. Or he could get a desk job in the Pentagon—what fun! Mancuso understood why some of the astronauts had cracked up after coming back from the moon. He, too, had worked many years for this command, and in another year his boat would be gone. He’d have to give the Dallas to someone else. But he did have her now.
“Pat, let’s lower all masts and take her down to twelve hundred feet.”
“Aye aye, sir. Lower the masts,” Mannion ordered. A petty officer pulled on the hydraulic control levers.
“ESM and UHF masts lowered, sir,” the duty electrician reported.
“Very well. Diving officer, make your depth twelve hundred feet.”
“Twelve hundred feet, aye,” the diving officer responded. “Fifteen degrees down-angle on the planes.”
“Fifteen degrees down, aye.”
“Let’s move her, Pat.”
“Aye, Skipper. All ahead full.”
“All ahead full, aye.” The helmsman reached up to turn the annunciator.
Mancuso watched his crew at work. They did their jobs with mechanistic precision. But they were not machines. They were men. His.
In the reactor spaces aft, Lieutenant Butler had his enginemen acknowledge the command and gave the necessary orders. The reactor coolant pumps went to fast speed. An increased amount of hot, pressurized water entered the exchanger, where its heat was transferred to the steam on the outside loop. When the coolant returned to the reactor it was cooler than it had been and therefore denser. Being denser, it trapped more neutrons in the reactor pile, increasing the ferocity of the fission reaction and giving off yet more power. Farther aft, saturated steam in the “outside” or nonradioactive loop of the heat exchange system emerged through clusters of control valves to strike the blades of the high-pressure turbine. The Dallas’ huge bronze screw began to turn more quickly, driving her forward and down.
The engineers went about their duties calmly. The noise in the engine spaces rose noticeably as the systems began to put out more power, and the technicians kept track of this by continuously monitoring the banks of instruments under their hands. The routine was quiet and exact. There was no extraneous conversation, no distraction. Compared to a submarine’s reactor spaces, a hospital operating room was a den of libertines.
Forward, Mannion watched the depth gauge go below six hundred feet. The diving officer would wait until they got to nine hundred feet before starting to level off, the object being to zero the dive out exactly at the ordered depth. Commander Mancuso wanted the Dallas below the thermocline. This was the border between different temperatures. Water settled in isothermal layers of uniform stratification. The relatively flat boundary where warmer surface water met colder depth water was a semipermeable barrier which tended to reflect sound waves. Those waves that did manage to penetrate the thermocline were mostly trapped below it. Thus, though the Dallas was now running below the thermocline at over thirty knots and making as much noise as she was capable of, she would still be difficult to detect with surface sonar. She would also be largely blind, but then, there was not much down there to run into.
Mancuso lifted the microphone for the PA system. “This is the captain speaking. We have just started a speed run that will last forty-eight hours. We are heading towards a point where we hope to locate a Russian sub that went past us two days ago. This Russkie is evidently using a new and rather quiet propulsion system that nobody’s run across before. We’re going to try and get ahead of him and track on him as he passes us again. This time we know what to listen for, and we’ll get a nice clear picture of him. Okay, I want everyone on this boat to be well rested. When we get there, it’ll be a long, tough hunt. I want everybody at a hundred percent. This one will probably be interesting.” He switched off the microphone. “What’s the movie tonight?”
The diving officer watched the depth gauge stop moving before answering. As chief of the boat, he was also manager of the Dallas’ cable TV system, three video-cassette recorders in the mess room which led to televisions in the wardroom, and various other crew accommodations. “Skipper, you got a choice. Return of the Jedi or two football tapes: Oklahoma-Nebraska and Miami-Dallas. Both those games were played while we were on the exercise, sir. It’ll be like watching them live.” He laughed. “Commercials and all. The cooks are already making the popcorn.”
“Good. I want everybody nice and loose.” Why couldn’t they ever get Navy tapes, Mancuso wondered. Of course, Army had creamed them this year…
“Morning, Skipper.” Wally Chambers, the executive officer, came into the attack center. “What gives?”
“Come on back to the wardroom, Wally. I want you to listen to something.” Mancuso took the cassette from his shirt pocket and led Chambers aft.
The V. K. Konovalov
Two hundred miles northeast of the Dallas, in the Norwegian Sea, the Konovalov was racing southwest at forty-one knots. Captain Tupolev sat alone in the wardroom rereading the dispatch he’d received two days before. His emotions alternated between rage and grief. The Schoolmaster had done that! He was dumbfounded.
But what was there to do? Tupolev’s orders were explicit, the more so since, as his zampolit had pointed out, he was a former pupil of the traitor Ramius. He, too, could find himself in a very bad position. If the slug succeeded.
So, Marko had pulled a trick on everyone, not just the Konovalov. Tupolev had been slinking about the Barents Sea like a fool while Marko had been heading the other way. Laughing at everyone, Tupolev was sure. Such treachery, such a hellish threat against the Rodina. It was inconceivable—and all too conceivable. All the advantages Marko had. A four-room apartment, a dacha, his own Zhiguli. Tupolev di
d not yet have his own automobile. He had earned his way to a command, and now it was all threatened by—this! He’d be lucky to keep what he had.
I have to kill a friend, he thought. Friend? Yes, he admitted to himself, Marko had been a good friend and a fine teacher. Where had he gone wrong?
Natalia Bogdanova.
Yes, that had to be it. A big stink, the way that had happened. How many times had he had dinner with them, how many times had Natalia laughed about her fine, strong, big sons? He shook his head. A fine woman killed by a damned incompetent fool of a surgeon. Nothing could be done about it, he was the son of a Central Committee member. It was an outrage the way things like that still happened, even after three generations of building socialism. But nothing was sufficient to justify this madness.
Tupolev bent over the chart he’d brought back. He’d be on his station in five days, in less time if the engine plant held together and Marko wasn’t in too much of a hurry—and he wouldn’t be. Marko was a fox, not a bull. The other Alfas would get there ahead of his, Tupolev knew, but it didn’t matter. He had to do this himself. He’d get ahead of Marko and wait. Marko would try to slink past, and the Konovalov would be there. And the Red October would die.
The North Atlantic
The British Sea Harrier FRS.4 appeared a minute early. It hovered briefly off the Kennedy’s port beam as the pilot sized up his landing target, the wind, and sea conditions. Maintaining a steady thirty-knot forward speed to compensate for the carrier’s forward speed, he side-slipped his fighter neatly to the right, then dropped it gently amidships, slightly forward of the Kennedy’s island structure, exactly in the center of the flight deck. Instantly a gang of deck crewmen raced for the aircraft, three carrying heavy metal chocks, another a metal ladder which he set up by the cockpit, whose canopy was already coming open. A team of four snaked a fueling hose towards the aircraft, eager to demonstrate the speed with which the U.S. Navy services aircraft. The pilot was dressed in an orange coverall and yellow life jacket. He set his helmet on the back of the front seat and came down the ladder. He watched briefly to be sure his fighter was in capable hands before sprinting to the island. He met Ryan at the hatch.