by Tom Clancy
Greer turned and stared at the fire. He had just joined the DIA when the army and air force had pulled off the daring raid on the Song Tay prison camp twenty miles west of Hanoi. The raid had been a failure because the North Vietnamese had removed all of the captured pilots a few weeks before, something that aerial photographs could not determine. But everything else had gone perfectly. After penetrating hundreds of miles into hostile territory, the raiding force appeared entirely by surprise and caught many of the camp guards literally with their pants down. The Green Berets did a letter-perfect job of getting in and out. In the process they killed several hundred enemy troops, themselves sustaining a single casualty, a broken ankle. The most impressive part of the mission, however, was its secrecy. Operation KINGPIN had been rehearsed for months, and despite this its nature and objective had not been guessed by friend or enemy—until the day of the raid itself. On that day a young air force captain of intelligence went into his general’s office to ask if a deep-penetration raid into North Vietnam had been laid on for the Song Tay prisoner-of-war camp. His astonished commander proceeded to grill the captain at length, only to learn that the bright young officer had seen enough disjointed bits and pieces to construct a clear picture of what was about to happen. Events like this gave security officers peptic ulcers.
“Red October’s going to defect, isn’t she?” Tyler persisted.
If the admiral had had more sleep he might have bluffed it out. As it was, his response was a mistake. “Did Ryan tell you this?”
“Sir, I haven’t spoken with Jack since Monday. That’s the truth, sir.”
“Then where did you get this other information?” Greer snapped.
“Admiral, I used to wear the blue suit. Most of my friends still do. I hear things,” Tyler evaded. “The whole picture dropped into place an hour ago. The Russkies have never recalled all of their boomers at once. I know, I used to hunt them.”
Greer sighed. “Jack thinks the same as you. He’s out with the fleet right now. Commander, if you tell that to anyone, I’ll have your other leg mounted overtop that fireplace. Do you understand me?”
“Aye aye, sir. What are we going to do with her?” Tyler smiled to himself, thinking that as a senior consultant to Sea Systems Command, he’d sure as hell get a chance to look at a for-real Russian submarine.
“Give her back. After we’ve had a chance to look her over, of course. But there’s a lot of things that could happen to prevent our ever seeing her.”
It took Skip a moment to grasp what he’d just been told. “Give her back! Why, for Christ’s sake?”
“Commander, just how likely do you think this scenario is? Do you think the whole crew of a submarine has decided to come over to us all at once?” Greer shook his head. “Smart money is that it’s only the officers, maybe not all of them, and that they’re trying to get over here without the crew’s knowing what they’re up to.”
“Oh.” Tyler considered that. “I suppose that does make sense—but why give her back? This isn’t Japan. If somebody landed a MiG-25 here we wouldn’t give it back.”
“This is not like holding onto a stray fighter plane. The boat is worth a billion dollars, more if you throw in the missiles and warheads. And legally, the president says, it’s their property. So if they find out we have her, they’ll ask for her back, and we’ll have to give her back. Okay, how will they know we have her? Those crew members who don’t want to defect will ask to go home. Whoever asks, we send.”
“You know, sir, that whoever does want to go back will be in a whole shitload of trouble—excuse me, sir.”
“A shitload and a half.” Tyler hadn’t known that Greer was a mustang and could swear like a real sailor. “Some will want to stay, but most won’t. They have families. Next you’ll ask me if we might arrange for the crew to disappear.”
“The thought has occurred to me,” Tyler said.
“It’s occurred to us, too. But we won’t. Murder a hundred men? Even if we wanted to, there’s no way we could conceal it in this day and age. Hell, I doubt even the Soviets could. Besides that, this simply is not the sort of thing you do in peacetime. That’s one difference between us and them. You can take those reasons in any order you want.”
“So, except for the crew, we’d keep her…”
“Yes, if we could hide her. And if a pig had wings, it could fly.”
“Lots of places to hide her, Admiral. I can think of a few right here on the Chesapeake, and if we could get her round the Horn, there’s a million little atolls we could use, and they all belong to us.”
“But the crew will know, and when we send them home, they’ll tell their bosses,” Greer explained patiently. “And Moscow will ask for her back. Oh, sure, we’ll have a week or so to conduct, uh, safety and quarantine inspections, to make sure they weren’t trying to smuggle cocaine into the country.” The admiral laughed. “A British admiral suggested we invoke the old slave-trading treaty. Somebody did that back in World War II, to put the grab on a German blockade runner right before we got into it. So, we’ll get a ton of intelligence regardless.”
“Better to keep her, and run her, and take her apart…” Tyler said quietly, staring into the orange-white flames on the oak logs. How do we keep her? he wondered. An idea began to rattle around in his head. “Admiral, what if we could get the crew off without them knowing that we have the submarine?”
“Your full name is Oliver Wendell Tyler? Well, son, if you were named after Harry Houdini instead of a justice of the Supreme Court, I—” Greer looked into the engineer’s face. “What do you have in mind?”
While Tyler explained Greer listened intently.
“To do this, sir, we’ll have to get the navy in on it right quick. Specifically, we’ll need the cooperation of Admiral Dodge, and if my speed figures for this boat are anything like accurate, we’ll have to move smartly.”
Greer rose and walked around the couch a few times to get his circulation going. “Interesting. The timing would be almost impossible, though.”
“I didn’t say it would be easy, sir, just that we could do it.”
“Call home, Tyler. Tell your wife you won’t be making it home. If I don’t get any sleep tonight, neither do you. There’s coffee behind my desk. First I have to call the judge, then we’ll talk to Sam Dodge.”
The USS Pogy
“Pogy, this is Black Gull 4. We’re getting low on fuel. Have to return to the barn,” the Orion’s tactical coordinator reported, stretching after ten hours at his control console. “Anything you want us to get you? Over.”
“Yeah, have a couple cases of beer sent out,” Commander Wood replied. It was the current joke between P-3C and submarine crews. “Thanks for the data. We’ll take it from here. Out.”
Overhead, the Lockheed Orion increased power and turned southwest. The crewmen aboard would each hoist an extra beer or two at dinner, saying it was for their friends on the submarine.
“Mr. Dyson, take her two hundred feet. One-third speed.”
The officer of the deck gave the proper orders as Commander Wood moved over to the plot.
The USS Pogy was three hundred miles northeast of Norfolk, awaiting the arrival of two Soviet Alfa-class submarines which several relays of antisubmarine patrol aircraft had tracked all the way from Iceland. The Pogy was named for a distinguished World War II fleet submarine, named in turn for an undistinguished game fish. She had been at sea for eighteen hours, and was fresh from an extended overhaul at the Newport News shipyard. Nearly everything aboard was either straight from manufacturers’ crates or had been completely worked over by the skilled shipfitters on the James River. This was not to say that everything worked properly. Many items had failed in one way or another on the post-overhaul shakedown the previous week, a fact less unusual than lamentable, Commander Wood thought. The Pogy’s crew was new, too. Wood was on his first deployment as a commanding officer after a year of desk duty in Washington, and too many of the enlisted men were green, just out of sub
school at New London, still getting accustomed to their first cruise on a submarine. It takes time for men used to blue skies and fresh air to learn the regime inside a thirty-two-foot-diameter steel pipe. Even the experienced men were making adjustments to their new boat and officers.
The Pogy had met her top speed of thirty-three knots on post-overhaul trials. This was fast for a ship but slower than the speed of the Alfas she was listening to. Like all American submarines, her long suit was stealth. The Alfas had no way of knowing she was there and that they would be easy targets for her weapons, the more so since the patrolling Orion had fed the Pogy exact range information, something that ordinarily takes time to deduce from a passive sonar plot.
Lieutenant Commander Tom Reynolds, the executive officer and fire control coordinator, stood casually over the tactical plot. “Thirty-six miles to the near one, and forty on the far one.” On the display they were labeled Pogy-Bait 1 and 2. Everyone found the use of this service epithet amusing.
“Speed forty-two?” Wood asked.
“Yes, Captain.” Reynolds had handled the radio exchange until Black Gull 4 had announced its intention to return to base. “They’re driving those boats for all they’re worth. Right for us. We have hard solutions on both…zap! What do you suppose they’re up to?”
“The word from CINCLANT is that their ambassador says they’re on a SAR mission for a lost boat.” His voice indicated what he thought of that.
“Search and rescue, eh?” Reynolds shrugged. “Well, maybe they think they lost a boat off Point Comfort, ’cause if they don’t slow down real fast, that’s where they’ll end up. I’ve never heard of Alfas operating this close to our coast. Have you, sir?”
“Nope.” Wood frowned. The thing about the Alfas was that they were fast and noisy. Soviet tactical doctrine seemed to call for them mainly in defensive roles: as “interceptor submarines” they could protect their own missile subs, and with their high speed they could engage American attack submarines, then evade counterattack. Wood didn’t think the doctrine was sound, but that was all right with him.
“Maybe they want to blockade Norfolk,” Reynolds suggested.
“You might have a point there,” Wood said. “Well, in any case, we’ll just sit tight and let them burn right past us. They’ll have to slow as they cross the continental shelf line, and we’ll tag along behind them, nice and quiet.”
“Aye,” Reynolds said.
If they had to shoot, both men reflected, they’d find out just how tough the Alfa really was. There had been much talk about the strength of the titanium used for her hull, whether it really would withstand the force of several hundred pounds of high explosive in direct contact. A new shaped-charge warhead for the Mark 48 torpedo had been developed for just this purpose and for handling the equally tough Typhoon hull. Both officers set this thought aside. Their assigned mission was to track and shadow.
The E. S. Politovskiy
Pogy-Bait 2 was known to the Soviet Navy as the E. S. Politovskiy. This Alfa-class attack sub was named for the chief engineering officer of the Russian fleet who had sailed all the way around the world to meet his appointment with destiny in the Tsushima Straits. Evgeni Sigismondavich Politovskiy had served the czar’s navy with skill and a devotion to duty equal to that of any officer in history, but in his diary, which was discovered years later in Leningrad, the brilliant officer had decried in the most violent terms the corruption and excesses of the czarist regime, giving a grim counterpoint to the selfless patriotism he had shown as he sailed knowingly to his death. This made him a genuine hero for Soviet seamen to emulate, and the State had named its greatest engineering achievement in his memory. Unfortunately the Politovskiy had enjoyed no better luck than he had enjoyed in the face of Togo’s guns.
The Politovskiy’s acoustical signature was labeled Alfa 3 by the Americans. This was incorrect; she had been the first of the Alfas. The small, spindle-shaped attack submarine had reached forty-three knots three hours into her initial builder’s trials. Those trials had been cut short only a minute later by an incredible mishap: a fifty-ton right whale had somehow blundered in her path, and the Politovskiy had rammed the unfortunate creature broadside. The impact had smashed ten square meters of bow plating, annihilated the sonar dome, knocked a torpedo tube askew, and nearly flooded the torpedo room. This did not count shock damage to nearly every interior system from electronic equipment to the galley stove, and it was said that if anyone but the famous Vilnius headmaster had been in command, the submarine would surely have been lost. A two-meter segment of the whale’s rib was now a permanent fixture at the officer’s club in Severomorsk, dramatic testament to the strength of Soviet submarines; in fact the damage had taken over a year to repair, and by the time the Politovskiy sailed again there were already two other Alfas in service. Two days after sailing on her next shakedown, she suffered another major casualty, the total failure of her high-pressure turbine. This had taken six months to replace. There had been three more minor incidents since, and the submarine was forever marked as a bad luck ship.
Chief Engineer Vladimir Petchukocov was a loyal Party member and a committed atheist, but he was also a sailor and therefore profoundly superstitious. In the old days, his ship would have been blessed on launching and thereafter every time she sailed. It would have been an impressive ceremony, with a bearded priest, clouds of incense, and evocative hymns. He had sailed without any of that and found himself wishing otherwise. He needed some luck. Petchukocov was having trouble with his reactor.
The Alfa reactor plant was small. It had to fit into a relatively small hull. It was also powerful for its size, and this one had been running at one hundred percent rated power for just over four days. They were racing for the American coast at 42.3 knots, as fast as the eight-year-old plant would permit. The Politovskiy was due for a comprehensive overhaul: new sonar, new computers, and a redesigned reactor control suite were all planned for the coming months. Petchukocov thought it irresponsible—reckless—to push his submarine so hard, even if everything were functioning properly. No Alfa plant on a submarine had ever been pushed this hard, not even a new one. And on this one, things were beginning to come apart.
The primary high-pressure reactor coolant pump was beginning to vibrate ominously. This was particularly worrying to the engineer. There was a backup, but the secondary pump had a lower rated power, and using it meant losing eight knots of speed. The Alfa plant achieved its high power not with a sodium-cooled system—as the Americans thought—but by running at a far higher pressure than any reactor system afloat and using a revolutionary heat exchange system that boosted the plant’s overall thermal efficiency to forty-one percent, well in excess of that for any other submarine. But the price of this was a reactor that at full power was red-lined on every monitor gauge—and in this case the red lines were not mere symbolism. They signified genuine danger.
This fact, added to the vibrating pump, had Petchukocov seriously concerned; an hour earlier he had pleaded with the captain to reduce power for a few hours so that his skilled crew of engineers could make repairs. It was probably only a bad bearing, after all, and they had spares. The pump had been designed so that it would be easy to fix. The captain had wavered, wanting to grant the request, but the political officer had intervened, pointing out that their orders were both urgent and explicit: they had to be on station as quickly as possible; to do otherwise would be “politically unsound.” And that was that.
Petchukocov bitterly remembered the look in his captain’s eyes. What was the purpose of a commanding officer if his every order had to be approved by a political flunky? Petchukocov had been a faithful Communist since joining the Octobrists as a boy—but damn it! what was the point of having specialists and engineers? Did the Party really think that physical laws could be overturned by the whim of some apparatchik with a heavy desk and a dacha in the Moscow suburbs? The engineer swore to himself.
He stood alone at the master control board. This was located i
n the engine room, aft of the compartment that held the reactor and the heat exchanger/steam generator, the latter placed right at the submarine’s center of gravity. The reactor was pressurized to twenty kilograms per square centimeter, about twenty-eight hundred pounds per square inch. Only a fraction of this pressure came from the pump. The higher pressure caused a higher boiling point for the coolant. In this case, the water was heated to over 900° Celsius, a temperature sufficient to generate steam, which gathered at the top of the reactor vessel; the steam bubble applied pressure to the water beneath, preventing the generation of more steam. The steam and water regulated one another in a delicate balance. The water was dangerously radioactive as a result of the fission reaction taking place within the uranium fuel rods. The function of the control rods was to regulate the reaction. Again, the control was delicate. At most the rods could absorb just less than one percent of the neutron flux, but this was enough either to permit the reaction or to prevent it.
Petchukocov could recite all this data in his sleep. He could draw a wholly accurate schematic diagram of the entire engine plant from memory and could instantly grasp the significance of the slightest change in his instrument readings. He stood perfectly straight over the control board, his eyes tracing the myriad dials and gauges in a regular pattern, one hand poised over the SCRAM switch, the other over the emergency cooling controls.
He could hear the vibration. It had to be a bad bearing getting worse as it wore more and more unevenly. If the crankshaft bearings went bad, the pump would seize, and they’d have to stop. This would be an emergency, though not really a dangerous one. It would mean that repairing the pump—if they could repair it at all—would take days instead of hours, eating up valuable time and spare parts. That was bad enough. What was worse, and what Petchukocov did not know, was that the vibration was generating pressure waves in the coolant.
To make use of the newly developed heat exchanger, the Alfa plant had to move water rapidly through its many loops and baffles. This required a high-pressure pump which accounted for one hundred fifty pounds of the total system pressure—almost ten times what was considered safe in Western reactors. With the pump so powerful, the whole engine room complex, normally very noisy at high speed, was like a boiler factory, and the pump’s vibration was disturbing the performance of the monitor instruments. It was making the needles on his gauges waver, Petchukocov noted. He was right, and wrong. The pressure gauges were really wavering because of the thirty-pound overpressure waves pulsing through the system. The chief engineer did not recognize this for what it was. He had been on duty too many hours.