by Tom Clancy
“What did you study?”
“I was headin’ for a degree in electrical engineering, with a strong minor in cybernetics. Three semesters to go. I’ll get it, then my masters, then my doctorate, and then I’ll go back to work for the navy as a civilian.”
“Why are you a sonar operator?” Bugayev sat down. He had never spoken like this with an enlisted man.
“Hell, sir, it’s fun! When something’s going on—you know, a war game, tracking another sub, like that—I am the skipper. All the captain does is react to the data I give him.”
“And you like your commander?”
“Sure thing! He’s the best I’ve had—I’ve had three. My skipper’s a good guy. You do your job okay, and he doesn’t hassle you. You got something to say to him, and he listens.”
“You say you will go back to college. How do you pay for it? They tell us that only the ruling class sons go to university.”
“That’s crap, sir. In California if you’re smart enough to go, you go. In my case, I’ve been saving my money—you don’t spend much on a sub, right?—and the navy pitches in, too. I got enough to see me all the way through my masters. What’s your degree in?”
“I attended a higher naval school. Like your Annapolis. I would like to get a proper degree in electronics,” Bugayev said, voicing his own dream.
“No sweat. I can help you out. If you’re good enough for Cal Tech, I can tell you who to talk to. You’d like California. That is the place to live.”
“And I wish to work on a real computer,” Bugayev went on, wishful.
Jones laughed quietly. “So, buy yourself one.”
“Buy a computer?”
“Sure, we got a couple of little ones, Apples, on Dallas. Cost you about, oh, two thousand for a nice system. That’s a lot less than what a car goes for.”
“A computer for two thousand dollars?” Bugayev went from wishful to suspicious, certain that Jones was leading him on.
“Or less. For three grand you can get a really nice rig. Hell, you tell Apple who you are, and they’ll probably give it to you for free, or the navy will. If you don’t want an Apple, there’s the Commodore, TRS-80, Atari. All kinds. Depends on what you want to use it for. Look, just one company, Apple, has sold over a million of ’em. They’re little, sure, but they’re real computers.”
“I have never heard of this—Apple?”
“Yeah, Apple. Two guys started the company back when I was in junior high. Since then they’ve sold a million or so, like I said—and they are some kinda rich! I don’t have one myself—no room on a sub—but my brother has his own computer, an IBM-PC. You still don’t believe me, do you?”
“A working man with his own computer? It is hard to believe.” He stabbed out the cigarette. American tobacco was a little bland, he thought.
“Well, sir, then you can ask somebody else. Like I said, Dallas has a couple of Apples, just for the crew to use. There’s other stuff for fire control, navigation, and sonar, of course. We use the Apples for games—you’ll love computer games, for sure. You’ve never had fun till you’ve tried Choplifter—and other things, education programs, stuff like that. Honest, Mr. Bugayev, you can walk into most any shopping center and find a place to buy a computer. You’ll see.”
“How do you use a computer with your sonar?”
“That would take a while to explain, sir, and I’d probably have to get permission from the skipper.” Jones reminded himself that this guy was still the enemy, sort of.
The V. K. Konovalov
The Alfa drifted slowly at the edge of the continental shelf, about fifty miles southeast of Norfolk. Tupolev ordered the reactor plant chopped back to about five percent of total output, enough to operate the electrical systems and little else. It also made his submarine almost totally quiet. Orders were passed by word of mouth. The Konovalov was on a strict silent ship routine. Even ordinary cooking was forbidden. Cooking meant moving metal pots on metal grates. Until further notice, the crew was on a diet of cheese sandwiches. They spoke in whispers when they spoke at all. Anyone who made noise would attract the attention of the captain, and everyone aboard knew what that meant.
SOSUS Control
Quentin was reviewing data sent by digital link from the two Orions. A crippled missile boat, the USS Georgia, was heading into Norfolk after a partial turbine failure, escorted by a pair of attack boats. They had been keeping her out, the admiral had said, because of all the Russian activity on the coast, and the idea now was to get her in, fixed, and out as quickly as possible. The Georgia carried twenty-four Trident missiles, a noteworthy fraction of the country’s total deterrent force. Repairing her would be a high priority item now that the Russians were gone. It was safe to bring her in, but they wanted the Orions first to check and see if any Soviet submarines had lingered behind in the general confusion.
A P-3B was cruising at nine hundred feet about fifty miles southeast of Norfolk. The FLIR showed nothing, no heat signature on the surface, and the MAD gear detected no measurable disturbance in the earth’s magnetic field, though one aircraft’s flight path took her within a hundred yards of the Alfa’s position. The Konovalov’s hull was made of non-magnetic titanium. A sonobuoy dropped seven miles to the south of her position also failed to pick up the sound of her reactor plant. Data was being transmitted continuously to Norfolk, where Quentin’s operations staff entered it into his computer. The problem was, not all of the Soviet subs had been accounted for.
Well, the commander thought, that figures. Some of the boats had taken the opportunity to creep away from their charted loci. There was the odd chance, he had reported, that one or two strays were still out there, but there was no evidence of this. He wondered what CINCLANT had working. Certainly he had seemed awfully pleased with something, almost euphoric. The operation against the Soviet fleet had been handled pretty well, what he’d seen of it, and there was that dead Alfa out there. How long until the Glomar Explorer came out of mothballs to go and get that? He wondered if he’d get a chance to look the wreck over. What an opportunity!
Nobody was taking the current operation all that seriously. It made sense. If the Georgia were indeed coming in with a sick engine she’d be coming slow, and a slow Ohio made about as much noise as a virgin whale determined to retain her status. And if CINCLANTFLT were all that concerned about it, he would not have detailed the delousing operation to a pair of P-3s piloted by reservists. Quentin lifted the phone and dialed CINCLANTFLT Operations to tell them again that there was no indication of hostile activity.
The Red October
Ryan checked his watch. It had been five hours already. A long time to sit in one chair, and from a quick glance at the chart it appeared that the eight-hour estimate had been optimistic—or he’d misunderstood them. The Red October was tracing up the shelf line and would soon begin to angle west for the Virginia Capes. Maybe it would take another four hours. It couldn’t be too soon. Ramius and Mancuso looked pretty tired. Everybody was tired. Probably the engine room people most of all—no, the cook. He was ferrying coffee and sandwiches to everyone. The Russians seemed especially hungry.
The Dallas/The Pogy
The Dallas passed the Pogy at thirty-two knots, leapfrogging again, with the October a few miles aft. Lieutenant Commander Wally Chambers, who had the conn, did not like being blind on the speed run of thirty-five minutes despite word from the Pogy that everything was clear.
The Pogy noted her passage and turned to allow her lateral array to track on the Red October.
“Noisy enough at twenty knots,” the Pogy’s sonar chief said to his companions. “Dallas doesn’t make that much at thirty.”
The V. K. Konovalov
“Some noise to the south,” the michman said.
“What, exactly?” Tupolev had been hovering at the door for hours, making life unpleasant for the sonarmen.
“Too soon to say, Comrade Captain. Bearing is not changing, however. It is heading this way.”
Tupole
v went back to the control room. He ordered power reduced further in the reactor systems. He considered killing the plant entirely, but reactors took time to start up and there was no telling yet how distant the contact might be. The captain smoked three cigarettes before going back to sonar. It would not do at all to make the michman nervous. The man was his best operator.
“One propeller, Comrade Captain, an American, probably a Los Angeles, doing thirty-five knots. Bearing has changed only two degrees in fifteen minutes. He will pass close aboard, and—wait…His engines have stopped.” The forty-year-old warrant officer pressed the headphones against his ears. He could hear the cavitation sounds diminish, then stop entirely as the contact faded away to nothing. “He has stopped to listen, Comrade Captain.”
Tupolev smiled. “He will not hear us, Comrade. Racing and stopping. Can you hear anything else? Might he be escorting something?”
The michman listened to the headphones again and made some adjustments on his panel. “Perhaps…there is a good deal of surface noise, Comrade, and I—wait. There seems to be some noise. Our last target bearing was one-seven-one, and this new noise is…one-seven-five. Very faint, Comrade Captain—a ping, a single ping on active sonar.”
“So.” Tupolev leaned against the bulkhead. “Good work, Comrade. Now we must be patient.”
The Dallas
Chief Laval pronounced the area clear. The BQQ-5’s sensitive receptors revealed nothing, even after the SAPS system had been used. Chambers maneuvered the bow around so that the single ping would go out to the Pogy, which in turn fired off her own ping to the Red October to make sure the signal was received. It was clear for another ten miles. The Pogy moved out at thirty knots, followed by the U.S. Navy’s newest boomer.
The V. K. Konovalov
“Two more submarines. One single screw, the other twin screw, I think. Still faint. The single-screw submarine is turning much more rapidly. Do the Americans have twin-screw submarines, Comrade Captain?”
“Yes, I believe so.” Tupolev wondered about this. The difference in signature characteristics was not all that pronounced. They’d see in any case. The Konovalov was creeping along at two knots, one hundred fifty meters beneath the surface. Whatever was coming seemed to be coming right for them. Well, he’d teach the imperialists something after all.
The Red October
“Can anybody spell me at the wheel?” Ryan asked.
“Need a stretch?” Mancuso asked, coming over.
“Yeah. I could stand a trip to the head, too. The coffee’s about to bust my kidneys.”
“I relieve you, sir.” The American captain moved into Ryan’s seat. Jack headed aft to the nearest head. Two minutes later he was feeling much better. Back in the control room, he did some knee bends to get circulation back in his legs, then looked briefly at the chart. It seemed strange, almost sinister, to see the U.S. coast marked in Russian.
“Thank you, Commander.”
“Sure.” Mancuso stood.
“It is certain that you are no sailor, Ryan.” Ramius had been watching him without a word.
“I have never claimed to be one, Captain,” Ryan said agreeably. “How long to Norfolk?”
“Oh, another four hours, tops,” Mancuso said. “The idea’s to arrive after dark. They have something to get us in unseen, but I don’t know what.”
“We left the sound in daylight. What if somebody saw us then?” Ryan asked.
“I didn’t see anything, but if anybody was there, all he’d have seen was three sub conning towers with no numbers on them.” They had left in daylight to take advantage of a “window” in Soviet satellite coverage.
Ryan lit another cigarette. His wife would give him hell for this, but he was tense from being on the submarine. Sitting at the helmsman’s station left him with nothing to do but stare at the handful of instruments. The sub was easier to hold level than he had expected, and the only radical turn he had attempted showed how eager the sub was to change course in any direction. Thirty-some-thousand tons of steel, he thought—no wonder.
The Pogy/The Red October
The Pogy stormed past the Dallas at thirty knots and continued for twenty minutes, stopping eleven miles beyond her—and three miles from the Konovalov, whose crew was scarcely breathing now. The Pogy’s sonar, though lacking the new BC-10/SAPS signal-processing system, was otherwise state of the art, but it was impossible to hear something that made no noise at all, and the Konovalov was silent.
The Red October passed the Dallas at 1500 hours after receiving the latest all-clear signal. Her crew was tired and looking forward to arriving at Norfolk two hours after sundown. Ryan wondered how quickly he could fly back to London. He was afraid that the CIA would want to debrief him at length. Mancuso and the crewmen of the Dallas wondered if they’d get to see their families. They weren’t counting on it.
The V. K. Konovalov
“Whatever it is, it is big, very big, I think. His course will take him within five kilometers of us.”
“An Ohio, as Moscow said,” Tupolev commented.
“It sounds like a twin-screw submarine, Comrade Captain,” the michman said.
“The Ohio has one propeller. You know that.”
“Yes, Comrade. In any case, he will be with us in twenty minutes. The other attack submarine is moving at thirty-plus knots. If the pattern holds, he will proceed fifteen kilometers beyond us.”
“And the other American?”
“A few kilometers seaward, drifting slowly, like us. I do not have an exact range. I could raise him on active sonar, but that—”
“I am aware of the consequences,” Tupolev snapped. He went back to the control room.
“Tell the engineers to be ready to answer bells. All men at battle stations?”
“Yes, Comrade Captain,” the starpom replied. “We have an excellent firing solution on the American hunter sub—the one moving, that is. The way he runs at full speed makes it easy for us. The other we can localize in seconds.”
“Good, for a change,” Tupolev smiled. “You see what we can do when circumstances favor us?”
“And what shall we do?”
“When the big one passes us, we will close and ream his asshole. They have played their games. Now we shall play ours. Have the engineers increase power. We will need full power shortly.”
“It will make noise, Comrade,” the starpom cautioned.
“True, but we have no choice. Ten percent power. The Ohio cannot possibly hear that, and perhaps the near hunter sub won’t either.”
The Pogy
“Where did that come from?” The sonar chief made some adjustments on his board. “Conn, sonar, I got a contact, bearing two-three-zero.”
“Conn, aye,” Commander Wood answered at once. “Can you classify?”
“No, sir. It just came up. Reactor plant and steam noises, real faint, sir. I can’t quite read the plant signature…” He flipped the gain controls to maximum. “Not one of ours. Skipper, I think maybe we got us an Alfa here.”
“Oh, great! Signal Dallas right now!”
The chief tried, but the Dallas, running at thirty-two knots, missed the five rapid pings. The Red October was now eight miles away.
The Red October
Jones’ eyes suddenly screwed shut. “Mr. Bugayev, tell the skipper I just heard a couple of pings.”
“Couple?”
“More’n one, but I didn’t get a count.”
The Pogy
Commander Wood made his decision. The idea had been to send the sonar signals on a highly directional, low-power basis so as to minimize the chance of revealing his own position. But the Dallas hadn’t picked that up.
“Max power, Chief. Hit Dallas with everything.”
“Aye aye.” The chief flipped his power controls to full. It took several seconds until the system was ready to send a hundred-kilowatt blast of energy.
Ping ping ping ping ping!
The Dallas
“Wow!” Chief Laval exclai
med. “Conn, sonar, danger signal from Pogy!”
“All stop!” Chambers ordered. “Quiet ship.”
“All stop.” Lieutenant Goodman relayed the orders a second later. Aft, the reactor watch reduced steam demand, increasing the temperature in the reactor. This allowed neutrons to escape out of the pile, rapidly slowing the fission reaction.
“When speed gets to four knots, go to one-third speed,” Chambers told the officer of the deck as he went aft to the sonar room. “Frenchie, I need data in a hurry.”
“Still going too fast, sir,” Laval said.
The Red October
“Captain Ramius, I think we should slow down,” Mancuso said judiciously.
“The signal was not repeated,” Ramius disagreed. The second directional signal had missed them, and the Dallas had not relayed the danger signal yet because she was still traveling too fast to locate the October and pass it along.
The Pogy
“Okay, sir, Dallas has killed power.”
Wood chewed on his lower lip. “All right, let’s find the bastard. Yankee search, Chief, max power.” He went back to control. “Man battle stations.” An alarm went off two seconds later. The Pogy had already been at increased readiness, and within forty seconds all stations were manned, with the executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Tom Reynolds, as fire control coordinator. His team of officers and technicians were waiting for data to feed into the Mark 117 fire control computer.
The sonar dome in the Pogy’s bow was blasting sound energy into the water. Fifteen seconds after it started the first return signal appeared on Chief Palmer’s screen.
“Conn, sonar, we have a positive contact, bearing two-three-four, range six thousand yards. Classify probable Alfa class from his plant signature,” Palmer said.
“Get me a solution!” Wood said urgently.
“Aye.” Reynolds watched the data input as another team of officers was making a paper and pencil plot on the chart table. Computer or not, there had to be a backup. The data paraded across the screen. The Pogy’s four torpedo tubes contained a pair of Harpoon antiship missiles and two Mark 48 torpedoes. Only the torpedoes were useful at the moment. The Mark 48 was the most powerful torpedo in the inventory; wire-guided—and able to home in with its own active sonar—it ran at over fifty knots and carried a half-ton warhead. “Skipper, we got a solution for both fish. Running time four minutes, thirty-five seconds.”