COPYRIGHT

All the characters in this book, with the exception of Sergey Gorshkov, Yuri Padorin, Oleg Penkovskiy, Valery Sablin, Hans Tofte, and Greville Wynne, are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The names, incidents, dialogue and opinions expressed are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Nothing is intended or should be interpreted as expressing or representing the views of the US Navy or any other department or agency of any government body.

HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1985

First published in the USA by Naval Institute Press 1984

Copyright © Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd 1984

Tom Clancy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover illustration © Shutterstock.com

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2018 ISBN: 9780007375059

SOURCE ISBN: 9780008279530

Version 2018-11-15

PRAISE FOR TOM CLANCY:

‘He constantly taps the current world situation for its imminent dangers and spins them into an engrossing tale’

New York Times

‘Heart-stopping action … entertaining and eminently topical’

Washington Post

‘Exhilarating. No other novelist is giving so full a picture of modern conflict’

Sunday Times

‘A brilliantly constructed thriller that packs a punch like Semtex’

Daily Mail

‘A virtuoso display of page-turning talent’

Sunday Express

DEDICATION

For Ralph Chatham,

a sub driver who spoke the truth,

and for all the men who wear dolphins

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

The First Day: Friday, 3 December

The Second Day: Saturday, 4 December

The Third Day: Sunday, 5 December

The Fourth Day: Monday, 6 December

The Fifth Day: Tuesday, 7 December

The Sixth Day: Wednesday, 8 December

The Seventh Day: Thursday, 9 December

The Eighth Day: Friday, 10 December

The Ninth Day: Saturday, 11 December

The Tenth Day: Sunday, 12 December

The Eleventh Day: Monday, 13 December

The Twelfth Day: Tuesday, 14 December

The Thirteenth Day: Wednesday, 15 December

The Fourteenth Day: Thursday, 16 December

The Fifteenth Day: Friday, 17 December

The Sixteenth Day: Saturday, 18 December

The Seventeenth Day: Sunday, 19 December

The Eighteenth Day: Monday, 20 December

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Tom Clancy

About the Publisher

THE FIRST DAY
Friday, 3 December

THE RED OCTOBER

Captain First Rank Marko Ramius of the Soviet Navy was dressed for the Arctic conditions normal to the Northern Fleet submarine base at Polyarnyy. Five layers of wool and oilskin enclosed him. A dirty harbour tug pushed his submarine’s bow around to the north, facing down the channel. The dock that had held his Red October for two interminable months was now a water-filled concrete box, one of the many specially built to shelter strategic missile submarines from the harsh elements. On its edge a collection of sailors and dockyard workers watched his ship sail in stolid Russian fashion, without a wave or a cheer.

‘Engines ahead slow, Kamarov,’ he ordered. The tug slid out of the way, and Ramius glanced aft to see the water stirring from the force of the twin bronze propellers. The tug’s commander waved. Ramius returned the gesture. The tug had done a simple job, but done it quickly and well. The Red October, a Typhoon-class sub, moved under her own power towards the main ship channel of the Kola Fjord.

‘There’s Purga, Captain.’ Gregoriy Kamarov pointed to the icebreaker that would escort them to sea. Ramius nodded. The two hours required to transit the channel would tax not his seamanship but his endurance. There was a cold north wind blowing, the only sort of north wind in this part of the world. Late autumn had been surprisingly mild, and scarcely any snow had fallen in an area that measures it in metres; then a week before a major winter storm had savaged the Murmansk coast, breaking pieces off the Arctic icepack. The icebreaker was no formality. The Purga would butt aside any ice that might have drifted overnight into the channel. It would not do at all for the Soviet Navy’s newest missile submarine to be damaged by an errant chunk of frozen water.

The water in the fjord was choppy, driven by the brisk wind. It began to lap over the October’s spherical bow, rolling back down the flat missile deck which lay before the towering black sail. The water was coated with the bilge oil of numberless ships, filth that would not evaporate in the low temperatures and that left a black ring on the rocky walls of the fjord as though from the bath of a slovenly giant. An altogether apt simile, Ramius thought. The Soviet giant cared little for the dirt it left on the face of the earth, he grumbled to himself. He had learned his seamanship as a boy on inshore fishing boats, and knew what it was to be in harmony with nature.

‘Increase speed to one-third,’ he said. Kamarov repeated his captain’s order over the bridge telephone. The water stirred more as the October moved astern of the Purga. Captain Lieutenant Kamarov was the ship’s navigator, his last duty station having been harbour pilot for the large combatant vessels based on both sides of the wide inlet. The two officers kept a weather eye on the armed icebreaker three hundred metres ahead. The Purga’s after deck had a handful of crewmen stomping about in the cold, one wearing the white apron of a ship’s cook. They wanted to witness the Red October’s first operational cruise, and besides, sailors will do almost anything to break the monotony of their duties.

Ordinarily it would have irritated Ramius to have his ship escorted out – the channel here was wide and deep – but not today. The ice was something to worry about. And so, for Ramius, was a great deal else.

‘So, my Captain, again we go to sea to serve and protect the Rodina!’ Captain Second Rank Ivan Yurievich Putin poked his head through the hatch – without permission, as usual – and clambered up the ladder with the awkwardness of a landsman. The tiny control station was already crowded enough with the captain, the navigator, and a mute lookout. Putin was the ship’s zampolit (political officer). Everything he did was to serve the Rodina (Motherland), a word that had mystical connotations to a Russian and, along with V. I. Lenin, was the Communist Party’s substitute for a godhead.

‘Indeed, Ivan,’ Ramius replied with more good cheer than he felt. ‘Two weeks at sea. It is good to leave the dock. A seaman belongs at sea, not tied alongside, overrun with bureaucrats and workmen with dirty boots. And we will be warm.’

‘You find this cold?’ Putin asked incredulously.

For the hundredth time Ramius told himself that Putin was the perfect political officer. His voice was always too loud, his humour too affected. He never allowed a person to forget what he was. The perfect political officer, Putin was an easy man to fear.

‘I have been in submarines too long, my friend. I grow accustomed to moderate temperatures and a stable deck under my feet.’ Putin did not notice the veiled insult. He’d been assigned to submarines after his first tour on destroyers had been cut short by chronic seasickness – and perhaps because he did not resent the close confinement aboard submarines, something that many men cannot tolerate.

‘Ah, Marko Aleksandrovich, in Gorkiy on a day like this, flowers bloom!’

‘And what sort of flowers might those be, Comrade Political Officer?’ Ramius surveyed the fjord through his binoculars. At noon the sun was barely over the southeast horizon, casting orange light and purple shadows along the rocky walls.

‘Why, snow flowers, of course,’ Putin said, laughing loudly. ‘On a day like this the faces of the children and the women glow pink, your breath trails behind you like a cloud, and the vodka tastes especially fine. Ah, to be in Gorkiy on a day like this!’

The bastard ought to work for Intourist, Ramius told himself, except that Gorkiy is a city closed to foreigners. He had been there twice. It had struck him as a typical Soviet city, full of ramshackle buildings, dirty streets, and ill-clad citizens. As it was in most Russian cities, winter was Gorkiy’s best season. The snow hid all the dirt. Ramius, half Lithuanian, had childhood memories of a better place, a coastal village whose Hanseatic origin had left rows of presentable buildings.

It was unusual for anyone other than a Great Russian to be aboard – much less command – a Soviet naval vessel. Marko’s father, Aleksandr Ramius, had been a hero of the Party, a dedicated, believing Communist who had served Stalin faithfully and well. When the Soviets first occupied Lithuania in 1940, the elder Ramius was instrumental in rounding up political dissidents, shop owners, priests, and anyone else who might have been troublesome to the new regime. All were shipped off to fates that now even Moscow could only guess at. When the Germans invaded a year later, Aleksandr fought heroically as a political commissar, and was later to distinguish himself in the Battle of Leningrad. In 1944 he returned to his native land with the spearhead of the Eleventh Guards Army to wreak bloody vengeance on those who had collaborated with the Germans or been suspected of such. Marko’s father had been a true Soviet hero – and Marko was deeply ashamed to be his son. His mother’s health had been broken during the endless siege of Leningrad. She died giving birth to him, and he was raised by his paternal grandmother in Lithuania while his father strutted through the Party Central Committee in Vilnius, awaiting his promotion to Moscow. He got that, too, and was a candidate member of the Politburo when his life was cut short by a heart attack.

Marko’s shame was not total. His father’s prominence had made his current goal a possibility, and Marko planned to wreak his own vengeance on the Soviet Union, enough, perhaps, to satisfy the thousands of his countrymen who had died before he was ever born.

‘Where we are going, Ivan Yurievich, it will be colder still.’

Putin clapped his captain’s shoulder. Was his affection feigned or real? Marko wondered. Probably real. Ramius was an honest man, and he recognized that this short, loud oaf did have some human feelings.

‘Why is it, Comrade Captain, that you always seem glad to leave the Rodina and go to sea?’

Ramius smiled behind his binoculars. ‘A seaman has one country, Ivan Yurievich, but two wives. You never understand that. Now I go to my other wife, the cold, heartless one that owns my soul.’ Ramius paused. The smile vanished. ‘My only wife, now.’

Putin was quiet for once, Marko noted. The political officer had been there, had cried real tears as the coffin of polished pine rolled into the cremation chamber. For Putin the death of Natalia Bogdanova Ramius had been a cause of grief, but beyond that the act of an uncaring God whose existence he regularly denied. For Ramius it had been a crime committed not by God but the State. An unnecessary, monstrous crime, one that demanded punishment.

‘Ice.’ The lookout pointed.

‘Loose-pack ice, starboard side of the channel, or perhaps something calved off the east-side glacier. We’ll pass well clear,’ Kamarov said.

‘Captain!’ The bridge speaker had a metallic voice. ‘Message from fleet headquarters.’

‘Read it.’

‘“Exercise area clear. No enemy vessels in vicinity. Proceed as per orders. Signed, Korov, Fleet Commander.”’

‘Acknowledged,’ Ramius said. The speaker clicked off. ‘So, no Amerikantsi about?’

‘You doubt the fleet commander?’ Putin inquired.

‘I hope he is correct,’ Ramius replied, more sincerely than his political officer would appreciate. ‘But you remember our briefings.’

Putin shifted on his feet. Perhaps he was feeling the cold.

‘Those American 688-class submarines, Ivan, the Los Angeleses. Remember what one of their officers told our spy? That they could sneak up on a whale and bugger it before it knew they were there? I wonder how the KGB got that bit of information. A beautiful Soviet agent, trained in the ways of the decadent West, too skinny, the way the imperialists like their women, blonde hair …’ The captain grunted amusement. ‘Probably the American officer was a boastful boy, trying to find a way to do something similar to our agent, no? And feeling his liquor, like most sailors. Still. The American Los Angeles class, and the new British Trafalgars, those we must guard against. They are a threat to us.’

‘The Americans are good technicians. Comrade Captain,’ Putin said, ‘but they are not giants. Their technology is not so awesome. Nasha lutcha,’ he concluded. Ours is better.

Ramius nodded thoughtfully, thinking to himself that zampoliti really ought to know something about the ships they supervised, as mandated by Party doctrine.

‘Ivan, didn’t the farmers around Gorkiy tell you it is the wolf you do not see that you must fear? But don’t be overly concerned. With this ship we will teach them a lesson, I think.’

‘As I told the Main Political Administration,’ Putin clapped Ramius’ shoulder again, ‘Red October is in the best of hands!’

Ramius and Kamarov both smiled at that. You son of a bitch! the captain thought, saying in front of my men that you must pass on my fitness to command! A man who could not command a rubber raft on a calm day! A pity you will not live to eat those words, Comrade Political Officer, and spend the rest of your life in the gulag for that misjudgement. It would almost be worth leaving you alive.

A few minutes later the chop began to pick up, making the submarine roll. The movement was accentuated by their height above the deck, and Putin made excuses to go below. Still a weak-legged sailor. Ramius shared the observation silently with Kamarov, who smiled agreement. Their unspoken contempt for the zampolit was a most un-Soviet thought.

The next hour passed quickly. The water grew rougher as they approached the open sea, and their icebreaker escort began to wallow on the swells. Ramius watched her with interest. He had never been on an icebreaker, his entire career having been in submarines. They were more comfortable, but also more dangerous. He was accustomed to the danger, though, and the years of experience would stand him in good stead now.

‘Sea buoy in sight, Captain.’ Kamarov pointed. The red lighted buoy was riding actively on the waves.

‘Control room, what is the sounding?’ Ramius asked over the bridge telephone.

‘One hundred metres below the keel, Comrade Captain.’

‘Increase speed to two-thirds, come left ten degrees.’ Ramius looked at Kamarov. ‘Signal our course change to Purga, and hope he doesn’t turn the wrong way.’

Kamarov reached for the small blinker light stowed under the bridge coaming. The Red October began to accelerate slowly, her 30,000-ton bulk resisting the power of her engines. Presently the bow wave grew to a three-metre standing arc of water; man-made combers rolled down the missile deck, splitting against the front of the sail. The Purga altered course to starboard, allowing the submarine to pass well clear.

Ramius looked aft at the bluffs of the Kola Fjord. They had been carved to this shape millennia before by the remorseless pressure of towering glaciers. How many times in his twenty years of service with the Red Banner Northern Fleet had he looked at the wide, flat U-shape? This would be the last. One way or another, he’d never go back. Which way would it turn out? Ramius admitted to himself that he didn’t much care. Perhaps the stories his grandmother had taught him were true, about God and the reward for a good life. He hoped so – it would be good if Natalia were not truly dead. In any case, there was no turning back. He had left a letter in the last mailbag taken off before sailing. There was no going back after that.

‘Kamarov, signal to Purga: “Diving at –,”’ he checked his watch, ‘“– 1320 hours. Exercise OCTOBER FROST begins as scheduled. You are released to other assigned duties. We will return as scheduled.”’

Kamarov worked the trigger on the blinker light to transmit the message. The Purga responded at once, and Ramius read the flashing signal unaided: ‘IF THE WHALES DON’T EAT YOU. GOOD LUCK TO RED OCTOBER!’

Ramius lifted the phone again, pushing the button for the sub’s radio room. He had the same message transmitted to fleet headquarters, Severomorsk. Next he addressed the control room.

‘Depth under the keel?’

‘One hundred forty metres. Comrade Captain.’

‘Prepare to dive.’ He turned to the lookout and ordered him below. The boy moved towards the hatch. He was probably glad to return to the warmth below, but took the time for one last look at the cloudy sky, and receding cliffs. Going to sea on a submarine was always exciting, and always a little sad.

‘Clear the bridge. Take the conn when you get below, Gregoriy.’ Kamarov nodded and dropped down the hatch, leaving the captain alone.

Ramius made one last careful scan of the horizon. The sun was barely visible aft, the sky leaden, the sea black except for the splash of whitecaps. He wondered if he were saying good-bye to the world. If so, he would have preferred a more cheerful view of it.

Before sliding down he inspected the hatch seat, pulling it shut with a chain and making sure the automatic mechanism functioned properly. Next he dropped eight metres down the inside of the sail to the pressure hull, then two more into the control room. A michman (warrant officer) shut the second hatch and with a powerful spin turned the locking wheel as far as it would go.

‘Gregoriy?’ Ramius asked.

‘Straight board shut,’ the navigator said crisply, pointing to the diving board. All hull-opening indicator lights showed green, safe. ‘All systems aligned and checked for dive. The compensation is entered. We are rigged for dive.’

The captain made his own visual inspection of mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic indicators. He nodded, and the michman of the watch unlocked the vent controls.

‘Dive,’ Ramius ordered, moving to the periscope to relieve Vasily Borodin, his starpom (executive officer). Kamarov pulled the diving alarm, and the hull reverberated with the racket of a loud buzzer.

‘Flood the main ballast tanks. Rig out the diving planes. Ten degrees down-angle on the planes,’ Kamarov ordered, his eyes alert to see that every crewman did his job exactly. Ramius listened carefully but did not look. Kamarov was the best young seaman he had ever commanded, and had long since earned his captain’s trust.

The Red October’s hull was filled with the noise of rushing air as vents at the top of the ballast tanks were opened and water entering from the tank floods at the bottom chased the buoying air out. It was a lengthy process, for the submarine had many such tanks, each carefully subdivided by numerous cellular baffles. Ramius adjusted the periscope lens to look down and saw the black water change briefly to foam.

The Red October was the largest and finest command Ramius had ever had, but the sub had one major flaw. She had plenty of engine power and a new drive system that he hoped would befuddle American and Soviet submarines alike, but she was so big that she changed depth like a crippled whale. Slow going up, even slower going down.

‘Scope under.’ Ramius stepped away from the instrument after what seemed a long wait. ‘Down periscope.’

‘Passing forty metres,’ Kamarov said.

‘Level off at one hundred metres.’ Ramius watched his crewmen now. The first dive could make experienced men shudder, and half his crew were farmboys straight from training camp. The hull popped and creaked under the pressure of the surrounding water, something that took getting used to. A few of the younger men went pale but stood rigidly upright.

Kamarov began the procedure for levelling off at the proper depth. Ramius watched with a pride he might have felt for his own son as the lieutenant gave the necessary orders with precision. He was the first officer Ramius had recruited. The control room crew snapped to his command. Five minutes later the submarine slowed her descent at ninety metres and settled the next ten to a perfect stop at one hundred.

‘Well done. Comrade Lieutenant. You have the conn. Slow to one-third speed. Have the sonarmen listen on all passive systems.’ Ramius turned to leave the control room, motioning Putin to follow him.

And so it began.

Ramius and Putin went aft to the submarine’s wardroom. The captain held the door open for the political officer, then closed and locked it behind himself. The Red October’s wardroom was a spacious affair for a submarine, located immediately forward of the galley, aft of the officer accommodations. Its walls were soundproofed, and the door had a lock because her designers had known that not everything the officers had to say was necessarily for the ears of the enlisted men. It was large enough for all of the October’s officers to eat as a group – though at least three of them would always be on duty. The safe containing the ship’s orders was here, not in the captain’s stateroom where a man might use his solitude to try opening it by himself. It had two dials. Ramius had one combination, Putin the other. Which was hardly necessary, since Putin undoubtedly knew their mission orders already. So did Ramius, but not all the particulars.

Putin poured tea as the captain checked his watch against the chronometer on the bulkhead. Fifteen minutes until he could open the safe. Putin’s courtesy made him uneasy.

‘Two more weeks of confinement,’ the zampolit said, stirring his tea.

‘The Americans do this for two months, Ivan. Of course, their submarines are far more comfortable.’ Despite her huge bulk, the October’s crew accommodations would have shamed a gulag jailer. The crew consisted of fifteen officers, housed in fairly decent cabins aft, and a hundred enlisted men whose bunks were stuffed into corners and racks throughout the bow, forward of the missile room. The October’s size was deceptive. The interior of her double hull was crammed with missiles, torpedoes, a nuclear reactor and its support equipment, a huge backup diesel power plant, and a bank of nickel-cadmium batteries outside the pressure hull, which was ten times the size of its American counterparts. Running and maintaining the ship was a huge job for so small a crew, even though extensive use of automation made her the most modern of Soviet naval vessels. Perhaps the men didn’t need proper bunks. They would only have four or six hours a day to make use of them. This would work to Ramius’ advantage. Half of his crew were draftees on their first operational cruise, and even the more experienced men knew little enough. The strength of his enlisted crew, unlike that of Western crews, resided much more in his eleven michmanyy (warrant officers) than in his glavnyy starshini (senior petty officers). All of them were men who would do – were specifically trained to do – exactly what their officers told them. And Ramius had picked the officers.

‘You want to cruise for two months?’ Putin asked.

‘I have done it on diesel submarines. A submarine belongs at sea, Ivan. Our mission is to strike fear into the hearts of the imperialists. We do not accomplish this tied up in our barn at Polyarnyy most of the time, but we cannot stay at sea any longer because any period over two weeks and the crew loses efficiency. In two weeks this collection of children will be a mob of numbed robots.’ Ramius was counting on that.

‘And we could solve this by having capitalist luxuries?’ Putin sneered.

‘A true Marxist is objective, Comrade Political Officer,’ Ramius chided, savouring this last argument with Putin. ‘Objectively, that which aids us in carrying out our mission is good, that which hinders us is bad. Adversity is supposed to hone one’s spirit and skill, not dull them. Just being aboard a submarine is hardship enough, is it not?’

‘Not for you, Marko.’ Putin grinned over his tea.

‘I am a seaman. Our crewmen are not, most never will be. They are a mob of farmers’ sons and boys who yearn to be factory workers. We must adjust to the times, Ivan. These youngsters are not the same as we were.’

‘That is true enough,’ Putin agreed. ‘You are never satisfied, Comrade Captain. I suppose it is men like you who force progress upon us all.’

Both men knew exactly why Soviet missile submarines spent so little of their time – barely fifteen percent of it – at sea, and it had nothing to do with creature comforts. The Red October carried twenty-six SS-N-20 Seahawk missiles, each with eight 500-kiloton multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles – MIRVs – enough to destroy two hundred cities. Land-based bombers could only fly a few hours at a time, then had to return to their bases. Land-based missiles arrayed along the main East–West Soviet rail network were always where paramilitary troops of the KGB could get at them lest some missile regiment commander suddenly came to realize the power at his fingertips. But missile submarines were by definition beyond any control from land. Their entire mission was to disappear.

Given that fact, Marko was surprised that his government had them at all. The crew of such vessels had to be trusted. And so they sailed less often than their Western counterparts, and when they did it was with a political officer aboard to stand next to the commanding officer, a second captain always ready to pass approval on every action.

‘Do you think you could do it, Marko, cruise for two months with these farmboys?’

‘I prefer half-trained boys, as you know. They have less to unlearn. Then I can train them to be seamen the right way, my way. My personality cult?’

Putin laughed as he lit a cigarette. ‘That observation has been made in the past, Marko. But you are our best teacher and your reliability is well known.’ This was very true. Ramius had sent hundreds of officers and seamen on to other submarines whose commanders were glad to have them. It was another paradox that a man could engender trust within a society that scarcely recognized the concept. Of course, Ramius was a loyal Party member, the son of a Party hero who had been carried to his grave by three Politburo members. Putin waggled his finger. ‘You should be commanding one of our higher naval schools, Comrade Captain. Your talents would better serve the state there.’

‘It is a seaman I am, Ivan Yurievich. Only a seaman, not a schoolmaster – despite what they say about me. A wise man knows his limitations.’ And a bold one seizes opportunities. Every officer aboard had served with Ramius before, except for three junior lieutenants, who would obey their orders as readily as any wet-nosed matros (seaman), and the doctor, who was useless.

The chronometer chimed four bells.

Ramius stood and dialled in his three-element combination. Putin did the same, and the captain flipped the lever to open the safe’s circular door. Inside was a manila envelope plus four books of cipher keys and missile-targeting coordinates. Ramius removed the envelope, then closed the door, spinning both dials before sitting down again.

‘So, Ivan, what do you suppose our orders tell us to do?’ Ramius asked theatrically.

‘Our duty, Comrade Captain.’ Putin smiled.

‘Indeed.’ Ramius broke the wax seal on the envelope and extracted the four-page operation order. He read it quickly. It was not complicated.

‘So, we are to proceed to grid square 54–90 and rendezvous with our attack submarine V. K. Konovalov – that’s Captain Tupolev’s new command. You know Viktor Tupolev? No? Viktor will guard us from imperialist intruders, and we will conduct a four-day acquisition and tracking drill, with him hunting us – if he can.’ Ramius chuckled. ‘The boys in the attack submarine directorate still have not figured how to track our new drive system. Well, neither will the Americans. We are to confine our operations to grid square 54–90 and the immediately surrounding squares. That ought to make Viktor’s task a bit easier.’

‘But you will not let him find us?’

‘Certainly not,’ Ramius snorted. ‘Let? Viktor was once my pupil. You give nothing to an enemy, Ivan, even in a drill. The imperialists certainly won’t! In trying to find us, he also practises finding their missile submarines. He will have a fair chance of locating us, I think. The exercise is confined to nine squares, forty thousand square kilometres. We shall see what he has learned since he served with us – oh, that’s right, you weren’t with me then. That’s when I had the Suslov.’

‘Do I see disappointment?’

‘No, not really. The four-day drill with Konovalov will be an interesting diversion.’ Bastard, he said to himself, you knew beforehand exactly what our orders were – and you do know Viktor Tupolev, liar. It was time.

Putin finished his cigarette and his tea before standing. ‘So, again I am permitted to watch the master captain at work – befuddling a poor boy.’ He turned towards the door. ‘I think –’

Ramius kicked Putin’s feet out from under him just as he was stepping away from the table. Putin fell backwards while Ramius sprang to his feet and grasped the political officer’s head in his strong fisherman’s hands. The captain drove his neck downward to the sharp, metal-edged corner of the wardroom table. It struck the point. In the same instant Ramius pushed down on the man’s chest. An unnecessary gesture – with the sickening crackle of bones Ivan Putin’s neck broke, his spine severed at the level of the second cervical vertebra, a perfect hangman’s fracture.

The political officer had no time to react. The nerves to his body below the neck were instantly cut off from the organs and muscles they controlled. Putin tried to shout, to say something, but his mouth flapped open and shut without a sound except for the exhalation of his last lungful of air. He tried to gulp air down like a landed fish, and this did not work. Then his eyes went up to Ramius, wide in shock – there was no pain, and no emotion but surprise. The captain laid him gently on the tile deck.

Ramius saw the face flash with recognition, then darken. He reached down to take Putin’s pulse. It was nearly two minutes before the heart stopped completely. When Ramius was sure that his political officer was dead, he took the teapot from the table and poured two cups’ worth on the deck, careful to drip some on the man’s shoes. Next he lifted the body to the wardroom table and threw open the door.

‘Dr Petrov to the wardoom at once!’

The ship’s medical office was only a few steps aft. Petrov was there in seconds, along with Vasily Borodin, who had hurried aft from the control room.

‘He slipped on the deck where I spilled my tea,’ Ramius gasped, performing closed heart massage on Putin’s chest. ‘I tried to keep him from falling, but he hit his head on the table.’

Petrov shoved the captain aside, moved the body around, and leapt on the table to kneel astride it. He tore the shirt open, then checked Putin’s eyes. Both pupils were wide and fixed. The doctor felt around the man’s head, his hands working downward to the neck. They stopped there, probing. The doctor shook his head slowly.

‘Comrade Putin is dead. His neck is broken.’ The doctor’s hands came loose and he closed the zampolit’s eyes.

‘No!’ Ramius shouted. ‘He was alive only a minute ago.’ The commanding officer was sobbing. ‘It’s my fault. I tried to catch him, but I failed. My fault!’ He collapsed into a chair and buried his face in his hands. ‘My fault,’ he cried, shaking his head in rage, struggling visibly to regain his composure. An altogether excellent performance.

Petrov placed his hand on the captain’s shoulder. ‘It was an accident, Comrade Captain. These things happen, even to experienced men. It was not your fault. Truly, Comrade.’

Ramius swore under his breath, regaining control of himself. ‘There is nothing you can do?’

Petrov shook his head. ‘Even in the finest clinic in the Soviet Union nothing could be done. Once the spinal cord is severed, there is no hope. Death is virtually instantaneous – but also it is quite painless,’ the doctor added consolingly.

Ramius drew himself up as he took a long breath, his face set. ‘Comrade Putin was a good shipmate, a loyal Party member, and a fine officer.’ Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Borodin’s mouth twitch. ‘Comrades, we will continue our mission! Dr Petrov, you will carry our comrade’s body to the freezer. This is – gruesome, I know, but he deserves and will get an honourable military funeral, with his shipmates in attendance, as it should be, when we return to port.’

‘Will this be reported to fleet headquarters?’ Petrov asked.

‘We cannot. Our orders are to maintain strict radio silence.’ Ramius handed the doctor a set of operations orders from his pocket. Not those taken from the safe. ‘Page three, Comrade Doctor.’

Petrov’s eyes went wide reading the operational directive.

‘I would prefer to report this, but our orders are explicit: Once we dive, no transmissions of any kind, for any reason.’

Petrov handed the papers back. ‘Too bad, our comrade would have looked forward to this. But orders are orders.’

‘And we shall carry them out.’

‘Putin would have it no other way,’ Petrov agreed.

‘Borodin, observe: I take the comrade political officer’s missile control key from his neck, as per regulations,’ Ramius said, pocketing the key and chain.

‘I note this, and will so enter it in the log,’ the executive officer said gravely.

Petrov brought in his medical orderly. Together they took the body aft to the medical office, where it was zippered into a body bag. The orderly and a pair of sailors then took it forward, through the control room, into the missile compartment. The entrance to the freezer was on the lower missile deck, and the men carried the body through the door. While two cooks removed food to make room for it, the body was set reverently down in the corner. Aft, the doctor and the executive officer made the necessary inventory of personal effects, one copy for the ship’s medical file, another for the ship’s log, and a third for a box that was sealed and locked up in the medical office.

Forward, Ramius took the conn in a subdued control room. He ordered the submarine to a course of two-nine-zero degrees, west-northwest. Grid square 54–90 was to the east.

THE SECOND DAY
Saturday, 4 December

THE RED OCTOBER

It was the custom in the Soviet Navy for the commanding officer to announce his ship’s operational orders and to exhort the crew to carry them out in true Soviet fashion. The orders were then posted for all to see – and be inspired by – outside the ship’s Lenin Room. In large surface ships this was a classroom where political awareness classes were held. In Red October it was a closet-sized library near the wardroom where Party books and other ideological material were kept for the men to read. Ramius disclosed their orders the day after sailing to give his men the chance to settle into the ship’s routine. At the same time he gave a pep talk. Ramius always gave a good one. He’d had a lot of practice. At 0800 hours, when the forenoon watch was set, he entered the control room and took some file cards from an inside jacket pocket.

‘Comrades!’ he began, talking into the microphone, ‘this is the captain speaking. You all know that our beloved friend and comrade, Captain Ivan Yurievich Putin, died yesterday in a tragic accident. Our orders do not permit us to inform fleet headquarters of this. Comrades, we will dedicate our efforts and our work to the memory of our comrade, Ivan Yurievich Putin – a fine shipmate, an honourable Party member, and a courageous officer.

‘Comrades! Officers and men of Red October! We have orders from the Red Banner Northern Fleet High Command, and they are orders worthy of this ship and this crew!

‘Comrades! Our orders are to make the ultimate test of our new silent propulsion system. We are to head west, past the North Cape of America’s imperialist puppet state, Norway, then to turn southwest towards the Atlantic Ocean. We will pass all of the imperialist sonar nets, and we will not be detected! This will be a true test of our submarine and his capabilities. Our own ships will engage in a major exercise to locate us and at the same time to befuddle the arrogant imperialist navies. Our mission, first of all, is to evade detection by anyone. We will teach the Americans a lesson about Soviet technology that they will not soon forget! Our orders are to continue southwest, skirting the American coast to challenge and defeat their newest and best hunter submarines. We will proceed all the way to our socialist brothers in Cuba, and we will be the first ship to make use of a new and supersecret nuclear submarine base that we have been building for two years right under their imperialist noses on the south coast of Cuba. A fleet replenishment vessel is already en route to rendezvous with us there.

‘Comrades! If we succeed in reaching Cuba undetected by the imperialists – and we will! – the officers and men of Red October will have a week – a week of shore leave to visit our fraternal socialist comrades on the beautiful island of Cuba. I have been there, comrades, and you will find it to be exactly what you have read, a paradise of warm breezes, palm trees and comradely good fellowship.’ By which Ramius meant women. ‘After this we will return to the Motherland by the same route. By this time, of course, the imperialists will know who and what we are, from their slinking spies and cowardly reconnaissance aircraft. It is intended that they should know this, because we will again evade detection on the trip home. This will let the imperialists know that they may not trifle with the men of the Soviet Navy, that we can approach their coast at the time of our choosing, and that they must respect the Soviet Union!

‘Comrades! We will make the first cruise of Red October a memorable one!’

Ramius looked up from his prepared speech. The men on watch in the control room were exchanging grins. It was not often that a Soviet sailor was allowed to visit another country, and a visit by a nuclear submarine to a foreign country, even an ally, was nearly unprecedented. Moreover, for Russians the sand of Cuba was as exotic as Tahiti, a promised land of white sand beaches and dusky girls. Ramius knew differently. He had read articles in Red Star and other state journals about the joys of duty in Cuba. He had also been there.

Ramius changed cards in his hands. He had given them the good news.

‘Comrades! Officers and men of Red October!’ Now for the bad news that everyone was waiting for. ‘This mission will not be an easy one. It demands our best efforts. We must maintain absolute radio silence, and our operating routines must be perfect! Rewards only come to those who truly earn them. Every officer and every man aboard, from your commanding officer to the newest matros, must do his socialist duty and do it well! If we work together as comrades, as the New Soviet Men we are, we shall succeed. You young comrades new to the sea: Listen to your officers, to your michmanyy, and to your starshini. Learn your duties well, and carry them out exactly. There are no small jobs on this ship, no small responsibilities. Every comrade depends for his life upon every other. Do your duty, follow your orders, and when we have completed this voyage, you will be true Soviet sailors! That is all.’ Ramius released his thumb from the mike switch and set it back in the cradle. Not a bad speech, he decided – a large carrot and a small stick.

In the galley aft a petty officer was standing still, holding a warm loaf of bread and looking curiously at the bulkhead-mounted speaker. That wasn’t what their orders were supposed to be, was it? Had there been a change in plans? The michman pointed him back to his duties, grinning and chuckling at the prospect of a week in Cuba. He had heard a lot of stories about Cuba and Cuban women and was looking forward to seeing if they were true.

In the control room Ramius mused. ‘I wonder if any American submarines are about?’

‘Indeed, Comrade Captain,’ nodded Captain Second Rank Borodin, who had the watch. ‘Shall we engage the caterpillar?’

‘Proceed, Comrade.’

‘Engines all stop,’ Borodin ordered.

‘All stop.’ The quartermaster, a starshina (petty officer), dialled the annunciator to the STOP position. An instant later the order was confirmed by the inner dial, and a few seconds after that the dull rumble of the engines died away.

Borodin picked up the phone and punched the button for engineering. ‘Comrade Chief Engineer, prepare to engage the caterpillar.’

It wasn’t the official name for the new drive system. It had no name as such, just a project number. The nickname caterpillar had been given it by a young engineer who had been involved in the sub’s development. Neither Ramius nor Borodin knew why, but as often happens with such names, it had stuck.

‘Ready, Comrade Borodin,’ the chief engineer reported back in a moment.

‘Open doors fore and aft,’ Borodin ordered next.

The michman of the watch reached up the control board and threw four switches. The status light over each changed from red to green. ‘Doors show open. Comrade.’

‘Engage caterpillar. Build speed slowly to thirteen knots.’

‘Build slowly to one-three knots, Comrade,’ the engineer acknowledged.

The hull, which had gone momentarily silent, now had a new sound. The engine noises were lower and very different from what they had been. The reactor plant noises, mainly from pumps that circulated the cooling water, were almost imperceptible. The caterpillar did not use a great deal of power for what it did. At the michman’s station the speed gauge, which had dropped to five knots, began to creep upward again. Forward of the missile room, in a space shoe-horned into the crew’s accommodations, the handful of sleeping men stirred briefly in their bunks as they noted an intermittent rumble aft and the hum of electric motors a few feet away, separated from them by the pressure hull. They were tired enough even on their first full day at sea to ignore the noise, fighting back to their precious allotments of sleep.

‘Caterpillar functioning normally, Comrade Captain,’ Borodin reported.

‘Excellent. Steer two-six-zero, helm,’ Ramius ordered.

‘Two-six-zero, Comrade.’ The helmsman turned his wheel to the left.

THE USS BREMERTON

Thirty miles to the northeast, the USS Bremerton was on a heading of two-two-five, just emerging from under the icepack. A 688-class attack submarine, she had been on an ELINT – electronic intelligence gathering – mission in the Kara Sea when she was ordered west to the Kola Peninsula. The Russian missile boat wasn’t supposed to have sailed for another week, and the Bremerton’s skipper was annoyed at this latest intelligence screw-up. He would have been in place to track the Red October if she had sailed as scheduled. Even so, the American sonarmen had picked up on the Soviet sub a few minutes earlier, despite the fact that they were travelling at fourteen knots.

‘Conn, sonar.’

Commander Wilson lifted the phone. ‘Conn, aye.’

‘Contact lost, sir. His screws stopped a few minutes ago and have not restarted. There’s some other activity to the east, but the missile sub has gone dead.’

‘Very well. He’s probably settling down to a slow drift. We’ll be creeping up on him. Stay awake, Chief.’ Commander Wilson thought this over as he took two steps to the chart table. The two officers of the fire control tracking party who had just been establishing the track for the contact looked up to learn their commander’s opinion.

‘If it was me, I’d go down near the bottom and circle slowly right about here.’ Wilson traced a rough circle on the chart that enclosed the Red October’s position. ‘So let’s creep up on him. We’ll reduce speed to five knots and see if we can move in and reacquire him from his reactor plant noise.’ Wilson turned to the officer of the deck. ‘Reduce speed to five knots.’

‘Aye, Skipper.’

SEVEROMORSK, USSR

In the Central Post Office building in Severomorsk a mail sorter watched sourly as a truck driver dumped a large canvas sack on his work table and went back out the door. He was late – well, not really late, the clerk corrected himself, since the idiot had not been on time once in five years. It was a Saturday, and he resented being at work. Only a few years before, the forty-hour week had been started in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately this change had never affected such vital public services as mail delivery. So, here he was, still working a six-day week – and without extra pay! A disgrace, he thought, and had said often enough in his apartment, playing cards with his workmates over vodka and cucumbers.

He untied the drawstring and turned the sack over. Several smaller bags tumbled out. There was no sense in hurrying. It was only the beginning of the month, and they still had weeks to move their quota of letters and parcels from one side of the building to the other. In the Soviet Union every worker is a government worker, and they have a saying: As long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.

Opening a small mailbag, he pulled out an official-looking envelope addressed to the Main Political Administration of the Navy in Moscow. The clerk paused, fingering the envelope. It probably came from one of the submarines based at Polyarnyy, on the other side of the fjord. What did the letter say? the sorter wondered, playing the mental game that amused mailmen all over the world. Was it an announcement that all was ready for the final attack on the imperialist West? A list of Party members who were late paying their dues, or a requisition for more toilet paper? There was no telling. Submariners! They were all prima donnas – even the farmboy conscripts still picking shit from between their toes paraded around like members of the Party elite.

The clerk was sixty-two. In the Great Patriotic War he had been a tankrider serving in a guards tank corps attached to Konev’s First Ukrainian Front. That, he told himself, was a man’s job, riding into action on the back of the great battle tanks, leaping off to hunt for the German infantrymen as they cowered in their holes. When something needed doing against those slugs, it was done! Now what had become of Soviet fighting men? Living aboard luxury liners with plenty of good food and warm beds. The only warm bed he had ever known was over the exhaust vent of his tank’s diesel – and he’d had to fight for that! It was crazy what the world had become. Now sailors acted like czarist princes and wrote tons of letters back and forth and called it work. These pampered boys didn’t know what hardship was. And their privileges! Every word they committed to paper was priority mail. Whimpering letters to their sweethearts, most of it, and here he was sorting through it all on a Saturday to see that it got to their womenfolk – even though they couldn’t possibly have a reply for two weeks. It just wasn’t like the old days.

The sorter tossed the envelope with a negligent flick of the wrist towards the surface mailbag for Moscow on the far side of his work table. It missed, dropping to the concrete floor. The letter would be placed aboard the train a day late. The sorter didn’t care. There was a hockey game that night, the biggest game of the young season, Central Army against Wings. He had a litre of vodka bet on Wings.

MORROW, ENGLAND

‘Halsey’s greatest popular success was his greatest error. In establishing himself as a popular hero with legendary aggressiveness, the admiral would blind later generations to his impressive intellectual abilities and a shrewd gambler’s instinct to –’ Jack Ryan frowned at his computer. It sounded too much like a doctoral dissertation, and he had already done one of those. He thought of dumping the whole passage from the memory disc but decided against it. He had to follow this line of reasoning for his introduction. Bad as it was, it did serve as a guide for what he wanted to say. Why was it that introductions always seemed to be the hardest part of a history book? For three years now he had been working on Fighting Sailor, an authorized biography of Fleet Admiral William Halsey. Nearly all of it was contained on a half-dozen floppy discs lying next to his Apple computer.

‘Daddy?’ Ryan’s daughter was staring up at him.

‘And how’s my little Sally today?’

‘Fine.’

Ryan picked her up and set her on his lap, careful to slide his chair away from the keyboard. Sally was all checked out on games and educational programmes, and occasionally thought that this meant she was able to handle Wordstar also. Once that had resulted in the loss of twenty thousand words of electronically recorded manuscript. And a spanking.

She leaned her head against her father’s shoulder.

‘You don’t look fine. What’s bothering my little girl?’

‘Well, Daddy, y’see, it’s almost Chris’mas, an … I’m not sure that Santa knows where we are. We’re not where we were last year.’

‘Oh, I see. And you’re afraid he doesn’t come here?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Why didn’t you ask me before? Of course he comes here. Promise.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

‘Okay.’ She kissed her father and ran out of the room, back to watching cartoons on the telly, as they called it in England. Ryan was glad she had interrupted him. He didn’t want to forget to pick up a few things when he flew over to Washington. Where was – oh, yeah. He pulled a disc from his desk drawer and inserted it in the spare disc drive. After clearing the screen, he scrolled up the Christmas list, things he still had to get. With a simple command a copy of the list was made on the adjacent printer. Ryan tore the page off and tucked it in his wallet. Work didn’t appeal to him this Saturday morning. He decided to play with his kids. After all, he’d be stuck in Washington for much of the coming week.

THE V.K. KONOVALOV

The Soviet submarine V. K. Konovalov crept above the hard sand bottom of the Barents Sea at three knots. She was at the southwest corner of grid square 54–90 and for the past ten hours had been drifting back and forth on a north – south line, waiting for the Red October to arrive for the beginning of Exercise OCTOBER FROST. Captain Second Rank Viktor Alexievich Tupolev paced slowly around the periscope pedestal in the control room of his small, fast attack sub. He was waiting for his old mentor to show up, hoping to play a few tricks on him. He had served with the Schoolmaster for two years. They had been good years, and while he found his former commander to be something of a cynic, especially about the Party, he would unhesitatingly testify to Ramius’ skill and craftiness.

And his own. Tupolev, now in his third year of command, had been one of the Schoolmaster’s star pupils. His current vessel was a brand-new Alfa, the fastest submarine ever made. A month earlier, while Ramius had been fitting out the Red October after her initial shakedown, Tupolev and three of his officers had flown down to see the model sub that had been the test-bed for the prototype drive system. Thirty-two metres long and diesel-electric powered, it was based in the Caspian Sea, far from the eyes of imperialist spies, and kept in a covered dock, hidden from their photographic satellites. Ramius had had a hand in the development of the caterpillar, and Tupolev recognized the mark of the master. It would be a bastard to detect. Not quite impossible, though. After a week of following the model around the north end of the Caspian Sea in an electrically powered launch, trailing the best passive sonar array his country had yet made, he thought he had found a flaw. Not a big one, just big enough to exploit.

Of course there was no guarantee of success. He was not only in competition with a machine, but also with the captain commanding her. Tupolev knew this area intimately. The water was almost perfectly isothermal; there was no thermal layer for a submarine to hide under. They were far enough from the freshwater rivers on the north coast of Russia not to have to worry about pools and walls of variable salinity interfering with their sonar searches. The Konovalov had been built with the best sonar systems the Soviet Union had yet produced, copied closely from the French DUUV-23 and a bit improved, the factory technicians said.

Tupolev planned to mimic the American tactic of drifting slowly, with just enough speed to maintain steerage, perfectly quiet and waiting for the Red October to cross his path. He would then trail his quarry closely and log each change in course and speed, so that when they compared logs in a few weeks the Schoolmaster would see that his erstwhile student had played his own winning game. It was about time someone did.

‘Anything new on sonar?’ Tupolev was getting tense. Patience came hard to him.

‘Nothing new, Comrade Captain.’ The starpom tapped the X on the chart that marked the position of the Rokossovskiy, a Delta-class missile sub they had been tracking for several hours in the same exercise area. ‘Our friend is still cruising in a slow circle. Do you think that Rokossovskiy might be trying to confuse us? Would Captain Ramius have arranged for him to be here, to complicate our task?’

The thought had occurred to Tupolev. ‘Perhaps, but probably not. This exercise was arranged by Korov himself. Our mission orders were sealed, and Marko’s orders should have been also. But then, Admiral Korov is an old friend of our Marko.’ Tupolev paused for a moment and shook his head. ‘No. Korov is an honourable man. I think Ramius is proceeding this way as slowly as he can. To make us nervous, to make us question ourselves. He will know we are to hunt him and will adjust his plans accordingly. He might try to enter the square from an unexpected direction – or to make us think that he is. You have never served under Ramius, Comrade Lieutenant. He is a fox, that one, an old grey-whiskered fox. I think we will continue to patrol as we are for another four hours. If we have not yet acquired him then, we will cross over to the southeast corner of the square and work our way in to the centre. Yes.’

Tupolev had never expected that this would be easy. No attack submarine commander had ever embarrassed Ramius. He was determined to be the first, and the difficulty of the task would only confirm his own prowess. In one or two more years, Tupolev planned to be the new master.

THE THIRD DAY
Sunday, 5 December

THE RED OCTOBER

The Red October had no time of her own. For her the sun neither rose nor set, and the days of the week had little significance. Unlike surface ships, which changed their clocks to conform with the local time wherever they were, submarines generally adhered to a single time reference. For American subs this was Zulu, or Greenwich mean time. For the Red October it was Moscow standard time, which by normal reckoning was actually one hour ahead of standard time to save on utility expenses.

Ramius entered the control room in mid-morning. Their course was now two-five-zero, speed thirteen knots, and the submarine was running thirty metres above the bottom at the west edge of the Barents Sea. In a few more hours the bottom would drop away to an abyssal plain, allowing them to go much deeper. Ramius examined the chart first, then the numerous banks of instruments covering both side bulkheads in the compartment. Last he made some notations in the order book.

‘Lieutenant Ivanov!’ he said sharply to the junior officer of the watch.

‘Yes, Comrade Captain!’ Ivanov was the greenest officer aboard, fresh from Lenin’s Komsomol School in Leningrad, pale, skinny, and eager.

‘I will be calling a meeting of the senior officers in the wardroom. You will now be the officer of the watch. This is your first cruise, Ivanov. How do you like it?’

‘It is better than I had hoped, Comrade Captain,’ Ivanov replied with greater confidence than he could possibly have felt.

‘That is good, Comrade Lieutenant. It is my practice to give junior officers as much responsibility as they can handle. While we senior officers are having our weekly political discussion, you are in command of this vessel! The safety of this ship and all his crew is your responsibility! You have been taught all you need to know, and my instructions are in the order book. If we detect another submarine or surface ship you will inform me at once and instantly initiate evasion drill. Any questions?’

‘No, Comrade Captain.’ Ivanov was standing at rigid attention.

‘Good.’ Ramius smiled. ‘Pavel Ilych, you will forever remember this as one of the great moments of your life. I know, I can still remember my first watch. Do not forget your orders or your responsibilities!’

Pride sparkled in the boy’s eyes. It was too bad what would happen to him, Ramius thought, still the teacher. On first inspection, Ivanov looked to have the makings of a good officer.

Ramius walked briskly aft to the ship’s medical office.

‘Good morning, Doctor.’

‘Good morning to you, Comrade Captain. It is time for our political meeting?’ Petrov had been reading the manual for the sub’s new X-ray machine.

‘Yes, it is. Comrade Doctor, but I do not wish you to attend. There is something else I want you to do. While the senior officers are at the meeting, I have the three youngsters standing watch in control and the engineering spaces.’

‘Oh?’ Petrov’s eyes went wide. It was his first time on a submarine in several years.

Ramius smiled. ‘Be at ease, Comrade. I can get from the wardroom to control in twenty seconds, as you know, and Comrade Melekhin can get to his precious reactor just as fast. Sooner or later our young officers must learn to function on their own. I prefer that they learn sooner. I want you to keep an eye on them. I know that they all have the knowledge to do their duties. I want to know if they have the temperament. If Borodin or I watch over them, they will not act normally. And in any case, this is a medical judgement, no?’

‘Ah, you wish me to observe how they react to their responsibilities.’

‘Without the pressure of being observed by a senior line officer,’ Ramius confirmed. ‘One must give young officers room to grow – but not too much. If you observe something that you question, you will inform me at once. There should be no problems. We are in open sea, there is no traffic about, and the reactor is running at a fraction of its total power. The first test for young officers ought to be an easy one. Find some excuse for travelling back and forth, and keep an eye on the children. Ask questions about what they are doing.’

Petrov laughed at that. ‘Ah, and also you would have me learn a few things, Comrade Captain? They told me about you at Severomorsk. Fine, it will be as you say. But this will be the first political meeting I have missed in years.’

‘From what your file says, you could teach Party doctrine to the Politburo, Yevgeni Konstantinovich.’ Which said little about his medical ability, Ramius thought.

The captain moved forward to the wardroom to join his brother officers, who were waiting for him. A steward had left several pots of tea along with black bread and butter to snack on. Ramius looked at the corner of the table. The bloodstain had long since been wiped away, but he could remember exactly what it looked like. This, he reflected, was one difference between himself and the man he had murdered. Ramius had a conscience. Before taking his seat, he turned to lock the door behind him. His officers were all sitting at attention, since the compartment was not large enough for them to stand once the bench seats were folded down.

Sunday was the normal day for the political awareness session at sea. Ordinarily Putin would have officiated, reading some Pravda editorials, followed by selected quotations from the works of Lenin and a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the readings. It was very much like a church service.

With the demise of the zampolit this duty devolved upon the commanding officer, but Ramius doubted that regulations anticipated the sort of discussion on today’s agenda. Each officer in this room was a member of his conspiracy. Ramius outlined their plans – there had been some minor changes which he had not mentioned to anyone. Then he told them about the letter.

‘So, there is no going back,’ Borodin observed.

‘We have all agreed upon our course of action. Now we are committed to it.’ Their reactions to his words were just what he expected them to be – sober. As well they might be. All were single; no one left behind a wife or children. All were Party members in good standing, their dues paid up to the end of the year, their Party cards right where they were supposed to be, ‘next to their hearts.’ And each one shared with his comrades a deep-seated dissatisfaction with, in some cases a hatred of, the Soviet government.

The planning had begun soon after the death of his Natalia. The rage he had almost unknowingly suppressed throughout his life had burst forth with a violence and passion that he had struggled to contain. A lifetime of self-control had enabled him to conceal it, and a lifetime of naval training had enabled him to choose a purpose worthy of it.

Ramius had not yet begun school when he first heard tales from other children about what his father Aleksandr had done in Lithuania in 1940 and after that country’s dubious liberation from the Germans in 1944. These were the repeated whisperings of their parents. One little girl told Marko a story that he recounted to Aleksandr, and to the boy’s uncomprehending horror her father vanished. For his unwitting mistake Marko was branded an informer. Stung by the name he was given for committing a crime – which the State taught was not a crime at all – whose enormity never stopped pulling at his conscience, he never informed again.

In the formative years of his life, while the elder Ramius ruled the Lithuanian Party Central Committee in Vilnius, the motherless boy was raised by his paternal grandmother, common practice in a country savaged by four years of brutal war. Her only son left home at an early age to join Lenin’s Red Guards, and while he was away she kept to the old ways, going to mass every day until 1940 and never forgetting the religious education that had been passed on to her. Ramius remembered her as a silver-haired old woman who told wonderful bedtime stories. Religious stories. It would have been far too dangerous for her to bring Marko to the religious ceremonies that had never been entirely stamped out, but she did manage to have him baptized a Roman Catholic soon after his father had deposited him with her. She never told Marko about this. The risk would have been too great. Roman Catholicism had been brutally suppressed in the Baltic states. It was a religion, and as he grew older Marko learned that Marxism-Leninism was a jealous god, tolerating no competing loyalties.

Grandmother Hilda told him bedtime stories from the Bible, each with a lesson of right and wrong, virtue and reward. As a child he found them merely entertaining, but he never told his father about them because even then he knew that Aleksandr would object. After the elder Ramius again resumed control of his son’s life, this religious education faded into Marko’s memory, neither fully remembered nor fully forgotten.

As a boy, Ramius sensed more than thought that Soviet Communism ignored a basic human need. In his teens, his misgivings began to take a coherent shape. The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man’s soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value. It also cast aside the objective measure of justice and ethics which, he decided, was the principal legacy of religion to civilized life. From earliest adulthood on, Marko had his own idea about right and wrong, an idea he did not share with the State. It gave him a means of gauging his actions and those of others. It was something he was careful to conceal. It served as an anchor for his soul and, like an anchor, it was hidden far below the visible surface.

Even as the boy was grappling with his first doubts about his country, no one could have suspected it. Like all Soviet children, Ramius joined the Little Octobrists, then the Young Pioneers. He paraded at the requisite battle shrines in polished boots and blood-red scarf, and gravely stood watch over the remains of some unknown soldier while clasping to his chest a deactivated PPSh submachinegun, his back ramrod straight before the eternal flame. The solemnity of such duty was no accident. As a boy Marko was certain that the brave men whose graves he guarded so intensely had met their fates with the same sort of selfless heroism that he saw portrayed in endless war movies at the local cinema. They had fought the hated Germans to protect the women and children and old people behind the lines. And like a nobleman’s son of an earlier Russia, he took special pride in being the son of a Party chieftain. The party, he heard a hundred times before he was five, was the Soul of the People; the unity of Party, People, and Nation was the holy trinity of the Soviet Union, albeit with one segment more important than the others. His father fitted easily into the cinematic image of a Party apparatchik. Stern but fair, to Marko he was a frequently absent, gruffly kind man who brought his son what presents he could and saw to it that he had all the advantages the son of a Party secretary was entitled to.

Although outwardly he was the model Soviet child, inwardly he wondered why what he learned from his father and in school conflicted with the other lessons of his youth. Why did some parents refuse to let their children play with him? Why when he passed them did his classmates whisper ‘stukach,’ the cruel and bitter epithet of informer? His father and the Party taught that informing was an act of patriotism, but for having done it once he was shunned. He resented the taunts of his boyhood peers, but he never once complained to his father, knowing that this would be an evil thing to do.

Something was very wrong – but what? He decided that he had to find the answers for himself. By choice Marko became individual in his thinking, and so unknowingly committed the gravest sin in the Communist pantheon. Outwardly the model of a Party member’s son, he played the game carefully and according to all the rules. He did his duty for all Party organizations, and was always the first to volunteer for the menial tasks allotted to children aspiring to Party membership, which he knew was the only path to success or even comfort in the Soviet Union. He became good at sports. Not team sports – he worked at track and field events in which he could compete as an individual and measure the performances of others. Over the years he learned to do the same in all of his endeavours, to watch and judge the actions of his fellow citizens and officers with cool detachment, behind a blank face that concealed his conclusions.

In the summer of his eighth year the course of his life was forever changed. When no one would play with ‘the little stukach,’ he would wander down to the fishing docks of the small village where his grandmother had made her home. A ragtag collection of old wooden boats sailed each morning, always behind a screen of patrol boats manned by MGB – as the KGB was then known – border guards, to reap a modest harvest from the Gulf of Finland. Their catch supplemented the local diet with needed protein and provided a minuscule income for the fishermen. One boat captain was old Sasha. An officer in the czar’s navy, he had revolted with the crew of the cruiser Avrora, helping to spark the chain of events that changed the face of the world. Marko did not learn until many years later that the crewmen of the Avrora had broken with Lenin – and been savagely put down by Red Guards. Sasha had spent twenty years in labour camps for his part in that collective indiscretion and only been released at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The Rodina had found herself in need of experienced seamen to pilot ships into the ports of Murmansk and Archangel, to which the Allies were bringing weapons, food, and the sundries that allow a modern army to function. Sasha had learned his lesson in the gulag: he did his duty efficiently and well, asking for nothing in return. After the war, he’d been given a kind of freedom for his services, the right to perform back-breaking work under perpetual suspicion.

By the time Marko met him, Sasha was over sixty, a nearly bald man with ropy old muscles, a seaman’s eye, and a talent for stories that left the youngster wide-eyed. He’d been a midshipman under the famous Admiral Marakov at Port Arthur in 1906. Probably the finest seaman in Russian history, Marakov’s reputation as a patriot and an innovative fighting sailor was sufficiently unblemished that a Communist government would eventually see fit to name a missile cruiser in his memory. At first wary of the boy’s reputation, Sasha saw something in him that others missed. The boy without friends and the sailor without a family became comrades. Sasha spent hours telling and retelling the tale of how he had been on the admiral’s flagship, the Petropavlovsk, and participated in the one Russian victory over the hated Japanese – only to have his battleship sunk and his admiral killed by a mine while returning to port. After this Sasha had led his seamen as naval infantry, winning three decorations for courage under fire. This experience – he waggled his finger seriously at the boy – taught him of the mindless corruption of the czarist regime and convinced him to join one of the first naval soviets when such action meant certain death at the hands of the czar’s secret police, the okhrana. He told his own version of the October Revolution from the thrilling perspective of an eyewitness. But Sasha was very careful to leave the later parts out.

He allowed Marko to sail with him and taught him the fundamentals of seamanship that decided a boy not yet nine that his destiny lay with the sea. There was a freedom at sea he could never have on land. There was a romance about it that touched the man growing within the boy. There were also dangers, but in a summer-long series of simple, effective lessons, Sasha taught the boy that preparation, knowledge, and discipline can deal with any form of danger; that danger confronted properly is not something a man must fear. In later years Marko would reflect often on the value this summer had held for him, and wonder just how far Sasha’s career might have led if other events had not cut it short.

Marko told his father about Sasha towards the end of that long Baltic summer and even took him to meet the old seadog. The elder Ramius was sufficiently impressed with him and what he had done for his son that he arranged for Sasha to have command of a newer, larger boat and moved him up on the list for a new apartment. Marko almost believed that the Party could do a good deed – that he himself had done his first manly good deed. But old Sasha died the following winter, and the good deed came to nothing. Many years later Marko realized that he hadn’t known his friend’s last name. Even after years of faithful service to the Rodina, Sasha had been an unperson.

At thirteen Marko travelled to Leningrad to attend the Nakhimov School. There he decided that he, too, would become a professional naval officer. Marko would follow the quest for adventure that had for centuries called young men to the sea. The Nakhimov School was a special three-year prep school for youngsters aspiring to a career at sea. The Soviet Navy at that time was little more than a coastal defence force, but Marko wanted very much to be a part of it. His father urged him to a life of Party work, promising rapid promotion, a life of comfort and privilege. But Marko wanted to earn whatever he received on his own merits, not to be remembered as an appendage of the ‘liberator’ of Lithuania. And a life at sea offered romance and excitement that even made serving the State something he could tolerate. The navy had little tradition to build on. Marko sensed that in it there was room to grow, and saw that many aspiring naval cadets were like himself, if not mavericks then as close to mavericks as was possible in a society so closely controlled as his own. The teenager thrived with his first experience of fellowship.

Nearing graduation, his class was exposed to the various components of the Russian fleet. Ramius at once fell in love with submarines. The boats at that time were small, dirty, and smelled from the open bilges that the crews used as a convenient latrine. At the same time submarines were the only offensive arm that the navy had, and from the first Marko wanted to be on the cutting edge. He’d had enough lectures on naval history to know that submarines had twice nearly strangled England’s maritime empire and had successfully emasculated the economy of Japan. This had greatly pleased him; he was glad the Americans had crushed the Japanese navy that had so nearly killed his mentor.

He graduated from the Nakhimov School first in his class, winner of the gold-plated sextant for his mastery of theoretical navigation. As leader of his class, Marko was allowed the school of his choice. He selected the Higher Naval School for Underwater Navigation, named for Lenin’s Komsomol, VVMUPP, still the principal submarine school of the Soviet Union.

His five years at VVMUPP were the most demanding of his life, the more so since he was determined not to succeed but to excel. He was first in his class in every subject, in every year. His essay on the political significance of Soviet naval power was forwarded to Sergey Georgiyevich Gorshkov, then commander in chief of the Baltic Fleet and clearly the coming man of the Soviet Navy. Gorshkov had seen the essay published in Morskoi Sbornik (Naval Collections), the leading Soviet naval journal. It was a model of progressive Party thought, quoting Lenin six different times.

By this time Marko’s father was a candidate member of the Presidium, as the Politburo was then called, and very proud of his son. The elder Ramius was no one’s fool. He finally recognized that the Red Fleet was a growing flower and that his son would someday have a position of importance in it. His influence moved his son’s career rapidly along.

By thirty, Marko had his first command and a new wife. Natalia Bogdanova was the daughter of another Presidium member whose diplomatic duties had taken him and his family all over the world. Natalia had never been a healthy girl. They had no children, their three attempts each ending in miscarriage, the last of which had nearly killed her. She was a pretty, delicate woman, sophisticated by Russian standards, who polished her husband’s passable English with American and British books – politically approved ones to be sure, mainly the thoughts of Western leftists, but also a smattering of genuine literature, including Hemingway, Twain, and Upton Sinclair. Along with his naval career, Natalia had been the centre of his life. Their marriage, punctuated by prolonged absences and joyous returns, made their love even more precious than it might have been.

When construction began on the first class of Soviet nuclear-powered submarines, Marko found himself in the yards learning how the steel sharks were designed and built. He was soon known as a very hard man to please as a junior quality control inspector. His own life, he was aware, would ride on the workmanship of these often drunk welders and fitters. He became an expert in nuclear engineering, spent two years as a starpom, and then received his first nuclear command. She was a November-class attack submarine, the first crude attempt by the Soviets to make a battleworthy long-range attack boat to threaten Western navies and lines of communication. Not a month later a sister ship suffered a major reactor casualty off the Norwegian coast, and Marko was first to arrive on the scene. As ordered, he successfully rescued the crew, then sank the disabled sub lest Western navies learn her secrets. Both tasks he performed expertly and well, a noteworthy tour de force for a young commander. Good performance was something he had always felt it was important to reward in his subordinates, and the fleet commander at that time felt the same way. Marko soon moved on to a new Charlie I-class sub.

It was men like Ramius who went out to challenge the Americans and the British. Marko took few illusions with him. The Americans, he knew, had long experience in naval warfare – their own greatest fighter, Jones, had once served the Russian navy for the Czaritza Catherine. Their submariners were legendary for their craftiness, and Ramius found himself pitted against the last of the war-trained Americans, men who had endured the sweaty fear of underwater combat and utterly defeated a modern navy. The deadly serious game of hide-and-seek he played with them was not an easy one, the less so because they had submarines years ahead of Soviet designs. But it was not a time without a few victories.

Ramius gradually learned to play the game by American rules, training his officers and men with care. His crews were rarely as prepared as he wished – still the Soviet Navy’s greatest problem – but where other commanders cursed their men for their failings, Marko corrected the failings of his men. His first Charlie-class submarine was called the Vilnius Academy. This was partially a slur against his half-Lithuanian blood – though since he had been born in Leningrad of a Great Russian, his internal passport designated him as that – but mainly recognition that officers came to him half-trained and left him ready for advancement and eventual command. The same was true of his conscripted crewmen. Ramius did not permit the low-level terrorism normal throughout the Soviet military. He saw his task as the building of seamen, and he produced a greater percentage of reenlistments than any other submarine commander. A full ninth of the michmanyy in the Northern Fleet submarine force were Ramius-trained professionals. His brother submarine commanders were delighted to take aboard his starshini, and more than one advanced to officers’ school.

After eighteen months of hard work and diligent training Marko and his Vilnius Academy were ready to play their game of fox and hounds. He happened upon the USS Triton in the Norwegian Sea and hounded her mercilessly for twelve hours. Later he would note with no small satisfaction that the Triton was soon thereafter retired, because, it was said, the oversized vessel had proven unable to deal with the newer Soviet designs. The diesel-powered submarines of the British and the Norwegians that he occasionally happened across while snorkelling he dogged ruthlessly, often subjecting them to vicious sonar lashing. Once he even acquired an American missile submarine, managing to maintain contact with her for nearly two hours before she vanished like a ghost into the black waters.

The rapid growth of the Soviet Navy and the need for qualified officers during his early career prevented Ramius from attending the Frunze Academy. This was normally a sine qua non of career advancement in all of the Soviet armed services. Frunze, in Moscow near the old Novodevichiy Monastery, was named for a hero of the Revolution. It was the premier school for those who aspired to high command, and though Ramius had not attended it as a student, his prowess as an operational commander won him an appointment as an instructor. It was something earned solely on merit, for which his highly placed father was not responsible. That was important to Ramius.

The head of the naval section at Frunze liked to introduce Marko as ‘our test pilot of submarines.’ His classes became a prime attraction not only for the naval officers in the academy but also for the many others who came to hear his lectures on naval history and maritime strategy. At weekends spent at his father’s official dacha in the village of Zhukova-1, he wrote manuals for submarine operations and the training of crews, and specifications for the ideal attack submarine. Some of his ideas had been controversial enough to upset his erstwhile sponsor, Gorshkov, by this time commander in chief of the entire Soviet Navy – but the old admiral was not entirely displeased.

Ramius proposed that officers in the submarine service should work in a single class of ship – better yet, the same ship – for years, the better to learn their profession and the capabilities of their vessels. Skilled captains, he suggested, should not be forced to leave their commands for deskbound promotions. Here he lauded the Red Army’s practice of leaving a field commander in his post so long as the man wanted it, and deliberately contrasted his view on this matter with the practice of imperialist navies. He stressed the need for extended training in the fleet, for longer-service enlisted men, and for better living conditions on submarines. For some of his ideas he found a sympathetic ear in the high command. For others he did not, and thus Ramius found himself destined never to have his own admiral’s flag. By this time he did not care. He loved his submarines too much ever to leave them for a squadron or even a fleet command.

After finishing at Frunze, he did indeed become a test pilot of submarines. Marko Ramius, now a captain first rank, would take out the first ship of every submarine class to ‘write the book’ on its strengths and weaknesses, to develop operational routines and training guidelines. The first of the Alfas was his, the first of the Deltas and Typhoons. Aside from one extraordinary mishap on an Alfa, his career had been one uninterrupted story of achievement.

Along the way he became the mentor of many young officers. He often wondered what Sasha would have thought as he taught the demanding art of submarine operations to scores of eager young men. Many of them had already become commanding officers themselves; more had failed. Ramius was a commander who took good care of those who pleased him – and took good care of those who did not. Another reason why he had never made admiral was his unwillingness to promote officers whose fathers were as powerful as his own but whose abilities were unsatisfactory. He never played favourites where duty was concerned, and the sons of a half-dozen high Party officials received unsatisfactory fitness reports despite their active performance in weekly Party discussions. Most had become zampoliti. It was this sort of integrity that earned him trust in fleet command. When a really tough job was at hand, Ramius’ name was usually the first to be considered for it.

Also along the way he had gathered to himself a number of young officers whom he and Natalia virtually adopted. They were surrogates for the family Marko and his wife never had. Ramius found himself shepherding men much like himself, with long-suppressed doubts about their country’s leadership. He was an easy man to talk to, once a man had proven himself. To those with political doubts, those with just grievances, he gave the same advice: ‘Join the Party.’ Nearly all were already Komsomol members, of course, and Marko urged them to take the next step. This was the price of a career at sea, and guided by their own craving for adventure most officers paid that price. Ramius himself had been allowed to join the Party at eighteen, the earliest possible age, because of his father’s influence. His occasional talks at weekly Party meetings were perfect recitations of the Party line. It wasn’t hard, he’d tell his officers patiently. All you had to do was repeat what the Party said – just change the words around slightly. This was much easier than navigation – one had only to look at the political officer to see that! Ramius became known as a captain whose officers were both proficient and models of political conformity. He was one of the best Party recruiters in the navy.

Then his wife died. Ramius was in port at the time, not unusual for a missile sub commander. He had his own dacha in the woods west of Polyarnyy, his own Zhiguli automobile, the officer car and driver those with his command station enjoyed, and numerous other creature comforts that came with his rank and his parentage. He was a member of the Party elite, so when Natalia had complained of abdominal pain, going to the Fourth Department clinic which served only the privileged had been a natural mistake – there was a saying in the Soviet Union: Floors parquet, docs okay. He’d last seen his wife alive lying on a trolley, smiling as she was wheeled towards the operating room.

The surgeon on call had arrived at the hospital late, and drunk, and allowed himself too much time breathing pure oxygen to sober up before starting the simple procedure of removing an inflamed appendix. The swollen organ burst just as he was retracting tissue to get at it. A case of peritonitis immediately followed, complicated by the perforated bowel the surgeon caused in his clumsy haste to repair the damage.

Natalia was placed on antibiotic therapy, but there was a shortage of medicine. The foreign – usually French – pharmaceuticals used in Fourth Department clinics had run out. Soviet antibiotics, ‘plan’ medications, were substituted. It was a common practice in Soviet industry for workers to earn bonuses by manufacturing goods over the usual quota, goods that bypassed what quality control existed in Soviet industry. This particular batch of medication had never been inspected or tested. And the vials had probably been filled with distilled water instead of antibiotics, Marko learned the next day. Natalia had lapsed into deep shock and coma, dying before the series of errors could be corrected.

The funeral was appropriately solemn, Ramius remembered bitterly. Brother officers from his own command and over a hundred other navy men whom he had befriended over the years were there, along with members of Natalia’s family and representatives of the local Party Central Committee. Marko had been at sea when his father died, and because he had known the extent of Aleksandr’s crimes, the loss had had little effect. His wife’s death, however, was nothing less than a personal catastrophe. Soon after they had married Natalia had joked that every sailor needs someone to return to, that every woman needs someone to wait for. It had been as simple as that – and infinitely more complex, the marriage of two intelligent people who had over fifteen years learned each other’s foibles and strengths and grown even closer.

Marko Ramius watched the coffin roll into the cremation chamber to the sombre strain of a classical requiem, wishing that he could pray for Natalia’s soul, hoping that Grandmother Hilda had been right, that there was something beyond the steel door and mass of flame. Only then did the full weight of the event strike him: the State had robbed him of more than his wife, it had robbed him of a means to assuage his grief with prayer, it had robbed him of the hope – if only an illusion – of ever seeing her again. Natalia, gentle and kind, had been his only happiness since that Baltic summer long ago. Now that happiness was gone forever. As the weeks and months wore on he was tormented by her memory; a certain hairstyle, a certain walk, a certain laugh encountered on the streets or in the shops of Murmansk was all it took to thrust Natalia back to the forefront of his consciousness, and when he was thinking of his loss, he was not a professional naval officer.

The life of Natalia Bogdanova Ramius had been lost at the hands of a surgeon who had been drinking while on call – a court-martial offence in the Soviet Navy – but Marko could not have the doctor punished. The surgeon was himself the son of a Party chieftain, his status secured by his own sponsors. Her life might have been saved by proper medication, but there had not been enough foreign drugs, and Soviet pharmaceuticals were untrustworthy. The doctor could not be made to pay, the pharmaceutical workers could not be made to pay – the thought echoed back and forth across his mind, feeding his fury until he decided that the State would be made to pay.

The idea had taken weeks to form and was the product of a career of training and contingency planning. When the construction of the Red October was restarted after a two-year hiatus, Ramius knew that he would command her. He had helped with the designing of her revolutionary drive system and had inspected the model, which had been running on the Caspian Sea for some years in absolute secrecy. He asked for relief from his command so that he could concentrate on the construction and outfitting of the October and select and train his officers beforehand, the earlier to get the missile sub into full operation. The request was granted by the commander of the Red Banner Northern Fleet, a sentimental man who had also wept at Natalia’s funeral.

Ramius had already known who his officers would be. All graduates of the Vilnius Academy, many the ‘sons’ of Marko and Natalia, they were men who owed their place and their rank to Ramius; men who cursed the inability of their country to build submarines worthy of their skills; men who had joined the Party as told and then become even more dissatisfied with the Motherland as they learned that the price of advancement was to prostitute one’s mind and soul, to become a highly paid parrot in a blue jacket whose every Party recitation was a grating exercise in self-control. For the most part they were men for whom this degrading step had not borne fruit. In the Soviet Navy there were three routes to advancement. A man could become a zampolit and be a pariah among his peers. Or he could be a navigation officer and advance to his own command. Or he could be shunted into a speciality in which he would gain rank and pay – but never command. Thus a chief engineer on a Soviet naval vessel could outrank his commanding officer and still be his subordinate.

Ramius looked around the table at his officers. Most had not been allowed to pursue their own career goals despite their proficiency and despite their Party membership. The minor infractions of youth – in one case an act committed at age eight – prevented two from ever being trusted again. With the missile officer, it was because he was a Jew; though his parents had always been committed, believing Communists, neither they nor their son were ever trusted. Another officer’s elder brother had demonstrated against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and disgraced his whole family. Melekhin, the chief engineer and Ramius’ equal in rank, had never been allowed the route to command simply because his superiors wanted him to be an engineer. Borodin, who was ready for his own command, had once accused a zampolit of homosexuality; the man he had informed on was the son of the chief zampolit of the Northern Fleet. There are many paths to treason.

‘And what if they locate us?’ Kamarov speculated.

‘I doubt that even the Americans can find us when the caterpillar is operating. I am certain that our own submarines cannot. Comrades, I helped design this ship,’ Ramius said.

‘What will become of us?’ the missile officer muttered.

‘First we must accomplish the task at hand. An officer who looks too far ahead stumbles over his own boots.’

‘They will be looking for us,’ Borodin said.

‘Of course,’ Ramius smiled, ‘but they will not know where to look until it is too late. Our mission, comrades, is to avoid detection. And so we shall.’

THE FOURTH DAY
Monday, 6 December

CIA HEADQUARTERS

Ryan walked down the corridor on the top floor of the Langley, Virginia, headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had already passed through three separate security checks, none of which had required him to open his locked briefcase, now draped under the folds of his buff-coloured toggle coat, a gift from an officer in the Royal Navy.

What he had on was mostly his wife’s fault, an expensive suit bought on Savile Row. It was English cut neither conservative nor on the leading edge of contemporary fashion. He had a number of suits like this arranged neatly in his closet by colours, which he wore with white shirts and striped ties. His only jewellery was a wedding band and a university ring, plus an inexpensive but accurate digital watch on a more expensive gold band. Ryan was not a man who placed a great deal of value in appearances. Indeed, his job was to see through these in the search for hard truth.

He was physically unremarkable, an inch over six feet, and his average build suffered a little at the waist from a lack of exercise enforced by the miserable English weather. His blue eyes had a deceptively vacant look; he was often lost in thought, his face on autopilot as his mind puzzled through data or research material for his current book. The only people Ryan needed to impress were those who knew him; he cared little for the rest. He had no ambition to celebrity. His life, he judged, was already as complicated as it needed to be – quite a bit more complicated than most would guess. It included a wife he loved and two children he doted on, a job that tested his intellect, and sufficient financial independence to choose his own path. The path Jack Ryan had chosen was in the CIA. The agency’s official motto was, The truth shall make you free. The trick, he told himself at least once a day, was finding that truth, and while he doubted that he would ever reach this sublime state of grace, he took quiet pride in his ability to pick at it, one small fragment at a time.

The office of the deputy director for intelligence occupied a whole corner of the top floor, overlooking the tree-covered Potomac Valley. Ryan had one more security check to pass.

‘Good morning, Dr Ryan.’

‘Hi, Nancy.’ Ryan smiled at her. Nancy Cummings had held her secretarial job for twenty years, had served eight DDIs, and if the truth were known she probably had as good a feel for the intelligence business as the political appointees in the adjacent office. It was the same as with any large business – the bosses came and went, but the good executive secretaries lasted forever.

‘How’s the family, Doctor? Looking forward to Christmas?’

‘You bet – except my Sally’s a little worried. She’s not sure Santa knows that we’ve moved, and she’s afraid he won’t make it to England for her. He will,’ Ryan confided.

‘It’s so nice when they’re that little.’ She pressed a hidden button. ‘You can go right in, Dr Ryan.’

‘Thanks, Nancy.’ Ryan twisted the electronically protected knob and walked into the DDI’s office.

Vice Admiral James Greer was reclining in his high-backed judge’s chair reading through a folder. His oversized mahogany desk was covered with neat piles of folders whose edges were bordered with red tape and whose covers bore various code words.

‘Hiya, Jack!’ he called across the room. ‘Coffee?’

‘Yes, thank you, sir.’

James Greer was sixty-six, a naval officer past retirement age who kept working through brute competence, much as Hyman Rickover had, though Greer was a far easier man to work for. He was a ‘mustang,’ a man who had entered the naval service as an enlisted man, earned his way into the Naval Academy, and spent forty years working his way to a three-star flag, first commanding submarines, then as a full-time intelligence specialist. Greer was a demanding boss, but one who took care of those who pleased him. Ryan was one of these.

Somewhat to Nancy’s chagrin, Greer liked to make his own coffee with a West Bend drip machine on the shelf behind his desk, where he could just turn around to reach it. Ryan poured himself a cup – actually a navy-style handleless mug. It was traditional navy coffee, brewed strong, with a pinch of salt.

‘You hungry, Jack?’ Greer pulled a pastry box from a desk drawer. ‘I got some sticky buns here.’

‘Why thanks, sir. I didn’t eat much on the plane.’ Ryan took one, along with a paper napkin.

‘Still don’t like to fly?’ Greer was amused.

Ryan sat down in the chair opposite his boss. ‘I suppose I ought to be getting used to it. I like the Concorde better than the wide-bodies. You only have to be terrified half as long.’

‘How’s the family?’

‘Fine, thank you, sir. Sally’s in first grade – loves it. And little Jack is toddling around the house. These buns are pretty good.’

‘New bakery just opened up a few blocks from my place. I pass it on the way in every morning.’ The admiral sat upright in his chair. ‘So, what brings you over today?’

‘Photographs of the new Soviet missile boat, Red October,’ Ryan said casually between sips.

‘Oh, and what do our British cousins want in return?’ Greer asked suspiciously.

‘They want a peek at Barry Somers’ new enhancement gadgets. Not the machines themselves – at first – just the finished product. I think it’s a fair bargain, sir.’ Ryan knew the CIA didn’t have any shots of the new sub. The operations directorate did not have a man at the building yard at Severodvinsk or a reliable man at the Polyarnyy submarine base. Worse, the rows of ‘boat barns’ built to shelter the missile submarines, modelled on World War II German submarine pens, made satellite photography impossible. ‘We have ten frames, low obliques, five each bow and stern, and one from each perspective is undeveloped so that Somers can work on them fresh. We are not committed, sir, but I told Sir Basil that you’d think it over.’

The admiral grunted. Sir Basil Charleston, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, was a master of the quid pro quo, occasionally offering to share sources with his wealthier cousins and a month later asking for something in return. The intelligence game was often like a primitive marketplace. ‘To use the new system, Jack, we need the camera used to take the shots.’

‘I know.’ Ryan pulled the camera from his coat pocket.

‘It’s a modified Kodak disc camera. Sir Basil says it’s the coming thing in spy cameras, nice and flat. This one, he says, was hidden in a tobacco pouch.’

‘How did you know that – that we need the camera?’

‘You mean how Somers uses lasers to –’

‘Ryan!’ Greer snapped. ‘How much do you know?’

‘Relax, sir. Remember back in February, I was over to discuss those new SS-20 sites on the Chinese border? Somers was here, and you asked me to drive him out to the airport. On the way out he started babbling about this great new idea he was heading west to work on. He talked about it all the way to Dulles. From what little I understood, I gather that he shoots laser beams through the camera lenses to make a mathematical model of the lens. From that, I suppose, he can take the exposed negative, break down the image into the – original incoming light beams, I guess, then use a computer to run that through a computer-generated theoretical lens to make a perfect picture. I probably have it wrong.’ Ryan could tell from Greer’s face that he didn’t.

‘Somers talks too goddamned much.’

‘I told him that, sir. But once the guy gets started, how the hell do you shut him up?’

‘And what do the Brits know?’ Greer asked.

‘Your guess is as good as mine, sir. Sir Basil asked me about it, and I told him that he was asking the wrong guy – I mean, my degrees are in economics and history, not physics. I told him we needed the camera – but he already knew that. Took it right out of his desk and tossed it to me. I did not reveal a thing about this, sir.’

‘I wonder how many other people he spilled to. Geniuses! They operate in their own crazy little worlds. Somers is like a little kid sometimes. And you know the First Rule of Security: The likelihood of a secret’s being blown is proportional to the square of the number of people who’re in on it.’ It was Greer’s favourite dictum.

His phone buzzed. ‘Greer … Right.’ He hung up. ‘Charlie Davenport’s on the way up, per your suggestion, Jack. Supposed to be here half an hour ago. Must be the snow.’ The admiral jerked a hand towards the window. There were two inches on the ground, with another inch expected by nightfall. ‘One flake hits this town and everything goes to hell.’

Ryan laughed. That was something Greer, a down-easter from Maine, never could seem to understand.

‘So, Jack, you say this is worth the price?’

‘Sir, we’ve wanted these pictures for some time, what with all the contradictory data we’ve been getting on the sub. It’s your decision and the judge’s but, yes, I think they’re worth the price. These shots are very interesting.’

‘We ought to have our own men in that damned yard,’ Greer grumped. Ryan didn’t know how Operations had screwed that one up. He had little interest in field operations. Ryan was an analyst. How the data came to his desk was not his concern, and he was careful to avoid finding out. ‘I don’t suppose Basil told you anything about their man?’

Ryan smiled, shaking his head. ‘No, sir, and I did not ask.’ Greer nodded his approval.

‘Morning, James!’

Ryan turned to see Rear Admiral Charles Davenport, director of naval intelligence, with a captain trailing in his wake.

‘Hi, Charlie. You know Jack Ryan, don’t you?’

‘Hello, Ryan.’

‘We’ve met,’ Ryan said.

‘This is Captain Casimir.’

Ryan shook hands with both men. He’d met Davenport a few years before while delivering a paper at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Davenport had given him a hard time in the question-and-answer session. He was supposed to be a bastard to work for, a former aviator who had lost flight status after a barrier crash and, some said, still bore a grudge. Against whom? Nobody really knew.

‘Weather in England must be as bad as here, Ryan.’ Davenport dropped his bridge coat on top of Ryan’s. ‘I see you stole a Royal Navy overcoat.’

Ryan was fond of his toggle coat. ‘A gift, sir, and quite warm.’

‘Christ, you even talk like a Brit. James, we gotta bring this boy home.’

‘Be nice to him, Charlie. He’s got a present for you. Grab yourself some coffee.’

Casimir scurried over to fill a mug for his boss, then sat down at his right hand. Ryan let them wait a moment before opening his briefcase. He took out four folders, keeping one and handing the others around.

‘They say you’ve been doing some fairly good work, Ryan,’ Davenport said. Jack knew him to be a mercurial man, affable one moment, brittle the next. Probably to keep his subordinates off balance. ‘And – Jesus Christ!’ Davenport had opened his folder.

‘Gentlemen, I give you Red October, courtesy of the British Secret Intelligence Service,’ Ryan said formally.

The folders had the photographs arranged in pairs, four each of four-by-four prints. In the back were ten-by-ten blowups of each. The photos had been taken from a low-oblique angle, probably from the rim of the graving dock that had held the boat during her post-shakedown refit. The shots were paired, fore and aft, fore and aft.

‘Gentlemen, as you can see, the lighting wasn’t all that great. Nothing fancy here. It was a pocket camera loaded with 400-speed colour film. The first pair was processed normally to establish light levels. The second was pushed for greater brightness using normal procedures. The third pair was digitally enhanced for colour resolution, and the fourth was digitally enhanced for line resolution. I have undeveloped frames of each view for Barry Somers to play with.’

‘Oh?’ Davenport looked up briefly. ‘That’s right neighbourly of the Brits. What’s the price?’ Greer told him. ‘Pay up. It’s worth it.’

‘That’s what Jack says.’

‘Figures,’ Davenport chuckled. ‘You know he really is working for them.’

Ryan bristled at that. He liked the English, liked working with their intelligence community, but he knew what country he came from. Jack took a deep breath. Davenport liked to goad people, and if he reacted Davenport would win.

‘I gather that Sir John Ryan is still well connected on the other side of the ocean?’ Davenport said, extending the prod.

Ryan’s knighthood was an honorary one. It was his reward for having broken up a terrorist incident that had erupted around him in St James’s Park, London. He’d been a tourist at the time, the innocent American abroad, long before he’d been asked to join the CIA. The fact that he had unknowingly prevented the assassination of two very prominent figures had gotten him more publicity than he’d ever wanted, but it had also brought him in contact with a lot of people in England, most of them worth the time. Those connections had made him valuable enough that the CIA asked him to be part of a joint American–British liaison group. That was how he had established a good working relationship with Sir Basil Charleston.

‘We have lots of friends over there, sir, and some of them were kind enough to give you these,’ Ryan said coolly.

Davenport softened. ‘Okay, Jack, then you do me a favour. You see whoever gave us these gets something nice in his stocking. They’re worth plenty. So, exactly what do we have here?’

To the unschooled observer, the photographs showed the standard nuclear missile submarine. The steel hull was blunt at one end, tapered at the other. The workmen standing on the floor of the dock provided scale – she was huge. There were twin bronze propellers at the stern, on either side of a flat appendage which the Russians called a beaver tail, or so the intelligence reports said. With the twin screws the stem was unremarkable except in one detail.

‘What are these doors for?’ Casimir asked.

‘Hmm. She’s a big bastard.’ Davenport evidently hadn’t heard. ‘Forty feet longer than we expected, by the look of her.’

‘Forty-four, roughly.’ Ryan didn’t much like Davenport, but the man did know his stuff. ‘Somers can calibrate that for us. And more beam, two metres more than the other Typhoons. She’s an obvious development of the Typhoon class, but –’

‘You’re right, Captain,’ Davenport interrupted. ‘What are those doors?’

‘That’s why I came over.’ Ryan had wondered how long this would take. He’d caught onto them in the first five seconds. ‘I don’t know, and neither do the Brits.’

The Red October had two doors at the bow and stern, each about two metres in diameter, thought they were not quite circular. They had been closed when the photos were shot and only showed up well on the number four pair.

‘Torpedo tubes? No – four of them are inboard.’ Greer reached into his drawer and came out with a magnifying glass. In an age of computer-enhanced imagery it struck Ryan as charmingly anachronistic.

‘You’re the sub driver, James,’ Davenport observed.

‘Twenty years ago, Charlie.’ He’d made the switch from line officer to professional spook in the early sixties. Captain Casimir, Ryan noted, wore the wings of a naval aviator and had the good sense to remain quiet. He wasn’t a ‘nuc.’

‘Well, they can’t be torpedo tubes. They have the normal four of them at the bow, inboard of these openings … must be six or seven feet across. How about launch tubes for the new cruise missile they’re developing?’

‘That’s what the Royal Navy thinks. I had a chance to talk it over with their intelligence chaps. But I don’t buy it. Why put an anti-surface-ship weapon on a strategic platform? We don’t, and we deploy our boomers a lot further forward than they do. The doors are symmetrical through the boat’s axis. You can’t launch a missile out of the stern, sir. The openings barely clear the screws.’

‘Towed sonar array,’ Davenport said.

‘Granted they could do that, if they trail one screw. But why two of them?’ Ryan asked.

Davenport gave him a nasty look. ‘They love redundancies.’

‘Two doors forward, two aft. I can buy cruise missile tubes. I can buy a towed array. But both sets of doors exactly the same size?’ Ryan shook his head. ‘Too much of a coincidence. I think it’s something new. That’s what interrupted her construction for so long. They figured something new for her and spent the last two years rebuilding the Typhoon configuration to accommodate it. Note also that they added six more missiles for good measure.’

‘Opinion,’ Davenport observed.

‘That’s what I’m paid for.’

‘Okay, Jack, what do you think it is?’ Greer asked.

‘Beats me, sir. I’m no engineer.’

Admiral Greer looked his guests over for a few seconds. He smiled and leaned back in his chair. ‘Gentlemen, we have what? Ninety years of naval experience in this room, plus this young amateur.’ He gestured at Ryan. ‘Okay, Jack, you’ve set us up for something. Why did you bring this over personally?’

‘I want to show these to somebody.’

‘Who?’ Greer’s head cocked suspiciously to one side.

‘Skip Tyler. Any of you fellows know him?’

‘I do.’ Casimir nodded. ‘He was a year behind me at Annapolis. Didn’t he get hurt or something?’

‘Yeah,’ Ryan said. ‘Lost his leg in an auto accident four years ago. He was up for command of the Los Angeles and a drunk driver clipped him. Now he teaches engineering at the Academy and does a lot of consulting work with Sea Systems Command – technical analysis, looking at their ship designs. He has a doctorate in engineering from MIT, and he knows how to think unconventionally.’

‘How about his security clearance?’ Greer asked.

‘Top secret or better, sir, because of his Crystal City work.’

‘Objections, Charlie?’

Davenport frowned. Tyler was not part of the intelligence community. ‘Is this the guy who did the evaluation of the new Kirov?’

‘Yes, sir, now that I think about it,’ Casimir said. ‘Him and Saunders over at Sea Systems.’

‘That was a nice piece of work. It’s okay with me.’

‘When do you want to see him?’ Greer asked Ryan.

‘Today, if it’s all right with you, sir. I have to run over to Annapolis anyway, to get something from the house, and – well, do some quick Christmas shopping.’

‘Oh? A few dolls?’ Davenport asked.

Ryan turned to look the admiral in the eye. ‘Yes, sir, as a matter of fact. My little girl wants a Skiing Barbie doll and some Jordache doll outfits. Didn’t you ever play Santa, Admiral?’

Davenport saw that Ryan wasn’t going to back off anymore. He wasn’t a subordinate to be browbeaten. Ryan could always walk away. He tried a new tack. ‘Did they tell you over there that October sailed last Friday?’

‘Oh?’ They hadn’t. Ryan was caught off guard. ‘I thought she wasn’t scheduled to sail until this Friday.’

‘So did we. Her skipper is Marko Ramius. You heard about him?’

‘Only secondhand stuff. The Brits say he’s pretty good.’

‘Better than that,’ Greer noted. ‘He’s about the best sub driver they have, a real charger. We had a considerable file on him when I was at DIA. Who’s bird-doggin’ him for you, Charlie?’

‘Bremerton was assigned to it. She was out of position doing some ELINT work when Ramius sailed, but she was ordered over. Her skipper’s Bud Wilson. Remember his dad?’

Greer laughed out loud. ‘Red Wilson? Now there was one spirited submarine driver! His boy any good?’

‘So they say. Ramius is about the best the Soviets have, but Wilson’s got a 688 boat. By the end of the week, we’ll be able to start a new book on Red October.’ Davenport stood. ‘We gotta head back, James.’ Casimir hurried to get the coats. ‘I can keep these?’

‘I suppose, Charlie. Just don’t go hanging them on the wall, even to throw darts at. And I guess you want to get moving, too, Jack?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Greer lifted his phone. ‘Nancy, Dr Ryan will need a car and a driver in fifteen minutes. Right.’ He set the receiver down and waited for Davenport to leave. ‘No sense getting you killed out there in the snow. Besides, you’d probably drive on the wrong side of the road after a year in England. Skiing Barbie, Jack?’

‘You had all boys, didn’t you, sir? Girls are different.’ Ryan grinned. ‘You’ve never met my little Sally.’

‘Daddy’s girl?’

‘Yep. God help whoever marries her. Can I leave these photographs with Tyler?’

‘I hope you’re right about him, son. Yes, he can hold onto them – if and only if he has a good place to keep them.’

‘Understood, sir.’

‘When you get back – probably be late, the way the roads are. You’re staying at the Marriott?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Greer thought that over. ‘I’ll probably be working late. Stop by here before you bed down. I may want to go over a few things with you.’

‘Will do, sir. Thanks for the car.’ Ryan stood.

‘Go buy your dolls, son.’

Greer watched him leave. He liked Ryan. The boy was not afraid to speak his mind. Part of that came from having money and being married to more money. It was a sort of independence that had advantages. Ryan could not be bought, bribed, or bullied. He could always go back to writing history books full time. Ryan had made money on his own in four years as a stockbroker, betting his own money on high-risk issues and scoring big before leaving it all behind – because, he said, he hadn’t wanted to press his luck. Greer didn’t believe that. He thought Jack had been bored – bored with making money. He shook his head. The talent that had enabled him to pick winning stocks Ryan now applied to the CIA. He was rapidly becoming one of Greer’s star analysts, and his British connections made him doubly valuable. Ryan had the ability to sort through a pile of data and come out with the three or four facts that meant something. This was too rare a thing at the CIA. The agency still spent too much of its money collecting data, Greer thought, and not enough collating it. Analysts had none of the supposed glamour – a Hollywood-generated illusion – of a secret agent in a foreign land. But Jack knew how to analyse reports from such men and data from technical sources. He knew how to make a decision and was not afraid to say what he thought, whether his bosses liked it or not.

This sometimes grated the old admiral, but on the whole he liked having subordinates whom he could respect. The CIA had too many people whose only skill was kissing ass.

THE US NAVAL ACADEMY

The loss of his left leg above the knee had not taken away Oliver Wendell Tyler’s roguish good looks or his zest for life. His wife could testify to this. Since leaving the active service four years before, they had added three children to the two they already had and were working on a sixth. Ryan found him sitting at a desk in an empty classroom in Rickover Hall, the US Naval Academy’s science and engineering building. He was grading papers.

‘How’s it goin’, Skip?’ Ryan leaned against the door frame. His CIA driver was in the hall.

‘Hey, Jack! I thought you were in England.’ Tyler jumped to his foot – his own phrase – and hobbled over to grab Ryan’s hand. His prosthetic leg ended in a square, rubber-coated band instead of a pseudo-foot. It flexed at the knee, but not by much. Tyler had been a second-squad All American offensive tackle sixteen years before, and the rest of his body was as hard as the aluminium and fibreglass in his left leg. His handshake could make a gorilla wince. ‘So, what are you doing here?’

‘I had to fly over to get some work done and do a little shopping. How’s Jean and your … five?’

‘Five and two-thirds.’

‘Again? Jean ought to have you fixed.’

‘That’s what she said, but I’ve had enough things disconnected.’ Tyler laughed. ‘I guess I’m making up for all those monastic years as a nuc. Come on over and grab a chair.’

Ryan sat on the corner of the desk and opened his briefcase. He handed Tyler a folder.

‘Got some pictures I want you to look at.’

‘Okay.’ Tyler flipped it open. ‘Whose – a Russian! Big bastard. That’s the basic Typhoon configuration. Lots of modifications, though. Twenty-six missiles instead of twenty. Looks longer. Hull’s flattened out some, too. More beam?’

‘Two or three metres’ worth.’

‘I heard you were working with the CIA. Can’t talk about that, right?’

‘Something like that. And you never saw these pictures, Skip. Understood?’

‘Right.’ Tyler’s eyes twinkled. ‘What do you want me not to look at them for?’

Ryan pulled the blowups from the back of the folder. ‘These doors, bow and stern.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Tyler set them down side by side. ‘Pretty big. They’re two metres or so, paired fore and aft. They look symmetrical through the long axis. Not cruise missile tubes, eh?’

‘On a boomer? You put something like that on a strategic missile sub?’

‘The Russkies are a funny bunch, Jack, and they design things their own way. This is the same bunch that built the Kirov class with a nuclear reactor and an oil-fired steam plant. Hmm … twin screws. The aft doors can’t be for a sonar array. They’d foul the screws.’

‘How ’bout if they trail one screw?’

‘They do that with surface ships to conserve fuel, and sometimes with their attack boats. Operating a twin-screw missile boat on one wheel would probably be tricky on this baby. The Typhoon’s supposed to have handling problems, and boats that handle funny tend to be sensitive to power settings. You end up jinking around so much that you have trouble holding course. You notice how the doors converge at the stern?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

Tyler looked up. ‘Damn! I should have realized it right off the bat. It’s a propulsion system. You shouldn’t have caught me marking papers, Jack. It turns your brain to jelly.’

‘Propulsion system?’

‘We looked at this – oh, must have been twenty some years ago – when I was going to school here. We didn’t do anything with it, though. It’s too inefficient.’

‘Okay, tell me about it.’

‘They called it a tunnel drive. You know how out West they have lots of hydroelectric power plants? Mostly dams. The water spills onto wheels that turn generators. Now there’s a few new ones that kind of turn that around. They tap into underground rivers, and the water turns impellers, and they turn the generators instead of a modified mill wheel. An impeller is like a propeller, except the water drives it instead of the other way around. There’s some minor technical differences, too, but nothing major. Okay so far?

‘With this design, you turn that around. You suck water in the bow and your impellers eject it out the stern, and that moves the ship.’ Tyler paused, frowning. ‘As I recall you have to have more than one per tunnel. They looked at this back in the early sixties and got to the model stage before dropping it. One of the things they discovered is that one impeller doesn’t work as well as several. Some sort of back pressure thing. It was a new principle, something unexpected that cropped up. They ended up using four, I think, and it was supposed to look something like the compressor sets in a jet engine.’

‘Why did we drop it?’ Ryan was taking rapid notes.

‘Mostly efficiency. You can only get so much water down the pipes no matter how powerful your motors are. And the drive system took up a lot of room. They partially beat that with a new kind of electric induction motor, I think, but even then you’d end up with a lot of extraneous machinery inside the hull. Subs don’t have that much room to spare, even this monster. The top speed limit was supposed to be about ten knots, and that just wasn’t good enough, even though it did virtually eliminate cavitation sounds.’

‘Cavitation?’

‘When you have a propeller turning in the water at high speed, you develop an area of low pressure behind the trailing edge of the blade. This can cause water to vaporize. That creates a bunch of little bubbles. They can’t last long under the water pressure, and when they collapse the water rushes forward to pound against the blades. That does three things. First, it makes noise, and us sub drivers hate noise. Second, it can cause vibration, something else we don’t like. The old passenger liners, for example, used to flutter several inches at the stern, all from cavitation and slippage. It takes a hell of a lot of force to vibrate a 50,000-ton ship; that kind of force breaks things. Third, it tears up the screws. The big wheels only used to last a few years. That’s why back in the old days the blades were bolted onto the hub instead of being cast in one piece. The vibration is mainly a surface ship problem, and the screw degradation was eventually conquered by improved metallurgical technology.

‘Now, this tunnel drive system avoids the cavitation problem. You still have cavitation, but the noise from it is mainly lost in the tunnels. That makes good sense. The problem is that you can’t generate much speed without making the tunnels too wide to be practical. While one team was working on this, another was working on improved screw designs. Your typical sub screw today is pretty large, so it can turn more slowly for a given speed. The slower the turning speed, the less cavitation you get. The problem is also mitigated by depth. A few hundred feet down, the higher water pressure retards bubble formation.’

‘Then why don’t the Soviets copy our screw designs?’

‘Several reasons, probably. You design a screw for a specific hull and engine combination, so copying ours wouldn’t automatically work for them. A lot of this work is still empirical, too. There’s a lot of trial and error in this. It’s a lot harder, say, than designing an airfoil, because the blade cross-section changes radically from one point to another. I suppose another reason is that their metallurgical technology isn’t as good as ours – same reason that their jet and rocket engines are less efficient. These new designs place great value on high-strength alloys. It’s a narrow specialty, and I only know the generalities.’

‘Okay, you say that this is a silent propulsion system, and it has a top speed limit of ten knots?’ Ryan wanted to be clear on this.

‘Ballpark figure. I’d have to do some computer modelling to tighten that up. We probably still have the data laying around at the Taylor Laboratory.’ Tyler referred to the Sea Systems Command design facility on the north side of the Severn River. ‘Probably still classified, and I’d have to take it with a big grain of salt.’

‘How come?’

‘All this work was done twenty years ago. They only got up to fifteen-foot models – pretty small for this sort of thing. Remember that they had already stumbled across one new principle, that back-pressure thing. There might have been more out there. I expect they tried some computer models, but even if they did, mathematical modelling techniques back then were dirt-simple. To duplicate this today I’d have to have the old data and programs from Taylor, check it all over, then draft a new program based on this configuration.’ He tapped the photographs. ‘Once that was done, I’d need access to a big league mainframe computer to run it.’

‘But you could do it?’

‘Sure. I’d need exact dimensions on this baby, but I’ve done this before for the bunch over at Crystal City. The hard part’s getting the computer time. I need a big machine.’

‘I can probably arrange access to ours.’

Tyler laughed. ‘Probably not good enough, Jack. This is specialized stuff. I’m talking about a Cray-2, one of the biggies. To do this you have to mathematically simulate the behaviour of millions of little parcels of water, the water flow over – and through, in this case – the whole hull. Same sort of thing NASA has to do with the Space Shuttle. The actual work is easy enough – it’s the scale that’s tough. They’re simple calculations, but you have to make millions of them per second. That means a big Cray, and there’s only a few of them around. NASA has one in Houston, I think. The navy has a few in Norfolk for ASW work – you can forget about those. The air force has one in the Pentagon, I think, and all the rest are in California.’

‘But you could do it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Okay, get to work on it, Skip, and I’ll see if we can get you the computer time. How long?’

‘Depending on how good the stuff at Taylor is, maybe a week. Maybe less.’

‘How much do you want for it?’

‘Aw, come on, Jack!’ Tyler waved him off.

‘Skip, it’s Monday. You get us this data by Friday and there’s twenty thousand dollars in it. You’re worth it, and we want this data. Agreed?’

‘Sold.’ They shook hands. ‘Can I keep the pictures?’

‘I can leave them if you have a secure place to keep them. Nobody gets to see them, Skip. Nobody.’

‘There’s a nice safe in the superintendent’s office.’

‘Fine, but he doesn’t see them.’ The superintendent was a former submariner.

‘He won’t like it,’ Tyler said. ‘But okay.’

‘Have him call Admiral Greer if he objects. This number.’ Ryan handed him a card. ‘You can reach me here if you need me. If I’m not in, ask for the admiral.’

‘Just how important is this?’

‘Important enough. You’re the first guy who’s come up with a sensible explanation for these hatches. That’s why I came here. If you can model this for us, it’ll be damned useful. Skip, one more time: This is highly sensitive. If you let anybody see these, it’s my ass.’

‘Aye aye, Jack. Well, you’ve laid a deadline on me, I better get down to it. See you.’ After shaking hands, Tyler took out a lined pad and started listing the things he had to do. Ryan left the building with his driver. He remembered a Toys-R-Us right up Route 2 from Annapolis, and he wanted to get that doll for Sally.

CIA HEADQUARTERS

Ryan was back at the CIA by eight that evening. It was a quick trip past the security guards to Greer’s office.

‘Well, did you get your Surfing Barbie?’ Greer looked up.

‘Skiing Barbie,’ Ryan corrected. ‘Yes, sir. Come on, didn’t you ever play Santa?’

‘They grew up too fast, Jack. Even my grandchildren are all past that stage.’ He turned to get some coffee. Ryan wondered if he ever slept. ‘We have something more on Red October. The Russians seem to have a major ASW exercise running in the northeast Barents Sea. Half a dozen ASW search aircraft, a bunch of frigates, and an Alfa-class attack boat, all running around in circles.’

‘Probably an acquisition exercise. Skip Tyler says those doors are for a new drive system.’

‘Indeed.’ Greer sat back. ‘Tell me about it.’

Ryan took out his notes and summarized his education in submarine technology. ‘Skip says he can generate a computer simulation of its effectiveness,’ he concluded.

Greer’s eyebrows went up. ‘How soon?’

‘End of the week, maybe. I told him if he had it done by Friday we’d pay him for it. Twenty thousand sound reasonable?’

‘Will it mean anything?’

‘If he gets the background data he needs, it ought to, sir. Skip’s a very sharp cookie. I mean, they don’t give doctorates away at MIT, and he was in the top five of his Academy class.’

‘Worth twenty thousand dollars of our money?’ Greer was notoriously tight with a buck.

Ryan knew how to answer this. ‘Sir, if we followed normal procedure on this, we’d contract one of the Beltway Bandits –’ Ryan referred to the consulting firms that dotted the beltway around Washington, DC ‘– they’d charge us five or ten times as much, and we’d be lucky to have the data by Easter. This way we might just have it while the boat’s still at sea. If worst comes to worst, sir, I’ll foot the bill. I figured you’d want this data fast, and it’s right up his alley.’

‘You’re right.’ It wasn’t the first time Ryan had short-circuited normal procedure. The other times had worked out fairly well. Greer was a man who looked for results. ‘Okay, the Soviets have a new missile boat with a silent drive system. What does it all mean?’

‘Nothing good. We depend on our ability to track their boomers with our attack boats. Hell, that’s why they agreed a few years back to our proposal about keeping them five thousand miles from each other’s coasts, and why they keep their missile subs in port most of the time. This could change the game a bit. By the way, October’s hull, I haven’t seen what it’s made of.’

‘Steel. She’s too big for a titanium hull, at least for what it would cost. You know what they have to spend on their Alfas?’

‘Too much for what they got. You spend that much money for a superstrong hull, then put a noisy power plant in it. Dumb.’

‘Maybe. I wouldn’t mind having that speed, though. Anyway, if this silent drive system really works, they might be able to creep up onto the continental shelf.’

‘Depressed-trajectory shot,’ Ryan said. This was one of the nastier nuclear war scenarios in which a sea-based missile was fired from within a few hundred miles of its target. Washington is a bare hundred air miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Though a missile on a low, fast flight path loses much of its accuracy, a few of them can be launched to explode over Washington in less than five minutes’ time, too little for a president to react. If the Soviets were able to kill the president that quickly, the resulting disruption of the chain of command would give them ample time to take out the land-based missiles – there would be no one with authority to fire. This scenario is a grand-strategic version of a simple mugging, Ryan thought. A mugger doesn’t attack his victim’s arms – he goes for the head. ‘You think October was built with that in mind?’

‘I’m sure the thought occurred to them,’ Greer observed. ‘It would have occurred to us. Well, we have Bremerton up there to keep an eye on her, and if this data turns out to be useful we’ll see if we can come up with an answer. How are you feeling?’

‘I’ve been on the go since five thirty London time. Long day, sir.’

‘I expect so. Okay, we’ll go over the Afghanistan business tomorrow morning. Get some sleep, son.’

‘Aye aye, sir.’ Ryan got his coat. ‘Good night.’

It was a fifteen-minute drive to the Marriott. Ryan made the mistake of turning the TV on to the beginning of Monday Night Football. Cincinnati was playing San Francisco, the two best quarterbacks in the league pitted against one another. Football was something he missed, living in England, and he managed to stay awake nearly three hours before fading out with the television on.

SOSUS CONTROL

Except for the fact that everyone was in uniform, a visitor might easily have mistaken the room for a NASA control centre. There were six wide rows of consoles, each with its own TV screen and typewriter keyboard supplemented by lighted plastic buttons, dials, headphone jacks, and analogue and digital controls. Senior Chief Oceanographic Technician Deke Franklin was seated at console fifteen.

The room was SOSUS (sonar surveillance system) Atlantic Control. It was in a fairly nondescript building, uninspired government layer cake, with windowless concrete walls, a large air-conditioning system on a flat roof, and an acronym-coded blue sign on a well-tended but now yellowed lawn. There were armed marines inconspicuously on guard inside the three entrances. In the basement were a pair of Cray-2 supercomputers tended by twenty acolytes, and behind the building was a trio of satellite ground stations, all up- and down-links. The men at the consoles and the computers were linked electronically by satellite and landline to the SOSUS system.

Throughout the oceans of the world, and especially astride the passages that Soviet submarines had to cross to reach the open sea, the United States and other NATO countries had deployed gangs of highly sensitive sonar receptors. The hundreds of SOSUS sensors received and forwarded an unimaginably vast amount of information, and to help the system operators classify and analyse it a whole new family of computers had to be designed, the supercomputers. SOSUS served its purpose admirably well. Very little could cross a barrier without being detected. Even the ultraquiet American and British attack submarines were generally picked up. The sensors, lying on the bottom of the sea, were periodically updated; many now had their own signal processors to presort the data they forwarded, lightening the load on the central computers and enabling more rapid and accurate classification of targets.

Chief Franklin’s console received data from a string of sensors planted off the coast of Iceland. He was responsible for an area forty nautical miles across, and his sector overlapped the ones east and west so that, theoretically, three operators were constantly monitoring any segment of the barrier. If he got a contact, he would first notify his brother operators, then type a contact report into his computer terminal, which would in turn be displayed on the master control board in the control room at the back of the floor. The senior duty officer had the frequently exercised authority to prosecute a contact with a wide range of assets, from surface ships to antisubmarine aircraft. Two world wars had taught American and British officers the necessity of keeping their sea lines of communication – SLOCs – open.

Although this quiet, tomblike facility had never been shown to the public, and though it had none of the drama associated with military life, the men on duty here were among the most important in the service of their country. In a war, without them, whole nations might starve.

Franklin was leaning back in his swivel chair, puffing contemplatively on an old briar pipe. Around him the room was dead quiet. Even had it not been, his five-hundred-dollar headphones would have effectively sealed him off from the outside world. A twenty-six-year chief, Franklin had served his entire career on destroyers and frigates. To him, submarines and submariners were the enemy, regardless of what flag they might fly or what uniform they might wear.

An eyebrow went up, and his nearly bald head cocked to one side. The pulls on the pipe grew irregular. His right hand reached forward to the control panel and switched off the signal processors so that he could get the sound without computerized interference. But it was no good. There was too much background noise. He switched the filters back on. Next he tried some changes in his azimuth controls. The SOSUS sensors were designed to give bearing checks through the selective use of individual receptors, which he could manipulate electronically, first getting one bearing, then using a neighbouring gang to triangulate for a fix. The contact was very faint, but not too far from the line, he judged. Franklin queried his computer terminal. The USS Dallas was up there. Gotcha! he said with a thin smile. Another noise came through, a low-frequency rumble that only lasted a few seconds before fading out. Not all that quiet, though. Why hadn’t he heard it before switching the reception azimuth? He set his pipe down and began making adjustments on his control board.

‘Chief?’ A voice came over his headphones. It was the senior duty officer.

‘Yes, Commander?’

‘Can you come back to control? I have something I want you to hear.’

‘On the way, sir.’ Franklin rose quietly. Commander Quentin was a former destroyer skipper on a limited duty after a winning battle with cancer. Almost a winning battle, Franklin corrected himself. Chemotherapy had killed the cancer – at the cost of nearly all his hair, and turning his skin into a sort of transparent parchment. Too bad, he thought, Quentin was a pretty good man.

The control room was elevated a few feet from the rest of the floor so that its occupants could see over the whole crew of duty operators and the main tactical display on the far wall. It was separated from the floor by glass, which allowed them to speak to one another without disturbing the operators. Franklin found Quentin at his command station, where he could tap into any console on the floor.

‘Howdy, Commander.’ Franklin noted that the officer was gaining some weight back. It was about time. ‘What do you have for me, sir?’

‘On the Barents Sea net.’ Quentin handed him a pair of phones. Franklin listened for several minutes, but he didn’t sit down. Like many people he had a gut suspicion that cancer was contagious.

‘Damned if they ain’t pretty busy up there. I read of a pair of Alfas, a Charlie, a Tango, and a few surface ships. What gives, sir?’

‘There’s a Delta there, too, but she just surfaced and killed her engines.’

‘Surfaced, Skipper?’

‘Yep. They were lashing her pretty hard with active sonar, then a ’can queried her on a gertrude.’

‘Uh-huh. Acquisition game, and the sub lost.’

‘Maybe.’ Quentin rubbed his eyes. The man looked tired. He was pushing himself too hard, and his stamina wasn’t half what it should have been. ‘But the Alfas are still pinging, and now they’re headed west, as you heard.’

‘Oh.’ Franklin pondered that for a moment. ‘They’re looking for another boat, then. The Typhoon that was supposed to have sailed the other day, maybe?’

‘That’s what I thought – except she headed west, and the exercise area is northeast of the fjord. We lost her the other day on SOSUS. Bremerton’s up sniffing around for her now.’

‘Cagey skipper,’ Franklin decided. ‘Cut his plant all the way back and just drifting.’

‘Yeah,’ Quentin agreed. ‘I want you to move down to the North Cape barrier supervisory board and see if you can find her, Chief. She’ll still have her reactor working, and she’ll be making some noise. The operators we have on that sector are a little young. I’ll take one and switch him to your board for a while.’

‘Right, Skipper.’ Franklin nodded. That part of the team was still green, used to working on ships. SOSUS required more finesse. Quentin didn’t have to say that he expected Franklin to check in on the whole North Cape team’s boards and maybe drop a few small lessons as he listened in on their channels.

‘Did you pick up on Dallas?’

‘Yes, sir. Real faint, but I think I got her crossing my sector, headed northwest for Toll Booth. If we get an Orion down there, we might just get her locked in. Can we rattle their cage a little?’

Quentin chuckled. He didn’t much care for submariners either. ‘No, NIFTY DOLPHIN is over, Chief. We’ll just log it and let the skipper know when he comes back home. Nice work, though. You know her reputation. We’re not supposed to hear her at all.’

‘That’ll be the day!’ Franklin snorted.

‘Let me know what you find, Deke.’

‘Aye aye, Skipper. You take care of yourself, hear?’

THE FIFTH DAY
Tuesday, 7 December

MOSCOW

It was not the grandest office in the Kremlin, but it suited his needs. Admiral Yuri Ilych Padorin showed up for work at his customary seven o’clock after the drive from his six-room apartment in the Kutuzovskiy Prospekt. The large office windows overlooked the Kremlin walls; except for those he would have had a view of the Moscow River, now frozen solid. Padorin did not miss the view, though he had won his spurs commanding river gunboats forty years before, running supplies across the Volga into Stalingrad. Padorin was now the chief political officer of the Soviet Navy. His job was men, not ships.

On the way in he nodded curtly to his secretary, a man of forty. The yeoman leaped to his feet and followed his admiral into the inner office to help him off with his greatcoat. Padorin’s navy-blue jacket was ablaze with ribbons and the gold star medal of the most coveted award in the Soviet military, Hero of the Soviet Union. He had won that in combat as a freckled boy of twenty, shuttling back and forth on the Volga. Those were good days, he told himself, dodging bombs from the German Stukas and the more random artillery fire with which the Fascists had tried to interdict his squadron … Like most men he was unable to remember the stark terror of combat.

It was a Tuesday morning, and Padorin had a pile of mail waiting on his desk. His yeoman got him a pot of tea and a cup – the usual Russian glass cup set in a metal holder, sterling silver in this case. Padorin had worked long and hard for the perks that came with this office. He settled in his chair and read first through the intelligence dispatches, information copies of data sent each morning and evening to the operational commands of the Soviet Navy. A political officer had to keep current, to know what the imperialists were up to so that he could brief his men on the threat.

Next came the official mail from within the People’s Commissariat of the Navy and the Ministry of Defence. He had access to all of the correspondence from the former, while that from the latter had been carefully vetted since the Soviet armed services share as little information as possible. There wasn’t too much mail from either place today. The usual Monday afternoon meeting had covered most of what had to be done that week, and nearly everything Padorin was concerned with was now in the hands of his staff for disposition. He poured a second cup of tea and opened a new pack of unfiltered cigarettes, a habit he’d been unable to break despite a mild heart attack three years earlier. He checked his desk calendar – good, no appointments until ten.

Near the bottom of the pile was an official-looking envelope from the Northern Fleet. The code number at the upper left corner showed that it came from the Red October. Hadn’t he just read something about that?

Padorin rechecked his ops dispatches. So, Ramius hadn’t turned up in his exercise area? He shrugged. Missile submarines were supposed to be elusive, and it would not have surprised the old admiral at all if Ramius were twisting a few tails. The son of Aleksandr Ramius was a prima donna who had the troubling habit of seeming to build his own personality cult: he kept some of the men he trained and discarded others. Padorin reflected that those rejected for line service had made excellent zampoliti, and appeared to have more line knowledge than was the norm. Even so, Ramius was a captain who needed watching. Sometimes Padorin suspected that he was too much a sailor and not enough a Communist. On the other hand, his father had been a model Party member and a hero of the Great Patriotic War. Certainly he had been well thought of, Lithuanian or not. And the son? Years of letter-perfect performance, as many years of stalwart Party membership. He was known for his spirited participation at meetings and occasionally brilliant essays. The people in the naval branch of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, reported that the imperialists regarded him as a dangerous and skilled enemy. Good, Padorin thought, the bastards ought to fear our men. He turned his attention back to the envelope.

Red October, now there was a fitting name for a Soviet warship! Named not only for the revolution that had forever changed the history of the world but also for the Red October Tractor Plant. Many was the dawn when Padorin had looked west to Stalingrad to see if the factory still stood, a symbol to the Soviet fighting men struggling against the Hitlerite bandits. The envelope was marked Confidential, and his yeoman had not opened it as he had the other routine mail. The admiral took his letter opener from the desk drawer. It was a sentimental object, having been his service knife years before. When his first gunboat had been sunk under him, one hot August night in 1942, he had swum to shore and been pounced on by a German infantryman who hadn’t expected resistance from a half-drowned sailor. Padorin had surprised him, sinking the knife in his chest and breaking off half the blade as he stole his enemy’s life. Later a machinist had trimmed the blade down. It was no longer a proper knife, but Padorin wasn’t about to throw this sort of souvenir away.

‘Comrade Admiral,’ the letter began – but the type had been scratched out and replaced with a hand-written ‘Uncle Yuri.’ Ramius had jokingly called him that years back when Padorin was chief political officer of the Northern Fleet. ‘Thank you for your confidence, and for the opportunity you have given me with command of this magnificent ship!’ Ramius ought to be grateful, Padorin thought. Performance or not, you don’t give this sort of command to –

What? Padorin stopped reading and started over. He forgot the cigarette smouldering in his ashtray as he reached the bottom of the first page. A joke. Ramius was known for his jokes – but he’d pay for this one. This was going too fucking far! He turned the page.

‘This is no joke, Uncle Yuri – Marko.’

Padorin stopped and looked out of the window. The Kremlin wall at this point was a beehive of niches for the ashes of the Party faithful. He couldn’t have read the letter correctly. He started to read it again. His hands began to shake.

He had a direct line to Admiral Gorshkov, with no yeomen or secretaries to bar the way.

‘Comrade Admiral, this is Padorin.’

‘Good morning, Yuri,’ Gorshkov said pleasantly.

‘I must see you immediately. I have a situation here.’

‘What sort of situation?’ Gorshkov asked warily.

‘We must discuss it in person. I am coming over now.’ There was no way he’d discuss this over the phone; he knew it was tapped.

THE USS DALLAS

Sonarman Second Class Ronald Jones, his division officer noted, was in his usual trance. The young college dropout was hunched over his instrument table, body limp, eyes closed, face locked into the same neutral expression he wore when listening to one of the many Bach tapes on his expensive personal cassette player. Jones was the sort who categorized his tapes by their flaws, a ragged piano tempo, a botched flute, a wavering French horn. He listened to sea sounds with the same discriminating intensity. In all the navies of the world, submariners were regarded as a curious breed, and submariners themselves looked upon sonar operators as odd. Their eccentricities, however, were among the most tolerated in the military service. The executive officer liked to tell a story about a sonar chief he’d served with for two years, a man who had patrolled the same areas in missile submarines for virtually his whole career. He became so familiar with the humpback whales that summered in the area that he took to calling them by name. On retiring, he went to work for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, where his talent was regarded not so much with amusement as awe.

Three years earlier, Jones had been asked to leave the California Institute of Technology in the middle of his junior year. He had pulled one of the ingenious pranks for which Cal Tech students were justly famous, only it hadn’t worked. Now he was serving his time in the navy to finance his return. It was his announced intention to get a doctorate in cybernetics and signal processing. In return for an early out, after receiving his degree he would go to work for the Naval Research Laboratory. Lieutenant Thompson believed it. On joining the Dallas six months earlier, he had read the files of all his men. Jones’ IQ was 158, the highest on the boat by a fair margin. He had a placid face and sad brown eyes that women found irresistible. On the beach Jones had enough action to wear down a squad of marines. It didn’t make much sense to the lieutenant. He’d been the football hero at Annapolis. Jones was a skinny kid who listened to Bach. It didn’t figure.

The USS Dallas, a 688-class attack submarine, was forty miles from the coast of Iceland, approaching her patrol station, code-named Toll Booth. She was two days late getting there. A week earlier, she had participated in the NATO war game NIFTY DOLPHIN, which had been postponed several days because the worst North Atlantic weather in twenty years had delayed other ships detailed to it. In that exercise the Dallas, teamed with HMS Swiftsure, had used the foul weather to penetrate and ravage the simulated enemy formation. It was yet another top performance for the Dallas and her skipper, Commander Bart Mancuso, one of the youngest submarine commanders in the US Navy. The mission had been followed by a courtesy call at the Swiftsure’s Royal Navy base in Scotland, and the American sailors were still shaking off hangovers from the celebration … Now they had a different mission, a new development in the Atlantic submarine game. For three weeks, the Dallas was to report on traffic in and out of Red Route One.

Over the past fourteen months, newer Soviet submarines had been using a strange, effective tactic for shedding their American and British shadowers. Southwest of Iceland the Russian boats would race down the Reykjanes Ridge, a finger of underwater highlands pointing to the deep Atlantic basin. Spaced at intervals from five miles to half a mile, these mountains with their knife-edged ridges of brittle igneous rock rivalled the Alps in size. Their peaks were about a thousand feet beneath the stormy surface of the North Atlantic. Before the late sixties submarines could barely approach the peaks, much less probe their myriad valleys. Throughout the seventies Soviet naval survey vessels had been seen patrolling the ridge – in all seasons, in all weather, quartering and requartering the area in thousands of cruises. Then, fourteen months before the Dallas’ present patrol, the USS Los Angeles had been tracking a Soviet Victor II-class attack submarine. The Victor had skirted the Icelandic coast and gone deep as she approached the ridge. The Los Angeles had followed. The Victor proceeded at eight knots until she passed between the first pair of seamounts, informally known as Thor’s Twins. All at once she went to full speed and moved southwest. The skipper of the Los Angeles made a determined effort to track the Victor and came away from it badly shaken. Although the 688-class submarines were faster than the older Victors, the Russian submarine had simply not slowed down – for fifteen hours, it was later determined.

At first it had not been all that dangerous. Submarines had highly accurate inertial navigation systems able to fix their positions to within a few hundred yards from one second to another. But the Victor was skirting cliffs as though her skipper could see them, like a fighter dodging down a canyon to avoid surface-to-air missile fire. The Los Angeles could not keep track of the cliffs. At any speed over twenty knots both her passive and active sonar, including the echo-fathometer, became almost useless. The Los Angeles thus found herself navigating completely blind. It was, the skipper later reported, like driving a car with the windows painted over, steering with a map and a stopwatch. This was theoretically possible, but the captain quickly realized that the inertial navigation system had a built-in error factor of several hundred yards; this was aggravated by gravitational disturbances, which affected the ‘local vertical,’ which in turn affected the inertial fix. Worst of all, his charts were made for surface ships. Objects below a few hundred feet had been known to be misplaced by miles – something that mattered to no one until recently. The interval between mountains had quickly become less than his cumulative navigational error – sooner or later his submarine would drive into a mountainside at over thirty knots. The captain backed off. The Victor got away.

Initially it was theorized that the Soviets had somehow staked out one particular route, that their submarines were able to follow it at high speed. Russian skippers were known to pull some crazy stunts, and perhaps they were trusting to a combination of inertial systems, magnetic and gyro compasses attuned to a specific track. This theory had never developed much of a following, and in a few weeks it was known for certain that the Soviet submarines speeding through the ridge were following a multiplicity of tracks. The only thing American and British subs could do was stop periodically to get a sonar fix of their positions, then race to catch up. But the Soviet subs never slowed, and the 688s and Trafalgars kept falling behind.

The Dallas was on Toll Booth station to monitor passing Russian subs, to watch the entrance to the passage the US Navy was now calling Red Route One, and to listen for any external evidence of a new gadget that might enable the Soviets to run the ridge so boldly. Until the Americans could copy it, there were three unsavoury alternatives: they could continue losing contact with the Russians; they could station valuable attack subs at the known exits from the route; or they could set up a whole new SOSUS line.

Jones’ trance lasted ten minutes – longer than usual. He ordinarily had a contact figured out in far less time. The sailor leaned back and lit a cigarette.

‘Got something, Mr Thompson.’

‘What is it?’ Thompson leaned against the bulkhead.

‘I don’t know.’ Jones picked up a spare set of phones and handed them to his officer. ‘Listen up, sir.’

Thompson himself was a masters candidate in electrical engineering, an expert in sonar system design. His eyes screwed shut as he concentrated on the sound. It was a very faint low-frequency rumble – or swish. He couldn’t decide. He listened for several minutes before setting the headphones down, then shook his head.

‘I got it a half hour ago on the lateral array,’ Jones said. He referred to a subsystem of the BQQ-5 multifunction submarine sonar. Its main component was an eighteen-foot-diameter dome located in the bow. The dome was used for both active and passive operations. A new part of the system was a gang of passive sensors which extended two hundred feet down both sides of the hull. This was a mechanical analogue to the sensory organs on the body of a shark. ‘Lost it, got it back, lost it, got it back,’ Jones went on. ‘It’s not screw sounds, not whales or fish. More like water going through a pipe, except for that funny rumble that comes and goes. Anyway, the bearing is about two-five-zero. That puts it between us and Iceland, so it can’t be too far away.’

‘Let’s see what it looks like. Maybe that’ll tell us something.’

Jones took a double-plugged wire from a hook. One plug went into a socket on his sonar panel, the other into the jack on a nearby oscilloscope. The two men spent several minutes working with the sonar controls to isolate the signal. They ended up with an irregular sine wave which they were only able to hold a few seconds at a time.

‘Irregular,’ Thompson said.

‘Yeah, it’s funny. It sounds regular, but it doesn’t look regular. Know what I mean, Mr Thompson?’

‘No, you’ve got better ears.’

‘That’s ’cause I listen to better music, sir. That rock stuff‘ll kill your ears.’

Thompson knew he was right, but an Annapolis graduate doesn’t need to hear that from an enlisted man. His vintage Janis Joplin tapes were his own business. ‘Next step.’

‘Yessir.’ Jones took the plug from the oscilloscope and moved it into a panel to the left of the sonar board, next to a computer terminal.

During her last overhaul, the Dallas had received a very special toy to go along with her BQQ-5 sonar system. Called the BC-10, it was the most powerful computer yet installed aboard a submarine. Though only about the size of a business desk, it cost over five million dollars and ran at eighty million operations per second. It used newly developed sixty-four-bit chips and made use of the latest processing architecture. Its bubble memory could easily accommodate the computing needs of a whole squadron of submarines. In five years every attack sub in the fleet would have one. Its purpose, much like that of the far larger SOSUS system, was to process and analyse sonar signals; the BC-10 stripped away ambient noise and other naturally produced sea sounds to classify and identify man-made noise. It could identify ships by name from their individual acoustical signatures, much as one could identify the finger or voice prints of a human.

As important as the computer was its programming software. Four years before, a PhD candidate in geophysics who was working at Cal Tech’s geophysical laboratory had completed a program of six hundred thousand steps designed to predict earthquakes. The problem the program addressed was one of signal versus noise. It overcame the difficulty seismologists had discriminating between random noise that is constantly monitored on seismographs and genuinely unusual signals that foretell a seismic event.

The first Defense Department use of the program was in the Air Force Technical Applications Command (AFTAC), which found it entirely satisfactory for its mission of monitoring nuclear events throughout the world in accordance with arms control treaties. The Navy Research Laboratory also redrafted it for its own purposes. Though inadequate for seismic predictions, it worked very well indeed in analysing sonar signals. The program was known in the navy as the signal algorithmic processing system (SAPS).

‘SAPS SIGNAL INPUT,’ Jones typed into the video display terminal (VDT).

‘READY,’ the BC-10 responded at once.

‘RUN.’

‘WORKING.’

For all the fantastic speed of the BC-10, the six hundred thousand steps of the program, punctuated by numerous GOTO loops, took time to run as the machine eliminated natural sounds with its random profile criteria and then locked into the anomalous signal. It took twenty seconds, an eternity in computer time. The answer came up on the VDT. Jones pressed a key to generate a copy on the adjacent matrix printer.

‘Hmph.’ Jones tore off the page. ‘“ANOMALOUS SIGNAL EVALUATED AS MAGMA DISPLACEMENT.” That’s SAPS’ way of saying take two aspirin and call me at the end of the watch.’

Thompson chuckled. For all the ballyhoo that had accompanied the new system, it was not all that popular in the fleet. ‘Remember what the papers said when we were in England? Something about seismic activity around Iceland, like when that island poked up back in the sixties.’

Jones lit another cigarette. He knew the student who had originally drafted this abortion they called SAPS. One problem was that it had a nasty habit of analysing the wrong signal – and you couldn’t tell it was wrong from the result. Besides, since it had been originally designed to look for seismic events, Jones suspected it of a tendency to interpret anomalies as seismic events. He didn’t like the built-in bias, which he felt the research laboratory had not entirely removed. It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you. Besides, they were always discovering new sea sounds that nobody had ever heard before, much less classified.

‘Sir, the frequency is all wrong for one thing – nowhere near low enough. How ’bout I try an’ track in on this signal with the R-15?’ Jones referred to the towed array of passive sensors that the Dallas was trailing behind her at low speed.

Commander Mancuso came in just then, the usual mug of coffee in his hand. If there was one frightening thing about the captain, Thompson thought, it was his talent for showing up when something was going on. Did he have the whole boat wired?

‘Just wandering by,’ he said casually. ‘What’s happening this fine day?’ The captain leaned against the bulkhead. He was a small man, only five eight, who had fought a battle against his waistline all his life and was now losing because of the good food and lack of exercise on a submarine. His dark eyes were surrounded by laugh lines that were always deeper when he was playing a trick on another ship.

Was it day, Thompson wondered? The six-hour one-in-three rotating watch cycle made for a convenient work schedule, but after a few changes you had to press the button on your watch to figure out what day it was, or else you couldn’t make the proper entry in the log.

‘Skipper, Jones picked up a funny signal on the lateral. The computer says it’s magma displacement.’

‘And Jonesy doesn’t agree with that.’ Mancuso didn’t have to make it a question.

‘No, sir. Captain. I don’t. I don’t know what it is, but for sure it ain’t that.’

‘You against the machine again?’

‘Skipper, SAPS works pretty well most of the time, but sometimes it’s a real kludge.’ Jones’ epithet was the most pejorative curse of electronics people. ‘For one thing, the frequency is all wrong.’

‘Okay, what do you think?’

‘I don’t know, Captain. It isn’t screw sounds, and it isn’t any naturally produced sound that I’ve heard. Beyond that …’ Jones was struck by the informality of the discussion with his commanding officer, even after three years on nuclear subs. The crew of the Dallas was like one big family, albeit one of the old frontier families, since everybody worked pretty damned hard. The captain was the father. The executive officer, everyone would readily agree, was the mother. The officers were the older kids, and the enlisted men were the younger kids. The important thing was, if you had something to say, the captain would listen to you. To Jones, this counted for a lot.

Mancuso nodded thoughtfully. ‘Well, keep at it. No sense letting all this expensive gear go to waste.’

Jones grinned. Once he had told the captain in precise detail how he could convert this equipment into the world’s finest stereo rig. Mancuso had pointed out that it would not be a major feat, since the sonar gear in this room alone cost over twenty million dollars.

‘Christ!’ The junior technician bolted upright in his chair. ‘Somebody just stomped on the gas.’

Jones was the sonar watch supervisor. The other two watchstanders noted the new signal, and Jones switched his phones to the towed array jack while the two officers kept out of the way. He took a scratch pad and noted the time before working on his individual controls. The BQR-15 was the most sensitive sonar rig on the boat, but its sensitivity was not needed for this contact.

‘Damn,’ Jones muttered quietly.

‘Charlie,’ said the junior technician.

Jones shook his head. ‘Victor. Victor class for sure. Doing turns for thirty knots – burst of cavitation noise, he’s digging big holes in the water, and he doesn’t care who knows it. Bearing zero-five-zero. Skipper, we got good water around us, and the signal is real faint. He’s not close.’ It was the closest thing to a range estimate Jones could come up with. Not close meant anything over ten miles. He went back to working his controls. ‘I think we know this guy. This is the one with a bent blade on his screw, sounds like he’s got a chain wrapped around it.’

‘Put it on speaker,’ Mancuso told Thompson. He didn’t want to disturb the operators. The lieutenant was already keying the signal into the BC-10.

The bulkhead-mounted speaker would have commanded a four-figure price in any stereo shop for its clarity and dynamic perfection; like everything else on the 688-class sub, it was the very best that money could buy. As Jones worked on the sound controls they heard the whining chirp of propeller cavitation, the thin screech associated with a bent propeller blade, and the deeper rumble of a Victor’s reactor plant at full power. The next thing Mancuso heard was the printer.

‘Victor I-class, number six,’ Thompson announced.

‘Right,’ Jones nodded. ‘Vic-six, bearing still zero-five-zero.’ He plugged the mouthpiece into his headphones. ‘Conn, sonar, we have a contact. A Victor class, bearing zero-five-zero, estimated target speed thirty knots.’

Mancuso leaned out into the passageway to address Lieutenant Pat Mannion, officer of the deck. ‘Pat, man the fire-control tracking party.’

‘Aye, Cap’n.’

‘Wait a minute!’ Jones’ hand went up. ‘Got another one!’ He twiddled some knobs. ‘This one’s a Charlie class. Damned if he ain’t digging holes, too. More easterly, bearing zero-seven-three, doing turns for about twenty-eight knots. We know this guy, too. Yeah, Charlie II, number eleven.’ Jones slipped a phone off one ear and looked at Mancuso. ‘Skipper, the Russkies have sub races scheduled for today?’

‘Not that they told me about. Of course, we don’t get the sports page out here,’ Mancuso chuckled, swirling the coffee around in his cup and hiding his real thoughts. What the hell was going on? ‘I suppose I’ll go forward and take a look at this. Good work, guys.’

He went a few steps forward into the attack centre. The normal steaming watch was set. Mannion had the conn, with a junior officer of the deck and seven enlisted men. A first-class firecontrolman was entering data from the target motion analyser into the Mark 117 fire control computer. Another officer was entering control to take charge of the tracking exercise. There was nothing unusual about this. The whole watch went about its work alertly but with the relaxed demeanour that came with years of training and experience. While the other armed services routinely had their components run exercises against allies or themselves in emulation of Eastern Bloc tactics, the navy had its attack submarines play their games against the real thing – and constantly. Submariners typically operated on what was effectively an at-war footing.

‘So we have company,’ Mannion observed.

‘Not that close,’ Lieutenant Charles Goodman noted. ‘These bearings haven’t changed a whisker.’

‘Conn, sonar.’ It was Jones’ voice. Mancuso took it.

‘Conn, aye. What is it, Jonesy?’

‘We got another one, sir. Alfa 3, bearing zero-five-five. Running flat out. Sounds like an earthquake, but faint, sir.’

‘Alfa 3? Our old friend, the Politovskiy. Haven’t run across her in a while. Anything else you can tell me?’

‘A guess, sir. The sound on this one warbled, then settled down, like she was making a turn. I think she’s heading this way – that’s a little shaky. And we have some more noise to the northeast. Too confused to make any sense of just now. We’re working on it.’

‘Okay, nice work, Jonesy. Keep at it.’

‘Sure thing, Captain.’

Mancuso smiled as he set the phone down, looking over at Mannion. ‘You know, Pat, sometimes I wonder if Jonesy isn’t part witch.’

Mannion looked at the paper tracks that Goodman was drawing to back up the computerized targeting process. ‘He’s pretty good. Problem is, he thinks we work for him.’

‘Right now we are working for him.’ Jones was their eyes and ears, and Mancuso was damned glad to have him.

‘Chuck?’ Mancuso asked Lieutenant Goodman.

‘Bearing still constant on all three contacts, sir.’ Which probably meant they were heading for the Dallas. It also meant that they could not develop the range data necessary for a fire control solution. Not that anyone wanted to shoot, but this was the point of the exercise.

‘Pat, let’s get some sea room. Move us about ten miles east,’ Mancuso ordered casually. There were two reasons for this. First, it would establish a base line from which to compute probable target range. Second, the deeper water would make for better acoustical conditions, opening up to them the distant sonar convergence zones. The captain studied the chart as his navigator gave the necessary orders, evaluating the tactical situation.

Bartolomeo Mancuso was the son of a barber who closed his shop in Cicero, Illinois, every fall to hunt deer on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Bart had accompanied his father on these hunts, shot his first deer at the age of twelve and every year thereafter until entering the Naval Academy. He had never bothered after that. Since becoming an officer on nuclear submarines he had learned a much more diverting game. Now he hunted people.

Two hours later an alarm bell went off on the ELF radio in the sub’s communications room. Like all nuclear submarines, the Dallas was trailing a lengthy wire antenna attuned to the extremely low-frequency transmitter in the central United States. The channel had a frustratingly narrow data band width. Unlike a TV channel, which transmitted thousands of bits of data per frame, thirty frames per second, the ELF radio passed on data slowly, about one character every thirty seconds. The duty radioman waited patiently while the information was recorded on tape. When the message was finished, he ran the tape at high speed and transcribed the message, handing it to the communications officer who was waiting with his code book.

The signal was actually not a code but a ‘one-time-pad’ cipher. A book, published every six months and distributed to every nuclear submarine, was filled with randomly generated transpositions for each letter of the signal. Each scrambled three-letter group in this book corresponded to a pre-selected word or phrase in another book. Deciphering the message by hand took under three minutes, and when that was completed it was carried to the captain in the attack centre.

NHG JPR YTR

FROM COMSUBLANT TO LANTSUBS AT SEA STANDBY

OPY TBD QEQ GER

POSSIBLE MAJOR REDEPLOYMENT ORDER LARGE-SCALE

MAL ASF NME

UNEXPECTED REDFLEET OPERATION IN PROGRESS

TYQ ORV

NATURE UNKNOWN NEXT ELF MESSAGE

HWZ

COMMUNICATE SSIX

COMSUBLANT – commander of the Submarine Force in the Atlantic – was Mancuso’s big boss, Vice Admiral Vincent Gallery. The old man was evidently contemplating a reshuffling of his entire force, no minor affair. The next wake-up signal, AAA – encrypted, of course – would alert them to go to periscope-antenna depth to get more detailed instructions from SSIX, the submarine satellite information exchange, a geosynchronous communications satellite used exclusively by submarines.

The tactical situation was becoming clearer, though its strategic implications were beyond his ability to judge. The ten-mile move eastward had given them adequate range information for their initial three contacts and another Alfa which had turned up a few minutes later. The first of the contacts, Vic 6, was now within torpedo range. A Mark 48 was locked in on her, and there was no way that her skipper could know the Dallas was here. Vic 6 was a deer in his sights – but it wasn’t hunting season.

Though not much faster than the Victors and Charlies, and ten knots slower than the smaller Alfas, the Dallas and her sisters could move almost silently at nearly twenty knots. This was a triumph of engineering and design, the product of decades of work. But moving without being detected was useful only if the hunter could at the same time detect his quarry. Sonars lost effectiveness as their carrier platform increased speed. The Dallas’ BQQ-5 retained twenty percent effectiveness at twenty knots, nothing to cheer about. Submarines running at high speed from one point to another were blind and unable to harm anyone. As a result, the operating pattern of an attack submarine was much like that of a combat infantryman. With a rifleman it was called dash-and-cover; with a sub, sprint-and-drift. After detecting a target, a sub would race to a more advantageous position, stop to reacquire her prey, then dash again until a firing position had been achieved. The sub’s quarry would be moving too, and if the submarine could gain position in front of it, she had then only to lie in wait like a great hunting cat to strike.

The submariner’s trade required more than skill. It required instinct, and an artist’s touch; monomaniacal confidence, and the aggressiveness of a professional boxer. Mancuso had all of these things. He had spent fifteen years learning his craft, watching a generation of commanders as a junior officer, listening carefully at the frequent round-table discussions which made submarining a very human profession, its lessons passed on by verbal tradition. Time on shore had been spent training in a variety of computerized simulators, attending seminars, comparing notes and ideas with his peers. Aboard surface ships and ASW aircraft he learned how the ‘enemy’ – the surface sailors – played his own hunting game.

Submariners lived by a simple motto: there are two kinds of ships, submarines … and targets. What would Dallas be hunting? Mancuso wondered. Russian subs? Well, if that was the game and the Russians kept racing around like this, it ought to be easy enough. He and the Swiftsure had just bested a team of NATO ASW experts, men whose countries depended on their ability to keep the sea-lanes open. His boat and his crew were performing as well as any man could ask. In Jones he had one of the ten best sonar operators in the fleet. Mancuso was ready, whatever the game might be. As on the opening day of the hunting season, outside considerations were dwindling away. He was becoming a weapon.

CIA HEADQUARTERS

It was 4.45 in the morning, and Ryan was dozing fitfully in the back of a CIA Chevy taking him from the Marriott to Langley. He’d been over for what? twenty hours? About that, enough time to see his boss, see Skip, get the presents for Sally, and check the house. The house looked to be in good shape. He had rented it to an instructor at the Naval Academy. He could have gotten five times the rent from someone else, but he didn’t want any wild parties in his home. The officer was a Bible-thumper from Kansas, and made an acceptable custodian.

Five and a half hours of sleep in the past – thirty? Something like that; he was too tired to look at his watch. It wasn’t fair. Sleeplessness murders judgement. But it made little sense telling himself that, and telling the admiral would make less.

He was in Greer’s office five minutes later.

‘Sorry to have to wake you up, Jack.’

‘Oh, that’s all right, sir,’ Ryan returned the lie. ‘What’s up?’

‘Come on over and grab some coffee. It’s going to be a long day.’

Ryan dropped his topcoat on the sofa and walked over to pour a mug of navy brew. He decided against Coffee Mate or sugar. Better to endure it naked and get the caffeine full force.

‘Any place I can shave around here, sir?’

‘Head’s behind the door, over in the corner.’ Greer handed him a yellow sheet torn from a telex machine. ‘Look at this.’

TOP SECRET

102200Z*****38976

NSA SIGINT BULLETIN REDNAV OPS

MESSAGE FOLLOWS

AT 083145Z NSA MONITOR STATIONS [DELETED] [DELETED] AND [DELETED] RECORDED AN ELF BROADCAST FROM REDFLEET ELF FACILITY SEMIPOLIPINSK XX MESSAGE DURATION 10 MINUTES XX 6 ELEMENTS XX

ELF SIGNAL IS EVALUATED AS ‘PREP’ BROADCAST TO REDFLEET SUBMARINES AT SEA XX

AT 090000Z AN ‘ALL SHIPS’ BROADCAST WAS MADE BY REDFLEET HEADQUARTERS CENTRAL COMMO STATION TULA AND SATELLITES THREE AND FIVE XX BANDS USED: HF VHF UHF XX MESSAGE DURATION 39 SECONDS WITH 2 REPEATS IDENTICAL CONTENT MADE AT 091000Z AND 092000Z XX 475 5-ELEMENT CIPHER GROUPS XX

SIGNAL COVERAGE AS FOLLOWS: NORTHERN FLEET AREA BALTIC FLEET AREA AND MED SQUADRON AREA XX NOTE FAR EAST FLEET NOT REPEAT NOT AFFECTED BY THIS BROADCAST XX

NUMEROUS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT SIGNALS EMANATED FROM

ADDRESSES IN AREAS CITED ABOVE XX ORIGIN AND TRAFFIC ANALYSIS TO FOLLOW XX NOT COMPLETED AT THIS TIME XX

BEGINNING AT 100000Z NSA MONITOR STATION [DELETED] [DELETED] AND [DELETED] RECORDED INCREASED HF AND VHF TRAFFIC AT REDFLEET BASES POLYARNYY SEVEROMORSK PECHENGA TALLINN KRONSTADT AND EASTERN MED AREA XX ADDITIONAL HF AND VHF TRAFFIC FROM REDFLEET ASSETS AT SEA XX AMPLIFICATION TO FOLLOW XX

EVALUATION: A MAJOR UNPLANNED REDFLEET OPERATION HAS BEEN ORDERED WITH FLEET ASSETS REPORTING AVAILABILITY AND STATUS XX

END BULLETIN

NSA SENDS

102215Z BREAKBREAK

Ryan looked at his watch. ‘Fast work by the boys at NSA, and fast work by our duty watch officers, getting everybody up.’ He drained his mug and went over for a refill. ‘What’s the word on signal traffic analysis?’

‘Here.’ Greer handed him a second telex sheet.

Ryan scanned it. ‘That’s a lot of ships. Must be nearly everything they have at sea. Not much on the ones in port, though.’

‘Landline,’ Greer observed. ‘The ones in port can phone fleet ops, Moscow. By the way, that is every ship they have at sea in the Western Hemisphere. Every damned one. Any ideas?’

‘Let’s see, we have that increased activity in the Barents Sea. Looks like a medium-sized ASW exercise. Maybe they’re expanding it. Doesn’t explain the increased activity in the Baltic and Med, though. Do they have a war game laid on?’

‘Nope. They just finished CRIMSON STORM a month ago.’

Ryan nodded. ‘Yeah, they usually take a couple of months to evaluate that much data – and who’d want to play games up there at this time of the year? The weather’s supposed to be a bitch. Have they ever run a major game in December?’

‘Not a big one, but most of these acknowledgements are from submarines, son, and subs don’t care a whole lot about the weather.’

‘Well, given some other preconditions, you might call this ominous. No idea what the signal said, eh?’

‘No. They’re using computer-based ciphers, same as us. If the spooks at the NSA can read them, they’re not telling me about it.’ In theory the National Security Agency came under the titular control of the director of Central Intelligence. In fact it was a law unto itself. ‘That’s what traffic analysis is all about. Jack. You try to guess intentions by who’s talking to whom.’

‘Yes, sir, but when everybody’s talking to everybody –’

‘Yeah.’

‘Anything else on alert? Their army? Voyska PVO?’ Ryan referred to the Soviet air defence network.

‘Nope, just the fleet. Subs, ships, and naval aviation.’

Ryan stretched. ‘That makes it sound like an exercise, sir. We’ll want a little more data on what they’re doing, though. Have you talked to Admiral Davenport?’

‘That’s the next step. Haven’t had time. I’ve only been in long enough to shave myself and turn the coffee on.’ Greer sat down and set his phone receiver in the desk speaker before punching in the numbers.

‘Vice Admiral Davenport.’ The voice was curt.

‘Morning, Charlie, James here. Did you get that NSA-976?’

‘Sure did, but that’s not what got me up. Our SOSUS net went berserk a few hours ago.’

‘Oh?’ Greer looked at the phone, then at Ryan.

‘Yeah, nearly every sub they have at sea just put the pedal to the metal, and all at about the same time.’

‘Doing what exactly, Charlie?’ Greer prompted.

‘We’re still figuring that out. It looks like a lot of boats are heading into the North Atlantic. Their units in the Norwegian Sea are racing southwest. Three from the western Med are heading that way, too, but we haven’t got a clear picture yet. We need a few more hours.’

‘What do they have operating off our coast, sir?’ Ryan asked.

‘They woke you up, Ryan? Good. Two old Novembers. One’s a raven conversion doing an ELINT job off the cape. The other one’s sitting off King’s Bay making a damned nuisance of itself.’

Ryan smiled to himself. An American or allied ship was a she; the Russians used the male pronoun for a ship; and the intelligence community usually referred to a Soviet ship as it.

There’s a Yankee boat,’ Davenport went on, ‘a thousand miles south of Iceland, and the initial report is that it’s heading north. Probably wrong. Reciprocal bearing, transcription error, something like that. We’re checking. Must be a goof, because it was heading south earlier.’

Ryan looked up. ‘What about their other missile boats?’

‘Their Deltas and Typhoons are in the Barents Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, as usual. No news on them. Oh, we have attack boats up there, of course, but Gallery doesn’t want them to break radio silence, and he’s right. So all we have at the moment is the report on the stray Yankee.’

‘What are we doing, Charlie?’ Greer asked.

‘Gallery has a general alert out to his boats. They’re standing by in case we need to redeploy. NORAD has gone to a slightly increased alert status, they tell me.’ Davenport referred to the North American Aerospace Defense Command. ‘CINCLANT and CINCPAC fleet staffs are up and running around in circles, like you’d expect. Some extra P-3s are working out of Iceland. Nothing much else at the moment. First we have to figure out what they’re up to.’

‘Okay, keep me posted.’

‘Roger, if we hear anything I’ll let you know, and I trust –’

‘We will.’ Greer killed the phone. He shook a finger at Ryan. ‘Don’t you go to sleep on me, Jack.’

‘On top of this stuff?’ Ryan waved his mug.

‘You’re not concerned, I see.’

‘Sir, there’s nothing to be concerned about yet. It’s what, one in the afternoon over there now? Probably some admiral, maybe old Sergey himself, decided to toss a drill at his boys. He wasn’t supposed to be all that pleased with how CRIMSON STORM worked out, and maybe he decided to rattle a few cages – ours included, of course. Hell, their army and air force aren’t involved, and it’s for damned sure that if they were planning anything nasty the other services would know about it. We’ll have to keep an eye on this, but so far I don’t see anything to –’ Ryan almost said lose sleep over ‘– sweat about.’

‘How old were you at Pearl Harbor?’

‘My father was nineteen, sir. He didn’t marry until after the war, and I wasn’t the first little Ryan.’ Jack smiled. Greer knew all this. ‘As I recall you weren’t all that old yourself.’

‘I was a seaman second on the old Texas.’ Greer had never made it into that war. Soon after it started he’d been accepted by the Naval Academy. By the time he had graduated from there and finished training at submarine school, the war was almost over. He reached the Japanese coast on his first cruise the day after the war ended. ‘But you know what I mean.’

‘Indeed I do, sir, and that’s why we have the CIA, DIA, NSA, and NRO, among others. If the Russkies can fool all of us, maybe we ought to read up on our Marx.’

‘All those subs heading into the Atlantic …’

‘I feel better with word that the Yankee is heading north. They’ve had enough time to make that a hard piece of data. Davenport probably doesn’t want to believe it without confirmation. If Ivan was looking to play hardball, that Yankee’d be heading south. The missiles on those old boats can’t reach very far. Sooo – we stay up and watch. Fortunately, sir, you make a decent cup of coffee.’

‘How does breakfast grab you?’

‘Might as well. If we can finish up on the Afghanistan stuff, maybe I can fly back tomorr – tonight.’

‘You still might. Maybe this way you’ll learn to sleep on the plane.’

Breakfast was sent up twenty minutes later. Both men were accustomed to big ones, and the food was surprisingly good. Ordinarily CIA cafeteria food was government-undistinguished, and Ryan wondered if the night crew, with fewer people to serve, might take the time to do their job right. Or maybe they had sent out for it. The two men sat around until Davenport phoned at quarter to seven.

‘It’s definite. All the boomers are heading towards port. We have good tracks on two Yankees, three Deltas, and a Typhoon. Memphis reported in when her Delta took off for home at twenty knots after being on station for five days, and then Gallery queried Queenfish. Same story – looks like they’re all headed for the barn. Also we just got some photos from a Big Bird pass over the fjord – for once it wasn’t covered with clouds – and we have a bunch of surface ships with bright infrared signatures, like they’re getting steam up.’

‘How about Red October?’ Ryan asked.

‘Nothing. Maybe our information was bad, and she didn’t sail. Wouldn’t be the first time.’

‘You don’t suppose they’ve lost her?’ Ryan wondered aloud.

Davenport had already thought of that. ‘That would explain the activity up north, but what about the Baltic and Med business?’

‘Two years ago we had that scare with Tullibee,’ Ryan pointed out. ‘And the CNO was so furious he threw an all-hands rescue drill on both oceans.’

‘Maybe,’ Davenport conceded. The blood in Norfolk was supposed to have been ankle deep after that fiasco. The USS Tullibee, a small one-of-a-kind attack sub, had long carried a reputation for bad luck. In this case it had spilled over onto a lot of others.

‘Anyway, it looks a whole lot less scary than it did two hours back. They wouldn’t be recalling their boomers if they were planning anything against us, would they?’ Ryan said.

‘I see that Ryan still has your crystal ball, James.’

‘That’s what I pay him for, Charlie.’

‘Still, it is odd,’ Ryan commented. ‘Why recall all of the missile boats? Have they ever done this before? What about the ones in the Pacific?’

‘Haven’t heard about those yet,’ Davenport replied. ‘I’ve asked CINCPAC for data, but they haven’t gotten back to me yet. On the other question, no, they’ve never recalled all their boomers at once, but they do occasionally reshuffle all their positions at once. That’s probably what this is. I said they’re heading towards port, not into it. We won’t know that for a couple of days.’

‘What if they’re afraid they’ve lost one?’ Ryan ventured.

‘No such luck,’ Davenport scoffed. ‘They haven’t lost a boomer since that Golf we lifted off Hawaii, back when you were in high school, Ryan. Ramius is too good a skipper to let that happen.’

So was Captain Smith of the Titanic, Ryan thought.

‘Thanks for the info, Charlie.’ Greer hung up. ‘Looks like you were right, Jack. Nothing to worry about yet. Let’s get that data on Afghanistan in here – and just for the hell of it, we’ll look at Charlie’s pictures of their Northern Fleet when we’re finished.’

Ten minutes later a messenger arrived with a cart from central files. Greer was the sort who liked to see the raw data himself. This suited Ryan. He’d known of a few analysts who had based their reports on selective data and been cut off at the knees for it by this man. The information on the cart was from a variety of sources, but to Ryan the most significant were tactical radio intercepts from listening posts on the Pakistani border, and, he gathered, from inside Afghanistan itself. The nature and tempo of Soviet operations did not indicate a backing off, as seemed to be suggested by a pair of recent articles in Red Star and some intelligence sources inside the Soviet Union. They spent three hours reviewing the data.

‘I think Sir Basil is placing too much stock in political intelligence and too little in what our listening posts are getting in the field. It would not be unprecedented for the Soviets not to let their field commanders know what’s going on in Moscow, of course, but on the whole I do not see a clear picture,’ Ryan concluded.

The admiral looked at him. ‘I pay you for answers, Jack.’

‘Sir, the truth is that Moscow moved in there by mistake. We know that from both military and political intelligence reports. The tenor of the data is pretty clear. From where I sit, I don’t see that they know what they want to do. In a case like this the bureaucratic mind finds it most easy to do nothing. So, their field commanders are told to continue the mission, while the senior Party bosses fumble around looking for a solution and covering their asses for getting into the mess in the first place.’

‘Okay, so we know that we don’t know.’

‘Yes, sir. I don’t like it either, but saying anything else would be a lie.’

The admiral snorted. There was a lot of that at Langley, intelligence types giving answers when they didn’t even know the questions. Ryan was still new enough to the game that when he didn’t know, he said so. Greer wondered if that would change in time. He hoped not.

After lunch a package arrived by messenger from the National Reconnaissance Office. It contained the photographs taken earlier in the day on two successive passes by a KH-11 satellite. They’d be the last such photos for a while because of the restrictions imposed on orbital mechanics and the generally miserable weather on the Kola Peninsula. The first set of visible light shots taken an hour after the FLASH signal had gone out from Moscow showed the fleet at anchor or tied to the docks. On infrared a number of them were glowing brightly from internal heat, indicating that their boilers or gas-turbine engines were operating. The second set of photos had been taken on the next orbital pass at a very low angle.

Ryan scrutinized the blowups. ‘Wow! Kirov, Moskva, Kiev, three Karas, five Krestas, four Krivaks, eight Udaloys, and five Sovremennys.’

‘Search and rescue exercise, eh?’ Greer gave Ryan a hard look. ‘Look at the bottom here. Every fast oiler they have is following them out. That’s most of the striking force of the Northern Fleet right there, and if they need oilers, they figure to be out for a while.’

‘Davenport could have been more specific. But we still have their boomers heading back in. No amphibious ships in this photo, just combatants. Only the new ones, too, the ones with range and speed.’

‘And the best weapons.’

‘Yeah,’ Ryan nodded. ‘And all scrambled in a few hours. Sir, if they had this planned in advance, we’d have known about it. This must have been laid on today. Interesting.’

‘You’ve picked up the English habit of understatement, Jack.’ Greer stood up to stretch. ‘I want you to stay over an extra day.’

‘Okay sir.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Mind if I phone the wife? I don’t want her to drive out to the airport for a plane I’m not on.’

‘Sure, and after you’ve finished that, I want you to go down and see someone at DIA who used to work for me. See how much operational data they’re getting on this sortie. If this is a drill, we’ll know soon enough, and you can still take your Surfing Barbie home tomorrow.’

It was a Skiing Barbie, but Ryan didn’t say so.

THE SIXTH DAY
Wednesday, 8 December

CIA HEADQUARTERS

Ryan had been to the office of the director of central intelligence several times before to deliver briefings and occasional personal messages from Sir Basil Charleston to his highness, the DCI. It was larger than Greer’s, with a better view of the Potomac Valley, and appeared to have been decorated by a professional in a style compatible with the DCI’s origins. Arthur Moore was a former judge of the Texas State Supreme Court, and the room reflected his southwestern heritage. He and Admiral Greer were sitting on a sofa near the picture windows. Greer waved Ryan over and passed him a folder.

The folder was made of red plastic and had a snap closure. Its edges were bordered with white tape and the cover had a simple white paper label bearing the legends EYES ONLY Δ and WILLOW. Neither notation was unusual. A computer in the basement of the Langley headquarters selected random names at the touch of a key; this prevented a foreign agent from inferring anything from the name of an operation. Ryan opened the folder and looked first at the index sheet. Evidently there were only three copies of the WILLOW document, each initialled by its owner. This one was initialled by the DCI himself. A CIA document with only three copies was unusual enough that Ryan, whose highest clearance was NEBULA, had never encountered one. From the grave looks of Moore and Greer, he guessed that these were two of the Δ-cleared officers; the other, he assumed, was the deputy director of operations (DDO), another Texan named Robert Ritter.

Ryan turned the index sheet. The report was a xeroxed copy of something that had been typed on a manual machine, and it had too many strikeovers to have been done by a real secretary. If Nancy Cummings and the other elite executive secretaries had not been allowed to see this … Ryan looked up.

‘It’s all right, Jack,’ Greer said. ‘You’ve just been cleared for WILLOW.’

Ryan sat back, and despite his excitement began to read the document slowly and carefully.

The agent’s code name was actually CARDINAL. The highest ranking agent-in-place the CIA had ever had, he was the stuff that legends are made of. CARDINAL had been recruited more than twenty years earlier by Oleg Penkovskiy. Another legend – a dead one – Penkovskiy had at the time been a colonel in the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, a larger and more active counterpart to America’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). His position had given him access to daily information on all facets of the Soviet military, from the Red Army’s command structure to the operational status of intercontinental missiles. The information he smuggled out through his British contact, Greville Wynne, was supremely valuable, and Western countries had come to depend on it – too much. Penkovskiy was discovered during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. It was his data, ordered and delivered under great pressure and haste, that told President Kennedy that Soviet strategic systems were not ready for war. This information enabled the president to back Khrushchev into a corner from which there was no easy exit. The famous blink ascribed to Kennedy’s steady nerves was, as in many such events throughout history, facilitated by his ability to see the other man’s cards. This advantage was given him by a courageous agent whom he would never meet. Penkovskiy’s response to the FLASH request from Washington was too rash. Already under suspicion, this finished him. He paid for his treason with his life. It was CARDINAL who first learned that he was being watched more closely than was the norm for a society where everyone is watched. He warned Penkovskiy – too late. When it became clear that the colonel could not be extracted from the Soviet Union, he himself urged CARDINAL to betray him. It was the final ironic joke of a brave man that his own death would advance the career of an agent whom he had recruited.

CARDINAL’s job was necessarily as secret as his name. A senior adviser and confidant of a Politburo member, CARDINAL often acted as his representative within the Soviet military establishment. He thus had access to political and military intelligence of the highest order. This made his information extraordinarily valuable – and, paradoxically, highly suspect. Those few experienced CIA case officers who knew of him found it impossible to believe that he had not been ‘turned’ somewhere along the line by one of the thousands of KGB counterintelligence officers whose sole duty it is to watch everyone and everything. For this reason CARDINAL-coded material was generally cross-checked against the reports of other spies and sources. But he had outlived many small-fry agents.

The name CARDINAL was known in Washington only to the top three CIA executives. On the first day of each month a new code name was chosen for his data, a name made known only to the highest echelon of CIA officers and analysts. This month it was WILLOW. Before being passed on, grudgingly, to outsiders, CARDINAL data was laundered as carefully as Mafia income to disguise its source. There were also a number of security measures that protected the agent and were unique to him. For fear of cryptographic exposure of his identity, CARDINAL material was hand delivered, never transmitted by radio or landline. CARDINAL himself was a very careful man – Penkovskiy’s fate had taught him that. His information was conveyed through a series of intermediaries to the chief of the CIA’s Moscow station. He had outlived twelve station chiefs; one of these, a retired field officer, had a brother who was a Jesuit. Every morning the priest, an instructor in philosophy and theology at Fordham University in New York, said mass for the safety, and the soul of a man whose name he would never know. It was as good an explanation as any for CARDINAL’s continued survival.

Four separate times he had been offered extraction from the Soviet Union. Each time he had refused. To some this was proof that he’d been turned, but to others it was proof that like most successful agents CARDINAL was a man driven by something he alone knew – and therefore, like most successful agents, he was probably a little crazy.

The document Ryan was reading had been in transit for twenty hours. It had taken five for the film to reach the American embassy in Moscow, where it was delivered at once to the station chief. An experienced field officer and former reporter for the New York Times, he worked under the cover of press attaché. He developed the film himself in his private darkroom. Thirty minutes after its arrival, he inspected the five exposed frames through a magnifying glass and sent a FLASH-priority dispatch to Washington saying that a CARDINAL signal was en route. Next he transcribed the message from the film to flash paper on his own portable typewriter, translating from the Russian as he went. This security measure erased both the agent’s handwriting and, by the paraphrasing automatic to translation, any personal peculiarities of his language. The film was then burned to ashes, the report folded into a metal container much like a cigarette case. This held a small pyrotechnic charge that would go off if the case were improperly opened or suddenly shaken; two CARDINAL signals had been lost when their cases were accidentally dropped. Next the station chief took the case to the embassy’s courier-in-residence, who had already been booked on a three-hour Aeroflot flight to London. At Heathrow Airport the courier sprinted to make connections with a Pan Am 747 to New York’s Kennedy International, where he connected with the Eastern shuttle to Washington’s National Airport. By eight that morning the diplomatic bag was in the State Department. There a CIA officer removed the case, drove it immediately to Langley, and handed it to the DCI. It was opened by an instructor from the CIA’s technical services branch. The DCI made three copies on his personal Xerox machine and burned the flash paper in his ashtray. These security measures had struck a few of the men who had succeeded to the office of the DCI as laughable. The laughs had never outlasted the first CARDINAL report.

When Ryan finished the report he referred back to the second page and read it through again, shaking his head slowly. The WILLOW document was the strongest reinforcement yet of his desire not to know how intelligence information reached him. He closed the folder and handed it back to Admiral Greer.

‘Christ, sir.’

‘Jack, I know I don’t have to say this – but what you have just read, nobody, not the president, not Sir Basil, not God if He asks, nobody learns of it without the authorization of the director. Is that understood?’ Greer had not lost his command voice.

‘Yes, sir.’ Ryan bobbed his head like a schoolboy.

Judge Moore pulled a cigar from his jacket pocket and lit it, looking past the flame into Ryan’s eyes. The judge, everyone said, had been a hell of a field officer in his day. He’d worked with Hans Tofte during the Korean War and had been instrumental in bringing off one of the CIA’s legendary missions, the disappearance of a Norwegian ship that had been carrying a cargo of medical personnel and supplies for the Chinese. The loss had delayed a Chinese offensive for several months, saving thousands of American and allied lives. But it had been a bloody operation. All of the Chinese personnel and all of the Norwegian crewmen had vanished. It was a bargain in the simple mathematics of war, but the morality of the mission was another matter. For this reason, or perhaps another, Moore had soon thereafter left government service to become a trial lawyer in his native Texas. His career had been spectacularly successful, and he’d advanced from wealthy courtroom lawyer to distinguished appellate judge. He had been recalled to the CIA three years earlier because of his unique combination of absolute personal integrity and experience in black operations. Judge Moore hid a Harvard law degree and a highly ordered mind behind the façade of a West Texas cowboy, something he had never been but simulated with ease.

‘So, Dr Ryan, what do you think of this?’ Moore said as the deputy director of operations came in. ‘Hi, Bob, come on over here. We just showed Ryan here the WILLOW file.’

‘Oh?’ Ritter slid a chair over, neatly trapping Ryan in the corner. ‘And what does the admiral’s fair-haired boy think of that?’

‘Gentlemen, I assume that you all regard this information as genuine,’ Ryan said cautiously, getting nods. ‘Sir, if this information was hand delivered by the Archangel Michael, I’d have trouble believing it – but since you gentlemen say it’s reliable …’ They wanted his opinion. The problem was, his conclusion was too incredible. Well, he decided, I’ve gotten this far by giving my honest opinions …

Ryan took a deep breath and gave them his evaluation.

‘Very well, Dr Ryan,’ Judge Moore nodded sagaciously. ‘First I want to hear what else it might be, then I want you to defend your analysis.’

‘Sir, the most obvious alternative doesn’t bear much thinking about. Besides, they’ve been able to do it since Friday and they haven’t done it,’ Ryan said, keeping his voice low and reasonable. Ryan had trained himself to be objective. He ran through the four alternatives he had considered, careful to examine each in detail. This was no time to allow personal views to intrude on his thinking. He spoke for ten minutes.

‘I suppose there’s one more possibility. Judge,’ he concluded. ‘This could be disinformation aimed at blowing this source. I cannot evaluate that possibility.’

‘The thought has occurred to us. All right, now that you’ve gone this far, you might as well give your operational recommendation.’

‘Sir, the admiral can tell you what the navy’ll say.’

‘I sorta figured that one out, boy,’ Moore laughed. ‘What do you think?’

‘Judge, setting up the decision tree on this will not be easy – there are too many variables, too many possible contingencies. But I’d say yes. If it’s possible, if we can work out the details, we ought to try. The biggest question is the availability of our own assets. Do we have the pieces in place?’

Greer answered. ‘Our assets are slim. One carrier, Kennedy. I checked. Saratoga’s in Norfolk with an engineering casualty. On the other hand, HMS Invincible was just over here for that NATO exercise, sailed from Norfolk Monday night. Admiral White, I believe, commanding a small battle group.’

‘Lord White, sir?’ Ryan asked. ‘The Earl of Weston?’

‘You know him?’ Moore asked.

‘Yes, sir. Our wives are friendly. I shot grouse with him in Scotland last September. He makes noises like a good operator, and I hear he has a good reputation.’

‘You’re thinking we might want to borrow their ships, James?’ Moore asked. ‘If so, we’ll have to tell them about this. But we have to tell our side first. There’s a meeting of the National Security Council at one this afternoon. Ryan, you will prepare the briefing papers and deliver the briefing yourself.’

Ryan blinked. ‘That’s not much time, sir.’

‘James here says you work well under pressure. Prove it.’ He looked at Greer. ‘Get a copy of his briefing papers and be ready to fly to London. That’s the president’s decision. If we want their boats, we’ll have to tell them why. That means briefing the prime minister, and that’s your job. Bob, I want you to confirm this report. Do what you have to do, but do not get WILLOW involved.’

‘Right,’ Ritter replied.

Moore looked at his watch. ‘We’ll meet back here at 3:30, depending on how the meeting goes. Ryan, you have ninety minutes. Get cracking.’

What am I being measured for? Ryan wondered. There was talk in the CIA that Judge Moore would be leaving soon for a comfortable ambassadorship, perhaps to the Court of St James’s, a fitting reward for a man who had worked long and hard to reestablish a close relationship with the British. If the judge left, Admiral Greer would probably move into this office. He had the virtues of age – he wouldn’t be around that long – and of friends on Capitol Hill. Ritter had neither. He had complained too long and too openly about congressmen who leaked information on his operations and his field agents, getting men killed in the process of demonstrating their importance on the local cocktail circuit. He also had an ongoing feud with the chairman of the Select Intelligence Committee.

With that sort of reshuffling at the top and this sudden access to new and fantastic information … What does it mean for me? Ryan asked himself. They couldn’t want him to be the next DDI. He knew he didn’t have anything like the experience required for that job – though maybe in another five or six years …

REYKJANES RIDGE

Ramius inspected his status board. The Red October was heading southwest on track eight, the westernmost surveyed route on what Northern Fleet submariners called Gorshkov’s Railroad. His speed was thirteen knots. It never occurred to him that this was an unlucky number, an Anglo-Saxon superstition. They would hold this course and speed for another twenty hours. Immediately behind him, Kamarov was seated at the submarine’s gravitometer board, a large rolled chart behind him. The young lieutenant was chain-smoking, and looked tense as he ticked off their position on the chart. Ramius did not disturb him. Kamarov knew his job, and Borodin would relieve him in another two hours.

Installed in the Red October’s keel was a highly sensitive device called a gradiometer, essentially two large lead weights separated by a space of one hundred yards. A laser-computer system measured the space between the weights down to a fraction of an angstrom. Distortions of that distance or lateral movement of the weights indicated variations in the local gravitational field. The navigator compared these highly precise local values to the values of his chart. With careful use of gravitometers in the ship’s inertial navigation system, he could plot the vessel’s location to within a hundred metres, half the length of the ship.

The mass-sensing system was being added to all the submarines that could accommodate it. Younger attack boat commanders, Ramius knew, had used it to run the Railroad at high speed. Good for the commander’s ego, Ramius judged, but a little hard on the navigator. He felt no need for recklessness. Perhaps the letter had been a mistake … No, it prevented second thoughts. And the sensor suites on attack submarines simply were not good enough to detect the Red October so long as he maintained his silent routine. Ramius was certain of this; he had used them all. He would get where he wanted to go, do what he wanted to do, and nobody, not his own countrymen, not even the Americans, would be able to do a thing about it. That’s why earlier he had listened to the passage of an Alfa thirty miles to his east and smiled.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Judge Moore’s CIA car was a Cadillac limousine that came with a driver and a security man who kept an Uzi submachinegun under the dashboard. The driver turned right off Pennsylvania Avenue onto Executive Drive. More a parking lot than a street, this served the needs of senior officials and reporters who worked at the White House and the Executive Office Building, ‘Old State,’ that shining example of Institutional Grotesque that towered over the executive mansion. The driver pulled smoothly into a vacant VIP slot and jumped out to open the doors after the security man had swept the area with his eyes. The judge got out first and went ahead, and as Ryan caught up he found himself walking on the man’s left, half a step behind. It took a moment to remember that this instinctive action was exactly what the marine corps had taught him at Quantico was the proper way for a junior officer to accompany his betters. It forced Ryan to consider just how junior he was.

‘Ever been in here before, Jack?’

‘No, sir, I haven’t.’

Moore was amused. ‘That’s right, you come from around here. Now, if you came from farther away, you’d have made the trip a few times.’ A marine guard held the door open for them. Inside a Secret Service agent signed them in. Moore nodded and walked on.

‘Is this to be in the Cabinet Room, sir?’

‘Uh-uh. Situation Room, downstairs. It’s more comfortable and better equipped for this sort of thing. The slides you need are already down there, all set up. Nervous?’

‘Yes, sir, I sure am.’

Moore chuckled. ‘Settle down, boy. The president has wanted to meet you for some time now. He liked that report on terrorism you did a few years back, and I’ve shown him some more of your work, and the one on Russian missile submarine operations, and the one you just did on management practices in their arms industries. All in all, I think you’ll find he’s a pretty regular guy. Just be ready when he asks questions. He’ll hear every word you say, and he has a way of hitting you with good ones when he wants.’ Moore turned to descend a staircase. Ryan followed him down three flights, then they came to a door which led to a corridor. The judge turned left and walked to yet another door, this one guarded by another Secret Service agent.

‘Afternoon, Judge. The president will be down shortly.’

‘Thank you. This is Dr Ryan. I’ll vouch for him.’

‘Right.’ The agent waved them in.

It was not nearly as spectacular as Ryan had expected. The Situation Room was probably no larger than the Oval Office upstairs. There was expensive-looking wood panelling over what were probably concrete walls. This part of the White House dated back to the complete rebuilding job done under Truman. Ryan’s lectern was to his left as he went in. It stood in front and slightly to the right of a roughly diamond-shaped table, and behind it was the projection screen. A note on the lectern said the slide projector in the middle of the table was ready loaded and focused, and gave the order of the slides, which had been delivered from the National Reconnaissance Office.

Most of the people were already here, all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defence. The secretary of state, he remembered, was still shuttling back and forth between Athens and Ankara trying to settle the latest Cyprus situation. This perennial thorn in NATO’s southern flank had flared up a few weeks earlier when a Greek student had run over a Turkish child with his car and been killed by a gang minutes later. By the end of the day fifty people had been injured, and the putatively allied countries were once more at each other’s throats. Now two American aircraft carriers were cruising the Aegean as the secretary of state laboured to calm both sides. It was bad enough that two young people had died, Ryan thought, but not something to get a country’s army mobilized for.

Also at the table were General Thomas Hilton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Jeffrey Pelt, the president’s national security adviser, a pompous man Ryan had met years before at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. Pelt was going through some papers and dispatches. The chiefs were chatting amicably among themselves when the commandant of the marine corps looked up and spotted Ryan. He got up and walked over.

‘You Jack Ryan?’ General David Maxwell asked.

‘Yes, sir.’ Maxwell was a short, tough fireplug of a man whose stubbly haircut seemed to spark with aggressive energy. He looked Ryan over before shaking hands.

‘Pleased to meet you, son. I liked what you did over in London. Good for the corps.’ He referred to the terrorist incident in which Ryan had very nearly been killed. ‘That was good, quick action you took, Lieutenant.’

‘Thank you, sir. I was lucky.’

‘Good officer’s supposed to be lucky. I hear you got some interesting news for us.’

‘Yes sir. I think you will find it worth your time.’

‘Nervous?’ The general saw the answer and smiled thinly. ‘Relax, son. Everybody in this damned cellar puts his pants on the same way as you.’ He backhanded Ryan to the stomach and went back to his seat. The general whispered something to Admiral Daniel Foster, chief of naval operations. The CNO looked Ryan over for a moment before going back to what he was doing.

The president arrived a minute later. Everyone in the room stood as he walked to his chair, on Ryan’s right. He said a few quick things to Dr Pelt, then looked pointedly at the DCI.

‘Gentlemen, if we can bring this meeting to order, I think Judge Moore has some news for us.’

‘Thank you, Mr President. Gentlemen, we’re had an interesting development today with respect to the Soviet naval operation that started yesterday. I have asked Dr Ryan here to deliver the briefing.’

The president turned to Ryan. The younger man could feel himself being appraised. ‘You may proceed.’

Ryan took a sip of ice water from a glass hidden in the lectern. He had a wireless control for the slide projector and a choice of pointers. A separate high-intensity light illuminated his notes. The pages were full of errors and scribbled corrections. There had not been time to edit the copy.

‘Thank you, Mr President. Gentlemen, my name is Jack Ryan, and the subject of this briefing is recent Soviet naval activity in the North Atlantic. Before I get to that it will be necessary for me to lay a little groundwork. I trust you will bear with me for a few minutes, and please feel free to interrupt with questions at any time.’ Ryan clicked on the slide projector. The overhead lights near the screen dimmed automatically.

‘These photographs come to us courtesy of the British,’ Ryan said. He now had everyone’s attention. ‘The ship you see here is the Soviet fleet ballistic missile submarine Red October, photographed by a British agent in her dock at their submarine base at Polyarnyy, near Murmansk in northern Russia. As you can see, she is a very large vessel, about 650 feet long, a beam of roughly 85 feet, and an estimated submerged displacement of 32,000 tons. These figures are roughly comparable to those of a World War I battleship.’

Ryan lifted a pointer. ‘In addition to being considerably larger than our own Ohio-class Trident submarines, Red October has a number of technical differences. She carries twenty-six missiles instead of our twenty-four. The earlier Typhoon-class vessels, from which she was developed, only have twenty. October carries the new SS-N-20 sea-launched ballistic missile, the Seahawk. It’s a solid-fuel missile with a range of about six thousand nautical miles, and it carries eight multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, MIRV’s, each with an estimated yield of five hundred kilotons. It’s the same RV carried by their SS-18s, but there are less of them per launcher.

‘As you can see, the missile tubes are located forward of the sail instead of aft, as in our subs. The forward diving planes fold into slots in the hull here; ours go on the sail. She has twin screws; ours have one propeller. And finally, her hull is oblate. Instead of being cylindrical like ours, it is flattened out markedly top and bottom.’

Ryan clicked to the next slide. It showed two views superimposed, bow over stern. ‘These frames were delivered to us undeveloped. They were processed by the National Reconnaissance Office. Please note the doors here at the bow and here at the stern. The British were a little puzzled by these, and that’s why I was permitted to bring the shots over earlier this week. We weren’t able to figure out their function at the CIA either, and it was decided to seek the opinion of an outside consultant.’

‘Who decided?’ the secretary of defence demanded angrily. ‘Hell, I haven’t even seen them yet!’

‘We only got them Monday, Bert,’ Judge Moore replied soothingly. ‘These two on the screen are only four hours old. Ryan suggested an outside expert, and James Greer approved it. I concurred.’

‘His name is Oliver W. Tyler. Dr Tyler is a former naval officer who is now associate professor of engineering at the Naval Academy and a paid consultant to Sea Systems Command. He’s an expert in the analysis of Soviet naval technology. Skip – Dr Tyler – concluded that these doors are the intake and exhaust vents for a new silent propulsion system. He is currently developing a computer model of the system, and we hope to have this information by the end of the week. The system itself is rather interesting.’ Ryan explained Tyler’s analysis briefly.

‘Okay, Dr Ryan.’ The president leaned forward. ‘You’ve just told us that the Soviets have built a missile submarine that’s supposed to be hard for our men to locate. I don’t suppose that’s news. Go on.’

‘Red October’s captain is a man named Marko Ramius. That is a Lithuanian name, although we believe his internal passport designates his nationality as Great Russian. He is the son of a high Party official, and as good a submarine commander as they have. He’s taken out the lead ship of every Soviet submarine class for the past ten years.

‘Red October sailed last Friday. We do not know exactly what her orders were, but ordinarily their missile subs – that is, those with the newer long-range missiles – confine their activities to the Barents Sea and adjacent areas in which they can be protected from our attack boats by land-based ASW aircraft, their own surface ships, and attack submarines. About noon local time on Sunday, we noted increased search activity in the Barents Sea. At the time we took this to be a local ASW exercise, and by late Monday it looked to be a test of October’s new drive system.

‘As you all know, early yesterday saw a vast increase in Soviet naval activity. Nearly all of the blue-water ships assigned to their Northern Fleet are now at sea, accompanied by all of their fast fleet-replenishment vessels. Additional fleet auxiliaries sailed from the Baltic Fleet bases and the western Mediterranean. Even more disquieting is the fact that nearly every nuclear submarine assigned to the Northern Fleet – their largest – appears to be heading into the North Atlantic. This includes three from the Med, since submarines there come from the Northern Fleet, not the Black Sea Fleet. Now we think we know why all this happened.’ Ryan clicked to the next slide. This one showed the North Atlantic, from Florida to the Pole, with Soviet ships marked in red.

‘The day Red October sailed, Captain Ramius evidently posted a letter to Admiral Yuri Ilych Padorin. Padorin is chief of the Main Political Administration of their navy. We do not know what that letter said, but here we can see its results. This began to happen not four hours after that letter was opened. Fifty-eight nuclear-powered submarines and twenty-eight major surface combatants all headed our way. This is a remarkable reaction in four hours. This morning we learned what their orders are.

‘Gentlemen, these ships have been ordered to locate Red October, and if necessary, to sink her.’ Ryan paused for effect. ‘As you can see, the Soviet surface force is here, about halfway between the European mainland and Iceland. Their submarines, these in particular, are all heading southwest towards the US coast. Please note, there is no unusual activity on the Pacific side of either country – except we have information that Soviet fleet ballistic missile submarines in both oceans are being recalled to port.

‘Therefore, while we do not know exactly what Captain Ramius said, we can draw some conclusions from these patterns of activity. It would appear that they think he’s heading in our direction. Given his estimated speed as something between ten and thirty knots, he could be anywhere from here, below Iceland, to here, just off our coast. You will note that in either case he has successfully avoided detection by all four of these SOSUS barriers –’

‘Wait a minute. You say they have issued orders to their ships to sink one of their own submarines?’

‘Yes, Mr President.’

The president looked at the DCI. ‘This is reliable information, Judge?’

‘Yes, Mr President, we believe it to be solid.’

‘Okay, Dr Ryan, we’re all waiting. What’s this Ramius fellow up to?’

‘Mr President, our evaluation of this intelligence data is that Red October is attempting to defect to the United States.’

The room went very quiet for a moment. Ryan could hear the whirring of the fan in the slide projector as the National Security Council pondered that. He held his hands on the lectern to keep them from shaking under the stare of the ten men in front of him.

‘That’s a very interesting conclusion, Doctor.’ The president smiled. ‘Defend it.’

‘Mr President, no other conclusion fits the data. The really crucial thing, of course, is the recall of their other missile boats. They’ve never done that before. Add to that the fact that they have issued orders to sink their newest and most powerful missile sub, and that they are chasing in this direction, and one is left with the conclusion that they think she has left the reservation and is heading this way.’

‘Very well. What else could it be?’

‘Sir, he could have told them that he’s going to fire his missiles. At us, at them, the Chinese, or just about anyone else.’

‘And you don’t think so?’

‘No, Mr President. The SS-N-20 has a range of six thousand miles. That means he could have hit any target in the Northern Hemisphere from the moment he left the dock. He’s had six days to do that, but he has not fired. Moreover, if he had threatened to launch his birds, he would have to consider the possibility that the Soviets would enlist our assistance to locate and sink him. After all, if our surveillance systems detect the launch of nuclear-armed missiles in any direction, things could get very tense, very quickly.’

‘You know he could fire his birds in both directions and start World War III,’ the secretary of defence observed.

‘Yes, Mr Secretary. In that case we’d be dealing with a total madman – more than one, in fact. On our missile boats there are five officers, who must all agree and act in unison to fire their missiles. The Soviets have the same number. For political reasons their nuclear warhead security procedures are even more elaborate than ours. Five or more people, all of whom wish to end the world?’ Ryan shook his head. ‘That seems most unlikely, sir, and again, the Soviets would be well advised to inform us and enlist our aid.’

‘Do you really think they would inform us?’ Dr Pelt asked. His tone indicated what he thought.

‘Sir, that’s more a psychological question than a technical one, and I deal principally with technical intelligence. Some of the men in this room have met their Soviet counterparts and are better equipped to answer that than I am. My answer to your question, however, is yes. That would be the only rational thing for them to do, and while I do not regard the Soviets as entirely rational by our standards, they are rational by their own. They are not given to this sort of high-stakes gambling.’

‘Who is?’ the president observed. ‘What else might it be?’

‘Several things, sir. It could simply be a major naval exercise aimed at testing their ability to close our sea lines of communication and our ability to respond, both on short notice. We reject this possibility for several reasons. It’s too soon after their autumn naval exercise, CRIMSON STORM, and they are only using nuclear submarines; no diesel-powered boats seem to be involved. Clearly speed is at a premium in their operation. And as a practical matter, they do not run major exercises at this time of year.’

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