THE SEVENTEENTH DAY
SUNDAY, 19 DECEMBER
The Red October
“Eight more hours,” Ryan whispered to himself. That’s what they had told him. An eight-hour run to Norfolk. He was back at the rudder diving-plane controls by his own request. Operating them was the only thing he knew how to do, and he had to do something. The October was still badly shorthanded. Nearly all of the Americans were helping out in the reactor and engine spaces aft. Only Mancuso, Ramius, and himself were in control. Bugayev, with the help of Jones, was monitoring the sonar equipment a few feet away, and the medical people were still worrying over Williams in sick bay. The cook was shuttling back and forth with sandwiches and coffee, which Ryan found disappointing, probably because he had been spoiled by Greer’s.
Ramius was half sitting on the rail that surrounded the periscope pedestal. The leg wound was not bleeding, but it had to be hurting more than the man admitted since he was letting Mancuso check the instruments and handle the navigation.
“Rudder amidships,” Mancuso ordered.
“Midships,” Ryan turned the wheel back to the right to center it, checking his rudder angle indicator. “Rudder is amidships, steady on course one-two-zero.”
Mancuso frowned at his chart, nervous at being forced to pilot the massive submarine in so cavalier a manner. “You have to be careful around here. The sandbar keeps building up from the southerly littoral drift, and they have to dredge it every few months. The storms this area’s been having can’t have helped much.” Mancuso went back to look through the periscope.
“I am told this is a dangerous area,” Ramius said.
“The graveyard of the Atlantic,” Mancuso confirmed. “A lot of ships have died along the Outer Banks. Weather and current conditions are bad enough. The Germans are supposed to have had a hell of a time here during the war. Your charts don’t show it, but there’s hundreds of wrecks spotted on the bottom.” He went back to the chart table. “Anyway, we give this place a nice wide berth, and we don’t turn north till about here.” He traced a line on the chart.
“These are your waters,” Ramius agreed.
They were in a loose three-boat formation. The Dallas was leading them out to sea, the Pogy was trailing. All three boats were traveling flooded-down, their decks nearly awash, with no one on their bridge stations. All visual navigation was being done by periscope. No radar sets were operating. None of the three boats was making any electronic noise. Ryan glanced casually at the chart table. They were beyond the inlet proper, but the chart was marked with sandbars for several more miles.
Nor were they using the Red October’s caterpillar drive system. It had turned out to be almost exactly what Skip Tyler had predicted. There were two sets of tunnel impellers, a pair about a third of the way back from the bow and three more just aft of midships. Mancuso and his engineers had examined the plans with great interest, then commented at length on the quality of the caterpillar design.
For his part, Ramius had not wanted to believe that he had been detected so early on. Mancuso had ultimately produced Jones with his personal map to show the October’s estimated course off Iceland. Though a few miles off the ship’s log, it was too close to have been a coincidence.
“Your sonar must be better than we expected,” Ramius grumbled a few feet from Ryan’s control station.
“It is pretty good,” Mancuso allowed. “Better yet, there’s Jonesy—he’s the best sonarman I’ve ever had.”
“So young, and so smart.”
“We get a lot of them that way,” Mancuso smiled. “Never as many as we’d like, of course, but our kids are all volunteers. They know what they’re getting into. We’re picky about who we take, and then we train the hell out of ’em.”
“Conn, sonar.” It was Jones’ voice. “Dallas is diving, sir.”
“Very well.” Mancuso lit a cigarette as he went to the intercom phone. He punched the button for engineering. “Tell Mannion we need him forward. We’ll be diving in a few minutes. Yeah.” He hung up and went back to the chart.
“You have them for more than three years, then?” Ramius asked.
“Oh, yeah. Hell, otherwise we’d be letting them go right after they’re fully trained, right?”
Why couldn’t the Soviet Navy get and retain people like this? Ramius thought. He knew the answer all too well. The Americans fed their men decently, gave them a proper mess room, paid them decently, gave them trust—all the things he had fought twenty years for.
“You need me to work the vents?” Mannion said, coming in.
“Yeah, Pat, we’ll dive in another two or three minutes.”
Mannion gave the chart a quick look on his way to the vent manifold.
Ramius hobbled to the chart. “They tell us that your officers are chosen from the bourgeois classes to control ordinary sailors from the working class.”
Mannion ran his hands over the vent controls. There sure were enough of them. He’d spent two hours the previous day figuring the complex system out. “That’s true, sir. Our officers do come from the ruling class. Just look at me,” he said deadpan. Mannion’s skin was about the color of coffee grounds, his accent pure South Bronx.
“But you are a black man,” Ramius objected, missing the jibe.
“Sure, we’re a real ethnic boat.” Mancuso looked through the periscope again. “A Guinea skipper, a black navigator, and a crazy sonarman.”
“I heard that, sir!” Jones called out rather than use the intercom speaker. “Gertrude message from Dallas. Everything looks okay. They’re waiting for us. Last gertrude message for a while.”
“Conn, aye. We’re clear, finally. We can dive whenever you wish, Captain Ramius,” Mancuso said.
“Comrade Mannion, vent the ballast tanks,” Ramius said. The October had never actually surfaced and was still rigged for dive.
“Aye aye, sir.” The lieutenant turned the topmost rank of master switches on the hydraulic controls.
Ryan winced. The sound made him think of a million toilets being flushed at once.
“Five degrees down on the planes, Ryan,” Ramius said.
“Five degrees down, aye.” Ryan pushed forward on the yoke. “Planes five degrees down.”
“She’s slow going down,” Mannion observed, watching the handpainted depth-gauge replacement. “So durn big.”
“Yeah,” Mancuso said. The needle passed twenty meters.
“Planes to zero,” Ramius said.
“Planes to zero angle, aye.” Ryan pulled back on the control. It took thirty seconds for the submarine to settle. She seemed very slow to respond to the controls. Ryan had thought that submarines were as responsive as aircraft.
“Make her a little light, Pat. Enough that it takes a degree of down to hold her level,” Mancuso said.
“Uh-huh.” Mannion frowned, checking the depth gauge. The ballast tanks were now fully flooded, and the balancing act would have to be done with the much smaller trim tanks. It took him five minutes to get the balance exactly right.
“Sorry, gentlemen. I’m afraid she’s too big to dial in quick,” he said, embarrassed with himself.
Ramius was impressed but too annoyed to show it. He had expected the American captain to take longer than this to do it himself. Trimming a strange sub so expertly on his first try…
“Okay, now we can come around north,” Mancuso said. They were two miles past the last charted bar. “Recommend new course zero-zero-eight, Captain.”
“Ryan, rudder left ten degrees,” Ramius ordered. “Come to zero-zero-eight.”
“Okay, rudder left ten degrees,” Ryan responded, keeping one eye on the rudder indicator, the other on the gyro compass repeater. “Come to oh-oh-eight.”
“Caution, Ryan. He turns slowly, but once turning you must use much backward—”
“Opposite,” Mancuso corrected politely.
“Yes, opposite rudder to stop him on proper course.”
“Right.”
“Captain, do you
have rudder problems?” Mancuso asked. “From tracking you it seemed that your turning circle was rather large.”
“With the caterpillar it is. The flow from the tunnels strikes the rudder very hard, and it flutters if you use too much rudder. On our first sea trials, we had damage from this. It comes from—how do you say—the come-together of the two caterpillar tunnels.”
“Does this affect operations with the propellers?” Mannion asked.
“No, only with the caterpillar.”
Mancuso didn’t like that. It didn’t really matter. The plan was a simple, direct one. The three boats would make a straight dash to Norfolk. The two American attack boats would leapfrog forward at thirty knots to sniff out the areas ahead while the October plodded along at a constant twenty.
Ryan began to ease his rudder as the bow came around. He waited too long. Despite five degrees of right rudder, the bow swung right past the intended course, and the gyro repeater clicked accusingly on every third degree until it stopped at zero-zero-one. It took another two minutes to get back on the proper course.
“Sorry about that. Steady on zero-zero-eight,” he finally reported.
Ramius was forgiving. “You learn fast, Ryan. Perhaps one day you will be a true sailor.”
“No thanks! The one thing I’ve learned on this trip is that you guys earn every nickel you get.”
“Don’t like subs?” Mannion chuckled.
“No place to jog.”
“True. Unless you still need me, Captain, I’m ready to go aft. The engine room’s awful shorthanded,” Mannion said.
Ramius nodded. Was he from the ruling class? the captain wondered.
The V. K. Konovalov
Tupolev was heading back west. The fleet order had instructed everyone but his Alfa and one other to return home at twenty knots. Tupolev was to move west for two and half hours. Now he was on a reciprocal heading at five knots, about the top speed the Alfa could travel without making much noise. The idea was that his sub would be lost in the shuffle. So, an Ohio was heading for Norfolk—or Charleston more probably. In any case, Tupolev would circle quietly and observe. The Red October was destroyed. That much he knew from the ops order. Tupolev shook his head. How could Marko have done such a thing? Whatever the answer, he had paid for his treason with his life.
The Pentagon
“I’d feel better if we had some more air cover,” Admiral Foster said, leaning against the wall.
“Agreed, sir, but we can’t be so obvious, can we?” General Harris asked.
A pair of P-3Bs was now sweeping the track from Hatteras to the Virginia Capes as though on a routine training mission. Most of the other Orions were far out at sea. The Soviet fleet was already four hundred miles offshore. The three surface groups had rejoined and were now ringed by their submarines. The Kennedy, America, and Nimitz were five hundred miles to their east, and the New Jersey was dropping back. The Russians would be watched all the way home. The carrier battle groups would be following them all the way to Iceland, keeping a discreet distance and maintaining air groups at the fringe of their radar coverage continuously, just to let them know that the United States still cared. Aircraft based in Iceland would track them the rest of the way home.
HMS Invincible was now out of operation and about halfway home. American attack subs were returning to normal patrol patterns, and all Soviet subs were reported to be off the coast, though this data was sketchy. They were traveling in loose packs and the noise generated made tracking difficult for the patrolling Orions, which were short of sonobuoys. Still and all, the operation was about over, the J-3 judged.
“You heading for Norfolk, Admiral?” Harris asked.
“Thought I might get together with CINCLANT, a post-action conference, you understand,” Foster said.
“Aye aye, sir,” Harris said.
The New Jersey
She was traveling at twelve knots, with a destroyer fueling on either beam. Commodore Eaton was in the flag plot. It was all over and nothing had happened, thank God. The Soviets were now a hundred miles ahead, within Tomahawk range but well beyond everything else. All in all, he was satisfied. His force had operated successfully with the Tarawa, which was now headed south to Mayport, Florida. He hoped they’d be able to do this again soon. It had been a long time since a flag officer on a battleship had had a carrier respond to his command. They had kept the Kirov force under continuous surveillance. If there had been a battle, Eaton was convinced that they’d have handled Ivan. More importantly, he was certain that Ivan knew it. All they awaited now was the order to return to Norfolk. It would be nice to be back home for Christmas. He figured his men had earned it. Many of the battleship’s men were oldtimers, and nearly everyone had a family.
The Red October
Ping. Jones noted the time on his pad and called out, “Captain, just got a ping from Pogy.”
The Pogy was now ten miles ahead of the October and Dallas. The idea was that after she got ahead and listened for ten minutes, a single ping from her active sonar would signal that the ten miles to the Pogy and the twenty or more miles beyond her were clear. The Pogy would drift slowly to confirm this, and a mile to the October’s east the Dallas went to full speed to leapfrog ten miles beyond the other attack sub.
Jones was experimenting with the Russian sonar. The active gear, he’d found, was not too bad. The passive systems he didn’t want to think about. When the Red October had been lying still in Pamlico Sound, he’d been unable to track in on the American subs. They had also been still, with their reactors only turning generators, but they had been no more than a mile away. He was disappointed that he’d not been able to locate them.
The officer with him, Bugayev, was a friendly enough guy. At first he’d been a little standoffish—as if he were a lord and I were a serf, Jones thought—until he’d seen how the skipper treated him. This surprised Jones. From what little he knew of Communism, he had expected everyone to be fairly equal. Well, he decided, that’s what I get from reading Das Kapital in a freshman poli-sci course. It made a lot more sense to look at what Communism built. Garbage, mostly. The enlisted men didn’t even have their own mess room. Wasn’t that some crap! Eating your meals in your bunk rooms!
Jones had taken an hour—when he was supposed to be sleeping—to explore the submarine. Mr. Mannion had joined him. They started in the bunkroom. The individual footlockers didn’t lock—probably so that officers could rifle through them. Jones and Mannion did just that. There was nothing of interest. Even the sailor porn was junk. The poses were just plain dumb, and the women—well, Jones had grown up in California. Garbage. It was not at all hard for him to understand why the Russians wanted to defect.
The missile had been interesting. He and Mannion opened an inspection hatch to examine the inside of the missile. Not too shabby, they thought. There was a little too much loose wiring, but that probably made testing easier. The missile seemed awfully big. So, he thought, that’s what the bastards have been aiming at us. He wondered if the navy would hold onto a few. If it was ever necessary to flip some at old Ivan, might as well include a couple of his own. Dumb idea, Jonesy, he said to himself. He didn’t ever want those goddamned things to fly. One thing was for sure: everything on this bucket would be stripped off, tested, taken apart, tested again—and he was the navy’s number one expert on Russian sonar. Maybe he’d be present during the analysis…It might be worth staying in the navy a few extra months for.
Jones lit a cigarette. “Want one of mine, Mr. Bugayev?” He held his pack out to the electronics officer.
“Thank you, Jones. You were in university?” The lieutenant took the American cigarette that he’d wanted but been too proud to ask for. It was dawning on him slowly that this enlisted man was his technical equal. Though not a qualified watch officer, Jones could operate and maintain sonar gear as well as anyone he’d known.
“Yes, sir.” It never hurt to call officers sir, Jones knew. Especially the dumb ones. “California Institute of Techn
ology. Five semesters completed. A average. I didn’t finish.”
“Why did you leave?”
Jones smiled. “Well, sir, you gotta understand that Cal Tech is, well, kinda a funny place. I played a little trick on one of my professors. He was working with strobe lights for high-speed photography, and I rigged a little switch to work the room lights off the strobe. Unfortunately there was a short in the switch, and it started this little electrical fire.” Which had burned out a lab, destroying three months of data and fifteen thousand dollars of equipment. “That broke the rules.”
“What did you study?”
“I was headin’ for a degree in electrical engineering, with a strong minor in cybernetics. Three semesters to go. I’ll get it, then my masters, then my doctorate, and then I’ll go back to work for the navy as a civilian.”
“Why are you a sonar operator?” Bugayev sat down. He had never spoken like this with an enlisted man.
“Hell, sir, it’s fun! When something’s going on—you know, a war game, tracking another sub, like that—I am the skipper. All the captain does is react to the data I give him.”