The Hunt for Red October

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.