The Hunt for Red October

by Tom Clancy

  Shavrov’s mission was to do something about it. He couldn’t shoot, of course. His orders from Admiral Stralbo on the Kirov had been explicit about that. But he was carrying a pair of Atoll heat-seeking missiles which he would be sure to show the imperialists. He and his admiral expected that this would teach them a lesson: the Soviet Navy did not like having imperialist snoopers about, and accidents had been known to happen. It was a mission worthy of the effort it took.

  This effort was considerable. To avoid detection by the airborne radar Shavrov had to fly as low and slow as his fighter could operate, a bare twenty meters above the rough Atlantic; this way he would get lost in the sea return. His speed was two hundred knots. This made for excellent fuel economy, though his mission was at the ragged edge of his fuel load. It also made for very rough flying as his fighter bounced through the roiled air at the wave tops. There was a low-hanging mist that cut visibility to a few kilometers. So much the better, he thought. The nature of the mission had chosen him, rather than the other way around. He was one of the few Soviet pilots experienced in low-level flying. Shavrov had not become a sailor-pilot by himself. He’d started flying attack helicopters for frontal aviation in Afghanistan, graduating to fixed-wing aircraft after a year’s bloody apprenticeship. Shavrov was an expert in nap-of-the-earth flying, having learned it by necessity, hunting the bandits and counterrevolutionaries that hid in the towering mountains like hydrophobic rats. This skill had made him attractive to the fleet, which had transferred him to sea duty without his having had much say in the matter. After a few months he had no complaints, his perqs and extra pay being more attractive than his former frontal aviation base on the Chinese border. Being one of the few hundred carrier-qualified Soviet airmen had softened the blow of missing his chance to fly the new MiG-27, though with luck, if the new full-sized carrier were ever finished, he’d have the chance to fly the naval version of that wonderful bird. Shavrov could wait for that, and with a few successful missions like this one he might have his squadron command.

  He stopped daydreaming—the mission was too demanding for that. This was real flying. He’d never flown against Americans, only against the weapons they gave to the Afghan bandits. He had lost friends to those weapons, some of whom had survived their crashes only to be done to death by the Afghan savages in ways that would have made even a German puke. It would be good to teach the imperialists a lesson personally.

  The radar signal was growing stronger. Beneath his ejection seat a tape recorder was making a continuous record of the signal characteristics of the American aircraft so that the scientific people would be able to devise a means of jamming and foiling the vaunted American flying eye. The aircraft was only a converted 707, a glorified passenger plane, hardly a worthy opponent for a crack fighter pilot! Shavrov checked his chart. He’d have to find it soon. Next he checked his fuel. He’d dropped his last external tank a few minutes earlier, and all he had now was his internal fuel. The turbofan was guzzling fuel, something he had to keep an eye on. He planned to have only five or ten minutes of fuel left when he returned to his ship. This did not trouble him. He already had over a hundred carrier landings.

  There! His hawk’s eyes caught the glint of sun off metal at one o’clock high. Shavrov eased back on his stick and increased power gently, bringing his Forger into a climb. A minute later he was at two thousand meters. He could see the Sentry now, its blue paint blending neatly into the darkening sky. He was coming up beneath its tail, and with luck the empennage would shield him from the rotating radar antenna. Perfect! He’d blaze by her a few times, letting the flight crew see his Atolls, and—

  It took Shavrov a moment to realize that he had a wingman.

  Two wingmen.

  Fifty meters to his left and right, a pair of American F-15 Eagle fighters. The visored face of one pilot was staring at him.

  “YAK-106, YAK-106, please acknowledge.” The voice on the SSB (single side band) radio circuit spoke flawless Russian. Shavrov did not acknowledge. They had read the number off his engine intake housing before he had known they were there.

  “106, 106, this is the Sentry aircraft you are now approaching. Please identify yourself and your intentions. We get a little anxious when a stray fighter comes our way, so we’ve had three following you for the past hundred kilometers.”

  Three? Shavrov turned his head around. A third Eagle with four sparrow missiles was hanging fifty meters from his tail, his “six.”

  “Our men compliment you on your ability to fly low and slow, 106.”

  Lieutenant Shavrov was shaking with rage as he passed four thousand meters, still eight thousand from the American AWACS. He had checked his six every thirty seconds on the way in. The Americans must have been riding back there, hidden in the mist, and vectored in on him by instructions from the Sentry. He swore to himself and held course. He’d teach that AWACS a lesson!

  “Break off, 106.” It was a cool voice, without emotion except perhaps a trace of irony. “106, if you do not break off, we will consider your mission to be hostile. Think about it, 106. You are beyond radar coverage of your own ships, and you are not yet within missile range of us.”

  Shavrov looked to his right. The Eagle was breaking off—so was the one to the left. Was it a gesture, taking the heat off of him and expecting some courtesy in return? Or were they clearing the way for the one behind him—he checked, still there—to shoot? There was no telling what these imperialist criminals would do; he was at least a minute from the fringe of their missile range. Shavrov was anything but a coward. Neither was he a fool. He moved his stick, curving his fighter a few degrees to the right.

  “Thank you, 106,” the voice acknowledged. “You see, we have some trainee operators aboard. Two of them are women, and we don’t want them to get rattled their first time out.” Suddenly it was too much. Shavrov thumbed the radio switch on his stick.

  “Shall I tell you what you can do with your women, Yankee?”

  “You are nekulturny, 106,” the voice replied softly. “Perhaps the long overwater flight has made you nervous. You must be about at the limit of your internal fuel. Bastard of a day to fly, what with all these crazy, shifting winds. Do you need a position check, over?”

  “Negative, Yankee!”

  “Course back to Kiev is one-eight-five, true. Have to be careful using a magnetic compass this far north, you know. Distance to Kiev is 318.6 kilometers. Warning—there is a rapidly moving cold front moving in from the southwest. That’s going to make flying a little rough in a few hours. Do you require an escort back to Kiev?”

  “Pig!” Shavrov swore to himself. He switched his radio off, cursing himself for his lack of discipline. He had allowed the Americans to wound his pride. Like most fighter pilots, he had a surfeit of that.

  “106, we did not copy your last transmission. Two of my Eagles are heading that way. They will form up on you and see that you get home safely. Have a happy day, Comrade. Sentry-November, out.”

  The American lieutenant turned to his colonel. He couldn’t keep a straight face any longer. “God, I thought I’d strangle talking like that!” He sipped some Coke from a plastic cup. “He really thought he’d sneak up on us.”

  “In case you didn’t notice, he did get within a mile of Atoll range, and we don’t have authorization to shoot at him until he flips one at us—which might wreck our day,” the colonel grumped. “Nice job of twisting his tail, Lieutenant.”

  “A pleasure, Colonel.” The operator looked at his screen. “Well, he’s heading back to momma, with Cobras 3 and 4 on his six. He’s going to be one unhappy Russkie when he gets home. If he gets home. Even with those drop tanks, he must be near his range limit.” He thought for a moment. “Colonel, if they do this again, how ’bout we offer to take the guy home with us?”

  “Get a Forger—what for? I suppose the navy’d like to have one to play with, they don’t get much of Ivan’s hardware, but the Forger’s a piece of junk.”

  Shavrov was tempted to
firewall his engine but restrained himself. He’d already shown enough personal weakness for one day. Besides, his YAK could only break Mach 1 in a dive. Those Eagles could do it straight up, and they had plenty of fuel. He saw that they both carried FAST-pack conformal fuel cells. They could cross whole oceans with those. Damn the Americans and their arrogance! Damn his own intelligence officer for telling him he could sneak up on the Sentry! Let the air-to-air armed Backfires go after them. They could handle that famed overbred passenger bus, could get to it faster than its fighter guardians could react.

  The Americans, he saw, were not lying about the weather front. A line of cold weather squawls racing northeast was just on the horizon as he approached the Kiev. The Eagles backed off as he approached the formation. One American pilot pulled alongside briefly to wave goodbye. His head bobbed at Shavrov’s return gesture. The Eagles paired up and turned back north.

  Five minutes later he was aboard the Kiev, still pale with rage. As soon as the wheels were chocked he jumped to the carrier deck, stomping off to see his squadron commander.

  The Kremlin

  The city of Moscow was justly famous for its subway system. For a pittance, people could ride nearly anywhere they wanted on a modern, safe, garishly decorated electric railway system. In case of war, the underground tunnels could serve as a bomb shelter for the citizens of Moscow. This secondary use was the result of the efforts of Nikita Khrushchev, who when construction was begun in the mid-thirties had suggested to Stalin that the system be driven deep. Stalin had approved. The shelter consideration had been decades ahead of its time; nuclear fission had then only been a theory, fusion hardly thought of at all.

  On a spur of the line running from Sverdlov Square to the old airport, which ran near the Kremlin, workers bored a tunnel that was later closed off with a ten-meter-thick steel and concrete plug. The hundred-meter-long space was connected to the Kremlin by a pair of elevator shafts, and over time it had been converted to an emergency command center from which the Politburo could control the entire Soviet empire. The tunnel was also a convenient means of going unseen from the city to a small airport from which Politburo members could be flown to their ultimate redoubt, beneath the granite monolith at Zhiguli. Neither command post was a secret to the West—both had existed far too long for that—but the KGB confidently reported that nothing in the Western arsenals could smash through the hundreds of feet of rock which in both places separated the Politburo from the surface.

  This fact was of little comfort to Admiral Yuri Ilych Padorin. He found himself seated at the far end of a ten-meter-long conference table looking at the grim faces of the ten Politburo members, the inner circle that alone made the strategic decisions affecting the fate of his country. None of them were officers. Those in uniform reported to these men. Up the table to his left was Admiral Sergey Gorshkov, who had disassociated himself from this affair with consummate skill, even producing a letter in which he had opposed Ramius’ appointment to command the Red October. Padorin, as chief of the Main Political Administration, had successfully blocked Ramius’ transfer, pointing out that Gorshkov’s candidate for command was occasionally late in paying his Party dues and did not speak up at the regular meetings often enough for an officer of his rank. The truth was that Gorshkov’s candidate was not so proficient an officer as Ramius, whom Gorshkov had wanted for his own operations staff, a post that Ramius had successfully evaded for years.

  Party General Secretary and President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Andre Narmonov shifted his gaze to Padorin. His face gave nothing away. It never did, unless he wished it to—which was rare enough. Narmonov had succeeded Andropov when the latter had suffered a heart attack. There were rumors about that, but in the Soviet Union there are always rumors. Not since the days of Laventri Beria had the security chieftain come so close to power, and senior Party officials had allowed themselves to forget that. It would not be forgotten again. Bringing the KGB to heel had taken a year, a necessary measure to secure the privileges of the Party elite from the supposed reforms of the Andropov clique.

  Narmonov was the apparatchik par excellence. He had first gained prominence as a factory manager, an engineer with a reputation for fulfilling his quota early, a man who produced results. He had risen steadily by using his own talents and those of others, rewarding those he had to, ignoring those he could. His position as general secretary of the Communist Party was not entirely secure. It was still early in his stewardship of the Party, and he depended on a loose coalition of colleagues—not friends, these men did not make friends. His succession to this chair had resulted more from ties within the Party structure than from personal ability, and his position would depend on consensus rule for years, until such time as his will could dictate policy.

  Narmonov’s dark eyes, Padorin could see, were red from tobacco smoke. The ventilation system down here had never worked properly. The general secretary squinted at Padorin from the other end of the table as he decided what to say, what would please the members of this cabal, these ten old, passionless men.

  “Comrade Admiral,” he began coldly, “we have heard from Comrade Gorshkov what the chances are of finding and destroying this rebellious submarine before it can complete its unimaginable crime. We are not pleased. Nor are we pleased with the fantastic error in judgment that gave command of our most valuable ship to this slug. What I want to know from you, Comrade, is what happened to the zampolit aboard, and what security measures were taken by your office to prevent this infamy from taking place!”

  There was no fear in Narmonov’s voice, but Padorin knew it had to be there. This “fantastic error” could ultimately be laid at the chairman’s feet by members who wanted another in that chair—unless he were able somehow to separate himself from it. If this meant Padorin’s skin, that was the admiral’s problem. Narmonov had had men flayed before.

  Padorin had prepared himself for this over several days. He was a man who had lived through months of intensive combat operations and had several boats sunk from under him. If his body was softer now, his mind was not. Whatever his fate might be, Padorin was determined to meet it with dignity. If they remember me as a fool, he thought, it will be as a courageous fool. He had little left to live for in any case. “Comrade General Secretary,” he began, “the political officer aboard Red October was Captain Ivan Yurievich Putin, a stalwart and faithful Party member. I cannot imagine—”

  “Comrade Padorin,” Defense Minister Ustinov interrupted, “we presume that you also could not imagine the unbelievable treachery of this Ramius. You now expect us to trust your judgment on this man also?”

  “The most disturbing thing of all,” added Mikhail Alexandrov, the Party theoretician who had replaced the dead Mikhail Suslov and was even more determined than the departed ideologue to be simon-pure on Party doctrine, “is how tolerant the Main Political Administration has been toward this renegade. It is amazing, particularly in view of his obvious efforts to construct his own personality cult throughout the submarine service, even in the political arm, it would seem. Your criminal willingness to overlook this—this obvious aberration from Party policy—does not make your judgment appear very sound.”

  “Comrades, you are correct in judging that I erred badly in approving Ramius for command, and also that we allowed him to select most of Red October’s senior officers. At the same time, we chose some years ago to do things in this way, to keep officers associated with a single ship for many years, and to give the captain great sway over their careers. This is an operational question, not a political one.”

  “We have already considered that,” Narmonov replied. “It is true that in this case there is enough blame for more than one man.” Gorshkov didn’t move, but the message was explicit: his effort to separate himself from this scandal had failed. Narmonov didn’t care how many heads it took to prop up his chair.

  “Comrade Chairman,” Gorshkov objected, “the efficiency of the fleet—”

  “Efficiency?” A
lexandrov said. “Efficiency. This Lithuanian half-breed is efficiently making fools of our fleet with his chosen officers while our remaining ships blunder about like newly castrated cattle.” Alexandrov alluded to his first job on a state farm. A fitting beginning, it was generally thought, for the man who held the position of chief ideologue was as popular in Moscow as the plague, but the Politburo had to have him or one like him. The ideological chieftain was always the kingmaker. Whose side was he on now—in addition to his own?

  “The most likely explanation is that Putin was murdered,” Padorin continued. “He alone of the officers left behind a wife and family.”

  “That’s another question, Comrade Admiral.” Narmonov seized this issue. “Why is it that none of these men are married? Didn’t that tell you something? Must we of the Politburo supervise everything? Can’t you think for yourselves?”

  As if you want us to, Padorin thought. “Comrade General Secretary, most of our submarine commanders prefer young, unmarried officers in their wardrooms. Duty at sea is demanding, and single men have fewer distractions. Moreover, each of the senior officers aboard is a Party member in good standing with a praiseworthy record. Ramius has been treacherous, there is no denying that, and I would gladly kill the son of a bitch with my own hands—but he has deceived more good men than there are in this room.”

  “Indeed,” Alexandrov observed. “And now that we are in this mess, how do we get out of it?”