by Tom Clancy
Now! He flipped the switch, which deployed half a dozen high-intensity magnesium parachute flares. All four Linebacker aircraft acted within seconds. Suddenly the Kirov was inside a box of blue-white magnesium light. Richardson pulled back on his stick, banking into a climbing turn past the battle cruiser. The brilliant light dazzled him, but he could see the graceful lines of the Soviet warship as she was turning hard on the choppy seas, her men running along the deck like ants.
If we were serious, you’d all be dead now—get the message?
Richardson thumbed his radio switch. “Linebacker Lead to Sentry-Delta,” he said in the clear. “Robin Hood, repeat, Robin Hood. Linebacker flight, this is lead, form up on me. Let’s go home!”
“Linebacker flight, this is Sentry-Delta. Outstanding!” the controller responded. “Be advised that Kiev has a pair of Forgers in the air, thirty miles east, heading your way. They’ll have to hustle to catch up. Will advise. Out.”
Richardson did some fast arithmetic in his head. They probably could not catch up, and even if they did, twelve Phantoms from the 107th Fighter Interceptor Group were ready for it.
“Hot damn, lead!” Linebacker 4, the crop duster, moved gingerly into his slot. “Did you see those turkeys pointing up at us? God damn, did we rattle their cage!”
“Heads up for Forgers,” Richardson cautioned, grinning ear to ear inside his oxygen mask. Second-line flyers, hell!
“Let ’em come,” Linebacker 4 replied. “Any of those bastards closes me and my thirty, it’ll be the last mistake he ever makes!” Four was a little too aggressive for Richardson’s liking, but the man did know how to drive his Hog.
“Linebacker flight, this is Sentry-Delta. The Forgers have turned back. You’re in the clear. Out.”
“Roger that, out. Okay, flight, let’s settle down and head home. I guess we’ve earned our pay for the month.” Richardson looked to make sure he was on an open frequency. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Barry Friendly,” he said, using the in-house U.S. Air public relations joke that had become a tradition in the 175th. “I hope you have enjoyed your flight, and thank you for flying Warthog Air.”
The Kirov
On the Kirov, Admiral Stralbo raced from the combat information center to the flag bridge, too late. They had acquired the low-level raiders only a minute from the outer screen. The box of flares was already behind the battle cruiser, several still burning in the water. The bridge crew, he saw, was rattled.
“Sixty to seventy seconds before they were on us, Comrade Admiral,” the flag captain reported, “we were tracking the orbiting attack force and these four—we think, four—racing in under our radar coverage. We had missile lock on two of them despite their jamming.”
Stralbo frowned. That performance was not nearly good enough. If the strike had been real, the Kirov would have been badly damaged at least. The Americans would gladly trade a pair of fighters for a nuclear powered cruiser. If all American aircraft attacked like this…
“The arrogance of the Americans is fantastic!” The fleet zampolit swore.
“It was foolish to provoke them,” Stralbo observed sourly. “I knew that something like that would happen, but I expected it from Kennedy.”
“That was a mistake, a pilot error,” the political officer replied.
“Indeed, Vasily. And this was no mistake! They just sent us a message, telling us that we are fifteen hundred kilometers from their shore without useful air cover, and that they have over five hundred fighters waiting to pounce on us from the west. In the meantime Kennedy is stalking us to the east like a rabid wolf. We are not in an attractive position.”
“The Americans would not be so brash.”
“Are you sure of that, Comrade Political Officer? Sure? What if one of their aircraft commits a ‘pilot error’? And sinks one of our destroyers? And what if the American president gets a direct link to Moscow to apologize before we can ever report it? They swear it was an accident and promise to punish the stupid pilot—then what? You think the imperialists are so predictable this close to their own coastline? I do not. I think they are praying for the smallest excuse to pounce on us. Come to my cabin. We must consider this.”
The two men went aft. Stralbo’s cabin was a spartan affair. The only decoration on the wall was a print of Lenin speaking to Red Guards.
“What is our mission, Vasily?” Stralbo asked.
“To support our submarines, help them to conduct the search—”
“Exactly. Our mission is to support, not to conduct offensive operations. The Americans do not want us here. Objectively, I can understand this. With all our missiles we are a threat to them.”
“But our orders are not to threaten them,” the zampolit protested. “Why would we want to strike their homeland?”
“And, of course, the imperialists recognize that we are peaceful socialists! Come now, Vasily, these are our enemies! Of course they do not trust us. Of course they wish to attack us, given the smallest excuse. They are already interfering with our search, pretending to help. They do not want us here—and in allowing ourselves to be provoked by their aggressive actions, we fall into their trap.” The admiral stared down at his desk. “Well, we shall change that. I will order the fleet to discontinue anything that may appear the least bit aggressive. We will end all air operations beyond normal local patrolling. We will not harass their nearby fleet units. We will use only normal navigational radars.”
“And?”
“And we will swallow our pride and be as meek as mice. Whatever provocation they make, we will not react to it.”
“Some will call this cowardice, Comrade Admiral,” the zampolit warned.
Stralbo had expected that. “Vasily, don’t you see? In pretending to attack us they have already victimized us. They force us to activate our newest and most secret defense systems so they can gather intelligence on our radars and fire control systems. They examine the performance of our fighters and helicopters, the maneuverability of our ships, and most of all, our command and control. We shall put an end to that. Our primary mission is too important. If they continue to provoke us, we will act as though our mission is indeed peaceful—which it is as far as they are concerned—and protest our innocence. And we make them the aggressors. If they continue to provoke us, we shall watch to see what their tactics are, and give them nothing in return. Or would you prefer that they prevent us from carrying out our mission?”
The zampolit mumbled his consent. If they failed in their mission, the charge of cowardice would be a small matter indeed. If they found the renegade submarine, they’d be heroes regardless of what else happened.
The Dallas
How long had he been on duty? Jones wondered. He could have checked easily enough by punching the button on his digital watch, but the sonarman didn’t want to. It would be too depressing. Me and my big mouth—you bet, Skipper, my ass! he swore to himself. He’d detected the sub at a range of about twenty miles, maybe, had just barely gotten her—and the fuckin’ Atlantic Ocean was three thousand miles across, at least sixty footprint diameters. He’d need more than luck now.
Well, he did get a Hollywood shower out of it. Ordinarily a shower on a freshwater-poor ship meant a few seconds of wetting down and a minute or so of lathering, followed by a few more seconds of rinsing the suds off. It got you clean but was not very satisfying. This was an improvement over the old days, the oldtimers liked to say. But back then, Jones often responded, the sailors had to pull oars—or run off diesel and batteries, which amounted to the same thing. A Hollywood shower is something a sailor starts thinking about after a few days at sea. You leave the water running, a long, continuous stream of wonderfully warm water. Commander Mancuso was given to awarding this sensuous pastime in return for above-average performance. It gave people something tangible to work for. You couldn’t spend extra money on a sub, and there was no beer or women.
Old movies—they were making an effort on that score. The boat’s library wasn’t bad,
when you had time to sort through the jumble. And the Dallas had a pair of Apple computers and a few dozen game programs for amusement. Jones was the boat champion at Choplifter and Zork. The computers were also used for training purposes, of course, for practice exams and programmed learning tests that ate up most of the use time.
The Dallas was quartering an area east of the Grand Banks. Any boat transiting Route One tended to come through here. They were moving at five knots, trailing out the BQR-15 towed-array sonar. They’d had all kinds of contacts. First, half the submarines in the Russian Navy had whipped by at high speed, many trailed by American boats. An Alfa had burned past them at over forty knots, not three thousand yards away. It would have been so easy, Jones had thought at the time. The Alfa had been making so much noise that one could have heard it with a glass against the hull, and he’d had to turn his amplifiers down to minimums to keep the noise from ruining his ears. A pity they couldn’t have fired. The setup had been so simple, the firing solution so easy that a kid with an old-fashioned sliderule could have done it. That Alfa had been meat on the table. The Victors came running next, and the Charlies and Novembers last of all. Jones had been listening to surface ships a ways to the west, a lot of them doing twenty knots or so, making all kinds of noise as they pounded through the waves. They were way far off, and not his concern.
They had been trying to acquire this particular target for over two days, and Jones had had only an odd hour of sleep here and there. Well, that’s what they pay me for, he reflected bleakly. This was not unprecedented, he’d done it before, but he’d be happy when the labor ended.
The large-aperture towed array was at the end of a thousand-foot cable. Jones referred to the use of it as trolling for whales. In addition to being their most sensitive sonar rig, it protected the Dallas against intruders shadowing her. Ordinarily a submarine’s sonar will work in any direction except aft—an area called the cone of silence, or the baffles. The BQR-15 changed that. Jones had heard all sorts of things on it, subs and surface ships all the timé, low-flying aircraft on occasion. Once, during an exercise off Florida, it had been the noise of diving pelicans that he could not figure out until the skipper had raised the periscope for a look. Then off Bermuda they had encountered mating humpbacks, and a very impressive noise that was. Jones had a personal copy of the tape of them for use on the beach; some women had found it interesting, in a kinky sort of way. He smiled to himself.
There was a considerable amount of surface noise. The signal processors filtered most of it out, and every few minutes Jones switched them off his channel, getting the sound unimpeded to make sure that they weren’t filtering too much out. Machines were dumb; Jones wondered if SAPS might be letting some of that anomalous signal get lost inside the computer chips. That was a problem with computers, really a problem with programming: you’d tell the machine to do something, and it would go do it to the wrong thing. Jones often amused himself working up programs. He knew a few people from college who drew up game programs for personal computers; one of them was making good money with Sierra On-Line Systems…
Daydreaming again, Jonesy, he chided himself. It wasn’t easy listening to nothing for hours on end. It would have been a good idea, he thought, to let sonarmen read on duty. He had better sense than to suggest it. Mr. Thompson might go along, but the skipper and all the senior officers were ex-reactor types with the usual rule of iron: You shall watch every instrument with absolute concentration all the time. Jones didn’t think this was very smart. It was different with sonarmen. They burned out too easily. To combat this Jones had his music tapes and his games. He could lose himself in any sort of diversion, especially Choplifter. A man had to have something, he reasoned, to lose his mind in, at least once a day. And something on duty in some cases. Even truck drivers, hardly the most intellectual of people, had radios and tape players to keep from becoming mesmerized. But sailors on a nuclear sub costing the best part of a billion…
Jones leaned forward, pressing the headphones tight against his head. He tore a page of doodles from his scratch pad and noted the time on a fresh sheet. Next he made some adjustments on his gain controls, already near the top of the scale, and flipped off the processors again. The cacophony of surface noise nearly took his head off. Jones tolerated this for a minute, working the manual muting controls to filter out the worst of the high-frequency noise. Aha! Jones said to himself. Maybe SAPS is messing me up a little—too soon to tell for sure.
When Jones had first been checked out on this gear in sonar school he’d had a burning desire to show it to his brother, who had a masters in electrical engineering and worked as a consultant in the recording industry. He had eleven patents to his name. The stuff on the Dallas would have knocked his eyes out. The navy’s systems for digitalizing sound were years ahead of any commercial technique. Too bad it was all classified right alongside nuclear stuff…
“Mr. Thompson,” Jones said quietly, not looking around, “can you ask the skipper if maybe we can swing more easterly and drop down a knot or two?”
“Skipper,” Thompson went out into the passageway to relay the request. New course and engine orders were given in fifteen seconds. Mancuso was in sonar ten seconds after that.
The skipper had been sweating this. It had been obvious two days ago that their erstwhile contact had not acted as expected, had not run the route, or had never slowed down. Commander Mancuso had guessed wrong on something—had he also guessed wrong on their visitor’s course? And what did it mean if their friend had not run the route? Jones had figured that one out long before. It made her a boomer. Boomer skippers never go fast.
Jones was sitting as usual, hunched over his table, his left hand up commanding quiet as the towed array came around to a precise east-west azimuth at the end of its cable. His cigarette burned away unnoticed in the ashtray. A reel-to-reel tape recorder was operating continuously in the sonar room, its tapes changed hourly and kept for later analysis on shore. Next to it was another whose recordings were used aboard the Dallas for reexamination of contacts. He reached up and switched it on, then turned to see his captain looking down at him. Jones’ face broke into a thin, tired smile.
“Yeah,” he whispered.
Mancuso pointed to the speaker. Jones shook his head. “Too faint, Cap’n. I just barely got it now. Roughly north, I think, but I need some time on that.” Mancuso looked at the intensity needle Jones was tapping. It was down to zero—almost. Every fifty seconds or so it twitched, just a little. Jones was making furious notes. “The goddamned SAPS filters are blanking part of this out!!!!! We need smoother amplifiers and better manual filter controls!!” he wrote.
Mancuso told himself that this was faintly ridiculous. He was watching Jones as he had watched his wife when she’d had Dominic and he was timing the twitches on a needle as he had timed his wife’s contractions. But there was no thrill to match this. The comparison he used to explain it to his father was the thrill you got on the first day of hunting season, when you hear the leaves rustle and you know it’s not a man making the noise. But it was better than that. He was hunting men, men like himself in a vessel like his own…
“Getting louder, Skipper.” Jones leaned back and lit a cigarette. “He’s heading our way. I make him three-five-zero, maybe more like three-five-three. Still real faint, but that’s our boy. We got him.” Jones decided to risk an impertinence. He’d earned a little tolerance. “We wait or we chase, sir?”
“We wait. No sense spooking him. We let him come in nice and close while we do our famous imitation of a hole in the water, then we tag along behind him to wax his tail for a while. I want another tape of this set up, and I want the BC-10 to run a SAPS scan. Use the instruction to bypass the processing algorithms. I want this contact analyzed, not interpreted. Run it every two minutes. I want his signature recorded, digitalized, folded, spindled, and mutilated. I want to know everything there is about him, his propulsion noises, his plant signature, the works. I want to know exactly who he is
.”
“He’s a Russkie, sir,” Jones observed.
“But which Russkie?” Mancuso smiled.
“Aye, Cap’n.” Jones understood. He’d be on duty another two hours, but the end was in sight. Almost. Mancuso sat down and lifted a spare set of headphones, stealing one of Jones’ cigarettes. He’d been trying to break the habit for a month. He’d have a better chance on the beach.
HMS Invincible
Ryan was now wearing a Royal Naval uniform. This was temporary. Another mark of how fast this job had been laid on was that he had only the one uniform and two shirts. All of his wardrobe was now being cleaned and in the interim he had on a pair of English-made trousers and a sweater. Typical, he thought—nobody even knows I’m here. They had forgotten him. No messages from the president—not that he’d ever expected one—and Painter and Davenport were only too glad to forget that he was ever on the Kennedy. Greer and the judge were probably going over some damned fool thing or another, maybe chuckling to themselves about Jack Ryan having a pleasure cruise at government expense.
It was not a pleasure cruise. Jack had rediscovered his vulnerability to seasickness. The Invincible was off Massachusetts, waiting for the Russian surface force and hunting vigorously after the red subs in the area. They were steaming in circles on an ocean that would not settle down. Everyone was busy—except him. The pilots were up twice a day or more, exercising with their U.S. Air Force and Navy counterparts working from shore bases. The ships were practicing surface warfare tactics. As Admiral White had said at breakfast, it had developed into a jolly good extension of NIFTY DOLPHIN. Ryan didn’t like being a supernumerary. Everyone was polite, of course. Indeed, the hospitality was nearly overpowering. He had access to the command center, and when he watched to see how the Brits hunted subs down, everything was explained to him in sufficient detail that he actually understood about half of it.
