The Hunt for Red October jr-3

by Tom Clancy

  “Aye, Comrade. Can he reach the bottom quickly enough?” the starpom asked.

  Tupolev racked his brain for the October’s handling characteristics. “No, he cannot dive that deep in so short a time. We have him.” Sorry, my old friend, but I have no choice, he thought.

  The Red October

  Ryan cringed each time the sonar lash echoed through the double hull. “Can’t you jam that or something?” he demanded.

  “Patience, Ryan,” Ramius said. He had never faced live warheads before but had exercised this problem a hundred times in his career. “Let him know he has us first.”

  “Do you carry decoys?” Mancuso asked.

  “Four of them, in the torpedo room, forward — but we have no torpedomen.”

  Both captains were playing the cool game, Ryan noted bitterly from inside his terrified little world. Neither was willing to show fright before his peer. But they were both trained for this.

  “Skipper,” Jones called, “two fish, bearing constant at three-two-zero — they just went active. I say again, the fish are now active — shit! they sound just like 48s. Skipper, they sound like Mark 48 fish.”

  Ramius had been waiting for this. “Yes, we stole the torpedo sonar from you five years ago, but not your torpedo engines. Bugayev!”

  In the sonar room, Bugayev had powered up the acoustical jamming gear as soon as the fish were launched. Now he carefully timed his jamming pulses to coincide with those from the approaching torpedoes. The pulses were dialed into the same carrier frequency and pulse repetition rate. The timing had to be precise. By sending out slightly distorted return echoes, he could create ghost targets. Not too many, nor too far away. Just a few, close by, and he might be able to confuse the fire control operators on the attacking Alfa. He thumbed the trigger switch carefully, chewing on an American cigarette.

  The V. K. Konovalov

  “Damn! He’s jamming us.” The michman, noting a pair of new pips, showed his first trace of emotion. The fading pip from the true contact was now bordered with two new ones, one north and closer, the other south and farther away. “Captain, the target is using Soviet jamming equipment.”

  “You see?” Tupolev said to the zampolit. “Use caution now,” he ordered his starpom.

  The Red October

  “Ryan, all up on planes!” Ramius shouted.

  “All the way up.” Ryan yanked back, pulling the yoke hard against his belly and hoping that Ramius knew what the hell he was doing.

  “Jones, give us time and range.”

  “Aye.” The jamming gave them a sonar picture plotted on the main scopes. “Two fish, bearing three-two-zero. Range to number one is 2,000 yards, to number two is 2,300—I got a depression angle on number one! Number one fish is heading down a little, sir.” Maybe Bugayev wasn’t so dumb after all, Jones thought. But they had two fish to sweat…

  The Pogy

  The Pogy’s skipper was enraged. The goddamned rules of engagement prevented him from doing a goddamned thing, except, maybe—

  “Sonar, ping the sonuvabitch! Max power, blast the sucker!”

  The Pogy’s BQQ-5 sent timed wave fronts of energy lashing at the Alfa. The Pogy couldn’t shoot, but maybe the Russian didn’t know that, and maybe this lashing would interfere with their targeting sonar.

  The Red October

  “Any time now — one of the fish has capture, sir. I don’t know which.” Jones moved the phones off one ear, his hand poised to slap the other off. The homing sonar on one torpedo was now tracking them. Bad news. If these were like Mark 48s…Jones knew all too well that those things didn’t miss much. He heard the change in the Doppler shift of the propellers as they passed beneath the Red October. “One missed, sir. Number one missed under us. Number two is heading in, ping interval is shortening.” He reached over and patted Bugayev on the shoulder. Maybe he really was the on-board genius that the Russians said he was.

  The V. K. Konovalov

  The second Mark C torpedo was cutting through the water at forty-one knots. This made the torpedo-target closing speed about fifty-five. The guidance and decision loop was a complex one. Unable to mimic the computer homing system on the American Mark 48, the Soviets had the torpedo’s targeting sonar report back to the launching vessel through an insulated wire. The starpom had a choice of sonar data with which to guide the torpedoes, that from the sub-mounted sonar or that from the torpedoes themselves. The first fish had been duped by the ghost images that the jamming had duplicated on the torpedo sonar frequency. For the second, the starpom was using the lower-frequency bow sonar. The first one had missed low, he knew now. That meant that the target was the middle pip. A quick frequency change by the michman cleared the sonar picture for few seconds before the jamming mode was altered. Coolly and expertly, the starpom commanded the second torpedo to select the center target. It ran straight and true.

  The five-hundred-pound warhead struck the target a glancing blow aft of midships, just forward of the control room. It exploded a millisecond later.

  The Red October

  The force of the explosion hurled Ryan from his chair, and his head hit the deck. He came to from a moment’s unconsciousness with his ears ringing in the dark. The shock of the explosion had shorted out a dozen electrical switchboards, and it was several seconds before the red battle lights clicked on. Aft, Jones had flipped his headphones off just in time, but Bugayev, trying to the last second to spoof the incoming torpedo, had not. He was rolling in agony on the deck, one eardrum ruptured, totally deafened. In the engine spaces men were scrambling back to their feet. Here the lights had stayed on, and Melekhin’s first action was to look at the damage-control status board.

  The explosion had occurred on the outer hull, a skin of light steel. Inside it was a water-filled ballast tank, a beehive of cellular baffles seven feet across. Located beyond the tank were high-pressure air flasks. Then came the October’s battery and the inner pressure hull. The torpedo had impacted in the center of a steel plate on the outer hull, several feet from any weld joints. The force of the explosion had torn a hole twelve feet across, shredded the interior ballast tank baffles, and ruptured a half-dozen air flasks, but already much of its force had been dissipated. The final damage was done to thirty of the large nickle-cadmium battery cells. Soviet engineers had placed these here deliberately. They had known that such a placement would make them difficult to service, difficult to recharge, and worst of all expose them to seawater contamination. All this had been accepted in light of their secondary purpose as additional armor for the hull. The October’s batteries saved her. Had it not been for them, the force of the explosion would have been spent on the pressure hull. Instead it was greatly reduced by the layered defensive system which had no Western counterpart. A crack had developed at the weld joint on the inner hull, and water was spraying into the radio room as though from a high-pressure hose, but the hull was otherwise secure.

  In control, Ryan was soon back in his seat trying to determine if his instruments still worked. He could hear water splashing into the next compartment forward. He didn’t know what to do. He did know it would be a bad time to panic, much as his brain screamed for the release.

  “What do I do?”

  “Still with us?” Mancuso’s face looked satanic in the red lights.

  “No goddammit, I’m dead — what do I do?”

  “Ramius?” Mancuso saw the captain holding a flashlight taken from a bracket on the aft bulkhead.

  “Down, dive for bottom.” Ramius took the phone and called engineering to order the engines stopped. Melekhin had already given the order.

  Ryan pushed his controls forward. In a goddamned submarine that’s got a goddamned hole punched in it, they tell you to go down! he thought.

  The V. K. Konovalov

  “A solid hit, Comrade Captain,” the michman reported. “His engines stopped. I hear hull creaking noises, his depth is changing.” He tried some additional pings but got nothing. The explosion had greatly disturbed th
e water. There were rumbling echoes of the initial explosion reverberating through the sea. Trillions of bubbles had formed, creating an “ensonified zone” around the target that rapidly obscured it. His active pings were reflected back by the cloud of bubbles, and his passive listening ability was greatly reduced by the recurring rumbles. All he knew for sure was that one torpedo had hit, probably the second. He was an experienced man trying to decide what was noise and what was signal, and he had reconstructed most of the events correctly.

  The Dallas

  “Score one for the bad guys,” the sonar chief said. The Dallas was running too fast to make proper use of her sonar, but the explosion was impossible to miss. The whole crew heard it through the hull.

  In the attack center Chambers plotted their position two miles from where the October had been. The others in the compartment looked at their instruments without emotion. Ten of their shipmates had just been hit, and the enemy was on the other side of the wall of noise.

  “Slow to one-third,” Chambers ordered.

  “All ahead one-third,” the officer of the deck repeated.

  “Sonar, get me some data,” Chambers said.

  “Working on it, sir.” Chief Laval strained to make sense of what he heard. It took a few minutes as the Dallas slowed to under ten knots. “Conn, sonar, the boomer took one hit. I don’t hear her engines…but there ain’t no breakup noises. I say again, sir, no breakup noises.”

  “Can you hear the Alfa?”

  “No, sir, too much crud in the water.”

  Chamber’s face screwed into a grimace. You’re an officer, he told himself, they pay you to think. First, what’s happening? Second, what do you do about it? Think it through, then act.

  “Estimated distance to target?”

  “Something like nine thousand yards, sir,” Lieutenant Goodman said, reading the last solution off the fire control computer. “She’ll be on the far side of the ensonified zone.”

  “Make your depth six hundred feet.” The diving officer passed this on to the helmsman. Chambers considered the situation and decided on his course of action. He wished Mancuso and Mannion were here. The captain and navigator were the other two members of what passed for the Dallas’ tactical management committee. He needed to exchange some ideas with other experienced officers — but there weren’t any.

  “Listen up. We’re going down. The disturbance from the explosion will stay fairly steady. If it moves at all, it’ll go up. Okay, we’ll go under it. First we want to locate the boomer. If she isn’t there, then she’s on the bottom. It’s only nine hundred feet here, so she could be on the bottom with a live crew. Whether or not she’s on the bottom, we gotta get between her and the Alfa.” And, he thought on, if the Alfa shoots then, I kill the fucker, and rules of engagement be damned. They had to trick this guy. But how? And where was the Red October?

  The Red October

  She was diving more quickly than expected. The explosion had also ruptured a trim tank, causing more negative buoyancy than they had at first allowed for.

  The leak in the radio room was bad, but Melekhin had noted the flooding on his damage control board and reacted immediately. Each compartment had its own electrically powered pump. The radio room pump, supplemented by a master-zone pump that he had also activated, was managing, barely, to keep up with the flooding. The radios were already destroyed, but no one was planning to send any messages.

  “Ryan, all the way up, and come right full rudder,” Ramius said.

  “Right full rudder, all the way up on the planes,” Ryan said. “We going to hit the bottom?”

  “Try not to,” Mancuso said. “It might spring the leak worse.”

  “Great,” Ryan growled back.

  The October slowed her descent, arcing east below the ensonified zone. Ramius wanted it between himself and the Alfa. Mancuso thought that they might just survive after all. In that case he’d have to give this boat’s plans a closer look.

  The Dallas

  “Sonar, give me two low-powered pings for the boomer. I don’t want anybody else to hear this, Chief.”

  “Aye.” Chief Laval made the proper adjustments and sent the signals out. “All right! Conn, sonar, I got her! Bearing two-zero-three, range two thousand yards. She is not, repeat not, on the bottom, sir.”

  “Left fifteen degrees rudder, come to two-zero-three,” Chambers ordered.

  “Left fifteen degrees rudder, aye!” the helmsman sang out. “New course two-zero-three. Sir, my rudder is left fifteen degrees.”

  “Frenchie, tell me about the boomer!”

  “Sir, I got…pump noises, I think…and she’s moving a little, bearing is now two-zero-one. I can track her on passive, sir.”

  “Thompson, plot the boomer’s course. Mr. Goodman, we still have that MOSS ready for launch?”

  “Aye aye,” responded the torpedo officer.

  The V. K. Konovalov

  “Did we kill him?” the zampolit asked.

  “Probably,” Tupolev answered, wondering if he had or not. “We must close to be certain. Ahead slow.”

  “Ahead slow.”

  The Pogy

  The Pogy was now within two thousand yards of the Konovalov, still pinging her mercilessly.

  “He’s moving, sir. Enough that I can read passive,” Sonar Chief Palmer said.

  “Very well, secure pinging,” Wood said.

  “Aye, pinging secured.”

  “We got a solution?”

  “Locked in tight,” Reynolds answered. “Running time is one minute eighteen seconds. Both fish are ready.”

  “All ahead one-third.”

  “All ahead one-third, aye.” The Pogy slowed. Her commanding officer wondered what excuse he might find for shooting.

  The Red October

  “Skipper, that was one of our sonars that pinged us, off north-north-east. Low-power ping, sir, must be close.”

  “Think you can raise her on gertrude?”

  “Yes sir!”

  “Captain?” Mancuso asked. “Permission to communicate with my ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jones, raise her right now.”

  “Aye. This is Jonesy calling Frenchie, do you copy?” The sonarman frowned at the speaker. “Frenchie, answer me.”

  The Dallas

  “Conn, sonar, I got Jonesy on the gertrude.”

  Chambers lifted the control room gertrude phone. “Jones, this is Chambers. What is your condition?”

  Mancuso took the mike away from his man. “Wally, this is Bart,” he said. “We took one midships, but she’s holding together. Can you run interference for us?”

  “Aye aye! Starting right now, out.” Chambers replaced the phone. “Goodman, flood the MOSS tube. Okay, we’ll go in behind the MOSS. If the Alfa shoots at it, we take her out. Set it to run straight for two thousand yards, then turn south.”

  “Done. Outer door open, sir.”

  “Launch.”

  “MOSS away, sir.”

  The decoy ran forward at twenty knots for two minutes to clear the Dallas, then slowed. It had a torpedo body whose forward portion carried a powerful sonar transducer that ran off a tape recorder and broadcast the recorded sounds of a 688-class submarine. Every four minutes it changed over from loud operation to silent. The Dallas trailed a thousand yards behind the decoy, dropping several hundred feet below its course track.

  The Konovalov approached the wall of bubbles carefully, with the Pogy trailing to the north.

  “Shoot at the decoy, you son of a bitch,” Chambers said quietly. The attack center crew heard him and nodded grim agreement.

  The Red October

  Ramius judged that the ensonified zone was now between him and the Alfa. He ordered the engines turned back on, and the Red October proceeded on a north-easterly course.

  The V. K. Konovalov

  “Left ten degrees rudder,” Tupolev ordered quietly. “We’ll come around the dead zone to the north and see if he is still alive when we turn back. Fir
st we must clear the noise.”

  “Still nothing,” the michman reported. “No bottom impact, no collapse noises…New contact, bearing one-seven-zero…Different sound, Comrade Captain, one propeller…Sounds like an American.”

  “What heading?”

  “South, I think. Yes, south…The sound’s changing. It is American.”

  “An American sub is decoying. We ignore it.”

  “Ignore it?” the zampolit said.

  “Comrade, if you were heading north and were torpedoed, would you then head south? Yes, you would — but not Marko. It is too obvious. This American is decoying to try to take us away from him. Not too clever, this one. Marko would do better. And he would go north. I know him, I know how he thinks. He is now heading north, perhaps northeast. They would not decoy if he was dead. Now we know that he is alive but crippled. We will find him, and finish him,” Tupolev said calmly, fully caught up in the hunt for Red October, remembering all he had been taught. He would prove now that he was the new master. His conscience was still. Tupolev was fulfilling his destiny.

  “But the Americans—”

  “Will not shoot, Comrade,” the captain said with a thin smile. “If they could shoot, we would already be dead from the one to the north. They cannot shoot without permission. They must ask for permission, as we must — but we already have the permission, and the advantage. We are now where the torpedo struck him, and when we clear the disturbance we will find him again. Then we will have him.”

  The Red October

  They couldn’t use the caterpillar. One side was smashed by the torpedo hit. The October was moving at six knots, driven by her propellers, which made more noise than the other system. This was much like the normal drill of protecting a boomer. But the exercise always presupposed that the escorting attack boats could shoot to make the bad guy go away…