by Tom Clancy
“You Ryan? I’m Tony Parker. Where’s the loo?” Jack gave him the proper directions and the pilot darted off, leaving Ryan standing there in a flight suit, holding his bag and feeling stupid. A white plastic flight helmet dangled from his other hand as he watched the crewmen fueling the Harrier. He wondered if they knew what they were doing.
Parker was back in three minutes. “Commander,” he said, “there’s one thing they’ve never put in a fighter, and that’s a bloody toilet. They fill you up with coffee and tea and send you off, and you’ve no place to go.”
“I know the feeling. Anything else you have to do?”
“No, sir. Your admiral chatted with me on the radio when I was flying in. Looks like your chaps have finished fueling my bird. Shall we be off?”
“What do I do with this?” Ryan held up his bag, expecting to have to hold it in his lap. His briefing papers were inside the flight suit, tucked against his chest.
“We put it in the boot, of course. Come along, sir.”
Parker walked out to the fighter jauntily. The dawn was a feeble one. There was a solid overcast at one or two thousand feet. It wasn’t raining, but looked as though it might. The sea, still rolling at about eight feet, was a gray, crinkled surface dotted with whitecaps. Ryan could feel the Kennedy moving, surprised that something so huge could be made to move at all. When they got to the Harrier, Parker took the duffle in one hand and reached for a recessed handle on the underside of the fighter. Twisting and pulling the lever, he revealed a cramped space about the size of a small refrigerator. Parker stuffed the bag into it, slamming the door shut behind it, making sure the locking lever was fully engaged. A deck crewman in a yellow shirt conferred with the pilot. Aft a helicopter was revving its engines, and a Tomcat fighter was taxiing towards a midships catapult. On top of this a thirty-knot wind was blowing. The carrier was a noisy place.
Parker waved Ryan up the ladder. Jack, who liked ladders about as much as he liked flying, nearly fell into his seat. He struggled to get situated properly, while a deck crewman strapped him into the four-point restraint system. The man put the helmet on Ryan’s head and pointed to the jack for its intercom system. Maybe American crews really did know something about Harriers. Next to the plug was a switch. Ryan flipped it.
“Can you hear me, Parker?”
“Yes, Commander. All settled in?”
“I suppose.”
“Right.” Parker’s head swiveled to check the engine intakes. “Starting the engine.”
The canopies stayed up. Three crewmen stood close by with large carbon dioxide extinguishers, presumably in case the engine exploded. A dozen others were standing by the island, watching the strange aircraft as the Pegasus engine screamed to life. Then the canopy came down.
“Ready, Commander?”
“If you are.”
The Harrier was not a large fighter, but it was certainly the loudest. Ryan could feel the engine noise ripple through his body as Parker adjusted his thrust-vector controls. The aircraft wobbled, dipped at the nose, then rose shakily into the air. Ryan saw a man by the island point and gesture to them. The Harrier slid to port, moving away from the island as it gained in height.
“That wasn’t too bad,” Parker said. He adjusted the thrust controls, and the Harrier began true forward flight. There was little feeling of acceleration, but Ryan saw that the Kennedy was rapidly falling behind. A few seconds later they were beyond the inner ring of escorts.
“Let’s get on top of this muck,” Parker said. He pulled back on the stick and headed for the clouds. In seconds they were in them, and Ryan’s field of view was reduced from five miles to five feet in an instant.
Jack looked around his cockpit, which had flight controls and instruments. Their airspeed showed one hundred fifty knots and rising, altitude four hundred feet. This Harrier had evidently been a trainer, but the instrument panel had been altered to include the read-out instruments for a sensor pod that could be attached to the belly. A poor man’s way of doing things, but from what Admiral Painter said it had evidently worked well enough. He figured the TV-type screen was the FLIR readout, which monitored a forward-looking infrared heat sensor. The airspeed gauge now said three hundred knots, and the climb indicator showed a twenty-degree angle of attack. It felt like more than that.
“Should be hitting the top of this soon,” Parker said. “Now!”
The altimeter showed twenty-six thousand feet when Ryan was blasted by pure sunlight. One thing about flying that he never got used to was that no matter how awful the weather was on the ground, if you flew high enough you could always find the sun. The light was intense, but the sky’s color was noticeably deeper than the soft blue seen from the ground. The ride became airliner smooth as they escaped the lower turbulence. Ryan fumbled with his visor to shield his eyes.
“That better, sir?”
“Fine, Lieutenant. It’s better than I expected.”
“What do you mean, sir?” Parker inquired.
“I guess it beats flying on a commercial bird. You can see more. That helps.”
“Sorry we don’t have any extra fuel, or I’d show you some aerobatics. The Harrier will do almost anything you ask of her.”
“That’s all right.”
“And your admiral,” Parker went on conversationally, “said that you don’t fancy flying.”
Ryan’s hands grabbed the armrests as the Harrier went through three complete revolutions before snapping back to level flight. He surprised himself by laughing. “Ah, the British sense of humor.”
“Orders from your admiral, sir,” Parker semi-apologized. “We wouldn’t want you to think the Harrier’s another bloody bus.”
Which admiral, Ryan wondered, Painter or Davenport? Probably both. The top of the clouds was like a rolling field of cotton. He’d never appreciated that before, looking through a foot-square window on an airliner. In the back seat he almost felt as if he were sitting outside.
“May I ask a question, sir?”
“Sure.”
“What’s the flap?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, sir, that they turned my ship around. Then I get orders to ferry a VIP from Kennedy to Invincible.”
“Oh, okay. Can’t say, Parker. I’m delivering some messages to your boss. I’m just the mailman,” Ryan lied. Roll that one three times.
“Excuse me, Commander, but you see, my wife is expecting a child, our first, soon after Christmas. I hope to be there, sir.”
“Where do you live?”
“Chatham, that’s—”
“I know. I live in England myself at the moment. Our place is in Marlow, upriver from London. My second kid got started over there.”
“Born there?”
“Started there. My wife says it’s those strange hotel beds, do it to her every time. If I were a betting man, I’d give you good odds, Parker. First babies are always late anyway.”
“You say you live in Marlow?”
“That’s right, we built a house there earlier this year.”
“Jack Ryan—John Ryan? The same chap who—”
“Correct. You don’t have to tell anybody that, Lieutenant.”
“Understood, sir. I didn’t know you were a naval officer.”
“That’s why you don’t have to tell anyone.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry for the stunt earlier.”
“That’s all right. Admirals must have their little laughs. I understand you guys just ran an exercise with our guys.”
“Indeed we did, Commander. I sank one of your submarines, the Tullibee. My systems operator and I, that is. We caught her near the surface at night with our FLIR and dropped noisemakers all round her. You see, we didn’t let anyone know about our new equipment. All’s fair, as you know. I understand her commander was bloody furious. I’d hoped to meet him in Norfolk, but he didn’t arrive until the day we sailed.”
“You guys have a good time in Norfolk?”
“Yes, Commander. We we
re able to get in a day’s shooting on your Chesapeake Bay, the Eastern Shore, I believe you call it.”
“Oh yeah? I used to hunt there. How was it?”
“Not bad. I got my three geese in half an hour. Bag limit was three—stupid.”
“You called in and blasted three geese in a half hour this late in the season?”
“That is how I earn my modest living, Commander, shooting,” Parker commented.
“I was up for a grouse shoot with your admiral last September. They made me use a double. If you show up with my kind of gun—I use a Remington automatic—they look at you like you’re some kind of terrorist. I got stuck with a pair of Purdeys that didn’t fit. Got fifteen birds. Seemed an awful lazy way to hunt, though, with one guy loading my gun for me, and another platoon of ghillies driving the game. We just about annihilated the bird population, too.”
“We have more game per acre than you do.”
“That’s what the admiral said. How far to Invincible?”
“Forty minutes.”
Ryan looked at the fuel gauges. They were half empty already. In a car he’d be thinking about a fill-up. All that fuel gone in half an hour. Well, Parker didn’t seem excited.
The landing on HMS Invincible was different from the COD’s arrival on the Kennedy. The ride became rocky as Parker descended through the clouds, and it occurred to Ryan that they were on the leading edge of the same storm he’d endured the night before. The canopy was coated with rain, and he heard the impact of thousands of raindrops on the airframe—or was it hail? Watching the instruments, he saw that Parker leveled out at a thousand feet, while they were still in clouds, then descended more slowly, breaking into the clear at a hundred feet. The Invincible was scarcely a half the Kennedy’s size. He watched her bobbing actively on the fifteen-foot seas. Parker used the same technique as before. He hovered briefly on the carrier’s port side, then slid to the right, dropping the fighter twenty feet onto a painted circle. The landing was hard, but Ryan was able to see it coming. The canopy came up at once.
“You can get out here,” Parker said. “I have to taxi to the elevator.”
A ladder was already in place. He unbuckled and got out. A crewman had already retrieved his bag. Ryan followed him to the island and was met by an ensign—a sublieutenant, the British call the rank.
“Welcome aboard, sir.” The youngster couldn’t be more than twenty, Ryan thought. “Let me help you out of the flight suit.”
The sublieutenant stood by as Ryan unzipped and took off his helmet, Mae West, and coverall. He retrieved his cap from the bag. In the process he bounced off the bulkhead a few times. The Invincible seemed to be corkscrewing in a following sea. A bow wind and a following sea? In the North Atlantic in winter, nothing was too crazy. The officer took his bag, and Ryan held onto the briefing material.
“Lead on, leftenant,” Ryan gestured. The youngster shot up a series of three ladders, leaving Jack panting behind, thinking about the jogging he wasn’t getting in. The combination of the ship’s motion and an inner ear badly scrambled from the day’s flying made him dizzy, and he found himself bumping into things. How did professional pilots do it?
“Here’s the flag bridge, sir.” The sublieutenant held the door open.
“Hello, Jack!” boomed the voice of Vice Admiral John White, eighth earl of Weston. He was a tall, well-built man of fifty with a florid complexion set off by a white scarf at his neck. Jack had first met him earlier in the year, and since then his wife Cathy and the countess, Antonia, had become close friends, members of the same circle of amateur musicians. Cathy Ryan played classical piano. Toni White, an attractive woman of forty-four, owned a Guarnieri del Jesu violin. Her husband was a man whose peerage was treated as the convenient afterthought. His career in the Royal Navy had been built entirely on merit. Jack walked over to take his hand.
“Good day, Admiral.”
“How was your flight?”
“Different. I’ve never been in a fighter before, much less one with ambitions to mate with a hummingbird,” Ryan smiled. The bridge was overheated, and it felt good.
“Jolly good. Let’s go aft to my sea cabin.” White dismissed the sublieutenant, who handed Jack his bag before withdrawing. The admiral led him aft through a short passageway and left into a small compartment.
It was surprisingly austere, considering that the English liked their comforts and that White was a peer. There were two curtained portholes, a desk, and a couple of chairs. The only human touch was a color photograph of his wife. The entire port wall was covered with a chart of the North Atlantic.
“You look tired, Jack.” White waved him to the upholstered chair.
“I am tired. I’ve been on the go since—hell, since 6:00 A.M. yesterday. I don’t know about time changes, I think my watch is still on European time.”
“I have a message for you.” White pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and handed it over.
“Greer to Ryan. WILLOW confirmed,” Ryan read. “Basil sends regards. Ends.” Somebody had confirmed WILLOW. Who? Maybe Sir Basil, maybe Ritter. Ryan would not quote odds on that one.
Jack tucked it in his pocket. “This is good news, sir.”
“Why the uniform?”
“Not my idea, Admiral. You know who I work for, right? They figured I’d be less conspicuous this way.”
“At least it fits.” The admiral lifted a phone and ordered refreshments sent to them. “How’s the family, Jack?”
“Fine, thank you, sir. The day before I came over Cathy and Toni were playing over at Nigel Ford’s place. I missed it. You know, if they get much better, we ought to have a record cut. There aren’t too many violin players better than your wife.”
A steward arrived with a plateful of sandwiches. Jack had never figured out the British taste for cucumbers on bread.
“So, what’s the flap?”
“Admiral, the significance of the message you just gave me is that I can tell this to you and three other officers. This is very hot stuff, sir. You’ll want to make your choices accordingly.”
“Hot enough to turn my little fleet around.” White thought it over before lifting the phone and ordering three of his officers to the cabin. He hung up. “Captain Carstairs, Captain Hunter, and Commander Barclay—they are, respectively, Invincible’s commanding officer, my fleet operations officer, and my fleet intelligence officer.”
“No chief of staff?”
“Flew home, death in the family. Something for your coffee?” White extracted what looked like a brandy bottle from a desk drawer.
“Thank you, Admiral.” He was grateful for the brandy. The coffee needed the help. He watched the admiral pour a generous amount, perhaps with the ulterior motive of making him speak more freely. White had been a British sailor longer than he’d been Ryan’s friend.
The three officers arrived together, two carrying folding metal chairs.
“Admiral,” Ryan began, “you might want to leave that bottle out. After you hear this story, we might all need a drink.” He passed out his two remaining briefing folders and talked from memory. His delivery took fifteen minutes.
“Gentlemen,” he concluded, “I must insist that this information be kept strictly confidential. For the moment no one outside this room may learn it.”
“That is too bad,” Carstairs said. “This makes for a bloody good sea story.”
“And our mission?” White was holding the photographs. He poured Ryan another shot of brandy, gave the bottle a brief look, then stowed it back in the desk.
“Thank you, Admiral. For the moment our mission is to locate Red October. After that we’re not sure. I imagine just locating her will be hard enough.”
“An astute observation, Commander Ryan,” Hunter said.
“The good news is that Admiral Painter has requested that CINCLANT assign you control of several U.S. Navy vessels, probably three 1052-class frigates, and a pair of FFG Perrys. They all carry a chopper or two.”
“Wel
l, Geoffrey?” White asked.
“It’s a start,” Hunter agreed.
“They’ll be arriving in a day or two. Admiral Painter asked me to express his confidence in your group and its personnel.”
“A whole fucking Russian missile submarine…” Barclay said almost to himself. Ryan laughed.
“Like the idea, Commander?” At least he had one convert.
“What if the sub is heading for the U.K.? Does it then become a British operation?” Barclay asked pointedly.
“I suppose it would, but from the way I read the map, if Ramius was heading for England, he’d already be there. I saw a copy of the president’s letter to the prime minister. In return for your assistance, the Royal Navy gets the same access to the data we develop as our guys get. We’re on the same side, gentlemen. The question is, can we do it?”
“Hunter?” the admiral asked.
“If this intelligence is correct…I’d say we have a good chance, perhaps as good as fifty percent. On one hand, we have a missile submarine attempting to evade detection. On the other, we have a great deal of ASW arrayed to locate her, and she will be heading towards one of only a few discrete locations. Norfolk, of course, Newport, Groton, King’s Bay, Port Everglades, Charleston. A civilian port such as New York is less likely, I think. The problem is, what with Ivan sending all his Alfas racing to your coast, they will get there ahead of October. They may have a specific port target in mind. We’ll know that in another day. So, I’d say they have an equal chance. They’ll be able to operate far enough off your coast that your government will have no viable legal reason to object to whatever they do. If anything, I’d say the Soviets have the advantage. They have both a clearer idea of the submarine’s capabilities and a simpler overall mission. That more than balances their less capable sensors.”
“Why isn’t Ramius coming on faster?” Ryan asked. “That’s the one thing I can’t figure. Once he clears the SOSUS lines off Iceland, he’s clear into the deep basin—so why not crack his throttles wide open and race for our coast?”
