by Tom Clancy
“Comrades,” Petrov reported, “the second set of badges was contaminated, worse than the first.”
Ramius noted that Petrov was rattled. It wasn’t the first set of badges, or the second. It was the third and fourth since sailing. He had chosen his ship’s doctor well.
“Bad badges,” Melekhin growled. “Some bastard of a trickster in Severomorsk—or perhaps an imperialist spy playing a typical enemy trick on us. When they catch the son of a bitch I will shoot him myself—whoever he is! This sort of thing is treasonous!”
“Regulations require that I report this,” Petrov noted. “Even though the instruments show safe levels.”
“Your adherence to the rules is noted, Comrade Doctor. You have acted correctly,” Ramius said. “And now regulations stipulate that we make yet another check. Melekhin, I want you and Borodin to do it personally. First check the radiation instruments themselves. If they are working properly, we will be certain that the badges are defective—or have been tampered with. If so, my report on this incident will demand someone’s head.” It was not unknown for drunken shipyard workers to be sent to the gulag. “Comrades, in my opinion there is nothing at all to concern us. If there were a leak, Comrade Melekhin would have discovered it days ago. So. We all have work to do.”
They were all back in the wardroom half an hour later. Passing crewmen noticed this, and already the whispering started.
“Comrades,” Melekhin announced, “we have a major problem.”
The officers, especially the younger ones, looked a little pale. On the table was a Geiger counter stripped into a score of small parts. Next to it was a radiation detector taken off the reactor room bulkhead, its inspection cover removed.
“Sabotage,” Melekhin hissed. It was a word fearsome enough to make any Soviet citizen shudder. The room went deathly still, and Ramius noted that Svyadov was holding his face under rigid control.
“Comrades, mechanically speaking these instruments are quite simple. As you know, this counter has ten different settings. We can choose from ten sensitivity ranges, using the same instrument to detect a minor leak or to quantify a major one. We do that by dialing this selector, which engages one of ten electrical resistors of increasing value. A child could design this, or maintain and repair it.” The chief enginer tapped the underside of the selector dial. “In this case the proper resistors have been clipped off, and new ones soldered on. Settings one to eight have the same impedance value. All of our counters were inspected by the same dockyard technician three days before we sailed. Here is his inspection sheet.” Melekhin tossed it on the table contemptuously.
“Either he or another spy sabotaged this and all the other counters I’ve looked at. It would have taken a skilled man no more than an hour. In the case of this instrument.” The engineer turned the fixed detector over. “You see that the electrical parts have been disconnected, except for the test circuit, which was rewired. Borodin and I removed this from the forward bulkhead. This is skilled work; whoever did this is no amateur. I believe that an imperialist agent has sabotaged our ship. First he disabled our radiation monitor instruments, then he probably arranged a low-level leak in our hot piping. It would appear, comrades, that Comrade Petrov was correct. We may have a leak. My apologies, Doctor.”
Petrov nodded jerkily. Compliments like this he could easily forego.
“Total exposure, Comrade Petrov?” Ramius asked.
“The greatest is for the enginemen, of course. The maximum is fifty rads for Comrades Melekhin and Svyadov. The other engine crewmen run from twenty to forty-five rads, and the cumulative exposure drops rapidly as one moves forward. The torpedomen have only five rads or so, mostly less. The officers exclusive of engineers run from ten to twenty-five.” Petrov paused, telling himself to be more positive. “Comrades, these are not lethal doses. In fact, one can tolerate a dose of up to a hundred rads without any near-term physiological effects, and one can survive several hundred. We do face a serious problem here, but it is not yet a life-threatening emergency.”
“Melekhin?” the captain asked.
“It is my engine plant, and my responsibility. We do not yet know that we have a leak. The badges could still be defective or sabotaged. This could all be a vicious psychological trick played on us by the main enemy to damage our morale. Borodin will assist me. We will personally repair these and conduct a thorough inspection of all reactor systems. I am too old to have children. For the moment, I suggest that we deactivate the reactor and proceed on battery. The inspection will take us four hours at most. I also recommend that we reduce reactor watches to two hours. Agreed, Captain?”
“Certainly, Comrade. I know that there is nothing you cannot repair.”
“Excuse me, Comrade Captain,” Ivanov spoke up. “Should we report this to fleet headquarters?”
“Our orders are not to break radio silence,” Ramius said.
“If the imperialists were able to sabotage our instruments…What if they knew our orders beforehand and are attempting to make us use the radio so they can locate us?” Borodin asked.
“A possibility,” Ramius replied. “First we will determine if we have a problem, then its severity. Comrades, we have a fine crew and the best officers in the fleet. We will see to our own problems, conquer them, and continue our mission. We all have a date in Cuba that I intend to meet—to hell with imperialist plots!”
“Well said,” Melekhin concurred.
“Comrades, we will keep this secret. There is no reason to excite the crew over what may be nothing, and at most is something we can handle on our own.” Ramius ended the meeting.
Petrov was less sure, and Svyadov was trying very hard not to shake. He had a sweetheart at home and wanted one day to have children. The young lieutenant had been painstakingly trained to understand everything that went on in the reactor systems and to know what to do if things went awry. And it was some consolation to know that most of the solutions to reactor problems to be found in the book had been written by some of the men in this room. Even so, something that could neither be seen nor felt was invading his body, and no rational person would be happy with that.
The meeting adjourned. Melekhin and Borodin went aft to the engineering stores. A michman electrician came with them to get the proper parts. He noted that they were reading from the maintenance manual for a radiation detector. When he went off duty an hour later, the whole crew knew that the reactor had been shut down yet again. The electrician conferred with his bunkmate, a missile maintenance technician. Together they discussed the reason for working on a half dozen Geiger counters and other instruments, and their conclusion was an obvious one.
The submarine’s bosun overheard the discussion and pondered the conclusion himself. He had been on nuclear submarines for ten years. Despite this he was not an educated man and regarded any activity in the reactor spaces as something to the left of witchcraft. It worked the ship, how he did not know, though he was certain that there was something unholy about it. Now he began to wonder if the devils he never saw inside that steel drum—were coming loose? Within two hours the entire crew knew that something was wrong and that their officers had not yet figured out a way to deal with it.
The cooks bringing food forward from the galley to the crew spaces were seen to linger in the bow as long as they could. Men standing watch in the control room shifted on their feet more than usual, Ramius noted, hurrying forward at the change of watch.
The USS New Jersey
It took some getting used to, Commodore Zachary Eaton reflected. When his flagship was built, he was sailing boats in a bathtub. Back then the Russians were allies, but allies of convenience, who shared a common enemy instead of a common goal. Like the Chinese today, he judged. The enemy then had been the Germans and the Japanese. In his twenty-six-year career, he had been to both countries many times, and his first command, a destroyer, had been home-ported at Yokoshuka. It was a strange world.
There were several nice things about his flagship. Bi
g as she was, her movement on the ten-foot seas was just enough to remind him that he was at sea, not at a desk. Visibility was about ten miles, and somewhere out there, about eight hundred miles away, was the Russian fleet. His battleship was going to meet them just like in the old old days, as if the aircraft carrier had never come along. The destroyers Caron and Stump were in sight, five miles off either bow. Further forward, the cruisers Biddle and Wainwright were doing radar picket duty. The surface action group was marking time instead of proceeding forward as he would have preferred. Off the New Jersey coast, the helicopter assault ship Tarawa and two frigates were racing to join up, bringing ten AV-8B Harrier attack fighters and fourteen ASW helicopters to supplement his air strength. This was useful, but not of critical concern to Eaton. The Saratoga’s air wing was now operating out of Maine, along with a goodly collection of air force birds working hard to learn the maritime strike business. HMS Invincible was two hundred miles to his east, conducting aggressive ASW patrols, and eight hundred miles east of that force was the Kennedy, hiding under a weather front off the Azores. It slightly irked the commodore that the Brits were helping out. Since when did the U.S. Navy need help defending the American coast? Not that they didn’t owe us the favor, though.
The Russians had split into three groups, with the carrier Kiev easternmost to face the Kennedy’s battle group. His expected responsibility was the Moskva group, with the Invincible handling the Kirov’s. Data on all three was being fed to him continuously and digested by his operations staff down in flag plot. What were the Soviets up to? he wondered.
He knew the story that they were searching for a lost sub, but Eaton believed that as much as if they’d explained that they had a bridge they wanted to sell. Probably, he thought, they want to demonstrate that they can trail their coats down our coast whenever they want, to show that they have a seagoing fleet and to establish a precedent for doing this again.
Eaton did not like that.
He did not much care for his assigned mission either. He had two tasks that were not fully compatible. Keeping an eye on their submarine activity would be difficult enough. The Saratoga’s Vikings were not working his area, despite his request, and most of the Orions were working farther out, closer to the Invincible. His own ASW assets were barely adequate for local defense, much less active sub hunting. The Tarawa would change that, but also change his screening requirements. His other mission was to establish and maintain sensor contact with the Moskva group and to report at once any unusual activity to CINCLANTFLT, the commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet. This made sense, sort of. If their surface ships did anything untoward, Eaton had the means to deal with them. It was being decided now how closely he should shadow them.
The problem was whether he should be nearby or far away. Near meant twenty miles—gun range. The Moskva had ten escorts, none of which could possibly survive more than two of his sixteen-inch projectiles. At twenty miles he had the choice of using full-sized or subcaliber rounds, the latter guided to their targets by a laser designator installed atop the main director tower. Tests the previous year had determined that he could maintain a steady firing rate of one round every twenty seconds, with the laser shifting fire from one target to another until there were no more. But this would expose the New Jersey and her escorts to torpedo and missile fire from the Russian ships.
Backing farther off, he could still fire sabot rounds from fifty miles, and they could be directed to the target by a laser designator aboard the battlewagon’s helicopter. This would expose the chopper to surface-to-air missile fire and to Soviet helicopters suspected of having air-to-air missile capability. To help out with this, the Tarawa was bringing a pair of Apache attack helicopters, which carried lasers, air-to-air missiles, and their own air-to-surface missiles; they were antitank weapons expected to work well against small warships.
His ships would be exposed to missile fire, but he didn’t fear for his flagship. Unless the Russians were carrying nuclear warheads, their antiship missiles would not be able to damage his ship gravely—the New Jersey had upwards of a foot of class B armor plate. They would, however, play hell with his radar and communications gear, and worse, they would be lethal to his thin-hulled escorts. His ships carried their own antiship missiles, Harpoons and Tomahawks, though not as many as he would have liked.
And what about a Russian sub hunting them? Eaton had been told of none, but you never knew where one might be hiding. Oh well—he couldn’t worry about everything. A submarine could sink the New Jersey, but she would have to work at it. If the Russians were really up to something nasty, they’d get the first shot, but Eaton would have enough warning to launch his own missiles and get off a few rounds of gunfire while calling for air support—none of which would happen, he was sure.
He decided that the Russians were on some sort of fishing expedition. His job was to show them that the fish in these waters were dangerous.
Naval Air Station, North Island, California
The oversized tractor-trailer crept at two miles per hour into the cargo bay of the C-5A Galaxy transport under the watchful eyes of the aircraft’s loadmaster, two flight officers, and six naval officers. Oddly, only the latter, none of whom wore aviator’s wings, were fully versed in the procedure. The vehicle’s center of gravity was precisely marked, and they watched the mark approach a particular number engraved on the cargo bay floor. The work had to be done exactly. Any mistake could fatally impair the aircraft’s trim and imperil the lives of the flight crew and passengers.
“Okay, freeze it right there,” the senior officer called. The driver was only too glad to stop. He left the keys in the ignition, set all the brakes, and put the truck in gear before getting out. Someone else would drive it out of the aircraft on the other side of the country. The loadmaster and six airmen immediately went to work, snaking steel cables to eyebolts on the truck and trailer to secure the heavy load. Shifting cargo was something else an aircraft rarely survived, and the C-5A did not have ejection seats.
The loadmaster saw to it that his ground crewmen were properly at work before walking over to the pilot. He was a twenty-five-year sergeant who loved the C-5s despite their blemished history.
“Cap’n, what the hell is this thing?”
“It’s called a DSRV, Sarge, deep submergence rescue vehicle.”
“Says Avalon on the back, sir,” the sergeant pointed out.
“Yeah, so it has a name. It’s a sort of a lifeboat for submarines. Goes down to get the crew out if something screws up.”
“Oh.” The sergeant considered that. He’d flown tanks, helicopters, general cargo, once a whole battalion of troops on his—he thought of the aircraft as his—Galaxy before. This was the first time he had ever flown a ship. If it had a name, he reasoned, it was a ship. Damn, the Galaxy could do anything! “Where we takin’ it, sir?”
“Norfolk Naval Air Station, and I’ve never been there either.” The pilot watched the securing process closely. Already a dozen cables were attached. When a dozen more were in place, they’d put tension on the cables to prevent the minutest shift. “We figure a trip of five hours, forty minutes, all on internal fuel. We got the jet stream on our side today. Weather’s supposed to be okay until we hit the coast. We lay over for a day, then come back Monday morning.”
“Your boys work pretty fast,” said the senior naval officer, Lieutenant Ames, coming over.
“Yes, Lieutenant, another twenty minutes.” The pilot checked his watch. “We ought to be taking off on the hour.”
“No hurry, Captain. If this thing shifts in flight, I guess it would ruin our whole day. Where do I send my people?”
“Upper deck forward. There’s room for fifteen or so just aft of the flight deck.” Lieutenant Ames knew this but didn’t say so. He’d flown with his DSRV across the Atlantic several times and across the Pacific once, every time on a different C-5.
“May I ask what the big deal is?” the pilot inquired.
“I don’t know,” Ames
said. “They want me and my baby in Norfolk.”
“You really take that little bitty thing underwater, sir?” the loadmaster asked.
“That’s what they pay me for. I’ve had her down to forty-eight hundred feet, almost a mile.” Ames regarded his vessel with affection.
“A mile under water, sir? Jesus—uh, pardon me, sir, but I mean, isn’t that a little hairy—the water pressure, I mean?”
“Not really. I’ve been down to twenty thousand aboard Trieste. It’s really pretty interesting down there. You see all kinds of strange fish.” Though a fully qualified submariner, Ames’ first love was research. He had a degree in oceanography and had commanded or served in all of the navy’s deep-submergence vehicles except the nuclear-powered NR-1. “Of course, the water pressure would do bad things to you if anything went wrong, but it would be so fast you’d never know it. If you fellows want a check ride, I could probably arrange it. It’s a different world down there.”
“That’s okay, sir.” The sergeant went back to swearing at his men.
“You weren’t serious,” the pilot observed.
“Why not? It’s no big deal. We take civilians down all the time, and believe me, it’s a lot less hairy than riding this damned white whale during a midair refueling.”
“Uh-huh,” the pilot noted dubiously. He’d done hundreds of those. It was entirely routine, and he was surprised that anyone would find it dangerous. You had to be careful, of course, but, hell, you had to be careful driving every morning. He was sure that an accident on this pocket submarine wouldn’t leave enough of a man to make a decent meal for a shrimp. It takes all kinds, he decided. “You don’t go to sea by yourself in that, do you?”
“No, ordinarily we work off a submarine rescue ship, Pigeon or Ortolan. We can also operate off a regular submarine. That gadget you see there on the trailer is our mating collar. We can nest on the back of a sub at the after escape trunk, and the sub takes us where we need to go.”
