by Tom Clancy
“No, no family.” He turned and addressed a junior officer in Russian. “Take the next group. You heard my instructions to the doctor?”
“Yes, Comrade Captain!” the young man said.
They heard the Mystic’s electric motors overhead. A moment later came the metallic clang of the mating collar gripping the escape trunk. It had taken forty minutes, but it had seemed like a week. God, what if the reactor really was bad? Ryan thought.
The Scamp
Two miles away, the Scamp had halted a few hundred yards from the Ethan Allen. Both submarines were exchanging messages on their gertrudes. The Scamp sonarmen had noted the passage of the three submarines an hour earlier. The Pogy and Dallas were now between the Red October and the other two American subs, their sonar operators listening intently for any interference, any vessel that might come their way. The transfer area was far enough offshore to miss the coastal traffic of commercial freighters and tankers, but that might not keep them from meeting a stray vessel from another port.
The Red October
When the third set of crewmen left under the control of Lieutenant Svyadov, a cook at the end of the line broke away, explaining that he wanted to retrieve his cassette tape machine, something he had saved months for. No one noticed when he didn’t return, not even Ramius. His crewmen, even the experienced michmanyy, jostled one another to get out of their submarine. There was only one more group to go.
The Pigeon
On the Pigeon, the Soviet crewmen were taken to the crew’s mess. The American sailors were observing their Russian counterparts closely, but no words passed. The Russians found the tables set with a meal of coffee, bacon, eggs, and toast. Petrov was happy for that. It was no problem keeping control of the men when they ate like wolves. With a junior officer acting as interpreter, they asked for and got plenty of additional bacon. The cooks had orders to stuff the Russians with all the food they could eat. It kept everyone busy as a helicopter landed from shore with twenty new men, one of whom raced to the bridge.
The Red October
“Last group,” Ryan murmured to himself. The Mystic mated again. The last round trip had taken an hour. When the pair of hatches was opened, the lieutenant from the DSRV came down.
“Next trip will be delayed, gentlemen. Our batteries have about had it. It’ll take ninety minutes to recharge. Any problem?”
“It will be as you say,” Ramius replied. He translated for his men and then ordered Ivanov to take the next group. “The senior officers will stay behind. We have work to do.” Ramius took the young officer’s hand. “If something happens, tell them in Moscow that we have done our duty.”
“I will do that, Comrade Captain.” Ivanov nearly choked on his answer.
Ryan watched the sailors leave. The Red October’s escape trunk hatch was closed, then the Mystic’s. One minute later there was a clanging sound as the minisub lifted free. He heard the electric motors whirring off, fading rapidly away, and felt the green-painted bulkheads closing in on him. Being on an airplane was frightening, but at least the air didn’t threaten to crush you. Here he was, underwater, three hundred miles from shore in the world’s largest submarine, with only ten men aboard who knew how to run her.
“Commander Ryan,” Ramius said, drawing himself to attention, “my officers and I request political asylum in the United States—and we bring you this small present.” Ramius gestured toward the steel bulkheads.
Ryan had already framed his reply. “Captain, on behalf of the president of the United States, it is my honor to grant your request. Welcome to freedom, gentlemen.”
No one knew that the intercom system in the compartment had been switched on. The indicator light had been unplugged hours before. Two compartments forward the cook listened, telling himself that he had been right to stay behind, wishing he had been wrong. Now what will I do? he wondered. His duty. That sounded easy enough—but would he remember how to carry it out?
“I don’t know what to say about you guys.” Ryan shook everyone’s hand again. “You pulled it off. You really pulled it off!”
“Excuse me, Commander,” Kamarov said. “Do you speak Russian?”
“Sorry, Lieutenant Williams here does, but I do not. A group of Russian-speaking officers was supposed to be here in my place, but their helicopter crashed at sea last night.” Williams translated this. Four of the officers had no knowledge of English.
“And what happens now?”
“In a few minutes, a missile submarine will explode two miles from here. One of ours, an old one. I presume that you told your men you were going to scuttle—Jesus, I hope you didn’t say what you were really doing?”
“And have a war aboard my ship?” Ramius laughed. “No, Ryan. Then what?”
“When everybody thinks Red October has sunk, we’ll head northwest to the Ocracoke Inlet and wait. USS Dallas and Pogy will be escorting us. Can these few men operate the ship?”
“These men can operate any ship in the world!” Ramius said it in Russian first. His men grinned. “So, you think that our men will not know what has become of us?”
“Correct. Pigeon will see an underwater explosion. They have no way of knowing it’s in the wrong place, do they? You know that your navy has many ships operating off our coast right now? When they leave, well, then we’ll figure out where to keep this present permanently. I don’t know where that will be. You men, of course, will be our guests. A lot of our people will want to talk with you. For the moment, you can be sure that you will be treated very well—better than you can imagine.” Ryan was sure that the CIA would give each a considerable sum of money. He didn’t say so, not wanting to insult this kind of bravery. It had surprised him to learn that defectors rarely expect to receive money, almost never ask for any.
“What about political education?” Kamarov asked.
Ryan laughed. “Lieutenant, somewhere along the line somebody will take you aside to explain how our country works. That will take about two hours. After that you can immediately start telling us what we do wrong—everybody else in the world does, why shouldn’t you? But I can’t do that now. Believe this, you will love it, probably more than I do. I have never lived in a country that was not free, and maybe I don’t appreciate my home as much as I should. For the moment, I suppose you have work to do.”
“Correct,” Ramius said. “Come, my new comrades, we will put you to work also.”
Ramius led Ryan aft through a series of watertight doors. In a few minutes he was in the missile room, a vast compartment with twenty-six dark-green tubes towering through two decks. The business end of a boomer, with two-hundred-plus thermonuclear warheads. The menace in this room was enough to make hair bristle at the back of Ryan’s neck. These were not academic abstractions, these were real. The upper deck he walked on was a grating. The lower deck, he could see, was solid. After passing through this and another compartment they were in the control room. The interior of the submarine was ghostly quiet; Ryan sensed why sailors are superstitious.
“You will sit here.” Ramius pointed Ryan to the helmsman’s station on the port side of the compartment. There was an aircraft-style wheel and a gang of instruments.
“What do I do?” Ryan asked, sitting.
“You will steer the ship, Commander. Have you never done this before?”
“No, sir. I’ve never been on a submarine before.”
“But you are a naval officer.”
Ryan shook his head. “No, captain. I work for the CIA.”
“CIA?” Ramius hissed the acronym as if it were poisonous.
“I know, I know.” Ryan dropped his head on the wheel. “They call us the Dark Forces. Captain, this is one Dark Force who’s probably going to wet his pants before we’re finished here. I work at a desk, and believe me on this if nothing else—there’s nothing I’d like better than to be home with my wife and kids right now. If I had half a brain, I would have stayed in Annapolis and kept writing my books.”
“Books? What do yo
u mean?”
“I’m an historian, Captain. I was asked to join the CIA a few years ago as an analyst. Do you know what that is? Agents bring in their data, and I figure out what it means. I got into this mess by mistake—shit, you don’t believe me, but it’s true. Anyway, I used to write books on naval history.”
“Tell me your books,” Ramius ordered.
“Options and Decisions, Doomed Eagles, and a new one coming out next year, Fighting Sailor, a biography of Admiral Halsey. My first one was about the Battle of Leyte Gulf. It was reviewed in Morskoi Sbornik, I understand. It dealt with the nature of tactical decisions made under combat conditions. There’s supposed to be a dozen copies at the Frunze library.”
Ramius was quiet for a moment. “Ah, I know this book. Yes, I read parts of it. You were wrong, Ryan. Halsey acted stupidly.”
“You will do well in my country, Captain Ramius. You are already a book critic. Captain Borodin, can I trouble you for a cigarette?” Borodin tossed him a full pack and matches. Ryan lit one. It was terrible.
The Avalon
The Mystic’s fourth return was the signal for the Ethan Allen and Scamp to act. The Avalon lifted off her bed and motored the few hundred yards to the old missile boat. Her captain was already assembling his men in the torpedo room. Every hatch, door, manhole, and drawer had been opened all over the boat. One of the officers was coming forward to join the others. Behind him trailed a black wire that led to each of the bombs aboard. This he connected to a timing device.
“All ready, Captain.”
The Red October
Ryan watched Ramius order his men to their posts. Most went aft to run the engines. Ramius had the good manners to speak in English, repeating himself in Russian for those who did not understand their new language.
“Kamarov and Williams, will you go forward and secure all hatches.” Ramius explained for Ryan’s benefit. “If something goes wrong—it won’t, but if it does—we do not have enough men to make repairs. So, we seal the entire ship.”
It made sense to Ryan. He set an empty cup on the control pedestal to serve as an ashtray. He and Ramius were alone in the control room.
“When are we to leave?” Ramius asked.
“Whenever you are ready, sir. We have to get to Ocracoke Inlet at high tide, about eight minutes after midnight. Can we make it?”
Ramius consulted his chart. “Easily.”
Kamarov led Williams through the communications room forward of control. They left the watertight door there open, then went forward to the missile room. Here they climbed down a ladder and walked forward on the lower missile deck to the forward missile room bulkhead. They proceeded through the door into the stores compartments, checking each hatch as they went. Near the bow they went up another ladder into the torpedo room, dogging the hatch down behind them, and proceeded aft through the torpedo storage and crew spaces. Both men sensed how strange it was to be aboard a ship with no crew, and they took their time, Williams twisting his head to look at everything and asking Kamarov questions. The lieutenant was happy to answer them in his mother language. Both men were competent officers, sharing a romantic attachment to their profession. For his part, Williams was greatly impressed by the Red October and said as much several times. A great deal of attention had been paid to small details. The deck was tiled. The hatches were lined with thick rubber gaskets. They hardly made any noise at all as they moved about checking watertight integrity, and it was obvious that more than mere lip service had been paid to making this submarine a quiet one.
Williams was translating a favorite sea story into Russian as they opened the hatch to the missile room’s upper deck. When he stepped through the hatch behind Kamarov, he remembered that the missile room’s bright overhead lights had been left on. Hadn’t they?
Ryan was trying to relax and failing at it. The seat was uncomfortable, and he recalled the Russian joke about how they were shaping the New Soviet Man—with airliner seats that contorted an individual into all kinds of impossible shapes. Aft, the engine room crew had begun powering up the reactor. Ramius was speaking over the intercom phone with his chief engineer, just before the sound of moving reactor coolant increased to generate steam for the turboalternators.
Ryan’s head went up. It was as though he felt the sound before hearing it. A chill ran up the back of his neck before his brain told him what the sound had to be.
“What was that?” he said automatically, knowing already what it was.
“What?” Ramius was ten feet aft, and the caterpillar engines were now turning. A strange rumble reverberated through the hull.
“I heard a shot—no, several shots.”
Ramius looked amused as he came a few steps forward. “I think you hear the sounds of the caterpillar engines, and I think it is your first time on a submarine boat, as you said. The first time is always difficult. It was so even for me.”
Ryan stood up. “That may be, Captain, but I know a shot when I hear it.” He unbottoned his jacket and pulled out the pistol.
“You will give me that.” Ramius held out his hand. “You may not have a pistol on my submarine!”
“Where are Williams and Kamarov?” Ryan wavered.
Ramius shrugged. “They are late, yes, but this is a big ship.”
“I’m going forward to check.”
“You will stay at your post!” Ramius ordered. “You will do as I say!”
“Captain, I just heard something that sounded like gunshots, and I am going forward to check it out. Have you ever been shot at? I have. I have the scars on my shoulder to prove it. You’d better take the wheel, sir.”
Ramius picked up a phone and punched a button. He spoke in Russian for a few seconds and hung up. “I will go to show you that my submarine has no souls—ghosts, yes? Ghosts, no ghosts.” He gestured to the pistol. “And you are no spy, eh?”
“Captain, believe what you want to believe, okay? It’s a long story, and I’ll tell it to you someday.” Ryan waited for the relief that Ramius had evidently called for. The rumble of the tunnel drive made the sub sound like the inside of a drum.
An officer whose name he did not remember came into the control room. Ramius said something that drew a laugh—which stopped when the officer saw Ryan’s pistol. It was obvious that neither Russian was happy he had one.
“With your permission, Captain?” Ryan gestured forward.
“Go on, Ryan.”
The watertight door between control and the next space had been left open. Ryan entered the radio room slowly, eyes tracing left and right. It was clear. He went forward to the missile room door, which was dogged tight. The door, four feet or so high and about two across, was locked in place with a central wheel. Ryan turned the wheel with one hand. It was well oiled. So were the hinges. He pulled the door open slowly and peered around the hatch coaming.
“Oh, shit,” Ryan breathed, waving the captain forward. The missile compartment was a good two hundred feet long, lit only by six or eight small glow lights. Hadn’t it been brightly lit before? At the far end was a splash of bright light, and the far hatch had two shapes sprawled on the gratings next to it. Neither moved. The light Ryan saw them by was flickering next to a missile tube.
“Ghosts, Captain?” he whispered.
“It is Kamarov.” Ramius said something else under his breath in Russian.
Ryan pulled the slide back on his FN automatic to make sure a round was in the chamber. Then he stepped out of his shoes.
“Better let me handle this. Once upon a time I was a lieutenant in the marines.” And my training at Quantico, he thought to himself, had damned little to do with this. Ryan entered the compartment.
The missile room was almost a third of the submarine’s length and two decks high. The lower deck was solid metal. The upper one was made of metal grates. Sherwood Forest, this place was called on American missile boats. The term was apt enough. The missile tubes, a good nine feet in diameter and painted a darker green than the rest of the room, loo
ked like the trunks of enormous trees. He pulled the hatch shut behind him and moved to his right.
The light seemed to be coming from the farthest missile tube on the starboard side of the upper missile deck. Ryan stopped to listen. Something was happening there. He could hear a low rustling sound, and the light was moving as though it came from a hand-held work lamp. The sound was traveling down the smooth sides of the interior hull plating.
“Why me?” he whispered to himself. He’d have to get past thirteen missile tubes to get to the source of that light, cross over two hundred feet of open deck.
He moved around the first one, pistol in his right hand at waist level, his left hand tracing the cold metal of the tube. Already he was sweating into the checkered hard-rubber pistol grips. That, he told himself, is why they’re checkered. He got between the first and second tubes, looked to port to make sure nobody was there, and got ready to move forward. Twelve to go.
The deck grating was welded out of eighth-inch metal bars. Already his feet hurt from walking on it. Moving slowly and carefully around the next circular tube, he felt like an astronaut orbiting the moon and crossing a continuous horizon. Except on the moon there wasn’t anybody waiting to shoot you.
A hand came down on his shoulder. Ryan jumped and whirled around. Ramius. He had something to say, but Ryan put his fingertips on the man’s lips and shook his head. Ryan’s heart was beating so loudly that he could have used it for sending Morse code, and he could hear his own breathing—so why the hell hadn’t he heard Ramius?
Ryan gestured his intention to go around the outboard side of each missile. Ramius indicated that he would go around the inboard sides. Ryan nodded. He decided to button his jacket and turn the collar up. It would make him a harder target. Better a dark shape than one with a white triangle on it. Next tube.
Ryan saw that words were painted on the tubes, with other inscriptions forged onto the metal itself. The letters were in Cyrillic and probably said No Smoking or Lenin Lives or something similarly useless. He saw and heard everything with great acuity, as though someone had taken sandpaper to all his senses to make him fantastically alert. He edged around the next tube, his fingers flexing nervously on the pistol grip, wanting to wipe the sweat from his eyes. There was nothing here; the port side was okay. Next one…
