by Tom Clancy
The V. K. Konovalov
“Solution confirmed, Comrade Captain,” the starpom said.
“Fire one and two,” Tupolev ordered.
“Firing one…Firing two.” The Konovalov shuddered twice as compressed air charges ejected the electrically powered torpedoes.
The Red October
Jones heard it first. “High-speed screws port side!” he said loudly and clearly. “Torpedoes in the water port side!”
“Ryl nalyeva!” Ramius ordered automatically.
“What?” Ryan asked.
“Left, rudder left!” Ramius pounded his fist on the rail.
“Left full, do it!” Mancuso said.
“Left full rudder, aye.” Ryan turned the wheel all the way and held it down. Ramius was spinning the annunciator to flank speed.
The Pogy
“Two fish running,” Palmer said. “Bearing is changing right to left. I say again, torpedo bearing changing right to left rapidly on both fish. They’re targeted on the boomer.”
The Dallas
The Dallas heard them, too. Chambers ordered flank speed and a turn to port. With torpedoes running his options were limited, and he was doing what American practice taught, heading someplace else—very fast.
The Red October
“I need a course!” Ryan said.
“Jonesy, give me a bearing!” Mancuso shouted.
“Three-two-zero, sir. Two fish heading in,” Jones responded at once, working his controls to nail the bearing down. This was no time to screw up.
“Steer three-two-zero, Ryan,” Ramius ordered, “if we can turn so fast.”
Thanks a lot, Ryan thought angrily, watching the gyrocompass click through three-five-seven. The rudder was hard over, and with the sudden increase in power from the caterpillar motors, he could feel feedback flutter through the wheel.
“Two fish heading in, bearing is three-two-zero, I say again bearing is constant,” Jones reported, much cooler than he felt. “Here we go, guys…”
The Pogy
Her tactical plot showed the October, the Alfa, and the two torpedoes. The Pogy was four miles north of the action.
“Can we shoot?” the exec asked.
“At the Alfa?” Wood shook his head emphatically. “No, dammit. It wouldn’t make a difference anyway.”
The V. K. Konovalov
The two Mark C torpedoes were charging at forty-one knots, a slow speed for this range, so that they could be more easily guided by the Konovalov’s sonar system. They had a projected six-minute run, with one minute already completed.
The Red October
“Okay, coming through three-four-five, easing the rudder off,” Ryan said.
Mancuso kept quiet now. Ramius was using a tactic that he didn’t particularly agree with, turning into the fish. It offered a minimum target profile, but it gave them a simpler geometric intercept solution. Presumably Ramius knew what Russian fish could do. Mancuso hoped so.
“Steady on three-two-zero, Captain,” Ryan said, eyes locked on the gyro repeater as though it mattered. A small voice in his brain congratulated him for going to the head an hour earlier.
“Ryan, down, maximum down on the diving planes.”
“All the way down.” Ryan pushed the yoke to the stops. He was terrified, but even more frightened of fouling up. He had to assume that both commanders knew what they were about. There was no choice for him. Well, he thought, he did know one thing. Guided torpedoes can be tricked. Like radar signals that are aimed at the ground, sonar pulses can be obscured, especially when the sub they are trying to locate is near the bottom or the surface, areas where the pulses tend to be reflected. If the October dove she could lose herself in an opaque field—presuming she got there fast enough.
The V. K. Konovalov
“Target aspect has changed, Comrade Captain. Target is now smaller,” the michman said.
Tupolev considered this. He knew everything there was on Soviet combat doctrine—and knew that Ramius had written a good deal of it. Marko would do what he taught all of us to do, Tupolev thought. Turn into the oncoming weapons to minimize target cross-section and dive for the bottom to become lost in the confused echoes. “Target will be attempting to dive into the bottom-capture field. Be alert.”
“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 u
nder 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 the 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 Octo
ber 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!”
