The Hunt for Red October (Jack Ryan, #3)

by Tom Clancy

“Well, they can’t be torpedo tubes. They have the normal four of them at the bow, inboard of these openings . . . must be six or seven feet across. How about launch tubes for the new cruise missile they’re developing?” “That’s what the Royal Navy thinks. I had a chance to talk it over with their intelligence chaps. But I don’t buy it. Why put an anti-surface-ship weapon on a strategic platform? We don’t, and we deploy our boomers a lot farther forward than they do. The doors are symmetrical through the boat’s axis. You can’t launch a missile out of the stern, sir. The openings barely clear the screws.” “Towed sonar array,” Davenport said. “Granted they could do that, if they trail one screw. But why two of them?” Ryan asked. Davenport gave him a nasty look. “They love redundancies.” “Two doors forward, two aft, I can buy cruise missile tubes. I can buy a towed array. But both sets of doors exactly the same size?” Ryan shook his head. “Too much of a coincidence. I think it’s something new. That’s what interrupted her construction for so long. They figured something new for her and spent the last two years rebuilding the Typhoon configuration to accommodate it. Note also that they added six more missiles for good measure.” “Opinion,” Davenport observed. “That’s what I’m paid for.” “Okay, Jack, what do you think it is?” Greer asked. “Beats me, sir. I’m no engineer.”