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

by Tom Clancy

“These guys are on a submarine. You can’t see a whole lot. Now, what if the officers—not even all the officers—are doing this? How will the crew know what’s going on?” Foster shook his head. “They won’t. They can’t. Even our guys might not, and our men are trained a lot better than theirs. Their seamen are nearly all conscripts, remember. On a nuclear submarine you are absolutely cut off from the outside world. No radios except for ELF and VLF—and that’s all encrypted; messages have to come through the communications officer. So, he has to be in on it. Same thing with the boat’s navigator. They use inertial navigation systems, same as us. We have one of theirs, from that Golf we lifted off Hawaii. In their machine the data is also encrypted. The quartermaster reads the numbers off the machine, and the navigator gets their position from a book. In the Red Army, on land, maps are classified documents. Same thing in their navy. The enlisted men don’t get to see charts and are not encouraged to know where they are. This would be especially true on missile submarines, right? “On top of all that, these guys are working sailors, nucs. When you’re at sea, you have a job to do, and you do it. On their ships, that means from fourteen to eighteen hours a day. These kids are all draftees with very simple training. They’re taught to perform one or two tasks—and to follow their orders exactly. The Soviets train people to do their jobs by rote, with as little thinking as possible. That’s...