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

by Tom Clancy

He was physically unremarkable, an inch over six feet, and his average build suffered a little at the waist from a lack of exercise enforced by the miserable English weather. His blue eyes had a deceptively vacant look; he was often lost in thought, his face on autopilot as his mind puzzled through data or research material for his current book. The only people Ryan needed to impress were those who knew him; he cared little for the rest. He had no ambition to celebrity. His life, he judged, was already as complicated as it needed to be—quite a bit more complicated than most would guess. It included a wife he loved and two children he doted on, a job that tested his intellect, and sufficient financial independence to choose his own path. The path Jack Ryan had chosen was in the CIA.

James Greer was sixty-six, a naval officer past retirement age who kept working through brute competence, much as Hyman Rickover had, though Greer was a far easier man to work for. He was a “mustang,” a man who had entered the naval service as an enlisted man, earned his way into the Naval Academy, and spent forty years working his way to a three-star flag, first commanding submarines, then as a full-time intelligence specialist. Greer was a demanding boss, but one who took care of those who pleased him. Ryan was one of these.

“Photographs of the new Soviet missile boat, Red October,” Ryan said casually between sips. “Oh, and what do our British cousins want in return?” Greer asked suspiciously. “They want a peek at Barry Somers’ new enhancement gadgets. Not the machines themselves—at first—just the finished product. I think it’s a fair bargain, sir.” Ryan knew the CIA didn’t have any shots of the new sub.

“We have ten frames, low obliques, five each bow and stern, and one from each perspective is undeveloped so that Somers can work on them fresh. We are not committed, sir, but I told Sir Basil that you’d think it over.”

“To use the new system, Jack, we need the camera used to take the shots.” “I know.” Ryan pulled the camera from his coat pocket. “It’s a modified Kodak disk camera. Sir Basil says it’s the coming thing in spy cameras, nice and flat. This one, he says, was hidden in a tobacco pouch.” “How did you know that—that we need the camera?” “You mean how Somers uses lasers to—” “Ryan!” Greer snapped. “How much do you know?”

“And what do the Brits know?” Greer asked. “Your guess is as good as mine, sir. Sir Basil asked me about it, and I told him that he was asking the wrong guy—I mean, my degrees are in economics and history, not physics. I told him we needed the camera—but he already knew that. Took it right out of his desk and tossed it to me. I did not reveal a thing about this, sir.”

“So, Jack, you say this is worth the price?” “Sir, we’ve wanted these pictures for some time, what with all the contradictory data we’ve been getting on the sub. It’s your decision and the judge’s but, yes, I think they’re worth the price. These shots are very interesting.”

“Gentlemen, I give you Red October, courtesy of the British Secret Intelligence Service,” Ryan said formally. The folders had the photographs arranged in pairs, four each of four-by-four prints. In the back were ten-by-ten blowups of each. The photos had been taken from a low-oblique angle, probably from the rim of the graying dock that had held the boat during her post-shakedown refit. The shots were paired, fore and aft, fore and aft. “Gentlemen, as you can see, the lighting wasn’t all that great. Nothing fancy here. It was a pocket camera loaded with 400-speed color film. The first pair was processed normally to establish high levels. The second was pushed for greater brightness using normal procedures. The third pair was digitally enhanced for color resolution, and the fourth was digitally enhanced for line resolution. I have undeveloped frames of each view for Barry Somers to play with.” “Oh?” Davenport looked up briefly. “That’s right neighborly of the Brits. What’s the price?” Greer told him. “Pay up. It’s worth it.” “That’s what Jack says.”

To the unschooled observer, the photographs showed the standard nuclear missile submarine. The steel hull was blunt at one end, tapered at the other. The workmen standing on the floor of the dock provided scale—she was huge. There were twin bronze propellers at the stern, on either side of a flat appendage which the Russians called a beaver tail, or so the intelligence reports said. With the twin screws the stern was unremarkable except in one detail. “What are these doors for?” Casimir asked. “Hmm. She’s a big bastard.” Davenport evidently hadn’t heard. “Forty feet longer than we expected, by the look of her.” “Forty-four, roughly.” Ryan didn’t much like Davenport, but the man did know his stuff. “Somers can calibrate that for us. And more beam, two meters more than the other Typhoons. She’s an obvious development of the Typhoon class, but—” “You’re right, Captain,” Davenport interrupted. “What are those doors?” “That’s why I came over.” Ryan had wondered how long this would take. He’d caught on to them in the first five seconds. “I don’t know, and neither do the Brits.” The Red October had two doors at the bow and stern, each about two meters in diameter, though they were not quite circular. They had been closed when the photos were shot and only showed up well on the number four pair.

“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.”

“Okay, Jack, you’ve set us up for something. Why did you bring this over personally?” “I want to show these to somebody.” “Who?” Greer’s head cocked suspiciously to one side. “Skip Tyler. Any of you fellows know him?” “I do,” Casimir nodded. “He was a year behind me at Annapolis. Didn’t he get hurt or something?” “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Lost his leg in an auto accident four years ago. He was up for command of the Los Angeles and a drunk driver clipped him. Now he teaches engineering at the Academy and does a lot of consulting work with Sea Systems Command—technical analysis, looking at their ship designs. He has a doctorate in engineering from MIT, and he knows how to think unconventionally.” “How about his security clearance?” Greer asked. “Top secret or better, sir, because of his Crystal City work.” “Objections, Charlie?”

“Did they tell you over there that October sailed last Friday?” “Oh?” They hadn’t. Ryan was caught off guard. “I thought she wasn’t scheduled to sail until this Friday.” “So did we. Her skipper is Marko Ramius. You heard about him?” “Only secondhand stuff. The Brits say he’s pretty good.” “Better than that,” Greer noted. “He’s about the best sub driver they have, a real charger. We had a considerable file on him when I was at DIA. Who’s bird-doggin’ him for you, Charlie?” “Bremerton was assigned to it. She was out of position doing some ELINT work when Ramius sailed, but she was ordered over. Her skipper’s Bud Wilson. Remember his dad?”

“So they say. Ramius is about the best the Soviets have, but Wilson’s got a 688 boat. By the end of the week, we’ll be able to start a new book on Red October. ” Davenport stood. “We gotta head back, James.” Casimir hurried to get the coats. “I can keep these?”

Greer lifted his phone. “Nancy, Dr. Ryan will need a car and a driver in fifteen minutes. Right.” He set the receiver down and waited for Davenport to leave. “No sense getting you killed out there in the snow. Besides, you’d probably drive on the wrong side of the road after a year in England. Skiing Barbie, Jack?” “You had all boys, didn’t you, sir? Girls are different.” Ryan grinned. “You’ve never met my little Sally.”

Greer watched him leave. He liked Ryan. The boy was not afraid to speak his mind. Part of that came from having money and being married to more money. It was a sort of independence that had advantages. Ryan could not be bought, bribed, or bullied. He could always go back to writing history books full time. Ryan had made money on his own in four years as a stockbroker, betting his own money on high-risk issues and scoring big before leaving it all behind—because, he said, he hadn’t wanted to press his luck. Greer didn’t believe that. He thought Jack had been bored—bored with making money. He shook his head. The talent that had enabled him to pick winning stocks Ryan now applied to the CIA. He was rapidly becoming one of Greer’s star analysts, and his British connections made him doubly valuable. Ryan had the ability to sort through a pile of data and come out with the three or four facts that meant something. This was too rare a thing at the CIA.

The U.S. Naval Academy

Ryan sat on the corner of the desk and opened his briefcase. He handed Tyler a folder. “Got some pictures I want you to look at.” “Okay.” Tyler flipped it open. “Whose—a Russian! Big bastard. That’s the basic Typhoon configuration. Lots of modifications, though. Twenty-six missiles instead of twenty. Looks longer. Hull’s flattened out some, too. More beam?” “Two or three meters’ worth.” “I heard you were working with the CIA. Can’t talk about that, right?”

Ryan pulled the blowups from the back of the folder. “These doors, bow and stern.” “Uh-huh.” Tyler set them down side by side. “Pretty big. They’re two meters or so, paired fore and aft. They look symmetrical through the long axis. Not cruise missile tubes, eh?” “On a boomer? You put something like that on a strategic missile sub?” “The Russkies are a funny bunch, Jack, and they design things their own way. This is the same bunch that built the Kirov class with a nuclear reactor and an oil-fired steam plant. Hmm . . . twin screws. The aft doors can’t be for a sonar array. They’d foul the screws.” “How ’bout if they trail one screw?” “They do that with surface ships to conserve fuel, and sometimes with their attack boats. Operating a twin-screw missile boat on one wheel would probably be tricky on this baby. The Typhoon’s supposed to have handling problems, and boats that handle funny tend to be sensitive to power settings. You end up jinking around so much that you have trouble holding course. You notice how the doors converge at the stern?” “No, I didn’t.” Tyler looked up. “Damn! I should have realized it right off the bat. It’s a propulsion system. You shouldn’t have caught me marking papers, Jack. It turns your brain to Jell-O.” “Propulsion system?” “We looked at this—oh, must have been twenty some years ago—when I was going to school here. We didn’t do anything with it, though. It’s too inefficient.” “Okay, tell me about it.” “They called it a tunnel drive. You know ho...

“Now, this tunnel drive system avoids the cavitation problem. You still have cavitation, but the noise from it is mainly lost in the tunnels. That makes good sense. The problem is that you can’t generate much speed without making the tunnels too wide to be practical. While one team was working on this, another was working on improved screw designs. Your typical sub screw today is pretty large, so it can turn more slowly for a given speed. The slower the turning speed, the less cavitation you get. The problem is also mitigated by depth. A few hundred feet down, the higher water pressure retards bubble formation.”

“Then why don’t the Soviets copy our screw designs?” “Several reasons, probably. You design a screw for a specific hull and engine combination, so copying ours wouldn’t automatically work for them. A lot of this work is still empirical, too. There’s a lot of trial and error in this. It’s a lot harder, say, than designing an airfoil, because the blade cross-section changes radically from one point to another. I suppose another reason is that their metallurgical technology isn’t as good as ours—same reason that their jet and rocket engines ...

“But you could do it?” “Sure. I’d need exact dimensions on this baby, but I’ve done this before for the bunch over at Crystal City. The hard part’s getting the computer time. I need a big machine.” “I can probably arrange access to ours.” Tyler laughed. “Probably not good enough, Jack. This is specialized stuff. I’m talking about a Cray-2, one of the biggies. To do this you have to mathematically simulate the behavior of millions of little parcels of water, the water flow over—and through, in this case—the whole hull. Same sort of thing NASA has to do with the Space Shuttle. The actual work is easy enough—it’s the scale that’s tough. They’re simple calculations, but you have to make millions of them per second. That means a big Cray, and there’s only a few of them around. NASA has one in Houston, I think. The navy has a few in Norfolk for ASW work—you can forget about those. The air force has one in the Pentagon, I think, and all the rest are in California.” “But you could do it?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, get to work on it, Skip, and I’ll see if we can get you the computer time. How long?” “Depending on how good the stuff at ...

CIA Headquarters

“We have something more on Red October. The Russians seem to have a major ASW exercise running in the northeast Barents Sea. Half a dozen ASW search aircraft, a bunch of frigates, and an Alfa-class attack boat, all running around in circles.” “Probably an acquisition exercise. Skip Tyler says those doors are for a new drive system.” “Indeed.” Greer sat back. “Tell me about it.”

“Okay, the Soviets have a new missile boat with a silent drive system. What does it all mean?” “Nothing good. We depend on our ability to track their boomers with our attack boats. Hell, that’s why they agreed a few years back to our proposal about keeping them five hundred miles from each other’s coasts, and why they keep their missile subs in port most of the time. This could change the game a bit. By the way, October’s hull, I haven’t seen what it’s made of.” “Steel. She’s too big for a titanium hull, at least for what it would cost. You know what they have to spend on their Alfas.” “Too much for what they got. You spend that much money for a superstrong hull, then put a noisy power plant in it. Dumb.” “Maybe. I wouldn’t mind having that speed, though. Anyway, if this silent drive system really works, they might be able to creep up onto the continental shelf.”

“Depressed-trajectory shot,” Ryan said. This was one of the nastier nuclear war scenarios in which a sea-based missile was fired within a few hundred miles of its target. Washington is a bare hundred air miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Though a missile on a low, fast flight path loses much of its accuracy, a few of them can be launched to explode over Washington in less than a few minutes’ time, too little for a president to react. If the Soviets were able to kill the president that quickly, the resulting disruption of the chain of command would give them ample time to take out the land-based missiles—there would be no one with authority to fire. This scenario is a grand-strategic version of a simple mugging, Ryan thought. A mugger doesn’t attack his victim’s arms—he goes for the head. “You think October was built with that in mind?” “I’m sure the thought occurred to them,” Greer observed. “It would have occurred to us. Well, we have Bremerton up there to keep an eye on her, and if this data turns out to be useful we’ll see if we can come up with an answer. How are you feeling?” “I’ve been on the go since five-thirty London time. Long day, sir.”

SOSUS Control

The room was SOSUS (sonar surveillance system) Atlantic Control. It was in a fairly nondescript building, uninspired government layer cake, with windowless concrete walls, a large air-conditioning system on a flat roof, and an acronym-coded blue sign on a well-tended but now yellowed lawn. There were armed marines inconspicuously on guard inside the three entrances. In the basement were a pair of Cray-2 supercomputers tended by twenty acolytes, and behind the building was a trio of satellite ground stations, all up- and down-links. The men at the consoles and the computers were linked electronically by satellite and landline to the SOSUS system.

Throughout the oceans of the world, and especially astride the passages that Soviet submarines had to cross to reach the open sea, the United States and other NATO countries had deployed gangs of highly sensitive sonar receptors. The hundreds of SOSUS sensors received and forwarded an unimaginably vast amount of information, and to help the system operators classify and analyze it a whole new family of computers had to be designed, the supercomputers. SOSUS served its purpose admirably well. Very little could cross a barrier without being detected. Even the ultraquiet American and British attack submarines were generally picked up. The sensors, lying on the bottom of the sea, were periodically updated; many now had their own signal processors to presort the data they forwarded, lightening the load on the central computers and enabling more rapid and accurate classification of targets.

Chief Franklin’s console received data from a string of sensors planted of...

The senior duty officer had the frequently exercised authority to prosecute a contact with a wide range of assets, from surface ships to antisubmarine aircraft. Two world wars had taught American and British officers the necessity of keeping their sea lines of communication—SLOCs—open.

An eyebrow went up, and his nearly bald head cocked to one side. The pulls on the pipe grew irregular. His right hand reached forward to the control panel and switched off the signal processors so that he could get the sound without computerized interference. But it was no good. There was too much background noise. He switched the filters back on. Next he tried some changes in his azimuth controls. The SOSUS sensors were designed to give bearing checks through the selective use of individual receptors, which he could manipulate electronically, first getting one bearing, then using a neighboring gang to triangulate for a fix. The contact was very faint, but not too far from the line, he judged. Franklin queried his computer terminal. The USS Dallas was up there. Gotcha! he said with a thin smile. Another noise came through, a low-frequency rumble that only lasted a few seconds before fading out. Not all that quiet, though. Why hadn’t he heard it before switching the reception azimuth? He set his pipe down and began making adjustments on his control board.

“Damned if they ain’t pretty busy up there. I read a pair of Alfas, a Charlie, a Tango, and a few surface ships. What gives, sir?” “There’s a Delta there, too, but she just surfaced and killed her engines.” “Surfaced, Skipper?” “Yep. They were lashing her pretty hard with active sonar, then a ’can queried her on a gertrude.” “Uh-huh. Acquisition game, and the sub lost.” “Maybe.” Quentin rubbed his eyes. The man looked tired. He was pushing himself too hard, and his stamina wasn’t half what it should have been. “But the Alfas are still pinging, and now they’re headed west, as you heard.” “Oh.” Franklin pondered that for a moment. “They’re looking for another boat, then. The Typhoon that was supposed to have sailed the other day, maybe?” “That’s what I thought—except she headed west, and the exercise area is northeast of the fjord. We lost her the other day on SOSUS. Bremerton’s up sniffing around for her now.” “Cagey skipper,” Franklin decided. “Cut his plant all the way back and just drifting.” “Yeah,” Quentin agreed. “I want you to move down to the North Cape barrier supervisory board and see if you can find her, Chief. She’ll still have her reactor working, and she’ll be making some noise. The operators we have on that sector are a little young. I’ll take one and switch him to your board for a while.”

THE FIFTH DAY

TUESDAY, 7 DECEMBER

M...

Yuri Ilych Padorin showed up for work at his customary seven o’clock after the drive from his six-room apartment in the Kutuzovskiy Prospekt.

Padorin was now the chief political officer of the Soviet Navy. His job was men, not ships.

He settled in his chair and read first through the intelligence dispatches, information copies of data sent each morning and evening to the operational commands of the Soviet Navy. A political officer had to keep current, to know what the imperialists were up to so that he could brief his men on the threat.

Near the bottom of the pile was an official-looking envelope from the Northern Fleet. The code number at the upper left corner showed that it came from the Red October. Hadn’t he just read something about that?

So, Ramius hadn’t turned up in his exercise area? He shrugged. Missile submarines were supposed to be elusive, and it would not have surprised the old admiral at all if Ramius were twisting a few tails.

Padorin suspected that he was too much a sailor and not enough a Communist. On the other hand, his father had been a model Party member and a hero of the Great Patriotic War.

The people in the naval branch of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, reported that the imperialists regarded him as a dangerous and skilled enemy.

The envelope was marked Confidential, and his yeoman had not opened it as he had the other routine mail.

“Comrade Admiral,” the letter began—but the type had been scratched out and replaced with a handwritten “Uncle Yuri.” Ramius had jokingly called him that years back when Padorin was chief political officer of the Northern Fleet. “Thank you for your confidence, and for the opportunity you have given me with command of this magnificent ship!” Ramius ought to be grateful, Padorin thought. Performance or not, you don’t give this sort of command to— What? Padorin stopped reading and started over. He forgot the cigarette smoldering in his ashtray as he reached the bottom of the first page. A joke. Ramius was known for his jokes—but he’d pay for this one. This was going too fucking far! He turned the page. “This is no joke, Uncle Yuri—Marko.”

He had a direct line to Admiral Gorshkov, with no yeomen or secretaries to bar the way. “Comrade Admiral, this is Padorin.” “Good morning, Yuri,” Gorshkov said pleasantly. “I must see you immediately. I have a situation here.” “What sort of situation?” Gorshkov asked warily. “We must discuss it in person. I am coming over now.” There was no way he’d discuss this over the phone; he knew it was tapped.

The USS Dallas

Sonarman Second Class Ronald Jones, his division officer noted, was...

In all the navies of the world, submariners were regarded as a curious breed, and submariners themselves looked upon sonar operators as odd. Their eccentricities, however, were among the most tolerated in the military service.