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

by Tom Clancy

Three years earlier, Jones had been asked to leave the California Institute of Technology in the middle of his junior year. He had pulled one of the ingenious pranks for which Cal Tech students were justly famous, only it hadn’t worked. Now he was serving his time in the navy to finance his return. It was his announced intention to get a doctorate in cybernetics and signal processing. In return for an early out, after receiving his degree he would go to work for the Naval Research Laboratory. Lieutenant Thompson believed it. On joining the Dallas six months earlier, he had read the files of all his men. Jones’ IQ was 158, the highest on the boat by a fair margin. He had a placid face and sad brown eyes that women found irresistible. On the beach Jones had enough action to wear down a squad of marines. It didn’t make much sense to the lieutenant. He’d been the football hero at Annapolis. Jones was a skinny kid who listened to Bach. It didn’t figure.

The USS Dallas, a 688-class attack submarine, was forty miles from the coast of Iceland, approaching her patrol station, code-named Toll Booth.

Now they had a different mission, a new development in the Atlantic submarine game. For three weeks, the Dallas was to report on traffic in and out of Red Route One.

Jones’ trance lasted ten minutes—longer than usual. He ordinarily had a contact figured out in far less time. The sailor leaned back and lit a cigarette. “Got something, Mr. Thompson.” “What is it?” Thompson leaned against the bulkhead. “I don’t know.” Jones picked up a spare set of phones and handed them to his officer. “Listen up, sir.” Thompson himself was a masters candidate in electrical engineering, an expert in sonar system design. His eyes screwed shut as he concentrated on the sound. It was a very faint low-frequency rumble—or swish. He couldn’t decide. He listened for several minutes before setting the headphones down, then shook his head.

“I got it a half hour ago on the lateral array,” Jones said. He referred to a subsystem of the BQQ-5 multifunction submarine sonar. Its main component was an eighteen-foot-diameter dome located in the bow. The dome was used for both active and passive operations. A new part of the system was a gang of passive sensors which extended two hundred feet down both sides of the hull. This was a mechanical analog to the sensory organs on the body of a shark. “Lost it, got it back, lost it, got it back,” Jones went on. “It’s not screw sounds, not whales or fish. More like water going through a pipe, except for that funny rumble that comes and goes. Anyway, the bearing is about two-five-zero. That puts it between us and Iceland, so it can’t be too far away.”

During her last overhaul, the Dallas had received a very special toy to go along with her BQQ-5 sonar system. Called the BC-10, it was the most powerful computer yet installed aboard a submarine. Though only about the size of a business desk, it cost over five million dollars and ran at eighty million operations per second. It used newly developed sixty-four-bit chips and made use of the latest processing architecture. Its bubble memory could easily accommodate the computing needs of a whole squadron of submarines. In five years every attack sub in the fleet would have one. Its purpose, much like that of the far larger SOSUS system, was to process and analyze sonar signals; the BC-10 stripped away ambient noise and other naturally produced sea sounds to classify and identify man-made noise. It could identify ships by name from their individual acoustical signatures, much as one could identify the finger or voice prints of a human.

As important as the computer was its programming software. Four years before, a Ph.D. candidate in geophysics who was working at Cal Tech’s geophysical laboratory had completed a program of six hundred thousand steps designed to predict earthquakes. The problem the program addressed was one of signal versus noise. It overcame the difficulty seismologists had discriminating between random noise that is constantly monitored on seismographs and genuinely unusual signals that foretell a seismic event. The first Defense Department use of the program was in the Air Force Technical Applications Command (AFTAC), which found it entirely satisfactory for its mission of monitoring nuclear events throughout the world in accordance with arms control treaties. The Navy Research Laboratory also redrafted it for its own purposes. Though inadequate for seismic predictions, it worked very well indeed in analyzing sonar signals. The program was known in the navy as the signal algorithmic processing system (SAPS).

“Hmph.” Jones tore off the page. “‘ANOMALOUS SIGNAL EVALUATED AS MAGMA DISPLACEMENT.’ That’s SAPS’ way of saying take two aspirin and call me at end of the watch.”

“Sir, the frequency is all wrong for one thing—nowhere near low enough. How ’bout I try an’ track in on this signal with the R-15?” Jones referred to the towed array of passive sensors the Dallas was trailing behind her at low speed.

“Just wandering by,” he said casually. “What’s happening this fine day?” The captain leaned against the bulkhead. He was a small man, only five eight, who had fought a battle against his waistline all his life and was now losing because of the good food and lack of exercise on a submarine. His dark eyes were surrounded by laugh lines that were always deeper when he was playing a trick on another ship.

“Skipper, Jones picked up a funny signal on the lateral. The computer says it’s magma displacement.” “And Jonesy doesn’t agree with that.” Mancuso didn’t have to make it a question. “No, sir, Captain, I don’t. I don’t know what it is, but for sure it ain’t that.” “You against the machine again?” “Skipper, SAPS works pretty well most of the time, but sometimes it’s a real kludge.” Jones’ epithet was the most perjorative curse of electronics people. “For one thing the frequency is all wrong.” “Okay, what do you think?” “I don’t know, Captain. It isn’t screw sounds, and it isn’t any naturally produced sound that I’ve heard. Beyond that . . .” Jones was struck by the informality of the discussion with his commanding officer, even after three years on nuclear subs. The crew of the Dallas was like one big family, albeit one of the old frontier families, since everybody worked pretty damned hard. The captain was the father. The executive officer, everyone would readily agree, was the mother. The officers were the older kids, and the enlisted men were the younger kids. The important thing was, if you had something to say, the captain would listen to you. To Jones, this counted for a lot.

“Christ!” The junior technician bolted upright in his chair. “Somebody just stomped on the gas.”

“Damn,” Jones muttered quietly. “Charlie,” said the junior technician. Jones shook his head. “Victor. Victor class for sure. Doing turns for thirty knots—big burst of cavitation noise, he’s digging big holes in the water, and he doesn’t care who knows it. Bearing zero-five-zero. Skipper, we got good water around us, and the signal is real faint. He’s not close.” It was the closest thing to a range estimate Jones could come up with. Not close meant anything over ten miles. He went back to working his controls. “I think we know this guy. This is the one with a bent blade on his screw, sounds like he’s got a chain wrapped around it.”

“Victor I–class, number six,” Thompson announced. “Right.” Jones nodded. “Vic-six, bearing still zero-five-zero.” He plugged the mouthpiece into his headphones. “Conn, sonar, we have a contact. A Victor class, bearing zero-five-zero, estimated target speed thirty knots.”

“Wait a minute!” Jones’ hand went up. “Got another one!” He twiddled some knobs. “This one’s a Charlie class. Damned if he ain’t digging holes, too. More easterly, bearing zero-seven-three, doing turns for about twenty-eight knots. We know this guy, too. Yeah, Charlie II, number eleven.” Jones slipped a phone off one ear and looked at Mancuso. “Skipper, the Russkies have sub races scheduled for today?” “Not that they told me about. Of course, we don’t get the sports page out here.” Mancuso chuckled, swirling the coffee around in his cup and hiding his real thoughts. What the hell was going on? “I suppose I’ll go forward and take a look at this. Good work, guys.”

“So we have company,” Mannion observed. “Not that close,” Lieutenant Charles Goodman noted. “These bearings haven’t changed a whisker.” “Conn, sonar.” It was Jones’ voice. Mancuso took it. “Conn, aye. What is it, Jonesy?” “We got another one, sir. Alfa 3, bearing zero-five-five. Running flat out. Sounds like an earthquake, but faint, sir.” “Alfa 3? Our old friend, the Politovskiy. Haven’t run across her in a while. Anything else you can tell me?” “A guess, sir. The sound on this one warbled, then settled down, like she was making a turn. I think she’s heading this way—that’s a little shaky. And we have some more noise to the northeast. Too confused to make any sense of just now. We’re working on it.” “Okay, nice work, Jonesy. Keep at it.”

“Pat, let’s get some sea room. Move us about ten miles east,” Mancuso ordered casually. There were two reasons for this. First, it would establish a base line from which to compute probable target range. Second, the deeper water would make for better acoustical conditions, opening up to them the distant sonar convergence zone. The captain studied the chart as his navigator gave the necessary orders, evaluating the tactical situation.

Two hours later an alarm bell went off on the ELF radio in the sub’s communications room. Like all nuclear submarines, the Dallas was trailing a lengthy wire antenna attuned to the extremely low-frequency transmitter in the central United States. The channel had a frustratingly narrow data band width. Unlike a TV channel, which transmitted thousands of bits of data per frame, thirty frames per second, the ELF radio passed on data slowly, about one character every thirty seconds. The duty radioman waited patiently while the information was recorded on tape. When the message was finished, he ran the tape at high speed and transcribed the message, handing it to the communications officer who was waiting with his code book.

COMSUBLANT—commander of the Submarine Force in the Atlantic—was Mancuso’s big boss, Vice Admiral Vincent Gallery. The old man was evidently contemplating a reshuffling of his entire force, no minor affair.

The submariner’s trade required more than skill. It required instinct, and an artist’s touch; monomaniacal confidence, and the aggressiveness of a professional boxer. Mancuso had all of these things. He had spent fifteen years learning his craft, watching a generation of commanders as a junior officer, listening carefully at the frequent round-table discussions which made submarining a very human profession, its lessons passed on by verbal tradition. Time on shore had been spent training in a variety of computerized simulators, attending seminars, comparing notes and ideas with his peers. Aboard surface ships and ASW aircraft he learned how the “enemy”—the surface sailors—played his own hunting game.

CIA Headquarters

“Sorry to have to wake you up, Jack.” “Oh, that’s all right, sir,” Ryan returned the lie. “What’s up?” “Come on over and grab some coffee. It’s going to be a long day.”

“Any place I can shave around here, sir?” “Head’s behind the door, over in the corner.” Greer handed him a yellow sheet torn from a telex machine. “Look at this.”

TOP SECRET 102200Z*****38976 NSA SIGINT BULLETIN REDNAV OPS

MESSAGE FOLLOWS AT 083145Z NSA MONITOR STATIONS [DELETED] [DELETED] AND [DELETED] RECORDED AN ELF BROADCAST FROM REDFLEET ELF FACILITY SEMIPOLIPINSK XX MESSAGE DURATION 10 MINUTES XX 6 ELEMENTS XX ELF SIGNAL IS EVALUATED AS “PREP” BROADCAST TO REDFLEET SUBMARINES AT SEA XX AT 090000Z AN “ALL SHIPS” BROADCAST WAS MADE BY REDFLEET HEADQUARTERS CENTRAL COMMO STATION TULA AND SATELLITES THREE AND FIVE XX BANDS USED: HF VHF UHF XX MESSAGE DURATION 39 SECONDS WITH 2 REPEATS IDENTICAL CONTENT MADE AT 091000Z AND 092000Z XX 475 5-ELEMENT CIPHER GROUPS XX SIGNAL COVERAGE AS FOLLOWS: NORTHERN FLEET AREA BALTIC FLEET AREA AND MED SQUADRON AREA XX NOTE FAR EAST FLEET NOT REPEAT NOT AFFECTED BY THIS BROADCAST XX NUMEROUS ACKNOWLEDGMENT SIGNALS EMANATED FROM ADDRESSES IN AREAS CITED ABOVE XX ORIGIN AND TRAFFIC ANALYSIS TO FOLLOW XX NOT COMPLETED AT THIS TIME XX BEGINNING AT 100000Z NSA MONITOR STATIONS [DELETED] [DELETED] AND [DELETED] RECORDED INCREASED HF AND VHF TRAFFIC AT REDFLEET BASES POLYARNYY SEVEROMORSK P...

END BU...

NSA SENDS 102215Z B...

“What’s the word on signal traffic analysis?” “Here.” Greer handed him a second telex sheet. Ryan scanned it. “That’s a lot of ships. Must be nearly everything they have at sea. Not much on the ones in port, though.” “Landline,” Greer observed. “The ones in port can phone fleet ops, Moscow. By the way, that is every ship they have at sea in the Western Hemisphere. Every damned one. Any ideas?”

“Well, given some other preconditions, you might call this ominous. No idea what the signal said, eh?” “No. They’re using computer-based ciphers, same as us. If the spooks at the NSA can read them, they’re not telling me about it.” In theory the National Security Agency came under the titular control of the director of Central Intelligence. In fact it was a law unto itself. “That’s what traffic analysis is all about, Jack. You try to guess intentions by who’s talking to whom.”

“Anything else on alert? Their army? Voyska PVO?” Ryan referred to the Soviet air defense network. “Nope, just the fleet. Subs, ships, and naval aviation.”

“Vice Admiral Davenport.” The voice was curt. “Morning, Charlie, James here. Did you get that NSA-976?” “Sure did, but that’s not what got me up. Our SOSUS net went berserk a few hours ago.” “Oh?” Greer looked at the phone, then at Ryan. “Yeah, nearly every sub they have at sea just put the pedal to the metal, and all at about the same time.” “Doing what exactly, Charlie?” Greer prompted.

“We’re still figuring that out. It looks like a lot of boats are heading into the North Atlantic. Their units in the Norwegian Sea are racing southwest. Three from the western Med are heading that way, too, but we haven’t got a clear picture yet. We need a few more hours.”

“What do they have operating off our coast, sir?” Ryan asked. “They woke you up, Ryan? Good. Two old Novembers. One’s a raven conversion doing an ELINT job off the cape. The other one’s sitting...

“There’s a Yankee boat,” Davenport went on, “a thousand miles south of Iceland, and the initial report is that it’s heading north. Probably wrong. Reciprocal bearing, transcription error, something like that. We’re checking. Must be a goof, because it was heading south earlier.” Ryan looked up. “What about their other missile boats?” “Their Deltas and Typhoons are in the Barents Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, as usual. No news on them. Oh, we have attack boats up there, of course, but Gallery doesn’t want them to break radio silence, and he’s right. So all we have at the moment is the report on the stray Yankee.”

“What are we doing, Charlie?” Greer asked. “Gallery has a general alert out to his boats. They’re standing by in case we need to redeploy. NORAD has gone to a slightly increased alert status, they tell me.”

“All those subs heading into the Atlantic . . .” “I feel better with word that the Yankee is heading north. They’ve had enough time to make that a hard piece of data. Davenport probably doesn’t want to believe it without confirmation. If Ivan was looking to play hardball, that Yankee’d be heading south. The missiles on those old boats can’t reach very far. Sooo—we stay up and watch. Fortunately, sir, you make a decent cup of coffee.”

The two men sat around until Davenport phoned at quarter to seven. “It’s definite. All the boomers are heading towards port. We have good tracks on two Yankees, three Deltas, and a Typhoon. Memphis reported when her Delta took off for home at twenty knots after being on station for five days, and then Gallery queried Queenfish. Same story—looks like they’re all headed for the barn. Also we just got some photos from a Big Bird pass over the fjord—for once it wasn’t covered with clouds—and we have a bunch of surface ships with bright infrared signatures, like they’re getting steam up.”

“How about Red October? ” Ryan asked. “Nothing. Maybe our information was bad, and she didn’t sail. Wouldn’t be the first time.” “You don’t suppose they’ve lost her?” Ryan wondered aloud. Davenport had already thought of that. “That would explain the activity up north, but what about the Baltic and Med business?”

“Anyway, it looks a whole lot less scary than it did two hours back. They wouldn’t be recalling their boomers if they were planning anything against us, would they?” Ryan said. “I see that Ryan still has your crystal ball, James.” “That’s what I pay him for, Charlie.” “Still, it is odd,” Ryan commented. “Why recall all of the missile boats? Have they ever done this before? What about the ones in the Pacific?” “Haven’t heard about those yet,” Davenport replied. “I’ve asked CINCPAC for data, but they haven’t gotten back to me yet. On the other question, no, they’ve never recalled all their boomers at once, but they do occasionally reshuffle all their positions at once. That’s probably what this is. I said they’re heading towards port, not into it. We won’t know that for a couple of days.”

“What if they’re afraid they’ve lost one?” Ryan ventured. “No such luck,” Davenport scoffed. “They haven’t lost a boomer since that Golf we lifted off Hawaii, back when you were in high school, Ryan. Ramius is too good a skipper to let that happen.”

Ryan scrutinized the blowups. “Wow! Kirov, Moskva, Kiev, three Karas, five Krestas, four Krivaks, eight Udaloys, and five Sovremennys.” “Search and rescue exercise, eh?” Greer gave Ryan a hard look. “Look at the bottom here. Every fast oiler they have is following them out. That’s most of the striking force of the Northern Fleet right there, and if they need oilers, they figure to be out for a while.” “Davenport could have been more specific. But we still have their boomers heading back in. No amphibious ships in this photo, just combatants. Only the new ones, too, the ones with range and speed.” “And the best weapons.” “Yeah.” Ryan nodded. “And all scrambled in a few hours. Sir, if they had this planned in advance, we’d have known about it. This must have been laid on today. Interesting.”

THE SIXTH DAY

WEDNESDAY, 8 DECEMBER

CIA Headq...

Moore was a former judge of the Texas State Supreme Court, and the room reflected his southwestern heritage.

The folder was made of red plastic and had a snap closure. Its edges were bordered with white tape and the cover had a simple white paper label bearing the legends EYES ONLY ∆ and WILLOW.

A CIA document with only three copies was unusual enough that Ryan, whose highest clearance was NEBULA, had never encountered one.

From the grave looks of Moore and Greer, he guessed that these were two of the ∆-cleared officers; the other, he assumed, was the deputy director of operations (DDO), another Texan named Robert Ritter.

The agent’s code name was actually CARDINAL. The highest ranking agent-in-place the CIA had ever had, he was the stuff that legends are made of. CARDINAL had been recruited more than twenty years earlier by Oleg Penkovskiy. Another legend—a dead one—Penkovskiy had at the time been a colonel in the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, a larger and more active counterpart to America’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). His position had given him access to daily information on all facets of the Soviet military, from the Red Army’s command structure to the operational status of intercontinental missiles. The information he smuggled out through his British contact, Greville Wynne, was supremely valuable, and Western countries had come to depend on it—too much.

Penkovskiy was discovered during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. It was his data, ordered and delivered under great pressure and haste, that told President Kennedy that Soviet strategic systems were not ready for war. This information enabled the president to back Khrushchev into a corner from which there was no easy exit.