Red Storm Rising

by Tom Clancy

Its purpose was to research means of splitting the NATO alliance, and in general to conduct political and psychological operations aimed at undermining Western will. Its specific plan to shake the NATO military and political structure in preparation for a shooting war was Nord’s proudest example of legerdemain.

And if this KGB magic fails to work?”

“Then it is not assured, but the balance of forces is on our side. You know that, Yuri.”

“With the troops we led forty years ago, Andrey, we could do this.”

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

USS Chicago had been in commission for only six weeks, her completion delayed by a yard fire and her commissioning ceremony marred by the absence of the Mayor of Chicago due to a strike of city workers.

“Take good care of our ship,” said the Mayor of Chicago. “We call them boats, sir, and we’ll take good care of her for you. Will you join us in the wardroom?”

Things were starting quickly for Chicago. The Navy wanted to see just how effective her new quieting systems were. Everything looked good in the acoustical test range off the Bahamas. Now they wanted to see how well things worked in the Barents Sea.

“What’s with the tile on your deck? I never heard of rubber decks on a ship.” “It’s called anechoic tile, sir. The rubber absorbs sound waves. It makes us quieter to operate, and makes it harder to detect us on sonar if somebody pings at us. Coffee?”

MOSCOW, R.S.F.S.R.

“Comrades, on 15 June of this year, just four months from now, we launch an offensive against NATO.”

We all know that historically the Soviet fighting man performs at his best in winter, and NATO is at its lowest state of readiness.”

Achieving full combat readiness requires that we do too many things out of the ordinary. If nothing else, East Germany is rife with Western spies. NATO will notice. NATO will react. They will meet us on the border with everything in their collective arsenals.

The Soviets had far more reserves of men and material with which to fight such a war. And the political will to use them.

NATO has war stocks of materiel to sustain them for roughly five weeks. Our pretty, expensive fleet must close the Atlantic.”

“If we fail to achieve surprise in the West, Andrey Petravich, it will be necessary for our beloved comrades in the Navy to isolate Europe from America,” Rozhkov pronounced. He blinked hard at the response.

“If the Americans succeed in attacking Kola, they effectively prevent our closure of the North Atlantic. And you are wrong to shrug off these attacks. American entry into the Barents Sea will constitute a direct threat to our nuclear deterrent forces, and could have more dire consequences than you imagine.”

He held up a closed fist. “By doing this we can, first”—he raised a finger—“prevent an American naval attack against the Rodina; second”—another finger—“use the majority of our submarine forces in the North Atlantic basin where the trade routes are, instead of keeping them on passive defense; and, third”—a final finger—“make maximum use of our naval aviation assets. At one stroke this operation makes our fleet an offensive rather than a defensive weapon.”

4

Maskirovka 1

MOSCOW, R.S.F.S.R.

How odd, he thought, while looking up from his notes, that he often had to speak more openly to these paid foreign spies than to members of the Party Central Committee. Spies, exactly what they were . . .

“It’s bloody fair,” Calloway said wonderingly, his breath giving ghostly substance to his words. “They propose a builddown with elimination of many existing weapons, allowing both sides to replace obsolete launchers, both sides to reach a total of five thousand deliverable warheads, that number to remain stable for five years after the three-year reduction period. There is a separate proposal to negotiate complete removal of ‘heavy’ missiles, replacing them with mobile missiles, but to limit missile flight tests to a fixed number per year—” He flipped that page and rapidly scanned the remainder. “Nothing in the draft treaty about your Star Wars research . . . ? Didn’t he mention that in his statement? Patrick, old son, this is, as you say, dynamite. This could as easily have been written in Washington. It will take months to work out all the technical points, but this is a bloody serious, and bloody generous, proposal.”

FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

“We’re not talking politics, we’re talking nuclear strategy,” the section chief growled back. As if there were a difference, Toland said to himself.

KIEV, THE UKRAINE

“Indeed, Comrade General: we will do our sleeping after the war.”

5

Sailors and...

THE CHESAPEAKE BAY, MARYLAND

“Pop, I’m not in Trends and Intentions—those idiot fortune-tellers! —but I know that even the Russians don’t kill people for jollies. When Ivan kills people publicly, he does it to make a point. These were not manpower officers taking bribes to fake deferments. They weren’t popped for stealing diesel fuel or building dachas with pilfered lumber. I checked our records, and it turned out we have files on two of them. They were both experienced line officers, both with combat experience in Afghanistan, both Party members in good standing. One was a graduate of Frunze Academy, and he even had a few articles published in Military Thought, for God’s sake! But all four were court-martialed for falsifying their regimental readiness reports—and shot three days later. That story will hit the streets in Krasnaya Zvezda over the next few days as a two- or three-part story under ‘The Observer’s’ by-line—and that makes it a political exercise with a capital P.”

“Yeah, car and truck batteries.” “Really?” “Yeah, for the last month you can’t get a battery for your car or truck over there. A lot of cars are not moving, and batteries are being stolen left and right, so people are disconnecting their batteries at night and taking them home, would you believe?” “But Togliattishtadt—” Toland said, and stopped. He referred to the massive auto factory-city in European Russia, the construction of which was a “Hero Project” for which thousands of workers had been mobilized. Among the most modern auto complexes in the world, it had been built mainly with Italian technology. “They have a hell of a battery manufacturing facility there. Hasn’t blown up, has it?” “Working three shifts. What do you think of that?”

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

“Yeah, well, we were up in the Barents Sea, you know, northeast of the Kola Fjord, trailing a Russian sub—an Oscar—about, oh, ten miles back of her—and all of a sudden we find ourselves in the middle of a friggin’ live-fire exercise! Missiles were flying all over the damned place. They wasted three old hulks, and blasted hell out of a half-dozen target barges.”

“You get the feeling that the Russians are doing anything out of the ordinary, Dan?” Toland asked, suddenly interested. “You didn’t hear?” “Hear what?” “They’ve cut back their diesel sub patrols up north, quite a bit, too. I mean, normally they’re pretty hard to hear, but mostly over the past two months they just ain’t there. I heard one, just one. Wasn’t like that the last time I was up north. There have been some satellite photos of them, a lot of diesel boats tied up alongside for some reason or another. In fact, their patrol activity up north is down across the board, with a lot of maintenance activity going on. The current guess is that they’re changing their training cycle. This isn’t the usual time of year for live-firing.” McCafferty laughed. “Of course, it could be that they finally got tired of chippin’ and paintin’ those old ‘cans, and decided to use ’em up—best thing to do with a ’can anyway.”

“How hard is it to change batteries in a sub?” “It’s a nasty, heavy job. I mean, you don’t need special machinery or anything. We do it with Tiger Teams, and it takes something like three or four weeks. Ivan’s subs are designed with larger battery capacities than ours, and also for easier battery replacement—they’re supposed to go through their batteries faster than Western subs, and they compensate for it by making replacement easier, hard-patches on the hull, things like that. So for them it’s probably an all-hands evolution. What exactly are you getting at, Bob?”

“So, what uses batteries?” Morris asked rhetorically. “Submarines,” McCafferty pronounced. “Tanks, armored vehicles, command cars, starter carts for planes, lots of stuff painted green, y’know? Bob, what you’re saying—shit, what you’re saying is that all of a sudden Ivan has decided to increase his readiness across the board. Question: Do you know what the hell you’re talking about?”

“Jesus, you know what this sounds like? Ivan’s always ready to go to sea, and now it looks like he wants to be real ready,” Morris observed. “But the papers all say that they’re acting like born-again angels with this arms-control stuff. Something does not compute, gentlemen.”

An hour later, Lieutenant Commander Robert M. Toland, USNR-R, was informed that he had been placed on extended active duty by order of the Secretary of Defense. In fact it was by order of CINCLANT, but the forms would be correctly filled out in a week or so.

Toland was relieved of his post and transferred to Intentions, part of CINCLANT’s personal intelligence advisory staff.

6

The Wa...

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

“Most of the kokolzniki are relatively old folks. The median age is in the late forties, early fifties. So most of the private plots are managed by the older people, while the mechanized work, like driving the combines and trucks—” “Which pays a hell of a lot better.” “—is done by the younger workers. You’re telling me that this way they can increase some food production without the younger men . . . of military service age.”

The Soviets had taken an entire class of fleet ballistic missile submarines out of service. They were conducting arms talks in Vienna. They were buying grain from America and Canada under surprisingly favorable terms, even allowing American hulls to handle 20 percent of the cargo.

SHPOLA, THE UKRAINE

Already four divisions—all of his elite Guards tank units—had been taken away, and each change in CINC-Southwest’s order of battle forced him to restructure his own plan for the Gulf. An endless circle. He was being forced to select less-ready units, forcing Alekseyev to devote more time to unit training and less time to the plan that had to be completed in another two weeks.

USS PHARRIS

“Sir, the navigation and air-search radars are in stand-by and the sonar is in passive mode,” replied the TAO. “Contact looks like a snorkeling submarine. Came in clear all at once. We’ve got a target-motion-analysis track going. His bearing is changing fore-to-aft, and pretty fast, too. A little soon to be sure, but it’s shaping up like he’s on a reciprocal heading, probably no more than ten miles out.”

USS CHICAGO