Red Storm Rising

by Tom Clancy

Around them was a country whose citizens were poorly fed and poorly housed, whose only abundant commodities were the painted signs and slogans praising Soviet Progress and Solidarity. Some of the men at this table actually believed those slogans, Sergetov knew. Sometimes he still did, mainly in homage to his idealistic youth. But Soviet Progress had not fed their nation, and how long would Soviet Solidarity endure in the hearts of people hungry, cold, in the dark?

One-man rule held dangers vividly remembered by the older generation of the Party. The younger men had heard the tales of the great purges under Stalin often enough to take the lesson to heart, and the Army had its own institutional memory of what Khrushchev had done to its hierarchy. In the Politburo, as in the jungle, the only rule was survival, and for all collective safety lay in collective rule.

Sergetov paused, greatly disturbed at how easily he had gone along with the unspoken decision. I have sold my soul . . . Or have I acted like a patriot? Have I become like the other men around this table? Or have I merely told the truth—and what is truth?

How about you and me go over to talk with CINCLANT and his intelligence chief?” Toland winced. What have I got myself into? “Sir, I’m down here for a training rotation, not to—” “Looks to me like you got this intelligence crap down pretty pat, Commander. You believe what you just told me is true?” Toland stiffened. “Yes, sir.” “Then I’m giving you a chance to prove it. You afraid to stick your neck out—or do you just offer opinions to relatives and friends?” the Admiral asked harshly.

There was a tendency in the U.S. Navy to assume that since they made their living by charging into machine-gun fire, Marines were dumb.

His General was also pale as he switched off the television set. “ ‘Arise, ye Russian people.’ We must set these thoughts aside, Pasha. It is hard, but we must. The State is not perfect, but it is the State we must serve.” Alekseyev eyed his commander closely. The General had almost choked on those words; he was already practicing how to use them on the crucial few who would know of this outrage, yet had to perform their duties as though it never existed. There will come a day of reckoning, Pasha told himself, a day of reckoning for all the crimes committed in the name of Socialist Progress. He wondered if he’d live to see it and decided he probably wouldn’t.

The television cameras were there, of course. A lesson learned from the American media, Sergetov thought, the crews poking their way into the action to record every horrible scene for the evening news. He was surprised to see an American crew with their Soviet counterparts. So, we have made mass murder an international spectator sport.

Such a masquerade! Sergetov told himself. See how kind we are to the families of those we have murdered! He had seen many lies in his thirty-five years in the Party. He had told enough of them himself—but never anything that came close to this. Just as well, he thought, that I’ve had nothing to eat today. His eyes came back reluctantly to the waxen face of a child. He remembered the sleeping faces of his own children, now grown. So often after arriving home late from Party work, he had stolen a look into their bedroom at night to see their peaceful faces, always lingering to be sure that they were breathing normally, listening for the sniffles of a cold or the murmurs of a dream. How often had he told himself that he and the Party worked for their future? No more colds, little one, he said with his eyes to the nearest child. No more dreams. See what the Party has done for your future.

“What do you think of this German stuff?” “The Krauts I’ve worked with at sea have been all right. Trying to blast the whole Russian command structure—nobody’s that crazy.” Morris shrugged, a frown spreading across his dark face. “XO, there ain’t no rule that says the world has to make sense.”

The Chancellor of the German Federal Republic stared out the windows of his Bonn office. He remembered his armed service forty years before: a frightened teenager with a helmet that nearly covered his eyes. “It’s happening again.” How many will die this time? “Ja.” Dear God, what will it be like?

He snapped up the handles and stepped back. “Down scope.” The oiled steel tube was heading down before he’d spoken the second word. The captain nodded approval at his quartermaster, who held out a stopwatch. The scope had been up above the surface for a total of 5.9 seconds. After fifteen years in submarines, it still amazed him how so many people could do so much in six seconds. When he’d gone through submarine school, the criterion had been a seven-second exposure.

“Amazing how good nothing can look, eh, Joe?” he asked his executive officer. The cloud ceiling was well below a thousand feet, and the wave action had rapidly coated the periscope lens with water droplets. No one had ever invented an efficient gadget for keeping that lens clear, McCafferty reflected, you’d think that after eighty-some years . . .

The captain had to smile. Everybody aboard was trying to affect a casual manner that had to be outrageously faked. Certainly everyone was as tense as he was, and McCafferty wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of this miserable lake. Of course he couldn’t act in such a way as to allow his crew to become overly concerned; the captain must be in total control at all times—what fucking games we play! he told himself. What are we doing here? What is going on in this crazy world? I don’t want to fight a fucking war!

“It will be good to be on land again, Comrade Captain.” The General didn’t like being on such a large, unprotected target and would not feel safe until he had solid ground under his feet. At least as an infantryman you had a rifle with which to defend yourself, usually a hole to hide in, and always two legs to run away. Not so on a ship, he had learned. A ship was one large target, and this one was virtually unprotected. Amazing, he thought, that anything would feel worse than being on a transport aircraft. But there he had a parachute. He had no illusions about his ability to swim to land.

I should be sleeping, Morris told himself. I should stockpile sleep, bank it away against the time when I can’t have any. But he was too keyed up to sleep.

Like every pre-war battle plan in this century, the sub skipper reflected, this one too was being torn up because the enemy wasn’t going to cooperate and do what we thought he’d do.

“Let’s have an attitude check!” Edwards said as he walked over to his meteorological instruments. “I hate this fucking place!” the tower crew answered at once. “Let’s have a positive attitude check.” “I positively hate this fucking place!” “Let’s have a negative attitude check.” “I don’t like this fucking place!” “Let’s have a short attitude check.” “Fuckit!”

He remembered a brief on Soviet helicopters in the Air Force Academy. “We are not afraid of the Russians,” an Afghan had been quoted, “but we are afraid of their helicopters.”

As the submarine leveled off beneath the waves, the ESM mast went up first, sniffing for hostile electronic signals, then the search periscope. The captain made a quick sweep around the sky, then the surface, his executive officer closely watching the television readout to back up the skipper’s observations. Everything looked clear. There was a moderate sea running, with five-foot swells, and the clear blue sky was decorated with fair-weather cumulus clouds. On the whole, a beautiful day. Except for the war.

“I got Garcia on guard. I think we better go back to being Marines after all. If that’d been for real, we’d all be cold meat by now, Lieutenant.” “We’re all too tired to move out just yet.” “Yes, sir. The lady okay?” “She’s had a tough time. When she wakes up—hell, I don’t know. I’m afraid she might just come apart on us.” “Maybe.” Smith lit a cigarette. “She’s young. She might bounce back if we give her a chance.” “Get her something to do?” “Same as us, skipper. You’re better off doin’ than thinkin’.”

A field hospital was in the trees five hundred meters away, and the wind carried the shrieks of the wounded to the command post. Not like that in the movies he’d watched as a child—and still watched. The wounded were supposed to suffer in quiet, determined dignity, puffing on cigarettes proffered by the kindly, hardworking medics, waiting their turn for the courageous, hardworking surgeons and the pretty, dedicated nurses. A fucking lie, all of it a monstrous fucking lie, he told himself. The profession for which he had prepared his life was organized murder.

HMS Battleaxe was already out there, three miles ahead, a subtly different shade on her hull, and the White Ensign fluttering at her mast. A signal light started blinking at them. WHAT THE DEVIL IS A REUBEN JAMES, Battleaxe Wanted to know. “How do you want to answer that, sir?” a signalman asked. Morris laughed, the ominous spell broken. “Signal, ‘At least we don’t name warships for our mother-in-law. ’ ” “All right!” The petty officer loved it.

“Does it bother you, sinking them?” Calloway asked. “I’ve been in the Navy for seventeen years and I’ve never met anybody who likes killing people. We don’t even call it that, except maybe when we’re drunk. We sink ships and try to pretend that they’re just ships—things without people in them. It’s dishonest, but we do it anyway.

“The hell of it is, it’s exciting,” O’Malley went on. “You’re doing something extremely difficult. It requires concentration and practice and a lot of abstract thought. You have to get inside the other guy’s head, but at the same time you think of your mission as destroying an inanimate object. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? So, what you do is, you don’t think about that aspect of the job. Otherwise the job wouldn’t get done.”

As long as you can laugh, Mike remembered his father saying, you are not defeated.

“Whom else can you trust, Mikhail Eduardovich? The Rodina faces possible destruction, the Party leadership has gone mad, and I don’t even have full control of the KGB. Don’t you see: we have lost! We must now save what we can.” “But we still hold enemy territory—” “Yesterday does not matter. Today does not matter. What matters is one week from today. What will our Defense Minister do when it becomes obvious even to him that we have failed? Have you considered that? When desperate men realize they have failed—and those desperate men have control of atomic weapons, then what?”