Jack Ryan 4 - The Hunt for Red October (30 page)

tional
nature of admiralty and salvage law. This was

ratified by the
United States
in the Salvage Act of

1912, 37 Stat. 242, (1912), 46 U.S.C.A. §§ 727-731;

and also in 37 Stat. 1658 (1913).

“International law will be observed, Alex,” the president promised. “In all particulars.” And whatever we get, he thought, will be taken to the nearest port,
Norfolk
, where it will be turned over to the receiver of wrecks, an overworked federal official. If the Soviets want anything back, they can bring action in admiralty court, which means the federal district court sitting in Norfolk, where, if the suit were successful—after the value of the salvaged property was determined, and after the U.S. Navy was paid a proper fee for its salvage effort, also determined by the court—the wreck would be returned to its rightful owners. Of course, the federal district court in question had, at last check, an eleven-month backlog of cases.

Arbatov would cable
Moscow
on this. For what good it would do. He was certain the president would take perverse pleasure in manipulating the grotesque American legal system to his own advantage, all the time pointing out that, as president, he was constitutionally unable to interfere with the working of the courts.

Pelt looked at his watch. It was about time for the next surprise. He had to admire the president. For a man with only limited knowledge of international affairs only a few years earlier, he'd learned fast. This outwardly simple, quiet-talking man was at his best in face to face situations, and after a lifetime's experience as a prosecutor, he still loved to play the game of negotiation and tactical exchange. He seemed able to manipulate people with frighteningly casual skill. The phone rang and Pelt got it, right on cue.

“This is Dr. Pelt speaking. Yes, Admiral—where? When? Just one? I see . . .  
Norfolk
? Thank you, Admiral, that is very good news. I will inform the president immediately. Please keep us advised.” Pelt turned around. “We got one, alive, by God!”

“A survivor off the lost sub?” The president stood.

“Well, he's a Russian sailor. A helicopter picked him up an hour ago, and they're flying him to the
Norfolk
base hospital. They picked him up 290 miles northeast of
Norfolk
, so I guess that makes it fit. The men on the ship say he's in pretty bad shape, but the hospital is ready for him.”

The president walked to his desk and lifted the phone. “Grace, ring me Dan Foster right now . . .  Admiral, this is the president. The man they picked up, how soon to
Norfolk
? Another two hours?” He grimaced. “Admiral, you get on the phone to the naval hospital, and you tell them that I say they are to do everything they can for that man. I want him treated like he was my own son, is that clear? Good. I want hourly reports on his condition. I want the best people we have in on this, the very best. Thank you, Admiral.” He hung up. “All right!”

“Maybe we were too pessimistic, Alex,” Pelt chirped up.

“Certainly,” the president answered. “You have a doctor at the embassy, don't you?”

“Yes, we do, Mr. President.”

“Take him down, too. He'll be extended every courtesy. I'll see to that. Jeff, are they searching for other survivors?”

“Yes, Mr. President. There's a dozen aircraft in the area right now, and two more ships on the way.”

“Good!” The president clapped his hands together, enthusiastic as a kid in a toy store. “Now, if we can find some more survivors, maybe we can give your country a meaningful Christmas present, Alex. We will do everything we can, you have my word on that.”

“That is very kind of you, Mr. President. I will communicate this happy news to my country at once.”

“Not so fast, Alex.” The chief executive held his hand up. “I'd say this calls for a drink.”

SUNDAY, 12 DECEMBER

SOSUS Control

At SOSUS Control in
Norfolk
, the picture was becoming increasingly difficult. The
United States
simply did not have the technology to keep track of submarines in the deep ocean basins. The SOSUS receptors were principally laid at shallow-water choke points, on the bottom of undersea ridges and highlands. The strategy of the NATO countries was a direct consequence of this technological limitation. In a major war with the Soviets, NATO would use the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom SOSUS barrier as a huge tripwire, a burglar alarm system. Allied submarines and ASW patrol aircraft would try to seek out, attack, and destroy Soviet submarines as they approached it, before they could cross the lines.

The barrier had never been expected to halt more than half of the attacking submarines, however, and those that succeeded in slipping through would have to be handled differently. The deep ocean basins were simply too wide and too deep—the average depth was over two miles—to be littered with sensors as the shallow choke points were. This was a fact that cut both ways. The NATO mission would be to maintain the
Atlantic
Bridge
and continue transoceanic trade, and the obvious Soviet mission would be to interdict this trade. Submarines would have to spread out over the vast ocean to cover the many possible convoy routes. NATO strategy behind the SOSUS barriers, then, was to assemble large convoys, each ringed with destroyers, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft. The escorts would try to establish a protective bubble about a hundred miles across. Enemy submarines would not be able to exist within that bubble; if in it they would be hunted down and killed—or merely driven off long enough for the convoy to speed past. Thus while SOSUS was designed to neutralize a huge, fixed expanse of sea, deep-basin strategy was founded on mobility, a moving zone of protection for the vital
North Atlantic
shipping.

This was an altogether sensible strategy, but one that could not be tested under realistic conditions, and, unfortunately, one that was largely useless at the moment. With all of the Soviet Alfas and Victors already on the coast, and the last of the Charlies, Echoes, and Novembers just arriving on their stations, the master screen Commander Quentin was staring at was no longer filled with discrete little red dots but rather with large circles. Each dot or circle designated the position of a Soviet submarine. A circle represented an estimated position, calculated from the speed with which a sub could move without giving off enough noise to be localized by the many sensors being employed. Some circles were ten miles across, some as much as fifty; an area anywhere from seventy-eight to two thousand square miles had to be searched if the submarine were again to be pinned down. And there were just too damned many of the boats.

Hunting the submarines was principally the job of the P-3C Orion. Each Orion carried sonobuoys, air-deployable active and passive sonar sets that were dropped from the belly of the aircraft. On detecting something, a sonobuoy reported to its mother aircraft and then automatically sank lest it fall into unfriendly hands. The sonobuoys had limited electrical power and thus limited range. Worse, their supply was finite. The sonobuoy inventory was already being depleted alarmingly, and soon they would have to cut back on expenditures. Additionally, each P-3C carried FLIRs, forward-looking infrared scanners, to identify the heat signature of a nuclear sub, and MADs, magnetic anomaly detectors that located the disturbance in the earth's magnetic field caused by a large chunk of ferrous metal like a submarine. MAD gear could only detect a magnetic disturbance six hundred yards to the left and right of an aircraft's course track, and to do this the aircraft had to fly low, consuming fuel and limiting the crew's visual search range. FLIR had roughly the same limitation.

Thus the technology used to localize a target first detected by SOSUS, or to “delouse” a discrete piece of ocean preparatory to the passage of a convoy, simply was not up to a random search of the deep ocean.

Quentin leaned forward. A circle had just changed to a dot. A P-3C had just dropped an explosive sounding charge and localized an Echo-class attack sub five hundred miles south of the
Grand Banks
. For an hour they had a near-certain shooting solution on that Echo; her name was written on the Orion's Mark 46 ASW torpedoes.

Quentin sipped at his coffee. His stomach rebelled at the additional caffeine, remembering the abuse of four months of hellish chemotherapy. If there were to be a war, this was one way it might start. All at once, their submarines would stop, perhaps just like this. Not sneaking to kill convoys in midocean but attacking them closer to shore, the way the Germans had done . . .  and all the American sensors would be in the wrong place. Once stopped the dots would grow to circles, ever wider, making the task of finding the subs all the more difficult. Their engines quiet, the boats would be invisible traps for the passing merchant vessels and warships racing to bring life-saving supplies to the men in
Europe
. Submarines were like cancer. Just like the disease that he had only barely defeated. The invisible, malignant vessels would find a place, stop to infect it, and on his screen the malignancies would grow until they were attacked by the aircraft he controlled from this room. But he could not attack them now. Only watch.

“PK EST 1 HOUR—RUN,” he typed into his computer console.

“23,” the computer answered at once.

Quentin grunted. Twenty-four hours earlier the PK, probability of a kill, had been forty—forty probable kills in the first hour after getting a shooting authorization. Now it was barely half that, and this number had to be taken with a large grain of salt, since it assumed that everything would work, a happy state of affairs found only in fiction. Soon, he judged, the number would be under ten. This did not include kills from friendly submarines that were trailing the Russians under strict orders not to reveal their positions. His sometime allies in the Sturgeons, Permits, and Los Angeleses were playing their own ASW game by their own set of rules. A different breed. He tried to think of them as friends, but it never quite worked. In his twenty years of naval service submarines had always been the enemy. In war they would be useful enemies, but in a war it was widely recognized that there was no such thing as a friendly submarine.

A B-52

The bomber crew knew exactly where the Russians were. Navy Orions and air force Sentries had been shadowing them for days now, and the day before, he'd been told, the Soviets had sent an armed fighter from the
Kiev
to the nearest Sentry. Possibly an attack mission, probably not, it had in any case been a provocation.

Four hours earlier the squadron of fourteen had flown out of
Plattsburg
,
New York
, at 0330, leaving behind black trails of exhaust smoke hidden in the predawn gloom. Each aircraft carried a full load of fuel and twelve missiles whose total weight was far less than the -52's design bombload. This made for good, long range.

Which was exactly what they needed. Knowing where the Russians were was only half the battle. Hitting them was the other. The mission profile was simple in concept, rather more difficult in execution. As had been learned in missions over Hanoi—in which the B-52 had participated and sustained SAM (surface-to-air missile) damage—the best method of attacking a heavily defended target was to converge from all points of the compass at once, “like the enveloping arms of an angry bear,” the squadron commander had put it at the briefing, indulging his poetic nature. This gave half the squadron relatively direct courses to their target; the other half had to curve around, careful to keep well beyond effective radar coverage; all had to turn exactly on cue.

The B-52s had turned ten minutes earlier, on command from the Sentry quarterbacking the mission. The pilot had added a twist. His course to the Soviet formation took his bomber right down a commercial air route. On making his turn, he had switched his IFF transponder from its normal setting to international. He was fifty miles behind a commercial 747, thirty miles ahead of another, and on Soviet radar all three Boeing products would look exactly alike—harmless.

It was still dark down on the surface. There was no indication that the Russians were alerted yet. Their fighters were only supposed to be VFR (visual flight rules) capable, and the pilot imagined that taking off and landing on a carrier in the dark was pretty risky business, doubly so in bad weather.

“Skipper,” the electronic warfare officer called on the intercom, “we're getting L- and S-band emissions. They're right where they're supposed to be.”

“Roger. Enough for a return off us?”

“That's affirm, but they probably think we're flying Pan Am. No fire control stuff yet, just routine air search.”

“Range to target?”

“One-three-zero miles.”

It was almost time. The mission profile was such that all would hit the 125-mile circle at the same moment.

“Everything ready?”

“That's a roge.”

The pilot relaxed for another minute, waiting for the signal from the entry.

“F
LASHLIGHT
, F
LASHLIGHT
, F
LASHLIGHT
.” The signal came over the digital radio channel.

“That's it! Let 'em know we're here,” the aircraft commander ordered.

“Right.” The electronic warfare officer flipped the clear plastic cover off his set of toggle switches and dials controlling the aircraft's jamming systems. First he powered up his systems. This took a few seconds. The -52's electronics were all old seventies-vintage equipment, else the squadron would not be part of the junior varsity. Good learning tools, though, and the lieutenant was hoping to move up to the new B-lBs now beginning to come off the Rockwell assembly line in
California
. For the past ten minutes the ESM pods on the bomber's nose and wingtips had been recording the Soviet radar signals, classifying their exact frequencies, pulse repetition rates, power, and the individual signature characteristics of the transmitters. The lieutenant was brand new to this game. He was a recent graduate of electronic warfare school, first in his class. He considered what he should do first, then selected a jamming mode, not his best, from a range of memorized options.

The
Nikolayev

One hundred twenty-five miles away on the Kara-class cruiser
Nikolayev
, a radar michman was examining some blips that seemed to be in a circle around his formation. In an instant his screen was covered with twenty ghostly splotches tracing crazily in various directions. He shouted the alarm, echoed a second later by a brother operator. The officer of the watch hurried over to check the screen.

By the time he got there the jamming mode had changed and six lines like the spokes of a wheel were rotating slowly around a central axis.

“Plot the strobes,” the officer ordered.

Now there were blotches, lines, and sparkles.

“More than one aircraft, Comrade.” The michman tried flipping through his frequency settings.

“Attack warning!” another michman shouted. His ESM receiver had just reported the signals of aircraft search-radar sets of the type used to acquire targets for air-to-surface missiles.

The B-52

“We got hard targets,” the weapons officer on the -52 reported. “I got a lock on the first three birds.”

“Roger that,” the pilot acknowledged. “Hold for ten more seconds.”

“Ten seconds,” the officer replied. “Cutting switches . . . now.”

“Okay, kill the jamming.”

“ECM systems off.”

The
Nikolayev

“Missile acquisition radars have ceased,” the combat information center officer reported to the cruiser's captain, just now arrived from the bridge. Around them the
Nikolayev
's
crew was racing to battle stations. “Jamming has also ceased.”

“What is out there?” the captain asked. Out of a clear sky his beautiful clipper-bowed cruiser had been threatened—and now all was well?

“At least eight enemy aircraft in a circle around us.”

The captain examined the now normal S-band air search screen. There were numerous blips, mainly civilian aircraft. The half circle of others had to be hostile, though.

“Could they have fired missiles?”

“No, Comrade Captain, we would have detected it. They jammed our search radars for thirty seconds and illuminated us with their own search systems for twenty. Then everything stopped.”

“So, they provoke us and now pretend nothing has happened?” the captain growled. “When will they be within SAM range?”

“This one and these two will be within range in four minutes if they do not change course.”

“Illuminate them with our missile control systems. Teach the bastards a lesson.”

The officer gave the necessary instructions, wondering who was being taught what. Two thousand feet above one of the B-52's was an EC-135 whose computerized electronic sensors were recording all signals from the Soviet cruiser and taking them apart, the better to know how to jam them. It was the first good look at the new SA-N-8 missile system.

Two F-14 Tomcats

The double-zero code number on its fuselage marked the Tomcat as the squadron commander's personal bird; the black ace of spades on the twin-rudder tail indicated his squadron, Fighting 41, “The Black Aces.” The pilot was Commander Robby Jackson, and his radio call sign was Spade 1.

Jackson was leading a two-plane section under the direction of one of the Kennedy's E-2C Hawkeyes, the navy's more diminutive version of the air force's AWACS and close brother to the COD, a twin-prop aircraft whose radome makes it look like an airplane being terrorized by a UFO. The weather was bad—depressingly normal for the
North Atlantic
in December—but was supposed to improve as they headed west.
Jackson
and his wingman, Lieutenant (j.g.) Bud Sanchez, were flying through nearly solid clouds, and they had eased their formation out somewhat. In the limited visibility both remembered that each Tomcat had a crew of two and a price of over thirty million dollars.