Jack Ryan 4 - The Hunt for Red October (48 page)

“How 'bout that?”
Tyler
grinned.

“Skip, you were up for command of
Los Angeles
, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We owe you for this, Commander, we owe you a lot. I did some checking the other day. An officer injured in the line of duty does not necessarily have to retire unless he is demonstrably unfit for duty. An accident while returning from working on your boat is line of duty, I think, and we've had a few ship commanders who were short a leg. I'll go to the president myself on this, son. It will mean a year's work getting back in the groove, but if you still want your command, by God, I'll get it for you.”

Tyler
sat down for that. It would mean being fitted for a new leg, something he'd been considering for months, and a few weeks getting used to it. Then a year—a good year—relearning everything he needed to know before he could go to sea . . .  He shook his head. “Thank you, Admiral. You don't know what that means to me—but, no. I'm past that now. I have a different life, and different responsibilities now, and I'd just be taking someone else's slot. Tell you what, you let me get a look at that boomer, and we're even.”

“That I can guarantee.” Foster had hoped he'd respond that way, had been nearly sure of it. It was too bad, though.
Tyler
, he thought, would have been a good candidate for his own flag except for the leg. Well, nobody ever said the world was fair.

The
Red October

“You guys seem to have things under control,” Ryan observed. “Does anybody mind if I flake out somewhere?”

“Flake out?” Borodin asked.

“Sleep.”

“Ah, take Dr. Petrov's cabin, across from the medical office.”

On his way aft Ryan looked in Borodin's cabin and found the vodka bottle that had been liberated. It didn't have much taste, but it was smooth enough. Petrov's bunk was not very wide or very soft. Ryan was past caring. He took a long swallow and lay down in his uniform, which was already so greasy and dirty as to be beyond hope. He was asleep in five minutes.

The Sea Cliff

The air-purifier system was not working properly, Lieutenant Sven Johnsen thought. If his sinus cold had lasted a few more days he might not have noticed. The Sea Cliff was just passing ten thousand feet, and they couldn't tinker with the system until they surfaced. It was not dangerous—the environmental control systems had as many built-in redundancies as the Space Shuttle—just a nuisance.

“I've never been so deep,” Captain Igor Kaganovich said conversationally. Getting him here had been complicated. It had required a Helix helicopter from the
Kiev
to the
Tarawa
, then a U.S. Navy Sea King to
Norfolk
. Another helicopter had taken him to the USS Austin, which was heading for 33N 75W at twenty knots. The
Austin
was a landing ship dock, a large vessel whose aft end was a covered well. She was usually used for landing craft, but today she carried the Sea Cliff, a three-man submarine mat had been flown down from Woods Hole,
Massachusetts
.

“Does take some getting used to,” Johnsen agreed, “but when you get down to it, five hundred feet, ten thousand feet, doesn't make much difference. A hull fracture would kill you just as fast, just down here there'd be less residue for the next boat to try and recover.”

“Keep thinking those happy thoughts, sir,” Machinist's Mate First Class Jesse Overton said. “Still clear on sonar?”

“Right, Jess.” Johnsen had been working with the machinist's mate for two years. The Sea Cliff was their baby, a small, rugged research submarine used mainly for oceanographic tasks, including the emplacement or repair of SOSUS sensors. On the three-man sub there was little place for bridge discipline. Overton was not well educated or very articulate—at least not politely articulate. His skill at maneuvering the minisub was unsurpassed, however, and Johnsen was just as happy to leave that job to him. It was the lieutenant's task to manage the mission at hand.

“Air system needs some work,” Johnsen observed.

“Yeah, the filters are about due for replacement. I was going to do that next week. Coulda' done it this morning, but I figured the backup control wiring was more important.”

“Guess I have to go along with you on that. Handling okay?”

“Like a virgin.” Overton's smile was reflected in the thick Lexan view port in front of the control seat. The Sea Cliff's awkward design made her clumsy to maneuver. It was as though she knew what she wanted to do, just not quite how she wanted to do it. “How wide's the target area?”

“Pretty wide. Pigeon says after the explosion the pieces spread from hell to breakfast.”

“I believe it. Three miles down, and a current to spread it around.”

“The boat's name is Red October, Captain? A Victor-class attack submarine, you said?”

“That is your name for the class,” Kaganovich said.

“What do you call them?” Johnsen asked. He got no reply. What was the big deal? he wondered. What did the name of the class matter to anybody?

“Switching on locater sonar.” Johnsen activated several systems, and the Sea Cliff pulsed with the sound of the high-frequency sonar mounted on her belly. “There's the bottom.” The yellow screen showed bottom contours in white.

“Anything sticking up, sir?” Overton asked.

“Not today, Jess.”

A year before they had been operating a few miles from this spot and nearly been impaled on a
Liberty
ship, sunk around 1942 by a German U-boat. The hulk had been sitting up at an angle, propped up by a massive boulder. That near collision would surely have been fatal, and it had taught both men caution.

“Okay, I'm starting to get some hard returns. Directly ahead, spread out like a fan. Another five hundred feet to the bottom.”

“Right.”

“Hmph. There's one big piece, 'bout thirty feet long, maybe nine or ten across,
eleven o'clock
, three hundred yards. We'll go for that one first.”

“Coming left, lights coming on now.”

A half-dozen high-intensity floodlights came on, at once surrounding the submersible in a globe of light. It did not penetrate more than ten yards in the water, which ate up the light energy.

“There's the bottom, just where you said, Mr. Johnsen,” Overton said. He halted the powered descent and checked for buoyancy. Almost exactly neutral, good. “This current's going to be tough on battery power.”

“How strong is it?”

“Knot an' a half, maybe more like two, depending on bottom contours. Same as last year. I figure we can maneuver an hour, hour an' a half, tops.”

Johnsen agreed. Oceanographers were still puzzling over this deep current, which seemed to change direction from time to time in no particular pattern. Odd. There were a lot of odd things in the ocean. That's why Johnsen got his oceanography degree, to figure some of the buggers out. It sure beat working for a living. Being three miles down wasn't work, not to Johnsen.

“I see somethin', a flash off the bottom right in front of us. Want I should grab it?”

“If you can.”

They couldn't see it yet on any of the Sea Cliff's three TV monitors, which looked straight ahead, forty-five degrees left and right of the bow.

“Okay.” Overton put his right hand on the waldo control. This was what he was really best at.

“Can you see what it is?” Johnsen asked, fiddling with the TV.

“Some kinda instrument. Can you kill the number one flood, sir? It's dozzlin' me.”

“Wait one.” Johnsen leaned forward to kill the proper switch. The number one floodlight provided illumination for the bow camera, which went immediately blank.

“Okay, baby, now let's just hold steady . . .” The machinist's mate's left hand worked the directional propeller controls; his right was poised in the waldo glove. Now he was the only one who could see the target. Overton's reflection was grinning at itself. His right hand moved rapidly.

“Gotcha!” he said. The waldo took the depth-gauge dial a diver had magnetically affixed to the Sea Cliff's bow prior to setting out from the
Austin
's dock bay. “You can hit the light again, sir.”

Johnsen flicked it on, and Overton maneuvered his catch in front of the bow camera. “Can you see what it is?”

“Looks like a depth gauge. Not one of ours, though,” Johnsen observed. “Can you make it out, Captain?”

“Da,” Kaganovich said at once. He let out a long breath, trying to sound unhappy. “It is one of ours. I cannot read the number, but it is Soviet.”

“Put it in the basket, Jess,” Johnsen said.

“Right.” He maneuvered the waldo, placing the dial in a basket welded on the bow, then getting the manipulator arm back to its rest position. “Getting some silt. Let's pick up a little.”

As the Sea Cliff got too close to the bottom the wash from her propellers stirred up the fine alluvial silt. Overton increased power to get back to a twenty-foot height.

“That's better. See what the current is doin', Mr. Johnsen? Good two knots. Gonna cut our bottom time.” The current was wafting the cloud to port, rather quickly. “Where's the big target?”

“Dead ahead, hundred yards. Let's make sure we see what that is.”

“Right. Going forward . . .  There's something, looks like a butcher knife. We want it?”

“No, let's keep going.”

“Okay, range?”

“Sixty yards. Ought to be seeing it soon.”

The two officers saw it on TV the same time Overton did. Just a spectral image at first, it faded like an afterimage in one's eye. Then it came back.

Overton was the first to react. “Damn!”

It was more than thirty feet long and appeared perfectly round. They approached from its rear and saw the main circle and within it four smaller cones that stuck out a foot or so.

“That's a missile, Skipper, a whole fuckin' Russkie nuclear missile!”

“Hold position, Jess.”

“Aye aye.” He backed off on the power controls.

“You said she was a Victor,” Johnsen said to the Soviet.

“I was mistaken.” Kaganovich's mouth twitched.

"Let's take a closer look, Jess.''

The Sea Cliff moved forward, up the side of the rocket body. The Cyrillic lettering was unmistakable, though they were too far off to make out the serial numbers. There was a new treasure for Davey Jones, an SS-N-20 Seahawk, with its eight five-hundred-kiloton MIRVs.

Kaganovich was careful to note the markings on the missile body. He'd been briefed on the Seahawk immediately before flying from the
Kiev
. As an intelligence officer, he ordinarily knew more about American weapons than their Soviet counterparts.

How convenient, he thought. The Americans had allowed him to ride in one of their most advanced research vessels whose internal arrangements he had already memorized, and they had accomplished his mission for him. The Red October was dead. All he had to do was get that information to Admiral Stralbo on the
Kirov
and the fleet could leave the American coast. Let them come to the
Norwegian Sea
to play their nasty games! See who would win them up there!

“Position check, Jess. Mark the sucker.”

“Aye.” Overton pressed a button to deploy a sonar transponder that would respond only to a coded American sonar signal. This would guide them back to the missile. They would return later with their heavy-lift rig to put a line on the missile and haul it to the surface.

“That is the property of the
Soviet Union
,” Kaganovich pointed out. “It is in—under international waters. It belongs to my country.”

“Then you can fuckin' come and get it!” snapped the American seaman. He must be an officer in disguise, Kaganovich thought. “Beg pardon, Mr. Johnsen.”

“We'll be back for it,” Johnsen said.

“You'll never lift it. It is too heavy,” Kaganovich objected.

“I suppose you're right.” Johnsen smiled.

Kaganovich allowed the Americans their small victory. It could have been worse. Much worse. “Shall we continue to search for more wreckage?”

“No, I think we'll go back up,” Johnsen decided.

“But your orders—”

“My orders, Captain Kaganovich, were to search for the remains of a Victor-class attack submarine. We found the grave of a boomer. You lied to us, Captain, and our courtesy to you ends at this point. You got what you wanted, I guess. Later we'll be back for what we want.” Johnsen reached up and pulled the release handle for the iron ballast. The metal slab dropped free. This gave the Sea Cliff a thousand pounds of positive buoyancy. There was no way to stay down now, even if they wanted to.

“Home, Jess.”

“Aye aye, Skipper.”

The ride back to the surface was a silent one.

The USS
Austin

An hour later, Kaganovich climbed to the
Austin
's bridge and requested permission to send a message to the
Kirov
. This had been agreed upon beforehand, else the
Austin
's commanding officer would have refused. Word on the dead sub's identity had spread fast. The Soviet officer broadcast a series of code words, accompanied by the serial number from the depth-gauge dial. These were acknowledged at once.

Overton and Johnsen watched the Russian board the helicopter, carrying the depth-gauge dial.

“I didn't like him much, Mr. Johnsen. Keptin
Kaganobitch. The name sounds like a terminal studder. We snookered him, didn't we?”

“Remind me never to play cards with you, Jess.”

The
Red October

Ryan woke up after six hours to music that seemed dreamily familiar. He lay in his bunk for a minute trying to place it, then slipped his feet into his shoes and went forward to the wardroom.

It was E.T. Ryan arrived just in time to see the credits scrolling up the thirteen-inch TV set sitting on the forward end of the wardroom table. Most of the Russian officers and three Americans had been watching it. The Russians were all dabbing their eyes. Jack got a cup of coffee and sat at the end of the table.

“You liked it?”

“It was magnificent!” Borodin proclaimed.

Lieutenant Mannion chuckled. “Second time we ran it.”

One of the Russians started speaking rapidly in his native language. Borodin translated for him. “He asks if all American children act with such—Bugayev, svobodno?”