The Hunt for Red October

“But you could do it?”

“Sure. I’d need exact dimensions on this baby, but I’ve done this before for the bunch over at Crystal City. The hard part’s getting the computer time. I need a big machine.”

“I can probably arrange access to ours.”

Tyler laughed. “Probably not good enough, Jack. This is specialized stuff. I’m talking about a Cray-2, one of the biggies. To do this you have to mathematically simulate the behavior of millions of little parcels of water, the water flow over — and through, in this case — the whole hull. Same sort of thing NASA has to do with the Space Shuttle. The actual work is easy enough — it’s the scale that’s tough. They’re simple calculations, but you have to make millions of them per second. That means a big Cray, and there’s only a few of them around. NASA has one in Houston, I think. The navy has a few in Norfolk for ASW work — you can forget about those. The air force has one in the Pentagon, I think, and all the rest are in California.”

“But you could do it?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, get to work on it, Skip, and I’ll see if we can get you the computer time. How long?”

“Depending on how good the stuff at Taylor is, maybe a week. Maybe less.”

“How much do you want for it?”

“Aw, come on, Jack!” Tyler waved him off.

“Skip, it’s Monday. You get us this data by Friday and there’s twenty thousand dollars in it. You’re worth it, and we want this data. Agreed?”

“Sold.” They shook hands. “Can I keep the pictures?”

“I can leave them if you have a secure place to keep them. Nobody gets to see them, Skip. Nobody.”

“There’s a nice safe in the superintendent’s office.”

“Fine, but he doesn’t see them.” The superintendent was a former submariner.

“He won’t like it,” Tyler said. “But okay.”

“Have him call Admiral Greer if he objects. This number.” Ryan handed him a card. “You can reach me here if you need me. If I’m not in, ask for the admiral.”

“Just how important is this?”

“Important enough. You’re the first guy who’s come up with a sensible explanation for these hatches. That’s why I came here. If you can model this for us, it’ll be damned useful. Skip, one more time: This is highly sensitive. If you let anybody see these, it’s my ass.”

“Aye aye, Jack. Well, you’ve laid a deadline on me, I better get down to it. See you.” After shaking hands, Tyler took out a lined pad and started listing the things he had to do. Ryan left the building with his driver. He remembered a Toys-R-Us right up Route 2 from Annapolis, and he wanted to get that doll for Sally.

CIA Headquarters

Ryan was back at the CIA by eight that evening. It was a quick trip past the security guards to Greer’s office.

“Well, did you get your Surfing Barbie?” Greer looked up.

“Skiing Barbie,” Ryan corrected. “Yes, sir. Come on, didn’t you ever play Santa?”

“They grew up too fast, Jack. Even my grandchildren are all past that stage.” He turned to get some coffee. Ryan wondered if he ever slept. “We have something more on Red October. The Russians seem to have a major ASW exercise running in the northeast Barents Sea. Half a dozen ASW search aircraft, a bunch of frigates, and an Alfa-class attack boat, all running around in circles.”

“Probably an acquisition exercise. Skip Tyler says those doors are for a new drive system.”

“Indeed.” Greer sat back. “Tell me about it.”

Ryan took out his notes and summarized his education in submarine technology. “Skip says he can generate a computer simulation of its effectiveness,” he concluded.

Greer’s eyebrows went up. “How soon?”

“End of week, maybe. I told him if he had it done by Friday we’d pay him for it. Twenty thousand sound reasonable?”

“Will it mean anything?”

“If he gets the background data he needs, it ought to, sir. Skip’s a very sharp cookie. I mean, they don’t give doctorates away at MIT, and he was in the top five of his Academy class.”

“Worth twenty thousand dollars of our money?” Greer was notoriously tight with a buck.

Ryan knew how to answer this. “Sir, if we followed normal procedure on this, we’d contract one of the Beltway Bandits—,” Ryan referred to the consulting firms that dotted the beltway around Washington, D.C., “— they’d charge us five or ten times as much, and we’d be lucky to have the data by Easter. This way we might just have it while the boat’s still at sea. If worse comes to worst, sir, I’ll foot the bill. I figured you’d want this data fast, and it’s right up his alley.”

“You’re right.” It wasn’t the first time Ryan had short-circuited normal procedure. The other times had worked out fairly well. Greer was a man who looked for results. “Okay, the Soviets have a new missile boat with a silent drive system. What does it all mean?”

“Nothing good. We depend on our ability to track their boomers with our attack boats. Hell, that’s why they agreed a few years back to our proposal about keeping them five hundred miles from each other’s coasts, and why they keep their missile subs in port most of the time. This could change the game a bit. By the way, October’s hull, I haven’t seen what it’s made of.”

“Steel. She’s too big for a titanium hull, at least for what it would cost. You know what they have to spend on their Alfas.”

“Too much for what they got. You spend that much money for a superstrong hull, then put a noisy power plant in it. Dumb.”

“Maybe. I wouldn’t mind having that speed, though. Anyway, if this silent drive system really works, they might be able to creep up onto the continental shelf.”

“Depressed-trajectory shot,” Ryan said. This was one of the nastier nuclear war scenarios in which a sea- based missile was fired within a few hundred miles of its target. Washington is a bare hundred air miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Though a missile on a low, fast flight path loses much of its accuracy, a few of them can be launched to explode over Washington in less than a few minutes’ time, too little for a president to react. If the Soviets were able to kill the president that quickly, the resulting disruption of the chain of command would give them ample time to take out the land-based missiles — there would be no one with authority to fire. This scenario is a grandstrategic version of a simple mugging, Ryan thought. A mugger doesn’t attack his victim’s arms — he goes for the head. “You think October was built with that in mind?”

“I’m sure the thought occurred to them,” Greer observed. “It would have occurred to us. Well, we have Bremerton up there to keep an eye on her, and if this data turns out to be useful we’ll see if we can come up with an answer. How are you feeling?”

“I’ve been on the go since five-thirty London time. Long day, sir.”

“I expect so. Okay, we’ll go over the Afghanistan business tomorrow morning. Get some sleep, son.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Ryan got his coat. “Good night.”

It was a fifteen-minute drive to the Marriott. Ryan made the mistake of turning the TV on to the beginning of Monday Night Football. Cincinnati was playing San Francisco, the two best quarterbacks in the league pitted against one another. Football was something he missed living in England, and he managed to stay awake nearly three hours before fading out with the television on.

SOSUS Control

Except for the fact that everyone was in uniform, a visitor might easily have mistaken the room for a NASA control center. There were six wide rows of consoles, each with its own TV screen and typewriter keyboard supplemented by lighted plastic buttons, dials, headphone jacks, and analog and digital controls. Senior Chief Oceanographic Technician Deke Franklin was seated at console fifteen.

The room was SOSUS (sonar surveillance system) Atlantic Control. It was in a fairly nondescript building, uninspired government layer cake, with windowless concrete walls, a large air-conditioning system on a flat roof, and an acronym-coded blue sign on a well-tended but now yellowed lawn. There were armed marines inconspicuously on guard inside the three entrances. In the basement were a pair of Cray-2 supercomputers tended by twenty acolytes, and behind the building was a trio of satellite ground stations, all up-and down-links. The men