The Hunt for Red October

MED AREA XX ADDITIONAL HF AND VHF TRAFFIC FROM REDFLEET ASSETS AT SEA XX AMPLIFICATION TO FOLLOW XX

EVALUATION: A MAJOR UNPLANNED REDFLEET OPERATION HAS BEEN ORDERED WITH FLEET ASSETS REPORTING AVAILABILITY AND STATUS XX

END BULLETIN

NSA SENDS

102215Z

BREAKBREAK

Ryan looked at his watch. “Fast work by the boys at NSA, and fast work by our duty watch officers, getting everybody up.” He drained his mug and went over for a refill. “What’s the word on signal traffic analysis?”

“Here.” Greer handed him a second telex sheet.

Ryan scanned it. “That’s a lot of ships. Must be nearly everything they have at sea. Not much on the ones in port, though.”

“Landline,” Greer observed. “The ones in port can phone fleet ops, Moscow. By the way, that is every ship they have at sea in the Western Hemisphere. Every damned one. Any ideas?”

“Let’s see, we have that increased activity in the Barents Sea. Looks like a medium-sized ASW exercise. Maybe they’re expanding it. Doesn’t explain the increased activity in the Baltic and Med, though. Do they have a war game laid on?”

“Nope. They just finished CRIMSON STORM a month ago.”

Ryan nodded. “Yeah, they usually take a couple of months to evaluate that much data — and who’d want to play games up there at this time of the year? The weather’s supposed to be a bitch. Have they ever run a major game in December?”

“Not a big one, but most of these acknowledgments are from submarines, son, and subs don’t care a whole lot about the weather.”

“Well, given some other preconditions, you might call this ominous. No idea what the signal said, eh?”

“No. They’re using computer-based ciphers, same as us. If the spooks at the NSA can read them, they’re not telling me about it.” In theory the National Security Agency came under the titular control of the director of Central Intelligence. In fact it was a law unto itself. “That’s what traffic analysis is all about, Jack. You try to guess intentions by who’s talking to whom.”

“Yes, sir, but when everybody’s talking to everybody—”

“Yeah.”

“Anything else on alert? Their army? Voyska PVO?” Ryan referred to the Soviet air defense network.

“Nope, just the fleet. Subs, ships, and naval aviation.”

Ryan stretched. “That makes it sound like an exercise, sir. We’ll want a little more data on what they’re doing, though. Have you talked to Admiral Davenport?”

“That’s the next step. Haven’t had time. I’ve only been in long enough to shave myself and turn the coffee on.” Greer sat down and set his phone receiver in the desk speaker before punching in the numbers.

“Vice Admiral Davenport.” The voice was curt.

“Morning, Charlie, James here. Did you get that NSA-976?”

“Sure did, but that’s not what got me up. Our SOSUS net went berserk a few hours ago.”

“Oh?” Greer looked at the phone, then at Ryan.

“Yeah, nearly every sub they have at sea just put the pedal to the metal, and all at about the same time.”

“Doing what exactly, Charlie?” Greer prompted.

“We’re still figuring that out. It looks like a lot of boats are heading into the North Atlantic. Their units in the Norwegian Sea are racing southwest. Three from the western Med are heading that way, too, but we haven’t got a clear picture yet. We need a few more hours.”

“What do they have operating off our coast, sir?” Ryan asked.

“They woke you up, Ryan? Good. Two old Novembers. One’s a raven conversion doing an ELINT job off the cape. The other one’s sitting off King’s Bay making a damned nuisance of itself.”

Ryan smiled to himself. An American or allied ship was a she; the Russians used the male pronoun for a ship; and the intelligence community usually referred to a Soviet ship as it.

“There’s a Yankee boat,” Davenport went on, “a thousand miles south of Iceland, and the initial report is that it’s heading north. Probably wrong. Reciprocal bearing, transcription error, something like that. We’re checking. Must be a goof, because it was heading south earlier.”

Ryan looked up. “What about their other missile boats?”

“Their Deltas and Typhoons are in the Barents Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, as usual. No news on them. Oh, we have attack boats up there, of course, but Gallery doesn’t want them to break radio silence, and he’s right. So all we have at the moment is the report on the stray Yankee.”

“What are we doing, Charlie?” Greer asked.

“Gallery has a general alert out to his boats. They’re standing by in case we need to redeploy. NORAD has gone to a slightly increased alert status, they tell me.” Davenport referred to the North American Aerospace Defense Command. “CINCLANT and CINCPAC fleet staffs are up and running around in circles, like you’d expect. Some extra P-3s are working out of Iceland. Nothing much else at the moment. First we have to figure out what they’re up to.”

“Okay, keep me posted.”

“Roger, if we hear anything, I’ll let you know, and I trust—”

“We will.” Greer killed the phone. He shook a finger at Ryan. “Don’t you go to sleep on me, Jack.”

“On top of this stuff?” Ryan waved his mug.

“You’re not concerned, I see.”

“Sir, there’s nothing to be concerned about yet. It’s what, one in the afternoon over there now? Probably some admiral, maybe old Sergey himself, decided to toss a drill at his boys. He wasn’t supposed to be all that pleased with how CRIMSON STORM worked out, and maybe he decided to rattle a few cages — ours included, of course. Hell, their army and air force aren’t involved, and it’s for damned sure that if they were planning anything nasty the other services would know about it. We’ll have to keep an eye on this, but so far I don’t see anything to —” Ryan almost said lose sleep over “—sweat about.”

“How old were you at Pearl Harbor?”

“My father was nineteen, sir. He didn’t marry until after the war, and I wasn’t the first little Ryan.” Jack smiled. Greer knew all this. “As I recall you weren’t all that old yourself.”

“I was a seaman second on the old Texas.” Greer had never made it into that war. Soon after it started he’d been accepted by the Naval Academy. By the time he had graduated from there and finished training at submarine school, the war was almost over. He reached the Japanese coast on his first cruise the day after the war ended. “But you know what I mean.”

“Indeed I do, sir, and that’s why we have the CIA, DIA, NSA, and NRO, among others. If the Russkies can fool all of us, maybe we ought to read up on our Marx.”

“All those subs heading into the Atlantic…”

“I feel better with word that the Yankee is heading north. They’ve had enough time to make that a hard piece of data. Davenport probably doesn’t want to believe it without confirmation. If Ivan was looking to play hardball, that Yankee’d be heading south. The missiles on those old boats can’t reach very far. Sooo — we stay up and watch. Fortunately, sir, you make a decent cup of coffee.”

“How does breakfast grab you?”

“Might as well. If we can finish up on the Afghanistan stuff, maybe I can fly back tomorr — tonight.”

“You still might. Maybe this way you’ll learn to sleep on the plane.”

Breakfast was sent up twenty minutes later. Both men were accustomed to big ones, and the food was surprisingly good. Ordinarily CIA cafeteria food was government-undistinguished, and Ryan wondered if the night