The Hunt for Red October

“Son of a bitch.” He knew the sensitivity levels by heart. He took the manual down to check them anyway. Fortunately, the segments were logarithmic. His exposure was twelve rads. Fifteen to twenty-five for the engineers. Twelve to twenty-five rads in two days, not enough to be dangerous. Not really life threatening, but…Petrov went back into his office, careful to leave the films in the labs. He picked up the phone.

“Captain Ramius? Petrov here. Could you come aft to my office, please?”

“On the way, Comrade Doctor.”

Ramius took his time. He knew what the call was about. The day before they sailed, while Petrov had been ashore procuring drugs for his cupboard, Borodin had contaminated the badges with the X-ray machine.

“Yes, Petrov?” Ramius closed the door behind him.

“Comrade Captain, we have a radiation leak.”

“Nonsense. Our instruments would have detected it at once.”

Petrov got the films from the lab and handed them to the captain. “Look here.”

Ramius held them up to the light, scanning the film strips top to bottom. He frowned. “Who knows of this?”

“You and I, Comrade Captain.”

“You will tell no one — no one.” Ramius paused. “Any chance that the films were — that they have something wrong, that you made an error in the developing process?”

Petrov shook his head emphatically. “No, Comrade Captain. Only you, Comrade Borodin, and I have access to these. As you know, I tested random samples from each batch three days before we sailed.” Petrov wouldn’t admit that, like everyone, he had taken the samples from the top of the box they were stored in. They weren’t really random.

“The maximum exposure I see here is…ten to twenty?” Ramius understated it. “Whose numbers?”

“Bulganin and Surzpoi. The torpedomen forward are all under three rads.”

“Very well. What we have here, Comrade Doctor, is a possible minor — minor, Petrov — leak in the reactor spaces. At worst a gas leak of some sort. This has happened before, and no one has ever died from it. The leak will be found and fixed. We will keep this little secret. There is no reason to get the men excited over nothing.”

Petrov nodded agreement, knowing that men had died in 1970 in an accident on the submarine Voroshilov, more in the icebreaker Lenin. Both accidents were a long time ago, though, and he was sure Ramius could handle things. Wasn’t he?

The Pentagon

The E ring was the outermost and largest of the Pentagon’s rings, and since its outside windows offered something other than a view of sunless courtyards, this was where the most senior defense officials had their offices. One of these was the office of the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the J-3. He wasn’t there. He was down in a subbasement room known colloquially as the Tank because its metal walls were dotted with electronic noisemakers to foil other electronic devices.

He had been there for twenty-four hours, though one would not have known this from his appearance. His green trousers were still creased, his khaki shirt still showed the folds made by the laundry, its collar starched plywood-stiff, and his tie was held neatly in place by a gold marine corps tiepin. Lieutenant General Edwin Harris was neither a diplomat nor a service academy graduate, but he was playing peacemaker. An odd position for a marine.

“God damn it!” It was the voice of Admiral Blackburn, CINCLANT. Also present was his own operations officer, Rear Admiral Pete Stanford. “Is this any way to run an operation?”

The Joint Chiefs were all there, and none of them thought so.

“Look, Blackie, I told you where the orders come from.” General Hilton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sounded tired.

“I understand that, General, but this is largely a submarine operation, right? I gotta get Vince Gallery in on this, and you should have Sam Dodge working up at this end. Dan and I are both fighter jocks, Pete’s an ASW expert. We need a sub driver in on this.”

“Gentlemen,” Harris said calmly, “for the moment the plan we have to take to the president need only deal with the Soviet threat. Let’s hold this story about the defecting boomer in abeyance for the moment, shall we?”

“I agree,” Stanford nodded. “We have enough to worry about right here.”

The attention of the eight flag officers turned to the map table. Fifty-eight Soviet submarines and twenty- eight surface warships, plus a gaggle of oilers and replenishment ships, were unmistakably heading for the American coast. To face this, the U.S. Navy had one available carrier. The Invincible did not rate as such. The threat was considerable. Among them the Soviet vessels carried over three hundred surface- to-surface cruise missiles. Though principally designed as antiship weapons, the third of them believed to carry nuclear warheads were sufficient to devastate the cities of the East Coast. From a position off New Jersey, these missiles could range from Norfolk to Boston.

“Josh Painter proposes that we keep Kennedy inshore,” Admiral Blackburn said. “He wants to run the ASW operation from his carrier, transferring his light attack squadrons to shore and replacing them with S-3s. He wants Invincible out on their seaward flank.”

“I don’t like it,” General Harris said. Neither did Pete Stanford, and they had agreed earlier that the J-3 would launch the counterplan. “Gentlemen, if we’re only going to have one deck to use, we damned well ought to have a carrier and not an oversized ASW platform.”

“We’re listening, Eddie,” Hilton said.

“Let’s move Kennedy out here.” He moved the counter to a position west of the Azores. “Josh keeps his attack squadrons. We move Invincible inshore to handle the ASW work. It’s what the Brits designed her for, right? They’re supposed to be good at it. Kennedy is an offensive weapon, her mission is to threaten them. Okay, if we deploy like this, she is the threat. From over here she can range against their surface force from outside their surface-to- surface missile perimeter—”

“Better yet,” Stanford interjected, pointing to some vessels on the map, “threaten this service force here. If they lose these oilers, they ain’t going home. To meet that threat they’ll have to redeploy themselves. For starters, they’ll have to move Kiev offshore to give themselves some kind of air defense against Kennedy. We can use the spare S-3s from shore bases. They can still patrol the same areas.” He traced a line about five hundred miles off the coast.

“Leaves Invincible kind of naked, though,” the CNO, Admiral Foster, noted.

“Josh was asking about some E-3 coverage for the Brits.” Blackburn looked at the air force chief of staff, General Claire Barnes.

“You want help, you get help,” Barnes said. “We’ll have a Sentry operating over Invincible at dawn tomorrow, and if you move her inshore we can maintain that round the clock. I’ll throw in a wing of F-16s if you want.”

“What do you want in return, Max?” Foster asked. Nobody called him Claire.

“The way I see this, you have Saratoga’s air wing sitting around doing nothing. Okay, by Saturday I’ll have five hundred tactical fighters deployed from Dover to Loring. My boys don’t know much about antiship stuff. They’ll have to learn in a hurry. I want you to send your kids to work with mine, and I also want your Tomcats. I like the fighter-missile combination. Let one squadron work out of Iceland, the other out of New England to track the Bears Ivan’s starting to send our way. I’ll sweeten that. If you want, we’ll send some tankers to Lajes to help keep Kennedy’s birds flying.”

“Blackie?” Foster asked.

“Deal,” Blackburn nodded. “The only thing that bothers me is that Invincible doesn’t have all that much ASW capacity.”

“So we get more,” Stanford said. “Admiral, what say we take Tarawa out of Little Creek, team her with New Jersey’s group, with a dozen ASW choppers aboard and seven or eight Harriers?”

“I like it,” Harris said quickly. “Then we have two baby carriers with a noteworthy striking force right in front of their groups, Kennedy playing stalking tiger to their east, and a few hundred tactical fighters to the west. They have to come into a three-way box. This actually gives us more ASW patrolling capacity