The Hunt for Red October

the interim he had on a pair of English-made trousers and a sweater. Typical, he thought — nobody even knows I’m here. They had forgotten him. No messages from the president — not that he’d ever expected one — and Painter and Davenport were only too glad to forget that he was ever on the Kennedy. Greer and the judge were probably going over some damned fool thing or another, maybe chuckling to themselves about Jack Ryan having a pleasure cruise at government expense.

It was not a pleasure cruise. Jack had rediscovered his vulnerability to seasickness. The Invincible was off Massachusetts, waiting for the Russian surface force and hunting vigorously after the red subs in the area. They were steaming in circles on an ocean that would not settle down. Everyone was busy — except him. The pilots were up twice a day or more, exercising with their U.S. Air Force and Navy counterparts working from shore bases. The ships were practicing surface warfare tactics. As Admiral White had said at breakfast, it had developed into a jolly good extension of NIFTY DOLPHIN. Ryan didn’t like being a supernumerary. Everyone was polite, of course. Indeed, the hospitality was nearly overpowering. He had access to the command center, and when he watched to see how the Brits hunted subs down, everything was explained to him in sufficient detail that he actually understood about half of it.

At the moment he was reading alone in White’s sea cabin, which had become his permanent home aboard. Ritter had thoughtfully tucked a CIA staff study into his duffle bag. Entitled “Lost Children: A Psychological Profile of East Bloc Defectors,” the three-hundred-page document had been drafted by a committee of psychologists and psychiatrists who worked with the CIA and other intelligence agencies helping defectors settle into American life — and, he was sure, helping spot security risks in the CIA. Not that there were many of those, but there were two sides to everything the Company did.

Ryan admitted to himself that this was pretty interesting stuff. He had never really thought about what makes a defector, figuring that there were enough things happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain to make any rational person want to take whatever chance he got to run west. But it was not that simple, he read, not that simple at all. Everyone who came over was a fairly unique individual. While one might recognize the inequities of life under Communism and yearn for justice, religious freedom, a chance to develop as an individual, another might simply want to get rich, having read about how greedy capitalists exploit the masses and decided that being an exploiter has its good points. Ryan found this interesting if cynical.

Another defector type was the fake, the imposter, someone planted on the CIA as a living piece of disinformation. But this kind of character could cut both ways. He might ultimately turn out to be a genuine defector. America, Ryan smiled, could be pretty seductive to someone used to the gray life in the Soviet Union. Most of the plants, however, were dangerous enemies. For this reason a defector was never trusted. Never. A man who had changed countries once could do it again. Even the idealists had doubts, great pangs of conscience at having deserted their motherland. In a footnote a doctor commented that the most wounding punishment for Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was exile. As a patriot, being alive far from his home was more of a torment than living in a gulag. Ryan found that curious, but enough so to be true.

The rest of the document addressed the problem of getting them settled. Not a few Soviet defectors had committed suicide after a few years. Some had simply been unable to cope with freedom, the way that long-term prison inmates often fail to function without highly structured control over their lives and commit new crimes hoping to return to their safe environment. Over the years the CIA had developed a protocol for dealing with this problem, and a graph in an appendix showed that the severe maladjustment cases were trending dramatically down. Ryan took his time reading. While getting his doctorate in history at Georgetown University he had used a little free time to audit some psychology classes. He had come away with the gut suspicion that shrinks didn’t really know much of anything, that they got together and agreed on random ideas they could all use…He shook his head. His wife occasionally said that, too. A clinical instructor in ophthalmic surgery on an exchange program at St. Guy’s Hospital in London, Caroline Ryan regarded everything as cut and dried. If someone had eye trouble, she would either fix it or not fix it. A mind was different, Jack decided after reading through the document a second time, and each defector had to be treated as an individual, handled carefully by a sympathetic case officer who had both the time and inclination to look after him properly. He wondered if he’d be good at it.

Admiral White walked in. “Bored, Jack?”

“Not exactly, Admiral. When do we make contact with the Soviets?”

“This evening. Your chaps have given them a very rough time over that Tomcat incident.”

“Good. Maybe people will wake up before something really bad happens.”

“You think it will?” White sat down.

“Well, Admiral, if they really are hunting a missing sub, yes. If not, then they’re here for another purpose entirely, and I’ve guessed wrong. Worse than that, I’ll have to live with that misjudgment — or die with it.”

Norfolk Naval Medical Center

Tait was feeling better. Dr. Jameson had taken over for several hours, allowing him to curl up on a couch in the doctor’s lounge for five hours. That was the most sleep he ever seemed to get in one shot, but it was sufficient to make him look indecently chipper to the rest of the floor staff. He made a quick phone call and some milk was sent up. As a Mormon, Tait avoided everything with caffeine — coffee, tea, even cola drinks — and though this type of self-discipline was unusual for a physician, to say nothing of a uniformed officer, he scarcely thought about it except on rare occasions when he pointed out its longevity benefits to his brother practitioners. Tait drank his milk and shaved in the restroom, emerging ready to face another day.

“Any word on the radiation exposure, Jamie?”

The radiology lab had struck out. “They brought a nucleonics officer over from a sub tender, and he scanned the clothes. There was a possible twenty-rad contamination, not enough for frank physiological effects. I think what it might have been was that the nurse took the sample from the back of his hand. The extremities might still have been suffering from the vascular shutdown. That could explain the depleted white count. Maybe.”

“How is he otherwise?”

“Better. Not much, but better. I think maybe the keflin’s taking hold.” The doctor flipped open the chart. “White count is coming back. I put a unit of whole blood into him two hours ago. The blood chemistry is approaching normal limits. Blood pressure is one hundred over sixty-five, heart rate is ninety-four. Temperature ten minutes ago was 100.8—it’s been fluctuating for several hours.

“His heart looks pretty good. In fact, I think he’s going to make it, unless something unexpected crops up.” Jameson reminded himself that in extreme hypothermia cases the unexpected can take a month or more to appear.

Tait examined the chart, remembering what he had been like years ago. A bright young doc, just like Jamie, certain that he could cure the world. It was a good feeling. A pity that experience — in his case, two years at Danang — beat that out of you. Jamie was right, though; there was enough improvement here to make the patient’s chances appear measurably better.

“What are the Russians doing?” Tait asked.

“Petchkin has the watch at the moment. When it came his turn, and he changed into scrubs — you know he has that Captain Smirnov holding onto his clothes, like he expected us to steal them or something?”

Tait explained that Petchkin was a KGB agent.

“No kidding? Maybe he has a gun tucked away.” Jameson chuckled. “If he does, he’d better watch it. We got three marines up here with us.”

“Marines. What for?”

“Forgot to tell you. Some reporter found out we had a Russkie up here and tried to bluff his way onto the floor. A nurse stopped him. Admiral Blackburn found out and went ape. The whole floor’s sealed off. What’s the big secret, anyway?”

“Beats me, but that’s the way it is. What do you think of this Petchkin guy?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never met any Russians before. They don’t smile a whole lot. The way they’re taking turns watching the patient, you’d think they expect us to make off with him.”

“Or maybe that he’ll say something they don’t want us to hear?” Tait wondered. “Did you get the feeling that they might not want him to make it? I mean, when they didn’t want to tell us about what his sub was?”

Jameson thought about that. “No. The Russians are supposed to make a secret of everything, aren’t they? Anyway, Smirnov did come through with it.”

“Get some sleep, Jamie.”

“Aye, Cap’n.” Jameson walked off toward the lounge.