The Hunt for Red October

CAN READ THIS AAA AAA AAA RED OCTOBER RED OCTOBER CAN YOU READ THIS CAN YOU READ THIS

The message kept repeating. The signal was jerky and awkward. Ramius didn’t notice this. He translated the English signal in his head, at first thinking it was a signal to the American submarine. His knuckles went white on the periscope hand grips as he translated the message in his mind.

“Borodin,” he said finally, after reading the message a fourth time, “we set up a practice firing solution on Invincible. Damn, the periscope rangefinder is sticking. A single ping, Comrade. Just one, for range.”

Ping!

The Invincible

“One ping from the contact area, sir, sounds Soviet,” the speaker reported.

White lifted his phone. “Thank you. Keep us informed.” He set it back down. “Well, gentlemen…”

“He did it!” Ryan sang out. “Send the rest, for Christ’s sake!”

“At once.” Hunter grinned like a madman.

RED OCTOBER RED OCTOBER YOUR WHOLE FLEET IS CHASING AFTER YOU YOUR WHOLE FLEET IS CHASING AFTER YOU YOUR PATH IS BLOCKED BY NUMEROUS VESSELS NUMEROUS ATTACK SUBMARINES ARE WAITING TO ATTACK YOU REPEAT NUMEROUS ATTACK SUBMARINES ARE WAITING TO ATTACK YOU PROCEED TO RENDEZVOUS 33N 75W WE HAVE SHIPS THERE WAITING FOR YOU REPEAT PROCEED TO RENDEZVOUS 33N 75W WE HAVE SHIPS THERE WAITING FOR YOU IF YOU UNDERSTAND AND AGREE PLEASE PING US AGAIN ONE TIME

The Red October

“Distance to target, Borodin?” Ramius asked, wishing he had more time as the message was repeated again and again.

“Two thousand meters, Comrade Captain. A nice, fat target for us if we…” The starpom’s voice trailed off as he saw the look on his commander’s face.

They know our name, Ramius was thinking, they know our name! How can this be? They knew where to find us — exactly! How? What can the Americans have? How long has the Los Angeles been trailing us? Decide — you must decide!

“Comrade, one more ping on the target, just one.”

The Invincible

“One more ping, Admiral.”

“Thank you.” White looked at Ryan. “Well, Jack, it would seem that your intelligence estimate was indeed correct. Jolly good.”

“Jolly good my ass, my Lord Earl! I was right. Son of a bitch!” Ryan’s hands flew up in the air, his seasickness forgotten. He calmed down. The occasion called for more decorum. “Excuse me, Admiral. We have some things to do.”

The Dallas

Whole fleet is chasing after you…Proceed to 33N 75W. What the hell was going on? Mancuso wondered, catching the end of the second signal.

“Conn, sonar. Getting hull popping noises from the target. His depth is changing. Engine noise increasing.”

“Down scope.” Mancuso lifted the phone. “Very well, sonar. Anything else, Jones?”

“No, sir. The helicopters are gone, and there aren’t any emissions from the surface ships. What gives, sir?”

“Beats me.” Mancuso shook his head as Mannion brought the Dallas back in pursuit of the Red October. What the hell was happening here? the captain wondered. Why was a Brit carrier signaling to a Russian submarine, and why were they sending her to a rendezvous off the Carolinas? Whose subs were blocking her path? It couldn’t be. No way. It just couldn’t be…

The Invincible

Ryan was in the Invincible’s communications room. “MAGI TO OLYMPUS,” he typed into the special encoding device the CIA had sent out with him, “PLAYED MY MANDOLIN TODAY. SOUNDED PRETTY GOOD. I’M PLANNING A LITTLE CONCERT, AT THE USUAL PLACE. EXPECT GOOD CRITICAL REVIEWS. AWAITING INSTRUCTIONS.” Ryan had laughed before at the code words he was supposed to use for this. He was laughing now, for a different reason.

The White House

“So,” Pelt observed, “Ryan expects the mission will be successful. Everything’s going according to plan, but he didn’t use the code group for certain success.”

The president leaned back comfortably. “He’s honest. Things can always go wrong. You have to admit, though, things do look good.”

“This plan the chiefs came up with is crazy, sir.”

“Perhaps, but you’ve been trying to poke a hole in it for several days now, and you haven’t succeeded. The pieces will all fall in place shortly.”

The president was being clever, Pelt saw. The man liked being clever.

The Invincible

“OLYMPUS TO MAGI. I LIKE OLD-FASHIONED MANDOLIN MUSIC. CONCERT APPROVED,” the message said.

Ryan sat back comfortably, sipping at his brandy. “Well, that’s good. I wonder what the next part of the plan is.”

“I expect that Washington will let us know. For the moment,” Admiral White said, “we’ll have to move back west to interpose ourselves between October and the Soviet fleet.”

The Avalon

Lieutenant Ames surveyed the scene through the tiny port on the Avalon’s bow. The Alfa lay on her port side. She had obviously hit stern first, and hard. One blade was snapped off the propeller, and the lower rudder fin was smashed. The whole stern might have been knocked off true; it was hard to tell in the low visibility.

“Moving forward slowly,” he said, adjusting the controls. Behind him an ensign and a senior petty officer were monitoring instruments and preparing to deploy the manipulator arm, attached before they sailed, which carried a television camera and floodlights. These gave them a slightly wider field of view than the navigation ports permitted. The DSRV crept forward at one knot. Visibility was under twenty yards, despite the million candles of illumination from the bow lights.

The sea floor at this point was a treacherous slope of alluvial silt dotted with boulders. It appeared that the only thing that had prevented the Alfa from sliding farther down was her sail, driven like a wedge into the bottom.

“Holy gawd!” The petty officer saw it first. There was a crack in the Alfa’s hull — or was there?

“Reactor accident,” Ames said, his voice detached and clinical. “Something burned through the hull. Lord, and that’s titanium! Burned right through, from the inside out. There’s another one, two burn-throughs. This one’s bigger, looks like a good yard across. No mystery what killed her, guys. That’s two compartments open to the sea.” Ames looked over to the depth gauge: 1,880 feet. “Getting all this on tape?”

“Aye, Skipper,” the electrician first class answered. “Crummy way to die. Poor bastards.”

“Yeah, depending on what they were up to.” Ames maneuvered the Avalon around the Alfa’s bow, working the directional propeller carefully and adjusting trim to cruise down the other side, actually the top of the dead sub. “See any evidence of a hull fracture?”

“No,” the ensign answered, “just the two burn-throughs. I wonder what went wrong?”

“A for-real China Syndrome. It finally happened to somebody.” Ames shook his head. If there was anything the navy preached about reactors, it was safety. “Get the transducer against the hull. We’ll see if anybody’s alive in there.”