The Hunt for Red October

their hands on this submarine!”

CIA Headquarters

“Thank you for coming on such short notice, Senator. I apologize for getting you up so early.” Judge Moore met Donaldson at the door and led him into his capacious office. “You know Director Jacobs, don’t you?”

“Of course, and what brings the heads of the FBI and CIA together at dawn?” Donaldson asked with a smile. This had to be good. Heading the Select Committee was more than a job, it was fun, real fun to be one of the few people who were really in the know.

The third person in the room, Ritter, helped a fourth person out of a high-backed chair that had blocked him from view. It was Peter Henderson, Donaldson saw to his surprise. His aide’s suit was rumpled as though he’d been up all night. Suddenly it wasn’t fun anymore.

Judge Moore waxed solicitous. “You know Mr. Henderson, of course.”

“What is the meaning of this?” Donaldson asked, his voice more subdued than anyone expected.

“You lied to me, Senator,” Ritter said. “You promised that you would not reveal what I told you yesterday, knowing all the time you’d tell this man—”

“I did no such thing.”

“—who then told a fellow KGB agent,” Ritter went on. “Emil?”

Jacobs set his coffee down. “We’ve been onto Mr. Henderson for some time. It was his contact that had us stumped. Some things are just too obvious. A lot of people in D.C. have regular cab pickup. Henderson’s contact was a cab driver. We finally got it right.”

“The way we found out about Henderson was through you, Senator.” Moore explained: “We had a very good agent in Moscow a few years ago, a colonel in their Strategic Rocket Forces. He’d been giving us good information for five years, and we were about to get him and his family out. We try to do that, you know; you can’t run agents forever, and we really owed this man. But I made the mistake of revealing his name to your committee. One week later, he was gone — vanished. He was eventually shot, of course. His wife and three daughters were sent to Siberia. Our information is that they live in a lumber settlement east of the Urals. Typical sort of place, no plumbing, lousy food, no medical facilities available, and since they’re the family of a convicted traitor, you can probably imagine what sort of hell they must endure. A good man dead, and a family destroyed. Try thinking about that, Senator. This is a true story, and these are real people.

“We didn’t know at first who had leaked it. It had to be you, or one of two others, so we began to leak information to individual committee members. It took six months, but your name came up three times. After that we had Director Jacobs check out all of your staffers. Emil?”

“When Henderson was an assistant editor of the Harvard Crimson, in 1970, he was sent to Kent State to do a piece on the shooting. You remember, the ‘Days of Rage’ thing after the Cambodian incursion and that awful screw-up with the national guard. I was in on that, too, as luck would have it. Evidently it turned Henderson’s stomach. Understandable. But not his reaction. When he graduated and joined your staff he started talking with his old activist friends about his job. This led to a contract from the Russians, and they asked for some information. That was during the Christmas bombing — he really didn’t like that. He delivered. It was low- level stuff at first, nothing they couldn’t have gotten a few days later from the Post. That’s how it works. They offered the hook, and he nibbled at it. A few years later, of course, they struck the hook nice and hard and he couldn’t get away. We all know how the game works.

“Yesterday we planted a tape recorder in his taxi. You’d be amazed how easy it was. Agents get lazy, too, just like the rest of us. To make a long story short, we have you on tape promising not to reveal the information to anyone, and we have Henderson here spilling that data not three hours later to a known KGB agent, also on tape. You have violated no laws, Senator, but Mr. Henderson has. He was arrested at nine last night. The charge is espionage, and we have the evidence to make it stick.”

“I had no knowledge whatever of this,” Donaldson said.

“We hadn’t the slightest thought that you might,” Ritter said.

Donaldson faced his aide. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

Henderson didn’t say anything. He thought about saying how sorry he was, but how to explain his emotions? The dirty feeling of being an agent for a foreign power, juxtaposed with the thrill of fooling a whole legion of government spooks. When he was caught these emotions changed to fear at what would happen to him, and relief that it was all over.

“Mr. Henderson has agreed to work for us,” Jacobs said helpfully. “As soon as you leave the Senate, that is.”

“What does that mean?” Donaldson asked.

“You’ve been in the Senate, what? Thirteen years, isn’t it? You were originally appointed to fill out an unexpired term, if memory serves,” Moore said.

“You might try asking my reaction to blackmail,” the senator observed.

“Blackmail?” Moore held his hands out. “Good Lord, Senator, Director Jacobs has already told you that you have broken no laws, and you have my word that the CIA will not leak a word of this. Now, whether or not the Justice Department decides to prosecute Mr. Henderson is not in our hands. ‘Senate Aide Convicted of Treason: Senator Donaldson Professes No Knowledge of Aide’s Action.’”

Jacobs went on, “Senator, the University of Connecticut has offered you the chair in their school of government for some years now. Why not take it?”

“Or Henderson goes to prison. You put that on my conscience?”

“Obviously he cannot go on working for you, and it should be equally obvious that if he is fired after so many years of exemplary service in your office, it will be noticed. If, on the other hand, you decide to leave public life, it would not be too surprising if he were not able to get a job of equivalent stature with another senator. So, he will get a nice job in the General Accounting Office, where he will still have access to all sorts of secrets. Only from now on,” Ritter said, “we decide which secrets he passes along.”

“No statute of limitations on espionage,” Jacobs pointed out.

“If the Soviets find out,” Donaldson said, and stopped. He didn’t really care, did he? Not about Henderson, not about the fictitious Russian. He had an image to save, losses to cut.

“You win, Judge.”

“I thought you’d see it our way. I’ll tell the president. Thanks for coming in, Senator. Mr. Henderson will be a little late to the office this morning. Don’t feel too badly about him, Senator. If he plays ball with us, in a few years we might let him off the hook. It’s happened before, but he’ll have to earn it. Good morning, sir.”

Henderson would play along. His alternative was life in a maximum security penitentiary. After listening to the tape of his conversation in the cab, he’d made his confession in front of a court stenographer and a television camera.

The Pigeon

The ride to the Pigeon had been mercifully uneventful. The catamaran-hull rescue ship had a small helicopter platform aft, and the Royal Navy helicopter had hovered two feet above it, allowing Ryan and Williams to jump down. They were taken immediately to the bridge as the helicopter buzzed back northeast to her home.

“Welcome aboard, gentlemen,” the captain said agreeably. “Washington says you have orders for me. Coffee?”

“Do you have tea?” Williams asked.

“We can probably find some.”

“Let’s go someplace we can talk in private,” Ryan said.

The Dallas

The Dallas was now in on the plan. Alerted by another ELF transmission, Mancuso had brought her to antenna depth briefly during the night. The lengthy EYES ONLY message had been decrypted by hand in his cabin. Decryption was not Mancuso’s strong point. It took him an hour as Chambers conned the Dallas back to trail her contact. A crewman passing the captain’s cabin heard a muted damn through the door. When Mancuso reappeared, his mouth couldn’t keep from twitching into a smile. He was not a good card player either.

The Pigeon

The Pigeon was one of the navy’s two modern submarine rescue ships designed to