The Hunt for Red October

“I’m Doctor Noyes,” the commander said to Mancuso in the control room. He had never been on a submarine before, and when he looked around he saw a compartment full of instruments all in a foreign language. “What ship is this?”

“Krazny Oktyabr,” Borodin said, coming over. In the centerpiece of his cap there was a gleaming red star.

“What the hell is going on here?” Noyes demanded.

“Doc,” Ryan took him by the arm, “you have two patients aft. Why not let’s worry about them?”

Noyes followed him aft to sick bay. “What’s going on here?” he persisted more quietly.

“The Russians just lost a submarine,” Ryan explained, “and now she belongs to us. And if you tell anybody —”

“I read you, but I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t have to believe me. What kind of cutter are you?”

“Thoracic.”

“Good,” Ryan turned into sick bay, “you have a gunshot wound victim who needs you bad.”

Williams was lying naked on the table. A sailor came in with an armful of medical supplies and set them on Petrov’s desk. The October’s medical locker had a supply of frozen plasma, and the two corpsmen already had two units running into the lieutenant. A chest tube was in, draining into a vacuum bottle.

“We got a nine-millimeter in this man’s chest,” one of the corpsmen said after introducing himself and his partner. “He’s had a chest tube in the last ten hours, they tell me. The head looks worse than it is. Right pupil is a little blown, but no big deal. The chest is bad, sir. You’d better take a listen.”

“Vitals?” Noyes fished in his bag for a stethoscope.

“Heart is 110 and thready. Blood pressure’s eighty over forty.”

Noyes moved his stethoscope around Williams’ chest, frowning. “Heart’s in the wrong place. We have a left tension pneumothorax. There must be a quart of fluid in there, and it sounds like he’s heading for congestive failure.” Noyes turned to Ryan. “You get out of here. I’ve got a chest to crack.”

“Take care of him, Doc. He’s a good man.”

“Aren’t they all,” Noyes observed, stripping off his jacket. “Let’s get scrubbed, people.”

Ryan wondered if a prayer would help. Noyes looked and talked like a surgeon. Ryan hoped he was. He went aft to the captain’s cabin, where Ramius was sleeping with the drugs he’d been given. The leg had stopped bleeding, and evidently one of the corpsmen had checked on it. Noyes could work on him next. Ryan went forward.

Borodin felt he had lost control and didn’t like it, though it was something of a relief. Two weeks of constant tension plus the nerve-wrenching change in plans had shaken the officer more than he would have believed. The situation now was unpleasant — the Americans were trying to be kind, but they were so damned overpowering! At least the Red October’s officers were not in danger.

Twenty minutes later the Zodiac was back again. Two sailors went topside to unload a few hundred pounds of frozen food, then helped Jones with his electronic gear. It took several minutes to get everything squared away, and the seamen who took the food forward came back shaken after finding two stiff bodies and a third frozen solid. There had not been time to move the two recent casualties.

“Got everything, Skipper,” Jones reported. He handed the depth gauge dial to the chief.

“What is all of this?” Borodin asked.

“Captain, I got the modulator to make the gertrude.” Jones held up a small box. “This other stuff is a little color TV, a video cassette recorder, and some movie tapes. The skipper thought you gentlemen might want something to relax with, to get to know us a little, you know?”

“Movies?” Borodin shook his head. “Cinema movies?”

“Sure,” Mancuso chuckled. “What did you bring, Jonesy?”

“Well, sir, I got E.T., Star Wars, Big Jake, and Hondo.” Clearly Jones wanted to be careful what parts of America he introduced the Russians to.

“My apologies, Captain. My crewman has limited taste in movies.”

At the moment Borodin would have settled for The Battleship Potemkin. The fatigue was really hitting him hard.

The cook bustled aft with an armload of groceries. “I’ll have coffee in a few minutes, sir,” he said to Borodin on his way to the galley.

“I would like something to eat. None of us has eaten in a day,” Borodin said.

“Food!” Mancuso called aft.

“Aye, Skipper. Let me figure this galley out.”

Mannion checked his watch. “Twenty minutes, sir.”

“We have everything we need aboard?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jones bypassed the pulse control on the sonar amplifier and wired in the modulator. It was even easier than he’d expected. He had taken a radio microphone from the Dallas along with everything else and now connected it to the sonar set before powering the system up. He had to wait for the set to warm up. Jones hadn’t seen this many tubes since he’d gone out on TV repair jobs with his father, and that had been a long time ago.

“Dallas, this is Jonesy, do you copy?”

“Aye.” The reply was scratchy, like a taxicab radio.

“Thanks. Out.” He switched off. “It works. That was pretty easy, wasn’t it?”

Enlisted man, hell! And not even trained on Soviet equipment! the October’s electronics officer thought. It never occurred to him that this piece of equipment was a near copy of an obsolete American FM system. “How long have you been a sonarman?”

“Three and a half years, sir. Since I dropped out of college.”

“You learn all this in three years?” the officer asked sharply.

Jones shrugged. “What’s the big deal, sir? I’ve been foolin’ with radios and stuff since I was a kid. You mind if I play some music, sir?”

Jones had decided to be especially nice. He had only one tape of a Russian composer, the Nutcracker Suite, and had brought that along with four Bachs. Jones liked to hear music while he prayed over circuit diagrams. The young sonarman was in Hog Heaven. All the Russian sets he had listened to for three years — now he had their schematics, their hardware, and the time to figure them all out. Bugayev continued to watch in amazement as Jones’ fingers did their ballet through the manual pages to the music of Tchaikovsky.

“Time to dive, sir,” Mannion said in control.

“Very well. With your permission, Captain Borodin, I will assist with the vents. All hatches and openings are…shut.” The diving board used the same light-array system as American boats, Mancuso noticed.

Mancuso took stock of the situation one last time. Butler and his four most senior petty officers were already tending to the nuclear tea kettle aft. The situation looked pretty good, considering. The only thing that could really go badly wrong would be for the October’s officers to change their minds. The Dallas would be keeping the missile sub under constant sonar observation. If she moved, the Dallas had a ten-knot speed advantage with which to block the channel.

“The way I see it, Captain, we are rigged for dive,” Mancuso said.

Borodin nodded and sounded the diving alarm. It was a buzzer, just like on American boats. Mancuso, Mannion, and the Russian officer worked the complex vent controls. The Red October began her slow descent. In five minutes she was resting on the bottom, with seventy feet of water over the top of her sail.

The White House

Pelt was on the phone to the Soviet embassy at three in the morning. “Alex, this is Jeffrey Pelt.”

“How are you, Dr. Pelt? I must offer my thanks and that of the Soviet people for your action to save our sailor. I was informed a few minutes ago that he is now conscious, and that he is expected to recover fully.”

“Yes, I just learned that myself. What’s his name, by the way?” Pelt wondered if he had awakened Arbatov. It didn’t sound like it.