The Hunt for Red October

Ryan turned the index sheet. The report was a xeroxed copy of something that had been typed on a manual machine, and it had too many strikeovers to have been done by a real secretary. If Nancy Cummings and the other elite executive secretaries had not been allowed to see this … Ryan looked up.

‘It’s all right, Jack,’ Greer said. ‘You’ve just been cleared for WILLOW.’

Ryan sat back, and despite his excitement began to read the document slowly and carefully.

The agent’s code name was actually CARDINAL. The highest ranking agent-in-place the CIA had ever had, he was the stuff that legends are made of. CARDINAL had been recruited more than twenty years earlier by Oleg Penkovskiy. Another legend – a dead one – Penkovskiy had at the time been a colonel in the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, a larger and more active counterpart to America’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). His position had given him access to daily information on all facets of the Soviet military, from the Red Army’s command structure to the operational status of intercontinental missiles. The information he smuggled out through his British contact, Greville Wynne, was supremely valuable, and Western countries had come to depend on it – too much. Penkovskiy was discovered during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. It was his data, ordered and delivered under great pressure and haste, that told President Kennedy that Soviet strategic systems were not ready for war. This information enabled the president to back Khrushchev into a corner from which there was no easy exit. The famous blink ascribed to Kennedy’s steady nerves was, as in many such events throughout history, facilitated by his ability to see the other man’s cards. This advantage was given him by a courageous agent whom he would never meet. Penkovskiy’s response to the FLASH request from Washington was too rash. Already under suspicion, this finished him. He paid for his treason with his life. It was CARDINAL who first learned that he was being watched more closely than was the norm for a society where everyone is watched. He warned Penkovskiy – too late. When it became clear that the colonel could not be extracted from the Soviet Union, he himself urged CARDINAL to betray him. It was the final ironic joke of a brave man that his own death would advance the career of an agent whom he had recruited.

CARDINAL’s job was necessarily as secret as his name. A senior adviser and confidant of a Politburo member, CARDINAL often acted as his representative within the Soviet military establishment. He thus had access to political and military intelligence of the highest order. This made his information extraordinarily valuable – and, paradoxically, highly suspect. Those few experienced CIA case officers who knew of him found it impossible to believe that he had not been ‘turned’ somewhere along the line by one of the thousands of KGB counterintelligence officers whose sole duty it is to watch everyone and everything. For this reason CARDINAL-coded material was generally cross-checked against the reports of other spies and sources. But he had outlived many small-fry agents.

The name CARDINAL was known in Washington only to the top three CIA executives. On the first day of each month a new code name was chosen for his data, a name made known only to the highest echelon of CIA officers and analysts. This month it was WILLOW. Before being passed on, grudgingly, to outsiders, CARDINAL data was laundered as carefully as Mafia income to disguise its source. There were also a number of security measures that protected the agent and were unique to him. For fear of cryptographic exposure of his identity, CARDINAL material was hand delivered, never transmitted by radio or landline. CARDINAL himself was a very careful man – Penkovskiy’s fate had taught him that. His information was conveyed through a series of intermediaries to the chief of the CIA’s Moscow station. He had outlived twelve station chiefs; one of these, a retired field officer, had a brother who was a Jesuit. Every morning the priest, an instructor in philosophy and theology at Fordham University in New York, said mass for the safety, and the soul of a man whose name he would never know. It was as good an explanation as any for CARDINAL’s continued survival.

Four separate times he had been offered extraction from the Soviet Union. Each time he had refused. To some this was proof that he’d been turned, but to others it was proof that like most successful agents CARDINAL was a man driven by something he alone knew – and therefore, like most successful agents, he was probably a little crazy.

The document Ryan was reading had been in transit for twenty hours. It had taken five for the film to reach the American embassy in Moscow, where it was delivered at once to the station chief. An experienced field officer and former reporter for the New York Times, he worked under the cover of press attaché. He developed the film himself in his private darkroom. Thirty minutes after its arrival, he inspected the five exposed frames through a magnifying glass and sent a FLASH-priority dispatch to Washington saying that a CARDINAL signal was en route. Next he transcribed the message from the film to flash paper on his own portable typewriter, translating from the Russian as he went. This security measure erased both the agent’s handwriting and, by the paraphrasing automatic to translation, any personal peculiarities of his language. The film was then burned to ashes, the report folded into a metal container much like a cigarette case. This held a small pyrotechnic charge that would go off if the case were improperly opened or suddenly shaken; two CARDINAL signals had been lost when their cases were accidentally dropped. Next the station chief took the case to the embassy’s courier-in-residence, who had already been booked on a three-hour Aeroflot flight to London. At Heathrow Airport the courier sprinted to make connections with a Pan Am 747 to New York’s Kennedy International, where he connected with the Eastern shuttle to Washington’s National Airport. By eight that morning the diplomatic bag was in the State Department. There a CIA officer removed the case, drove it immediately to Langley, and handed it to the DCI. It was opened by an instructor from the CIA’s technical services branch. The DCI made three copies on his personal Xerox machine and burned the flash paper in his ashtray. These security measures had struck a few of the men who had succeeded to the office of the DCI as laughable. The laughs had never outlasted the first CARDINAL report.

When Ryan finished the report he referred back to the second page and read it through again, shaking his head slowly. The WILLOW document was the strongest reinforcement yet of his desire not to know how intelligence information reached him. He closed the folder and handed it back to Admiral Greer.

‘Christ, sir.’

‘Jack, I know I don’t have to say this – but what you have just read, nobody, not the president, not Sir Basil, not God if He asks, nobody learns of it without the authorization of the director. Is that understood?’ Greer had not lost his command voice.

‘Yes, sir.’ Ryan bobbed his head like a schoolboy.

Judge Moore pulled a cigar from his jacket pocket and lit it, looking past the flame into Ryan’s eyes. The judge, everyone said, had been a hell of a field officer in his day. He’d worked with Hans Tofte during the Korean War and had been instrumental in bringing off one of the CIA’s legendary missions, the disappearance of a Norwegian ship that had been carrying a cargo of medical personnel and supplies for the Chinese. The loss had delayed a Chinese offensive for several months, saving thousands of American and allied lives. But it had been a bloody operation. All of the Chinese personnel and all of the Norwegian crewmen had vanished. It was a bargain in the simple mathematics of war, but the morality of the mission was another matter. For this reason, or perhaps another, Moore had soon thereafter left government service to become a trial lawyer in his native Texas. His career had been spectacularly successful, and he’d advanced from wealthy courtroom lawyer to distinguished appellate judge. He had been recalled to the CIA three years earlier because of his unique combination of absolute personal integrity and experience in black operations. Judge Moore hid a Harvard law degree and a highly ordered mind behind the façade of a West Texas cowboy, something he had never been but simulated with ease.

‘So, Dr Ryan, what do you think of this?’ Moore said as the deputy director of operations came in. ‘Hi, Bob, come on over here. We just showed Ryan here the WILLOW file.’

‘Oh?’ Ritter slid a chair over, neatly trapping Ryan in the corner. ‘And what does the admiral’s fair-haired boy think of that?’

‘Gentlemen, I assume that you all regard this information as genuine,’ Ryan said cautiously, getting nods. ‘Sir, if this information was hand delivered by the Archangel Michael, I’d have trouble believing it – but since you gentlemen say it’s reliable …’ They wanted his opinion. The problem was, his conclusion was too incredible. Well, he decided, I’ve gotten this far by giving my honest opinions …

Ryan took a deep breath and gave them his evaluation.

‘Very well, Dr Ryan,’ Judge Moore nodded sagaciously. ‘First I want to hear what else it might be, then I want you to defend your analysis.’

‘Sir, the most obvious alternative doesn’t bear much thinking about. Besides, they’ve been able to do it since Friday and they haven’t done it,’ Ryan said, keeping his voice low and reasonable. Ryan had trained himself to be objective. He ran through the four alternatives he had considered, careful to examine each in detail. This was no time to allow personal views to intrude on his thinking. He spoke for ten minutes.

‘I suppose there’s one more possibility. Judge,’ he concluded. ‘This could be disinformation aimed at blowing this source. I cannot evaluate that possibility.’

‘The thought has occurred to us. All right, now that you’ve gone this far, you might as well give your operational recommendation.’

‘Sir, the admiral can tell you what the navy’ll say.’

‘I sorta figured that one out, boy,’ Moore laughed. ‘What do you think?’

‘Judge, setting up the decision tree on this will not be easy – there are too many variables, too many possible contingencies. But I’d say yes. If it’s possible, if we can work out the details, we ought to try. The biggest question is the availability of our own assets. Do we have the pieces in place?’

Greer answered. ‘Our assets are slim. One carrier, Kennedy. I checked. Saratoga’s in Norfolk with an engineering casualty. On the other hand, HMS Invincible was just over here for that NATO exercise, sailed from Norfolk Monday night. Admiral White, I believe, commanding a small battle group.’

‘Lord White, sir?’ Ryan asked. ‘The Earl of Weston?’

‘You know him?’ Moore asked.

‘Yes, sir. Our wives are friendly. I shot grouse with him in Scotland last September. He makes noises like a good operator, and I hear he has a good reputation.’

‘You’re thinking we might want to borrow their ships, James?’ Moore asked. ‘If so, we’ll have to tell them about this. But we have to tell our side first. There’s a meeting of the National Security Council at one this afternoon. Ryan, you will prepare the briefing papers and deliver the briefing yourself.’

Ryan blinked. ‘That’s not much time, sir.’

‘James here says you work well under pressure. Prove it.’ He looked at Greer. ‘Get a copy of his briefing papers and be ready to fly to London. That’s the president’s decision. If we want their boats, we’ll have to tell them why. That means briefing the prime minister, and that’s your job. Bob, I want you to confirm this report. Do what you have to do, but do not get WILLOW involved.’

‘Right,’ Ritter replied.

Moore looked at his watch. ‘We’ll meet back here at 3:30, depending on how the meeting goes. Ryan, you have ninety minutes. Get cracking.’

What am I being measured for? Ryan wondered. There was talk in the CIA that Judge Moore would be leaving soon for a comfortable ambassadorship, perhaps to the Court of St James’s, a fitting reward for a man who had worked long and hard to reestablish a close relationship with the British. If the judge left, Admiral Greer would probably move into this office. He had the virtues of age – he wouldn’t be around that long – and of friends on Capitol Hill. Ritter had neither. He had complained too long and too openly about congressmen who leaked information on his operations and his field agents, getting men killed in the process of demonstrating their importance on the local cocktail circuit. He also had an ongoing feud with the chairman of the Select Intelligence Committee.

With that sort of reshuffling at the top and this sudden access to new and fantastic information … What does it mean for me? Ryan asked himself. They couldn’t want him to be the next DDI. He knew he didn’t have anything like the experience required for that job – though maybe in another five or six years …

REYKJANES RIDGE

Ramius inspected his status board. The Red October was heading southwest on track eight, the westernmost surveyed route on what Northern Fleet submariners called Gorshkov’s Railroad. His speed was thirteen knots. It never occurred to him that this was an unlucky number, an Anglo-Saxon superstition. They would hold this course and speed for another twenty hours. Immediately behind him, Kamarov was seated at the submarine’s gravitometer board, a large rolled chart behind him. The young lieutenant was chain-smoking, and looked tense as he ticked off their position on the chart. Ramius did not disturb him. Kamarov knew his job, and Borodin would relieve him in another two hours.

Installed in the Red October’s keel was a highly sensitive device called a gradiometer, essentially two large lead weights separated by a space of one hundred yards. A laser-computer system measured the space between the weights down to a fraction of an angstrom. Distortions of that distance or lateral movement of the weights indicated variations in the local gravitational field. The navigator compared these highly precise local values to the values of his chart. With careful use of gravitometers in the ship’s inertial navigation system, he could plot the vessel’s location to within a hundred metres, half the length of the ship.

The mass-sensing system was being added to all the submarines that could accommodate it. Younger attack boat commanders, Ramius knew, had used it to run the Railroad at high speed. Good for the commander’s ego, Ramius judged, but a little hard on the navigator. He felt no need for recklessness. Perhaps the letter had been a mistake … No, it prevented second thoughts. And the sensor suites on attack submarines simply were not good enough to detect the Red October so long as he maintained his silent routine. Ramius was certain of this; he had used them all. He would get where he wanted to go, do what he wanted to do, and nobody, not his own countrymen, not even the Americans, would be able to do a thing about it. That’s why earlier he had listened to the passage of an Alfa thirty miles to his east and smiled.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Judge Moore’s CIA car was a Cadillac limousine that came with a driver and a security man who kept an Uzi submachinegun under the dashboard. The driver turned right off Pennsylvania Avenue onto Executive Drive. More a parking lot than a street, this served the needs of senior officials and reporters who worked at the White House and the Executive Office Building, ‘Old State,’ that shining example of Institutional Grotesque that towered over the executive mansion. The driver pulled smoothly into a vacant VIP slot and jumped out to open the doors after the security man had swept the area with his eyes. The judge got out first and went ahead, and as Ryan caught up he found himself walking on the man’s left, half a step behind. It took a moment to remember that this instinctive action was exactly what the marine corps had taught him at Quantico was the proper way for a junior officer to accompany his betters. It forced Ryan to consider just how junior he was.

‘Ever been in here before, Jack?’

‘No, sir, I haven’t.’

Moore was amused. ‘That’s right, you come from around here. Now, if you came from farther away, you’d have made the trip a few times.’ A marine guard held the door open for them. Inside a Secret Service agent signed them in. Moore nodded and walked on.

‘Is this to be in the Cabinet Room, sir?’

‘Uh-uh. Situation Room, downstairs. It’s more comfortable and better equipped for this sort of thing. The slides you need are already down there, all set up. Nervous?’

‘Yes, sir, I sure am.’

Moore chuckled. ‘Settle down, boy. The president has wanted to meet you for some time now. He liked that report on terrorism you did a few years back, and I’ve shown him some more of your work, and the one on Russian missile submarine operations, and the one you just did on management practices in their arms industries. All in all, I think you’ll find he’s a pretty regular guy. Just be ready when he asks questions. He’ll hear every word you say, and he has a way of hitting you with good ones when he wants.’ Moore turned to descend a staircase. Ryan followed him down three flights, then they came to a door which led to a corridor. The judge turned left and walked to yet another door, this one guarded by another Secret Service agent.

‘Afternoon, Judge. The president will be down shortly.’

‘Thank you. This is Dr Ryan. I’ll vouch for him.’

‘Right.’ The agent waved them in.

It was not nearly as spectacular as Ryan had expected. The Situation Room was probably no larger than the Oval Office upstairs. There was expensive-looking wood panelling over what were probably concrete walls. This part of the White House dated back to the complete rebuilding job done under Truman. Ryan’s lectern was to his left as he went in. It stood in front and slightly to the right of a roughly diamond-shaped table, and behind it was the projection screen. A note on the lectern said the slide projector in the middle of the table was ready loaded and focused, and gave the order of the slides, which had been delivered from the National Reconnaissance Office.

Most of the people were already here, all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defence. The secretary of state, he remembered, was still shuttling back and forth between Athens and Ankara trying to settle the latest Cyprus situation. This perennial thorn in NATO’s southern flank had flared up a few weeks earlier when a Greek student had run over a Turkish child with his car and been killed by a gang minutes later. By the end of the day fifty people had been injured, and the putatively allied countries were once more at each other’s throats. Now two American aircraft carriers were cruising the Aegean as the secretary of state laboured to calm both sides. It was bad enough that two young people had died, Ryan thought, but not something to get a country’s army mobilized for.

Also at the table were General Thomas Hilton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Jeffrey Pelt, the president’s national security adviser, a pompous man Ryan had met years before at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. Pelt was going through some papers and dispatches. The chiefs were chatting amicably among themselves when the commandant of the marine corps looked up and spotted Ryan. He got up and walked over.

‘You Jack Ryan?’ General David Maxwell asked.

‘Yes, sir.’ Maxwell was a short, tough fireplug of a man whose stubbly haircut seemed to spark with aggressive energy. He looked Ryan over before shaking hands.

‘Pleased to meet you, son. I liked what you did over in London. Good for the corps.’ He referred to the terrorist incident in which Ryan had very nearly been killed. ‘That was good, quick action you took, Lieutenant.’

‘Thank you, sir. I was lucky.’

‘Good officer’s supposed to be lucky. I hear you got some interesting news for us.’

‘Yes sir. I think you will find it worth your time.’

‘Nervous?’ The general saw the answer and smiled thinly. ‘Relax, son. Everybody in this damned cellar puts his pants on the same way as you.’ He backhanded Ryan to the stomach and went back to his seat. The general whispered something to Admiral Daniel Foster, chief of naval operations. The CNO looked Ryan over for a moment before going back to what he was doing.

The president arrived a minute later. Everyone in the room stood as he walked to his chair, on Ryan’s right. He said a few quick things to Dr Pelt, then looked pointedly at the DCI.

‘Gentlemen, if we can bring this meeting to order, I think Judge Moore has some news for us.’

‘Thank you, Mr President. Gentlemen, we’re had an interesting development today with respect to the Soviet naval operation that started yesterday. I have asked Dr Ryan here to deliver the briefing.’

The president turned to Ryan. The younger man could feel himself being appraised. ‘You may proceed.’

Ryan took a sip of ice water from a glass hidden in the lectern. He had a wireless control for the slide projector and a choice of pointers. A separate high-intensity light illuminated his notes. The pages were full of errors and scribbled corrections. There had not been time to edit the copy.

‘Thank you, Mr President. Gentlemen, my name is Jack Ryan, and the subject of this briefing is recent Soviet naval activity in the North Atlantic. Before I get to that it will be necessary for me to lay a little groundwork. I trust you will bear with me for a few minutes, and please feel free to interrupt with questions at any time.’ Ryan clicked on the slide projector. The overhead lights near the screen dimmed automatically.

‘These photographs come to us courtesy of the British,’ Ryan said. He now had everyone’s attention. ‘The ship you see here is the Soviet fleet ballistic missile submarine Red October, photographed by a British agent in her dock at their submarine base at Polyarnyy, near Murmansk in northern Russia. As you can see, she is a very large vessel, about 650 feet long, a beam of roughly 85 feet, and an estimated submerged displacement of 32,000 tons. These figures are roughly comparable to those of a World War I battleship.’

Ryan lifted a pointer. ‘In addition to being considerably larger than our own Ohio-class Trident submarines, Red October has a number of technical differences. She carries twenty-six missiles instead of our twenty-four. The earlier Typhoon-class vessels, from which she was developed, only have twenty. October carries the new SS-N-20 sea-launched ballistic missile, the Seahawk. It’s a solid-fuel missile with a range of about six thousand nautical miles, and it carries eight multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, MIRV’s, each with an estimated yield of five hundred kilotons. It’s the same RV carried by their SS-18s, but there are less of them per launcher.

‘As you can see, the missile tubes are located forward of the sail instead of aft, as in our subs. The forward diving planes fold into slots in the hull here; ours go on the sail. She has twin screws; ours have one propeller. And finally, her hull is oblate. Instead of being cylindrical like ours, it is flattened out markedly top and bottom.’

Ryan clicked to the next slide. It showed two views superimposed, bow over stern. ‘These frames were delivered to us undeveloped. They were processed by the National Reconnaissance Office. Please note the doors here at the bow and here at the stern. The British were a little puzzled by these, and that’s why I was permitted to bring the shots over earlier this week. We weren’t able to figure out their function at the CIA either, and it was decided to seek the opinion of an outside consultant.’

‘Who decided?’ the secretary of defence demanded angrily. ‘Hell, I haven’t even seen them yet!’

‘We only got them Monday, Bert,’ Judge Moore replied soothingly. ‘These two on the screen are only four hours old. Ryan suggested an outside expert, and James Greer approved it. I concurred.’