His phone buzzed. “Greer… Right.” He hung up. “Charlie Davenport’s on the way up, per your suggestion, Jack. Supposed to be here half an hour ago. Must be the snow.” The admiral jerked a hand towards the window. There were two inches on the ground, with another inch expected by nightfall. “One flake hits this town and everything goes to hell.”
Ryan laughed. That was something Greer, a down-easier from Maine, never could seem to understand.
“So, Jack, you say this is worth the price?”
“Sir, we’ve wanted these pictures for some time, what with all the contradictory data we’ve been getting on the sub. It’s your decision and the judge’s but, yes, I think they’re worth the price. These shots are very interesting.”
“We ought to have our own men in that damned yard,” Greer grumped. Ryan didn’t know how Operations had screwed that one up. He had little interest in field operations. Ryan was an analyst. How the data came to his desk was not his concern, and he was careful to avoid finding out. “I don’t suppose Basil told you anything about their man?”
Ryan smiled, shaking his head. “No, sir, and I did not ask.” Greer nodded his approval.
“Morning, James!”
Ryan turned to see Rear Admiral Charles Davenport, director of naval intelligence, with a captain trailing in his wake.
“Hi, Charlie. You know Jack Ryan, don’t you?”
“Hello, Ryan.”
“We’ve met,” Ryan said.
“This is Captain Casimir.”
Ryan shook hands with both men. He’d met Davenport a few years before while delivering a paper at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Davenport had given him a hard time in the question-and-answer session. He was supposed to be a bastard to work for, a former aviator who had lost flight status after a barrier crash and, some said, still bore a grudge. Against whom? Nobody really knew.
“Weather in England must be as bad as here, Ryan.” Davenport dropped his bridge coat on top of Ryan’s. “I see you stole a Royal Navy overcoat.”
Ryan was fond of his toggle coat. “A gift, sir, and quite warm.”
“Christ, you even talk like a Brit. James, we gotta bring this boy home.”
“Be nice to him, Charlie. He’s got a present for you. Grab yourself some coffee.”
Casimir scurried over to fill a mug for his boss, then sat down at his right hand. Ryan let them wait a moment before opening his briefcase. He took out four folders, keeping one and handing the others around.
“They say you’ve been doing some fairly good work, Ryan,” Davenport said. Jack knew him to be a mercurial man, affable one moment, brittle the next. Probably to keep his subordinates off balance. “And — Jesus Christ!” Davenport had opened his folder.
“Gentlemen, I give you Red October, courtesy of the British Secret Intelligence Service,” Ryan said formally.
The folders had the photographs arranged in pairs, four each of four-by-four prints. In the back were ten-by-ten blowups of each. The photos had been taken from a low-oblique angle, probably from the rim of the graving dock that had held the boat during her post-shakedown refit. The shots were paired, fore and aft, fore and aft.
“Gentlemen, as you can see, the lighting wasn’t all that great. Nothing fancy here. It was a pocket camera loaded with 400-speed color film. The first pair was processed normally to establish high levels. The second was pushed for greater brightness using normal procedures. The third pair was digitally enhanced for color resolution, and the fourth was digitally enhanced for line resolution. I have undeveloped frames of each view for Barry Somers to play with.”
“Oh?” Davenport looked up briefly. “That’s right neighborly of the Brits. What’s the price?” Greer told him. “Pay up. It’s worth it.”
“That’s what Jack says.”
“Figures,” Davenport chuckled. “You know he really is working for them.”
Ryan bristled at that. He liked the English, liked working with their intelligence community, but he knew what country he came from. Jack took a deep breath. Davenport liked to goad people, and if he reacted Davenport would win.
“I gather that Sir John Ryan is still well connected on the other side of the ocean?” Davenport said, extending the prod.
Ryan’s knighthood was an honorary one. It was his reward for having broken up a terrorist incident that had erupted around him in St. James’s Park, London. He’d been a tourist at the time, the innocent American abroad, long before he’d been asked to join the CIA. The fact that he had unknowingly prevented the assassination of two very prominent figures had gotten him more publicity than he’d ever wanted, but it had also brought him in contact with a lot of people in England, most of them worth the time. Those connections had made him valuable enough that the CIA asked him to be part of a joint American-British liaison group. That was how he had established a good working relationship with Sir Basil Charleston.
“We have lots of friends over there, sir, and some of them were kind enough to give you these,” Ryan said coolly.
Davenport softened. “Okay, Jack, then you do me a favor. You see whoever gave us these gets something nice in his stocking. They’re worth plenty. So, exactly what do we have here?”
To the unschooled observer, the photographs showed the standard nuclear missile submarine. The steel hull was blunt at one end, tapered at the other. The workmen standing on the floor of the dock provided scale — she was huge. There were twin bronze propellers at the stern, on either side of a flat appendage which the Russians called a beaver tail, or so the intelligence reports said. With the twin screws the stern was unremarkable except in one detail.
“What are these doors for?” Casimir asked.
“Hmm. She’s a big bastard.” Davenport evidently hadn’t heard. “Forty feet longer than we expected, by the look of her.”
“Forty-four, roughly.” Ryan didn’t much like Davenport, but the man did know his stuff. “Somers can calibrate that for us. And more beam, two meters more than the other Typhoons.
She’s an obvious development of the Typhoon class, but — “
“You’re right, Captain,” Davenport interrupted. “What are those doors?”
“That’s why I came over.” Ryan had wondered how long this would take. He’d caught onto them in the first five seconds. “I don’t know, and neither do the Brits.”
The Red October had two doors at the bow and stem, each about two meters in diameter, though they were not quite circular. They had been closed when the photos were shot and only showed up well on the number four pair.
“Torpedo tubes? No — four of them are inboard.” Greer reached into his drawer and came out with a magnifying glass. In an age of computer-enhanced imagery it struck Ryan as charmingly anachronistic.
“You’re the sub driver, James,” Davenport observed.
“Twenty years ago, Charlie.” He’d made the switch from line officer to professional spook in the early sixties. Captain Casimir, Ryan noted, wore the wings of a naval aviator and had the good sense to remain quiet. He wasn’t a “nuc.”
“Well, they can’t be torpedo tubes. They have the normal four of them at the bow, inboard of these openings… must be six or seven feet across. How about launch tubes for the new cruise missile they’re developing?”
“That’s what the Royal Navy thinks. I had a chance to talk it over with their intelligence chaps. But I don’t buy it. Why put an anti-surface-ship weapon on a strategic platform? We don’t, and we deploy our boomers a lot further forward than they do. The doors are symmetrical through the boat’s axis. You can’t launch a missile out of the stern, sir. The openings barely clear the screws.”
“Toward sonar array,” Davenport said.
“Granted they could do that, if they trail one screw. But why two of them?” Ryan asked.
Davenport gave him a nasty look. “They love redundancies.”
“Two doors forward, two aft, I can buy cruise missile tubes. I can buy a towed array. But both sets of doors exactly the same size?” Ryan shook his head. “Too much of a coincidence. I think it’s something new. That’s what interrupted her construction for so long. They figured something new for her and spent the last two years rebuilding the Typhoon configuration to accommodate it. Note also that they added six more missiles for good measure.”
“Opinion,” Davenport observed.
“That’s what I’m paid for.”
“Okay, Jack, what do you think it is?” Greer asked.
“Beats me, sir. I’m no engineer.”
Admiral Greer looked his guests over for a few seconds. He smiled and leaned back in his chair. “Gentlemen, we have what? Ninety years of naval experience in this room, plus this young amateur.” He gestured at Ryan. “Okay, Jack, you’ve set us up for something. Why did you bring this over personally?”
“I want to show these to somebody.”
“Who?” Greer’s head cocked suspiciously to one side.