“True enough, Admiral.” Ryan was beginning to feel the brandy.
“There’s a cot in the locker over there. I’ll have someone set it up for you, and you can sleep in here for the time being. If anything comes in for you, we’ll get you up.”
“That’s kind of you, sir.” Admiral White was a good guy, Jack thought, and his wife was something very special. In ten minutes, Ryan was on the cot and asleep.
The Red October
Every two days the starpom collected the radiation badges. This was part of a semiformal inspection. After seeing to it that every crewman’s shoes were spit-shined, every bunk was properly made, and every footlocker was arranged according to the book, the executive officer would take the two-day-old badges and hand the sailors new ones, usually along with some terse advice to square themselves away as New Soviet Men ought. Borodin had this procedure down to a science. Today, as always, the trip from one compartment to another took two hours. When he was finished, the bag on his left hip was full of old badges, and the one on his right depleted of new ones. He took the badges to the ship’s medical officer.
“Comrade Petrov, I have a gift for you.” Borodin set the leather bag on the physician’s desk.
“Good.” The doctor smiled up at the executive officer. “With all the healthy young men I have little to do but read my journals.”
Borodin left Petrov to his task. First the doctor set the badges out in order. Each bore a three-digit number. The first digit identified the badge series, so that if any radiation were detected there would be a time reference. The second digit showed where the sailor worked, the third where he slept. This system was easier to work with than the old one, which had used individual numbers for each man.
The developing process was cookbook-simple. Petrov could do it without a thought. First he switched off the white overhead light and replaced it with a red one. Then he locked his office door. Next he took the development rack from its holder on the bulkhead, broke open the plastic holders, and transferred the film strips to spring clips on the rack.
Petrov took the rack into the adjacent laboratory and hung it on the handle of the single filing cabinet. He filled three large square basins with chemicals. Though a qualified physician, he had forgotten most of his inorganic chemistry and didn’t remember exactly what the developing chemicals were. Basin number one was filled from bottle number one. Basin two was filled from bottle two, and basin three, he remembered, was filled with water. Petrov was in no hurry. The midday meal was not for two more hours, and his duties were truly boring. The last two days he had been reading his medical texts on tropical diseases. The doctor was looking forward to visiting Cuba as much as anyone aboard. With luck a crewman would come down with some obscure malady, and he’d have something interesting to work on for once.
Petrov set the lab timer for seventy-five seconds and submerged the film strips in the first basin as he pressed the start button. He watched the timer under the red light, wondering if the Cubans still made rum. He had been there, too, years before, and acquired a taste for the exotic liquor. Like any good Soviet citizen, he loved his vodka but had the occasional hankering for something different.
The timer went off and he lifted the rack, shaking it carefully over the tank. No sense getting the chemical — silver nitrate? something like that — on his uniform. The rack went into the second tank, and he set the timer again. Pity the orders had been so damned secret — he could have brought his tropical uniform. He’d sweat like a pig in the Cuban heat. Of course, none of those savages ever bothered to wash. Maybe they had learned something in the past fifteen years? He’d see.
The timer dinged again, and Petrov lifted the rack a second time, shaking it and setting it in the water-filled basin. Another boring job completed. Why couldn’t a sailor fall down a ladder and break something? He wanted to use his East German X-ray machine on a live patient. He didn’t trust the Germans, Marxists or not, but they did make good medical equipment, including his X-ray, autoclave, and most of his pharmaceuticals. Time. Petrov lifted the rack and held it up against the X-ray reading plate, which he switched on.
“Nichevo!” Petrov breathed. He had to think. His badge was fogged. Its number was 3-4-8: third badge series, frame fifty-four (the medical office, galley section), aft (officers’) accommodations.
Though only two centimeters across, the badges were made with variable sensitivity. Ten vertically segmented columns were used to quantify the exposure level. Petrov saw that his was fogged all the way to segment four. The engine room crewmen’s were fogged to segment five, and the torpedomen, who spent all their time forward, showed contamination only in segment one.
“Son of a bitch.” He knew the sensitivity levels by heart. He took the manual down to check them anyway. Fortunately, the segments were logarithmic. His exposure was twelve rads. Fifteen to twenty-five for the engineers. Twelve to twenty-five rads in two days, not enough to be dangerous. Not really life threatening, but… Petrov went back into his office, careful to leave the films in the labs. He picked up the phone.
“Captain Ramius? Petrov here. Could you come aft to my office, please?”
“On the way, Comrade Doctor.”
Ramius took his time. He knew what the call was about. The day before they sailed, while Petrov had been ashore procuring drugs for his cupboard, Borodin had contaminated the badges with the X-ray machine.
“Yes, Petrov?” Ramius closed the door behind him.
“Comrade Captain, we have a radiation leak.”
“Nonsense. Our instruments would have detected it at once.”
Petrov got the films from the lab and handed them to the captain. “Look here.”
Ramius held them up to the light, scanning the film strips top to bottom. He frowned. “Who knows of this?”
“You and I, Comrade Captain.”
“You will tell no one — no one.” Ramius paused. “Any chance that the films were — that they have something wrong, that you made an error in the developing process?”
Petrov shook his head emphatically. “No, Comrade Captain. Only you, Comrade Borodin, and I have access to these. As you know, I tested random samples from each batch three days before we sailed.” Petrov wouldn’t admit that, like everyone, he had taken the samples from the top of the box they were stored in. They weren’t really random.
“The maximum exposure I see here is… ten to twenty?” Ramius understated it. “Whose numbers?”
“Bulganin and Surzpoi. The torpedomen forward are all under three rads.”
“Very well. What we have here, Comrade Doctor, is a possible minor — minor, Petrov — leak in the reactor spaces. At worst a gas leak of some sort. This has happened before, and no one has ever died from it. The leak will be found and fixed. We will keep this little secret. There is no reason to get the men excited over nothing.”
Petrov nodded agreement, knowing that men had died in 1970 in an accident on the submarine Voroshilov, more in the icebreaker Lenin. Both accidents were a long time ago, though, and he was sure Ramius could handle things. Wasn’t he?
The Pentagon
The E ring was the outermost and largest of the Pentagon’s rings, and since its outside windows offered something other than a view of sunless courtyards, this was where the most senior defense officials had their offices. One of these was the office of the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the J-3. He wasn’t there. He was down in a subbasement room known colloquially as the Tank because its metal walls were dotted with electronic noisemakers to foil other electronic devices.
He had been there for twenty-four hours, though one would not have known this from his appearance. His green trousers were still creased, his khaki shirt still showed the folds made by the laundry, its collar starched plywood-stiff, and his tie was held neatly in place by a gold marine corps tiepin. Lieutenant General Edwin Harris was neither a diplomat nor a service academy graduate, but he was playing peacemaker. An odd position for a marine.
“God damn it!” It was the voice of Admiral Blackburn, CINCLANT. Also present was his own operations officer, Rear Admiral Pete Stanford. “Is this any way to run an operation?”
The Joint Chiefs were all there, and none of them thought so.
“Look, Blackie, I told you where the orders come from.” General Hilton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sounded tired.
“I understand that, General, but this is largely a submarine operation, right? I gotta get Vince Gallery in on this, and you should have Sam Dodge working up at this end. Dan and I are both fighter jocks, Pete’s an ASW expert. We need a sub driver in on this.”