“Gentlemen,” Harris said calmly, “for the moment the plan we have to take to the president need only deal with the Soviet threat. Let’s hold this story about the defecting boomer in abeyance for the moment, shall we?”
“I agree,” Stanford nodded. “We have enough to worry about right here.”
The attention of the eight flag officers turned to the map table. Fifty-eight Soviet submarines and twenty-eight surface warships, plus a gaggle of oilers and replenishment ships, were unmistakably heading for the American coast. To face this, the U.S. Navy had one available carrier. The Invincible did not rate as such. The threat was considerable. Among them the Soviet vessels carried over three hundred surface-to-surface cruise missiles. Though principally designed as antiship weapons, the third of them believed to carry nuclear warheads were sufficient to devastate the cities of the East Coast. From a position off New Jersey, these missiles could range from Norfolk to Boston.
“Josh Painter proposes that we keep Kennedy inshore,” Admiral Blackburn said. “He wants to run the ASW operation from his carrier, transferring his light attack squadrons to shore and replacing them with S-3s. He wants Invincible out on their seaward flank.”
“I don’t like it,” General Harris said. Neither did Pete Stanford, and they had agreed earlier that the J-3 would launch the counterplan. “Gentlemen, if we’re only going to have one deck to use, we damned well ought to have a carrier and not an oversized ASW platform.”
“We’re listening, Eddie,” Hilton said.
“Let’s move Kennedy out here.” He moved the counter to a position west of the Azores. “Josh keeps his attack squadrons. We move Invincible inshore to handle the ASW work. It’s what the Brits designed her for, right? They’re supposed to be good at it. Kennedy is an offensive weapon, her mission is to threaten them. Okay, if we deploy like this, she is the threat. From over here she can range against their surface force from outside their surface-to-surface missile perimeter — “
“Better yet,” Stanford interjected, pointing to some vessels on the map, “threaten this service force here. If they lose these oilers, they ain’t going home. To meet that threat they’ll have to redeploy themselves. For starters, they’ll have to move Kiev offshore to give themselves some kind of air defense against Kennedy. We can use the spare S-3s from shore bases. They can still patrol the same areas.” He traced a line about five hundred miles off the coast.
“Leaves Invincible kind of naked, though,” the CNO, Admiral Foster, noted.
“Josh was asking about some E-3 coverage for the Brits.” Blackburn looked at the air force chief of staff, General Claire Barnes.
“You want help, you get help,” Barnes said. “We’ll have a Sentry operating over Invincible at dawn tomorrow, and if you move her inshore we can maintain that round the clock. I’ll throw in a wing of F-16s if you want.”
“What do you want in return, Max?” Foster asked. Nobody called him Claire.
“The way I see this, you have Saratoga’s air wing sitting around doing nothing. Okay, by Saturday I’ll have five hundred tactical fighters deployed from Dover to Loring. My boys don’t know much about antiship stuff. They’ll have to learn in a hurry. I want you to send your kids to work with mine, and I also want your Tomcats. I like the fighter-missile combination. Let one squadron work out of Iceland, the other out of New England to track the Bears Ivan’s starting to send our way. I’ll sweeten that. If you want, we’ll send some tankers to Lajes to help keep Kennedy’s birds flying.”
“Blackie?” Foster asked.
“Deal,” Blackburn nodded. “The only thing that bothers me is that Invincible doesn’t have all that much ASW capacity.”
“So we get more,” Stanford said. “Admiral, what say we take Tarawa out of Little Creek, team her with New Jersey’s group, with a dozen ASW choppers aboard and seven or eight Harriers?”
“I like it,” Harris said quickly. “Then we have two baby carriers with a noteworthy striking force right in front of their groups, Kennedy playing stalking tiger to their east, and a few hundred tactical fighters to the west. They have to come into a three-way box. This actually gives us more ASW patrolling capacity than we’d have otherwise.”
“Can Kennedy handle her mission alone out there?” Hilton asked.
“Depend on it,” Blackburn replied. “We can kill any one, maybe any two of these four groups in an hour. The ones nearest shore will be your job, Max.”
“How long did you two characters rehearse this?” General Maxwell, commandant of the marine corps, asked the operations officer. Everyone chuckled.
The Red October
Chief Engineer Melekhin cleared the reactor compartment before beginning the check for the leak. Ramius and Petrov were there also, plus the engineering duty officers and one of the young lieutenants, Svyadov. Three of the officers carried Geiger counters.
The reactor room was quite large. It had to be to accommodate the massive, barrel-shaped steel vessel. The object was warm to the touch despite being inactive. Automatic radiation detectors were in every corner of the room, each surrounded by a red circle. More were hanging on the fore and aft bulkheads. Of all the compartments on the submarine, this was the cleanest. The deck and bulkheads were spotless white-painted steel. The reason was obvious: the smallest leak of reactor coolant had to be instantly visible even if all the detectors failed.
Svyadov climbed an aluminum ladder affixed to the side of the reactor vessel to run the detachable probe from his counter over every welded pipe joint. The speaker-annunciator on the hand-held box was turned to maximum so that everyone in the compartment could hear it, and Svyadov had an earpiece plugged in for even greater sensitivity. A youngster of twenty-one, he was nervous. Only a fool would feel entirely safe looking for a radiation leak. There is a joke in the Soviet Navy: How do you tell a sailor from the Northern Fleet? He glows in the dark. It had been a good laugh on the beach, but not now. He knew that he was conducting the search because he was the youngest, least experienced, and most expendable officer. It was an effort to keep his knees from wobbling as he strained to reach all over and around the reactor piping.
The counter was not entirely silent, and Svyadov’s stomach cringed at each click generated by the passage of a random particle through the tube of ionized gas. Every few seconds his eyes flickered to the dial that measured intensity. It was well inside the safe range, hardly registering at all. The reactor vessel was a quadruple-layer design, each layer several centimeters of tough stainless steel. The three inner spaces were filled with a barium-water mixture, then a barrier of lead, then polyethylene, all designed to prevent the escape of neutrons and gamma particles. The combination of steel, barium, lead, and plastic successfully contained the dangerous elements of the reaction, allowing only a few degrees of heat to escape, and the dial showed, much to his relief, that the radiation level was less than that on the beach at Sochi. The highest reading was made next to a light bulb. This made the lieutenant smile.
“All readings in normal range, comrades,” Svyadov reported.
“Start over,” Melekhin ordered, “from the beginning.”
Twenty minutes later Svyadov, now sweating from the warm air that gathered at the top of the compartment, made an identical report. He came down awkwardly, his arms and legs tired.
“Have a cigarette,” Ramius suggested. “You did well, Svyadov.”
“Thank you, Comrade Captain. It’s warm up there from the lights and the coolant pipes.” The lieutenant handed the counter to Melekhin. The lower dial showed a cumulative count, well within the safe range.
“Probably some contaminated badges,” the chief engineer commented sourly. “It would not be the first time. Some joker in the factory or at the yard supply office — something for our friends in the GRU to check into. ‘Wreckers!’ A joke like this ought to earn somebody a bullet.”
“Perhaps,” Ramius chuckled. “Remember the incident on Lenin?” He referred to the nuclear-powered icebreaker that had spent two years tied to the dock, unusable because of a reactor mishap. “A ship’s cook had some badly crusted pans, and a madman of an engineer suggested that he use live steam to get them cleaned. So the idiot walked down to the steam generator and opened an inspection valve, with his pots under it!”
Melekhin rolled his eyes. “I remember it! I was a staff engineering officer then. The captain had asked for a Kazakh cook — “
“He liked horsemeat with his kasha,” Ramius said.
“ — and the fool didn’t know the first thing about a ship. Killed himself and three other men, contaminated the whole fucking compartment for twenty months. The captain only got out of the gulag last year.”
“I bet the cook got his pans cleaned, though,” Ramius observed.