“Red October’s going to defect, isn’t she?” Tyler persisted.
If the admiral had had more sleep he might have bluffed it out. As it was, his response was a mistake. “Did Ryan tell you this?”
“Sir, I haven’t spoken with Jack since Monday. That’s the truth, sir.”
“Then where did you get this other information?” Greer snapped.
“Admiral, I used to wear the blue suit. Most of my friends still do. I hear things,” Tyler evaded. “The whole picture dropped into place an hour ago. The Russkies have never recalled all of their boomers at once. I know, I used to hunt them.”
Greer sighed. “Jack thinks the same as you. He’s out with the fleet right now. Commander, if you tell that to anyone, I’ll have your other leg mounted overtop that fireplace. Do you understand me?”
“Aye aye, sir. What are we going to do with her?” Tyler smiled to himself, thinking that as a senior consultant to Sea Systems Command, he’d sure as hell get a chance to look at a for-real Russian submarine.
“Give her back. After we’ve had a chance to look her over, of course. But there’s a lot of things that could happen to prevent our ever seeing her.”
It took Skip a moment to grasp what he’d just been told. “Give her back! Why, for Christ’s sake?”
“Commander, just how likely do you think this scenario is? Do you think the whole crew of a submarine has decided to come over to us all at once?” Greer shook his head. “Smart money is that it’s only the officers, maybe not all of them, and that they’re trying to get over here without the crew’s knowing what they’re up to.”
“Oh.” Tyler considered that. “I suppose that does make sense — but why give her back? This isn’t Japan. If somebody landed a MiG-25 here we wouldn’t give it back.”
“This is not like holding onto a stray fighter plane. The boat is worth a billion dollars, more if you throw in the missiles and warheads. And legally, the president says, it’s their property. So if they find out we have her, they’ll ask for her back, and we’ll have to give her back. Okay, how will they know we have her? Those crew members who don’t want to defect will ask to go home. Whoever asks, we send.”
“You know, sir, that whoever does want to go back will be in a whole shitload of trouble — excuse me, sir.”
“A shitload and a half.” Tyler hadn’t known that Greer was a mustang and could swear like a real sailor. “Some will want to stay, but most won’t. They have families. Next you’ll ask me if we might arrange for the crew to disappear.”
“The thought has occurred to me,” Tyler said.
“It’s occurred to us, too. But we won’t. Murder a hundred men? Even if we wanted to, there’s no way we could conceal it in this day and age. Hell, I doubt even the Soviets could. Besides that, this simply is not the sort of thing you do in peacetime. That’s one difference between us and them. You can take those reasons in any order you want.”
“So, except for the crew, we’d keep her…”
“Yes, if we could hide her. And if a pig had wings, it could fly.”
“Lots of places to hide her, Admiral. I can think of a few right here on the Chesapeake, and if we could get her round the Horn, there’s a million little atolls we could use, and they all belong to us.”
“But the crew will know, and when we send them home, they’ll tell their bosses,” Greer explained patiently. “And Moscow will ask for her back. Oh, sure, we’ll have a week or so to conduct, uh, safety and quarantine inspections, to make sure they weren’t trying to smuggle cocaine into the country.” The admiral laughed. “A British admiral suggested we invoke the old slave-trading treaty. Somebody did that back in World War n, to put the grab on a German blockade runner right before we got into it. So, we’ll get a ton of intelligence regardless.”
“Better to keep her, and run her, and take her apart…” Tyler said quietly, staring into the orange-white flames on the oak logs. How do we keep her? he wondered. An idea began to rattle around in his head. “Admiral, what if we could get the crew off without them knowing that we have the submarine?”
“Your full name is Oliver Wendell Tyler? Well, son, if you were named after Harry Houdini instead of a justice of the Supreme Court, I — “ Greer looked into the engineer’s face. “What do you have in mind?”
While Tyler explained Greer listened intently.
“To do this, sir, we’ll have to get the navy in on it right quick. Specifically, we’ll need the cooperation of Admiral Dodge, and if my speed figures for this boat are anything like accurate, we’ll have to move smartly.”
Greer rose and walked around the couch a few times to get his circulation going. “Interesting. The timing would be almost impossible, though.”
“I didn’t say it would be easy, sir, just that we could do it.”
“Call home, Tyler. Tell your wife you won’t be making it home. If I don’t get any sleep tonight, neither do you. There’s coffee behind my desk. First I have to call the judge, then we’ll talk to Sam Dodge.”
The USS Pogy
“Pogy, this is Black Gull 4. We’re getting low on fuel. Have to return to the barn,” the Orion’s tactical coordinator reported, stretching after ten hours at his control console. “Anything you want us to get you? Over.”
“Yeah, have a couple cases of beer sent out,” Commander Wood replied. It was the current joke between P-3C and submarine crews. “Thanks for the data. We’ll take it from here. Out.”
Overhead, the Lockheed Orion increased power and turned southwest. The crewmen aboard would each hoist an extra beer or two at dinner, saying it was for their friends on the submarine.
“Mr. Dyson, take her two hundred feet. One-third speed.”
The officer of the deck gave the proper orders as Commander Wood moved over to the plot.
The USS Pogy was three hundred miles northeast of Norfolk, awaiting the arrival of two Soviet Alfa-class submarines which several relays of antisubmarine patrol aircraft had tracked all the way from Iceland. The Pogy was named for a distinguished World War II fleet submarine, named in turn for an undistinguished game fish. She had been at sea for eighteen hours, and was fresh from an extended overhaul at the Newport News shipyard. Nearly everything aboard was either straight from manufacturers’ crates or had been completely worked over by the skilled shipfitters on the James River. This was not to say that everything worked properly. Many items had failed in one way or another on the post-overhaul shakedown the previous week, a fact less unusual than lamentable, Commander Wood thought. The Pogy’s crew was new, too. Wood was on his first deployment as a commanding officer after a year of desk duty in Washington, and too many of the enlisted men were green, just out of sub school at New London, still getting accustomed to their first cruise on a submarine. It takes time for men used to blue skies and fresh air to learn the regime inside a thirty-two-foot-diameter steel pipe. Even the experienced men were making adjustments to their new boat and officers.
The Pogy had met her top speed of thirty-three knots on post-overhaul trials. This was fast for a ship but slower than the speed of the Alfas she was listening to. Like all American submarines, her long suit was stealth. The Alfas had no way of knowing she was there and that they would be easy targets for her weapons, the more so since the patrolling Orion had fed the Pogy exact range information, something that ordinarily takes time to deduce from a passive sonar plot.
Lieutenant Commander Tom Reynolds, the executive officer and fire control coordinator, stood casually over the tactical plot. “Thirty-six miles to the near one, and forty on the far one.” On the display they were labeled Pogy-Bait 1 and 2. Everyone found the use of this service epithet amusing.
“Speed forty-two?” Wood asked.
“Yes, Captain.” Reynolds had handled the radio exchange until Black Gull 4 had announced its intention to return to base. “They’re driving those boats for all they’re worth. Right for us. We have hard solutions on both… zap! What do you suppose they’re up to?”
“The word from CINCLANT is that their ambassador says they’re on a SAR mission for a lost boat.” His voice indicated what he thought of that.
“Search and rescue, eh?” Reynolds shrugged. “Well, maybe they think they lost a boat off Point Comfort, ‘cause if they don’t slow down real fast, that’s where they’ll end up. I’ve never heard of Alfas operating this close to our coast. Have you, sir?”