“These are your waters,” Ramius agreed.
They were in a loose three-boat formation. The Dallas was leading them out to sea, the Pogy was trailing. All three boats were traveling flooded-down, their decks nearly awash, with no one on their bridge stations. All visual navigation was being done by periscope. No radar sets were operating. None of the three boats was making any electronic noise. Ryan glanced casually at the chart table. They were beyond the inlet proper, but the chart was marked with sandbars for several more miles.
Nor were they using the Red October’s caterpillar drive system. It had turned out to be almost exactly what Skip Tyler had predicted. There were two sets of tunnel impellers, a pair about a third of the way back from the bow and three more just aft of midships. Mancuso and his engineers had examined the plans with great interest, then commented at length on the quality of the caterpillar design.
For his part, Ramius had not wanted to believe that he had been detected so early on. Mancuso had ultimately produced Jones with his personal map to show the October’s estimated course off Iceland. Though a few miles off the ship’s log, it was too close to have been a coincidence.
“Your sonar must be better than we expected,” Ramius grumbled a few feet from Ryan’s control station.
“It is pretty good,” Mancuso allowed. “Better yet, there’s Jonesy — he’s the best sonarman I’ve ever had.”
“So young, and so smart.”
“We get a lot of them that way,” Mancuso smiled. “Never as many as we’d like, of course, but our kids are all volunteers. They know what they’re getting into. We’re picky about who we take, and then we train the hell out of ‘em.”
“Conn, sonar.” It was Jones’ voice. “Dallas is diving, sir.”
“Very well.” Mancuso lit a cigarette as he went to the intercom phone. He punched the button for engineering. “Tell Mannion we need him forward. We’ll be diving in a few minutes. Yeah.” He hung up and went back to the chart.
“You have them for more than three years, then?” Ramius asked.
“Oh, yeah. Hell, otherwise we’d be letting them go right after they’re fully trained, right?”
Why couldn’t the Soviet Navy get and retain people like this? Ramius thought. He knew the answer all too well. The Americans fed their men decently, gave them a proper mess room, paid them decently, gave them trust — all the things he had fought twenty years for.
“You need me to work the vents?” Mannion said, coming in.
“Yeah, Pat, we’ll dive in another two or three minutes.”
Mannion gave the chart a quick look on his way to the vent manifold.
Ramius hobbled to the chart. “They tell us that your officers are chosen from the bourgeois classes to control ordinary sailors from the working class.”
Mannion ran his hands over the vent controls. There sure were enough of them. He’d spent two hours the previous day figuring the complex system out. “That’s true, sir. Our officers do come from the ruling class. Just look at me,” he said deadpan. Mannion’s skin was about the color of coffee grounds, his accent pure South Bronx.
“But you are a black man,” Ramius objected, missing the jibe.
“Sure, we’re a real ethnic boat.” Mancuso looked through the periscope again. “A Guinea skipper, a black navigator, and a crazy sonarman.”
“I heard that, sir!” Jones called out rather than use the intercom speaker. “Gertrude message from Dallas. Everything looks okay. They’re waiting for us. Last gertrude message for a while.”
“Conn, aye. We’re clear, finally. We can dive whenever you wish, Captain Ramius,” Mancuso said.
“Comrade Mannion, vent the ballast tanks,” Ramius said. The October had never actually surfaced and was still rigged , for dive.
“Aye aye, sir.” The lieutenant turned the topmost rank of master switches on the hydraulic controls.
Ryan winced. The sound made him think of a million toilets being flushed at once.
“Five degrees down on the planes, Ryan,” Ramius said.
“Five degrees down, aye.” Ryan pushed forward on the yoke. “Planes five degrees down.”
“She’s slow going down,” Mannion observed, watching the handpainted depth-gauge replacement. “So durn big.”
“Yeah,” Mancuso said. The needle passed twenty meters.
“Planes to zero,” Ramius said.
“Planes to zero angle, aye.” Ryan pulled back on the control. It took thirty seconds for the submarine to settle. She seemed very slow to respond to the controls. Ryan had thought that submarines were as responsive as aircraft.
“Make her a little light, Pat. Enough that it takes a degree of down to hold her level,” Mancuso said.
“Uh-huh.” Mannion frowned, checking the depth gauge. The ballast tanks were now fully flooded, and the balancing act would have to be done with the much smaller trim tanks. It took him five minutes to get the balance exactly right.
“Sorry, gentlemen. I’m afraid she’s too big to dial in quick,” he said, embarrassed with himself.
Ramius was impressed but too annoyed to show it. He had expected the American captain to take longer than this to do it himself. Trimming a strange sub so expertly on his first try…
“Okay, now we can come around north,” Mancuso said. They were two miles past the last charted bar. “Recommend new course zero-zero-eight, Captain.”
“Ryan, rudder left ten degrees,” Ramius ordered. “Come to zero-zero-eight.”
“Okay, rudder left ten degrees,” Ryan responded, keeping one eye on the rudder indicator, the other on the gyro compass repeater. “Come to oh-oh-eight.”
“Caution, Ryan. He turns slowly, but once turning you must use much backward — “
“Opposite,” Mancuso corrected politely.
“Yes, opposite rudder to stop him on proper course.”
“Right.”
“Captain, do you have rudder problems?” Mancuso asked. “From tracking you it seemed that your turning circle was rather large.”
“With the caterpillar it is. The flow from the tunnels strikes the rudder very hard, and it flutters if you use too much rudder. On our first sea trials, we had damage from this. It comes from — how do you say — the come-together of the two caterpillar tunnels.”
“Does this affect operations with the propellers?” Mannion asked.
“No, only with the caterpillar.”
Mancuso didn’t like that. It didn’t really matter. The plan was a simple, direct one. The three boats would make a straight dash to Norfolk. The two American attack boats would leapfrog forward at thirty knots to sniff out the areas ahead while the October plodded along at a constant twenty.
Ryan began to ease his rudder as the bow came around. He waited too long. Despite five degrees of right rudder, the bow swung right past the intended course, and the gyro repeater clicked accusingly on every third degree until it stopped at zero-zero-one. It took another two minutes to get back on the proper course.
“Sorry about that. Steady on zero-zero-eight,” he finally reported.
Ramius was forgiving. “You learn fast, Ryan. Perhaps one day you will be a true sailor.”
“No thanks! The one thing I’ve learned on this trip is that you guys earn every nickel you get.”
“Don’t like subs?” Mannion chuckled.
“No place to jog.”
“True. Unless you still need me, Captain, I’m ready to go aft. The engine room’s awful shorthanded,” Mannion said.
Ramius nodded. Was he from the ruling class? the captain wondered.
The V. K. Konovalov
Tupolev was heading back west. The fleet order had instructed everyone but his Alfa and one other to return home at twenty knots. Tupolev was to move west for two and half hours. Now he was on a reciprocal heading at five knots, about the top speed the Alfa could travel without making much noise. The idea was that his sub would be lost in the shuffle. So, an Ohio was heading for Norfolk — or Charleston more probably. In any case, Tupolev would circle quietly and observe. The Red October was destroyed. That much he knew from the ops order. Tupolev shook his head. How could Marko have done such a thing? Whatever the answer, he had paid for his treason with his life.
The Pentagon
“I’d feel better if we had some more air cover,” Admiral Foster said, leaning against the wall.
“Agreed, sir, but we can’t be so obvious, can we?” General Harris asked.
A pair of P-3Bs was now sweeping the track from Hatteras to the Virginia Capes as though on a routine training mission. Most of the other Orions were far out at sea. The Soviet fleet was already four hundred miles offshore. The three surface groups had rejoined and were now ringed by their submarines. The Kennedy, America, and Nimitz were five hundred miles to their east, and the New Jersey was dropping back. The Russians would be watched all the way home. The carrier battle groups would be following them all the way to Iceland, keeping a discreet distance and maintaining air groups at the fringe of their radar coverage continuously, just to let them know that the United States still cared. Aircraft based in Iceland would track them the rest of the way home.