“Conn, sonar. Getting hull popping noises from the target. His depth is changing. Engine noise increasing.”
“Down scope.” Mancuso lifted the phone. “Very well, sonar. Anything else, Jones?”
“No, sir. The helicopters are gone, and there aren’t any emissions from the surface ships. What gives, sir?”
“Beats me.” Mancuso shook his head as Mannion brought the Dallas back in pursuit of the Red October. What the hell was happening here? the captain wondered. Why was a Brit carrier signaling to a Russian submarine, and why were they sending her to a rendezvous off the Carolinas? Whose subs were blocking her path? It couldn’t be. No way. It just couldn’t be…
Ryan was in the Invincible’s communications room. “MAGI TO OLYMPUS,” he typed into the special encoding device the CIA had sent out with him, “PLAYED MY MANDOLIN TODAY. SOUNDED PRETTY GOOD. I’M PLANNING A LITTLE CONCERT, AT THE USUAL PLACE. EXPECT GOOD CRITICAL REVIEWS. AWAITING INSTRUCTIONS.” Ryan had laughed before at the code words he was supposed to use for this. He was laughing now, for a different reason.
“So,” Pelt observed, “Ryan expects the mission will be successful. Everything’s going according to plan, but he didn’t use the code group for certain success.”
The president leaned back comfortably. “He’s honest. Things can always go wrong. You have to admit, though, things do look good.”
“This plan the chiefs came up with is crazy, sir.”
“Perhaps, but you’ve been trying to poke a hole in it for several days now, and you haven’t succeeded. The pieces will all fall in place shortly.”
The president was being clever, Pelt saw. The man liked being clever.
“OLYMPUS TO MAGI. I LIKE OLD-FASHIONED MANDOLIN MUSIC. CONCERT APPROVED,” the message said.
Ryan sat back comfortably, sipping at his brandy. “Well, that’s good. I wonder what the next part of the plan is.”
“I expect that Washington will let us know. For the moment,” Admiral White said, “we’ll have to move back west to interpose ourselves between October and the Soviet fleet.”
Lieutenant Ames surveyed the scene through the tiny port on the Avalon’s bow. The Alfa lay on her port side. She had obviously hit stern first, and hard. One blade was snapped off the propeller, and the lower rudder fin was smashed. The whole stern might have been knocked off true; it was hard to tell in the low visibility.
“Moving forward slowly,” he said, adjusting the controls. Behind him an ensign and a senior petty officer were monitoring instruments and preparing to deploy the manipulator arm, attached before they sailed, which carried a television camera and floodlights. These gave them a slightly wider field of view than the navigation ports permitted. The DSRV crept forward at one knot. Visibility was under twenty yards, despite the million candles of illumination from the bow lights.
The sea floor at this point was a treacherous slope of alluvial silt dotted with boulders. It appeared that the only thing that had prevented the Alfa from sliding farther down was her sail, driven like a wedge into the bottom.
“Holy gawd!” The petty officer saw it first. There was a crack in the Alfa’s hull — or was there?
“Reactor accident,” Ames said, his voice detached and clinical. “Something burned through the hull. Lord, and that’s titanium! Burned right through, from the inside out. There’s another one, two burn-throughs. This one’s bigger, looks like a good yard across. No mystery what killed her, guys. That’s two compartments open to the sea.” Ames looked over to the depth gauge: 1,880 feet. “Getting all this on tape?”
“Aye, Skipper,” the electrician first class answered. “Crummy way to die. Poor bastards.”
“Yeah, depending on what they were up to.” Ames maneuvered the Avalon around the Alfa’s bow, working the directional propeller carefully and adjusting trim to cruise down the other side, actually the top of the dead sub. “See any evidence of a hull fracture?”
“No,” the ensign answered, “just the two burn-throughs. I wonder what went wrong?”
“A for-real China Syndrome. It finally happened to somebody.” Ames shook his head. If there was anything the navy preached about reactors, it was safety. “Get the transducer against the hull. We’ll see if anybody’s alive in there.”
“Aye.” The electrician worked the waldo controls as Ames tried to keep the Avalon dead still. Neither task was easy. The DSRV was hovering, nearly resting on the sail. If there were survivors, they had to be in the control room or forward. There could be no life aft.
“Okay, I got contact.”
All three men listened intently, hoping for something. Their job was search and rescue, and as submariners themselves they took it seriously.
“Maybe they’re asleep.” The ensign switched on the locater sonar. The high-frequency waves resonated through both vessels. It was a sound fit to wake the dead, but there was no response. The air supply in the Politovskiy had run out a day before.
“That’s that,” Ames said quietly. He maneuvered upward as the electrician rigged in the manipulator arm, looking for a spot to drop a sonar transponder. They would be back again when the topside weather was better. The navy would not pass up this chance to inspect an Alfa, and the Glomar Explorer was sitting unused somewhere on the West Coast. Would she be activated? Ames would not bet against that.
“Avalon, Avalon, this is Scamp—” the voice on the gertrude was distorted but readable, “—return at once. Acknowledge.”
“Scamp, this is Avalon. On the way.”
The Scamp had just received an ELF message and gone briefly to periscope depth for a FLASH operational order. “PROCEED AT BEST SPEED TO 33N 75W.” The message didn’t say why.
“CARDINAL is still with us,” Moore told Ritter.
“Thank God for that.” Ritter sat down.
“There’s a signal en route. This time he didn’t try to kill himself getting it to us. Maybe being in the hospital scared him a little. I’m extending another offer to extract him.”
“Again?”
“Bob, we have to make the offer.”
“I know. I had one sent myself a few years back, you know. The old bastard just doesn’t want to quit. You know how it goes, some people thrive on the action. Or maybe he hasn’t worked out his rage yet…I just got a call from Senator Donaldson.” Donaldson was the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence.
“Oh?”
“He wants to know what we know about what’s going on. He doesn’t buy the cover story about a rescue mission, and thinks we know something different.”
Judge Moore leaned back. “I wonder who planted that idea in his head?”
“Yeah. I have a little idea we might try. I think it’s time, and this is a dandy opportunity.”
The two senior executives discussed this for an hour. Before Ritter left for the Hill, they cleared it with the president.
Donaldson kept Ritter waiting in his outer office for fifteen minutes while he read the paper. He wanted Ritter to know his place. Some of the DDO’s remarks about leaks from the Hill had touched a sore spot with the senator from Connecticut, and it was important for appointed and civil service officials to understand the difference between themselves and the elected representatives of the people.